Best Drum Heads

The Remo Coated Ambassador is the drum head responsible for more recorded snare sounds than any other product in drumming history. The 10-mil single ply, the standard Remo coating, the open tuning range from low backbeat to high jazz crack — producers from the 1960s onwards have built records around this head, which means every engineer hears it as the reference. Replace your snare batter with anything else and the conversation in the control room becomes about the head before it becomes about the song.

The trade-off is durability. Single-ply heads dent faster than two-ply heads under heavy rim shots; metal drummers will replace a Coated Ambassador every few months. For everyone else — rock, pop, funk, jazz, country, hip-hop — this is the snare head, and the small dents add to the character rather than degrading the sound. Buy them by the three-pack. You'll go through them.

The Evans G2 Coated is the rock tom drummer's default for the same reason the Coated Ambassador is the snare default: producers expect the sound. The two-ply construction (7-mil + 7-mil) gives the toms focused attack and controlled sustain — the toms cut through guitars without the long ring that single-ply heads produce. For metal, hard rock, modern country, and any genre where the toms are featured prominently in the mix, the G2 is the head that lets the kit work for the song.

The G2 is also the most durable tom head in this comparison. Two plies absorb the rim-shot impacts that crack single-ply heads, and the Evans coating holds up better than Remo's under stick wear. The compromise is openness — G2s sound less alive at low volume, less responsive to brushes, less suited to jazz or acoustic genres. Buy single-ply heads (Remo Ambassador, Evans G1) for those applications and keep G2s for the rock kit.

The Aquarian Super-Kick II solves the single most annoying problem in drum recording: getting the kick to sound like a modern kick without throwing a pillow inside the drum and shutting half the resonance down. The head has a floating muffle ring built into the underside, which dampens the high-frequency ring while leaving the fundamental thump intact. The kick sounds tight, focused, and modern straight out of the box, with no internal dampening required.

The two-ply construction means the head also lasts. Drummers playing aggressive double-bass patterns regularly destroy single-ply kick heads inside a year; the Super-Kick II will outlast most kick drum shells. The compromise is tuning range — the muffle ring fixes the kick at the focused-modern sound, so jazz drummers wanting an open, boomy kick should look at the Aquarian Regulator or the Remo Powerstroke 3 instead. For everyone else, this head is the obvious choice.