What Is Drum Tuning? « Make Drum Work . Com

8Dec/090

What Is Drum Tuning?

paint-plate

Imagine. You're standing in front of a blank canvas.

You've been told to paint your life's masterpiece. But there's a problem: You've only been given these 6 colours.

If you're a skilled colour mixer then you should be able to mix nearly all other colours from that small selection. So you'll have no problem with your painting. If you're not a skilled colour mixer then you're in trouble!

Now, I'm not much of a painter. In fact I can barely stay in the lines when I do a colouring book. So if I wanted to paint with the colour orange then I wouldn't be able to mix it from these colours. I'd have to keep it simple and use a tube of orange paint.

What's this got to do with drum tuning?

When you hit your drum head you will hear a note or a collection of notes come from it. This is the "colour" that you are painting with. The sound you are hearing from your drum head is made up of the sounds coming from each of the lugs on your drum. These are the base colours that you are mixing to get your final colour. Are you with me?

The note coming out of your drum head is created by the notes at each of the lugs on your drum.

In drum tuning you are trying to get the purest note coming out of your drum head. So you need to make sure you have the same note at each of the lugs on your drum. It's like me with the orange paint. What's the simplest way to mix orange from 6 or more other colours? Make sure that each of the other colours are orange to begin with!

How do you get the same note at each lug?

This is where it starts to get difficult! These notes are created by the tension of the drum head at the lug. So to get the same note at each lug, you need to get the same tension. It took me a long time to figure out how to do this well so don't worry if you're a little unsure about it. I'm going to take you through the whole process and show you how it applies to each of the drums on your kit.