Kick Tuner
Tune your kick to the key so it locks with the bass instead of fighting it. Pick a key, hear the kick against your bassline, or drop in your own kick and get it back in tune.
Best notes for your kick
Tune the kick's tail (the low boom after the click) to one of these. The root is the safest choice; the fifth works too.
Tune your own kick
Sounds to load your MIDI into
Supersaw Essentials: 25 free trance presets for Vital, the free synth. Leads, plucks, pads and gated stabs, voiced for every tool on this site.
Why tune your kick?
A trance kick isn't just a click. After the attack, its pitch drops and settles into a low tone, the tail, somewhere around 40 to 70 Hz. That tone has a note, and it sits in exactly the same range as your bass. If the two are out of tune with each other, they beat against each other: the low end wobbles, sounds muddy on a club system and eats headroom you need for loudness.
Tune the tail to the root of your key and the kick and bass reinforce each other instead. The fifth is the next best choice. Watch for the chords where the bass moves a semitone or a tritone away from the kick; a short tail, or sidechaining the bass harder, keeps those clean.
How to tune a kick sample in your DAW
Drop your kick on this page to find its note. It tells you how many semitones and cents to move it. In your sampler, transpose by the semitones and fine tune by the cents, or download the tuned WAV from here. Transposing a sample shortens or lengthens it slightly, just as a hardware sampler would, which is how most producers tune kicks.
For the full frequency of every note, see the Note to Hz chart. To shape how the bass ducks under the kick, use the Pump Shaper.
Questions
Which part of the kick does it measure?
The tail, from about 50 ms after the hit until it fades. That's the part with a steady pitch, and the part that meets the bass.
My kick doesn't seem to have a note. Why?
Very short or very distorted kicks may not have a clear tail. If the result says the pitch is unclear, tune it by ear against the bassline here, or choose a kick with a longer, cleaner tail.
Should the kick be tuned to the root even when the chord changes?
Yes, usually. The kick plays through every chord, so the key's root is the note that fits most of the time. Retuning the kick per chord is possible but rarely worth it in trance.
Can I use the kick I download from here?
Yes. The kick is synthesised in your browser and is yours to use in released music.