Review – Tuning Snares Pro Tips

Every month, dozens of music tech videos go up on the internet. SoundGym combs through them so you don’t have to – bringing you the very best over on our ‘learn’ page. Each month we will pick out one that we think is especially worthy of your attention, and explain why we like it, while also discussing any problems we may identify.

This month, we take a look at ‘Tuning Snares: Pro Tips’ by ADSR. The idea of tuning drums is something that doesn’t ever occur to many producers, but it really can make or break a drum sound, as this great little video shows.

Pro Tip -Tuning Snares

Mixing  

6 min

ADSR

Drums are such important mix elements that making sure that they sit well with the rest of your mix should always be a priority. This video does a nice job of demonstrating this, showing us how much better the snare sits in the track when moved into the correct key.

There is a useful tip for finding the pitch of your snare, using Voxengo’s SPAN, a very handy free plug-in. Once you have identified the pitch of your snare, you can then go ahead and move it into the correct key for your track. At this point the video delves into a little bit of music theory that may lose some people, but knowledge of key signatures really is an incredibly useful part of your creative toolkit, so we don’t blame them for going there! This video tutorial gives us a very good example of when understanding scales can lead to you producing a more cohesive track. There are numerous free online resources if you think that now is the time to brush up on your knowledge in this area.

This is a short and snappy video that demonstrates a technique you could end up using in literally every mix you do; for that reason it is well worth investigating.