Tuning Your Beats

Do you get your kicks and snares from an 808, your hats from a 909, and your tom from your sister's cousin's best friends' daughters' tom that you sampled at a party one night

So you've you put all these tracks together, years in the making, only to realize later in life what exactly music IS, how sound behaves, and how the mind interprets it. All of your music has beats that are out of key with your song. Well when you add beats from a song into say, some synth thing, most of the time, they are left in their original state, and the samples are just inserted without much further thought, at least for me, and until about 2 or 3 years ago, I was unaware of my out of tune beats. They sounded good, but they didn't sound as good as they could have.

Anyway, since then I've noticed how cool tuning your beats and percusion noises is, and just adding random drum samples are like, totally out of key. How many of you think about this with their music, who doesn't care, and who has a wealth of information about the topic?

Post Script: since this realization, I've pondered about rock music, where the hats and snares and kicks are probably so ugly out of key it's not even funny. Do I have it wrong? Am I missing the big picture? Does a snare cover such a frequency range that it's not possible top even tune with music? What's going on with this whole out of tune music thing? It's all out of tune just enough o make it sound good right? If I make music that is so perfectly in tune it's stupid, will it even sound good?

i'm so confused...

on the "rock band" recordings i've done - or perhaps more accurately, every time i've recorded an acoustic drum kit, the only drums i've worried about tuning are the toms, as they ring with sufficient tonality to justify it.

a snare is largely masked by white noise (from the snares themselves). if the snares are taken off, then the snare drum may need tuning as well.

kicks are generally such low-frequency sounds and with such a sharp transient pattern that tuning doesn't enter into it. they CAN be tuned, but most people (myself included) wouldn't notice or care if you tuned them (beyond making them sound good in and of themselves).

this can be very different in the case of certain jazz kits that have far less boomy, smaller kick drums that resonate with a definite tone.

this all also depends on the sonic complexity of what you're recording.

tool is big on tuning the drums to match the music, they make quite a point of it.

if you get into electronics, it's a whole other ballgame. slow-decay 808 kicks, glitchy bitreduced percussion - tuning or not tuning can have a definite effect either way. or not. just depends what you're going for.

in my personal opinion, human ears are 'trained' such that we don't necessarily need percussive sounds to be in tune with the music, and in fact the dissonance, however subtle, that creates may be something we're accustomed to.

as with anything, i'd be hesitant to say it's "better" one way or the other. just different. like quantizing vs. not quantizing. like analogue vs. digital. like softsynth vs. hardware. like notes vs. silence.

love,

c

I tune percussion sounds, but I never think to myself, "Take that Ab and turn it into a Bb..." like I would with a synth line. I honestly just turn the tune knob until I'm happy. I do consciously take a BD part, tune it to something, then have another tuned down -6 or -4 semi-tones. 4, 6, 9, and 12 tones as the interval is usually awesome between bass drums.

most rock bands tune drums just like they tune guitars. anyway, percussion rarely follows the chromatic scale (99% won't discern a few cents of tuning), plus you get all sorts of fun harmonics. perfection is subjective.

i just jackson pollack on the fx until you can't tell what the tune is

I like to have my drums un-tuned. Because most people won't hear it, and it has a certain color to it against the rest of the music.

i tune my beats. but i don't know if i'm tuning them in tune.

a lot of of the times i will start a song with a tuned bass drum or tuned snare and bass beat to invent the entire melody for the song to work off of.