Absolutely, I did not say anything different.

Correct, that's why I did not say that.

LOL, where? By saying 'you don't need'???

Caution, offenses are not tolerated here.

 

The secret to creating a punchy kick is to use this sampled sound as a layer. It works every time, literally.

 

What makes a kick feels *pretty anything you like to name* is actually determined by its wave shape : slow, growly, deep, short, punchy, and so on.

Analyse it and you'll see what is lacking and what is over present. To have an corresponding idea of what wave shape gives what feeling to you, just analyse kicks samples you like or try to correctly isolate from tracks you like the feeling it gives to you.

There are useful stuff posted before, but yeah beefing up acoustic kicks is a real work to do, something challenging and a bit more exciting than layering some samples produced (/recycled / copied / ect.) by a cascade of people before.

Use Psyscope by FX23. I use the free version. And if by any chance a kind hearted soul would read this message, receiving a generous share of the pro version would warm my heart .

Back to the practice : Psyscope has been one of the most important tools of my sound design arsenal. You can read so much info and check transient response of any effect you want in real time. This thing should have been out since years ago.


The 707 Kick waveshape and its "revolving harmonics"

A punchy kick is generally determined by a short envelope, some pretty generous harmonics revolving around 180hz, 290hz,160hz, and 97hz; and most of the acoustic kicks you heard as "punchy" have been played muted with any sort of dampening devices (wallet, gaffer, ect) and tightened with analog gates.
Compression occurs, of course, short attack if not the shortest if you use analog or like processors.

Because most analog cannot be that short (nominally speaking, like 0ms) it would always produce a short punchy attack anyways. Beware the all digital compressors and bad analog emulations though. Not for the same reasons. I even advice you to use powerful modern digital style compressors like the Nova wideband or fircomp and add some harmonics after with the excellent prebox from Analog obsession. Those three are free or exist in freeware versions btw. You can go hard on compression but only to bring the harmonics shape in a packed way without destroying their natural hierarchy of deployment or squaring them.

Of course any value here ain't definitive, those are coming from a 707 Bass drum kick; one of the punchiest acoustic kick ever produced and ever played and replayed. There are a plethora if not a whole cosmos of kick sound possible, I'm narrowing it of course to the "punchy acoustic kick" because it's a long time study actually from me.

What could I add next to the good advice shared before ? Again without any sound available only generic oriented advice can be shared;

- Yeah, a Pulteq style eq can help, simply, I just don't like waves VA, like most of their (not everything) VA product line it flattens anything to my hear (and in the video too...), and also, I did so much bullshit with Pulteq on kicks to "make them punchy" so I don't recommend it to myself :p

- I don't use parallel compression at all (don't crucify me please)

- The triggered sine trick... it's kind of iterative of Rbass, dbx120 sub generator, bass mint ect... those generally work with feedbacked fixed resonant filter topologies with a gain controlled with an enveloppe follower... it can help, but it can screw too. It is more adapted to make bassy sounds huge than punchy but it can be marvelous sometimes. I would recommend rather some low end quick expansion to avoid boominess and high end expansion to mimic the high end "click" of a 707 kick without the "cardboardness" feel when you high shelf too hard an acoustic kick and you have that skin tone sustaining. I would also try to align a synth kick, played or sampled, to add thumpiness, but it may denature the source.

gold lines, analyse; pitch down (or up ??); remove boominess, again, this can be helped easily by expanding rather than boosting, because the engaged frequencies won't sustain;

- about saturation, be gentle, or even do not saturate, just thicken the signal to mimic analog hardware with Reviver, by Fielding DSP a killer in its own league, a stealth assassin, a mastering facility secret weapon;

The voice of God or bark of dog, you choose, basically, a sub frequency cut with a low end boost, generally works with everything but I have more experience with taming huge kicks with this kind of tool

- Finally the transient designer. Can clearly do the job and avoid you to read everything above. But I personally did not find one that sounds good to me. Any recommendation for the best transient designer ever manufactured guys ? This kind of tools turns the sound into something artificial damn too rapidly.

edit : I did not find a way to share some audio clips, it would be a pleasure to share an example of what a dry camco close mic signal gives with all this treatment.

edit II : just a shootout to Variety of Sound. Among the finest audio plugins ever manufactured and freeware. Transformer and saturation models, eqs, and compressors. Have a look if not already good luck in your good sounding quest

 

Last edited: Oct 5, 2022

I play acoustic drums and do the mixing, so here's a very simple tip (unlike previous posts in the thread):

heavy EQ and nothing else - I mean, don't hesitate to do 12dB boosts or cuts, use your ears, don't trust your eyes,
acoustic kick raw rarely sounds great and polished when recorded,
if you want more low end, crank up the low shelf and low cut the useless rumble,
if you want to make it punch through the chorus, crank up the bell eq where it clicks,
don't be afraid to do slightly different EQ in different song parts,
don't be afraid to do very different EQ if double pedal is engaged and kick gets very dense

I've been struggling with decent acoustic kick drum sound years back and it was only because I heard everywhere big EQ adjustments ruin the sound - I say that's bullshit - especially if you aim for modern drum sound, without using samples (which is totally doable), you need to go extreme, and only then eventually dial back,
and if you ask, how do you know if it's too much? only if you reach the point where you ask yourself if it's too harsh, only then pull the EQ adjustments back a bit

on a side note, as folks here advised:
saturation can do the magic - but only if you have a good sound to enrich
compression will do the balancing part, again only after it already sounds good enough
transient shaping can yield quick results, but it's a shortcut that rarely sounds nice without proper EQ treatment first

 

dude.....you should seriously consider writing books self publish them or something

you wrote all that...it takes some patience to do that

 

idk about the best ever, but for me, some that I like :

1. Softube Transient Shaper - go-to for quick shaping, I like the dual band option. Funny that I always use this to lower the sustain, instead of emphasizing.
2. Neutron 4 Transient Shaper - multiband, nice GUI with analyzer, a little more control of the curve. Can be very subtle.
3. Wavesfactory Quantum - It's a more complex design, like a multi-fx. I use this a lot lately to do stupid shit such as to add reverb to the sustain part only. Can be used as traditional transient designer but not really recommended for mixing, because it produce a lot of artifacts but really awesome tool for sound design.

anyway for a "transient designing" job to emphasize Attack of percussive element, I like the Native Instrument (it's Softube but whatever) remake of the dbx160. I found using them a lot lately. Native Instrument VC-160. It's punchy af, my snares love it and currently in an unhealthy relationship with it. no kidding.

 

I would probably recommend to experiment with EQ and Compression because they can have a huge impact on your kick.
Try to boost around 50-120 Hz (Or even lower depending on the sound you are going for) to give your kick more punch.
Next to that you can compress it (I usually like to use smash and grab ).
After that process im usually happy because the EQ and Compression will enhance the kick nicely.
If the kick still feels too weak you should either check your source material (your raw kick sound) or try to layer it as other people suggested it.

 

Last edited: Oct 5, 2022

imho moderators at all times should be helping/serving the community,not trying to impose their opinion/knowledge on others

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Anyway if I was @petrrr I would start first to understand/learn what a balanced mix is & how important that is, gain staging & perceived loudness (also attack & release of your drum samples)
you might want to look into having great well produced sound sources first, creating your drum patterns before starting getting into mixing your songs
Here are my suggestions :
Addictive drums 2
Butch Vig Drums
Stylus Rmx
Heavyocity Damage drum kit

^ Hope the above helps you ,cheers !

 

Parallel bandpass filter track.
You set up a track, send the kick track to this new track. Insert an EQ on new track, capable of bandpass filter with Q selector, such as Fab Pro-Q3, find the resonant frequency of the kick, e'g' 50/60hrz, add bandpass filter and real narrow Q, the idea is to over emphasis the resonant peak of the kick drum only. Use fader on the new channel to add in to taste. good luck

 

I won't say they're the best but I find Sleepy-Time Transient pretty useful and versatile, especially the Advanced section and it's free https://plugins4free.com/plugin/1672/
I also find Boz Digital Transgressor very useful and a good addition to Sleepy Time's because it comes with pretty different parameters.
I've used both on drums.

 

Absolutely. The freq response needs to be tuned upside down - so to speak. I've never EQed an instrument as heavily as a kick.

 

Sadly, that's not always possible.
Also keep in mind that I'm a member too and a human being.

I don't do that - on principle.
When it comes to mixing and mastering everyone can believe and do whatever he/she wants. I'm only offering my opinion and experience.

 

Sleepy Time Transient and Transpire by Sonic Anomaly are some free transient designers that outperform most commercial ones (at least the broadband / single-band ones with no extra stuff). Great on drums (just don't overdo it).

Oh, and don't assume that a transient designer can do much to enhance the attack of a kick that has no transients (= no upper mids or high frequency content). You want to have at least some frequency information up there in order for the transient shaper to be effective.

 

Hard to say how to get your kick punchy. Depends on many factors: kick, room, miking, beater, tuning, playstyle, genre, etc....

In general EQ and compression are perfectly sufficient to get everything good out of a kick.
It probably doesn't hurt to boost the fundamental frequency and/or the chest.
The fundamental is around 50-60Hz and the chest is around ~80Hz.
Between 150 and 180Hz are mostly hollow resonances that you can lower.
The range around 400Hz usually makes the kick muddy. There it is often also worthwhile to take something away.
Between 950Hz and 1kHz sits the pressure of the beater - you can try to raise this range carefully and with a narrow band bell.
At about 4kHz is the click of the kick, here you can raise generously.
And between 8 and 10kHz is the air.
Everything above 10kHz has no use.
And sometimes an HPF below the funamental is worth trying.

Don't be shy when boosting or cutting. +-15dB (or even more) can be perfectly ok.

 

https://heavyocity.com/product/punish/

 

Push up the slider marked "Fuller" and then turn the "Punch" knob to 11.