I like wood disk under the snare. But I heard difference only with the full drum set being played. From my experience: I put small wooden panel of axis in front of the didgeridoo when playing in guite dead room. That way I get reflections back to my ears and hear articulations better.
You can graze a crack with a torch and brazing rod if you are careful. I did a 22 inch heavy ride. Lasted for 3 decades - just have to be VERY careful with the torch.
I thought about cleaning the area really well and applying flux and solder to fill the crack. You should be able to use a lower heat. Have you ever tried it?
Hey David. Just wanted to leave a comment on your latest video saying I love the content man! It’s awesome. I can’t get enough of your channel. I’ve learned a ton about the ins and outs of drums besides the playing portion. Thanks a bunch, bro! Keep the content coming PLEASE! :)
Try aluminum flashing it’s stiffer, it’s cheap and can be found at Home Depot. I used some for a wrap alternative, I had the idea of lining the inside of my kick with it but haven’t got around to it.
Rather than wood, I know a guy use put a couple pieces of large tile chunks. Used 3 to virtually cover the floor under the snare without setting the legs on an uneven surface.
Having the alu-foil just hang loose inside will create all kinds of vibrating noises. But then again some noise adds to the enjoyment of music, take vinyl as an example.
I also completely thrashed the first “nice” cymbal I ever bought. It was a used A custom china that already had a few cracks in it. Picked it up from MME for like $120 . Beat the absolute devil out of it.
Live sound engineer here. The snare disk test would be better illustrated with an OMNI mic. The 57 is Cardiod. Even if sound refelects, It's only catching sound in front of the diagphragm. ie the reso head. Perhaps the hack works, but the mic just didn't catch it.
Honestly I didn't hear much of a difference between the before and after on the fiberglass modification. I might actually consider doing that to my MIJ stencil snare just to make it a bit stronger.
Oh shit you're in Richmond? I'm in the historic triangle lmao that's wild. Idk how you stand the traffic man it's too much for me. Loved the video though, first time I've seen this channel
It's funny the only one I knew before watching was the tea towel and after watching this I feel like it's the only one worth doing with any significant change in sound. This may be a hot take but I think the Beatles made good music
None of them sounded "better" to me. The only worthwhile one I think is the tea towels because they did change the sound to something that might be useful on occasion.
I didn't hear too much of a difference with the fiberglass lining to make it worth it. Maybe a little bit more muted, but that might be due to a slight difference in tuning. I think the same effect could be gotten with some moon gel on the head. Seems like more effort for hardly any difference in tone.
I tried filling a snare drum with sand. Worked about as well as you'd expect, but at least there was less of my the AWFUL playing to be heard which perhaps my neighbours appreciated, so there's that.
How about covering the outside of the shells with aluminum foil because you wanted a chrome drum set but could not afford one? I did that once....ha ha!
There is a minor difference in resonance and sustain... but that's it. Not sure with modern recording and live techniques not sure it's worth the effort.
Many years ago I had the opportunity to chat with Jeff Campitelli, who told me that, on the last album he had recorded with Joe Satriani, the producer insisted he use a different snare on every track, but by the time they finished mixing, they all sounded the same anyway.
We did the towel thing when I was playing at a church... We were trying not to blow the band off the stage + easy to be more dynamic... We did 1/2 the snare drum and all of the floor Tom on curtain fills ... It was nice with half the snare for builds on songs we would not over power the band ... Ps I don't play there anymore they got too quiet
The tea towel thing seems to be the only one that really works. Everything else is psychological. Drilling and routing cymbals works to a point but it’s probably better to replace them when they are too far gone.
Not psychological, you can literally put the sounds into audacity and see the waveforms are eeeever so slightly different. Maybe you do not know what to listen for or you are not that used to the sound of drums.
@@DumbArse it's incredibly subtle, and it's hard to say that minor differences in tuning/how heavy you hit the drum aren't affecting the waveforms as much or more than the hacks themselves. I wouldn't say it doesn't do 'anything' to the sound, but other than the tea towels the change in sound is so minor that you would be better off tuning differently or adding a plugin rather than going through the effort for these.
In rock & roll context, would you really want to strain your ears to hear the difference? People are so obsessed with details like these that they forget about making good music first, and when they do they edit and automate the hell out of it anyway... ;-)
@@DumbArse As the other reply said the difference is so minor that it could have other explanations, but I also wanted to emphasize that we're talking about an instrument sound which means we're really talking about something that would be heard in the much denser context of actual music rather than the very sparse and zoomed in demonstration here. If the difference is so subtle that you can barely hear it when it's the only sound, there's no chance any actual human is going to really pick up on whether or not you used any of these "techniques" when listening to the drums mixed with a full band. So even if we grant that you're absolutely correct and there is a literal difference, it isn't a meaningful difference since it won't have a noticeable impact on the final product. You would be much better off spending any time and energy you'd invest into this kind of pretentious tweak on improving the aspects of the song people will actually hear (or if it's already fine then just moving on to write something else), this is the worst kind of "perfectionism" where you're basically just making up meaningless tasks to inflate how much work you've put into a track without actually improving it in any way.
To build on the disc under the snare drum thing... a studio trick I've seen is to put a small ish cymbal under (ish) the snare drum, and actually point a mic into the cymbal. I think it's much more of a sound than just a wooden disc under the snare
. To build yet again on your cymbal trick a flat metal disc ie a saw blade would reflect more that a piece of wood. Wood probably absorbs sound more than metal.
I similarly heard that the main thing there was a change in the bleed on other mics (I think, the kick mic) - which you can hear more at the start when you're playing the *whole* kit … fwiw! Anyway nice work on this channel!
Hi David, I saw this recent post of yours and it brought back some memories for me and my friends back home. This is what I wrote to them all. Alright this is for my peeps in Indiana that grew up with me and the Percussion Center. I was working at the Percussions Center in Ft. Wayne as a young man. Nearl Graham was my drum teacher for a long time. Here on this video is one of the things I was around as a young man. Neal Graham was the owner of the shop and was one of the most creative people I knew. He had out of the box ideas that he made come true several times. Vibra- Fibing was one of them. It was weird to see this RU-vid vid. Plus hearing Neals voice on a phone call was once again was haunting. Unfortunately Neal passed away almost 10 years ago. Any way this shop was all about drums and drummers. Not a guitar in sight. PS- Most of Neil Peart's drum sets in the beginnng years were built at Ft. Wayne's Percussion Center. I remember the Slingerland kit getting vibra-fibed. The process was laborious for sure. However, it was smooth on the inside unlike pearl's version which looked like a hand full of shredded fiberglass thrown in the drum and then sprayed with resin. The quick shot of the Tama kit does not show the cool finish it had. A whispy inked purple wood finish. All of these kits that came out of the percussion were designed by Neal Graham the owner however most the labor was done by Larry Yeager now a tour manager for Fleetwood mac. Both of them could build things from nothing and turn it into something. The are other stories but a lot custom builds came out of this shop when I was very young. I now realize what a special time and environment that was back then. back a lot of memories. Thank you, very much. Here is was I wrote to my friends back home. I watch your channel a lot and you doing a great service to all the drummers out there. Shop's like Neal and Channels like yours help drummer still come together as a community. Bravo!
Here’s one I tried when I was 16 or 17 around 1980, way before internet and when you only heard things by word of mouth (which is how I heard this) or in Modern Drummer. An older, more experienced drummer told me that if you wanted to tame the ringiness of a steel snare, stick some maxi pads on the inside of the shell. From what I remember, it did help some. And my sister was none the wiser. 😂
A lot of these is all the same logic. Put something fragile and thin on the inside drum liner to amplify overtones and dynamics. Put something that absorbs the sound to do the opposite, cotton balls, a towel, a pillow. It's all the same logic and was huge in the 70s.
@@lifeunderthestarstv I agree. And today, there is a large portion of drum accessories designed to muffle drums and cymbals, such as moongels, rings, snareweights, muffled heads, etc. When I started drumming, none of these existed. We had to improvise. 😎
I remember Hal Blaine saying that he used Rubbermaid bathtub appliques to muffle his drum heads. Back then, they had that sort of daisy/asterisk 70's shape. Came in different colors too! ✳ I still use Dr. Scholl's moleskin where the BD beater hits.
Bernard Purdie had a snare drum reflection disc that he was personally selling/distributing years ago. I was working at Columbus Percussion and he walked in, while on tour with Aretha and tried to get us to stock them. His pitch was to throw it on the floor and specifically use it to amplify brush playing. He did a demo for us and i'm pretty sure he just played louder when he threw the disc down. Love the dude's playing, but we weren't buying it 😂
This video reminds me of my 13-year-old self creating my own electronic drum pad, in '83 and with instructions from a musicians' magazine: I used one of my bongos for this (which had been my very first 'toms') and glued a circle of tin foil onto the skin's underside and mounted an old guitar pick-up underneath this; This would basically work on the same principles as an electric guitar's strings and pick-ups. When I plugged it into an amp, all I heard was a very underwhelming "tsh-tsh" noise instead of the expected Simmons®-like "doo-doo" sound, though - I eventually figuered that I'd also need a sound module to plug this into, which the article had somehow forgotten to mention 😄
@@joeday4293 - LOL! Yes, totally! 😂👍 And it hadn't stopped there either! After a later issue of the same magazine was released and had Eddie Van Halen with his famous guitar on the cover, I somehow believed it to be a great idea to modify my _own_ guitar like that (My very first one, too! A Strat copy for around 300 bucks) and ripped out all the electronics and replaced them with only that old humbucker pick-up from my 'awesome' e-drum pad plus 1 Volume control: 1.) My guitar looked absolutely horrible afterwards compared to EVH's because of its sunburst finish, and 2.) I still wasn't suddenly able to also _play_ like him! 👎😄
David you’re my fav RU-vidr! Watching you since ages and I think it’s just mindblowing to see your journey and how you improved as a musician itself! As a recording engineer your sound hacks are SO useful and really creatively enhancing my workflow! Thanks for your things man! All the best from görmany
I once had planned to (1970s) replace my Sears and Roebuck Pearl blue sparkle shells with aluminum at my friends fathers machine shop. We cut and rolled a piece of 1/4" aluminum stock and took it to a shop to have it welded, they welded it crooked, made them redo but it was out of round by then, but we tweaked it and put hardware, hoop and head on and and it made an ok timbale he he! I gave up the idea! I would like to see someone experiment with shells I could only dream of; Solid wood, glass, different plastics, aluminum and clay! Keep up the good work! PS a drum shell must play a physical supportive roll and have resonant and reflective and absorptive acoustic qualities (thicker vs thinner shells)...:)
Ever since I heard of one-piece Brady snare drum shells, I've wanted an entire kit that way. Maybe someday when I have more money than sense, since I don't have much of either. LOL
Whenever I watch these videos I always feel like an old man who can barely hear because whenever there's a comparison I cannot tell even the faintest difference
It may be that you need better speakers or headphones? There are times where I'll find videos like this when I have my laptop put through my stereo via bluetooth, and there are other times (like tonight) where I will just listen via the laptop speakers (which at least reproduce some sounds, but nothing at all to brag about. Just like my recordings, I will listen to different systems, just to see what the recordings sound like. While I much prefer good systems, it is important to remember that not everybody has a near-field reference monitor system, so in order for people with a $25 sound system (cheap earbuds) or whatever to listen without harmful distortions (mega-bass, which is my downfall), those cheap systems will "out" your recordings! Haha! That said, even at almost age 61, I am still learning new things. I am only in the last couple of years immersing myself into the drum culture. I am a string and brass player by trade, but I should have done this years ago. In soccer, they call it "touches," where you practice by touching the ball with your feet, just to see what happens if x and y, then r and z, or whatever variables you choose. To me, it's the same in recordings and instruments and amps: You simply try different stuff out, to see what you like and what you don't like. And the worst part of this is that one technique may work for you, but not for someone else. All this to say that I feel your pain, in that I can barely notice a change in the comparisons myself! But I am starting to discern more and more, as I listen to more and more, and start to understand what drummers are looking for in building their kits. And in the case of this video, I think David's point is that there in fact is not a ton of change in the old-school drum hacks. But we all live and learn! All the best to you as you learn to discern! 🙂
Honesty at this point I could watch David do any so called drum hack and would be enjoyable to watch. Welp, time to piss off my neighbors and jam out 🥹 This channel always makes me want to play
the snare plate works, I usually use 3 large round river rocks , and put them under the snare between the snare stand feet on carpeted floors - this diffuses the snare sound back up into the overhead mics and the drummers ears , gives a nice air to the sound .
I thought the "towel hack" was so common that it's more just a "technique" now 🤷♀ Used towels for years to get punchier sounds and eliminate/reduce the ringing overtones (especially on the school's old beat up snares nearly beyond repair)
repairing cymbals/modifying them is a super cool process, and can last for years and years. I worked with a local machine shop, we found the trick is slow speeds and very very low pressure. Cutting out cracks, or small edge cracks(if its less than 1/4" ish you can save a majority of the sound of the cymbal and even some taper), and some kind of lower support mount made of wood in the shape of the drum. Something else to consider is balance, when you take mass out of one side its good to do the opposite side so the cymbal balances, since your taking a large enough bit out to change mass on one side the sound was going to change anyway. I had 2 a custom crashes we shaved several cracks off the edge. I played them for another 9 years, and only paid $35 for the pair(plus the fee of the machine shop, your mileage may vary) Find a local machine shop and work with them, they do custom stuff all the time. If you're doing it at home, you are limited on how much you can mod because of the limit and inconsistency of hand tools. not that its impossible but if you're looking for gigging/recording quality and more longevity, using big mills etc at those shops help keep the integrity of the surrounding cymbal in check.
I made a video about coating the inside of a drum shell last year, with some history on the topic and on vibra-fibing, it has a detailed explanation on how I did it, time-lapses of me painting and sanding the shell, a hip lo-fi chill beat in the background and a before-after comparison, check it out if you're interested! ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-u9C3dIJaoSU.html
My first kit was a 7 piece Pearl kit. Personally I prefer the sound of wood. I remember the long strands of fibreglass they used which was kind of a cool conversation piece.
Old school Pearl wood-fiberglass drums used random matrix chopped glass mat instead of cloth. The finish wasn't perfectly smooth and the fiberglass was quite a bit thicker than a single layer of 6k cloth. They projected pretty well but nothing like a Reference!
Reflectivity is impedance. Stronger materials are more reflective. It has been shown that applying metal film to the inside of the drum can make it 3dB louder. You have to glue the foil on with epoxy to get the effect, it is similar to the glass fiber, and basically makes the drum slightly brighter and louder. Loose tinfoil will sap energy out of the drum.
This was a lot of fun to watch. Back in the 70s I had a Pearl fiberglass and wood set. It sounded great. I did a lot of shows with it and it always cut through.
I have seen the drilling at edge of cracks in industry. It will often be done with perspex guards (doors). I do not think it will work so well with cymbals.
I love how I watch this channel, specially the drum hacks, with MASSIVE interest, while all drums I own are a millenium electric e-kit, a pair of broken bongos I bought for 2€, a toy tambourine and a sleight bells
Yeah the fibreglass in the snare shell just sounds more dead. All these hacks, better off changing heads, tuning, and where the kit is in the room, etc.
When you have a crack with a hole drilled at each end take a hack saw blade, push it in the crack at the hole & saw along the crack so the edges don't rub together. It slows down the spreading of the crack
I've done the towel thing, but mostly for small rooms and apartments. even stuffed them full of shirts and stuff. Taped the cymbals, ( like two or three pieces of electrical tape.) and I could play drums in an upstairs apartment. Old dude beneath just thought I was listening to the stereo and never complained.
