I have a Tama Starclassic Birch/Bubinga drumkit. The toms are TAMA's Hyperdrive (short toms). I am looking for new heads and ask the question what would be the best type of drum heads for short sized Toms, or how to choose? (1 ply, 2 ply, etc.) I have been using REMO Pinstripe heads but they appear to muffle these toms too much.
What are you thoughts and suggestions.
Tom sizes are as follows: 8x6, 10x6 1/2, 12x7, 13x7 1/2
Pinstripes - or any dual skin/oil-head do one job & do it quite well...
They dampen ring & overtone.
That's fine if you don't want ring & overtone, of course.
If you want those back, then lose the extra skin & the oil-fill.
That leaves you with a "bog standard" Remo Ambassador, clear, uncoated.
Cheap, cheerful, ubiquitous until the pinstripes took over.
Basically it's just a single fairly thin skin with lots of ring & lots of overtone.
Without going into different manufacturers &/or model designations, once you've got down to that single clear skin, the thinner it is the more overtone it will have, but the easier it is to tune out the ring. Thick single-skins will ring like a bell if you're not careful - which presumably is why people got into the pinstripes. Any idiot can tune them ;)
A secondary consideration is you can under- or over-tune them to get a huge variety of tones out of them.
A personal favourite of mine is to use thin skins on small drums, keeping the pitching "down a drum"...
lemme explain...
If you were to have 3 toms, 12, 14 & 18 with regular tuning, then instead you take 3 smaller, say 10, 13 & 16 & pitch them down to where you would have had the larger toms. Lots of smack, slap & depth, less definite 'note', little ring.
An additional note - for 'short' toms, this type of skin setup will hint at that 'rototom' sound in terms of 'slappiness' but with more depth because of the shell & optional 2nd head.
