The Drums - The Bottom Heads

Hi, I'm Wes Crawford and now we're going to talk about the bottom heads and what kind of tension adjustments we might want to make with them.

On a snare drum, you will see the bottom head is just about always clear and its very thin, its an extra thin head. You actually do not have to tighten this up as much to get a higher pitch on it. So, a lot of times people for the snare drum head want a little bit higher pitch but its not actually cranked down on the lugs as much as you might on the top. Another consideration is sympathetic snare buzz. Sometimes well hit a tom, did you hear the snares ring or continue to buzz. We hit another drum and there is a sympathetic vibration going on which makes the snares buzz. A little bit of buzz is natural and it can actually sound a little sterile if you dont have a little bit, but if it gets to be so much in a recording situation or the way that you're being miked in a live performance situation that is bothersome to other people and you do want to check it out in context, playing around the drums if all of a sudden it sticks out a whole lot with one tom. Then what you need to do to cure that is to go back and change the tension of this bottom head. This will be your first thing you will try and if you cant do that without making a sound on the snare drum that you dont want anymore, sometimes just loosening one lug that's near the snare strand on one side will do the trick too. With tom heads, we also have bottom heads pretty much thats the norm anymore back in the 60s, early 70s, a lot of the toms only had one head, they were easier to get to a truer pitch and the engineers didnt have to worry about the sound and ring of the bottom head, but we get a lot deeper kind of a sound, a lot more resonate sound if we have two heads on the toms. The bottom head, some people like to tune to the exact same pitch as the top head and you get more resonance out of the same pitch. Some people like the sound of tuning the bottom head a little more loosely than the top head to get sort of a drop up a Doo (ph) kind of sound on the toms.

Some people like to tune the bottom head a little higher than the top head and you will get more of an attack in ringing kind of sound out of the toms and this again is just a matter of personal preference. I would say a third of the drummers polled in one interview I saw, one article I read one, wanted it the same, the bottom head at the same pitch, a third wanted higher, a third preferred lower. So, its really sort of an equal kind of a preference, its up to you to decide. The whole aspect we might discuss for one moment about tuning the toms, the true pitches. Some people like to do that. Other people like to just tune each drum to where it sounds best and then check to see if they sound like a nice kit or a set altogether. The great thing about tuning it, the pitch is, as its going to sound wonderful probably in a recording or in any kind of situation it will sound more musical with the song, but since we change keys sometimes in songs and since a lot of songs are in different keys, we dont want to have a pitch sound, something, so it doesnt sound good with that song. So, a lot of people dont try for exact pitches, instead just do a general good sounding kit and just make the drum sound good to itself.