11–20 of 74 posts
Drum sets are pretty weird in general. I play the drums but I don't know much about their history or development and I've always felt the kit feels like an arbitrary arrangement of circles for me to hit. There's nothing "unifying" about it for want of a better term.
> Just as guitarists have cut back on amp power and now focus on tone As much as I would like to think that this is true, all the concerts I went to prior to Covid had WAAAAAY too much freakin' bass. These were bands with vocal and guitar gods and the bass was cranked up to like 9000 such that you could barely make out the vocals and guitars if the bass was playing. The best audio at a concert I had was the one where…
> Just as guitarists have cut back on amp power and now focus on tone As much as I would like to think that this is true, all the concerts I went to prior to Covid had WAAAAAY too much freakin' bass. These were bands with vocal and guitar gods and the bass was cranked up to like 9000 such that you could barely make out the vocals and guitars if the bass was playing. The best audio at a concert I had was the one where…
The title doesn’t match the article. It’s not about why toms descend in tone (typically - unless you are Jimmy Chamberlain and a handful of others). It’s about why toms have variable lengths.
Isn’t descending a suitable word to describe just that? Like descending stairs?
A person can ascend stairs, or descend.
A drummer could play an ascending pattern on their toms, or a descending pattern.
But neither the toms or stairs have an inherent upward or downward direction.
> Just as guitarists have cut back on amp power and now focus on tone As much as I would like to think that this is true, all the concerts I went to prior to Covid had WAAAAAY too much freakin' bass. These were bands with vocal and guitar gods and the bass was cranked up to like 9000 such that you could barely make out the vocals and guitars if the bass was playing. The best audio at a concert I had was the one where…
I started doing it after the doctor at my annual medical check mentioned I had frequency loss at 24 years old that he would associate with a 40 year old. Should probably have worn ear protection earlier... But wearing them consistently helped a lot because the measurements were mostly "normal" now 10 years later.
Drum sets are pretty weird in general. I play the drums but I don't know much about their history or development and I've always felt the kit feels like an arbitrary arrangement of circles for me to hit. There's nothing "unifying" about it for want of a better term.
- history, drum set evolved kind of organically bringing marching band percussion, orchestral percussion and other drums into the theater / concert halls / dance halls
As a consequence things like temple blocks were often placed above the bass drum which, before toms were really a thing. They were loosely pitched in similar way.
As the drums evolved they became a thing unto themselves and not just a collection of percussion instruments.
3 or more toms was rare historically. The "floor Tom" and "high tom" allowed a drummer to make a high and a low sound with their hands, which has numerous musical applications
Then as kits got more toms key factors become:
- reach (you cannot fit a low tom above a bass drum)
- style: rock generally suited looser and lower tension tunings, bigger drums, jazz tended to be more tightly tuned toms, and smaller sized drums, more open resonance, pop and funk generally wanted more dampened staccato sounds.
- feel. Drummers balance tuning of their drums with how it feels to play. You will not pick a tuning that feels bad, or sounds bad to you.
- mountings: you can either mount toms directly on bass drum, with legs on the floor or off cymbal stands (and the latter option was bolstered by modern hardware), but so to balance space, mount points and reach there isn't really many other places for them to go.
I'm being brief here, and the musical motivation was sort of natural and evolutionary and not prescribed by music theory.
Finally, if you play tuned percussion like timpani, you go to great lengths to retune them quickly between different passages and pieces. You cannot re-tune toms to an exact pitch while playing it with 4 limbs, and so it would be repeatedly out of tune with the music, and that would be worse than the approximate high mid low you get today!
Hope that makes some sense.
> Just as guitarists have cut back on amp power and now focus on tone As much as I would like to think that this is true, all the concerts I went to prior to Covid had WAAAAAY too much freakin' bass. These were bands with vocal and guitar gods and the bass was cranked up to like 9000 such that you could barely make out the vocals and guitars if the bass was playing. The best audio at a concert I had was the one where…
One of my favourite bands to see live actually take their own sound guy on tour with them. They sound incredible.
> Just as guitarists have cut back on amp power and now focus on tone As much as I would like to think that this is true, all the concerts I went to prior to Covid had WAAAAAY too much freakin' bass. These were bands with vocal and guitar gods and the bass was cranked up to like 9000 such that you could barely make out the vocals and guitars if the bass was playing. The best audio at a concert I had was the one where…
This is one of the reasons I always wear ear protection when going to live concerts. With the right kind of earplugs you can have very clear sound and in a way hear the vocals and guitars better than without. It also comes with the added benefit of no ringing ears in the morning. I started doing it after the doctor at my annual medical check mentioned I had frequency loss at 24 years old that he would associate with…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe the sounds are too short to disturb the user’s perception of tonality? Sure some people have the absolute ear (ability to tell a note from the sound), but those are rare and rarely enjoy music with drums.
A tom has a surprisingly long decay, so I think it's more a matter of the pitch not being entirely constant (neither between hits nor over the span of a single hit). That being so, it would make sense to avoid hitting a tom with a low frequency note in unison with, say, a bass guitar playing the same note. That could result in two bassy notes sounding off a semitone apart... yuck. Whatever sense my theory makes, I di…
Perception of consonance and dissonance is related to the phenomenon of "beats"[0]. If you add two sine waves of similar frequency, you get alternating constructive and destructive interference, sounding like tremolo. As you increase the difference in frequency, the beat becomes faster, until it's no longer heard as tremolo, and becomes a single dissonant tone. Increase it further still and the dissonance vanishes as it's heard as two separate tones.
Importantly, beats depend on absolute difference in frequency, not relative difference. Musical intervals are relative differences, e.g. a semitone higher in equal temperament is 2^(1/12) times higher frequency, not some fixed number of cycles per second. The higher in the musical scale, the bigger the absolute difference per semitone. This means low frequency sine waves a semitone apart will sound consonant, medium frequency will sound dissonant, and at high enough frequencies the dissonance diminishes.
However, this effect applies to all the harmonics/partials of the notes, not just the fundamentals. A smooth bass note will have mostly fundamental, so the pairs of harmonics with frequency differences that cause dissonance will be quiet and unnoticeable. A bright or distorted bass note will have much louder harmonics, so the dissonance will be obvious.
Was text written like this before the days of SEO?