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-- The Perfect Kick - Here's How
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did i ever say i got an A in English? =)

maybe you also misunderstood me. I respect the producers of pop music because as far as skills go they know what they are doing.......but ya as far as the creativity of pop music, yes its not that creative...

Emperor you a joke man ! Why dont u put urself on a musical course or something

I dont get it? Why is this dude gettin slammed? I can totally get the connection between pop and trance, especially the cheesy shit.

As for tuning kicks... I dont do it, but it makes perfect sense to me.

quote:

Originally posted by Emperor did i ever say i got an A in English? =)

Here, the Emperor, have an A in English !

(strongbad reference)

quote:

Originally posted by Axolotyl I dont get it? Why is this dude gettin slammed? I can totally get the connection between pop and trance, especially the cheesy shit. As for tuning kicks... I dont do it, but it makes perfect sense to me.

I think it was the following statements that made me think...

quote:

Originally posted by Emperor the 'note' or pitch of the kick does matter........thats totally what sets a pro track apart from a amatuer track

I beg to differ, Sir...maybe you should think that one through a bit more carefully.

quote:

Originally posted by Emperor you can magically predict the next notes in a pro-written melody

surely if a pro wrote a melody they wouldn't make it as predictable as if an amateur wrote it. (generalising again)

quote:

Originally posted by Emperor With progressions you only have a certain amount of choices to a chord change.

Chord change is only half of it...the other half being the chord or note duration.

Anyway, despite my view I can definately still see where he's coming from .

1. Pitch is defined by a fundamental plus harmonics. Kicks rarely have a discernable fundamental frequency (they're more like a broad spectrum in the bass range), and therefore cannot have pitch. Kicks which do have a recognizable pitch generally sound awful in a mix no matter how they're tuned.

2. There is no formula for professional music - chord progressions, melodies, or otherwise. Classical music, jazz, funk, soul, hip hop (rap), trip hop, house, psytrance, and more were all created by people who defied convention and broke the rules. Formulaic music may have more commercial appeal due to its familiarity but that does not make it good or professional (in fact, it's usually the production quality of a track that makes it "professional", not its musical richness).

3. If you think you are able to tell what key a track is in by listening to the kick, it's because most of the crap out there is all in the same key to begin with. And if you're able to magically predict the next segment of a melody or progression, it's probably because it's been ripped off from some other melody or progression. Music can be original and unpredictable and still be good/professional - it's just that there's an assload of producers out there who exploit formulas for commercial success (and occasionally resort to outright plagiarism).

4. Trance (in its true form) is dark, brooding, layered music with an abundance of gated and staccatto effects and synths. What many people in this thread are referring to as "trance" is just bastardized trance - saccharine, syrupy, mind-numbing uber-hyper-ultra-mega-super-saw schlock trance, slathered in commercial mayonnaise and ketchup. Half of the vocal stuff isn't even differentiable from Euro anymore (one of the local Euro radio stations here actually plays several of these tracks). That *particular* flavour of trance sounds similar to pop music because it IS pop music, retaining almost no elements of real trance except for the syncopated kick/hi-hat/bass pattern, and not even retaining that during the 45-minute breakdown sequences.

Please, do not use this as the definition of "trance", because trance was never historically so commercial. Defining trance by the standards of Rank 1 and Ferry Corsten is like defining rap by the standards of Ja Rule and Fifty Cent. None of these artists reflect what the genres really are. Just as those of us who aren't culturally braindead would prefer to remember hip hop as the music of Grandmaster Flash and the Funky Four, there were/are still many good trance producers and DJs like Baby Doc, Tarantella, and Christopher Lawrence.

I'm sorry for that rant but it absolutely had to be said. There are too many people rambling on and on in this thread like they know everything there is to know about this shit, when they really sound like high schoolers trying to come up with a thesis for their term paper in social studies.

Trance in its True Form is dark and brooding? wtf ever.

dont worry about trance being commercial either. its not at all, here in usa anyway. im sure the worst trance song on your radio is better than the best song the RETARDED techno stations play around here.

Diginut i agree on everyting, except your definition of trance. Trance is not definable. You say Ferry Corsten and Rank 1 is not pure trance, nonsence. Everything with a non-breaking kick and a melody is trance. Imo your definition of trance is music which only you like.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh whatever, why would i care

Hah, why am I not surprised that the n00bs are jumping on me about the definition of trance. Let me guess, you've been listening to it since 2000 or later? Early trance was more like psytrance, minus the Hindi/Israeli influences and a little slower tempo.

Anyway, what possible incentive would there be for me to define "trance" as just the music I like? I really don't like a lot of the dark stuff. I find it repetitive as hell. And I have no problem with Euro either - it's a bit syrupy but I'd take E-Type over Britney Spears any day of the week. I'm simply telling the truth about the history of the genre. Everything changed around 1999-2000, when producers finally started making tracks with more commercial appeal, then started drawing in a commercial crowd, which demanded MORE commercial tracks, etc. - it's a vicious circle now, one from which I doubt there is any escape.

Some of you probably hate hearing this because for the past few months/years you've been telling yourself how cool you are because you listen to this rare underground music and get sexually aroused when your neighbour yells at you to turn it down. Get over yourselves - not only is it powerfully immature to define yourself based on the music you listen to, but the music is still basically pop music.

quote:

Originally posted by mysticalninja Trance in its True Form is dark and brooding? wtf ever. dont worry about trance being commercial either. its not at all, here in usa anyway. im sure the worst trance song on your radio is better than the best song the RETARDED techno stations play around here.

maybe in states!!

come to europe.. heres trance is commercial.. every little basic (cross music..pop..rock..etc)night club plays trance.

trance dj's are biggest gods

they even make movies about them

here in little finland when latest finnish trance hits the markets..it's all the time in top10 singles..


orkidea, alt+f4, melleganproject, darude, dallas superstars, avanto and tab to mention few

quote:

Let me guess, you've been listening to it since 2000 or later?

99-2000 around there, with songs like sandstorm, atomic dance explosion, its a fine day, daft punk, oakenfold, alot of ATB, and DJ Mangoo lol. I remember saying I like DJ Mangoo more than Trance[]Controll once and my friend's called me a noob =(.

Pretty much I listen'd to whatever came up when you searched for 'techno' or 'trance' in Napster Mp3's and P2P networks were just getting big around then.

quote:

is it powerfully immature to define yourself based on the music you listen to

Agree'd. There's two genre's of music as far as im concened, good music, and crap. I don't care if its the #1 hit of the year or if it has a 10 year old rapping on it if its well produced good music. I listen to music for the music not the image

Nothing is more annoying than ppl who dont.. I showed my friend the 'Gorillaz - SunShine in a bag' song before it had a music video back in the day, and when he saw it on tv he said something like, 'oh its gay now.. mtv ruins music'

His whole personality is based on this type of anti-majority's opinion thinking. He always has been and still is a dipshit trying desperately too be unique. I just had to vent on that real quick.. anyone else have an asshat of a friend like that? Is there any hope for them or are they doomed too this stupid cock gobbler attitude for life?

quote:

Originally posted by mysticalninja Is there any hope for them or are they doomed too this stupid cock gobbler attitude for life?

no hope, people are like sheep, if a sheep jumps down a cliff all sheep will follow

how do I make a kick that sounds like a whiffle ball bat hitting a dead horse?

what's a perfect kick ?

quote:

Originally posted by hardikaveri come to europe.. heres trance is commercial.. every little basic (cross music..pop..rock..etc)night club plays trance. trance dj's are biggest gods they even make movies about them here in little finland when latest finnish trance hits the markets..it's all the time in top10 singles..

But here in the UK - last year only a single trance number (by Tiesto) made it into the Ministry of Sound's top 100 tracks of the year. The other 99 were either House or Breaks. Number one was the Eric Prydz thingy.

quote:

Originally posted by mysticalninja Trance in its True Form is dark and brooding? wtf ever.

This has got to be the most uneducated statement I've read on this forum.

I'll tell you what. Go listen to Atmos - Klein Aber Doctor and tell me that it's not dark and brooding. Better yet, try to tell me that it's in any way uplifting. I doubt you could do either.

quote:

Originally posted by Airyck Sterrett how do I make a kick that sounds like a whiffle ball bat hitting a dead horse?

hahaha


thanks for trying to bring it back on topic.

quote:

Originally posted by DigiNut 1. Pitch is defined by a fundamental plus harmonics. Kicks rarely have a discernable fundamental frequency (they're more like a broad spectrum in the bass range), and therefore cannot have pitch. Kicks which do have a recognizable pitch generally sound awful in a mix no matter how they're tuned. 2. There is no formula for professional music - chord progressions, melodies, or otherwise. Classical music, jazz, funk, soul, hip hop (rap), trip hop, house, psytrance, and more were all created by people who defied convention and broke the rules. Formulaic music may have more commercial appeal due to its familiarity but that does not make it good or professional (in fact, it's usually the production quality of a track that makes it "professional", not its musical richness).

Dude -

I see your point here. But I've done a lot of thinking and messing around with kick drums in my time and some of them do have a pitch and sometimes that pitch is important - percussion just has harmonics that aren't as easily deducable by the brain as closely related. On the other hand I agree it's pretty unlikely you can tell what key a tracks gonna be in by the kick - although you can usually have a good guess at C or F or something with a lot of white notes, at least if I've had anything to do with it.

And whilst there isn't a formula for a successful track there are a lot of musical ideas that are formulaic that are part of music, if you didn't use any formulas at all you'd end up with something that people didn't want to listen to, usually it's good to only break a couple of rules when you write a track not all of them at once. On the other hand the whole uplifting trance formula is pretty tired I guess but still fun at the right moment.

But all that aside I had some thoughts about the whole kick drum business.

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.

STICKY ALERT!!

haha top post dave!! much appreciated mate thanks!

quote:

Originally posted by DigiNut 4. Trance (in its true form) is dark, brooding, layered music with an abundance of gated and staccatto effects and synths. What many people in this thread are referring to as "trance" is just bastardized trance - saccharine, syrupy, mind-numbing uber-hyper-ultra-mega-super-saw schlock trance, slathered in commercial mayonnaise and ketchup. [/COLOR][/FONT]

Okay, Ishkur Yeah, you might hate Ferry and Rank 1 for bastardizing trance, but it's still trance. That's like saying Green Day isn't punk. Yes, I think they suck, and they're mainstream as fuc*, but it's still a bastardized form of punk.

Besides, is any genre of music still un-bastardized? I can't think of any that haven't hit the mainstream facefirst...

^ The posts you're digging up are way too ancient for me to really care anymore, but you missed the point - Rank 1 and Ferry can make whatever music they want, I just get annoyed when people think that all trance should follow their "formula", when that's not even what trance music is really about. Some of us just get sick and tired of listening to trance nublets who just had their first hit of E telling us that that's what the music actually *IS* and that it needs to sound like that in order to be "professional".

"The channel fader should be reading -8db with just the kick playing."
ok this is some general info on db reading,
but i am courious is there any guideline about db reading of other elements (hihats,ohihats,claps...)?

quote:

Originally posted by krivi but i am courious is there any guideline about db reading of other elements (hihats,ohihats,claps...)?

http://www.ctgmusic.com/topic.php?id=4680

Read my first post there, particularly the third paragraph. A bit ancient, but it should answer your question.

thanx mate,
some good tips there..

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