Gentleman Jim wrote:I think a certain amount of this discussion comes down to "How much of your job is it to do whatever your client wants?" versus "How much of your job is it to guide your client, since you're probably the one with more experience and knowledge?"
There's a prejudice, an assumption in those questions, and that assumption is that anyone who chooses to play a drum set with lots of toms
is already in the wrong and needs to be corrected. Let's examine this.
So many of these threads start out with an obvious bias: the OP doesn't like big drum sets, or 7-string guitars, or piccolo snares, or 5-string basses, or fretless basses, or valve trombones. Generally it's because those instruments have been predominantly used in styles of music the OP doesn't like.
And so, either the musician in question is playing one of these horrid, reviled styles of music or they're just using an instrument that the engineer associates with "bad" music, and what then? If the music isn't "the bad music," the engineer should maybe just get over himself and record the band...and if it IS "the bad music," why did the engineer take the gig?
Perhaps the better question is "How much say should the engineer have in what instruments the band plays?" or "How directly should the engineer's musical tastes dictate the material the band records?"
I'd also argue that inexperience or lack of knowledge isn't always the cause of a player choosing an instrument that, for lack of a better phrase, reeks of excess. The player may have a perfectly valid reason for wanting 16 toms or no frets. I may or may not enjoy Neil Peart or Terry Bozzio's music, but I do recognize that their instrument choices are dictated by the musical ideas they choose to express, and not by inexperience or lack of knowledge.