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What are useful applications for the pitch knob when playing the drum parts, and how should it be used? I think I saw something a long time ago on the internet (may have been here, but havent found anything so far) that explained how important using the create pitch is in drum parts.

Thank you!

It tweaks the sounds to help you express your creativity
That's just like modifying the attack of a synth, or using a LFO, or a filter... use it if you feel you need it. If you find it useless today, probably you will love it tomorrow.

Try coying a pattern. On the copied one detune all drum parts some of the way- apart from the bass drum- then add some delay and effects to the detuned parts. Then play your patterns alternately and see if you like the sound you get.

Retuning the drums can be used for many purposes, but most frequently I find myself focusing on these two:

First, if you want unusual percussion sounds, try tuning a drum way up or down. Some drums can sound completely unrecognizable and can expand your sound palette. This is great when you can't quite find the bass, snare, whatever among the 207 sounds that the EMX has.

Second, the more I compose, the more obvious it becomes that drum pitch tuning is just as crucial as playing synth parts in the same key. Playing all your keyboard lines in, say, Cm7 is an obvious step when playing, but drums in any good groove create a melody all their own as well. If you want to enhance your grooves (and avoid cacophony), make sure you also listen to the relationship between the drum tones -- and then between the drum parts and synth lines as well.

You might try tuning the drums to the key of the song. Make the snare the and the base drum the key notes. Lets say in the key of C the snare and base drums are tuned to C. The toms could be tunes to the C cord keeping the lowest drum the C note and the other two toms E and G notes. After doing this I found the difference is night and day and cleans up your recording. But of course you can go wild and make out of tune punctuation hits ECT. Later Johnny G..

using the step motion sequence on one of the Hi Hats whilst wildly twisting the pitch knob will be recycled in the next pass as individual stepped pitches... to me this can sound like you have a hell of a lot more parts playing then you really do.

for instance you can also get both a bass drum and a snare from one sound by going + and - 12 tones

Also, a number of the "drum hit" PCM samples do NOT seem to have the transient (the main, initial, loudest peak of sound - i.e. the drumhit itself excluding the tail) mapped tightly to the beginning of the sample chuink. When you play the sample, there is therefore a split-second of silent-ness before the drum hit. This is normally unnoticable, but when you slow these samples down, the hit falls further and further away from the trigger time of the pad, because this silence becomes longer as a result of being time-stretched to pitch it down.

2 Pieces of advice...

1) Beware of this, it can be the "funny thing" you can't put your finger on sounding wrong with your track
.... &.....
2) USE this as one of the MANY ways this machine offers you to make your recordings sound less like they were recorded on a 16 step sequencer with a global swing parameter. Unless that's exactly what you're after, in which case leave me alone and let me sleep.