HHG Drums 14x7 Walnut Stave Snare With Wood Hoops, Semi Gloss Lacquer

Walnut is one of our all-time favorite wood species for drums. It's warm, round, wet, and punchy. We built this drum to put the spotlight on this wonderful wood species.

This drum features our handmade wooden hoops. The hoops on this drum are made from solid walnut. Not plywood like Yamaha style wood hoops. In fact, the hoops for this drum came from the same tree, and board as the drum shell itself.

The walnut hoops in concert with walnut shell make for an incredibly cohesive instrument, both visually and sonically. The hoops help add to the warm wood tone of the drum, while drying up the notes slightly for a super clean and articulate sound. Not to mention the hoops have a mind boggling rimshot, and cross-stick sound. These hoops are hand made by us, just like our shells, in Hollidaysburg Pennsylvania!

This drum also features Internal tone control.

You may or may not have encountered a drum with internal tone control or internal dampening before. I have fond memories of an old 60s Supraphonic snare that I had that featured this mechanism.

If you know what I'm talking about, Skip this paragraph. Basically, internal tone control is a small mechanism on the inside of the drum that consists of a piece of spring steel, and a circular felt dampening pad. An operation knob is placed on the outside of the drum, this knob turns a threaded rod which moves the felt dampening pad on or off of the batter head, effectively muffling or dampening the drum to the desired amount.

The problem with old internal dampening mechanisms was that they had a couple of small details that were overlooked, these small details turned the majority of the drum world against these simple and genius little devices.

We have done our best to reimagine and improve upon the design of our predecessors, and have reintroduced this feature on all HHG drums, including this one.

You'll notice a small wooden knob above the air vent on this drum, the knob is made from the exact same walnut board that was used to build this shell, and it bears the HHG initials engraved in it. This wood knob is the operation knob for the internal tone control. By turning it clockwise you advance the large felt dampening pad toward the head. The knob has a positive stop so that you can only back the dampening pad so far away from the head before it stops. This way, you are always only about a quarter of an inch away from a dampened snare drum head.

The way I personally like to use the dampening system is to hold a drumstick in one hand, making repeated strokes on the drum at a medium to low volume, while slowly turning the dampening knob, I use my ears to listen to the drum and as the dampening is slowly applied.... this allows you to find The sweet spot or you have just the right amount of dampening applied without choking the batter head.

This is one of the most unique and bespoke instruments we've ever produced, and we're very excited to be able to offer it to you!!

One last note on wood hoops. Please keep in mind that though they are strong, all wooden hoops are not indestructible. They can be destroyed with ultra high tension and heavy bashing. Of course, the Hoops can always be swapped out for any standard metal hoop at anytime if you need to do some aggressive playing.

 As with all of our drums and listings shown, when you place an order with HHG Drums, your new instrument will be hand-crafted in house, from scratch. The drum shown in the pictures was built for a customer, and now resides with them.