Category Archive: Guest Blog

Guest-blog by John Dutra of Guerilla Drum Making

September 30, 2011

| Author: Vintage & Rare

Meet John Dutra. He has been drumming for fifteen years and making custom drums for the last ten. He’s the owner and creator of the world renowned Guerrilla Drum Making DVD, which helps the average Joe build his own professional custom drum set with no tools and no experience. He’s also heavily involved with live gigging, studio gigs, and teaching drums. Lastly, he is the newest addition to our rooster of competent guest-bloggers, and this is his first contribution. Enjoy:

The minimalists guide to knowing your drum shells and designing the perfect sound.

Let’s jump right in and start talking about the most important factor in the sound design of drums: drum shells!

Any drummer who’s played a variety of drum types knows that the shells are the meat and potatoes… the heart and soul of the drum. It’s where the true sound of the drum comes from. Other factors like heads, snare wires, hoops, bearing edges and tuning styles affect the tone of drums as well. But remember… with good shells those factors help boost your sound and with bad shells, you’re dependent on those things for a good sound. I’ll take the former, thanks.

But this isn’t about what’s good and what’s bad – that’s just to subjective. In each variety of wood (it’s estimated there are over 100,000 species of trees), metal, synthetics, and construction of all three… there’s huge potential for some awesome drum tones with unique sounds perfect for what style of music your after.

If you want a minimalist guide to understanding drum shells with some easily digestible sound explanations, this is it. Hopefully this will get you started down the road to designing the perfect sounding drum set with the best products.

Let’s break this guide into three parts: Wood, Metal, and Imitation Drum Shells (A.K.A Synthetics).

PART 1: WOOD

Wood Drum Shell Construction – The Big 4 and 1 Other One
1. Plied Shells: good range of pitch (great for tuning) and long sustain. Built with plys and lots of glue!

2. Steam Bent: very strong and brilliant sound with long sustain and resonation. Built by steambending a plank of wood and glued at an overlapping joint. Low amounts of glue and lots of wood!

3. Solid Shells: tone is like steam bent shells but higher in pitch and more woody. Truly a solid construction (think of a hollowed out tree trunk made into a drum) with no glue.

4. Segment: not long sustain but high pitched and more “wood” sounding. Lots of glue used with grains running horizontally.

5. Stave: awesome construction with low amount of glue and wood grain that runs vertical. Shell tone has long sustain and a rich resonation.

Popular Wood Drum Shell Types
– Maple: very even sounding wood. good high tones and low tones and all around a great all purpose shell.
– Birch: hard wood with higher pitch than maple and cuts through nicely, but very similar to maple as well. Awesome shell for studio gigs in my opinion.
– Mahogany: a very soft wood…nice rich low end that resonates beautifully
– Bubinga: also a very rich low end with a punchy sound and beautiful looks. Makes awesome snare drums.
– Beech: if maple and birch had a child, his name would be beech.
– Poplar: very smooth and even tone with highs, mids and lows.

Please note: there are tons more wood type than the above mentioned. However, these are the most common.

Depth, diameter, and thickness all play a huge roll in sound design as well. Remember this rule of thumb when considering your shell thickness: the thinner the shell… the lower the tone. The thicker the shell, the higher the tone.

PART 2: METAL

Metal Drum Shell Construction- The Big 2
1. Cast: liquid metal pored into a mold. sounds like,… metal! high pitch.. long sustain and good tuning range.
2. Spun: formed by high speed spinning. Spun metal also has great resonation and sustain and a high pitch.

Popular Metal Drum Shell Types
– Brass: Nice open sound. Good range of high tones and low tones and sounds awesome at live gigs and in the studio.
– Steel: very high pitched sounding drum with decent lows.
– Aluminum: a very versatile sounding shell with a lot of tuning ranges. good highs, mids and a nice low thud!
– Titanium: Very metal sounding! Resonating high pitch and not the greatest low end tones.

Please note again: there are tons more alloys than the above mentioned. However, these are very common shells.

PART 3: Imitation or Synthetic Shells

Popular Synthetic Shell Types:
– Fiberglass: an even sounding, soft shell with nice tones. Projects well in live gigging situations and very clean sounding.
– Acrylic: Very powerful and aggressive sounding shell. Awesome for live shows and harder to control for studio gigs yet perfect for that big rock, aggressive sound
– Carbon Fiber: A Dry sound. the high end tone outdoes the low end and mid range qualities of the shell, but can be perfect for that cracking snare drum your after.

Why isn’t there much info on synthetic shells?!! Well.. to be honest, synthetics have only been in the shell marketplace for about 40 years. There’s still a lot to learn!

CONCLUSION:

All in all… there’s a ton of options to consider when designing your perfect drum set. Things like shell thickness, diameter and depth, bearing edges and other important factors are not included in this minimalist list to understanding drum shell properties. But I hope you’ve learned a little more about shell types and their sound qualities, so that you can pick a type that best suits your immediate needs.

Questions? Comments? Opinions?! Leave them below in the comment section.

Good luck and have fun!
-John Dutra

Visit John’s website here: www.guerrilladrummaking.com

Till then, here’s a introductional video:

Guerrilla Drum Making DVD: DIY Drum Building from GDM on Vimeo.

Guestblog: MusicFund – Instruments for development

September 20, 2010

| Author: Vintage & Rare

Today we present to you Oliver Marie from MusicFund. An organisation that VintageandRare.com supports and admires.

Music Fund and VintageandRare.com hope to interest amateurs of vintage instruments to give support to Music Fund’s efforts to train instrument repair technicians in Africa and the Middle East, by donating money to Music Fund for this.  Furthermore, there is the possibility via MusicFund to buy guitars made locally and in poor conditions by Congolese guitar-makers.  And last but not least, Music Fund is looking for good quality guitars to donate to the music schools of Haiti.  If you have a guitar which is in good condition and want to donate it via Music Fund, please send it to Music Fund in Brussels. “Music is an instrument of development.”

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Music Fund (MF) develops partnerships with music schools in developing countries and conflict areas, specifically the Middle East (Palestine: Gaza, Ramallah, Nablus; Israel: Nazareth, Jerusalem); Mozambique (Maputo), and the DRC (Kinshasa). It focuses on the music instrument (donations, training in repair techniques, and creation of repair workshops for music instruments).

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MF collects music instruments all over Europe, inspects and repairs them, and then donates them to its partner schools.  However, most of its investment is in the creation and management of local repair workshops within its partner schools, and in the organisation of training programmes in instrument repair. This methodology allows the music instruments donated by MF to be maintained in good condition by the partners themselves, independently from Music Fund. Since the creation of MF in 2004-2005, thousands of music instruments have been collected and transferred to the Middle East and Africa.

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In Europe, MF is backed by a broad group of concert organisers and media. It also has the support of a wide variety of volunteers. The steering committee includes representatives from the cultural sector as well as the economic and political world.

In the Middle East and Africa, MF works with well-established music schools that need music instruments and technicians to maintain them. The partnerships with these schools are established for periods of three years, renewable normally two times, and a maximum of three times.

MF understands that music education and music playing alone do not prevent conflict or promote economic development. However, MF’s experience – in Congo, the Middle-East and Mozambique – is that music plays a very important role in building a society whose attention is directed towards culture, and thus away from the misery of war and poverty.

For example, music plays an important role in Congolese society. Music is omnipresent in Kinshasa, to help to soothe the pains of the war and at funerals, but also to celebrate weddings and births. Music has survived the conflicts in this country. The capacity is large: there are talented musicians and orchestras everywhere. There are needs for music instruments in good condition, instrument restorers to keep them in good condition, and music schools with sufficient means to educate young people in music.

In Palestine and in Israel MF has been able to measure the impact of music on young people. During the more violent periods of the Intifada, they came to learn music, to play chamber music, even as the shooting continued. These young people have refused to accept the inevitability of violence and conflict.

The goal of Music Fund’s activities is empowerment. MF seeks to move away from ‘aid’ towards development of capacity building and wealth creation. Its programmes take an holistic approach: MF not only supplies music instruments to its partner schools, but also takes initiatives for the transfer of the expertise needed to tune and repair them via training programmes and the creation of repair workshops in the partner schools.

Although it is satisfying and useful to organise the transfer and donations of music instruments from Europe to music schools in the Middle East and Africa, Music Fund since its creation in 2004-2005 has given priority to those aspects of its projects that enable empowerment and independence of its partners. Music Fund seeks to achieve this goal through: (1) training of technicians, and (2) the creation of repair workshops in the music schools.

  • (1) Training programmes teach teachers and students of the partner schools the basic repair techniques of music instruments.  The most talented students are invited to train as professional repair technicians in workshops and schools in Europe. After finishing these training programmes, the technicians are employed in the repair workshops in the partner schools.

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  • (2) Four repair workshops have been opened in the partner schools in Ramallah, Nablus, Maputo and Kinshasa.  MF is responsible for their start-up and provides tools and parts to allow these workshops to start repairing music instruments.  These workshops not only provide employment for young repair technicians; they also generate income for the schools, as musicians from outside the music schools have their music instruments repaired there for a fee.

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This combined methodology (opening workshops and training technicians) allows the partner schools to maintain their own musical instruments in good order independently from Music Fund. It also provides income and employment opportunities in and around the music schools. Music Fund spends as much as it can locally (buying instruments, tools, commodities, paying salaries, etc.), so that local people profit as much as possible from Music Fund’s expenditures.

Trade not aid: the overall aim is to shorten the aid-driven interventions and allow the partner schools as quickly as possible to become independent from Music Fund, both financially as well as in terms of possessing quality music instruments and repair tools and the skills to use them.

To what extent are the candidate’s initiatives innovative, in terms of focus area or methodology? Do these activities have the potential to be reproduced elsewhere in the world?

Music Fund understands ‘solidarity’ as a contractual relationship. One of Music Fund’s central concerns is the development of contractual relationships with its partners.

Music Fund works within the music niche of society and with a limited number of partner schools. Music Fund has made a conscious choice to focus its activity in terms of the type of interventions (music instruments, via donations and repair) as well as in terms of a limited number of partners.  This focus allows MF to deepen its involvement on basis of long-term relations that are direct, personal and durable.

Music Fund’s projects are concrete, clearly focused and limited in terms of timing and locations. For these reasons, they have a real impact on people’s lives. The activities are directed towards job and wealth creation. Because music, in general, and Music Fund’s projects, in particular, draw a lot of public and media attention. Music Fund has an important exemplary function: if Music Fund can do it, other organisations can do it as well in other fields.  Music Fund’s methodology is to develop programmes that are a format or template that can be implemented in other sectors of society.

Music Fund is innovative in giving importance to the role of music, in particular, and culture, in general, as instruments for development, It brings together expertise from the world of development workers and NGOs with expertise from the world of the arts – music ensembles and music presenters from all over Europe – in projects for development of poor and/or conflict stricken regions.  Culture and development is a small, but growing, sector in which Music Fund in a few years time has become a well-known and internationally respected pioneer, drawing enthusiasm and support for its actions, focus and perseverance.

Oliver Marie

MusicFund

 

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