Where to find good kicks

A lot of useful and detrimental information is present in this area of acoustic kick drums. This term refers to removing any obtuse signal response in this area to give your a kick a more precise attack and to clean up any muddiness from your low-end.

Similarly, if your kick sounds a bit flat or thin, you can search for some sweet spots in this area to bring up a bit more body to your overall kick sound. There is a fair amount of other instrumentation in this region of your mix from guitars and synths to basslines and vocals so try not to make your kick too fat or gritty as it will clutter up the rest of your mix. The most useful information for these kicks is held in this low-mid area.

Again, try not to boost anything in this area too much, or it will most likely land up conflicting with one of your other mid-heavy elements in the mix like guitars or vocals. I find the low-mid regions of these kicks to be a make-or-break area. Improper attenuation can lead to your kick sounding dull and a bit weak. You can look around Hz for some areas that might increase punchiness, and cut anywhere between — Hz if you need to remove some thickness. You can apply a low pass filter to sweep out the top end at 20 kHz, as this will save you the slightest bit of clutter when mixing later on.

You can also notch up anything around 1- 1. As with acoustic kicks, you can apply a low-pass filter to cut out any top-end frequencies to clean up your overall mix. I like to give these kicks a decent amount of attack as they drive a lot of the song. Short bass kicks should have a similar audio aesthetic to acoustic kicks, but I find that a lot of kicks in hip hop and trap have a grittier, more low-end sound.

When mixing these kicks I tend to pull my low pass filter down to around 12 — 10 kHz to give it a slightly warmer sound and to remove any redundant brightness. If your kick needs to hit a bit harder you can apply a notch between kHz and tune adjust accordingly. Try not to make the width of this notch too wide or it might land up overwhelming other rhythmic elements such as percussion or vocals.

You can also pull out a lot of the top end above 15 kHz to help clean up this area for a stronger presence in your attack. The above-listed guidelines should give you a basic foundation for mixing your kick drums. While they may take some time to practice and grasp completely, doing so will help you deal with most kick mixing situations in your future sessions.

These are not hard-pressed rules and I highly encourage you to experiment with different EQ settings and presets to see if you come with your own unique set of mixing techniques. Until next time, happy mixing. I'm a multi-instrumentalist, DJ, and producer with over 12 years of hands-on experience in the studio and on stage. Are you using a sampler, and is it hardware or software? These questions of sources and workflow are important in that the answers impact how you approach finding the kick sound you like, and how you subsequently sculpt it.

If you are using a drum machine, it will involve a bit more effort than simply searching the internet for a boom kick drum sample. Something like a Korg Volca Kick might be a great place to start if you want to synthesize your own sound. It offers musicians and producers quite a bit of flexibility. A Korg Volca Beats is another good option, even though its kick is not celebrated for being deep and booming. Alternatively, one can download and other drum machine kick samples into their DAW or hardware sampler of choice.

From there, the tweaking can commence. For our audio clips below, we settled on a Korg Volca Beats because of its rather tame kick drum sound. In our kick drum sequence below, we go with a 4 to the floor beat. After programming the kick, we went straight to the pitch knob to detune it.

How much is a matter of taste. We decided to detune it quite a bit to add depth to the kick. In the first audio clip you can hear the standard pitch on a Korg Volca Beats. In the second, you will hear it detuned. The difference is already marked. Using Trash 2, we auditioned several drive and distortion presets. And to experiment a little, we turned on the filter, boosting some of the low end in Trash 2. After adding drive, we turned to effects.

Using Ableton Live, we did some equalization and compression work on the Volca Beat kick drum. This allowed us to boost the low end, as well as the mid-low frequency, while filtering out some of the higher frequencies. As can be heard in the audio clip below, the boosting of the low end really give the Volca Beat kick drum some depth and boom. Another trick for making your kick boom is layer sounds. The kick drum is all about low frequencies. We have the basic acoustic kicks that the drummer plays using his foot and a pedal.

We also have electronically synthesised kicks like those of the classic Roland TR and Then we have amazing hybrid kicks sampled from acoustic kits, machines and records, then blended and resampled into infinite variations on the bass drum theme. So how do you control and perfect all these different sounds? Regardless of their origins, all kicks break down into three sonic elements: low, mid and top. Grab a few kick samples, put them up in your DAW, insert a graphic equaliser and experiment with cutting and boosting frequencies using a narrow Q making a thin, pointy spike.

Getting the perfect kick drum sound begins with balancing sub, punch, honk, mid and top see opposite. When recording an acoustic kick with a microphone inside the drum, you have the added problem of internal shell resonance.