Drum building has a great deal to do with room acoustics. Every drum consists of two membranes connected by a mostly wooden space — the shell. This space has direct contact with the membrane: the bearing edge touches the head, directly influencing its vibrations. But it also has an indirect influence, acting as a resonating body. I should briefly note here that a drum shell is not technically a „shell“ — timpani have shells, which are by definition closed at the bottom. Since common usage has prevailed, however, I will set aside this nuance (which is genuinely relevant when it comes to the physics of sound) and refer to the drum sides as „shells“ from here on, even though that is, strictly speaking, not quite correct.
If you think of the drum shell as a room, you will find that everything we know about room acoustics applies here as well. At certain sizes (from 16″ upward), we often encounter comb filter effects — also known as the basketball effect — caused by standing waves (room modes): sound waves travel from the source to the wall, are reflected, and overlap with the directly incoming signal. At certain frequencies — when the room dimension is an integer multiple of half the wavelength — a standing wave forms: cancellation and reinforcement at fixed points in the space.
In rooms, we know that smooth surfaces are not always conducive to good sound, because they reflect sound in a directed and nearly lossless way — much like a mirror with light. We find it more pleasant when sound is scattered somewhat more diffusely. Two opposing smooth walls represent the worst possible scenario: they form a flutter echo channel in which sound bounces back and forth with almost no energy loss. This produces clearly audible echoes (clapping → characteristic „flutter“), strongly pronounced room modes, and severe comb filter effects.
Since drum shells are round, the same principle applies as with parallel smooth walls. To prevent comb filter effects, one should therefore avoid making a shell perfectly smooth and perfectly round. This may explain why old drums — with shells that were slightly out-of-round in the middle, often held round only by reinforcement rings at the edges — sound so much warmer and more pleasant, while modern drums with their mirror-smooth surfaces sound considerably punchier and louder.
Beyond technical craftsmanship, drum builders would therefore benefit greatly from an understanding of room acoustics in order to optimize the sound of a drum.
Now, a drum kit does not only consist of many differently sized rooms — it also stands inside one. In the vast majority of cases, drums are not played outdoors but in a room, which in turn has an enormous influence on the sound of the kit: not just in the sense of ambience (reverb), but also on tone color, sustain, and attack. This influence is immense — often greater than that of the instrument itself.
The room first of all provides reverberation, which increases proportionally with volume. This is why it makes sense not to play as loud as possible in rooms, since rooms generally do not have a positive influence on sound the louder they get.
The first reflections from walls and ceiling arrive shortly after the direct sound (a few milliseconds). This alters the perceived tone color, can smear the transients (attack) of the drums, and affects localization and spatial perception. Through room modes (standing waves), a room can also emphasize certain frequencies or eliminate them entirely. A diffuser, for example, would completely absorb the decay of a drum kit, making it sound like a cardboard box. Individual frequencies of the snare might be boosted many times over, or the floor tom sound swallowed entirely. Then there are comb filter effects caused by overlapping signals that arrive together with the original sound but time-delayed — again reinforcing some frequencies and canceling others.
So in nearly all real-world rooms, a drum kit should be played as controlled as possible — not because of the signal, but because every excess energy acoustically degrades the room and makes recording more difficult, and additional room treatment necessary.
It will come as no surprise that drums are no longer built the way they were in the 1950s. Stages have gotten louder, music has become electrified, and drums are typically captured with close microphones. To achieve a controlled sound in rooms, however, a drum kit should ideally produce less volume — not be optimized for maximum loudness.
The Roomless Drum Kit
In looking at the modern drum kit, an approach has taken hold that divorces it entirely from its relationship with a room. Nearly every statement about a drum kit therefore needs an asterisk, with a footnote reading: „This applies when the drums are miked, processed, and amplified.“ There is a stark dissonance between how drums should ideally be built if optimized for rooms, and how they are actually built. This stems from the fact that electrified stages gave rise to a new philosophy in drum manufacturing: the „roomless“ drum kit. An instrument that is separated from its room by microphones and transmitted independently of it through amplification.
Most drummers are not fully aware of this concept. And of course there are many drummers who deliberately put together their kits with acoustic and spatial considerations in mind. But the drum industry — whose greatest push came from rock music — struggles to position the drum kit as an acoustic instrument in relation to rooms. The clearest evidence of this is the fact that recording studios go to great lengths to prevent a room from reflecting when drums are being recorded. The primary reason a band goes into a studio is usually that the studio provides the acoustic conditions necessary to capture a drum kit without it sounding strange.
The roomless drum kit can be compared to any acoustic guitar strung with steel strings and captured with a magnetic pickup: you may have cleanly recorded the guitarist’s performance, but the resulting sound will be strongly one-dimensional — thin and tinny. No one would mic a guitar that way, except as an effect. To capture the full sound of an acoustic guitar with all its nuances, you need a good microphone positioned in the room at a proper distance from the instrument, so that you actually capture a good blend of strings and body. Positioned too close, you would predominantly record the strumming of the strings — but what you want to hear is the vibration of the soundboard, set in motion by the strings.
In classical modern drum miking, the microphone is positioned approximately 1 inch (2–3 cm) from the head. This approach eliminates the room and reduces its influence to a minimum. But it also produces a fairly one-dimensional drum sound — quite unnatural, very comparable to the magnetic pickup on an acoustic guitar.
In a recording studio, an experienced engineer will not only know how to avoid phase problems with a dozen or more microphones on a kit — problems that can lead to cancellations or doublings, since each microphone is positioned differently and captures the same sound at a slightly different point in time, meaning the same frequencies arrive at different moments in different microphones and can cancel or reinforce each other in the mix.
Only once everything has been perfectly positioned and phase cancellations eliminated does the engineer begin the process of synthetically restoring the drum kit’s body by creating artificial reverberant spaces. This is among the most difficult undertakings in audio engineering, and what separates a truly successful engineer from the rest.
Studios have movable absorbers to reduce reflections, specialized microphones that minimize bleed and that do not capture linearly but instead boost frequencies that are flattering for drums. The sonic shaping begins even at the microphone placement stage: proximity to the head provides the most significant tonal influence — the proximity effect delivers bass boost, limiting, and compression. This makes the drum sound fuller, reduces attack, and extends sustain (which is why the drums sound less dead than they do played acoustically). The compression effect is so strong that in live settings, toms are ideally tuned with as little sustain as possible — otherwise the sustain is extended even further, and the gates close too late, producing an unwanted effect on the sound.
Everything I have just described is everyday reality for drummers and everyone who works with drum kits, live and in the studio.
It is therefore an observable fact that people want to reduce the influence of the room in which the instrument happens to be situated to an absolute minimum — and the further the acoustic impulse is removed from what reaches the ears, the better we usually find the result. Sound engineers know: only once they can override the stage — and thus the acoustic drum kit — can they truly achieve great sound. As long as the stage (and the acoustic drums) delivers bleed that is equally loud or even louder than the PA, they can do little more than damage control.
What is interesting is that the fact that a modern drum kit essentially cannot be played acoustically (or rather, it can — but it sounds better miked) is never mentioned. Anyone looking to drum manufacturers for qualifications of acoustic kits for use in real rooms will find nothing. Drummers who frequently play in difficult acoustic environments often use so-called Frankenstein kits — self-assembled drums from various eras that deliver what they actually need. But this is roughly equivalent to a guitarist reaching back for century-old vintage instruments, or stringing modern steel-string acoustics with nylon to approximate the sound of a classical guitar. Yes, it may work passably — but the question remains: why have manufacturers stopped building such instruments themselves?
It is not about making a drum kit simply quieter, but about making it sound better. And here, a psychoacoustic perception comes into play: an instrument that sounds good — lots of bass, reduced attack — is perceived as quieter, even when the objective sound pressure level is the same or even higher.
In concrete terms: more fundamental, less transient attack → the kit can be played louder without being perceived as disruptive or aggressive in the room. The room is excited less in its problematic frequency ranges, and the result is more pleasant — for fellow musicians, listeners, and microphones alike.
The consensus among experienced drummers is that the player matters more than the kit. Someone who plays with dynamic control and adapts their touch to the room will get better results from a budget kit than someone who hammers away blindly — regardless of how expensive the instrument is. This view, while widespread, is not entirely correct. Experienced drummers who play live frequently — and are therefore almost always miked — often don’t notice how poor their acoustic sound actually is. Two anecdotes illustrate this:
Drummer Carmine Appice once changed his kick drum from 24×14 to 24×16 depth. After a concert, the A&R representative from Sabian approached him and mentioned that he had preferred the sound of the shallower kick. Carmine was taken aback, and asked his sound engineer for his opinion. The engineer confirmed what had been said. Carmine was stunned: „Why didn’t anyone tell me?“
The second anecdote is one I witnessed personally: at the first rock concert held in the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, a well-known drummer performed. The kit he used was the one he always plays — though he also owned some fine vintage pieces that would almost certainly have sounded a hundred times better in that room. The sound engineer was close to despair, with every drum fader down to zero and the kit still far too loud. Getting a balanced sound was simply impossible — the Elbphilharmonie is not a forgiving room for percussive sounds. When I ran into the drummer some time later in a relaxed setting and brought up the event, he described an entirely different experience: for him and his band, it had been a particularly beautiful concert. Thanks to good in-ear monitors, he hadn’t noticed a thing about the acoustic problems.
Both of these situations — which actually happened — demonstrate that as a professional drummer, you are usually acoustically disconnected from your room, now more than ever. You judge your sound by what you hear in recordings or on your own monitor — but what it actually sounds like in the room is something you rarely find out, because hardly anyone dares to tell you.
In recording studios, the practice has also crept in of replacing the snare and/or kick drum partially or entirely with samples — without informing the band. Blending in samples is already quite common, for instance to give the bass drum a more defined, warm low end. It also spares the engineer from having to hint to the drummer that their snare sounds more like a trash can than stadium rock.
Why Are Drum Kits Marketed Without Reference to Rooms?
Market and Marketing
Drums have been sold for decades on the basis of loudness, power, and projection. „Cuts through the mix,“ „massive attack,“ „full projection“ — these are the selling points. A kit that deliberately produces less energy sounds like a compromise in marketing terms, even if it is acoustically more sensible. The customer would perceive it as a disadvantage and feel deeply uncertain.
The Target Audience Doesn’t Think in Terms of Room Acoustics
Most buyers — especially in the mid-price segment — don’t think about room acoustics when making a purchase. They think about looks, brand, drumhead configuration, and setup options. Room acoustics is a topic for recording engineers and experienced studio drummers, not for the mass market.
The Problem Lies Outside the Product
From a manufacturer’s perspective, the room is the customer’s problem, not the instrument’s. As long as the insight hasn’t taken hold that a drum kit that is too loud sounds worse in rooms, no success-driven manufacturer will want to touch this hot topic. Most are well aware of the physics — but also aware of the fact that maximum loudness has been sold as a virtue for so long that a 180-degree reversal is simply not possible without a significant loss of image.
Lack of Measurability and Comparability
Since drums are almost always miked in everyday use — and the sonic optimization happens at that stage — there is no objective way to truly compare the acoustic sound. YouTube sound comparisons are usually comparisons of different microphones close to the head, or different mic positions. The drummer learns: sound is made by the microphone and its placement; the instrument seems to be a tertiary factor.
The fact that drums are pretty much always miked makes any absolute statement impossible. Drummer claims „Big drums sound bigger“, then records a large drum, and puts a lot of effort into making it sound big. Did he prove he is right, or did he make it happen through „acoustic triggering“, and a smaller drum would have sounded better with less effort? Nobody will ever know because we judge the outcome, not the process. So there is no absolute truth, so it seems. Only commonly shares assumptions that feel like truth. Going against them is economical suicide, even if you are right and can prove it- on the internet, it is just words that hold no value, and when you record your prove, it is a recording that could be manipulated…