The Snare

So when I bought the Sonor I noticed a bunch of sympathetic snare wire vibrations due to the massive and awesome bass drum. I read somewhere that you could minimize this by getting snare wires with the center wires removed. These were harder to find than I thought, but I got a Puresound 16 wire snare with the middle taken out for a reasonable price online. I installed it and found to my dismay that, while it did cut down on sympathetic vibrations, that it essentially was impossible to get a clean "snare off" sound. The things virbrated like crazy in the worst possible way when the snares were off. I think this might be because essentially you are tightening the wires from the center...and that's where there's no wires. So the sides kinda hang loose all the time. I'm sure that a good drum tech could fix the problem, but I couldn't...so I took them off and put the old wires back on. I also put on a new reversed dot controlled sound and the snare sounds and feels great.

Related, this snare...my maple Pacific (by DW) has a chronic detuning problem. I've since read that this is really common with snares. Literally the lugs will fall out onto the ground after just one session of playing (I'm worried about forgetting this and losing some screws someday). I bought some tuning locks a while back to help with this, but think that I was using them wrong. So I put the entire set on the bottom lugs and we'll see how it goes. I went to Guitar Center to buy a second set for the top and they didn't have them any more. They also didn't have any snare straps (string, but not straps) or bass drum pedal straps (I wanted a spare). I went over there to be nice and buy local and all that crap (though it isn't really buying local) and they didn't even have what I needed. Same thing happened at Office Depot. All of this makes me want to always just shop online. Which I know isn't very progressive, but what am I supposed to do?

The maple Pacific snare does look great with the maple Sonor kit and I think it sounds good too. It's a slightly different color, but totally complimentary.