How To Tune Your Drums

Tuning Your Bass Drum – Drum Lesson (DRUMEO)

hi I’m Jarrett Bob and today I’m going to show you exactly how I tune my bass drum now the reason I say show is because everyone Tunes their bass drum a little bit differently and some drummers

will say you must do it this way and some drummers I say you must do it this way but really we all have our own unique sound and we all do things a little bit differently so I’m not

necessarily going to teach you how to tune the bass drum I’m just going to show you how I tune mine so I hope that makes sense first of all you’ll notice here I’m using an Evans Emad drum head

now I’m gonna actually be replacing this drum head with the exact same head okay now an E mat is a 10 mil head 1 ply and it actually has an external interchangeable dampening system I hope

that made sense there which means it has these rings that you can put on the outside of the drum and I can choose to have this size of ring or I can choose to have a larger in okay I actually

don’t need this in here anymore because I’m gonna take this off into it alright and then you’ll notice on this head I also have an EQ patch and that’s just something to protect the head this one

was actually put on after I put this big dent in the head okay so I recommend getting one of those before you actually start to play the drum so for now I’m just going to show you exactly how I

take off the drum head I basically just take a drum key and do a quarter or half turn all the way around the drum alright this is just to get it to the point where the head becomes loose oh that the

tension rods become loose or tee rods what are we going to call them and then I can just take them off by hand all right now that I’ve loosened all that the tension rods I’m basically just

going to take them all off okay not everyone to do this but with the bass drum this is something that I like to do let’s take them all off the ground and actually take my rim off this on the

ground and then just remove the head okay there’s the old drum pad you can choose to do with those whatever you want all right so now that I got the drum head off I’m

just going to kind of make sure there’s no big chunks or anything on the outside edge you know some dust there you can do this with a cloth or whatever and this is always a good time to to polish your

drums so if you want to do that that’s totally fine for the sake of time and for sake of these videos I’m just to keep them kind of shorter I’m not going to actually polish my drums right now

all right so now I got this I’m just going to grab the other head so now what I’m gonna do is I’m going to make sure the Evans is right at the top and centered I’m so OCD when it comes to

this sort of thing okay mix that’s the top and centered now when doing the bass drum a lot of bass drums actually have a little a little piece of rubber on here and this is where the the bass drum

actually clamps to the rim and so you want to make sure that that stays at the bottom of the drum case so don’t put it at the top because then you’re going to be clamping your bass drum to the nice

lacquered part especially on expensive drums like this okay let’s now make sure that’s right on the bottom centered I usually look in between there’s two lugs here so if I just Center it in between

there I know that that’s where vitro’s going to sit and that’s where the pedal is actually going to clamp okay so there we go now as far as seating the drum head this is something we do this is

something I do with snare drums where I put my fist in the middle and actually stretch the drum head I’m not going to do that with the bass drum head I never really do some of you guys might say oh

that’s wrong you should do it that’s fine if you want to do it go ahead and end and do that so now I’m just going to put these all back top

all right and I’m just going to hand tighten them as tight as I can go just with my hands now it’s important you guys if you a lot of these have washers on their so you like a little plastic

washer here okay make sure that when you take off the drum you don’t ever lose any of this stuff okay this stuff is what what keeps the tension what holds attention and

it’s all kind of necessary to keep your drums in tune keep your drums down and the best okay so now I have all the tension rods and tighten I’m going to take my drum key and I’m just going to

move around the drum and I’m going to do around a half a turn on each one all right now with bass drum tuning you don’t necessarily want to always tuned to a tone like we do with toms or even

sometimes we do with our snare drum stuff we more want that kind of low-end thump or that OOP right and so we don’t you don’t want to just crank it up as tight as you can go you want it to have

a lot of flex so when you head it you when you hit it you don’t have this long sustain and we’re going to talk a little bit more about muffling as well when I actually put the resonant head on talk

about what we do to try to chop off the sustain or or how we actually want it to sound we don’t want it sound bowing unless you are you know specifically looking for that sound in some sort of

orchestral music or some sort of jazz band or something like that unless it requested that but for most pop music and for most music and studios or bands that you go and play with your going to

want sort of a specific just pop sound okay now this for me my experience this tension is a little bit loose still so I’m just going to go around the drum one more time

now another thing I wanted to mention guys is I’m a little bit old school a lot of people like to use like a Tama tension watch and that actually measures the tension of each tension rod so you

can always get the exact same tension so I can tune it here to like whatever it is 15 – in here – 15 here team kind of just like a tire pressure gauge but in this case I just tuned it to my ear if

it sounds good I like it and you know that might be old school you guys might want to try those tools and that’s totally cool for these applications I’m not gonna I’m not going to do that

another thing you guys might have problems with is you might get ripples around the drum and that is that could be any number of things the the bass drum hoop could be warped it could be

way tighter on one side and way looser on the other and there’s this it’s hard to actually tell you exactly what you need to do to get rid of that ripple but let’s say there were a ripple right here

you know and I and there was none over here what I would do is I would tune up this one and these two around it I was just cranked close up a little bit not a whole lot but just a little bit okay and

from here you guys that’s all I do you might you might want to tap and make sure that the tension is even and that the tone is even but for me that is all I do and that’s why I absolutely love

these drum heads so I’m going to flip the drum over I’m going to put on a new resonant head and then I’m going to show you how it sounds and tweak it and we can talk a little bit what about what

I’m doing there so now I’m ready to tune the resonant side of my bass drum I’m going to do the same thing that is at the batter side and just slowly loosen all the tension

rods okay so now that I have all the tension runs off I’m just going to remove the old drum heads all right and now you’re going to see so my muffling I have in here okay a black sheet a white

sheet this is kind of lighter fabric and then I have something called an Q pad now this is something that velcros on the inside of my bass drum and there’s Delco strips here and then this sits up

against the batter side of the head and I like it because the beater you know with hit right around here yeah on the bat on the opposite on the batter side and so it’s kind of provides really

really good controlled muffling you know every time I hit the drum this thing actually moves and so it probably pops off the head a little bit every single time so it gives a lot of

that body and a little bit of resonance okay so I’m just going to put that back in and these I’m going to show you what I’ll do with these actually should do that now okay so what I normally do is

because this drum was I’ve been moving it around and stuff it these have kind of gone all over the place on the drum but I’ll put it like that I’m just going to set this on the inside of the drum

okay and that’s what I do there and then this I’m going to show you once I actually put on the new Rezo head because this is actually going to sit on the resonant side now the resonant side

head I’m using is an EQ three Evans resonant head and this is a one ply seven mill drum head okay now it also has a ring an internal kind of dampening ring this is just to kind of control the

overtones because what I find happens with with the resonant heads is you sometimes get this kind of wofully sound you know I mean like every time you hit the drum and so I think this ring really

kind of helps control that now I do it just again I want this centered on the bottom okay on the batter side it was centered on the top tell me the centered on the bottom and like I said you guys

can always polish your drums at this time it’s great time to do that okay so put that on now let’s let the tea lights back on okay so this just fell out like I said about these let’s

make sure that we keep that washer on this now just like the batter side we’re going to hand tighten all these now I have all of the tension rods and tighten okay and even with this one I had to use

this thing because I guess the tension rod needs probably need some oil or something like that which is something I’d normally do because it was kind of sticking so I couldn’t actually do with

my hand so I just use the drum key now once I want to want to say about the resonant head is I like to tune it higher than the batter head and that’s fine that what I find is if it’s too

loose you kind of get that wofully sound that I was talking about earlier and so I like to tune it up a little bit higher get a little bit more tone out of the drum a little bit more body I find and

then I actually put this on the inside I’ll do it once once I set the drum down I put this on the inside and it sits against this side of the drum head and I just think it controls it really really

well it’s still the drum still has a lot of body a lot of tone and a ton of punch okay so now I got this hand tighten I’m going to go around tighten these up okay so that feels right for me now one

thing I’m noticing here is a little ripple obtained oh if you guys can see it in the cameras and this is something I talked about on the batter side because of the the external damping

system that the Emad comes with you don’t even really notice it and it’s never really an issue but on these single ply heads without any sort of external damping stuff on the outside

you sometimes will get these ripples now to get rid of that ripple here all I do is I’ll tighten this one a little bit and then tighten those around them there it’s gone okay so don’t have

there’s not like massive adjustments to fix a minor problem okay and that feels right for me now you can again go around the head and tap for me that’s not what I do with the bass drum stuff and you

guys you know haters might be hate and you guys might be so you guys might just can’t wait to comment and tell this guy how much he’s doing this wrong well listen to the drum does the drum sound

good or do you hate the sound of it and do you think it’s a result of poor tuning that that’s the reason why you hate the sound of it or do you just don’t like the way that I like to make

my drum sound or the way that my whole drumset sounds in that case okay and so for me it’s just personal preference that’s just the way I do it okay so that sounds good now I’m going to take this

drum put it down here and now you guys will remember that I have that sheet on the inside kind of it’s laying in the bottom of the drum okay up against that Emad Pat okay so now I’m going to put

this on the inside of drum now this is a five inch hole cut into the side of this and a lot of drum heads don’t necessarily come with this hole I’d recommend getting it sound guys are

going to love you way easier to Mike and I find it’s just easier to to muffle and do stuff like that so just be very careful when putting it and don’t just just throw it in there but then you can

actually position it you know up against the inside of this head okay you might even see it there I always try and make it so you guys can’t really see it like tricks of the trade right now okay

so that goes there and then Victor is gonna be happy because I can put this mic right in the drum alright so now I have my pedals here and I’m just about to hook them up but here’s one more

thing I wanted to talk to you guys about because you know a lot I know a lot of you are heavy double bass drum players or you just like wail the kick drum and that’s kind of the way I am I like to

practice a lot of double kick a lot of bass drum focus stuff and so Evans has this thing called EQ patch and I like to put these on my drums you’ll notice in the last bass drum I had there was

almost an indent in it and that’s because when I first put on that Emad head I didn’t use one of these okay these are cheap this is like six dollars and so just put it on and or buy this

along with a head and you will not be sorry your bass drum head will last longer okay okay so here’s we’re going to hear mitt throw on the pedals the speed Cobras right those up now I want

to find out exactly where the bass drum beaters are landing and I want this EQ patch to land right there beside okay so I’m going to take this off adhesive off so now the EQ patches on and I’m ready

to hear how this thing really sounds so let’s give it a hit so at this point I think it sounds unbelievable honestly this is what I love Evans drumheads it’s not rocket science putting these things

on or tune them but what I would do is I would talk to Victor in the next room and say hey Victor how does that sound does it need a little bit more boom a little bit more

resonance or does it have enough muffling should I have less should I have more that sort of thing okay so you guys probably can’t hear Victor but he says he says he thinks it sounds really

good now one thing you guys could do with with the Emad is I could put the smaller ring and if I want okay I don’t necessarily have to this has the bigger

ring okay I could put this one in which is probably what I would do to get a little bit more body and a little bit more tone now you don’t all have the Emad system

and that’s fine Evan makes other great batter side heads that you could just add or remove muffling from now let’s see how it sounds with a little bit less external muffling sounds

pretty good so unless here in the room I know it’s it’s hard to hear you know exactly what the drum is sounding like or how the drum is changing stuff like that but I hope this got this gave you a

good indication of how I tune my drums for those you guys asking about you know how your drum sounds so good your drum sounds so good it’s like I start with good drums I put on really good drum

heads and then we have great mics and we run it through our whole audio system not putting tons of compression and tons of gating on them like the drums sound fairly organic and and very very

acoustic very very much like they sound if you’re in the room to the best of our abilities alright so that is how I tune a bass drum if you guys have any questions no matter

where you’re watching this video please just leave them in the comments below okay I’m online pretty much every day I would absolutely love to chat with you guys about this topic if you have any

tips to add you know if you doing a little bit differently or you found some cool tricks that maybe I didn’t touch on today please just share them below that’s it it’s all about sharing

information drummers teaching other drummers and drummers having fun together so thanks so much for watching this video guys and I’ll see you in the next one

all right so now I have big enough to say all right I’m going to put this does it have enough muffling should I have less they have more that’s with there’s the old drum pad you can choose to do it

with those

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