Last week I have released my first Kick Pack and after this release, I started getting questions about the kicks in this pack. The most frequent question was: "Are the kicks in all keys?" and "Are all kicks tuned?".
When it comes to questions about kick tonality, I do not believe that kicks can be tuned. I have heard this theory a lot of times during my career and I have spend a lot of time exploring this theory, but each time I came to the conclusion that kicks cannot be tuned. To be more precise, they can be tuned, but I don't think they should be tuned.
The main job of the kick is to Kick! Kick is a part of a drum section, and by playing the drums I really do not believe they should produce any notes, they are part of the rhythm section. Now, I don't say that we should not change the pitch of the kicks in the order that we better align the kick and the bass, but we definitely should not put them in the key root of a track! Actually, I think that we should avoid "tuning" the kick in the key root note, as that way, if we perfectly align the kick and the bassline, we will get boosted signal in that area, and we will have a boost in the are where kick and bass are overlapping. There was a time where I was perfectly aligning kick and the bass, and now I stopped doing it, and after I stopped doing that, I spend much less time aligning kick and the bass and the results are much better when I compare it with the results when I was aligning the kick and bass phases.
I already made two videos about kick and bass alignment, and with those techniques, we need to spend less time aligning kick and bass and we have much more freedom when it comes to designing the kick and the bass. If you missed those videos, I advise you to check them out:
The new video I made on this topic is an extension of that two videos where I speak a bit widely about this topic, where I explain more about why should we avoid the perfectly aligning kick and the bass.
I must note that I do not say that perfectly aligning kick and the bass is a wrong thing, I just want to say that this technique will give us huge limits when it comes to designing out kick and bass, and therefore I think it is the bad thing.
The video will be premiered on my youtube channel 16.05.2021 at 20:00 CET