You know when you see a guitarist performing and they always take a second to tune up. Sometimes it can take a little while depending on if that guitarist can find that note he’s trying to tune their guitar for. You wouldn’t think about it considering drums are just for keeping time, but drums much like a guitar get tuned as well. Stick around and ill tell you about drum tuning, and things that come along with it.
Tuning for an instrument is when you are trying to get that part of an instrument to make a certain note. Notes are made through the sound of vibration, no matter what instrument that may be. When you see the guitarist tuning up on stage, they are tightening or loosening that particular string in order for it to vibrate with just the right tension to hit the note they want. “Well, why the heck would a drum need to be tuned?” you may be saying, and I’m glad you asked.
The part of a drum you hit is known as the drum head. Drum heads need to be changed after so long depending on how beat up they really are, and changing them is quite the process. They’re held down by lug nuts all around the diameter of the drum like the snare drum to the right where the numbers are. Once loosened and the head is replaced with a new one, it’s time to start tightening them up again. Here’s where it gets interesting. In order to keep even tension across the drum head, you would tighten a quarter turn using a drum key on each lug nut, while going across from the one you started on and then following a star pattern. I know that sounds confusing, but the image to the right shows exactly what I mean. The less tight the lugs are around the drum the lower the drum sound will be.
Now, one thing you need to keep in mind is that all drums come in different sizes. The bigger the drum, the lower and deeper the sound. That means that your 14″ drum tuned as low as it can go probably won’t sound exactly like your 18″ when it’s tuned high, but they could be the same note. “whaaaaat? Notes on drums?”. Yeah, now is where the interesting gets more specific. Drums can be tuned to specific notes, and the way to do this isn’t any different than what we’ve talked about, just a little more attention to detail. Notice that picture up above again, see how the guy tuning is holding that drum stick near the lug? When you tighten each lug on the drum, you also tap on the drum head close to the lug a few times to see how it sounds. By doing this you can get a clear note through the sound of each tap. If each lug is tightened exactly the same, then your drum will be tuned to a note.
One of the challenges about this, however, is that drums naturally come out of tune after they’ve been hit so many times cause of all the vibration that is occurring loosening those lugs. This makes keeping a drum at a certain note all the time a little frustrating. Luckily there are ways drummers can keep their desired sound with the help of tuners like the one below.
Drum tuners like this one, read the amount of tension in the drum head beside the lug so that they can always read the same around the drum.
The last part of drum tuning is the difference between the drum heads. There is a batter head which is the one that gets hit, and there is a resonance head on the bottom. The way a drummer’s resonance or reso head is tuned will be different from one drummer to the next, it just depends on what they want to sound like. But, it can get really interesting, you can have two people with the same drums, batter heads tuned exactly the same, but if one drummer’s reso heads are tuned higher you’d never know they’re the same drums.
Let me know if you have any little drum tuning tips or quirks you like to do. Or, have you ever tuned drums before? If you like my post, feel free to comment on it and share it with friends or family. If you want to see more by me and stay up to date on my blog follow me for another day in the life of music and media.