Hi all! Let’s talk about drum tuning for any styles. What are your approaches for tuning your drums? By the tune bot or not? Do you tune all drums for keys or you don’t put your attention for it? I always try to tune by Tune Bot in fourth, fifth or thirds between each drum. Also I take fundamental frequency (let’s call it x-frequency:) and tune batter head: x-frequency x 1.2 and resonant head: x-frequency x 2.3. I think it will be very interesting and helpful to talk about your approaches)
I never tune drums unless something is bothering me. If whoever is producing it picks sounds that work together, or your drummer knows what they’re doing, there shouldn’t be a need to tune really. It’s about what feels right to me, not so much what is harmonically “correct”. My drummer barely tunes his kit unless something bothers him and it always sounds great
I have several kits and use different heads, tunings, and miking combos depending on what the project calls for. My standard go-to for toms that work for most things is coated G1 batter tuned medium low and Clear G1 reso tuned a major 4th higher than the batter. Every drum is different and sometimes this doesn’t work and you have to explore a little bit to get the rack and floor tom to have complimentary characteristics.
I think the tunebot is a really great tool to help learn about the relationship between the batter and resonant heads, though its not perfect and you have to be able to tell when its lying to you.
I do love using the tunebot to take notes on tunings that worked well and for recalling drum sounds when you need to get back to a sound from a previous session. I keep a spreadsheet with top/bottom head types and tunings for recalls.
It depends on the music, but where a drum is featured, eg a verse is all floor tom and snare, you don’t want the tom overtone to ring with a pronounced atonal harmonic, say an Ab (minor third) when the song is in F major… it depends how modal / harmonic the music is.
If you do the “power maths” - the bass is chucking out a certain fundamental, if a prominent drum is 50c away, when the two are summed you get an unstable on/off sum, rather than a smooth, consistent punchy wavefront - ie you lose consistent power / punch. Same thing happens if live mixing and the bass is a click out of tune from guitars - no amount of EQ will hit the audience in the chest - the fifths and roots have to be “in”.
I think drummers do this instinctively - if a particular drum isn’t chiming, they tend not to focus on it… but when it does chime, how it all comes together is a wonderful thing
So, for kick subsonic, via RBass or similar, it’s v common to use a tuning chart so that the subsonic being added is going to chime with the bass, e.g. I use https://muted.io/note-frequencies/
I think this is perhaps why some songs just come alive and others don’t… but you can’t re-tune for every song - in a studio, this instability would be caught by the engineer or producer - depends on pitch perception - everyone varies (not all folks are good at vocal retuning, for example)