Just like the description - the sound is soft and pretty low volume. It's calm, not extremely dynamic and you can't get a huge numbers of sound from it, but what it does, it does very well. Strong point is that this shaker records very well. You don't need ear-splitting shaker when you record, quite the contrary. You want something soft and compressed, which will sit nicely in the mix and not create a huge bump in your upper registers. This shaker's it.