Tuning Drums

So...for the first several years I owned drums I never tuned them. The first time it ever came up was when we recorded the SPB album. The engineer came over to my house to track drums and played them and then had to tune them all. Looking back, he could not have possibly done a thorough job given the amount of time he spent...but it was still the most that had happened to those drums since I bought them (though I HAD replaced all of the heads, so I must have done SOME kind of tuning). Anyway...I proceeded not to touch them again for over a year after that. I remember Diaper Daniels from Cribshitter commenting that he always thought it was hilarious how low I had my snare tuned...like I was doing that on purpose, for effect. Ha.

So when I started taking lessons with EN we talked a bit about tuning and I brought a snare in and he gave me the basics. I bought a Drum Dial and a ratching key. All good stuff. But I still didn't really know what I was doing in terms of sound. When you ask someone about tuning drums the answer is ALWAYS "it's just personal preference." Well what the hell does that mean?

So after being unhappy with my sound both at the Wisco and at Legends, I started thinking that I ought to take my kit to Drums N Moore and have him teach me to tune it. Then, daunted by this prospect and realizing how stupid I was being, I took my extra 12" black tom (which I don't use) and sat down with it and screwed around. Here's what I learned.

1) When the top head is tighter than the bottom, the sound is sharp and "choked". I never really understood what "choked" meant before...but having heard it now I do. This is how my drums had generally been tuned because I was going by the settings recommended in the brochure that came with my Drum Dial. This was the sound quality I'd been hearing and not liking. Restrained. Not boomy. Not ringing out. Not full. Just dead sounding. Focused, but dead. This seems like the perfect kind of sound for a snare drum...but not what I wanted from my toms.

2) When the top head is looser than the bottom, the sound is flappy. Unfocused. Generally just not good to my ear.

3) When the top head is about the same tension as the bottom, the sound booms. It is full and loud. This is the sound I was looking for from my toms.

4) Generally I had tended to tune toms in the lower range, where sometimes there was even a loose lug still. This makes the tuning hard to control. So now I think it is best to start with all lugs finger tight plus perhaps a quarter turn at least...then tune up from there.

5) I'll have to double check my notes, but I think I have the 12" at 75, the 13" at 73, and the 16" at 70 or so. My maple snare I tuned to 82 on bottom and 88 on top. I'm still figuring out the steel snare. It is hard to make it sound good.

6) The bass drum is tough to tune. I'm still figuring it out. I got the black kit to sound pretty good with equal tension on resonant and batter. I think around 75. I don't have much muffling in this drum and it has a powerstroke 3 on the batter. The red bass drum I still can't get. 75 was way too tight...it made my leg hurt to play it at that high of tension. I think I've got it down to more like 65 now. This drum has more muffling and an old coated emperor batter head. With both bass drums it was really hard to get the lugs to all be at the same tension. I don't know if the drums are warped or if the heads don't sit flush or if the port causes uneven tension.

After I tuned the black kit I thought I had it all figured out...but the red kit didn't sound good at the same settings and I'm having to mess with the black one more.