concert snares, a different animal?

mandrew

Gold Member
There are lots of threads about stave, single ply, multi-ply, and metal shell drums. Most of them have to do with sounds for the standard drum kit snare enviroment. Exotic woods are all the rage, and that is fine. I have noticed that the vast majority of shells for concert/symphonic snares are still 10-12 ply maple, or brass, copper, or bronze in the metal line. There are almost no stave drums, and although single ply drums are made, they are not the big sellers. 10 ply maple is the biggest mover, with some sort of cable, or cable and wire combination for snares. Are concert snares just a whole different animal, and why?
 
Concert snares are geared toward a certain sound.
Concert snare players for the most part aren't searching for a unique sound like kit players.
They tend to stay with proven established gear.
So, they are a different animal of sort.
 
A concert snare has to fulfill a certain role within an orchestra or wind ensemble, so you're not going to see a lot of weird drums, heads, or tunings, or see people using a piccolo when a normal snare is called for. When I was around classical players more, when they would get creative with the sound they would tend towards going moderately warm/dark. But maybe there's been a big antiquarian calf-and-gut revival since then, for all I know.

I'm trying to think back to what we used in college-- I think mostly Supraphonics, and a Rogers Dynasonic. The fancy drum was a non-ply Noble & Cooley. Those all had just Remo Ambassadors on them, and regular snares, with the same moderately-high tuning. Just a classic snare durm sound.
 
There's all manner of constructions used in concert applications. We've supplied quite a few stave & steam bent examples. Players have the same desire for quality of tone as any other player, but they do tend to be fairly conservative in their choice of wood species. Sensitivity, articulation, & focus are right at the top of an orchestral player's list of requirements. Increasingly, we get requests from players who seek more tone at lower dynamics too, hence introduce thin shell steam bent constructions.

A symphonic strainer system is not an essential element, but is very popular amongst many concert players. Having a choice of wire forms (gut, piano string, traditional snare wire, etc) offers some great sound variations. A three strainer system is most common/popular.
 
A tightly tuned (medium-high-ish) Black Swamp multisonic or Ludwig Super Sensitive with calfskin heads. Oh, man. I'm about to start drooling.

But yes, they are a completely different animal (although not, because they're all snare drums). Simply because they have a very different role to fulfill. And the sound ideals are different from "kit snares". More clarity, articulation and a different timbre. Although some kit players may like the same type of sound, like me :p

In my head, a concert snare is like a beautiful french (might also be italian, german or british) person (lady in my case) who speaks clearly, articulate and very understandable. Even though he/she uses difficult words in every other sentence. A kit snare could be speaking any language with any dialect in the world, depending somewhat on the style of music. Maybe not using difficult words as often as a concert snare, but they're usually always heard making people move in some way somewhere on the planet.
 
Pearl's Philharmonic Series is quite popular. You should look them up. One piece steam bent maple shells. Black Swamp is also popular. Also remember that soft playing for a symphonic player is louder then for a drumset player when he has to play past 100 other people in the group so dynamics are a bit different for a symphonic player.
 
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I played the concert circuit for about 10 years. There is very little money in it, so concert drummers aren't nearly the "gear-heads" that kit drummers are. In my state, there are only a couple concert organizations that get paid, and one of them went through a bankruptcy a couple years ago. In the concert band and orchestra I played in, we had to pay dues to join. I was the section leader for 8 years and I didn't make a dime doing concert work. When I gave it up to play drum set in small bands, I found it was a lot nicer to leave with some pay after a show.

I don't think most concert drummers could tell you what their snare shell is made of (other than metal or wood). The conductors don't know that much about percussion equipment either (unless they are drummers, like my junior high band director). In the big cities on the coasts, there are some profitable concert gigs. (I saw the Boston Pops on the Half Shell one time). Even there, it isn't like there are a lot of drummers doing it, so expecting your average concert drummer to be into top-of-the-line gear is like asking flea market vendors whether they prefer a Lexus over a Lincoln Town Car.
 
I don't think most concert drummers could tell you what their snare shell is made of (other than metal or wood). The conductors don't know that much about percussion equipment either (unless they are drummers, like my junior high band director). In the big cities on the coasts, there are some profitable concert gigs. (I saw the Boston Pops on the Half Shell one time). Even there, it isn't like there are a lot of drummers doing it, so expecting your average concert drummer to be into top-of-the-line gear is like asking flea market vendors whether they prefer a Lexus over a Lincoln Town Car.

That has to be one of the most insensitive and downright insulting comments that I have ever read on this forum. do you really think that professional concert musicians are totally clueless as to what they are playing? That they don't know any more about their drums than they are made of wood or metal? I have a friend in the Cleveland Symphony, and I think he knows a little more about his instrument than that! You don't have much regard for other musicians other than your self, do you . . .
 
That has to be one of the most insensitive and downright insulting comments that I have ever read on this forum. do you really think that professional concert musicians are totally clueless as to what they are playing? That they don't know any more about their drums than they are made of wood or metal? I have a friend in the Cleveland Symphony, and I think he knows a little more about his instrument than that! You don't have much regard for other musicians other than your self, do you . . .

Ease up. I know there are plenty of concert musicians who know their instruments. The Cleveland Symphony is not a small town concert band. As a matter of fact, the concert band developed after old Civil War units played in their towns after the war. These folks were poor. They were happy to play whatever they could get. I played concert music for 10 years and I can honestly say that in my experience, there is not as much attention paid to gear in small town concert bands. I know there are things like Super-Sensitive snares for concert work, but a lot of th percussionists I played with used old MIJ models that they didn't know a lot about. Please don't take offense. The point is totally innocuous.
 
This topic reminds me of a discussion I had a couple of years ago with Lee Vinson when he was percussionist with the Boston Symphony regarding snare drum choice for different musical applications.
On his website's gear page, he says that the first 9 snares listed are the one's he uses with that organization (the rest are in his collection). http://www.leevinson.com/gear.html

Tone quality,articulation,sensitivity...they seem to be the calling card of an orchestral snare drum.
 
Lee has a great collection, and good insight into the makings of a good concert snare. It seems that a lot of percussionists in symphonies use brass shells or 10+ ply maple shells.
 
My experience has been that concert musicians are just as demanding, if not more demanding, about the sound and performance of their drums than a kit player is. Many top-level pros on both sides of that distinction have no idea about how a drum is constructed. I remember seeing a builder friend at a drum show pointing out to a big-name clinician that the drum he was trying out was stave construction, and the big-name clinician looking completely blank because he no idea what the builder was talking about.

Generally, concert snare drums are more expensive than kit snare drums because of the higher cost of cable snares and/or multi-strainers. The tone demands are extremely specific, and the expectation is for highly sensitive response and consistent tone throughout a very wide dynamic range.

We've done concert snares with cable setups into standard strainers as well as with three-cable systems with several levels of precise adjustability. They've been steambent and stave shells, and the woods used have primarily been walnut, rosewood, bubinga and maple. The differences from kit snares are mainly in the bearing edges, snares, heads, strainers and snare beds -- not so much in the shell itself.

It's true I've encountered concert performers who don't know the full world of drums -- not much familiarity with kit drums, for example, or a timpanist who doesn't know snare drums very well -- but that's not unusual. People specializing in a certain type of music often are not well versed in other types of music, especially the gear involved -- this thread is a good example, really. But in a world in which percussionists can spend tens of thousands of dollars on extremely specialized instruments, I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that they don't know or care much about what they're playing on.

It's probably important here to make a distinction between the community orchestra player who isn't making a professional investment into his gear vs. the pro or semi-pro whose livelihood and ability to get hired depend on the sound he produces from the instrument(s). It's like the difference between a fine rock guitar and a fine classical guitar; at a certain level, you can't use one to play the other type of music and get any satisfactory result.
 
That's an excellent point in the last paragraph Motleyh. I can't imagine a Gladstone snare with cat gut snares for a 2&4 back beat behind David Bowie nor would I want to play "Scheherazade" on a deep bronze Sonor drum.
 
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