I am a drum builder. I can tell you. Wood type and hardness generally doesn't matter. The biggest factors of a drums sound is 1. The bearing edge. 2. The heads. and 3. The depth of the drum.4. Diameter of venting. The rest is barely perceptible nuance. Drums are rarely perfectly round. If you place it on a coordinate measurement machine, you will see what I am talking about. What you are paying for in high end kits are the finishes and materials. You give me a cheap drum with nice edge and good heads, tune it, and place it next to DW, then ask you to close your eyes and tell me which one is the 'better' drum, you would have a 50% chance of getting it right.

I have to agree with everything said. It mirrors my experience as a professional drummer for almost 30 years. I’ve played a LOT of different drums, almost all top of the line kits from practically every major manufacturer, and several series within those brands. The most significant aspect to me is the actual tactile experience. It’s not subtle at all. For example, I endorse DW, and I’ve played lots of their different shells over the last 11 years. Same sizes, same hardware, heads, etc. But the experience is totally different when playing a Collector’s Series Pure Maple with reinforcing rings compared to the Cherry Jazz (my favorite) which is thicker, and has a large percentage of soft gum wood in the middle. And, he’s right about recording. The sound gets so mangled it doesn’t matter, unless you tune medium to high. In the end, it’s about how the drums feel and how they make me feel. It’s hard being a consumer of this stuff because I don’t think most drummers have the opportunity to play dozens of different types of pro kits on a regular basis. It’s a total gamble to know if you’ll like the expensive kit you just ordered. It’s just part of the experience, but you’ll eventually figure out what you like if you play long enough.

I’ve watched all your videos in this series you’re doing and it’s really insightful. Watching your videos has really helped me understand the sound I’m looking for before I sink money into a drum or head. Trying to get great at recording myself right now and I think I’ve saved a lot of trial and error by watching you. Also your videos aren’t nerdy! You go around the nerd talk and the marketing talk and get down to realness of it in a way that’s easy to understand but also nuanced. Keep making videos man!

Joel, God bless you!! This is what serious drummers need to know, Thank you

The heads make the sound! Material type, thickness, bearing edges, rim type, wrap are about 5% of the sound. A guy on KZfaq plays a kit covered and it sounds like regular drums, he takes the blanket off and they are trash cans modified for heads on them

I agree with your series. I have a video on KZfaq called "Pearl Superman Drum set Restoration". It is a trashed Pearl Export with Luan shells where I had to fill all kinds of holes bored into the shells over the life of this drum set. I ended up painting the inside of the shells with an Epoxy Bilge paint, essentially putting an epoxy 6 mil layer on the inside. I leveled and smooth the bearing edges, and waxed them. This drum set is awesome and can keep up with the high end kits as well. I think your series on the bass drums depth and this one with the wood types lays bare all the biases in modern times associated with drummers in general. You can take a low end set and make it sound great with a little work. Bearing edges, heads, and a good chamber with a finished interior of the drum are the largest contributors to a good quality drum sound.

One of the most important things after drum heads is whether the bearing edges are level. I re-cut the edges on 2 of my kits and getting them level is more important than edge, because you can tune them evenly and accurately, which means cleaner tones = nicer to listen to IMHO.

Dear Joel love your videos! Love the technical stuff. On this video you open with remarks about guitars and wood choices. If I may interject here- spruce is the utmost important wood choice for what’s called the sound board or top- acoustic guitars. While some guitars are made totally with a given species of one wood, it isn’t preferred. Spruce has long been the choice to convey the sound from bridge. Same with pianos, which is percussion as well as drums. Pianos have spruce sound boards. As you pointed out in another of your well produced videos, “drum shells should not resonate”. Brilliant! I couldn’t agree more. If I could fabricate a small kit by machining pure zinc, really dense stuff, tune up a set remo ambassadors, I bet that would be very pure tone! It’s just bringing gig to gig!

You’ve confirmed everything I’ve ever said about how it really doesn’t matter the shell material of the drums. No need for me to give an abbreviated summary of what I say lol You e said it all! Well done!

The reality is for all intents and purposes, you can use any of the woods for any music or sounds/tunings. Side to side you can hear the difference, but in the real world, especially in the context of mix, it doesn't really matter. Play what you have access to, practice makes an order of magnitude more difference than the wood.

5 interesting series videos in one night, superb! Great framework for thinking about drum sound! 👍

Truly grateful for all of the work you put into this video. Thank you, Joel.

Great video !!! Thanks for posting.

I've tried dozens of combination wood drums (especially bass drums) . From Mahogany, Poplar, Birch, Maple etc. and a combination of many wood types. now I use maple (6-8 ply). After 10 years the wood finally dries out and sounds very punchy without getting muddy. but many of my friends swear by the mahogany shells.

Beyond excellent, Joel!!

love this series

To sum up my experience : if you're talking about ply shells, the sound or "tone" of the wood is the less relevant aspect by far, since there is almost as much glue as there is wood in the shells. The density, ease of working into plies, resistance to tension, etc is a lot more important. However, if you're talking about a solid wood shell, then the difference in wood is much more drastic, since every piece of wood in a stave shell resonates separately from the next, there are a lot more harmonics and way less glue - not to mention one solid piece of wood, almost zero glue. But they are obviously thicker, so less vibrating, and less tuning range since they are much higher in pitch to begin with. I'm really curious to see a hybrid of a ply *and* stave shells, for example with solid wood rings top and bottom, as well as reinforcement across each lug, with opposite grain from the plywood. I think especially for snares this would be killer... with high tension lugs, the tuning range would be crazy!!!

Love this! I will say I'm a huge lover of rosewood snares. I've had quite a few, and they all have performed incredibly well. They do seem to have just a touch more of everything than most of my other wood snares. I'd love to see a video like this on different metals and their sonic differences, and if people can really tell any difference. Brass, aluminum, copper, etc

thank you so much for your time. it was awesome.

Good video. I've always thought that the shell doesn't really make so huge difference eq-vice. It kind of does the high and low frequency roll off, but the main thing is the characteristics of the sound. How much different resonances and overtones it creates and where in the frequency spectrum. That makes a very subtle difference, but you can hear it in through the mics as well. My friend has two kits (Tama Starclassic if I remember right) of same sizes and they are made of different woods (birch and maple). Once we tuned those kits to similar pitches with similar heads and recorded some stuff. While the sound was really close, there was some little differences. The Birch had a little less resonances in the lower middle region (should I say it was cleaner in there?) and the stick attack was a bit higher sounding than the maple one. Maple in the other hand had more lower mid content and the bass end was a bit messier (not-so-defined-note). It was a great test. I'd say that the bass-mid-treble -charts in drum ads are kind of right describing the sound, but not quite so drastic.

Very cool! Funny - I was just in the Nordic website looking at shells the other day. Looking forward to watching your video on bearing edges. Subscribed!

I have a couple of Nordic shells for a future project, they look good but no sound yet. I've built two kits and various snares for myself and friends, your conclusions are spot on. Great video!

Watch the Ford drum co guys do the comparison of Sonor toms at NAMM, you can’t hear any difference in the sound, and they’re all different shells! They’re point is that all your hearing is the head, I think you’ve touched on that in one of your videos. ✌️thanks!

I like to think that the more you muffle the drum, the less and less it makes a single difference what material the drum is made of. The heads you choose have way more to do with perceived tone

I love all this stuff. I'd like to see a video about the differences between metal shells too.

Not ALL drums are made out of plywood. I owned a company some years ago where I produced stave design drum shells, Including full drum kits. The fact that I could use many different species of wood created a pallet of sonic properties that became very intriguing to me and my customers. Stave design drum shells utilize the various densities, porosities, and sonic properties of each wood, quite different from ply shells. And it was because of that premise and reality that I became a fairly successful company, which was also cutting edge at the time: nobody else made full stave drum sets when I started doing it. It was very rewarding to me to get feedback from all of my customers. Without exception, they were ecstatic over the drum that I had made for them. And, that was the best part of my business. 😊

Really like your content..... The real science explained.

Just became a fan. This was fascinating.

It's so nice to hear an explanation with rationale rather than people stating opinion as fact. Thanks a ton for this. It makes a lot of sense. I liked the elasticity/ plasticity discussion. It's obvious you have more understanding of physics than most KZfaqrs. I realize that is a pretty low bar, but it's appreciated. I do wonder about the direction of elasticity of different plies. I assume that there is more elasticity along the grain (like a hunting bow) than across it. Many shells are advertised as having certain plies with grain running vertically while others run horizontally. It would seem those could effectively cancel each other out to some degree. I have heard that normal plywood stays flatter due to the alternating direction of the grain in different plies. The more you learn about this stuff and the longer you think about it the more confusing it becomes. Thanks regardless!

I agree with the observations about bearing edges, how round the shell is, and heads. I’m glad more of us are aware of the importance of these issues. I think we might also consider shell build, e.g, multi ply, steam bent, and stave shells with thin inner walls, and whether the shell is undersized relative to the head or not. I’d argue that some shell materials offer a more noticeable sonic difference than than others. E.g, walnut vs acrylic, fiberglass or stainless steel. The walnut is going to favor a lower, fatter sound. I can get that with the other three materials, but it’s not quite the same. They pick up a little more high end, even at lower tunings, than do the walnut.

Good Work Joel, keep going!

Really good analysis and totally squares with my experience. I have a custom maple kit that I built in 2002 from 5mm, 6-ply Keller shells that is still my favorite kit. But in 2006 when I needed more volume for a hard rock situation (and didn't want to destroy my thin shell custom set), I bought a Tama Starclassic Performer Birch kit with slightly thicker 6mm, 6-ply shells. While that set served my needs as a stage kit for 17yrs and I even converted it to a jazz set with the addition of a smaller bass drum and floor tom with higher tunings, I always wished I was playing my maple set. The birch drums are louder, but they also sound very dead in comparison. Finally at the beginning of 2023 I decided to get a new Starclassic Maple set with 5mm, 6-ply shells to be my new stage set. Volume is less of an issue because I'm always mic'ed for rock these days, and the new maple kit "sings" like my custom set, which is now my permanent home studio kit for most recordings. I'm still keeping the birch set because it has a very different recorded sound from either of the maple kits given the same drum sizes, heads, tunings, and mic's. It's great to have different options from different woods!

wait,,, that kick drum is perfect too!!!! the internet would benefit from a video on kick tuning for sure!!! I prefer the poplar sound but they both sound great!

Absolutely fantastic vid from beginning to end! Subscribed! So far, I've been learning basic skills on drums for super cheap or thrown away - I just hate to see an instrument go in the garbage. Currently working on two badgeless drums I rescued from the curb. The shell wood actually looks decent. Much better than the Verve kit I practiced re-wrapping on. I have no idea what brand these two are, but they're old enough for the clear topcoat to have severely yellowed all theway through. I thought they were light gold - surprise!, hoops and lugs off, they were a silver sparkle in their youth. Your vids are so useful and so well researched!! Watching interior and exterior finish choices vids now. 😊 Thank you!!

Joel you de man. I love your videos. I have been playing drums for 55 years and I learnt more in about twelve hours of your videos than I had done previously. I particularly liked the one on the $1000 dollar Ludwig kit.....in my regular playing days (70s 80s) I sometimes made up kits using assorted drums but a key component to making them sound good was good cymbals! Now I am retired (engineer) I am looking to upgrade from my Pearl export to a 2nd hand Pro level kit.

Good info. Speaking on the acoustic guitar, most have spruce, cedar, or mahogany soundboards that provide most of the sound. They are generally soft compared to the body woods that help amplify the sound and contribute to the overall tone.

Thank you Joel, that was very informative! PS. Love the shirt!

Joel! If you mention your previous videos put a link in those videos for people like me to watch so I don’t have to search for those. Love your channel by the way!!great work!

Earned my sub!! You validated what 50 yrs of playing and gigging has taught me.

This felt very validating. I’ve had to stand my ground a few times over not just slapping gels on my drums so I don’t lost the sound, respectfully of course. I once had to tell a guitar player “you don’t play exclusively in palm mutes, right?” before it clicked. Then we were able to work together to find tones that still preserve the characteristics I aimed for.

Thank you… great video. I wanted to share something from my experience. I promise not to mention brands. Currently own birch, maple, poplar, and oak drums. There is something really special about my oak set that not one of the other drum sets come close to. They are far more deeper, warmer and powerful. Same sizes, same heads. I even bought a drum dial to make sure I could get the same head tension. Still the oak drums are hands down far more superior. If you’re ever in the market and can afford oak, give them a try. You won’t be disappointed!!

Hey man, really great video! Miles (Davis) talked about one’s sound and developing one’s sound as being basically everything! And for drummers, what you talked about here is of course a massive part. Hats off to you for taking on the challenging topic. Everything you spoke about is also a very “organic” thing. Trying to explain how to “play through the drum” to get the sound to come out nice and full and not sound thin, or we use terms like “ let the drums breathe” bla bla.. Elasticity and how the shell reacts, how the head reacts, how the stick hit marries with the head so that the energy makes the sound big and round and free with unrestricted energy.. It’s like how the hell do ya explain that?!?! Lol!!! Anyway, I think you did a wonderful job and should do more vids like this.. Dig into the room and how the drums react to it, different mics and pre’s. Different overheads, room mics with different types of compression and how it fattens a drum mix. Maybe a video on drums and different types of sustain, moon gels, suspension mounts, and why what and when etc! Cheers! Myles- 👍🏼

I have 7 snares (so far) myself, and one of them, my Wells Custom snare, isn't plies of wood at all. Its a steam-bent solid Cherry snare. It's gets a very distinct tone compared to my others. That may be because its solid, and/or Cherry, but it's *one of* my favorites.

I must be a drum geek as well, I made it through the whole video. It's interesting to hear your thoughts on the various woods used in making drums without all the sales hype from drum manufacturers. This is very good information. I'm wondering though with all this talk about the wood used for making drums, how does the different wood used in drum sticks affect the drum sound - maybe an idea for a future video. Thanks for sharing Joel, it's very much appreciated!!!

Mmhh...now that you cover the woods I'd really like to se/hear a wood to acrylic shell comparison 🤩 Great vids, bassist here but instant subscriber, your production value is top notch 👍🏼

Heads, bearing edge, tuning,plies, sizes- dia vs depth, wood species a distant last but still important.

Excellent video! I definitely have noticed that I generally prefer room microphones with all acoustic instruments, I do get more specific character of each type of drum, guitar etc. And yep, tuned super low, close microphone don’t worry about the wood. And based on the poplar and maple demonstration, I would use the poplar drum in a small cafe with volume limitation as it has a smaller sonic footprint. And the sugar maple drum in a bigger room with more people. Lastly, something I’ve talked about with band mates lately is to play the thing that makes you FEEL right. You’ll then perform better = better gig.

I have drums with shells made of maple, and others with shells made of maple/poplar or basswood. To tell the truth I've never found a lot of differences I find tonal differences are more influenced by head selection and tuning. I recently attended a jazz concert in a small jazz club setting. Sat right near the drummer he used a Sonor 'Bop' kit (the lower priced version not the higher priced version with the same name). The Sonor 'Bop' kit does not use the same wood as the higher end Sonor kits. The sound was amazing..very warm yet punchy. The bass drum sound was excellent. None of the drums were mic'd..purely the sound of the heads and shells came through. I have a Sonor 'Bop' kit I'd put it up against much more expensive drums for small venue acoustic situations, just as an example of 'lower priced drums' vs. much more expensive drums in terms of the composition of the shells. Very interesting video.

That’s why I love my copper snare drum and maple drums. I recently bought a Yamaha stage custom in birch just to test some heads and tuning to see if I could get it to sound like my RFM Canopus Kit I’ll let you know later

You're bouncing your feet nearly this whole video and I adore it 🤩🖤🙏🏻 I noticed this in one of your older videos and I've never been able to unsee it. 😁 I love it, never chance.

Been chasing snare tone decades. I could never get into metal snares. Different wood snares have different feels. I thought it was heads n hoops. Very interesting video.🤔🍻

Another one 🔥

Really enjoyed this and as others have said, your almost scientific approach while still looking at things as a drummer is both rare and valuable. More than that, your ability to explain it is also great. I particularly like your care to try and use the correct terminology in this one - as a former engineer/metallurgist and current drummer, it matters. I particularly liked your mind blown moment when realising steel is so elastic - haha! They make springs from it so it's kinda obvious when you think about it, the stuff just doesn't seem very giving when you bang your head against it. What's really cool about steel (all metals actually) is the way those properties can be manipulated by heat treatment and other finishing processes. You don't see much mention of it with drum builders typically, occasionally some of the small builders mentioning that they protect their specific alloy or heat treatment processes closely (Dunnett and Acoutin spring to mind currently.) The main exception would be hammered shells which act as a surface treatment introducing tension into the metal, but there are so many more of these processes to explore - maybe they don't market as well as a shell that looks like it's been hit with a bat. That said I do think (though I have no proof) you're onto something with the elasticity - I've just bought a 1983 Mastercraft Rosewood and concur that it's noticeably staccato and noticeably louder - also feeling a little brittle under the stick compared to what I was expecting. And you see similar things with cymbals - heat treatment isn't quite spot on and the cymbals don't quite flex enough and eventually crack and shatter, versus soft supple cymbals no one likes to look at because they're taco shaped. Keep doing this stuff because very few others are - the combination of experience, actual knowledge and application to the instruments is rare. I'd say most of the big manufacturers have people in their midst who know this stuff but don't share because they're giving away trade secrets, same for the independent builders who know their stuff beyond just making pretty saleable items. Nice to see the know-how shared. PS - your comments on ply shells really make me want to get my head round steam bent single ply stuff and the solid shell drums - I have some and I'm adamant that it makes a significant difference because of the reasons you touch on. Will eventually get them under mics to 'prove' it - whatever that might be.

Maybe this will help. Probably wont make your doubles better but here it gos. Stress (psi) is the force applied to a material. Strain (length) is the deformation when the stress is applied. Stress/ strain is the modulus of elasticity of a material or E. Great video.

Thanks so much for a very insightful video about the physics behind drum shell woods. Not being able to afford a maple set...yet I've always wondered if it's really worth buying a more expensive set or other exotic wood kits. I learned a lot. Cheers

I am so entralled with your channel. 65 y/o drummer. Comanche Texas. Familiar with John Zoog. Sonicz iz kewl , Sir.

Yeah man, great content! ...."It must be said"....

It isn't quite my favorite tone wood, but it is still very good is Purpleheart. That is probably the best looking wood for drums. DW Purpleheart drum sets are really nice. I have a set of Pearl Birch, and tend to like Birch more than maple. But what I really like is the Yamaha Hybrid Oak. That is a damn good sounding drum set! I also like how Mapex does a blend of woods, and their drums sound quite good too. I guess any drum set is a good drum set. lol. as long as it isn't a toy. Enjoyed the video!

I've fallen in Love with my Ludwig Brass Snare. It would be cool to see a comparison video with different metal drums.

Im.a new subscriber, and i can't fathom how you dont have thousands more subbs, your content is so good👍

Good thoughts about this subject,especially because your open for any aspect and noot have the tendency to lead or push it in certain,or wished direktion.So the result is,there is no right or wrong,no good or bad,but alot in between and it depends.....cool !

Excellent video, I appreciate your passion and attention to detail. Totally agree with your take on how much the different wood types affect sound-as in that it does a bit, but it’s mostly only noticeable when you’re physically in the room with the drums. I’m a Ludwig guy and over the years I’ve acquired a bunch of random misfit unmatched drums that I enjoy making jellybean kits out of. My current kit I’m using for recording with my band: 14 vistalite tom, 12 rototom, 16 stainless steel floor tom, 18 maple floor tom, 24 maple bass, and a supraphonic snare. All these different materials but it sounds great together. I actually have a full stainless kit and to be honest I feel it’s the best sounding drum material overall if I had to pick one. Just a little more oomph in every way. Must be that elasticity haha

Thanx for that video! Of course it´s very specific and deatiled but thats what differs most drummers from those, who have much passion and are interrested in the details which make a difference. If a mathematic professor tells you something about arithmetics, most people would get bored. And here its the same. We are not geeks or nerds, we are drummers who dive deep in their subject which fascinates us!

Awesome! 10 out of 10! These videos are amazing. It would be stupid cool to see the same series for metal drums - aluminum, COB, steel, bronze, bell brass, copper, black nickel of brass, etc. I’ve head for years that copper is so special & sweet overall. I simply haven’t pulled the trigger yet to complete this experiment. What do you like in metal? What do you prefer? Keep up the great work! TY 🤓

So, I've done this kind of deep dive and found that yes different woods have different sounds, not blaringly different but different. The important thing was the heads!! I know that a lot of people will get their panties in a bunch over what I'm about to say, but here it goes: Evans and to a degree Aquarian heads, for whatever reason, don't draw out the shells natural tone. If you take a set of Evans off one kit and put them on another they sound the same, no distinction in wood type, but with Remo I was able to hear a difference. Remo just seem to bring out a more organic sound, which some drummers don't want and that's fine, but if you want to hear the shell use Remo.

As a drummer, mechanical engineer, and hobby woodworker, this is the niche I am looking for!

I posted this on Part One but now I think it belongs here... There's a few bits of relevant physics worth clarifying a bit more. (1) The shell being relatively rigid and immovable creates sustain because head vibrations hitting the shell can't be transmitted into the shell, and get reflected right back into the head going the other way. (That's a lot like how guitars get sustain. Most of the energy of string vibration hitting the bridge or nut or fret can't be transmitted into the guitar, and is reflected right back into the string.) Only a little fraction of the energy is transmitted from the head(s) into the shell, leaving most of it in the heads, to be transmitted into the air bit by bit at successive cycles of vibration. (2) Rigidity works together with mass to resist vibration, so a shell that is more rigid may resist vibration better than one that is more massive. Rigidity braces the edge of the shell against more mass of shell. (Imagine that the shell was completely rigid. You couldn't move the edge of the shell at all without moving the entire shell exactly that much, so the entire mass of the shell would resist the vibration at the bearing edge. If the shell is flexible, only the mass near the bearing edge matters much... a floppy connection to the rest of the mass of the shell doesn't help a lot.) (3) THICKNESS of the wood usually matters FAR MORE to stiffness than the intrinsic stiffness of the particular wood itself. A particularly dense wood might be twice as stiff for a given thickness than a lighter wood, and usually about twice as dense, but you can just make the lighter wood a little thicker and it will be just as stiff. Stiffness depends on the CUBE of the thickness, so you can double the stiffness by using 26 percent thicker wood. (1.26 * 1.26 * 1.26 = very slightly over 2.000) If you double the thickness, you can make the shell 2 * 2 * 2 = EIGHT TIMES as stiff. That means that if you use a wood that is 2x lighter and 1/2 as stiff, but make it twice as thick, it will give you a shell that weighs the same but is several times stiffer than the thinner shell of the harder wood. That is why the soundboards (tops) of acoustic guitars are usually made of light woods (usually spruce or cedar), NOT expensive dense hardwoods. The only really important tonewood in a guitar is usually a cheap, soft, light wood, not the expensive "tonewoods" that raise the prices so much, because for a given mass you can make it significantly thicker and thus much stiffer for its weight. (4) That means---and everyone needs to understand this---PARTICULAR WOODS DON'T HAVE PARTICULAR SOUNDS INDEPENDENT OF THEIR THICKNESS, and SEEMINGLY SMALL DIFFERENCES IN THICKNESS MATTER A LOT, up to a point. Maple doesn't have a particular sound, nor does mahogany, or beech, or poplar, or any of them. They all have roughly similar mechanical properties aside from their density and stiffness, which are strongly correlated and don't really vary all that much. The shell's stiffness is what's important to how much it resonates, and at what frequencies, and that depends more on how thick it is than which of those woods it's made of. Once the wood gets to a certain thickness and stiffness, though, you reach a point of diminishing returns. If the shell is stiff and massive enough that very little energy is being transmitted from the heads into the wood at all, make it even more stiff and more massive won't make much of a difference.

Thanks for this. I currently have a Pearl Export ELX Poplar/Mahogany. Looking to upgrade and this subject has been very confusing. So thanks for your time and information.

Talk about a can of worms!! Like you said, head choice, tuning, bearing edge , shell thickness, re-rings or not, wood type all add to the ambient room sound of a drum. All in all play them and enjoy.

I play Tama ,starclassic ,love them ,birch .

In your discussion of hardwoods and softwoods, you talked about hardwoods coming from trees that bore fruits and softwoods coming from trees that made seeds. Guess what’s inside the hardwood fruit? Seeds. Both of hardwoods and softwoods come from plant based sexual activity. Another difference is it most hardwoods come from deciduous trees. Most softwoods come from conifers.

Very good and informative video as always. When you made a video about drum sizes in a minimalist recording and now this video made me think about what value drumset would be best for the money. I think that yamaha stage custom is hard to beat. Hard and semi thick birch shell, nice durable hardware and you can get big sizes. 24x15 kick and for toms pretty much anything from 8 to 14 inch and 14 to 18 inch floor toms

Awesome seminar. Of course, one could get lost in all the science, and try to design drums in their head, only for it to come down to hitting the thing with a stick and saying "I like this one" or "I like that one".

Late 80s early 90s premier xpk birch power toms are still my favourite .

Very informative video, Joel. You spoke only about ply shells. Zebra drums had made me a custom kit with stave mahogany shells and I think you can hear the warmth of that wood even through some processing. Will there be a follow up about solid shells and stave shells?

It's not just wood, look at snare drums. copper, brass, bronze, acrylic, ceramic. Btw, that poplar snare sounds awesome!!😂

the birch bubinga combo is never going to let you down but i agree once you start micing up you can make any drum sound great but on it own the attack of birch and the low end of bubinga create a perfect sound for raw drums

Oh but what about the rare log that is over 2000 years old that is rescued from the bottom of a freezing lake and the drum company wants to make a limited number of 50 snare drums that cost $5000 a piece?????? Just ruined the marketing departments day.

Hey Joel, I just wanted to let you know, that there's one video in your Drum Physics Playlist, that definitely doesn't belong there.. Cheers! (Your Channel is KILLER! ..coming from an Engineer & Drummer, like yourself;)

Jeff Hamilton played Remo before he became a spokesman for Mapex. Remo shells are composite like MDF and yet his kit sounded great. I’ve been playing for 65 plus years and had many kits mainly Poplar or Luan. In my experience poplar are fine but Luan swallows up sound. I’m down to two kids now, a 2013 Sonor Safari and a new Tama Club Jam Pancake. I know the Sonor is some form of 6 ply Poplar but it sounds very good for the Jazz, Lighter Rock, Country. It has enough jam but in some occasions I Mike the 16in kick. The Tama Pancake has a 12x4 snare and 10 x4 cymbal stand Mount. The floor tom is 13x4 and both toms are concert/single headed. The shells seem to be Poplar (maybe Basswood ?) but have amazing projection. I swapped out the supplied tom heads with Evans Calftones and the snare batter with a Remo coated Emperor and they sound great. Personally heads are the key.

Really enjoy your series. WHAT about SOLID SHELL??? Thanks

one thing you really got across great is how drums sound a lot different when close mic'd. Simply because what you actually hear when mic'd is how the drum head sounds, and how the drum set reacts to the room it is in; the actual acoustic sound of the drums would be picked up with the room mic's but those usually have less part in most mixes. Now, when your drums sound really good acoustically, you might find that it does matter in recording, simply because you will move away with your mi's from the drums the better they sound. We see this with many productions, as with the royal blood self titled first album (and second..) - the sound engineer was so flooded by the sound of the drums in the room, it was mic'd only with room mics, so 90% of the drum sound is how they sound, in real life. Huge. Well, that recording was 10 years ago, but this way of recording has seen a revival, i just heard from a band which was already half through recording their new album, when the drummer got new drums. They sounded so much better than the also not bad sounding yamaha studio custom kit they so far used, they decided to record the first 6 songs all again after hearing the difference of the drums on the new tracks. And yes, they used room mics. So if you are being cheap, you can say cheap drums work as well, as you can not hear much of a difference mic'd. But again, that is only true when close mic'd for all the reasons mentioned in the video. I have customers in my showroom every day who hear the huge difference between certain drums, often when trying to capture these differences on a recording it is really hard to do so. Good example is our video about different kick drums and snares, where we used close mics and room mics, and the difference on room mics is always way more audible than on close mics, due to the fact that the mic itself plays a huge role in the sound... kzfaq.info/get/bejne/h5-joqijrtiWlKM.htmlsi=NDzkHROFxV55_ml5

Another great video, Joel. I was hoping you might dig into ply orientation. Horizontal pies of wood are much more rigid than vertical plies. I know DW uses various orientations to achieve different sounds. Maybe others do as well.

In my experience, the differences between the material of the drum greatly diminishes when you put damping on the drum. I've recently taken drum samples of three drums (copper, brass and gum) all tuned to C and D notes with coated Emperors. The differences are very minor. Completely open, however, the differences are quite vast.

I am not a drum maker or a physicist specialized in acoustics, but as a musicologist and percussionist here are my two cents for this discussion: It is useful to think about what type of instrument drums are. They are not idiophones; that is, instruments in which the acoustic vibrations originate from exciting the entire body (shell in many cases) of the instrument (maracas, i.e.). Drums are membranophones; instruments that produce sound through the vibration of stretched membranes. This being the case, the sound producing material is whatever you use as the drumhead and NOT the shells or frames that you use to stretch it. The shells, however, act as modifiers of the sound produced by the heads. They mainly modify it as amplifiers, and in much less degree as filters reinforcing some frequencies and absorbing others somewhat changing the timbre (arrangement of overtones) produced by the head. The amplitude modification is mostly related to the size of the shell (depth; NOT width -if you change the width/diameter you're changing the size of the membrane, which of course, affects the pitch). The timber of an instrument depends on the amplification box material but more importantly on its shape. Since most drums have a circular section (because there is no way to have a uniformly stretched membrane using a polygonal frame) that factor is not usually a variable for drum sets (with some exception with those suit case kick drums. In other drums, timbre modifications occur with different circular section solids like conic, barrel-shaped, and goblet-shaped shells). Bearing edges and hoops also affect the sound INSOFAR they determine the amount of membrane surface in contact with the shell and the frequency of that contact in particular regions of the membrane. The effect of bearing edges -and less hoops- is then more noticeable than that of shell material because it directly modifies the membranes behavior. SO, there are VERY SUBTLE differences in timbre caused by the shell material, HOWEVER --and this is my main point-- we ARE NOT able to hear those timbre specificities through recordings (YT, TikTok, IG, etc. videos) because in many cases drums are recorded using microphones that are close to the drumhead and therefore mostly pick up the sound directly from the head and not modified by the shell. And when microphones are far from the instruments they also pick up the sound modified by the room they are in so we hear reverberations, echoes and further filtering. This "problem" happens for any type of instrument but is critical for drums because almost the entirety of a singular acoustic wave occurs with its attack. Add to that the specific capturing and transducing capacities of the microphones, and then those of the speakers/headphones used. I should perhaps make my own video about it, but feel I shouldn't keep wasting more time on this.

LOL The one thing you didn't add playing live is carrying one kit into the gig is completely different than carrying another. Vintage Gretsch Maple or a brand new Tama Star Classic(huge difference). 👍👍👍

this series is awesome, feels so refreshing to see a man really digging into it and not following current brands' marketing agenda. So, I'm looking forward to more videos and also I'd very much like to hear your unbiased thoughts on cymbals and how their sounds come to be as they do, too!

Poplar is a very underrated wood for drums...they sound great recorded, particularly. Whatever, keep em' cheap. They are warm, gushy, and highly tunable.

I love good drum educational videos like these. here my 5 cent: Shell having no impact is not true, but also, it is not as you imagine. I am a drum manufacturer who not only makes custom drums but also serial drums. Now with serial drums, you have the opportunity to observe single changes in manufacturing process: we have drums with the exact same hardware, dimensions, heads, tuning, only difference is the type of wood. Now when checking our maple and walnut sets, when tuned right, what you hear is the difference between walnut and maple. It is subtle when it comes to snare and toms, but pretty much audible when it comes to the kick. Now maple and walnut are pretty far away in the sonical spectrum, both being hard woods, but maple being way brighter than walnut. Thus it makes no sense to offer 3-4 more wood options that fall somewhere in between maple and walnut, sonically, when you can hardly hear the difference between these two woods. why is serial drum making better for observing differences in sound? Simply because when you build the same shell with the same tools and the same glue on the same day with the same humidity and the same pressure and the same.. you get the picture- you get a pretty similar product. now when i custom make a shell, there can be variations with EVERY step in manufacturing that can cause differences in sound, and unless you have done scientific research on each, you cannot really tell for sure how big each influence is. e.g. the direction of the wood grain has a bigger influence on the outcome of the shell sound than the wood itself. So there is so many ways I can f#ck with the outcome when I make a shell, it is really hard to boil it down to "this is maple, and this is birch"... this is bolloks, and it was used by drum brands to sell whatever they have in stock, not to educate drummers on how drum physics work.

I was hoping you would touch on stave drum construction…. I’m curious how the mass of wood in a drum with that kind of construction would effect the sound. Though you covers 11,000 topics in this video so you had to draw the line somewhere lol. Great video, thank you for the education!!

You are forgetting the hybrid maple/poplar/birch/rosewood/mahogony.... shells.

Concerning rosewood and its rapid decay compared to softer maple: I feel it comes down to how much "oil" is in the wood. Some types of wood have lots of natural tree oils in them... terpenes, other oils, etc. Rosewood has that.. ebony has that. Ebony is almost "waxy" in the type of tree oil it has. Equatorial woods tend to be oily. Temperate woods like maple tend to be less so.. has much less "oily" character. Some woods, if you compress them in a press, will exude oil. I think that has a lot to do with it.

Amazing content. I really wish I could see/hear the real difference between ply, stave, and steam-bent. Is there a difference? Do wood species sound more different if the shell is steam-bent? Also I'm really curious why you can find a million stave snares for sale, but full stave kits are almost non-existent. DW's VLT shells have a naturally lower fundamental since the plys aren't stretch perpendicular to the grain, thus the tension is way lower. Does that mean that a stave kit would have a crazy low fundamental since there's zero tension?

I want the tee!

In conclusion: it's not the car but the driver 😁

Obsessed with this series! It’s like Good Eats for drummers! I think the whole paradox of elasticity vs steel is interesting. For instance, steel is 7% denser than brass. When striking a steel snare, the transient of the steel is actually darker (so more fundamental tone) but the overtones after are brighter. So my guess is that it gives in on initial strike, which compromises the head’s ability to vibrate fully, mellowing and darkening it. Then, due to the elasticity, it snaps back to shape, and after which the vibrations of the head (way less strong than the drum strike) aren’t enough to flex it much, due to it being the hardest metal that drum builders use. Thus then the tone and overtones run free. So that’d explain the dark transient, the bright and pronounced ring and the projection. But that’s all just hypothetical. Do you think it checks out?

Very well done sir. Anything substantially unique with the steam bent shells?

I love maple drums

Hey Joel, not sure if have talked about directly mounting the Tom bracket to the Shell like they did in the “old” days compared to a Rimms mount system. Half my drums are directly mounted to the shell and sound fine. Can you do a comparison like the shorter size Bass drum video? ✌️🥁

What is the size and the head on that floor Tom? It’s thunderous!