Tuning Drum Samples - Creating Tracks
This quick and easy way to tune drum samples will have your projects sounding more natural and polished in seconds!
Tuning your drum samples is not one of the most important tasks on your list for the day, but it can help make your music sound even more professional and polished. When you are using a synth to generate your drum sounds, tuning is a non-issue. But if you happen to be using drum samples, as most producers and musicians are these days, then this should help you get one step closer to that perfect mix.
All you need to tune your drum samples using this method is a sample to work with, a sampler and a tuner. All DAWs come with their own stock sampler, but you can use any sampler you like for this and still yield the same results. Once you have added your sample in your sampler, make sure you have tweaked the necessary parameters to bring the overall volume and presence in-line with the original sample.
After you have your sampler set up to playback the drum samples correctly you can start tuning. Load up a tuner plugin on the track and program some MIDI notes to make the process as automated as possible. Now adjust the tune knob (may also be called transpose) until you hit the tuning that will best match your project. In this lesson specifically we take a kick drum that was tuned to A and tune it to C.
Although the video runs several minutes in length, this workflow can take only a matter of ten seconds once you are comfortable with the process. There are many other ways you can go about tuning your drum samples, but this is a very fast and CPU-friendly way to handle it. It also provides you with the added options that come with using a sampler! So once you get through this with the stock sampler plugin in your DAW, try using a more robust sampler, like Kontakt from Native Instruments, so you can take advantage of the wide selection of effects and modulation capabilities!
Cheers,
OhmLab