How to Tune a Drum

Have you ever had to tune a drum but you didn’t know how to do it? Tuning a Drum are very easy processes and once it is learned how to do it, it is like riding a bike. All someone has to do is follow these easy steps on how to do it and they will be a pro.

Drum, Drum key, Drum sticks

Step one, this step a person will need to make sure that they have all the supplies that someone might need. people will need to have a drum, a drum key, and a pair for drum sticks. Once you have all their equipment they can start step two.

Step two, when tuning a drum, you need to know what kind of sound you want and you need to know what kind of drum you have. To know what kind of sound best fits your drum answer the following questions. 1. What kind of drum is it. Is it a snare drum, a tom drum, or a bass drum, etc. 2, How big is the drum? The bigger the drum the lower the sound. To find this you can look on how big is the drum head. An eight inch drum hear and fourteen inch drum head will have different sound. Also look how big the drum shell is. Basically, look how deep the drum is. The deeper the drum the lower the voice. 3. Each drum has its own range so you have to know if you want it to be high or low in that range. Something to consider is if you want the drum muffled or not. This makes it so you have your goal to tune the drum to.

Step three, use the drum key to evenly tighten the drum lugs until you get the sound you want. For this the person tuning would want to turn in small increments and move in a star pattern. After they’ve make a full cycle of lugs use a drum stick to tap the head to see where the pitch is at.

Step four, once you get to the pitch you want tap around the lugs and make sure that the pitch sounds the same at all the lugs that way you can hit anywhere on the drum and it sounds the same. This also makes sure that there is even tension on the drum head and makes it last longer.