Getting your drums in tune

Push the pedal on an acoustic kick drum and it’s unlikely that the first thing to strike you about the resulting note will be an accurate sense of its pitch. Its volume might, as might its tone, or its punch… but it’s pitch? Probably not. And yet, without question, whether or not that Kick drum is ‘in tune’ with the rest of your track will have a major impact on the ‘success’ and feel overall.

Tuning acoustic drum samples is a technique underrated by too many producers, yet working with synthesized drum sounds can teach us a lot about how important a consideration tuning can be. If you build a kick drum sound inside a synthesizer, getting its pitch to align with the rest of your track will quickly become part of your programming approach; far sooner than it probably would for an acoustic kick drum sample. And yet, it’s doing the same job – providing a weighty thump and forming an essential part of the groove.

Part of the reason why it’s possible to ‘forget’ to tune an acoustic drum sample is because a kick drum’s fundamental frequency is often so low and so clouded by a dense cluster of harmonics, that you can trick yourself into thinking that an acoustic kick doesn’t actually have a specific pitch. Often, the best thing to do if you’re struggling to tune a kick drum sample accurately is to temporarily pitch shift it up by an octave or two. Its fundamental frequency will suddenly become much more obvious and you can have a tuned instrument nearby to cross-reference the note of its pitch. Having done this, shift the sample back down and select an appropriately low – but ‘in tune’ – pitch for your kick.