From there I started getting more interested in recording as a hobby, but playing drums professionally was always my focus at that time. So I started playing around with moving microphones and moving my drums around the room. The band director would let me bring my drumset to school and mic it up in the band room and record my drums there for demos I was doing with my friends. It was in that band room where I really started playing with acoustics. The concrete floor had 1.5 meter deep by 20 cm high steps that wrapped around one half of the room and turned the room into an amphitheater type setup with the conductor standing down at the bottom and the instruments setup in an arch across the room in front of the conductor on each big step (there were 4 or 5 steps to get to the top). The band room was the size of a school gymnasium, but it was acoustically designed and tuned using about a dozen of these huge 2 meter diameter convex sound clouds suspended from the ceiling (we had an 8 to 10 meter high ceiling in the band room), the walls were all out of parallel and we had these huge panels attached to the walls with hinges so that we could change the way sound reflected around the room. And the room was designed and built from the ground up as a music performance space. Our band room was big enough to fit our entire marching band drum line, concert band orchestra and jazz band all setup simultaneously from left to right across the room in front of the conductor’s podium. I was also lucky enough to go to a high school that had a really strong music program. It started with Tascam 4-track cassette tape recorders and a couple of cheap Teac microphones and expanded from there. And that is how I started playing around with recording music. Being the drumming in most of the garage bands with my friends when I was a teenager, I was the one responsible for recording since I had to have the mics to record my drums. Well, I started out playing drums when I was 11 years old, and I just fell in love with it. Would you mind sharing some of your background?
I’m curious how everything started out and how you got into engineering. Derek was kind enough to take time from his busy schedule and share some of his thoughts about drummers, drums and drum recordings.
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