On drums...

Looks like Florida, not Wisconsin!


My 8 Designer showed up yesterday. Amazingly, it actually is unused as advertised.

Hard to really see, in the photograph, how much more light the African bubinga reflects than the Italian, but you get a suggestion. In person, the Italian piece looks pasty by comparison. There are elements of light in the unstained elements of the engineered veneer, but nothing like the full heart of flame in the real stuff, and whatever lights there are, they are dulled by the stains and tinted glues. Stage lighting on genuine bubinga is a thing to see.

The Afro job is about a quarter inch taller than the Italian. Must come from living free.

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Gregory

So, I'm judging by sight that the set I bought off of you is the Italian Bubinga?

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Justin

Designer Maple Light (Bubinga) 8,10,12,14,16, 22 kick
Force Custom (Bee-Bop Jazz) 12,14, 18 kick
Remo Roto Tom (Chrome) 14, 16
Snare HLD 588 Signature

No one from the factory has yet stated definitively, but if the current bubinga is engineered, then yes, yours Italian. The key to knowing is twofold: too much consistency in the figure and wood that does not reflect or refract light. What makes unstained wood so warm and so mysterious is the fact that light goes into the cells and then reflects back out. You can't get chemical pigments to imitate it because light reflects off the surface of them, and since wood's cellular structure tends to wander, wood (like bubinga) looks very different depending on the angle of viewing.

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Gregory

Stated clearly here. 5th and 6th picture.
http://www.mikedolbear.com/story.asp?storyID=2303
Personally, I think the consistency of the engineered veneers subtract from their beauty. But it does allow for perfect matching add-ons. My SClassix snare is 2yrs older in production than my kit, and they are as perfect a match as you could hope for, perhaps too perfect .
The Rosewood is my favorite engineered veneer, its the most 'Genuine' (whatever that means ) looking faux veneer.
Apparently Skandi and American Walnut are actually what they say they are, the American Walnut kit at work definitely appears to be genuine to me.
http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/NEW-SONOR-SQ ... 336cca28fb

Gregory, how does the 8 match the rest of the kit?

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Jeff
Gots ta luv da Beech
Australia

Hey, Jeff. Thanks for the post, but I read nothing definitive there. What do you see?

As far as my 8 goes, the wood matches in the same way the rest of the kit matches: sort of – and I like it like that. The rest of the kit has more darks running through it, but an 8" tom is a small canvas. The hue matches on all the drums, and that does seem important. My Signature kit also matched – sort of. What's important (to me) is that it looks like the same family of figure, but wood is not a man–made product and there will be variations. Surely there are some logs of bubinga that would look really wrong, like some of the earliest veneers on Signatures, but at this point, non-matching veneer has become something a badge of honor!

I'd take a family portrait but my camera is hopeless at reproducing bubinga: something about it overloads the color card, and all the subtleties get lost in a mysterious conflagration of red electrons (see photo above).

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Gregory

Forgot to say: Thanks, Kelly!

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Gregory

Amen. Glad you got it.