The deep, rich, mellow tones of drums provided the backbone of the rock and jazz sounds of the fifties, sixties and seventies. This sound drives the vintage market today. The vintage tone allows the wood in the drum to speak. Unfortunately, for modern applications, this same quality often comes at the cost of sustain and crisp definition.
The late eighties and nineties saw a push in the drum market to brighten drum sounds and create more melodic tone with longer sustain. To use a guitar analogy, the drive produced a “single-coil pickup” sound, with crisp high-frequency attack followed by a long-lasting sustain carrying a mid-high frequency tonal component. This sonic character allows drums to break through the mix and shine but also creates challenges for engineers who find themselves constantly gating and compressing the signals to prevent cross-talk in the mix.
These modern engineering challenges gave veteran drum builder Ory Brochet pause. With a drum-building mentoring and knowledge-base pedigree running all the way back to George Way of Leedy, Ludwig and Camco (George, builder of Leedy/Ludwig/Camco, which became DW, influenced John Good, who hired and mentored Ory in 1992), Ory set out to tackle the challenges associated with the modern “single-coil pickup” sound. He was convinced that the tonal qualities which make modern drums special could be retained while the less desirable side effects could be reduced or eliminated.
It turns out that Ory was right.
After many iterations and attempts, Ory arrived at the “Orybon Voice,” a rich, mellow tone that allows the natural wood grain of each drum to speak. But unlike their predecessors of the fifties, sixties, and seventies, Orybon Drums also posses a killer crisp attack and epic sustain. To return to the guitar analogy, this tone would fall in the category of a “humbucker pickup”–rich, crisp sound that seats beautifully into the mix and makes its presence known without overpowering other frequencies. This characteristic is what makes Orybon Drums favorites among studio and live engineers, who can finally pull all the gating and compression off the drums and fill the mix with that incredible modern-vintage sound: the Orybon voice.
