My Basic Approach To The Build

 Rarely (if ever) will I use anything more than a 6 ply shell for one simple reason.

Thin shells resonate better!

Take two cardboard rolls (one standard towel and and one industrial tape) of the same diameter and cut them to the same length. The towel roll is about a third the thickness of the tape roll. Now hold them by the end and tap them.

The towel roll had a dramatically lower tone than the tape role because the thinner walled tube resonates better.

The same thing holds true with drums shells.

I get huge sounds from small diameter, lightweight kits.

The downside?

Thin walled shells can flex under tuning pressures, go oval and ckoke. Also, the thin contact point on the batter and resonant baring edges doesn’t make for great projection. There’s a simple way to overcome these issues which brings us to:

Why I Reinforce My Drums

I reinforce shells for four reasons.

1.Increased shell integrity thwarts choking. 

2.Thicker baring edges make better contact and transsion down the shell wall.

3.More wood allows me to custom form of the batter edge for individual application.

 4.It compells the shell into a perfect round.

You’ve seen reinforced shells but they're not like mine. Look closely. Notice the point at which the reinforcement hoop joins. It’s always cut to an angled overlap and then glued in.

Now look at mine.

They’re “butt joined” and pressure fit by hand into each drum.

Pressure fitting compells the drum into a near perfect round. And, assuming that the heads we use are also perfectly round, it allows for unencumbered resonance.

The addition of 3,4,5 or 6 ply’s of reinforcement, fattens the baring edges and enables me to fine tune that drum to the customers spec’s.
By manipulating a round over to the outside and the cut to the inside, almost any sound can be achieved and (Depending on application) I can hand form the edge to control the decay rate of that drum.

I can shorten sustain (my personal favorite ) or make it ring for 5 or 6 seconds.

This is particularly critical when playing live and the reason I designed Boom Theory sets to excel in live conditions. Most of the drums I build end up on stage and a resonant shell with short decay is an engineer’s wet dream.

If you've spent any recording, you'll know the first thing the  tech wants to do is tape your heads! Why? Cause under mic’ing conditions your average acoustic drum rings way more than needed to allow for good recording.

I compensate for this by reducing the area that I refer to a “passive harmonics zone”. It's the area that acts as a tuning fork between the outer baring edge and the flesh hoop and I discovered it durring R&D for the Bridgedeck X Series snare.

 The results? Stuff that used to get lost in the mix as mud now comes thorough the PA loud and clear. Most noticeable is the articulation you now experience from your rack and floor toms.

 Fit, Finish and Focus