Thanks Paul, it makes a bit more sense now..
I still think I wont fully understand it until I try it out myself, Which is grand cos I will be making a bodhran for my cousin - might try the skin ring out.
Do you just cut a ring out of the skin and glue it to the inside edges or would you just cut a circle out of the centre and tack it on under the main skin?

Cheers,
Cillian.

Skin rings, more or less tape on the drum, not taping the drum at all, too much tape dulls the pop sounds, RWE's are overtaped... all this is getting a bit too complicated for my taste.
I don't dare mucking about / experimenting with my RWE. It sounds fine as it is and i don't think it's overtaped. There's not that much tape on it in my opinion and it doesn't seem to kill the pop sounds. Since i've only had it for a little over a month i expect those sounds (and the sound in general) to improve still till the drum is fully played in and in my opinion it sounds gorgeous already.

Grtz,

Martijn

Hi Martijn-
I don't think anyone means to talk down your drum in particular! I think sometimes the thing is that some of us (Paul myself, some of the others maybe) have played quite literally hundreds of drums by loads of makers and in many instances have been able to A/B test play drums one right after the other. I think that sort of playing, listening, etc etc starts bringing out subtleties and lead to these kinds of opinions. There is definitely nothing wrong with you liking your drum and having your opinion of how it is set up, I certainly do not mean to suggest that you must think a different way! I suppose what I ought to have done is stress that these sorts of thing are opinion based and represent what I like and/or dislike. That and its a free exchange of ideas, alternatives, and suggestions that will push tonality in one direction or the other depending on what you're after. That's all I'd mean to say!

Cheers
Rob

Hey Martijn,

Welcome to my world :)

I don't think I said anything about the RWE in this thread? However... now that you bring it up I do think that it is over-taped and covers too much of the playing surface but that's just my opinion YMMV.

My point with the taping on the inside is that the Tipper is then hitting directly against skin - with tape stuck on the front, the tipper is hitting against a significantly more absorbent surface which will mute the attack sound of the stick against of the drum

If you are happy with your drum and it gets you the sounds you want then that's brilliant - which at the end of the day is really all that matters, isn't it? :)

P

Hey Rob and Paul,

Did i sound offended? :-) Haha!! Don't worry, i wasn't! ;-) I just made a general comment about things that were mentioned earlier in the discussion. Somebody mentioned something about the RWE and the tape and stuff and when i read all the things you could do to a drum my head was spinning a bit ;-).

So the comment about not wanting to try different things with my RWE was just because I'm probably as nuts about it as Paul is about his Egg drum and i don't want to risk anything happening to it :-).
(Picture Gollem and "my prescious" from Lord of the Rings or something :-) ).

I'm just an amateur compared to you guys who have played lots of drums. You speak from your experience and i from my limited experience, so i appreciate your opinions and knowledge and i think it's cool that you care so much about the bodhran and playing it that you discuss this stuff on this forum!

Maybe i'll experiment some more with my old Walton's in the future and then this discussion will come in handy !


Grtz,

M

Paul does have a point about the tape on the RWE reducing the playing surface however (which i feel is a shame sometimes). I didn't know it was possible or advisable to tape the inside of a drum !? Also i didn't know that it was possible to do all those other things that were mentioned to a drum! You learn something everyday :-).

Rolf Wagels and John Joe Kelly are capable of producing very high and clear tones with their RWE's, so it seems that in their case the tape isn't bothering them. It would be fun to hear what they would have to say about this subject.

Anyway, we might be getting a little off topic here (sorry!), because the subject was 'improvements to a cheap drum' and here we are talking about quite expensive drums :-)

Grtz,

Martijn