4fterthoughts: 2010

I've finally got my hands on a new drum set after all these years.... It was a long time coming, but a loving wife, a friendly neighbor and a load of cash made it happen.

My initial desire was to purchase a used set to keep costs down, but I couldn't find a set that fit what I was looking for. After a lot of research and sampling various brands of drum sets at the nearby drum stores, I decided that Yamaha made some high quality drum sets that sounded nice and had a reasonable price tag. There were plenty of great reviews from people who've owned multiple drum sets and rated Yamaha near the top of their list. The Oak Custom set that Yamaha offers is a high quality set that had all of the technology of their professional drum sets, but costs less.

Steph and I found one at a nearby Guitar Center. It was a floor model so I was able to try it out and both Steph and I really liked the sound of it. It was the first set I felt good about in a month so I was pretty excited. We got a quote from Guitar center and decided to shop around some more.

I was pleased to find that Huber & Breese, the shop Shannon and I purchased the Premier Drum Set from back around 2000, had both a Yamaha Birch Custom and Oak Custom. Tom, the salesman at the store, was great and very enthusiastic about drums and had a lot of great information to share about the different drum sets in the store. The Oak Custom was still the drum set of choice so we got down to business and started running the numbers on all of the equipment I planned to purchase.... needless to say it was pretty high. Tom commented that I had an amazing wife who'd let me spend all this money :-) ,which is true, but the money had been set aside for a while for this specific purchase.

Long store short, we cut a deal and happily walked away with a 5 piece Oak Custom Drum Set, a Mapex black panther velvetone 14 x 5.5 Walnut & Maple snare, stands (cymbal, snare, hi=hat), drum throne and an Aquarian Base Drum head (a bartering lesson learned from Hoser). The tom sizes are 10 x 8, 12 x 9, 14 x 12, 16 x 16 (16 inch tom is on order) and a base drum of 22 x 17. I got a great deal on a cymbal pack of Sabian XS20 cymbals (14, 16, 18 inch crashes, 20 ride, 14 hi-hats & 10 inch splash) online and then found a brand new set of DW 7000 double base drum pedals for dirt cheap on craigslist. I don't want to forget about the drum mutes (basically pads) for the sake of my wife and Dennis our awesome neighbor.

The name of the drum set is JAK, which are my mother's initials. She provided the bulk of the money for this purchase and I would have loved to play the set for her. I plan to get a custom Evans base drum head created to showcase the name of the set with a cool design.

Here is a video of the kit taken by my camcorder, which doesn't capture the drum sounds all that great, but at least you can get an idea of how the set sounds.