Pushing Drumheads Too Far | Season Four, Episode 34

Hello everyone, welcome back to Sounds Like a Drum King's independent media production. Today we are going to push the limits of your drums, but more importantly, the limits of your pads. If you have been with us for a while, you will know this. What we mainly do here is experiment with drum sounds and a lot of that involves experimenting with drum heads. This type of thing can result in having to spend some extra money on things that may not work in the end, but at the end of the day, this type of thing is largely the sound of the drums, coming into tension, balancing the patches and getting into the range, which is what we want to talk about today.

We'd like to take a minute too. Here to mention that this

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This is a way to directly help make sure we can continue to do this. Start with Patreon, so please if you have. or if you haven't, you want to check again, follow the link below and see if there is a level suitable for you. Every detail counts and really allows us to continue this in the future compared. To the idea of ​​buying a completely new drum set or buying a completely new set of drums to look for a different sound, if we instead spend a little time on the heads, we can really get a lot more out of these drums that we have made.

There are many episodes about that, but what we want to address today is what happens when you start to really move through extreme tunings. Are we ruining our drum heads by listening to really high tunings? If we check really high tunings. Are we ruining the casualties? The tunings are basically costing us money that we otherwise wouldn't have to spend if we didn't experiment well with these sounds. Today we're going to go to these extremes, we're going to focus on the toms and the snare and we're using pretty much the most common setup that we could use, which is coated with 10 mil g1 hitters, clear three mil stage side wound regular 10 thousand g1 reso in the trap and we want to take these new heads to the stratosphere.

Check out the links I can go and see what happens with them, so without further ado, I'm excited about this. Here is the highest tuning we were comfortable tuning these two that still sounded beautiful. Today we're ignoring the hype because it largely would. Don't be so worried about this kind of stuff with the hype. Kick drum tuning for me is a bit tighter range than I would use and I would very rarely try to tune it to the table with a kick drum in any situation. I might think about toms and snare, on the other hand I move around with tuning a lot and it may or may not surprise you to know that I don't change my heads very often and that includes hitters despite the fact that I hit very strong sometimes I choose heads that have a little more durability depending on the drums I'm going to use and the tuning and music I'm going to have to facilitate, but for today we're going to use single ply all over, coated masses, resoles transparent and these drums sound beautiful tuned this way if you saw our recent episode where we were trying to make this kit sound different than it looks, this for me too, you know?

If I saw this kit in the store and sat down and the heads were up I'd be surprised not to get mad about it, they sound great tuned like this, but it's another opportunity to calm expectations and realize that this is a functional tuning this is a choice that made me play differently as you'll see when we move on to the next tuning and we need to pay attention to those things, let's listen a little more in this tuning range now that there is discussion Around the idea of ​​putting drum heads on or breaking them, this guy Of things, some people subscribe to the idea of ​​tuning drums very high when they are fresh and then tuning them in the range you might want to use.

This is also a guitar. String analogy I've also heard people say, these Evans heads have a different type of collar, where this is totally unnecessary, you can just tune them to whatever pitch you want from the start and use them that way, if at all. This puts more stress on the head because they are not designed to have this done to them in any way. One word that we haven't mentioned much here yet, but that is specifically applicable here is elasticity when we are hitting. What the hell are these heads or if we tighten them to the extreme, what we are losing over time and what we notice as the head wears is the elasticity of the material that wants to give us less back, it is giving us less bounce, less tone and everything That over the course of the material stretching, this problem regarding elasticity is not unique to any particular brand or type of patch, but each one, each line, each model, each thickness will react differently under all of these stresses. and over time, each of them will lose elasticity at its own rate, both from tension and from hidden sticks.

Now we're going to test essentially what we're worried about, which is whether we've lost enough elasticity when lifting these heads. and playing them a lot they're not going to work at a lower voltage that maybe we now need to use for a new gaming scenario, so now let's adjust them to a fairly low range and see how they behave and again. We are going to retune the batters and also the reso because we are looking for a good sound. It is not about testing any particular patch. Well, they sound very good. I'm happy with these sounds.

I have no complaints about anything that is happening. Here, but I will tell you that up close, if you're getting really picky, there is a difference in this sound that if we had never tuned them as high as they would, it's not problematic in any way, but it's not exactly the same. The same as it would have been if we had gone here and started playing and that's because it's true that when you tighten the drum heads especially very hard, you're changing them in a way that you can't undo, that doesn't mean they're junk now. It doesn't mean that they no longer have a tuning range, but it's worth noting that if we were to do this six, seven, eight times, turning them up, down, and particularly if we were also tapping. them very loud when they're tuned under under tension um, it could shorten their life possibly significantly again depending on the player, the music, the sticks, all of that, so for me as a player and also as a listener, I don't really know. worry too much about this and it's not because we have some kind of sweet deal where we get free heads or something, my concerns are making a good sound and a usable sound and if I have moved them through many tunings and maybe they have lost their chances lower tuning or maybe they sound boxy when tuned super high, I'll still tune them to something that works for the moment that day and no one has ever told me that I need your rack toms to be tuned to these two notes or else It has never ever happened.

I don't think it's going to happen. I've played a lot of shows and a lot of sessions. It never happened or you touch it and they. whether they like the sound or they don't, so ultimately we shouldn't worry about that as much and worry a lot more about just making a beautiful sound, obviously even though we turned them up, they're still working, they're still doing the job and I'm having a lot of fun addressing both tensions to draw a couple of analogies about what this represents in a broader musical context. Guitarists change tuning all the time, they experiment with tunings, they experiment with different strings and sometimes they stretch and it doesn't sound good anymore and you change the strings, this kind of thing, all musicians do it their own way and avoid Being afraid, getting away from the idea that there are barriers that prevent us from doing these things, that's the biggest thing.

What we take away from this and a lot of the things we like to talk about here because for a lot of other instruments it's built in that you're going to experience, it's encouraged and I feel like with drums it's not encouraged as much in the same way. way we're a lot more afraid usually it feels complicated it also feels like we don't want to do something wrong and we don't want to break something we don't want to do something we can't undo um we want to know the numbers that things need to be tuned to so we can make everything sound exactly the same next time, let's go on a journey together and get away from that kind of similar-thinking track and expand the lanes we're running down here, starting with taking drums that maybe aren't for bop and tuning them down the range of bop take some small batteries tune them super low we have done it here we had a great time there is always something to find and that at the end of the day is the most fun part of this instrument to be fair I also know that many of those who watch have not had a lot of experience with certain tunings or experimenting with different tunings.

They know that many times we have a playing mentality and that is very important. practicing playing to improve playing turns out that we have to practice tuning to improve too and that can be extreme, it can be moving it around a bit, it can be copying a sound you hear on a recording as best you can All of this takes practice. It is ear training. We've talked about that a little bit in the past. We will talk more about it in the future. But it leads us to inspiration. Leads us. to find new and interesting things and it can also tell us about the musicians we love, why they tuned the records we love that way, why they chose that sound and just open our ears to more music and again, just more inspiration and we wait.

We hope this has inspired you even a little to just wander around with your head chasing some different sounds. Find out what it's like to have a really excited rack tom if you want, and also, if you like what you see, please. Please consider supporting us by liking, commenting and subscribing and make sure you get our notifications by hitting the bell down there and most importantly check out the link below to our patreon where we have tons of additional images, anecdotes, symbol series, many things. in the works that we haven't announced yet, it's a great way to connect with us and a great way to make sure that we can continue to do this and bring you all of these shenanigans that we do here for you