Kick Tips and Tricks

Details: Published on Monday, 16 January 2012 11:30

Can I kick it?

Copenhagen sound designer Joel Krozer and his company Six Bit Deep recently released a free collection of beautifull kick samples.

As most music producers, I'm a huge kick nerd and always up for new tips on how the make the fattest, cleanest, dirtiest, fullest, punchiest or strangest kicks. So I thought I'd get a few words from the crafter of booms and dunks on the techniques involved in kickology:

An insight into Six Bit Deep's sound design techniques

After the massive response we got to our recent sample pack 'Analog Bass Drums' I would like to shed some light on parts of the production process the sounds went through.

I will try to focus on the part that you as a producer can do within the comfort of your home or project studio, as I realize that most of you won't have access to the kind of esoteric analog gear we have in the studio.

Having said that, you can come a long way with skill, experimentation and experience, which always wins over the 'quality' of your tools.

When creating bass drums for use in modern music you are left with the choice of basing your sounds on either acoustic recordings, electronic synthesis or a combination of the two. Furthermore, layering different sounds together is a very common technique that we are going to explore a bit:

Layering
The benefits of layering are the control we get over the sound. Try picturing a bass drum as a quick sweeping sound that falls from a very high frequency to a very low one.

Thereby the attack of the sound contains all the high frequency content, the decay all the mids and the sustain all the low end.

When layering i usually only use two sounds and in general a maximum of four (rarely). Less is really more most of the time.

For the attack section, I'll choose a bass drum with the character i am looking for and shorten it down to a length of ca 0.5 ms depending on the amount of midrange information i want in my final drum sound. By doing this i take off most information below 100Hz. A fade will often be necessary on the tail to avoid clicks.

I'll use a separate track for the second bass drum which will give us our low end and trim the head of the region until we only hear frequencies below about 100Hz.

From here, all we can do is experiment. I recommend trying any of the following techniques:

1. Flipping the phase of one of the channels.

2. Nudging one of the channels forward or back by ms increments.

3. Pitching either of the sounds up or down.

4. Include sounds other than classic bass drums like timpani, pitched gongs, claps, slaps, stomps and whatever else you can think of.

Effects
Once you are getting close to the sound you are looking for, consider using filtering and compression. A good parametric eq is ideal for this but remember that if dramatic changes are required you are better off changing the region length of your samples as this usually produces fewer artifacts.

Also, before you start EQing the master channel, try removing or adding the desired frequencies on the individual tracks. Be aware of falling into the trap of just adding more and more low end as this will only turn down the overall level of the bass drum and prevent it from cutting through the mix.

Compression is another tool that can be useful for shaping the envelope and timbre of the sound. Envelope shaping, in this context, refers to adding more or less attack, decay and/or sustain and thereby make the sound either:

More snappy (short attack, medium release on compressor)
More punchy (medium attack, medium release on compressor)
Heavy (short release on compressor)
Light (medium release on compressor)

The timbre can be modified (i.e. colored) by use of compression too. I personally love the sound of analog tube compressors in particular Vari Mu type and Optical compressors on bass drums as well as the more aggressive VCA style.

Though they don't quite mimic these characteristics quite yet, you can try experimenting with the following
plugins:

Elysia Mpressor
UAD DBX160
Waves SSL
Sound Toys Decapitator

There are certainly more plugins that are useful but these should cover it well. It is also worth trying these compressors in parallel, by inserting one (preferably a fast VCA type) on an auxiliary and over compressing the sound with crazy ratios and fast release and finally mixing that result quietly under the original uncompressed signal.

Sometimes using an EQ after the compressor inserted in parallel can shape the sound in a beautiful way too!

Monitoring
One of the main limitations of working in smaller or home studios is accurate monitoring. Be aware of how your room reacts to the different frequencies your speakers produce.

Try checking your work back on headphones occasionally as well as different speakers if you can. Also, it is considered good practice to try the sounds in context of a session with other musical elements playing as it is common to lose focus after working on individual sounds for too long and as mentioned earlier, your ears will often think the bass drum is lacking in low end.

The monitoring conditions is also the most common reason our clients come to us for mastering and we are always happy to give free mix and sound design advice to our mastering clients.

Like these tips? Check out Six Bit Deep's website or Facebook page or read more about music prodoction here!