Electro, gothic, noise, darkwave from the Side-Line
Hey Guys, i still have a big Problem since Weeks. working on a Song everything sonds great for my ears exept the kick, its dull and you cant dance to these fucking lame 4/4 when i hear other Bands and Projekts it kicks ass ;)
i cleand every low end and compression, Layering and EQing Saturation or other shit. Can i get some advice?
thx tommy
the 4/4 is not the problem....90% of all technotrack use a complete straight 4/4 Kick...the magic happens mostly in the snare and hihat patterns as well as in the bass...my rhythm-section alone mostly sound crappy if soloed out....but combined with the bass they form the foundation of the song...
but the kick is not outstanding at the Club, tryed it at different speakers and headhones but most of the time its very dull. you got the copy of the song ;) u know^^ and the kick is ver lame... and i dont know how to cange it that it fits to the rest of the song...
will listen to it tonight...got my DSL back yesterday :-)
the Kick should also not be outstanding :-)....
wormsoftheearth
offlineMember
get a new kick sample. or layer another kick or two with it...if the original kick sample sucks than no amount of compression or EQing will fix it. My best kicks come from a couple combined hits made on the machine drum layered with a hit or two made with the sr16, run through some outboard gear. Just dropping in a vengeance kick or whatever never sounds good to me
wormsoftheearth
offlineMember
oh and i meant to add that side-chaining might be in order
damnit. i wanted to add some kinda snide remark about side-chaining but i was beaten to punch by actual helpful people.
damn you all
oh, and sounds like your source material is the problem.
and WOTE... gimmie that machinedrum
hey, thx for your advices i use the 909 kick coming with the Ableton live Drum machines. but its not the sound i want. tryed with different samples. Just have to work on it. but its very frustrating. i sidechain my bassline most of the time, ableton compressor is comfortable ;)
wormsoftheearth
offlineMember
lol if its not the sound you want, why use it?
maybe you should try, to increase the volume of the kick???
:-)
soillodge
onlineTech Moderator
Not to mention tuning the pitch and EQ of the kick and your bassline so they are not fighting for the same frequency space.
`michael
Sounds like it might be worth picking up some decent kick drum samples then. For me usually I will try and start with a good kick drum sample, then I'll probably add some compression, maybe getting 5-6dB of compression with 10ms or so attack to let some 'bite' through. This both fills the sound up, gives you a nice solid sound and can give you some bite to the attack.
EQ...quite often you don't need that much midrange in the kick, a nice high end attack, a nice solid low end but having too much mid can crowd things, so I might scoop some mid range out, esp if it's quite a resonant kick. Then maybe add some highs EQ for a nice crisp bite. Parallel compression can work really well too, instead of using the compressor as an insert, use it on a aux send and balance the normal and compressed signals. A little tube style distortion can really bring out the detail and punch of a kick, not a lot, keep it subtle, try using a tube emulator on an aux send.
Sometimes the kick is just bad or wrong for the track. Sometimes layering works, take the low end from one kick with the bite of another, low pass filter the low end, hi pass filter the high end. Combine the two.
Sometimes it's not the kick at all that is the issue, other frequencies are getting in the way of it, so 9/10 I'll put a hi pass filter on everything else other than the kick and the bass and really clean up the bottom end of the mix, maybe cutting everything below 150hz.
Side-chaining can be very effective (ie: the compressor/side chain plugin ducks the bassline when the kick strikes), but if you are using an offbeat bassline not hugely necessary, esp if you tweek the release of the bass sound so it's not overlapping the kick too much. If you are using a 16th part synth bass, side-chaining can really get things pumping and grooving.
Try moving the bassline up an octave, sometimes that can really clean up the low end of the mix. You only have so much space in a mix and you have a choice between the kick and the bass as to what provides the low energy, in some music the bass is king and the kicks are actually quite thin, in most club music the kick is king and the bass is actually quite a thin sound with a lot of the bottom end taken off. Sometimes the 'bass' line is actually less of a low end thing and more something that sits in the midrange.
The big question worth asking is, what do you actually want it to sound like? Can you name some tracks with kick drums you particularly like on?
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@ Modulate: Thx for all the good hints that was what i looking for. i Post a Vid from the song i like the kick later on.
I'd agree with starting with good samples.
Then after layering them with appropriate hi+low passes as described above, tweak the volume envelope on the sampler, making sure the tail of the kick (especially the low-passed sample if you're layering) doesn't interfere with the bassline (this goes with the bassline as well - making sure it's release doesn't overlap with the kick).
So if you think of your kick in 2 parts, the bass part and the high part, the bass part has to be deep and tight and not overlap with the bassline. Whereas the high part gives the character and can have a bit of a longer decay if you want.
Juggling a big phat kick drum and a bassline takes a lot of work. Sidechaining definitely helps in some cases. Oh and a kick drum should never look like a brick - it should always retain a defined transient in order to punch through a mix. Look at the kick in the mixer's VU meters and make sure it drops instantly after the transient. If it just blats out at max level (which is what happens after excessive compression), it may sound more satisfying on it's own (especially at low volumes) but it'll never cut through a mix. Incidentally, I never compress my kick drums and wouldn't recommend it for this reason - but that's a personal thing and wouldn't criticise anyone else for doing this.
Some of the best "looking" kicks I've heard are from the Machinedrum. They are beautifully defined transient *thip*s, really beautiful synthesis on that unit. Layer this kind of basis with hi-end *crunch* and you've got a club banger on your hands.
Erez from Infected Mushroom (who gets the best kicks around IMHO) also said some cool things about basslines where the bass notes are on the same beats as the kick, which is to automate a hi-pass on the bassline just for those notes. But personally I just try to avoid having the bass notes on the same hits as the kick...
wormsoftheearth
offlineMember
in addition to side-chaining, if my bass hits at the same time as the kick, I'll give my basses a fairly long attack to give the kick room. That infected mushroom interview kicked ass, tons of great tips
thx for the tips the layering made my day the problem was te hi end of the kick. now i layerd it with another kick low end filtered its fine now ;)
what interview u mean, and where can i find ;) i am alltime interested into music interview from producers.
Tommy
honestly the Kick is not a problem for me in the song...but the rest is really chaotically arranged..and this high arp line imho will become annoying....
Incidentally, damn, I wish I had that Modulate remix above to spin in my DJ set tonight... :0
"it should always retain a defined transient in order to punch through a mix. Look at the kick in the mixer's VU meters and make sure it drops instantly after the transient. If it just blats out at max level (which is what happens after excessive compression), it may sound more satisfying on it's own (especially at low volumes) but it'll never cut through a mix. Incidentally, I never compress my kick drums and wouldn't recommend it for this reason - but that's a personal thing and wouldn't criticise anyone else for doing this."
That is exactly why I was saying leave a 10ms-25ms attack on the compressor. This allows the transient of the kick through the compressor before compressing everything else. Then when you set the gain to the correct level (some compressors have auto-gain) you have effectively raised the volume of the transient as well as reducing the dynamic range of the rest of the kick. Obviously all compressors have their own unique characters so YMMV as to which one gives the sound you are after.
For the particular kick in the Suicide Commando remix I used the following settings.
Main kick - A punchy kick drum sample, this was a pretty good trance style kick drum in the first place but it needed a bit of tweeking to sit with the mix.
Sub kick - A deep sub kick, essentially a sine wave at 50hz
Bite kick - A heavily processed kick that sounds more like a sharp HiHat than anything that resembles a kick drum.
Main kick - this sounded ok out of the box but it was a bit resonant, it had a definite tonal note as opposed to just a thump so I put an EQ on it, 625Hz and 0.2Q, 6dB of cut to really carve a hole in the middle. I wanted to keep the low end and the bite but the tone in the middle would get in the way of the rest of the mix so I had to cut some of that out. To add some more bite I added a compressor, 3.5:1 ratio, 15ms attack, 70ms release and threshold set to give me about 3-4dB of compression. Not a lot but enough to really bring the transient out and change an ok sounding kick into something much punchier.
The sub kick is there to add a bit of low end weight, the chest shaking whoomp in a club. I matched them so that the sub kick and the punchy kick had very similar envelopes but sometimes you may need to put a gate/envelope on it...or even key it from the main kick via a sidechain. The key is to have both sounding like one sound, not two combined. In this case on the mixer I set the peak level of the sub 19db less than the peak of the punchy kick. I don't want it so loud it's taking up too much of the bottom end, it is there to add weight and some fatness to the other kick, not to really stand out on it's own.
The Bite Kick was actually the original kick in the remix. I added some distortion to it to bring out the top end, then really heavily EQ'd it to roll all the low end from about 1kHz and gave it a 15dB boost at 20kHz, 0.2Q, compression as per the main kick with the threshold set to give 10dB of reduction and added a short ambient reverb (0.12sec decay) as an insert to help it bed together better with the Main Kick. It ends up sounding like a thin click that when mixed in adds a nice amount of dirt and attack to the kick drum and helps it cut through. This is mixed in around the same peak volume as the Main Kick.
The compressor setting of 15ms attack, 70ms release, 3.5:1 ratio is something I saved as a preset called Snappy. Whatever I put through it, it is going to add bite to it. Adjust the threshold to suit, typically this works well at 3-10dB of gain reduction.
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