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 Lunar Custom  Snare  Drums

A new standard for custom and performance oriented snare drums

Lunar Custom  Snare  Drum  concept 

The concept of the Lunar Snare Drum is to provide an Instrument that has the power and attack of a metal drum whilst

maintaining

the warmth , tone and musicality of Wood.

The combination of unrivaled power and sensitivity to the lightest touch with a huge dynamic range.

This snare produces a monstrous rim-shot and in a moments notice and just by changing your stick angle and approach,

will allow you to play at the lowest volume, articulate and defined.

You can  determine and control your degree of ring to dry ratio, all in the same tuning with the same head.

This is the stick control masters wet dream.

Once you test drive a Lunar, the stunning appearance will become secondary.

The Fundamental pitch of the solid one piece same wood shell and the rigidity of the multiple ply shell, which is most cases

impossible

to implement without added support rings.

A shell built from one piece without support rings has to be thicker to stay in round and remain stable over the years.

Though I appreciate the purity and workmanship of such a shell, this does not allow me to shape the wall to the optimum 

sonic response thickness and shape.

My shell is built from one piece of wood, but differently  constructed.

The fundamental pitch of the solid shell and the stability and rigidity of a ply shell.

I saw one solid piece of wood  into 4 book matched components and then cold mold them  back together into a shell of

a starting thickness of 3/8 before shaping the walls.

This shell is then shaped into a convex to accommodate varying wall thicknesses that are then able to respond/oscillate 

sympathetically to a wide variety of frequencies and tunings whilst maintaining fundamental pitch and clarity.

The concept of the  varying wall thicknesses of the resonator/  the air chamber, is adopted from the string instrument school of

thought, where it has been implemented through history and is the primary mode  the response of an air chamber is manipulated,

fine-tuned and maximized by the builder.

Even though sometimes hard to see at first glance, a well constructed flat top Guitar built by a class A luthier, the backs and tops

are crowned and or graduated to balance and maximize the response and tuning ranges.

Carved Arch top guitars, violins......all single resonators  are  expected to perform a multitude of tasks in hyper-wide tuning ranges

and to  remain balanced with in one single air-chamber.

Why should a high performance snare drum which is the supposed to be the most dynamic instrument in the drum-set

be held to a lesser standard?

A snare is the most important sonic tool of the drum set and greatly influences the overall sound of the kit.

It is expected to drive the kit.

But it's the smallest drum that pushes the least amount of air, yet has to be most dynamic.

That's actually a tall order if you think about it.  

Our snares are designed to play superbly in a much wider tuning range than is traditionally expected from snare drums.

Headroom

A predestined amount of tension of the heads is required before any snare drum can respond or play.

With most snare drums, by the time that point is reached, there is little headroom left.

Meaning that the drum is already approaching the brighter registers because of its inherent small size. and the 

desired “sweet spot “for a particular musical situation may have already been surpassed.

The standard 4" shell (5,5 in the Peal FF)  dials into a surprisingly low  frequency and therefore offers

enough headroom for maneuverability and tuning to the room. 

The low meaty fundamental pitch stems from the choice of wood  and unique construction of the shaped walls.

Any Players are surprised at first at the tonal depth and power  of these shells, their  physical depth being

only 4" / 5,5" in the FF)

This short air column of the shell also offers the quicker and more defined response without loosing

the very desirable after -resonance indicative of a much deeper drum. 

These snares maneuver in a huge musical tuning range. 

They are designed for maximum amount

 of headroom/ tuning range.

They are very live and rich of desirable overtones

If played closer to the rim.

Beautiful musical overtones.

Very open and free but not annoyingly over the top.

In the dead center they are fat and on the dryer side.

The rim shot is a earsplitting without much

physical effort of the player. 

They offer a huge musical pallet to players that are

Masters in stick control and seek this range to express them self's.

Power is meaningless without control

It is essential to good playing,

to get out of your  snare what you put in and enjoy what you are hearing.             

Why is Lunar different and what are the" physics" behind the concept?

This shell is a hybrid between a solid shell made of one piece and a ply shell.

Each shell is build from one piece of wood retaining true fundamental pitch.

Because this one solid piece has been dissected into thick book matched slices and is then cold-molded

back together with the grain running in same direction, the shell has the stability and rigidity of a thick ply shell,

even though it is build from one piece of wood, and with that preserves the clear fundament pitch and character

of a shell made form one piece.

This explains why the Lunar looks the same on the inside as on the outside.

An ordinary shell made from one piece of wood would  not allow me to manipulate the wall thickness for

optimum balance and performance because its not stable enough and by that  limit me to thicker shell walls.

By shaping the walls as I choose,  I am able to fine-tune the fundamental pitch without

compromising this rigidity and stability necessary for unrivaled performance.

.

The shell is convex

The wall thickness of a snare drum is sonically most dominant factor determining the fundamental pitch.

It supersedes width and depth, because snares only come in a few similar sizes.

Kicks and toms compared to snares come in a wide variety of sizes and push huge amounts of air besides

serving a whole different purpose in the set and in the music.

The wall thickness of the Lunar snare varies over its depth.

The fattest section is in the center, thinning toward the bottom, with the thinnest ramping toward

and fairing into the bearing edge.

The multiple wall thicknesses permit the shell to respond to vast verity of sympathetic frequencies 

within the tuning range and the room.

The shell is shaped by hand (the process and concept is very much like a guitar or violin builder

who shapes/tunes his resonant plates.

The result is somewhat like a wing shape.

The woods we use are carefully chosen to accommodate this process.

With the standard 4 piece lay-up, we saw all the components from the same tree and the same piece of wood.

When cold molded by hand into a shell, they resonate together as one because there is no difference between

the out or the inside and they all share the same fundamental pitch.

They work in unison.

There is no different core material and the glue to wood ratio is a fraction then that of a regular ply shell of the same thickness.

Hawaiian Mango sliced for a snare shell

  Danny Yamamoto from "Hiroshima " with a Lunar Rosewood

"Warble" can occur when a shell is constructed to thin to lower the primary frequency range and makes

it respond quicker to the touch.

Because the shell is not rigid enough it oscillates at a wider more sluggish ratio then desirable,

especially when you begin to drive it.

It over reacts if you will and you will then loose control over the dynamics

The instability of the thin shell can cause a shell to respond warbled …less articulate in

some tuning ranges and situations.

It is like when you strike the drum regardless of where, the sound seams to be all over the place and the dynamics

cannot be easily controlled.

I seek the balance between the highest oscillation rate for volume and the control over the dynamics.

Many thinner sometimes steam-bent shells feature supportive rings on the inside to aid the rigidity

....meaning that the thickest area/mass  of the shell is around the bearing edges where the rings are installed.

Consider Lunar the opposite of that. We are the thickest in the horizontal center almost 3/8 and less

then 1/4 around the bearing  edge .....Equals no "dead spots".....hypersensitivity all across the playing surface.

The primary purpose of re-rings is to stabilize a thin and therefore otherwise unstable thin walled shell.

Many Vintage drums where built like that in the early days, because they did not know any different.

Today are revered and loved by many.

But not because this is the ultimate sonic serving shell construction, but because of their own special sound

and with that having earned their place of music history.

I love and respect them like a Model T Ford.

A thing of beauty,  rich history but not the recipe for a high performance in today's world.

                  A big  5" net Lunar on a lava rock in "Sand Island Park" Hawaii

No hardware attached directly to the shell

The Lunar custom snare uses the Pearl free-floating fitting. For those who are not familiar with this setup...

There are no holes drilled into the shell, nothing but the head and the bottom end of the fitting touches

the leading edges of the shell.

yet holds it – floats it securely in place and allows the shell to resonate/respond unencumbered with

it's true unaltered voice.

The batter side “balanced bearing edge “in conjunction with the convex shape never allows the shell t

o make contact with anything other than the batter head which wraps itself around the rounded outside of bearing edge.

Because of the shape of the drum the aluminum ring of the batter head naturally falls away from the shell and does not

buzz up against it when you play the drum.

The drums mounting system operates on compression rather than pulling,

tweaking and tension from 10 different points from the inside out.

The sound of wood

under a Koa tree in Hawaii

                                                                                           Lunar contact info:

                                                                                   Lunar Percussion            

                                                                                    Gabriel Ashford                          Shop  +49  0421  304 -6531 

                                                                                    Gustav-Adolf str. 13                   Cell    +49  0179  610 -45 697

                                                                                    28217  Bremen,  Germany          Office +49  0421  -6999-189  

                                                For questions or inquiries please call or email us at

                                                                       info@lunarpercussion.com

   Banking and Tax/Steuer ID for our European Customers                                 

Lunar USA  contact info:

                                     K2L2 Synthe-Sonix        authorized US Lunar Dealer 

                                                                              For  orders and inquiries please email Keith Luke at   keith_luke@rocketmail.com  

Send mail to creaproj@verizon.net  with questions or comments about this web site.
Last modified: 08/08/08