Well put! The drum dial or the tension watch gets you to the starting point, Or the final, 10 times faster. The drum dial also has a cheat sheet inside that you can use for different size drums, and a chart on back to record your settings for each drum and each kit. Which is worth it's wt. in gold when you use multiple kits and different style heads. To top it off I use a Planet Waves Full-Function Tuner & Metronome that works almost too good, and can enable even a novice to get studio quality tuning on each drum and quickly. The PW tuner will get you to either the pitch of the shell, or to a specific note, or anywhere in between. Then between sets, you can adjust with the dial if need be without making a sound. If the technology is available, why not use it? Rather work smarter than harder...

I just watched a video about the Tension Watch from Sweetwater and I am at least intrigued. For those of you that use a Tension Watch or a Drum Dial, do you find you use it simply for roughing in the tuning? I am kind of gathering that from your comments. I was amazed watching the video how little the dial moved with a half turn of a drum key. A half turn is a lot when you are fine tuning a drum! Do you find the Tension Watch (or Drum Dial) is accurate at really loose tensions below the point at which the drum is able to speak?

The idea of quickly roughing in a drum is very interesting to me especially after having my first experience with Yamaha's Nouveau lugs. If you have never had to tune a drum with these lugs, it is a very different experience. There is no way to start out at "finger tight" therefore it is very difficult to get started at roughly the same tension point on the head. I found my best bet was to raise the pitch of the drum beyond what I was aiming for and then getting the lugs in tune with each other. Once I did that I could slowly lower the head to the tension I really wanted. A device like this might also be useful for some of my employees who are still a little timid about their tuning skills.

What do you guys think?

The Tama tension watch measure in metric not standard I find it to be more accurate than the drum dial. , actually with the tension watch a half turn under certain torque values can make a huge tonal change and reading change, also both of the Instruments are nothing new they came from the printing and plastic industry, both industries use similar instruments for print paper and plastic to measure the torque being applied to the paper while going through the presses and the plastics while curing in the cutting process. that is how accurate they are and can be, I use my tension watch to basically do 98% of the tuning process then fine tune it by hand and trained ear. It is not a gimmick as you have found out from your research. but there is a learning curve to them. they will measure very well loose or tight head tension.

For me the Tension watch is generally right on target. I just tap at each lug to make sure they sound the same and make any adjustment to what I want in sound but that tends to be minor.

Thanks for the input guys! Probably worth $60 to try out. I am thinking if this saves some time on the front end then it would be worth the expense. I quite often have to put new heads on two or three kits at a time plus 6-12 snares. That is a lot of re-heading and tuning at a time. Speeding up the process would be extremely cool.

Thanks again guys, the info posted here is all good and useful. Sounds like the devices are handy to a point but the real deal is the ears. I think I need to train my ears first to identify the different pitches then maybe get a drumdial to speed thing up a bit.

Thanks again,

Jeff C

You may want to consider a tune bot if you are tuning to a specific pitch. Here is a video that does a side by side comparison of the drum dial verses a tune bot. [ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPE4zJcYrOg[/ame]

It appears to be quicker that the drum dial if tuning to a specific pitch. Plus you would have to know what the head tension was for that particular note which would require some kind of tuner to begin with. I would think that it would help train your ear over time also. I've been looking at these for a few weeks as I have a set of roto toms that I would like to tune to actual pitchs to use to double the melody of a few recordings, so I think I'll probably pick one up soon.

thanks for sharing, once again look how much time was saved by these devices, the tune bot I had heard of just never checked it out thanks a great comparison.

I`m sorry but those little taps are not gonna show you what the drum sounds like when you hit it harder !! When your done fine tunning the drum, play it for five minutes, then check the dial again, it wont be the same !!

I have an electric tunner for my guitar, I can easily tune to a perfect 440 the low E and when I go to the A, it pulls the string I just tunned out. enventually I get them all at 440, but two seconds into playing,..they are all out of 440.

These things can exactly tune your drum, but five minutes into play`n, your just close now, so ya better off just useing your ears and being close cuz that`s where your gonna end up anyway !!

Those little taps will tell you your tune, but no way will they tell you what the drum sounds like being hit !!

sorry your wrong. I'm a hard player, I sometimes don't have even touch my drums for a week or more after properly tuning with this method. Then something is wrong with your guitar the tuners, your bridge. or the nut needs adjusting? mine stay it tune for a good while with hard string bending? I don't have locking tuners either, good ole grovers.