4 Styles With 1 Snare

It is not always necessary to change the drums and cymbals you play in order to make your drum set fit into different musical contexts. In many situations, just changing your snare drum sound will make a huge difference. You might not even have to change the drum head.
Just take a drum key and find out how high and how low you can tune your snare drum.

For most musical genres a standard medium snare tuning will work perfectly fine. So this is what we would recommend to go with as your usual starting point.
But if you want to play reggae, funk or a slow ballad you might find yourself not completely confident with that medium tuning.

It is impressive how different one snare drum can sound when you tune it up high or very low. Also some muffling might help you achieve the sound you are looking for.

When listening to the whole drum set you will realize that the changed snare drum sound has a huge impact on your overall drum sound.

You might also experience that the way you play the same set of drums and cymbals changes if the snare is tuned very high or very low. The rebound of the snare drum head changes and it just feels – different.

So before going out to buy some new drums, make sure to check out what the ones you already have can do.
Check out what snare sounds you can achieve, and experiment with the musical ideas and possibilities that come with them!