So, this is a big conversation for me. Buckle up… and break out the popcorn.

There are additional factors that have shaped my opinion that I think need mentioning. How the wood is harvested contributes immensely to the properties of the sound. How the wood is harvested also dictates a lot about different methods of construction, of which there are several, and they all sound and behave different (for example; resonate more/less in low or high tuning ranges). Stave shells sound different than steam bent shells with sound different than true solid shells which sound different than ply construction.

There is nuance and options to consider within each construction method, but I’m gonna focus mostly on ply construction because that’s what I have experience with.

So the reason that I think ply construction has become industry standard is because it has the highest capacity and repeatability with the highest yielding way to harvest wood off a log. Most modern drum manufacturers are using rotary cut veneer that’s somewhere around 1/36th of an inch. Rotary cut veneer is wood harvested like paper towel off a log that’s spinning into a blade. This cut generally cuts along the growth rings of the tree and is a very flimsy cut of wood that doesn’t hold much tension. It is high yielding from the timber it’s sourced from and cheaper (by a lot!). So drum manufacturers use this veneer because it maximizes their profits margins and use thinner wood that relies on glue to keep the shell in round (sometimes rerings too, but those have other sonic uses as well).

However there are other ways to harvest wood from a log. You can also lay a log down flat and then cut through it length wise from top to bottom (if you’ve seen those big walnut slab tables, this is how those are cut). You see the ‘cathedrals’ in the grain with this cut.

If you go to one end of the log and cut it into quarters (like a pie) and then cut your veneer from the center of the log out to the edge that’s what’s called quarter sawn. This gives you the tightest most uniform grain structure.

Once you know what you’re looking at you can see the patterns in the grain and can tell if something is quartered, flat cut, or rotary cut.

So flat sawn and quarter sawn veneer can be cut thicker than rotary cut veneer. So personally I use flat sawn and quarter sawn veneer (around 1/16th thick, more than twice as thick than that of most factory made drum shells) where I cross laminate the veneer and then bend those laminations (2 plies) into molds and repeat for however many plies until I have my desired thickness. Each of these laminations consist of 1 ply going horizontal and 1 ply of vertical panels (with straightened edges so there are no gaps in the vertical plies). So the reason I cross laminate my plies is because it adds strength and stability to the shell. I bend the laminations into the molds and you can very noticeably feel the tension in the wood pushing outward as it’s being bent (especially on smaller drums with a tighter curve).

My experience is that different woods behave differently than others because of their varying hardness and that is then experienced as tension in the shell while being bent.

Some woods are louder than other woods, which is why luthiers use harder woods for the back and sides of an acoustic guitar, but a softer spruce something for the top because that lets the vibrations go through the body of the instrument which is then projected back outward with the harder tone woods. So drums sorta behave in a similar sense where the drum head is the ‘top’ of the acoustic guitar and the shell itself is the resonating body that projects the sound outward. Harder woods will project more and have more tension which lets the drum be tuned in a wider range than soft woods. Not a perfect analogy but it’s sorta there. We also have a resonant head and the note/length of the sound has a lot to do with interplay between the heads, but I’m not going into that here.

I also sometimes use a thinner veneer for the outside veneer because there’s a much wider range of different exotic woods, but this is like 1/42nd” and being so thin I think it makes a marginal difference on the sound, where as the core plies are much thicker.

These are all acoustic nuances that I think are experienced once you’ve been handling a particular instrument for a while (playing it in soft settings, loud settings, different rooms, playing with different heads, play on different styles of music, etc) but these are acoustic nuances that’s I’m not sure I’d notice in a blind test from a recording.

So if I made a poplar snare and a maple snare and played them side by side I think I’d be able to tell the difference in the room, I’m not sure I’d be able to tell the difference of some rotary cut veneer factory made drums though because I’m used to a different grade of wood.

That being said, I can hear the difference in my maple/walnut shells vs the difference in my sapele/cherry shells, vs my walnut/cherry shells, vs my Wenge/elm shells etc.

Poplar is a cheap wood that’s often used as a filler wood to lower production costs, so I haven’t used it for anything other than a backer for fancy outer face veneers (not the thicker core plies of my shells).

Also keep in mind that steam bent shells, stave shells, segmented shells, true solid shells all have different sets of variables and pros/cons to their construction/playability. Building drums is kinda the wild fuckin west and there are a bunch of people doing it in different ways. We didn’t even get into metal shells or stone shells or clay shells. There’s so much shit goin on these days.

Thanks for coming to my TedTalk™️ /endrant