Drums are the simplest, and most primitive, musical instruments. The drum is a percussive instrument, which produces sound by striking a membrane. The sound is propagated through a membrane, or drumhead, to the drum shell, which is designed to resonate when the membrane is struck. The drumhead is coupled to the drum shell through drum hoops, lugs, and lug or hoop holders. The energy created by striking the drum head is transferred into a wave in the drum shell, producing the distinctive drum sound, a tuned impulse.
While drums usually cannot play different pitches, they are usually tuned. The drum is tuned by tightening or loosening the drumhead by adjusting the lugs and drum hoops. The tighter the drumhead, the higher the pitch propagated by the drumhead.
Many drummers use a drum kit. Drum kits have several different drums, which can be individually tuned. A drum kit is often composed of various drums, such as a bass or kick drum, snare drums, and tom drums, as well as assorted cymbals and high-hats. When a drummer is drumming, there is substantial vibration throughout the drum kit. Additionally, the various drums can move or flex as they are struck, meaning that the drums, themselves, are vibrating and, therefore, moving. This is especially true of the tom and snare drums.
A drum mount or support is a sub-classification that includes many different methods of mounting the drum to legs or to other structural elements. The mounts used for drums often degrade the sound, because the drum is held too tightly, damping or attenuating the tuned impulse. Depending on how the drum mount is attached, and how it supports the drum, it can hinder the drum shell resonance, the drumhead, or both. Any drum mount or support that rigidly fixes itself to the drum, whether to the drum shell or the drum hoops, risks damping the sound. A very small number of mounts attach to lugs or lug holders. As currently implemented, these integrated mounting brackets and lugs are a bad idea, because they fail to properly isolate the tuning of the lug from the tuning of the drum mount. The lugs are supposed to be tuning the drum. By adding additional stiffness (force) to the lugs, a fixed drum will change the tuning of the drum. An integrated lug and drum mount is conceptually attractive, because such a device, if it did not adversely affect the tuning of the drum head, would be easier to install on the drum.
Other mounts attach to the top and/or bottom hoops of the drum shell. Still other supports attach to the drum shell. Rigidly attached supports, whether mounted to the shell or hoops, will damp the vibration of the drum, and may, ultimately, distort the sound through buzzing or rattling, if the support mount is not properly engineered and attached.
As a result, a new device is needed, integrating the lug and drum mount, without unduly affecting the tuning of the drum. The new integrated lug and mount should allow the drum shell to resonate freely. Such an integrated lug and mount needs to maintain the drum, in position, without, itself, generating objectionable sounds. The integrated lug and drum mount should be quickly and easily adjustable. It should also allow for quick set-up and break-down of a drum kit. An integrated lug and drum mount that has variable stiffness, and isolates the drum shell from the structural members supporting the drum would be ideal.