Tom or Concert Tom - One skin or two?
I built a set of tube toms recently and learned that a huge part of the cost is taken up by the tin bits! Hmm. I kept looking at all the shiny bits on my kit and thought. "Do I need all those? Really? I mean, they are beautiful and I love the sound but what if I could manage without some of them? I could maybe build two full kits with all those bits...!" But it would be sacrilege to pull those toms apart, wouldn't it?
Then I looked at Phil Collins' kit for a few weeks, and Carl Palmer's godly steel creation and half of Moony's monster set and gradually started getting all shaky about it.
Then I looked at a video of a band of a former guitarist of mine and that was it. Staring me in the face. The drummer was heavily miked and the entire kit was single skinned (apart from snare of course!) But that swung it. For gigging, it's so much easier with single skins. You can get inside your bass drum and do what you need really easily. And the toms are a lot less fuss too. You can mike inside, underneath or on top, loads of options, a bit of damping, no problem. The kit is a lot lighter. And the drums always seem to kick butt! Sound engineers love them! So why is it such a big deal. It's a drum kit not an altar. Don't be such a wuss. Rip em up!
My first kit was a double bass Premier with a full set of concert toms - well, some tiny concerts and the others with bottoms removed. It was pretty good. And all the drums fit inside each other. Very convenient packing. Then I traded it in for Simmons and gigged for 10 years with those. But the echoes were in my psyche. So that made it easier. A bit easier. I mean this was my Pearl Masters. My baby. But in the interests of science..!
Well, I took the bottom skin off the small tom - 10"- first. I was sweating a bit - will it ever sound as good again? Well yes, of course it will. It's just as easy to put a skin back on as it is to take it off, and it's great tuning practice. So off it came and then I started twiddling with the tuning. It's a lot deeper all of a sudden. And there's a bit of a twang, but not unpleasant, just different. So I tuned it in line with the others again and was pleasantly surprised. It still fit. A different tone, but not that bad at all. Damn it! I'd have to keep going. So the 12" was next. And that seemed a bit easier and tuned quite well and sounded really great! Better than the 10. The 14 inch was a bit harder. A bit more tuning to get a clear tone and a touch of damping - moongel and Blu Tac. [Yes Blu Tac - it's great - try it!] And the tones were there! Three toms all working together, not the same tone (not as good? Well, not the same! But pretty darn good!) I played the tube toms too and they sounded great with the concerts - much more in line. I recorded them on my phone and listened on my headphones in the house. It was ok. I needed to sleep on it. The next day I listened with fresh ears and I was beginning to get a good feeling. The floor tom was more hard work. I had to tune it twice - more carefully the 2nd time - but with a few different attempts at damping, there it was. Four tube toms and four concert toms - a really nice set of descending intervals. A last tweak on the floor tom and that was it. Go for it! The tin is coming off! I got the screwdriver set and took off all the extra chrome fittings, lubricated and cleaned the screws with WD40 and put the lot in a couple of plastic boxes. I was looking at the bulk of another kit to teach on! Rims, lugs and skins. I've tried turning the toms upside down a few times when I was recording and the bottom skins always sounded quite interesting. So why not try it? Nothing to lose. Just needed to buy shells this time. And the odd stand.
I keep tweaking the tuning and I am adjusting myself to a different drums tone. It is refreshingly good. I'm thinking of how best to deal with the holes left by the lugs. A chrome stud? Some kind of plastic or rubber stud that looks exactly like chrome? A cheap solution that makes the kit look as good as it did before or better. Aim high!
New avenues open up. Miking. I'm thinking of permanent internal mikes and maybe even the odd trigger - certainly on the tube toms. Gigging starts to be a lot easier. Packing drums together shouldn't be a problem - just a bit of foam in the right place. And you could put together a set of foam pads to fit internally for quiet practicing. And now I've got the bits for a new concert kit. Just need to decide whether to buy acrylic shells or wooden ones. I'm leaning towards acrylic. Could add a mic, trigger and lights.... I think single skins is the way forward for me. To boldly go. Where.....
Added a month later.......After a bit more tuning, the floor tom began to get on my nerves. there was an overtone that wouldn't go away. Some of the sweetness was missing. Eventually I put the bottom skin back on! The rest of the
kit is still single skinned and I've tweaked the tuning up. It's a bit like the black notes on a piano. Now I can play melodies on the toms, it's great. But not all plain sailing. You have to persevere here and compromise there. But, boy is it an education!
A month and a half later, I wanted to have another go. I read about a guy who always tunes snares with 2 keys at once to keep the tensioning more even, so I decided to give it a shot. I also noticed that the skins on the top and bottom of my budget floor tom were the same, but I'd added some black tape on the bottom head for damping. Hmmm. Rather than just trying the tuning again and probably getting the same result, I switched heads. I put the bottom head, still taped on my batter head, then re-tuned single-headed using 2 keys.
Yeehah! Half a dozen 2-handed turns later, a clear, deep tone came out. I was just a bit too sustained, so a little BluTac for damping and I had it. a lovely,deep ring with no overtones. 8 single headed drums all sounding melodic and pretty cohesive. So. to paraphrase Churchill, "Never give up. Never ever give up. Never, never, never, never, never." With drum tuning, there is always a way!
That wasn't the end of the story.
It's a couple of years later. I persisted with single skins on all the toms for quite a while and recorded some things quite happily and then invested in a new set of skins some Remo Pinstripes. And I really loved them. And just for fun I tried my ten inch tom with the bottom skin back on and liked that a bit more. The bottom skin gives you an extra bit of tone to play with. You can mess with the tunings of the two heads to give you different sounds. That's why they are the standard these days. I put the bottom heads back on. I'm sticking with two heads for now. I think if I was gigging though, I would switch back to single heads. They take up half the space in your van if you put them inside each other, they are lighter and easier to mike up. These things make a difference when you are on the road. And the sound they make is pretty darn good. But in the studio or workroom I can hear why purists insist on two heads.
But I learned by experimentation that there is definitely a place for single headed tom toms and bass drums. If I was buying drums for a school, for instance, I would buy a single headed kit. It would be much cheaper and convenient to store and carry and maintain. And the sound is absolutely good enough. When I ask other drummers if they've serioulsly tried single heads, they look at you in disbelief and mumble something about the 70's. They are wrong though. The two-headed trend is largely prejudice. And manufacturers make more money selling more expensive kits. All it would take to change the trend is a couple of big name players to follow Phil Collins and be original. And I predict that it will happen one day soon. Economics and common sense will make it happen. You'll see....
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