creating powerfull kick drum

[Kevin Gorman]

I have been messing around with kick drums alot latley, but never get them the way i want them to sound. I want a kick to sound beefy and also penetrate the mix. I personally think I am doing something wrong with compression, but maybe i'm wrong. Can you guys point me in the right direction to produce some better kicks?


Thanks :)

Kevin

[lau]

combining the Waves C4 and the L2 always works for me.....

You can get a hardcore kickdrum out of a fart with those two..


:rambo:

[Evil G]

lately i've had some success with bussing all my sounds other than the kick together and using eq to carve out space for the kick, usually with a notch around 50 hz (or wherever the oomph of the kick is) and another notch around 1.25 khz (or wherever the top/presence of the kick is).

[slavestudios]

try layering 2 or 3 different kicks...

a beefy phat kick, a sharp mid punch kik & a top thwakky hi kick ?


then eq them round each other & move them slightly so the dont phase & cancel each other out...

[MARKEG]

I been messing around creating my own recently with the help of this tutorial:

Sound Construction Vol 1: Kick Drums

I've been doing a lot of work putting together sounds from scratch. All sorts of different tones and such. In electronic music, the biggest benefit we have is sound, and I think it's really important to understand how sound comes together. Unfortunately, most tutorials on "making phatter pads" or "making bigger basses/kicks" or whatever never really talk about that. They're basic how-to's that don't really explain the consequencies of things that you do to sound. So, I'm going to start writing up some of my experiments/research and post it for everyone's benefit, explaining what I've been doing and why it does what it does (as best I can). This is the first installment, so any feedback about it would be appreciated. I'll be posting these on my website as well (www.cis.ohio-state.edu/~lackmeye) shortly after I put them on T.nu. Anyway, I hope you all enjoy.

The first sound I'm going to talk about is the kick drum. There's been a lot said about the kick drum, but all the posts on T.nu and the tutorials that they point to don't really talk enough about how they work and why. A lot of this is synthesis of things other people have said, but a lot of it is my own research. So if something sounds familiar to you, it probably is. Anyway, here goes.

The first thing to note about synthesized kick drums is that they are not accurate models of analog bass drums. An analog drum, when struck, vibrates at a single root frequency and has several harmonics. Many early synthesized kicks were like this, and most of them were terrible because the complexity of the harmonics in a "real world" kick is simply rediculously difficult to synthesize. Additionally, those sorts of kicks are very basic and just don't fit with an electronic bassline very well.
Currently, almost every synthesized kick (in trance/hourse) follows the same basic pattern (inspired by the now-legendary TR-909 kick). A sine wave of some sort that starts at a higher frequency and goes to some lower frequency over the course of the kick. Obviously, there are a lot of harmonics and modulations involved, but that's the basic idea. From that basic idea, we can easily construct a simple kick.

Infected Mushroom gave a short, accurate, but highly incomplete tutorial of how to do this using Sound Forge (just about anything will do).

Make yourself a sine wave (around 60 Hz, about half a second long, max amplitude)
Apply a pitch bend from +2 semitones to -2 semitones across the kick (tweaking is fine)
Apply another pitch bend from around +24 semitones to whatever pitch you want, this should be in two stages, a short, steep drop followed (immediately) by a long, shallower drop.
And that's it.

You can get a pretty decent sound like this. However, lets go in to why that works. The shallow pitch bend sets a frame for the kick. You could skip this step, but that subtle, constant drop is just nice to have and a lot easier to do as a separate step.
The important change is the big pitch bend (+24 to -24... ish). The higher the pitch starts, the more "plastic" the beginning of the kick will sounds. Now, having two line segments that create the pitch is very very important. The first segment is a steeper drop. How steep this drop is and how long of a time it takes determines how hard the "oomph" of the kick will be. Shorter times = harder leads. Note that going to too low of a frequency from here will drop the kick into sub frequencies and it will sound terrible on a high powered system. Also, too short of a time will sound pretty weird. Maybe not bad (okay, probably bad), but weird. The second segment determines the end of the kick. Drop this to wherever you want, the shallower the drop, the longer you have before the kick hits sub frequencies. You want to fade the kick out before it drops under 25 Hz or it'll just rattle things and sound terrible.
On a half-second sine wave, the first segment of the pitch bend would probably take around 1/10th of a second while the second segment would take the rest. However, this is *not* a cardinal rule at all. Experiment, experiment, experiment.
Note that you don't only have to have the pitch go down. Many times, I'll have the pitch start lower, bend it up to +20 very fast, then start the regular two-phase descent. This rounds out the lead of the kick more. It doesn't make a great stand-alone sound, but it can be a great sound to add to other kicks (more on that later).
Once you've applied the pitch bend, cut off any of the end of the kick that's falling too far under the sub range, put a fade-out at the end, and save what you have.

Okay, so you created this kick sound, now you load it into your drum machine and put it behind your latest track... and you can barely hear it. Compression up to full... nothing. First off, the amplitude is as high as it goes, the compression isn't going to do anything to a pure sine wave at max amplitude. But that's not what's hurting you. Pure sine waves are pretty weak sounds. Especially at low frequencies. You need harmonics in the kick to pull over the sound. How do you get these? Layering.

How do I layer kicks together?

If you laughed at this question, you don't know how to do it, because it's really not so simple. The first thing that you're going to need is several kicks. Play with different pitch bends, different pitched inital sine waves (try one at 80, or even 100 Hz), etc. Build yourself a library of 10 or so kicks to play with.
There are two ways to put sounds together, a crossfade, or a straight add (mix). The two have very different applications here, so I'll cover them separately.

You'll probably use a mix to add together most of your kicks. You'll almost definately use it for the first two layers, so let's talk about these first. When adding together a pair of kicks, you may or may not want to add all of both of them together. For example, you may love the beginning of one kick but hate the tail, but the other one you pretty well like (for example, adding the lead of a high-pitched kick to all of a low pitched kick to give it more power at the head end). It's important to know what part of the kick you want. When adding together two kicks, DO NOT ADD THEM AT FULL VOLUME. You'll want to reduce the volume of each of the kicks where you're doing the mix by around 9 dB (the relative amount that you lower them by may depend if you want more or less of one kick). Experiment with what bits you add and how.

Crossfading is another useful way of working with kicks. There are many ways to do it, but I usually use it to process a single sound. For example, I have a kick sound that starts nice and powerful, but that nice powerful lead turns into nasty harmonics at the end. How do you solve this? Crossfading.
Open two copies of the kick in question. On one copy, apply an EQ to remove those nasty harmonics (might as well just silence everything over 1000Hz... or maybe even 500Hz, use your discretion). You've probably demolished the lead in, but left yourself with a decent tail-end. On the original sound, find the part of the lead in that you want, then find what part of the tail-end you want on the processed sound. There should be a segment around 1/10 of a second long on both parts that sounds alright. You'll want to mark the beginning and end of this exactly on both waves. Crossfade in ONLY THAT PART from the processed wave. You'll end up with the kick and tail of the original wave, but a center part that crossfades. Now just slice off the end of the original wave and replace it with the end of the processed wave. Now you've killed the nasty harmonic in the tail without taking the power out of the lead.
You can use crossfading like this on any pair of kicks, but it gets difficult to do on other kicks. Just make sure that the section of the two kicks that you crossfade is EXACTLY THE SAME LEGNTH and try it. You can get some interesting results. The theory is always the same though, leave the start of one kick the same, crossfade in the middle, leave the end of the other kick the same.

You'll have to put together a lot of layers to get a really good kick. However, no matter how thin something sounds, every time you layer things together, save the result (provided it isn't terrible, of course). You can use these. I have dozens of samples sorted as deep, medium, high, heavy, dirty, plastic, etc... I just number them in ascending order so that I know the higher numbers tend to be the richer sounds. Find a way to organize, and toy with things. You can get some really good sounds pretty quickly, and they get better all the time.

Now, here's some additional notes:
Compression: Compression can frequently have the opposite effect that you intend when applied to kicks. Usually the deep part of the kick is already at a high amplitude, and using compression just brings out harmonics that you don't want. However, since the harmonics and modulations created by layering are what power the lead of a kick, compressing the lead can sometimes help add power to the kick.
EQ: EQ is great when used properly. Don't boost the low end, don't boost the low end, don't boost the low end. I'm serious, don't. You'll just make things clip and sound like crap. When EQing a bass, you want to EQ the high end (anything over about 300 Hz) to remove unwanted harmonics. Sometimes you'll run in to the notorious "ringer" harmonic. It tends to settle in around the second harmonic (about 150 Hz at 60 Hz). A parametric EQ can do wonders to soften or remove that and many other unwanted sounds. EQ cuts are always better than EQ boosts. Always. A cut in one place is a relative boost everywhere else, pretty good deal, right? If you want the low end to be higher, try cutting the 250 Hz range a bit. Rememeber though that sub frequencies should be used in moderation. A lot of sub may sound great on your small moniters, but will ALWAYS sound terrible on a 4000W club PA. Don't be tempted to add sub just because. It's bad bad bad.
Distortion: Distortion can really help kicks. Too much will make them very dirty (jungle/dnb like), though maybe that's what you want. Work with it, see what happens.
Reverb: A good kick probably won't need extra reverb while you're creating it. If you need the tone to be longer, start with a longer sine wave. As the pitch drops under 30 Hz, it'll appear to fade out with a sort of reverb anyway. As you layer, the harmonics will also start to fade out in a more reverb like way as well. Shortcutting using reverb is more likely to simply muddy up the kick, which defeats the purpose of all this layering to create harder, thicker kicks.
Basses: The hardest thing to do is put together a kick drum and a bass synth. If your kick sounds great until you put it with the bass, it's probably because the bass is too thick and it's drowning out your kick. Try cutting back some of the very low frequencies on the bassline, or try using a different bass entirely. If a bass is too thick, your kick will get drowned out no matter how hard it punches. Boosting the low end of the kick will not solve this. Don't fall into that trap (I've done it... you can spend weeks messing with a kick when it's not even the problem if you do this).
Sampling: Feel free to sample kicks that are already around, but there is an advantage to making your own. Different kicks play with different basses in different ways. When you know how to make your own kicks, you're more likely to understand what you need in the kick to work well with a bass synth, so knowing how to do it is a very useful skill that will dazzle your friends (and the ladies).

I hope this helps everyone. I'm going to review this more and maybe add some things and a few more samples before it goes on my site, but hopefully this gets some positive feedback and I'll keep on doing these in the future. Enjoy. Respect the sound! Best way to respect it... understand it.

~dlm

_________________
dlm (Columbus, trance/breaks)
We came for the sound, we stayed for the journey, and we come back because we love the vibe. On my floor, you will understand unity.

[Ritzi Lee]

2 Mark:

Did you constructed some kicks from a basic synewave yourself?
I want to hear your result.

[MARKEG]

ermmm well they're not actually THAT good yet but i'm getting there :doh:

you really do start to understand things better when you do this tutorial though - highly recommended.

when i get one i'm happy with i willl post up for sure.

[dirty_bass]

Or get an analogue kick generator, like drumatic 3 (free) or MicroTonic
And make your own kicks, but without too much of the complicatedness above.
As above, mix your kicks, experiment, mix a mid emphasised kick with a sub emphasised etc.
Good control of compression and EQ.
Erm there are so many things you can do to kicks, it surprises me just how un adventurous a lot of producers are with them.

[dan the acid man]

yeah, but its hard to kick those habits with kicks.......uhuhuhu............................... ..................i'll get my coat :oops: :doh:

[xfive]

yeah, but its hard to kick those habits with kicks.......uhuhuhu............................... ..................i'll get my coat :oops: :doh:

Get your whole wardrobe!

:lol:

[Kevin Gorman]

thanks everyone for your tips on making a great sounding kick! It's helping me out alot! i am now off to try everything in this thread! :)

[Ritzi Lee]

By the way, maybe it's a good time to tell this.
I think a kick doesn't have to be the premium overwelming sound in a track.

If you listen a lot of older dance productions, you can hear that the kick is just a tool to give the groove in your track more definition. It doesn't even have to be over all other sounds.. Just sitting nicely in the middle of all sounds, with a good compression.

Just combine a groovy phat bassline, with the kick underneath.

[TechnoNRGKid]

Soon as i get my PC i'll be sure to come back to this topic first.
I can deff use the nfo, :cool:

[Mindful]

By the way, maybe it's a good time to tell this.
I think a kick doesn't have to be the premium overwelming sound in a track.

If you listen a lot of older dance productions, you can hear that the kick is just a tool to give the groove in your track more definition. It doesn't even have to be over all other sounds.. Just sitting nicely in the middle of all sounds, with a good compression.

Just combine a groovy phat bassline, with the kick underneath.

Word

[tocsin]

lately i've had some success with bussing all my sounds other than the kick together and using eq to carve out space for the kick, usually with a notch around 50 hz (or wherever the oomph of the kick is) and another notch around 1.25 khz (or wherever the top/presence of the kick is).

Ha. Simple idea which probably would sound great and save me a shitload of time. Anyone know of an EQ that works from a key trigger? It would be even nicer to have the carved out ranges from the rest of the mix come in when the kick is silent.

[nihilist]

ive found if you compress a kick on its own then add it to a song the kick seems to be more stable,i had alot of problems with compresstion on a kick washing out other sounds and frequencies and it just seemed to muddy the whole sound, but this seemed to work for me.