Drum hardware digging

I have been interested in drums for a long time. I’ve been playing for years and have had dozens of different setups over that time. In addition there are many setups that I play that don’t belong to me and I have adapted to many different idiosyncratic configurations over the years.

That said, I’ve been playing around with minimal setups for recording and electronic triggers that I can use to quickly compose drum parts or “key in” patterns. Generally I can do this with a drum pad too, but there is something about a basic configuration of snare and hi-hat that lends itself to more creative compositions.

In my mind there are 2 canonical minimum viable setups. Kick/snare/hats and kick/snare/ride. Both ride and hats are not necessary together but it’s nice to have.

There are also 2 basic mounting configurations that I’m messing with – one that clamps to the table top and one that is floor standing. Floor standing configurations are either a cymbal stand or a hi-hat stand with the snare mounted to it on a ball mount. Kick drum is a trigger pedal. Desk mounted configurations are a pole from a monitor stand with drum mounts on it.

This sounds pretty straightforward but I’ve learned that there are a lot of ways to approach drum hardware and there are a few standards worth knowing.

Ball mounts are handy clamps that can attach to a cymbal stand and have an articulated arm with a large ball end that can be locked into any position. The heavier-duty variants of this are used to mount toms and lighter versions are for cowbells and other percussion. Dual versions exist for mounting two toms to the same stand, but you will have to get very heavy duty stands for something like that to be stable.

L-arms (cowbell mounts) come in two main sizes – 9.5 mm and 12 mm. This is pretty confusing since there are going to be some heavier-duty hardware that won’t work with some mounts because the hole isn’t big enough for the arm to go through. These arms are knurled so that they don’t twist once clamped down. They are typically held in place with another clamp that has a sort of eye bolt that the arm goes through and pulls it against another articulated piece of knurled metal. Some of these arms have 2 sizes on the same arm – one side is 9.5 mm and the other is 12 mm.

Hi-hat stand rods aren’t all the same diameter. It took me a while to realize that the heavy duty stand in my studio had an 8 mm rod and a lot of lighter-duty stands are 7 mm. It’s pretty close but a lot of hi-hat clutches won’t work with the 8 mm rod. Best bet is to just get all Gibraltar clutches that use the eye bolt mechanism. For some reason hi-hat clutches all cost about the same so getting a good one is the way to go.

Cymbal stands single vs double braced. I have mostly light weight single braced stands because the weight really starts adding up with drum hardware. However I love to mount as much stuff as I can to stands and use fewer of them. Hard to say. Usually the heavier stands need to be weighted down anyway to keep from tipping over unless you start to get the really crazy heavy stands with wide bases. The jury is out here, I think I might get some sandbags instead.

Cymbal tilters are standard M8 metric thread. I think back in the day there was an imperial measure that was used, maybe 5/16″ but it’s definitely bigger than 1/4″ so don’t be fooled. All those wing nuts are M8 threaded. This is nice because there are a lot of ways to do “cymbal stacking” if you can thread things onto a cymbal stand. Oh and the end of the stands have a little tilt adjustment so they are called “tilters”.

Rack gear is mostly 1.5″ tubes. Standard Neil Peart style setups use 1.5″ diameter tubing as the base. There are many many types of clamps that are designed to hang things off of this type of tubing. It’s very hard to find clamps that are anything but v-grove for mounting to cymbal stands or 1.5″.

Problems solvers such as connecting two cymbal arms together do exist. I will write about that soon. I’m constantly discovering new little bits of hardware as I get into this but it’s hard to figure out what to search for initially.