Re: Drumdial tuner
Well, I'm neither for or against using anything like the drumdial tuner or the Tama Tension Watch. I'm old school in the sense that like Ploughman and others have mentioned here, I've spent many an afternoon hitting drums, adjusting the tension, noting different types of heads working whatever ways depending on the individual drum, etc, to the point now when whenever I get a student or friends asking to tune up their sets, I can get a pretty satisfactory sound quickly in just about any situation...a full kit done in 15mins to half an hour or more, depending. This has been hard-won information, gained by a lot of trial and error, talking and swapping tips with fellow drummers.....and all way before DVD and YouTube.
One thing, well really, the main thing that the Drumdial and Tama Rhythm Watch is great for is, naturally, telling you the tension of the head so that you get the tuning that you like. Ok, so you tune it to that way. But if you spend a bit of time recording drums, here's one problem......you'll find that the sound of your drum or drumset sounds fine in your room, but all of a sudden put it in another room, especially the one where you'll be recording and what happens? The sound changes. Because when recording a drum or a set of drums, the instrument isn't the only thing, the enviroment that you're in will is also a factor in the overall drum sound, and a sound engineer or producer will often ask to alter, detune, or (drastically for some drummers) even muffle one drum, several drums, even the whole set so that the right sound balance is achieved. And unless you know far more about recorded drum sounds that these people (some people may......I'm not doubting that either), then really you have to accomodate them, that's the way it is sometimes. So that's where having an experienced ear in tuning helps, especially if we're talking about indefinite pitched instruments such as the drumkit.
Now, on the flip side of the coin, here's a situation where I did wish I had a DrumDial handy. A few years ago, doing some percussion overdubs at a mate's house, we brainstormed the idea of having a 15 second snippet of timpani as part of the many layers of percussion for an album of his original work. Well, I have quite a few large diameter Remo Rototoms that came fitted with "Tympani" heads so we thought, brilliant, let's get those tuned into a D Minor triad or maybe a D G A tuning to fit in the key of his tune. Well, everytime we'd do a slight tweak here and there, the low timp/roto kept sounding an F# as an overtone, throwing everything out. Or the high pitched one would sound a semi-tone low. Now unlike tom drums, we were dealing with pretty thin heads which you need for overtones (so you can't gaff-tape them out....that'd defeat the purpose)...it's just that they kept producing the wrong overtones, lol. Eventually, with a Roland guitar tuner we got it right, ending up with the D G A tuning. After four-five hours and much hair pulling and teeth grinding. Five hours....took a number of minutes to actually play the damned overdub in the end! We now have that as an in-joke at jam sessions nowadays. Now that's where the DrumDial would have been handy! So while I say that experience first and foremost will not be replaced by techological aids, it certainly can't be harmed by it...really the DrumDial and Rhythm Watch devices can certainly co-exist with the experienced human ear, in my honest opinion.
Last edited by Drumbledore; 04-02-2011 at 11:40 AM.
"...it's the Paradigm Of The Cosmos!" Stewart Copeland on Youtube
668: The Number Of The Guy Next Door To The Beast.
"A random act of kindness; it keeps my heart in shape!" - Late8
Bookmarks