hey everybody welcome back to sounds like a drum that cadence independent media today we are going to do a little throwback Tuesday to some really pitched up snares and this was a sound kind of in the 90s and the 2000s where people were really like shooting them super high sometimes and some people have asked about it and we also wanted to feature a wood drum because we've been doing an awful lot of metal snares lately so we're gonna kind of do two birds today also was a little aside because of some changes to algorithms and things some people have been missing notifications on new episodes so please make sure and click the little bell icon next to the subscribe button below to make sure that you actually get a notification when we drop in the webisodes this is particularly a throwback for me because I actually use to tune my snare in high school and some time in college kind of like this and what we're talking about here is not exactly a piccolo snare sound but definitely pitched very high I remember these sounds from like the sort of rap metal crossover stuff a lot of ska music some hardcore some just different things where it's a very short very cutting very bright snare sound that just goes right through everything like a gun and this is not I guess as popular these days but there's still times when it's the right sound and lots of times where it's kind of a kind of fun sound to use because it takes your mind back to a certain era kind of like when you hear people you know doing low five recordings to sound like the sixties or something like that and some people that specifically about like the Dave Matthews like the Carter Beauford sort of sound and I definitely had under the table and drumming back in the day and he was using one of Jeff okhla trees carbon steel drums and I was expecting it to be a piccolo based on the recorded sound of the instrument and it turned out to be five or a five and a half by 14 with die cast and I was really surprised because I thought that you needed a smaller drum to get that kind of sound and it turned out that he was just taking a very standard sized drum albeit like a 30-pound carbon steel one but never the less and and really kind of cranking it up and so I'm not sure what size he's using these days I know I mean he's got lots of drums but uh it's less about a size and more about a tuning scheme and a couple of little things you can do with your instrument regardless of the instrument itself to help get to that sound a little bit easier so first let's address some misconceptions I sort of touched on one there that you need a small drum to get a high sound this makes sense mentally because you think a small Tom is higher sounding than a low Tom so of course a smaller drum is gonna sound higher that is sort of true in as far as like how much air is moving and what note is gonna occur at a given tension because we have more surface area at a certain tension there's more room for that tension to get dispersed but the way that a small drum behaves when put at a certain pitch is going to be fatter than if you tuned a larger drum up to that same pitch because it's going to take a lot more tension to get a 14-2 say like if you're tuning it to like an A or like a certain some kind of measurement and you tune to twelve to that same thing there's a lot less tension in the twelfth to get there so that means that you actually have options with this you can go for a smaller drum if you want some more warmth at a given pitch range which sometimes I think is why guys like Gavin Harrison use a smaller drum or what Benny grab who is all them and he does great like fassan air sounds but he is pretty into 13s but then on the other hand like if you listen to Danny Carey like that's not a low tuned snare but it's an eight by fourteen so you know that there's a lot of crossover depending on what you want in addition to being at that pitch to come out of the drum so based on my memories and a few things that I looked up we decided to go with a maple drum 5 by 14 this is the house Pearl masters and we are doing basically what I would do if somebody said I need this drum to sound like you know mm you know that kind of sound which actually happened recently I did some tracking and they said all of this stuff is specific quickly 90s referencing they gave me a list of tracks and they're like we wanted to sound like these records and so I actually did do this like six weeks ago and it was a lot of fun for that particular situation I had some snare options we were at kind of a fancy studio but right here we're doing what I would do if this was my drum we first of all are doing coded single ply batter we're doing standard three mill snare side we have put diecast hoops on this which we'll get into the why of that shortly and misconception number two is that you have to have this thing tuned super high especially with regards to the snare side that's just not true in order to get articulation which is part of the reason or a large part of the reason I think why people pitch their snares up it can come from a lot of different places besides tension so thing number two after you know not wearing so much about the drum size don't think that a number one thing is to jack up that snare side head if you've watched our crank video about that you know that there's a threshold where you're not going to get tone out of the drum anymore and if you're gonna go high with your drum you need to maximize the chance that you're going to get tone out of it or else you're gonna end up with a thin sound and even in bands where I associate them with a highly tuned snare some records sound better than others with the snare sound specifically and I feel like I can almost hear that one of them is like the snare side head is too high so that when they do a rimshot the thing is already choked and they're like oh I need more so they hit it harder and it gets even more choked so by all means to not turn that head up and I know this is dicey because I'm not saying like a note or a drumdial measurement or amount of turns or something like that but I will get into the whether this one sounds like when we start playing it you can kind of hear for yourself when I'm talking about number three muffling ringy snares cut in a different way than muffled snares some people say muffling means you can turn it up which makes it punch out of the mix better that's true for some music other people say you need that ring to get through some people will even detune a lug to distort the overtones to cut through like a distorted guitar cuts through all of these things are true and they all work in different contexts but for me if I'm gonna be pitching a batter head up into this range there's not that much ring so I don't really muffle it if I muffle it at all it's a small piece of tape but that's it like one piece of tape because you want that high end because you're trying to cut through so if you take the high end out with muffling its defeating your chances of having the acoustic sound of the drum cut through and ee so if you're in a live situation versus a studio thing where like you can manipulate stuff in post-production and that sort of thing on top of that we chose die cast because die cast hoops are sort of self muffling to a certain degree they take a little bit of the wildness out of the overtones they really focus the rimshot and they also focus the center sound of the drum now along with this it's important to mention that your strike zone when you're dealing with an unloved is really important and one thing I do remember about that Carter Beauford video from the 90s is that they're in a studio he's playing so this fresh heads on everything so you can see the stick marks accumulate on his drum heads and on his snare there are two spots like this in the center of the drum where his right stick and his left stick hit and no marks anywhere else so that's where that consistent sound comes from and the center is gonna have lisanna overtones whether you're catching the rim or not sometimes when people say man this snare is ringy the first thing I want to ask is where are you hitting it and are you hitting it in the same place every time the day that I discovered that I had to do that was a sad day and and really really precipitated a lot of work and a lot of focus on just chopping that spot that I wanted and then being able to choose different spots there's a video from a few weeks ago that has a little bit of more depth about the hoop choice thing and we will do a video in the future about sort of like strike zone sounds and rim shots different kinds of rim shots all that kind of stuff okay and then lastly scenario our choice so if everything we're doing is steering toward articulation and cut with the die cast hoops and the relatively thin head single ply heads cranking it up we're paying attention to the topography of the snare side head we're not choking that out all this stuff if you then throw 42 strand wires on there you're going to have a kind of fatness which is awesome but might not be the thing you're after if you're trying to get that you know Magnum cut through sound in my mind I pitched up snare with wide wires on it is actually a really beautiful sound because it's like fat and also pitched up and it makes me almost think more like when people take a sample of a fat snare and pitch the sample up like that's what that sounds like because you still have all that wire sound but then especially in the center of the drum but then you've also got the shortness of it being cranked up which is also an awesome sound so long story short 24s at the widest probably 20s or the right choice you can go narrower than that and I would encourage you to try it the narrower you go also you're gonna lose whatever muffling of overtones the wires themselves are doing which will make the strike zone business even more important if we had 12s on this you'd have to really kind of like stay right in the middle and hit that bullseye every time to get the same sound all right this has 24 s on it right now and it sounds awesome man that is super loud um sidenote earplugs I can't stress enough if you're gonna do stuff like this to your snare drum and beat it like this get earplugs that's a short sound and it's a loud sound and especially coupled with the diecast hoops the rimshot is ridiculous it's short and you can hear that those overtones are there but you know if you put like one piece of tape on there like you know sort of bent in the middle that'll quell those that's enough you don't need moon gel or any of that kind of stuff and I really I I can't stress enough that like if you start putting a lot of stuff on this you're gonna lose the reason why you would do this and I mean a prime example is like all the old spin-doctors stuff like kryptonite or turn it upside down any of those things like you can hear that that drum is ringing and there might be a little tape on it but that ring is the character of that type of tuning and you know you might as well might as well use that because that's that's part of what makes it awesome I also associate this sort of sound with the Deftones and some other kind of like even heavier stuff then then the funk scene but I feel like it kind of comes from funk music I feel like it kind of comes from hip-hop and things like that that's sort of almost like a sample just like come through and I'm not totally sure why it's not like sort of in vogue right now like some people are still using it or they'll do it like a side snare thing but on the other hand a lot of jazz guys pitch their snare up super high these days and it's it's really great because when you're playing a lot of dense stuff at a low volume it all comes through really beautifully and you can be really conversational with your ghost notes you can still get rolls out of it provided you haven't cranked up the snare side head too high and then it still got some tone with the snares off because we haven't pitched up the snare side too high real quick as I mentioned it earlier about the the pitches or the tensions that the heads are at it's possible to kind of hear the pitch of the top head because it's not tabletop tight and the snare side head is up pretty high but I can still press it in with my thumb and this is one of those times that is kind of worth mentioning that like definitive pitches don't really define this sound I don't know the pitch of the batter head and I don't know the pitch of the snare side head I just went with my ear and found this sound down to where like the scenario side head doesn't really have a pitch by itself if I mute this with my hand and tap on it it doesn't make a note really as you can hear like if I tap on it with a stick that seems like it's SuperDuper high and it's it is high especially for a 14 but it's not choked it's not like you can't press into it and earlier when I was setting this drum up I tuned the batter head to where it made sense and felt good and then when I did at the snare side I did the ruler trick I did all that stuff and I played the top and I felt like there wasn't a lot of tone in the center of the drum which you heard earlier with the wires off so I took the snare side back down again and it may be like a quarter of a turn and then the tone appeared in the center and we've got lots of videos that you know go over this so you can go back and check out like all the snare of tuning little knickknacks and things like that but that just of it is that if you're trying to cut with a tuning like this the cut is in the batter head and the articulations in the snare side head and if you just go for cut with the snare side head and go up and up and up and up because you want it to be penetrating and really really aggressive you're gonna get to a point quickly where the sound of the drum is not good it'll be loud and it'll be cutting in a way but the sound will be unpleasant it's gonna be more painful to your ears and then already is and especially if you're trying to record it it's gonna sound super thin because the microphones want to hear tone the close mics want to hear tone the far mics everything wants to hear tone out of the drum and that's why you know we spend money on these instruments is to make sure that you're getting the tone that you want and if you don't pay attention to this stuff then it becomes less and less and less relevant what drum you're playing and how you're tuning it but suffice to say that hi is fun and go as high as you want just realize that you can go a lot higher with the batter head than you think maybe you could but there's a ceiling to the snare side where it's gonna start to work against you so in summation if you're going for this kind of sound you don't get a special drum you can use a regular size a drum you can use regular hoops diecast is gonna cut a little bit more pay attention to the thickness of your batter head and your snare side head don't go crazy use normal stuff a center dot is fine two-ply might be starting to get a little bit more challenging to get up in that range that you want and have that kind of short cutting sound don't go super wide with your snare wires and man just don't crank up the snare side head super high err on the side of a little bit lower make sure that there's tone in the center if you hit the center and it just goes but then that's what it's gonna do for everyone else you're just gonna get bet out there and it's not gonna travel very far so remember tone remember feel and crank it up and see what happens as always please like comment subscribe hit that little bell next to the subscribe button and let us know your favorite high snare sounds I'm always looking for different ones to reference and think about you know lead me and inspire me to different ways and stay tuned I'm gonna play a little bit for you