Tuning for rehearsing

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Lomas

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So I'm a drummer, have been for 10 + years. The thing is, I've never owned a kit so the science of tuning and tweaking has been lost on me.

Now to the problem. When I rehearse with my band, sometimes it's just impossible to get it to sound good. And I'm not talking about only the drums. The whole band sounds bad (not the playing, the actual sound). This always cause us to stop and start looking at the guitar amps and the bass amp and stuff like that. We share space with other bands so they can be set differently everytime. Anyway, half of the time we sound great and everyone is excited about playing, half the time we sound crappy.
After trying everything we can think of, I'm starting to think maybe it's the sound of the drums, not the guitars.

Anyone think this could be the problem, and if so, got any advice on what to think about when tuning them? Sometimes the snare just sounds wrong and has an annoying feel to it. I don't like high pitched sounding snares. I want them fat and pretty low I guess.
 
Lomas said:
So I'm a drummer, have been for 10 + years. The thing is, I've never owned a kit so the science of tuning and tweaking has been lost on me.

Now to the problem. When I rehearse with my band, sometimes it's just impossible to get it to sound good. And I'm not talking about only the drums. The whole band sounds bad (not the playing, the actual sound). This always cause us to stop and start looking at the guitar amps and the bass amp and stuff like that. We share space with other bands so they can be set differently everytime. Anyway, half of the time we sound great and everyone is excited about playing, half the time we sound crappy.
After trying everything we can think of, I'm starting to think maybe it's the sound of the drums, not the guitars.

Anyone think this could be the problem, and if so, got any advice on what to think about when tuning them? Sometimes the snare just sounds wrong and has an annoying feel to it. I don't like high pitched sounding snares. I want them fat and pretty low I guess.
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is everyone using tuners for guitar and bass and such? And retune regularly? Ask the guitarists and bass player if they know how long it takes for their guitars to go out of tune. If they can't tell you pretty directly, they don;t know their instruments and should tune every few songs.

Drum tuning can be tough to get good at. I bought a drum dial type gauge that helped me get the heads to a uniform tension and i could tune thempretty well by ear. Get Dave Weckl's "back to basics" DVD he has a tuning thing at the end, and everything else there is helpful (to me as a really poor drummer anyway). For snare you probabaly want to tune pretty high ont he beater side and more so on the snare side. Most other drums, you want to finger tighten, and then slowly tune until you like the tone. I usually keep toms tuned fairly low that way. Resonant heads genearlly go a bit higher than the beater side.
google the "drum tuning bible".

Daav
 
Thanks!

Yeah, they're good at keeping their instruments tuned. I mean, the obvious first thing we've been checking is the guitar sound, messing with the amp. but no matter how good we think the guitar sound is, when we play together it just sounds "separated". Then the next time when we get there we sound really good. I'm starting to think it's in our heads, but it's weird that we would all be in the "wrong" mood all at once. When it sounds good, there's a spark that just makes us all play a lot better. It's frustrating. I've been in bands for more than 10 years and still I can't figure this thing out.

That's why I was starting to look at the drums thinking maybe this is more important than I thought.
 
A drummer needs to know how to tune drums just as importantly as a guitar player needs to know how to tune a guitar. While drum tuning is not an easy thing to "master" someone playing drums for 10 years certainly should have a decent concept of tuning.

If you don't already have the skill, you must learn it or as you try to move up the food chain and work with better musicians this fundamental weakness will limit your ability to succeed (perhap not having your own drums may compromise your ability to succeed even more than not being able to tune - but that is a different discussion).

As you've already discovered, when instruments sound good - they can motivate your playing and when they sound bad....not so much.

A good drummer can make even poor drums sound better by knowing the best way to hit a drum to "pull the sound out" - just as a good guitar player can make an average guitar sound good - simply by knowing how to attack the strings. 10 years of experiance (in particular if you don't own your own drums) may not be enough time to have developed that level of playing skill - making tuning knowledge all the more important.

There are numerous books, CD's, DVD's and web sites devoted to drum tuning - perhaps it is time for you to seek these resources out.
 
Maybe the room sounds poopy. Do the amps and everything change positions between bands? The way that everything is set up in the room can dramatically affect the way everything sounds. Just as your listening position can as well.
 
Yep. Well I've never owned drums 'cause I've never had anywhere to put them. I have had access to drums all the time though. The problem being that they have always been shared by other bands, and usually pretty crappy.
I consider myself to be a good drummer (when I'm in the right mood)* and I pay a lot of atention to how I hit the drums and the difference it can make. I realize I should learn to tune them though.

Anyway, last nights rehearsal went well and the sound was good enough to motivate. I guess what I mean by "good" is that it sounds like it fits together. Not good amps, not a good room, but all I ask is that there's some kind of "glue" between the instruments. The snare drum sounded crappy because it wasn't ok physically. This time we took photographs of how everything was set up and where it stood, so I guess after the next rehearsal I will know if it's in our heads or not :)



* I realize a really good drummer doesn't depend on mood, or can control it better, but still!
 
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