Quick Tip: Tune Your Drums in Ableton Live
Tutorial Details
- Difficulty: Beginner/Intermediate
- Time: 10 minutes
- Difficulty: Beginner/Intermediate
- Requirements: Ableton Live
Tuning the drum samples in your song is an important but often overlooked technique in electronic music production. Like any musical instrument, a drum plays at a certain frequency, or pitch. Every frequency corresponds to a certain note on the musical scale.
If the drum samples in your track are pitched to notes that are out-of-key with the rest of the song, they can sound slightly but frustratingly “wrong.” Use Ableton’s built-in Spectrum frequency analyzer plug-in to determine the pitch of a drum sample, then use the Drum Rack’s Transpose function to move the sample’s pitch into the same key as the rest of the track.
Step 1
Load up a Drum Rack in Ableton, then add a synthesizer plug-in to a second MIDI track. Select one of the synthesizer’s pad presets. Drop a snare drum sample into a slot on the Drum Rack, then open the piano roll editor and put a snare on every other quarter note. Program a chord into the synthesizer’s piano roll. Here, I’m playing a G major chord — G, B, and D — but you can use any chord you like.
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Step 2
Drop Ableton’s Spectrum plug-in onto the Drum Rack. Play the drum track, then look for the highest peak on the Spectrum display. Move the mouse cursor over the peak to see its frequency and the corresponding note. Here, we can see that the snare drum’s dominant pitch corresponds to the note F#, which isn’t a component of the G major chord. We’ll need to change the drum’s pitch so that it matches one of the notes in the chord. Because we want to change the sample’s character as little as possible, we’ll move it to G — the closest note to F# in the chord.
Step 3
Set the snare drum’s Transpose control in the Drum Rack to “1.” This brings the snare drum’s pitch one step upward to G — the root note of the G major chord. Because we’re only moving the pitch by one step, the sonic character of the drum sample doesn’t change drastically, but it fits much better with the synth. Listen closely to the audio sample to hear the subtle but noticeable effects of tuning a drum sample. In the first and third bars of the loop, the snare drum is at its original pitch of F#; in the second and fourth bars, it’s transposed up to G.
When you add other drum samples to the drum rack, tune them to the same key. The drums don’t all need to be at the same note, as long as their notes are all part of the relevant chord. For example, in this situation, the kick drum could be transposed to B, the snare to G and the hi-hat to D. If you find that you need to transpose a drum sample’s pitch by more than a few steps, consider using a different sample, as large changes in pitch can make the drum sound very different.
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By James Podles
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here’s my method for tuning some drums (uses a guitar tuner)
http://mrtunes.ca/blog/624/how-to-tune-a-kick-drum-or-any-other-drum-for-that-matter
Seems like some audio files are missing from this tutorial. Very intersting technique. I did’t realize that Ableton Spectrum Analyzer could be used that way.
” If you find that you need to transpose a drum sample’s pitch by more than a few steps, consider using a different sample, as large changes in pitch can make the drum sound very different.”
Or use resonator (Ableton built in effect) to tune just mai frequency of the sample leaving the rest untouched.
Tuning hi hats makes no sense as they are non-tonal instruments.
I’m not sure I understand your technique completely.
What about another chords of the song/track? A transpose knob automation? Just kidding ;)
Or do you tune samples only about the 1st chord (the tonic “main” one)? For example, you used G-major here(so let’s say we are in the G-major scale) and F# is a 7th note of the scale.. but anyway you said it’s “wrong”, right?
I really would be glad to know what you are guided by when you pick the “right chord”.. or do you use notes of the scale as well? ..and what if we have “jumped” to another scale (modulation) in the middle or at the end of the song (in this case we’ve got another tonic chord).. And the last one — if you hi-pass filter your snares (maybe about 300-350Hz ) do you tune them as well?
I’m sorry there’s kind of a mess in my head about tuning drums. It would be really great if you could answer some of my questions. Thank you very much!
PS.. Sorry for the language. I’m not an English speaker..
@Moogy,
I can’t listen to the audio, but I assume the key of the track is G.
Therefore, F# is a semitone off the main tone, creating a dissonant sound.
Conventionally, the notes that would go best with a song in the key of G are the notes from the Gmajor triad which are G, B, D.
There are certain notes which will create a dissonance which should be avoided, such as F#, C# and so on.
@The writer of this article, what I always wondered was, say if you tuned your kick drum to a G, and Your bassline was playing a constant rootnote bassline of G, wouldn’t this create a very big clash in the frequency range, in the fundamental frequency area and all the harmonics above it?
hey, I have the same doubt Smas.
James Podles, can you answer please?
Thanks so much
I would also like to hear your thoughts on Smas’s query.
First of all great little article, I’ve never thought of using the Specrum Analyser for this purpose but will try it out.
Smas, it’s common to either notch out the kick’s main frequency from the bass track if they overlap, alternatively you could use sidechaining to duck those frequencies in the bass when the kick hits.. to remove any conflicts on the spectum.
The sub is usually going to be atleast an octave lower than the kick anyway.