EQ Vs Filter

[steevio]

yeah the 909 kick has a nearly constant sinewave of 51-52 HZ wavering around G# depending on the position of the knob, (in a random way) no matter what the actually tuning is, so it seems your'e tuning upper harmonics, but not the fundamental.
if you analyze almost every techno and house record from 1988 till the late ninetees, you'll find that 51/52 HZ is the dominant frequency.
i tend to tune my tracks to an actual key, or work to a fundamental note rather than working in HZ, because i usually record my tracks at only a few selected tempos, which means many of my tracks will mix together well from vinyl, i use different but complimentary keys, so they dont all come over as sounding the same, but they wont clash in the mix.
of course this doesnt matter so much nowadays with vinyl DJs on the wane, but personally i love vinyl, and the fact that when you find two records which sing together theres some magic in it, its like the writers were somehow surfing the same wave, i dont think that magic happens when you force two tunes together by tuning them digitally, but then again i'm old school

[s.k.]

... so it seems your'e tuning upper harmonics, but not the fundamental.

exactly steevio. but not quite. the 52Hz wave is dominant in terms of velocity, but that doesnt make it a harmonic fundamental! from harmony's point of view it can act like a subdominanta! im sure as a guitarist you're fully capable of understanding me.. at least from playing basic powerchords/... on what intervals up from that dominant frequency (be it a G, G# or whatever) one mixes a fundamental, is truely personal and can be done in different ways too.

about the fine-tuning, i think its not of prime importance.. you can work at 50Hz while designing it, and then in the sequencer just pitch wih half-a-semitone up or down to lie on G or G#.

ok lets not drag attention away from the topic now dunno how the conversation always tends to turn towards kick drums heheh

[steevio]

yeah lets not get lost in terminology here, all i was saying was that the 909 kick has a big 52 HZ sinewave as a permenant fixture no matter where you tune it.
why were we talking about kickdrums ? ha ha
the reason i work to notes rather than frequencies, is that i mostly use analogue gear, so i cant really tune things in the sequencer, i've got good old fashioned Boss chromatic guitar tuners attached to my gear to keep them in tune in the wildly fluctuating temperatures of my studio. its easy to just glance around and see that everything is sitting between the two red arrows and in tune while i'm mixing down.
this all probably sounds crazy to a musician working in ableton

believe me it is actually fun !

[oblioblioblio]

i tend to tune my tracks to an actual key, or work to a fundamental note rather than working in HZ, because i usually record my tracks at only a few selected tempos, which means many of my tracks will mix together well from vinyl, i use different but complimentary keys, so they dont all come over as sounding the same, but they wont clash in the mix.
of course this doesnt matter so much nowadays with vinyl DJs on the wane, but personally i love vinyl, and the fact that when you find two records which sing together theres some magic in it, its like the writers were somehow surfing the same wave, i dont think that magic happens when you force two tunes together by tuning them digitally, but then again i'm old school

This is all possible in the digital realm too. There is a special ratio whereby you can lock the pitch of a track harmonically to the tempo and vice versa.

I only half understand this formula, and explaining it is gonna be tricky, but anyway...

Basically, it is:

bpm x quantize/60=freq in hertz

and the other way round is

freq in hz x 60/quantize = bpm

The part which I don't understand is 'quantize'... but just checking it through now 16 seems to do the trick, though you'll probably need to multiply by 2 to get to an audible/danceable destination.

An example, you want the root of your track at 440 hz. The bpm harmonic to is....

bpm = freq in hz x 60/quantize

bpm = 440 *60/16

bpm = 440 * 3.75

bpm = 1650

errr. confusing part here... but if you divide by 2 a couple of times you get 103 bpm, which is right (I couldn't tell you why myself though!).

and so, if your 2 tracks are made using this ratio, if you use 'repitch' mode in your software instead of a timestretching algorithm (ie so that the software treats the track like a turntable would), then the tracks will have at least some kind of common ground from which to kindle a beautiful harmonic relationship!

personally, I use frequencies from the solar system (http://www.planetware.de/octave/index.html), as there is something relatively reassuring about doing so, and very interestingly they all conform to this ratio.

I hope totally derailing this thread has been useful to someone!

mark

[s.k.]

didnt know there was a formula about it, i've been doing it manually since forever..

just do a simple tremolo mixing 2 sines at a 1semitone interval, mix it so its on the difference between a major and a minor chord. for example if your root is G1, mix the sines at A# and B1 respectively. somewhere around 21000samples from the start(if you work at 44kHZ) the waveform tells you where to lock the loop. import that in your sequencer and set the tempo to fit the cut loop exactly, not worrying that its for example - 124.25

for those to whom this sounds like rocket science, heres the simple formula - work in G, and set tempo to 124.

[steevio]

personally, I use frequencies from the solar system (http://www.planetware.de/octave/index.html), as there is something relatively reassuring about doing so, and very interestingly they all conform to this ratio.

mark

thats funny, i've been using the earths frequency as a fundamental starting point for my tunes for a while now, the 24th octave of which is 194.75HZ or G. G seems quite a common key in dance music.

[steevio]

hey mark,
i just checked out your (http://www.planetware.de/octave/index.html)
link and it reckons 194.18 HZ, not 194.75, i wonder which ones right ? cant remember where i got my info from.
anyone got anything to say about eq's and filters ?

[oblioblioblio]

hey mark,
i just checked out your (http://www.planetware.de/octave/index.html)
link and it reckons 194.18 HZ, not 194.75, i wonder which ones right ? cant remember where i got my info from.
anyone got anything to say about eq's and filters ?

tough one! all this technology and I'm lost for a decent answer. Somehow the indians managed to work out the frequency of the earth year however many years ago though (their root note 'Sa' ('father to the others') is at this exact frequency). My attempts were slightly less successful.

According to a snippet from this (http://www.akashaproject.de/htmlen/music.html) website though...

"The octave-analogue vibration of the 24-hour earth day is equivalent to the frequency of 194.18 Hz (the median day of sun) and 194.71 Hz (star date/day) in the audible region for human perception."

And even though most of that goes straight over my head, it seems that the difference depends on how you are counting the time of an earth day.

Still doesn't really help you though.

I've been using the frequency of the sun recently, though I'm not entirely sure how suited it is to the classic techno situation.