To achieve a certain sound and appearance, several species of tree can be combined in a drum shell

If the previous fact opened your eyes for the versatility of a wooden snare, this one may blow your mind. When building a wooden snare, you can freely combine different species of tree instead of using just one. Thanks to plying technique, only imagination restricts different combinations. Two things to be considered when selecting the species of tree are sound qualities and appearance.

Let’s take an example:
You want a snare with round and full sound, a lot of low frequencies, but also an airy high end and decent projection should be present. The appearance of drum should be personal, lively and organic.

This kind of drum could be achieved with a combination of mahogany and cherrywood. Mahogany offers very warm and round low end as we have already learned. Cherrywood adds the pleasant and airy high end without being too dominant as birch and beech could be in this case. We would then select northern red oak for the outer surface to give that live and organic appearance with its very well present grains.

With this simplified example you hopefully get an idea that there really are dozens and dozens of possibilities to make your drum sound and look like you!

It is possible to select the outer ply of the shell only on the basis of the look

We touched on the appearance aspect already in the previous fact. But once more: the outer ply of the shell that determines the appearance of the drum can be selected purely on the basis of the look. It does not affect to the sound in practice. There is a nice variety of different characteristics what comes to a look of species of tree. Some of them are very light in tone where as some are very dark or even reddish. Grains may be very smooth and inconspicuous or on the other hand very prominent and organic.
Whichever ply we choose, the end result will be in a way or the other unique. That is the beauty of the wood!

Several lacquer coating techniques (including colors) affect the appearance even more, but RS Drums prefer the natural look of the ply. Avoiding the unnecessary processing will lead to the elegant and timeless appearance – or so we think of it.

The more expensive species of tree does not automatically sound better – neither more cheaper species of tree sounds automatically worse

What determines the cost of a certain species of tree is its commonness and availability – not its sound qualities. Also the workability of the certain wood affects to the cost of the end product. The more rare the wood is, the less you can obviously hear that kind of sound “in the field”. That makes the drum made of the rare species of tree more valuable and unique to its owner.

But. If you are after the sound that birch or maple can offer, then birch or maple are just right choices for you. And lucky for you they are also quite affordable materials. Comparing expensive and cheap species of tree are like comparing apples and oranges. Which one is better, it really is the matter of usage and taste.

When combining some common species of tree with the rare ones, it is possible to find something new and interesting in both sound and look wise while still keeping the price tag reasonable.

In the end of the day it is all about the personal preference of the player. Saffron is not for everyone despite being the most expensive spice in the world, you know!