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Some tracks make a feature of the drums and their tuning – the kick may even become the bassline (again, a great trick with sampled 808 kicks).808s & kicks go together like peanut butter & chocolate, but they fight each other like Kanye West & Taylor Swift. Then transposed back down to the starting octave, but with the fine-tuning control left in its new position: How Low Can You Go? Here’s how the kick sounds transposed up an octave ready for retuning: It tends to be easier to determine the pitch of the drum hit and hear how nicely it interacts with bass notes when it’s transposed up an octave or two. Many owners of the real thing find themselves restricted to writing tracks in the same key in order to make the rest of the elements work with the 808’s kick.Ī neat trick for making the job a little easier here is to transpose the kick upwards by one or two octaves, do the fine tuning, then transpose it back down by the same amount. As an aside, consider the fact that the TR-808 doesn’t actually have a pitch control for the kick drum.
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Kicks with a more clearly discernible pitch – such as long, booming 808s – will usually require more care than shorter, clickier samples. This won’t necessarily mean pitching up or down by whole semitones – you’ll probably need to use the fine tuning control to adjust by cents (fractions of a semitone). What we’re looking for here is a sweet spot where the kick sounds in tune with the bass and their frequencies don’t clash. Let’s try transposing the kick drum up one semitone: The ease with which this can be done really depends on the various musical elements used.Īnd here’s how it sounds with our kick drum: So far so good, but why do you need to retune drums? Let’s explore the merits of retuning a kick drum to fit the key of a specific track. FXpansion Geist, NI Battery and Steinberg’s Groove Agent ONE are relatively simple but effective drum samplers: Logic’s EXS-24 makes the process simple with a master tuning control:Īlthough it’s more complicated to do this if your drum hits are placed on audio tracks, you can always copy individual elements to a sampler for more immediate control. By adjusting all the drums simultaneously you can try and find the frequencies which work best in the context of a track. One of the easiest methods is to transpose all the drums in one go – something that’s very easy to do when using sampled drum hits from one plugin. However, for electronic music production, we usually want more control over the pitch of our drum samples. Realistic drum plugins such as Toontrack’s EZdrummer follow a similar approach, with the drum samples simply tuned to sound ‘good’ (click images to enlarge): Drummers can’t be expected to retune their kits to play songs in different keys, so it’s always a compromise between pitch, tone, resonance and damping. Many drummers have their own preferences when it comes to tuning their kicks, toms and snares, but this is often independent of musical context. First off, let’s consider how ‘real’ drummers tune their kits.
![how to tune 808s how to tune 808s](https://www.fromjasp.com/assets/images/flstudio/808-envelope.png)
There are many different approaches to drum kit tuning. Whether you use samples in a DAW, synthesised sounds from a drum plugin or a hardware drum machine, this guide outlines the basics behind tuning kick drums, toms, snares, claps and hi-hats when making dance music.
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The tuning of drum hits not only affects how a beat relates to the bassline, chords and other melodic elements, it also determine the overall sound and feel – and cohesion – of the drum mix. But tuning, and fine-tuning, is fundamental to a solid groove, and talented beatsmiths spend a long time tweaking the pitches of the hits in their grooves. Tuning drum hits in dance music is sometimes seen as a mysterious art – even when it comes to kicks and toms with clearly defined pitches.
#How to tune 808s how to#
Production guru Bruce Aisher explains how to tune drums to suit your tracks.