Let’s look at some of the questions drummers have about why tuning works the way it does.Why does each drum have a top and a bottom head?When you strike a drum, it forces air down the shell, and the resonant (bottom) head helps the top head sustain its note by bouncing that air...
while a cymbal crash is closer to the noisy end of the continuum. Timpani and bells may be just sufficiently suggestive of a harmonic spectrum that we can identify a fundamental pitch, yet they contain other inharmonic partials. Other drums produce more of a band-limited noise - randomly rela...
During the 1880s, devices were developed which allowed timpani players to change the pitch of the instrument quickly, allowing them to play more complex melodies. An important development in drum manufacturing occurred in the 1950s when drum makers began to experiment with using plastic instead of...