How To Tune Drums

If you ever played drums out of tune, you know how important tuning is. Poorly tuned drums can make even a great drummer sound terrible. With the right tuning the drums not only sound good, but also feel good. And if they feel good, you feel good.

Learning how to tune a drum set is definitely a worthwhile investment of your time. What will you need? You will need a bit of patience, a good ear, and a drum key.

What will you get? You will get more out playing. The experience of playing properly tuned drums is much more enjoyable and rewarding. Proper tuning also prolongs the life of your drum heads. It's very simple, if you want your drums to sound their best, you'll have to learn how to tune them.

Before we start, a piece of advice: when you first put on a new drum head, don't tension it down. Many drummers believe that you need to do this in order to seat the head, but in reality you can actually damage it. And if you damage the head you will never be able to tune it correctly. So don't do it. It's best to do it slowly, to break it in naturally.

Let's see how to do that.

Tom-Tom Tuning

We'll start with tom-toms. The following video will show you how to make them sound great. To seat the new drum head don't go around in a circle, but rather move back and forth across the drum. This is called the opposite lug tuning sequence. Remember, a drum head has to be tightened uniformly. Here is the video:

Snare Drum Tuning

In this 8 minute video Bob will explain how to tune the snare drum. You'll see how to adjust the top and bottom drum heads, and the snare wires to get the best results.

Bass Drum Tuning

Next we have bass tuning video. You'll learn some valuable tricks from Bob. Don't forget to experiment, you can use many adjustments to get the sound that suits your needs.



Remember, drum tuning is not an exact science. It's personal and you must experiment to get the sound which you prefer.