Drum Tuning - Advanced

2009-08-17T11:30:00.000-07:00

Pitch and Tone

Tuning drums is all about striking a balance between a good tone and a good pitch that blends in well with the music around it. It helps to think of the pitch you want to achieve when you are tuning the back skins on the drums and to think of tone on the front skins.

A good standard sound would use equal tuning where all your drums have similar relative tensions on all the back skins and also similar relative tensions on all the front skins. The drum shells are different sizes they will all have different pitches and tones and their relative tensions give continuity, so in theory each drum should compliment each other.

Advanced drum tuning is all about finding your own sound so perhaps you would prefer the high toms to be very high in pitch and tone and in contrast very low on the floor toms. Experiment using the tips you learn here to find your unique sound.

Drum Tuning

If you have never tuned drums before, read this article on how to tune drums.

Starting with your bass drum, tune the backs of your drums to a pitch you think sounds good. Tune the drums in order of lowest drum first (e.g. bass drum, floor tom, mid tom, high tom, snare).

Tune the front of your skins in a similar way to the backs, but this time, focus on the tonal qualities of the drum. It would help to think in terms of bass mid and treble.

Bass Drum tuning

We would recommend tuning the back of the bass drum so it is quite slack, but not so slack that it makes a horrible vibrating noise or that the rim falls off when you try to pick it up.

Snare Drum Tuning

The snare is a unique entity to the other drums because it needs to cut through the music like no other. For a good sound that suits all styles, tune the front of the snare very tight, so when you press the skin it feels like a well inflated ball or tyre.

Then tune the back for a pitch that suits you. Furthermore, adjust the snare wires to suit you. We recommend tapping very lightly in the middle of the snare and adjusting the wires to a position that if they were loosened any more, the snare sound would disappear.

Fine Tuning

If transporting your drums, they may go out of tune. Over time they will go out of tune anyway and if there are big changes in the surrounding temperature, they will definitely go out of tune.

If possible, fine tune your drums before every show.

Make time to tune your drums before recording them and fine tune your drums when you get to the studio.

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Practise to drum loops

2009-08-13T01:38:00.000-07:00

Drum Programming can open many doors for your practise schedules and also your band. Drummers that can write or read music and have a good knowledge of subdivisions may find this easier than others.

Get a copy of Cubase, Pro Tools or even Fruity Loops, anything that does programmable midi drums, and start programming in your drum beats that you play in your band.

Because the midi drums are perfectly in time with a metranome, they are the perfect practise tool for you and your band mates for use at their leisure. Export an audio file as a 128kbps mp3 with a one bar count in at the start for each of your drum songs and then email it to your band mates. The bass player in particular should find this very helpful indeed.

There so many other benefits of programming midi drums too:

Try out different speeds instantly by changing the bpm
It's a great writing tool for new drum beats
Fine tune beats that aren't sounding as good as they did in your head
Useful as a guide for recording a demo or album
If you can't make a band practise, the rest of the band can still meet up and jam to the mp3s you sent them

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Drum Tuning - Advanced

Practise to drum loops