heres alittle video comparing heads

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTFxD_HJvdI[/ame]

That has got to be the geekiest freekin' drummer I've ever seen. Serious mental instabilities. Looks like he eats a bit too much Poodle chow.

I say take him to Midas and see if they can fix "it".

Here's a music theme type ditty that I wrote and played everything except rhythm guitar on. It's all calf heads and mostly old K's. You can hear the kick in the intro. It's kinda long because it's not Top 40, it's for Clint's next movie... he just doesn't know about it yet! :)

http://musicmusicmusic.cn/clint2000a.html

The snare w/calf sounds great.

I wasn't sure if you meant mine - thanks if you did.

Apology - that's an Earthtone on a '64 Supra with a calf slunk bottom... the rest (toms and kick) are calf. Duh... it was the brown acid!

Also, a huge part of the sound, to me, is the Neumann KM84 overheads and they run through a pair of Summit TLA-100A tube compressors. But there's zero eq. I don't know if people realize how much, like on the Beatles recordings, the Neumanns and vintage tube compressors had to do with the sound... it's almost as much as the original sound itself.

On my snare I also have an EV PL11 and a U87 on the kick, but the kick goes through a Summit tube passive eq so that's another component.

I'm thinking of buying a set of Columbia calf heads on eBay and tucking them myself. (With all that free time I've got as a new dad. :)) Does anyone know if it's possible to use the metal hoops from wrecked old Mylar heads, or will I need to buy new hoops for tucking?

Don't know about reusing old metal hoops - I don't see why not though. If you can get the head tucked around the hoop and it dries out properly it should be good.

I recently bought Stern heads and the un-glued wood flesh-hoops from Rob Cook at Rebeats. I tucked em onto both heads on my 58 Gretsch toms and the batter side snare. They do sound incrediblely nice! It's my first dealings with calf and I think I'm hooked - although they've only been on there a little over a month. I was really impressed with the uniform thickness and the quality (look&feel) of the heads. I would have no trouble recommending the Stern Tanning heads. I will be tucking some on my 20" 58 Gretsch bass drum in the future.

I've thought about using old Remo hoops, but my concern was that there would be sharp areas that would cut the head (on top where you'd cut the old plastic head off). I like the fact that you can custom fit the wood hoops.

I ended up doing my floor toms with Columbia heads and bought wood hoops from Jeff. The heads sound good - real good. The only negative I can think of is that they vary more with the weather than my other calf heads. But maybe that's inherent to floor toms because they aren't under much tension. Still my kick with a Slingerland calf doesn't hardly vary at all, nor does my China tom.

But I'd use them again because they sound right to me. The wood hoops were very cheap - I forget exactly but I got 3 for under $20 as I recall.

That's a great price for hoops. I e-mailed Jeff Stern and he quoted me $10 to $12 each for the hoops. Which isn't bad, but when you add that to the cost of the heads, plus the expense of shipping everything up to Canada, it's been enough to have me put the calf head project on the back burner for a while.

It might move to the front burner soon, though: I special-ordered a set of American Vintage heads for my Ludwig recovering project last summer, and I'm still waiting! I called the music store last week and they said their distributor told them the heads should be in "sometime this year." Perhaps the universe is telling me to try tucking my own heads instead? :)

I'm not the world's handiest guy -- should I be concerned about my ability to tuck a head?

Maybe my hoops were cheap because it was about 2 years ago and it was for an 11", and two 14"'s.

Tucking them isn't hard, but the first time can be a bit frustrating. What saves you is that outside of trimming it too small there's not a whole lot you can screw up. Try to do it when you feel like you are in a patient mood the first time.

If you mess it up, just redo it 'til you get it right.

Part of what keeps the head on the hoop is that the head gets sticky when it gets wet because it contains a natural glue (hide glue). If you soak it too long, or if you redo it a zillion (not exactly) times the glue will be used up and it will be very hard to get it to work. But you will get several tries to redo it if you're not happy with it, so that takes the pressure off quite a bit.