From e-mail correspondence with Bill MacCormick -
"...[Robert] quite often didn't engage the snare and did this very often as I recall. He seemed to prefer the sound of the snare drum as just a higher pitched drum rather than a traditional snappy snare sound."
Here is some interesting stuff that John Trimble, a fellow RW fan and drummer/artist in his own right, wrote while we were in correspondence when I was writing my book. Unfortunately it was a bit too specialised to be used more than "in spirit", but it fits right in with the present discussion :
"[On] Little Red Record Wyatt uses his snare drum with the snares flipped off, normal snare tone is not used once, unheard of for that time. Although he is using his standard late Soft Machine set-up on his Ludwig kit – 24” bass drum, 14” rack tom-tom, single 18” floor tom-tom and snare -- he is obviously looking for a non-jazz, non-rock tonality. For live performances, at least, he made three adjustments. First, he took a smaller crash cymbal and placed it under his larger ride cymbal in a rather unconventional placing both on the right hand side of his bass drum. Second, he returned to using his 16" crash cymbal above the hi-hat. This allowed him more varied cymbal tones which are evident on the live recordings in particular. The third change was sonically disappointing. At some point during or after making Little Red Record Robert removed the bottom head from his rack mounted tom-tom which negated the inherent resonance of the drum. This was very in vogue in the early 1970’s with a lot of rock drummers doing the same, John Densmore of the Doors, as an example. But sadly it just kills the tone of the drum."
Conversely, "on the Matching Mole debut Robert has excellent drum set tone still similar to [Fourth] although not nearly as well recorded. Tight, crisp snare, full resonating tom-toms and a heavier use of cymbals and cymbal washes. Even in this somewhat murky recording Robert rises above it in cliché-free drumming. His snare drum tone alone is worth the price of the album."
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