Kick drum

Missing-Link

Missing-Link

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right...how.where?

the psy kick drum, i have tried to make it out of sine waves... that is actually the best result but it goes plopy when you do fast fills (rolls)...
i have tried loads of samples but they just dont sound right....

can any body help? how do i get that kick sound?


pleeeasssseeee :?
 
Fast fills? Not sure what you mean by that.

One thing I will say is that if you're after a kick roll, it's usually better to put the kick in it's own mutegroup (as in triggering a second kick sample will stop the first playing), otherwise you just get a low-end mush.

J.
 
Ok - its all very well and good making your own kick drums ..... but IMHO I would suggest using samples and concentrating your synthesis skills elsewhere ... like the tweaky bits !!!!!

Do you have a decent library of Drum Sounds >? Perhaps someone could suggest somewhere good to download some from >? I dont know anywhere really .. anyone >?

Me - I've got loads of em' on my pc - buts its at home and its not on the net I'm afraid ....
 
jamez_23 said:
Ok - its all very well and good making your own kick drums ..... but IMHO I would suggest using samples and concentrating your synthesis skills elsewhere ... like the tweaky bits !!!!!
Click to expand...

I've yet to download a kick drum sound that I can use for trance (some of the acoustic kicks I've got are luverly though).

I just use Soundforge to generate kick drums (I've got a library of about 40-odd these days), all with different characteristics - as a rule, the ones with a nice click tend to miss out on the low end, and the ones with nice bottom end are a bit lacking in click, so I use a couple of them and EQ accordingly (lowpass the bassy one, highpass the one with the nice click).

J.
 
Nowt wrong with that at all - I would love to know how to create the "perfect" kick drum from scratch - I just *always* fail !

After messing with Soundforge / Infected Mushroom tutorials / kick drum patches on synths etc .... and having long discussions about the different quality of different kicks I find it much easier just to use tried and tested kicks ( wavs ) .... usually nicked off other psy trance artists ..... with their permission of course >?

Makes it alot easier ... allows one to concentrate on the other elements of the music ..... its about finding sounds that suit you - then keeping them and working with them. God I would give up writing tunes if I had to fanny about creating a new kick drum for each tune !!! I guess that is the proper approach but hey ..... :lol:

... I'm really not helping am I ........ we ( me & imak ) used one kick drum wav file for virtually every tune we wrote for about a year ...... sounds diff in every track !!!
( we have new ones now though !! )
 
jamez_23 said:
God I would give up writing tunes if I had to fanny about creating a new kick drum for each tune !!! I guess that is the proper approach but hey ..... :lol:
Click to expand...

The way I work is that if I'm having a slow day trying to come up with interesting melodic or structural ideas, I'll just sit and make kick drums for a couple of hours - handy way to do something useful if you're stumped for inspiration and have a limited amount of time to spend on music.

J.
 
JPsychodelicacy said:
jamez_23 said:
God I would give up writing tunes if I had to fanny about creating a new kick drum for each tune !!! I guess that is the proper approach but hey ..... :lol:
Click to expand...

The way I work is that if I'm having a slow day trying to come up with interesting melodic or structural ideas, I'll just sit and make kick drums for a couple of hours - handy way to do something useful if you're stumped for inspiration and have a limited amount of time to spend on music.

J.
Click to expand...

Yeah - good plan !!

I do a similar kinda thing with synth's .... its impossible to retain inspiration all of the time and coming up with useful new patches can really help !!!! :)
 
Set an ADSR to modulate the frequency of a sine wave oscillator or self oscillating filter.Set the sustain parameter/EG amount/filter cut-off to tune the boom of your kick.
Set the fastest attack on the ADSR that is modulating the sine wave and the fastest attack you can get away with on the EG that controls the VCA, without getting clicks on the output (usually on analog synths).
The decay parameter on the EG that controls the frequency of the sine wave is what controls the sweep of the sine wave down to the frequency set by the sustain parameter/EG modulation amount.
The faster the decay the more tight and clickier the kick. The slower the decay the more old skool MWNN sort of sh-101, goa like the kick, where you can actually hear the frequency sweeping down.

EQ the region where you want to exaggerate the click of the kick and make sure you don't have a lot of sub in there, especially if you are planning on laying the kick on top of the bassline. But it's your choice really, subby kick, or subby basslines...but you can't have both occouring at the same time without using an awful lot of headroom.

Tune the kick using the method above so you can have a nice matching bassline-kick tone going on.

Compress the crap out of it. Use a slower attack on the comnpressor just enough to let the initial click transient to come through, but slam down on the body of kick and keep in nicely under control.
Use a gate to control the lenght of the boom to your BPM, or simply by adjusting the midi note lenght. Although it is best to record longer kicks than you will need and then simply gate the part you do not want out, instead of setting loop points to the tail of kick to stretch its "boom" to your BPM.
By adjusting the lenght of the kick and attack/release settings on your compressor so that the compressor barely goes out of the release state and the next kick occours, when a moment later the compressor starts working again you can get that nice "vacuum" kick effect, especially when you have a bit of tight reveb on it that has all the bottom end high passed on the returns, and only has the mid range of the reverb pasted on the tail of the kick.

Peace.
 
I use the ES2 in logic to synth my kicks. It hasn't quit got the low end I'm looking for but I compensate for this with eq Ect.
The benefit of synthesizing you kicks it that you can change the pitch and length just how you want it for the tune or part of the tune. Make sure that it's mono to avoid messiness on the rolls. You can also make it legato if you like. Much fun can then be had with a long note length, sustain and glide. I did this in my latest tune. One of the kicks continues then wobbles left to right and then pitches up and down, if I were to have made this in sound forge as I use to then It would have taken a hell of a lot longer and been a hell of a lot harder to sync in to the tune plus I would have had to remake it each time if I had decided to change the tempo.
I have tried other synths, the hydra had great low end for kicks but I couldn’t get a satisfactory high-end snap out of it. I have tried combining the two kicks but it just got messy.
 
I'll have to check out Kontact in a bit more detail in that case.
One other advantage of synthesizing you drum is that you can automate the ASDR times you your kick and completely change the kick during the tune. The applications of this in truth would be rare but its fun to experiment, as you never know what you might end up with.
:)
 
You can do that in Kontakt and Battery too. :)

I used to use samples simply because my old machine would creak badly if I was running too many synths, and I simply couldn't justify a synth slot just for a kick drum - these days I still use samples for drums, just because it's what I'm used to... your mileage may vary. :)

You use Logic, so you can also use EXS24 if you want (I use it for my drums and percussion when doing a track in Logic - mainly for educational reasons).

J.
 
Yep I use the ESX24 for my drum samps in logic but I'm defiantly going to check out Kontact now and I think I have Battery around some place cheers.
 
ok so if sampling is they way were do you get them from ?

would it be ok to sample one from other tunes or is it better to by a good sample cd ?

if so can anyone recomend one :)
 
Do you put your kick in a mono mixer channel? Say I'm using SX and battery, and swap between a mono and stereo channel for the battery output - there's a distinct difference.
I expected that if you output a kick equally into both sides of a stereo channel, that it would be the same as using a mono channel. But it seems not.

Anyone know why that is? :unsure:
 
bez23 said:
Do you put your kick in a mono mixer channel? Say I'm using SX and battery, and swap between a mono and stereo channel for the battery output - there's a distinct difference.
I expected that if you output a kick equally into both sides of a stereo channel, that it would be the same as using a mono channel. But it seems not.

Anyone know why that is? :unsure:
Click to expand...

Not entirely sure (it may be an inherent issue with either Battery 1 or the Cubase mixer - never used Battery in Logic, so I can't say for sure until I get home) - what I do know is that you want it in mono to avoid potential phasing problems with the kick.

Missing-Link - you *can* sample them from other tunes, a lot of us create them using Soundforge's built in tone generator and pitch bend, *or* you can sample the kicks you create with the synth. I don't know what the equivalent of Soundforge is for Macintosh (maybe Bias Peak?).

Basically any audio editor that will allow you to record/generate a sine wave, then apply a pitch bend envelope will do the trick.

J.
 
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