Taylor’s Annoying Rings
// March 14th, 2011 // Uncategorized
Drums are awesome, what sucks about it is this stupid little ring that carries after you hit a drum. 99.9999% of music has been so digitally altered and edited that no one except a drummer would know about it. It’s kinda like a crappy ring that just doesn’t sound good, and deadens the drums tone. I have spent literally hundreds of hours trying to get my kit to sound good. There are hundreds of theories and methods about how to get the perfect sound, and the fact is that there is no one way to get your drums to sound good. For my drums I usually tune the top and bottom skin to the same pitch, if not tune the bottom a little higher. The biggest thing is to get even perfect tension on every tuning lug…its f******g hard. The perfect drum tone is going to have a nice “dooo” sorta noise that naturally dampens itself after about a second or so with no annoying ring. Drummers spend forever trying to get it, but once they do it’s easy to re-achieve. New skins and the right skin help a lot as well.
The drums I am using currently are an old set of Pearl Exports. I’m not totally sure what year they are but I do know they are from the early to mid ‘80’s. They are a birch shell with a cheap cedar outer ply. Not a bad combination, they are about a low to mid-grade drum. The birch in the shell gives a nice resonance but not a lot of depth, while the cedar outer plies mostly give an inexpensive filler. The drums were originally covered with a plastic coating which can be compared mostly with a krazy carpet. I have since taken the plastic off and stained the shells a darker kind a mahogany color. This lets the wood breathe easier and gives a warmer tone. The only problem is I f*****d up and got stain on the skin seat and threw out the easy tenability of them…although it’s fixed now.
Through out the years of my drumming career…which is a huge overstatement…I have used a few different skins, I have used stock skins, I have used evens clear and coated skins, and different type of Remo skins. The ones I favour the most, by far, are Remo Embassador Pinstripe. These skins are so fantastic because they are a two ply, reasonably thick skin, with a thin film of oil between them. This gives a slappy hard hitting sound that also gives fantastic action and also can be tuned to a fairly wide range of notes, but can be a **** to tune. They are most suited to rock and metal styles and hold up very well to those with a heavy hand, I’m definitely guilty of this. Come to a show and I can show you how much!!
The ringing I started talking about is a nightmare in the drum world, sort of, more annoying than anything else…but you get the point. A ring occurs when you hit a drum head and the drum has a high pitched ring that carries on long after you hit the drum. It is cause by a few things and can be easy to get rid of, sometimes not. One cause of this ring is when one or both of the heads have an uneven tension across the skin. This is fairly easy to fix, there is a simple tuning method to even out the tension. You tap the skin about an inch and a half from the outside ring directly in line with each tuning lug, listen to the tone, then make all the lug points match the tone. This is one way to get rid of the ring. Another cause in conjunction with uneven head tension is if the batter and resonator skin are tuned off pitch to each other so the vibrations reverberate horribly. To fix this all you need to do is tune each head at the same pitch or one to be two to three notes higher or lower than the other, each drum is different but this should solve the problem.
Now next time you hear a really good sounding acoustic drum kit you can appreciate the art that is the awesomeness of a kick ass drummer and having awesome sounds all around you!
