harmonic bpm
If there is one thing that every electronic music producer should try at least once, I would say that it is synchronizing your bpm with the root key of your track. When you do this, you will find that the "tones" generated by modulating or slicing audio with high "straight" quantize settings will be octaves of this root key. You will also find that the amount of peaks in these tones and in the wave forms of your synths when they are playing octaves of your root key, will always have 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256 etc peaks in each bar.
With this kind of control you can do interesting things, like using any audio sample to make a bass line that is perfectly in-tune with your synth's root key. In the following image I used a single peak from a longer saw tooth wave and repeated it so that I could adjust the volume of each peak. This way I can adjust the envelope of the bass in a way that is not normally possible. You don't need to use a tuned sample for this, any sound will become in tune when sliced in this way, but only some sounds will produce nice bass frequencies.
Here I have made a typical low growling darkpsy bass line, only the 3 bass notes after each kick are really a single tone with just the right waveform. The top image shows and full bounced audio while under it you can see the kick and two long midi notes for the bass.
Listing all the ways to use this will take all day, so if you just want to try it, here is a "cheat sheet" with the octave matched bpms for each of the 12 notes in the standard equal temperament scale. Simply choose a bpm of the right, and use the key on the left as the root key for your track. This may not be as accurate as with proper micro-tuning, but it is close enough that most normal humans won't hear any problems.
If you want to have more freedom and explore this properly, Brainwave Harmonizer automatically generates tuning files that are octaves of the BPM in your DAW. These tuning files work in the latest versions of Omnisphere, Serum, Kontakt, Zebra, Alchemy, Spectral, Albino, Cronox, CrX4 and many other VST synths. You can select standard equal temperament, 5-limit just intonation, Pythagorean tuning among other interesting 12 tone scales.
If you want to make a track at a certain bpm but find that the matching key is not right for you, Brainwave Harmonizer can also generate tuning files that are a perfect fifth or a major third of your BPM.
Even if you don't use obvious glitches and rolls in your music, you will find that using synced Hz and bpms still makes your music more pleasing to the ear. This is because your brain find is easier to process aligned vibrations than it does unaligned ones. If you want to hear a good example of this, here is some amazing psychedelic dub music that Hedflux made using harmonic bpms:
Even if you don't use obvious glitches and rolls in your music, you will find that using synced Hz and bpms still makes your music more pleasing to the ear. This is because your brain find is easier to process aligned vibrations than it does unaligned ones. If you want to hear a good example of this, here is some amazing psychedelic dub music that Hedflux made using harmonic bpms:
