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If we're talking what I paid used it's my Ludwig 402 for £100 or the Acro prototype I got in a straight swap for a snare that cost me £100.

Brand new it's the Worldmax 14x6.5 NOB which cost a whopping £225
 
My cheapest snare? Tama Rockstar from the early 1990s. What do I love about it? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I have tried different heads (top and bottom) and snare wires. It's just a bad drum.

Attempting to play it and enjoy it is like trying to figure out the cleanest end of a dog turd to pick it up from.
 
View attachment 122981A B&W badge brass Ludwig 6.5x14. Not a bad drum. I replaced the wonky original strainer with a P-85 years ago. Frankly, I'm not all that crazy about this drum when compared to the LM400 and LM402 that I own. I have recently been thinking about selling or gifting this snare.
I might know a guy... :D
 
You want a cheap snare drum? Behold!
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I have one of these. I still have it because it was my first snare drum. I got it at a thrift store along with the other drums that made up my first set. It is, frankly, not great.
But, it sounds like a snare drum, and it cost me $11.
 

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If we're talking low cost: I bought this weird steel-shell import Supra knockoff for $75 used. The shell bead was concave, not convex, which I only know from Yamaha shells. The 8 imitation Imperial lugs were cheap pot metal and several of them actually broke when tensioned. I just replaced them with generic lugs and kept on playing it, it sounded pretty solid. I also replaced the stamped metal throwoff with a Pearl Export style throwoff. I eventually sold it to my buddy who needed a snare drum for a blues jam house kit.

This is the Peace 12-lug (!) steel-shell piccolo I traded for that Ludwig Standard aluminium snare. I bought it new from Music 6000 in Olympia for $75. It sounded great, to be honest. I used it as a main snare for a while when piccolo main snares were a thing.

I bought this 5x12 snare with 6 tube lugs, DW throwoff and maple re-rings from a friend for $100. No clue what its provenance was. I eventually took off the bottom head, snares and hardware and turned it into a timbale (and it sounds really good in that role).

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Here's mine:

I normally don't like 13" snares, and I'm predisposed not to like metal snares included with lower end kits......but dang do I love this drum.! Every time I play it, I literally say out loud to myself "What an awesome sounding snare"! A truly underrated gem in my opinion.
 

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Yamaha Stage Custom 14" x 5.5" Birch. Outside of the custom blood spatter finish, the drum sells for only about $125.
I used it in the studio once so far, and it performed beautifully. I've used it live many times with one particular band and have gotten some great compliments on it. Only thing I changed out was the hoops, and replaced them with S-Hoops.

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Found a 60's Dynasonic for $40 (didn't look this pretty when I got it). Recently traded it for a custom maple Parton. (First post btw. Just ordered Gretsch Renowns so I found this site while researching them).
 

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My (current) cheapest snare is a Gretsch Limited Edition Gold Series Maple Snare, 5.5x14. I got it used but in essentially brand new condition from Guitar Center for about $260. It came with a coated Ambassador and had a very bright and poppy sound. I wanted to warm it up a bit, so I put on a Fiberskyn Ambassador, and that did the trick! It's very warm and meaty sounding at medium tuning, which is exactly what I wanted.


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That would have to be my Gretsch Catalina Club Rock. I've upgraded it pretty significantly but it's not as pricey as my Rogers or Gretsch Brooklyn series.
 
My cheapest snare?

...all of them I've ever owned haha

The most expensive snare I ever bought was a pork pie 14" black steel snare or a pork pie 12" maple snare, both at somewhere around $200. The highest value snare I ever owned was probably a Tama 12" birch snare that came with a kit. Beautiful drum.

My only two snares I currently own are a Tama Metalworks 10" steel snare I recently got for a little over $100 and the 12" poplar snare that came with the club jam pancake kit I just got. Don't sleep on that 10" metalworks, thing is a monster of a drum despite it's size. It records like a dream and I just used it live at an unmiced gig and it cut like a hot knife through butter.

I don't really buy expensive drums. Lately I've been thinking about the fact that I've been playing twenty years gigging regularly in live original bands and now I am in my thirties with a good job and no kids. Maybe it's time I buy an expensive drum.
 
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