For a vintage kit, control your tone with felt or a thin folded towel, instead of those over-engineered and lifeless Powersonic, Super kicks, etc.

Fibreskyn 3 batter and resonant are very nice on bass drums - warm, punchy, mellow.

Coated Ambassador, or even Emperor yield lovely, fat tones for toms and kick.

Thin shells seem to sing better with thinner heads, in my experience. I believe older drums were originally designed this way.

I've heard that the new cheap alternative, RMV heads, now have a Vintage line. They fit Ludwig shells well due to the crimped hoops, like Ludwig heads. There can be a seating and hoop problem with epoxy-filled hoop bass drum heads due to Ludwig hoops being undersized - old and new. (There is a forum thread at Drummerworld all about this phenomenon.)

[COLOR="DarkRed"]IMHO....what you wanna try are Evans J1 Etched heads. They fit the description of what you are looking for.[/COLOR]

Thanks for the advice.

Loopagator, you mentioned that some heads have seating problems on Ludwig bass drums due to undersized hoops. Is this an issue with the shells, or just with the hoops that come with the drums?

I ask because the bass drum I bought doesn't have its original hoops. I'm going to buy a new set of maple hoops from Precision Drum Co. Will I still have an issue with seating the bass head, or do the new hoops take care of any potential problem?

For vintage drums with a round over bearing edge, it's just a hoop problem. So I'd say you should be ok with aftermarket hoops. I had to get my new Ludwig hoops notched 45*.

The 45* bearing edge drums can sometimes have seating issues with other brands. Sometimes it's not sonically perceptible, but you can clearly see that the heads don't sit flush on the edges.

I've been on a calf head trip for a few years and can't stand plastic anymore.

It's the difference between a leather jacket and a plastic jacket.

I maintain that the main reasons we were given to use plastic were bogus and that the real reason was because there was so much more money in selling plastic heads. All the stuff of hard to tune etc... hasn't turned out to be true.

I could go on and on because I'm like those religious people who come to your door - I really believe in this!

Calf on the kick is @%&&$!!! unbelievable.

I used plain ol' Ambassadors before this, and they're good with some tweaking with felt and duct tape, but man I'll never use them again.

I did find that using calf on the batter and plastic on the bottom didn't work and was worse than plastic on both.

When you put a just-tucked wet head on a drum and let it dry, it forms to that drum in a unique way that plastic never does. The drum could be out of round- no matter, a marriage occurs and the whole drum becomes one thing without the inherent clashing of wood and plastic harmonics.

It's very spiritual!

I am becoming a believer in the Calf Church of Sound. I'm having a grand old time working with these heads. I'm also understanding the differences in plastic resos and skin resos. I agree with MastroSnare on all those points. They are very easy to tune. Much easier than plastic (mylar). Wouldn't have believed it, but it's true.

thank you

For me it's actually to the point of a religion, it's very, very spiritual.

They are so easy to tune it's nuts - plastic was a routine we fell for, and Miles Davis talks about it in his autobiography.

I just got a slunk off of eBay and retucked it for my 64 Supra... I had been using goat skins from Earthtone and will never use them again. I cannot recommend them.

A calf head has immeasurably more contact with the shell than plastic and transfers way more sound to the shell.

Also, the whole thing of retucking heads isn't hard at all - it's fun!

AND: calf heads are way, way cheaper than plastic. When I used a plastic Ambassador on my snare I wanted to change it after about 4 hours - as soon as the center got shiny that awful sound started. The calf on my kick is from the 50's (at least) and if it ever broke I could make floor toms out of it.

So for me, I found calf much cheaper. I did my floor toms for about $20 a head - plastic would be near double. You can retuck and reuse calf, and the wood hoop adds to the total mix instead of adding dissonance.

If you have a set of 50's drums, you've never heard the way they were designed to sound if you use plastic.

Calf with brushes = heaven.

There is some fussing, but not as much as with plastic, and no where near what bassoon or oboe players go through with their reeds.

Interesting!

I'd always shied away from calf because I'd heard they were expensive and a nightmare to keep in tune. But you've piqued my interest.

There's a company called CP (Columbia Percussion) selling new calf heads on eBay for what looks like a very good price, but they don't come with hoops -- I think they're just the skins alone. This leaves some questions:

1) Where do you find hoops for calf heads?

2) When tucking, do you put the wet head on the drum? Would the moisture not damage the shell?

Thanks!

Paul

I got heads from CP off of eBay and they sound great - no problem, the ones I got I have zero complaints about.

I was thinking of having a rubber stamp made so I could stamp them - how many people have their own brand of heads! How about the cow from Cow and Chicken?

I got the hoops from ripped heads from eBay and I bought some from Jeff Stern - very cheap I think $5 each or something like that.

Yes, the head is put on the drum wet to form a "marriage" with the shell - a custom collar for that very drum is formed resulting in massive head to shell energy transfer that never happens with plastic.

I too was concerned about putting a wet head on the drum but after doing it many times it doesn't seem to warrant any concern.