You Should Never 'Key' Your Kick Drums - Here's Why ..
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- čas přidán 10. 08. 2022
- You should - NOT - key your kick drums and this video will explain why in 5 minutes. The idea that your kicks should always be in key with your tracks has been touted as a 'pro-tip' for some time now. Unfortunately, those pesky fundamental laws of the universe mean this is actually a terrible idea for modern producers ... Within just 5 minutes of your time we'll show you why ... As always - Don't believe the hype.
I made this video after getting emails asking what key some of our clap or hi-hat samples were in - I realised this had gotten way out of hand - hopefully, this will be the start of the end of this particular theory.
A deep dive on the bass end is coming.
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I'm going to go right ahead and strongly disagree with this or at least how the problem is being presented.
Adjusting drums to fit the key is not per se a thing that's bad and that should be avoided.
In the shown examples the tail of the kick is stretched out akin to an 808 and settles on one note and the bass synth plays a note in the same register at the same time.
That is a conceivably bad scenario to begin with that no experienced producer would let occur in the first place.
As the problem is obviously exaggerated, it becomes less and less of an issue the shorter the tail is. Still, it can happen to a subtle, but noticeable degree in real world applications.
Situations like these where cancellation happens are then easily avoided by either:
1. Using a kick with an even shorter tail in conjunction with a bass synth.
2. Using the kick as a bass itself, 808 style and cutting the bass synth entirely.
Or more effectively:
3. Ducking the bass synth out of the way using sidechain compression.
4. Arranging the instruments in a way so that they don't overlap in the time domain.
Of course it is important to trust your ears and set the pitch of your drums (whether they settle on a certain pitch or keep changing ever so slightly) to find the spot were the fundamental hits just right instead of a specific pitch. But the methods I mentioned will likely also result in a better understanding of producing and as well as end product than simply going "you should never do XYZ".
In music production there rarely is a "you should not", but rather a "if you do this, you should know how to work with (or around) it to achieve the desired result despite possible issues that might arise". Thanks for coming to my TED talk lol
I loved your TED talk and thank you for the time you spent replying ...
OK full disclosure here - I'm a Grammy-nominated producer and the studio half of a club production team called the Freemasons from the UK - I now run F9 and this video was ( I freely admit ) deliberately. designed to trigger as I want to know the history, thought processes and depth of this rather dangerous piece of internet lore that has become drilled into some people who are now starting to produce visually and make decisions based on file names / preset names, rather than using their ears.
It's been a fascinating experience .. I'm actually immensely impressed it's ended up so cordial in terms of the comments and yours is a perfect example of the best forms of communication on this platform.
The whole reason to wade into this subject was a number of emails I was getting from young producers making 4/4 club music and getting themselves into a terrible mess with their bass end and mixes thanks to bad information from many sides of the professional circle. When I had a producer email in asking for key information on the Claps and Hi-hats we make at F9 I knew this had all gone too far. He was in a terrible pickle as he thought he should only be picking drum sounds that are labelled to the tonic note of his production. Another was terribly worried about sending in his demo to a big club label in case they checked his kick and found it to be out of tune.
So much has gotten out of hand on this So now please let me address a few bits from your excellent comments above .
Genres - It's always human nature to assume that everyone makes the same music as we do as it's how we experience the production process ( and trust me I've made this mistake countless times) . Music production covers an extraordinary range of styles and genres and the example in this video shows the kind of kick length that is used the multitudes of 4/4 club music ( or EDM to give it's modern catch-all title ) .
I'm making an assumption here that you don't make this style of music ( do correct me if I'm wrong ) but please be aware that kicks of this length ( and beyond if you count Techno ) are very common in all these forms of music. About 3/4 of the kicks used in the 4/4 genres settle into a static frequency very quickly after an initial fast upward pitch envelope and the most famous is the TR 909 Kick although this a very interesting case - more on this in a bit.
So just to clear this video is really about phase, not kicks or bass and how two very carefully tuned oscillators can negatively ( and positively ) interact - You are absolutely correct in the assumption this was deliberately exaggerated for this example and in the real world, this is not how a production would be made per se, but it’s important to understand how bad it can get as you may miss the smaller Interactions that you so correctly mention above ending up with amplitude modulations that are hard to diagnose.
Just to be clear - What I’m saying here is that the >only< place this will happen is when your kick is deliberately tail-tuned to the exact pitch of the principal note of your production ( wether that be the scale’s tonic or another degree’s root note depending on the underlying chords ) .
We have in our systems enormous amounts of options for tuning our drums and this is certainly something we totally agree on - We should all be regularly testing and tuning all of our rhythm elements as even a few cents can make a massive difference and this often where the magic is .
We also fully agree that all this should be done using our ears and subjective and critical listening. Sadly this is not happening as it should - Many new producers are coming forward with the view that kicks ‘must’ be tuned perfectly to the main musical key they are working in and they are taking file name labels at face value ( a huge amount incorrectly labelled ). This is causing people to restrict their options unnecessarily and often based on flawed information.
Here I always cite the 909 kick - It’s probably the most used kick in the 4/4 club music explosion over the last 30 years and worked perfectly on productions across every single key and has a available tail length control ( decay knob ) in the same way the 808 circuit does ( although not as potentially long ). It’s analog circuit is actually factory-tuned sharp of a note in the western scale. All the original 80s hardware units are about 30-40 cents sharp these days ( component drift and tolerances ) , but having just tested the latest Roland cloud, the plugins are around 27 cents sharp.
Without doubt this has helped it work so ubiquitously in club music - Phase related cancellation is synergetic and falls away the moment the combining tones are tuned away from each other very quickly ( in the same way two synth oscillators sound larger than life when tuned apart slightly ) and it’s tail’s placement outside of the quantised realms of our scales was a very happy accident for all concerned.
Had it been tuned precisely to say note G1, I guarantee there would a great big hole in classic house music in both Gminor and Major.
>> Sidechaining / Ducking / Shortening.
To me all of this just ignores the main problem - My ( rather over the top admittedly ) analogy is having a landmine buried under your lawn and then stepping around it every day. That’s fine until you forget. It is best to avoid the situation in the 1st place as we both agree that in small ways there are still issues. For example - You would need to action 100% side chain to get around the issue completely and that places production restrictions on your process ( also if you bring the sidechain back too quickly, there could be tail modulations for either kick or bass ) -
You do not have to worry about this if you use a kick that is not precisely tuned - Or with a tail pitch in motion as you suggest - This can be the very best option as when that pitch is a vector not a static value, the potential for phase interactions is reduced.
Production fashions change very quickly - Already sidechaining is considered a no-no in some circles and in these circles, bass and kicks will need to collide again on a regular basis.
>> 4. Arranging the instruments in a way so that they don't overlap in the time domain.
Yes this will certainly work, but again your kick is now forcing production decisions and even the timing of your bassline - this is far from ideal. I actually see people lining things note by note with oscilloscopes in EDM production - changing the groove of their audio simply due to the kick’s tuning - this is a frankly terrible idea as once again - Not tuning your kick to that precise detail will nearly instantly solve any phase related issues. Again it’s like walking around that landmine and is a visual method of production.
>> Why did this subject suddenly appear
I investigated recently how all this came about - The whole idea is that it's better to have everything in key as it’s more wholesome sonically - It also coincided with the release of certain kick generating plugins. I think there's a lot to really think about in those lower octaves ..
30Hz-60Hz is an entire octave .. That’s 30hz for an entire octave or on average 2.5Hz per note, 440-880HZ is another octave in the midrange, That’s 440hz spread between an entire octave giving us 36HZ between each note ( N.B. these per-note values are averaged for illustrative purposes, not exact due to the logarithmic nature of audio ) - This is more than 14X the resolution.
We do not have the same relationship with tonality underneath the point where the ( average ) human voice can vocalise - This is immensely important to understand ( and probably the reasons behind the “808’s out of tune” Memes - Many are but still sound great ! ) .. I expect this is mainly due to the physical distribution of hairs inside the ear that are responsible for our hearing - they would have to become 10- 20X denser (whilst also becoming thicker / longer ) to have the same relationship with tuning in these lowest octaves - the spread of notes is just mathematics/physics so is set in stone.
We can easily test this - pull up a sine-wave and play a Triad of C starting at C3 - we all know that sound and can hear the interplay in the musical relationships. Now play the same chord starting from C1 - it's just a beating set of waves - our ability to treat it as music is gone. As we agree here - Tuning and critical listening is then the key to getting these lower octaves right as the musical theory is less and less relevant the lower you go - phase and wave interference are where we need to concentrate our efforts - In my opinion ( and I’m guessing yours too ) this should always be done with our ears first and then visual systems later on as even a few cents will change things dramatically.
So I appear to out TEDing here so I will stop,
I fully accept that production should not be about absolutes, and it seems we can wholeheartedly agree that we wish to encourage all to use their ears to work this stuff out and this is my main thrust . And I hope this is born out by people reading these comments .
Excellent to meet you.
I've never keyed drums, but I never knew there was such a solid reason we shouldn't. Thanks James, great explanation.
Keying kick drums is one of those things that people repeat because someone else said it. Finally there’s a short and clear video to explain why it’s such a bad idea. Nice work James!
Please do not believe a word of this video, it's misleading and chock-full of misconceptions. I posted a full correction in this comment section on Jan 26 2023 - sort the comments by newest and scroll down a little to read it.
I think the root of the problem is, why are you stacking 2 sounds on top of each other with sub frequency without any attempt at mixing them apart? There are so many issues with this that don't consider the tools we have today for modern production.
Sure, tuning the note one step up eliminated your phasing issues. But then you have 2 sub frequencies stacking on top of eachother. Unless you're in competition for House Music's quietest masters, you should probably sidechain the sub to the kick. Otherwise you're gonna have less headroom than a Spirit Airlines flight. Once your sub is sidechained to your kick, you then realize that you have 2 different notes triggering in the sub at the same time, and although they might not be phased, they don't sound right. Go to your piano and hit E0 and F0 together on a 1/4 note at 128bpm for 6 minutes repeatedly, lemme know if you could handle that in the club.
I'm not using my main account for this as I don't want to attract attention. But as someone who's kind of an accomplished House artist, I feel that there is some serious information being left out here. If you take any sound in C0 octave and try to stack it on top of a sub heavy kick with literally NO sidechain, NO separation of bands on your EQ, even if the notes are different, you will have all sorts of issues. The importance is in maintaining the elements of your track into your respective dynamic fields. Your sub layer shouldn't be anywhere near full volume when your kick triggers, your EQ on that layer should allow room for the low-mid of your kick to breath. All these details lead into a solid mix with no accidental phasing. I highly suggest using a Sidechain Compressor or LFO that allows for HPF sidechain, or you use a dynamic EQ or Multiband Compressor for sidchaining your sounds below 200hz to the kick. If you're a modern dance producer, you really want that separation.
Not to mention the fact that nearly every track on the charts gets by just fine with their kicks tuned. Personally, I could immediately tell when a kick is hitting out of the scale of the song, and it's jarring for me. I won't play a record in one of my shows if the track is in Em and I hear the kick hitting Bb or something odd. That's the type of thing that stands out for me on a live sound system, where the body of every kick is felt clearly.
This doesn't mean you can't use "keyless" kicks. If your kick is literally just a .3sec shot of basically pitch envelope, that's totally fine. Unfortunately those types of kicks pretty much only work in more minimalistic genres... and in 2008.
Have there been major records, even recently, that probably have a kick out of tune from the track? Absolutely. It doesn't mean that we should disregard a plethora of mixing capabilities at our disposal to make the right tuning work. I just don't think you're giving the while picture.
Thank you for taking the time to message but I'm afraid you are just missing the point here - Phase cancellations only happen when the two fundamentals are exactly tuned ( hence the changes here when using an analogue-styled synth ) the moment you move the tuning apart these issues fall away and very dramatically ( even a few cents ) - yes you still have two large sounds but they can come together additively instead of negatively,.
Please please please stop tuning kicks exactly to the key of your production - it's an absolutely terrible concept and that is the thrust of this video, not bass mixing - I will come to all of this soon. To pick you up on one thing though - sub frequencies will come together much easier and with less processing if there is contrast - It’s all down to the maths - 30-60HZ is an entire octave - this is nearly always forgotten ( 2.5hz per note as an average ) … At 440-880, there is 36.666Hz per note.
Phase cancellation occurs even with low levels and it's so very easy to avoid its quite dangerous to have a whole generation of producers fudging the issues with Sidechaining, and ridiculous levels of editing when some simple tuning and knowledge will remove all issues instantly. I've been around long enough to know that fashions will always come and go and soon Side-chaining will be seen as passé and then everyone who's subscribed to the whole idea of perfectly tuned kicks will have major issues... Use your ears, not internet theory to produce at all times.
Please note - I am fully trained in all of this ( university and decades in the real world of major studios with some of the best engineers in the world - a part of my history many do not know ) but I do have to approach the subject step by step - I fully understand this is a video of limited scope but It is designed for one thing - To make people fully appreciate how dangerous phase can be when not understood.
You are obviously very knowledgeable but you are in the minority - very few understand this at any technical level and showing the practical nature of the problem is the goal here before I start to offer solutions
Here’s the next video going in-depth on phase
czcams.com/video/qptvf5hUi4g/video.html
If you want a real-world, fully road tested and practical example of kicks being better tuned away, look at the 909 - It’s been on hundreds of thousands of productions ( if not millions counting unreleased ideas and demos ) and across every key imaginable - the reason, in my opinion, is it’s tuning - Every hardware ( and now software ) unit I’ve ever come across has the kick tuned about 40 cents sharp of a standard note of our scale
Harmony does not work the same way down in the subsonic for us humans as we cannot vocalise those sounds - There is absolutely no need to tune your kick to the Tonic of the key
Being a former fan of forums, forums have given me so many bad refferences on how and what to do in music production and mixing. Many really bad habits that has been stuck in my brain like earworms. It has taken me years to ”unlearn” the vast majority of the things i was told and read back in the day. So yes, this video is 100% on point!
My mind is blown. You just changed my approach to kicks! Thank you so much for these insights !
More coming Rod …
@@F9Audio would it be better if I tuned the kick to a 3rd or 5th of the key my song is in so as to avoid phase issues on the fundamental?
Love it! You’re so good James!
F9 smacking us down with the truth... and I love it.
very very very very very nice explanation.... I never understood the privileges that come with keying the kick... now I know it's not a useful operation, but more importantly I also understood why I probably had some problems on my mix that I couldn't explain! Thank you very much!!!!
This is *VERY* informative. Thank you for this!
A pleasure - much more coming in the next few weeks
I never used to give a shit, then I went through a phase (no pun intended) of tuning kicks, now I'm just back doing it by ear and feel and intentionally de-tuning sometimes. Excellent video.
Thank you! Over the last few years of seeing different people instruct others to tune their kick and bass together on CZcams, I've always had my doubts but assumed that because quite a few people were saying it, it must be true. Great and concise video!
A pleasure George ... More coming on this subject as it's big one, but yes - I'm afraid this all came about the moment the kick-drum generators appeared with note values available on the GUI or envelope breakpoints - Nicky Romero's KICK is an obvious example ... This plugin has the interesting function of providing kick tails in motion - This provides a perfect example of bad information as a kick tail in motion will only ever be at a given frequency in its curve for an infinitely small amount of time. Therefore labelling it with a particular root note is utterly incorrect as in all practicality it's never truly there - However it also means it will cause fewer phase problems than those with more static tails like the one I use here.
Phase is king in the subsonic area, not harmony ... We all need to get to producing with our ears, not theory.
Great content as usual! Thanks for this.
My pleasure! ! ... Please look out for the next set of videos on this subject - Just waiting for some animations to come in
Excellent explanation and visualisation, thanks🎵
Thanks Neil - do dive into the existing comments here - this was designed to cause conversations as I'm trying to understand just how this terribly flawed piece of advice came about ... I now fully understand and will record a much more indepth response to this - all the information I've honed over the last few months is on here though
Such a small thing with such a huge impact. Wondered why I got nothing when I tried the same thing when using the Gain utility to counter the phase lol. Learnt something new today so thank you James! G
Really really really hoping you guys at F9 Audio consider doing an F9 release based on Funky house from the early to mid 2000's.. You guys were the kings of that era ( The Freemasons) and have serious skin in the game in terms of offering something really special. Don't get me wrong, you guys offer world class products (Probably the best out there on the market) but for me and many other It's all about the late 90's early 2000's. There doesn't seem to be a lot online from that era which is a real shame because for me that was an unbelievable time to be alive going out clubbing. All the best F9 and Thank you for offering Top class products 😊
To test this, I made a 120bpm 4-to-the-floor project with 2 identical 808-like kicks and an Arturia Juno60 bassline (a real-life bassline, not a contrived bassline like in this video) and set it up so I could switch blindly between the 2 kicks. One of the kicks played the rootnote of the key of the bassllne, the other a semitone up. I had absolutely no problem picking out the keyed kick 100% of the time. So there is an audible difference. (And I can share the audio.)
You've mentioned in the comments that harmony is not that important in the sub region, but my ears tell me differently (and science seems to disagree with you as well). Even weirder... the kick that was a semitone up seemed to make the minor bassline almost sound major. So changing the tune of the sub seemed to play some psycho-acoustic trickery on the perception of the higher harmonics of the bassline. Maybe this has something to do with the phenomenon of the missing fundamental, where humans fill in the fundamental that is actually not present (the way Waves RBass claims to work). But then the other way around, where a fundamental suggests overtones.
But then the most important question about my test... which one sounded better? To me definitely the one with the kick in key. It sounded more cohesive, tighter and less flabby. As is to be expected. And it's why this has been a pro tip for years. You've mentioned you know pro engineers that never worry about tuning kicks. That corresponds with my experience of tracks of pro producers that I mix, that often contain out of tune kicks. When it's appropriate, I tune the kicks, and often it's one of the biggest improvements I make towards a great low end. More cohesive and tighter.
My rule for drums and percussion is: If you can play a melody with it, you should tune it. That doesn't mean you have to put it in key. Check out "Setup 707" by Edge of Motion for an excellent example of an out of key kick that adds a lot of appropriate tension. But not keying it because there might be some phase problems seems like an overly theoretical way of approaching music to me. Just program a bassline and if you hear some weird volume problem, phase might be an issue. Try to flip the phase on the bass, sometimes even such a simple thing fixes it. Tuning your kick a semitone (or some tens of cents) up or down sounds like a very crude solution to me. And it might cause potential phase issues just as well, resulting in annoying beating instead of notes being attenuated completely.
For me, phase issues don't weigh up against the unsettled feeling in the low end when the kick is not tuned (either to the root note, fifth, major third or fourth - in that order, due to the harmonic series). And you'll probably find that in real-life, phase cancellation is less of a problem as the bass notes are not where the kick is, and else they will be sidechained in some way. Heck, partial phase cancellation might even add some life to your bassline, whereas not keying it just sounds off. Constantly.
Great so we totally agree on most of it - Use your ears to produce not your eyes or any kind of key label written into a file name, preset name or using flawed theory you have picked up
This video is about phase, not kicks or bass … I do though stand 100% by all comments here and must disagree with you firmly about Force-tuning a kick perfectly the principal note of your production
As I’ve said multiple times here - it is the only place you can tune your kick across the myriad of options that will give you problems and to start dismissing phase out of hand is dangerous advice to those coming in through music - to then suggest that they need to slide bass notes around , use oscilloscopes, extreme sidechaining and all sorts of other extreme workflows to then fix the issues caused by this ( which is the mantra of those who subscribe to this ) is just dreadful advice as this causes people to spend way too much time on the technicality and not the substance or art or music - The only people who care about this are other producers , not the end-audience.
You are obviously very experienced but I deal every week with young and up and coming producers getting into a terrible tailspin over this and nearly every time it’s because they are relying on this flawed piece of theory as gospel and everytime without question their problems are solved by ignoring it and just using their ears to tune their kicks by ear, shorten then and stop relying on visual information … I have emails from people that literally stopped making music and spent months doing all of the above thanks to this concept and I’m gutted for them that they wasted so much time and got so downheartened with the process when they could not repeat the technique and just ended up in a mess mentally ..
Regarding on-note sub tuning - How do you feel about the 909 kick ? - nearly every machine I’ve ever used has a kick about 40 cents sharp of a western scale note and still the most successful club kick of all time on productions in every single key?
Use your ears, throw off the shackles of ‘silver bullet’ theories and get back to enjoying production again - that is my message to all coming to this topic
Great discourse, I thumbs-upped both comments. They are both equally valid and result in the unfortunate "tuning the kick just depends... on the song, on the kick/bass relationship, on the producer's preference, etc... Some people may literally be more sensitive to the key of the kick than others - especially people with a well-trained ear who are perhaps more consistently mentally filling in overtones or harmonics that are not actually present. Both of you make great points!@@F9Audio
Thanks a lot for this! After being an amateur drummer in the early 80s, who never tuned his kick, I got confused when I started to make EDM tracks a couple of years ago and heard that you need to put the kick in he key of the song. I am now happy to know that I can forget all about this! Looking forward to the coming videos - and hope to see some more "everything you know is wrong" stuff. 😀
Great message Stefan - This all exploded a few years ago and was driven by the release of kick drum generator plugins ( nearly all of which used key-related frequency points ) - A few major producers discussed it at the time and it ended up in lore - the irony is, when it gets to a certain level, many of the big boys have their tracks mixed externally... When you start talking to the guys who actually mix these tracks regularly, they are swapping kicks out all the time for better ones - I know quite a few of the serious mix guys after many years of work in various ends of the industry and none of the ( and I truly mean none of them ) ever concern themselves with the 'key' of a kick, they use fine tuning to tweak kicks into place and work on the length far more than the pitch. They completely depend on their ears and experience and if you ask me, these are the people to listen to. Every single excellent mix engineer who's ever been interviewed says something along the lines of "I always find a separate space for the kick and bass whilst I'm mixing" ... This is way, way harder when the two elements are tuned together
Danke! from Germany! Das hat mir sehr geholfen. It helps me a lot! Thank you!
Good video, well explained. However, getting a full and fat sounding bass is still a challenge!!! Looking forward to your series on this.
Very True ... I think it will always be and a lot of it is down to the physics of acoustics - Got some great info and ideas to try coming though !
I've been saying this for years. Yet I've been told to key the kick by a tutor, that actually got paid for his advice. More mythbusting James!
thankfully (in terms of saving my own ass) i always prefer short kicks, without much tonality, so when i tune my drums it's just for "stylistic" or asthetic reasons, never to put them in key
regardless, this is so interesting to know! wow
Yess! One of my favorite producer/Teacher is using the same plugin I use for kick!
Thank you so much! ❤
Great video and explanation James. What if you are sidechaining the bass? Does this help solve phasing issues?
No - Just please please please stop keying your kicks - most of the key info is whack anyway - just pick great kicks carefully and ignore all key labelling - they are percussive elements, not tonal - more info coming
@@F9Audio thanks James 🙏🏼
I mean yeah, there's phase cancellation any time you have 2 instruments generating sub sounds at the same time, whether the kick is keyed or not. And it's important to be aware of this. But it's the responsibility of the producer to step up and take control of this.
Any modern synth has the option of oscillator reset and precise start phase options for predictable phase on every note, which can be automated. This, and precise analysis of kick and sub relationship using a beat synced oscilloscope give any willing producer the power to make this work, and it's a beautiful thing when done properly.
But it does take more effort.
Please read the other posts on this thread - I've answered all of these points here already - basically, you have to go to the ends of the earth and work note by note to avoid phase conflicts with a perfectly root note tuned kick - Even then, the moment you apply any EQ that's not phase linear ( an EQ system that by it's very nature is prone to pre-ringing and frequency smearing ) to either kick or bass you then have to start again as that eq will change the phase and that amount will vary the more EQ you apply - All Digital EQs use delays to function - You will not have to do any of this ( at all ) if you tune your kicks away from root or use a kick with a tail in motion . ..What if a producer doesn't want to use ( very sterile sounding ) phase-locked bass sounds, what if they don't want to use extreme sidechaining ? - what if they don't want to work note by note, aligning every single note and fiddling with every sub-position ( it's often forgotten that phase is a function of time, so the only way you can truly lock your phase-locked bass sound to a kick is for that sound to play nothing more than the kick pattern ) .. Please please ( please ) stop using your eyes or theory to produce, use those two fantastic aural devices on either side of your skull to make production decisions - Nearly every modern kick I see labelled with a key is either totally incorrectly labelled, or has a tail in motion ( making the pitch of the tail a vector, not a constant ) .... Set yourself free and please - stop repeating bad information
What about other percussive elements, should they be tuned to the key of song?
MC Hammer’s trousers, 😄 wavy for sure. 30 years down the line and still not forgotten.
Hi James. Thanks for the very well presented argument of not keying kick to their track.
I've always thought music is maths, and maths being a parther to physics, therefore making music is an absolute to both (frequency being the underling element). That said, if my track is in any key, is there a rule to where the kick should be tuned or is it just a "feel"?
Cheers from a big fan,
Craig
Hi Craig ... I think we can tweak what you say above - Although maths really does have a correlation to music there are subtle tweaks - the equal tempered scale and piano stretch tuning a perfect example . Audio ( and for me this is when sound is turned into electrical , digital or physical such as magnetic or peaks and troughs in vinyl cutting ) is a different matter though as it's 100% physics.
With that in mind, you must always be aware of phase interactions as you dive down to lower frequencies as the process of wave-like interference can have enormous effects . This is mainly down to the fact that our ears are non-linear in frequency response ( just like the natural world ) and the relative amount of energy increases as you go lower in frequency. Also - 30-60HZ is an octave ( not an exact musical one in our scale, but you get the idea ) that means all 12 notes have to live across no more than 30HZ where as 440-880 hz is also an octave - 440HZ for all 12 notes, one octave higher and it's 880Hz for all 12 notes and on and on . I my experience you can not hear harmony properly at all under 60hz - maybe we have an internal finite resolution, I also suspect it's because we cant vocalise in the octaves where our kick and sub fundamentals live and the brain is always trying to restrict it's sensory input
So taking all the above into account I never suggest you try to create or use a kick that's perfectly tuned to your project's key as you will have a major fight with phase cancelations on your hands .. yes there are ways around it ( and I'm dealing with multiple threads on this here and on facebook ) but all of them mean a ton of additional work and serious restrictions in how you create your bass parts.
Please, pick your kicks by ear, feel and vibe first ( the fashions for kicks change quite a lot ) and then check it with monitoring that can actually generate the very lowest frequencies ( that's probably headphones for most of us as there's physical limits for small and mid-sized monitors that no one has yet been able to side-step ) and diagnostics processes like waveform view and spectral meters. Use fine and coarse tuning as even a few cents can make a difference down there
You should also concentrate your efforts on the kick length - the longer it is, the harder is is to control so experiment with getting it as short as possible - this will amaze you when it comes to placing your bass instruments as suddenly you will have a ton more room and on big club or festival systems this can change everything for the better .,. Just as an interesting aside on this note - find a DMX kick drum and have a look at the length - this was a the kick used on Blue Monday by New order - in my opinion the 80s best club track. It's amazingly short compared to modern kicks.
Also - so much of this is just bad info - Splice for example is full of keys with a given "key' and yet the tonal elements aren't actually at that pitch at all , or they contain tails where the frequency is falling so they just pass through a key and mathematically they are never actually at one frequency - it's like calling a circle and straight line ....
Set yourself free and just pick great kicks that work with your track - How many huge club records across all keys use a 909 ? - A kick that has a very prominent tone and a similar pitch from every machine ( I say similar as it's created using an analog circuit and component tolerances and inevitable component drift over time means every single 909 is slightly different ) ... In my opinion the reason this was even possible is that its not tuned to an exact note ..
Also - make sure you create by feel, never by theory - dance around the framework of maths and physics as that's where the fun is
I had this argument on gearslutz years ago..I got shouted down and told I didn’t know what I was talking about.
I was taught by the guys who did the 808 state tracks and they said never tune kicks..it’s better if your starting a track to create a beat first then as you add melodic elements you will instinctively work in that key group your beat is working at,so tuning kicks isn’t needed.
They also advised delaying bass lines by a few microseconds using midi so you have enough room for the kick too breath.
I said all this then was mocked on gearslutz and CZcams ..
Problem is CZcams and forums are full of people acting they know the right way of doing stuff but don’t …
It's one of the main reasons I'm covering all this ( working up a phase video at the moment ) as I see most pseudo-arguments are propelled by the loudest out there ( as they always have ) and there is a major issue with one-upmanship in all forum-related platforms ( and I include YT in this )..
The biggest failing in human nature is confirmation bias - People gain a small degree of knowledge on a subject ( without deep understanding of the fundamental principles ) and then only absorb./ accept information that re-confirms that POV. In the bass end, phase is king and in my experience - very few people can ever explain it properly ( and in fact many don't have a clue about it ) ..
I really want to change all that as for the last couple of years I've been getting regular emails from producers paranoid their track has an out-of-key kick and A+R / DJs will hear that and reject it, all the way to people asking for the key of Claps and hi-hats samples we create. Most often though are weak kicks or kicks phasing with bass all because they've taken as gospel advice from those who are simply repeating bad information ....
This is not unique to music - we saw all of this in frightening form in over the pandemic and again those who shouted loudest got heard.
Watch this space and we’ll get as much information based on fundamental physics and audio principles ( I am properly trained in both ) as humanly possible over the next few years - I’m always trying to balance commercial work with all this, but I too have had enough of those without real knowledge blagging their way through important subjects just for YT number or FB mentions
You might also like this :
czcams.com/video/5Bzu8xNp5X4/video.html
Thanks James ..one of the biggest pushers of the key kick misinformation is deadmaus..he’s always talking about it and I think that’s why people repeat it and think he’s right …but as you say phase Is more important not key.
Thanks again for this video and can’t wait too check out the next one
@@djjuno106 Deadmau5 said NOT to tune your kicks. czcams.com/video/5Bzu8xNp5X4/video.html
Deadmaus is famous for saying "DON'T tune your kicks." Kicks are percussive (and short in almost all genres), basses are tonal and are used for basslines. Generally speaking, if your kick is long enough for a pitch-detection algorithm to detect a sustained pitch, it's too long in duration for modern dance music.
Just a question : but aren't you able to create a kind of sidechain effect when you are keying your kick ? What is actually preferred nowadays.. because that waveform looks exactly like a sidechained bass/kick
Please excuse the copy and paste answer but though this covers it best ( from another comment )
OK - Let's put it his way - you effectively have an infinite number of tuning choices for your kick - Only one can cause phase cancellation to your tracks' root note ( where a lot of EDM and more bassline stay for a lot of their time ) - Only one tuning can cause standing waves of frequencies to fly around a club or event space as your kick's main tonality and bassline combine into a drone with absolutely no contrast between them. Only one tuning can cause inconsistencies in the bass end as the reflections phase-invert when they hit a wall and reflect back into the listener's / clubbers space ... Unless your sidechain is removing 100% of the audio during the perfectly-keyed kick these interactions will occur and depending on your bass sound, it's oscillators and it's position these events can become almost random - all of this is totally solved by tuning your kick away from the exact spot of your track's principal note ... It doesn't even have to be much as phase cancellation is almost synergistic.
This is the reason why the 909 kick has been so massively successful - It's about 40 cents sharp of a standard note and as we all know from synth programming, you only have to tune things apart by a relatively small amount to stop the beating/cancellation - that is the very nature of phase …It cannot suffer from major negative phase interactions as it’s so far removed from a principal tone in our Western scales.
So why did this "nugget' come about ??- the whole idea is that it's better to have everything in key as it’s more wholesome - this is just not the case in the bass end -
30Hz-60Hz is an entire octave .. That’s 30hz for an entire octave or on average 2.5Hz per note, 440-880HZ is another octave in the midrange, That’s 440hz spread between an entire octave giving us 36HZ between each note ( N.B. these per-note values are averaged for illustrative purposes, not exact due to the logarithmic nature of audio ) - This is more than 14X the resolution.
We do not have the same relationship with tonality underneath the point where the ( average ) human voice can vocalise - This is immensely important to understand ( and probably the reasons behind the “808’s out of tune” Memes) .. I expect this is mainly due to the physical distribution of hairs inside the ear that are responsible for our hearing - they would have to become 10- 20X denser (whilst also becoming thicker / longer ) to have the same relationship with tuning in these lowest octaves - the spread of notes is just mathematics/physics so is set in stone.
So why can we layer things in the upper mids all the way to the top so successfully and not in the bass? - It’s all down to the mathematic principles of musical octaves - the resolution just increases the higher we go in frequency so there’s so much more wiggle room - also with our ears, we need a sound that falls away in level as we increase in frequency so phase cancellations are less important as you go up the frequency scale ( and actually get pleasing - think of a solo violin versus a 30 piece orchestra )
So let me be clear - you do not ever ‘need’ to tune your kick exactly to the root note of your track - this is the only place that will cause you tons of trouble and force you to side chain - This is terrible EDM-Internet-Lore created by those without training in Physics or Audio Engineering ( I have both ) and the extreme workflows that are required to avoid it are utterly ridiculous. Also - It’s the only point where positive phase interactions can also cause you real issues - you can get very large level jumps due to the non-linear power distribution of audio across the spectrum.
Please remember you hear with your ears, not your eyes ( or nose for that matter - you’d never sniff a kick right ? ) , so the next time you see people with oscilloscopes and immensely complex visual workflows to get over the problems that perfectly keyed kicks create, just ask yourself this - Would you rather do all this ( and them possibly create massive phase shifts when you apply an eq to either bass or kick drying the final mix forcing you to start again ) - and do you fully understand the principals of phase? … It is so vital to the modern bottom end.
Here’s our video on it to give you some clarity
czcams.com/video/qptvf5hUi4g/video.html
Please please please, set yourself free - Ignore key information on kicks ( so much of it is actually incorrect as well - a check recently of Key’d Splice kicks made me actually spit my coffee out the other day - some were half an octave out ) and pick everything you need by ear - shorten the kicks as much as possible and use headphones to check as they often go a whole octave or more under the response that physical speakers can achieve in most personal setups ( this is a physicality of boxed- speaker design - the average for even the best modern near-fields is 45HZ - I have headphones here that reach down to 12HZ - about 3.5 octaves lower )
Basically - Use your ears first, not your eyes to produce. And always remember - this is physics, not internet conjecture and it has been understood for hundreds of years and rules our entire universe.
Thanks for that Great video. I always believed that the kick must key to the bass. Finally it's just about choosing the kick that sounds best in the context of the track, right? Regards. Ed
`Exactly right Ed - Use your ears only to pick great kicks for your track- every single production will be slightly different but over time you'll gather up a collection of great ones. You should always try tuning a little ( even a few cents will make a huge difference down there ) but do this completely by ear ( good quality headphones a great way to check the super-lows on this front as hey will often reach much lower than your monitors ) ...If this sounds counter intuitive, consider the most successful kick in club music history - the 909 ( making a massive comeback this decade too ) - This is on countless club productions in every single key possible over the last 35v years and without doubt this is helped by the fact it's between 20 and 40Hz sharp of a note in the western scale system (depending on the machine's component drift ) .
As you can see from the 909 - in the lowest octaves we don't need to worry about kick tuning to exact notes - why ?
30Hz-60Hz is an entire octave .. That’s 30hz for an entire octave or on average 2.5Hz per note, 440-880HZ is another octave in the midrange, That’s 440hz spread between an entire octave giving us 36HZ between each note ( N.B. these per-note values are averaged for illustrative purposes, not exact due to the logarithmic nature of audio ) - This is more than 14X the resolution.
We do not have the same relationship with tonality underneath the point where the ( average ) human voice can vocalise - This is immensely important to understand ( and probably the reasons behind the “808’s out of tune” Memes - Many are but still sound great ! ) .. I expect this is mainly due to the physical distribution of hairs inside the ear that are responsible for our hearing - they would have to become 10- 20X denser (whilst also becoming thicker / longer ) to have the same relationship with tuning in these lowest octaves - the spread of notes is just mathematics/physics so is set in stone.
We can easily test this - pull up a sine-wave and play a Triad of C starting at C3 - we all know that sound and can hear the interplay in the musical relationships. Now play the same chord starting from C1 - it's just a beating set of waves - our ability to treat it as music is gone.
The secret sauce is nearly always the length of the kick - get this as short as you can for your given genre and you'll have tons of room for bass making your track warmer, more musical and more responsive on club systems ...
Here's the second video we made on phase :
czcams.com/video/qptvf5hUi4g/video.html
Go please, set yourself free - Ignore key information on kicks ( so much of it is actually incorrect as well - a check recently of Key’d Splice kicks made me actually spit my coffee out the other day - some were half an octave out ) and pick everything you need by ear - shorten the kicks as much as possible and use headphones to check - visual aids only at the end of that process
Hopefully you'll find it all so much easier after this
Theres a fantastic write up (going back a few years now) on this from you guys all about the low end and keying kicks. Cant remember where I picked it up but I refer to it often. Also I bought a pack of kicks once from splice or wherever that all had key info and testing them myself with Fab Filter and mapping the fundamental most of them were labelled completely incorrectly and on top of that some Kicks with longer tails dived down In pitch. Now I just really focus on using my ears until I get a really solid feel in the low end and make sure the kick is complimenting the bass and then im good to go.
Thats the very best way to work Dylan ... There a lot more i want to cover on this and some of it I've mention in the excellent conversation with Michael on this video but the key to really understanding the bass end can often come from really getting to grips with how waves work and the exponential nature of frequency relation to music... Ears first - always - and plenty of breaks as something rather fascinating happens when you stay at the speakers for to long !
@@colebrown8293 I am certainly not confused Cole ... When you spend too long in front of Speakers, your ears adjust their frequency response to suit what's coming in - it takes about 20 minutes and after 1 hour, the results are extreme .... With modern bass-heavy music, this will generally mean your appreciation of bass end changes dramatically ... It's similar to the way our eyes and brains change light perception in dark conditions and takes about the same amount of time ( all of our senses are contrast based by the way ) ... As a result - not taking breaks effectively puts an EQ adjustment onto your hearing and as you will only ever make decisions based on your brain's perceived input, working on music without regular breaks is nearly always detrimental to your ability to make good decisions... After more than 25 years of producing, releasing and mixing at the highest levels, I can certainly tell you from bitter experience that this is the case -- The most important control on your DAW is the stop button - learn to use it and your work will become so much easier
Its why consoles have phase flip buttons. Cancellations happen in the low end. This happens when even sampling drums or even recording live drums when you have a mic in the drum and outside the hole in the outer head. You flip phase to check if you “lose” the low end. Same as in top and bottom of a snare. Believe your ears if “tuning” your kick works compensate for the phase
I totally agree, Even in electronic music that is fully created internally you should always try and see if phase inverting the kick ( or bass ) sounds better - One sound in modern music that never gets checked is the Snare - I cannot tell you how many fat modern snares could sound 100% better by testing the phase polarity ... .
However on the hard-tuning of kicks I'm afraid I must still disagree ... in modern samplers and DAWS we have 100 cents of tuning options per note, so that's really about 1200 options in a whole scale ... The only place in that wide gamut where phase can rear it's ugly head is about 10 cents either way of a principal note of the scale.
The whole concept of hard-tuning your kick to a note comes from the idea that the harmonic structure is better in the lowest octaves if everything is diatonic, but we really don't hear these relationships under the point where can vocalise. I'm sure it's different for creature like elephants and blue whales ( who in particular communicate with very low Freqs ) ..
You can test this so you know I'm not just spouting nonsense - Grab a sine wave tuned to A4 =440hz, now play a Simple triad centred around C3 - you can hear the harmonic structure and the relationships between them - now play exactly the same chord in the same inversion starting from C1
All you hear now is beating sine waves - I don't know any human being ( not even singers that fit in the 'bass' category ) that can hear the harmonic relationships down there and this is where the fundamentals lie in Modern kicks and bass
Given that scales and harmonic relationships are no longer experienced down there, How massively important phase becomes given the relative power of subsonic frequencies, and the fact that the resolution is dropping due to the natural exponential maths & frequency ( remember 440-880Hz is an octave with 440Hz to share between the 12 notes - conversely, C1 - C2 is another octave 32.7 Hz -65.4Hz with only 32.7 Hz for all 12 notes ). I postulate that we are going to find things much easier if we keep away from the prominent notes in the scales in which we work ..
Is there an example in real life - Yes ! - the 909 Kick drum - Every single unit I've ever met has a kick drum pitched between 30 and 40 cents above a key in the main western scales and without doubt this is part of it's international club-driven success - It can never interfere negatively with principal basslines and that to me is why it's possible for it to have been used (even before the DAW era ) to make such intense and bass-heavy club music for so long ( in every musical key conceivable ) . I would love to know if this was designed or accidental - I'm assuming the latter given the relative lack of sub in the era of it's design.
I do 100% agree with you about the ears ... It's my main push on all of this ... If it sounds great, it is great .. Mess with the tuning of your kicks, not in semitones, but in cents - somewhere there's some magic for your track, and if not, just try another kick - every track is unique as a fingerprint and no single theory will give you consistent results
Great talking with you ... I hope you enjoy this further video on phase where I discuss much of your excellent points above :
czcams.com/video/qptvf5hUi4g/video.html
I use Serum for the sub layer of my basses and you can fix and define the phase with that. As a consequence, you get a consistent sound any time! So although very interesting and true if using something analog, would this apply if you're consistent with the phase?
Great question - 'm afraid not - I'm going to have to start cut and pasting answers here so do bear with me - basically phase is a function of time so unless your bass-line rhythm is exactly the same as your kick, you sill have to slide every note that's on the root .. hang on and I'll paste an answer from below
Aaron - sorry it's a cut and paster, but this was a well considered answer last night :
For example - the most common solution to this is to phase lock your bass sound ( so the waveform of the synth's oscillators re-trigger identically each note ). You then slide the bass around until it’s in phase - another version is to use just 1 sampled note for the bass … There are many enormous problems to this :
1- As the given energy increases at lower frequencies, this can create huge Blooms of information when they play together and the only solution then is a ton of dynamic work that is a detriment to your baseline
2 - The only bass rhythm that guarantees this phase relationship across a whole baseline part is one where the bass plays exactly the same rhythm as the kick - the moment you use any form of counter rhythm you need to slide every single bass root note individually to keep it in phase - this is not only terribly time-consuming but may change your baselines groove.
3- Your baseline then needs to copy and pasted to every single part or this process needs to be repeated for every single alteration in bass sound
4 - Whilst you are no doubt using EQ to perfect the sound in production, you will absolutely need to apply additional processing to kick and bass sounds during the mixing phase ( Pun intended ) and all of this will directly affect the phase of these sounds - Nearly all EQ’s create phase shifts - it’s simply how they work. This limits you to phase-linear EQs - all of which have well-documented issues in the bottom end ( and very high latency ). Also - many plugins don’t fully report their latency correctly and this will shift audio often without your knowledge
5 - Your bass sound can also sound very sterile, has less life and often has to be copied and pasted across an entire production - human’s love movement in musical parts - it's why analog synthesis is still so prominent , why modulation is so important in all sound design and why there's a ton a plugins making everything 'wonky' at the moment
All of this is completely avoidable by not tuning your kick perfectly to the key of your track as these phase-related issues simply disappear very quickly - you then don’t have to hammer the sidechaining ( or frequency-dependent ducking like trackspacer ) so hard either .
That reminds me of when using pink noise to set levels in a mix was popular. I'd love your take on that.
That one had a little more merit in that it didn't do anything deliberately detrimental to the production, but it still was devoid of any emotive response and again - was producing by theory and not really using your ears to balance, but a set of rules and this is totally the wrong way to approach mixing - I used said to those using it at the time-, make it your starting point and then move away using your personal taste but sadly a few people where then afraid to make any changes inc case it wasn't technically correct ... As always - whatever sounds right is right, and the more experienced you get, the better you are at judging what sounds right ... I now don't know anyone still using pink noise to mix and that's a damn good thing in my opinion
@@F9Audio Thanks for this detailed response. Your channel is fantastic.
Using pink noise to set levels is more just a basic guideline, to see if there's anything that's too excessive or needs boosting. But that's more from a technical point of view, to ensure that maybe there's not too much bass in the mix that could be affecting the compression on the main bus. But it should never be used forcefully to decide the overall musical tonality of a track. If your track has a bit more high end than most, fine, as long as it sounds good, that's what matters. If we stuck to this rule of having everything aligned to pink noise, everything would sound the same.
@@Lolwutdesu9000 totally agree and also only really works for mixes that aren't needing to be bass heavy ... I think the takeaway on all this is that there's no silver bullet in mixing - we just have to put the spade work in and no amount of tricks or tips will give us a quick solution every time - every track is as unique as a fingerprint and bass end is hard to get right .. .Take regular breaks, listen on headphones as well as monitors and give yourself a break - It's always been hard to do a great mix and create a great record
By the way, Deadmau5 agrees: czcams.com/video/5Bzu8xNp5X4/video.html
life lesson in sound design and mixing
Non-Linear ftw 💎
🙏📖💪 best teacher ever 💪
When it comes to electronic music production tips, James Wiltshire > Everyone else.
This is the reason why I stopped watching CZcams videos for advice on music production and started relying on my ears,gut and speakers, they are the only things that will neve lie to you, CZcams videos have done nothing but confuse me!!
What if you sidechain the bass lowend completely out of the way of the kick? like inverse lfo tool on the kick of the bass sidechain. This is an amazing topic
You simply don't need to do this or any of the other more time-consuming workarounds if your kick is not in key - the problems only surface when the fundamentals are locked ... Why do anything that creates the need for restrictions or massive processing like completely destorying the on-beat bass note ? .... The whole concept came about as the understanding was that using harmony down there was important, but we simply do not hear harmony below a certain point - I'll explain all this in further videos soon ... In the meantime- set yourself free and jus use your ears to pick great kicks, then play with the length of them and fine/ coarse tuning to make them sit - If you've been keying your kicks for a while you'll find this a breath of fresh air
@@F9Audio Thank you so much for the reply man! Love you are doing this! Pure gold. Love to see you make a disco house record from scratch man! I would pay for this.
I have one question... what happens if I use sidechain compression between the kick and the bass?
The problem occurs the same but to a lower degree right?
Well you would have to use 100% sidechaining to make sure of absolutely no interaction - That's a major artistic sacrifice for simply flawed information - What happens when sidechaining is unfashionable ? _ threre's already movement away from it in some genres ..
Look - the only way your bass can cause phase issues with your kick is when you tune the kick exactly to the main note used in your bassline - the moment you tune away ( even slightly ) , the problems fall away and you don't have to jump through all these extreme hoops and constantly be on the look out for phasing, so please , please please please please stop doing this as it's utter nonsense.
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The 909 Kick drum is on millions of club productions in every single key imaginable - It is tuned roughly 40cents above a note in the standard western scales ... Does it sound out of place on any of those tracks? - You do not have the same relationship with harmony down there, so please stop listening to pseudo theory from those with no training in physics, music or real-world engineering, and use your ears to pick great kicks for your tracks ( and then shorten them as much as you can for your genre - this is where the magic is ) - You can then use all the hours saved avoiding phase issues by working on the music of your production - This is where you should be focussing your efforts - No one goes home humming your kick drum and the only people who care about how you made your kick is other producers - and they are not going to add to your career path at all - they are too busy worrying about theirs ...
Set yourself free and let this ridiculous piece of information go. You'll be so much happier when you do
I get so upset that so many new producers are facing bad information like this - on a mission to stop it asap
@@F9Audio Yea, I agree with what you are saying...
Now, my question becomes more advanced... what happens if you keep in consideration the musical scale we are working on? the notes in which we can place the kick are many...
Does this video mean that simply the kick must be placed out of scale? But maybe you have already partially answered me by talking about the 40 cents out of tune....
Before sidechain-ducking became de rigeur (after Benny Benassi's happy accident on 'Satisfaction') a really popular technique in pop-trance from 1996 onwards - as featured on BBE's 'Seven Days and One Week' and the big hits of Faithless and Sash - was to simply place the bass on the offbeat. The offbeat "basslines" sounded great in clubs and on the radio - and never created phase cancellation issues with the (909-style) kicks - because they never played at the same time!
Sidechain-ducking is just one method of reducing phasing issues, but in this day and age we all have access to an infinite number of kick samples, so instead of tuning/keying them or using excessive sidechaining, we can just audition loads of them until our ears decide "That one sounds best".
Which means if coincidentally my kick sample is in the same key as my bass, I have to manually change the kick's key?
In my experience after checking hundreds of commercially available kick drums, the key labels on more than 80% are completely wrong. Also, many kicks have tails that fall in pitch. Moving pitch is a vector, not an integer ( static number ) so there is absolutely no point to a key label but often these kicks are the most useful ( in particular if they have the lowest tone to them ) as the movement removes phase issues.
Please remember you have 100 cents of tuning options between notes on a Western scale. the most successful kick in dance music history - the 909 was tuned 40 cents sharp of an equal tempered note at the factory, and without doubt, this helped it work on tracks in any key across the 40 years it's been out in the wild.
You may rightly now ask - how come we can have a major element out of tune? - I thought everything needed to be in tune ? ....
Not under a certain frequency - when the human body can no longer vocalise a sound, we do not have the same relationship with it's pitch - this is why low bass and in particular sub-elements are so hard to tune by ear. Also the resolution disappears exponentially in the subsonic range - 32.5-65HZ is an entire octave ( all 12 notes in 30Hz ) whilst 2 octaves up it's a spread of 130hz - 260HZ (130hz to carry all 12 notes - that's 4X the resolution and so on and so on as you go up.
Use your ears to choose your kicks, tweak the length so it's a short as possible for your track ( this is often the magic ) and remember the 1st 10-20 Ms of the kick is where nearly all the action is - and that every single track is as unique as a fingerprint.
The advice that you need to Hard-Tune your kick to you're track's most prominent note is actually incredibly dangerous as it's the only place within the entire gamut of tuning options we have where it can be damaged the most. Every single method I've ever seen to get around this is like laying a landmine in your garden then trying not to step on it
James, what do you think of the new Scaler EQ ? Thanks in advance.
Very dangerous to say everything should be EQ’d to harmonic points only - you need to do this by ear - sometimes it’s the dissonance you want and my worry is we’re working by theory and visual instead of trusting those two amazing things either sides of our head
@@F9Audio Thank you James ! 🙏
Usually Love your stuff James but i cant agree here. you’re missing the fundamental knowledge that nearly all kick and bass combos are sidechained so waves will never interfere with each other that much.
Hi Alex - I'll pull you right up here straight away - Its very much human nature to assume everyone is making the same music you do and that's not the case - If your genre of music is heavily side-chained ( to the point of the bass being practically removed with every kick ) then you are absolutely right - it doesnt matter one bit which kick you use, but my point here is about phase and learning using your ears, not your eyes or ( terribly flawed ) theory to produce ... Not all forms of electronic music use extreme sidechaining and it's my job to teach best practices, not concentrate on one genre or area - But let me now ask you this ..... What's the theory behind having your kick drum perfectly tuned to the root note of your track? - Why is is better ? ... And also - what are you using for your kicks ? - Samples from Splice, or generators like KICK2 ? - Have you ever really checked the keys given in the filenames or examined the frequency tails of the kicks you are using ?
Then consider losing the ‘never’ in the title then?
Fascinating video, but what about keying the bass and kick octaves apart? I didn't think the advice was keying them together at the same note but rather the same root note.
Just please stop worrying about the key of your kick drum - you will be so much happier and find everything easier when you do - the above will force you into either a high pitched bass or high pitched kick ( and comically so in some keys ) - just find a great kick that sounds great with your track, use coarse and fine tune to perfect it and concentrate on it's length -thats where the magic bullet is , check on lots of monitoring systems and always remember - kicks are percussive instruments, not tonal
Every dnb/edm/Electronic Music producers that always say that tune your kicks/drums they should watch this and stop that nonsense! Thanks for your video 🥳🍹☕🍸
In DnB, the kick drum is usually pitched up and well away from the sub and bass.
A lot of drum synths have pitch bend on the kick to simulate what happens to a skin when you hit the drum.
Absolutely and this is actually very good - a pitch in motion ( even a little ) is a vector and therefore not really ever at a single frequency for more than an instant - this means phase problems are almost nonexistent ... What is really amusing is so many of the kicks in commercial packs state keys like "F" firmly in their file name even though the tail is in motion so cannot be keyed in this manner ... - this is causing all the noise in this situation ... Use your ears at all times and pick the best kick for your track, not your eyes or flawed data
What about keying them and then using something like SoundRadix Pi?
Daniel - just pick great kicks by ear and ones that compliment your track - then play with the length - there is no silver bullet , no magic formula or anything like this - Every single track is unique as a fingerprint and every producer struggles with bass end - please check all my other comments on here for details of all the why's and where's and this video and remember - the most famous dance kick of all time (909 ) is about 40 cents sharp of a note in the western scales straight out of the machines - this is no doubt one of the reasons why it's working so well even to this day in tracks pf every given key ( and even though it has very prominent higher harmonics ) ...
You do not ever ‘need’ to tune your kick exactly to the root note of your track - this is actually the only place that will cause you tons of trouble and force you to side chain - This is terrible EDM-Internet-Lore created by those without training in Physics or Audio Engineering ( I have both ) and the extreme workflows that are required to avoid it are utterly ridiculous. Also - It’s the only point where positive phase interactions can also cause you real issues - you can get very large level jumps due to the non-linear power distribution of audio across the spectrum.
Please remember you hear with your ears, not your eyes ( or nose for that matter - you’d never sniff a kick right ? ) , so the next time you see people with oscilloscopes and immensely complex visual workflows to get over the problems that perfectly keyed kicks create, just ask yourself this - Would you rather do all this ( and them possibly create massive phase shifts when you apply an eq to either bass or kick drying the final mix forcing you to start again ) - and do you fully understand the principals of phase? … It is so vital to the modern bottom end.
Here’s our video on it to give you some clarity
czcams.com/video/qptvf5hUi4g/video.html
Amazing as always James!! If I have a bass in “A” I may tune the kick to a G, when I can notice it like in a melodic track it can feel more musical than if it’s out of key but I use my ears and this is great advice and excellently put! Your kick pack is my staple now for so many of my clients. ❤
Yes = Ears every single time - Take the 909 kick -used in records in every key imaginable and has a very prominent upper harmonic structure - Normally It's about 40cents sharp of any musical note in the western scale - didn't do any of the records it's on any harm at all ) and probably why it's so damn usable ) - Harmony is not the same in the subsonic, we simply don't hear the notes the same way
ok but if you sidechain the kick to the bass as you always do, doesn't it fix this issue? bass and kick wont play at the same time
OK - Let's put it his way - you effectively have an infinite number of tuning choices for your kick - Only one can cause phase cancellation to your tracks' root note ( where a lot of EDM and more bassline stay for a lot of their time ) - Only one tuning can cause standing waves of frequencies to fly around a club or event space as your kick's main tonality and bassline combine into a drone with absolutely no contrast between them. Only one tuning can cause inconsistencies in the bass end as the reflections phase-invert when they hit a wall and reflect back into the listener's / clubbers space ... Unless your sidechain is removing 100% of the audio during the perfectly-keyed kick these interactions will occur and depending on your bass sound, it's oscillators and it's position these events can become almost random - all of this is totally solved by tuning your kick away from the exact spot of your track's principal note ... It doesn't even have to be much as phase cancellation is almost synergistic.
This is the reason why the 909 kick has been so massively successful - It's about 40 cents sharp of a standard note and as we all know from synth programming, you only have to tune things apart by a relatively small amount to stop the beating/cancellation - that is the very nature of phase …It cannot suffer from major negative phase interactions as it’s so far removed from a principal tone in our Western scales.
So why did this "nugget' come about ??- the whole idea is that it's better to have everything in key as it’s more wholesome - this is just not the case in the bass end -
30Hz-60Hz is an entire octave .. That’s 30hz for an entire octave or on average 2.5Hz per note, 440-880HZ is another octave in the midrange, That’s 440hz spread between an entire octave giving us 36HZ between each note ( N.B. these per-note values are averaged for illustrative purposes, not exact due to the logarithmic nature of audio ) - This is more than 14X the resolution.
We do not have the same relationship with tonality underneath the point where the ( average ) human voice can vocalise - This is immensely important to understand ( and probably the reasons behind the “808’s out of tune” Memes) .. I expect this is mainly due to the physical distribution of hairs inside the ear that are responsible for our hearing - they would have to become 10- 20X denser (whilst also becoming thicker / longer ) to have the same relationship with tuning in these lowest octaves - the spread of notes is just mathematics/physics so is set in stone.
So why can we layer things in the upper mids all the way to the top so successfully and not in the bass? - It’s all down to the mathematic principles of musical octaves - the resolution just increases the higher we go in frequency so there’s so much more wiggle room - also with our ears, we need a sound that falls away in level as we increase in frequency so phase cancellations are less important as you go up the frequency scale ( and actually get pleasing - think of a solo violin versus a 30 piece orchestra )
So let me be clear - you do not ever ‘need’ to tune your kick exactly to the root note of your track - this is the only place that will cause you tons of trouble and force you to side chain - This is terrible EDM-Internet-Lore created by those without training in Physics or Audio Engineering ( I have both ) and the extreme workflows that are required to avoid it are utterly ridiculous. Also - It’s the only point where positive phase interactions can also cause you real issues - you can get very large level jumps due to the non-linear power distribution of audio across the spectrum.
Please remember you hear with your ears, not your eyes ( or nose for that matter - you’d never sniff a kick right ? ) , so the next time you see people with oscilloscopes and immensely complex visual workflows to get over the problems that perfectly keyed kicks create, just ask yourself this - Would you rather do all this ( and them possibly create massive phase shifts when you apply an eq to either bass or kick drying the final mix forcing you to start again ) - and do you fully understand the principals of phase? … It is so vital to the modern bottom end.
Here’s our video on it to give you some clarity
czcams.com/video/qptvf5hUi4g/video.html
Please please please, set yourself free - Ignore key information on kicks ( so much of it is actually incorrect as well - a check recently of Key’d Splice kicks made me actually spit my coffee out the other day - some were half an octave out ) and pick everything you need by ear - shorten the kicks as much as possible and use headphones to check as they often go a whole octave or more under the response that physical speakers can achieve in most personal setups ( this is a physicality of boxed- speaker design - the average for even the best modern near-fields is 45HZ - I have headphones here that reach down to 12HZ - about 3.5 octaves lower )
Basically - Use your ears first, not your eyes to produce. And always remember - this is physics, not internet conjecture and it has been understood for hundreds of years and rules our entire universe.
Cool! And if the kick and bass are syncopated e.g. psytrance, and not directly on top of each other?
Obviously there will be no phase issues is the two sounds are not together, but what happens when your bassline changes note ? - do you change the kick pitch too ? ... Please forget all the nonsense connected to this idea as it really is one of the worst pieces of advice I've ever heard - Also most Kick key information is either approximate or flawed as so many kick gens have pitch envelopes on the tails so the frequency of the kick is moving - just pick kicks with your ears, not your eyes and pick them because they work, do not discount any kick because you consider it in the wrong key
If the keyed part of the kick overlaps with the fundamental of your 16th note bass you 're risking in losing a portion of the energy in the lows or boost. But you can always remove the fundamental of just this 16th, 8th or whatever bass not overlaps the keyed part of your kick. And like that no loss of low information at all.
It’s not bad at all. There are synths (Serum comes to mind) which can reset the waveform of the OSC every note. And you can choose the phase starting point of the note. These two things combined with sidechaining or dynamic EQ (EQ with bands which can be sidechained) can give you perfect solid low end with tuned kick. There is also the lenght of the kick drum parameter…
I'm afraid this doesn't actually solve things - unless you only have a bassline like the one above with a note on every 1/4 beat ( or the same place as the kick ) you will still have places where the kick can be affected by the phase of the bassline when you trigger the notes in different positions . As I show in the video. - phase is also temporal so it's related to position - My point here is simply don't believe this concept - it's total nonsense and every single work around is exactly that - a series of compromises that you honestly don't need to be making ... Also - the kick information on most samples is bad data - often modern kicks move through frequencies via an envelope so the given key is just a momentary point that a GUI or Plugin have identified .. Please, please please stop doing this and just pick a great kick for your track, ignore the labels and just try things out until you find the best one - Kicks are percussive instruments, not tonal
@@F9Audio I agree with you - there is enormous volume of tracks made with classic drum machines, and nobody bothered back then with drum tuning, and some of these tracks are classics, and even now sound amazing. And if you analize some of them, it turns out they are not made by today’s standarts - with drum tuning, sidechaining, etc. they were done by feeling, and maybe that’s one of their secrets…
@@vescopetcov Love this - This is going to be one of my points in a later video - the 909 kick is still used today ( getting on for 40 years ) with a very prominent tonal element and is on so many records across every key imaginable .. Once you get down there frequency wise, things change dramatically in how we perceive things - This is mainly due to the fact that 60 hz is an entire octave away from 30HZ and it seems our brains stop worrying about pitch below a certain point .. fascinating as always
@@F9Audio Great point re: the pitch envelope. I wondered too when the kick's supposed frequency was captured along its journey through the env. I assumed it was the tail. Maybe the best approach would be to first tune it to where it feels most "in the pocket" and secondly check for phase issues. Anyway, looking forward to the upcoming videos regarding this 👍
@@darrenheath23 You pretty much hit the nail on the head there Darren - Use coarse and fine-tuning until it sounds like it works ( ignore all key information along the way and try a collection of kicks - every track is different ) then do a few test bounces to see if there is any phase going on ( and always check the phase of things like snares as often then have a huge thump of low end in them ) ... Will cover all this - but the magic ticket is the length of the kick - short as possible for the genre and you'll be flying - you'll be amazed at how short you can get them! ... Also keep tabs on the very best ones and nick them back out of your own productions when they sound great - no DJ has ever not played a track in club or radio because an artist used the same kick twice
So in essence you show that it's better to key your kickdrum everywere BUT the key frequency. You could maybe go as far to say it's better not to tune it to a 3rd, 5th or 7th. Of course all this has to do a lot with the frequency the (for example) bass is playing. Eventually it comes down to listening what kick frequency will fit the other sounds the best right?
Yes - just use your ears always first and even small bits of tuning can make a massive difference - There's real evidence available too - All 909s I've ever met left the factory tuned between 20 and 40 cents away from a note in our western scales and that is the most successful and most used dance music kick of all time ( and with very prominent overtones and upper harmonics ) ... It seems that below a certain frequency, we just don't have the same relationship with pitch as we do in other octaves .. I assume it's because we can't vocalise down there ( in general ) and the notes just get packed closer together due to the exponential / Logarithmic maths involved with frequency ( e.g. 30-60 Hz is an octave in the same way that 300-600Hz is another octave and yet there is 10X the resolution between the two octaves )
Never say never. What if there is no bass and the tonal characteristics of my kick drum is the bass? (Hip-hop) Obviously you would want that in key with the rest of the song.
In the case there actually is bass - using an '808' in the bottom end is effectively using a very short transient and long bass note - you are playing the thing chromatically so you are creating a bass part ... Interestingly there is only one artist that wrote two number 1's without a baseline at all - can you name him ?
James Legend
what if you sidechain the bass to the kick, nothing will phase out right?
Excuse the Copy and Paste, but you need to know all the info on this..
Keying your kick - Let's put it his way - you effectively have an infinite number of tuning choices for your kick - Only one can cause phase cancellation to your tracks' root note ( where a lot of EDM and more bassline stay for a lot of their time ) - Only one tuning can cause standing waves of frequencies to fly around a club or event space as your kick's main tonality and bassline combine into a drone with absolutely no contrast between them. Only one tuning can cause inconsistencies in the bass end as the reflections phase-invert when they hit a wall and reflect back into the listener's / clubbers space ... Unless your sidechain is removing 100% of the audio during the perfectly-keyed kick these interactions will occur and depending on your bass sound, it's oscillators and it's position these events can become almost random - all of this is totally solved by tuning your kick away from the exact spot of your track's principal note ... It doesn't even have to be much as phase cancellation is almost synergistic.
This is the reason why the 909 kick has been so massively successful - It's about 40 cents sharp of a standard note and as we all know from synth programming, you only have to tune things apart by a relatively small amount to stop the beating/cancellation - that is the very nature of phase …It cannot suffer from major negative phase interactions as it’s so far removed from a principal tone in our Western scales.
So why did this "nugget' come about ??- the whole idea is that it's better to have everything in key as it’s more wholesome - this is just not the case in the bass end -
30Hz-60Hz is an entire octave .. That’s 30hz for an entire octave or on average 2.5Hz per note, 440-880HZ is another octave in the midrange, That’s 440hz spread between an entire octave giving us 36HZ between each note ( N.B. these per-note values are averaged for illustrative purposes, not exact due to the logarithmic nature of audio ) - This is more than 14X the resolution.
We do not have the same relationship with tonality underneath the point where the ( average ) human voice can vocalise - This is immensely important to understand ( and probably the reasons behind the “808’s out of tune” Memes) .. I expect this is mainly due to the physical distribution of hairs inside the ear that are responsible for our hearing - they would have to become 10- 20X denser (whilst also becoming thicker / longer ) to have the same relationship with tuning in these lowest octaves - the spread of notes is just mathematics/physics so is set in stone.
So why can we layer things in the upper mids all the way to the top so successfully and not in the bass? - It’s all down to the mathematic principles of musical octaves - the resolution just increases the higher we go in frequency so there’s so much more wiggle room - also with our ears, we need a sound that falls away in level as we increase in frequency so phase cancellations are less important as you go up the frequency scale ( and actually get pleasing - think of a solo violin versus a 30 piece orchestra )
So let me be clear - you do not ever ‘need’ to tune your kick exactly to the root note of your track - this is the only place that will cause you tons of trouble and force you to side chain - This is terrible EDM-Internet-Lore created by those without training in Physics or Audio Engineering ( I have both ) and the extreme workflows that are required to avoid it are utterly ridiculous. Also - It’s the only point where positive phase interactions can also cause you real issues - you can get very large level jumps due to the non-linear power distribution of audio across the spectrum.
Please remember you hear with your ears, not your eyes ( or nose for that matter - you’d never sniff a kick right ? ) , so the next time you see people with oscilloscopes and immensely complex visual workflows to get over the problems that perfectly keyed kicks create, just ask yourself this - Would you rather do all this ( and them possibly create massive phase shifts when you apply an eq to either bass or kick drying the final mix forcing you to start again ) - and do you fully understand the principals of phase? … It is so vital to the modern bottom end.
Here’s our video on it to give you some clarity
czcams.com/video/qptvf5hUi4g/video.html
Please please please, set yourself free - Ignore key information on kicks ( so much of it is actually incorrect as well - a check recently of Key’d Splice kicks made me actually spit my coffee out the other day - some were half an octave out ) and pick everything you need by ear - shorten the kicks as much as possible and use headphones to check as they often go a whole octave or more under the response that physical speakers can achieve in most personal setups ( this is a physicality of boxed- speaker design - the average for even the best modern near-fields is 45HZ - I have headphones here that reach down to 12HZ - about 3.5 octaves lower )
Basically - Use your ears first, not your eyes to produce. And always remember - this is physics, not internet conjecture and it has been understood for hundreds of years and rules our entire universe.
With the break chopping in jungle, keying kicks is a bit irrelevant and dimishes authenticity - but I do use PhaseNudge and an oscilloscope on my 808s to get them to sit with the break. It makes a big difference. Even those ol' 1960s kicks have a wave and if I can get my 808 to sit even partially on top of it I definitely get a more solid and focused low end.
Great comment, thank you my friend - Its Important to be accurate like this, but are you aware that the moment you apply any of the 95% of EQ that are not phase linear to either the kick or bass after all of this work whilst mixing you will throw the phase of that signal out ? Or if any of your bass end mixing plug-ins don’t report their latency correctly, you will get a phase shift?
Of course, you may be using an oscilliscope right at the end of the process, and the great thing about Kickdrums from breaks, particularly when sped up is that they are so short, the phase interactions are relatively tiny
Jungle and DNB, for my money are perfect examples of why using short kicks can be so powerful as they let the sub power through and it’s something I’m always encouraging 4/4 producers to try -it’s often surprising just how short you can make kick drones in a house production, for example
Thank you so much for the comment, always great to hear from a variety of producers across genres
@@F9Audio Hey, yeah the oscilloscope is after my final limiter but overall I listen for a vibe. Currently using the new Amigo Sampler and it's just changed everything. Google Amigo Sampler cheers
What if the kick is on the root note and the bass line is free flowing? Will that not add to the overall effect? I'm talking a boomy kick that is actually driving the bass line....also does the physics hold true if th bass line is at middle c but the kick is an octave lower?😇
Not quite sure what you mean by free flowing ? ... If you mean the more main room techno style of production where the Kick really is the bassline then that's a very different aesthetic - another example is the "animals' era of EDM
A bassline at Middle C ( C3 ) will have a fundamental frequency at 130Hz so will defiantly avoid the main bloom of modern kicks, but I also Guarantee you'll need subsonic information an octave lower ( 65Hz ) and that will fall foul -
Basically - out of the 1200 tuning options you have for a kick ( 12 notes X 100 cents ) the only place that you ever have Phase issues is when the bassline and kick exist in exactly the same spot on the audio spectrum - this is why it's always best to find spots where they don't clash. Also - you may not want to create huge Droning blooms of air pressure in a club or warehouse - you want contrast between the two instruments down there or your mix that sounds great at home could just end up as swampy mess on a much larger system
Good question on Octaves - Did you know there is twice as much room between each octave in terms of frequency? - 65-130Hz is an octave - that's 65Hz for each of the 12 notes in western scale - C3 - C4 is 130-260Hz - Thta's 130 Hz between each note, etc etc ... Nearly everything in Audio is exponential and it's why all this is so crucial down there - there is way , way less resolution than the upper octaves
@@F9Audio hi thanks for the reply.....when i say free flowing i mean a melodic Bass line that only hits the root in the same octave as the kick occasionally......also with regards to the octaves.....If the kick plays the root note...and the rest of the track isnt playing the route in that octave then it wouldn't get phase cancellation? maybe tune the kick to the third? I guess whatever the note it's tuned to there's a possibility of a clash at some point...
@@deannesmith3429 OK Dean - I can answer all of this with a great example - Every original 909 left the Roland Factory in Japan with the kick drum circuit producing a waveform that was nowhere near a note in our Western scales - Everyone I've used in recent years is about 40 cents sharp - I've just purchased an oscilloscope so will check the modern versions. This is the most successful kick in dance music history and still revered by house heads to this day - it works in almost every key and without doubt this is helped by the fact that it's tuning means it can not meaningfully interface with bass - It has very prominent upper harmonics and tone and yet it's been everywhere ..
Hopefully, this goes a long way to explain why the entire conversation about hard-tuning kicks to music notes is a moot point - it's just don't important down there and you only really create yourself issues instead of solutions ... There's so much more to this so please read all of my extensive comments on this on the replies below - I cover just about everything else surrounding all this lore - including the reasons why you should never believe the key labels on commercially available kick drums - 95% of them are just completely incorrect
I never understood why ppl did this. Even if it didn't totally mess up the phase, are you really going to adjust the pitch of the kick or other percussion elements to match the other instruments and the many different notes they might play? That's not how percussion works in the real world. A drummer isn't tuning his kick drum to match every note you play on guitar lol
Drummers actually very often DO tune their bass drum and snare to fit the scale/tonal character of the song! Same applies for toms! Same applies for orchestral percussions like timpani and others. You don't HAVE to key everything neither it is guaranteed that things will be better neither that it's the norm in modern production. But tuning all types of percussions can some times be more pleasant to your ears. You can tune anything even hhs, ohs, chs, sns, bds.
This has been a big thing in recent years. I was looking at Dave Parkinson kick drums in his construction pack examples recently, and every one I checked was not in key with the bass/key of the track lol.
But at the same time if you’re using off beat notes and/or sidechaining it works or?
Sorry for the cut and paste again, but this is the best answer I've written for this point and it's vital to understand it all ...
Keying your kick - Let's put it his way - you effectively have an infinite number of tuning choices for your kick - Only one can cause phase cancellation to your tracks' root note ( where a lot of EDM and more bassline stay for a lot of their time ) - Only one tuning can cause standing waves of frequencies to fly around a club or event space as your kick's main tonality and bassline combine into a drone with absolutely no contrast between them. Only one tuning can cause inconsistencies in the bass end as the reflections phase-invert when they hit a wall and reflect back into the listener's / clubbers space ... Unless your sidechain is removing 100% of the audio during the perfectly-keyed kick these interactions will occur and depending on your bass sound, it's oscillators and it's position these events can become almost random - all of this is totally solved by tuning your kick away from the exact spot of your track's principal note ... It doesn't even have to be much as phase cancellation is almost synergistic.
This is the reason why the 909 kick has been so massively successful - It's about 40 cents sharp of a standard note and as we all know from synth programming, you only have to tune things apart by a relatively small amount to stop the beating/cancellation - that is the very nature of phase …It cannot suffer from major negative phase interactions as it’s so far removed from a principal tone in our Western scales.
So why did this "nugget' come about ??- the whole idea is that it's better to have everything in key as it’s more wholesome - this is just not the case in the bass end -
30Hz-60Hz is an entire octave .. That’s 30hz for an entire octave or on average 2.5Hz per note, 440-880HZ is another octave in the midrange, That’s 440hz spread between an entire octave giving us 36HZ between each note ( N.B. these per-note values are averaged for illustrative purposes, not exact due to the logarithmic nature of audio ) - This is more than 14X the resolution.
We do not have the same relationship with tonality underneath the point where the ( average ) human voice can vocalise - This is immensely important to understand ( and probably the reasons behind the “808’s out of tune” Memes) .. I expect this is mainly due to the physical distribution of hairs inside the ear that are responsible for our hearing - they would have to become 10- 20X denser (whilst also becoming thicker / longer ) to have the same relationship with tuning in these lowest octaves - the spread of notes is just mathematics/physics so is set in stone.
So why can we layer things in the upper mids all the way to the top so successfully and not in the bass? - It’s all down to the mathematic principles of musical octaves - the resolution just increases the higher we go in frequency so there’s so much more wiggle room - also with our ears, we need a sound that falls away in level as we increase in frequency so phase cancellations are less important as you go up the frequency scale ( and actually get pleasing - think of a solo violin versus a 30 piece orchestra )
So let me be clear - you do not ever ‘need’ to tune your kick exactly to the root note of your track - this is the only place that will cause you tons of trouble and force you to side chain - This is terrible EDM-Internet-Lore created by those without training in Physics or Audio Engineering ( I have both ) and the extreme workflows that are required to avoid it are utterly ridiculous. Also - It’s the only point where positive phase interactions can also cause you real issues - you can get very large level jumps due to the non-linear power distribution of audio across the spectrum.
Please remember you hear with your ears, not your eyes ( or nose for that matter - you’d never sniff a kick right ? ) , so the next time you see people with oscilloscopes and immensely complex visual workflows to get over the problems that perfectly keyed kicks create, just ask yourself this - Would you rather do all this ( and them possibly create massive phase shifts when you apply an eq to either bass or kick drying the final mix forcing you to start again ) - and do you fully understand the principals of phase? … It is so vital to the modern bottom end.
Here’s our video on it to give you some clarity
czcams.com/video/qptvf5hUi4g/video.html
Please please please, set yourself free - Ignore key information on kicks ( so much of it is actually incorrect as well - a check recently of Key’d Splice kicks made me actually spit my coffee out the other day - some were half an octave out ) and pick everything you need by ear - shorten the kicks as much as possible and use headphones to check as they often go a whole octave or more under the response that physical speakers can achieve in most personal setups ( this is a physicality of boxed- speaker design - the average for even the best modern near-fields is 45HZ - I have headphones here that reach down to 12HZ - about 3.5 octaves lower )
Basically - Use your ears first, not your eyes to produce. And always remember - this is physics, not internet conjecture and it has been understood for hundreds of years and rules our entire universe.
Thanks a lot for the great info. Makes sense. I think some confusion is that many producers advising to key the kick in tutorials, etc, actually have big tracks released on reputable labels, and they sound great in the club. Their kicks are in key. I suppose this is where “seeing” would help make the decision to go against following their narrative.
Actually - A lot of these guys claim their kicks are in key and it's just not at all true
90% of the key labelled kicks I've checked recently are nowhere near their file-named tuning - Most of this is down to Kick 2 - this brilliant plugin uses envelopes for it's kicks' tail pitch control. It's a favourite for sample pack makers as you can just knock them out ( yes sadly that's how a great deal of sample creators operate - Quantity not quality ) ...
What's misunderstood is that the visual break-points on the envelope are just that - controllable hooks for a constantly changing envelope controlling the pitch ... This makes the pitch of the kick tail a vector, not a static number. This means the kick is never, ever at a single pitch, but in motion through that point. This makes all the key information of kicks such as these not just bad information, but complete garbage.
What's interesting though - as these kicks have no single pitch - they often work brilliantly in heavy dance music as they cannot really ever create those synergistic phase cancellations and I assume this is why they've always been favoured in Trance - one of the fastest forms of 4/4 club music where the kicks are more tightly packed together.
Now obviously there are exceptions, but this whole narrative of spending hours and hours on this side of things is beyond ridiculous - the only people who care a single jot about how you made your kick are other producers.
in my experience, they are never really supporters of your career - More frequently they are your competition and many will smile in your face and then talk you down as it's the naturally competitive nature of electronic production. They hardly ever buy your music or contribute to your income in any manner.
The public really couldn't give a monkey's about your kick as long as it sounds big and supports the most important bit - your actual artistic output - The tune!
Punters, DJs crowds and labels will all forgive sonics, but a bad track is just a bad track no matter how amazing your kick is ... The enormous amount of time producers are spending on all this would be 1000% more usefully spent working on the music, the sounds and the arrangement - No one has ever asked for their money back at a club because of the kick Tuning - the 909 kick is back and smashing it everywhere and no-one ever leaves a club whistling your kick drum.
Pick kicks by ear so they work with your track - get used to how great kicks sound in your own monitors, use headphones to ref the bass end and concentrate on the art - how does the track make you FEEL ?
I've done this professionally for 27 years ( never had a proper job ) and I can say with conviction the only tracks that matter in time are the ones that move you - for example - Robert Miles 'Children' or "man with the Red face' still haunts anyone who heard it back in the day up loud - That's what to aspire to if you ask me.
@@F9Audio what’s confusing is that listening by ear, you could still quite easily choose one that’s in key that sounds great haha. Maybe that depends on how trained your ear is.
Previously I’ve always checked the kick key by zooming in on high res on the likes of Voxengo Span and looking at the highest transient. Would you say that is as accurate as can be?
I just bought Mixed in Key recently, both Mac and studio versions. I’ve now started to notice the results of checking kicks in key vary highly compared to what span is telling me. MiK is great for songs and acapellas, but for kicks it seems to be all over the shop.
And yes RM - Children is a belter of a tune 🙌🏼
I knows it a cliche but if it sounds right - it IS right - We have to get right back to listening critically to music and get away from visual aids and internet lore - We only ever hear music with your ears and the eye / ear connection is known to be terribly flawed - The classic studio cliche used to be twiddling controls on a desk channel and 'hearing' the results only to find out that you were on the wrong channel or the EQ was off ... '
'Trust in your senses Luke' as Yoda / Obie Wan would say
MIK is not designed to determine tunings of individual instruments - It will always give an answer, but with kicks it's way way off and this is also responsible for the huge amounts of useless key information connected to sample packs
I'd suggest that just for a month you remove all key labels from kicks, stop worrying about it and concentrate on picking great kicks that work and see if your life gets easier - I'd put a lot of money on the fact that you'll have a more enjoyable , creative and sonically better time.
Some kicks just have magic and the bass end of every track is unique as a fingerprint due to the physics of waves ... EVERY producer sturggles with bass end and kick / bass relationships -
My no 1 tip is Keep your kicks as short as possible for your genre you'll have a ton more room for your bass and your life will simply be better
Phase cancelation from these fundamental frequencies hitting slight off and not being in phase is what is occurring. The same can happen with an electric bass if you have a DI and miced amp and they are out of phase. It doesn't just have to do with the kick drums being in the same key. Listen to underworld or many bands who do tune their kicks to the key, they just are more creative with their bass lines and aren't following the same pattern which is also why they may side chain the kick (or bass depending on the dong) to duck when the other hits in the same place. You could also correct your phase of the two and they won't be canceling each other out.
Yes you are absolutely right - You are i'm afraid re-enforcing my point here - having the fundamental of kick and bass in and identical space can cause phase cancelations and that is dangerous- Phase is king at these frequencies, not Harmony - we simply dont' hear harmonic relationships between 30 and 60hz and this is the whole selling point of putting your kick in key .. There are extreme workarounds, but you simply don't have to do any of it and can have way, way more creative freedom if you tune your kick away from the key.... Even if you do work on getting every note of your bassline's root in phase with a perfectly key'd kick, the moment you throw on an EQ during mix, the phase will change and you can run in to serious issues - Just please, please please stop of all this nonsense
Not always you have basslines that sit on top of the kick so I don’t see nothing wrong in tuning the kicks or if you do a slight phase shift could work.
In general terms, you have no control of the phase on a note by note basis in normal situations from 99% of modern bassline sources. you could play an octave above but that would give you a comically high bassline, or you'd use a sound with a subsonic element in the same area of the kick - just please, please please let this very questionable piece of advice go as it makes you produce by theory rather than practice ... You are also accepting often flawed information ( e.g. the note attached to the file name of a kick that was obtained through approximation or systems like Mixed in Key ) as gospel whe often it's not... if you open up some presets in a plugin such as "kick' by Sonic Academy , you'll see that the tails have pitch envelopes applied. This means the frequency of the tail is actually moving, it passes through a few points on the envelope that you can control and often the sample pack developer picks out one of these points and claims the kick is in this key - it's not - it's tail is actually moving over time, it just passes through that point for a moment. I'll go into all this in much detail soon, but for now, just ignore all key information on kicks, for each production, trial a whole series of kicks, find the one that sounds the best to you ( and during this investigation, do not ever discount a certain kick because of it's key ) . Once you have a great source kick, experiment with some fine-tuning and most importantly - it's length until it feels at it's best - this is way , way more important than the pitch - and always remember - Bass is a melodic instrument - Kicks are percussive elements - make peace with that and your life on the bottom end will be so much easier and fruitful
MC Hammers Pants are waves?!?? Imagine the ripples he creates in the space time continuum :D
Learning production honestly just feels like a repeating cycle of:
1 - "Here is *_This Technique_* which you SHOULD be doing!"
2 - Follow and apply *_This Technique_* to all old and future productions
3 - "Don't do *_This Technique_* here's why it's wrong!"
4 - Follow the new guidelines, and never do *_This Technique_* again
5 - ...
6 - "Here is *_That Technique_* which you SHOULD be doing!"
7 - Rinse repeat.
This one really is important though - please check all my replies here - I am one of the in this space who not only studied audio engineering but then went into the practical end of engineering and got taught in London’s major studios by brilliant engineers and producers
I cannot tell you how ridiculous this bit of internet lore is about hard-tuning kicks
If you ever need to ask more on this subject please do - I am always at info@f9-audio.com
To avoid cancelation, you have to phase align them.
I don’t think you fully understand the issue - you can only phase align for certain sound sources - anything emulating analog ( or say a live bass ) will have a fluctuating phase - You could use a one-shot sample but are you aware that 99% of eq’s change the phase? - even if you do phase align you face the reverse problem - potential positive re-enforcement of the fundamentals and harmonics - this can be hard to control -
Let me be very clear - this only happens when you hard tune your kick like this - a few cents on either side and at any other scale point or cent value in between this entire problem vanishes -
It is the worst piece of internet lore I have ever seen and I am not alone
You need contrast down there, not everything swamped around a single hertz value - this can just end up as a constant drone for certain styes of music
Almost forgot - you must also phase align for every single position within a bar your bassline happens on - for each different note position you will need to shift the sound backwards and forwards - this means your kick drum is deciding your bassline’s groove - this should never be the case
So, I'm going for a bit more nuance here. I absolutely love your work, banks and packs, so I highly value your opinion. However, I do think tuning your kicks can have a place in a mixdown. Lots of kick (samples) have a long(ish) tail with a tune to it. Dropping these into a track of a different scale might result in a harmonic clash. However, it's also true that whenever you have the tail of a kick and the sub itself in the same note, the phase of them can either amplify or cancel out parts of the other. The more 'movement' or 'complexity' in the sound of your sub, the more inconsistent results you will get.
However, this can be prevented by either shortening the tail of the kick and/or by sidechaining the subs. By checking your low end in an oscilloscope, you can see exactly where the tail of the kick ends and where the subs begin. Using a tool like Volumeshaper can then help you set the right crossover point for sidechaining, giving you a very consistent and tight low-end. Using a synth that has a retrigger function, can also help you get a consistent (repeating and non-moving) sub sound, making it even easier to place in the mix.
That being said; it's not necessary to tune your kick to the fundamental frequency of the scale of your track. If you have a track in Cminor, you can use a kick in F or G too. Probably even for the best, because they hit that crossover point that sounds best on most speakers. Which is also why the majority of kicks are between the keys of E and A (with F and G being the absolute winners). See for yourself on either Splice or Loopcloud.
Finally, going with the way of your examples in the video can and/or will result in a phase cancellation at some point anyway. Especially whenever you start playing a bass melody, because at some point you might just hit a bass note that's in the key of your kick. So regardless, you'd need to sidechain / control your sub if you want to really prevent any phase cancellation completely. At the same time, and this is even more nuance; if you're going for an old-school kind of sound, that 'inconsistency' can actually work to get a more authentic retro and 'humanized' sound.
Ps. as a recommendation: for an oscilloscope I absolutely love Psyscope. In one plug-in instance you can see the individual waveforms of the separate layers (kick and sub, or any others), but also the summed up total. So you can easily see where cancellation or amplification is happening and why it's happening exactly.
OK Michael - I'm going to challenge you here on two points ... First of all - have you ever checked the kicks you are using properly ? ... Many have totally incorrect pitch data in the filename as they were simply bunged through mixed in key which will give an approximate value which is the erroneously applied to the name. Also - many kicks are now generated in systems such as Sonic Acedemy's kick use pitch envelopes so the tails are in motion.. Secondly - 30-60Hz ( the main area in which we discuss the fundamental of modern kicks ) is an entire octave and human ears do not react to harmony in the same way down there as we do at say 100-200HZ ... Just please please please (please ) stop keying your kicks - it's so utterly pointless and you are producing by theory and not using your ears - Kicks are not tonal elements - if they were we would be playing them chromatically . Kicks are percussive elements and should be treated as such and we must use our ears primarily to choose sounds. If you read your reply above - not once have you discussed what things actually sound like - it's all theory and visual - you hear with your ears, not your eyes .... Yes kicks with a given key will work sometimes - but so will many, many others you are discounting with ideas like the above... set yourself free and use your ears
@@F9Audio Hi James! You are totally correct that a lot of kicks are labeled incorrectly, and I always recommend verifying them for yourself instead of trusting the labeling on any of the samples. You are also correct that often the tails use a pitch envelope and are in motion. However, most times this motion is minor. For example: going from G# to F#, and will result in a tail that will interfere with a sub in G the most. But this is also in the worst-case scenario, because besides the ideal clean sine wave - a lot of (modern) bass sounds will have some form of movement/motion to the waveform as well (not that I'm necessarily a big fan of that).
What I'm describing above actually starts from the ears; you can hear a harmonic clash or something not working if you have a kick with a longer tail that's not in the scale of the track. So I am using my ears, but I'm also going into the theory to understand why that is exactly, to get the most out of my sub frequencies. Mostly it just comes down to the tail of a kick, which *can* make kicks a tonal element. For example, an 808 can have quite a tonal element to it, so can kicks in some forms of EDM (especially that big room kind) or in hardstyle. I know these are the more exaggerated forms of tails with a kick, but the same goes for a lot of kicks used in house music. The majority of samples you'll come across will have quite a long-ish tail. So basically I treat the tail of a kick the same way I would treat a sub bass, because it essentially is. But also more nuance: the shorter the tail of a kick, the less 'tonality' it will have.
Your video only briefly mentions the time domain, but it is such an important factor with kicks and (sub) basses, because when you start playing a bass melody in the example you've set up for the video, you might just hit a note that will interfere with the kick you've chosen anyway.
Michael - given everything we have both discussed there is only one takeaway for the average producer - Completely ignore the given key of the kick drums you are picking from sample packs and use your ears first, then diagnostics second to check the bass end and pick the best kick for your track. Even though we might have different ethos's here , We really do agree that so much of the info is whack.
I would also like to repeat - the human brain and hearing system cannot differentiate harmony below 60s hz in the same way it does at higher frequencies - when all 12 notes ( and our even-tempered scale ) is shared between just 30HZ things are very, very different ...
In the low mids where notes are way more prominent aurally, there's just more information - lets's take the octave 250-500Hz where there's 250Hz for all notes to spread across - That's more than 8X more information and this increases as we move up the scale - 440HZ to 880Hz is 440Hz, etc etc, this increases exponentially which is why tuning is way more important in the upper registers.
My advice is always the same - Pick kicks because they sound good and do not concern yourself with the keys written into file names - the magic in a kick is often in the first 50Ms and ( as you say ) the length is way, way more important in the grand scheme of things ....
Please note that a moving frequency curve can never be considered an actual constant pitch at any point so it's immaterial as to which notes it travels through - it's neither major, minor ( or any of the 12 church modes ) as it travels through all points over time between the notes and could only ever be considered a particular note at an infinitely short level of time ( or at least 2 samples in digi systems as per the nyquist theory ) but honestly - this is all a moot point as even a tiny few cents of tuning will change the pitches involved when down there and we just don't perceive harmony the same way ( hence the reason so many 808s are way out of tune :)) ) ... Unless you are doing full FFT analysis at every point in time you have no true way of knowing exactly where everything is and that's not something i"d ever suggest as honestly - it takes you away from the artistic side of all this. I've seen producers spend hours ( even days ) on all this without realising that all the time spent on this would be far, far better spent working on the musical elements, arrangement and general production. No one walks away humming your kick drums.
However ( and this is terribly important ) you obviously have a system that works for you that has been perfected over time and everyone is different and needs to find their own place. If you do get a moment, just try forgetting the mental shackles of the things we're discussing above, make your kicks shorter and see if it's easier or not.
This is the point I really want to start driving home and the whole reason for this video ( which is the start of a series covering modern bass end that's minimal in terms of theory ) ... I want to highlight the bad level of information out there surrounding bass that producers coming up are confronted with and are taking as gospel when the physics and practicality are often totally flawed ..
Great discussing this with you though - Debate is so important as we all have so much to learn from each other and it's exactly what I want to encourage on this channel ... I'm off to grab the plugin you mention above
Have a great day - James
@@F9Audio Hi James, I'm happy to hear you see it that way because that was also how I meant it. I completely stand by your message not to do something because someone says it, but to find out for yourself what works, if it works and how it works exactly as that understanding will help you make better-informed decisions. I'm always happy with your videos and social media posts because I do share your feeling that there's a lot of mediocre advice out there.
I understand your point when it comes to harmonics in the sub frequencies, and I do agree that when it comes to the harmonic content the (low) mids are very important. But at the same time; the tail of a kick is often not that much different than the actual sub content of the bass you're playing, which you typically wouldn't play out of the key either, not even the sub itself.
That being said; you have a good point that the musical side is always the most important aspect of any production. You can have a technically (okay, maybe subjectively) 'perfect' track with boring musical content and you will still have nothing. Alternatively, a rich musical track with an imperfect technical finishing will always do better. However, I don't think the two are mutually exclusive, so striving for a track that's musically and technically impressive is never a bad thing for any producer.
All of that being said; do check out Psyscope! It's quite an underrated little plug-in, but probably one of the most elaborate oscilloscopes out there. Especially the fact you can visualize your waveforms layered, stacked or summed, and even in mid-side, can make your life a whole lot easier identifying (and solving) phase issues. Looking forward hearing your thoughts on that one. :)
What about to the 3rd or 5th? That okay?
Any tuning away will work - don't bother with theory down there - it really doesnt matter for most productions - Think of the 909 Kick drums - How many classic and contemporary productions does it fit with in every conceivable key ? nearly every 909 I've ever seen is about 40-50cents sharp of a note from our scales ... please see the other comment reply as to why harmony theory is not so important in the subsonic range
@@F9Audio duly noted 👍
Key the snare… (sometimes) never the kick (always) 🤟
I'm gonna stop you right there ;) - Tune drums, don't Key them - fiddlle with coarse and fine tuning, but never get caught up on any rules for them - just use those two wonderful tools on either side of your brain and if you find a sweet spot that sounds ace to you - I guarantee it will to chunk of the human population too
@@F9Audio Tune drums, don't Key them, you say. What's the difference in practice? I'm sure you know many singers. Next time in the studio play them back an song and ask them to sing out of tune. I bet they will find a very hard time doing so. Tuning your percussions using your ears only, like you suggest, is a great advice, but most of the times (if not always) you will subconsciously (ot consciously) tune up your percussion in the scale of your song. A pitch that belongs to your song. That's keying. That's tuning. No difference IMO.
@@alexyakas blimey you’re stalking me Alex
Ok - let’s dance
You cannot compare the vocal range with The subsonic end.. Our relationship with pitch falls away underneath the point that we can vocalise - if you don’t believe me, pull up a sine wave and play a C major triad starting at C3 - easily recognisable
Now play the same chord starting at C1 - if you can discern the individual pitches and the harmonies relationship between them then you officially have the best hearing in the world and possibly ever
Here’s the detail - Every doubling of frequency is an octave .. bit conversely every halving is a octave down ..
32.5- 65hz is an entire octave ( C1 - C2) - so is 260-523( A2 - A3 ) the difference in resolution between these two octaves is 5X .. the lowest octave ( on average ) 2.7hz between notes .. the upper octave ( the vocal range ) has around 10..8 hz per note ( on average - we use equal tempered but you get the idea )
Now let’s consider human hearing - the Chochlea is covered in hairs of differing lengths - these vibrate in Resonance to the frequencies created inside via the ear drum and this is how we perceive all sound ( interestingly - SPL Based tinnitus is thought to occur when the incoming sound breaks these hairs causing them to vibrate and give fake responses - it’s why it nearly always happens at higher frequencies and why we lose top end as we age )
At the very lowest these hairs have to be thicker - this means less of them over the surface area the lower you go .. add this to the ever decreasing resolution between notes in the bass and sub end and its so easy to see why our perception is so different down there ..
There’s a very famous meme in hip hop - ‘The 808s out of tune ‘ - that’s because so many are ! .. it’s also why the 909 kick can be so successful ( 20-40hz sharp of a western scale ) , why stretch tuning is needed for pianos and why you should always , 100 % use your ears
@@F9Audio hehehe! Told you tha you picked up one of my best topics! :D You got my comment about vocals wrong. You, as a producer and composer you know at least the basics around harmony, scales, chords etc. You can sing, even if you can't out loud, you can sing in your head. So when you are tweaking the the coarse or tuning knobs, the sweet spot will most of the times be around the scale of the song, you cannot tune, or key wrong, same as a singer cannot sing out of tune. I agree that kick drum because of its low freq information pitch is not recognisable from a point downward, never said the opposite, neither that not tuning your kicks is bad and tuning is good or a must, this is nonsense. Totally agree. All I'm saying is that is totally possible to make kick and bass work together if and only if you know how to manipulate phase, and these low frequencies.
As about your triad comment, please, let's spend time on talking about pragmatic scenarios, cause of course, there is no way of distinguish the notes of a triad with a sinewave down to C1, down this range we are talking about the fundamental, one note, one pitch, the fundamental, like in buildings.
Back to my initial comment, tuning/keying using your ears, most of the times I'm processing my percussions that way, I realise that the sweet spot I find while tweaking sounds ice to my ears exactly because the tuning lands around a note that belongs somewhere in the scale of your song.
I find it wrong stoping paying attention to tuning percussions for no reason. Drummers have been doing this for ages, for their kicks, their snares, their toms, like I told you already, I very often tune my crashes, rides, it makes a difference.
As long a you know what you're doing, tuning, keying the kick drum can be good same as destroy your track.
Hi James, what if instead, we tune the kick to the fifth of the track's key - how would that affect phase cancellation with the bass on the root key?
This comes up a lot - just don’t worry about the key - kicks are percussive elements and not tonal - if your bassline changes notes do you re pitch the kick as well ? …. Most ‘key’ info on kicks refer to very flawed data as it’s often an approximation or picked from a kick gen GUI and often the kick gens employ pitch envelopes on the tails so the frequency is moving, not static …. Also it f you create a track in Gminor ( a key that has excellent bass resonance for humans ) this idea would mean you would need a kick in D which would create a fundamental in the kick that would need to be incredibly high or incredibly low depending on the octave you tuned it too … Please produce with your ears, not some theory - go through your kicks and find one that sits well with the track and bass , check the bass for silly subsonics , then look at the length of the kick - the shorter you can make it, the more room you have for bass elements - please just let this idea go - it’s utter nonsense and you are discounting excellent kicks because of a letter written onto the name of a WAV file
@@F9Audio Got it. Thanks, James. There is so much talk around this subject that I was happy to see your take on this. Great video as always, and by the way an excellent topic for another one would be around the use of Gminor scale and 49Hz frequency on club tracks.
Its not just G - there's a good range of keys with excellent natural bass resonances, but also it's about the chords used in the production - for example "music sounds better with you" never actually hits the root note of the key it's in - the full sequence ends 1 whole tone beneath the base minor key - another reason why keying kicks is such a moot point .... I'll try and get as much out there as possible next few months
I don't mix long sustained kicks with long sustained bass either..
I think looking at other styles is always handy - Hip Hop currently uses some of the shortest kicks out there and D&B has always used fairly highly tuned, short kicks and both genres use long, sub-heavy basses ... The Shorter you can make your kick for your given genre of productions, style , the more room you will have for bass , bass melodic movement and the easier that end of things will be - I really found this during the creation of our recent disco packs .... Also if you look at the average Hip Hop and D&B pack, you'll not see key information on the kicks
you saved me from the curse of 'i have to use the kick that is in key - syndrome'
thank you for the information about the phase cancellation. now I can sleep with a smile on my face!
We actually really don't hear the notes all the way down there - the moment we can't vocalise a note, we have very little need to have the same relationship with it. Perfect example - I've never met a real 909 that's actually in tune with Western scales - Most are about 40 cents sharp - I think from an F from memory but might be F# ... A few months back I downloaded the Beatport top 10 and checked them - not a single track had a kick that was tuned to the tracks' key and about half had kicks whose tail's changed in pitch over time ( they sounded great ) - it's total nonsense - I hope all this makes you happier to work on music.
@@F9Audio that is a pure thesis! never expected kick's tail note to change in one song after final production. and yes I am very happy that now I can use my favorite kicks on any key :) Thank you!
Do try tuning them just up and down a few cents to find the sweeetest spot and try shortedning anything that's any longer thank half a 1/4 beat - this is normally the most importnat factor to help the bass come through
5 months later. Any update on this video ?
Absolutely - F9 Deep Dive Into Bass
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F9 #AMA Ask Me Anything
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And this might be useful when we get to the bass mixing videos Do you think you know EVERYTHING about COMPRESSORS? .....#compressor #mixing #beatmaker
czcams.com/video/rKUGXRLKwks/video.html
Please note - I have to balance these against commercial work - I’m a musician 1st and foremost - not a Yt-er
@@F9Audio
Hjr
Tune your kick to the 5th (7 semitones) in the key.....
That is a great tuning option, but honestly - there are 1200 options in most systems ( 12 notes and 100 cents per note ) and a huge swathe of them will work - A lot of tracks don;t just hang on the root for teh entire track, so it's vital to experiement
🤯
Try this James - Its the follow on to this conversation .. czcams.com/video/qptvf5hUi4g/video.html
ohhhhhhhh i thought you meant using a gate to poke holes in your bass keyed off the kick
very confusing title
I suppose it depends which genre you're coming in from - Obviously you're not doing this - bravo !
Last night, after a long struggle to keep the low end clean in my mix, I brewed a cup of tea in a slightly depressed state and surfed the internet for answers. Found this video (and channel F9). At first, like any believer (having watched thousands of tutorials), I did not believe, of course. But James' voice (and his experience) and the mention of Neil DeGras Tyson got me thinking... In the morning I woke up and eagerly took up my research. My headphones do not allow me to understand in detail what exactly is happening in the low end, the possibilities are approximately the same as if you look at the moon through binoculars. But! But no one forbids you from using an oscilloscope and eventually printing your audio for comparison. My track is in G# min and bass line contain G#, A, D# notes and my kick is A, and they sounded great without tuning. But the Internet says to tune (THIS WILL HELP) and of course I lowered the kick one semitone down ... Well, I will attach a link to the picture where it clearly shows how my kick and bass work without tuning and with it (everything will be signed in the picture and clearly visible). Thanks a lot James!
Link to the image of printed waveform: ibb.co/J7CZHP0
Personally, I came to the conclusion that you only need to tune a kick when it doesn't fit perfectly to key of your track. For example: Your track is in key of Cmin and you have Cmin bass line and found amazing kick, but his fundamental is G#. In this case, lowering the kick by one semitone will cause the kick to sound in the key of the track (and fatter), but without colliding with the bass line. In this case, pitching the kick will really help the low end and the bottom of the track will bounce happily. But if you have a Gmin track with consistent Gmin bass line and you pitch your amazing G# kick down by one semitone, you just ruin the vibe. You also need to remember that kick is not your wife that you (ideally) choose once and for the rest of your life. There are many kicks, they are all different. If this one doesn't work, choose another one.
Thanks a lot!
Great to see this, but I can actually make your life even simpler - just remove the 'keys' from all of your kicks ( or kick generator's patch names ) and use your ears, not your eyes to pick a great one for your track - just listen to them on speakers and headphones ( that can go as much as an octave lower that speakers ) and work out what feels right, not what you think will fit a given harmony target , then tweak the length ( short as you can for your genre is always better ) ... A little bit of fine tuning can make all the difference .... Harmony literally doesn't work for humans in the frequency area our modern kick drum fundamentals work in these days and it's for a couple of reasons ( mentioned here in other comments ).... Please fully set yourself free, stop over thinking this area and just listen - those two amazing devices on the side of your head hold the key to all of this - and much happier productions .... in the meantime : czcams.com/video/qFd8oaxUy8g/video.html
...at the end of all processing/last plugin:
automatic phase correction by sidechain.
boom...finished.....
Until sidechaining isn’t fashionable any more - it’s the case in many styles already - Also you may create subsonic drones ( constant perceived frequency at a single note from kick and bass if the bass centres on root note ) - Given that bass and sub wavelengths relate to venue size you can just render your track immensely annoying for DJs and clubbers in certain places. This is a variable you cannot control. If you have proper contrast between your bass and your kick drum this is not an issue in the slightest. Please note this can be incredibly difficult to work on with studio monitors as I guarantee you if you looked up the specs for yours they’ll start falling away around 45 Hz and often these problems are way down in the subsonics beneath, to be honest a lot of of this material as I went through and tested a ton of key labelled kicks recently available and all the major sample sites and 85% of them were incorrectly labelled… I spoke to a friend of mine who supplied some of the kicks for one of the most well-known sample sites and he said he’s been running them through mixed in key to work out the tuning. Please note this is a that has to make a decision and will generate a result even though it may be sharp or flat by a number and often it will pick up a harmonic instead of the fundamental also people take the breakpoint on kick generator plug-ins like kick too as if their gospel when in fact they are often waypoint and the pitch is actually vector and moving number these are never at any particular microsecond and can be the most useful because they just don’t phase in the same manner i’ve investigated this quite a bit and it really works. I’ve even started putting small pitch drops either with sampler mid pitch Ben control or Audio warping transitions give it you don’t have to go for it really make a difference.
I’m 25 years into this and I’ve seen every single conceivable version of dance music you could think of work across most of them and mix nearly all of them have friends houses in the world with this subject and he just laughed. Said he hears it all the time And often he is replacing weak kicks that have been hard tuned because when they’re up on his enormous 55 grand PMC system they just fall apart
Thankfully I never cared about this. Nor did the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin etc. Ears & good songs will always win 👌
But your example only shows phase issues when the kick and bass are playing the exact same thing at the exact same time. This isn't a real world example and the relationship between kick and bass in a normal production should be considered.
Try it Nick - replicate what I've done with other bassline patterns and you'll see the phase issues are still very much present - Even more unpredictable to be honest //
Please read the rest of my responses on here - I have not come to this subject randomly or at all un-prepared - This is the start of a lot of videos demystifying bass end, phase and this ( frankly ridiculous ) concept of keying your kicks .
Please, please please, stop keying your kicks and use your ears - more videos to follow.
Phase retrig?
Excuse the copy and paste but I've already answered this multiple times here :
Phase retrigger means you will have a kick drum making sound design choices for your bass - this is not at all how it should be
It also means you need to move your bassline backward and forwards in time to phase align - Next, you need to repeat this sliding of your bass notes for every single alternative position a bassline note sits on relative to a bar - No point having one note in phase and another canceling - Practically this means a new track for every single bass note position in use ... NOw obviously you only have to do this once for an old trance style offbeat bass, but for the 95% of basslines, the workload is extreme
Now you have a potential peril whilst mixing - if you apply one of the 99% of EQs that are not Phase linear to either the kick or bass, you will change the phase of that sound and have to start all over again. Also - some plugins do not report their latency to the DAWS correctly which can result in a few ms /samples delay ( a change in perceived phase as it's directly related to time )
Also - you are basically creating a constant high energy drone in the subsonic registers with everything hard tuned together - This will sound terrible in certain venues if the physical walls mean the natural standing waves are even close or if a mixer / Amp rack is distorted ( I've never seen a DJ mixer run correctly in all of my DJing days ) - you nearly always want contrast down there between kick and bass, any kind of sub drones are the bane of live sound engineers lives.
Absolutely none of this is an issue if you tune your kicks and sub-bass elements apart... And honestly - most kicks supposedly in a certain key either with file names or envelope break point are actually not even close.
The proof of all this has been out there for decades - every single 909 left the Roland factory with the kick tuned roughly 40 cents above a note from the western scales - I'll bet my trousers that this is one of the key reasons it's worked so well even with it's huge tail on dance music across genres and in every key imaginable
I just watched your other video on phase I retract my statement thanks for awesome content :)
Without osc phase retrigger kick tuning is not effective.
Even if you did Re-trigger the phase ( Sylenth & both versions of massive allow it ) you still cant control it and even if you could you would need a 1/4 bassline as phase is also temporal .. But my point here is bigger - This whole issue is bad information - just forget it, Use coarse and fine tuning with your kicks and try many kicks for each project - Length is crucial for kick drums and using your ears, not some theory you have heard second hand is always the best way to produce - more info coming
Keying your kicks or picking a note in the scale for that kick works wonders if you are sidechaining/ducking the bass to remove phase issues. This tutorial assumes and removes the solution for phase with volume automation. If your not volume automating then yes your correct
You have an unlimited choice for your kick drum tuning and yet it's recently become a mantra ( often from those with no engineering or physics training ) to use the limited options that will cause you the biggest phase issues - The most successful kick in club music history ( the 909 ) is tuned 40 cents sharp of a note on the western scale and has been on millions of productions in every single key - A major part of it's success ( even with extreme tail length ) is because it's impossible for it to phase destructively with any tracks bass tone In the way shown above. Destructive phase interactions exist only when the tunings are incredibly close - the moment you move away by only a few cents the effect falls away dramatically .... Sidechaining works - it's got absolutely nothing to do with your kick tuning - Please please please stop producing by theory, picking kicks only in certain notes and pick your kick drums by ear and then test out small amounts of tuning to see if it gets better - you can still apply all the same technique but you will quickly find that your life is 100% easier and your tracks sound better. We do not have the same relationship with harmony below the area of pitch we can physically vocalise - it's probably dramatically different for larger animals like elephants or whales, but this whole concept of pitching your kick to notes on a scale revolves around the idea of harmony in the sub-octaves and it's not a consideration you have to make for a percussive instrument like this... Pick great kicks, shorten them as much as possible and you won't need anywhere near the amount of ( often cheesy sounding ) sidechaining, any chord changes will ring through better and you'll have picked the right tool for the job ..... All I see around this subject is people using their eyes to produce and choose kicks - when you're at the point of oscilloscopes and moving your bass notes around simply for phase and not groove or art you know it's all gone way too far .. You'd never sniff a kick drum to check it ! Please concentrate on those two things on either side of your head as they are the only method you have of experiencing sound, audio and music
It’s all a matter of knowing WHAT you’re doing James. I find your statement quite hard by baptising keying the kick as nonsense. There can be perfect coexistence between tuned kick with the fundamental of a bassline even on a four on the floor for both. There is nothing bad about tuning kicks. You only need to know what you’ re doing and know the limitations that you might face. By the way, you don’t necessarily need to tune on fundamental of the song. It’s all about production, programming, arrangement and harmony decisions. The problems you highlight are known for many years, producers have found great techniques avoiding all these especially in electronic music.
Hi Alex ...Thanks for the comments - I agree with quite a bit of this, but please let me be specific - for me the core idea behind it is nonsense - That tuning your kick perfectly to a given note solves all your bass end issues as this is simply not the case - But - this is how it's being presented, and it's getting younger producers into a terrible pickle
I'm sure we can both agree that this is just not technically true ( and you have above ) - As you rightly suggest here there are many (rather extreme at times ) workflows that can avoid it but to me, nearly all resemble placing a landmine under your lawn and then walking around it which fine until that one day it's not.
For me, it's just not good to get into a workflow that creates an issue and then creates additional steps to work around it as one day when fashions change ( and side chaining is passé for example ) producers could find they have gone down a road that doesn't work ...
Also, you are totally right here in that you really must know what you are doing to get this to work and this means it's terrible advice for those starting ( where this often ends up ) -
For example - you could use phase locked synths for the bass, and move every single note backward and forwards (depending on its bar position ) using oscilloscopes until it lines up with your kick's phase, you coudl then heavily sidechain everything and make manual adjustments to the levels of bassline notes to deal with the postive phase effects you then get, or just use a simple offbeat bassline.
But the moment you come to mix and place any normal plugin EQ or filter on either the bass or the kick, it throws the phase and you have to start again. Some plugins don't report their latency correctly ( and some PDC systems just don't work as they should - FL and Pro Tools, I'm looking at you ! ) - this will throw the phase out as well - forcing you back into problem-solving.
All the above means that the kick drum is forcing production decisions - I know people that can hear a 1ms timing difference and shifting basslines about is changing groove. This is not something that should be defined by a kick drum, nor should the choice of the bass sound, or it's pattern.
Let me be very clear - none of this is needed if you tune your kick away, and in every single case it's better to pick kicks by ear using proper monitoring rather than restrict your kick selection using theory - again Im assuming this is a point we can agree on.
We can certainly look at history and current releases for proof. every 909 I've ever used has its kick drum tuned between 20 and 50 cents sharp of a note from the western scales and this kick is working perfectly in untold numbers of productions across the 35 years it;s been used in every single musical key. If you were to download the club chart in any major country you will not find key'd kicks .. Mainly as the given keys in the file names of the samples are not even slightly accurate most of the time
Ok so regarding your other comment, - I'm afraid I must disagree - Phase effects are synergistic - Almost like a resonance peak. True phase cancellation only really occurs with two perfectly tuned partials, the moment one is tuned away ( even slightly ) the effects turn into interference and the effects are minor compared to phase cancellation.
Its the same effect as tuning two oscillators ever so slightly apart - the sound is bigger - almost larger than life.
In regards to those with Tails that have pitch in motion - again I must disagree - Pitch in motion is a vector and as such the tones created are only ever at one frequency for an infinitely small amount of time.. The results will be interference, not phase, so the interaction is vastly different and way less dramatic .. the Pitch sweep often helps matters to as this pitch vector means interference with ( relatively ) static pitched notes from the bass end of the instrumentation will be momentary .. I've always assumed this is why they are so popular in trance where the Kicks are so tightly packed together due to the high tempos.
I 100% agree that it takes real work and experience to get the bass end right. in my nearly 30 years in professional circles and after literally hundreds of mixdowns in every conceivable manner every single track is as unique as a fingerprint as the bass end is nearly always a bun-fight.
My over-arching message though is -
>> Use your ears, not your eyes or theory like this to produce .. Something I think is getting really lost these days as everyone searches for the non-existent magic bullets.
Here's an example - there are 30 kick drums in this demo :
soundcloud.com/f9-audio/f9-kick-main-audio-demo-30-kicks-in-3-minutes
Not one was picked by pitch, all were chosen by ear, tuned slightly and the tail lengths edited to fit.
On just a curious final note - I'd love to hear some of your productions where you have got perfectly keyed kicks to work - post some up as a reply - I couldn't see anything on your YT profile
@@F9Audio Challenge accepted! :D Just give me a particular case scenario where you think keyed kick do not work on modern production. There's a plethora of scenarios, pick few requirements (e.g. four on the floor k&b, changing notes, rhythm alternation etc) and I will prove you that it can be done! You only need to know what you're doing.
I remember in uni discussing with colleagues (producers, mixing engineers) about how to tune the kick drum. I'm sure you remember that, it's still a thing of today, high Q quite a boost on a frequency that fits the scale of your song but in the low registry and suddenly ringing! AKA resonation, AKA TUNING of the kick. Problem was, you didn't know where this frequency is in time and the tail harder to control. By the way that was back in 2007, London, UK. So tuning percussive elements has always been part of the plan, at least for me. Not always applying it of course, but often. From kick tuning to cymbals :)
Waiting for your reply with the requirements of the challenge tell me what to do :D
I'm not challenging you at all Alex - Just asking if you've got tracks up online professionally where you've used perfectly key'd kicks ... If you really want to why not make your own video proving how it can be done easily ..
Also - I don’t accept ‘all caps’ in the comments here
@@F9Audio oh no don’t take me wrong, I said it in a good way, phase and k&b correlating is one of my favourite topics! Will try to make a video! Wanted you to tell me a particular case scenario to make it easier but anyway. Would like to comment on many things you wrote which I completely agree. The one I agree the most is young producers blindly keying their kick because that’s what they read on a forum that has to be done. I’m saying the exact opposite! You don’t HAVE to key you kick, but if you do and KNOW what you’re doing, I find nothing bad to chose to do depending of what you want to achieve!
"We don't hear harmonic relationships around 60 hz" ... So you're saying a bassline melody can play G note 49 hz, AND THEN minor 3rd B flat note 58 hz, OR major 3rd B note 62 hz ... and it would not matter at all which 3rd interval we play, right? ... perhaps you should re-consider your saying that the note of a long and artificially tone sustaining kick doesn't matter harmonically. In some genres of music, tuning those type of kicks feels and sounds better. Never trust your ears, because your environment and other factors can influence the final sound you hear, which is why most mixes don't translate in other environments. Oscilloscopes rightfully have their place in music production. Some music genres are produced surgically, like psy-trance, while other music genres you don't care about precision, the more "human" the better for those genres.
I'm saying that our ability to accurately hear the harmonic relationships between notes falls away under the point we can physically vocalise. Try something for me - take a sine wave and play a simple triad starting from C3 ( with the since tuned at 130.81Hz as per A4=440Hz concert tuning ) - you will be able to hear all of the harmonic intervals ... Now play precisely the same chord starting from C1 - it has now just become beating waves - you cannot hear most of the intervals correctly.
Let me give you 1 word that will be the complete solution for this so called "problem". Sidechaining. That way you will have a kick that is in tone with your track but doesn't interfere with your other low frequency elements.
Even though you are right about phasing, this is isn't a complete clip and kinda misleading in my opinion.
Ok - so lets agree on one thing and go from there - you want the very best kick for your track yes ? .. What makes you think that is by having a kick perfectly tuned to the key of your track ?
@@F9Audio because eventhough it's a low end sound, it's still a note playing in your song. So if it's out of tune it will sound less good in relation with your other elements. What I do is I stack a couple of kicks with a good sound and then make them short and make a tail in tune. Kick 2 is a great plugin for it!
OK so this is where the problem lies with all of this, and i'm afraid you've illustrated it perfectly .. Have a look at the envelopes in Kick 2, the breakpoints on so many of the kicks in use are at specific points it time - But they represent momentary points a curve - A value in motion ... in these cases, the frequency of the kicks' tail is never tuned to that point , it just hits it exactly for an infinitely small point of time ... they "key" of a kick tail in motion is in motion itself, never static as claimed.
All of this is moot though - Harmony theory simply falls apart in the lowest octaves for a variety of reasons- We have only just started experiencing and using these incredibly low tones in the last 30 years
Because we cannot vocalise or reproduce the sort of fundamentals used on modern kicks and basslines with our bodies , we do not experience harmony down there as it's of no use to us from an evolutionary basis . Phase interactions are key down there, not musical theory
30-60hz is a full octave of 12 notes, that's 30 hz for all 12 notes or 2.5Hz per note on average. Now take 440-880, notes A2 - A3, that's 440Hz for all 12 notes 36Hz per note on average - 14 times the resolution. This is why tuning gets so important around the upper mids
The inverse is true at the top - as we cannot vocalise above a certain high note, our detection of pitching and harmony starts to tail off.
Again - this isn't just my opinion, this is the physical world and the human condition at work
It still makes no sence to write my sub bass in the key of my song but the kickdrum doesn't have to be. I understand that in the past a lot of artists never did this, and that a song can also sound good without tuning it, but in my experience with producing songs, a song with al the low elements in key sounds smoother. Anyway best of luck to you!:)
By the sounds of things you are not actually using key’d kicks if using Kick 2 - you are just getting better at producing .. best of luck to you too but please start to use your ears, not theory or your eyes - don’t ever discard a good kick because of a key in its file name or patch name that may be flawed information - And if you're sidechaining ridiculously heavy - it make no difference what kick you pick so you might as well use the best one you can
What about sounding out of tune?
This is the question I've been dying for someone to ask as it means you fully grasp the concepts here and I can't believe its taken more than 6 months for this to happen, so thank you !
It won't sound out of tune and this is all down to human physiology and the physics / maths of waves and frequencies ..
We do not have the same relationship with very low bass tones as we do upper bass and anything above. It's for 2 very important reasons -
1 - The average human cannot replicate the very lowest tones involved down there with the human voice ( there are some genetic exceptions ) . the human brain is desperately trying to reduce the amount of information being received by the senses at all times, so even though musical theory may exist all the way down there, we simply don't need to worry about that end of things from an evolutionary point of view so our relationship with everything starts to become phase related as oppose to pitch related
2 - We have a physical system in our ears for hearing where tiny hairs of differing lengths produce nerve signals as they vibrate in resonance with the incoming audio - The biggest hairs pick up the lowest frequency and they become thicker - that means there are slightly less the lower you go and eventually ( under a certain point - and this varies like all genetic traits ) we can't actually hear the very lowest tones with our ears, but we can feel them with our bodies instead .. Although the human hearing is quoted at lowest 20HZ - in practice it's much much higher.
3 - A3 on a midi keyboard is 440Hz - the next A ( A4 ) is double that at 880HZ - that gives 440HZ for the entire octave worth of notes - that's ( on average ) 36.666HZ per note of our western scale
A1 is at 55 Hz and A0 is 27.5Hz - that gives 27.5 HZ for that entire octave - that means the resolution between notes down there is tiny compared with the upper octaves - It's ( on average ) 2.29HZ per note - that is 1/14 the of the resolution of the A3-A4 Octave .. this is an order of magnitude difference and there's no way given the physical nature of the hairs in our ears that the thicker hairs can become 14 X more densely packed - if anything they will decrease in density
I'm sure you can see the issue - due to the exponential nature of pitch, and the physical nature of our sensory equipment , the lower the go , the harder it is to judge pitch ( hence the reason for all the "808 is outta tune " memes in Hip Hop ) .. you can test this by pulling up the purest sound possible - a sine wave and playing chord around C3
Now go to C1, play the same chord and hear the difference - that's just beating waves and we cannot hear the musical structure - A much bigger animal like a whale or elephant might with different hearing abilities, but we can't,
Most modern kick tails that sound good in clubs will sit with their fundamental somewhere between 30 and 60Hz - we cannot hear pitch properly down there
So with that in mind - and given the fact that the ONLY place where your kick can cause Negative ( and positive ) Phase issues causing levelling issues is to tune it perfectly to the principal note in your production - why on earth would you do so given the above
My favourite current analogy is placing a landmine under your lawn and telling everyone to step around it all the time - it's fine until you forget and then it's not a good day.
So I'll leave this with you to test and make up your own mind - n the meantime I'm going to be getting on with productions by not worrying ever about the 'key' of my kick and enjoying my sample library and concentrate on the actual music I'm making
Use your ears, not your eyes or flawed theory to produce
@@F9Audio Thank you for this rich and informative answer. I was aware of that but wanted to know a professional's take on it. I didn't expect such a well-detailed answer supported by facts. My main issue right now is when I play different notes with my 808, it sounds fine in some notes and out of phase in others, I tried sidechain compression but didn't get satisfying results because of the ducking effect. What do you do in such scenarios?
@@anissbenthami listen on the best pair of headphones you have - does the problem still happen ? .. I think I know what’s going on but need to be sure
@@F9Audio I tried listening on different headphones and speakers and the problem persists. It's a phase cancellation issue
Is your Current kick Tuned exactly to a note ?
Im sorry but this isnt very great info. Yes a kick made from an unwavering 80hz will not sit in a mix well with a 80hz bassline... but you should be compensating for this with things like sidechain compression, or some kind of sidechained dynamic/multiband eq. In a lot of electronic genres you definitely want the bulk of your kick energy centered at the root frequency if possible
Sean - Full disclosure here - I'm a veteran Grammy Nominated producer with 27 years of experience and university-level training in Physics and Audio video systems - I've worked with the world's best engineers and talk regularly with those mixing at the highest levels of pop, EDM, etc. So please trust me when I say - this theory is utterly, utterly flawed and I please ask you to stop listening to the terrible advice thrown around by those who should know better ...
We are not talking about 80hz here, we are talking about much lower frequencies and under about 60HZ, things change very, very quickly.
The whole idea here is that tuning your kick drum to the exact Tonic note of the scale will result in the frequencies working together positively and harmonically - In other words, you are applying music theory whilst totally ignoring the bipolar problems of Phase.
The moment the human voice cannot vocalise a sound, our relationship with it changes. Harmony is only important across the human vocal range - Your senses are delivering 100 times the amount of information your brain can handle and we filter out everything not considered needed. Under a certain frequency, we no longer have a harmonic relationship with the audio and it all becomes more about interacting waves.
This gets extreme in the very lower octaves, also for a very simple mathematical reason. Let me explain further.
30-60hz is actually an entire octave - that gives only 30HZ to carry all 12 notes - an average of 2.5 Hz per note ( please note - this is an average and the actual spread is non-linear but it will give us a measurable point of comparison ). In the well-known 440-880hz octave we have 440Hz for all 12 notes - that’s 16X the resolution. Between 880HZ and 1760Hz we have 880HZ, 32 times the resolution. This is why tuning issues become so apparent in the midrange ( also where our human hearing is concentrated physiologically so we can hear instructions from other humans ). The sound and audio can be completely described using physics and none of it is linear - It’s exponential ( viewing it going up ) and logarithmic ( viewing it going down ) .
With these physiological and mathematical responses, harmony below a certain point is not viable for the human condition ( I’m sure larger species like elephants or Blue whales might have a differing relationship than we do as they can vocalise at a much lower point, but even this will reach a point where the resolution between frequencies breaks that down too )
We can forget harmony down there ( and test this, create a perfect sine and start playing chords from C0 upwards - all you will hear is beating tones, not a major or minor chord ) … Now try listening to C0 and C#0 - can you really, honestly hear the difference of a half-tone?
There’s a joke in Hip Hop - “The 808’s out of tune” - this is because they often are on so many records as many are tuned by hand or pulled from sample packs and the note of the filename believed when they are often a way off - The reason these make it all the way to the mix is that it’s so frankly terribly hard to tune down there by ear - impossible in some keys and sounds for the very reasons above.
What is important is Phase - and again for mathematical reasons, this gets more and more important the lower down the audio spectrum we go.
The energy carried by a frequency increases exponentially the lower we go. Right now we are using fundamentals every single day that are under 60hz ( like those shown in this video ). This creates enormous blooms of information down there ( which are easy to see in waveforms views) and one thing is key to their interaction- Phase - and as this video shows it can cause you major issues that are not consistent and difficult to diagnose.
>> Now we come to the really bad bits of information - Every single workaround from this problem creates issues either at that time or later on and you must absolutely remember that these issues dissolve very quickly indeed when the two interacting frequencies are tuned apart.
1 - Phase locked bass - this is a classic argument by those who are digging in on this concept. They say - ‘You make sure you are using a synth where you can re-trigger the phase of your bass every note” , Then you line it up with an oscilloscope and you are all good.
BUT - This works only if your bassline plays exactly the same rhythm of the kick - or say -a constantly repeated offbeat with an identical distance from the kick every note ( not the funkiest of rhythms ). The moment you have a bassline that has any other rhythm, where the notes fall on other divisions within the bar, you will have to work note by note to slip those notes about too to keep them phase aligned. Phase is a function of time.
These movements will interfere with your grooves and you have this process dictating where your bass notes should fall - Also - It fixes you to one sort of bass sound. It means you cannot use free-running analog sources
It also presents another equally vexing problem - If you are heavily using the tonic/root note against a perfectly tonic/ root note tuned Kick, and you are perfectly phase aligned ( bearing in mind it only has to slip a tiny bit for any cancellation to start to occur ), every time they play together they will create additional blooms of information as they interfere positively.
This in extreme cases can cause a 6DB jump in level - Should your production suddenly move to another note in the bass, this synergistic level bump will reduce dramatically and the other notes will all sound weak in comparison - this is just simple wave mechanics - It’s the 100% reverse of the cancellation and is just as unpredictable as the negative phase effects shown in this video - In fact, if I’d rendered out say 100 bars, at some point there would have been a massively loud bloom of bass information.
None of this is good - the only way to control it is dynamics and quite extreme dynamics at that
Even after all this, it’s then nearly always forgotten that when you come to mix and apply an EQ to your kick or Bass and start making changes, you will instantly shift the phase. All digital EQs use delays to work and this will instantly shift things about and you will have to start the alignment again to keep your balances.
Also - some plugins don’t report their Latency correctly under mix circumstances, so they can actually slip sounds backwards or forwards in time - Phase is a function of time so this will cause you phase issues once again meaning you have to re-align everything although in practice, you’ll probably never be aware of it and will be unknowingly losing power within your balance
Let me be 100% clear - You don’t have to worry about any of the above the moment you tune your kick away or use a kick with tail in motion ( Tail pitch dropping over time ). You can then also use any bass source you wish to without any problems.
2 - Sidechaining
It’s human nature to assume all producers make and like the same music as we do personally - It’s simply not the case. Side-chaining is a vital step in some genres, but in many others, it’s avoided, and in some it’s an absolute no-no. My job here is to talk to everyone across multiple styles and genres.
Without a doubt sidechaining can help reduce the phase issues on both ends ( cancellation and frequency blooming ) but lets just be realistic here - Phase cancellation of perfectly tuned fundamentals happens even at low relative levels as it’s at the point of synergy.
The only way to 100% ensure no phasing effects are happening to your perfectly tuned kick is to use 100% sidechaining - in other words - Completely get rid of any bass for the entire length of the kick - If you bring the volume back early using a dedicated sidechain envelope based plugin, or a threshold set higher than the fall-off of the kick you can cause these cancellations or blooms at the end of the tail of your kick creating modulation within the general bass end, or force you to play offbeat bass only.
These are two extremely big production restrictions and you should never produce yourself into a corner like this - The art is what people respond to, not the technicality.
With extreme sidechaining like this, you also lose the bassline completely for the 1st beat of every bar ( and please also remember you will need to either sidechain or High pass all synths and other sounds that may have subtonics in them too that play root notes ) …
This means that if you have any form of chord sequence in your production and you are following it by playing root notes of the chords on that bass instrument, you are losing that all-important 1st beat musical change and replacing it with a very large Tonic tone - no matter what the chord.
This concept also completely forgets the end result - We are nearly always talking here about tracks heading to clubs, but we’re mixing on midrange monitors in a small room ( so we’re not hearing it how it will end up ) .
If you tune everything to the precise tonic note in the subsonics ( where the resulting wavefronts coming out of the club or festivals’ system have the most energy ) these tones will reverberate around the club and overlap enormously to the bass and the combined effect of both being perfectly tuned can create droning tonic resonances and rumbles without definition - You’ll then get all kinds of weird cancellations due to the 3D nature of sound interactions as opposed to the Quasi-2D nature of audio interactions in our DAWS.
I’ve heard this so many times in clubs and it’s what DeadMau5 was referring to in his “rant about kicks’ ... "All you're going to hear is 30HZ across the board" ( might be paraphrasing here, but you get the idea ) .
Once again - all this falls away the very moment there is the secret sauce in your bass end - Contrast.
Tune your kick away from your tonic ( or principal root if your track never reaches the tonic - Stardust - 'Music Sounds better with you' a perfect example ) . OR - Use a kick with tail in motion.
If you head out online and do a round-up of every single major mix engineer’s interviews ( and now we have a ton of them in electronic and club music thanks to the explosion in club music and extreme hip hop ) you will always find variations on the same idea for the amazing bass end these guys bring … “ I always find a unique place for the Bass and kick so they can live together without getting in each other's way” .. They actively search out contrast between the kick and bass - that’s made 100% harder with the fundamentals in the same place.
Now here’s an interesting point - Many people claim to be using tuned kicks when they are actually not - for two reasons
1 - Most of the kicks in circulation are completely inaccurate in their labelling
2 - Many ( including nearly everything from Kick 2 ) use tails in motion
The second point is extremely important. Kick 2 is a brilliant device that uses pitch envelopes with breakpoints on it you can control and edit - so many people I know pick out the breakpoints and claim this is the key without realising it’s a point on an envelope that also may have a curve applied.
In these cases, the pitch of the tail is controlled by a vector, not a static integer, so claiming any part of that as a precise value for the duration of the kick is the same as claiming the earth is flat.
Given the control rates of plugins these days, any pitch controlled by a modern envelope or curve will not even be at that pitch for an entire cycle, so these proposed ‘keys’ are not information - they are just garbage.
What’s interesting though is that for this very reason they will often create way less in the way of dangerous phase interactions - Phase problems occur at their apex with 2 ( or more ) perfectly tuned sources being at differing parts of the cycle - this cannot occur if the cycle length is constantly in motion ..
As a result - Kicks with tails in motion can be a killer weapon - Ironically - so many producers who claim to get amazing bass end with Perfectly tonic-tuned kicks are not using tuned kicks at all - they are using kicks with Tails in motion and that’s why it sounds so good ( and because they have put their attention to the bass end extensively )
So with all this is mind - what do we do ?
It’s so simple -
1 - Use your ears and stop using your eyes or perceived flawed theory to produce your bottom end ( e.g. looking at the key labels on audio files or presets ), Every single track is different and unique as a fingerprint so will need a different approach on the bass end ( where all the energy is ).
If I were to suggest you “sniff’ your kick drums first to see if they’d work, this would seem nonsensical.
Don’t place all the importance on your sight either - we only experience sounds with our ears ( and sense of touch way down the bottom ) so concentrate your efforts there and stop discounting kicks and presets because of a key label - you might be discarding the perfect kick !
You can only truly do this when you have a monitoring system capable of replicating the sounds correctly and many monitors fall off very fast under 50HZ due to the unavoidable physics of cabinet design ( all cabinets act as physical high -pass filters ) .. This can be sidestepped with w really good pair of headphones ( as an example - My current Focals go all the way to 5HZ - somewhere I would never be able to go with Monitors )
2 - Try as many kicks as possible and don’t be afraid to swap out halfway through production - We al use conformation bias as we produce so we don’t want to admit we might have chosen the wrong kick at the early stages - it takes minutes to try a change of kick and we must learn to just bite the bullet and do it occasionally. Go for contrast every time .
3 - And this is the big one - play with your kick’s length - make it as short as you possibly can for your given genre and then you will have a ton of room for your bass to rise up going warmth, funk and musical movement ( Remember the kick is a percussive element and bass is for bass ) .. This is the most important piece of advice I can give you and I promise it will make your life better - It will stop the tail of your kick resonating out across large rooms, taking up a ton of room and stealing your basses’ place and will help bring your mix together in a way more pleasing way - Also it stops you having to use hugely long sidechain phases if your are using it creatively, and gives more room for the music and art to come through -
No one will leave a club humming your Kick drum - so don’t let it eat up 40% of your drops’ space.
There’s a reason Hip Hop and Drum and bass use ridiculously short kicks at the moment - it allows the sub bass sounds on these productions to come flying through - Let's face it - these genres sound amazing in clubs ( also check the hip hop kicks on splice - you won’t see any key information on them - hmm - maybe they’re onto something )
We have only in the last 30 years ( and only the last 15 in earnest ) started utilising this area of subsonic as in the past, having the currently fashionable amount of subsonics in your mix / production would not be compatible with Vinyl cutting , the analog equipment or tape storage. It’s human nature for all sorts of bad concepts to bubble up but this whole thing about Keys kicks needs to be called out
It’s dangerous, has no basis in musical, technical or accepted engineering theory, experience or expertise and throws restrictions on your work
Please please please stop doing this and start using your ears again - you will set yourself free
@@F9Audio the thing is that you will run to all these exact same problems tuning or not tuning your kick! Frequency down sweep will overlap with your base fundamental note no matter what. Inevitably. So it’s not about tuning or not tuning alone, it’s about altogether, compromising, arrangement, programming and mixing.
There isn’t an issue if you have your bass before or after the kick. That’s why many producers move the bass waveforms and not quantise everything. What you are saying is misleading.
It's not misleading in the slightest - if your bass plays at the same point as your kick ( and yes some basslines are produced so they don't, but many more do ) and your kick is tuned to the exact same place as your bass, they are subject to phase-based interference - even if you slide things backwards and forwards a touch - This is just simple physics, a lot of which I will explain in later videos ... We can certainly find extreme technique where this doesn't happen ( like phase -locked synths and note by note editing ) but you are simply restricting yourself if you have to do all of this simply to have a kick in key - The moment you tune your kick off-key none of this is an issue and you can pick great kicks by ear and not theory and use any bass source you wish - that leads to more work in the creative end of the production which is where you should always concentrate - no one walks away humming your kick drum ... Always remember you experience audio with your ears not your eyes so please trust these first, not concepts you’ve picked up from other producers as often things are said by named artists that bear no relation to the underlying physics or time-perfected methods ... The whole concept revolves around Harmony theory and this is just not have the same importance between 30-60z ( an entire octave ) for reasons I will illustrate in later videos
Ugh just side chain lol
Yeah, I had the same thought? Then if you want a longer kick for some reason it doesn't matter if it's in key or not.. right?
Exactly Nathan - Just please don’t worry about the key - most of the data is screwed anyway as many kick generators use frequency envelopes so the pitch is moving - just find a great kick that works with your track - AND tweak the length - that’s where the magic is - Shorter kicks = more room for bass = better bass end
Sorry to say but you TOTALLY missed the spot on this video!
The problem doesn't come from the kick being in tune but from your bass synth to be "analog style" meaning the wavevorm is not retriggered at every hot of a note. Look at the waveform of your bassline and you'll see the phase is shifting from one hit to another. Use "retrig" option or "O-phase" depending on your vst, or simply copy/paste a one note hit and you won't have this problem anymore... then you can add/remove some track delay (by ms or even better by sample) to really align your kick and bass for them to work in fact together for even stronger kick/bass and better blend.
Now this is if you want something rock solid, sometimes the phase cancellation and shift is also what you're after to make the sound more evolving and convey a more "organic feel".. that's really depending on the genre. But please don't leave this wrong info here coz it's just wrong what you are saying and people will believe it.
Also, if you use a analog drum machine (like elektron analog rytm) the kick will be constantly shifting phase as well (as the VCO is constantly playing in the back so unless you sync your key for it to a multiple of the tempo, phase will always be changing too), so resampling one kick hit and copy paste it might be the solution if you're after consistent kick/bass relationship. Don't forget about ducking (sidechain) or tools like xfer LFO where you can shape the bass level for it not to play when the kick plays, then you have no phase issues at all as there is no summing of phase shifted signals ;)
Brice - I really haven't missed the point at all and in fact you are re-enforcing it - have a look back over your arguments - see if you can spot the massive flaw that means an absolute ton of note-by-note work - I look forward to your answer
Hi Brice - Not had your reply so I'll fill in here .. As you agree, the problem is phase and phase is temporal ( time-related ). Its effects are huge from just small changes in timing. If you were use a key’d kick and to turn on oscillator phase re-sync ( so every note has the same phase ), or use a single note sample, then line the bass’s phase up with the kick, the only bassline rhythm that would lock 100% would be one that played exactly the same rhythm as the kick ( on one note ) .
The moment you play any form of counter rhythm to your kick drum ( almost 100% of basslines ) you need to slide every single root-note about in time across the entirety of your bassline until they are in phase again ( this would also cause ‘blooms’ of information where the kick and bass come together)
You then have two choices - either you copy and paste a small amount of bass you have worked on across your entire track ( bearing in mind the bass sound will be quite sterile sounding because of the phase re-triggering ), or you repeat this process across every part of the track.
As you rightly point out, you would not be able to use any form of analog styled bass including anything from a hardware synth as the phase from each note is different ( yes I know things the Moog Minatour have phase re-triggering, but they also need communication using either midi or CV/Gate - neither of which are sample-locked from a triggering point of view so each note will have minute timing variations to it ) - this means ( again ) full note-by-note alignment across the entire part
But that’s not all - all EQ’s apart from phase-linear impart phase changes, as do many other digital processes in use. Not only that, some plugins in do not report their latency 100% correctly under certain conditions ( we’ve all bounced down a part that was perfectly in time only to see it shifted slightly on the resulting waveform ). This means that every time you apply a plugin, or major bass-end EQ move, you might have to stop, check everything for timing issues and start the whole process again if a phase shift is present.
Again - this is not my opinion, this is not a guess - this is the physics of audio and I am fully trained in it.
Nearly all the problems mentioned above disappear the moment you tune your kick away from your bass. And every one of the world’s greatest mix engineers always say something along the lines of “I try to find a separate EQ pocket for both the kick and bass” - this cannot be done if you have them tuned to the same place.
Please, please let this terribly dangerous piece of information go - it’s never been a good idea to produce by theory - use your ears to pick great kicks for your tracks, don’t ever discount kicks because of a given Key ( most terribly inaccurate ) and use coarse and fine tuning to find the best pocket, then play with the length to get them short as possible for the production / Genre.
If you want a minor Magic-bullet to try - experiment with kicks that have a tail in motion - It doesn’t have to be much, but any kind of pitch envelope on a modern plugin will create a kick tail where it’s constantly in motion meaning phase issues are reduced even more.
Good luck
The maker of this video doesn't know enough about it to make this video. Oscillator retrigger is available on most modern VSTis and on many modern hardware synths. This allows you to retrigger the oscillator/s from the same starting point (phase) every time a new note is triggered, and allows you to precisely adjust the phase of eg. the bassline so that, when the bass and the sustain pitch of the kick play together, they do in fact reinforce each other instead of cancelling.
There is so much bad information on the internet, and ignorance masquerading as expertise, and this video is a part of it.
I don't personally tune kicks to basslines, as if a bassline contains more than one pitch then the idea of relative phase doesn't even apply much of the time, but if your material is suitable for it and you want to, it's perfectly possible to do so effectively and without destroying the low frequency energy of your track.
I know all about oscillator retrigger Colin - and all about phase ( please see my other replies here ) - I would actually respectfully argue that you might not be fully informed so if you dont' mind I'd like to correct you here :
Using fully aligned bass tones as you suggest would only work if every single bass note was in precisely the same position in relation to the kick it overlaps with every single time a bass note is triggered ( Phase is a function of time ) - The very moment you have more than 1 relative position for your bassline, you would then have to create a separate track for that note position and then re-align the phase -
This also means you would have to keep your kick drum pattern identical ( easiest obviously being 4/4 ) so if you had any more complex ( or interesting ) kick drum patterns in play you would have to re-align on a note-by-note and kick-by-kick basis.
Another downside is that your kick drum choice is now dictating micro shifts in the rhythms - that should never be the case.
That's before we even discuss the problem that a kick drum would be dictating the sound design ( and sound source ) of your bass sound - This is far from ideal.
Even if you went to the extremes I mentioned above, the very moment anything moved the position of the bass notes and kicks, these alignments would be in jeopardy - Please bear in mind that many plugins are known for not returning latency values correctly to DAWs and having worked professionally in audio since the 90s on every conceivable digital system, I can say with utter confidence that every single system I've ever used will introduce minuscule delays on nearly every session as code from differing sources comes together in modern workflows -
Another point that is nearly always forgotten is that all EQ will use delays to operate - in Hardware units this is created by capacitance or inductors, and in software, coded delay lines - by their very definition - all modern plug-in EQs will ( in normal modes ) create delays so sticking something as simple as an SSL style EQ on a kick will change the phase relationship between the kick and the bass - you would have to start again.
You could use linear phase EQ but this can cause 'pre-ringing' with even moderate Q levels which you may not want to use - Think of the plugin chains that end up on kicks and bass during mixdown - any single one of these could upset the carefully set up relationships created above and you'd potentially have to start again.
Let me be finally clear - None of the above is an issue if you tune your kick away from being hard-tuned to a principal note from your production - you don't have to go far for none of this to be an issue ( in the same way detuning two oscillators a small amount creates warmth and the phasing stops ) but it is vital to do so as otherwise you are basically doing the equivalent of burying a landmine in your production's metaphorical garden lawn and then just stepping over it - It's all fine, until it's not,
I totally agree that the internet is full of bad information, but it is also full of people assuming the worst and trolling without really looking around the channel
This video, I must admit was deliberately designed to be triggering - for one reason :
I really wanted to know why this ridiculous idea of hard-tuning your kicks came about as and why on earth it is still perpetuated - I now see that much of this comes from Psy Trance these days.
It's human nature to assume the only music is the music that person makes, but it's my job to educate for every single genre, not just one.
We have huge amounts of control over the tuning of our kick drums these days ( if you take cents as the lowest until of control there are 1200 options ) - only a few of these will cause the cancellation I show here and I think we can all agree that should be avoided - why cause potential damage to one of the most important sounds in your track ?
As I've said multiple times here - Every single 909 I've ever used has a pitch between 40 cents and 50 cents sharp of a note on the western scale - it's the principal reason why it works in every single key ( including F where many are tuned close to )
lol wow I cannot believe people are eating this up. Hook line and sinker. It does not matter if your kick and bass are in the same key or different keys, they are still occupying the same frequencies. You are going to lose power somewhere no matter what. This is why you try not to overlap those frequencies by placing your kick and bass notes apart from each other OR, you create space for the bass to sit with the kick... like side chaining them. The "fundamental" if this video is completely inaccurate and creating an issue for the sake of creating the issue and then intentionally leaving out what the solutions are.
I'm sorry but I can respectfully disagree completely with your comment - Phase interactions are at a peak state only when the fundamentals of the sources are identical - tune away even slightly and the negative effects change dramatically and turn into interference - This is pure physics and is very well understood .... You have ultimately enormous choice with your kick drum's tuning, but the only place it can cause the most damage is when it is hard tuned to the most prominent note of your track ( frequently the Tonic - often referred to as the key )
@F9Audio Why are you focusing on such an extraordinarily impractical use case? Of course if you have 2 of the exact same sound they will cancel each other out, who does this? Putting them in the exact same key does not imply the 2 sounds are going to be identical and by all means they should never be identical. Your bass synth will likely have multiple oscillators right? But those seems to work just fine, and why is that? Because each of them has a different characteristic or is detuned slightly. So, if you must have a kick and a bass that are identical for some reasons, you're going to have to add some saturation or something to change it up. But guess what? Even when you change them up, you still lose power in 1 or the other. Unless you solve that issue by making space for the bass to sit with the kick.
Furthermore, your video is about putting the kick in key with the bass. Not about phase. A kick in key does not imply if the bass is in Cm then the kick has to be in Cm. You still have D, E♭, F, G, A♭, B♭ to play with and even then, no matter what you choose, those 2 instruments are fighting for the same frequencies and must be solved with one of the many variants of sidechain techniques that exist specifically for this.
It actually sounds like we completely agree on most of this
OK so here's why - I am 27 years into this as a producer ( artist name was Freemasons - we were most active around 2005-2012 and did very well luckily ) but in between, I've worked in all manner in the audio industry and have seen waves of advice come and go.. I now run F9 which is dedicated to sound design and helping the next generation through all of this ...
I was getting floods of emails of new producers getting themselves into a right old pickle because it had gone around the forum side of the industry that you had to nail your kick's tuning down to the tonic note of your scale - This was ( erroneously ) known as "keying your kick" ...
Producers were going to extreme lengths to do this and nearly every time there were real issues in their fledgling productions caused by the kind of phase cancellation shown in this video .. None of them understood the idea of phase, they were just following completely flawed advice ( the likes of which you can see here in some comments - ) .
With this video, i can point them to a practical example of the most destructive form of phase cancellation and why they should stop using flawed theory, stop using the (often completely incorrect ) Given keys on sample's filenames or presets and concentrate on their ears when choosing kick drums,
Also - the sounds of kick and bass may be different as you say above, but the underlying fundamentals still have the ability to act on each other as if they are sine waves - Fourier discovered this over 100 years ago ( and is also why you have to be very careful of more than 1 oscillators in exactly the same register ) . As the fundamentals in 99% of bass instruments carry the most energy it's vital to understand this.
For me the perfect example is the 909 Kick - It's not tuned to a note in the western scales - every single hardware ( and now software ) version of it I've ever seen is about 30-40Cents sharp and no doubt one of the reasons it's been so immensely popular
Here's the follow-up video discussing Phase in much more detail.
czcams.com/video/qptvf5hUi4g/video.html
And another on kick drums in general
czcams.com/video/qFd8oaxUy8g/video.html
This is not just a singular video and I will actually update as soon as I have time..
@@F9Audio Even in this reply I have learned.... Thank you!
I know I am going to get hate for this. But, I mean, it seems like you are conflating some concepts. The "key" of a kick is very often dictated by its top end. What you are demonstrating in this video are basically a "bass" and a "kick", but they sound almost the same and occupy the same frequency and temporal space. This is the issue, not that you are keying the kick. This happens with any track in a mix, not just kicks that happen to be keyed. It is almost like you want to argue that keying a bass and a piano is also wrong, because they also happen to occupy the same frequencies, and yes, that is a thing. But if you transpose one it will sound terrible, and I would argue that a detuned kick, that is, a kick with a strong tonal component, also sounds like crap if it isn't keyed. So you solve it by not detuning it to avoid phase issues, but by deciding what actually brings more to the table in that frequency area at that time.
To me your argument is almost like "you should never tune your guitar, here is why" and just showing a setup where it obviously interferes with stuff in the same frequency area. So yeah.
This being said, I do also get phasing issues but they are not super hard to address. I use Trackspacer and make concious decisions about what needs to be in a track at a specific time. Not a pro, just my point of view.
We do'nt ever do hate on this channel Lars - I remove all comments that spiral out like that ... I'm actually curious where you got this from though as I'm afraid it's incorrect - Are you au fait with Fourier's theories and processes regarding harmonics ?
We didnt hear back from you so I'll fill in here. The 'note' of any monophonic tonal sound comes from its fundamental harmonic. In nearly all cases ( not all ) this is the lowest harmonic and the strongest - If it's unknown it can be found using a Fourier Transform. 99.9% of modern kicks in circulation today ( and every single one from the Kick generator plugins ) end with a periodic wave with a fundamental frequency somewhere between 90 and 30 hz, Whilst there are nearly always 2nd order and 3rd order + Harmonics present, they are weaker and the one to watch is the fundamental as ( with all audio in the. human experience ) the energy increases exponentially as you decrease frequency.
Phase is king in these lowest octaves as we cannot detect harmony in the same way as we do in the ranges that the human voice can vocalise. This is also due to the exponentially decreasing resolution between octaves -
30-60Hz is an entire octave so if we were to divide this range equally by 12 ( we use even tempered scales these days so this isn’t exactly how our scales work but will give us decent references ) that gives an average of 2.5hz difference between the 12 notes .. Lets now look at say 240-480Hz, a range where bass and piano might interact - that’s 250hz between all 12 notes so an average of 20Hz between them - 8 Times the resolution between frequencies.
I will demonstrate this in further videos but trust me when I say Harmony is not important when you get all the way down to the space where our modern kick and bass fundamentals exist - Phase is the thing to watch and it can eat your bass end if you’re not careful.
The whole theory around keying your kick revolves around keeping harmony intact down there and it simply creates enormous issues that even those that evangelise about it don’t often realise
For example - the most common solution to this is to phase lock your bass sound ( so the waveform of the synth's oscillators re-trigger identically each note ). You then slide the bass around until it’s in phase - another version is to use just 1 sampled note for the bass … There are many enormous problems to this :
1- As the given energy increases at lower frequencies, this can create huge Blooms of information when they play together and the only solution then is a ton of dynamic work that is a detriment to your baseline
2 - The only bass rhythm that guarantees this phase relationship across a whole baseline part is one where the bass plays exactly the same rhythm as the kick - the moment you use any form of counter rhythm you need to slide every single bass root note individually to keep it in phase - this is not only terribly time-consuming but may change your baselines groove.
3- Your baseline then needs to copy and pasted to every single part or this process needs to be repeated for every single alteration in bass sound
4 - Whilst you are no doubt using EQ to perfect the sound in production, you will absolutely need to apply additional processing to kick and bass sounds during the mixing phase ( Pun intended ) and all of this will directly affect the phase of these sounds - Nearly all EQ’s create phase shifts - it’s simply how they work. This limits you to phase-linear EQs - all of which have well-documented issues in the bottom end ( and very high latency ). Also - many plugins don’t fully report their latency correctly and this will shift audio often without your knowledge
5 - Your bass sound is basally sterile, has no life and often has to be copied and pasted across an entire production - human’s love movement in musical parts - it's why analog synthesis is still so prominent , why modulation is so important in all sound design and why there's a ton a plugins making everything 'wonky' at the moment
All of this is completely avoidable by not tuning your kick perfectly to the key of your track as these phase-related issues simply disappear very quickly - you then don’t have to hammer the sidechaining ( or frequency-dependent ducking like trackspacer ) so hard either . Please please please, let go of this idea that harmony is vital down there - it’s just not and I’ll give examples here soon.
Now as I say in the video - this is not my opinion, all of this is wave mechanics and phase in action and it’s probably one of the most carefully studied area in modern physics as it’s a fundamental part of our understanding of all quantum effects - the knowledge that powers our modern world. I feel very lucky to have been trained in this and audio when I was younger and have loved returning to it in the last few years
Many producers are trying to produce by theory and this is terribly dangerous - We experience music with our ears, not our eyes and this video is the start of me hoping to return people to trusting the two amazing listening devices on either side of their head and to stop trying to find some badly thought out magic -bullet that has turned into producer lore simply due to the creation of Kick-generator plugins and a few badly thought-out arguments from producers who have little or no knowledge of what phase actually is and what effects it in their day to day workflow.
Use your ears to pick kicks, then play with the length ( this is where your time is much better spent as the more room you can leave for bass parts the better - and the reason nearly all D&B and Hip Hop kicks are very short ) and then use fine/coarse tuning to get them to sit perfectly. Once you’ve done this, use diagnostics and metering to check for issues … This will normally take a fraction of time and effort and you can then spend that time on the important bit - the artistic and musical elements of your production … Music is not about how it sounds - it’s about how it makes you feel
No one ever walks away whistling your kick drum
Well, I am not claiming to have read them all cover-to-cover or to remember all of it, but yes, reasonably.
@@larsthomasdenstad9082 see above Lars
Your video unfortunately gets almost everything wrong. Long story short, your solution here does nothing but make your low-end even muddier. The real fix is to avoid overlapping kick bodies and bass notes in the first place. So you should either be using sidechain/ducking, or you shouldn't have a separate bass synth at all when the kick body is so long. Here are my thoughts:
0:06-0:15 Kicks do not have to have a single steady pitch like this one. In fact, many EDM kicks have a body that rapidly descends in frequency, or a body with 2-3 frequencies in succession, or just filtered noise with no one frequency in particular. Not all kicks have a key. But this one does, because its body is a long steady tone. This "kick" is more like an 808 sample with a clicky transient.
0:22 this looks like a virtual analog synth, which means it probably has free-running oscillators. Not a good way to make a sub because the initial phase on note onset is essentially unpredictable, you should be using a synth with direct control over oscillator phase.
0:36 yep, look closely at the bass waveform: you can see that half of the onsets start with a peak pointing up, and the other half pointing down. The phase at onset is inconsistent. Oddly though, it doesn't look like it's a free-running oscillator, it looks like the synth is flipping the polarity of every other note.
0:38 - 0:45 Yes. Compare a G chord over a G bass note to the a G chord over an F# bass note - the out-of-key bass is going to sound pretty weird ("unresolved"), and the in-key bass is going to sound strong ("resolved"). Tuning pitched instruments sounds good.
0:45 - 0:48 I have no idea why you're mixing together an 808 kick and a sub bass with almost identical amplitude envelopes. No producer worth their salt would do this unless they WANT a muddy, unpredictable bass sound - they would either use the 808 sub by itself, or they would sharply slice off all of the kick's sub content, and only then synthesize a separate sub bass. Or they would use sidechain or "ducking"... but that only makes sense to do if the kick body is shorter than the bass note
0:52 - 0:58 Well yeah, of course when you mix two sub frequencies together like this it's going to be a mess. Although look! you can see the effect of the alternating polarity from the bass synth! Every other bass note was polarity-flipped, and that's visible here as every 2nd kick/bass hit interfering differently than the others.
1:02 - 1:11 Yep, that's what happens when you mix two sub frequencies together. That's why almost nobody does this. You might use sidechain or "ducking", but in this case there's no point since the kick body is just as long as each bass note. So the entirety of the bass note would be ducked and it wouldn't make a difference if it was there or not.
1:37 - 1:57 This explanation is a little incorrect. More precisely, any two audio signals that are added together DO interfere. Usually the two signals are different enough in frequency content or periodicity that the result is a whole mess of constructive and destructive interference together, which sounds normal to us. However, the two signals you added together are nearly identical and almost completely regular, which means that their interference can be MOSTLY constructive or MOSTLY destructive at one time, and the resulting signal can have a significantly different amplitude.
2:12 - 2:27 Not "any decent modern synth" will have free-running oscillators. Usually it's just the virtual analog ones, because they're replicating a technical limitation of the past. In fact many synth plugins today are lazy and they don't bother keeping track of the oscillator phase while the synth isn't actually outputting a signal. So when a note begins, it will either start it at the same phase every time, or it will start it with a totally random phase in an effort to imitate a free-running oscillator.
2:28 - 2:32 that's polarity, not phase. The buttons at 2:47 are mislabeled. Usually there's no need to be this pedantic, but it's a very common misnomer that causes a lot of confusion around the concept of phase.
2:51 - 2:54 The confusion comes from the fact that a polarity inversion has the same effect as a 180 degree phase shift... for any purely periodic signal containing only odd harmonics - such as pure sinusoids - and that's it. You can invert the polarity of a noise signal, but that doesn't give it a "180 degree phase shift", because noise does not have phase.
2:54 - 3:06 When comparing two similar signals, this is called a null test. You may hear the misnomer "phase cancellation" when talking about the null test, but this term only describes periodic waves with very similar frequencies. The null test works just as well on aperiodic signals like impulses or noise, which don't have any phase to speak of. Its mechanism is destructive interference - it has nothing to do with phase.
3:06 - 3:20 This isn't a phase shift, this is a time delay. Dan Worrall has a great video on this: czcams.com/video/H3ZyaXgTqjM/video.html Anyway, thinking about phase shift here would only be useful if the signal was totally periodic and steady in frequency - for a given time delay, effective phase shift depends on frequency. But the null test doesn't care about phase or frequency - it tests whether or not two signals are exactly identical. A delayed signal is not identical to the un-delayed original, so the null test fails.
3:30 - 3:43 Half true. First you're forgetting about the role of amplitude - it looked like the bass synth had a smaller amplitude than the kick, but if they were closer in amplitude then you would really have serious problems. Second, even if they had different frequencies, the two sinusoids would still overlap and interfere.
3:44 - 4:02 What - ??? that's a complete mess. You pretty much just got lucky that the bass and the 808 constructively interfered at the beginning of each hit and destructively interfered towards the end, but it could have been the other way around. Plus, if you try this with a bassline that's more than one note, they're going to interfere differently every different note. Not to mention, you changed the BASS pitch, not the KICK pitch, so all you did was put your bass out of tune.
4:03 - 4:13 This is nonsense. Again, you changed your bass pitch, not your kick pitch. But even if you left the bass in tune and changed the kick instead, it wouldn't be any better! The problem isn't that the bass and kick have identical pitches, the problem is that you're superposing them like this in the first place - when you really don't need to. For a big room house four-on-the-floor one-note sub like this, all you need is one 808. In this case you don't need the synth bass at all, because it's doing the same thing as the 808, but worse because of its unpredictable onset phase.
4:26 - 4:55 it doesn't really matter here but this is bunk, unfortunately. youtube.com/@SabineHossenfelder is a great science communication channel
PS: you should be tuning all of your percussion, including kick, snare, hi hat, and whatever other accessories. Even though they aren't "pitched", pitch-shifting and frequency-shifting gives you fine control over the tone of your percussion. Snares and toms especially will have a few strong partials whose frequencies should be picked carefully, even though their pitches can be very vague. Frequency shifters are fantastic for this since they mostly affect the lowest frequencies of the drum, where most of the tone is, and also they don't introduce nasty artifacts like pitch shifters do.
PPS: Even in EDM, it's actually possible, but very difficult, to have a kick and bass sit together without ducking the bass. Noisia does this in their song Running Blind 1:27. czcams.com/video/TpPCZJLakLE/video.html How?? By... tuning their kick, so that no frequencies clash between it and the bass.
Thank you for your comment - (as you can see from my other comments here I've answered all this before but let's start again as you've spent a lot of time here
I must respectfully disagree with just about everything in your comment - My video gets everything right - its actually not about kicks or bass - Its about Phase - and this is known objective truth thanks to some very brilliant physicists .. we have rather a lot riding on it by now
>>> this bit is vital >>>>
Please do not make the classic human mistake of thinking everyone makes the same music as you ( which I assume is a form of EDM ? ) .. Not everyone wants or will use sidechaining - Its considered a real no-no in some circles. - Musicians have been putting bass parts on top of kick drums since the use of skinned drums began and will continue to do so for years - EDM production is very new and at some point will be historical ... My job is to teach all, not just one section of the musical community
But I look forward to the further discussion .. here's my best-edited answer to other posts here ( excuse the cut and paste )
I always describe 'Keying' your kicks as a flawed theory as exact tuning to the most prominet note in your production and bass end is the only place where you are in any danger of the most extreme forms of cancellation - Even 10 cents away and there is a dramatic reduction in cancellation ( in the same way two detuned oscillators become larger than life ) . You have a huge range of choices in your kick's tuning so why place it in the only one place where this is an issue ( and not just to your bass, but any low synths that use the principal note in your musical production ?
Here's an analogy - you can put a landmine under your lawn and just walk around it forever ( Sidechaining ) and that will work just fine - until the one day you forget and then it's bad day all around .. What happens when Side chaining is out of vogue? - All bad habits surrounding this will be detrimental - best to avoid them completely
This is the reason why the 909 kick has been so massively successful - It's ( fixed tone ) Tail about 40 cents sharp of a standard note and as we all know from synth programming, you only have to tune things apart by a relatively small amount to stop the beating/cancellation - that is the very nature of phase …It cannot suffer from major negative phase interactions as it’s so far removed from a principal tone in our Western scales.
90% of the key labelled kicks I've checked recently are nowhere near their file-named tuning - Most of this is down to Kick 2 - this brilliant plugin uses envelopes for it's kicks' tail pitch control. It's a favourite for sample pack makers as you can just knock them out ( yes sadly that's how a great deal of sample creators operate - Quantity not quality ) ...
What's misunderstood is that the visual break-points on the envelope are just that - controllable hooks for a constantly changing envelope controlling the pitch ... This makes the pitch of the kick tail a vector, not a static number. This means the kick is never, ever at a single pitch, but in motion through that point. This makes all the key information of kicks such as these not just bad information, but complete garbage.
What's interesting though - as these kicks have no single pitch - they often work brilliantly in heavy dance music as they cannot really ever create those synergistic phase cancellations and I assume this is why they've always been favoured in Trance - one of the fastest forms of 4/4 club music where the kicks are more tightly packed together.
So why did this "nugget' come about ??- the whole idea is that it's better to have everything in key as it’s more wholesome - this is just not the case in the bass end -
30Hz-60Hz is an entire octave .. That’s 30hz for an entire octave or on average 2.5Hz per note, 440-880HZ is another octave in the midrange, That’s 440hz spread between an entire octave giving us 36HZ between each note ( N.B. these per-note values are averaged for illustrative purposes, not exact due to the logarithmic nature of audio ) - This is more than 14X the resolution.
We do not have the same relationship with tonality underneath the point where the ( average ) human voice can vocalise - This is immensely important to understand ( and probably the reasons behind the “808’s out of tune” Memes) .. I expect this is mainly due to the physical distribution of hairs inside the ear that are responsible for our hearing - they would have to become 10- 20X denser (whilst also becoming thicker / longer ) to have the same relationship with tuning in these lowest octaves - the spread of notes is just mathematics/physics so is set in stone.
Don't believe me ? - pull up a sine-wave and play a Triad of C starting at C3 - we all know that sound and can hear the interplay in the musical relationships
Now play the same chord starting from C1 - it's just a beating set of waves - our ability to treat it as music is gone ..
So why can we layer things in the upper mids all the way to the top so successfully and not in the bass? - It’s all down to the mathematic principles of musical octaves - the resolution just increases the higher we go in frequency so there’s so much more wiggle room - also with our ears, we need a sound that falls away in level as we increase in frequency so phase cancellations are less important as you go up the frequency scale ( and actually get pleasing - think of a solo violin versus a 30 piece orchestra )
So let me be clear - you do not ever ‘need’ to tune your kick exactly to the root note of your track - this is the only place that will cause you tons of trouble and force you to side chain - This is terrible EDM-Internet-Lore created by those without training in Physics or Audio Engineering ( I have both ) and the extreme workflows that are required to avoid it are utterly ridiculous. Also - It’s the only point where positive phase interactions can also cause you real issues - you can get very large level jumps due to the non-linear power distribution of audio across the spectrum.
Please remember you hear with your ears, not your eyes ( or nose for that matter - you’d never sniff a kick right ? ) , so the next time you see people with oscilloscopes and immensely complex visual workflows to get over the problems that perfectly keyed kicks create, just ask yourself this - Would you rather do all this ( and them possibly create massive phase shifts when you apply an eq to either bass or kick drying the final mix forcing you to start again ) - and do you fully understand the principals of phase? … It is so vital to the modern bottom end.
@@F9Audio I'll summarize: in this video, you're trying to mix together: 1) a kick drum with a very long, pure sinusoid, 808-style body, and 2) a bassline. When you added the two together, you got nasty interference problems. That's normal. But your supposed fix was to raise the pitch of your bassline by a semitone! All that does is make your bassline out of tune. The interference problem is still there. Your solution did not work.
But it happened to sound ok in this case. The reasons are: 1) the specific bassline you used is just one note with identical spectral content and amplitude envelope as the kick, and 2) by chance, they interfered constructively in a pleasing way. I repeat: you got LUCKY in this SPECIFIC CASE. If you had done one thing slightly different, it would have sounded even worse.
Your video spreaded several misconceptions about phase that I've all heard a million times. Please read my comment above closely, I addressed each error in detail.
I'm urging you to reconsider. You have a large audience and the consequence of your errors is thousands of people now making those errors.
Gabriel - you completely miss understand this video - I'm not suggesting everyone tune their kicks 1 semitone up, down or anything similar - This video is about Phase ( this is explained at the end of it and leads onto this video czcams.com/video/qptvf5hUi4g/video.html ) ... I use the example of this particular tuning to show that the moment two tones are tuned away from each other, the synergistic cancellations ( or additions for that matter ) stop being an issue ... If anything this video is about losing the idea that 1 concept works and you should stick to that an encourages investigation.
My solution to all this is simple and I've said this on countless comments here over the last 6 months - Be fully aware of phase and stop using visual-based theory to produce and
>> use your ears > Use your ears
@@F9Audio Here are the corrections about \*phase\* specifically:
2:28 - 2:32 that's polarity, not phase. The buttons at 2:47 are mislabeled. Usually there's no need to be this pedantic, but it's a very common misnomer that causes a lot of confusion around the concept of phase.
2:51 - 2:54 The confusion comes from the fact that a polarity inversion has the same effect as a 180 degree phase shift... for any purely periodic signal containing only odd harmonics - such as pure sinusoids - and that's it. You can invert the polarity of a noise signal, but that doesn't give it a "180 degree phase shift", because noise does not have phase.
2:54 - 3:06 When comparing two similar signals, this is called a null test. You may hear the misnomer "phase cancellation" when talking about the null test, but this term only describes periodic waves with very similar frequencies. The null test works just as well on aperiodic signals like impulses or noise, which don't have any phase to speak of. Its mechanism is destructive interference - it has nothing to do with phase.
3:06 - 3:20 This isn't a phase shift, this is a time delay. Dan Worrall has a great video on this: czcams.com/video/H3ZyaXgTqjM/video.html Anyway, thinking about phase shift here would only be useful if the signal was totally periodic and steady in frequency - for a given time delay, effective phase shift depends on frequency. But the null test doesn't care about phase or frequency - it tests whether or not two signals are exactly identical. A delayed signal is not identical to the un-delayed original, so the null test fails.
- (slight amendment to 3:06 - 3:20 regarding "this isn't a phase shift, this is a time delay": Out of context, this is false. Time delays always result in a phase shift proportional to the instantaneous frequency of a sinusoid. However in this context, the phase shift is irrelevant: in your case time delay, not phase shift, is the reason for the different behavior from your null test.)
@@F9Audio I'd also like to make it clear where I agree with you: key labels on kick drums are often misleading, and too many producers are confused by incorrect technical specs and tricked into not using their ears. And we should be messing with the pitches of our kicks! 40 cents sharp could sound absolutely amazing. Can you link a song that has this kind of 909?
I cannot tune my kicks anyway, because I am a happy user of the TR-909 and absolutely love its stock sound ✌🏻 That being said I must admit that my 808 features a hidden BD tune pot, hehe ❤️🧡💛🤍 That one I tune all the time. Because it's fun. Like during jamming with it. ☯️
Great video! I think I remember deadmau5 explaining this too some moons ago.
A perfect example Hans - how many utterly classic tracks have a 909 kick from an original machine on them ? how many 909 based classics sound amazing across multiple keys ?
i mean is it an opinion or a fact, so what key should my kick be at if i have a bass in a certain key, because theyre definitely in some key
Phase is very much a fact-it's fundamental to audio and especially important in the bass and sub end of the spectrum.
Here's the important thing to think about: in all samplers, synths, and most DAWs' audio parameters, you have 12 notes and 100 cents per note of tuning optionality-that's 1200 potential values.
Most modern electronic tracks have one note that is used a lot (often, this is the root note of the track's musical scale). If you completely hard-tune your kick to that, you are picking the absolute worst place for it, as that's where phase is most likely to cause issues.
You actually don't need to have your kick tuned to any part of the Western scale, and if you want a practical example of this, look no further than the most successful kicks in electronic music-the 909 and 808-neither of which are tuned close to a note on the Western scales. Every 909 I've ever used left the factory with the kick's tail tuned about 40 cents sharp of an F.
The 909 kick has been used for decades in dance music in every key imaginable (and is having another resurgence at the moment), and without doubt, this has been helped by its off-scale tuning.
As we all know from synth programming, you only have to move the tuning of two oscillators away from each other a small amount for the phase effects to stop and the sound to become bigger. But I'm sure we've also all experienced bass synths creating uneven output when two oscillators are used in the same octave (32" for both, for example)-this is down to phase cancellation.
What's vital to understand is the logarithmic (non-linear) nature of audio. We all see this every day in EQ plots, but rarely does it get discussed in conversations about kicks, yet it drives everything.
Let me explain-an octave is a doubling of pitch, and within an octave, all 12 notes exist. The distance between each note is not equal, but we don't need to worry about that for the moment.
In our scales,
C0-C1 is (roughly) 32.7Hz-65.4Hz-That's all 12 notes spread between only 32.7Hz.
C1-C2 is (roughly) 65.4Hz-130.8Hz-That's all 12 notes spread between 65.4Hz.
C2-C3 is (roughly) 130.8Hz-261.6Hz-That's all 12 notes spread between 130.8Hz.
C3-C4 is (roughly) 261.6Hz-523.25Hz-That's all 12 notes spread between 260.6Hz.
As you can see, the amount of resolution between the notes of any octave increases as you move into higher frequencies (it doubles per octave).
There is also another very important effect in play here related to human physiology. When musical notes fall beneath (or above, for that matter) the range that the average human can vocalize, we do not have the same relationship with them. We do not hear pitch the same in the lowest octaves as we do in the upper bass or lower mid. This is why the 909 kick can be used, even with its long tail and strong harmonics, even when it's not tuned to our scales.
Most modern kicks have fundamentals in the lowest octave above-just pull up a simple sine wave, play a note between C0 and C1, and see if you can hum it. You won't be able to. Now play C0 and E0 together. Instead of a harmonic relationship, you will just hear beating sine waves.
This is why this entire conversation has basically always been total nonsense-it revolves around the concept that everything down there needs to be 'in key.' It absolutely doesn't, and a transient punch or drum element certainly doesn't and, in fact, should not.
As we said at the start here, the only place in all of those 1200 tuning options that creates the most danger is the area close to the track's principal note. Phase is king down there due to the lack of resolution in the lowest octaves-and conversely, why 12-string players sound lush compared to one, as the relatively huge resolution between notes in the upper octaves means the small variations in the tunings and playing of the instruments results in pleasing effects as opposed to mass cancellation.
It's also the reason, by the way, that the average string section has many more violins of top instruments than basses. I have the Hans Zimmer strings from Spitfire, and the massed Basses patch (I think it's about 30 players) is completely "Meh." The cancellation caused between them leaves a very weak patch indeed. He would have been much better off having that number and gotten them to play in octaves.
Now, let's look
at the landscape-80% of the kicks I've looked at from commercial packs are completely incorrectly labeled. Most are simply nowhere near the tuning given; they've simply been passed through Mixed In Key, which always gives a reading to the best of its ability, and down there, it's not always accurate at all. It will also make an approximation if the kick is tuned sharp or flat-more often than not, though, the front transient throws the detection off completely.
Many kicks use audio tails that fall in pitch-this can be described as a vector (a number in motion with a given speed and direction). In this case, the kick is only at a given pitch for an infinitely tiny amount of time and cannot ever be considered at a specific pitch for labeling use. KICK2, the plugin generator, has envelope breakpoints on it, and these are quoted, but they are just that-points within moving curves, and should never be considered that kick's 'key.'
In both of these cases, people are taking the filenames as gospel when, in fact, they are just bad information. This is why, even though they claim to be 'keying their kicks,' they are often not at all-they just don't realize.
So, what to do? Simple.
Do what the most experienced of producers have been doing for decades:
Pick the best kick for your track by ear, shorten it as much as possible for your genre (this is the secret sauce as it gives you more room for bass, and stops it ringing around large spaces like clubs or warehouses), and then try a few cents tuning, either way, to see if it gets better. Use headphones to check (the sub response often goes an octave lower than everyone's home monitors-this is just the physical limits of studio speakers) and listen on multiple systems. Ask any pro mixers you know to check. Use transient processing to help with the front.
Build up a collection of great kicks over time and do not be afraid to use them more than once-some just have magic. No one other than other producers ever cares about your kick.
And please, don't ever take a blind bit of notice of a key label on a kick drum again-you will not look back.