Tuning

There are a couple of things we need to go over before we jump into each individual drum.  As far as terminology goes, a few things can be confusing if you haven’t been into tuning drums before.  The batter head is the head you beat on.  The resonant head is the bottom head on the snare and toms, whereas the kick drum’s resonant head is the one furthest away from you.  Tension ranges are also important to note.  Lower pitched sounds are attributed to lower tuning tensions and, as you expect, higher pitched sounds are caused by a higher tension.  The same goes for medium tensions.

Low range is anywhere from loose screws to 1.5 drum key turns
Medium range is anywhere from 1.5 drum key turns to 3 key turns
High range is 4 drum key turns and up

A common reference for our style of tuning is what’s called “finger tight tension” or “FTT.”  When you put a drum head on the drum and tighten the lug screws onto the drum, start with your fingers, tightening the lugs as tight as you can get them before using a drum key.  For most cases, you will tighten each drum lug in a star pattern depending on how many lugs your drum has.  This evenly distributes the torque and tension across the drum shell.  The following diagrams displays the pattern by numbers:

For the snare drum and toms, after they’re at FTT, you’ll bring each lug up in tension with the turn of the drum key to your desired pitch.  Use your drum stick and tap around the edge of the drum head by each lug to hear the pitch in that specific area.  Try to get all of the lugs in tune with each other’s pitch.

Here’s a helpful tip to save you some time: On the 10 lug diagram, if you tune lug 1 up a full turn, lugs 2, 6, and 7 will be affected by lug 1’s tension change.  This is because as the pressure increases downwards on the drum at lug 1, it causes the rim to lift up and create pressure on lug 2 since it is screwed in.  This can be called sympathetic tension.  Just remember that one little turn of a lug has a major effect on the tone of each drum, especially floor toms.

Kick

Before you put both drumheads on, you’ll want to make sure there is some sort of muffling inside the actual drum resting on the bottom.  This can be in the form of a pillow, foam, blanket, or large sweater.  You’ll need to experiment with different positions of this muffling to determine what type of sound you want.  For most purposes, you’ll want the muffling touching the front head about 10% of the way up the drum and not touching the batter head at all.

The front and the batter will be slightly above FTT.  After both heads are at FTT, set the drum down batter side up.  Apply pressure in the center of the drum with your palm and make sure each lug is at FTT.  You can even bring each lug up 0.5-1 key turns.

Snare

Turn the snares off when trying to find the general tension/pitch range you want with the drum, and then turn them on when you’ve got the tuning you like.  Starting with the resonant head, you’ll want to tune it up to a medium to high tuning tension.  For most of our style, the medium tension will serve you very well.  For the batter head, a low to medium tuning range is going to be the best bet for the style and song selections we have.

We typically make our own “O-ring” out of an old drumhead and put it on top to dampen and thicken up the sound of the snare.  We basically carve out an “O” from an old head, about 1.5” thick and leave the metal rim off.

The actual snare wire tension can vary song to song, giving you slightly different tones in each song.  We typically go for looser snare setting, but not rattling. Your softest notes should gain snare response and your loudest notes should not have the snares rattling for more than half a second after the initial hit.

Toms

For toms, you can go with an even tuning between both top and bottom heads, meaning they can be the same pitch.  Some people prefer a pitch bend sound, in which case the bottom head is tuned tight and the top head is considerably looser than the bottom.  Rack toms normally sound good between 1.5-2 turns above FTT, while floor toms don’t take much tension past FTT to achieve good tone.