JR!

Indeed. MANY have asked this question over the decades! .. and .. what I have discovered after decades of my own research, as well as actually getting to check out Buddy's drums up close and personal back in 1973 .. now just WHERE did all that time go??!! .. I can tell you this: He didn't seem to really care all that much about his toms with regard to tuning, or more specifically as he called it, tensioning, but he DID pay pretty close attention to his snare drum and bass drum. One would have to agree that most all of Buddy's playing emanated from his snare drum, with the toms being kind of secondary. That said ... he favored a tighter reso on the snare drum, but the batter was almost always also at a med/high tension, with the exception of his extremely short Trixon/VOX endorsement in the front part of 1967. Those drums being birch or beech, and with a mere 6 plies no rings!, had a very low fundamental .. thus .. Buddy tensioned the crap out of those to get them in an area where he could work!, but I digress ... another story for another time. Anyway ...

... best way to really get a bead on his snare drum tensioning is to listen to "Winning The West" off the "Keep The Customer Satisfied" album. His drum solo features a good amount of snare drum, but with wires dropped/released, so you can easily get a bead on his tuning/tension .. and .. you can easily hear the tom tuning/tension too. I used exactly this to dial in my snare drums for years! His toms though ... well, in chatting with a couple of his techs, they all said the same ... didn't so much matter. But!, Buddy KNEW if they messed with them too, and would bark at them for doing so, even if the tension was so loose the toms sounded like crap! Funny thing about that is, when he played them, they did NOT sound like crap!, well ... a lot less like crap then when they played them anyway. Kinda reinforces the notion that a drummers "sound" does indeed come from within for the most part. At the end of his career when he was playing the restored set of 1940's Slingerland Radio King's, his snare drum tensioning dropped quite a bit from his earlier days .. but .. his chops certainly didn't. I have always thought there were two possible reasons for that: It was a deeper snare drum, as prior to this drum he played mostly 5X14's .. and .. he now preferred the snare drum in a slightly lower register, although he could still pull everything out of that drum and more! Hopefully this might have shed a little light on his tuning/tension preferences!

Tommyp

Great question, great answer, thank you!

Thanks Tommp! I suspected that about his toms, sometimes they sounded low and muddy and other times they were pitched up. You mentioned he payed attention to his kick, do you know how it was tuned? Batter lower or higher than resonant side?

JR!

Well, even more with some of his tension variances on his bass drums! In the simplest of terms, Buddy pretty much stayed with no pre muffled heads on his bass drums. REMO coated Ambassador weight front and back .. sometimes smooth Ambassador on the reso too .. and nothing more than one felt strip on both the batter and reso, no port. Having been lucky enough to see him LIVE 5 times between 1972 and 1978, and that's not even close to the amount some of the guys I know saw him LIVE!, I can tell you that his bass drum head tension was pretty much tighter on the reso than the batter ... but not by that much! In addition, I noticed a stray wrinkle in his front/reso head on a couple occasions, and always wondered did he WANT it that way??!! Or, did he not care??!! Bottom line on all that speculation is: Buddy's bass drums could be as soft as a whisper when he was feathering it, or like a freaking cannon when he laid into it. Again, so much of what he did came from his technique. Stories abound from guys that got to try his drums, and so many said the exact same thing: When I played his bass drum, it sounded very papery, almost non distinct, and it was incredibly boomy. When Buddy sat down and played the drum afterwards, having made ZERO adjustments, it sounded like a completely different drum! These guys were just astounded. So ... much of his "sound" was his technique, and then his tension/tunings. I can add ...

... back when I saw him in 1973, he had his Slingerland's of course .. and .. the Fibes SFT690/COF too, although back then I really wasn't all that familiar with Fibes. I just knew it was NOT a Slingerland snare drum! Anyway, this being 1973, there was no security or liability issues/concerns like we have today .. so .. after the 1st set the band disappeared behind the curtain for their break, and I said to my friend, I'm going to go check out Buddy's drums! He said are you crazy??!! ... but I was only 17 and had balls made out of titanium. So ... I hopped up on stage!, and no one stopped me, or even seemed to notice. Point of all this is, I went right up to his Slingrland's and started tapping the heads! I remember the bass drum to this day too ... tighter on the front/reso, but not that much more than the batter, and yeah ... there was a wrinkle in the front head too. Certainly didn't matter ... that bass drum would rip your head off when he layed into it! This was also the concert where I met with him in his dressing room .. one on one! .. and to this day really remember that fondly, although it did not start out so well! I caught him by surprise, and well ... he wasn't too happy about that ... but then he mellowed, and the rest went well. I was telling his daughter Cathy this story at the Chicago Drum Show the year I showed my BR snare drum collection/history, and I thought she was going to pee her pants! Anyway ... it also helps that Buddy's bass drums were just about always 14X24's, so that gives them just a little more oomph too.

Tommyp

Tommy, those were some great stories about the legend.

I agree, you had balls of titanium, because while he was the king of drums, Buddy's reputation as a man wasn't good. Rough, gruff and short tempered were nice descriptions of him. I often wonder if he had been a better person in life, if his legend would have been even greater in death. It seems a lot of folks can't get past his bad ways and thus don't give him his due as perhaps the greatest drummer of all time.

Thanks for sharing!

Point is he was the Ali of drummers