Tuning a Kick ..?

[nutrinoland]

HI...I have read that many people tune their kick to the key they are working in..generally the root note...for example D in the key of D minor..
I have tried to tune my kick by pitch shifting...But i am not able to hear the pitch of the kick , first of all..and secondly when I change the pitch..the kick starts sounding all funny....like un-usable as a kick...
How do I go about doing this ?

Thanks

[thomas]

Most of the time the kick sweeps from high freq to low freq, so it's not really in a key.. You can listen by ear what's the best pitch for the kick

[Nydhog]

some vst drum synthesizers allow you to do so... for example microtonic by Sonic charge... but I absolutely don't know how to do that with the virus... i am not a good drum sounds designer!
anyway maybe you experience that problem because the kick drum has too little low end... or the envelope has not enough decay and sustain... to set the correct pitch you should before try to hear a bassy sound from the kick...
then you could try to adjust the pitch via the pitch knob...

[ttoxique]

What a kick drum actually does is it takes a pitch and drops it, usually an octave or two. Because of this, it is essentially chromatic and can work in pretty much any key.

However, when you get into more distorted kicks such as in some hardcore and gabber, the distortion adds some upper harmonics which can give it a pitch feel- and in these cases, people like to tune them.

Anyways, it really helps to know what note the bass drum was originally made at (assuming it was made from a synth). Otherwise, it's difficult to tell what pitch it as already is at (as is the case with real drum samples) to ensure you are transposing correctly.

Make sure you are transposing, and not pitch correcting- for example, If a kick drum is dropping from C2 to C0, you don't want to force it to be a D2 and not drop. You'd want it to start at D2 and drop to D0.

When you do transpose a kick, transposing too high should make it sound like a tom drum and too low will make it a gravely mess. There's usually only one octave that kicks sound good in.

Try creating a kick drum using a regular old subtractive synth like a Virus- there are a few tutorials online. All you do is take a waveform like a sine or triangle, then modulate its pitch down an octave or two with an envelope that has only decay. You can then work with effects, waveshaping and cutoff to get the kind of kick you want. Square waves also work for distorty kicks, though cutoff should be low on a lowpass.

Doing this will allow you to play a kick via keyboard at the root note in your song, or let you sample it in at a specific note for easy transposition.

[nutrinoland]

Thanks Guys...

so basically a kick sweeps downwards in pitch...
am able to see this on my spectrum analyzer...
I have another question related to this...
so..on the analyzer the frequency on the kick sweeps downwards..Is the root note the point on the spectrum with most energy ?like the peak...
Its like the decay part of the kick is the frequencies sweeping downwards on the spectrum...and it occupies quite a range of low frequencies...