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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):
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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
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