Today we’re talking about how to find the perfect note for your kick to be on.
For starters, as mentioned in this post and in our free low-end guide, there’s no exact note for you to tune your kicks to. It all depends on the key of your track and it depends on the note that you most like that is available for you to use.
In the video below, I’ll show you the technique I use to find which note to place your kick on in a technique that works for any genre or key. In addition, this tutorial works with any DAW and you can do it with any spectrum analyzer (I used the FREE Voxengo Span) as well. Here’s what I will cover during the video:
- 00:00 Intro
- 00:16 Requirements
- 00:26 Spectrum Options
- 00:50 Track 1
- 01:05 Track 2
- 01:15 Track 3
- 01:22 Track 4
- 01:36 Key Analysis
- 02:17 How to find the best one
- 03:13 My only recommendation
As shown above, the technique consists of referencing songs you like that are in the same key of your tune and trying to find which note their kicks are playing on. Let’s say you have 5 tracks in G and you find out that 4 of them have their kicks tuned to A. In this scenario, my recommendation to you is that you try Kicks in A since that’s what you most enjoy listening to when the tune is in G.
If you want to go beyond just checking the key and actually extracting the kicks from these tracks so you could use them on your tracks, check how to do this these three techniques in this post.
Now it’s Your Turn!
I hope you’ve liked this technique!!
If so, let me know how you’ll use it within your tracks and, if you do it differently, let us know how you do it in the comments section below!