Tuning EVERYTHING to the root/scale of your track....

logikz said:
never. our dnb is completely dissonant when it comes to tuning drums. we also enjoy some slight dissonance in the darker moodier tracks, when it comes to instrumentation.
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I think having everything in key is cool if you're going for a particularly musical sound i.e. something like Culture Shock where you're really after that musical perfection across the whole track, but I do also think there's something to be said for a track not being perfect in this way if you're going for a more rougher sound with a bit more desired edge.

I can't imagine a proper jungle tune where everything is perfectly in key would really sound right lol
 
thedjnifty said:
I can't imagine a proper jungle tune where everything is perfectly in key would really sound right lol
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dude, for a lot of the early ray keith tracks, the drums are off Oo so i guess youre right.

always tuning everything by ear, when i got a sample i obv try to be perfect and look at an analyzer, but for drums, ears.

and @sammy. try loading a sample into the slicer or edison, press edit or tools and there should be a button where you can press "put notes into piano roll" - FL's own sample analyzer ;) - and you dont need melodyne (you tryed newtone btw? reeeeeallly good aswell).
 
As far as I can tell, there's two aspects to this:
1. Tuning drums to the key of you track will make them sound better and fit better
2. Tuning drums gives you more headroom because you get less phasing.
1 depends on the drum and how pitched it is. It's just personal taste and you have to use your ears.
2 Is always true, but I don't know how much extra headroom you get.
Is that right? Just wanted to check my understanding of stuff...
 
Yea i had a play with Newtone its pretty sick. Didn't know about the edison trick, i used to use edison a lot till I switched to Fruity Beta on the Mac. Edison is just one of those things i had to sacrifice! Soon as i drag a sound out it crashes! Guess it needs the correct directories and this Beta version creates like a virtual drive for all the vsts and windows based folders etc. It's confusing as shit and i can't wait to get back to the PC version!

My mate recently bought 'Zplane Vielklang 2' he was bangin on about how it pisses all over Melodyne! And its a fraction of the price!
It was pretty sick what I briefly saw of it. You can edit the vibrato which you can't really do properly in anything else. They apparently created the algorithms used for Melodyne and all the other detection software? Have a look into it ;)


smoothassilk said:
As far as I can tell, there's two aspects to this:
1. Tuning drums to the key of you track will make them sound better and fit better
2. Tuning drums gives you more headroom because you get less phasing.
1 depends on the drum and how pitched it is. It's just personal taste and you have to use your ears.
2 Is always true, but I don't know how much extra headroom you get.
Is that right? Just wanted to check my understanding of stuff...
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Yea pretty much man. It does open up a bit of headroom, i cant say how much as i haven't done a direct comparison I just know that the mixdown of my latest compared to one a few weeks back is night n day!

As someone mentioned it is nice to have things not as clinically crafted and eq'd, as it works with some tunes.... I imagine this clean sound that is appearing from people like culture shock etc is due to this type of attention to detail. I personally like both?
 
Sammy Dexcell said:
As someone mentioned it is nice to have things not as clinically crafted and eq'd, as it works with some tunes.... I imagine this clean sound that is appearing from people like culture shock etc is due to this type of attention to detail. I personally like both?
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Yeah definitely whatever works for you man, I think it's about understanding how your track's gonna sound if everything's perfectly in key and then deciding if that's what you wanna go for, or if you're not that bothered and would rather have a bit of edgy musical imperfection going on, either works!
 
I am going to have to ask a question...

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Im a little bit away from understanding (in my head) musical theory

What confused me here is someone said "tune the drums to the keys of the track" assuming the track has been finished (un tuned) and now its all layed out, then tune the drums to the key? as you don't have a key until you decide on a instrument to play the first note at 1 second. Yes?

What I might do is, lay down a kick and snare ( pitched a bit to sound like drums i've heard in a tune ) and hats - go sick with pitching hats because that (I believe) is the KEY to these mad, fast but clean hi hat patterns mainly in jump up.

Ok so we have no key yet do we? only got drums and hats...playing various pitches...

Reet, okay, combinator, what shall we have? a sampler? or a synth? hmmm, sampler, Im feeling creative (load up sample of lets say a..string sample i have)

This is where i determine the key of the whole track? the bass (HAS?/NOT?) to be in the same scale or key thing as the violin that starts the track off.
further more, if i want variation with the violin (which i will otherwise i have a boring sound with no movement or energy)
I have to stick to chord progressions or it (may) sound wack but thats ok as i have ears, same with a riser i made on a malstrom - if i play c3 it sounds okay...if i play up an octave it sounds okay....if i play in the middle, it sounds okay...why? really it should be pitched to a complimentary key to the strings that are playing as the track builds up or does it not matter? because as i said, it sound OKAY on any of the notes ( bar -3 and +3 etc )

Have i just typed a load of balls there?
What i want to know is, how do you determine the KEY and stick to it and keep the workflow flowing, i stop when i have to get surgical on a certain note and could spend hours basically doing nothing - the joys of production :) I love it!
 
SENATE said:
Have i just typed a load of balls there?
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Nah, thats a perfectly reasonable question. And you're right getting surgical before you even have a tune layed down is not the best way to approach this.
I basically made a track as i normally would, and then after when I was at the mixing down stages I noticed how it just wasn't sitting right and the impact on the drop just wasn't there. So I got surgical and started tuning things.
I had made the tune to what I perceived as 'normal' and then when I realised this technique I went back in and tweaked everything to find the mixdown when I exported it compared to the older version just felt bigger and clearer and just felt (for lack of a better word) 'natural'. Like it was just meant to do that?

After more playing about it doesn't really matter all that much, but if you are massively out with your kick n snare they will feel like they stick out a lot. Doing it with FX is a bit tedious. I think say if you had a white noise sweep from high to low just make sure the high part where it starts is eq'd in a way that it hits the root of your track and the lowest part of the sweep ends on the root again. Its hard to do so i ignore that and just go by ear, fx really doesn't make a difference thats just nitpicking IMO
 
SENATE said:
What i want to know is, how do you determine the KEY and stick to it and keep the workflow flowing, i stop when i have to get surgical on a certain note and could spend hours basically doing nothing - the joys of production :) I love it!
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You see, it is YOU who will determinate what key your track is. I normally think, before start putting sounds, what key should the song be in. Like D natural minor, for example. Then, I go from there.

You asked what instrument should play that "note", or that "scale", and so far, I noted that normally the first note played on a song should be the root note, or the key note, being it bass, pad, strings, or whatever. But, as music is an art, you don't need to stick to this. You can work on a key of D natural minor, but start the song with it's 5th, or A note. It's up to you to experiment and see what sounds good.

You also asked if the bass need to play the same scale of the strings. Well, normally yes, but you can, again, experiment with things.
 
Sammy Dexcell said:
Yea i had a play with Newtone its pretty sick. Didn't know about the edison trick, i used to use edison a lot till I switched to Fruity Beta on the Mac. Edison is just one of those things i had to sacrifice! Soon as i drag a sound out it crashes! Guess it needs the correct directories and this Beta version creates like a virtual drive for all the vsts and windows based folders etc. It's confusing as shit and i can't wait to get back to the PC version!
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mate, does slicex work?? has the same function!

@sonic half the forums in dexcell :teeth: - my fav tune of theirs aswell tho, banger

edit: just having a loop at vielklang, looks good. same as gtune, was looking for something like this. ty.
 
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groelle said:
@sonic half the forums in dexcell :teeth: - my fav tune of theirs aswell tho, banger
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Haha! Yea man my fav of ours too! Trying hard not to Kanye West' out an diva the forum. lol Just breaking that stigma of 'normal' recluse producers who hide n lurk/ignore places like this! It's good to give back. I started out on here! You guys kept me goin! GROUP HUG! :gang_bang

Ill check slice x you're a godsend if it works! :D
 
Sammy Dexcell said:
Haha! Yea man my fav of ours too! Trying hard not to Kanye West' out an diva the forum. lol Just breaking that stigma of 'normal' recluse producers who hide n lurk/ignore places like this! It's good to give back. I started out on here! You guys kept me goin! GROUP HUG! :gang_bang

Ill check slice x you're a godsend if it works! :D
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if i ever have somewhat of a success with the music im sure to stay here aswell. always gotta know where you came from.

it does work, just checked again to be sure. its under 'tools' and then analysis 'convert to score and dump to piano roll'

have fun ;)
 
Depends. If I am just designing a bass or sketching out an idea, I will throw down a kick and snare to get a groove going. Then after that I will bring up voxengo's span and a spectrogram. Will see where the drums are in comparison to each other and in comparison to the bass using the spectro. Will use span to fine tune.

Obviously if it is still sounding shit I will change the drum/s or change / tune the bass



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Also - out of tune chromatic notes work for darker, dissonant styles. Especially using the 2nd and minor second


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Yea, the basic idea is pretty great. But i even think that your ear chooses the right perc hits with the right key even from itself. What i mean is that when you have a perc or a hi hat that plays completely out of the key scale, then you probably tend to think this hi hat sample sucks and you are gonna delete it. :)

By the way, how do you guys deal with it when layering snares. Does every snare need to be in the same pitch? Because my layered snares have quite a wide range of tones... Not sure if that's good or not. But pitching my layered snares up or down sounds quite bad.
 
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Saftstein said:
By the way, how do you guys deal with it when layering snares. Does every snare need to be in the same pitch? Because my layered snares have quite a wide range of tones... Not sure if that's good or not. But pitching my layered snares up or down sounds quite bad.
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Not the 'same' pitch but we tend to do the standard thing of starting with a snare sound we like then trolling through a bank of sounds an finding an accompanying layer to fit for the putty middy hit and then the tail (if it needs one) but the process is similar to whats being preached everywhere. We will go up n down in pitch till it 'fits' sometimes its the same pitch sometimes its not, its just that sweet spot you're looking for. If it sounds shit we would delete/replace with a better sound.

After years n years of doing it we now have a sample collection that we just pitch up or down to fit a new track. So every tune hasn't just got that same exact snare, we will layer another one on top to change the character slightly too if need be...

Another useful thing is the 'pogo' effect in FL its a quick way to getting that 'Mefjus' type snare sound. Its essentially a pitch envelope though. Crank it all the way to the right and 'out' the sample till you get a small hit. If you then pitch that back down slightly on the piano roll thing, you can get a nice snap on the beginning of a sample!

If you don't have FL the equivalent would be to just add a pitch envelope of about 600cent and make the decay small with no release then pitch the sample down slightly?
 
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