Bought my first acoustic kit...

So as some of you may have read, I have been playing on an E-Kit for the past 5/6 months and decided to pick up an acoustic kit since I'm jamming with buddies and I want to start learning proper. I had picked them out about 2 weeks ago and finally got a chance to go pick them up.

Anyways, I know how things go around here, so here are your pics

I took about 30 minutes to tune up the toms the best I could tonight and The snare sounds pretty good already. Bass drum will come next, I just didnt have time before practice.

The kit is a Tama Superstar Custom.

Looks great! Those Superstars are great kits for the money.

Nice kit mate, happy playing.

I'm a pretty big fan of tama shells. I had some issues with the older starcast ISO mounts detuning my drums. they used to clip to the hoops, but it looks like the new ones are better.

nice score! the black fade looks sweet, and I'm willing to bet that kick drum sounds like a cannon when tuned up. have fun with it!

Lookin' good.

Thanks guys. Yeah, the bass drum hasn't recieved much attention yet, but it is already pretty good, so Im sure with a little tuning it will be pretty sweet. The whole tuning thing is all new to me since I know about zero when it ocmes to acoustic kits. What I can say after a night of jamming though is this- It was a blast. Much more fun to play on and much more fluid feeling.

I do have a question for you fellas though. I'm sure this is pretty common...

My snare rattles quite a bit when activated do to the vibrations from the bass players amp. What can I do to muffle this if anything? Also, if I want to tame down some of the energy of the snare drum overall, how should I approach muffling that as well? I'd like a slight decrease in volume and ring.

BTW- sorry for the dodgy pics. Looks like I was jumping around while taking some of those...sheesh.

How'd you make the whole kit shake like that in the second picture?

Exceptionally bad photography skills.

Although thinking about it, you could use a slightly slower shutter speed and you'll probably get this effect just from the normal tiny movements of your hands. (Assuming you arent using a tripod, which I dont have or use anyway)

A lot of it is tuning -- your tom interval compared to the snare may give you a sympathetic vibration in which case you should retune one or both.

Moongel or an O-ring on top of the snare head will dry it out a bit for you. I make my own rings by cutting them out of used drumheads.

Hm... you could always slap an ambassador reso on your snare. But sympathetic buzz is forever eternal.

I get empathetic buzz. Any ideas for that?

Hmm...so the snare vibrating against the reso head due to the bass players amp is just an uncontrollable thing then I guess...?

As for the tuning tips, I'll try a little moongel as suggested. I wanted to kind of play around with that on the toms to see what effect it would have as well.

yeah... I've tried all sorts of things. if your good at tuning you can get your toms to not set it off, but I've never had such luck with my kick or the bass guitar. it makes me sad when I see people muffle their snare.... besides stick response, a lot of people tighten their snares a lot because it chokes the ring out. you may want another head too. I'm a HUGE fan of the aquarian hi energy heads for my snare. it's unbreakable, and has a nice tastfull ring with no muffling. I tune with my batter cranked pretty hard, and my reso medium tight. if it's too loud for you, I would suggest learning to play softer. you kind of want your snare to be the loudest in your set... snare and kick

have fun!

I wouldn't say I'm good at tuning as Im still a rookie in that department, but I understand the concepts and I think I did an ok job with them the first time around. The toms don't really set off the snare...at least I don't notice it if they do.

Pretty much. You can work with angling the bass amp to reduce it a bit, but if you have a loud bass player, you're gonna get buzz.

^Good suggestion actually. I didnt even think about trying that. I'll try moving it to a different spot of the jam room and angle it differently. The amp does sit about 4-5 feet from the snare so that makes alot of sense to try.

Think about it. Your snare drum by nature will resonate at certain frequncie(s). The bass player plays near you through an amp and his frequencies run quite a large gamut. The chances that one of his frequencies will excite your drum are pretty large. Part of dealing with the buzz is learning to live with it.

The only way to totally get rid of it is complete isolation. However, it's a good idea to tune your toms/snare so that the toms don't incite excessive buzz on your snare. That in itself is usually difficult enough to keep you from even worrying about what the bass player does to your snare .

Yeah, it's gonna be near impossible to get rid of the buzzing when playing with you band. As for tuning tips, I always try to tune my resonant head a bit higher than my batter head, it gives it a fuller sound to my ears. And I'd advise against a regular ambassador head on the snare reso side, it gets rid of the sensitivity and ghost notes don't sound nearly as good to my ears.