Hi foster911.. (i dont know/seen/hear seamless) I make DnB for some time now, and in these years i made the habbit of working in F or G. (sometimes in F#) Liked it on guitar years ago. I live in same hometown as noisia and drink beer sometimes, and guess what? F is their favorite. I talked ones with optical ,and guess what? He even told me dont do DnB in other then F or G . Teebee.BSE,mefjus ? Same thing .Well maybe thats bollocks , and of course do what you like. But for me F and G are the notes. And it cant be coinsidence that when you hear and try to tune your notes with DnB it will be most often F or G .And i spoke to them after i made a habbit of making tunes in those notes. So yeah the magical F it is overhere! This wasnt really helpfull for was it?

 

I believe you have to decide what your orchestration would be, as a starting point.
The sonority of an instrument is a thing that is not clarified in most of the relevant music books. For example, all the string instruments have some "plus" using their open strings positions (like soundind bigger), but sometimes this would also make them sound a little bit hard, or even harsh. You can always ask the musicians to make suggestions before you deside which would be the prefered tonality.
Anyway, after finding out that your music is playing in a suitable range, you can try to take a few steps high or low (in semitones I mean). This may add some extra air or the dark mood that you were looking for

 

@foster911

I think you didn't notice that my last post was 100% sarcasm.

 

It's a matter of emotive quality, of how it affects the human spirit.

Maybe there's software to determine this?

 

Maybe sub-bass wise that's as low, deep and shattering the low-end on his monitors can go. Especially on "not that expensive" studio monitors, there's a sweetspot in the lowend that the monitors can reach in order to... still shake the house. I might be wrong, but that's a possibility as well.

When i had my first pair of studio monitors i used to compose between F# - B because that was the "fat" range on my monitors. Of course, that range was also emphasized by the room my monitors were used in.

 

That's no my belief. I just reported what I have seen. I love all the keys.