Hey guys, I'm in a small guerrilla brass band. We're totally independent, and as such, our instruments are a bit of a hodgepodge, but I've got to work with what we have, which is a 28" and a 20" Yamaha Fieldcorps bass drum, a 13x14 "tenor" (really a rack tom on a sling), a set of Pearl quads, a 15" Ludwig marching snare, and a pretty new 13" Pearl marching snare (KevlarŪ heads, free floating, etc.).

Now, I listed these in order of pitch. I figure there should be a spread between everything, I'm just not sure where to start. My thought is to tune my 28" bass drum to the lowest pitch I can still get good resonance from, and work up from there? What should I base the tuning off of?

Sounds like you have one of everything. Tuning will be no problem tune each instrument to sound the best and you will have plenty of spread.

I have a great exercise for you guys, Odello used to use it with the BD`s, get a samba beat going with sixteenths and accent on the dotted 8th,16th pattern on 1 and 3 in 4/4 time and then go around the ensemble and have each player take a solo over that pattern, should be fun!