Maple vs Birch

I voted with my wallet and replaced my birch kits with maple ones. I don't dislike birch at all but maple is where it's at, for me.
 
Many years ago, I asked a pro drummer which does he prefer, maple or birch. He responded.... "Yes". :) We both laughed and he went on to describe the differences. He said there's really no wrong choice. It's all about what sounds better to you. His preference was actually birch.

To my ears, maple is the better sound. I owned birch drums in the past and they never spoke to me the way maple does. It took me many years to arrive at this conclusion and a few birch kits, but nowadays I'm a "maple guy".
 
Jamos33 said:
I've been listening to a lot of maple and birch kits side by side trying to hear the differences (same quality, same heads and tuning, no dampening). My ears hear the birch as having less sustain but a more clarity. The Maple has more sustain, is a bit more agressive but most of all, is a more complex sound. However, overall, the differences are very subtle and I doubt the untrained ear would notice. I'm curious to know what your thoughts are on Maple vs Birch. What's your experience and opinion on the difference?
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Ive been a maple user for many years and love the wood..i had a teaching kit made of birch and found the sound to be a little dry for my liking..however miking up may be easier for birch but i love the sing that maple produces..ive yet to purchase bubinga but its on my mind.
 
I like both just fine, but I have a thing for maple because I like the more aggressive thing it does. That said, I would take a set of RC’s any day.
 
To be fair:
Bozozoid said:
I had a very difficult time with some 80s recording customs and I've been terribly negative ever since... as if I'm a soldier against birch. I have some Yamaha CDs with sounds from birch..beech..and maple. When I've got headphones on I'm totally with the birch toms but kits I've listened to in drumshops were nowhere near what I hear on the CD's. I've been confused ever since. Since this is a maple birch thread I'll have to go with what I hear in drumshops and maple wins. Even then maple doesn't really flip my trigger either. I've rehearsed on a mapex birch kit and didn't really dig the bright attack of it. Gotta stop..i could go on and on and on.
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Could be that birch works a bit better through the mic. I'm thinking of birch as the "audience side wood" and maple the "player side wood", though it's subtle and depends on other factors as well.
Square said:
Just so we don't think ourselves crazy, Eric Johnson, crazy good guitarist, is convinced that he can hear the differences in 9v batteries used to power his effects pedals.
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He was talking about a Fuzz Face, which was a very simple circuit without a voltage regulator. An 8.4 V rechargeable battery will sound like a dying battery compared with a 9.6 V alkaline in a Fuzz Face.
 
I will say that I did like the bass drums on both Tama birch sets I owned, but that was all.
 
Regarding birch, I have Yamaha Recording Custom(80s), Tama Superstar(80s), Premier Genista / Artist Birch, and Sonor Force 3000, and then there are the blended shells like the early Pearl Sessions and Yamaha Tours. You could say I'm a birch freak, though I have plenty of all-maple kits like Pearl MLX.

Maybe it's me, but I've never had a problem getting a sound I really like from these kits, deep, throaty toms and even a few snares like the Genista and a Pearl Masters Studio that's a real cracker. Birch has a pleasingly darker sound--you can really hear it in a snare drum more than a tom or bass drum. I think it's the most different-sounding wood.


Dan
 
Jamos33 said:
I've been listening to a lot of maple and birch kits side by side trying to hear the differences (same quality, same heads and tuning, no dampening). My ears hear the birch as having less sustain but a more clarity. The Maple has more sustain, is a bit more agressive but most of all, is a more complex sound. However, overall, the differences are very subtle and I doubt the untrained ear would notice. I'm curious to know what your thoughts are on Maple vs Birch. What's your experience and opinion on the difference?
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I dunno if I can tell the difference. If you're listening to lots of kits played on Youtube or retailer videos, there is going to be differences in how the videos are mic'd and produced, differences in how shells are made, differences in rims, differences in shell thickness (that's a big one). Honestly if I listened live to two kits that were as identical as possible with as many variables as possible made the same and only difference was the wood type and I listen with my back turned away, I am not sure I could tell a difference. Heck just listening to videos or drums live I have no idea if I'm listening to birch maple walnut or pine - they're all tuned differently. I hear some drums I like better than others and it's usually because of tuning + size of drum.
 
Adios said:
Reminiscent, to me, of rehearsals where one or more players continue noodling away making totally
useless racket while the band stops to discuss a chord change/progression or song structure issue.
MADDENING!!🤬
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Sounds like The Beatles in Get Back lol
 
I thought this comparison video interesting.
 
Birch has a faster vibratory pattern than maple. As Kenny Aronoff said in a print ad some 20 years ago. 'They just jumped right out at me.' I have flagship level kits in North American Rock Maple (two different kits) and Scandanavian Birch (2 different kits) and love both. The birch kits are easier to mic up / record but the maple kits have greater attack and are 'big and boomy.'

The birch kits are for practice (I play a lot of afro-cuban and latin grooves) and recording for their clarity of sound. If the part is intricate, I can hear the difference between drums better, just makes it easier.

But live it's one of the maple kits, as 'nothing fills up a room like maple.' If I could only have one kit it would be one of my maple kits.

As many others have also commented, especially at the pro / flagship level of kit, head changes can have a dramatic effect on sound.
 
Syncopated_1 said:
Birch has a faster vibratory pattern than maple. As Kenny Aronoff said in a print ad some 20 years ago. 'They just jumped right out at me.' I have flagship level kits in North American Rock Maple (two different kits) and Scandanavian Birch (2 different kits) and love both. The birch kits are easier to mic up / record but the maple kits have greater attack and are 'big and boomy.'

The birch kits are for practice (I play a lot of afro-cuban and latin grooves) and recording for their clarity of sound. If the part is intricate, I can hear the difference between drums better, just makes it easier.

But live it's one of the maple kits, as 'nothing fills up a room like maple.' If I could only have one kit it would be one of my maple kits.

As many others have also commented, especially at the pro / flagship level of kit, head changes can have a dramatic effect on sound.
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I had a birch session studio pearl kit and i thought it sounded muffled..i have an old maple kit and would never swap it..however i used to have a birch premier snare and it was awesome..for me its maple all day.
 
IBitePrettyHard said:
Edit

I've found it can often be difficult to accurately evaluate drums when they are recorded in a professional studio setting. The acoustics of the studio play a big part, and there's almost always EQ and levels added later to "enhance" the sound, making it somewhat misleading if you want a *true* sound. By "true" I mean the sound you'll actually hear if you're in the room, sitting behind the drums and playing them yourself.

For drum comparison shootout videos in particular, it can be tough to tell the difference between different wood types because of all the post-processing involved in the recordings. The more post-processing and tweaking you do to the recordings, the more all the drums start to sound the same. IMHO, the best way to do comparison videos is using RAW audio, with no EQ or levels.

For example, let's say you watch a demo of a Ludwig Club Date kit. It sounds fantastic in the video. You buy them and set them up at home, and wonder why the toms are so much quieter. Your snare drum sounds so much louder than the toms, and the 20x14" depth bass drum isn't as loud as you'd hoped. That's because the Levels (aka gain, or volume) of each of the drums were manipulated to sound more "balanced" on the recording. While in real life, the Club Date drums simply don't project as much as one would think.

Here's another example. You watch a snare drum demo and it sounds fantastic! You spend tons of money on it, set it up at home.....and.....it has a honk to it. The overtones are harsh sounding, and you didn't hear them in the demo. What's the deal? That's because the recordings you heard had all the harsh frequencies and overtones rolled off or minimized with EQ and other post-processing.

This is a problem for many of the drum demo channels on Youtube. They have high production values and the drums always sound great. But that's not exactly what you want when choosing drums to purchase with your hard-earned money. You want accuracy, so you know exactly what they'll sound like in your practice room. (without using $50,000 in recording equipment.)

Believe it or not, I've found that cell phone recordings of drums can often sound surprisingly accurate. As long as the room acoustics aren't too crazy, it can capture what it *actually* sounds like when you're sitting behind the kit.

Listening to drum demos and comparing/contrasting them is somewhat of a hobby of mine, I could talk about this all day.
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Can't agree. If you have overtones that weren't in the video, the issue is tuning, not eq. You can't eq "great" into a recording.
 
AudioWonderland said:
Can't agree. If you have overtones that weren't in the video, the issue is tuning, not eq. You can't eq "great" into a recording.
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Tuning is not what I'm referring to. I'm taking drum tuning out of the equation completely. If all drums are tuned equally, my hypothesis holds up.

With close-miking, it is very easy to target troublesome overtones and dial them out with EQ. That's why close miking on demo videos can sometimes be misleading.

However, with a simple setup like a single overhead mic or cell phone video, it's more difficult to hide the bad overtones without affecting or distorting the entire recording. That is why I think single mics and cell phone videos are sometimes more accurate. It's more difficult to manipulate with post-production and levels and EQ.

EQ can make a huge difference. It's easy to make an "ok" sounding snare sound incredible with the right EQ. Just look at the legendary Tama Bell Brass "Terminator" snare. I heard realistic recordings of it and it sounded only "good", but it didn't sound anywhere near as good as the records. But with the right EQ, it sounds incredible on all those famous recordings.
 
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Close-mic can also compensate for weak drums in a kit. Good recording samples (like DCP does) always has one segment with 'room mics' only. This is what the kit really sounds like.
 
IBitePrettyHard said:
Tuning is not what I'm referring to. I'm taking drum tuning out of the equation completely. If all drums are tuned equally, my hypothesis holds up.

With close-miking, it is very easy to target troublesome overtones and dial them out with EQ. That's why close miking on demo videos can sometimes be misleading.

However, with a simple setup like a single overhead mic or cell phone video, it's more difficult to hide the bad overtones without affecting or distorting the entire recording. That is why I think single mics and cell phone videos are sometimes more accurate. It's more difficult to manipulate with post-production and levels and EQ.

EQ can make a huge difference. It's easy to make an "ok" sounding snare sound incredible with the right EQ. Just look at the legendary Tama Bell Brass "Terminator" snare. I heard realistic recordings of it and it sounded only "good", but it didn't sound anywhere near as good as the records. But with the right EQ, it sounds incredible on all those famous recordings.
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Smh.. you can't magically take tuning out of it.
 
Syncopated_1 said:
Close-mic can also compensate for weak drums in a kit. Good recording samples (like DCP does) always has one segment with 'room mics' only. This is what the kit really sounds like.
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"Really" is fallacious... If you're the audience you may hear it like the room mic blended with overhead. If you're the drummer you may hear it more like the overhead (especially in ORTF configuration). Neither is any more "real" than the other. Never, ever have I heard myself playing drums that sound remotely as diffuse as a room mic recording.
 
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