dragonfly66
Member
I've had a Sonor AQ2 Safari kit for a few months and love it. I love the compactness of this kit. It sounds good especially the the bass drum. The 10" tom and ride are mounted off the bass drum. I have the crash mounted on the hi-hat stand.
When I first got the kit I simply did the Tom "Beat Down" Brown method of tuning the drums, which is to press in the middle of head and tighten until the wrinkles go away. The kit sounded good. Last week I thought I'd switch out the heads and do some tuning with my TuneBot. I have some Evans G2 Coated/G1 on the toms and Remo Controlled Sound X/Ambassador heads on the snare. I kept the original heads on the bass drums because it sounds like a beast and didn't want to mess with it.
The toms tuned up ok. The bass drum was a little harder to get all of the lugs to the same pitch. The snare was complete ridiculous. There were several lugs that were just so far off than the rest I thought, "something isn't right." So I measure the snare and it is not round. It was off by as much as 1/4" at one point. You can see all of the measurements here, https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1GzkueSRPnefhNmR1rZLpiiEbayR6v6ts?usp=sharing. In addition the bearing edges were not flush. That is also demonstrated in the photos. I sent this information to Sweetwater and they are getting an RA from Sonor to replace the snare.
So now I'm paranoid and I go back and check my two toms. The 10 tom is round. The 13 and bass drum are mostly round, both are off by 1/8" in one spot. Both the toms and the bass bearing edges do not sit flush against a flat surface. None of them is as bad as the snare though. The toms are tunable as is the bass drum, meaning I can get all of the lugs within 1 hz of each other even though the bearing edge isn't even. However, though the lugs rings at the same pitch if you touch the head you can tell the tension is looser on certain lugs to accommodate the inconsistencies in the bearing edge.
I realize that bearing edges are usually not perfect at this price point and I've read many times that if the head spins and you are able to tune it and it sounds good (which is the case with the toms and bass drum) then don't worry about it. While I can spin the head on the snare drum it is so clearly out of round you can't truly center the head and with the unevenness of the bearing edges the disparity in the lug pitches is too great to overcome.
I haven't been playing drums very long so just want to make sure I'm understanding what is acceptable and what isn't.
My questions:
When I first got the kit I simply did the Tom "Beat Down" Brown method of tuning the drums, which is to press in the middle of head and tighten until the wrinkles go away. The kit sounded good. Last week I thought I'd switch out the heads and do some tuning with my TuneBot. I have some Evans G2 Coated/G1 on the toms and Remo Controlled Sound X/Ambassador heads on the snare. I kept the original heads on the bass drums because it sounds like a beast and didn't want to mess with it.
The toms tuned up ok. The bass drum was a little harder to get all of the lugs to the same pitch. The snare was complete ridiculous. There were several lugs that were just so far off than the rest I thought, "something isn't right." So I measure the snare and it is not round. It was off by as much as 1/4" at one point. You can see all of the measurements here, https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1GzkueSRPnefhNmR1rZLpiiEbayR6v6ts?usp=sharing. In addition the bearing edges were not flush. That is also demonstrated in the photos. I sent this information to Sweetwater and they are getting an RA from Sonor to replace the snare.
So now I'm paranoid and I go back and check my two toms. The 10 tom is round. The 13 and bass drum are mostly round, both are off by 1/8" in one spot. Both the toms and the bass bearing edges do not sit flush against a flat surface. None of them is as bad as the snare though. The toms are tunable as is the bass drum, meaning I can get all of the lugs within 1 hz of each other even though the bearing edge isn't even. However, though the lugs rings at the same pitch if you touch the head you can tell the tension is looser on certain lugs to accommodate the inconsistencies in the bearing edge.
I realize that bearing edges are usually not perfect at this price point and I've read many times that if the head spins and you are able to tune it and it sounds good (which is the case with the toms and bass drum) then don't worry about it. While I can spin the head on the snare drum it is so clearly out of round you can't truly center the head and with the unevenness of the bearing edges the disparity in the lug pitches is too great to overcome.
I haven't been playing drums very long so just want to make sure I'm understanding what is acceptable and what isn't.
My questions:
- How much out of round is acceptable?
- How much unevenness is acceptable on the bearing edge?
- I live in the Southwest where it is awfully dry, would that dryness have caused this?
- Is there anything else I might be missing?
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