Welcome to the forum! I play large bass drums also, and yes the head beater response is a different feel, but not that much difference, Are you not using a higher tension on your 26" compared to a 22" head? also what beater are you using, a sonic hammer, hard felt, or wood or plastic? also what heads are you using? and are you using an Impact pad?

Thanks for the response! I do play with it a bit more loose than the smaller kick because it has a nice deep resonating boom to it. Should I be trying to achieve a higher pitch? The batter head that came on the drum is an Aquarian Super Kick II with a double pedal impact pad. I'm also using an Iron Cobra pedal with a hard felt beater. I'm trying to get this kit comfortable enough to take on the road with me and I certainly appreciate all of the wisdom on these forums. Any additional reccomendations are greatly appreciated.

Your welcome, Yes you want to run more tension on the batter side, and then you'll tune the front head lower than you are now to compensate for the higher tension that you'll use on the back or batter side, when your playing a bass drum this large that's a lot of air moving threw the shell so the head tension has to be a little higher than a smaller diameter bass drum would need. also are you using any muffling?

I'm not using any muffling in the kick, I really love the way it sounds right now but I think I might take your advice on swapping the tensions. As for the rest of the drums, they all have very muffled sounding Aquarian pinstripes on them and I'm hoping to get rid of those heads asap. I think the previous drummer tried to get more of a more modern heavy metal sound out of them. I love big resonating drum sounds (one of the reasons I purchased them) and am usually not a big fan of muffling unless absolutely necessary. I'm only 23 so my knowledge of vintage drums is pretty sparse, other than what I've read on here. I've noticed some vistalites with the felt strip muffles, is this usually a good idea on kick drums this size?

Yes the felt strip will work, but are a real pain to put on by yourself. I use moongel, simply because it's super fast and you can make huge sound changes without any head removal, just place them on the heads figure how to place them as to get the sound you want, also get those aquarians off, and get Ludwig black dot heads or Remo equivalent for the batter side and clear remo or ludwig for the bottom, do you listen to Bonham? if so look at his amber vistalite kit and the heads that he's using is the route you want to go also! also let me get back to muffling, the term can be misleading, we're not calm the drum down we're giving it more bottom end. that's when a large bass drum is properly muffled. here is a vid of Jason Bonham on a vista kit look at the heads. [ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uP-ZjbrNLWU[/ame]

I was definitely hoping the drums will get more of the Bonham sound but I figured I would have to ditch the pinstripes first and foremost. So the black dots will be my best bet? Do I need to do any additional muffling on the toms once I replace those heads? I noticed the drums have holes drilled for those tone control gadgets but they are no longer with the drums. Do you think it would be a good idea to try and track some of these down or just leave them be? One last question; do you have any reccomendations as to some online guides on dampening technique using moongel? Thanks so much for the help.

I know I'm dumping a lot on you at once, the black dots will give you more focus, as far as the missing tone controls, I don't use them, but if your kit is vintage yeah I would at least get them as to have them for resale value. Here look at John Bonhams Song remains the same Video set up just follow this head set up, [ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcYZlRWWxO0[/ame] also here are some moongel vid's [ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NQpDFAwDWw[/ame]

Thanks for all the info! I'll make a run to the music store tomorrow and hopefully have a completely different sounding kit by the end of the day :)

Tweaking the batter head (BTW THat's what John Bonham did, larger drums turned up) will alleviate your "feel" problem on the larger bass drum and you'll be surprised at how much kick it has. The aquarian heads are already muffled so I'm sure with a bit of fine tuning you'll have a bass drum that makes you froth at the mouth when you're done turning it up.