How Low is Too Low? | Season Four, Episode 40

Hello everyone, welcome back to Sounds as a Drum Kids Indie Media Production, today we're talking about low tom sounds and specifically how to make sure we have some tone in there and not just trying to get the bottom down. Possibly, we talk a lot about here about high tunings low tunings mid tunings tunings for styles, but one thing we haven't delved into very much is what to do when you're struggling between having a good amount of attack in your sound and also having a bass nice and robust. The tom sound under that attack a lot of times when we move to the toms and we want to lower them naturally, we tune them and try to get them into a low tuning country and there are a few different things you can do with the reso head and other things. try to get some tone back into the drum, but more importantly we need to think about the range that can be used with the size drum we have and then what we can do to mitigate the scenarios where we want to have the lowest level possible. . get out of the drum but not suddenly have no tone and only attack let's start with a tom tuning that suffers from exactly this problem tons of attack not much tone the first thing we should mention about this sound Again, we are not talking about good sounds and bad sounds, we're talking about functionality in a musical context with this sound both for your ears and for the listener right here in the kit and also for close microphones, up, far microphones that we have to talk about.

How not much sound comes out of these drums at the moment, other than that initial attack, and any low end you're experiencing when you're tuned this way won't go very far, so the audience won't hear it. your bandmates aren't going to hear it and any microphone that's more than a couple of inches away isn't going to receive anything now if you're currently playing just for your own enjoyment or practicing and aren't worried about microphones and the audience. , there is still a more beautiful tone that you could get from your drums again just for your own enjoyment and to inspire you to play more, practice more and improve your skills by simply adjusting some of the tensions on these toms.

I've had people want to talk to us about the idea of ​​cheap sounding drums versus expensive sounding drums. These are the same drums we use for the vast majority of the

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s here. They are quality instruments. This shows that even with very new heads and a bit of intentionally incomplete tuning, we can make them sound quite poor, so what you are hearing now is symptomatic, it has nothing to do with these drums, it's just the tuning that is important keep in mind before moving on to anything else. tunings for these toms there is nothing wrong with tom sounds that have a really dominant attack.

Something that has happened in recent years is that we have become very accustomed to hearing solo drums that have been treated a lot with post-production effects. different things, particularly on Instagram and other places on social media, this is a very different scenario than you would need for situations where your drums need to fit into music that uses other instruments and, more importantly, music in which the drums are not mixed as advanced as you are. We will hear in drum videos on all social media platforms which results in a skewed idea of ​​what the correct drum sounds are, which doesn't exist anyway, but sends us down a rabbit hole of trying to recreate sounds and think. in terms of sounds. that was never meant to be in musical context anyway now, if this is the kind of thing you're using again just for yourself for fun, you don't need to worry about it as much, they might still sound better, but particularly when to start fitting these instruments into a musical context and wanting them to do their job and shine, we need to pay attention to these things, then a slightly higher tuning which may actually sound lower to your ears now with this tuning both the reso and the batter have been tuned a bit, it's not dramatic and when you start experimenting with this you'll see that fractional turns actually make a big difference in terms of the behavior of the instrument.

Now what we have are instruments where the tension is higher, but there is a much greater presence of fundamental bass coming out of the drums, which gives us the feeling that they are actually tuned lower because we are hearing the bass and not just the bright attack and the emptiness beneath that we have felt. We talked in previous videos about the difference in the confluence of resonance and sustain. Right now we're getting more of both, but in particular the resonance around the fundamental tone of the drum is allowed to move and grow and create that tone. below which we want to support that attack in this tuning, it also comes faster because we have more tension on the heads, so you get your attack and immediately there is a tone right below it, which again for a context where you want these drums speak alongside others.

The instruments that come out of the box will be much easier to mix, everyone will be able to hear you better, and it's much more satisfying to play no matter what drums you're playing or what sizes you're playing. be a usable range for any size drums, any pair of heads, whatever you're using for the very music you're making, and these are the kind of experiments that can give you an idea of ​​what the lowest level at which you can go and still use it as high as you can go and still like the sound it's making.

This is one more in our long litany of opportunities to, instead of buying another instrument or trying to get excited about having more stuff, learn more about the instruments we have. We'll do it with the patch combinations we use and find inspiration in the range of that instrument which shows us the range in our own playing. Now, as a complement to these two previous tunings, we are going to go even higher with both. heads and this is to give a little more detailed explanation of something else that we lose in that extremely low tuning which is the dynamic range of these instruments.

This isn't necessarily the first tuning I would go to for a gig where I didn't know what they needed from me, but what we immediately do here is that drum loading, we can hear what we're doing, hit the drum really hard, It's growing and talking and giving us a lot of tone and a lot of activity and harmonics become a little more frequent if I play with this kind of dynamic range in the ultra-low initial tuning, everything that's very close to the drum just floats around and gets lost because nothing really resonates under there and when you play hit those drums with that super low tuning really hard you get something cool but you have to swing for the fences to make them do the best they can with that tension now let's listen to some intentionally dynamic playing between Our lowest tuning and our highest tuning to me are inspiring, however they are inspiring in different directions, what the high tuning gives me is not necessarily what the low tuning does and although the low tuning is a little lower than I would consider. usable for the music I like to make, it taught me something about the range of these drums and, going into high tuning, I had some new ideas I'd never had before just by virtue of the sound they were making and the feel they were giving me. giving along all those dynamics now because of the nature of the way we do things here in the spirit of the channel, you're listening again uncompressed, unmuted, nothing's happening here, they're wide open in this tuning.

In a recording situation, in a live situation or even depending on your personal preference, you can dampen a little to adjust the relationship between the patches in terms of the interval between the two tones, try whatever you want knowing that we are starting with a beautiful sound resonant that gives us a lot of tone and still has good articulation at low dynamics, everything is within limits once we are working on playing music, so starting wide like we do here, you know, those overtones were a little excessive. for me, but I want to make sure that you hear exactly what we are listening to in the room and so that you know that nothing strange is happening, it is also important to keep in mind that the music we listen to regardless of what you see on the networks Social media right now influences our preferences in terms of how we tune the kit, so each of these may speak to you differently and there may be one that you like more than the rest.

For me, the middle setting is the one that makes me happiest and seems most versatile in terms of tone, power, projection and all that, but don't be afraid to go to extremes on the lows or highs, away from things. What do you think you should do? be normal in your ear or how you expect the drums to sound and there is a distinct possibility that it will excite you to play different types of styles of music and also other things that you might listen to and that you are excited about expanding your own playing to summarize What we mean here is that the idea that the lowest sound requires the lowest tuning is not always the case, many times it is not the case and to explore what it means to return the tone to the drums. with a relatively low tuning will open your ears to the tone to attack the confluence of both things and get you closer to what your optimal drum sound could be with the drums and heads you are using and that sums it up for today.

Thank you very much for watching and joining us on this journey to toms. Low tunings are fun. Really low tunings are fun and sometimes you can go too low for the room, it just happens sometimes. Please like, comment and subscribe, and most importantly. Follow the link below to check out our patreon, if you haven't already it's the best way to support us, help us continue making these videos, join the community, let's talk to each other, get great ideas and check out all the extra stuff we have. We're doing here that are exclusive to Patreon, including the token series, uh, additional play demos, different anecdotes, things like that, and lastly, if you're a low-fit person, you're really curious how you've managed to mitigate this type of problems.

To EQ your toms, did you find that you needed to tune them differently? You just hit as hard as you can and at the end of the day there are a lot of options there and I hope this has given you some new things to think about when you go as low as you can