by
12. May 2009 08:15
A few months ago I was headed back to work from a lunch break. While driving I looked over next to me and there was a van next to me that said HeadDrums. I was so curious that I flagged down the gentlemen driving and asked him to pull over. His name is Steve Meyer. Come to find out he had a lot to say about a new Drum technology he developed. Here are a few of the questions I asked him.
Find Head Drums technology and Steve Meyer
So what makes your drum technology unique?
We make our drum shells from scratch. I hand pick the wood and each drum shell is cut from a single board. We make stave drum shells which have superior acoustic resonance because like a conga, all the wood is oriented from top to bottom. Because sound travels faster along the grain of wood, this is the best way to orient the wood and maximize tone and response.
Most stave drums are thicker than ours because they are lathe turned. This results in a drum that chokes at low volume and lacks sensitivity because there is too much mass in the shell. Just like a fine guitar, the lighter the instrument, the more sound you get.
Why aren't drums made this way now?
Most major manufacturers buy or make plywood shells because its cheap and strong. Not because it makes a superior drum shell. The difficulty is in the manufacturing method. The investment in equipment is significant, several hundred thousand dollars, to buy veneering machines to peel the logs and molds for each drum size to glue the veneers together. The veneers are .025 to .032 thick usually and depending on the number of plays requires many square feet of material. But this makes each drum shell a very random event, no consistency from drum to drum.
What other methods are out there?
Steam bending is becoming an increasingly popular method for shell construction. But steam bending orients the wood in the wrong direction for maximum resonance. And because each shell must be a perfect single board, it requires very large pieces of wood, and drastically limits the wood species that can be used. The tendency for steam bending of wood is that the material always wants to return to its original shape. Most examples of steam bending are very thick and require deep reinforcing rings to help keep the shell in round. The bigger the drum the harder it is to bend the wood. So most builders are making very shallow drums
Whole log segments are theoretically the ideal, but like the steam bent, very few trees grow large enough to make a single piece bass drum. The other problem is that making a drum in the direction of the rings of the tree is the weakest orientation of the wood and can lead to separations and splitting. This requires many months of drying the rough shell before it can be made into a drum. Depending on the skill of the maker, there can be a huge amount of waste.
Our method makes the most consistent drum because we use all the wood from one part of the tree, orienting the grain for its maximum strength. This means the density of the material throughout the shell is even more uniform than the tree itself.
The thin shell (1/4") means that the shell is sensitive to the subtlest ghost notes and fills, but strong enough to withstand constant touring.
So having the grain the same way is not new. It was just expensive to manufacture correct? How are you able to overcome this problem?
There are only a handful of stave shell builders in the world. But all of them lathe turn he shells. Lathe turning makes sense from a woodworking perspective, but severely limits how thin the shell can be and how large a diameter drum can be made.