Hoy Moytes,
Sorry O'm loyte,
Equilibrium from DMG is a very good solution.
And this is one possible help too:
MeldaProduction’s MAnalyzer (free from www.meldaproduction.com) displays the frequency values of the input signal’s first few harmonics.
Then frequency can be translated to notes easily.

Nice day to all.

 

Voxengo Harmonieq maps frequencies to note values as well, it's just that in some cases (many actually) the fundamental is quite big and pinpointing an accurate reading can be an exercise in frustration. If you want to see what I mean load up Battery, select the Arena kit and try to see if you can find the pitch for kicks 2, 3 and 7. Thanks so much for all the responses so far, this is going to be really helpful for a lot of people and I've also found another excuse to post more Chemlab.

 

Do hats, cymbals, etc, have pitch? They seem similar to white noise, I thought that's why I could never get their pitch.

 

Do not like it, do not do it ofen, and I am not into EDM, IDM...
But this Elastik Player from here ( AudioZ) with Ubershall Sample Libraries, these guys made something for not so smart ppl and bored ppl like me, lol.
ALways there is key for samples, and when you choose few, you can change it easily there, in Elastik Player and export.I am double checking out with keybords if everything is ok. for every pitch, but usually it is. Not complicated. Everything tuned. User friendly.
In Ableton always work +++.
But I am rarely doing drums, hate this tuning, killing my flow, eating my nerves.
thanks for topic, wish I was reading this years before

 

Something... kinda... if I am doing it, I would think about it melodicaly. Like logic.
Kick is tonic, Snare is Dominant, then some hats ( depends from pattern) could be like III in scale, or I would put it on flat VIIth and so on. I sound now like a freak ...Oh, what about lot of brushes?
SO many options...

 

I have a little bit unusual technique for tuning drums that works great, and I tune them completely by ears. It's actually nothing unusual if you're a guitarist and I did pick this trick up from a guitarist I know. They often tune a guitar through lots of distortion and a guitar that is perfectly tuned is necessary for a great and on the pitch nicely distorted sound.

So... I just put some heavy distortion on the drum buss or separate drums and tune away. The more harmonics it produces and the longer the drum sounds, the better and easier it is to tune them. Sometimes I even remove it afterwards. [joking] Of course, if the drums are really short it can be hard to tune them, so distortion makes them flat sounding and therefore longer and you can hear its tune easier.

Fabfilter Saturn is a good "tuner", but really any distorting, waveshaping plugin will work as the quality doesn't matter much as you will remove it afterwards anyway.

Of course, sometimes I just use ReaTune... [a tuner in Reaper] or just use ears. Whatever works. There is a nice tuner and a [bad] "magneto style" saturator on this page that you can use: http://www.samplerchan.com/ This saturator is not strong enough for tuning, but the tuner works very well.

These pedals sound heavy enough for tuning: http://www.heptode.com/vst_plugins.html Don't spare the "gain" knob and the EQ knobs! Turn them all all the way clockwise for best results. That's what all the guitarists do. So it can't be wrong.

Cheers!

 

Yes. For example in Attack and Tremor you set the note for them when you're synthesizing the timbre.

Olymoon
Thanks man I totally forgot about MAnalyzer, that's really useful.

SineWave
Great advice thanks, never need an excuse to distort the shit out of some drums. :phones:
I had an idea that increasing the sustain with a transient designer could work too.

 

Yep, I recently saw the "pitch it up" tip in a tutorial and I gotta say it works pretty damn sweetly!

Loving the Melodyne tip too, nice to actually put the hundreds of £$€`s worth of soft gear to work.

Cool thread too Cataly5t.

 

MYCbeats

For many genre, anyway, this is not so important. But ask this question to Elvin Jones and you'll get a very different answer.

SineWave, Catalys Me too, If I tune drums, I do it by ears. Mostly because any way, the drum have a different role to play, so the right pitch for it is not necessarily the fundamental of a chord, it may be the 7th or things like that so, for a musical drum pitching I trust my ears and follow my musical feeling.

 

Well there's a few things to consider when it comes to kick drum tuning. It's always best to start at the source, the sample. If you have a key labelled sample library then great, you can choose kicks that match the key of your track or fall within the scale. If your kicks are not key labelled then they might be layered. In which case sometimes both the subby part (the one with the fundemental frequency/frequencies) and the attack (clicky) part of the kick are tuned identically, and sometimes they are tuned differently.

The simplest way to tune your kick drum is use your ears. What note do you hear the kick drum playing overall? Tune it to match your song, and keep in mind there is no right or wrong here it depends on what you prefer to hear.

Another simple method is as was stated before to pitch the sample up 12 or 24 semitones until the fundamental frequency is high pitched enough that you can clearly distinguish it by ear and/or using a spectrum analyzer.

A more scientific way to approach this without expensive or complicated plugins is to split the kick drum into 2 separate parts, one part is the subby part that carries the main frequencies, and the other which carries the attack and the clicky part. You can then tune each of them individually to your liking and re-layer them anyway you like. Use a spectrum analyzer to determine and set the keys for each part. Alot of times simply tuning your kick to the key of the song doesn't sound too good and interferes too much with your bassline, in which case you would need to either use another sample or significantly shorten the decay time of your kick so that its tail does not spill over onto the bassline.

In alot of my own projects I only don't care much about the tuning if I like the sample I'm using, I will eq the kick in such a way to make it fit with the rest of the track.

 

There you go, Sinewave mentioned even before I did...this same concept goes for percussion as well, although alot of hat and cymbal samples are processed white noise, they still have a pitch and a timbre that you can pick up on by ear.

 

This may be an out there method for those who don't play an actual instrument but the easiest way is to just have a guitar[or whatever instrument] tuner vst. It'll detect the pitch of just about anything.

 

Voxengo harmonieq gives the freq ==>pitch as well
Sadly I dont tend to really stick to that ortodoxy...
sadly coz i see that improves lots of things

 

Pitching drums is a bit of an inexact science, it can make a big difference sometimes and others be a waste of time.

Think of how a drum works in the real world. Some sort of beater or stick hits a skin and that makes a sound, that then reverberates through the drum head which creates a different sound. The snappy hit sound has a pitch (sort of) and the boomy reverberation sound has a pitch (sort of), often these are different and neither of these fit neatly into a chromatic scale.

The (sort of) is because each element of the drum sound has different factors working on it which means it's not probably not playing a consistent pitch from the first transient (hit) to the point at which it is silent. It might drift only by a few cents or by a considerable amount. Think of it as a sound with pitch bend on it, except its made up of a couple of layers (at least) that are starting at different pitches and drifiting at different rates.

A lot of sample packs are made up from layers of different drum sounds complicating things even more. Most of them will have a synthetic layer, which like the 808 kicks in the opening post will have a more consistent and identifiable pitch.

Pitch a drum sample and it will more often than not take other component frequencies out of tune at the same time. Thats why pitching things by ear really is the best way. Records with real drums on, and most others have all been done like this and 'perfectly' pitched drums (rather than what 'sounds right') is a relatively new concept. Close your eyes and dial through. Melodyne etc can give you a good starting point but I've also found that all those different pitching softwares will analyze even simply pitched loops etc in different ways, let alone drums, often it takes longer fixing those things when you think it should be right but it isn't.

Time spent analysing a load of drum sounds would be better spent organising your drum sounds so you have them separated into kick tops/clicks/subs/etc and layering them yourself, or simply getting a folder of kicks etc separated by character, e.g. Boomy Kicks, Punchy Kicks, Clicky Kicks or whatever makes sense to you and swapping through them once you've made your track.

Dont spend hours getting your drums tuned and eq'd etc before you make your track or you'll never get it made.

 

" Do hats, cymbals, etc, have pitch? They seem similar to white noise, I thought that's why I could never get their pitch. "

in usual music no. except for the ride, but it's usually too high to be a problem in the harmony.

In electronic they can.
TR's are filtered white noise, depending on heavy the Q is, it can be a troublesome pitch.
For snare, and toms , the transient is a "bleep" of sine, followed by white noise. it can has a pitch too, depending on the decay time, and the arrival freq.

 

Every sound has it's own pitch, as long as it is a part of the frequency spectrum. Even if is a white noise, if you narrow the band of a eq in the peaky area of that white noise and solo it, it's actually a musical note for dogs , anyway, did you saw that the EQ's that provide a keyboard across the frequency field (Like Waves H-EQ or Equillibrium from DMG), it doesn't stop under 3khz or 5 khz or 10 khz? that keyboard covers from 20hz up to 20khz, and a hi-hat... or white noise... or whateva'... even if it's placed very high e.g. 12-14-16khz, it still represent a pitch. Anyway... sometimes that ultra-high pitched sounds like acute hi-hats are not necessary to be pitched to the song's scale because they're more like a percussive/rythmic or complementary sounds in conjunction with the other instruments.