How to Change Heads and Tune Drums

Knowing how to properly tune your drums is vital to having a great sounding drum kit. Even if you are a novice drummer, having a well tuned drum kit will make you stand above the rest.

Get a drum key. Drum keys are used to tune drums and are inexpensive. If you're going to play drums, it's a good idea to get one and make sure your kit is in tune with itself. To start tuning your drums or changing the heads, all you need is a stick and your drum key. Turn the snares off the snare drum and you're ready to start.

How to change drum heads: 


Start loosening the tension rods evenly. Go around the drum, gently loosening each tension rod, using a drum key, by turning each about half a turn. You don't want to loosen them off completely one at a time, but instead evenly loosen them half a turn each, just keep going around the drum until you can start loosening them by hand.

Remove the rim and the tension rods, and remove the old drum head. Wipe the inside of the drum, and the edge of a drum with a dry piece of fabric. Also wipe the new drum head to make sure everything's clean and without dents.

Seat the drum head. After setting the new head on the drum, put the rim and tension rods back onto the drum. Tighten all of the tension rods evenly using your hands (no drum key yet) and keep going until all of the tension rods are finger tight.

Break in the drum head. Push down in the centre of the drum with your fist. Do this 5-10 times. Don't worry, you won't break it. You should be able to put a good portion of your body weight onto the drum.

• Drummers do this for the same reason that a guitar player stretches his guitar strings. It is to get the drum all stretched out before we start using it. If we didn't do this, the drum would constantly be going out of tune for the first week or so, which would get very time consuming.

 • Make sure the tension rods are all still tight and make adjustments as necessary. Once you've got the new head seated and the tension rods relatively tight, you're ready to start tuning the drum.

Tuning the Snare:

Tighten the tension rods in a diagonal pattern. Start with the tension rod closest to you. Turn the drum key half a turn tighter. Do not move on to the tension rod beside it. Instead, the next tension rod that you are going to turn half a turn is the tension rod furthest away from you (directly across from the one you've already turned half a turn) now tighten this one half a turn. The next tension rod you are going to tighten is the one to the left of the tension rod you started on. Then go directly across the drum from there and continue this pattern.

• Keep going around the drum until all of the tension rods are totally even, and the drum has the sound that you want it to. You may have to go over all of the tension rods 4-8 times, or until you reach the desired tone.

Give it the tone you want. Many drummers and techs will hit the drumstick against the body of the drum (the side, not the part with the head) and listen for the overtone, then try and match the pitch when tuning the head. You can also listen to recordings to try and match the tone you want to achieve.

• If it is a new drum head, tension the head higher than your desired pitch and press hard in the centre. You will hear the pitch drop. This seats the head, as well as pitches it correctly to get the great crack sound out of the snare. The top head should be tightened slightly tighter than the bottom, when you're finished.

Make sure the tension is even across the drum. Go around the drum and tap an inch away from each tension rod with a drumstick. Fine tune the rods to make sure the point you're hitting results in the same tone all the way around the drum, tightening or loosening depending on the tone you're getting.

• If you don't like some of the overtones that your drum is giving off you can use some form of dampening (moon gel, drum gum, o-rings). You don't want to use dampening as a solution to poor tuning, but instead as an enhancement of good tuning.

Do the same thing to the bottom head of your drum. Depending on your taste it will either be the same pitch as your batter, or a bit lower or higher. Follow the same process, periodically taking time to smooth out the wrinkles in the plastic covering with a cloth or a napkin as you bang on it. This will help make the tone uniform across the drum, so the wrinkles won't settle out later and change the sound.

Maintain your snares. The snares themselves are also very important, so it's a good idea to keep them in pristine condition and try to tighten them so that they are flat all the way across the skin of the drum. Too tight and it will bow off of the middle, too loose and it wont touch at all. A good rule of thumb is to tighten the snares until just after they stop rattling.

Tuning the Toms and Kick Drum:

Tune to the body of the drum. Toms are the most important drum to pitch appropriately, so it's important that you take the time to play on the body a few times to get a sense of the pitch of the individual drum, and keep tuning until you've matched it.

Listen for a smooth single tone. Follow the same procedure as you would for the snare drum, smoothing out the head with a cloth and tapping around the perimeter of the drum surface to check for evenness. Use your ears and really focus on the sound.

• The ideal is a round tone that will decay into a single note smoothly and evenly. Good drums are amenable to many different pitches and tones, but you may find that a particular tension or particular pitch is really good for your drums. Keep going until you find it.

Tune the bottom first. The part of the drum that creations the projection and sustain more than any other is the bottom head. It's the most important part of tuning the drum kit, because the batter heads won't sound right if you don't take the time to accurately pitch the bottom heads. It'll be easier to tune the top heads, too, because the bottom will be reverberating at the correct pitch, making it easier to match.

Consider using a rotisserie or a lazy Susan to turn the drum. It's a lot easier to get all around the drum, turning all the keys and shifting things around if you can move the drum easily, rather than moving your body. It's annoying to have to shift around on the floor, on your knees, turning the key and soon becomes a tiresome process. Instead, get something that rotates to set the drum on and turn the drum as you work.

• A rotating table setting, called a "lazy Susan," would be perfect for the job, or a rotating desk chair or bar stool. Get comfortable, because tuning can take a while.

Tips:

Another thing you can do is tune your drums with a bass, tell someone to help you, its very easy, you start tuning the Bass drum with E string, left tom with A string, right tom with D string, and the floor tom with G string, snare drum you can tune it however you like it to sound. Unlike most instruments, drum set tuning is not an exact science. There is no one specific way to tune your drum kit. It really comes down to experimentation and experience. Play around with different tunings and figure out which works best with the style of music you play and the type of drum set you are playing. Many drummers like to tune their toms in fourths. A fourth is the interval between the first two notes of "Here Comes the Bride", which is four tones.

A special tool called the DrumDial is available from many music retailers. This tool is used by choosing a tension number, placing it at each lug on the drum, and tightening the lug until the dial reads the desired tension number. This device can save time for changing a head quickly, and can also assist with a quick tune-up before a show, but it is not 100% accurate and tuning by ear still remains an important skill.

For changing a drum head quickly, you can buy a 'ratchet' drum key from some drum shops and the 'bit' will fit in a cordless drill. Use the kind of cordless drill that has a 'torque' setting. You can remove the head quickly using the cordless drill. Then, using the technique described above, first tune the drum to the lightest torque setting, then experiment with heavier settings. With practice you can change a snare head in a few minutes. There are also drum keys that use the ratchet system and do not require a cordless drill. Such drum keys are safer to use than the drill system, as they are made specifically for drum tuning and will not over tighten or damage the drum.

Tuning your resonant heads lower than your batter heads will cause a downward pitch bend in the note produced from the drum, and tuning them higher than your batter heads will cause an upward pitch bend.

While having a long sustain from your drum will sound nice, it is usually a problem for sound engineers when your kit is being recorded and/or amplified via microphones, so you might want to think about dampening your drums before playing them amplified.

Warning:

Do not over tighten your drum, this can damage your drum, and ruin your drum head. You will know that it has been over tightened, if when you take off the drum head, it will have a noticeable depression in the middle, an indication that the head has been stretched beyond its elastic limit (which you don't want), but you can also tell if it is too tight after tuning, because if the drum is too tight, the sound it produces will start to sound choked, as the drum head will not be able to reverberate properly.