Music Tweak Blog

Knowing what parts and pieces are on your drums (like any instrument) is a very import thing to know. This tutorial is part of a series that teaches you about drums, this particular lesson is to teach you what the parts of the drums are called so if you have something that ever needs to be replaced you will know what your looking for. The lesson also gives you some hints about what to do when you’re changing your drum heads or skins. Don’t forget to go over all your hardware and make sure it’s all tight when your taking off your skins, there is nothing worse than tuning your drums and find out soothing is loose. We will also teach you about how important the bearing head of the drum shell is, it will give you your tone depending how it is cut.

Dampening and muffling is something ever drummer is going to encounter at some time in there life, they will want to take some of that ring from there drum after they hit it. There are a few techniques to do this, some good and some bad. One of the obvious ways is to buy drum heads that are designed to take some of the ring in the first place, if you buy these you won’t have to dampen them. Another way is to use tape; this way can cause future problems with the adhesive staying on the skin, or the tape ripping of the powder coating on drums like the snare. You can also use O-rings which are made out of the same stuff drum heads are and they sit inside your drum. These are just a few ways you can dampen and muffle your drums to take the reverb/ring sound you get when you hit it. This video lesson will do through all these ways and more and teach you how to apply these methods to your drum kit.

When is it time to change the head? In this video there are some tips about when you should change your heads and also what heads you should change them to.

To tell you need to change your heads you will need to take it off and look for tears or dings, if the head isn’t flat you will need to change it. If your heads are like this they will sound very dull and will tend to break fast. Another reason to change your heads is if you have a big gig coming up or you’re recording, it will make your drums sound fresh and crisp.

Deciding what head you want to use you have two choices, Coated heads and clear heads, Clear heads will be more clear and brighter sounding, coated are more bass and damp and usually made for use with brushes.

Time to tune your drums? When you have put the drum head on make sure you have put all the parts back on, make sure all the tension rods have a washer and tighten them up finger tight, not using your drums keys just yet. Another good tip is to put some oil on the tension rods to help make everything screw in smoother and even extend the life of the rods. Now get two drum keys to tune your drums to save on time and follow the tightening pattern that is shown in the video. Next step is Seating the head, there are three purposes for doing this 1 is to break in the head, 2 to test the head and make sure its not faulty and 3 making the head stick. Just start by tuning the drum higher than what you usually would in a normal playing position, to do this just tune a half turn up with you drum keys as shown in the video. The last step it to give the drum CPR by pushing pressure on the head of the drum, what you will hear is some crackling of the drum, this is a good thing, I means the drum is setting and sitting rite. Now its time to loosen the head all the way till the tension rods are finger tight again. Now to get the rough tuning you will use your tensioning pattern to tighten the head up until you get a tone from the drum.

This is the last video in the series of tuning your drum heads. There are a few things we'll clear up before we get into tuning our drums, First thing is what will we be tuning our drums to? Every drum has a range of tone in which it speaks best, take the tone out of this range and it will sound hollow and dead.