My Whitney Drums Sound

When it comes to tuning drums, I am more of what I might call an organic tuner, in that I just try to find a tuning that lets the drum’s own tone come through. With any luck, each drum in the kit sounds good in the context of the other drums around it. Other than that, I don’t make too much of a fuss about my tuning. I don’t use any dampening on my drums either. No felt, no gels, just tuning and technique to direct the sound.

The original Aquarian heads that shipped with my Whitney Drums are good all-around drum heads, and likely work well in most contemporary settings, but the combination of them with the wood hoops/rims of this kit had me working a little harder than I want to get a nice sustained note out of the bass and toms. I did some online research and switched to Evans J1 Etched heads on the batter-side of the snare and toms and an Evans Calftone head on the batter side of the bass drum in January of 2018. I’m not sure if Evans even makes those anymore.

In the fall of 2019 I swapped out the Evans J1 Etched heads for Remo Ambassador Renaissance heads. These are even nicer to my ear, a tiny bit darker in tone, and have a similar kind of surface for brushwork and a similar feel/rebound as the Evans’s heads did. I also put one on the bass drum and I like it better than the Calftone. I must confess that I am using a tiny bit of felt with it to end the sustain a bit faster.

These 1-ply 10-mil heads have more rebound when you are playing with lighter-weight sticks at soft volume levels, and a little less rebound when you are playing harder than typical weight heads do. This has turned out to be a huge plus for me now that I’ve gotten used to them as most of my gigs these days are in restaurants and small clubs where I’m playing with acoustic bands and vocalists. I can now play with sticks more often without being “too loud”. I can also play at softer dynamics with brushes or sticks and I still get as much tone out of them as if I was playing louder. The quality of the tone doesn’t degrade just because I’m playing softly.

When I purchased my second Whitney kit in 2020 (with larger drums), I played the Aquarian heads that came on it for one gig and then switched to some Evans G1 heads thinking that would give me a little more of the tone I was looking for. I’ve used Evans G1s with good success on another wood-rimed kit so I was pretty confident that they would work on this kit for me. I tried three different tunings and played them on a couple of gigs but the whole time I felt like I was working too hard to get the drums to sing. They turned up nice and felt good, but still not as good as I thought they could, so in the spring of 2021 I put the Remo Ambassador Renaissance heads on this larger kit too and, as a friend of mine says “boom”, there’s both the sound and the feel I was searching for.

The video below is for anyone curious about the sound quality of the fat-in-the-middle shell design that the Whitney Drums have. I chose this recording because there’s no fancy gear involved, just the sound picked up from an iPhone. Would you guess my two toms only take 10-inch and 14-inch heads?

When I’m Waiting by Attila Csikos. “Hung-lish Project Recorded May 2023 at a college music department performance.

I’ll try to find a video or audio recording in the future that does a better job of showing how big the sound of these little drums is.