1. Turn off your snare drum wires; there should be a lever on the side of the drum where you can do that. 2. Get a drum key (available at any music store for $2) and you are going to want to loosen the tension rods on the sides of the drum. You don't want to loosen them 1 at a time, but instead evenly loosen them half a turn each, just keep going around the drum until you can start loosening them by hand.
3. Loosen the rest of them completely off (by hand).
4. Take off the rim and tension rods.
5. Take off the old drum head.
6. Wipe the inside of the drum, and the edge of a drum with a dry piece of fabric. Also wipe the new drum head.
7. Set the new drum head on top of the drum.
8. Put the rim and tension rods back onto the drum.
9. Tighten all of the tension rods evenly using your hands, (no drum key yet) keep going until all of the tension rods are finger tight.
10. Break in the drum head. Push down in the center of the drum with your fist. Do this 5-10 times. Don't worry, you won't be able to break the drum head, and if you do break the drum head, take it back to the store where you bought it and try another brand. You should be able to put a good portion of your body weight onto the drum. We do this for the same reason that a guitar player stretches his guitar strings. It is to get the drum all stretched out before we start using it. If we didn't do this, the drum would constantly be going out of tune for the first week or so, which would get very time consuming.
11. Make sure all the tension rods are still hand tight.
12. Tighten the tension rods using the drum key. Start with the tension rod closest to you. Turn the drum key half a turn tighter. Do not move on to the tension rod beside it. The next tension rod that you are going to turn half a turn is the tension rod furthest away from you (directly across from the one you've already turned half a turn) now tighten this one half a turn. The next tension rod you are going to tighten is the one to the left of the tension rod you started on. Then go directly across the drum from there and continue this pattern. Keep going around the drum until 1) all of the tension rods are totally even, and 2) until the drum has the sound that you want it to. You may have to go over all of the tension rods 4-8 times, or until you reach the desired tone.
13. Go around the drum and tap an inch away from each tension rod with a drumstick. Go around and "fine tune the pitch" to make sure each tension rod sounds the same. If you don't like some of the overtones that your drum is giving off you can use some form of dampening (moon gel, drum gum, o-rings). You don't want to use dampening as a solution to poor tuning, but instead as an enhancement of good tuning.
14. Do the same thing to the bottom head of your drum, but you want to tune the bottom head (reso-head) just a little bit lower than the top head.
15. However when tuning the snare drum, to get the great crack sound out of the drum, the bottom skin should be tightened slightly tighter than the top.
16. The snares themselves are also very important, keep them in pristine condition and try to tighten them so that they are flat all the way across the skin of the drum. Too tight and it will bow off of the middle, too loose and it wont touch at all.
