There’s a certain extra bit of synergy you get in your mix when the kick which is the anchor of your mix matches the main key of the song itself. I don’t recommend changing the tuning of your drums on the pieces themselves ahead of the recording; they should be in tune with one another and that’s it. No, you can easily match the tuning of your kick to match your song on the mix level without having to mess with the physical drums themselves, and it can be a nice little addition to the mix. Let’s talk how to tune your kick to your song in the mix.
How to Tune Your Kick to Your Song
The fundamental body of the kick is typically in that 50-90Hz range.
There’s roughly an entire octave in there (G1-F#2 occurs from 49-92Hz), so you can bring more attention to the exact frequency within that range which relates to your song’s key.
There are two ways to do this.
Boost That Frequency on Your Existing Kick
First, a simple narrow band boost of your song’s key’s frequency in that fundamental/body region of your existing drum helps to make it pair better with the song itself.
You can find the exact frequency which relates to every key in that area with this frequency chart.
For instance, if your song is in the key of C, you’ll see on the chart that the second practical octave for C vibrates at 65Hz (65.406Hz to be precise).
Giving your kick a small, narrow boost here helps that frequency which matches the rest of your song assert itself.
As I did in my EQ kick drum tutorial (which you can also find in my complete free EQ cheat sheet for your entire mix), I typically recommend giving your kick a small boost to its fundamental in general:
This helps to give your kick more fullness, thickness, and warmth on that low end, particularly if you have a top heavy/thin kick.
When you do this, simply set that center/peak boost point to the frequency of your song’s key via the chart I linked to a moment ago.
This is an incredibly subtle way to give some love to the key of your song for that synergy while adding some thickness to the kick at the same time.
What if your kick is too thin in the sense that boosting there doesn’t sound good, or maybe you want more of this effect without making your kick too boomy?
Supplement the Kick With a Sine Wave
The best way to tune your kick to your song’s key is to supplement it with the sine wave kick drum trick.
This involves creating a midi track and dropping a sine wave “instrument” on it. Obviously samples will work, too, if you have sine wave samples, but virtually every DAW has the ability to create sine waves via an oscillator.
Sine waves are the smoothest and purest representations of frequencies, and when pitched down/vibrating in that 50-90Hz range, they sound exactly like the fundamental of a full sounding recorded kick drum.
This is why I typically recommend that if you recorded your own kick drum, unless you have access to pro level studio equipment and a studio quality environment, you should consider supplementing them with a sine wave to mimic that low end thickness.
The trick is simple enough and just takes a few steps:
Step 1 – Create a Sine Wave on a Midi Track
Again, virtually every DAW will have a way to make a sine wave.
Just doing a search for “Sine” in the “Instrument” folder of my Ableton Live gives me multiple stock options to drag and drop on a midi track.
You can then make a looped 1-bar note in the key of your song (between G1 and F#2 – this is that fundamental kick range).
Let’s say our song is in the key of C, so I’d make a 1-bar C2 note with that sine wave.
The sine wave should sound like a smooth but very low pitched, thick thud, albeit a drawn out one.
If you hear any kind of popping artifact from that loop restarting every bar you can alternatively just create one long drawn out C2 note which spans your entire mix.
Don’t worry, it won’t actually be heard the entire song, only when the kick drum plays which is the next step.
Step 2 – Add a Gate on that Track and Sidechain it to Your Kick
Adding a gate to our midi track ensures that the sine wave is only heard when the gate is open.
Adjusting the sidechain and setting it to the kick track in our mix means that the gate will now open/close based on the behavior of our kick.
As you can see in the image above, we set the threshold to just below the quietest instance of the kick. This ensures anytime the kick triggers, the gate on our sine wave also opens for a split second, adding that “oomph” to the fundamental of our kick.
Step 3 – Adjust the Sine Wave Tone and Gate to Taste
The last step is to simply make some adjustments to taste, mostly to the gate. The sine wave itself should sound fine as is, but the gate’s attack and release might need some adjustments to ensure that it opens and closes more ideally.
For instance, adding a little attack time delays the opening of the gate by a few milliseconds, allowing the transient “click” of the beater of the recorded drum to hit that skin and cut through the mix.
You might want to add a little release time to give that gate a smooth off ramp to close back up more naturally versus an abrupt cutoff which can result in an audible artifact (as I also detail in the image above).
You can now blend in the fader level of that sine wave so that you feel it rather than hear it.
But just like that, we’ve added the fundamental thickness of a studio quality, professionally recorded kick.
And more importantly, we’ve easily tuned our kick to our song to give one of the most important elements of our mix a little synergy with the rest of the instruments.
