hey what's up this is phillip ellis and this is my method for changing and tuning a batter side snare drum head right now i have a controlled sound i mean it's perfectly fine but for the purpose of this video i'm going to put on an evans hd and i've never used this in my life so this is also kind of a demo of the hd and so yeah first of all take off the old head you know i use a dry cloth you know just some sort of like cloth to wipe down and actually dump out if there's any dust or debris on the inside of the shell i also i mean i'll use my my shirt but yeah just wipe the inside of the hoop get all the dust out take your new drum head put it on there and finger tighten all of the tension rods okay and i'm actually going to set this down here on the ground so i can get some more elbow grease into it and what i do is i just press down on the rim and then finger tighten it on everyone and i do the star pattern a star pattern if you don't know is just uh you know start at this lug go directly across from it with a tin lug you can even skip a look but i don't i i just so you go to there go to there go to this one and you go directly across so on and so forth until you have tuned all of your lugs relatively the same tension and again this is just the finger tightening part so i got my got all my lugs tuned up finger tight nice and loose so what i'm going to do now is turn the snares off and just tap tune tap about an inch away from each lug and kind of see where it's at and i'm going to be tuning up because i know that it's too low for me right now and honestly i just use my ear half the time i use my ear half the time i use my fill i just fill and see what the pressure is next to each of the tension rods and especially like if i'm in the middle of a set plane and i can't do the whole and try to listen to the tune then i'll definitely just kind of nonchalantly feel around and i can i can tell which ones are you know a little bit looser than the others so and that sounds really good but you know i don't have that much experience with evan's drumheads but i know that the remo drum heads they actually need to be stretched a little bit so what i normally do is i just take the palm of my hand put kind of almost my full body weight in there but i really don't think the evans ones need that little stretching so because that sounded really good but the reason i stretch my remo drum heads is just uh if you don't pre-stretch them it's a lot like you know putting new guitar strings on the guitar if you don't actually stretch them uh but while you're tuning them and tuning them up whenever you start playing them they're just going to all go out of tune it's the same thing with drum heads you want to you want to get them to where the stretching is done whenever you play on them so they stay in tune when you play them but let's check this out again and i'm just i do it really fast because i like what i hear i like that sound and that's a great sounding snare drum head so you know like i told you in the beginning i'm used to remo ambassador coated but this is an evans hd and i really like it for the resonant side on the snare drum or the snare side the way i tune this uh man there's really no science behind it to me because the way i tune it and what i picked up kind of from a stanton moore clinic is you know well stanton moore cranks his bottom snare drum head and the reason he does that is to get as much snare sensitivity out of his snare drum uh at any you know volume uh or any tuning uh range so you know i kind of went with that idea and i i do i do crank it pretty high up there um i mean it's really tight and they're all the same i don't know some people do these two tighter than the rest of them to give them the sensitivity from their snare but yeah i just crank them all up really tight uh and again i'll tap tune and tune them all up to the same pitch and really you just gotta you know you gotta experiment but that's kind of how i do my snare uh snare bottom head uh just crank it and you know one thing to keep in mind uh you know most people know this but there are some drummers that will try to put you know a snare drum head on here that doesn't go on the snare side of a snare drum so they'll end up putting you know an ambassador clear which is made for a tom instead of one of the really thin snare side heads so yeah the way you can tell is if they're like paper thin that's for the snare side and if they're if they're clear and they are holding their shape when you touch it then they're not for the snare side so yeah a little tip and hope that helps