Beware the Snare

I bought a new snare drum. Well, actually I ordered it. It's being built by a one-man shop (so far as I know) d.b.a. the Northern Drum Company, based right next door in a suburb of Green Bay. It'll be done in mid-January.

I'll write a bit about the process that led me to this drum, but first some background. The snare drum is the heart of a drummer's instrument, responsible for about 80% of what most people think a drummer does. Musicians often have an intimate relationship with their instruments, something that might get labeled "spiritual" by its depth or intensity. For drummers, the focus of this intimacy will rest with the snare drum, much more than with any other piece or the kit as a whole (though a specific cymbal can sometimes be the object of intense affection). Drummers are very particular about the snare drum's size, features and details, how it sounds, how it's tuned. These things are very tightly woven into a drummer's playing style and sense of musical identity.


(Not my drum, not even my manufacturer. Pics will follow upon delivery.)

This deep-rooted interface between mind and machine interests me. I'm fascinated by the technical / mechanical aspects of musical instruments--piano, violin, synthesizer, guitar; these are soulfully-crafted physical things that are intended for nuanced or artistic missions. Drums seem at first maybe to offer less opportunity for artistry in their construction details than other instruments. I mean, they're primitive, simple: two heads stretched over a cylinder and hit with a stick. (I feel the emergence of my inner cave man just writing those words. My wife's long hair suddenly appears to me like some kind of handle.) But if this is your instrument, this is what you obsess about; these are the details available to you for manipulation. (For those unfamiliar, a snare drum differs from any other drum--apart from existing in a pretty narrow range of sizes--only in having a band of metal wires--the snares--stretched taught across the outside of the lower drum head; thus, when the top head is struck, the bottom head and snares rattle sympathetically, producing a sound we've all heard a buzillion times before, even if we didn't know what produced it.)

I've owned several drum sets over the years, from rank beginner stuff to my personal high point, a German Sonor rosewood kit that I bought when I played for a few years in a band in Minneapolis. I originally bought that kit without a snare (the snare often being a separate matter from the rest of the kit) and later added a much newer Sonorlite 12-ply birch snare drum that was a magnificent bit of work. Fantastic drum. I sold that kit when my band experience ended, and went some 15 years with no drums at all. A few years back now I bought a cheap kit out of the paper, a going-out-of-business-already sale from a pimply teenager who decided, after making some expensive and well-directed upgrades, that he did not want to be a drummer after all. (I remember being puzzled that his mother asked me to play a bit when I came to get them--I had not played in years, remember--and she actually cried a little when we hauled them out to the car. Clearly she was much more enthusiastic about a bright future for her son of promiscuity, piercings and drug rehab than he was.)

But though I was no longer playing actively, I perhaps did not give the necessary consideration to how I would feel, after the thrill of again having some drums at my disposal, about, well, cheap drums. They weren't that bad, really, but I had previously owned the equivalent of, say, a Steinway piano or a Martin guitar, and now I found myself with an instrument suitable for, well, for the kind of wannabe who sits upstairs watching TV while his tearful mother hauls his drums out to a stranger's car. The snare was especially disappointing to me--the one drum that's not allowed to be shitty! It didn't actually sound awful, but it was the wrong size, and its features (or lack thereof) screamed "cheap drum." OK, call me a snob, but I just had trouble being at peace with that.

And so I began casually looking for its replacement a couple years ago. I wouldn't mind upgrading the whole kit, but for now I was concerned just to do this heart transplant. I looked at Yamaha--they do everything well, and their craftsmanship and material quality are world-beating--and at everybody's favorite drum company, Drum Workshop (one of their snares is pictured above). But this stuff is all quite expensive, and I am, after all, just banging a few minutes a day in my basement. No reason to let my delusions of grandeur run away with me altogether. I also looked into making my own drum from selected bits purchased from the Precision Drum Company of New York. The materials are of good quality, and I'd save a bit of money and take a hand in the finished product to boot.

This latter was what I finally decided to do, and I went out last week to look one last time at my local music stores to figure out how the big manufacturers solved a couple little details. And I managed during this little trek to run across this very unusual and striking drum, looking like a bit of heavy industrial hardware, something adapted from retired power plant machinery or some interior bit of a jet engine. I asked a few questions and learned that it was the hand-built product of a local manufacturer, the Northern Drum Company. I was thinking of assembling my drum from someone else's parts, and here was a guy who started with raw materials and constructed this jewel-like instrument from scratch! Out of (presumably) a little shop in the hinterlands of Wisconsin! The drum I saw was of cast bronze and weighed about 20 lbs. (most snare drums weigh, say, four pounds). They were asking about $800 for it, twice what it would cost me to construct my own from Precision. Too much. Still, I pored over it for half an hour, looked at the other instruments there, and went home. But I couldn't stop thinking about the bronze drum, and I decided on a lark to look at the company website and inquire what a drum made to my own specs (without bronze or a dealer's markup) might run me. I sent off an email request. And I went back the next day to the store and asked to take the drum into a back room and spend some quality time. We got to know each other a bit better. We became friendly. We became intimate.

The steel drum I'm having built is more modestly priced, though still on the expensive side relative to what I budgeted originally. But for what it is I felt the quote was most reasonable. And the company makes drums of any size to order, so if the snare drum and I turn out to get along I could follow later on with a whole stable of siblings. We'll see how this little adventure plays out, and I'll most likely put up a product review after we've spent a little time together.