Step #1 in good drum tone is to actually give a crap....

This is the first blog post regarding drum tuning and drum tone. Just a few things before we dig in to the meat and potatoes. I was lucky to learn drum tuning or at least my baseline starting point from two great people. Neither of these people are drummers which we will get into later. The first person was Larry Sturm. Larry  is a great recording engineer that I worked with on several projects over a few year period. He really turned my ears around when it came to what to listen for when tuning drums. The second was Steve Albini who I had the pleasure of doing a session with and he was great and getting good drum sounds. Over a several year period I was selling Steve drum heads back when I worked at Guitar Center and was able to pick his brain about tuning. From there I just kept applying and refining what I had learned. The tough thing with drum tuning is that it can be very subjective. There are no absolutes when it comes to how drums should sound, however there are some good rules to follow that will at least get you into the game. I have been working on this for years and I still get a bit of nervousness when I'm doing sound check or am recording and it's time to hit that snare or tom for the first time. I'm always somewhat waiting to hear the engineer make a negative comment or have a not so pleasant look on his face. But, the more I do this the more I get a thumbs up from the engineer. If the front of house engineer takes the time to tell you how good your kit sounded, you know you are on the right track. They do a different set of drums every day and I'm sure they are pretty over it by now so you must be doing something right when they take time out to tell you. So let's jump in and see how long it takes me to piss off all the drummers out there..
   Here I go. It is disrespectful to the art form to show up with your drums sounding like crap. Old heads, no clue and an attitude of not caring. WTF? Guitar players will spend 3 grand on a new guitar head just to get a minuscule tone improvement so why are drummers such slackers when it comes to their sound? I understand the difficulty in drum tuning but there is no excuse for not trying to learn and get better at it. Not to mention the fact that when your drum sound rules, you sound way better. Your basic AC/DC drum beat now sounds way better than the guy going on after you who may be a much better drummer. When I play at a festival I usually feel that most of the drummers are better than me so my edge is to have a great sound.
If you feel in the dark on drum tuning don't bury your head in the sand. Many great drummers who are playing in big bands suck at tuning. Tuning is part of the drum techs job but many of us don't have a tech so we need to become an expert at it ourselves. And I might ad that many of the pro drum techs are just faking it on the tuning side of things anyways....
Start taking it seriously today and you will probably sound better just by making an effort..
The next post will start with what to listen for to get good tone and what's the difference between drum tuning and drum tone. Feel free to email me your drum tuning questions to danny@themusicfactoryoc.com