Tuning Drums

Ferdows

New member
Sup guys,

So Im producing for a while now and when I started I learned to tune my drums especially kicks/snares/toms.

But last night I was watching a live band perform and they perform a lot of songs, but obviously the drummer has the same snare/kick/toms.

So how does that work? Won't it matter at a live performance that the drums arn't in tune?
 
cool question

for real drums there is really no tuned pitch so the idea is that the drums are instead tuned relatively, and therefore able to fit against any key
 
the sound of a real tom has no real pitch but we can say that it is a high medium or low tom depending on how it is tuned

most drummers try to tune so that they have a sense of moving in 3rds - do-doo-dooh.

the kick and snare are then pitched to be relatively speaking a fifth apart - thwack-thump

you can tune cymbals but only to make them higher in most cases (you do this by grinding some of the cymbal material away - some guys will use plasticine (play-do) or blue-tak to add weight and therefore drop the pitch and damp vibrations at the same time

check out this video



by the far the best introduction tuning I have seen
 
oh really interesting, thanks for the detailed answer! Could you do this the same way with electronic drums in your DAW?
 
you can apply the ideas more literally as you can simply pitch shift the required amount

In reasons Kong drum designers you can go even further
 
With electronic sounds you can tune the kick if needed. I've never touched a snare's pitch in this matter, like he said. Drums don't have a pitch unless it's a 808 or something like that. I've seen various people say they tune their kicks to their bassline since it helps it sit right. I don't do this usually because I find that it makes the kick sound bad on higher notes. You could give it a try though.
 
With electronic sounds you can tune the kick if needed. I've never touched a snare's pitch in this matter, like he said. Drums don't have a pitch unless it's a 808 or something like that. I've seen various people say they tune their kicks to their bassline since it helps it sit right. I don't do this usually because I find that it makes the kick sound bad on higher notes. You could give it a try though.

Funny thing about the 808 is there is no pitch knob....that all came from running the 808 kick into the SP 1200.
 
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