Tutorial: Sampling kicks from your favorite tracks
NOTE: I have never made a tutorial before, and I would love some real advice and editing suggestions from veterans of the production studio forum (PM me). Also since this process involves repeating steps over and over, and “judgment” calls; I will denote when to “repeat until you like it.” Also, if something like this has ever been made. Please let me know. I won’t delete this, since I put work into it, but if it’s redundant, it shouldn’t be stickied.
Tools used:
-Sound Forge 8
-(Waves if you have them, if not the Sony Plug-ins do well)
-Patience
-SNAP TO ZERO CROSSING MUST BE ON
Reason: I was doing [something] and was listening to [a cool track] heard a cool kick, and said HEY wouldn’t it be fun to use that.
Ethics: You’re stealing someone else’s either sampled, or painstakingly created kick (sometimes it’s hard to tell). This is more for fun and understanding how sound works, than anything else.
Steps:
1. Find a song with a delicious kick in it. For this tutorial I used “Evil Angel feat. Kim Marsh - Today [Alphazone Dub Mix]”
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2. Record it:
a. Make sure you either have a wav (CD) source, vinyl, or high quality mp3 (mp3 NEVER recommended for editing audio though)
b. In this example I ripped a short cut from a copy I had on vinyl
c. On your mixer make sure EVERYTHING is zeroed (I have a DJX700 so my recording is going to be sub-par no matter what)
d. I recorded the max my MOTU 2408 MKI would allow, 24bit, 48khz.
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3. Finding: Find the driest possible kick you can find. The one with the least going on in it. Copy it, and then make 2 new sound files. One file will be your original kick, untampered; the other will be your “re-created” kick (obvious). Be sure to make the new files at the same bit-depth and sample-rate as your recording. MAKE THEM BOTH MONO.
Original Sample
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4. Trimming: Mmm Just look at all those harmonics. In my case, I am going to make a judgment call and say that the last little bit isn’t very important (think of how long a kick is dry, anywhere between 15-30ms) I trimmed it at 00:00.281. Do the same to your original copy (this will be very important later).
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5. Drawing: It’s paint by numbers with waveforms in a sense. You are going to draw over the original kick with the pencil tool and guess at what the original waveform might have looked like dry.
COMPARISON:
a. This part is your call in certain parts. I usually leave the very first few milliseconds the same as the original sample, since important “slap” information is contained here. Maybe smooth out a few amplitude fluctuations. But other than that leave it pretty much alone.
redrawn (traced) over original
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6. Smoothing: This part is pretty easy; select the entire waveform (except your precious “slap” data). And go to Process – Smooth/Enhance. Set it to “-3” and process it. Press Ctrl+Y to repeat the smoothing (I did it about 5 times).
re-drawn smoothed
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7. EQing: Now go back to your original kick sample. Select the decay part of the kick (the “wump”). And go to Process -> EQ -> Parametric EQ.
a. Settings are: High Frequency Shelf, 150Hz (or what sounds good), Transition of 0.1 octaves, and amount to -60 db. High accuracy.
b. Reasons: When we listen to sounds, the mid-range and high-mid frequencies mean the most to us. The last part of a kick, the decay, is usually just a big low end “wump” that fades out. We only need a more accurate “wump” part for the sake of this exercise so we can safely remove ALL the high end of the wump section.
8. Pasting: Mix paste your Eq’d original “wump” section to the exact time of your new “wump” section. Use Ctrl+Shift+D to examine the selection of the original, and copy those values to your new kick selection. Then go Edit -> Paste Special -> Mix...
a. Settings are: Source at -10db approx, new wave at 0.0db, Apply Destination volume to overlapping area only ON, Pre/Post Fade .001 ON
9. Pasting 2: Mix paste the un-eq’d “slap” section with the exact same settings as above.
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10. Smooth: Smooth the area together 3 times (at the -3 setting) in between where you mix-pasted your “slap” data and “wump” data.
11. Fading: Fade out the last quarter of the kick, and do a very small fade in to the very beginning of it.
final kick
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12. Finishing: Finish by using dither! If you save it as a 24bit 48 kHz file that’s fine. If you want to save it as a 16bit 44.1 kHz use dither!
a. In the previous steps you basically just processed each piece. In this step (if you want to keep your original 24bit, 48 kHz sample) we add a Dither plug in to the CHAIN on the new kick. Use the standard 16bit preset.
All in all. It’s a fun process to remake audio and it’s a good learning process as well. I really enjoyed doing this and making it. Being this is a draft. I would appreciate any comments on quality of the tutorial as well as suggestions. For advanced DAE users some of this will be redundant, but for the youngns’ it might be useful.
Thanks.
Adam Wrzeski
The RTF file, and all the wav samples can be also downloaded from this rar.
kick_tutorial.rar
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Last edited by wrzonance on Feb-12-2009 at 18:24
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Wow, I'm going to have fun with this one tonite! Nice tut!
