So was the DW Subwoofer a passing fancy?

I Thought AVH just connected two identical sided bass drums.

He actually did. This isn't a subwoofer. The subwoofer is an 4 drumheads apparatus, AVH actually had only 2 plain drumheads.
I think later on, he used a connected "real" subwoofer.
 
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I have a 22x18" Dw and last year i bought a 23x15". It have been my nº1 since that . Big sound , faster than the 22"punchy ,i love it. This week i found a woofer matching my 22"Exotic . I´m curious about how it sound , but i will never drill my Bass Drum and i´m sure i rarely use it live but... I bought it to use as a Gong Drum or large tom like Eric Moore, Mike Mangini, Thomas Lang ,Donati...... It´s a 8" deep so i can easily found a place for it and using it with a internal Beta 52 and a Moon Mic on the outside. 23" Drum heads are available at Remo and Dw factory heads.
 
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What's the opposite of one of these, where people (again, DW I think) have a "mini" drum in-front of the kick, like a 12" or something?
 
What's the opposite of one of these, where people (again, DW I think) have a "mini" drum in-front of the kick, like a 12" or something?

That's a sub-kick. It's basically a Yamaha NS10 speaker that is wired as a microphone. It's made to pick up low end frequencies that a small-diameter microphone cannot.

It's ultimately a friendly consumer re-packaging of an old "speaker as microphone" studio trick.
 
I discovered that I don't get that much more out of a 24" that I do with a 22", so I've been sticking to 22" lately because it works. Because of this, personally, I don't think I'd get more out of the 23" that I'm not already getting from a 22".

Agreed. I have a Gretsch 22x20 "cannon kick" whose extra length splits the difference between the 24 and the 22. It still fits in a 22" case and gives me all the punch and boom I could want.
I don't see any 23" cases or heads for that DW drum at any drum shop I walk into. I'd love to play one, but I feel owning & gigging with it would be more trouble than it's worth.
 
Agreed. I have a Gretsch 22x20 "cannon kick" whose extra length splits the difference between the 24 and the 22. It still fits in a 22" case and gives me all the punch and boom I could want.
I don't see any 23" cases or heads for that DW drum at any drum shop I walk into. I'd love to play one, but I feel owning & gigging with it would be more trouble than it's worth.
The 23x15 fits perfectly on my 22" ahead bag . For gigs i prefer the 23, even for the 3 inches less, i can’t imagine carrying a 22x20 , For the drumheads i don’t know what country you are living , i live in the south of europe and i can get a drumhead coming from 3000km in 4 days .
 

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To add. It is a custom speaker specially made for the SKRM.
Indeed.

Also a good read
TLDR: The subkick doesn't do what you are lead (even intuitively) to believe it does... It doesn't capture the LF of the BD. It is basically an analog air pressure sensor that vibrates at it's own resonant frequency.
 
The 23x15 fits perfectly on my 22" ahead bag . For gigs i prefer the 23, even for the 3 inches less, i can’t imagine carrying a 22x20 , For the drumheads i don’t know what country you are living , i live in the south of europe and i can get a drumhead coming from 3000km in 4 days .

The US.
The 20" length does take up a bit more stage real estate, but I compensate by sitting further back.
 
The only DW guy I can think of that might still use one is Mick Fleetwood. Not DW related but AVH was the subwoofer guy in the 70s/80s.

A nice idea but totally impractical for most working drummers. A good bass drum mic is smaller and does the same thing and fits in a mic case.

The 23" bass drum don't get me started....lets make something nobody stocks heads for and was completely uneccesary in the first place, but DW overthink and/or overengineer something....who'da thunk it!
I think I need an 11" tom :)
 
Making the bass drum drum longer by adding the same diameter woofer doesn't make too much sense to me, but Billy Ward used to use a 8x28 woofer with his 12x20 bass drum. He maintained he loved the feel and punch of the 12x20 married with the bigger sound and resonance the woofer added. Makes sense. (There was a great demo on YouTube where he gets his sound engineer to remove the drum while he's playing and then put it back. The difference is vivid - I think Hudson Music have removed it now.)
 
Making the bass drum drum longer by adding the same diameter woofer doesn't make too much sense to me, but Billy Ward used to use a 8x28 woofer with his 12x20 bass drum. He maintained he loved the feel and punch of the 12x20 married with the bigger sound and resonance the woofer added. Makes sense. (There was a great demo on YouTube where he gets his sound engineer to remove the drum while he's playing and then put it back. The difference is vivid - I think Hudson Music have removed it now.)

It was posted on page 1.

For some reason a video of JR Robinson was pulled too.

Anthying going on with Hudson?

It makes total sense if you think about it like that. If you prefer small and short sized kicks for their response but you need a big sound, the wooder gives you just that.

1605130443158.jpeg
 
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In a world of shallow kicks being fashionable and deep/cannon/beer-can kicks not, the subwoofer kick is truly a passing fancy.

Although I'm a big fan of slightly deeper kicks (much to everyones hate, yes they do indeed kick out more subsonics), having a shallow kick and then plonking one of those things in front of it you're essentially creating a far deeper kick anyway.
 
Don't know if this has been mentioned or not.......but the DW subwoofer is basically a big microphone with a microphone inside of it.
It's not intended to give you a lot of different sound from behind the kit. The subwoofer captures the sub frequencies from the kick drum and has a mic inside to capture that tone as purely as possible. Just sayin. I've used them since I was a teenager (not all DWs of course) inspired by Alex Van HAlen of course........ not the first guy to do it but AVH took drum experimentation to new levels back then.
 
I think we all knew it was a fad that wouldn't last long when neither Pearl nor Tama even bothered to come out with their own version.

As mentioned, it was highly impractical for the average working drummer. And the cost of essentially buying another drum that you don't even get the pleasure of hitting was lost on most people.

And the sonic benefits that came from using one, while measurable, were small compared to the cost. And once the drums are blended in with the full band, thought a PA or mixing console, I doubt most anyone could hear the real difference. So it was a lot of money and time to achieve fractional, if not negligible, improvement.
That's one opinion. I think they are awesome and can't be replicated once you've dialed in a subwoofer correctly. A ton of the hate for the subwoofer comes from not knowing how to set them up correctly in my opinion.
 
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