An important part of playing an instrument is learning to care for and maintain it and its parts (drummers have quite a few parts to look out for!) and the most heavily used part of the drum kit is the snare drum.
Drum heads, or drum skins wear out over time and eventually need replacing. When that happens, you will need to tune it back up to where you want it.
Here’s a look at the absolute basics of how that’s done.
You will need:
- Drum Key
- Drumsticks
Step 1 After having set the new skin in place on the drum (make sure it’s centered!), reposition the hoop and make sure the holes align to the tuning lugs attached to the shell of the drum. Place the tension rods through each hole of the hoop and into the corresponding holes in the tuning lugs (or they are also just called “lugs”).
Here’s an illustration to show you which parts of the snare drum we’re talking about.
Step 2 Finger-tighten (tighten by hand) each tension rod. ‘Finger tight’ means you turn the tension rods (these have threads on them, just like any screws) until the tension rod just touches the edge of the rim of the hoop. Do this all the way around. If the lugs are a bit tight, use a drum key to make sure each one is touching the rim.
Step 3 Using your Drum Key, give the rod closest to you a turn to increase the tension, do the same with the one across from that, then the next one, and so on (this method is often called the “star pattern”). Each one gets a turn in order to get them up to tension evenly. The illustration below shows the star pattern applied to a drum with 8 lugs.
Step 4 You can check the tension by tapping the skin directly in front of each tension rod. More likely than not, the sound will be a little different at each one. Use your drum key to tune the rods so that they all sound the same when hit.
Do this until you achieve your desired sound. Tightening the rods will make the snare drum sound higher pitched. Loosening it will make it lower pitched.
Did you know? Some drummers like to tune their drums with 2 drum keys? Talk about efficient! Here’s how they would apply the star pattern with 2 keys instead of 1:
We hope this blog has been helpful. Stay tuned for more general musicianship knowledge articles and more on our Blog Page!
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