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AaronP 25 October 2009

My older brother is a drummer - and a stereo-type drummer who has nothing to do with music at all, he just hits things. I use his set often for recording (it's a nice old gretsch jazz set). About a week ago I detuned his floor tom, so it got that beautiful thunderous sound that makes me think of what it would sound like inside your head, were you to be hit violently in the head with a baseball bat or some other blunt object.

Now, today he came back from college to visit with his lovely family and found his tom detuned. At this he became furious, and claims that I have ruined his head. According to him, when a head is detuned after being kept in tension for a long period of time (in this case about five years, these things are beat to pulp), it is instantly transmutated into polonium 210 and becomes part of the internal lining of Satan's digestive tract. That is to say, it is ruined and I have to buy him a new one.

I want to ask (because I trust his honesty about as thoroughly as I can trust salad mushrooms to be experts on Descartes' contributions to the development of calculus), is it true that detuning a drum head and playing on it (with tympani mallets) will cause it to be destroyed forever, unable to return to it's former resonance? He presented his case by tuning it up and demonstrating that, according to him, it now sounds flat and without sustain... which it does a bit, but I was fairly certain it was that way before.

Thank you if you can settle this argument. And remember, you could be costing me ~$25.

Comments

jg49 Sun, 10/25/2009 - 14:18

I don't know anything much about drum heads but I do know something about brothers and lending/borrowing/using someone elses gear. $25.00 does not seem like much in the grand scheme of things, family relations, drum rental costs and just being a good sport. I'd buy him the head and ask him if I could continue using the drums. Just my two cents.

MadMax Sun, 10/25/2009 - 18:28

I've probably been playing drums longer than both of you have been alive... combined.

Over tensioning a head will do that... not under tensioning... unless you absolutely beat the hell out of it for hours on end with 2b's.

Which brings up another point...

Heads should really be replaced every session... and no less often than every 6 months of playing. After that, they're pretty well shot to hell anyway.

So, replace the head for $25 and make him replace the rest of em', cause I can guarantee you they're shot and probably sounds like crap.

Space Mon, 10/26/2009 - 16:54

"According to him, when a head is detuned after being kept in tension for a long period of time (in this case about five years,..."

Come on, five years and he's acting like there is science to this?

The science right now is that this is no longer a tunable skin...it's just a matter of time before it becomes petrified.

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