Over the years, I’ve heard people tell me a lot of things that they believe to be true, but aren’t.
They hear it from other musicians and pass it on and pretty soon, people start accepting it as absolute fact.
The actual truth gets buried in history and that’s the way legends are born. It’s charming, but inaccurate.
Let’s examine some of these beliefs.
Bass drum ports
There are a lot of drummers that cut a small hole (usually around 4 to 6 inches in diameter) in their front head to “port” their drum.
Somebody may have told them that this tunes the drum (like a bass reflex speaker) to improve the bottom end. Is it true? Yes and no.
Cutting a hole will provide a vent which can be tuned to resonate the air inside the drum, but that’s what the second head does anyway – it’s like a passive radiator, driven from the pedal head.
Putting a hole in the front head is kinda like putting a hole in your speaker to port your hi-fi system.
So, why do drummers put that hole in their drums? Primarily to use as an opening for a kick drum mic, without removing the head entirely.
A lot of drummers still print the band’s name on their drum head and that’s important to them. That hole is important when you walk into a studio to record. Live drummers saw their studio counterparts using the hole and thought it looked cool, and adopted it.
Where the hole is located is very important, but not for any reason you’d normally think about.
It should be above the center line of the drum, so that a short mic stand will work, and the mic stand boom arm angle will let the engineer position the mic to point directly at the spot where the beater hits the head.
The hole diameter should be around 6 inches to allow for various size microphones.
The center of the hole should be above the center line of the drum, so that the entire opening is in the upper half of the drum. Any 6 inches opening above the 9:00 to 3:00 line will work.
Tubes are better than transistors
When transistors first appeared, their distortion characteristics were very different than tubes.
Once you exceeded their output range, they simply gave up, all at once and distortion went straight up very quickly.
A transistor amp which hit 100 watts at .05 distortion might put out 110 watts, but at 35 percent distortion. A tube amp distorted slower and more gracefully, often generating 2nd and 4th harmonics – which made the sound even better.
The newer breeds of MOSFET transistors a able to mimic this kind of distortion, and the gap narrowed.
With the new breed of computer modeling amps, and some of the new DSP chips, the gap between tubes and transistors is getting even narrower.
