What's good everybody? Welcome back to Love Music More. I am Scoobert Doobert. Today I want to hit you with a hot take. All live drums are rock drums. So I was just at a concert for American Football. I somewhat recently went to a Vulfpeck show, went to a Nate Smith show, and it struck me by how similar the drum sounds are across all of these different genres and vibes where the recordings themselves.
The Microphone As A Microscope
where people have a little bit more control. Tend to be drier, tend to be more restrained, but the second you get into like a large concert venue, drums start to converge to some degree. It starts to sound like rock. And I think that's a, there's a reason.
And part of it is mechanical. Part of it is just the ways that these microphones work, the trade-offs that you have when you're dealing with live sound and the styles of music that the audience brings out of you. Like what the actual venue brings out of you and the ways that.
audience is expected in ways that it just works so why why is it that the gear takes you one way the venue takes you the same way and the vibe also takes you the same way and to answer that I think we have to take a step back and talk about the differences between recording drums in a recording studio versus playing drums live and miking them
So, one of the reasons why I love talking about drum recording is that it is full fidelity. It is the entire audio spectrum from the lowest of the low to the highest of the high. It makes it very challenging to paint a picture of a drum kit that sounds amazing on its own and also has enough room for the rest of the band to even exist because you're probably not making a solo drum record. And those trade-offs.
highlighted even more when you are in person because not only do you have the lack of control the lack of dynamic control like how hard you're playing because people
they're in a space and they're doing stuff versus in a studio you can splice together takes you can be really restrained you can play with weird posture with weird drumsticks you don't have to really hit loud and project in the same way that a vocalist sounds very different live versus in the studio because they're able to play with the microphone have more isolation and the isolation is the other part that I want to stress so a great example is anytime there's a tambourine on a stage
you're going to hear that tambourine loud and proud it's going to bleed into all of the different microphones so when you are dealing with a live drum kit you're dealing with bleed when you're dealing with a live drum kit
You have not only the drums bleeding into each other, but you have trying to reject the monitors and the audience and the different instruments that are on stage, especially if you have amps on stage near the drum kit.
All this stuff creates trade-offs and you use something called gating often and gating is able to make it so that the impulse, the thing that you hit is only the thing that you hear in that microphone.
It acts like a strong arm that just blocks anything from progressing so the typical ones are tom gates so toms the the drum fills the the drummers play on their toms they are notorious for their bleed because they're just kind of sitting there they're next to a surface that resonates the resonant drum heads and so they pick up a lot of just weird rumble so typically especially live
You gate those out so the only time that those microphones turn on or emit audio into the mix is when there's a clear impulse, when there's a clear hit on that tom. And then you pick how does that release.
So in the studio, you can have a lot more leeway and you can have that tom go and fade off into the distance with a long release.
In the live setting, you typically just want like a quick quick attack on that gate because the rest of the room is going to take on that release the rest of the microphones are going to take on that release if you leave the release from just that isolated tom microphone you can pick up a lot of weird rumbles from the rest of the band around you from even the audience you know resonating into the drum kit and by doing that you end up changing the genre which is so fascinating with drums and it's also why i think a lot of drummers become recording engineers
and mix engineers is that the drums are such a good lever for saying what kind of music are we playing right now even if it's the same beat if you had something very quiet and intimate and something very bombastic and gated it's going to sound like a very different genre a very different vibe just by the way that you're playing the exact same rhythms Same deal with the microphones that you choose.
So when you're in a recording environment, you can choose ribbon microphones and condensers and you can sometimes see this on really top-end productions or people that are really, really trying to control their sound. They will do this and they will take some of that intimate energy and try their best to apply it onto a live stage, sometimes to mixed results. Sometimes you get more feedback.
You certainly have a trade-off every time that you switch from the standard. kind of live mixers toolkit into the recording studio toolkit just think of the recording studio as more like a microphone as a microscope it's it's a finer tuned instrument that
In the live environment can backfire because they can be brittle these microphones can break they can feedback they can be just more frustrating to use but in the controlled environment of the studio they can unlock really incredible amount of tonal versatility and like a gradient that you can choose from
in the live setting typically those gradients get kind of flattened in the same way that in the live setting there isn't as much stuff going on in stereo typically most things are mono in live because you have some people standing on the right side of the stage some people standing on the left side of the stage and it'd be super weird if they only got the left channel and so typically you know there'll be some stereo effects and some venues will be retrofitted to do all sorts of cool stuff but most of the time most of the things that people do
it's just straight up down the middle versus in the studio where you have even atmos and things that you can do there you can obviously do that live as well but it's just way more rare and it requires a different level of production that yeah if you're gonna go see any of the former pink floyd members they're gonna do it but if you're going to see a
band that's touring in a van they're probably not going to have the whole stereo rig they're probably going to be straight up and down and when it's straight up and down it ends up creating a punchier more classic kind of sound and it gets a little more rock again when you're playing harder it gets a little more rock again and there's an interesting thing about the tonal qualities of drums
So when you've played in bands with strict noise control ordinances or, you know, you're playing your kind of background music or something like that so the drummers really happen to play super lightly, the drums fundamentally sound different. It's not just a loudness thing. It's a tone thing. It's same thing with like a guitar amp.
It sounds better when it's cranked, even if you then turn it way down for what ends up going out into the audience or going into the mix.
The tubes act differently at a louder volume. The more gain, the snare drums and the heads react better if you're smacking them, usually. And so typically when you're in a live setting, the drummers are playing harder. They're playing into a typical dynamic microphone style mic locker. They're dealing with bleed, so they have a lot more gating.
And the audience is egging them on and the whole thing just becomes more of a rock show. And of course, that's not to say it's bad. It's really, really cool. But it's an interesting thing to when you're creating your own music to think about the level of control that you have in the studio and how it evaporates when you get live.
and how that can affect the way that you want to practice and prepare for your live show it's almost like saying what is the rock version of my song even if you're not a rock act there's a part of it there's a part of it that by owning that energy and knowing that that energy is going to come particularly if you have live drums which is the best i think it's great to have live drums for uh
live show in part because it brings that energy and it matches the energy of the audience rather than being a static thing and knowing that preparing your voice preparing your mix preparing the flow of your set to be more of a rock show is just fitting into the kind of reality that is live performance Of course, these things change, and if you have a lot of money, you can get around these hurdles.
But when you're at a certain level, you're a rock band. It doesn't matter what genre you play. And finally, venue is very important. When you are in a theater that has some reverb naturally, you cannot play the same dry thing that you recorded on the record. It just doesn't work that way physics. And... From there, that changes so much of the genre choice.
You can listen to different records and hear how they play with room and reverb and echo and all that kind of stuff.
And I find it really fascinating with the whole rock history thing about how venue influenced things like hair metal and Led Zeppelin, where they knew the venue that they'd be playing in would be huge. They weren't being aspirational. They knew.
And so they designed their music to fit that, like AC/DC, designed their music to play in a stadium and sound good in a stadium in the same way that chamber music was written to sound good in a chamber.
I think that this is an underrated difficulty for bands that are starting out that are playing opening sets. Figuring out how do we sound good while we don't control or know the venue? And how do you write music that simultaneously is very gratifying and true to your vision for the recorded process where you have a lot more control?
While at the same time having a great enough song or flexible enough band that you can roll with the punches and dial up or down the rock scale if the venue calls for it. Sometimes you're going to be playing the Viper Room. When you're playing the Viper Room, you should play it like it's the Viper Room.
And it's a weird thing for a bedroom pop artist or a funk artist or somebody that's really used to really tight rhythms. But that's part of the fun of life too. That's part of the conversation. That's part of the reason why people go and they pay is they want to see a great artist slightly out of their comfort zone doing something different, doing something electric.
There's a reason why people sometimes play their songs way faster live. It's like James Brown is a magic in making the rock version of what you do. If you enjoyed this podcast, I'd like to invite you to rate it five stars, share it with your friends, and tune in next week for another great guest episode.
I've had some awesome conversations this year with incredible musicians, and there's going to be more drum talk from people that are far better at the instrument than I am. So tune in for that, and if you want to hear my music, go to scoobertdoobert.pizza to check it out.