Setting Up Your Drums for Success
How you set up your drums is personal at best. These days drum manufacturers are designing hardware that allows you to adjust your drums and cymbals at virtually any height and angle, and so providing infinite possibilities. While this may be beneficial, it could potentially make things more confusing for a beginner who is setting up their drums for the first time. So, where is a good place to start?
The best advice I have ever got was from Ed Soph, who said to think of the drum set as if it were one big snare drum. What this means is to position things in a way so they are close together and easily accessible so that you are hitting the drums in the center of the head. Everything should be an extension of the snare drum, which is central to the drum set. If you have to fully extend your arms to hit a drum or a cymbal, you may have positioned it too high and/or too far away. Also, be careful not to angle the drums at too steep of a slope. I have seen beginning students angle their toms to the point where the shells are almost parallel with the floor. This is probably not the best way to position any drum since when we play, our sticks basically move in an up and down (not forward) motion. Plus, you’ll run a much higher risk of denting heads like that. They should be angled some, but it depends on how high or how low you sit (another topic for another time). The same rule applies to cymbals. You want to be able to hit them both with the tip of the sticks and also on the edge of the cymbal with the shoulder of the stick. If both types of strokes are not possible with your current setup, maybe reevaluating the height and angle of your cymbals would be in order.
As I mentioned earlier, how you set up your drums is personal. Your physical size will more than likely factor into how you position things. I’m not very big guy (about 5’ 5”), so my set up might not feel comfortable to someone who is taller (and vice-versa). Your choice of grip will also influence your setup. Many players who play traditional grip tend ot angle the drums differently (especially the snare) than a matched grip player. It’s important to understand that the traditional grip was originally developed to accommodate the natural slope of the old rope-tensioned marching drums. Most traditional grip players tend to set their snare up a little higher, sloped down, and slightly to the right to follow the natural slope of the left-hand stick. Matched grip players will usually position their snare drum flatter or slightly angled toward them.
I hope you have found this information useful in some way. some self evaluation is never a bad thing. In most cases, it can help to affirm the things we are doing that are working, and hopefully help correct the things that are not working. The ultimate goal is to make good music, and we don’t want our setup to hold us back from that goal. Good luck!
