How To Tune Your Snare Drum

Practicing drum beats, drum fills, hand and foot technique, drum rudiments and drum solos are the biggest part of what we do on our practice time. However good you might be, your chops and musicality will take a back seat to the way your drum set sounds if it isn’t tuned properly. Therefore, it’s essential for you to practice your abilities to tune your drums if you ever want them to sound any good. In this free drum lesson, Jared Falk goes over the different steps he follows to tune the snare drum to his liking. He also shares some tips and tricks that will have you tuning snare drums like a pro.

Think of this free drum lesson as a way of learning a bunch of very useful techniques for snare drum tuning. Don’t worry too much about knowing what the right sound for your snare drum should be. As you practice your tuning abilities and explore the possibilities, your ears will start telling you what you like and what you don’t like. Listening to your favorite recordings is a very good way of checking what type of snare sound you like the most as well.

Once you’re done tuning the snare drum to your liking, you might find that it rattles a lot once you hit a rack-tom, or that it rings and resonates for too long. Check the free drum lesson “How To Muffle Your Drums” to learn about the muffling techniques Jared enjoys using for getting rid of unwanted resonance and ring, and for decreasing sympathetic snare buzz.

If you’d like to learn how to tune the remaining drums on your drum set, check the free drum lessons “How To Tune Your Bass Drum” and “How To Tune Your Toms“.