Drum Tuning Tips for Toms

Video Transcript

"Alright once again, I'm Jake Jorgenson, and I'm going to be showing you how to tune a tom. Basic tom tuning, and here we go. The first basic step in tuning: first, you want to loosen your lugs. Those are these right here. You're going to want to loosen these up, let's see, every single one. Actually, I'll show you the basic tuning first from a dead head, which is this right now. Just a dead head right now. So you loosen, first your one head. Now, what you do is you finger tighten, or just kind of, yeah, just kind of feel for when this catches the rim, when the actual lug hits the rim, and when it starts to tighten against the head and bring it in towards the drum. So you kind of feel, just kind of loosely, a lot of doing that. And once you kind of get it, kind of got that right now, you do it however tight you want it. I'm going to do about, let's see, these are two half turns. So we're going to do two half turns. And when you're tuning your drum, you go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. You do opposites, so you get equal tuning throughout the drum. Now that we've tightened them, we want to listen in. You bring your stick out about an inch or so from the beginning of the head. You bring your stick out and you just kind of - now, you want these all to be the same tightness, and you want to get perfect tightening. You listen in and whichever one sounds, whichever tuning you want, you base the rest of how you tighten those off of that one tuning. So I'm going to go off of this one. I like that pitch. And this one's a little lower, so I'm going to tighten it just a little bit. Just a little more. So those sound pretty much the same now. Usually lugs across from each other are going to sound the same. So this one I had to lower, so this one might have to need lowering too. Yeah. Those are pretty much sounding all the same right now, so I can just see. Double-check, make sure that's the pitch I want. You can base the pitch off of one lug, just however you want it, off of that thing. For the sound I'm kind of doing right now, it's going to be - it's going to have a lot of reverb, it's going to have a lot of overtone. It's good for like jazz kind of playing and let's see, more Latin-style drumming. And you want more overtone and a little less dampening, which is more on the rock side, and let's see. And also you want - not only base it off of how you want it to sound, but how you want your drum to - how you want your rebound off of your stick, how tight you want it, if you want it kind of a little more dead, getting those rolls in. And it's pretty much all up to you on how you want your sound quality."