Borrowed an 80s Tama Bell Brass 14x6.5 for a session and stumbled into something weird/cool: rotating the drum in the snare stand radically changed the rimshot pitch and decay. Not just “a little more choke” different-like two very different instruments.
What I did:
- Die-cast hoops, medium-high top, fairly tight reso, 20-strand wires, basket arms just kissing the bottom hoop.
- Rotated the drum so the throw-off alternated between being centered on a basket arm vs centered between two arms.
- Used a phone spectrogram while hitting consistent rimshots and center strokes.
What I heard/saw:
- With the throw-off centered on a basket arm, the overtone “ping” around 700 Hz dropped a bunch and the overall note got drier/shorter.
- Rotating 30-60 degrees brought the ping back and the decay lengthened, with a noticeable shift in rimshot pitch.
- On my maple and brass snares this effect is subtle; on the Bell Brass it’s dramatic, like the cast shell’s stiffness is creating stable node patterns that the stand either clamps at a node (drier) or an antinode (ringier).
Questions for Bell Brass owners/engineers:
- Do you deliberately align the throw-off or a lug over a basket arm to “voice” the drum? Any go-to positions that consistently dry it up without killing the body?
- Have you A/B’d different stand contact styles (thick rubber vs thin, nylon tips, 3-point vs hoop cradle) specifically on Bell Brass? Which preserved the low-mid punch while taming the high ping?
- Has anyone tried a RIMS-style/floating snare cradle with a Bell Brass to decouple the shell mass from the stand? Worth it or overkill?
- Hoop swaps: does going from die-cast to 2.3mm triple-flange on this shell reduce the stand-rotation sensitivity, or just make everything ringier across the board?
- Recording angle: do you notice the “rotation voicing” more in overheads/rooms than the close mic? I heard the character shift most in rooms.
- Micro-tuning: tiny reso changes (like 1/8 turn) seemed to move the “sweet” rotation spots. Is that expected from shell mode interactions, or am I chasing ghosts?
- Wires/heads that keep the Bell Brass thump without turning into full-on Black Album ping? I liked Controlled Sound X over Hazy 300 with 20-strand PureSound, but I’m open to recipes that play nice with this rotation trick.
If you’ve mapped node lines on a Bell Brass or have a repeatable “basket alignment” method for consistent results, I’d love to hear it. Bonus points for frequency plots or quick clips. This feels like a free tone knob hiding in plain sight.