Drum Riser...How? ...Why?

[brandondrury]

Hey dude,

You mentioned your drum riser. I've always wanted one too, but I don't know why.

I was curious as to why you are going through the trouble of building it and also how you are going about doing it.

You mentioned being decoupled from the floor, which seams like a great thing for a rig like mine where you can feel the floor shaking with every step you take....a DW kick will seriously shake the house. My instincts tell me that this wouldn't be so necessary on very hard floors. I'm just guessing though, so set me straight if I'm confused here.

Assuming you could decouple a drumset from the floor (which could be a good thing) how do you decouple it from the rise? Does that make sense? I've read about guys filling these risers with sand to make them mega dense. Or do you want the drums coupled to the riser for a more...big/boomy sound?

Anyway, just curious what you are up to.

Brandon

[DogpitStudios]

Well, I'm building our riser for its isolation reasons. It will give me just a little bit more separation between rooms, and it will also stop vibrations from shaking loose things in the room creating unwanted noise. The best thing to do to get separation between the rooms would be to build a new floor over the existing one that is decoupled or "floating" from the original floor, but obviously I don't have the money to do that so a drum riser decoupled from the floor would be the next best step. The problem with a riser is it is essentially a large floating drum, and when an instrument is played on top of it, it will amplify the noise unless the inside is properly treated. Most people say that you need tons of mass to stop the riser from amplifying but you only need mass to isolate sound, where I believe that absorbent material will stop the resonation in the riser like it would behind a curved diffuser. The structure of a riser is a simple box able to hold weight on top of it, so it must be built the way you would build a floor. The way to decouple it from the floor is to attack feet made of a very dense rubber to the bottom of it. The best rubber for this comes from scrap tires. Junkyards will sell scrap tires to you for very cheap considering they want to get rid of them. It may even be free of charge. It was never explained to me the reason why rubber works so well, but I assume its because rubber does not transmit electricity energy or heat very well. I hope I answered all of your questions. If you have more please ask. And anyone may correct me if I am wrong in anything I have said, this is just what I've been told.


Ben

[brandondrury]

I didn't think about isolation.

You are talking about isolating the drums from shaking the floor which transfers throughout the building. That makes sense. I guess this is to isolate the drums from your control room?

Rubber seams like a good choice. I know there was a guy about 5 years ago who was selling rubber pads. They were a hot item back when I first got into recording. Anyway, they weren't all that expensive.

I was actually just reading in EQ about some A list drummer who did something similar. He said the secret for his drum riser was multiple layers of different stuff. To be honest though, I know extremely little about risers so I'm more interested in learning on this thread than anything else.

Brandon

[DogpitStudios]

Could you possibly send the link for that EQ article this way if its online? Many layers of different stuff could make sense. Someone also once mentioned to me that building a drum riser acts as a mini stage for the drums in the room producing a more "true" drum sound in the room? I'm not exactly sure what that means but I can try to find the board that was said on and ask the guy some more about it.

Ben

[brandondrury]

I looked all around for that article on drum risers, but it seams to be lost in the void. I'm not 100% sure it was an EQ magazine. Either way, it wasn't THAT informative. It was the drummer explaining it...not the guy who actually built it. He just said they used as many different layers of as many different things possible. I do know that it wasn't that tall because his ceiling started out at 8'.

I'm also not sure what a "true" drum sound means. I don't know of anyone who claims to use a riser everytime and I've never seen it done in my limited travels.

Brandon

[DogpitStudios]

I don't know what "true" means in the context either, thats why the question mark is there.

Ben

[brandondrury]

Maybe that guy is still living in 1987 when all drums were on top of 12 foot risers?

Brandon