How to Tune a Drum Set

Video Transcript

"Alright, so we're going to talk about tuning a drum kit. The of tuning a drum kit starts with tuning of individual drums, so you're going to want to make sure that you get the drums tuned well and you can tune them in relation to each other. So, first thing you want to do is, when you're putting on the drum heads, tune them, and get the head in tune with itself. So, when you put on the drumhead for the first time, get all your lugs loosely on there, and the head settled, and then of course it'll be very, very loose. You just want your lugs on there, just tighten them by hand to start out with, just so that they're not severely loose around your drum. And then once you have that done, then you're ready to go to the next step, which is, you want to get these wrinkles smoothed out. So what I always do, I always make a fist and press down firmly but not too hard on the drumhead, and you'll see the wrinkles around your fist there, and that's what you're going to try to smooth out. You're just going to want to try to tighten the lugs enough to get rid of those wrinkles at first, and then you can tune from there. So you kind of want to think of this like you're changing a car tire almost, you want to start with one lug, and then go across directly to the next one, and then you come back to the other side and go clockwise one lug, and then back directly to the next one, and repeat that pattern until you've gone all the way around. So we're going to start here on this lug, and then we're going to turn just enough so that the wrinkles disappear, that's pretty good right there, and go directly across to the next one, turn until the wrinkles disappear, come back, go clockwise one, turn them until the wrinkles are gone, and that's the start of getting a drumhead tuned. So then, to get the drumhead in tune with itself like we said, you want to check the tension around the different parts of the drums, like that, you can just do it by ear. You can kind of hear if you hit the drum at the different points of the drum, about an inch or so in from the rim, you can tell by the pitch of the drum how the tension is on the different parts of the drum heads, so we'll start here. Sounds to me like this one is a little bit tighter, so we'll loosen this one a little bit, it's arbitrary whether you want to tighten this or loosen this one. That one just sound off with the rest of them. I'm going to say it's a little bit tight, so we're going to loosen it. The sound that you want is going to be the sound that's right, as long as you're not damaging your equipment. So we saw right there, once we got the drum in tune with itself, I didn't like where the pitch was, I was going to bring it down. If that's the pitch you wanted, great, that was right right there. So right now we've got a better sounding drum in my opinion, better sounding rack top."