How To Tune Your Toms - Drum Lesson

[Music] oh let's tune some toms what's up youtuber so i figured this would be a perfect opportunity for me to teach you how i tune my drums especially my toms because i need to swap out the heads i just finished my first in-person camp in the last almost two years so we had done a hundred camps here ten years of 10 camps per year here at the mikes lessons.com studio and then obviously the pandemic happened and then we had to stop for almost two years and then we just had camp 101 and it was amazing but we at the campers and me i'll say we we put the smackdown on these heads so these heads are toast it's time to swap them out and i've gotten questions from you guys really since the beginning of youtube of like how do you tune your drums how should i tune my drums and i just thought okay this is a perfect time i've been on youtube since 2005 2006 and i've never done a tuning lesson so let's get into it first thing i'm gonna do is i'm going to take the head off and replace it with a new one i do use a power drill for this i don't use the drill to put the head back on i feel like it's really hard to nail like when the tension rod is going to actually make contact with the rim or with the hoop so eventu you end up screwing it up a little bit but i don't mind using it to take the drum head off just speeds up the process all right so once i have the head off the first thing i do especially on these older drums this is a 1965 gretch round badge kit in progressive jazz sizes first thing i do is i just feel around the drum to make sure that there's no splintering or no divots or anything like that if there's anything that feels like an imperfection i'm not going to sand it because i'm going to ruin the bearing edge but i might take a block of paraffin wax or just a block of wax and lightly rub it around the edge just to fill in those imperfections but in this drum there are no imperfections if you will so i'm gonna take a new head by the way listen to this like why is this head toast there's no dents it's a single ply head but we actually didn't dent it too bad it's just that we stretch the mylar out in the middle so the head so this material is called mylar and it can stretch and if you play it too much it'll stretch out and then the head just kind of loses its tone if you listen just flappy compared to a brand new head i mean it's not gonna sound like a drum but there's some tone by the way if you're wondering why i'm holding the drum head up it's because there's a microphone up here so i'm going to put this on and then i want to make sure that the head goes on evenly with these old drums the wrap this blue stuff it's a wrap and it overlaps and so what happens sometimes is you might not notice it but the collar of the drum head will catch on that point where it overlaps then you put the hoop on and you tighten it down and you end up just going into the wrap and and kind of wrecking it and it comes off the drum so i'm gonna make sure that everything sits nice and even and i definitely want to make sure that my logo lines up the logo of the head needs to line up perfectly with the logo on the drum which it now does and by the way i've just got this sitting on um one of these stools back here and it gives me an easy thing to spin around all right so now that i've got that i can place the hoop on it try to get everything lined up as close as possible so i have to move it once it's there and then like i said i'm not going to use the drill for this so for this part i just go using my fingers and get everything finger tight just so the tension rods are making contact once they are doing that then we're in a place where we can start tuning now one really important thing before i start showing you how i tune my toms is you need to make sure that whatever your drum is sitting on that the bottom is being muffled so the actual stool that it's on is about 12 inches so it doesn't touch the drum head so i used a practice pad a reflex pad i put that on there and that way the bottom head is being muffled so when i'm tuning the top head or if i flip it over into the bottom head i'm only hearing tone from one head instead of having two heads resonate which makes it very difficult to tune all right i'm gonna start tuning now and as i'm tuning you'll eventually hear the drum head make contact with the shell right now parts of the head are not contacting the shell so i don't have a pure sound this is all by feel and ear we're almost there we're there all right so now the drum is out of tune but i've got a pure tone so i know i've made contact now what does it mean for a drum especially a single head to be in tune it means that all of the tension rods are tuned to the exact same pitch now every drum has quite a big frequency range that it can be tuned to but i want this i need all of these to sound exactly the same and i'm gonna do it the best i can with my ear before i break out the toon bot [Music] you also might notice that i'm tuning pretty high two reasons for that one i actually like my 12 inch tom to be almost up to that jazz bebop level i like it really tight so that's just personal preference it's not right or wrong but the other reason is and this is something you should be aware of once i put this drum head or put this drum on my drum set and start playing it the mylar is going to loosen up a little bit the glue is going to crack a little bit everything's going to loosen up and the pitch will go down so i kind of start off higher than i normally would knowing that it's going to loosen a bit [Music] now if you can't tell like they all sound the same especially when you're sitting right in front of the drum one of the things you can do is just put your finger in the middle of the drum that'll kill the overtones so from this to this okay so this one right here sounds quite a bit higher [Music] so because i'm trying to tune up and i want to higher pitch tom i'm going to tune everything to this the best i can [Music] alright so now i feel pretty good with that and what i want to do is remember how i said it's going to loosen up i want to pre-do that as much as i can without having to play on the drum or beat the heck out of it so one of the ways you can do it is just give it a little cpr all right so now we're going to get into something that's very personal and i think we'll separate this from a lot of the tuning videos you might have seen i tune the top head obviously for pitch i need it to be in tune but i tune it mainly for feel i want my drum set to feel a certain way and so like that right there i like to be able to get a buzz a nice clean buzz stroke out of my rack tom because i like that feel i like that rebound i can control the pitch from the bottom head so as long as i get the top head in tune and to feel the way i want it then i'll go into the bottom head and dial in the pitch so now we're at a point where i'm going to fine tune the drum with the toon bot i would suggest that all of you learn how to tune by ear you do not need one of these i think they should rename this the fine tune bot because if you try to tune a drum from slack with this it's going to be a rough day for you so i get the drum as close as i can with my ear and then i fine tune it with this this also gives me a readout to let me know on a clinic or something i want to have my drums tuned to this specific pitch and i can just travel with this i was close i like to have my tom my top head at 280 and i was at 283 i'm gonna back this down just a little bit now now we're at 280 so i press this button and it'll it'll make sure that the rest of the tension rods are at 280. pretty close dead on dead on boom okay so if we want the most resonance that we can get out of our drum then we tune both heads to the exact same pitch so let's try that and just see where that puts us [Music] all right so now both drum heads are tuned to 280 hertz i know i like my top head there but like i said if this drum sounds too high pitched to me i'm going to lower the bottom head if it sounds too low pitched to me i'm going to raise the bottom head [Music] i dig it i'm going to leave it exactly where it is so 280 on top 280 on bottom this thing is not a necessity like i said it's important to learn how to tune your drums by ear i learned to tune by sitting in my room with a 10 inch tom or a 12 inch tom and i would tune it the best i could to match the records that i was hearing and the records that makes me sound like i'm 6000 years old cds recordings whatever and then i would just undo the head and do it all over again so i used to practice tuning and now i can get my drum to sound the way i want to sound this is not how i need your drums to sound i recognize that i tune my 12 a lot higher than most people but the principles that go into this it's all the same now as far as what could we have done different if we tune that bottom head higher we might get a little slight one the pitch would go up but we would get like an upward pitch bend so do room and if we tune lower we might get a little downward pitch man doom if the drum head is out of tune on the bottom that's when you get that growl doom round and we do not want that by the way just in case you don't believe how important the bottom head is [Music] let's just take the bottom head and let's undo one tension rod now it sounds like buttered ass all because of one tension rod on the bottom head all right now let's swap over to my floor tom i've got a brand new head on here but it is slack so it's just finger tight listen to it yeah there we go all right so i'm going to slowly start tightening up all the tension rods and i'm kind of waiting using my ear to see when that drum head makes 360 degree contact with the bearing edge which it's not doing yet but you'll hear what it does almost there almost there there we go now we've got a pure tone pure is relative i wouldn't say it's in tune but we have a tone let's listen and see where this is at it's actually not that bad um so once again i like to tune for feel i don't want my floor tom to be as bouncy as my snare or as my rack tom but i don't like to be completely dead either so i want to come down a little bit this seems a little high for me for my floor [Music] tom [Music] all right and like i said if there's too many frequencies going on you just can't hear just put your finger in the middle and that's pretty close let me see how the feel is [Music] i like the feel so i'm good there now i'm going to use the tombot to fine tune everything sounds pretty good so i think i'm gonna go with the bottom head at the same tuning just to get the purest tone possible i might like that it might not we'll see what happens [Music] all right so let's see what that sounds like what did i tell you if you tune both heads exactly the same you're going to get a lot of tone out of your drone i don't know that i like it i'm just not digging it i think i want to bring the bottom head up a little bit so i'm doing 150 on the batter head or the top head and then 165 on the bottom head all right let's see what that sounds like [Music] i'm digging that that is beautiful all right so let's go throw both of these drums on the kit because once we put them on the drum set the way they sounded in this room with this ceiling and this carpet and 20 snare drums rattling behind me it may not be the same as on the drum set so once you get it on the kit then you can fine tune some more all right so we're back on the kit now keep in mind i'm only using a single overhead mic this is all i have to capture sound obviously there is a microphone in front of my bass drum but it's not going to capture any of the sound of the toms so let's see what we've got so far [Music] it's good i feel like i might have gone a little too high on the rack time i'm gonna bring it down just a tiny bit [Music] i feel good and that's the most important thing is how do the drums feel to me obviously i want them to be in tune i want them to sound great but i also don't want to sacrifice my enjoyment on the instrument and i think that that's my biggest point to you is obviously you want to get your drums in tune but keep in mind you want them to be fun to play as well and that's a really key important part to tuning is you're changing the tension of the drum and if you go looser and looser and looser they become less responsive and they might not be as fun to play it really depends on your genre of music and your style of drumming but for me this is perfect these are not the way your drums should sound i said that earlier this is how i want my kit to sound i want you to experiment with your drums and learn your drums inside and out and care about the bottom head and how much it changes the tone of your drums and last but not least form a bond with your drum set the more that you work on tuning and you swap heads and you get on the inside of the drum and you look for little splinters you make sure all the little bolts are tight and then none of the washers fell off the more you do that the more that you and your drum set will have a connection every time you sit down so i hope you got something out of this and i will see you guys next time

Channel: Mike Johnston

Views: 65,362

Rating: 4.9516673 out of 5

Keywords: drum tuning, how to tune your toms, how to tune toms, how to tune drums, drum lessons, drum lesson, drum tuning lesson, How to tune your toms, How to tune your toms drum lesson, tuning your drums, Mike Johnston, Mikeslessons, mikeslessons vs drumeo, how to tune tom drums, tuning toms, tom tom tuning, drum tuning tutorial, drum tuning app, tune bot, tunebot drums, tune bot settings

Id: tKZD1FymwPE

Length: 16min 0sec (960 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 30 2021