How to Loosen a Drum Head

Video Transcript

Hi, I'm Shaun Schaefer on behalf of Expert Village and today, I'm going to show you how to change a drum head and tune the drum. So in changing a drum head, the first thing you need to do is loosen the lugs. But before we do that, I want to point out some key components of our drum here. These little screw looking things, those are called the lugs. They go down into the socket there, and then you have, this is the rim. It goes all the way around the drum. And then this, the white part up here is the actual drum head. So as you can see we have eight lugs. Eight lugs all the way around this drum. So you got to loosen all the lugs and the only way you can do that is with your drum key. So let's get started. Now what I do, I usually just, it can be pretty tight. So I just loosen it to where it's pretty loose. I don't loosen it all the way. And what you want to do is you kind of want to do a star pattern. Notice I'm not, I just did this one. I'm not coming over here to do this one. I'm going to go all the way across the drum and I'm going to do this one. And just loosen that to where it's just real loose. Now after this one, you go back across the drum to this one right here. So we did this one, came across, now we're going back. We call this the star pattern and get used to that because that's how we're going to be tuning the drum later. So after that one go straight across the drum. We'll just loosen to where we could unscrew them with our fingers at the end here. Go back across, loosen. Go back across. See if you were to draw this pattern out, it would look kind of like a star. Back across, and one more over here. Now see you can hear the drum head collapse there, so it's pretty loose. If you want to take a look at the head, you can see that this is not in playing condition anymore. So let's take a look at what the next step is.

Watch these related videos

• 
  How to Loosen a Drum Head

  playlist Views: 845

• 
  Tighten Drum Lugs with the Star Pattern

  playlist Views: 1,089

• 
  How to Tighten Drum Lugs to the Threads

  playlist Views: 1,015

• 
  Tips on Changing & Tuning a Drum Head

  playlist Views: 1,172

• 
  How to Remove a Drum Rim

  playlist Views: 851

• 
  The Tuning Pattern of a Drum

  playlist Views: 1,894

Community Members who...

• Favorited this Video
• Rated This Video

Thumbs up or Thumbs down? Be the first to rate this video!

Top Tags