T-Racks....

[loopdon]

The setting I gave to Scot was my best effort to emulate my old hardware setup from our old studio. Consisting of a marshal and drawmer compression as part of the chain, along with a really old Stratos valve desk.
The EQ has a low cut and a little high boost, but obviously the EQ needs to be tuned for each tune. But all other settings give a nice presence and fullness to the mix without over cooking it (skranzzze style).
I`ll dig out the preset when I get back to the studio (I am away on work at the mo).

I`ll also be posting up the next part of my production tutorial.
Big Steve`s Big Kicks!!
Which will be a step by step guide for making your own killer kicks from scratch (ie, not from yeuch......samples), with audio file examples and some screen grabs

That sounds useful, mate. I have done my own kicks with soundforge and have read about 3 tutorials about it. But i reckon yours will shed some light on issues that weren't covered in the other tuts.

This is one of the tutorials (probably the best-known one):

http://infected-mushroom.net/Studio/...m_Tutorial.htm

This from tranceaddict is useful as well:

"TUTORIAL: How to make a kick drum in Adobe Audition

This little tutorial will teach you how to make a boomin kick drum from scratch using AA. Note that this is a synthetic kick style, and not trying to recreate an organic real kick. One other thing you might need is a list of equal-tempered tunings, I will explain this later.

1st Step: Is to decide where you want the kick to sit in the frequency spectrum. At around 120-130hz (A#1-D2) is a good place to start for getting that punchy kick sound which is also warm and appearant on smaller speaker systems. You might find lower than this sounds deep but lacks punch, and higher than this becomes too tonal. Next decide the frequency you want the kick to decay to. The relation between the starting frequency and the decayed frequency is that of depth. The farther from the start it decays, the deeper the sound is. But this can be overdone easily, so don't bring it down too far, in general more than an 17 semitones. Next think about the key of the song. For the most compatibility between the bassline and the kick, decide to start and end on a frequency that is consonant to the key, intervals such as octaves, 5ths, and 4ths (going up or down) work well. So if the key is D, try starting the kick on A1 and having it decay to D1 or E1.

2nd Step: Is to generate the carrier tone that is the base of the kick. I should explain now that there are two ways to start this: either generate the lowest tone of the kick first (the decayed frequency) or the highest tone (the starting frequency). Its just a matter of preference when it comes to the pitch envelope stage. Personally I prefer starting high and enveloping down. Anyway, go to the Generate->Tones menu in AA, lock the final settings to the starting, set the master gain to about -3dB, choose the sine wave (or whatever shape), and input your desired starting frequency for the kick. Now there is a decision here to be made; if you decided to start with the high frequency of the kick, you MUST set the time of the wave shorter than the desired length of the kick, and if you decided to start low, then you must set the time higher than the desired length. That takes some trial and error to find out how long the final kick will be, but luckily its only two undo operations back to fix it. If the wave you generated doesnt end on a zero-crossing, enable snap-to-zeros and delete the incongruent end.

3rd Step: Is to pitch the carrier wave. This is one of the most important steps for deciding the overall sound of the kick. Select the entire wave (Ctrl-A) and go to Effects->Time/Pitch->Pitch Bender. If you started high, start the pitch envelope at 0 semitones and work your way down to the decayed frequency you want, or vise versa if you started low. The slope between the start and the end of the envelope is the most important setting to tweak the sound. Experiment alot with this.

4th step: Is to give this wave some dynamic. Select the entire wave again, and go to Effects->Amplitude->Envelope. There's not alot to say here, just give the drum some shape that sounds good. Usually a peak around the punchy section of the wave, followed by a reduction of -6dB in the boomy part is a winner.

5th step: Is cleaning up the digitality of this newly made kick. It's a very crude block of sound that needs its digital shell chipped off of it. What I mean is, look at the beginning and ending of the waveform (actually you want to look at this before you apply the volume envelope). You will see the wave comes to a abrupt stop at the end of its period. This is NOT how an analog oscillator releases itself. If we want a smooth sound out of this drum, you need to bandpass filter the beginning and end of the wave. The difference is appearant after you do it, and the sound is much smoother. Bandpass filter the beginning of the wave (a few wave cycles into the start of it) at the frequency the beginning of the wave is at. And then do the same for the end of the wave. The result is some of the cleanest bass you could ask for.

Experimenting: Some things to experiment with are:
Waveshape of carrier
Starting phase of carrier for snappy transient(45 works good)
Pitch Envelope
Volume Envelope
Layering other percussions for a snappy transient
Filtering
Reverb

This is a little long and involved but I've has some decent results with this method, far superior to using softsynths. The main thing here is to experiment, as AA has alot of powerful features if you give it the time."

I have another one but i will need some time to put it up. It emphasizes the importance of the actual note/pitch a kickdrum (or better the bass-wave portion after the initial attack/transient).

[detfella]

check here http://www.ismism.de/home_e.htm for a bass drum plugin, from the site

"If you built your basskicks up to now following the "infected kickdrum tutorial", you can get the same results with BazzIsm in seconds that took hours before."

[Grenoybel]

I tried that plug, but it seemed to me a litlle to much "infected", IMO

[dirty_bass]

http://iterativemusic.com/~dirtybass...ompression.trp

There`s the link to my T-Racks settings

[loopdon]

thanks, steve! will have a look asap.

[stjohn]

thanks steve...is this for the standalone or the plugin?? i cant seem to load into the plug in one anyway :whoops:

[BloodStar]

big thanks. I will have to spend more time and play with t-Racks again.

[vadarfone]

There is a MASSIVE thread about this on dogsonacid.com

Seems to quite the in thing now to generate your own kicks (and other drums) in an audio editor... The results are pounding when you get it right too. No dodgy phasing, no softness and no shitty sample sound, just a good solid TUNK! that you can rely on to rock it.

Combined with a sub sine generated in the same way, tracks have a massive low end drive and purity...

[loopdon]

@wormjar: i think i linked to that thread here allready.. good one.