Drumming on Fly Dates
This past week I’ve been out on the road again with 33Miles. I left my house at about 5:00 am on Friday morning to meet Caleb at Target on Old Hickory Blvd. We flew out into Denver, CO for our first show. Once we got into Denver we had a long 2 hour drive up into the mountains in Estes Park for our first show. It was a great show for some awesome youth. We got about 4 hours of sleep that night, and drove back to the airport at 5:00 am again the next day. Then we flew into Spokane, WA, had a 2 hour drive to Richland and did it all over again.
The point of this entry was more to talk about how to setup on Fly Dates, what to take and not to take, etc. Personally, I like to fly with my own cymbals, snare drum, sticks, electronics, and my own kick pedal. Sometimes I can’t fit them all depending on what airlines we are traveling on, but if I can get them all on the plane, and I tend to recommend that. The snare drum is the center of your drum kit sound. It’s usually easy to fix a kick drum, and toms, and besides you can’t fly them, but it’s tough to fix an overtuned snare drum. Once it’s too high, it’s very hard to bring the head back down to normal, so I do tend to love my own snare drum. It’s kinda my signature sound.
For the kick pedal, I carry the single version of my normal double pedal for convenience. It’s really easy to break the pedal down into a manageable size, and that way you’ll have the right kick foot response. That’s really important if you use your bass drum a lot, which I’d say most players would. It’s crucial to have a kick pedal you are comfortable with. The electronics are like my mixer, ears, cables, all that jazz. And I typically also like to carry my own cymbals as well just to keep with as much of my sound as I can when I am not able to use my kit. That’s pretty much the standard for using backline gear, which is what you’d call the drumset, bass rig, and guitar amp that the venue provides for the bands who are flying in.
When I break down the kit upon arrival to the venue, usually I’ll take pretty much everything on the kit, other than toms and kick down to make room for my stuff. If there are microphone stands in there I’ll pull them out too to allow for me to customize the kit without having to move my stands around the mics. It’s much easier that way in my experience. Then I’ll put up my snare and get my kick, snare, and hat in the normal positions, then position everything around those things. Lastly I’ll put on my kick pedal and make sure I am all set.
From there comes the battle of tuning, or detuning a drumset. A lot of times guys crank their toms up so dang high they sound like timbales. The problem is once they are there it’s very hard to bring them back to down to a normal pitch. A lot of times 33 will ask them to provide fresh heads, and I’ll go ahead and swap those onto the kit. That way I have the chance to get the drums to sound as close to my own as possible. I am a little spoiled with my custom Risen Drums kit, but you can still work with anything as long as it has clean heads and you can bring your own essentials.
Once the heads are set, drums are set, I’ll let the engineer come in with the mics and we’re all set. From there I usually just do a few short “around the drums” exercises to make sure I can find the drums without looking at them. I find that if I close my eyes and play a little during sound check it helps me to feel out where the little changes in the kit are. Since it isn’t exactly like my own that really gives me a good overview and from there I can rock it out.
So that’s how I do fly dates. I hope that this helps someone. As always you can email me with questions.