Excessively resonating bass drum

colinjnk

Junior Member
If I point my bass drum away from the walls of my practice room, the drum resonates excessively, regardless of the muffling applied.

As a solution I have had to point the bass drum towards the wall about 2-feet away to counter the resonating sound. However, when I do this it eliminates a lot of body and lower-tones from the bass drum.


How can I control the excessive resonation, but keep the body of the drum?


I'm playing in an 11x9 foot room with a concrete floor and a thin carpet. The roof is angled. I've played the drums in different rooms and it has sounded fantastic. It sounded controlled, but deep. Maybe it's the room (or maybe it's my tuning!).

I'm using an 18x22 Tama Superstar (birch) bass drum with a Remo PS3 & Falam Patch (with a pillow).
 
Guessing that your 11x9 room is rectangular and has gyproc or some other smooth surface walls ;-) ...

it sounds like you're describing a rather large bass-trap. that is, every corner of your practice room is acting as a collector of bass frequencies. treating bass traps isn't always easy, and don't necessarily run out and buy $200 Auralex bass trap diffusers.

if you can, first try adding some softer materials to your walls that will help diffuse the frequencies better. start with not too much and check as you go along. you may be surprised that the 'problem' won't take as much to solve as you'd think.

Also, you can build a fairly inexpensive bass diffuser with materials purchased from home depot, or some such building supply center: cardboard concrete pillar forms cut down to at least 4 feet high, fill them up with sand and wrap them in a nice fabric of your choice (actually, do the wrap first...), and stick one in each corner of the room that you can.

good luck!
 
You just described what kind of room the drums are in perfectly.

I'll take a look at this bass trap stuff, thank you.
 
If I point my bass drum away from the walls of my practice room, the drum resonates excessively, regardless of the muffling applied.

As a solution I have had to point the bass drum towards the wall about 2-feet away to counter the resonating sound. However, when I do this it eliminates a lot of body and lower-tones from the bass drum.


How can I control the excessive resonation, but keep the body of the drum?


I'm playing in an 11x9 foot room with a concrete floor and a thin carpet. The roof is angled. I've played the drums in different rooms and it has sounded fantastic. It sounded controlled, but deep. Maybe it's the room (or maybe it's my tuning!).

I'm using an 18x22 Tama Superstar (birch) bass drum with a Remo PS3 & Falam Patch (with a pillow).

Don't spend another minute worrying about it. You're not doing any gig's in your room, so no one will be there to critique the tone of the kick. If it sounds great everywhere else, it's just some weird acoustics in the room. Try hanging a blanket on one wall like a mural, it might break up the bass trap. Or rearrange the room so the it faces another wall. Don't go spending money on expensive fixes for this, it's not worth it. Just mess with stuff to change the room around.
 
Let me share my experiences with you. Just today I was cleaning my downstairs so there would be room for the people that are coming over tomorrow to jam. Anyway, I usually have my kit facing the wall in the corner of the room as it sounds good, but I had to re-arrange the room putting my kit sort of in the middle of the room. Doing this made my kick drum sound terrible, when it was facing the wall I had a small pillow in there for a nice thump but in the middle of the room that pillow made it sound ungodly. So I removed the pillow and it still didn't sound good with its original tuning, re-tuned it and it still sounded bad. My final solution was 2 bath towels in my very low tuned kick and the result was awesome.

I guess what I'm trying to say is try every possible combination you can before you decide to spend money. Chances are if you spend half an hour screwing with it you'll find something that works good for you. If you don't find something that works for you just take Vipercussionists advice and don't worry about the acoustics in THAT room as long as thats the only place your kick sounds bad.
 
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