The snare drum has become an integral part of drum kits. Used in almost every genre of modern music, its roots go way back. The snare drum history is fascinating. When the question where did the snare drum originated arose, most music historians trace today’s version to Medieval Europe.
The first snare drum called Tabor appeared throughout that historical time. However, when was the snare drum invented? It was invented in the 14th century. The name refers to the single-strand snare found in each two-headed model.
The Tabor is still in use today in European folk music. In the 16th century, the armies of the Ottoman Empire employed a rudimentary snare as one of the instruments for their marching music.
The article also highlights various historical facts about the snare drum. When it comes to who invented the snare drum, the Swiss are sometimes credited with inventing the rudiments of drumming, which developed alongside the snare drum.
The tabor evolved into the Modern snare drum, such as the kit snare (the type usually included in a drum kit), marching snare, tarol snare, and piccolo snare.
The history of the snare drum started after it was introduced by Europeans to North America, the field drum was first used by the colonists as a signaling instrument, to convey military orders and to call people to church or other gatherings. In 1610, Jamestown colonists in Virginia used a field drum to lure native Powhatan people into a deadly ambush.
A drum believed to be the oldest in the United States that is part of the Connecticut Historical Society’s collection was used in 1650 to call parishioners to church in the town of Farmington. In military use, the drum allowed troops to communicate with one another. The famous rudimental snare drum solo Three Camps was played as a way for a divided company of soldiers to communicate.
After the Civil War, in the United States, drummers took their instruments home, and the drum began to reflect evolving musical styles, while, in Europe, the snare drum had made its way into the concert hall. In his 1706 opera Alcyone, French composer Marin Marais used a snare drum to evoke a storm, Gauthreaux points out in his dissertation. It was, at the time, a unique use of the instrument.
For many years, it remained more common for composers to use the instrument to create a military atmosphere. Beethoven used a march-like snare-drum part in his 1810 incidental music for Goethe’s Egmont. The instrument is used similarly in Rossini’s 1817 overture to La Gazza Ladra (The Thieving Magpie).
In post-Civil War America, the snare drum had also made its way indoors for use in entertainment. Vaudeville was popular, as were the Dixieland and ragtime styles. Largely for economic reasons, it became ideal for one drummer to play the instruments previously assigned to two: chiefly, the snare drum, bass drum, and cymbal.
William F. Ludwig was among the practitioners of this so-called “double-drumming” approach. In 1909, not satisfied with the user-unfriendliness of the crude “overhang” bass-drum pedals of the day he and his brother, Theobald, invented the modern bass drum pedal. And that gave rise to the drum set — and Ludwig & Ludwig.
What are snare drums made of is an essential question to understand more about the history. As you can tell from the video below, old snare drums can pack quite a punch:
A snare drum is constructed of a hollow cylinder made of metal or wood, with two drumheads stretched over it—one on the top and one on the bottom. The drumheads are made of calfskin or plastic. The drumheads are held in place by metal or wood rims. In regards to how does a snare drum work, it makes a distinctive sound due to a set of wires that sit outside the bottom drumhead. These wires are called the “snare” and make a rattling sound when the drum is struck. A musician plays the snare drum by striking the top with sticks, mallets, or brushes.
Boston-based drum maker Harry Bower had developed a throw-off system around the same time that Stromberg patented his.
While World War I slowed production for companies like Ludwig, the conflict had little effect on the innovations that were being made. The single-flanged metal hoop made its appearance around the end of the war and was followed a few years later by the double-flanged hoop. Around that time, Ludwig and the Leedy Drum Company introduced their versions of the Black Beauty snare drums — the DeLuxe (Fig. 6) and Elite (Fig. 7) models, respectively.
While the Slingerland Drum Company is widely believed to have become the first to use the Black Beauty name, when it first introduced its engraved, black-nickel-over brass drum in 1928, a George B. Stone & Son catalog produced nearly four years earlier offers a “Black Beauty Separate Tension Snare Drum,” as evidenced on Vinson’s blog. Drum makers had started using brass after the Civil War, during which brass shells had been imported from Europe.
The History of the Snare Drum in the 1920s represented the first golden age of drum-building — marked particularly by the Black Beauty drums that had been produced beginning in the late teens — the next few decades saw great changes in musical styles, which, in turn, dictated which types of snare drums the players of the day used.
The History of the Snare Drum evolved with the whole drum set during the 1930s, thanks in large part to Gene Krupa, who incorporated tunable tom-toms in his setup, making Chinese toms, which had heads that were tacked onto the shells, all but obsolete. At that point in his career, Krupa endorsed Slingerland drums, playing the company’s then-new Radio King models, and was truly the first rock-star drummer, though that genre was still a few decades from materializing.
In 1931, Ludwig started using the name Black Beauty in association with its line of engraved, black-nickel-plated brass snare drums, which it would continue to produce until 1940. That company’s Cecil Strupe, a former Leedy employee, came up with a triple-flanged metal hoop in 1938. Single- and double-flanged metal hoops had appeared two decades earlier, of course, while die-cast hoops wouldn’t become widely available, through the Gretsch Company, until the late 1950s.
The 1960s ushered in a second golden age of drum making, and the soundtrack was rock and roll. In 1959, Ludwig introduced the Supraphonic, as iconic a snare drum as has been produced. Initially a chrome-over-brass drum, the company started making it with Ludalloy (chrome over aluminum) in 1962, the same year that Rogers introduced its Dyna-Sonic model, originally a wooden drum that featured a parallel-action strainer that had a lot in common with Leedy’s 1921 Marvel design.
The Dyna-Sonic featured a system that kept the snare strainer itself from choking the bottom head. While John Bonham famously played a 14″ x 6.5″ Supraphonic throughout his career, Buddy Rich for many years used a Dyna-Sonic. The drum was designed, in fact, with Rich’s sonic interests in mind.
Another important innovation that made its appearance in 1962 was Ludwig’s metal Acousti-Perfect drum shell, whose “rolled-in” snare bed, which replaced the crimped snare bed common to most metal shells of the day, featured a longer, more gradual taper than had been the norm. Previous to being cut by machine on wooden drums, snare beds were simply hand-carved arches.
Before shells were modified in that way, a head and hoop held snares in place. Aldridge says the advent of the Acousti-Perfect design marks the most significant innovation in snare bed design. It addressed the fact that plastic heads didn’t conform to more abrupt snare bed tapers. Generally speaking, the introduction of plastic heads in the late 1950s marked a point at which snare beds became shallower and featured longer tapers than they had previously.
The most significant moment of the 1960s in terms of drum-related trends took place on February 9, 1964, the night The Beatles performed on The Ed Sullivan Show. While metal-shell instruments had become the popular choice among drummers, Ringo Starr’s preference for a wooden snare drum tilted demand in that direction. Not surprisingly, Starr’s appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show did wonders for Ludwig.
It was a piece of marketing that couldn’t have been more fruitful. Orders for Ludwig kits multiplied exponentially overnight, Donn Bennett, whose drum shop in Bellevue, Washington, deals primarily with celebrity instruments, says. Today, the eight-lug Ludwig Jazz Festival snare drum in an oyster-black finish is a sought-after drum among collectors, thanks almost exclusively to Starr. It was a good period for drum manufacturers; there were many of them, and they all benefitted from a relatively healthy economy.
In 1978, Ludwig began reissuing the Black Beauty snares it had started producing after World War I and discontinued in 1940. What was old was new again, and continues to be so. That’s not to say the last few decades of the previous century didn’t see their share of innovations.
Cable snares became popular in the 1970s, particularly among orchestral players, who, in the 1990s, embraced the triple-strainer systems produced by such big companies as Pearl and boutique manufacturers like Black Swamp Percussion. These mechanisms allowed players to quickly switch from gut to wire to cable snares. Unlike gut, the cable is not affected by temperature or humidity.
In regards to the History of the Snare Drum, the 1980s and ’90s saw the birth of an ever-growing vintage movement, marked in part by anniversary models and the reintroduction of tube lugs and single-flange hoops. Replicas remain popular today, as evidenced by Tama’s recent 40th anniversary, limited-edition reissue of its Superstar drums from the 1970s, and by Drum Workshop’s Collector’s Series Icon drums, which honor Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason, Queen’s Roger Taylor, and Rush’s Neil Peart.
Thanks to the availability of the Internet, collectors of authentic vintage instruments can search the world for specific makes and models. The past few decades have seen a boom in custom drum makers like the Craviotto Drum Company (Johnny Craviotto), AK Drums (Adrian Kirchler), the Brady Drum Company (Chris Brady), and Dunnett Classic Drums (Ronn Dunnett), as well as other craftsmen like Aldridge, perhaps the most sought-after master engraver in the United States.
While plenty of innovations have been applied to snare-drum building over the years, the instrument’s fundamental design hasn’t changed much at all. Technology has helped manufacturers refine different parts of the drum, history has provided a vast library of sounds to replicate, and musical styles have largely dictated design trends. Just as bebop led to the popularity of smaller instruments, the big-band era and the music that filled arenas in the 1970s and ’80s prompted drummers to use bigger drums.