TUNING AND PITCH

In the last issue, I discussed the importance of timing, feel and groove, and looked at various ways to assess the project and deal with the issues at hand. In this one, I’d like to look at the equally critical ‘sister’ issues of tuning and pitching, which I’ll treat separately.

It could be broadly stated that between pitch and timing, it’s timing that is more flexible. Feel and groove are highly fluid and genre-specific elements of music. Tuning and pitching, on the other hand, tends be more universally understood and agreed upon, irrespective of genre.

It’s typical for an instrumentalist to tune their instrument, but it’s far less typical for them analyse their rhythmic performance against a grid in a DAW. Generally, people will notice tuning issues long before they’ll pick up on timing issues.

Even the casual non-musical listener can usually tell that there’s something not quite right, even though they may not have the language to explain it. Needless