Next I moved my 12" tom to my work table. I tried both a towel under the opposite head and also without it. I now have the Tune Bot at the 10 o'clock position on the hoop. I usually call tension rod #1 the lug just to the right of the logo on the drum head and the logo is always at the top of the drum. Tension rod #1 gave me a reading of 268 cycles, kinda of weird. #2 was 198.6, #3 was 198.7, #4 was 268.5, #5 was 199.1 and #6 was 198.6. All except tension rods 1 and 4 were pretty close, I was pretty proud of what my ears had done. I started working with rod #1, trying to ascertain why the Tune Bot was registering a semi harmonic instead of the specific fundamental. A true second harmonic would be the doubling of the fundamental frequency. I was hitting one inch behind each tension rod. No matter what I did, I could not get that reading back to the fundamental frequency of the other rods. I brought the tension down on both 1 and 4 and it still read 267 cycles at #1. For grins and giggles, I moved the Tune Bot and placed it at the 12 o'clock position on the hoop, wow, now it's reading 197.1, close to the fundamental frequency at the rest of the drums lugs. OK something is strange here, so I mover the Tune Bot back to the 10 o'clock position and again it's reading 262 cycles. I didn't adjust any tension rods between the times I moved the Tune Bot. The Tune Bot is supposed to be able to accurately read the sound from the head anywhere around the hoop. The tension rods 1 and 4 sounded a bit flat to my ears, but the device was not picking this up as a fundamental frequency, even though the "filter" was in the circuit at the time. I moved the Tune Bot to the 6 o'clock position of the hoop.and hit the area of the #1 tension rod again. The reading was 259.8 cycles, not touching anything, I gave it another hit five or six seconds later, now it was within a couple of cycles of the 2, 3, 5 and 6 tension rods. I was finding some of the readings to be a bit wish washy. I don't want to have to interpret which readings are more accurate than others. This unit is supposed to expedite the tuning process, this has yet to be proven to me.
Dennis