Our Challenge for New Sound

We have to maintain our special discriminating high standards concerning our products so that our target audience can both hear and see for themselves the "Canopus" difference.

What is good sound? We believe that our mission is to let the character of material come out fully. But, if we maintain our special concern as a maker, we have to find ourselves apart from our starting point as drum maker for drummers. If we let only the products with our approval be in market, it will be impossible to embody the request of drummer, when our ideal sound and drummers ideal sound disagree. Is it an ego of maker? Is there only one sound in this world, where people have different taste and orientations.
Our answer to that question is our classification of our products by 2 badges.By this classification by badges, we will be able to offer new sound character and appearance.

This is the theme of Canopus for 2007.

Birch

1.Birch has its particular rich sound unlike Maple.
2.When you play fast phrase, each beat sounds clearly.
3.Clear musical interval in different size drums.
4.Low and loud sound unlike Maple.
5.Straight sound projection unlike shells with reinforcement.

Canopus has perfected its Maple shell drums by choosing the different width of reinforcements and different numbers of plies depending on its shell sizes. It is the masterpiece of acoustic drums with clean and clear sound. You can see the core of the Maple sound.
Canopus Maple series drums are highly appreciated by Jazz, Pops and Fusion drummers. Rock drummers gave us advices for us, too. We also faced the request of Rock drummers asking us more straightforward sound projection. We admit the fact that rich sounding of reinforcement in Maple shell will work adversely in so called "loud" Rock situation.

Canopus' Birch Series Drums are the culmination of a year of research and development and simply have become the answer to those Rock drummers requests. Our new Birch series drums have an overwhelming advantage in that they inherently possess in sound presence, volume, clear musical intervals, sharpness in tone and overall characters.

The Signle-head tom


The single-head Tom popular in the 1970's is virtually gone from the contemporary music scene.
Initially gaining popularity because of its wide melodic range and clear attack, the single-head tom was simply a regular tom tom with the bottom head removed. This created dramatic problems including short sustain and unwanted (crevice) ripping noise. In the recording environment these unwanted characteristics were corrected artificially through electronic enhancements. Because of the undesirable characteristics, eventually the single-head tom lost its popularity.

For 2003, Canopus has revitalized a single-head tom that delivers all of its advantages while addressing crevice noise and sustain problems.


Consideration of the shell for a single-head drum.

In general, to gain stabilized results a drum must resonate as a whole.
When a double-headed tom is struck, the energy given to the top head is saved in the shell allowing sustain to resonate with the bottom head. This produces controlled decay. Also, the top head vibrates, moving the air in a balanced movement with the bottom head.

In a sense, the bottom head muffles the unwanted vibration of the top head, preventing unwanted crevice noise. In the case of the single-head tom, when the player strikes the drum the structural balance of the instrument is broken. The top head is fixed with a metal hoop and lug parts while the bottom has no fixed parts.

As a result, the shell does not resonate as a whole, the components do not vibrate in a matched fashion with the other parts of the drum, and undesirable crevice noise is created. In fact, the vibration of the different parts tend to cancel each other and sustain is lost accordingly. The development of Canopus' single-head tom began by using a shell without reinforcement.

Of course, the immediate result was no different than taking an existing tom tom and removing one head.The first tests focused on the edge design in order to find the most melodic tones possible. Once this was achieved, modifications of the shell were made to deliver a well-rounded and fat sound.
Good results were gained by adding a thin reinforcement to the shell, but the perfect sound still eluded the developers.

Even reinforced, the shell made unbalanced vibrations and did not cure all of the problems.A reinforcement of extra thickness was introduced to compensate for the mass of the head and lugs, and the results were again improved.

The sound energy generated from the head collected in the shell to circulate as vibration energy. The extra mass of the reinforcement produced a reasonable resistance in the airflow of the tom. This was a significant improvement, but more work needed to be done. While the thick reinforcement controlled the unwanted crevice noise, the structural shortcomings created poor sound projection and short sustain.
The solution to these disappointing characteristics was found by making an oblique cut in the reinforcement to allow smoother airflow and proper balance in the sound.