Tuning your drums. The Drum Tuning Bible.
I found a great site this week with a very comprehensive guide to tuning drums. It is called the Drum Tuning Bible and is available to read online or download for free. It is quite a long read but well worth it to gain a better understanding of your instrument and how to get the best out of it.
A short excerpt from the site is included below.
“Ask any well respected producer what makes a great song and most will tell you a good drummer is an essential ingredient. Beginners should know that it is far more important to tune well and play steady than it is play as many notes as possible, and still sound bad. Well respected engineers will say that if the drummer can tune and play proficiently, recording a drum sound takes care of itself. So don’t ever sell yourself short as an important ingredient in the scheme of things. Drummers need to know a lot about how sound works.
Drummers need to be able to hear the tonal differences in pitch and timbre to tune. Some people just cannot hear these changes. For those people, I recommend you spend a few dollars and buy what’s called “Ear Training” software. This is available for your computer and will teach almost everyone how to hear pitch changes. This guide will not.
The musical ability of someone playing drums is not synonymous with an ability to technically understand it, nor does it mean you can tune a drum, or explain how to tune a drum. Having actually shopped for new kits, snare drums, heads, etc., at many local shops in the Midwest, and having frequented chain stores and various forums on the internet, there is a major stream of misinformation being transmitted at all age and skill levels. This Drum Tuning Bible is my attempt to give you factual information.
I cannot emphasize enough that it takes work to tune. This guide does not say, “Put 2 turns on one side and then a few more on the other side”. This goes into great detail about the drum, its construction as well as tuning in an attempt to teach those who really want to understand what their entire drum set can do, how to go about figuring that out and put it into practice. It requires time, patience, thinking and work.
You must plan on at least 3 hours, if not more, on each drum in your kit to truly understand how it responds to tuning and how you respond to tuning.
It will get substantially shorter if you understand what to expect. And therein is the shortcut to tuning and great sound, knowing what to expect. So if you spend the time to read the entire “bible”, it should also aid you in choosing and tuning a drum set to fulfill your dreams.
These are the Essential Concepts:
1. The interval between drums is more important than many realize and the size of both the diameter and the depth are key to getting even resonance and the desired incremental notes between drums. Diameter determines the note of the drum, depth influences articulation and resonance. See “Shell Depth versus Diameter”
2. The tiniest of movements on the tuning lug “will” make huge differences in pitch and resonance of the drum, more so with a rigid hoop, such as cast. Tweaks of the lugs on the resonant side are more prone to raising pitch than are ones on the batter side. One simple rule to remember (assuming the drum is well tuned to begin with) is “Batter for feel, resonant for pitch”. See “Zones”
3. Tuning that works for a small venue will not likely work as well for a large venue. You have to consider what component of your sound will carry through to the audience. What does the audience hear? Is it the batter side via a microphone, or is it the resonant side via an acoustic set? Which leads too…
4. All drums sound different at 0, 15, 50, 150 foot or differing distances. It’s a sound wave/reflection thing. So what sounds good to the drummer while playing may be terrible to the audience, in whatever forms the audience takes. It’s important to go out and listen to what your kit sounds like while the other instruments are playing. Move around and make head selections and tunings accordingly. A higher pitch enables the drum to carry more, lower pitches less so.”
Go and read the whole thing here.
Technorati Tags: tuning drums, drummer, drums, music, Drum Tuning Bible
January 29th, 2007 at 10:47 am
[...] One of the most common questions I am asked as a drum teacher is on tuning a drum set. It’s not like tuning a guitar where it’s either right or wrong. Drum tuning is very much up to the individual and how they think it should sound. However, there are some basic steps you should follow to make the whole process much easier. Here is a brief article on the basics of tuning drums by Thaddeus Johnson. For a more advanced explanation you might want to look over our previous article, Tuning Your Drums - The Drum Tuning Bible. [...]
October 30th, 2007 at 12:19 pm
I am a guitar plyer and a steel guitar player for more than 35 years I have run alot of bands and tuing is a must especially using steel guitar and two fiddles which is three fretless instruments and the harmonics have to be right on.
I have taught many drummers how to play jazz and western swing and country music.
There is a musicial alaphabet tuning for drums that you use a strobe tuner and get all the drums perfect. I have that info.
I have contacted numerious drum sites and there all wrong. sample the top of the snare is tuned to an E note and the bottom head is tuned to an F note you also tune the toms and kick drums depending on the size of heads you have. Need more info contact me.
Ernie Dunlap
erniedunlap@gmail.com