Hans Richter. Episode 3: The Custom Drum Kit.
The snare lay on the workbench. Once, it had been a drum. Now, it was a shell with dents, stripped threads, and a head that looked like the battered lid of a barrel. Hans removed the rim and laid it next to the anvil. Standard, thin. He weighed it in his hand like a man who already knows the result.
— “Too soft, ” he said. Not as a musician. As a blacksmith.
He didn’t “mount” the new rim — he assembled it. The steel was raw, with visible hammer marks. Not perfectly round, but honest. When he tightened the bolts, the sound wasn’t ringing — it was dull, short. Like a strike on a plate lying on the ground.
He chose the “head” (Kevlar) not because it was “recommended.” He tightened it higher than ordinary lugs would allow. Here, they didn’t object. The lugs themselves were forged by him — thick, with short threads. They didn’t bend. They endured.
When he struck it for the first time, I instinctively stepped back. Not from the volume — but from the character. The sound didn’t spread across the room. It simply appeared and disappeared. As if someone had struck a hammer against immobile metal.
He partially plated the toms with steel. Not for aesthetics — for control. The wood inside still tried to resonate, but the metal wouldn’t let it bloom. The tom answered. It didn’t sing. It didn’t linger. It answered — short and to the point.
He reinforced the bass drums from the inside. Metallic rings, thickened edges. He cut the hole in the resonant head himself. The circle wasn’t perfect. Но it was as straight as the kit required.
A drum rim cracked? Hans forged a new one from a steel rod as thick as a finger. It was slightly crooked, black from scale, but it could survive a direct hit from a shell.
A cymbal mount broke? He threw away the “toy wingnuts” and set everything on industrial M12 bolts, tightening them with a wrench so that they could only be undone with a powerful impact driver.
The drum kit grew and mutated. It lost its showroom gloss, becoming overgrown with forged brackets, riveted patches, and heavy cast-iron counterweights so the stands wouldn’t fall from his strikes.
It looked monstrous.
It weighed as much as a cast-iron bridge.
It sounded like a rockfall in a canyon.
— “Hammers don’t need tuning, ” Hans would say. “They need a swing.”
When Hans sat down at this “Frankenstein, ” magic happened. This crude, tormented metal suddenly began to sound like no expensive “Premier” or “Tama” ever could. It was the sound of survival. The sound that broke through pain.
A Rhythm with No Echo.
The studio was “proper.” Wood, diffusers, absorbers, microphones that cost as much as a good car. It was a space trained to make music beautiful.
But Hans didn’t bring music there.
When he started unloading the iron, the engineer, accustomed to lacquered Tamas and Pearls, stopped chewing his gum. He stared at the set for a long time without asking questions, then silently replaced the standard mic stands with reinforced booms and cast-iron counterweights.
It was the right decision. The vibration from Hans’s footsteps already had the floor reconsidering its career choice.
— “Does it always look like that?” the engineer asked, nodding at the bass drum.
Hans just nodded.
The engineer, still hoping for normality, asked:
— “The heads have sagged a bit. Do you have a drum key?”
He likely expected a standard T-shaped key that every drummer carries. Hans patted his pockets, reached into his backpack, and pulled out a size 2 adjustable pipe wrench, the kind usually used to fix main water lines.
— “Ordinary ones break, ” Hans explained, noticing the engineer’s bulging eyes. “This one holds. And it respects the instrument.”
He carefully tightened a bolt with two fingers. The metal groaned plaintively.
— “A-sharp, ” Hans said with satisfaction.
The engineer nodded the way people nod when they’ve decided to stop asking questions to avoid further confusion.
The kit, which we called “Frankenstein, ” looked like a victim of an industrial accident that had been put back together not for music, but for revenge.
The snare hung lower than usual. Massive, with a forged rim that didn’t shine with chrome but absorbed light like a black hole. The bass drums resembled part of a bunker’s ventilation system. The ports in the heads looked like technological hatches cut with a blowtorch.
A Small Problem.
The engineer habitually moved a dynamic microphone toward the snare head. He listened in his headphones. He frowned. He moved it back. Then further.
— “It doesn’t ring, ” the sound op stated, taking off his headphones. “It… ends.”
His face was frozen in professional bewilderment.
— “Hans, let’s check the levels first, ” the engineer’s voice in the headphones grew cautious. “Play very quietly. Pianissimo. Like a kitten creeping across a carpet.”
Hans thought about it. The task was non-trivial. He nodded and barely touched the snare with his stick.
The sound was as if a bag of cement had been dropped on the floor. Fine plaster fell from the ceiling.
The engineer adjusted his ear pads as if the problem were in the headphones.
— “Was that the kitten?”
— “That was a tiger, ” Hans replied seriously. “I left the kittens at home.”
— “Fine, ” the operator conceded, turned on the -20 dB pad, and dialed the gain almost to zero. “Then give me the tiger. But… a cub.”
— “Recording, ” I said shortly.
The first hit on the snare blew the clipping on the preamp. The red overload indicators flashed and stayed on. It was less like a sound and more like a sharp spike in atmospheric pressure in a hermetic chamber.
— “Don’t play a rhythm, ” the engineer asked, nervously turning knobs. “Just one hit.”
Hans struck.
On the screen, there was no beautiful, decaying wave. There was a clipped peak — a vertical jump hitting the ceiling of the scale. The attack front was like the drop of a guillotine.
And almost instant silence followed.
— “There’s almost no sustain, ” the sound engineer said quietly. “The room doesn’t have time to catch it.”
He added some “room” mics.
The room refused to cooperate.
The toms behaved the same way. They didn’t fill the space with a rumble. They left holes in it.
— “It doesn’t reflect, ” the sound director muttered. “It… cuts.”
Like a knife that isn’t interested in the material’s opinion.
Impulse.
We had to record the bass drums separately. Not because of the volume — because of the character. Every hit was an isolated event, without the “tail” that usually glues a rhythm section together.
When Hans finished the take, silence hung in the control room. Not the relaxed pause after a good take, but the wary silence after a cannonade.
The engineer turned to me.
— “Those aren’t drums, ” he said softly. “That’s an impulse generator.”
I smiled to myself. Finally, someone had phrased it in scientific terms.
This set didn’t ask to be beautiful. It demanded to be recorded as a fact.
— “They aren’t background, ” the sound director said. “They are the frame.”
Ordinary drums need to be persuaded. These — do not. They don’t want to be beautiful. They don’t want to be voluminous. They simply exist — harsh, brief, inevitable.
The engineer leaned back in his chair.
— “Fine, ” he said. “Then we do the opposite.”
He stopped trying to soften them. He kept the attack. He kept the dryness. He kept the cold.
Minimum processing. Only a limiter so it wouldn’t kill our converters. No smoothing. No cosmetics.
When the final rhythm played back in full, it was clear: you couldn’t hide these drums. You could only accept them as a construction.
I looked at Hans behind the glass. He was wiping his face with a towel, perfectly calm, like a worker after a shift at a machine tool.
— “I fixed them, ” he said, coming into the control room. “They talked too much. I removed the extra.”
The engineer, still trying to save his professional worldview, cautiously said:
— “You see… it’s missing…” he made a circling motion with his hands. “Warmth. The sound is too cold. It needs a little sun…”
He looked at Hans, expecting a discussion about EQ.
Hans silently walked to the air conditioner and pulled the plug.
— “It’ll heat up now, ” he said, heading back. “I can’t promise sun. But it’ll be warm.”
Viktor snorted into his fist.
The engineer waved his hand and hit “Save.”
Hans said nothing. He just listened.
Like a man checking not the sound — but the strength.
It was on this “Frankenstein” that Hans learned the main thing — not just to strike, but to hear the material’s feedback. Of course, years later, he learned to control his monstrous strength. Now he sits at his top-tier Sonor and plays with surgical precision, not even breaking the thinnest sticks. He realized that metal can not only be flattened but also made to sing.
But that old “Frankenstein” stands in his forge as a reminder of a time when we didn’t play music, but forged it.
(from the notes of Viktor Stahl)