Our resident BR expert, tommyp, will most likely know the answer to this. I'm sure he'll respond once he reads the post!

Mark

Awesome, cool, TommyP has helped me before :)

Good question..

.lets see what the answers are.........Help2Hmmmm

EricP!... Mark!... Blair!... et al!

I crank with gigs during the summer.. ( 15 nights in July alone with the Sinatra Show ) .. thus I can't respond as quickly as I'd like to, but that said...

Buddy's bass drum set-up with regard to heads/muffling was pretty constant throughout his career. BR's choice for bass drum heads were indeed REMO Ambassador weight/coated on the batter, and pretty much the same on the resonant. In the early days, pre his last Ludwig endorsement.. ( Rogers and Slingerland in this case ) .. the reso was also coated.. but .. that changed to smooth white later, although the weight remained in Ambassador territory. When I saw him back in 1972.. ( Slingerland's of course! ) .. the front/reso head was an Ambassador coated with Slingerland logo. The batter was almost always an Ambassador coated. Regarding his use of felt strips...

He did indeed!... and primarily on the front/reso head with the felt running vertically just to the right of the "B" in his BR shield. I'm sure that if I dug through a bunch of my pics there could be slight deviations to that placement, but for the most part, that's where the felt was. There are very few pics from the back side of his drums, but as I recall from back in '72... the batter head also had one felt strip running vertically. That could have changed in later years as well... but for the period in question it was slightly muffled. Buddy played a wood beater too... which I have no doubt tore those batter heads up in short order. His bass drum sound was always very OPEN with quite a bit of "boom" to it, and by today's standards would be considered WIDE OPEN. He controlled the bass drum with his foot/technique rather than lots of muffling. The drum was a cannon when he wanted it!... but he could also feather it gently with the drum sounding superb in both areas.

Hopefully this was of some help for you!

Tommyp

Thanks Tommy most insightful.

Tommy, thanks a ton man! You were fine in response time sir! :)

I think the wood beater is what really nails it. I also read something

yesterday while Googling this subject that Buddy carried a 3/4'' piece

of plywood around with him everywhere and set up on that, so maybe

in conjunction with the wood beater is what helped make his kick sound

really woody/punchy. From the recordings I can't hear a real wide open boom,

but trust that it's there.

Thanks again for answering this!

BTW, I still never messed with trying to whiten up my yellowed out WFL's!

Setting up on a sheet of plywood makes a kit come alive. I once saw a sheet of plywood used for a kit base where stand and spur locations had been countersunk into a sheet of plywood to facilitate same setup night after night.

That's awesome!

I was just thinking how stuff would stay from not sliding about so it sounds like they killed 2 problems at once with the routed out placement slots!

Was just getting ready to switch my felt to the resonant side but now really want a piece of plywood and wood beater, have to settle for the plastic side

of my Rogers Big R pedal for now...

I have used galvanized flanges to hold things in place on portable risers. They are easy to install and simple to adjust if you mess up.