Drum Building Tips To Make A Drum Set Like The Pros
By John Dutra | August, 2009
Efficient Drum building routines are put to practice by pro drum makers after years worth of messing up, constant repetition and drum building experiments. Often, you don’t hear to many “DRUM BUILDING SECRETS” because everyone has their own routine that works for them and them only.
But I’ve come to practice these three drum building philosophies that are absolutely necessary to follow when taking on a drum building project.
These are tips that drum building companies know and use every day.
Follow this advice with the knowledge from the Guerrilla Drum Making DVD and you’ll be an unstoppable drum builder.
#1: Save Time By Batching Your Drum Building Steps:
Batching your drum building simply means to group similar activities together and do them all at the same time. This is the most simple drum building tip that has the most tangible results. Activities to batch in a drum building project could be the sanding stage of all your drum shells, glueing your drum wrap, staining, painting, drilling, or assembling your drums for example.
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Batching the drum building stages are important for many reasons, including time saving and the reduction of activity clutter, but mainly because batching your activities ensures that your drum building project will come out consistent. Drum building is not as hard as it sounds, but you can get some huge variances between drums if you’re not batching your work.
Let me give you some examples…
If you are staining your drum set, you’ll get a more consistent look if you take every drum shell through the same stage of the drum building process before moving onto the next stage. It’s far better to sand all your drums (stage 1), raise the grain on all of them (stage 2), sand them again (stage 3), prep the insides of the shells (stage 4) and then individually stain them and let them dry (stage 5) for a consistency with all the drum shells.
Imagine if you took ONE DRUM SHELL separately through those 5 different drum building stages. Once that drum is done, then begin taking the next drum shell through the same 5 steps. This would not only be a major waste of time and energy throughout the drum building stages, but your drums have the probability of coming out with an inconsistent drum finish.
Another example where batching a drum building project is important is during the drum hardware layout stages. It’s far more efficient to set up lug lines, drill all the drums and then assemble all of the drums instead of marking one, drilling one and assembling one drum. It simply takes too long to do it individually.
Think of drum building like putting your groceries away. You pull all of your groceries out of the bag and take a handful of stuff that needs to go in the pantry, the fridge, the freezer, the outside beer refrigerator, etc etc. You don’t take out one thing and walk it to its place and come back and do it all over again until your groceries are put away.
Whether going through the drum finishing stages, the hardware stages, the prepping stages or whatever… batch your drum building activities. Believe me, it will not only make the drum building project speed up but will also help keep a consistent feeling with all the drums in the set. Drum building can be a long road if you want it to be.
#2: Listen To Your Grandpa… Measure Twice, Drill Once:
I know… you’ve heard this a million times and drum building is no different: measure twice and drill your drum shells ONCE. Now… this doesn’t mean that you need to overmeasure or make a math problem out of how you’re trying to setup your lugs… but it does mean double check your work. Drum building pros around the world have learned this lesson the hard way, so why not learn from everyone else’s mistakes?
Drum building has a few crucial steps that are unforgiving and irreversible. One of them is the drilling stage. After you measure and mark all your hardware lines, you’d better do a quick double check before drilling.
As we say all the time, drum building is not hard… nor is it rocket science. You’ll see in the Guerrilla Drum Making DVD that every method to measuring for drum lugs and setting up hardware lines is very simple. And to make your drum building experience even smoother, measure twice and drill once.
#3: Set Your Drum Building Goals and Invest in Quality Products:
I always tell someone that’s getting their feet wet in drum building this extremely important thing:
“Drum building with poor products WILL yield poor results.”
Another thing I tell someone is to think of the end goal and set your drum building budget accordingly. Do you, for example, want a studio kit or something to bash on the road and throw around every night without drum cases?
You get what you pay for, and you should be paying for products that are specific to your goals. If making a professional sounding and looking custom drum set is your goal… invest in the best. You’ll still be saving money over ordering them from a drum building company and you’ve got the power to choose from any kind of drum shell or piece of hardware you want.
If you’re band sounds like the Ramones and you want to trash your drum set every night like Dave Grohl did… I would recommend investing in something that is LESS expensive and lesser in quality. It doesn’t mean that you’re drum building project is any better or worse than the next guys… it just means that you made a smart choice.
A lot of people first getting into drum building want to make the coolest looking drum set and the baddest sounding kit ever for $300.00
Is it doable?
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Of corse… it’s doable. There’s a million situations where this could work out.
Remember that drum building to save money is a byproduct of drum building to make a killer, 100% one of a kind drum set that is perfect for you and your musical situation. Saving money and having a unique sounding set go hand in hand… and one shouldn’t outweigh the other.
But whether or not your aiming for the big stage or the dive bar or the studio, you should still be investing in most APPROPRIATE products for your drum building goals. This way, they last for a lifetime or they last for one year. It’s up to you…
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