An Alternative Way to Tune Your Drum Sounds

Pitch shifting is a relevant tool when processing drum sounds. Electronic musicians frequently argue drum samples sound better when pitched down. This is generally done using the sampler's or DAW's built-in pitch control, but it can also be accomplished with plugins in a more efficient way. The following tutorial will show you another method to pitch shift or tune your drum sounds. 

As usual, we prepared a short sequence in our SoundBridge: DAW. It includes most of the significant elements of a full mix. Let's take a listen to it.

Tune Your Drum Sounds with Soundtoys

The whole mix sounds good, but the hi-hat is flat and dull. We can use pitch automation to fix this. In this case, we will load a plugin that provides formant shifting in addition to standard pitching: LittleAlterBoy by Sound Toys. Let's load a fresh instance on the hi-hat's effect rack.

We want to make the hi-hat sound more lo-fi by lowering its tone. The Pitch control doesn't give the desired effect entirely, but the Formant control does great in this sense. With the built-in Drive control, we can add character and homogenize the dynamics with distortion. If we want this to sound more natural, we may mix in some of the original hi-hat signals. In our case, however, the mix is set to 100%.

Since we want to alter the format at specific points in the hi-hat sequence, we've automated this parameter, as shown below. Let's hear how our hi-hat sequence sounds before and after LittleAlterBoy's processing.

This technique works well with electro kicks, snares, and acoustic drums.

Lastly, let's hear how our processed hi-hat sounds in the context of the whole mix.

If you liked this article on drum processing, here are some more on the same subject:

• Add Edge to Your Drums
• Create Epic Cinematic Drums
• Tighten Up the Drums in Your Mix
• Separate the Elements in the Full Mix by Using UNMIX::DRUMS