Owning and Playing an Autotune
I purchased my kit in 1979 from a long defunct music shop called 'City Mouth' in Cardiff. It was a basic 5 piece double skinned 'Originator', 12, 13, 16 and 22" Bass Drum, in white. I declined the snare drum as I much prefered a chromed brass Slingerland I had.
Shortly afterwards I sourced a pair of concert Toms, 8 and 10", and an extra 18" Floor Tom from Supreme Drums in London. At the same time I obtained a yellow second bass drum. I painted this white and covered the outside with plastic sheet. (There were no white bass drums left, at this time...). It matched pretty well, from a distance!
I played this double bass drum 9 piece kit for many years in a pub rock band (venues were bigger in those days ;-)
There are two main problems with gigging an Arbiter Autotune.
Firstly, because the drums are oversized (the shell diameter is quite a bit bigger than the head diameter) it is very difficult to find cases to fit. The 22" bass drum needs a 24" case, for example. I had to manage without cases as a full set of big enough cases would have been about £300 more than I could afford ;-)
Secondly, they are probably among the heaviest drums ever produced. I'm sure this has a great deal to do with the sound. (Probably also a great deal to do with the epidemic of bad backs among drummers).
A minor problem (major when it happens, but minor because you only usually do it once!) is hardware failure, namely shearing bolts off whilst over-tightening the Tom holder to stop the overweight Toms drooping, because the swiv-o-matic isn't really up to it.
Another problem is losing the fine tensioning screws. Because the screws are usually not actually being used to tension the skin they are slackened off - and rattle loose and fall out. This was fixed on later production runs by mushrooming the bolt ends over so thay can't fall out. Not a bad idea to get a centre punch and do this for yourself, if you want to keep the screws in on an early kit. (I only thought of this after I lost most of my screws...)
Apart from that, the drums are pretty tough and strong. The surface of the fibreglass (known as the 'gel-coat' in fibreglassing circles) is fairly easy to scratch and over the years tends to look a bit scruffy. This is true of laquered and waxed drums, of course, but I think people are much more careful with laquered wood than solid looking fibreglass.
Tuning the kit up at the venue is, of course, simplicity itself. This is the whole point of the kit. There is no excuse for not getting the best sound you can at any gig...
Skins
I have tried lots of skins over the years. Aquarian skins do not work well, thay seem to have very thick beads which mean the rims can't always be engaged onto the rollers. The recommended heads for all Arbiter kits were Remo and these work fine. The important thing is they must be in good condition without slack spots or uneven stretching. In the 1970s a lot of skins had variable distances between the rim and the shoulder, where the head material bends over to form the flat head surface. The quality control wasn't very good. Modern skins are much more accurate and consistent. This may be one reason why the Autotune needed a fine tuning mechanism and the AT and Flats range seems to manage without it.
My favourite skins were always Remo Ambassadors on the top and Diplomats on the bottom with no damping at all. I have used Remo blackspots, too, which also work well.
The Sound
They are LOUD, and very resonant. The drums (if tuned appropriately) have amazing sustain and huge dynamics (that is, you can tap them fairly gently and get a reasonable tone, hit them hard and get a huge sound, or hit them very, very hard and they just keep pumping out the volume...)
Played with totally undamped resonant heads the drums give a sound like no other. Not to everyone's tastes, it is much more of a kit for solid rock music than dinner jazz!
Jon Hiseman played a lot of concert toms and they have almost an octoban like character.
I really don't like the sound of the kit when damped. There isn't much point in trying to remove the characteristic resonance and sustain. Evans hydraulics and gaffer tape would tend to result in a sound like thumping a Reliant Robin (Quirky British three wheeled car... made of fibreglass). I have used a pinstripe on the bass drum to calm it down a bit, with a small amount of internal damping, but the drums are not like the modern 'power' Toms and Bass drums; they are fairly shallow. Consequently they don't ring quite so much - or at least the ring doesn't contain so many high frequencies.
Some people are not very complementary about the Autotune kit. They are usually drummers who have never seen or heard one, actually, but base their opinion on the assumption that since the design had a short lifespan and the idea never really took off, they must be rubbish. And if they are rubbish, they must sound rubbish... I refer such people to the following album: Wardance - Colosseum II.
Whatever you think of the Autotune sound, if you stood blindfolded and listened to a drummer playing modern wood kits (Mapex, Premier, Ludwig, Pearl, Sonor, whatever...) one after the other, could you honestly recognise any one of them from the sound? I doubt it. But once you've heard an Arbiter Autotune kit you would be probably be able to pick it out from the rest straight away. There are very few drums where this is true. I think the very fact that the Autotune kit has its own sound, its own character, should earn it an honorary place in drum history - regardless of any shortcomings in its tuning mechanism.
