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If you need a little (or a lot) of dampening on your drums, and you don’t want to go the duct tape and paper towel route, you should look into getting some Moongel.
What is Moongel?
Moongel is a non-toxic, self-adhesive gel (technical term is thermoplastic elastomer) that can be applied to drum heads (both batter and resonant), percussion instruments, as well as cymbals. It’s designed to help control the resonance of the instrument, by reducing sustain, and eliminating unwanted overtones. They can be used live, or in the studio. They are washable and reusable. Moongel is available in blue or clear, and comes in a pack of 6, with its own carrying case.
How do you use it?
Moongel is incredibly easy to use. Simply put a piece, or two, or three, or a half of a piece (you can cut them in half with regular scissors) on your batter head, resonant head, or percussion instrument, or cymbal. That’s it. For drums, the closer to the center, the more it reduces sustain. For cymbals, it’s the opposite.
I currently use three pieces of Moongel on my studio snare drum (Pearl Masters MCX Maple – 14” x 6.5”, one piece on my live snare drum (Pearl Decade Maple – 14” x 5.5”), and nothing on my studio and live toms and cymbals.
What about tuning?
“If you tune your drums correctly, you don’t need to dampen them!”
That’s something I hear fairly often. Dampening is just that, dampening. If you put Moongel, or any kind of dampening on a badly tuned drum, it’s not going to make the drum magically sound better. It’s going to be a bad sounding drum that rings a little bit less.
I’ve tuned my snare drum using various methods, even using tools such as a DrumDial and Tune-Bot, to ensure the drum was tuned “correctly”, a very, very, VERY subjective term in the world of music. I would get a great sound and feel from the drum, but I’d also get overtones that I did not want. Since I have the snare drum close mic’d, I wanted to reduce the overtones, but I didn’t want to change the tuning, so I put a few pieces of Moongel on, and I was ready to go. I got a great sound, and the overtones and excess ring were gone.
Demonstration
For these demonstrations, I used two Audix F9 overhead, an Audix F5 snare, and an Audix F6 kick drum microphones. I used no EQ or compression. I wanted the drums to sound as authentic as possible to give you an idea of what they truly sound like.
Snare Drum – 14″ x 6.5″
Toms – 8″, 10″, 12″, 14″, 16″, 18″
Toms – 10″, 12″, 14″, 16″
Final Thoughts
Moongel is easy to use, versatile, and inexpensive, at about $7 for a pack of 6. If you need just a little dampening, or quite a bit, or anywhere in between, I can’t think of a reason not to pick up a pack.
Originally Published – 12/13/2018
Updated – 3/1/2022