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is just right for shell making. It’s an art
form that John and Shon have dialed-in
over these many years. In speaking with
both craftsmen, HVX’s story unfolds with
colorful clarity.
John Good: This program can only be
fully understood if you understand veneer.
Veneer’s attributes are as follows: no matter
what kind of wood, when it’s cut into a
veneer, if it has a long grain (horizontal),
it’s going to have a high timbre (pitch).
If it’s short grain (vertical), it’ll have a
lower timbre. When you combine them
in various configurations, varied sound
qualities are achieved.
Rich M: Does this also affect the strength
of the shell?
JG: Absolutely, that’s why we have to
cross-laminate, or the shells would fold
up like a hat box. Look at this piece of
long-grain veneer (he holds out a piece
of maple veneer across my fingertip). It’s
only 1/36th of an inch thick and it hardly
bends on your hand, you can see the
strength here. Now watch as we place
the same thickness with a vertical grain, it
bends over your hand easily. Also, every
piece of wood has a musical note value
(as I held the horizontal wood veneer,
John bent it and as it tightened, the pitch
raised, as opposed to the vertical grain that
was already much lower due to the short
grain orientation. Now, I have one more
piece, a 45° diagonal cut veneer (when
placed on my hand, it bent diagonally).
So, no matter what type of wood is used,
the important factors are the direction and
orientation of the grain when assembling a
shell. Understanding this much will help
paint a clearer picture of the path to HVX.
RM: So, the importance of grain direction
and how the veneers are layered gives
you not only the shell’s sound potential,
but also gives you control over the shell’s
strength. Fascinating! Touch briefly on
your early experience with timbre. Also,
your familiarity with maple and how it
led you to experimenting with the other
woods you employ today.
JG: Well, Curly Maple is mainly long grain,
but has a predominant figure of vertical
grain, as well, so when we used it as
the outside veneer, the pitch of the drum
was almost always lower. This bothered
me, so Shon and I thought, “What if we
turned maple vertical?” When we did
that, it became the starting point for the
VLT shell. This really began to make sense
when we started combining wood types
as exotic veneers, turning veneer vertical
and then book-matching (mirror-imaging)
the sheets. It was then that the rest of the
grain orientation world opened up. We
also found out that by turning the wood
vertical around the shell, the shell’s pitch
remained very, very low and that offered
up a wider range of woods as shell-making
materials. These days, probably more than
50% of our exotic woods are vertical grain.
RM: What about the diagonal wood grain?
How did you utilize that?
JG: We decided to try layering the diagonal
veneer in an ‘X’ pattern, with the outside
sheet in one direction, then the next one in
the opposite direction. We found out that
the pitch went down even lower! So, as we
were progressing with our experimentation
with grain direction, we were getting
lower, deeper sounding drums. Then, we
thought, “How can we make an ‘X’ shell
even lower?” We thought to place two
vertical plies in the middle of the ‘X’s and
it proved our hypothesis by bringing the
pitch down even more. That experiment
became a shell we now call VLX. That’s
used for floor toms, and for bass drums
we add one or two more vertical plies in
there and that becomes VLX Plus. With
four vertical plies in a bass drum, you have
to be careful because you can kill small
animals with the low, subsonic frequency
generated by that drum!
RM: I’m sure there are a lot of drummers
reading this right now with a big smile.
Who doesn’t want a bass drum with that
kind of low-end punch?!
JG: Yes! This brings us to Performance
Series HVX shells. We knew that our
production kits wouldn’t be Timbre
Matched, so we decided to have the grain
technology do the work for us. When we
decided to try putting that diagonal ply as
the last outer and inner ply of a standard
shell with alternating horizontal and
vertical plies, we wound up stabilizing the
vibration of the drum. We also found a
consistency with tone and timbre between
shells within the same size diameter. This
process led us to create something we’d
never made before: a medium-to-lowpitched
drum with tremendous consistency
and uncompromised shell integrity.
Shon Smith: With the ‘X’ ply added, we
didn’t need to add the reinforcement
hoops either. The diagonal ply gave it the
strength needed by pushing back on itself.
RM: So, this ultimately saves man-hours
by avoiding the shell selection process,
thus making it a very efficient production
item?
JG: Indeed. Shon and I had never really
done production-style drums until HVX.
It really is the perfect recipe for our
Performance Series kits and artists are
going crazy for the sound of these drums.
It makes sense because they have a nice
tuning range. You can tune these drums
low because of the ‘X’ factor within the
plies, and we’ve found that because
there are no reinforcement hoops, there’s
yet another little advantage to the lower
frequency range because reinforcement
hoops raise the pitch ever so slightly.
They’re also really versatile. We’ve had
very positive feedback from Rock guys,
Gospel drummers, Country drummers,
every style of music! In fact, when you
buy a Performance Series kit, you get a
demo of John “JR” Robinson playing the
drums in various styles, so you really get
to hear them properly, as played by one of
the world’s most recorded drummers.
RM: It was always assumed that a drum’s
sonic range had more to do with the
thickness or mass of the shell and you have
both proven that that’s not necessarily the
case. Do you feel like you’re toying with
physics?
SS: That’s what we thought too! But after
years of work with grain orientation, we’re,
in essence, defying Mother Nature. This
is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s a lot
more we can do, and we’re having a blast
doing it!
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