I’ve spent years trying to make recordings sound bigger.
Bigger drums. More weight. More excitement. More impact.
But going into this new series of recordings, I started wondering whether I had been asking the wrong question.
Instead of asking:
How do I make the drums sound bigger?
I started asking:
Where does that feeling of weight actually come from?
I can hear it in many of my favourite records, but it doesn’t always come from the same place. Records from different eras can feel equally powerful while getting there in completely different ways.
That made me wonder whether “bigger” was really a sound at all, or whether it was the result of something happening underneath the sound.
Strangely enough, reverb is what started changing how I thought about it.
Thinking about reverb as energy
One of the happy byproducts of working alongside the people at Relab is that you get much deeper into classic reverb design than any reasonable person probably needs to.
The deeper I got, the less I thought about reverb simply as an effect, or as a collection of early reflections, echoes, and delay lines.
I started thinking about it as energy added to a recording.
Where does that energy go?
How long does it last?
How does it spread?
How does it change over time?
That way of thinking made sense for reverbs and rooms. Then I caught myself asking:
Why don’t I think about drums the same way?
That was the connection I had been missing.
Maybe the tricks aren’t the point
I went back to the larger-than-life rock records I love.
When people talk about how those records were made, the conversation often becomes a list of techniques:
Tape. Transformers. Room microphones. Layered samples. Subharmonics. Gated reverbs. Distortion.
There are hundreds of videos explaining each trick.
But maybe the word trick is part of the problem. It makes us think of these as isolated techniques, things we can add one at a time until a sound becomes big enough.
I started wondering whether the people making those records were doing something more connected.
Maybe all those different tools were being used to chase the same underlying result.
They were shaping the energy around the sound.
Some tools reinforced particular resonances. Some created new harmonics. Some extended the decay or made the room feel larger. Others changed where the sound reached its greatest intensity.
Different tools, perhaps, but the same deeper pursuit:
Where should the energy appear, what should happen to it, and how long should it last?
A small experiment
I started running a few simple experiments.
For one of them, I took a drum tuned around a deliberate resonance, added a supporting tone, and ran the combination through asymmetric saturation.
New frequencies appeared, as you would expect from a nonlinear process.
That wasn’t the interesting part.
What caught my attention was that I could influence where those new frequencies appeared by changing what I fed into the saturation.
The saturation wasn’t just adding generic colour to a finished drum sound. What it produced depended on the resonances already present.
That changed the sequence in my head.
Instead of recording a drum and then adding saturation to make it sound bigger, what if I shaped the drum’s resonance first? Could I get the saturation to produce something more intentional, and maybe more musical?
As a guitar player, I already understand this relationship.
We use EQ before an overdrive or distortion pedal all the time. We shape what enters the nonlinear stage because that changes the character of what comes out.
I had just never fully carried that way of thinking over to drums.
Designing the conditions for impact
This is still a hypothesis. I don’t know how far it holds yet.
But I’m beginning to think that impact may not be something we add to a sound after the fact.
It may be something we design into the conditions around it.
That would mean drum tuning, EQ, saturation, room microphones, samples, and reverb aren’t separate stages in the search for a bigger sound.
They interact.
The resonance of the drum changes what the saturation produces. The room changes how the initial hit develops through time. Reverb changes where that energy goes and how long it remains. The arrangement determines whether all of that energy has somewhere useful to go.
Seen this way, “bigger” isn’t one quality, and it isn’t one trick.
It may be the result of several connected decisions steering energy toward the same musical moment.
That gives me a different set of questions to work with:
Where should the energy appear?
Which resonances should feed the saturation?
What should reinforce the initial hit?
What should extend it?
How should it evolve?
Where in the song should it reach its greatest intensity?
Those questions feel more useful to me than simply asking how to make something bigger.
The next experiment
Some of this thinking has already made its way into the first song in this new recording series.
Next, I want to see whether I can reshape the resonant modes of a recorded drum before saturation, and whether that lets me produce harmonics that feel more connected to the song.
If I’m recording the drums myself, I can explore the same idea through tuning, microphone placement, and the room. If the tracks have already been recorded, I’ll have to find out how much of that relationship I can still influence without forcing it.
I don’t know yet whether this becomes a repeatable method.
For now, it has done something more important. It has changed what I listen for.
I started by asking how to make the drums sound bigger.
Now I’m asking how to shape the flow of energy that allows them to feel bigger.
That’s the relationship I’m taking into recording the next song
