How do you make a fat sounding kick from scratch?
- Thread starter psymagi
- Start date
JPsychodelicacy
Studio Elf
Make loads and layer them, picking one with a nice bottom end and lowpassing it, then one with a nicer attack click and highpassing it. Mix and match more, EQ'ing to suit and when you've got something you're 100% happy with, render it as a single kick which you can then add to your collection. 
J.
J.
M
makdaddy
Guest
..or google "infected mushroom kick tutorial".. if you find it have a go at that - its a sine wave pitched from high to low / repitched..and so on...
Abstraction
happy juice
once you have made your kick with either of the above methods, try cutting an eq notch out of the middle of the kick. start with a narrow q, find the frequency where it sounds best and then adjust the q till its perfect.
Fromem_Ory
Shantidisestablishment
paddy dude, lets have a play with this next week! give u a shout bro
I've found that layering kick directly in battery is also a good method. You can adjust the attack of the low one and the hold and decay of the high one or if your using battery two you can eq the high and lows out as you wish. Then play with the pitch of each one so they meet nicely in the middle. I've found allot more controlle with this method when getting your kick just right for the track.JPsychodelicacy said:Make loads and layer them, picking one with a nice bottom end and lowpassing it, then one with a nicer attack click and highpassing it. Mix and match more, EQ'ing to suit and when you've got something you're 100% happy with, render it as a single kick which you can then add to your collection.
J.
Speakafreaka
Champagne Rouletter
In the end I finally figured out a way of doing this which actually worked for me. I'd got so thoroughly sick of trying to synthesize kick drums that I'd just about given up and was just going to stick to samples, but then I stumbled across this way of doing it which is a bit like the Infected Tutorial but not really, as I think that revolves around offline processes *shudder* which I don't like as I find it really difficult to involve the bass, or tweak the kick afterwards, and they don't layer the kick. Basically, what I did was try and copy someone elses kick through abusing sine waves, and in the process ended up making my own kick.
Sooooo... to produce your own kick you'll need a synthesizer which can produce pure sine waves and a sample player which gives you a visual representation of the sound in its memory and good control of pitchbending the sample (ie battery or RMIV or kontakt or any other half decent sampler, I use RMIV because I like the pitchbend controls).
First.
Everyone has the Triangle II synth right? If not google it and DL it - it is free. Set it up so that it is playing just a single sine from one osc through a completely open LP filter with no resonance at all. Make sure when you play a note that the amp settings do not make the note click on attack or release. Play a very low (lower then the sub of a kick) note for several bars, like maybe 9 or 10 bars at 120 bpm - you can't go too long here, but you are really going to be pitching this up a lot and shortening it loads, so make it too long. If it is so low you can't hear it that is just fine as long as there is a very strong (don't clip it or limit it, although actually that could be interesting, must try at some point) pure sine signal which you are exporting. Export this sound. If you want, you can get rid of that synth.
Next fire your sampler up.
Load the sine sample into two cells of the sampler, and load a sample of a finished kick that you like into another cell. If you haven't found one of these, use mine (produced via this method). If you look at the visual representation of the kick, you'll see that it is compromised of two distinct sections, the intial attack and then a second swell which is the sub of the kick. By adjusting the sample start control on the sampler, you should be able to figure out what is attack/body and what is sub pretty easily. When you have this, you may want to set up the finished kick so that only the attack of the kick plays. Zoom right in on the kick attack, far enough so that you can easily see the individual cycles of the sine wave. Next select the sine wave, zoom right in on its attack, and use the tuning controls (not pitchbend) so that the start of the sine wave is playing at the same pitch as the start of the kick drum sample. You may have to export and import a few times to do this. Now using the pitch controls bend the pitch of the rest of the wave down so that the it matches as closely as possible the wave cycle of the finished kick drum attack as closely as possible. Using the amplitude envelope, set the sine wave to amp to close at the same time as the finished kick waves sample.
Now compare the two samples in the audio realm. If you have done it properly, you won't hear much of a difference, and certainly, you should now have a very usable attack. If you haven't then you've done something wrong. Do not pass go. Do not collect £200. The nice thing about this is that you don't need to listen to the sample at all, you can just set it up visually - if they look the same then they are the same, and in the process you can be sure that you are going to get a much better understanding of how to construct kicks.
You can do exactly the same thing with the sub, although I'd recommend listening carefully to make sure that the sub attack doesn't distort when played with the main attack. Remember not to be to aggressive with the Sub attack or release, and not to hold the sub for too long. As a rule of thumb your kick should be no longer then 1/16th, so that it doesn't interfere with your bass.
NB: It is actually better to tune the sine up to the end of the attacks speed, and then pitch bend from there (doesn't introduce sampling resolution artefacts) up, but is considerably more difficult (imo) to do for very little benefit.
That is it. By the time you've finished you are going to have a much more thorough understanding of kick drums and be much better equiped to 'roll you own'. Next time to try doing it without using the finished sample as reference.
Hope this helps. I would post up pictures, but I'm on dial up and this was a mission anyway.
Sooooo... to produce your own kick you'll need a synthesizer which can produce pure sine waves and a sample player which gives you a visual representation of the sound in its memory and good control of pitchbending the sample (ie battery or RMIV or kontakt or any other half decent sampler, I use RMIV because I like the pitchbend controls).
First.
Everyone has the Triangle II synth right? If not google it and DL it - it is free. Set it up so that it is playing just a single sine from one osc through a completely open LP filter with no resonance at all. Make sure when you play a note that the amp settings do not make the note click on attack or release. Play a very low (lower then the sub of a kick) note for several bars, like maybe 9 or 10 bars at 120 bpm - you can't go too long here, but you are really going to be pitching this up a lot and shortening it loads, so make it too long. If it is so low you can't hear it that is just fine as long as there is a very strong (don't clip it or limit it, although actually that could be interesting, must try at some point) pure sine signal which you are exporting. Export this sound. If you want, you can get rid of that synth.
Next fire your sampler up.
Load the sine sample into two cells of the sampler, and load a sample of a finished kick that you like into another cell. If you haven't found one of these, use mine (produced via this method). If you look at the visual representation of the kick, you'll see that it is compromised of two distinct sections, the intial attack and then a second swell which is the sub of the kick. By adjusting the sample start control on the sampler, you should be able to figure out what is attack/body and what is sub pretty easily. When you have this, you may want to set up the finished kick so that only the attack of the kick plays. Zoom right in on the kick attack, far enough so that you can easily see the individual cycles of the sine wave. Next select the sine wave, zoom right in on its attack, and use the tuning controls (not pitchbend) so that the start of the sine wave is playing at the same pitch as the start of the kick drum sample. You may have to export and import a few times to do this. Now using the pitch controls bend the pitch of the rest of the wave down so that the it matches as closely as possible the wave cycle of the finished kick drum attack as closely as possible. Using the amplitude envelope, set the sine wave to amp to close at the same time as the finished kick waves sample.
Now compare the two samples in the audio realm. If you have done it properly, you won't hear much of a difference, and certainly, you should now have a very usable attack. If you haven't then you've done something wrong. Do not pass go. Do not collect £200. The nice thing about this is that you don't need to listen to the sample at all, you can just set it up visually - if they look the same then they are the same, and in the process you can be sure that you are going to get a much better understanding of how to construct kicks.
You can do exactly the same thing with the sub, although I'd recommend listening carefully to make sure that the sub attack doesn't distort when played with the main attack. Remember not to be to aggressive with the Sub attack or release, and not to hold the sub for too long. As a rule of thumb your kick should be no longer then 1/16th, so that it doesn't interfere with your bass.
NB: It is actually better to tune the sine up to the end of the attacks speed, and then pitch bend from there (doesn't introduce sampling resolution artefacts) up, but is considerably more difficult (imo) to do for very little benefit.
That is it. By the time you've finished you are going to have a much more thorough understanding of kick drums and be much better equiped to 'roll you own'. Next time to try doing it without using the finished sample as reference.
Hope this helps. I would post up pictures, but I'm on dial up and this was a mission anyway.
jackrabbit
pulse width fay
Had to try that Speakafreaka, interesting idea.
just re read what you posted, thing I got only part of what you where saying. Made a couple of bars of sines from minkystarshine(on a mac here). Then wacked it in the time machine in kontact, sped it up and repeated half a dozon times. Got a kick, repeated process for another layer to thicken it up. Eq'ed lots+bounced.
The end result was definatly a quiet kick with a much more simple wave form than factory sample kick. I will have another go with a clear head and more of an idea what you where talking about.
just re read what you posted, thing I got only part of what you where saying. Made a couple of bars of sines from minkystarshine(on a mac here). Then wacked it in the time machine in kontact, sped it up and repeated half a dozon times. Got a kick, repeated process for another layer to thicken it up. Eq'ed lots+bounced.
The end result was definatly a quiet kick with a much more simple wave form than factory sample kick. I will have another go with a clear head and more of an idea what you where talking about.
Speakafreaka
Champagne Rouletter
cheers guys.
Jackrabbit
don't use time machine, just pitch the sine up on the main pitch control and use envelopes to control the bend although I've never tried it in kontakt. It would be alot easier in RMIV I promise. You won't need EQ. The kick I've provided has no EQ, no compression - just made out of two pitch shifted sine waves.
It shouldn't be quiet if you've got a loud sine wave in the first place, because you aren't turning anything down. In fact you may well have to turn the mixer down. Simplicity eh?!
Jackrabbit
don't use time machine, just pitch the sine up on the main pitch control and use envelopes to control the bend although I've never tried it in kontakt. It would be alot easier in RMIV I promise. You won't need EQ. The kick I've provided has no EQ, no compression - just made out of two pitch shifted sine waves.
It shouldn't be quiet if you've got a loud sine wave in the first place, because you aren't turning anything down. In fact you may well have to turn the mixer down. Simplicity eh?!
jackrabbit
pulse width fay
Speakafreaka said:
Only means of sample playback is apptriga and kontact.
Speakafreaka said:
I got the wrong end of the stick. I first thought you meant squash 2 bars worth of sine stabs into the length of one beat hence time machine. I always have to comlicate things. Made some interesting sounds in between though.
Cheers :ismile: