hey guys this is Cody that sounds like a drum cadence independent media productions and today we're going to do a little bit of a deep dive on snare side heads specifically we're going to take all the other variables of tuning out of the equation and just make kind of dramatic adjustments to the snare side to inspect how it affects the sound of the snare drum so what we've got today again is Ben's super phonic 70s five by fourteen beautiful little drum sounds great and what we're gonna do today is we're going to leave this batter head where it is which is sort of at a medium-high pitch and what we've done is put a brand new snare side head on the bottom of the drum and we haven't actually pitched it up enough even for it to conform to the bearing edge yet some of the screws are actually below finger tight and this is just kind of where again it ended up from getting the hoop level which you know you can check out that process in our original episode one snare video so what we're gonna do is ignoring the pitch of the bottom head whether we're talking about each tuning lug or the pit the head overall we are going to slowly bring the head up and I'm gonna do quarter turns and then retention the wires so that they sit you know flush on the head and sort of discover how much of an effect the bottom head has on the drum because super Phonics are versatile and kind of quality instruments there's gonna be a lot of usable sounds in this range but this also is designed to illustrate that each of the heads has a huge impact on the sound of the drum and sometimes you can just change one of them and achieve a really different sound rather than thinking that you need to make huge adjustments to both sides of the drum if you want a different tuning so for just a reference of where the pitch of the batter head is I'm gonna mute the bottom head with my hand and just play the batter a little bit just to kind of give you an idea of where we've set it up now we'll get the wires on and just kind of see what it sounds like in this range I'm making sure not to over-tighten the wires or choke the drum but they're definitely engaged they're not loose and flopping around too despite how it might sound so the the bottom head is extremely loose there are a couple of spots along the edge of it that I can almost feel a little bit of a wrinkle and I did just level it I didn't tune it so there are some wild overtones because the bottom head is so low it's actually making some of its own kind of pitchy craziness that's coming up through the top of the head and now it I mean it's already it's got some good crack to it it's kind of fat but it's also a little bit messy and it doesn't have a lot of brightness in the snare so this is an interesting sound for if you don't want the wire the sound of the wires rather to be super crispy and brittle but there's still a fair amount of attack here so you can get kind of a sound that in my mind is a little older or more kind of crunchy and vintage sounding just by pitching down the snare side head some and you can experiment with this with any drum and just kind of see what's gonna give you the next step is it's gonna flip it over and go in the star pattern and again you know you can watch the old video and see how that goes to just bring the bottom head up a quarter turn and then check it out again so we brought the bottom head up and this means that if we want to have the same tension on the snare wires we're gonna have to tighten them a little bit and as you can hear from this drum right now the the wires are looser because we've brought the head and the rim away from them which has reduced the pressure on the strings and all the wires from below a quarter-turn is not a lot it's it makes a pretty big pitch differential on the bottom head but it doesn't actually move the hoop that much so it still sounds good without even tensioning the wires at all so this is a little bit tighter sounding but there are also some wild overtones in the edge because of changes that have happened to the bottom head as we're tensioning it up they're starting to be some dissonance in the edge which you can probably hear and if I were to get rid of that I would do a little bit of adjusting to each lug on the bottom head to try to even out its pitches just a little bit and I might end up doing that to the top head too but rather than doing that we're just going to go up another quarter turn and see what happens next so now we've gone up a half turn from where we started and probably the most dramatic change that I'm hearing here actually it hasn't got anything to do with the wires right now it's how much more tone there is in the drum now that the bottom head has been raised up when it was that low before it didn't have enough tension on it to promote the resonance of the batter head back up through and make a big note and now we haven't changed the batter head at all it has a lot more sound coming out of it and a lot more resonance at this tuning just from changing the bottom head now probably the most surprising part about this particular series of adjustments we did is we only went half a turn on the snare side head and to my fingers now it's extremely tight just from that much and before it was pretty sloppy I think I could have put a dent in it with my finger if I'd press hard enough and now it feels pretty tight um not tabletop tight I can still move it a little bit but it's it's hard now and I think if we were to go another quarter to a half turn it would probably choke the drum out in a way that wouldn't necessarily give it the best tone but there's only one way to find out so we're gonna try it again we're gonna go up another quarter of a turn just to be safe see what happens I went ahead and checked the heights with the ruler since the concept of a quarter-turn is sort of an imprecise measurement and pretty much we're in the ballpark still things have stayed put and now we are in to where it's like hard to press into the head and get it to move at all I'm not pressing very hard and I wouldn't recommend doing that either because you can't put dents in the bottom of the head a lot of times when you take your bottom head off you'll see marks from when you were setting it on the stand just wear like the little hands from the stand of bumped into it so since we just listened to it a moment ago with the wires off we want to do that again so you can hear that the pitch has changed even though I haven't changed this head at all and there's a lot less tone now and this is telling me that this particular pitch relationship is stifling some of the resonance and I know that if we raise the batter head up a little bit they would start to work together a little bit better again make a little bit more of a note but right now we're into a zone where the drum is getting choked out a bit from the snare side head but there's still some tone in the top and I think it's going to be a very cutting kind of Stewart Copeland sort of sound once between the wires on that's actually sounds pretty good I don't think that I would go much higher than this for the snare side head further than this some of that satisfaction in the feel of hitting the drum really heart starts to go away as it starts to choke out and it'll also start to make the lighter stuff that you do have a little bit less character because the heads aren't interacting with the wires in such a nice way the well the reason that we're doing this is because an awful lot of people have written us to say I'm really excited to experiment with the snare side head because I was always just told that you should tune it up as tight as it'll go and then that's what you do with the snare side head and I really feel kind of opposite about that I feel like experimenting downward with the head is gonna tell you more about your drum and I think that cranking it up is absolutely a valid sound if that's the sound you want but as a rule I think that experimenting in the span between finger tight and like a turn and a half at most is probably all that you need to worry about the actual span of exciting pitches in the sanera set head is a little narrower than the batter side head you can really go super low with a batter side or extremely high two and have them still kind of function but because snare side is so thin it's a little bit narrower of a set of options so check in next week there's going to be a second part to this where we keep the snare side cranked and we experiment with the batter head and see what happens in terms of like what ranges are usable and what it does to the overall sound of the drum and as usual if you like what you see please comment on the video give us a like please subscribe and tune in next week because there's a lot more to do