I bought this as a cheap practice pad - I replaced batter head with a mesh head and use it for quiet rudiment practice. Works well in that regard.Now, if you want to actually play this? You have some work ahead of you! Firstly, replace both heads with pro heads like Evans, Aquarian, etc… The stock heads are super cheap and thin. Secondly, the throw-off and anchor hardware is super cheap. Oil the throw to make it function smoother….otherwise replace it altogether. Thirdly, replace the snare pickup. It’s anchored by cheap plastic strips that don’t flex much and doesn’t hold the snares snug to the resonant head. You’re going to get annoying buzzing no matter how you tension it. Fourthly, neither side has any formed bearing edges - they are both completely flat and need to routed to some kind of angle, otherwise your heads are not going to have a stable seat on the rims and your intonation will be atrocious at best.Overall this is a cheap practice snare that will get the job done in practice, however I would never rely on this for official show performance.

It’s not to bad for the price!! Really cool

Great drum

Background: I'm a fairly experienced drummer and I bought this due to how cheap it is in order to try some modifications to it.Due to the price, I was expecting some corners to be cut from the manufacturing, but I was surprised at just how many corners were cut! I understand that people will be looking at this ad for different reasons and with different expectations, so here are reviews for three different use cases:Toy for a child:Sure, it's fine for that. The drum won't sound good out of the box without being adjusted properly, but if you just want something for a kid to hit a few times for fun, this should be fine. It looks good and the price is awesome!First snare for a beginning:It will be decent, though limited for this. Out of the box it will sound bad, but that will be true for pretty much any mail-ordered drum. Please take it to an experienced drummer to have them tune the heads and adjust the snare wire tension. After that it will sound like a completely different drum. I was able to get it sounding pretty ok as is, but was not able to get it any better due to a number of construction limitations. It won't be able to grow with your beginner, because of two main limitations: 1) The next step would be to put better heads on it, but they don't fit! More on that below. Also, 2) The throw-off (the piece of hardware that turns the snare sound on and off) is very poorly designed and is pretty much unusable. Again, the drum would work for a beginner, but it's very limiting. I'm all about cheap instruments, but in this case, spending $20-30 more would probably get you a considerably better drum.For an experienced or serious student drummer:If you want it to sound good, you have a large and challenging hill to climb with this drum and I don't believe it's worth it. Here is a long list of :- The drum looks great! The shell and hardware look really nice. There is no logo on the shell itself, only on the head, and it was "Glarry" instead. Whatever, the cheap stock heads need to be replaced first thing anyway, as you might expect.- There is no bearing edge on the bottom side of the shell! What in the world?!? See the photo. I mean, it works like that, but it's never going to sound good. I was surprised to see that there are actually snare beds, but otherwise the wood is still just a flat, rough-cut edge as if it's straight from a table saw. It's not even sanded, and there were tons of bumps rough saw marks. You can see and feel all of the bumps through the bottom head. Luckily I got set up for cutting bearing edges like 3 days before I got this snare. It took a lot of work due to the saw marks, but I eventually got it shaped correctly and put a real head on the bottom.- A 13" Remo Coated Ambassador doesn't fit on the top! Something is wrong if the most standard snare top head doesn't even fit! The bearing edge was cut all of the way to the outside edge of the shell, and it hit the slant of the collar near the metal rim, not near the playable part of the head. I had to recut this edge too, with an inner and outer 45 degree angle to move the tip of the edge inward more. Previous to that, I tried just cranking the tensions rods way tight to power through it and reshape the head's collar, but...- There are no washers between the tension rods and the hoops. When I cranked the top hoop super tight, it got incredibly hard to turn and I discovered I was actually ripping chrome plating and metal off of both the hoop and the tension rods. I discovered this when I pulled a piece out of my finger.... I had to then take the hoop and rods off and grind them back smooth with a Dremel, files, and sandpaper. The right size washers are hard to find at a hardware store. I ended up with #10 washers and using my Dremel to open up the inner hole more in order to fit.- The design of the throw-off is almost laughable. It has a pivoting fulcrum kind of design which looks great at first, but as you start bringing it down (you know, when the stare wires would normally start getting looser), the snare wires get tighter! And not only that, but the get a LOT tighter, enough to cause the plastic strip or string holding the wires to be pulled out of place! Not until it gets about 180 degrees from where it started do the snares actually get looser. And even then, they may still not be removed from the bottom head, if you're using the plastic strips. With the throw-off being upside down at this point, the rigidity of the plastic strips will actually hold the wires up against the bottom head on their own. Since string doesn't have this rigidity, switching to string will give you a spot on the travel of the throw-off, all of the way at the bottom, where the snare wires won't touch the head. But with how tight it gets on the way to that point, is really not feasible to every use the throw off. Your strings will probably have pulled out by then. I tried many different ways of using the existing throw-off, but couldn't come up with anything better within reason. The best I can come up with is to drill out the two rivots that it pivots on and replace it with a single bolt or something that goes all of the way across, in order to let the strings bend across that bolt. This would allow the throw-off to control tension, not position, of the strings/strap.- The snare wires seem to be too short. I recently ordered some very standard, plain 12" snare wires and the wires on this drum were only about an 1/8th of an inch longer than the 12" wires. See the picture.- The lugs had a little audible spring sound, but that's pretty standard on drums and not a huge deal. But if you're already taking it apart, take the lugs off and put a piece of a cotton ball in each lug to keep the springs from ringing.- When you factor in the purchases I made in order to make this drum work correctly (washers, adhesive sandpaper to flatten the bearing edge, Dremel bit, new snare wires), the cost of tools you may need to buy (like a router bit for the bearing edges), and the time involved, it's probably cheaper to buy a slightly more expensive snare that doesn't need nearly as much work. But if you already have a stocked workshop and you save time by learning from my experience, this drum may be worth it for you.After all of that work, it now works and sounds like a normal drum.