No low frequencies?

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One always has to remember these days where the garbage pail is, because it's so easy to make sounds, and to put sounds together into something that appears to be music, but it's just as hard as it always was to make good music.
- Robert Moog

MrJiveBoJingles...I think I would die without ur help. Thanks a bunch for the kick help!

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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?

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Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself

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.

Last edited by Derivative on May-15-2006 at 19:25

^ 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.

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"When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading."

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).

That's the second time you mention Sunrise at Palamos today. Have you been listening/analyzing it a lot lately?
Good post though!

- farris

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..