KICK DRUMS

[Lada Laika]

fucking lol the mental image

[dingformung]

Lately I've developed a thing for kick drums that are almost no kick drums. Very mid-heavy kick drums with not that much bass in it or kick drums that are almost bass notes. I think these kinda kick drumse are really good drumse

[thawkins]

I think I share this affinity. In styles like techno or trance or something like that, the kick needs to be huge sometimes, but recently I like it when the kick sort of hides in the mix - you sort of know it's there not because of it stands out or something, but rather when it stops and goes quiet then you know something's missing.

[TheBro]

I just use samples and then layer them. Some kick drums are pretty beefy as it stands like the ones from the Yamaha RY30!!!

[Entorwellian]

Cooledit's tone generator, noise gen, built-in eq and amp filters + pitch processing gave me some really awesome kick drums. Since I knew what frequency the tones were at it made mixing them later a lot easier. I don't know what it is with Cooledit but all of the sample processing I do with it has this 90's aesthetic as coming out kind of hollow, tinny but clean. It works well with kick drums and drops because you can go to insanely low frequencies and still have the bass sound clean on top of everything else being mixed into the track. Sometimes I would mask another sound over them to give them some "boom", like a door closing or dropping books, and other times I could just do it with the tones alone and make some nice dips and clunk sounds. I've tried other sample packs, hardware and soft synths but I still prefer cooledit after all of these years.

[dingformung]

Sounds nice. Gotta check out Cooledit

[hma]

its never kickdrum alone though, sometimes its bass first, sometimes hihat... but if i start with kick first i go by the mood, usually kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkckkkkkkkkkk chccj kkkkkkkkkkkkkckkkkkkkkkk tjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjp kckkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkckckkkck 

[eryngi]

Lately I've developed a thing for kick drums that are almost no kick drums. Very mid-heavy kick drums with not that much bass in it or kick drums that are almost bass notes. I think these kinda kick drumse are really good drumse

yes this!

i keep trying to achieve this sound but usually accidentally make the kick too big. not that there's anything wrong with that. but it's always pleasing when someone pulls off that sound well.. i think it kinda relies on the interplay between kick and its surroundings, like, reverbiness or sidechainediness or whayever that make a clicky little kick fit and seem powerful instead of thin.

eg afx - tha. good kick!

[dingformung]

yeah, the impact the kick has on other sounds is almost more important than the kick itself. I guess you could make a cool track with the kick drum being muted but still sidechain compressing other tracks imprinting its contour into the synths. I always like when it has a varying impact on every track pushing away some tracks while other tracks seem almost unaffected by it

[Salvatorin]

a.k.a. every actress track

[Entorwellian]

Sounds nice. Gotta check out Cooledit

 

Soundforge's tones are supposed to be even better for kicks and bass hits. I can't remember if it was Burial or Madlib that used it for that purpose, but making your own kicks from scratch in that program supposedly is the best software to do it. I never used it personally, but there was an older user here named vodor who swore by it.

[Braintree]

Sounds nice. Gotta check out Cooledit

 

 

Better get yourself a time machine.

[Entorwellian]

Cool edit Pro 2.0 didn't work for a while but ever since Windows 10 had the legacy driver update it started working again. Totally dived back into it and realized how much I still love it 20+ years. Haven't even touched Reaper in a few months now. 

[Braintree]

Daaaamn. I loved Cool Edit. The time stretching is so bad it's good.

Long live Peter Quistgard.

[Entorwellian]

The time stretching is incredible in a deconstructive way. Like putting the time stretcher on poor quality and using a repeating decimal number for the speed, like 0.1111111, made this really cool stutter that I would use for percussion pieces and loops. You could put in negative numbers too and it'd be half and half that you would get an even cooler stutter or the program outright crashes.

 

I'd say about 50% of my stuff, across the board, has been made in Cool Edit. My songs go through at least once Cooledit process.

[Braintree]

Yeah, I used to take a short loop from a track I was making and time stretch the shit out of it then bring it back in as background texture. Worked a lot better than the flawless time stretching that we have now.

[modey]

I was a SoundForge 5 guy, right up to the point where I switched to mac, 7 years ago or something. It had some great editing features for quickly glitching things up..

[sheatheman]

I’ve made plenty of kicks over the past 4 years, but these days I’ve gotten so good at manipulating a sample to sound exactly how I want, that the stock ableton sample bank is good enough for me 90% of the time. I still enjoy making wooden sounding kicks on tempest, or creating my own elektron style kick “machines”, or sampling sounds with my phone and making drum kits...

 

...but in the end, a kick is just a tool like a hammer or a screwdriver, and I’m a lot more interested in a song than a kick.

 

Plus I’m getting really into actual tools lately since I’ve been doing handyman work, and I don’t have as much time to nerd out on transient design and pitch envelopes.

 

And I’m learning trumpet during my downtime in the truck.

[Guest]

love kick drums! I prefer subtractive synthesis, self-oscillating filters and then adjusting the amp and filter envelope to taste. My proudest bass drum achievement was when using my Moog Minitaur to do just this, but after I sampled realized that both oscillators were cranked to 10 (thought they were both off lol), turned out juicy. Prior to making my own kicks I used (and still sometimes do) Goldbaby samples. This is my favorite of the packs he's released: http://www.goldbaby.co.nz/12voltpunch.html

Hugo got excellent taste imho

[Nil]

I had to teach my students how to synthesize drums using Serum (not my choice), and was actually quite surprised by the nice kicks and snare you can make with it. I can’t help thinking Serum is way over-rated but still.