Drum Tuning Troubleshooting

I’d like to discuss some drum tuning troubleshooting tips. For example, wrinkles in the drumhead, excess overtones or rings or maybe getting too much snare buzz when you’re playing the toms. So let’s begin with wrinkles in the drumhead. So, let’s take a look at the 12-inch drum. Now, let’s say that I get a brand new drumhead put it on, seat it, stretch it, snug up the tension rods and begin to tune it. Also then I notice there is a ripple or a wrinkle in the drumhead. The obvious solution would be to take my drum key, turn the tension rods until the ripple smooth out. Now, a lot of the times that’s all you need to do. Sometimes it doesn’t work, you might be going “Well, wait a second I see this mass of ripple in the drumhead and I start to tune it, but I don’t want to get too high”. Okay, as far as the pitch goes. So if it’s a good drumhead and you tighten it up and the wrinkle goes away and the drumhead sounds too high, simply, you can just lower the tuning of the bottom head to compensate for what you did on the top or the tension here. Now, sometimes that doesn’t even work. Now, hopefully you’ll never encounter this but you might put on a brand new drumhead, did the exact same thing I’d just discussed and there’s still a wrinkle no matter what you do. Believe it or not, it could be a defective drumhead. If that’s the case, go back to your local music retailer explain the situation and they should replace it for you. Come back home with your brand new drumhead, put it on, let’s hope the problem is solved, it might be a defective drumhead. If you notice the exact same problem you might unfortunately have a warped drum. This is where it gets a little tricky to fix because once the drum is warped then you’re not really going to get it back into a perfect round shape so you might have to deal with that warp unless you can find a way to replace that drum. So, if you see the wrinkle on the head just try what I mentioned, tighten it up, see if it works for you. Most cases it will. So, let me show you how to eliminate or reduce any snare drum excess buzz or sizzle from the bottom snare wires. So, let me turn on the snare and hit it so you can hear how that sounds. [Demonstration] So, as you can hear there’s quite a bit of excess sizzle coming from my snare drum. Now, my snare drum is in tune. I haven’t changed anything since the previous excerpts. So, what I’m going to simply do is I’m just going to hit the snare drum and slowly turn the little knob on the strainer in a tightening position so you can hear the change in the snare wires. [Demonstration] So, as you can see, I’ve eliminated any excess snare sizzles that I didn’t want simply by turning little knob on the strainer. Now, you might have a snare drum at home that you’re trying this with. If that seems really hard to turn the only thing you need is a little dab of oil or something like that to make it turn easier. Now, if you find that you’re turning it and it’s turning easy and it’ stops, don’t force it because that means that as far as that’s going to go. If you still have the snare sizzle happening, all that means is that you need to tighten up the strings on the button that hold the snare wire. It could be a plastic strap, it could be a little miller strap or some sort of a leather strap holding the snare wires to the bottom of the head on either side with the strainers. So all you need to do is completely reduce all the slack off of the snare wires just by loosening the knob on the strainer. Then you have to loosen the snare wires either with a drum key or a screw driver, reduce some slacks so the snare wires are going to hang down a bit, tighten it back up and then start tightening the know on your strainer. Then you’ll notice that you have more play to use with the snare wires so they’re going to actually come back up to the bottom head and you probably reduce that. Now, if that doesn’t happen still, you’re going to have to resort to some muffling. You might have to put some moon gel or drum gum on the top head. You might have to put some on the bottom head. The only problem with the bottom head sometimes is because there is so much vibration on the bottom head, the muffling can tend to fall off. So you might have to put a piece of tape or even tape a piece of moon gel to the bottom just to see if that works. One thing I wouldn’t suggest doing that I’ve seen, I used to do some repairs years ago and I see guys putting tape right over the top of their snare wires, and don’t do that because you don’t have the option to turn it off and on and it’s not actually working properly with the strainer. So don’t do that. Just do what you can to get rid of any excess snare buzz. A lot of times it could be tuning. So be sure to experiment with that. Another challenge that comes up for drummers when they hit their toms the snare starts to buzz or ring. How do we reduce that? Well, I know we can reduce it. Eliminating it seems to be impossible unless we actually turn the snare a wire completely off which is not how we want to play the snare in most scenarios. Let me give you example of what I mean just in case you are not clear. [Demonstration] So as you can see, I'm not even hitting the snare drum, I’m hitting the tom. And the bottom snare wires are rattling. It’s simply because there are sound traveling through the air, through the drum, rattling the bottom wires. Now, believe it or not this is pretty reduced, the sound that you heard because I have my snare wires really tight from the previous example. If I loosen the snare wires and hit the tom again, listen now. [Demonstration] So you saw that the loose of the snare wires were the more buzz I had. Now, keep in mind I didn’t hit the snare drum at all. So, let’s go back to tightening it up again and I want to make sure my snare still sounds good. I don’t want to jeopardize the sound of my snare to eliminate some buzz because in the live setting no ones going to hear that anyways. In the studio it can be reduced as well because you have individual mikes but I found it very hard to eliminate completely. So let me just tighten up the snare wires again, hit the snare to make sure I still like the sound of the snare drum. [Demonstration] Now, I will hit the tom to see if it reduces the snare wires sizzle. [Demonstration] Now, let us see if putting some muffling on the snare drum makes much of a difference. [Demonstration] So, you can see it made a little bit of a difference but not a lot. You just kind of get use to the actual sound of the drum ringing when it’s on. It’s not a bad thing and if it’s really excess, tighten the snare bottom, tighten the strainer, make sure the drums are in perfect tune or as good as you can get them and it’ll reduce it so you won’t be going crazy with the sound always buzzing in your face. So experiment with that.