Goki wrote:
Thanx for the Aquarian tip Tim - unfortunately no chance to try them.
Back here, only REMO (Ambassador, Pinstripe) and EVANS (G1, G2) are the option...
I respect Tim's opinion and his experience with Aquarian. I myself have not had great experiences with Aquarian, but then I cannot claim
great experience with Aquarian, either.
Remo will be warmer than either Aquarian or Evans; less attack is audible. From what I understand, Remo is also not quite as durable, but I can't speak to that one way or the other.
My beef with Remo is that they seem a bit careless about quality control; some heads are great, some are wretched. Evans, on the other hand, seems to turn out a consistently good product.
Projection, the way the drum sounds and
feels out in the room, is decidedly increased by having the top and bottom heads working together. Heads of different weights are not, at least in theory, able to cooperate. Their different speeds of vibration tend to cancel each other out, and so you get less sustain and less projection. Projection is a quality that is not necessarily needed when recording or when close miked, but for all other live situations, it is the difference between drums that are viscerally present and drums that are merely... er, present
Two heads working together are the reason for two-headed drums. Concert toms are certainly simpler to tune, but they lack projection. People used to take heads off their toms to increase projection: I think the rational was that the second head was stopping the sound. What may have been achieved was a singular tone that didn't kill itself against a dissimilar head and tuning down below; I don't know. But it is clear that they had it backwards.
Resonance is by definition sound produced by sympathetic vibration. One way to think of this would be the way an out of tune piano projects, as opposed to one that is in tune. The first sounds weak and tinny even if sort of interesting; the second is warm and rich, and fills the room with its resonance.