A super-common problem many drummers encounter is the dreaded "my kick drum sounds like I'm bouncing a basketball" issue. Here are a few different ideas on how to fix it...Well hey there, welcome back or more Drummer Daily. I'm happy you're here. My name's Daniel, and I'm going to be your drum coach for at least the amount of time that you listen to this podcast. This weekend, this past weekend, I got a question and I thought I'd share it with you and see if we could maybe help you out with something that you might be facing, which is this. I was doing one of my drive intensives, and the person that I was doing it with, one of his questions was, "Hey, I feel like a lot of times my kick drum sounds like a giant basketball when I hit it." That sound, if you don't know what I mean then you probably don't have this problem. If you relate at all then all of a sudden you'll be like, "Yes, I know exactly what you're talking about."That is a, the kick drum sounding like a basketball, where it just has this really weird bouncy sound to it. It's not a pleasing sound. That's a common problem, and it's a problem that I've had before. It's definitely a problem that I had when I first started playing drums, and especially when I first started really paying attention to tuning drums, and the heads that I was using, things like that.I thought I'd offer a little bit of advice on some places to kind of start looking, to kind of troubleshoot that. The real cause I think of that, and for me to explain this I don't want to get too geeky, or too technical in a way that's boring or hard to follow. In order to kind of really grasp what's happening that causes a bass drum, or a kick drum to sound like a basketball bouncing, we have to think about how a drum creates sound. There's a lot of stuff going on in a drum, and I don't understand most of it. Let me just put that disclaimer out. There's the basics of you have a giant cylinder basically, with a couple of stretchy pieces of plastic on each side. You're hitting one side of that, and there is sound waves being generated. They bounce around inside the drum until the sound waves and the air escape somehow. Either as energy back into one of those two heads, or through an air hole, or another hole in the drum, or the head itself.What I think of is this. When your bass drum beater, when it hits the head, think of it this way. The energy obviously gets transferred from the bass drum beater into that head that it hits. Then that head moves, the whole surface of the head moves at some level, and all of this air and sound waves get pushed out of that head forward into the front head of the bass drum. Now, there's sound waves which is energy, and there's air all moving around. It kind of sends forth energy, it sends forth, I think of it like the energy coming out of the bass drum head that you hit, is kind of like a bunch of football players just running full speed ahead towards that front head.Depending on what that front head is made of, they're either going to bounce off of that head. Think about a bunch of football players running, big heavy football players running at a piece of paper stretched across the field. How easy it would be for them all as a group to just rip right through that, and move it a lot. Versus if there was a giant 20 foot thick brick wall in front of them. No matter how hard they're running, you're going to ... They're going to not get very hard, and probably not move anything at all.Full transcript at http://danielhadaway.com/119
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