Kick Drums

[Basil Rush]

I had some more thoughts about the whole kick drum business, mostly this comes from the world of trance and poppy dance mind you, but a lot of it still applies unless you get into really distorted kicks which will need treating a bit differently ... anyway, I posted this somewhere else the other day and after writing it all thought I'd better share it here. All suggestions welcome

EQING

A clean sounding kick drum generally starts with a complex broadband wave form for the attack portion followed by a descending sinewave for the weighty portion of the kick drum. EQing above the 500hz (ish) region tends to affect the attack portion and EQing below that affects the decay portion.

Because the decay portion is usually pretty close to a sine wave EQing it has some nasty side effects. The EQ basically just changes the amplitude curve.

Try rendering a 200hz cut and have a look at what it does to the wave form, it'll just make a quiet bit in the middle of your kick drum.

Avoid doing big cuts (more than a couple of db) in this area of the sound otherwise you'll have a weird double hit sounding thing.

FILTERING

On the other hand Dave West is absolutely spot on when he talks about filtering the bottom off the thing with a high pass filter - sometimes it seems nicer to filter off below about 20hz though and use a low shelving filter to reduce but not eliminate all the sub freqencies (unless you've got a massive subwoofer you'll probably not hear the difference except in headphones).

Again I'd agree with Dave on the setting the Kick drum to peak at about -8db, I use -6db personally but as long as you've got a good reference point in this kind of region you won't go far wrong, go much above -6 though and you'll end up in trouble later in the track with no headroom left.


COMPRESSION

I don't think there's a right setting here. Compression is again just going to change the amplitude envelope of your kick drum. You can use it with a fast attack to tame a really clicky sound and make it sound weightier or you can use it with a slow attack (15ms maybe) to make it sound tighter. You can use more or less ratio depending on what your original sample sounds like.

You could just zoom in on the bitch and edit the volumes on it instead, that's mostly what the compression is doing. You need to make sure the release time is set so the compressor recovers between each drum hit otherwise the first kick will sound louder than the rest, which will probably suck. Dave says 50ms to 100ms, he's probably right, check the meters. Check any bits where you've got kick drums close together.

Personally I use the Waves RCompressor on just about everything, I've got some posh outboard but for this kind of task it the software seems to work fine. Although I'm curious about Mr Wests comment about the TC stuff although I've not got it.

PITCH

If the kicks almost right but lacking a bit of weight try pitching it down half a tone or something. If it's not tight enough try up half a tone, if you pitch it a long way from where it came from it'll sound naff.

GENERALLY

Don't forget if you've got a brilliant sounding kick drum that's already been processed by some legendary trance producer maybe you don't need any of this stuff - if you sampled it off a record a bit of highpass might remove some record rumble mind you - but off a sample CD it might just be briliant already, although as the years go by more and more compression seems to be going on.

Basically all this processing is gonna make the sample sound tighter, looser, brighter or darker depending on how you use it, and it's going to get rid of any nasty confusing rumble. It's going to tuck it into the mix or bring it forward and make it more prominent. It's not going to make a shit sample sound good.

I've got about 2000 kick drum samples, most of them don't work in most records.

EDITING THE WAVE FORM

This is a wicked way of getting a couple of extra posh sound points out of your kick drum. Zoom in on the thing, get out the pencil tool and the cutting tool and cut any naff bits out of it - sometimes you get a kick that's been made from two sine waves and has a naff bit in the middle where it goes quiet or too loud, or where someone has mashed the EQ, sometimes you can just delete a couple of cycles of the waveform and fix this up.

You can run a pitch shifter, preferably somethign that lets you draw in pitch dives and things to make the tail of the kick drum more energetic.

Finally, and really importantly, you can just cut the end off the thing to make it tighter (and fade out a new tail).


THE ATTACK PORTION

Sometimes all a kick drum is missing is a closed highhat playing at the same time.

STEREO VS MONO

I don't see why you can't have a stereo kick as long as the bass portion of it is mono (i.e. the same and in phase).

Mono is a safe option though.

If you want to check push the mono button on your mixer and make sure nothing bad happens (like the kick sounding really different) .

COMPRESSING WITH THE BASS

Sometimes this works great - but most of the stuff we release doesn't do this and we get by ok.

Helps if you don't have the bass playing on the same note as the kick sometimes. If it's not sounding tight enough try deleting any bass notes on the

beat.

If it's a complex bass sound you can run a sidechained compressor from the kick drum on the bass channel, this will let you duck the bass where the kick happens without mucking up your perfected kick sound - this is easier in some software than others, i'm sure there's a million threads on how to do it kicking around as this question comes up all the time with people. It's easy in Protools and that's as far as I ever got with it.

TIMING

Make sure the kick drum actually starts on the beat, zoom in and check you've not got some blank space before it kicks in!

REVERB

Usually avoid it, but there are a couple of cool effects you can have here. One is to use a really bassy reverb and have it come up after the kick, sounds like german hard trance if you get it right. THe other is to use a short room reverb but with the bass cut on the send or return from the verb, just a little will make it sound nice if you have a bitof the track where the kick drum is expose (and I really do mean a tiny bit of reverb).

Avoid shit reverbs (most of the software ones suck badly, especially the cheap ones that come free with software, we use outboard for reverbs, even a cheap Lexicon MPX100 sounds better than 95% of software reverbs).

MAKING YOUR OWN

If anyone has done this and made something serious brilliant I'd love to talk to you, I've made some by joining the front of a good one with the back end of another but I've never made one from scratch I'd be happy to use.

I've had a fair few goes though, there's a Reaktor synth I made which anyones welcome to try and improve if they can (send me any changes ta!).

There's a picture of it here

ftp://80.176.210.21/pub/reaktor-designs/kicksynth.jpg

And you can download it (should with with Reaktor 4 and 5)

ftp://80.176.210.21/pub/reaktor-des...kSynthCERN3.ens

I've also tried Stomper but it's fiddly to get something close to right for trance, quite amusing to try though.

Waves MaxBass is a tool you can sometimes use to make eq type changes to a kick without introducing any really horrid side effects on the amplitude - use with care.

Finally if anyone has any kickdrums that sound a bit like Astrix then I'd love to get hold of them ...

cheers!
J @ CERN
http://www.cheapemotions.com/


ps. Really though a) use decent speakers b) learn to listen to things properly c) I've not made the perfect kick drum yet (although one or two of them have sounding fantastic in clubs) so take all this advice with a pinch of salt d) most track's kick drums suck in some way e) doesn't trying to define genres suck.

[stjohn]

great readin man!!!

[BloodStar]

nice

[SlavikSvensk]

cool man

[Evil G]

the comment about using too much eq and ending up with the kick sounding like it's broken into two parts is gold. :clap: it's happened to me when i've been too zealous in trying to drive out the mud and it's very frustrating.

the only thing i have to add is that both eq and compression are better done in the context of the mix (as with all sounds, really). a kick that sounds great by itself will often sound muddy in the mix, taking up too much room. if your track has parts with the kick very exposed, it might be a good idea to eq/compress those parts seperately from the parts where it is working under a fuller sound to avoid compromising too much.

[fatcollective]

very interesting, no doubt come it to good use...thanks!

[FIK]

Thanks a lot, really usefull.

[Mindful]

Good read that,gotta say that for the first year or so when I started out I found kicks were one of the hardest things to get my head around(I am awesome now of course :lol: )and its thru reading and practicing that you get good at them(like all things)

What Evil g said about eq and compression within the context of the overall mix is very true.


Its great to see your input back on here again Basil,If I remember correctly you know what your on about when it comes to pecussion.

[robin m]

That's a useful read, cheers...

[MARKEG]

thanks for posting that up man. i actually never thought about adding a hi hat.

[RDR]

Lovely and welll thought out tips there chief. Good on ya