What’s the right fundamental frequency for each drum in my kit?
If you’re asking what frequencies you should you tune your drums to, or what’s the best fundamental frequency for each drum in my kit? Then you’ve already made a step in the right direction with learning about drum tuning and drum acoustics. You’ll already know that tightening either drumhead increases the fundamental frequency or pitch of the drum, and you’ll be aware that bigger drums tune to lower frequencies than lower drums. Equally, if you’ve followed our tutorial on drumheads you’ll know that thicker, coated or double ply drumheads lead to lower frequencies too. You’ve probably also seen in our tutorials that a single drum can be tuned effectively over quite a large frequency range, so there are a few options too. Now, This is all essential information for a drummer to understand, but it doesn’t actually help decide exactly what frequencies you should tune each drum to in your kit.
Well, the quick and unhelpful answer to the question is ‘it depends’ and it’s true that the choice depends on many different factors. We’ll get to a more complete answer in a moment, but let’s just recap on what the dependent and non-dependent factors are. So, here are a few factors that will determine the different frequencies:
- The size of each drum in your kit
- How many drums you have in the kit
- Your preference of drumhead type
- The type of music you want to play
- Your personal preferences to low and high tuning
- Whether you want to tune to musical pitches and intervals or not
Something that actually has very little impact on the choice is the make of the drumkit or even the shell material of the drums. You can tune a 14 inch floor tom exactly the same regardless of whether it is made of beach plywood, solid mahogany or even Perspex. Equally a drum set made by Sonor or Ludwig can be tuned to exactly the same frequencies as a drum set manufactured by Pearl or DW, assuming the kit has the same individual drum sizes and the same drumheads installed. While these kits certainly sound subtly different, they can all be tuned the same, in the same way a Fender guitar sounds different to a Gibson, or a Steinway piano sounds different to Yamaha, yet these instruments can all be tuned to the same musical frequencies. Additionally, the depth of the drums makes only a little difference; deeper drums can be tuned a bit lower than shallow drums, but on the whole drums come in fairly standard depths that allow a comparable range to be considered. It’s very obvious that the diameter of the drums makes a much bigger difference than the depth of the drum when considering the viable tuning range.
The iDrumTune Drum Kit Designer
A quick and easy way to select the frequencies for tuning is to use the drumkit designer feature that is built into idrumtune. You’ll find the Drum Kit Designer in iDrumTune’s Preset Manager, by pressing the little tools icon in the top left corner.
Once you have opened the drumkit designer, you can start to describe your own drum kit and then explore a few different tuning options. We’ll go through this step by step:
- First, you can select the number of drums in your kit, including the kick and snare drum.
- Then, you can start to customise the settings to more accurately describe your kit. Tapping on the size of a drum will change the size, so if the display shows a 12 in rack tom but you have a 14 inch Tom in your kit, then tap the size twice and it will change to 13 and then 14. You can also change a Rack Tom to a Floor Tom by tapping on the name too.
- Once you have the kit described accurately, you can adjust the tuning style to give different tunings for the kit. If you play rock or metal drums you’ll probably want to use a low tuning, and higher tunings for jazz or fusion. As you move the slider you’ll see the frequencies change and the dots on the keyboard (representing each drum’s fundamental pitch frequency) will change. We generated the algorithm for the different tunings by testing out hundreds of drums and drum setups, so these built in suggestions give really good starting points for each drum in your kit.
- Pick the setting that makes most sense to you, including a tuning setting for your snare, and then you are ready to convert your kit design into a tuning preset of your own. Just tap the ‘Import to Preset Manager’ button and the kit will appear ready made for you as a preset, with suggested overtone frequencies (for lug tuning) automatically calculated. You can name and save your kit preset and then start tuning your kit and listening to the results.
Some examples of tunings created with the iDrumTune Kit Designer are shown below.
Once you have designed your drum kit and imported it back into the Preset Manager, you can now call upon the preset to help you while tuning. For example, in Pitch Tuning mode, you can open the Preset Popup by pressing the small drum kit button in the bottom left of the app. Your preset kit shows and the kit frequencies for the fundamental and edge overtone are shown. You can scroll through your presets and the individual drums by tapping on their names in the popup. Once you have the correct drum selected, tune away using the skills you have learnt in this course until you get the tuning you are looking for.
Experiment Experiment Experiment
The steps above really just give you a basic starting point for tuning. From this point on you need to experiment yourself. We have given you musical frequencies to tune to – this is a good initial approach because it ensures that all the drums in your kit are tuned with musical relationships or intervals between each other. But, as you’ll already know, it’s not essential to tune drums to musical frequencies, if you decide that one of your drums sounds a bit better a couple of Hz lower or higher, then that is great. You can go back into the Preset Manager and change some of the numbers to suit your final preferences.
Another reason for experimenting is that you learn and develop your ears during the process. And you’ll become a much more adaptable drummer if you can identify the different qualities between a low-tuned kit and a high-tuned kit. So, it’s well worth taking some time and tuning your kit both low, medium and high, just to hear the difference. We guarantee these tunings can all sound great on any kit, and you’ll develop your hearing, your acoustics knowledge, and your tuning ability by doing this exercise.
Another way to personalise is to tweak the tunings directly in the drum kit designer. If you want to nudge a single drum so that it is slightly higher or slightly lower, again you can tap on the frequency to modify it to the next note up or down to that provided by the algorithm. Furthermore, you might want to try different resonant head or RTF tunings. We recommend using the 1.5 RTF value when starting out, as this represents a perfect musical fifth (see our tutorial on resonant head tuning for a full explanation of these acoustic principles). But you can try the perfect sixth RTF too, and this can be selected in the kit designer also by tapping the rtf button before exporting to the preset manager.
You should find the kit designer both fun to play with and rewarding in terms of understanding the kit and how it can be tuned as a whole, and we’ve added a little walk through video of the Drum Kit Designer above, for those who haven’t yet got the iDrumTune app, to see what it’s all about. It’s worth going through the whole iDrumTune course to get to grips with all the different drum setup aspects that the drum kit tuned brings together, but once you’ve done this and experimented with a few different setups, you’ll find that you are well on your way to mastering the setup and tuning of a full drum kit, and you’ll take full control of the musicality of your instrument!
If you want to know more about the underlying science of drumheads and drum sound, and learn more creative approaches to drum sound and drum tuning, check out the free iDrumTune ‘Drum Sound and Drum Tuning’ course at www.idrumtune.com/learn
Author Professor Rob Toulson is an established musician, sound engineer and music producer who works across a number of different music genres. He is also an expert in musical acoustics and inventor of the iDrumTune Pro mobile app, which can be downloaded from the App Store links below:
