My Premier Drum sounds awesome due to the fact I bought a Brand new K-Falam for it and I kept the Kevlar® snare side, for the fact I didn't want to mess with the snares and all, anyway I have the bottom head cranked pretty high and then I had the top head cranked below that high pitched "gack" sound and I believe it helped have a good response on the snares but when I finished the crank job now it sounds heavenly to me. What was the sweetest sounding snare you played on? Also what Heads and how high was it tuned?

The sweetest sounding snare that I have played on was a Pearl drum with mylar on bottom, fairly tight, and boned out Falams K-series head on top. It sounded sweet, right up until it popped. Hey, it was my first time cranking out a head - guess I went a little too high <img src="/threads/images/graemlins/70410-whistling.gif" alt="" />

I have a 14" Yamaha MTS, Remo Falam II on top and a clear mylar head on the bottom. Sounds great indoors (solos), not so good with the projection outside, but it sounds good nonetheless. The top head is super-tight and the bottom is not quite as tight.

Thor, I personally can't believe you "popped" a Falams K-Series head! Unheardof!

You'd be surprised, TenorSweeps. In my marching days we would go through top heads (Remo Falams and Premier Tenduras) about every 5 days on average. When you're constantly playing and tuning them they can go fast.

does anyone just play single snare or do you all play double? I'm in the Royal Canadian Air Cadets and we just got done with the tattoo but next year i want to put together a wicked drumline prob is i only got a premier with a single snare..... anyone tell me how to get rid of the gank sound after i hit the drum?

oh and its a premier drum:)

dazedandconfused, utilize the 'edit' button if u could. You have 30 mins after the time of posting to edit it if needed.

Thank You <img src="/threads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

Most marching bands and drum corps in the States use single snares. Some corps have just recently starting using them here and there, but as far as high school and college drumlines go, you'd be hard pressed to find one that uses double-snare.

And what do you mean by gank sound after you hit it? Are talking about the hollow kind of mettalic sound? I own an HTS-784 and find that over-tightening the snares can cause this. Also, the tighter your heads the less ring you tend to have. But the main culprit is probably that you have the snares too tight. What I do is tighten them just enough so that they're touching the bottom head just about all the way across. This gets rid of the ring and creates a nice snare response.

Search the snare tuning forum for "ring" and I'm sure you'll come up with some more info..

Sweetest sounding snare i ever used was a Pearl Championship snare with an Ambassodor snare side and a White Max batter.

I'd have to say a premier with a tendura batter head, mylar snare side. batter tuned pretty tight, snare a little loser.

I think the "gank" sound you're getting is caused by the bottom head. Try some different levels of torque on the bottom head and see what you get out of it. But, keep in mind that in a stadium, nobody will hear the ring from your drum that you do, unless you're performing indoor percussion...then they might.

Another solution is to look at how evenly the snares are on each side of the bottom head. I don't mean the tension on each snare...I'm talking about how closely they're pulled against the head. If they're tight at one end, and loose on the other, they will cause a kind of buzzing, ringing, 'ganking' sound. We had one that had this problem because of a warped snare strainer. It's pretty ghetto, but wedging a quarter, penny, and a dime stacked up in the snare strainer to push the snares more tightly against the head did the trick for us. And hence, the 36 cent Yamaha was born.

The sweetest sounding snare I've played was back in high school line. We had Yamaha sFzs at the time, but we took old 15" catgut snares (about five per drum) off some mothballed ludwigs and tightened them down underneath the top head, directly on the double rim. It's surprising that it didn't create a bad enough pressure point in the Kevlar® head to crack it, but they held up. We went through a three day process of torqing them down evenly over time to give the heads time to stretch and seat, and usually another four or five hours tuning them to sound exactly the same. They had Falams on top and bottom. The bottom heads didn't receive any special treatment, but both top and bottom were tightened VERY evenly over a few days, instead of all at once. This made them stretch and seat a lot more evenly, which made the sound of the drum much more controllable and predictable in tuning, and more durable.

And...yes I too have cracked MANY a Kevlar® head in my day. Tightening them slowly over time saves you a lot of money if you tend to break those things in tuning.

Actually DLWebmaestro I just recently went to a highschool band camp and one snare line did have double snares. It was insane because I had never saw that before.Would been better if the line didn't suck as bad as they did. =)

Josh,
my line has the Yamaha multi trimble snares.
i don't like the sound with the top snare on.
and it adds 4 pounds to the drum.
not worth it in my opinion.

This is an easy answer. The sweetest sounding snare is the one that you tune to your liking. Therefore, it sounds sweet to you....

good answer coos, why didn't i think of that?
i haven't got to tune my own snare yet.
*off topic* i hope to be getting one soon and i'll tell ya how it turns out.

The best sounding snares to me....... are definitly Dynasty

now why is that?

I hope to co-op during the school year and earn enough money to buy my favorite sounding drum, the 14" sfz. Ive achieved so many sweet sounding tunings out of this snare, that Ive lost count. Good times! <img src="/threads/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />

yeah, i have to got a good crisp sounds out of a yamaha but, the slippery when wet sound of a dynasty is also great! <img src="/threads/images/graemlins/smirk.gif" alt="" />

the sweetest snare ive ever played was a pearl championship with falams k-series snare side

the 13 inch Yamaha MTS snares. mmmm...its just so tasty. Flam II's on the bottom and those stock heads on top. Nothing else seems to last. Any reason's why?

I was just wondering this is a little off topic but what is the best snare and what is its cost. In my sophomore year I played snare, and We had somewhat old pearl series I forgot which.

search the snare forums, Im sure it could help you out

my sweetest was a 13" pearl with white max on top cranked to high heaven and evans Kevlar® bottom cranked slow(quarter turn at a time for about 2 hours) when i heard the other snares playing in the line while i was listening, i got on my knees and worshiped the drums!!!!!

Our line used double snares for the second half of our schow this year. I have to admit it's an unusual sound. You really have to play through to get the grace notes on sixteenth notes to sound good. Otherwise, you can here the top snare and it has this weird sound. As far as rolls at high speeds, it tends to sound awesome.

My hich school line has the 14" Yamaha multi timbre snares also. The double snare doesn't sound that great in my opinion and we only use it once in the show. Not really worth it in my opinion.

As for tuning....I like the tuning of my Pearl 14" FFX. I have a White Max on top and a Hazy Ambassador on the bottom. I have the White Max cranked pretty high and the ambassador a bit lower. Sounds sweet....

Premier snares tend to have a much "wetter" Kevlar® sound than other drums. Not sure why, but they just do. Pearl snares seem to be the driest I have heard or played. I definitely prefer the wetter Premier sound.

I have a 14" yamahaMTS,with a white max top head, and a mylar evans head-- orchesstral 200 on the bottom, it creats a very staccato but wet sound, and when you flip on the MTS you get a wetter, but still just as short sound, andI like the MTS, and the prodct specs ony make it out to be 2 pounds heavier, hardly anything. The options of having 4 Timbres to work with is great when wrting music

i agree with 1snareone next season our line is going all tendura (i hope) and mylar on the bottom, the tendura seem to tolerate getting up real high. our other heads (evans gold) sounded really good but popped after a short time.