Ep. 28 The Effects of Cranking the Snare Side Head

hey guys welcome back to sounds like a drum and welcome to part 2 of our what are snare side heads really doing to us video in the previous one we talked about going through a lot of pitches on the snare side and what it does to the sound of the drum without adjusting the batter at all and now we're going to do the opposite we left this bottom head cranked and now we're going to see what we can do with the batter head win it's tabletop tight like this so for starters this snare side head is it's too extremely high we chose a brand new head for this drum just to make sure that the sound is as pure as possible and not being influenced by the head having been played a lot and kind of stretched out and stuff so now there were way up here in the stratosphere why would we do this well I think that most people tune the snare side head very high and again this is just my opinion and things people have said to me I think they tune it high because they're looking for articulation and clarity and also probably because someone told them that that's what you do with the snare side head and that is totally fair I have done super-high tuning on snare side for long stretches of my life when it was getting me a sound that made me happy and now especially doing more you know studio situations and things that are a little bit clinical it's good to explore the options which is what we did in the previous video now here we have the same heads same drum and the batter head is basically where it was at the end of the last video and we're going to check out this sound and then try to analyze what's good about it and then go way down from here and also go way up from here the main thing that I noticed when we cranked up a snare side head to where it's basically choking out and I'm making a pitch anymore or really resonating much anymore is that there's a certain loss of clarity toward the edge of the head the center is articulate and the edge gets a little bit messy sounding when you play articulate ideas kind of right the edge and this is kind of a cool thing if you want to do a lot of rolls if you're doing maybe some like New Orleans stuff and you want to have messy rolls and then clarity and your backbeat that's cool if you want to have even response over the whole head you have to make some adjustments to make that happen which is why I don't tend to tune that head this high now the batter head right now is in a medium-high range as it was before so we'll give it a little listen with the snares off and then give it a little listen with snares on I hear some janky stuff going on in the drum I hear the wires moving around extra there's some kind of funny overtones coming from them those little sort of transients are things that I associate with a snare side head being tuned extremely high because it's now vibrating at a very high very small frequency and causing those wires to do some kind of crazy stuff and interact with each other in weird ways if I was in a situation where I had to use this tension for some reason then I would probably go for a higher tuning on the batter side to try to match this sort of choked thing and just sort of like steer into the skid a little bit with it so this drum is tuned high but I'm gonna go higher first and see if we can get something that's a little clearer and a little more inline with the idea of a very high tuned snare drum [Music] okay this is kind of extreme we had to go higher than I thought to kind of get out of that range of those ugly interactions with the wires so batter heads really not making a note anymore it's pretty dead but this is also kind of a cool sound it gives me sort of a hip-hop idea or like a funk got a vibe and even with a little muffling it could be cool too so we'll do the same thing listen with the wires off and we'll turn them on to check it out as a sort of important aside here it didn't change the tension on the wires which I think a lot of times when there's sloppy sound and the wires that's the first place that a player will go to try to get rid of that racket and end up just choking the drum even more to try to get some of that design and strange stuff to go away there's still a little bit of funny business going on the wires but it's a lot more controlled right now I've also seen people like tape the wires to the drum and some other kind of stuff like that to get them to not rattle around like that it really is the tuning of the snare side head that makes that stuff happen and if you check out that previous video you can hear it kind of start to happen as we get it tighter and tighter and tighter it goes away from that thing of wolf and then the sound is over to having some kind of strange After Effects so yeah this sounds like a gunshot and it's really loud in here and it's cool and it sounds good I for this sound I probably still wouldn't tune the snare side this high because the drum itself feels hard now and it feels kind of choked out and even in orchestral situations not so much that I was doing them but I got to check out someone's orchestral drum that they were using at an extremely high tension they still weren't really jacking up the snare side head that much they tuned it up for sure but they still want to be able to play into the drum same as us and so no matter what music you're doing making sure that at the very least the snare side head still has some give and a little bit of tone in it is going to improve the sound so now let's go the other way I went up to get this about almost half a turn like between a quarter and a half a turn so I'm gonna go down a ways and try and see if I can get this to do kind of a fatback thing which is gonna lead us into what I think is the most important part of this particular experiment that we're doing [Music] okay so the the reason that I'm excited about this portion of the video is because something that I have had conversations about a lot with drummers about the sound of the snare drum is that they feel like the drum is making too many overtones or too much tone overall and they're getting a lot of note and a lot of noise and a lot of sustain out of the drum but it's not a drum II sound it's like a pitchy kind of sound that overwhelms everything and then also the drum feels weirdly choked when you just hit it in the middle and you end up with a scenario where no dynamic sounds good the rimshot sound crazy if your strike zone is larger than maybe an inch then all your back beats sound different and you can even have it clash with the tonality of a track if you're not muffling it so then the next step is let's put a ton of tape and moon gels on there and then it's still choked and now it's dead and the wires are also not having a good time interacting with the snare side head and they're creating strange overtones and so ugly stuff so where we're at now is the tabletop tight it's narrow side and we've lowered the batter down a lot but it's not a pitch that I wouldn't play the drum at it's just gonna sound ridiculous with the snare side head tuned like this [Music] [Music] [Music] what we have here is too much promotion of residents from the snare side head it's causing extreme activation of the batter head and the snare side head is choked so we can't get it to move and interact with the snare head at this pitch and that means that what you're ending up with is almost no fundamental and a boatload of overtones you might be able to hear them from my talking in the mic I mean they're loud to me right here because the bottom head is like trying to make them come out and as much as this is a broad sound it's not really a nice punchy sound it's got a lot of overtones and it feels like an effect to me it almost sounds like compression like this like this sound is compressed and if you just take the snare side down like a quarter turn from where it is right now it'll completely change the character of this kind of sound and it will also make the drum clean inarticulate from one side to the other and in the middle so I guess the last thing to do is just lower the snare side a little bit and see if it does what we think it's going to do I just really quickly lowered the pitch of the snare side head between a quarter and a half a turn which is a significant amount for a snare side head because of the material that it's made out of and already this sounds completely different than just a minute ago didn't change the batter head at all it's still kind of a wild sound because we are tuned down on the batter head and I don't have the wire super tight but the feel of it to the stick in the rimshot in the center everywhere is a huge improvement and that was just lowering the snare side head between a quarter and a half of a turn and these are the kind of Manute adjustments that actually make huge difference and if you know what kind of sound you're looking for you can make these tiny adjustments and get closer to it so just as a final aside for this if I was sitting down at this drum and I wanted to have it do sort of a middle-of-the-road thing that's gonna work on a lot of stuff at this point I would probably lower the snare side head a little bit more and I would probably raise the batter head a little bit more because right now it's on the low side it's got a big wide sound it's ringing for kind of a while and that's again is cool it's kind of an effect rather than like as a run-of-the-mill snare sound so as a last thing I'm gonna nudge the snare side down just a little bit and I'm gonna raise the batter head a quarter turn and I suspect that that's going to end up with a sort of thing that I would want out of this particular kind of drum [Music] alright it did what I thought I was gonna do slight nudge down on the bottom and a quarter turn up and there were a couple of lugs that I know just a little bit to even out the pitches because anytime you change the bottom it's gonna mess with the top a little bit because they're talking to each other and here's the final sign for the Supra today yeah it's good it's just a knee it's it's got a lot of tone in it but it's not too much overtone the fundamentals pretty strong with some slight adjustments to the snare side head we could dial in more articulation or more length of tone in the wires which we're gonna address in a future video I have some schemes for that to kind of figure out how to get more articulation or more fatness out of the drum with different choices down there but yeah sounds great and as usual please like subscribe comment let us know if you have any thoughts about this if you have any ideas or questions and talk to you soon

Channel: Sounds Like A Drum

Views: 262,177

Keywords: Sounds Like A Drum, Cadence Independent Media, Drums, Percussion, Drum Tech, How to tune a drum, Drum Education, Snare Side Drumhead, Snare Side Head Tuning, Cody Rahn

Id: Moru2uzLB6I

Length: 13min 9sec (789 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 18 2018