How to Tune the Drums

Video Transcript

Hi! My name is Ken Marcou and I’m going to talk a little bit about tuning drums. The drums have a top and a bottom head which need to resonate together in a harmonist way, this is more than anything trial and error and just kind of hitting it till it’s done good to be quiet honest but there are lugs that go around the drum, these are lugs here every drum has them and what they do is they hold the drum head which is this thing right here…this is what you’ll actually hit. The top drum head is called a batter head, the bottom drum head underneath the drum is called a resonant head, both of them resonate and they have to resonate together to get a good sound in drum. To do that the way I typically do it is first thing I do is tune the top head and I’ll mute the bottom head with my hand, it’s not a perfect science but it works, from here I hit each one of the lug locations which you know basically I hit right in front of each one of the lugs and you try to get each one sounding more less the same, so like so…now more or less each one of those hits were about the same tone there were some with differences though and from there I would take my drum key which I have on my key chain which is attached to me at all times believe it or not and this is what the drum key looks like, more less you use this to manipulate the lug screw which is on the drum and you can tighten it or loosen it depending on if that lug location is too high or too low in pitch. If it’s too low in pitch you want to tighten the lug so that the pitch goes up, if it’s too high in pitch you want to loosen the lug location so that pitch goes down, I’ll demonstrate that here if I hit this location…and then I loosen it…you can hear the pitch change pretty substantially that’s just one lug location, so usually you want to do this very suddenly by turning each lug location very suddenly, now I’m going to pitch this back up to where it was generally…and from here I want to go around the whole drum and match all the pitches and from there you’d want to do that on the bottom head and make sure each tone of each head works together so that the drum in the end sounds nice, that’s how you tune your drums in a nutshell. .

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