I concur with this^. Every drum I get will be of a certain level of quality where I’m certain I’m gonna tweak it to my way of playing so I’d just buy it and see if I can make it do what I need it to do. If not, then I return it. I figure every snare drum has to be at least like a Supraphonic for ease of use - everything else is icing on the cake.
Agreed. "Sounds Like a Drum" asked a question in a recent video about why so many drummers need confirmation on whether their snare sounds good or not. Leads me to wonder just how many snare drums in the wild we are really seeing these days and especially with the demise of Mom and Pop local shops and the nascent scourge. Even if we aren't really shopping for something, I am betting most of us get more looks and time spent at videos--productive or not--than we do actually listening to REAL snare drums in the wild. It used to be you shopped catalogs, and I am not sure the modern YouTube videos are any more informative. You'd hit your local music store or drum shop and play the drums in the flesh.
Interesting, informative and entertaining, those videos all can be all of the above and still not all that useful in making a decision. I am not sure you really come away in most cases with any more than you would get reading a catalog and their florid descriptions.
Preachin to the choir there. Drum shops are awful for auditions unless you can sequester yourself in a quiet room or space. I've bought cymbals online by sound files only, but that was where there was minimal processing, after sampling hundreds of models, exchanging scores of E-mails with the dealer and asking countless questions on an old forum that is no longer extant. I was nervous, but ended up one hundred percent satisfied. Snare drums are an entirely different beast.
REFERENCE sound ... that's it exactly. NONE, and I mean absolutely none, of these videos are giving you a REFERENCE sound. Some shops (DCP comes to mind) will point out build issues and sacrifices to cut costs: cheap heads, changes to lugs, throws and hoops. DCP videos are usually informative and entertaining and even useful in making choices by specifications and quality control factors. And I enjoy the room mic portions of their demos. They are too short and almost entirely a groove or fill.
I believe Ringo did almost all the Beatles stuff on a Jazz Fest. There is about every kind of snare sound I could want in those recordings, and maybe a few I really don't want at all. To be sure, some studio trickery is involved.
Under close mics, those differences are sometimes pretty apparent. Sometimes not so easy when snare A is at 3:00 mark and the other snare you are looking at is at 15:00 mark. And I still think we are dealing here with an audio equivalent of an airbrushed centerfold. And then there is the player's touch, choice of sticks etc, and you almost never see them using anything other than a stick. I mean that more as an observation than I do a criticism. I am sure a ton of time and effort already goes into the productions.
See, that's just it. I don't think there is any baseline here; there is nothing that can be used as a REFERENCE sound. I'd hope that every snare drum ever made could sing happily at various tunings--okay any well-made intact drum that is. What we are getting here isn't the sound of a drum's construction and craftsmanship; we are getting an audio composition: from the room, sound treatments, the performer, to mics, cables and whatever other editing and processing it goes through. That's a lot of audio voodoo and pixy dust.
