Resotune?

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Being a drummer and a person who built a custom kit, I think that tuning is just a small part of the puzzle to getting good drum tones. You have to start off with having properly cut bearing edges. You can make a cheapo kit sound great if the edges are nice and even. Often times a little sanding on the edges of even the most expensive kits will make it sound better. Then there is head selection which is personal and tailored to taste.

It's a nice toy but really who needs it? Better off tuning by ear or if necessary using a drum dial. then take the rest of the cash and make or buy something nice.
 
Pucho is clearly not my obvious customer, especially at early days pricing, but how many people do you know who tune their guitar by ear, or with a string tension gauge? :wink:

YMMV

JR
 
Just being able to get a consistent cleared tuning for a drum quickley is a boon for someone who has to change 4 heads in an hour or someone who wants the drums in the same key as the song. Badass.

I full advocate knowing how to tune drums by ear.

I'm also impressed with the package and the application of ideas to make this product.
 
[quote author="amorris"]Clearing? what do you mean?[/quote]

Clearing is jargon for making all the lugs in tune with themselves. In practice the rims system is flexible, and not all knife edges are square, or shells perfectly round, so it's more than making the torque the same or spot head tension the same. When the head is clear there will be less, but stronger, resonance modes dominating the sound, This sound is sometimes described as clear or opening up the head's sound.. When lugs are poorly balanced resonances are all over the place and more noise like.

When tuning by ear, don't be confused by the apparent torque of a given lug as hardware varies and less than perfect drums require other than equal tension on individual lugs to clear. Trust your ears and not your fingers.

a good website about general drum tuning is http://home.earthlink.net/~prof.sound/

I just make measurement equipment, I don't tell people how to voice their drums.

JR
 
[quote author="JohnRoberts"]Pucho is clearly not my obvious customer, ...[/quote]

John - did you design this?

I think it's a brilliant concept. Drum tuning is one of the most time consuming parts of the recording process. I agree that a good drummer should be able to tune his kit, but very often bands come in with a young and/or inxperienced drummer, and, for me at least, drum tuning seems a black art. Even a tension guage makes a massive difference.

Assuming the resotune does what it says it does, I'd definitely get one.

Pucho - thanks for the tip on sanding the edges too.

Stewart
 
> Clearing? what do you mean?

A string is one-dimensional and has one tuning-screw.

A drum-skin is two-dimensional and has many (6, 8, 12) tuning-screws.

Just for a simple: if the skin rings 220Hz one way (say N-S) and 230Hz another way (E-W), it aint going to ring well nor have a consistent pitch. And if you hit elsewhere (NW-SE) you have 220Hz fighting 230Hz, a disturbing 10Hz wobble, and probably many other frequencies all fighting each other.

So you put the skin on and turn all lugs to equal thumb-strain. But the skin has grain, thickness variation, the tension-ring is warped, the shell-edge is unflat and has rough spots. So you go around the edge with a stick and listen where it is low or high (loose or tight). And you make little adjustments. Which interact with each other. You can go round and round chasing your tail and still be un-even. It is a skill, and not done quickly well.

Yes, the skilled drummer is a mechanic who will inspect new skins, file rough shells, bend warped rings, and also a tuner who can hear fine pitch without a full context.

The working drummer (or tech) has to go on-stage with a new skin in 10 minutes and not shame himself or his fellow stars.

I worked with a high-skill piano technician. He had no problem tuning with a pin-wrench and one fork. But, especially in school-work, he used a machine very like Restotune. The tuning gets 99% right much faster and with less strain (both on ear and on excess pin-turning). That left him more time to twiddle the final stretch for the specific frame/string scaling and user preference. (Actually he could trim it once, store that, and get the same piano to the same point quicker next time.)

I dunno what drumming pays, but with 80+ pianos in 16/7 duty and high payrate, $350 seems cheap (I think he paid >$999 for his piano tuner).
 
The patent paper has much more than most folks want to know.

http://www.google.com/patents?id=jMwTAAAAEBAJ&dq=6,925,880

It seems both Useful and reasonably Novel. I didn't know they still issued such patents.
 
[quote author="zebra50"][quote author="JohnRoberts"]Pucho is clearly not my obvious customer, ...[/quote]

John - did you design this?


Stewart[/quote]

Guilty and thanks everybody, or almost everybody, for the kind words..

I could talk about this for hours but won't since that is pimping my own booty.

I will be glad to answer any specific questions that aren't proprietary.

JR
 
I would love to see video of it in action. I am confused as to how you place it on the drums, there are 2 drum sticks held to its side, ?, it has 2 speakers to couple it, do you have to move it around as you work? do you put it in the center?.. If results would be 1/4 as dramatic as I think they might, I would be interested in one but i would have to pimp myself out as a rental locally!
 
I'm not a big video guy but I agree I need to do a better one. I do have a video on my website splash page but its from years ago at a drum show when I was interviewed by a drum website. I'm the old guy who isn't smiling. The unit in that video is my very first prototype, without a proper bottom grille. You can see it working, but the lighting and sound isn't great.

http://www.drummercafe.com/reviews/gear/circular-science-resotune.html
It was shot at a PASIC show in the "quiet" :roll: section, so the mics on the RESOTUNE are picking up sound even when tuner isn't making any sound.

I'm REALLY glad you asked because the link to that video from my website was broken due to changes at the drum website where it's located (I fixed it).

RESOTUNE normally sits on square plastic struts we provide, but round drum sticks can be used if you misplace those struts. The tuner sits above but not touching the drum head. It must be oriented toward one lug at a time for clearing.

It does a frequency scan to find and lock to the first overtone resonance mode, and then captures a reference return from that first lug. You then move it around to the other lugs and make them all identical to the first lug using that reference.

To tune to a different pitch, you measure where you are and adjust up or down from there, then clear the head at that new pitch. You can precisely offset the resonant head sharp or flat after tuning the batter. It is probably a little quicker to rough tune with something like a drum dial or torque wrench when changing heads, but that's about all I'd trust them for.

If you are on a limited budget you can learn how to clear drumheads by ear for free, and with a cheap pitch source tune to specific notes for a fraction of the cost of my tuner. Most don't bother to tune to actual notes and I'm not claiming any huge benefit from that.

My best market in these early (read expensive) days of scientific tuning are professionals and retired drummers who can now afford sweet DW kits but still can't tune them well. I have had a few players who are tuning challenged get a drum tech to set up their kit once and then use RESOTUNE to return to that voicing when they change heads or whatever.

JR
 
John I hope I didn't offend. To be perfectly honest I am very skeptical about anything related to tuning drums other then ones own ear. I guess you could call it old skool separate the men VS the boys. However after watching the video I can totally see a practical use for such an item.
 
FWIW I hope to pick up one of these in the next month or so. I work each year on a 7 day live TV shoot with acts like Alabama 3, Cowboy Junkies, Steve Earle, the Charlatans, Super Furry Animal, Amy Winehouse etc. It's sort of like Jules Holland (sp?) but we record in a beautiful old church and the acts all perform on the same stage (altar) one after another. I get 10 mins between acts and the changeovers are very high pressure.

I hope to use Resotune to ensure consistency of tuning across the week. I will have a full spare set of toms and some spare snares. If a drummer wants to deviate significantly from the "norm" he can tune one of the spares to his or her preference. The next morning I can return it to our chosen norm. I hope it will add some much needed predictability for the drum tuning in a week of 14 hour days and high stress.

The main engineer is a drummer and places very high standards on the drum setup. Some of the visiting drummers are true masters of tuning and leave the kit better than they found it but most should have their licence to hold a drum key revoked!


BTW John I thing you should feel free to talk about your work here, it's obvious you are not targeting you chosen market but are rather discussing ideas and principles in general.

All the best,
Ruairi
 
[quote author="pucho812"]John I hope I didn't offend. To be perfectly honest I am very skeptical about anything related to tuning drums other then ones own ear. I guess you could call it old skool separate the men VS the boys. However after watching the video I can totally see a practical use for such an item.[/quote]

Trust me you are not alone and my skin is pretty thick, and even I don't claim it's a must have for every drummer especially at current pricing.

I got more push back about my feedback finder LED invention as all those crusty old sound men told me they don't need no stinkin LED to tell them where the feedback is... :roll: but the less experienced customers in the sound trenches loved 'em.

I'm just providing a tool, not arguing it's the only way to accomplish the task.

JR

PS: To Ruairi, I don't think it's appropriate for me or anybody to blatantly promote a product they have a commercial interest in.. It's too easy to delude ourselves about how smart or handsome our children are. The real underlying technology here is kind of obscure and not electronic, while the solution uses electronics, I don't know how interesting that is.
 
> there are 2 drum sticks held to its side, ?, it has 2 speakers to couple it, do you have to move it around as you work? do you put it in the center?..

I was wondering too. John knows some about drums, assumes his customers do too, and I'm left in the dust. Zig-zagging through the manual gave me enough clues.

It sits above but close to the skin. How you do that is not too important. Apparently he supplies some bridge-work to suit common drums, tympani may need adaptation, and if nothing else you steal some curtain rods and wood-scraps and duct-tape.

In that position, a speaker sings a sliding tone and the ear or mike hears the skin resonate at its preferred frequencies.

If you do that to a 1-string violin, you get several body resonances and several string resonances. You can tell which are string because they are narrow and very nearly exact multiples (440, 881, 1323...) while body resonances are broad and not so harmonic.

A drum's shell resonances are weak. There may be a second skin but when measured very close to the top (batter) skin the bottom skin is weak. The circular membrane's resonances are not even close to the 1,2,3,4 harmonic series of a string, but the ratios are well-known (for normal shapes, squares, circles; you build a lima-bean shape drum it will have different ratios).

Now, John's patent and product shape show/suggest two speakers far enough apart to excite two areas. And he has animations showing how the second resonance wobbles half-and-half. So I'm thinking that this is how the micro-brain knows that it has found second resonance, except it would seem to find it as a null not a peak. Well, sometimes it is easier to dip a null than find the tip of a hill. And surely John spent much time with tinker-toy speaker/mike arrays and a 'scope before picking this particular technique. I'm glad he did it, and am glad it wasn't me.

Anyway, from the second resonance you can predict and check the first resonance. If the prediction fails, you could really have found the 5th resonance of a super-loose skin (drums are not as standardized as piano notes, and even that piano-tuner machine sometimes got lost).

Then it gets into skin set-up theory. Anybody licensed to possess a drum-key "should" know this stuff.... I don't.

Analogy: a marimba bar has two resonances. The lengthwise resonance is the pitch, different on each bar. You can also excite a sideways resonance, weaker, higher, and about the same on every bar (they's all the same width). The marimba player strikes to excite the length and not the width. Obviously a skin with the 12 and 6 (o'clock) pegs tight and the 3 and 9 pegs loose could have two resonances, and that would not get the whole skin working together.

Analogy: piano has 3 strings per higher note; this improves Sustain. Energy transfers from one string to another and the net result is longer energy storage. If the three strings are not very near the same pitch, it is not only dissonant (sour, honky-tonk), the sustain drops off fast. Presumably getting the whole skin working together has some similar benefit on a drum.

So this machine seems to require you to move it to straddle each key, to get all 8 tuning pins and their skin-sectors singing the same frequency. We could picture a version with 8 speakers and no walk-around, but drums come different sizes and sometimes more/less pins. And the full-head tuner would be too big for the headphone/pistol case he offers to carry it, really a major addition to the drummer's burden. When the base 2-speaker model falls to $39 (gitar tuners have fallen lower, which was inconceivable when the first ones came out), John can re-goose the market with bigger one-step versions for drum-techs who value speed more than price or portability.

Obviously if it can sense each section, it can sense the whole drum if you want a specific pitch. This is a matter of interpretation because a circular membrane does not have the simple 1,2,3,4 overtone progression of a string or pipe, and the "sense of musical pitch" is not so strong. Some drummers pitch, others just go where the head and shell sing together nicely and the drum-kit has a nice spread of pitches. The optimum overall-pitch algorithm may be different from the peg-balance algorithm; that's why he has a micro-CPU instead of ramp-generators and flip-flops. Another page of code, another menu-item, it could drum-hum "Dixie" if the market wanted that feature.

Movie on drummercafe site is not loading for me, even after you said "fixed", but it may be "me" or this computer. One of your neighbors must have a camcorder for grandchild movies, slip him a six of beer to shoot a clearing-round and post it on YouTube. You can add URLs in YouTube descriptions, but nothing beats printing BIG on a card for your closing shot.
 
[quote author="JohnRoberts"][quote author="pucho812"]John I hope I didn't offend. To be perfectly honest I am very skeptical about anything related to tuning drums other then ones own ear. I guess you could call it old skool separate the men VS the boys. However after watching the video I can totally see a practical use for such an item.[/quote]

Trust me you are not alone and my skin is pretty thick, and even I don't claim it's a must have for every drummer especially at current pricing.[/quote]
As a guitarist with very little patience for the 99.99% of drummers who are not like puncho, resotune is a really cool idea. Hats off mate :guinness: :guinness: :guinness: :thumb:
 
[quote author="PRR"]> there are 2 drum sticks held to its side, ?, it has 2 speakers to couple it, do you have to move it around as you work? do you put it in the center?..
[/quote] I warned you I could talk for hours.. I have years invested in this and am still learning.
I was wondering too. John knows some about drums, assumes his customers do too, and I'm left in the dust. Zig-zagging through the manual gave me enough clues.

It sits above but close to the skin. How you do that is not too important. Apparently he supplies some bridge-work to suit common drums, tympani may need adaptation, and if nothing else you steal some curtain rods and wood-scraps and duct-tape.
The spacing matters for very precision note tuning as the speakers and surface area of the tuner, if too close to to the drumhead, they acoustically couple and increase the effective mass of the drumhead shifting the note very slightly (lower). The spacing using the standard struts we provide deliver accuracy within the resolution of the tuner. While the basic technology works (I have a tympani in my lab) we do not currently support tuning tympani which have no raised rim support to rest on, and the drum resonances are very much different so the scan algorithm is completely different. The better behaved overtone relationships would be much easier to work with, while the lack of simple mechanical support is more difficult.
In that position, a speaker sings a sliding tone and the ear or mike hears the skin resonate at its preferred frequencies.

If you do that to a 1-string violin, you get several body resonances and several string resonances. You can tell which are string because they are narrow and very nearly exact multiples (440, 881, 1323...) while body resonances are broad and not so harmonic.

A drum's shell resonances are weak. There may be a second skin but when measured very close to the top (batter) skin the bottom skin is weak. The circular membrane's resonances are not even close to the 1,2,3,4 harmonic series of a string, but the ratios are well-known (for normal shapes, squares, circles; you build a lima-bean shape drum it will have different ratios).
There are interactions between the two heads. At the lowest fundamental both heads act as one system. The 1st overtone which I use is not significantly affected by second head. I describe this in detail on my website see https://www.resotune.com/About_drums.htm
Now, John's patent and product shape show/suggest two speakers far enough apart to excite two areas. And he has animations showing how the second resonance wobbles half-and-half. So I'm thinking that this is how the micro-brain knows that it has found second resonance, except it would seem to find it as a null not a peak. Well, sometimes it is easier to dip a null than find the tip of a hill. And surely John spent much time with tinker-toy speaker/mike arrays and a 'scope before picking this particular technique. I'm glad he did it, and am glad it wasn't me.

Anyway, from the second resonance you can predict and check the first resonance. If the prediction fails, you could really have found the 5th resonance of a super-loose skin (drums are not as standardized as piano notes, and even that piano-tuner machine sometimes got lost).
PRR is close.. The two speakers couple into the same general node. My strategy of using two microphones is to locate one mic over the midpoint of the drumhead and the other spaced a few inches toward the rim. For the (0,1) mode fundamental both mics get a strong reading, for overtones of the (1,x) series there will be a null in center mic and strong signal spaced away from the midpoint. While great in theory this alone is unreliable if tuner is not precisely positioned or drum rattles and burps. Secondly while the math is well defined for a single drumhead, the coupling of a second drumhead more in one resonance mode than others causes an offset between the strict mathematical relationships between resonances. I use a combination of multiple strategies and the tuner can still be fooled by a too loose drum head that isn't vibrating simply or from very poor tuner placement.
Then it gets into skin set-up theory. Anybody licensed to possess a drum-key "should" know this stuff.... I don't.

Analogy: a marimba bar has two resonances. The lengthwise resonance is the pitch, different on each bar. You can also excite a sideways resonance, weaker, higher, and about the same on every bar (they's all the same width). The marimba player strikes to excite the length and not the width. Obviously a skin with the 12 and 6 (o'clock) pegs tight and the 3 and 9 pegs loose could have two resonances, and that would not get the whole skin working together.

Analogy: piano has 3 strings per higher note; this improves Sustain. Energy transfers from one string to another and the net result is longer energy storage. If the three strings are not very near the same pitch, it is not only dissonant (sour, honky-tonk), the sustain drops off fast. Presumably getting the whole skin working together has some similar benefit on a drum.
yes.. cleared head has more good sounding sustain, less undesirable noise
So this machine seems to require you to move it to straddle each key, to get all 8 tuning pins and their skin-sectors singing the same frequency. We could picture a version with 8 speakers and no walk-around, but drums come different sizes and sometimes more/less pins. And the full-head tuner would be too big for the headphone/pistol case he offers to carry it, really a major addition to the drummer's burden. When the base 2-speaker model falls to $39 (gitar tuners have fallen lower, which was inconceivable when the first ones came out), John can re-goose the market with bigger one-step versions for drum-techs who value speed more than price or portability.
I am playing with DSP and have some ideas but haven't yet found an approach that works without the two speakers. They do not in fact couple into different nodes but acoustically couple to the same drumhead node. Their spacing is to straddle the lug and isolate it from the other lugs for measurement and adjustment. Doing this with only one speaker, or external excitement, can still be adjusted but does not readily converge. Not unlike when tuning by ear you must sometimes go around the lugs a few times because they interact with each other. I could make a much cheaper tuner but the lack of quick convergence is annoying to me and inappropriate for a precision process.
Obviously if it can sense each section, it can sense the whole drum if you want a specific pitch. This is a matter of interpretation because a circular membrane does not have the simple 1,2,3,4 overtone progression of a string or pipe, and the "sense of musical pitch" is not so strong. Some drummers pitch, others just go where the head and shell sing together nicely and the drum-kit has a nice spread of pitches. The optimum overall-pitch algorithm may be different from the peg-balance algorithm; that's why he has a micro-CPU instead of ramp-generators and flip-flops. Another page of code, another menu-item, it could drum-hum "Dixie" if the market wanted that feature.
The tuning to a specific pitch is a fallout of the clearing process. As long as I have a crystal time base, and I predict someday it will be used, I provide that capability. My very first prototype was analog but it quickly became obvious that an analog approach required far too much customer involvement. Perhaps sophisticated drum techs could master such a system but I needed to reduce this to push a button and it finds the resonance, push another button and arrows tell you which way to turn the lug. I still have customers who can't master that, but drums are not simple instruments.
Movie on drummercafe site is not loading for me, even after you said "fixed", but it may be "me" or this computer. One of your neighbors must have a camcorder for grandchild movies, slip him a six of beer to shoot a clearing-round and post it on YouTube. You can add URLs in YouTube descriptions, but nothing beats printing BIG on a card for your closing shot.

Agreed I have access to a video studio two states away but have dragged my feet on getting a proper video... for the cost of a road trip I can buy my own camera, and probably will.... The link is working for me so if others have trouble let me know.

JR
 
> if too close to to the drumhead, they acoustically couple and increase the effective mass of the drumhead shifting the note very slightly (lower).

That crossed my mind. Also resistance, and maybe stiffness? The resistance would mostly be swamped by other losses; and now I'm not sure stiffness rises, or could be significant next to skin tension.

Still, if the original brackets fell off the truck, a mike-stand, duct tape, and some notion of the "right" distance would get the job done. The brackets are too convenient to lose, but not high-magic precision parts.

do not currently support tuning tympani

Kettledrums are very different. In acoustics, and the people who can make a living as principal timpani chair.

> There are interactions between the two heads.

At an extreme, they must couple in unison. I don't think that happens. If it did, it would work nearly as a 1-skin drum, so why? Anyhow, unless the shell is exceptionally short, the bottom skin affects all batter skin peg-points about equally.

> I still have customers who can't master that

I can NOT play. So I try not get aggravated at good musicians who are bad mechanics.

> As a guitarist with very little patience for the 99.99% of drummers who are not like puncho, resotune is a really cool idea.

There are other music mechanic problems to be solved.

The $39 gitar tuner has left no excuse for basic out-of-tune. However many fine electric guitarists have no idea how to set the adjustable bridge. Yes, a good general tuner can guide them, but maybe a Special Product is needed to get their attention. Pickup height is another often screwed-up screw.

Violas, bass, violin have a Bridge Post. When this gets out of whack, the instrument is very sick. This is NOT a simple problem. The general approach (used intuitively by fiddle techs) is to excite all the body resonances, compare to a (mental) database of good and bad instruments, and try to work out if a 0.3mm nudge will help, or it needs to be sanded, or if the real cause is an unsuspected crack in the purfling.

But after last Wednesday, what I really want is... we have offices (MY office) near rehearsal rooms. If someone warms a sax or trumpet with the door open, I want a siren to follow them, 5Hz flat and half a beat late.
 

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