Balancing your drum kit? Geoff Nicholls applies the well-tempered stick.

Something occasionally happens which I find depressing and dispiriting; I go to a gig and inevitably pick out the drummer, but then I realise all I can actually hear of the kit is the hi-hat. The bass drum and toms are an indecipherable rumble; the snare is so bassy that there's no clout. Know the feeling?

PA problems are the bane of all musicians, but drummers suffer the most. This is because although you endeavour to play the kit as a coordinated single instrument, it is in fact treated as any number (well, the number of mikes actually) of separate sound sources. Hence the most drastic of a drummer's balance problems — those attributable to outside manipulation (PAs and studios) — but the other less obvious problems are attributable to the drums and drummer him/herself.

So to start with we have to get our own house in order. The first obstacle is in achieving an overall balance and dynamic range with the other musicians. In the old days the problem was usually the drummer being too loud. Nowadays it's often reversed: you have to hit so damn hard your technique is reduced (elevated?) to Kung Fu. This points up the fact that the drums are the only acoustic instrument left in regular rock usage and this is at the root of most balance/sound problems.

Firstly, being acoustic, drums are designed to project, so they sound different in tone when played soft than when played loud. A tom which is tuned high sounds much lower from a distance or when hit hard. This has to be borne in mind when tuning and close-miking. Secondly it brings the problem of sounding good (or appropriate) at high or low volume. It's frustrating doing a bedroom rehearsal and having to dampen everything down to approximate controlled sound, but it's better than having to say, "I know it doesn't sound quite right, but it will when it's louder". Nobody ever believes you, and you can hardly blame them.

Conversely, it's tough indeed when you form your first band and you're expected to sound like a Trevor Horn production from behind your secondhand Maxwin. The fact is, acoustic bass and snare drums don't sound like the monsters you hear on most popular waxings of the present decade (a 40's recording of Max Roach without the technique, if you're lucky!).

There's not much you can do about this outside the studio, but what you can achieve is a convincing sound by an awareness of the acoustic balance and projection of the kit. For instance, the snare may be the loudest item but it usually doesn't project as well as the hi-hats which seem to cut through anything. So you may have to really clout the snare while going much easier on the hi-hat. Tom-toms nearly always have to be played hard. Even if you can hear them, they rarely come through as strongly as you'd like. The bass drum similarly — although the largest drum — it's often felt rather than heard. If there's just one mike around I'd always put it on the bass drum first, (cf. Mark Brzezicki, Big Country, One Two, Dec. '84.)

This brings us to the complicated subject of miking, PA's, recording etc. Ignoring the pitfalls, miking does bring distinct advantages. For instance, certain small parts of the kit which are inaudible acoustic-wise in a loudish band can easily become gems when miked. In my experience, the high tones of small toms and splash cymbals, for example, come through a PA beautifully, adding a lot of colour. Think how Stewart Copeland uses them for instance. In fact his whole conception of balance and projection utilises the PA. His tightly tuned kit works great miked up, but he'd probably tune it differently in an acoustic situation. But take another influential drummer whose style evolved in a different era and setting — John Bonham — his whole sound works acoustically. You get the feeling with just one ambient mike in the room that the kit would still sound huge and balanced.

Clearly this sort of consideration means the drummer not only has to sort out his own balance problems, but also needs to be aware of what PA and recording engineers have to deal with. A bad balance live is sometimes inevitable; when it happens in the studio you've at least a chance to remedy it. With a dozen mikes the engineer is not likely to achieve straight-off the balance of kit sounds you know intimately. It's unnerving when you hear a first rough playback and hardly recognise yourself. Usually, with just a subtle adjustment of level here and there, it will start to sound workable.

What's more difficult is coming to terms with the reality of your recorded sound — like hearing your voice on tape or seeing yourself on TV (horrors!). Close miking magnifies aspects you may have been getting away with acoustically. The consistency of your time and the weight of stroke (technique nightmares) we'll leave aside. But the drums themselves may be inconsistent in that the decay time of each tom may vary too much. If the toms are tuned consistently they should balance nicely (see above), and often a small damping adjustment remedies this. Occasionally it's simply that one drum is tensioned tighter (or looser) than the next in order to get the interval you fancy. This can make fills sound ugly because one tom sounds duff. To give an example, with standard 12in, 13in, 16in, tom-toms, the first two are close in size with a big jump to the 16in. Tune them to equal intervals, therefore, and you might end up with the small one sounding poor compared with the others. Maybe 12in, 14in, 16in would be easier to handle? I'm not saying this is necessarily so, but it is true that one drum sometimes causes all the trouble. I'd be interested to hear from anyone who's encountered similar or related problems. Anyway, it's certainly advisable to give your kit a close and critical listen before going into the studio.