Changing Bass Drum Heads
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Learn How To Change Your Bass Drum Heads!
I'd like to show you how to change the head on a bass drum. Front bass drum heads don't get changed very often. Unless they are damaged on accident, they usually stay in pretty decent shape. Much like the bottom heads on your toms. But lets turn the drum over and change the head on the side that does take a beating on a regular basis. There's a dent on my head from the beater on the drum, and that creates a weak spot. The worst thing than could happen to any drummer is to have the beater go through the drum head in the middle of a show.
Most bass drums have wingnuts already attached to the tension rods, but there will be no wingnuts down at the bottom on the lower two where the bass drum touches the floor on most drums. This is because the ground can push up on a wingnut and throw your drum out of tune. You may have seen a drum kit with those tension rods placed someplace else on the drum, but it is just because the owner didn't realize why there were no wingnuts on those two tension rods.
There are ten tension rods total, so what I like to do is to loosen two at a time, one across from the other. When I get all of them loose, I just pull the tension rods off and set them on the head, then I pull the rim off and sit it aside. Next I'll pull the head off with the tension rods on it and set it aside. Next I'll just give a good inspection of the inside. Make sure nothing came loose. I also check the positioning of my muffling. If you use muffling, now is a good time to check your as well. We'll talk about muffling more in a later video. Next I wipe the dust off from around the rim area then grab the new head and place it on. I like to align the logo up with the badge on the top of the bass drum. If you don't have a badge just make sure that the logo is aligned at the middle.
At this point the head is ready to have the rim placed on it. I dust the rim off before I place it on, bass drums seem to get the most dust. The little rubber piece glued to the hoop is designed to protect the hoop from the clamp of the bass drum pedal. Unfortunately the bottom of the hoop tends to get a little damaged. Theres no hole to line up the tension rods on bass drums so you need to just eye it up as you put the hoop back into position. I put the tension rods back on, one across from the other, trying to keep even tension on the hoop. Drum hoops are made of wood and can break if too much uneven tension is applied to them. Once they are all on, I just snug everything up and then the bass drum head is installed and ready for tuning.
Learn how to tune your bass drum in the next video drum lesson.
