Sweet Riser

Here’s a product that was brought to my attention that I wish was around years ago!

I bring you the Sweet Riser. I remember back in my youth trying to build a drum riser in my moms basement and rigging one up that, looking back, I’m surprised didn’t kill me.  Trust me, stealing truck loads of plastic milk crates from the nearby grocery store stacking them two high and putting a couple pieces of plywood on them isn’t the safest way to build one…not to mention, the grocery store gets REALLY pissed off about their milk crates disappearing! But let me digress from my self incrimination…

Sweet Riser builds drums risers and stages. Does a drummer NEED his/her own drum riser? Probably not but I know I have played a few places with big stages but no riser and if I had had a portable riser I would have enjoyed the show much more…sorry as much as the music being the important thing, image is a close second to me…but enough about me. 

I wasn’t able to get an actual riser from them to review but what I can see from their webpage and knowing a little bit about carpentry, these things look pretty solid and the company stands behind them 100%.

There are three main sizes of risers, small, medium and large, each size having a couple variations of depth and height, Height being either 16 inches or 24 inches. 

Prices range from $399.00 for a 6’6” x 5’4” x 16” high riser to $799.00 for an 8’x8’x24” high riser (which with my drum set…I would need the latter). They also do custom sizes.

Would it be efficient to have a riser at a gig? Sweet Riser has a video showing one being set up in 2 minutes, eleven seconds on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GQa8o1PavI). I’ve seen drummers take longer than that to get one drum on stage!

Now this product isn’t just for drummers. Any facility/venue that hosts music events, whether it be a club, theater, church, etc, can use one of these. It may or may not be cost effective for a drummer to shell out $500-$600 for a riser, depending on the drummer, but this is a pretty good price for a club or church who will use it consistently. 

So if you’re in the market for a riser or a stage, give Sweet Riser a call! If I’m ever in the market for one, I plan on calling them!

The Drum Foundry Layout Mat

Here’s another one for the builders! 

This is a cool little mat that has multiple uses! Are you tired of taping a head and hoop onto a shell to layout the holes? This is the answer!

The Drum Foundry Layout Mat is good for shell sizes 6” to 24”. Not only that but it lays out 6 hole, 8 hole and 10 hole patterns, has a snare bed layout AND it shows if your shell is even the slightest bit out of round! Yes, this thing is pretty cool! I have one and I use it religiously. I almost forgot! You can also use it determine bass drum spur placement!

I’ve seen other ones out there, I’ve even had someone email me one for free (not for review, just because) but I realized after I downloaded it and looked at it, my printer doesn’t print 28x28 sizes so it’s not really that useful.  There are a couple layout mats selling on ebay, two in the UK and one in the US, the US one goes for $50.00 plus $18.00 shipping. The Drum Foundry Mat goes for $44.99 from the Drum Foundry webpage.

Overall I love this thing, I use it in all my drum building! Drum Foundry has some pretty cool gadgets for building drums. Maybe they’ll see this review and offer some stuff up for review! *wink*,*wink*, *nudge*, *nudge*.

Happy Building!

Rimshot Locs

I was sent a set of these by a friend of mine to review. They are called Rimshot Locs, their purpose is to prevent tension rods from backing out the lugs due to vibration.  There are a couple different products out there for this issue and these are the newest ones to enter the market so I thought I’d give them a try. I received them in November and wanted to really put them through the test so I put them on my snare drum as soon as I got them, checked the tension with my handy dandy Drum Dial and then played the crap out of it, then I stuck the drum in my garage that has no climate control….don’t worry, I live in Arizona, it never gets anywhere close to freezing.

So over the past few months I went out the garage and practiced for at least thirty minutes every few days and then put it back out there without even touching the tension rods. The temperature variations in my garage have ranged between the mid 40’s at night to the mid 80’s during the day since November.

Today I checked the tension rods and here’s what I found….no variation whatsoever. I got the exact same readings on the Drum Dial. These things work and they work well!

The Up side? They work! And they come in three different sizes:

RSL2 – Is a 2” lock

RSL1 – is a 1” lock

RSL – Mini- is a 0.5” Lock

The down side? Price.  They sell each size in a number of packs, mainly 6, 8, and 10 packs with the prices ranging from 17.99 to 31.99. My review is of the RSL-1 eight pack that runs 23.99. So if you want them on an all rods on an eight lug snare both batter and reso, you’re looking at about $50.00…that’s a lot…but then again, your tension rods will never back out on you. If you just have that one stupid tension rod that keeps backing out for no apparent reason, then a six pack will do the job for roughly $20.

Overall, this is a great product, although it would be nice if one could cover all the rods on a snare for a more reasonable cost but I guess any product that has any value and usefulness will cost extra.

Until next review!

Followers

I truly appreciate each and every one of you who comes and reads my reviews. The blog is now getting about 2000 hits a month! Thank you! Thank You! I just want to ask if you guys who are reading but not followers would be willing to become official registered followers of this blog. Right now I have 62, not bad but if the number was in the hundreds or thousands, I think a lot of companies would be more willing to have products reviewed here.
It's free to become a follower, all you need is a Google account, if you have gmail, you're already half way there! Google accounts are free!

Just think, if more companies are willing to send product to be reviewed, the better the chances are of giveaways!

PJ

Drums Playalong

OK here’s something pretty cool I found on Facebook.  Drums Playalong Drumless Tracks. This is a CD (or CDs) loaded with well known songs with the drum tracks removed.  I know that there are many CDs out there that have drumless tracks but this is quite a collection….we’re talking 1900 songs! That’s no typo folks! One thousand, nine hundred songs…and there is a wide variety of music included. Just a few examples: ABBA, AC/DC, Amon Amarth, Billy Ward Trio, Black Sabbath, Blink-182, Breaking Benjamin, Children of Bodom, Coldplay, Dream Theater, and the list goes on, there isn’t a music genre that isn’t on this product!

If you friend Drumsplayalong on Facebook, they post a drumless track here and there on Facebook to check out. I’ve supplied a link to one here:

http://soundcloud.com/drumsplayalong/slipknot-duality-davulsuz?utm_source=soundcloud&utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=facebook&utm_content=http%3A%2F%2Fsoundcloud.com%2Fdrumsplayalong%2Fslipknot-duality-davulsuz

Is there a down side to this product?  Maybe.  They are out of Turkey, I’ve emailed with the owner and he seems on the up and up but I’m always skeptical about over seas companies.  The price for this item is $100…kind of steep but then again, there are 1900 songs, so that alone  makes it worth it if you want to jam along to songs and play around making up your own drum parts.

As I’m writing this review and looking through the song list I’m getting more and more interested in picking it up for myself!  So check out their Facebook, friend them and check out the samples and go from there!

Until next review (I have a few lined up!)

Merry Christmas!!

Merry Christmas to everyone! Have a Happy and safe holiday!

I have a some new reviews lined up for the new year!

Keep drumming!!!

PJ

Twin Cities Drum Shell and Percussion LLC

OK, here’s one for all the drum builders! Sick and tired of being called a “Keller company?” Not that there’s anything wrong  with Keller shells but they have become synonymous with the custom drum market…well…that may be about to change. I bring you Twin Cities Drum Shells and Percussion LLC.

Right off the bat, Twin Cities offers not only 100% maple shells, they also offer the following shells,

Maple/poplar

Walnut/poplar

Mahogany/poplar

Maple/Mahogany

Bubinga/Maple

The Gold Standard shell is “a thick maple face with 1/8 mahogany core and the inner plys are maple.  (Maple/mahogany/maple).”

Their Vintage shell has a thick core of Mahogany with your choice of the inner and outer species ply.

They also do a “Ribbon Stripe” shell that looks incredible!

But guess what? Ply shells aren’t the only thing that they make!! They also make stave shells and hoops! You can even have them make you hoops to match the shell!  The best part is that their wood hoops are priced very nicely!

With all this info on their webpage, I had to check out one of their shells, so I bought an 8 ply,  6.5 x 14 Bubinga/maple shell.  It got here pretty quick (good sign). I opened it up and took a look at it. It’s sturdy and it’s BEAUTIFUL. It’s still in it’s raw stage, I haven’t started working on it yet but as a raw shell, it surpasses Keller. I placed it on top of an 8 ply keller maple shell and noticed immediately that the Keller shell was out of round.  I placed the TC shell on my DF drill matt and sure enough, it was perfectly round! Not just acceptable, but PERFECTLY ROUND!

I will post photos when the drum is complete, I have an idea of what I want to do with it, I wanted to do this review for the raw shell so drum builders can check them out and know that there is an alternative to Keller shells.

Price wise, TC are higher priced than Keller but then the quality appears to be higher as well. I’m not trashing Keller shells I use them quite a bit but it’s nice to know that there is another high quality source with some more variety in species to choose from.

Will Twin Cities put Keller out of business? Probably not, but like I said, builders now have another affordable option to choose from…and maybe we can be called Twin Cities kits as well as Keller kits!

Check out their page at www.tcdrumshells.com for the scoop!

Have a Merry Christmas Everyone!!