My mom called me the other day, clearly frustrated that a friend of hers had helped her set up her drums with new heads, but had failed to tune them for her. When she expressed to him that she didn’t feel confident enough to tune them properly, he said “just tune them how you like them.”
This is what everyone tells you to do when you’re tuning your drums! In my opinion, it’s a bit frustrating to hear, as a beginner, because both me and my mom didn’t really know what to do with that suggestion. And no one seems to even acknowledge that tuning drums is confusing and frustrating as hell for the beginner.
I’ve overcome a bit of that frustration and confusion recently so this post is to share what helped me. I’ll go over tips to help focus your energies, but in a nutshell, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s hard to get good advice on how to tune a drum because it’s just impossible for other people to explain to you how to listen to a drum, and listening is about 95% of tuning.
This is something you’ll have to learn on your own, and it’s going to take practice, patience, impatience, frustration, and just a whole lot of experimentation. As Gavin Harrison says, tuning drums is a ‘black art’.
For the following, I’m going to assume you’ve already figured out how to remove/loosen/tighten a drumhead by turning the tension rods holding it in place using the appropriate drum key (standard or slotted). I assume you’re at the point of “I’ve tried to learn how to tune my drums by reading/watching tutorials and asking my teacher, but my drums still sound like dookie.”
Tip: Drums have a pitch, but only sort of
Each time you strike a drum, it produces many, many, many pitches. There’s pitches from the shell, from the hardware, from the resonant chamber between the two heads (I’ll call that the boom), from the rim. But there’s going to be a lowest pitch. This is the drum’s fundamental frequency, the boom.
Sort of. I say sort of, because this frequency depends not only on how both drum heads are tuned and the drum’s diameter, but also on how hard you hit the drum, which changes every time you hit just a bit. Hitting it harder will tend to raise the pitch.
What fundamental frequency do you want? Well, you probably shouldn’t worry too much about it until after you learn how to tune a single drum to *a* pitch.
But if you do feel curious, one thing drummers do to find the ‘ideal’ fundamental frequency is to take both drumheads off, hold the drum’s hardware with one hand to where the drum just hangs there, and tap the side of the drum with your knuckle.
What’s the lowest pitch you hear? Getting the boom to that pitch is your goal. But wait…do you even hear a pitch?!
Tip: Learn how to listen
What if you can’t even tell what pitch you hear when you bang your drum?! All you hear is a thud or a ding or a pop! I mean, there’s sort of a pitch, but you can’t really tell what it is. And now that you’ve tried to figure it out for 2 minutes, you’re completely disoriented.
Don’t panic. Making sense of the pitches you hear from every part of a drum is a skill that you can develop over time. How? By trying to do it every day.
Spend a couple minutes each day banging on various surfaces in your house, or on a headless drum, or on a drum with a head, and just listen to what you hear. You’ll hear a lot of pitches, maybe, or maybe just one. Maybe you can hum one of the pitches, or a pitch that’s an octave higher or lower.
If you can’t do that, just practice singing a pitch that is harmonious with the tone you hear. This pitch is probably going to be part of the harmonic spectrum of the loudest of the pitch you’re hearing. That’s because you will never actually be hearing a single pitch. You’ll be hearing many pitches that are all on the harmonic spectrum of the lowest pitch you hear. So if your singing sounds ‘right’, you’re probably singing one of these pitches (possibly in a different octave).
The harmonic spectrum:
If you’ve never heard of the harmonic spectrum of a pitch, it might actually help with drum tuning to expose yourself to the idea of it. I recommend this excellent article, which explains the harmonic spectrum using the singer Anna-Marie Hefele’s epic video about polyphonic singing. If you’re like me, you’ve already encountered that video one night down the Youtube rabbit hole, but it’s an amazing video.
Fortunately, you don’t need to be able to be able to sing like Anna-Maria does, but you’re gonna be tuning your drum to manipulate overtones, similar to how she tunes her vocal tract. So it’s good to be able to recognize overtones when you hear them. Eventually you’ll be able to tell whether you’re singing an overtone or the fundamental (lowest) pitch.
Tip: Your tension rods control the pitch, but they need to ‘agree’ with each other
The overtones from produced by the tension in each rod are distinct from the overall pitch of the drum’s ‘boom’, but they also need to tuned.
To see what I mean, grab a drum and take off the resonant head, leaving only the batter head on (for simplicity’s sake – it probably doesn’t matter so much. But use a tom so you don’t have to hear the snare wires). Put your drum on your rug and grab a stick and drum key. If you can’t hear a tone when you beat the batter head, tighten all the tension rods to where you hear a tone instead of just a thud.
Tap very gently on your drumhead near a tension rod, so that you can hear a high-pitched tone from that individual rod. It might help to gently dampen the center of the drumhead, so that the fundamental frequency doesn’t overpower that ringing tone controlled by the rod.
Now tap near another tension rod. You might notice that…well, you can also hear the ring from the first tension rod, but now there’s another another ring that dominates. Perhaps this tone is higher or lower than the first ring. If you’re lucky, it’s the same. That’s when the tension rods ‘agree’.
Now go around to all your other rods. If all the tension rods on both heads agree, you’re going to get the cleanest tone (which may or may not be what you want). But this is not your situation right now. Odds are you’re gonna find one or more tension rods that produce a nasty clash with the first tension rod!
Ok, now here’s for each training: tune all the rods to where they make the drum ring with the same tone as the first tension rod, more or less.
This is a skill that gets easier with time. But you should practice it: if the tone near the rod sounds flat, tighten it a bit. If it sounds sharp, loosen it a bit. This can take quite a while if you’ve never done it before, so…get your practicing done first.
Now that you’ve made the tension rods agree, bang on the drum. Notice that the pitch of the drum has changed? But what if you liked the old pitch! Now you have to tune all the rods BACK DOWN to get that pitch AND they agree….omg.
That’s one reason it’s so hard to tune a drum: correcting a clashing tension rod changes the pitch of the entire head.
Tip: Fixing the ‘worst’ tension rod impacts the pitch of the drum the most
Detune your drum by loosening all the rods, then tighten them back up to where the drum produces a pitch once more.
Find the tension rod that stands out as producing the most wrong pitch: do this by very gently and quickly tapping the entire perimeter of the drumhead and finding where it seems the pitch is most raised or most lowered. That will be by the offending rod.
If this rod sounds lower-pitched than the others, tightening it a bit will dramatically alter the pitch of the entire drum. Analogously, if the rod is creating a tone that’s too high, loosening it just a little will dramatically lower the pitch of the drum.
Somehow, tightening an already tight rod won’t raise the pitch so dramatically. Same with loosening an already loose rod.
Tip: Tuning one head affects the other head
What exactly do I mean by that?
If you’ve got a rack tom with batter and resonant heads and you tighten the resonant head, you’re gonna get a higher pitch when you beat the batter head.
This was the single most confusing thing to me, to tell you the truth. Everyone talks about ‘tune the resonant head to a lower pitch than the batter head to get the boing’, but when I tried that, the pitch of the batter head changed!!! So what do they mean by pretending that the batter and resonant heads can be tuned separately?
They mean to sit your drum down on a rug or similar surface, tune the resonant head to a pretty pitch, then turn the drum over and tune the batter head to a pretty pitch.
The problem with this approach, for beginners, is that once you take your drum off the floor and let it hang in your hand, your drum now produces a completely different pitch!!! WHAT JUST HAPPENED?!
Tip: Tune your batter head when your drum is already in place on your kit
Hahaha, wouldn’t you like to understand what just happened when you picked your drum up? I would too.
You’ll notice a lower pitch when it’s hanging in your hand. That’s because now the drum shell, the resonant chamber between the two drumheads and the other opposing rim can now produce their pitches at full volume. So you can hear the awesome ‘boom’ of the drum. Before, the rug was dampening this sound.
At first I thought that maybe sitting down the drum on the floor suppresses the ‘boom’, but that the rim is ringing at one of the overtones of this frequency. That would mean that you’re actually only tuning the higher harmonics of the boom when you adjust the tension rods on a head. That makes sense, because the pitch of the drum increases when you tighten all the rods on one of the heads….
But that can’t be the WHOLE story, because when you change the frequency of resonating chamber of the drum (in place on your kit) by loosening/tightening the head on one rim, the opposing rim still rings at the same pitch as before, but boom of the drum changes in pitch.
So what do you do? You have 4-5 drums to tune and other things to do! Like practice.
I just tune the resonant head how I want it (to some harmonic of the drum shell), then tune the batter head after I situation the drum at the kit.
Tune the batter head to where the rim sounds harmonious with the resonant rim. Or try to, give up for the day, and try again tomorrow.
The important thing is to understand that you’re gonna get better at tuning the more you try, and not to give up entirely!
Tip: Tuning your kit is 10x harder than tuning a single drum
Say you’ve got each individual drum to where the resonant head agrees with the batter head and each drum’s boom is at the drum shell’s naturally resonant frequency when you tap it with your knuckle.
It took several months of practice to be able to do this quickly, and you think you’re awesome, but when you assemble these drums into a kit and start playing, and it sounds horrible!
Why?
Say you’ve got four drums: snare, rack tom, floor tom, bass. That means you’ve got 12 really loud pitches that all could be ringing together: 3 from each drum (the shell and the two rims).
Caveat: lot of people like tuning their bass drum beater head pretty floppy and putting a pillow in it, so you might not have to worry too much about a tone from the bass drum if you do that.
The point is, you’ve got to tune your drums to work together well.
What a lot of drummers do is to tune their drums to a chord. The bigger the diameter of the drum, the lower pitch you should tune it to.
For example, my bass drum shell resonates at a very low ‘A’. It’s so low, I can’t even tell you what octave it’s in, I just know that when I sing an A in any octave when I’m tapping the drum, it sounds ‘right’.
So I tune the bass drum to an A.
I lucked out and my floor tom and rack tom shells each resonate to different notes in an A major chord: A, C#, and E.
That’s because my drums are from a good kit. The best kits have drums that are matched together based on the resonant frequencies of their shells, and I lucked out and got this 50 year old Sonor Champion kit from a friend of mine who has an excellent ear – this used to be his touring kit.
Unfortunately, my snare doesn’t match the rest of my kit. It’s actually a great drum, though. My brother-in-law found it, a Pearl piccolo snare, ON THE SIDE OF THE ROAD, and gave it to me when I started playing! But the drum I love so much has resonant frequency of B flat, not even in the right key.
But that’s fine, this does not have to be perfect, especially when you’re just a beginner. No one is expecting you or me to sound like Simon Phillips.
I just tuned my B flat snare to an A 2 octaves above my bass drum, and it still sounds pretty good!
I hope you find that reading this helps you eventually make sense of drum tuning!