Snare ring

ZDrumMan

ZDrumMan

Active Member
Sorry if this has been discussed at nausium, but just curious what others are doing to get rid of excessive snare drum ring. I have over tuned, under tuned, purposefully out of tuned, and eventually added items to stop the ring. But as you know, adding dampening also decreases the dynamic range so accents are not as loud and ghost notes not as ... present. The drum is a Sonor Designer snare and the heads are the standard snare Remo heads (ambassador coated and clear). Suggestions welcomed ...
 
ZDrumMan said:
Sorry if this has been discussed at nausium, but just curious what others are doing to get rid of excessive snare drum ring. I have over tuned, under tuned, purposefully out of tuned, and eventually added items to stop the ring. But as you know, adding dampening also decreases the dynamic range so accents are not as loud and ghost notes not as ... present. The drum is a Sonor Designer snare and the heads are the standard snare Remo heads (ambassador coated and clear). Suggestions welcomed ...
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I'm quite impressed with my Snareweight M80. Seems to reduce sustain without affecting initial attack or sensitivity. Plus you can fold parts of it or fold the whole thing away in a second.

Of course some snare drums just ring more than others. It's worth experimenting with pre-muffled single ply heads if you like the feel of the Ambassador. The very popular Controlled Sound has the extra patch in the middle that can make a bit of difference (as well as improve durability). And the Powerstroke 3 is also cool in its own way. Everyone puts a P3 on their kick but somehow they forget about it when it comes to the snare. It's basically an Ambassador with less sustain.
 
My suggestion is to either learn to love and embrace the ring, or try to ignore it and listen through the ring. If muffling isn't desirable then embracing the ring is the only choice left. So what's worse, the muffled sound or the wide open sound? There really should be a middle ground somewhere.

Muffling KILLS the drum unmiced. Even a tiny bit of tape will rob audience tone. Miced up? Muffle away.

That ring carries with it, the tonality and liveliness and personality of the drum.

If you're playing alone... shoot for the middle ground. Muffle lightly for yourself
If you're playing out acoustically to an audience...no muffling at all.
If you're miced up then feel free to muffle away or not.

These are the guidelines I follow. Except I never muffle anything. I love the tone of my drums unmiced, captured from about 20 feet away.
If I took the same scenario and added a little tape, I would not love my unmiced drum tone. Ring is my ally now.
I kind of despise muffled acoustic unmiced drums now after loving the ring for years now

Embrace the ring. If you do this successfully, after a short time, a muffled drum will sound like ass from then on. Unmiced drums IMO sound best unmuffled. By a huge margin. All my opinion.


That's my experience with ring. I learned to accept that it's part of a healthy drum tone. YMMV.
 
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CS coated or equivalent can help just enough. Can even cut the size of a moongel or honey small so it is not over muffling which I've done before. It's also a playing style too; generally dead center and softer will be a drier result. Of course tuning is important as well. Swapping rims to something heavier can help too.
 
I'm not a fan of prominent snare ring. Of course, "prominent" means something different to every player, so determining how much ring is too much is pretty personal from the outset. Nevertheless, here are a few suggestions for mitigating ring without applying ridiculous concentrations of tone-destroying muffling:

I. Play a wood snare -- though I believe that the Sonor snare in question is composed of maple, correct? In general, wood is warmer and drier than metal. Exceptions do exist, but wood produces less ring, ping, and honk than most metal snares I've encountered.

II. Try a batter head with built-in tone control, such as Remo's Coated Powerstroke 3. It's a single ply -- the same weight, in fact, as an Ambassador -- but it contains an overtone-reducing inlay ring. Ring and ping will be abated, but the inlay's influence isn't as drastic as that of an external device placed on top of the head.

III. Try a 2mil snare-side head. The thinner weight will dry out the sound. Both buzz and ring will be minimized.

I'm well-versed in the arguments for allowing ring to flourish. It transports sound to the audience, potentially augments the drum's presence in the mix, permits the drum to speak in an unhindered fashion, and so on. While all of that is true, when I'm in a mic'd setting, the audience receives sound just fine no matter how I'm tuned, and in an un-mic'd setting, I'm usually in a small venue where I'm not seeking maximum volume anyway. As for recording, no engineer has ever requested more ring from my drums -- exactly the opposite, if anything. A drier sound just makes sense in my case. Every case stands alone, however, and individual taste should be the deciding factor.
 
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C.M. Jones said:
In general, wood is warmer and drier than metal. Exceptions do exist, but wood produces less ring, ping, and honk than most metal snares I've encountered.
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My DW performance maple is the exception. It has more ring than my Acrolite and almost as much as the Sensitone brass.
 
s1212z said:
It's also a playing style too; generally dead center and softer will be a drier result. Of course tuning is important as well.
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No question there. Drummers who feel that they're losing the battle against overtones would be wise to examine their strike zones. Cleanliness resides in the center of the head. Off-center hits can be landfills of rubbish.
 
someguy01 said:
My DW performance maple is the exception. It has more ring than my Acrolite and almost as much as the Sensitone brass.
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Not at all surprised about the Acrolite. Aluminum rivals wood in dryness and sometimes even outperforms it in that category. Brass is often less polite, but, again, every shell has its own qualities.
 
In the context of "only drums", a ringing snare sounds errant, but in the context of recording and audio mixing the ringing introduces harmonics that help the drum speak more clearly in the mix, and retain its character in the mix.

I bought this drum a few years ago:

Tama SLP Super Aluminum flat.jpg

It's Tama's chrome-plated aluminum snare drum ("Super Aluminum") and it has a prominent ring to it. In the pic you can see that I replaced the sound-arc hoops with die cast. That dried it up a bit. Then I tried using an Evans Genera batter head (with an overtone reduction ring built in) and that really dried it up. The drum sounded great, it really cracked. But when I went to record with it, it sounded dull and flat. It was plenty loud, but there was no character to its sound.

I backtracked and used the stock hoops with the stock head (Evans G1), but this time with only one MoonGel. That brought the "ringing" harmonics into the mix and made the snare drum sound better in the mix and fit better in the tune.

Good luck! The struggle is real.
 
With a really ringy snare, the person who hears most of it is the drummer. 10 feet away where's the ring again?

Great suggestions here. Die cast hoops, wood shells and a 2 mil reso head, dry sounding heads...ring can't thrive in that environment.

Remember moleskin? Some moleskin patches on the inside of the drum shell will consume a lot of overtones too.

I never hear of anyone using, or even mentioning, moleskin as a sound alteration method anymore.
 
Like others, I embrace the ring. However, I make sure the batter head is in tune with itself. The Tune-bot is great for this! There's nothing worse than an out-of-tune snare batter creating sour sounding overtones. I do like to use a cut-out ring from an old head when I want a deader snare sound. The bottom head is tuned to the bot as well.
 
I'd also like to add that less than optimal tuning IMO is the biggest generator of bad ring. With no muffling at all, tuning is more critical than ever. A good tuning will yield pleasing O-Tones, where a "lacking" tuning generates bad sounding O-Tones. Tunebot to the rescue.

I'd also like to add that the reso head ideally should be a same, 3rd, 4th, 5th or octave interval to the batter to truly tune out bad OT's.

Then...if you can get pleasing intervals between the bass and snare...And the toms?...firing on all 8 right there

My favorite 3 tom tuning is high tom tuned to a preferred high tom note, 2nd tom a 4th below the first tom, and the low tom an octave lower than the high tom. It resolves, my goal.

For just 2 toms I keep them an octave apart again, so it resolves. I like the resos an octave above the batters on the toms and bass.

Many hundreds of hours of experimentation were required to land at those personal conclusions.
 
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GruntersDad said:
How much ring can be heard say 20 feet away where an audience may be? Sitting on top of it is much different.
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Let's also factor in the size of the audience, the venue, the acoustics. etc.
What in the environment is reflecting or absorbing sound?
Is the stage and / or walls carpeted?
 
larryace said:
I'd also like to add that less than optimal tuning IMO is the biggest generator of bad ring. With no muffling at all, tuning is more critical than ever. A good tuning will yield pleasing O-Tones, where a "lacking" tuning generates bad sounding O-Tones. Tunebot to the rescue.
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This is totally the key to a non-ringing center hit. Any wanted ring can still be found away from center. I love that about the snare. It can be dead in the middle but frantic at the edge.
 
C.M. Jones said:
Drummers who feel that they're losing the battle against overtones would be wise to examine their strike zones.
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I agree with this big time, although I'm in the ringy snare camp. I avoid the aptly named "dead" center and thrive on the chaos of the outer zone. I will address strike zone and head selection before I do too much muffling and even then it's on a room-by-room, temporary basis.
 
Out of Round said:
I agree with this big time, although I'm in the ringy snare camp. I avoid the aptly named "dead" center and thrive on the chaos of the outer zone. I will address strike zone and head selection before I do too much muffling and even then it's on a room-by-room, temporary basis.
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All perfectly legitimate. There's nothing wrong with off-center hits if you like that effect, just as there's nothing wrong with a snare that rings, pings, and honks if it suits your fancy and works well with the music you're playing. I'm of the philosophy that a drum is in tune when you like the way it sounds. How you get there is up to you.
 
Just to add some clarification to my scenario, I use all the sounds of the snare, middle, sides, rims, etc. so I know of what y'all speak when you talk about more ring out of the center circle. And there are a number of times I use that area for a groove (2 center, 4 outside of center). I am lucky in that I have two sets: one I consider to be my practice/GB set (1960's Slingerland with some upgraded hardware) and my Sonor designer set for performances. I swapped out the metal Slingerland snare today for the Sonor and the ring is looonnnng. I slapped a couple of gel things on the head and get something of the sound I want, but not really. Also, I have been thinking that the ring is going to be overwhelming when I record which is what prompted the question. So my next step is to record and see what results. I guess I can always go to different heads if needed.
 
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