They do have a pitch, however because it is percussive as opposed to sustained, we don’t register the pitch as easily. Many will also purposely obfuscate the pitch, such as cymbals, they don’t hold a tone, but rather multiple tones at once, making a washing sound and working for any key. If you ever look at a cymbal you will see the rings and divots around the cymbal, because if they weren’t there it would ring like a bell which definitely has a pitch.
As for the drums themselves they definitely do a have a pitch and it is common for to tune them in fifths, or octaves. Think of a drumline, those drums all have pitches and tones, they also function identically to a traditional drum kit. You can very similarly to the cymbals obfuscate this tone by doing an offset tuning so your drum head resonates unevenly across the head creating multiple tonalities at once.
You can achieve this by being lazy and not tuning.
I’m a professional sound engineer and ex-professional drummer BTW.
Glad to have all you audio people and so many musicians on Lemmy :) Really getting interested in psychoacoustics for various applications lately so its been awesome :)
If you don’t already play with Ableton Live I highly recommend it. It’s got tons of signal-altering filters that you can chain together into pipelines and it’s great for developing an intuitive understanding of the connections between signal, waveform, sound, and perception.
They do have a pitch, however because it is percussive as opposed to sustained, we don’t register the pitch as easily. Many will also purposely obfuscate the pitch, such as cymbals, they don’t hold a tone, but rather multiple tones at once, making a washing sound and working for any key. If you ever look at a cymbal you will see the rings and divots around the cymbal, because if they weren’t there it would ring like a bell which definitely has a pitch.
As for the drums themselves they definitely do a have a pitch and it is common for to tune them in fifths, or octaves. Think of a drumline, those drums all have pitches and tones, they also function identically to a traditional drum kit. You can very similarly to the cymbals obfuscate this tone by doing an offset tuning so your drum head resonates unevenly across the head creating multiple tonalities at once.
You can achieve this by being lazy and not tuning.
I’m a professional sound engineer and ex-professional drummer BTW.
Glad to have all you audio people and so many musicians on Lemmy :) Really getting interested in psychoacoustics for various applications lately so its been awesome :)
As an audiophile who just joined lemmy, any recommended Fediverses? :D (and am I using the term right?)
If you don’t already play with Ableton Live I highly recommend it. It’s got tons of signal-altering filters that you can chain together into pipelines and it’s great for developing an intuitive understanding of the connections between signal, waveform, sound, and perception.