I recently got a new bop sized kit and the bass drum has regular lug screws rather than the old style t-rods.At first, I was thinking the lug screws would be kinda cool, but the thing is, I always have to grab the key before I can tune the bass drum now. With t-rods, the "key" is always there! Also, I can't visually tell if the lug screws are loosening or not. T-rods usually stay in place.The only drawbacks of the t-rod is that the 4 bottom t-rods are somewhat limited in their movement and that they sometimes get bent. The regular lug screw style gives a "cleaner" or more "uniform" look and are easier to pack into a bag or case.singer
I've used, and use both. On a vintage piece I will try to stay original with the T-Rods.
I have a 10x28 inch parade drum I made into a set kick, and it looked WAY better with T-Rods than it did with Key-Rods for the simple fact it gave the drum the appearance of being deeper. The Key-Rods looked way too shallow, an optical illusion I know, but it made all the difference.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, I picked up a 1980's 14x26 CoW Ludwig kick that only had a few of the original T-Rods left, and rather than spend all kinds of cash finding the original Ludwig T-Rods I just outfitted the whole drum with Key-Rods, it looks great and IMO is just as functional.
I don't find myself tuning my kick drums all that often, so getting one of multiple drumkeys out of my gigbag isn't too much of a hassle and I very RARELY if ever find one of them backing out and loosening the tuning, once the head is finally seated it becomes pretty stable. It might be different with a Bop kit with the higher almost floor tomesque tunings and require more tweaking of the tuning.
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