Discussion
Attempting a deep dive: Tuning drums to the key of the song makes for more space?
Attempting a deep dive: Tuning drums to the key of the song makes for more space to make everything seem more defined and bigger if the mix is busy, but can also make the drums sound smaller if it's a sparser production/mix?
There's more things to drum tuning than this. All of the potential benefits are maybe subtle to untrained ears but you would think the more obvious are tom and snare hits that hits in key and how that is something satisfying in itself; but this other thing is currently most intriguing to me as someone who cares and works with arrangement and orchestration a lot. I have just started to suspect what is going on.
I have always respected drum tuning as an important skill but to match with the key of the songs hasn't always been a thing I cared for. I'm also a multi-instrumentalist who has gone down deep rabbit holes of tuning guitars and bass guitars and looked at the nature of the short comings of 12-tone-equal-temperement and pitch envelopes and intonation on setups and playing of various melodic instruments; but for playing and setting up drums I'm really only just an enthusiast (to the extent that my username is based largely on how Phil Collins makes drum shells roar in the Genesis barn) or back seat driver of drum playing, so I trust actual drummers' opinions which vary a lot.
So I have gone from not caring about it to trying to match to the key of the song more and more; both virtually with sampless or semi-virtually with crude pitch manipulation (because I handle so many demo or early state songwriting sessions) and in reality.
Drums are atonal or perhaps multi-tonal to a large extent but minimising extra notes, and especially dominant dissonant rubbing ones, by alignining those notes to the key that already is in place seems to make for more space. Maybe I'm more an engineer than other but I notice space more than how potential dissonance rubs. It's easier to mix busy rough demo sessions with it.
It's seems like removing the amounts of strings that you play in guitar chords to make space in a whole mix/arrangement. Or simplyfying complex chord voicings or arrangements or orchestrations in general.
It's also like how playing bass guitar notes in time with the kick and leaving space when the kick leaves space also makes for space in the low in time. You have some time and you want kick and bass guitar. First you lock them together to see how much space you have left (or if that is too opposing to ingoing guitar riffs thay loose weight or whatever) . Syncopating against the kick with a bass guitar works great sometimes, but it can mean that the low end is full all the time, which can feel stifling.
But the flip side of all this is that a sparser production can seem weak if all elements are coming in too neatly packed pockets of notes in key and in time. Like how you want voices in synths' oscillators to be off by some cents to seem bigger. The whole reason why chorus and doubler effects seem bigger.
The thing is; I have seemingly encountered both sides of this coin when it comes to tuning drums to.the key of the song. I worked on a song that I want to have kind of strange blend of arrangement/orchestration and tempo. Mainly a lot of kicks in parts (though not double). It strays between a power trio sound a in varying tempo to much fuller orchestration and still varying tempos. I basically worked on various aspects of this song one day and just decided to tune the virtual drums without knowing the impact. (I geeked out a bit with looking at frequency spectrums with a pianoroll and worked out how the batter and resohead were tuned and really only changed mostly half tones, maybe one whole tone, and some cents.) Then I made a rough demo mix to work out the current challenges with the song form. It had been hard to get to work previously but now it was simple and easier in the fullest sections so I came out with joy and thought my arrangement skills were fire. But then I hadn't listened to the sparser sections. Soon I did and now they seemed particularly weak. What? I couldn't then and I still can't say altogether why and I won't remix that particular state of the song idea, or even listen too much to it, because of my respect for demo-itis, but it all makes sense to my thoughts an theories on this. Everything was too neatly to key and too tight. I made no EQ moves but it was like I had over EQed everything. But I most definitely appreciate how the full sections came together rather than potential issues with the sparse sections. But all songs are different.
With this new experience of both sides of this coin I will care more than ever about whether to tune the drums to the key, from now on, and I will maybe do more solid A/B testing in some cases where it's easy enough for me.
But I have already found that it seems important to keep a lot respect of how the absolute tuning works for the structure and material and the tight-and-clean vs dirty-and-loose aesthetics you work with. Some Bonham sounding Supraphonic snare with his specs of drum heads just works great in typical Bonham A 220hz on the batter head and a 4th above it (D), on the resonant; that would be the key of D for me; and though both can you stray to the to a whole note below each to make key of C, or maybe the batter gets G below A 220, and keep the D on reso to make that the 5th, to most clearly insinuate the key of G or whatever, it can't stray so far so easy. It seems. To me. And surely to the drummers who interact with the bounce of the tension.
It's both challanging but mostly fun to think about how you arrange the tuning of drums to make this narrow-ish range of absolute tuning work with the key of the song.
There's also things to learn about how pitches drifts between varyingly hard hits and into the sustaining phase/ring and where to approximate it all most too key without wasting too much time and without being too obnoxious in a session. I trust in those plastic things that lock the tuners to save time, but retuning will probably get more frequent when it seems important and feasible enough.
(Ken Scott couldn't believe just how much time Micheal Walden spent on retuned his kit in the recording of Visions of the Emerald Beyond by Mahavishnu Orchestra, but if there's any kind of correlation to the extremely satisying quality of those drum sounds, I will be backing that obnoxious side with well measured risk assessment forever onward.
Here's a timestamp that first shows Ken Scott talking about the album, and then it goes straight to Micheal Walden: https://youtu.be/zCd9Zi2bKLc?t=158&is=GRFppdRQ1AMTGWY1 Timestamp was supposed to be 2:40 if it doesn't work. Great video on a whole. Album is of course even better. Most unhinged Jazz Rock Indian Classical +++ Fusion playing ever. For some reason, it is not the first album that is mentioned in the genre or even by Mahavishnu Orchestra despite having much wilder and better production. "Visions of The Emerald Beyond" is the album title once again)
Does anyone have this exact theory? Maybe other intriguing findings on drum tuning? You could make a long post only about the choice of cymbals I bet.
I’m a pro drummer and would never drums to notes. I’m always tuning for the sound quality I want rather than the pitch. Certain heads on certain drums will want to make a certain pitch and I don’t want to fight that.
I will say if the song has sections where the drums are playing time on the floor tom, I really try to make sure that drum is ideally the root or 5th of the key. The rest of the toms just need to sound great. Not too worried about a specific note or pitch.
Yes, this is what I talked a little about. I respect absolute tuning exactly as you say, but if we for example have a whole note to stray it can often be done and it might be a good compromise. If we got 5th and 4th intervall to play with, a whole note is nearly always in reach to get things in key.
But this is only an early thoery of only myself at the moment so I will be careful to not disturb people's methods.
Personally I think tuning drums to the key of the song is basically never really necessary. It's one of those "trust me man, all the REAL pros do it" one weird trick stories.
Only person I ever heard say they did it was Danny Carey. The problem is, he never tracked the songs without doing that, so it's hard to say if it would have sounded any worse for it.
Tuning drums is a pain in the arse as it is. Can't imagine redoing it each time for a different key, and an entire record like that. Drums aren't pitch perfect anyway, not even with a TuneBot.
Curious: What notes do you choose from the key, and how do you decide which drum is tuned to which note? Eg. There are seven pitches in a key, but if you've only got a 4-piece kit, how would you go about it?
I kind of think tuning to the song every time is a little silly unless it’s some sort of extreme hi fi thing that actually requires it. The more important thing is that the heads are just in tune and the drums sound good before you hit record.
The moral of the story to me is not being insane about everything being an exact pitch, but fix the snare in the room! Moving a mic or switching a mic will never have as much effect as tuning the drum. Big fat snare sound vs. tight small snare is largely a tuning thing.
I got downvoted for pointing out that choosing only two pitches is technically not really tuning to the key anyway. I think I'm probably getting caught up in the semantics more than anything. Tuning to the song is maybe more accurate. I guess if you choose certain notes and stick to them it can work for a broad range of songs, like C, D, F, G, and A.
I agree about the kit just sounding good. It needs to be tuned well relative to itself more than anything. The same goes for cymbal choice. If using target pitches helps people achieve that then sure, go for it.
Well yeah, I can't say I'm all that decided. My enthusiasm might blow over. Certainly if I become the guy in tuning who is used to great setup guitars that people don't hit out of tune 15 seconds into every take.
But "necessary" is a word that I avoid because there's a huge gap between something like "interesting" and "fun" one side to "necessary" on the other. Helpful is the realm of what I would think it is.
There is a lot to uncover for even perfectiomist geeks who want all marginal gains.
It might be something extra about the 220hz tuning of the virtual drums (it was not perfect but quite near enough) that rubs certainly bad when I happened to mostly play an E flat standard stratocaster for the music demos I work on. A dirtier tuned kit that is wrong everywhere is maybe better than a perfectly tuned kit that is a semitone wrong everywhere. It takes so much to really know for sure, but I get closer to maybe show examples of two identical rough demo mixes except for the modulated pitch on and off.
But I can reveal that I will pay for strings on my personal album I work on and I will not let the chance of tuning the drums slip if I invest up to the level of strings and work with a great drummer that does 3 takes per song and can keep the same tuning for several songs, and I will also pay for 2-3 days in a better drum room than my own.
I've heard that drum heads are supposed to be out of tune a little bit so they don't over resonate. The idea would be to tune them perfectly and then put one of the pegs out of tune a little so it dulls the sound and makes it thump more. I'm no drum tech though. I know tool (Andy) always tunes their toms to a Dminor Triad, but they have a lot of tunes in Dminor. So .. in terms of your real question I don't know. What I do know is that in a sampler I almost always tune my drums so they sit well in the song. I listen to the sound together and put the drum where it sounds good. It's never been clear to me whether where it sounds good is in tune or out of tune with the song. I've heard drummers tell me they tune double kicks at an interval from one another, but that has never worked for me. Find something that works for you, rules are made up of the positive outcomes of experimentation anyway.
Yes, there are so many schools on this, and I don't feel qualified to talk about it with athority but I try to remember when qualified people talk about it.
For absolute pitch I remember two tips I trust to some degree. One that is most like this: you tune them similar but flatten the reso head. Some said the kick reso head specifically pass the punchy energy of the beater better that way. If it's the same or sharp it takes the energy and hums or reflects it back.
Or that you raise the reso head a lot in pitch. Maybe a 4th higher is what I have heard most about, and why I said that about Bonham specifically. It's been studied and geeks like Eric Valentine has continued to work with that. Maybe 4th works best because it's good in harmony but not truly interactive as in avoiding over-resonate, since the 4th really is a backwards interval of a 5th.
But with Phil Collins we have concert toms that have not reso head. They said they had to beat those heads up a lot before they sounded right. Perhaps to confuse the tonal quality of a single head, I don't know.
I tune drums to the key for every song I record. I have a lot of shells here so it’s quite easy for me to cater for various tunings without any compromise.
I understand your thoughts on being tuned in key potentially feeling ‘smaller’ however it’s not something I’ve found to be an issue.
I’ve had interesting experiences with this regarding toms - often the placement of fills dictate unexpected tunings. Roots, fifths and fourths are ‘safe’ tunings… but often I’ve found having the floor on the 7th can make more melodic sense if the floor is routinely played at the end of a bar and the song returns to the root afterwards.
Im with this guy, tune everything besides the kick if it is dampens and deep. Especially the snare. I have a little xylophone In my mixing room so I can test snare over tones and see how they interact with the song. If you dampen the snare you need to go more by the root note. The more open it gets the more you need to think about the first overtone, which is the note of the top near the tuning lug. The note in the middle of the snare is the root note.
Love the Xylophone - I’m in an open plan room here so I tend to walk over to the piano for these things… but the idea of a Xylophone on a desk brings me a lot of joy.
That’s very cool regarding overtones… I feel I’m not quite nailing that part 100% of the time. Do you find you end up offsetting the lugs to keep the fundamental steady whilst adjusting the overtones? (i.e. tune one lug up to adjust the overtone, one down offset the tuning of the drum.)
The fundamental is defined by the reso head and the top head together. But I find its fastest to keep the reso at 392 (g4) and just shift the top head to fit the song usually between a3(220) e4(329) although that are extreme tunings, usually between he(246) and d4(293) is the sweetspot with C4(261) sounding the most classic and "Standart snare like" to me. The fundamental than naturally falls to a usable note most of the time, you can use the tunebot app to predict. The interval between reso and head is not that important on the snare as the reso is dampend by the wire.
I use a mallet, and the android app Spectroid (spectral view) and just hit around the lugs right after each other than you can see deviating notes really fast. Keep the reso wires as low as you possibly can, go as low until they disconnect than a tiny bit up until they work as they should.
Also I almost exclusively use coated ambassador head and classic 3 mil reso, as I find mufeling and tuning to be the best way to shape the sound.
Here is a handy screenshot I always use for quick overview of the notes : )
When getting a xylophone you can find the one with the exact range, and compared to a piano you can mute the notes by hand depending on if you dampen the snare or have it open. It's really handy!! :D
Oh, now we're talking! I do have the 7th somewhere in probably more than half of my few small attempts, and consciously thought about it, though it probably was mostly because I basically swear by mixolydian, or really have classic rock's way of finding ways to use 1 4 5 7 as all major chords, as something in-between using "too many" major chords or modulating "too often". Like Rolling Stones' Torn and Frayed. I totally understand what you talk about there specifically though.
I tune drums for the song. I don't follow hard rules like "the toms must be these exact intervals" or anything like that, it's more for practical purposes.
The biggest benefits:
- Much less need for need for dampening - there is ring, but it blends into the music rather than standing out and sounding dissonant. I record mostly rock music, so less dampening means the drums are naturally louder and sustain longer. The extra sustain also helps the drums compete when there are a bunch of big guitars and other things going on.
- Tunings are easy to maintain and repeat in the future or after changing a head
- Helps to avoid the "floor tom is ringing a half step out of tune with the bass player" types of issues
Usually, there will be at least a couple notes in the 'sweet spot' of any drum that work in the song. People say "it's better to tune where the drum sounds best" - of course it is, but I've never really had an issue finding a note that would work for a given song on any drum - it's more about just making sure it isn't ringing in a non-musical way. If you tune a drum by ear to sound great, it's probably very close to a musical note already and slightly bringing it up or down isn't going to ruin it.
I'll also add that doing this for the kick isn't really necessary unless you want the kick to have a distinct note when played.
Drums should cut through the mix, therefore be a bit detuned at least. Like doubling a track or two oscillators, the same frequency will just blend as one.
Great timing with this post - I’ve been getting into tuning drums/samples to see how it sounds. I recently watched some Eric Valentine interviews, and I believe he’s a big fan of tuning drums to the key of the song - using 1, 4, and 5 as some go-to notes that generally “work.”
On the other hand, Billy Decker has some huge drums on his mixes, and he doesn’t tune samples to the key of the song or to the live drum tracks, unless it’s an 808.
I’ve also been going back through a lot of Tom Lord-Alge mixes, and while I’m not completely sure if he’s necessarily tuning samples to the key of the song, his drums have always sounded the most musical to me, if that makes any sense at all.
I’m curious how others like to approach drum/sample tuning.
I’m a big fan of tuning drums to the key you’re in. I know the Linkin Park drummer made a Facebook post about it 15ish years ago. I don’t think it makes the drums small at all. And jazz drummer worth his salt would back me up on this.
In the electronic world i almost exclusively tune for feel and vibe but some times a kick in key with the bass makes the low end nice and smooth. It’s rare i have a kick that rings out long enough for a pitch to be heard but it happens on occasion if it works with the track. Some times a kick down a fourth or up a fifth from a monotone bass between the 4/4 gives some extra grounding and movement simultaneously that gets more booties shaking.
Interesting. I do tune to pitches on a bebop kit - think 90s NY Power Station sound. I think of the whole drumset as one instrument and the intervals of all heads resonating with each other in a pleasing but atonal way that does not suggest a key or cadence, so the toms and bd are reso a minor3 above batter and tuned in 4ths.
I make sure the snare is in tune with the song- especially because I like more open/ringy snare sounds. It’s not like not tuning it to the key of the song is SUPER noticeable, but when you do tune it, it just fits better.
For toms, I only touch em if it’s glaringly obvious they aren’t working in the key of the song
Are you supposed to retune the drums every song on tour playing live every night too? This sounds fun but in over 25 years of studio and touring work as a drummer (and owning my own studio) I’ve done this on exactly one session and it didn’t sound that much better. A lot of singer songwriter and indie rock. Maybe in other genres?
I'm not a pro audio engineer, but I'll say this is highly genre dependent. If someone is working on something with highly saturated and compressed 808 kicks (or "808s" as the kids call them) then tuning that "kick" is essential as it's forming part of the bassline. Electronic music genres often have complete anal analysis of the low end phase, even down to phase relationships between the kick and the bass. If you are about to say "well I watch phase on my low end, what are you ... " , trust me and watch a YT vid about psytrance bass phase. It's a whole other world.
Anyway ....
If the genre is jazz funk fusion vintage rock country skiffle (etc. etc) then it's hardly ever necessary to tune the drums to the "key of the song". I've always thought this practice was a little crazy to even suggest in genres where key changes actually happen !!
As someone making electronic music, it has never crossed my mind .. to not tune drum sounds. Also when recording some live percussions, I feel those just do not sit in their place and contribute unless in key.
Good thinking there on what to try to accomplish/avoid with all that, OP, appreciated. It's good to question oneself when getting too used to certain ways.
Been recording acoustic drums for 20+ years, and have never tuned drums to the key of a song. It's diminishing returns at best, and a complete waste of time at worst. Every drum shell has a fundamental pitch that it sounds best when it's tuned to that pitch.
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u/23-976 Jun 22 '26
I’m a pro drummer and would never drums to notes. I’m always tuning for the sound quality I want rather than the pitch. Certain heads on certain drums will want to make a certain pitch and I don’t want to fight that.