Seeing as how TuneSong Records is sharing a variety of drum samples, we may as well have a quick “fireside chat” about tonal content and the perceived frequency of a drum sample at any given point - depending on what “type” of drum sound sample it is.
This is hopefully going to guide the way for those who have not really thought about tuning drum kits, and individual drum sound samples.
Ask a “real-world” drummer about it, and they might just frown and say “Don’t you worry about that mate, you just make sure your guitar is in tune.” And that isn’t an expression of professional unfriendliness, it’s a representation of how it is almost impossible to talk about tuning drums, compared to tuning the guitar or a synthesizer.
The inconvenient truth here is that you sort of need to think about it, and possibly talk about it. If the subject just causes friction, then drop it, as there is no need to cause confused conversations and potential arguments. After all, this is music; emotion! Energy in motion … Many beautiful songs have been written without any explicit understanding of what is going on with a drum sound sample’s “pitch ramp”.
The bass drum and the tom drum and a few different types of percussion sound samples are the “usual suspects” when it comes to the presence of a “pitch ramp” in their tonal frequency character, in their temporal existence. “Temporal meaning time-based. That is the key. It usually starts as a bit lower in perceived frequency, quickly goes up about a quarter of a semitone (that is 25 “fine cents” in the scientific talk) over about 30 milliseconds (about a third of a second) … then eases back down again.
So that’s the pitch ramp. Fascinating. If you don’t “mess” with the sample, and it sounds “in-tune” with the song or the bass … then great. Forget this page exists and move forwards with your cool tunes.
If, however, you make the length of a drum sound sample shorter - we are not talking about directly changing the coarse or fine pitch of it here - then what happens? Less of the “pitch ramp” is heard … by the listener … by the beat producer in the studio … by the audience.
So this rave that is going longer than planned is designed to share some kind of “practical wisdom” eventually gained after nearly two decades of head-scratching and moderate bewilderment as regards the perceived pitch frequency of a bass drum that has a “pitch ramp”. Some don’t, and yay for them, although quite a few do.
Firstly, let’s define where the “perceived bass drum pitch frequency” actually is. Is it at the start of the pitch ramp, at the end of the returning pitch ramp? No. It (the perceived fundamental note of the bass drum) is… just a little above two thirds of the way along the ascending pitch ramp component of the sound sample… as the bass drum sound sample plays as a sound event.
Usually the pitch ramp starts a little lower and ascends quickly then descends although not necessarily all the way back to where it began the quickly ascending pitch ramp.. Whether it does or not, it’s sort of like a rule of thumb where the “perceived fundamental tone frequency” of the bass drum is going to be perceived … at about two-thirds of the ascent of the “pitch ramp”.
Perhaps skateboarders could grasp this next part more easily than beat producers. Seeing as how the perceived fundamental frequency is sort of based on a ratio (2/3) then if a beat producer wants to shorten the length of the bass drum sound - editing say 20 percent of the tail of the bass drum sample finishing it neatly with a quick fadeout … then quite possibly the drum sample is going to sound about 20 fine cents higher in fundamental frequency tone..
These “cents” are referred to in most samplers as “fine”; they are “centi-tones”, hundredths of a semitone. Whilst the “coarse” tuning parameter moves by single semitones. So it is the “fine” tuning of a bass drum sound sample that may very well require detuning by ten or twenty “fine” units of measurement, if the the beat producer chooses to shorten the length of a bass drum sample by say twenty percent.
And so, to revisit the twenty years of moderate confusion about why a bass drum sound sample would suddenly sound “out of tune” simply by adjusting the length, and not the pitch … this is the reason. The “pitch ramp” component of the sound sample. It does not change position just because the tail of the sound is edited off.
And then we have the concurrently influential ratio of two thirds … that is to say, at about two thirds of the bass drum sample sound event, whatever the perceivable frequency of the sample is, at that point, that is sort of pretty much going to be the perceived “tuned note” of the sample. Sure, with drum samples, there is also a noise component, and there are different types of noise … also a “click” component with a bass drum. This does not change the two-thirds ratio rule of thumb when it comes to the perceived “tuned note” of the sample.
Sooooo… test it out. Get a bass drum sample you like, maybe adjust it in tuning slightly to get it in tuning sync with the bass synth perhaps … then duplicate the tracks and shorten the bass drum sample by twenty percent or more. Have a listen. It was in tune with the bass synth before, but now it isn’t and the only thing that changed was the length. Hopefully this overly long rave shall prevent any confusion in such a scenario in the future. Or the present.