How to Tune a Conga

Video Transcript

"RYAN LARSON: Now we're going to talk about tuning our congas. Most congas you'll get will have the head already on them and they'll be evenly tuned. And what I mean by evenly tuned is all the brackets will be tuned to the same tension. Now, if you're going to put a new head on, what you want to do is put the head on and put this over and bracket these in so they're loose and then tighten by hand each nut. And you want to tighten it until you can't tighten it anymore by hand. And you want to go from one side of the conga to the other. So, tighten this one and then tighten one over here and tighten one over here and over here and vice versa. And just go around the instrument and get them tight just by hand first. And then once you have it by hand, you should get a slight sound. It probably won't sound good out of the instrument. And then what you want to do is take your tuning wrench which is usually provided as well or it's usually just a standard wrench you can find that fits on here. And you want to tune each one counter-clockwise, just one notch going around in a circle until it gets to the sound you want. A lot of conga players like to tighten it as high as they go. Especially if you're playing with a band, you want that high pitch sound to cut through the whole band. And you don't really want to be playing a lot of bass notes because you have a bass player and you're going to have a drummer as well. So, you just want to have this nice--and just cut through. So--but if you're playing by yourself and you want to get some low notes, you can loosen it up and you'll get some nice sounds out of the instrument. So, now we're going to go through and show you some more on the congas."