Knowing me, I probably already have a thread or two pertaining to this subject floating around....but, since we are all quarantined, I guess I might as well torture you all with another one! ;)
Okay, so back near the turn of the millennium, a few drum designers came out of left field with new drum construction designs that actually had some physical/scientific reasoning behind them.
The first type I remember seeing was the Peavey RadialPro 1000 drums. They definitely caught my eye and I thought they looked very cool. But, as most drummers are traditionalists, I found myself in the minority....in other words, most drummers didn't like the look. But, I couldn't help but wonder what was behind the "weird" look. There had to be a reason...right? Yes. And I just found this fantastic video that explains the idea far better than I could describe.....so please enjoy the following:
[ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufPf2XgPoWw"]peavey_radialpro_1000.wmv - YouTube[/ame]
If you want to skip to the meat of the RP1000 design, then jump to the 3:30 mark.
This design was first introduced by a dude named Steven Volpp and I think there was some lawsuit stuff between Peavey and Volpp before Peavey ended up with ownership.
The idea addresses the "problem" (?) that is created when a traditional lugged drum torsions the shell in odd ways while under tension. The Volpp/Peavey design allows the tension rods to pull down in a completely vertical way in addition to allowing the shell to remain completely round. I think the belief is/was that a shell that was "warped" out of its roundness by lug tension wasn't able to resonate to its fullest.
The Peavey RadialPro snare drum design was the exact opposite of the tom design -in that, the snare was a big, thick block of rock maple that didn't resonate at all. The design did allow the vertical tension rod alignment, though.
I actually owned one of these snare drums. The shell, itself was very well machined. Everything else, however, was very inexpensive, generic, "Gibralter"-type hardware. All the metal pieces were made of "Chinesium" -best name I ever heard for it....basically very cheap alloy -teh stuff that looks like chrome but has a slight rainbow coloring to it...you all probably know what I mean...In other words, the metal pieces are where the corners were cut. The drum I owned sounded like many snare drums sound and was nothing spectacularly different. I didn't play it much and sold it fairly soon after. I regretted not buying a RP1000 kit when it came through the music store....a red one that was lovely and the toms were exceptional...I mean reeeeallly exceptionally nice. Oh well.
