cymbal stand tom mount or snare stand?

so I've decided to wait until next spring on buying a car, and get new drums now. I have decided on the Gretsch Catalina Club Mod 4-Piece shell pack:



one thing though: since the shell pack comes with a virgin bass drum, it also comes with a Gibraltar single tom mount that allows you to mount the rack tom from a cymbal stand. however, I'm not sure if any of my cymbal stands are heavy-duty enough to hold both a cymbal and a tom, and I would hate for the stand to tip over while playing and wreck my cymbal and tom. the stand I would be mounting it from is an entry-level Ludwig straight stand that would also hold a 17" Sabian AA Fast crash.

my questions are: will the entry-level Ludwig stand and the tom mount hold a 17" cymbal and a 12"x8" tom safely? or should I buy another snare stand and put the tom on that?

and, if getting another snare stand is the case, any recomendations on a low-cost but sturdy snare stand I could use as a tom stand?

thanks for all your help.

P.S. if you need to see a pic of the Ludwig cymbal stand, click the link in my signature to see pics of my current kit. (It's the stand that has the Sabian cymbal on it)

Provided the rack tom hangs directly above one of the stand legs, you should be fine. Look at the Gretsch picture. They even show a cymbal on a boom arm. Since your cymbal stand is a straight stand, the weight of the cymbal pressing straight down will add even more counterweight force to off-set the mass of the tom. Geometry. What you don't want to do is hang the tom in such a way that it's directly between 2 stand legs. That might cause the outside leg to lift, and your rig to topple.

harryconway said:

Provided the rack tom hangs directly above one of the stand legs, you should be fine. Look at the Gretsch picture. They even show a cymbal on a boom arm. Since your cymbal stand is a straight stand, the weight of the cymbal pressing straight down will add even more counterweight force to off-set the mass of the tom. Geometry. What you don't want to do is hang the tom in such a way that it's directly between 2 stand legs. That might cause the outside leg to lift, and your rig to topple.

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oh cool. so I can save like 50 bucks on not getting another snare stand. sweet! thanks harryconway.

I think the snare stand option would have caused me some positioning problems too. I mean, the snare stand being there would have forced me to move my crash cymbal farther to the left, and the rack tom wouldn't be over the bass drum much, so it'd be harder to do rolls from the rack tom to the floor tom all the way over to the right.

Sometimes the snare stand works great, some times not. In the dark ages (when I started drumming), most kits had the single rack tom flying off a rail consolette. If that position worked great, you were in luck. If you needed it changed, lots of cats went to the snare stand. But, plenty of flat based snare stands existed back then. I'll still use the snare stand method sometimes. Just depends. Every situation is different. But all my rack toms have RIMS with Yamaha tom mounts attached, and with Yamaha ball socket tom arms and aux. clamps (or the Yamaha tri-head stands), I usually fly toms.

I've got a superstar customs with a 14" hanging tom and its conected to my stand with a crash on it. As long as it is not in between the two legs as harry explained, it's fine

I think I found the perfect solution to this issue. I just got the Pearl 2000 snare stand, which has basket arms that adjust to hold drums of between 10" and 16" so it holds the drum perfectly. Plus it has hollow rubber grips that hold the drum in place but let it resonate more. The tom sounds great, I can place it wherever I want, and I can have a virgin bass drum. Also, as an aside, the snare stand is of outstanding quality. Even better than DW in my opinion.