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-- How to steal your favourite kick.
How to steal your favourite kick.
I was doing my usual routine of plundering kicks from unsuspecting tracks today when it occurred to me that a tutorial on how to do this would probably be helpful for some of you, so I threw this thing together quickly. Everything I do here is done in Adobe Audition.
Part 1:
First we have to find a track that will allow us to accomplish our task. You're obviously not going to be able to rip the kick out of a really thick mix, so you need a track that has some sort of percussive intro/outro. Basically if there's a pad or melody playing over the kick you're shit out of luck.
The track I used in this example is the MORPH remix of Sunday Afternoon. The end of the track is nothing other than the kick and percussive elements, so it was an ideal candidate.
http://www.flamevault.com/~celerity...ut/Original.JPG
Listen: http://www.flamevault.com/~celerity...ut/Original.mp3
Now notice that the tail end of the kick is overlapped by a highhat. This isn't good, and by simply trying to filter this out you'll most likely end up with an artifact on the tail of the kick that gives it this wobbly type ugly sound that you don't want to be using. Remember, the kick is the foundation of your track so if it's anything less than utterly professional sounding your track will never sound anything more than amateur. So, what we do is this:
First, we cut the kick up until the hat comes in, which is at around 11ms:
http://www.flamevault.com/~celerity...t/raw%20cut.JPG
Listen: http://www.flamevault.com/~celerity...t/Raw%20Cut.mp3
K, now that sounds okay, except for the fact that it's half the length of any kick we need thereby doing us absolutely no good at all. Here's where we have to get tricky and simple cutting and pasting won't help us. We'll have to deal with the bottom of the kick and the top of the kick differently, so the first thing we'll do from here is run a lowpass filter over the kick set to about 500hz.
Crap, I lost the screenshot I had of the LP filter. Oh well, it's exactly the same as the pic of the Highpass filter that you'll see in a little bit, except in reverse, so don't worry.
Listen: http://www.flamevault.com/~celerity.../LP%20short.mp3
Okay, so now we have to stretch the kick out so it's a suitable length. To do this, we'll use Audition's stretch function. Note that I'm starting the stretch at a zero crossing, and not stretching the entire thing but only from .020 milliseconds onwards. The reason for this is so the initial clicky bit doesn't get stretched out as well.
http://www.flamevault.com/~celerity/KickTut/stretch.JPG
Listen: http://www.flamevault.com/~celerity...20Stretched.mp3
Great, so now we have a kick that's about twice the initial length. There's only one problem, it sounds like some shitty kick from a happy hardcore track, and unless that's what you're interested in getting then you're not finished yet. What we do next is use Audition's Pitch Bend function to make it so the entire kick isn't the same frequency. In this example I've set the overall bend to be 10 semitones, adjust this to whatever you feel like in order to get the sound you want.
http://www.flamevault.com/~celerity...itch%20bend.JPG
Listen: http://www.flamevault.com/~celerity...t/LP%20bent.mp3
K now this is sounding pretty good, so all we have to deal with is the high end. Go back to the original raw cut of the kick, and this time instead of running a LP filter over it, we run a HP filter of it set to roughly 500hz:
http://www.flamevault.com/~celerity...ut/FFT%20HP.JPG
Listen: http://www.flamevault.com/~celerity.../HP%20Short.mp3
K, now we can do a couple of things. We can leave it as is and have a kick that doesn't have much of a tailing high end, which is good sometimes, or we can extend the tail of the kick to drag on for the length of the entire kick. My approach at doing this is as follows. First, we add about 15 milliseconds of silence to the end of the HP'd kick, and then we toss it through whatever reverb plugin you feel like using. I won't get into the specifics of the reverb because it really depends on the type of sound you want, but I ran it through a medium sized room and filtered out everything below roughly 1khz.
Now, we copy what we have to the clipboard and go back to the lowpass filtered kick. We then use the Audition function called Mix Paste to combine the HP and the LP version of the kick.
http://www.flamevault.com/~celerity...mix%20paste.JPG
And we get this pretty thing as the final product:
http://www.flamevault.com/~celerity...l%20product.JPG
Listen: http://www.flamevault.com/~celerity...l%20Product.mp3
There we go, all done! Note that this doesn't sound exactly the same as the original, mainly due to the type of reverb tail I put on the high end of the kick. If you wanted to do an exact replica you'd play around with the kick end tail, but I don't see why you would ever want a kick that sounded EXACTLY the same as one that's already in another released track.
BTW, I have no idea if it's actually legal to sample other people's kicks in your own tunes without their consent. My understanding is that it's fine, but don't quote me on that and get angry letters from other producers =P
Cheers.
nice and thorough explanation here 
Nice Sean. You might try to post that at Trance.nu tutorials. As far as stealing kicks, it happens everday and most people overlook it. Jono was talking about it at the Anjuna forum a couple of months ago, they don't mind, but of course it's frustrating at times because getting the kick right is so hard.
nice explaination, i tried a similar sorta thing with sound forge, got a bit of distortion from the kick sample though...
Yeah, I can definitely see their point. Personally I sample all of my kicks, but I blend several together and alter them to suit my tastes so at the end of the day they sound noticeably different. I'll check out trance.nu and see about posting this there, thanks.
as always...great tutorial djsean...
some very helpful advice on this one hehehe....
This is what the forum needs.. Good work
nice subject and good tutorial! thanks
cheers Sean, very helpful!
Re: How to steal your favourite kick.
| quote: |
| Originally posted by dj-sean BTW, I have no idea if it's actually legal to sample other people's kicks in your own tunes without their consent. My understanding is that it's fine, but don't quote me on that and get angry letters from other producers =P Cheers. |
I get all my kicks from my 909, HONEST
Re: Re: How to steal your favourite kick.
| quote: |
| Originally posted by Mr.Mystery Basically sampling any length from a track is illegal... BUT how many people do you think are going to whine about a single kick drum? It gets done by more famous people than you realise... |
sweet deal-oh
Thanks for the info. I wish this forum had a dedicated tutorials section. I will try Trance.nu
I heard a story that Aqua sued someone over a stolen kick... But don't quote me on that. (The moral of the story is, I guess, don't steal the kick from a track that's been at no. 1 in the charts...)
Sampling then processing is still illegal, as you'll quickly find out if you try to sample Michael Jackson.
I started stealing kicks recently, after a great deal of frustration trying to use sample CDs. I have to say that leaving hi-hats in can sound really good... I recently just chucked two ripped kicks into a good sampler (NN:XT is brilliant here for Reason people, otherwise see Kontakt, Intakt, Halion, etc.) and set low-pass filter envelopes on each to wipe out the top of the hi-hats while keeping that lovely hi-end info in the attack phase.
The result was a kinda Bom-ada-Bom-ada sound which actually helped the groove no end! Gave everything else something to hang from, and helped the creative process.
Funnily enough, I recently found myself making good kicks from sample CDs, after all that. (I was showing a friend around Cubase SX, and he only had sample CDs around) The technique is quite simple - find two or three kicks. One should be very subby (usually there's a sub-bass kick directory in good dance sample CDs), one very 'pokky' (like a pop kick) and (if you feel like it) one should be kinda plump and mid-rangey. Layer them together, and swap em around until you have the beginnings of a good kick sound. After that it's just a matter of multi-band compression/EQing/etc. etc. etc. to taste. You should be able to get away with a little high & low end excitement, or a bit of distortion... Whatever.
I guess working closely with good kicks helps give you a feel for what makes a kick work...
Tequila
cheers sean
Re: Re: Re: How to steal your favourite kick.
| quote: |
| Originally posted by dj-sean Also, I think unless you take a direct sample it'd be pretty hard for them to prove that their kick was the original source. I mean in this case, the low frequency will be slightly different depending on the amt it gets pitch bent, and the added reverb to the high end makes the kick sound somewhat different as well. |
Can you recommend some appropriate sample CDs to get really punchy kicks off of?
I use 'Techno Trance essentials' mainly. Although I got some lovely kicks a while back from a random source. I have, like, 500MB of drum hits. It's hard to keep track.
Who's up for a kick swap session?
Ben
[Thumbs up mode]Great work this sean!!![/thumbs up mode off]
is there any chance someone could re-host the pics for this? i'm trying it for the first time atm and they'd come in v. handy!
this is how to EASILY steal a kick.. import the tune.. cut the first kick in the whole tune.. (make sure its a tune with nothing playing over the kick..) import it to your song isolate it and VIOLA!!!
ive built quite a few kicks out of freely available kick samples off the net. basically layer between 3 and 10 kick drums, EQ some or all of them (with a spectrum analyser to show me what the fk im cutting off or boosting). render it in fruity as a 32bit wav. reimport it into a new file with izotope ozone and add a teeny finishing touch there if necessary.
i got quite a few trance type kicks (which are my best ones), a couple of hard house type kicks (typically less subby, more of a colder, harder kind of thump) and a couple of kicks designed for freeform/hardcore tracks (some of which are distorted gabba style to varying degrees) i havent got a host though id be interested in swapping some samples. you will not be able to recognise what samples have been used to make the new ones. i can even package the original kicks and blips with the new ones and its still difficult to identify any of them cuz of the heavy EQing/filtering and layering.
its highly unlikely anyone will sue you for using a commercial kick unless to make an example out of you (i.e. to deter lots of people from doing it). the cost of issuing a subpoena alone, let alone actually getting a lawyer and suing you comes at a significant cost to all parties involved (cept the lawyers of course). basically, as long as you dont nick something totally obvious, it wont be worth anyone's time and money to sue you cuz it'll just draw out and cost everyone. if you are subtle in pillaging kicks then you will be very hard to sue either way because all creative practice is in some part derived from stuff before it.
No longer have these pics, sorry. As others have mentioned, the attack phase of the kick is the most distinct part, so I'd recommend NOT ripping off kicks for your productions if you plan on actually releasing anything =P
With even a bit of layering though you have a new attack bit, and I'd be at a loss to know how it would be possible for anyone to know what the original samples were, unless they had some crazy distinct tail or whatnot.
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