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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.
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