- We've got our drums picked.

We've got our heads on them.

Now it's time to tune the drums and make them sound great

in the room before we can put the microphones on 'em.

Again, part of getting the great sound

from the drums is making the actual drums

sound good to your ear in the room.

'Cause if they don't sound good in here,

they're never going to sound good in the control room

under the microscope with microphones on them.

So, Ross is going to walk us through tuning some drums

and treating them to make them sound awesome in here.

- Okay. So let's start with a kick drum.

This kick drum at this point, nothing inside of it.

This is the way it sounds.

(drum thudding)

And it's not bad where it's at,

but it's not right for what we're doing today.

So we're going to adjust it a little bit.

And the first thing we're going to do

is we're going to put a little muffling inside of it

because the heads are just

a little too resonant the way they are.

- So, right now it's wide open, right?

No, nothing inside. - There's nothing inside.

- No muffling. - Yeah.

I like a little piece of a blanket

and I fold it up so that it fits inside there.

And you can do this with a pillow

or whatever you have handy.

A lot of times people will take a pillow off their couch

or they'll take their jacket or sweatshirt or laundry,

whatever they want to put inside there.

As long as it's in the bottom of the drum

and it's touching both heads,

it should muffle it down pretty good.

- Do you cut the blanket to the depth

of the drum in a, you know, best case scenario?

- I actually cut the blanket

so that it's twice the depth of the drum

so I can fold it over. - Okay.

- So that when it's folded over,

it's touching both heads and it's snug inside of the drum.

- So it's not going to move anywhere.

- Yeah, so the head's actually hold it in place.

So let's see what that does to the sound.

(drum thudding)

So that muffles it down quite a bit.

Takes it kind of punchy.

It's still a little high for my liking.

Let me loosen down some of the tension rods here

and see what we get when I take it down a little bit.

(drum thudding)

It's getting a little better.

Loosen it down a little bit more.

(drum thudding)

It sounds pretty good.

We'll leave that like that for now,

until we hear it in the context

of the song and then we'll make adjustments if need be.

And I can imagine, we might move the blanket

around a little bit on the inside as well.

- Do we need to deal with the front head at all?

- We could experiment around,

you want to experiment a little bit?

- Yeah, I mean like what effect

does the front head have on the

the overall tone of the drum?

- Well, it has the same effect as the back,

in that the tighter it is,

the higher the drum's going to sound.

So if we loosen that down a little bit,

you'll get a little bit lower note out of the kick

and you'll also get a little bit more,

what I call flap off the front head.

You'll get a little bit more of that front head moving

and that'll translate into air moving.

You want me to try it?

- Yeah, yeah. Let's hear that.

- Why don't you hit the kick rim and I'll loosen it down?

(drum thudding)

This is pretty loose to begin with

so it's not going to make that big of a difference.

(drum thudding)

- Yeah, I can feel the low end back here.

- Yeah.

So you're getting a little bit more low end.

You're getting a little bit more movement

on that front head.

So that would translate

into a liver sounding drum - Mm-hmm.

- As well as lower.

And we'll see what the mics pick up

and then I'll adjust accordingly.

- Right.

- All right, so usually the kick drums is where we start

in the studio anyway, so we'll start there.

Then I'll move into the snare drum.

(drum beating)

Snare drum is cranked a little high for my taste right now.

Again, it might work for some songs

but I think for what our purposes are today

we should muffle it down a little bit.

(drum beating)

Take the pitch down a little bit.

So what I'm going to suggest for that is just

fold up a piece of Kleenex, put it on the drum.

Take a piece of Gaffer's tape

or any kind of tape you can find.

I tend to like the Gaffer's tape

and just tape it across the head.

And that will take most of that ring out of there.

(drum beating)

So that's not so bad.

Just by putting that on there.

(rhythmic drums beating)

So that actually got rid of most of the weird overtones,

but I'm going to take this drum down a little bit

just because it's a big drum

and I like my big drums tuned fat and sassy.

(drum beating)

- Oh.

- See, that's got a whole lot more attitude now.

- Yeah.

(drum beating)

(rhythmic drum beating)

- So it's pretty good.

- It seems to speak really well there.

- Yeah, and I can see how the guys in the control room

will get kind of excited when they hear that

through the mics. - Yeah.

Now, when you're tuning a drum, particularly a snare drum,

I mean, you know, you can tune it up,

you can tune it down, but just as you just had it,

I mean it was really high and you know, it sounded okay.

But then you get it to a pitch

where the drum itself is happy,

like there's a resonance to it.

- There's a sweet spot.

- There's a sweet spot too. - Yeah.

The better the drum

and the better condition the drum is

like if the edges are good. If the shell is good.

As long as the heads are fairly new,

you'll have a bigger sweet spot.

- Right.

- So you can get the drum sounding good,

higher as well as lower.

So there's a bigger, sweet spot.

I can usually tell if a drum's not right,

where if it only has one sweet spot.

So if I can basically only take it

to one place that it sounds good, then it's usually

it's a, you know, you're compromising with your equipment.

- There's a problem in there somewhere.

- Yeah. - That needs to be fixed.

- And I mean, with what I do, I like to start

with something that is good to begin with and you're

only going to get better from there.

- Right.

- I mean, the way I look at it is recording is forever.

I mean, once you make a recording, even if you don't hit a

hit it out of the park, you're still going to live

with that recording forever.

- Sure.

- And you go back to listening to it in a year

or 10 years, or whatever you want to say, hey, I'm

I'm still proud of that.

That sounded good back then.

- Yeah.

- I don't want to cringe when I hear it.

- And now with a snare again,

we just dealt with the top head.

How does the tuning of the bottom head

relate to what the drums doing and

and how good it's going to sound in the end?

- Well, the bottom head was obviously the

the drum sounds good now.

So the bottom head was in good shape.

It's real important that the bottom head is nice

and snug on a snare drum.

I think that the bottom head should be,

I would say at least a fifth above

the top head on a snare drum.

(drum beating)

If not a third, the gist

of it is that the bottom head is tighter

than the top head on a steel rim.

- Right. - Most of the time.

And, and again, there's no hard and fast rules.

It's all up to experimentation.

If you're not happy with where it's at,

mess around with it and don't be afraid

A lot of people of are afraid to touch the bottom head

especially on the snare drum, because it's a thin membrane.

They're afraid they're going to break it.

- Right.

- And as long as you keep it symmetrical

you're probably not going to break it.

And make sure all these edges aren't sharp

and aren't digging into the head.

More snare drum bottom heads get broken

by some little thing that's digging

into the head that starts a little tiny dent.

And then that's a point of weakness.

- Right. - And there's so much tension

here that any little point of weakness

can turn into a split. - Right.

- So that's it for the bottom of the snare drum.

- And I mean arguably the snare drum

sets the character for the song.

You know, the snare drum is in a, in a pop record,

in a rock record is really

like one of the trademark sounds of that song.

- I couldn't agree more.

- And it needs to be, it needs to be the right sound.

So the combination of the drum,

the head and the tuning

will really determine a big part

of the character of that song.