Your Resos Are Killing Your Tom Tone | Season Three, Episode 38

Hello everyone, welcome back to sounds like an independent media production by Drum Kane, today we're talking about Tom Rezzo heads. Something very specific about Tom Resort heads. The ends of them. We're talking about what happens when you go super high, super low and what we do. I want to point out now first things first, the reso head, we're talking about the head on the bottom of the drum, away from you, the one that you're not hitting, sometimes they call it, you know, the bottom head, there are names, I call it the The reso head because it really contributes a lot to the resonance of the drum makes sense to me.

What we want to talk about here today is that there are situations where you may not realize that the problem you are having is specific to the reso patch and it may be a matter of age or wear or whether it is new or range but today we talk specifically about tuning intervals and basically that just like the tuning of that head can ruin the sound of the drum or at least so that you don't have a very good concert, today we have equipped the toms in the Pearl kit with g1 transparents on the top and bottom because they are basically the cleanest, clearest and simplest thing we can put in here, so whatever is happening on the drum, we will know if there was coding there or any other kind of additional business, it could be contributing to that and confusing the situation, so basically we're going to go for the most clinical setup possible and then I went ahead and adjusted the hitters to the range that I like, they're about a fifth apart, the hitters between the two drums and we're not going to play them today, they'll stay that way, so everything you hear in the demos today will just be changes to the resonant patches.

First, let's hear how it sounds in what I consider an optimal tuning for this range so that they sound basically how they normally sound when we use them in the studio. Here we are. dealing with the hitters tuned to feel the sound like the pitch of what I would like to hear and then I tuned the rezzos around a minor third in higher intervals basically the difference between an a up to a c or something like that and this for me gives the balance correct attack,

tone

and dynamics. I can get basically everything I want out of them depending on what patches I use, it may change a little but generally this is where I put things now when we dive into sounds.

Let's hear where we get with this interval. I know for a fact that a younger version of me or myself with a little less experience would have immediately reached for some sort of cushioning. We are not going to do any cushioning today. I just want to show you that this sound, which for me doesn't really need any damping, is completely open and is due to the intervals between the heads. First I want to hear what happens when the prayer is too low. Basically, I won't aim for a specific note or interval. I'm going to go as low as I can where I can still get a

tone

out of the head basically so it doesn't move, it's not finger tight, but it's as low as possible and it still resonates.

Where I ended up is about a quarter under the hitters on both of them or so, so it's a really dramatic jump from where we were before, it's very, very, very low and when you hear it on that demo, some of that noise and kind of The decay is actually the reso heads going around, so what we've done is like reversed the way they behave: we have the tighter one at the top and the looser one at the bottom and our tone has gone, everything has slowed down. the resolution moves slower so the whole behavior of the drum is slower the shell doesn't really kick in it's definitely not throwing the tone very far hearing it in the room we were like it was almost like concert timpani or like there is no bottom head There I heard people who then put duct tape on the bottom of the drums to try to fix this.

They put tape on top. Moon gels. All kind of things. This is only because the reso is too low. These are new patches and are undamaged. They really haven't been altered at all, we just put them here, so now you know if that's what you're hearing, there's not enough pitch frustrations, check the bottom to see if they're too low. Now the other extreme is the one indicated. That's what I come across a lot in backline kits and also in studios, the drum heads look good, they've been used but they're in a reasonable range, I hit them and say, oh boy, those don't sound good and look. under the drum and prayer heads are very tight.

When I talk to people who like a high-reso head but then a normal midrange head, they tend to tell me that they're looking for a faster sound. it sounds with more articulation, that is, less harmonics, it's all to achieve a good sound basically, but the main thing is that they want the drum to respond quickly. Now, lifting the resv patch will do this, I mean, that's part of what happens when you lift it, but there's a threshold that you reach where it can't actually return anything to you because the intervals between the two patches are too wide and they can't communicate with each other, so this is basically a situation where the drum cannot resonate for the opposite reason than the drum.

Lastly, on a drum that is optimally tuned for a good sound, there are reflections on the inside of the shell between the heads and things like that, but when we get to this kind of tension, we're basically dealing with a closed tube and we're getting too much reflection on the bottom head, but there's really no resonance with the batter head tuned to a mid pitch like this, we can't actually get the bottom head to move at all because the frequencies are so far away from each other. um, they can't really have much conversation and work together to make the drum itself resonate and throw tone and maybe a note to the room or even to the microphones, and when you run into drums drowned out in these kinds of different ways , sometimes you can still have a good close mic sound, but sure when you get like five feet away it just dies.

Some of these situations that I'm doing here don't sound so radical where I'm sitting, but as soon as you get a little bit further away or even get in like an overhead mic, it immediately disappears and then you know, you start tearing up the tape, you start messing around and You don't even consider that side of the drum that we never play and you don't think about that. much is responsible for a huge, I mean, at least 50 of the sound of everything else, now bringing the prayer to a reasonable level, I mean reasonable, a medium tension somewhere that is in the range of the batter will give us the opportunity to To really get resonance off the drum there are certain tunings on certain drums and situations where the sound you're hearing is really just the heads for us, especially those of us who have drums that we like and have had for a long time.

I know maybe I spent a lot of money on um we want to use the drum, we don't just want to hear the sound, you know, a few tens of dollars on drum heads, so when we go down, we'll come back. in that range where the mass, the reso and the shell are all working together to make a beautiful sound to me, you know, I think a good place to start is to just tune them the same way and then just turn up the reso a little bit as you go. you want it. Go and find the optimal place for

your

battery.

Full Disclaimer Disclosure. All that higher than the baddest reso. Reso lower than dough. Both totally acceptable. They both make great sounds depending on what sound you're going for. This is not about whether it should be higher or higher. less than or equal it is about understanding that there are limits based on the pitch of the hitter's head if we were dealing with a much higher pitch on the hitters this whole range with the prayers would move and in the same way if the batteries were super lows move down because we're not trying to just say this is the right tension for the prayer, this is the right tension for the hitter, they work together and they move, so if I wanted a jazz tuning, I could tune the slightly lower resolution. and everything is very in tune from where they are, but the bottom line is that you have to understand that there is a range for every drum, there is a range for every head and you want to work within the limitations of the physics of that instrument and make sure you don't go too far. extreme to the point of not getting what you can get from the front, so when you find

your

self in a scenario where someone has retuned your drums and you want it back or you.

You're using a backline rig and crazy things come out of them when you hit them, maybe you just traveled and they changed tone, maybe you used, you know, calfskin heads or something like that and then the weather affects them basically what wanna. The takeaway from this is that damping is not the first place to go, in my opinion the first place to go is to tune the hitters so they feel good and generally in the pitch range you like , then tune the rezzos. Same thing, maybe a little higher, maybe a little lower, but generally in the same vicinity and see if you're going to come off the drum at that point.

What you're looking for, the extremes aren't very useful, I find it for tuning um, especially for more traditional sounds like you're hearing here um and similarly, damping is the last place I go unless I'm looking for a type of almost synthetic sound, a little bit tapey, maybe in a recording situation, but I go as far as I can with the tuning. and the choice of head, before we start adding dough to the dough, it's also worth noting that choosing the right heads for the situation you're in will also affect all of this if we were using coated doughs or if there were two doughs. -ply or if there were hydraulics here or if we were using a different type of resolution head, all of these things affect these ranges and these intervals and everything too, so make sure that when you study these things and when you get into experimentation that you understand How the heads you're using should normally work will help you figure out what they can do for you.

You know, there was a bit of experimentation for me today because I don't normally play clear g1s on the top and bottom, so I played around with them to get a feel for them. You know, it's almost like sitting in front of a new instrument when you're trying out totally new patches in a combination you've never used before and trying to get a good sound, thanks so much for watching, like, comment, subscribe and click the bell notification below so you can hear all the new videos coming out of the studio here, particularly on Patreon, lots of bonus stuff there playing demos. anecdote chats, follow the link below and see if there is a level that works for you, please help us stay here, you are really supporting us in these wild times we find ourselves in and we cannot express our gratitude enough for that together . with me wanting to know about your time intervals because I do, don't forget that when you're experimenting with these things it's not really about promoting a sound, so if you maybe hear me say that the rezzo is a minor third higher. and you do that and it doesn't sound good on your drums, okay all drums are different, make sure you find a sound that makes you happy and experiment until you get it and once you get it, reverse engineer it a little.

But make sure you can do it again because at the end of the day it's about getting there fast so we can get down to the business of making music.