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-- How do you cure a hollow kick?
How do you cure a hollow kick?
Is it a freq problem, sound problem, low end problem. Man isn't that kick a forbidden art?
No low frequencies?
MrJiveBoJingles...I think I would die without ur help. Thanks a bunch for the kick help!
Ok, been reading into some articles on kicks. Supposedly, the kick should reach down to the 80 hz range right? And it's mostly that area [say 80 - 150] that gives the kick the THUD. Punch comes from the mids/high mids I guess. But if I'm not mistaken, the kick is suppose to "sandwich" the bassline between it's low and high points. Which means that a considerable amount of mids in the kick have to be lowered or EQed down. Right? Or, am I being the newbie dumbass?
80hz is very low - its bordering on sub bass and anything down that low is mostly warmth and hummm.
You know how a kick drum is built right? It is a sine wave whose pitch is modulated negatively by an envelope.
The 'curve' and the amplitude of the modulation determines the aggressiveness of the attack with fast exponential curves resulting in 'laser' like squelchy kick drums and very hard 'clicky' kick drums.
A more linear curve results in 'rounder' kick drums. Thats because the initial pitch down is slower and less agressive.
Getting the right curve is the most important bit first.
This is a kick I built from soundforge (after post processing, which is detailed below):
[[ LINK REMOVED ]]
Bear in mind - I am the type of person that thinks a 909 kick drum is the most beautiful thing after Elisha Cuthbert so this reflects in the type of kicks I make. Im not into those hard distorted Alpha Zone type kicks, prefering the rubbery, clean analogue kick drum sound (ala: M.I.K.E. sunrise at palamos or Binary Finary 1998 for example).
This one is a 65hz sine wave. Pitch bend the sine wave along a non linear curve. This one is very non linear. It starts of very steep and then curves slightly in an 'S' shape then tails off really quick. Then I did another Pitch bend on it with a very fast downward slope. I lost the first pitch bend slope (overwrote it with the second pitch bend and forgot to screenshot it) but I managed to get a screen grab of the second one - it is also non linear and looks like this:
Then I decided, It didnt have enough top clarity in the mids and highs so I did another Pitch Bend - which looked like this:
After that one it started to sound really 909ish so I was pretty happy with it.
It sounds really plain straight out of Sound Forge, so I had to beef it up with a little harmonic content. So I stuck greasetube on it, which is a freeware tube amp simulator. Any tube or valve amp overdrive simulator will do. Its the same deal with clean guitars - to get real tone out of these instruments I am of the mind you have to stick them through a few valves. Then distorted the mids and highs using saturation distortion using Tridirt (freeware 3 band distortion plugin).
After that, I stuck a resonant filter before both distortions in the signal chain and set the cutoff to around 16khz with a slight amount of resonance. It killed some of the ultra low end bloat and made it sound 'clickier.'
After that, I put a reverb on it with a very short decay time. Its ok to do it here, because the decay time is very short and the end result is summed to mono with no phasing issues. Ergo, no comb filtering. You will need to run a spectrum on the kick to check that no part of it is in anti phase. If it is, you need to lower the wetness and decay time until it no longer pushes into anti phase. Summing the result to mono when parts of the kick are in anti phase will cause some parts of the sound to disappear which is not good.
Generally speaking, as long as the decay time is short enough that it doesnt overlap with the next kick - you should be ok.
The upside of adding the reverb is that it adds some real smooth, low end to the sound and in the right amount makes the kick kind of more 3d to my ears. It just gives it a greater sense of space and a nice tail out.
Note: NO EQ has been used. I always find EQing kick drums for tonal balance almost always makes them sound unnatural. For sitting the kick in a mix, a little EQ can help but I always try to not use EQ in the sound design stage. Once its complete you can roll off a little bit of the sub because this kick is sub heavy at the moment.
I have also yet to cut and fade the tail of the kick drum and otherwise clean it up. But the basic idea is there.
^ Excellent post.
But, you can just do what everyone ranging from Junkie XL to, well, most people do: sample. Take 3 kicks that you like, take the lows from one, the mids from another, and the highs from the last one and merge them together to come up with something new.
Yea. Once you have a library of nice kick sounds you have built, you can layer them.
I like to keep the purity of my kick drums so Im not much into layering kicks. But if you layer hihats and snares with just the right amount of attack/decay/release and with just the right amount of swing, you can really bring a kick drum alive. Alot of it is in the mix.
Interesting reading as ever Derivative 
+1
Interesting read
| quote: |
| Originally posted by Derivative (ala: M.I.K.E. sunrise at palamos or Binary Finary 1998 for example). |
Not really analysing it. Its the first song on my mp3 player so I listen to it like...every day when I walk to work. After the 35 hundredth listen you start to hear it differently and notice every tiny detail of the sound. Also, its a cracking good song and I like the mix of sounds.
Alot of the trancers I listen to now seem to have these humongous, stomping, hard kick drums ala Alphazone and I just dont feel it...
Its always the same songs I go back to for sound design inspiration - 1998 by Binary Finary (and that incredible minimoog lead. Wow), Sunrise at Palamos for *that* incredible lead which I still have trouble recreating exactly. Done an almost perfect clone of the Strange World lead though. Then there are others like Astral Projection's Power Gen and all that Art of Trance lark.
They all have these rubbery, analogue-esque, clean and warm kicks that dont overpower every other instrument in the mix. I just love those kinds of bass drum sounds.
Once I clean up this kick drum, Ill throw a drum loop together to show you how different it sounds when mixed with other instruments and percs. You can really change the whole 'shape' and 'tone' of the kick drum by layering in hi hats and snares and fiddling with the balance of the mix.
Biggest problem I used to have was definitely to bog a sound down with complexity far too early. It this stage it doesnt need EQ or ridiculous amounts of compression. But it may need a little of those processes later on.
Good thread.
There are very usefull explanations on here.. 
| quote: |
| Originally posted by azndragon0613 Ok, been reading into some articles on kicks. Supposedly, the kick should reach down to the 80 hz range right? And it's mostly that area [say 80 - 150] that gives the kick the THUD. Punch comes from the mids/high mids I guess. But if I'm not mistaken, the kick is suppose to "sandwich" the bassline between it's low and high points. Which means that a considerable amount of mids in the kick have to be lowered or EQed down. Right? Or, am I being the newbie dumbass? |
EQ settings will vary *massively* depending on the kick drum and the degree and 'curve' of the pitch modulation.
It is counterproductive to suggest all purpose EQ settings to soften kick drum attack transients because they simply do not exist.
If you are building your kick drums from scratch you will be in a better position to know what needs EQ and where, especially if you run a spectrum analtsis of the final sound.
If you use ready made kick drum samples, you still probably need to do the spectral analysis if your ears arent good at picking out frequency ranges. My ears definitely arent up to scratch yet without some kind of visual aid to point me in the right direction.
But my initial point still stands - You should not pile on the EQ on kickdrums too soon. EQ is a finishing touch - it helps the final sound sit in the mix better. Do not use EQ to shape the tone and transient hit of the drum. Thats what the pitch modulation and filters are for.
yea a cut at 80hz will kill the bass but its a bass drum! I want bass on my kicks!
Otherwise 'BOM BOM BOM BOM' turns into 'put put put put'' 
If the sub is so overwhelming without EQ then its a pretty good sign that you fecked up when building the kick. Try generating a sine wave with a higher frequency or change the degree of the curve.
nice post deriv thanks and very cool links too
great thread
Heres another kick for you. It is quite reminiscent of the kick drum in 'For an Angel'
[[ LINK REMOVED ]]
Made using the same method near enough. Pitch bend this one twice and compressed the upper mid and treble ranges hard with a multiband compressor. Short reverb tail using SIR and the 'Nice Drum Room.wav' impulse which can be found in one of the Voxengo free impulse packs. Overdriven using Voxengo's free tube amp simulator.
Shortend the envelope window and length of the sample until it gives the kick drum just the right amount of release and lowered the wetness to around -16.5 dB so its just enough to make the kick seem more 3D without overpowering it with an obvious reverberation.
Ill post the mod curves later. Also, I am beginning to use reverb alot on kick drums these days. Ill make a classic Underworld 'Born Slippy' type kick because that one has a plate reverb tail on it which contributes to that huge 'Booom' that it has.
hollow kick...............make it into two layers...being "hollow"...i usume its missing its mid makeup. double the kick track. eq track 1 so you only have the first half of the spectrum (lows+somemids) then track 2 eq so you have some mids+highs. this should be done easily with lowpass/highpass. then find a kick thats not hollow......remove the highs and lows....combine it with the hollow kiick...compressed and eq to taste.
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