Basic processing tips on getting a tight/bumping kick drum that punches through your mix. This may take a few attempts at first to get used to, but youll get it sounding great eventually. Never underestimate the use of a compressor. If used correctly, many rewards may be reaped. Assign kick drum to its own channel/mixer channel. Dont worry about levels or volume for now as we are still setting everything up. Now place an EQ plugin of your choice on the kick drum, in my case the iZotope Ozone 5 Equalizer. Use one of the bands as a high pass filter and set a fairly tight Q bandwidth, usually adjustable or by set parameters... If you have the options between 12/24/48 chose between 12/24. Extremely low sub frequency cuts with bandwidths as tight as 48 are generally only more practical in mastering situations... At this point you would like to adjust your fader for the kick drum until it peaks around -8/-6 dB on your master output meter. A HUGE part of getting a kick drum to really hit in your mix is also dependent on mix-down and gain-staging. Now working at a low level you must turn your interface or monitors up, so that you can hear what you are doing. (BE careful as your volume is up, other sounds on your computer or freshly added sounds to your project that have not been turned down will be very loud). A good tip to EQing would be: No matter what you do, if it sounds better to you, then you did it right. If not, then try again. After you manipulate with EQ of choice move on further into the process by adding a compressor to your kick drums signal flow. Take your compressor and adjust for a ratio of either 2:1 or 4:1. Bring your threshold down until you can hear the compressor shaving off dBs of sound. Now you must adjust your attack timing (this is how fast or slow the compressor will react and compress signal). You must also set your release timing (this is how fast or slow the compressor will let go of the sound and allow it to return to the original unprocessed sound) after you are happy with these values, continue to using gain to makeup for lost volume as gain reduction occurs. You also may have to re adjust your kicks volume so that it is not too loud. In your mix down, you want to have a minimal amount of -6 dB of headroom on your master output. Most of the time, you will also like to have a stereo imaging tool of some sort to make sure that you keep your kick drum in mono. If you want some sort of stereo effect to your kick, then you may not want this. These are the basics to getting a tight sounding kick drum, I hope I have been helpful. These tips can be applied in any DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) and any make of plugin, depending on how well you do it... Will determine how good your kick will sound. REMEMBER: Sound selection also plays a HUGE role in getting a good sounding track. When listening to your track and enjoying your better sounding kick. You may still find your kick is rather dark sounding and youre feeling more than you hear. You could be missing a slight bit of a click to your kick. Generally a compressor alone is enough to create this. If not, use your EQ, and from around 2-4/5000 kHz frequency, with a large bandwidth notch, you can add a little bit of a clicky sound to your kick to make it hit that slight bit harder in a full mix. Finally: Depending on the style of music you create, where this kick drum may be used AND how it is being used, you could add a very small dry/wet mix % of a small room type reverb with a shorter decay time and a 0 ms predelay to further add some texture and place it in its own virtual acoustic space. I will later be adding pictures to this little guide here so that it can be easier followed... Cheers for reading and I hope I have been helpful!
Posted on: Sun, 09 Mar 2014 23:44:29 +0000
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