Looks great . I have no experience with tacked reso head drums. So your basically dealing with the tension your left with when the skin drys ? Or can you manipulate the tension with heat ? But you can tighten the batter head however you like and adjust the batter heads tension to the reso. Just never knew how that worked exactly. Or does that head dry tight enough your good with the reso ? Just wondered how you go about tuning.

Good questions Tim.

John, the drum set is looking really good. If you ever sell them call me first please.

Ready to take out a second mortgage? :D

Tim - Yes, the amount of tension on the head when the skin dries can be controlled, but only minimally. How much final tension is on the head depends on how much tension you put on the head while it's wet and being mounted. Tight head at mounting will produce a high pitched reso when dry. Same goes for medium , or low tension. I double stretched the head so that it would be good and stable when finally dry. I got a good low/mid-range note/tone when the head dried. It's a deep sounding, resonant drum. I'll tune the top to where I want it and that combined with the note the reso produces will be the pitch the drum makes. I want the drum to pitch -down- when I hit it, which means I'll probably tune the batter slightly higher than the reso.

So to answer your question... final pitch, low, medium, or high is determined by how tight the head is when wet and installed. It's really kind of a wait & see deal to find out where the head will settle out tone-wise. The drum sounds good, so I guess I did alright.

John

Ready to take out a second mortgage?

Well, ya

LOL - You're at the top of the list... :p

John

how do you compensate or calculate for initial tension setting on the tacked reso head in relation to what the humidity was when you installed it and what the humidity may/will change to in the future? meaning that if its stretched tight now and then humidity drops, what keeps it from tightening too much and popping? this is not questioning your method. they would have run across this same scenario back when these drums were made. in fact, it would have been worse in the old days as air conditioning and such wasn't around. must be a way around it.?

mike

Mikey - That's the trade-off between using calf and modern heads. Plastic is temperature and moisture stable, calf is the opposite. It reacts to changes in temperature and humidity. I said in my comment that there is no predicting 'exactly' what pitch a newly installed tacked calf head will settle into when cured/dried. All you can do is try to control the initial tension that you put on the head when you mount it. I was going for low to medium pitch in the 14" so I didn't over-tighten the head before tacking it. If I had added more pull on the head before tacking it, it would have cured to a higher fundamental note. There are rigs you can set-up by attaching strong nylon cords all around the edge of the calf skin which allows you to pull it as tight, or as loose as you want to. But again, you are correct, there is no way to absolutely control the final pitch of the head after it dries. As I mentioned earlier, you have to kinda wait and see where it settles out. I'm sure they had the same approach in the old days, tighter = higher pitch, looser = lower pitch.

The drum sounds awesome by the way. Wanna see it? :p

John

Looks real nice John! It will be interesting to see how that mount looks/works.

Beautiful drum! John, I think you are doing an awesome job. I'm learning a lot from your posts. Thank you. Even though you may have some limitations when tuning it is a vintage drumset and I expect it will sound awesome and probably just like it did back in the day when all drums we built like that. Keep up the good work!