kicks

[RDR]

Gulp! here we go.

Firstly i got to set out a few basics.

*example*

100hz = 100 cycles of a wavelength per second
therefore (herin known as TF)

TF 0.1 cycles per ms
TF 1 cycle = 10ms[oops put 1ms in first edit..]

*musical delay basics*

QTR bar delay times

60 x 1000 / Tempo = number of ms in a qtr bar of whatever tempo

eg. 60 x 1000 / 140bpm = 428.57142857142857142857142857143


Calculation

Precept - getting frequencies to run in line with a tempo. This means an equal number of wave cycles in a 16th, 32nd 1/2 bar etc etc. This is especially important in the bass end. Getting the compression and rarefaction waves to push the speakers forward in time with the music releases some power in the bottom end.


f#3 = 1000ms/184.997hz = 5.40549306204965485 cycles per ms

(this next bit is a bit hit and miss - understand im not a maths expert ;) )

The figure we are trying to reach is around 200-800ms depending on your prefered tempo. in this case we will try and reach around 428 as in the previous example.

5.40549306204965485 cycles per ms x 80 (this figure is reached by experimentation) = 432.439444963972388

we can now transpose the formulae

60000 / 432.439444963972388 = 138.7477bpm

This tempo cannot be reached by most sequencers (except logic and i think digital performer) but the difference of 1 decimal place is almost negligable especially over short distances such as 4 bars.

if we were to use 128 cycles we would use this tempo 86.7173bpm.


These are just my calculations and are totally open for people to attack/ pull apart. If you find them useful then im pleased, if you dont understand them please ask for clarification. If you want to criticise, please tell me where i went wrong.

I dont really use these much, but it was fun doing the workings.

[dan the acid man]

who let carol vorderman sign up to this board :lol: :lol:

[Jay Pace]

Props, dodgyedgy, props to you.

Nice one!

:lol:

[Evil G]

Gulp! here we go.

i'm with you on the F# = 86.7 bpm calculation (and by the same calc i get D = 137.625 bpm and D# = 145.875) but i'm a little foggy on how you arrived at the other number, using 80 instead of 128.

i guess any even number will do, not just factors of 2 (2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128 ...)??? am i understanding correctly?

[RDR]

@evil g - yeah man, all your multiplying out is full cycles, so however many doesnt matter, in this case all we are doing is fitting qtr bar tempo to a specific time length.


Those are the same figures i get give or take 0.025

i did a big chart with all sorts of tempos on but i lost the damn thing...

C'est la vie.
Hope it helps peepz, or at least stimulates some thought on the matter.

As an antidote to this i have a friend who i learned some of it off. He's a ****ing genius and i cant pretend to understand half of what he goes on about.

One other thing he does, which is possible, and fun is phase shaping. Painting pictures on a phase display on an oscilloscope[and two detuned and panned oscillators] . its easy(ish) and fun. doesnt really require specialist knowledge, just a scope wiht a phase display. he paints pictures in sounds of leaves, spinning corrolis's pulstaing circlues etc etc...

The flip side? he did a degree in music production. and after 10 years i ahve never never never never heard him finish a tune.

Stuff he has done is sonically perfect, but dull and useless.

James brown has no ****ing knowledge of anything other than dope and wife beating. (excepting the wife beating) he is THE ****ING FUNKIEST MAN I EVER SAW. no question.


Let your funk be your guide. music only matters if it moves ya hips!!!!!

[Evil G]

cool man. i get it now. thx.

[mrbenn]

feels like being in my accoutstics and electronics lesson

sound advice though :clap:

[dirty_bass]

Maths takes the art out of music :cry:

[Jay Pace]

Maths takes the art out of music

Don't know about that. Whilst no one wants to hear self satisfying geekcore, knowing the ins and outs of the nature of sound and psycho-acoustics gives you power to wield.

Power in the hands of talented people = beautiful music.

Not sure how possible it is too produce at a decent standard without having a decent working knowledge of computing and sound. Unless you can hire an uber geek engineer of course, then you don't need to learn diddly squat.

Oh, for an engineer...

[RDR]

Maths takes the art out of music :cry:

I totally agree. It makes it cold and calculating (pun intended )

it can have some uses, but IMHO only if it can be used to advance an artistic idea, maths for the sake of maths is pretty pointless and makes me feel like im back at school struggling over quadratic equations. After all, the human interface between music and the human should be an instrument, not a pencil.

unless of course you are snapping the pencil in two in frustration and sample the sound :lol: :lol: :lol:

[Jay Pace]

Music and mathmatics are inextricably linked.

So much skill in musicianship is fundamentally mathmatical, although it may not be realised as such.

Going to stop now for fear of sounding overly pretentious.

Acoustics is crazy though.

[loopdon]

hey, this thread was suppose to be about kicks, eh? :roll: :lol: :lol:

please everybody, share your tips 'n' tricks about kicks, be it eqing, the use of plugs whatever, coz i know there's still s much knowledge to gather for a newbie like me

so please....

[Jay Pace]

OK - First, go get a copy of the Wavez plugins

Take a 909 kick
Apply reverb
Saturate using RBass at around the 50hz point.
Apply a modicum of distortion (quadrafuzz is good)
Roll off the high frequencies.
then...
Layer another sharp kick on top.
Apply distortion to a different frequency range
Boost the frequencies around 80hz
Roll off the high frequencies.
and then...
Layer another kick on top
Boost the frequencies around 120hz

Try experimenting which frequencies to roll off, which areas to boost and which to saturate. Experiment with distortion, reverb, filtering and layer it all together.

Or.....

Get a really hefty kick, have a low sine sub bass and sidechain it heavily to the kick. BoowooahhBoowooahhBoowooah and suchlike.

Makes me happy anyway :lol:

[Basil Rush]

Kicks are a bitch.

My only words of vague wisdom on this are that some samples are inherently crap. No amount of polishing will help them, however much you like the attack if the tails crap it's gonna be a real pain the arse.

I've got about 600 kick drums on the computer here because I spent the best part of a year looking for the right ones, and of the 600 there's only about 6 that I'd ever really use.

There's a lot of layering of drums goes on but you have to be quite careful not to introduce a bit of weirdness and phasing that you don't want that creates an ugly hole in the kick as it plays.

f you are layering kick drums on top of each other then timing differences can make the sound completely different - if you are triggering from a sampler layered kicks will sound different every time - this will suck for repetative fast beats so either record loads of different ones and pick the one you like or record the layers separately and sort them out on some audio tracks where there won't be any timing issues

That said there's lots of tracks out there that sound good with really quite dubious kicks.

Also, thinking about it ...

Worth zooming right in in a wave editor and looking at the waveforms and trying to decide ifyou can see and edit out any wierd bits or quiet bits. you can do a lot more with a wave editor on this front thatyou can fix with plugins.

Don't overdo the compression on them you can make a dramatic difference to a kick with ratios less than 4:1.

ou probably don't need the gain reduction meters to be reading much more than 6-8db of cut or so normally otherwise the attack of the sound will be way in your face. (at 6db of reduction the attack will start about twice as loud as the rest of the kick sound ...)

make sure your compressor release time is set such that the compressor returns to 0db gain reduction in between each kick otherwise your first kick drum will sound different from all the others ...

Don't boost stuff with an EQ unless you really have to. Usually kicks need a bit of a cut in the mid if they aren't sitting.

Sometimes they have a really hard top end that makes the mix sound small and cluttered and a 6db cut using high shelving eq makes a massive difference to the mix.

Sometimes they have a shit load of sub bass that doesn't help at all, use a hi-pass filter to sort this out (about 30-50Hz probably). You can sometimes hear this in headphones but probably won't be able to tell the difference on monitors unless you've got gods own monitoring system. it'll sound far less muddy on a rig if you get rid of any excess sub bass.

if you're really struggling to fine tune a sound then maxbass from waves can help. it make a very full and middy sound if you want that ... often a bit too much, more usefully you can also add the bottom octave with it (use the dies bassum preset for a starter) ... use maxbass with care.

EQ, Maxbass and filter before the compressor normally. if it sounds good the other way then go for it, but generally best EQ and Filters then Compression.

Once you have the perfect sound, bounce it down and load it back into your track this time with no effects.

Zoom right in again check two things:

Firstly that the wave forms first big peak goes upwards, this will sound subtley more upfront (assuming your speakers and cables are wired right) as the cone comes towards your face first creating a pressure wave as opposed to sucking the air away from your ears which does sound different.

Secondly zoom right in again and check that it actually starts on the beat and that none of the processing (or the original sample) has left a gap at the beginning. Kicks sound better when they are dead in time. It's much more difficult to guarantee this if you're triggering them from a sampler so I always run the important percussion from audio tracks.

All this stuff applies equally to bass, especially the cutting unwanted sub stuff which can often mess up a bass track badly.

if you've got a lot of bass activity in your track you can use a shorter kick drum sample (just zoom in and chop the thing and then fade the last few cycles of it), if you've got an emptier or middy bass part then having a longer deep tail to the kick can be useful.

But above all start with a half decent sample that has the right kind of attack, harmonics and tail.

That's what I do anyway but i like a really clean tight sound, you might need to do something different if you're doing nastier hard stuff..

That's quite a long list of stuff (i was only going to say don't use a crap sample to start with) ... hope it makes sense.

[loopdon]

thanx so much, guys, u rule!!!



basil. that's what i would call an xxxl-post

that post is absolutely ace, indeed.

so much knowledge in there,

the audio-track thing is something i def. will amongst others, again thanks.

:clap: :clap: :clap: :clap: :clap: :clap: :clap: :clap: :clap: :clap:

[tracatak]

ty everyone.....but my first ? is for jaypace ...only the first kick gets the reverb right...that should be plenty i think...and can u play ith the 50hz ranges etc in anythign else besides waves...my waves plugin is giving me trouble at the moment..maybe somethign basic in fruity so i can experiement as i retry to install my waves plugins...? fruity parametric eq maybe or 7 band eq...whihc has 63, 250, 500, 1500, 3k,5k, 8k (all hz) ....so what im asking sorta is ..if i wanan make something 50hz do i play with the first knob which says 63hz ...and maybe same knob when i wanna make the 2nd kick 80hz? or am i way off..

[loopdon]

sorry, m8, but i am not shure what you're on about.

if you want to enhance/cut a certain frequency you can use the fruity parametric eq, you can do more with that than with the 7 band eq.

it's not limited to preset frequencies...

please reformulate your question, so we can all try to help, i was rather confused


or just don't try posting after you've come home from a party ;)

just kidding... :lol:

[Mindful]

Cheers Basil I got alot of good advice from that list :clap:

[Mindful]

http://www.analogx.com/contents/down...udio/delay.htm

Just found this.

[Basil Rush]

Wonder what a delay would sound like if it was stretched to be in time with a shuffle, so something that came in on the 8th beat say echoed just longer than 1/16th later and something that came in on the odd 16th s of a bar repeated just faster than a 16th ...

mmmm

*thinks*

shuffle delay.