Setting up a drum kit
Drum kits are unique instruments. No other instrument can be customized like a drum kit. Basically a drum kit is a collection of percussive instruments, nothing more and nothing less. The selection of percussion instruments that you want incorporated with your kit is all up to the drummer.
A very basic drum kit will consist of a bass drum, a snare drum, three toms, a hi-hat, a crash cymbal and a ride cymbal. Some people choose to use more, some less. Some want a room full of drums, while others want all the cymbals they can get. Each component has its own unique sound characteristics. Apart from drums and cymbals, one can also add other percussive instruments such as bells, bar chimes, cabasas, mounted tambourines and cowbells.
Very common add-ons to a drum kit are tambourines, cow bells, splash cymbals and Chinese cymbals. The set-up will also vary with musical style: often metal involves a huge drum kit with multiple bass drums, while jazz generally involves small kits with small bass drums, few drums and cymbals.
If I set up my full kit with all that I have, my set-up consists of a bass drum (22×18”), a snare drum (14×5,5”), 4 toms (10×8”, 12×9”, 14×11”, 16×16”), two octobans that I built myself (8×18” and 8×22”), a hi-hat, two crash cymbals, two splash cymbals, a ride cymbal and a Chinese cymbal. So that’s 8 drums and 7 cymbals. However, I have multiple ways of setting it up. I can use it all, but I can also choose to leave some things out. Here are a few pictures of set-up that I have used over the last year:
As you can see, the kit has gone through a few different styles. Sometimes all toms are involved, sometimes just the smaller three, sometimes the 12” and the 16”, and at the moment the 10”, 12” and 16”.
Tuning a drum correctly can also make a world of difference. The octobans can be tuned to a low thud, as well as to a high, resonant tone. The snare drum is also very versatile in its tuning, ranging from a thunderous metal sound to a poppy funk sound. An interesting experiment that I do now is have one of the toms set up and tuned as a “concert tom”, i.e. no resonant head. This puts its sound characteristics in between that of the octobans and the regular toms, giving me an interesting sound palette to choose from.
Rock on!
Did you know that the sound of a guitar has a lots-o-lost of configurations as well?
String thickness, String-winding, String-coating. Combine those and you’re already up to at least 50 possibilities!
Then there’s the base-tension, which is usually 10Hz margin, thus, also another 10 settings.
Then, we also have the ability to tune in specific preset-tunings…
No, really, a drumkit might be big, it’s really not “definately the biggest”
Even a Grand-Piano can has at least 80 different set-ups!
I know. But so do drums, I mentioned that in an earlier post. There’s numerous options of drum heads to choose from, different thicknesses, coatings, multi-ply heads and lots of heads have certain dampening mechanisms to accentuate certain modes of vibration of the drumhead. Different combinations of batter head and resonant head will give different sounds. Also, drum kits are not limited by scales and chords (though some drummers choose to tune chromatically).