snare with a towel & brushes????

[CrackedDrumHead]

I saw a great jazz band down in Las Vegas. The drummer was fantastic. But he not only was playing with brushes (which I can understand) he had a towel over top of his snare...WTF??!!??

 

He'd have to reposition the towel every 5mins or so cause it kept trying to slip off (I'da "ducked" taped it to the snare).

 

I wanted to go up to him after the show and ask why he was doing this but he left pretty quickly after the gig.

 

Has anyone else done this or seen this done? Brushes I can understand but the combination of brushes & a towel seem to dampen the whole snare effect - wouldn't you want some flavor of the snare to come out???

[drummercafe]

The towel would keep the resonance down; dampen the drum. Perhaps this is need for the sound he needed. Like you, I would have gone about it a little differently.

 

As far as the snare sound with brushes, if you don't want the snare wires to sound, you just flip the snare strainer off!

 

And, a bit of history, traditionally the snare drum was played with the snares off when using brushes. Of course plenty of people leave the snares on, which is just a different sound ... but old school players flip the snares off most of the time. This allows the contact of the brush on the batter head to speak and sound more dominant than the snare wires. Another advantage would be that having the snares turned off ... well, it would reduce (eliminate) the sympathetic vibrations we have grown to love/hate. The kick, toms and bass won't cause the snare to buzz if the snares are off ... and that's a good thing when playing a soft volumes ... like when using brushes.

 

A little bit more terminology clarification, just for grins ...

 

... when you turn the snares OFF, it's called a muffled snare drum. When you place a towel or some other material on the drum to reduce the resonance, it's called a dampened snare drum. These terms are used in music composition, more specifically Classical music, but good terms to know nonetheless.