If you play acoustic drums, you know snare buzz is a fact of life — it’s simply part of the sound. All of the drums and cymbals feed off of each other to create the natural sound of a drum kit. In a live setting, those buzzes — along with other vibrations and resonances — are generally buried by everything else on stage, so it’s often not much of an issue. But sometimes it can be too much; it needs to be controlled. This is especially true in the studio.
Of course, if you got rid of all that interaction, you’d get what sounds much more like an electronic kit. With those kits each sound is completely isolated. Not that there’s anything wrong with that — in fact, it’s ideal for situations such as the recording studio (where you want a clean recording), or where you need independent control over the sound of each drum and cymbal.
But if you want to keep the interaction while still keeping it under control, you’ll need to control the sympathetic vibrations. These come from other instruments and sound sources around your kit and cause snares to buzz. Rack toms, especially in the 10″ and 12″ range, can be primary offenders. Your bass player’s cabinet set too close to the kit can also make the snare go crazy.
You can’t always control where you can set up your drums on a stage, in a club, or in a church. But you can take easy steps to control unwanted snare buzz coming from your kit. Here are eight tips and tricks that I’ve found work well:
1 – Make sure the snare wires are installed correctly
Snare wires need to be installed evenly on the drum so that there is the exact same amount of space between the ends of the snare wire sets and the drum shell. This is very important for the snare wires to work properly.
2 – Tune toms away from the snare’s frequency range
The rack toms just in front of your snare are usually the drums that can really make the snare wires buzz. While you don’t want to sacrifice the tone of your toms, I have found that every drum has an ideal range of tuning. You should be able to find a tom tuning where you get minimal snare buzz.
3 – De-tune lugs near the throw off and butt plate
The area directly beneath the throw off and butt plate on the drum shell edge is the snare bed. It is one of the most important parts of a good snare drum shell. The snare bed allows the wires to seat evenly across the drum. There are many widths of snare bed but usually they run the width of the lugs just to either side of the throw off and butt plate. De-tuning those lugs can sometimes help the wires seat better and calm down the buzz. There is no perfect tension; try de-tuning them by varying amounts to see what works best for your drum.
4 – Rotate your snare
Try turning your snare so the wires are as far away from the toms as possible. This will make them run parallel to the kick drum head. The throw off and butt plate will run between your legs from knee to knee. This gets the wires a tiny bit farther away from the rack toms, but every little bit helps. The only drag about this is that the throw off will now be to the side of the drum rather then right between your legs, where a lot of drummers like to have it.
5 – Use a thinner snare-side head
The “snare side” is what the head on the bottom of the drum is called. There are different thicknesses available. The Evans Hazy 300 resonant snare head is a 3-mil thickness and the Remo Hazy Diplomat snare-side drum-head comes in at a 2-mil thickness. Both are great options to try. Using a thinner bottom can have an effect on snare buzz, the overall sound, and the feel of the drum.
6 – Upgrade to a higher-quality set of snare wires
Upgrading your snare wires to something like the PureSound Equalizer Series or PureSound Custom Series can make a big difference. Snare wires can have great effect on not only the wire buzz but the drum’s “snap” as well.
My final two suggestions are last resorts — try them when nothing else is working or you need that last little bit to get the drum just perfect. The key here is to not muffle or choke the bottom head. A little goes a long way.
7 – Try some card tricks
Place a piece of a playing card or baseball card between the snare wires and the drum head at the edge of the drum. Experiment with the size and placement.
8 – Break out the gaffe tape
Try putting a small piece of gaffer tape over the edges of the snare wires. Definitely do not go overboard with this one! Too much gaffe will be a real gaffe!
In closing, remember that snare buzz is part of an acoustic drum set’s sound. It just needs to be controlled, and as we’ve seen here, there are many ways to do that.
