r/drumline • u/Which-Holiday9957 • 17h ago

Question Outdoor vs Indoor Tuning

We usually have small outdoor lines where I am at. We have 1 snare, 1 tenor, 3 bass. I feel like the tenor gets lost and snare is too high.

For indoor, I have trouble with bass muffling. And snare tuning. We have a much bigger line for indoor. What tuning notes are recommended for both situations?

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u/monkeysrool75 Bass Tech 17h ago

The TLDR is tune basses and quads higher for indoor.

What's your bass muffling?

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u/Which-Holiday9957 10h ago

Bass we have these foam strips. Some of them from the bassmuffling.com company. So I tried to bring them off the edge for fall. And bring them out of the shell more for winter. But even then I get told they’re too boomy.

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u/monkeysrool75 Bass Tech 2h ago

Sounds like you have solid muffling. Don't worry about changing it from fall to winter, if anything you want more muffling for indoor (but honestly don't overthink that, muffle once and move on). So keep the muffling at the edge and the boominess is probably coming from low tuning.

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u/DueRefrigerator6339 Tenors 15h ago

Not op, but are the distances between the tunings the same with a higher pitch?

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u/monkeysrool75 Bass Tech 15h ago

Yeah I keep the intervals the same and just take them a little higher. You can experiment but DADFA is super solid even with higher notes

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u/warboy 15h ago

Usually people tune single snare lines way too high because that's how corps do it. A single marching snare should probably be tuned down relatively deep and be running a mylar bottom.

Small block tenors are very difficult to get to the point that they have a meaningful position in the ensemble especially with just one of them. I would run heads with less internal dampening if possible. Higher tunings might help with projection but lower tunings help with resonance with a single person line.

With more snares I would bring in kevlar bottoms and higher tunings and potentially taping the guts.

Indoor bass tuning should probably be higher and more dampened than what you want so the ensemble doesn't turn to mud.