Kick Drum

How’s everyone making their kick drums? sometimes I make the 808 in a vst and then layer with samples…

Detuned and time-shortened tom toms.

Sometimes anyway.

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cool

you know what’s up

S’all about dat tone, yo. :sunglasses:

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truuue

I find a honey and get her next to my speakers…when the right sample comes up, she giggles and I know it is the right one

I cheat now most of time and just hide a click behind a 808 boom - it seems much bigger than fitting a subby kick with a 808 for trap stuff

in another genre the kick could or might contain a lot of bass and switch out its spot with a bass or sub from time to time

but in music where the sub is super prevalent and theres no other lows - you should get rid of most of the kicks punch imo

time shortened - like pitching it down?

wanna try this

lately i just get a good quality drum machine kick

like a 909

usually take out some sustain and low end and sometimes highs too

  • mainly just sample and fiddle with envelope but sometimes i’d compress or distort it or reverb it, depending how i’m feelin

i’m a much happier person since i stopped worrying about creating kicks with layering

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a transient is in a way a pitch bend

going from high to low

and a kick is in a way every sound that does that as quickly
in theory everything could turn into a kick this way

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I’ve been going the route of taking 3 samples. I low pass a track and audition the low end of my samples to get the right punch (pitch the sample if needed), then layer a nice top end and body kick. I don’t like much mid range so I tend to mix the body section lower within the layers. Group then EQ and compress them together. I find myself spending way to much time making kicks though…takes away from the songwriting fun… :frowning:

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Same…I feel like I spend way to much time obsessing over designing kicks and snares…ohhhh the problems of being a producer…

Yeah: pitched down but time-shortened to the approx. length of a kick.

Toms have a ton of tone usually, so esp. when sidechained they have extra “oomph”. But it also depends on the tom being sampled of course. I’m partial to old Ludwig samples but W.E.W. (Whatever works)

More importantly, toms often have the attack and tone to work well as kicks against our big rape-y bass tones.

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to be crude - would i just chop off the extra length right

no but thats a really good question

it has to to carry over part the attack portion to the ADSR part that actually rings a bit

technically a thud has a tiny recoil - - - the attack bit ricochets back and creates the thud before the decay that is hardly there
(‘squish’ )

whereas a more clacky sound like a snare has the dynamics going off in a triangle shape,a ‘tap’ where the ricochet’ing of the attack is so tiny it only shows itself later on in the ADSR and there its in the decay portion that end up summing itself and ringing out (holding the tone)

we’re talking micro seconds ofcourse

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This is how to make a kick drums with frequency layering :slight_smile: (spectrogram on the right with a tool like Izotope RX)

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