Snare Rattle

[griffd]

I am a beginning drummer (4 months). The snare on my snare drum rattles (make the snare sound) when I him my tom tom or kick drum. How do I stop this?? Tighten the snare, tighten or losen the bottom snare head? Or this this normal????

Thanks

Dan

 

[crankz1]

This is normal.
You try to minimize it by altering the tuning on the snare drum or the other drums that are creating the sympathetic buzz.
Moon gel, tape or muffling in general can help as well. Though extremes will kill tone and resonance.

 

[Freethinker]

I am a beginning drummer (4 months). The snare on my snare drum rattles (make the snare sound) when I him my tom tom or kick drum. How do I stop this?? Tighten the snare, tighten or losen the bottom snare head? Or this this normal????

Thanks

Dan

here is what i do, first tighten up the snares good and tight, then hold the drum over your head and hit the batter side or have someone do it for you, now watch the snares, you will notice a few of them seem to keep vibrating after the others have stopped these are the ones that need to be delt with. you can either use some wire cutters to remove the offending wires or take a small piece of duct tape or whatever and go around those particular snare wires, don't put the tape on your head just the wires and put the tape off center if possible, this will solve your issue.

 

[mrface2112]

i would highly advise against putting tape on the wires or cutting them. i couldn't think of anything worse to do to a snare drum, really. if the snares aren't vibrating evenly then there's a problem with either the snares themselves or the snare beds on the drum (ie: they're not laying flat).

some of this is "that's how it is". snares are going to rattle when loud noises around them happen. that's just what they do--snares vibrate and they rattle. you'll pretty much always see this when you kick the kick. if you tighten the snares some, you can cut down on this, but be sure not to choke the drum. also, it's possible that the kick is resonating at a frequency that's an octave or two down from the pitch of the snare. try retuning the kick or snare just a tad to see if that fixes that.

if the snare and tom are pitched too closely together, hitting the tom will make the snare resonate almost as loudly as if you'd hit the snare instead of the tom. this is called "sympathetic resonance", and it's b/c the two drums are too close in pitch. the solution here is to tune one of the drums to a different pitch.

as the pitch of the snare is typically the more "important" of the two, i'd get the snare where i want it and then tune the tom so that it's out of the way.

moongel and such are good for final adjustments in terms of ring, etc (although i'd never use duct tape), but you really need to get the drums in tune first....


cheers,
wade