Hey everybody my name is Vincent Baynard I'm one of the drummers with Elevation
Worship and today we're going to be talking through sort of our approach to
how we tune drums set them up and achieve our drum sound with Elevation
Worship so we're going to start with the kick drum and we've got a DW Collector
Series kick here they're just real consistent drums for us and they're what
we like to use for a lot of our projects and we've got a power stroke p3 clear
black dot head on it we like this a lot for the studio when we're live we like
to use the power stroke p3 smooth white it just translated translates a little
bit better and for the kick I like to keep it real simple
right now we've got new heads on it and I just go through make sure everything
is finger tight and we're good there and then I just like to go through and I'll
do the star pattern and just kind of do a half turn on everything and just I'm
feeling as I go making sure everything is kind of uniform because a lot of
times as you're tightening they'll kind of loosen up so as I'm going I'm finger
tighten in each one before I go to the half turn so now that we've got
everything like half turn we're just gonna kind of go through and feel and
make sure nothing is too out of order here so now that we've got the batter
side pretty much situated we're gonna do the same process on the resonant side
we'll just kind of everything is finger tight we'll go through just half turn as
a starting point and then just kind of listen through the drum and just make
sure nothing's kind of out of whack and then we'll keep moving from there and on
this resonant side we've got a power stroke p3
ebony
so now I've got half turn all around we'll just kind of feel make sure
nothing is too loose this actually feels pretty good and the wrinkles
anywhere once we push down on the middle so now we've got it pretty much in place
we'll put a kick pedal on it and then we'll give it a couple kicks and make
sure everything feels good sounds good we'll make some tweaks from there so now
that we've got the kick pretty much tuned to a good place we've added a kick
pedal and we've added a little Evans EQ patch to the kick drum which helps with
the longevity of the kick head a little bit but it also adds a little bit of
attack which I like and so now we'll just give it a few kicks and see how it
feels how it sounds and we'll make some tweaks if we need to so that feels
really good to me and a lot of times I'll just kind of
double check making sure nothing is loose keeping everything pretty uniform
nothing's wrong here so it feels good sounds pretty good in the room so I
think we're good with the kick for now so now that we've got the kick in a good
place we're gonna move on and start with the rack Tom we've got a 13 by 9 rack
tom here it's usually our go-to size for a rack tom and we like to use the tune
bot it's a cool little tool that you can use to kind of quickly dial in a drum
set it's not like a final thing at the end of the day you have to listen to the
drum and like make sure you're the drum is agreeing with what you're trying to
do to it but I've generally found that it's a good place to start to kind of
get something roughly in the ballpark so for our rack tom we like to get both the
top and the bottom head to the same frequency I know sometimes you can tune
the bottom head tighter for resonance and stuff but I've generally found that
getting both heads at the same frequency gives you the maximum resonance and then
you could control it from there with some moon gels or something like that so
we're gonna start with the bottom head we've got just a Remo ambassador clear
and we're generally shooting around 150 for our 13 inch rack Tom's
and right now these are just finger tight and they're sitting around 109 so
we're not too far off so now I'll just kind of go through and then just slowly
tweak it bring it up and once we get around 150 152 then we'll just kind of
move on to the top head and as I'm doing this I'm listening I'm not just looking
to hit a number I'm listening to the drum and making sure that everything is
sounding pretty uniform right now we're at 124 so we're just gonna kind of keep
moving up a little bit I'm probably going about a quarter turn each time so
we're sitting at about 142 so we're getting there and then we'll just make a
final little small adjustment one thing to note too that as I'm turning I'm
feeling the tension on each drum so I'm not cranking one and leaving another one
pretty load to try to hit a number I'm making sure that I'm trying to keep
everything pretty uniform cool so we're at 153 which is good enough for me and
then we'll swap it over and do the top head as well and then we'll just start
with we'll probably do half turns here
cool so we're pretty much sitting around 152 right there so now that we've pretty
much got at ballparked what I'll do is I'll put it on the stand and then I like
to when I'm hitting the drum to test it I want to hear like one consistent note
I don't want it to be diving too much or to have like any weird resonance so
let's just see what sounds like
so that actually sounds pretty good so what I like to do from here is we've got
some moon gels and this drum is just wide open right now and it's ringing as
much as it can because at the top and the bottom are at the same frequency
there's a little bit of like a papery sound that I'm hearing and I've found
that usually the bottom head is where that's coming from so I've got a moon
gel here that I've cut into a little thin strip and then I'm just gonna place
it somewhere towards the rim of the drum not too far and then I'll listen from
there so that took that little tone that I was hearing out of there so I'm just
gonna leave that and then I'll put one somewhere around the top towards the rim
as well and this is just taking a little bit of the resonance out just to make it
a little more manageable so that sounds pretty good to me right now and we can
go through and make final tweaks once we get the full kit put together but I
think we're good with the rack tom right now so now that we got the rec tom in a
good spot we've added a couple floor toms we've got a 16 by 16 and an 18 by
16 and the process for these two is will be the same process that we did on the
rack Tom I've already gone through it it's tuned in the top and the bottom
head to the same resonance on both sides and then once we get them in a good spot
add some in gels to control some of the resonance and on the 16 we like to keep
it about 120 121 on top and bottom and then on the 18 we like to keep it around
96 and those numbers just kind of give us the intervals that we're looking to
here between the drums and sort of big picture the reason we're using coded
heads are to give us just a little bit more of a warm sound in worship it's
kind of a lot of big Tom's and stuff like that and the clear heads just kind
of cut have a little bit too much attack for us and from some like a tuning
perspective when we're using the tune bot what you need to do the reason I was
putting it on the drum throne was because you need to have one side of the
head muted so that you can see the and see and hear the frequencies
that are happening on the whatever head you're working on at the time so that's
why I was doing that and one other little thought is we cut the moon gels
into little strips rather than just putting a full moon gel on there what
that does is it lets us kind of get a little more refined in how we control
the resonance without just completely squashing the sound of the drum we like
to still let them breathe and have some life to them and we found that if you
can just use little strips instead of a full and then that helps us with that so
I'll go through these now and let you hear the drums again this is 150 ish on
top and bottom and this is 121 top and bottom and then this will be 96 top and
bottom so that's a nice little interval and it sounds really good for our
context so now that we've got these in a good spot we'll add in the snare alright
so now we've got all of our Tom's in place and tuned up nice we've added in
the snare this is a six and a half by fourteen Ludwig black beauty it's one of
my personal favorite snares and it's one of our favorites to use for recording
I've done the same process with this snare that I've done with the Tom's as
far as using a tune bot the only difference is we tune the top and
bottoms to different frequencies and I've just found that it just sounds a
little better that way on the top I like to keep it around 250 something like
that and then on the bottom I keep it around 380 and that's just a personal
preference it feels good to play in that range and it also sounds good
one thing to note about the snare tuning is I know in worship a lot of times the
tenancy is still I tuned down really low and you can definitely get good drum
sounds that way but I've found that by kind of staying in the mid-range a
little bit of tuning that it lets the drum breathe a little bit better and
that kind of helps with some of that low in that people are looking for so this
might actually be tuned to maybe a touch higher
and some typical snare snares would be tuned but I found that this records
really well in this range and it also just sounds really good in the room one
final little thought about the drums themselves I like to use these lug locks
and what this does is on the snare in particular it's getting a lot of love so
if you can just pop them on here it keeps the rods from detuning and
keeps your snare and the rest of your drums and tuned a little bit better
there's a couple different ones that I like to use this one is made by tuner
fish and they just look like a little fish which is cool but I like these a
lot for the tops because it keeps it can only go so far before it just doesn't
let it detune any further I like to use these little just kind of rectangular
ones on the bottom just because they're more convenient you don't have to worry
about them falling off as much as you do with the fish so now that we've got
everything kind of put together I'll just kind of go through the kit real
quick let let you hear it and then we'll move on and kind of round things out
talking about cymbals
so now that we've got the actual drums themselves put together we wanted to
just briefly touch on our approach to cymbals we typically are going for a
darker sound which is pretty typical of worship music size wise we tend to lean
towards 20-inch crashes they just have enough decay but they get out of the way
of the mix pretty quickly for high hats we typically stay 15 16 inches something
like that it gives us a nice wash for when we're opening them up for some
situations but it still has a nice crispness to it when it's closed 22 inch
rides usually are where we're sitting for the same reason they're bright
enough when you're crash riding that they sit in a good spot in the mix but
they're not weak sounding like maybe a 20 or something would be for our context
and you can achieve that dark washy sound with any brand we're not too brand
specific we use all kinds of different brands so this is pretty much our
approach to achieving a drum sound and worship music it's definitely not a
one-size-fits-all approach but it's what works for us in our context I hope this
has been helpful and thanks for watching