How to Make a Bass Drum Pillow

Video Transcript

"How to make a bass drum pillow. To make a bass drum pillow can be simple but there are some nuances that you're going to want to know to make it work right. So, what we've got here is we've got out bass drum taken apart. I have a pillow, the head for the front of the bass drum, the hoop for the front of the bass drum, the lugs, and a basic drum key. So, to use this as a bass drum pillow there's a few things you'll need to know. Number one is that where you put it is the most important thing. You can use this type of pillow. You can buy something called a bass drum pillow but it's basically the same thing and it's a lot more expensive. This will work just as well if you use it right. First thing we want to do is really position this the right place inside of the bass drum. There's a few different ways we can do this. One way is to put the pillow like this. As you can see it's just resting up against the batter head and it would just barely be touching the front head once we put it in. This is going to give you minimal muffling and it's going to sound the most open. It will ring the most. The other way to do this is to move it forward so that it's not really on the batter head but it will be on the front head once we put it in. The other alternative is to have it this way. This way you're really going to get the most muffling as you can see half of the batter head is being touched by the pillow. That's really going to muffle it quite a bit. Of course you can also have it up this way. You can choose what sounds best. Right now we're going to have it like this which is going to give us some muffling on the batter head and a little bit of muffling on the resident head. Now we'll go ahead and put it back together. Now lets go ahead and put this back together. So first, once you've got your pillow placed exactly where you want it, put the resident head back on. Then, take your hoop and put that back on. Now, we'll start putting in the lugs and we'll just hand tighten them for the time being just so that they stay on. After you've hand tightened all the lugs you can go back through and in a star pattern just tighten them a little bit more. Once that's done you've got your bass drum pillow in and you've got a more muffled drum sound."