An important fact about the kick drum we’ve built so far is that its pitch changes depending on the MIDI note that’s triggering it. That, of course, has a big impact on the results we get from tweaking the decay of the pitch envelope.
For example, if you drop this Operator patch into a Drum Rack…
…the note being sent into Operator is C3. (Drum Rack cells recieve different notes, but they all transmit C3 by default.)
This means you’ll hear something way too high to be a kick drum at first. Sure, it’s easy enough to change the note mapping in the Drum Rack…
….or use Operator’s Transpose control.
But you also have the option of leaving the starting pitch high, and making the pitch envelope decay really fast so you get down to the low frequencies quickly.
This will have a very different character than transposing the kick – but well worth experimenting with. The more you understand about these pitch charactaristics, the better.
There’s also a programming solution to this issue which we’ll explore shortly…
