Production Technique: Tuning Kick Drums

Just as it is important to tune an acoustic kick drum, it’s also important to tune an electronic kick. Tuning the kick to the track is an often overlooked step in the production process, so let’s take a day to look at how to properly tune a kick drum.

First Things First

It’s important to realize that your initial kick sound will never be your final sound. After all of the subsequent sample swapping and processing, your kick will evolve with your song to fit like a glove – if you do it right.

During the writing process, it’s not necessary to go through the trouble of precisely tuning a kick. It’s more important to finish arranging the song. However, once you have your arrangement laid out, the first thing to do is tune your kick drum. Don’t stress about it before unless it’s a major problem (in which case, you likely have the wrong sample).

Identify the Track Key

The key of the track is the pitch it is based around. It is often easily identified by the bass line, but if you are using a sample in a key other than C, beware – your piano roll is lying to you!

To identify the key of a track:

1. Choose a sound with definitive harmonic information (no blips or heavily effected sounds) and drop a spectrum analyzer on it. Most have an option to display frequencies as musical tones, but if not a frequency will suffice. *Hint: Abelton Live’s EQ 8 has a built in spectrum analyzer that displays musical notes. If you don’t have one, here is a good one that I use pretty often: Waves PAZ Frequency Analyser. Voxengo has a free one that I’ve used before as well, avaliable here.
2. Use the analyzer to identify the fundamental note of your sound. You can often do this by hovering over the leftmost, tallest peak. If you have your note, congrats – you have the key of your song. If not, use the chart to the right to identify the key.

Tune the Kick

Once you have the track key, the rest is pretty simple. Most kick samples will be in the key of C, unless otherwise noted. To be certain, you can employ the same technique above to identify the key of a kick sample.

Now to tune the kick, you are going to identify the closest perfect interval of your track’s key. Perfect interval is a term from music theory. The perfect intervals are fifths, fourths, and octaves.

Using C as an example, fifth = G, fourth = F, and octave = C. So for example, if your track’s key is Bb, your closest perfect interval would be Bb (in Bb: 5 = F, 4 = Eb, 8 = Bb) at two semitones down. So transpose your kick sample down two semitones to tune the kick. But if your track’s key is A, your closest perfect interval would be two semitones up at D (in A: 5 = E, 4 = D, 8 = A).

Conclusion

It will require a google search or two if you aren’t fluent in music theory, but it’s well worth the effort, as it will make your life at the mixing stage infinitely easier by gluing your low end together. I know the music theory might have been a little much for some folks, but believe me people – the sooner you get some basic music theory in your head, the faster you will produce exponentially better tracks.

Until next time,

Chris Lazaga
AudioMunk