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Why do drum sets have descending toms?

lowvolumedrumming.org

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Re: Why do drum sets have descending toms?

#31

Post by drittich »

speeder wrote: post #9
uniqueid wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's my impression, too. I once did some research on toms for some audio code. Toms are pretty tonal, as far as drums go, yet, as far as I could tell from my research there's no standard tuning for them. That would make sense if pop musicians all tuned their toms according to the music they were playing, but to the extent that they do, the tunings I read about were mostly flakey (ie: ungrounded in music theory)

That explains a particular drummer I know... I know a drummer that is very particular about tuning his drums, and he gets mad when people change it, thing is, he also plays other instruments, so I guess he DOES choose what notes he wants from his drum.

Tuning is not just about pitch, it's about timbre, too. On top of that, the feel under the stick changes at different tensions. Most drums have a handful of pitches where they resonate the best (or to the player's taste). It's a lot of effort for many drummers to get the balance they like, and this is often harder on less-expensive kits.

Re: Why do drum sets have descending toms?

#32

Post by yakshaving_jgt »

uniqueid wrote: post #6
laurent92 wrote: post #5

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…

> I think it's more a matter of the pitch not being entirely constant

In modern popular music at least, it's not desirable for the pitch to be constant. You typically want to tune the resonant head (the one at the bottom) a little higher in pitch than the batter head so that there's a slight descending pitch shift.

Re: Why do drum sets have descending toms?

#33

Post by dwighttk »

sammorrowdrums wrote: post #16
monkeyfacebag wrote: post #2

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.

I was a pro drummer for years. There is a general balance of factors: - 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 evolve…

Roto-toms were cool for a while.

Re: Why do drum sets have descending toms?

#34

Post by Applejinx »

Back when I was a kid, I made a four-tom drumkit out of a normal kit by sawing all the toms in half and making them shallow single-headed drums :)

I would love to have a 'pancake' kit with all the drums double-headed but shallow. Maybe someday I'll try to get that made. The article suggests you could simply do that: everything gets the same very shallow drum depth, like a kit composed of snares without snare wires.

Re: Why do drum sets have descending toms?

#35

Post by Applejinx »

dwighttk wrote: post #33
sammorrowdrums wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a pro drummer for years. There is a general balance of factors: - 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 evolve…

Roto-toms were cool for a while.

Still are!

(says owner of seven)

Re: Why do drum sets have descending toms?

#36

Post by Applejinx »

bsder wrote: post #7

> 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…

Interestingly, that used to be the rule rather than the exception… at the time when rock bands grew in importance to dominate the music scene and built an industry to sell their products to listeners.

Back when people went completely nuts for rock music, the PAs were generally so inadequate that they were just for vocals, and monitoring wasn't really a thing. Most gigs of the era ran off each instrument generating its own stage volume, hence the Marshall stacks and such.

The Grateful Dead famously scaled this concept up to insane heights with the Wall Of Sound system, where each instrument and voice had its own speaker stacks even at stadium levels. It really worked exceptionally well, but was cumbersome and didn't last that long.

This can be done in electronic genres, as well: it just isn't, for the most part. I daresay there have been sound installations that did it.

Re: Why do drum sets have descending toms?

#37

Post by wombatmobile »

ArtTimeInvestor wrote: post #20

I tried to find the answer in the text but wasn't able to. It seems to be stuffed to the extreme with related information and anecdotes. Making the central point almost impossible to grasp. If it is in there at all. As I said, I could not find it. Was text written like this before the days of SEO?

Yes. What is this article about???

The pitch of the sound of each drum?

The softness or hardness of the drum when hit with a certain force?

The height of the surface of each drum above the floor?

What point/s is/are the article making about these characteristics?

Re: Why do drum sets have descending toms?

#38

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

uniqueid wrote: post #3
monkeyfacebag wrote: post #2

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.

That's my impression, too. I once did some research on toms for some audio code. Toms are pretty tonal, as far as drums go, yet, as far as I could tell from my research there's no standard tuning for them. That would make sense if pop musicians all tuned their toms according to the music they were playing, but to the extent that they do, the tunings I read about were mostly flakey (ie: ungrounded in music theory)

All drums - including the snare, but excluding the snare rattle - are modal. They're the 2D/3D implementation of a wave equation.

So instead of having a neat more-or-less integer-based harmonic series like a 1D resonant object (i.e. a string) they have multiple complex resonant modes which are triggered simultaneously, and which decay at different rates.

So they're semi-pitched. There's usually a fundamental, but the other frequencies can be almost as loud. So if you tune the fundamental you can still get dissonance with the other modes.

All of this makes the idea of tuning a bit and miss.

Re: Why do drum sets have descending toms?

#39

Post by darkwater »

chubot wrote: post #21

Hm the author mentions several times that he builds drums. And I would like to check out his drums, but there isn't a clear place to view them? That said, the point he makes is a good one, and one seems obvious in retrospect!

The name of the company is in a box at the end of the post. It's called Adoro Drums https://www.adoro-drums.com/en

Re: Why do drum sets have descending toms?

#40

Post by piva00 »

speeder wrote: post #9
uniqueid wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's my impression, too. I once did some research on toms for some audio code. Toms are pretty tonal, as far as drums go, yet, as far as I could tell from my research there's no standard tuning for them. That would make sense if pop musicians all tuned their toms according to the music they were playing, but to the extent that they do, the tunings I read about were mostly flakey (ie: ungrounded in music theory)

That explains a particular drummer I know... I know a drummer that is very particular about tuning his drums, and he gets mad when people change it, thing is, he also plays other instruments, so I guess he DOES choose what notes he wants from his drum.

That happens in electronic music as well. There are some artists who are very specific about tuning their drums, from bass drum/kick (which in my opinion should be tuned to fit with your bass at least), toms and hats.

As another commenter mentioned, it's also about timbre and not only tuning for a song. I've noticed I got particular about tuning at least my kick and bass layer to the scale of the lead of a track (if there is a noticeable key), in techno is easy to break almost any rule but to me, personally, is much easier to start a new idea with the kick and bass in tune.

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