Resonance vs. Ring vs. Sustain
A couple of weeks ago, I played on the worst-sounding kit I have ever encountered in more than six decades as a drummer.
I had decided to check out an open jam in a nearby town. I watched and listened for a while before sitting in, and I could tell that the drums had some issues – the kick drum was too loud and too dry, the toms sounded like piles of paper with no tone whatsoever, and the snare was boxy to an extreme and barely audible. I’ve run into badly tuned and set up kits before, and I believe that a good player can gauge a kit’s strengths and weaknesses and use the strengths to produce at least an acceptable sound. But when I actually sat in for a few numbers to get acquainted with the musicians, what I encountered sitting behind this particular kit was pretty much a worst-case scenario.
The kick drum was packed to the brim with pillows and then miked too closely. The toms were single-headed and what I had thought were tuning problems turned out to be heads that were dented to the point of sagging in the middle; even under tension the heads couldn’t vibrate. And the snare drum … well, its heads were cranked to the max and choking the drum, the wires were tightened to the point where they were acting as a muffler strap instead of vibrating, and a third of the batter head surface was taken up by ½”-thick gauze pads covered completely with duct tape. Best I could do was to loosen the wires a couple of turns to at least give them a fighting chance. Overall, it felt like playing a set of practice pads and sounded pretty similar.
I don’t normally think in terms of MAKING drums sound good. I think in terms of ALLOWING drums to sound good, by not putting too many limits on them. Letting a drum open up its voice is way more productive than suppressing it.
So I thought it might be time to talk about open sounds. And immediately we run into the limitations of the language; people try to use descriptive words, and other people understand those words differently. Let’s take a look at three ways of describing an open drum sound – resonance, ring, and sustain – that get used interchangeably but may actually carry different meanings. I have my own interpretations:
Sustain is a word I use to describe the length of a drum’s note. It’s nothing more than the duration from the time the drum is struck to the time the note becomes inaudible. Potential sustain of a given drum starts with the material and construction of the shell and the head. Then there are a number of other factors that act as controls on the sustain, and the selection and combination of those factors determine the final duration of the note. Sustain is about the openness of the drum’s voice.
Ring, I feel, involves harmonics and overtones. It’s not defined by the length of the note as much as by its complexity, which can be as simple as a simple thump or as rich as a full spectrum of frequencies and voices blended together. Differences in ring may stem from the configuration of heads and the shapes and materials of the shells, but bearing edge profiles and the relationship of head diameter to shell diameter are also key factors. With kit drums, the “ringy” area of the head is generally near the outside edges, where the harmonics are more robust although the volume is lower. Ring is about the liveliness of the drum’s sound.
Resonance is a term which is used by a lot of people to suggest sustain or ring, but I think of resonance as an expression of tone. Tone is a product of all parts of the drum combining to determine the character of its sound – not just the heads but also the shell, hoops, and lugs, etc. All them transmit and modify vibrations, which interact with the original head vibrations. In some cases these components can act to suppress tone by suppressing vibration or inhibiting its flow. This is why sonic character of two drums made of the same materials may be different due to construction methods (e.g. solid wood vs. ply, or sharp vs. rounded bearing edges). Resonance is about the beauty of the drum’s tone.
So, talking about acoustic drums for live performance (studio use is a whole different animal), what do I look for in sound character? For toms, I like a good amount of sustain, moderate ring that varies according to the diameter of the drum, and very warm tones with decent stick definition from the head. For bass drums, I prefer limited but not stifled ring, limited overtones, and lots of big tone. For snares, my choice is moderate sustain, enough ring to sound open, and a generous amount of tone even at high tunings. That gives me a starting point that I can then adjust through tuning, selective dampening, hoop selection, etc., to give me lots of character range to the finished sounds.
Those are my big three end-result components of a drum's voice: resonance, ring, and sustain. The terms are often used interchangeably, but the real qualities are very different. And, as I frequently tell my clients, you can always reduce resonance, ring, and sustain, but you can’t add them once the drum is built. So when I design and build a drum, I’m considering all of the design factors that determine a drum‘s capabilities in these three areas, and – most importantly -- I’m making decisions that help those factors work together to achieve the goals.
Piling up all that muffling, dead heads, and one-dimensional tuning on the kit I played at the jam didn't put controls on the capabilities of the drums. It just turned them completely off -- actually, a total loss of control of the sound.
