The "problem" I have with this process is that each type of wood has a unique grain pattern. A maple shell that gets stained to look like mahogany, might take on the color of mahogany, but the grain pattern is very different.

And yes, most vintage wrapped shells were usually covering up outer plies that were less than perfect.

One advantage (maybe) is that a non-wrapped shell might end up with a bit more resonant tone after the wrap is taken off due to the fact that the diameter is decreased and the heads won't fit as tightly and "float" a bit more....mmmaybe.

I never gave the tone of the shells nonsense a moment's thought for my nearly thirty years of playing gigs. Who the hell could hear anything tone-related? The biggest issue when playing in rock bands was for the unamplified drums to be heard over the din of four Dual Showman amps. So, "tone" be damned, I had to use heavy sticks to slam hard on heavy drum heads. On the few recording sessions on which I played, the "tone" was managed by the guys in the control room.

Well...You speak the truth, as far as I'm concerned. I can't hear the difference, either....but my ears are already gone from 45 years of gigs and no hearing protection...Maybe someone out there can hear the difference.

What the drummer hears is not what the audience hears. I prefer my snare drum to give me a whip crack sound ,and my toms and bass drum to give me a melodic thud with no ringiness. But, does anyone else in the building hear anything but thump and bang sounds?

Good grief man, you needed to find a new band if things were so bad the tone of your drums was irrelevant. Then again, maybe that's why there are so many differing shell configurations, snare drums, congas and everything else in the mix of the sounds we hear. It was all there just to confuse the listeners who really only wanted to hear a thud from the blow of a heavy stick rising above the incessant twang of the guitars and driving whines of the horn section (all BR's efforts to hide his unendorsed snare drums a total waste of effort). LoLoLoLo

I have this cheap 5 pc. kit I was planning on staining and glossy sealing different colors to be a jelly bean kit. Really only doing 4 drums and using a metal snare. Red, yellow, green and purple. Plus I was thinking of making them concert toms also. The stain and sealant seems a little costly and I may just vinyl fabric wrap it but not as jelly bean kit if I wrap it.

Let's take your sarcastic post a bit further. Why even bother to use cymbals when most cymbal work is either absent from most recorded music or edited out by the recording engineers and producers? We hear the occasional crashes and some sticks on closed hihat sounds, but rarely hear ride cymbals.

And thus, D J Fontana on Marie's the Name:

[ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59pOE3OmUi8"]Elvis Presley - (Marie's The Name) His Latest Flame [Official Audio] - YouTube[/ame]

There is no doubt that the rock and roll producers were primarily after the beat (backbeat in particular) and everything else took second or lesser place,at best. I'd have expected the engineers to have been subjected to the producer's direction, but I suppose it would depend on the producer. Certainly Phil Spector was controlling what we heard from his work. I saw something lately where McCartney was not happy with the results of the Let It Be album. Imagine you're a Beatle and You Can't Always Get What You Want.

In my experience, every three ply Ludwig drum with a Mahogany outer ply has had stain grade veneer. It is very hard to get the wrap off without at least some damage so that is an issue as far as suitability for staining and varnishing, but the biggest issue is that most people don't have a clue what they are doing so the end product can look pretty bad.

Maple is probably more of a mixed bag as far as the quality of the grain. It is also tricky to stain without getting blotchy. A natural finish is easy, provided the outer ply is nice.

Any low end Poplar, Basswood or Luan shell is probably going to have low quality wood, even for those species. Unless you really know what you are doing and stain them dark and use grain filler, as well as put on a really good top coat, the end product will look terrible. A lot of these low end drums have the grain running vertically so that also make them look bad.

A lot of middle of the road furniture is made of Poplar and stained to look like other woods, and can look nice, but in those cases they are using stain grade wood and know how to finish it properly.