Hi

It's a different sound alright. I have a calf batter on my 58 Gretsch snare.....plastic Evans on the snare side but I may change to a Slunk Calf.

I recently tucked new calfhide on my 1925 Wilson Brothers COB snare. Lovely drum & great sound with the calfhide. I put a Slunk on the snareside. I let it dry for a few days after I seating it finger tight. I've been tightening it up there pretty good and so far it's holding nicely.

A person to ask about this would be Rob Cook at Rebeats & maybe Jeff at SternTanning. Jeff said he has some customers - Orchestral drummers - that use slunk calf.........maybe he could forward your question to one of those drummers. I'd like to know a little more too. But, so far my tight reso head is holding out nicely.

Did you custom fit wood flesh-hoops or did you go with tucking onto the metal hoops?

I've only tucked my Valje conga heads onto the metal hoops.....and it's a lot different to do conga heads than regular drum heads. I tucked my 58 Gretsch drums & the Willson onto wood flesh-hoops.

I actually didn't tuck these - I bought pre-tucked on wood hoops. I tucked a bunch of heads back about 15 years ago and it's an experience I personally just don't miss and was happy to hand off to someone else.

I've also done conga heads.... those actually were some of my least favorite things to tuck.

Thanks for the tips though. I may contact Rob. My head has pretty much settled in terms of dryness at this point, so it seems... a little fluctuation from the cold morning air off the ocean but nothing too drastic. It will be interesting to really play on calf heads - the feel under the stick of the snare side was even quite different.

Calf heads were tanned from yearling calves less than a year in age. Slunk skins were tanned from unborn calfskins which, gruesome as it sounds, were often by products of the cow slaughtering process. — The Making of a Drum Company, ed. Rob Cook (Hal Leonard 2001, p.53) FYI

Sounds cotroversial ;)