How To Tune Drums at Drum-Tuning.com
Tuning drums is a chore for most drummers. I have never heard a drummer say, “I can’t wait to get home and tune my drums, boy am I ever excited to do that.” I am sure for most drummers is ranks right up there with taking out the trash. But the fact is, is that if you never took out the trash, your house would stink. Same goes for tuning, if you never tune your drums, they won’t sound good.
Here is a basic guide that will teach you how to tune your drums. Follow this step by step and your drums should be sounding great!
Step One:
Loosen all tension rods, do not take them off the drum; just make sure they are loose so that you can tighten them by hand.
Step Two:
Hand tighten all the tension rods that you loosened. I know this may sound like digging a hole and filling it in again but you will see the value when we’re finished. Make sure you tighten them as much as possible with your hands.
Step Three:
Using the diagram below, follow these steps.
Using your drum key we can start tuning the drums. Start on “A” and make one full turn with your drum key, then move across to “B” and do the same. When tuning drums, you never want to move side to side, as you develop an uneven tension on one side of the drum first making it harder to keep them even as you continue around the other side of the drum. With that said, continue on with “E” or “D.”
Some drums have more than 6 tension rods such as floor toms or bass drums. Follow the same steps with those drums, all you will be doing is adding in more letters.
Step Four:
Now we have to tune your resonant head. This is the head on the bottom of the drum. We are going to follow all the same steps as tuning your batter head. You will want to bottom head around the same tension and pitch as your batter head.
Step Five:
Mount your drum on your kit and start rocking!
No matter what you are going to have to make small adjustments here and there. Once you get all your drums evenly tuned, you will have to tune them so they sound good together. You want to make sure there is a large enough pitch difference in your toms as there is no point in having two of the same sounding drums on your kit unless it is 2 bass drums.
Just remember that drum tuning is subjective, there is no one right way to do it. I have tuned my drums in ways that other people didn’t like. I am sure you will come across situations like that as well.
Here is a video off of Youtube demonstrating how to tune your drums.
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