Creative & Culture

Snare Drum Effects

Drummers looking to expand their range of style may not have several snares at their disposal. However, by changing the tension and pitch on a single snare drum, drummers can mimic kits from Motown to The Bee Gees. Learn in this video what styles you can achieve through simple snare adjustments. Enlarge

Snare Drum Effects

Drummers looking to expand their range of style may not have several snares at their disposal. However, by changing the tension and pitch on a single snare drum, drummers can mimic kits from Motown to The Bee Gees. Learn in this video what styles you can achieve through simple snare adjustments.

In variations of tuning, we can get some massively different results depending on how you want. I'm trying to get a kind of James Brown sound. Obviously, this is a different drum, but it's nice to just crank it up really high with a very loose snare tension.

So, this is how tightly our snare is there. I pressed against the drum. I've got hardly any snares there because I want quite an old-school sound, and then I've got them very loose with this tension adjustment.

So, that's with a very high top-head. Now, here, I've got a very loose top head and I'm going to mute it quite a lot. I've got some gaffer tape holding it down and my wallet holding it down so it doesn't ring so much, and it gives us that fat disco sound.

So, the important bit there is that we've done the same work as before. We've tuned it exactly the same way as before but gone for a very low note. Maybe we'll even take down a couple of the lugs even more to get this extreme, really tubby sound.

So, that's the techniques to tuning a snare drum. Just make sure that every individual lug is at the same pitch and maybe go for a higher top-skin as to your bottom-skin. .