It was a combination of a few things.

1. The Tom mount was rattling causing a weird buzz.

2. I had the basket too tight on the snare stand and it was causing the drum to choke. Rookie mistake, Ive never mounted one of my racks on a snare stand before. I had no idea you could kill the resonance by keeping the basket too tight.

3. I'm mediocre at tuning on a good day. You couple that with my first attempt at tuning an acrylic drum, overtone city was the end result. After a 2 hour session of tweaking and retweaking I got them sounding pretty good. Here is where I'm right now tuning wise. [ame]http://youtu.be/c5pSmAAmIbs[/ame]

1st part is no moon gel 2nd is with.

Hey man! Hope I'm not overstepping any boundaries here, but I've always found that with Vistas, a little overtone is ok because they're so loud to begin with. When playing with a live band, the overtones get lost, but the incredible volume still comes through nicely. Even your cymbals do a good job of eating up some of the weirdness.

But from your video I can hear that you're getting a good amount of pitch-bend – where the tone of the drum is high right after you strike the head and then dips down after a second. I've always found that if the pitch bend is going from up to down, it can be corrected by bringing up the tension of the bottom head. A good way to do this is to have the drum in your lap and strike the head with one hand while turning a tension rod (on the bottom hoop) with the other. It's worked like magic for me in the past.

Hope this helps! (and I hope I don't sound like a know-it-all internet ass)

Joe

Bizz,

Thanks for checking back. Indeed it is very easy to choke a tom with a snare stand. Good on ya for figuring that out.

I highly recommend Bob Gatzen's tuning tutorials online. I like his because his methods make sense, he is a really good communicator and educator and the video production quality is high. Start with his tom tuning video. Here is the thing: his goal is tune a drum to it's lowest possible pitch (or close to it) and matching the resonant head to the batter head. That is a good place to start, but to me, what makes these tutorials good is that if you master the technique, you can then tune your drums anyway you like. It's all about getting heads in tune with themselves and then in tune too and bottom. In my experience I find that I usually tune the resonant head a minor third to a perfect fourth above the batter head. It adds some punch and reduces a little bit of sustain.

I only have my phone to listen to right now so it is a little difficult to hear what's going on with your drums. Don't let some sustain bother you. The goal is that sustain should produce the fundamental tone and minimize the harmonic overtones. I am no expert, but that may be tougher on an acrylic kit.

By the way, great job on your resto. Nicely done. Pretty cool that the Moongel matches your shells. I have been looking for some black diamond pearl Moongel myself.

Thanks for the advice guys. I have the day off today and just spent about an hour futzing with the the reso heads. I have to say its a definite improvement. I took the Moon Gel off, brought up the pitch and it sounds like they are starting to get there. I made a couple minute video from out front and even with the Iphone mic I can hear the hugeness of these drums.

[ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sH6JBxuWLI8"]Vista tuning the sequel - YouTube[/ame]