When you are learning the basics of how to play drums, one of the most important things that you need to learn how to do is to tune your drums. You see, when I was first learning how to play I made the mistake of not figuring out how to tune drums properly until I had been playing for almost five years. So essentially, I spent five years sounding much worse than I would have if I had only realized the value of tuning the drums, had learned how to do it properly, and had just taken a little bit of time every few weeks to keep my drums in tune.
Tuning drums is really not that hard, it just takes patience. You have to understand what to listen for or you will just end up confused and not feeling like you’ve actually improved your drum sound at all.
Listen to the Drum Heads
The first thing you should listen for when you are tuning your instrument is the sound of each drum head. First, play each drum head individually by itself while you dampen the other one so you don’t get any stray resonance from the other drum head. What does this sound like? Better than you thought? Worse than you thought? If you’re like me, it was both of those at the same time. On some levels I could really hear what I was doing wrong in drum tuning, but at the same time it didn’t sound that bad. However, because of the principles of acoustics and drum resonance the further you are away from the drum set, the worse it is going to sound. So if the drums just sound a little bit out of tune to you, they are going to sound much, much worse from farther away.
Tune Each Drum Lug
After you have learned how to listen to the drum heads individually, it is time to get them in tune. You can do this by pulling out your drum key and tuning each drum lug to match the pitch of one drum lug, which you will choose to be your master pitch. The concept of master pitch is something that is foreign to most drummers, however it is very important because you have to have one lug to reference while you are tuning. So tap around the edges of the drum head near each different drum lug until you find the master pitch that you want. Then proceed to tune every other drum lug to match the pitch of this one. This will take some time, and in general when you are tuning drums you need to expect to spend about an hour on each drum. Don’t worry though, you will only need to do this once every couple of months as long as you do it right.
Drum tuning can seem to be one of the most tedious parts of learning the drums, however it plays arguably the biggest role in determining your overall drum sound. And drummers who know how to tune their drums really well generally get much more respect from the drumming community as a whole than drummers who, say, are very good technically but have a poor drum sound. So you should definitely include learning how to tune drums as a part of your education while you are learning the drums.
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