Alot of people often find themselves with a weak kick drums once their track is done. This is not intentional but after all the processing and layers of other vital track elements, the kick seems to be shoved aside. If you don't make sure your kick punches then you'll end up like Steven Seagal. It's kind of like breakfast. You have a bad one and your whole day will suffer for it. So lets chow down in this kick processing tutorial Bruce Lee style! BWAHHH (insert gong sample here).

Instead of me typing up a storm about kicks here are a few videos on kick layering...

Point Blank Music School Kick Master Class

Loop Masters Kick Tutorial (Making sure your kick is in phase)

and just for gigsandshits a video with major bass music artist Far Too Loud

Always make sure you bounce your kick out at some point in the production chain to see it in wav. form or view it on some kind of advance visual plugin to make sure the transients are on point...ESPECIALLY if you are going the lazy route and using a single kick sample right out of the box(I strongly suggest layering multiple kicks! as it is extremely hard to find a proper kick sample out of the box).
Mind you that most kick samples out of the box are made for further processing and not just to be thrown into tracks without any further tweaking. I.E. alot of sample libraries leave in uneeded frequency ranges to give drum samples a fuller/"natural" sound all by it's lonesome so kicks sound good when you are scanning through your samples for a kick. You will almost always have to cut some part of a kick to make it fit in a mix due to this.


Now that you have a good kick. On to mixing it in with your bass to provide a quality mix environment so both your kick and bass sit in their respective frequency ranges without any quarrels.

Basically you need to make sure your kick and bass db peaks don't occupy the same frequencies. Its is a very simple fix with any multiband eq plugin. Alot of people work around this by side chaining with serious compression. Even with this, the problem is not completely fixed, especially with certain types of compression, IE newyork/parallel compression. I've found it's best to lock in your lowend frequencies, then sidechain them just to make sure.

Another note is to also cut unnecessary frequencies in your leads and pads and such. Drops those on to a frequency analyzer and make sure they, like your bass, don't occupy low frequencies to the point it will distort your kick or even your bass.

Most eq'ing techniques should be applied with subtlety. Don't over do it. Cut too much and your kick will start soundin like a perc. You can use these techs and maintain a phat kick to keep your track chuggin. If all else fails you can always tweak a freq or two in mastering down the stretch. These tips and tricks are just that. Train your ear to hear phasing issues and like minded problems and these notes will become second nature.


Hope this helps!!!!!!!

 

hey baby, I'd like to kick your drum if you knows what i maaaeennzzz....

great post btw : )

 

Lol! Thanks Hk!!
ISM Bazzism is one of my personal favs other than Voxengo's Drumformer Ubuntu! Far Too Loud uses Bazzism in the third video. That along with a quality transient master (I use Native Instruments Transient Master) is a solid route to go.

 

Bus all tracks but the kick layers, bass layers, etc and HP it and/or low shelving cut. SC compress the bass bus to the kick (or ghost kick). Has worked for me for many years.

Keeping kicks in phase is essential knowledge though.

 

Thanks so much for sharing, how nice of you.
Also folks remember I believe there is a fatter kicks video in AudioSex Academy (Part I) page 2 I think.

I actually struggle with Industrial kicks which take some planning to execute properly not to mention the snares which usually make use of gated reverb with the tail cut off. Personally I like SPL Transient Designer for my work with transients, good plug.

 

Got a link for this video?

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=1oSIuekl03A

 

About the relation between a kick and the bass (about the peaks to not overlap eachother in the same frequency region) this also can be done with a volume envelope, not only with a eq.
For example, the Volume Shaper 3 from Cableguys, you can draw your own envelope, not only to set the end of the already arranged kicks, but also sidechain of a bassline, so there's no frequency information on the bass while the kick goes in. I found out while using the Volume Shaper, that it does the most transparent and natural sidechain for me, like it glues up the kick and the bass together, sounding as one. All the time when i go for sidechain, the Volume Shaper is my go-to tool, like i would call it "Mr. Sidechain" as a nickname. *yes*

 

I think Volume Shaper is also the fastest, because you don't have to route nothing (like the classic way of compression), and also you're able to automate the host bypass, so the Volume Shaper kicks in only when you need it. You can also make ghost-sidechain on the fly.

 

Awesome, thanks for the post.