Hi! I'm Wes Crawford and now we're going to discuss tensioning the snares. We've already put our heads on and assume that we have heads all tensioned the way we want with the tones and the pitches we want. And now one adjustment that a lot of people don’t consider strongly enough is how to tension the snares to the proper sound that you want. All snare drums are a bit different, but basically you're going to have some type of knob here that will adjust the tension of the snares. And by this, I mean the actual wires, the strands of wire is on the bottom, you can adjust how tightly they are pulled against the bottom head and this will affect the sound to greatly, vastly different sound if they’re very loosely touching the head versus very, very tight against the head and I’ll demonstrate this. I’ll tap the snare drum and that's what it’s going to sound like if the snares are very loose against the bottom head. And I'm going to gradually now tighten by turning this knob clockwise as I hit the drum and you can see the difference in sound [Demonstration].
What I did, I tightened this knob so that you could hear the difference between the snares very loosely against the bottom head all the way to what I consider to be too tight. When it’s too loose, it’s all rattling, it doesn’t sound too good. When it’s too tight it sounds choked and just like bound.
So, you want to find generally speaking, unless you're trying to get some kind of special effect sound, you want to get an in between position that's right for you. Also, I want to emphasize this, with tuning and particularly with this snare tightening topic, you want to get somebody sometimes to play your drums and you stand up front and hear what they sound like [Demonstration].
Right there, you still have a nice snappy kind of attack sound with the snares, but you also have a little bit of body because the snares don’t stop immediately after hitting the drum. It just gives a little bit of fatness. You can make it a bit fatter by loosening the snares a little bit more. By fat, I mean a wider sound, it doesn’t go away quiet as quickly or you could actually make even more attack and snap here by tightening it up a little bit more [Demonstration]. And from my position and my ear, all those are acceptable sounds on the snare drum, but again you really need to see what it sounds like up front.
I’ve also seen people’s snare drums up close that thought, wow, they really sound horrible but then mike up and out in a PA, they sounded really good. So, that's also a consideration just as much as what we're hearing right here with the tension of the head and the tightness of the snares themselves and interweaving variable is distance from the drum. You want to see what that effect has and being mike and going through a PA. So, all these are considerations for getting the snare drum to sound that you want.
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