I am slowly getting a bit better at this, but am still finding it hard to make a cheap tom sound ok. Apart from drastic eq, and (obviously) using good drums...What techniques do you guys use..does anyone have any interesting tips? Thanks.
Al

i struggled with this for a long time. it took me a while to find the heads that best suit my kit and my playing. turned out they are remo clear pinstripes, which i disliked for years. anyway, tuning - i get the best (heaviest, fattest, etc) sound from my toms (rack 9x12, floor 16x16) by tuning them as loose as i can without sacrificing tone and at least a little bit of stick rebound. my floor tom needs a fair amount of muffling, especially tuned so low.

relative tension between your top and bottom heads is very important. as a general rule (snare being an exception) i try keeping bottom a bit tighter than top. your top head will contribute more to the actual pitch, but the bottom will have a great effect on the tone and sustain.

change your heads as often as you can. it is very difficult to tune a head that is completely beaten up and stretched out. i can't afford to change mine as often as i'd like. when i do, the first couple of days before they start to go is a real treat.

try this for toms;
take both heads off and hit the side of the drum. it should produce a tone. either remember the note that the empty shell makes or go to a piano and find it. put on new top and bottom heads and tune them both to this note. it took me a while to get this down but it can sound very good.

i have been liking evans g2 heads on toms and a coated ambassador on the snare. i would like to get a new batter side head for my kick drum but really don't know which to try. any suggestions?

elisha wiesner wrote: i would like to get a new batter side head for my kick drum but really don't know which to try. any suggestions?

i like the remo coated powerstroke 3 with a falam attack pad. tuned extremely loose, almost flappy. this is on a 16x24" drum with the same head in ebony on front with a 6" hole. no muffling makes contact with the heads, just a t shirt spread across the bottom of shell to cut down on the sharper, higher frequency reflections/resonance inside.

tuning is _so_ important, and yet so often overlooked. and it's hardest with toms, where you can't use muffling to compensate for bad tuning.

i reckon the important things are:

1) heads that aren't totally wrecked --- whether from being over-played, or over-tightened.
2) a clean, smooth, sharp bearing edge.
3) correct seating of the head against the bearing edge.
4) good, even tuning from lug to lug over each head.
5) `correct' pitch ratio between batter and resonant head on each tom.

if you get all this right, then you often won't need any muffling. bear in mind that often, within the context of a mix, the part of the tom sound that is most important is the attack; the sustain will often be obscured.

for heads, a good starting point is a double-ply head (like Remo Pinstripe) or coated head (like Remo coated Ambassador) on the batter side, matched with an uncoated, single-ply head (like Remo clear Ambassador) on the resonant side.

as you change heads, clean the bearing edges with a damp cloth. if they feel rough or splintery, give them a light sanding.

seat the heads by tuning them up fairly high, and then giving them a firm push in the middle with the palm of your hand. you should hear a crackling sound as the glued seam gives way. when you've done this, detune evenly down to slack, ready to begin the tuning proper.

a `standard' tuning scheme for toms has the batter head tuned a few semitones above the resonant head. this gives a slightly falling note in the decay of the drum, which is emphasised by the use of a batter head that is heavier than the resonant head.

as you tune a head up, work from lug to lug in a kind of star-shaped pattern. this keeps the tuning even from lug to lug. use quarter- or half-turns on each pass at a lug.

only scratched the surface, but hope it's some help.

naoko wrote:only scratched the surface, but hope it's some help.

that's a pretty wicked description of the tuning process right there! the only thing you didn't mention is after wiping down your bearing edges, before putting the new heads on, to run a very thin layer of oil along the bearing edge. i can neither confirm nor deny the effect of doing that, but i've heard it from a couple of different friends who teach drum lessons when i asked them "so what's your take on tuning?". one of them actually does it, the other had heard of it but doesn't do it. so maybe it's worth a try. maybe not.

toomanyhelicopters wrote:before putting the new heads on, to run a very thin layer of oil along the bearing edge.

I had a teacher in college who did this with wax. That's also a common technique for timpanists. I don't know that I'd want to saturate the bearing edges of my wooden drums with oil every time I changed the heads. It sounds like a bad idea to me, but I might be missing something.

Chris Garges
Charlotte, NC

cgarges wrote:

toomanyhelicopters wrote:before putting the new heads on, to run a very thin layer of oil along the bearing edge.

I don't know that I'd want to saturate the bearing edges of my wooden drums with oil every time I changed the heads.

well, FWIW, it was a specific kind of oil (that i don't recall), and the one time this technique was demonstrated to me, there was, as i said, a very thin layer just along the bearing edge, not any kinda saturation. i can't say for sure because i'm far from an expert, but i would think if anything, a light coating of an appropriate oil would be much better for wood than the water in a damp cloth would. i have no idea though. i'm just going by what this doude told me and showed me. not that this changes anything, but he was a nationally touring marching band kid, and currently is a professional drum lesson giver, so he's at least not entirely ignorant.

so in conclusion, maybe do, or maybe do not put oil on your bearing edges. i would recommend a lotta research to anybody who was to look into that anyways.

this, according to yamaha:

"Lubricating wood bearing edges with a thin coat of Yamaha paraffin or cork grease will ease high-tension tuning, and help prevent moisture from seeping into the shell"

he plays yamaha drums, and is a former marching guy. so maybe that's where he learned it from, the drum manufacturer. yo no se.

there is a good article on drum tuning in the new sept/oct issue of tapeop.

a friend recently went over the process with me, and it was very helpful.

one of my favorite links on the web:

http://home.earthlink.net/~prof.sound/

ok, well how about SOOOOO much info it's just sick.