MikeM
Platinum Member
I was thinking about buying a drum dial. I can tune toms and bass drums by ear without any trouble, but snares are so much more finicky. I was thinking that I'd get a DD and just use it to record the tension on the heads once I found my snare's ultimate sweet spot.
A friend of mine has a DD and let me borrow it, so I tried it last night on my snare and discovered that it doesn't have near the resolution to get me to any sweet spot, or if it does, it's just accidental. I could make some relatively minor adjustments on just a few lugs and get pretty drastic sonic changes that were practically imperceptible to the DD.
It seems to me that a DD is only useful for getting the head tensions in the general ball-park, but aren't sensitive enough to consistently get you right to the sweet spot.
Am I missing something? So far, I'm glad I didn't buy one.
Edit: I was thinking about inventing and patenting a laser-based tool that measures head frequency at every lug since that's really what I'm after. That could possibly make me very wealthy. Also, maybe a scanning laser to sweep over the entire surface of both heads with servos controlling the tension at every lug to keep each head in tune with itself and with each other. (just throwing that out there in case someone want to save me the trouble!)
A friend of mine has a DD and let me borrow it, so I tried it last night on my snare and discovered that it doesn't have near the resolution to get me to any sweet spot, or if it does, it's just accidental. I could make some relatively minor adjustments on just a few lugs and get pretty drastic sonic changes that were practically imperceptible to the DD.
It seems to me that a DD is only useful for getting the head tensions in the general ball-park, but aren't sensitive enough to consistently get you right to the sweet spot.
Am I missing something? So far, I'm glad I didn't buy one.
Edit: I was thinking about inventing and patenting a laser-based tool that measures head frequency at every lug since that's really what I'm after. That could possibly make me very wealthy. Also, maybe a scanning laser to sweep over the entire surface of both heads with servos controlling the tension at every lug to keep each head in tune with itself and with each other. (just throwing that out there in case someone want to save me the trouble!)