"GETTING BALANCED BEFORE YOU LOSE YOUR HEAD" When changing a head, I find it very useful to first retune, and rebalance the drum BEFORE YOU TAKE OFF THE HEAD TO BE REPLACED! A drum is a tensioned instrument, therefore bottom head tension affects top head tension and vice versa. They both affect the shell. If the drum is balanced when you remove the one head, minor imperfections in pitch from lug to lug become much more obvious and easy to fix. Furthermore, the shell is balanced to the "regular" tension of the bottom head therefore making tuning back up to "how you like it" a much easier and q ..read more

Hello everyone. Pro Drum Tech, Drummer, and YouTube Educator, Kenny Sharretts blogging about drum tuning on the 2019 Elvis Costello/Blondie Summer Tour with a quick discussion on adjusting your tuning for your IEM mix, and/or your venue. With some tours I do the venues tend to be similar in nature. On an Arena tour, you can tune for an arena, and generally stay at that tuning the entire tour. Same with a shed tour. With this tour, however, there were a variety of venues from arenas, to sheds, to theaters, which means I have to accommodate for the venue in my tuning. Moreover, some of the sheds ..read more

A common issue for ALL drummers is getting rid of unwanted snare buzz, be it a live setting, or the recording studio. While you want your snares to vibrate freely for the best “snare” sound possible, too much unnecessary buzz is a drag. Whether it’s rattle from a kick drum hit, or sympathetic buzz from a ringing tom, how you control snare buzz can make you a friend or foe to an audio engineer getting drum sounds. There are several tips I will recommend here for solving this problem, but none is as fundamentally important as centering, and leveling your snares. Centering, and leveling the snare ..read more

Hello to everyone who has asked me how I tuned drums for Stanley Randolph in the recording of Stevie Wonder’s Live At Last DVD. I was blessed to have Pearl’s engineer’s test this method in their sound lab. I was quite humbled to have received glowing revues. Thank you to Pearl Drums. Do note that while Stanley likes his drum tuned a bit lower these days, the template works in any key. So here are the details ..read more

All right all right. It's about time! First things first. I love teaching people how to set up and tune drums. The smile on a drummers face when he or she hears their kit sound better than it ever has, AND it was by their own hand. . . ? Now that is a beautiful thing to behold. With this in mind, I will be posting tuning tips, and tricks on this page regularly in hopes that all drummers, and tuners of drums find them useful. "RESETTING AN OLD HEAD" A common practice when you put on a new drumhead is to stretch the head with your hand after it's first few rounds of tightening. Once at a fair d ..read more

Today I'm blogging about a tuning topic that will be discussed via a multi part blog, with video examples to help you understand how to ..read more

Hello everyone. Here’s a quick discussion on a topic I encounter in EVERY tuning lesson I do, so I figured it is a worth a short blog for my members. The topic is based upon these questions. “Have you ever tried tuning up a drum when it’s really loose or really tight, and it doesn’t seem to change pitch that quickly?”, “Have you ever had a drum that you tried to tune down just a little, but it dropped in pitch quickly, and basically came unraveled with only a small set of turns? “ and “Have you ever tightened a drum up with what you thought were just a little set of turns, but it went way up i ..read more

Hello everyone. Pro Drum Tech, Drummer, and YouTube Educator, Kenny Sharretts blogging to you from The 2019 Elvis Costello/Blondie Summer Tour with a quick tuning tip blog on how to get the “Ultimate Punk Rock /New Wave Floor Tom” Sound ..read more

Hello to my blog readers. Today I’m writing on a subject that I receive a lot of DM questions about, and I also read a lot of smack talk about amongst drummers in online forums who stand by their opinions on either side of the matter. That matter is drum muffling. Since I just did a video for RTOM for Sweetwater’s Gear Fest 2020 discussing when, how, and why to use moon gels I figured this was a perfect time for a blog on the topic. In fact I will use “moon gels” as my catch all phrase for any products one might use for drum muffling. Because the reality is drum muffling is a means to an end ..read more

Beyond the causes of snare buzz discussed in part 1, the most common cause of snare buzz is sympathetic vibrations from the other drums in your kit. While it is next to impossible to get rid of all sympathetic vibrations from your other drums, it is possible to limit the influence of vibrations by tuning your toms (and even your Bass drum) around your snare ..read more