Kick Compression Guide

[Críoch]

Agree with the orchestra analogy.. When I was trying to figure EQ'ing etc.. out first.. I had a eureka moment when I realised that.

[loopdon]

This is a nice guide.

What has helped me tremendously is working with a wave-editor.
Doing manual compression etc. Getting a visual understanding of what's going on
and being more able to connect the visual aspect with the sound aspect.

Audacity in my case. And smexescope. Also listening and listening and....
What i have also done is run a high pass over an entire folder of kicks to yield
a transient folder (doesn't have to be kicks). This can be skipped through when
you have a nice kick and bass relationship going and want that little icing on top.
You will probably want to to fade-in/low pass the original kick to accommodate for
the extra high-end energy the transient brings.

This has helped me understand stuff better.

It's great to vibe it out, though, i just think you have to strike a balance between
nerd-ism and feel, if that makes sense? And with experience vibeing will undoubtedly
be different than before you have any experience or much. Things that look seemingly
effortless can have afforded quite a lot of work beforehand.

[loopdon]

I could do a little tutorial on how to paste together kickdrums and resynth tuned
booms for sampled kicks etc. Is there any interest? I'd would do it with Audacity, which is free.
What would you lot like to see that you don't know about kicks and i might know?

I hate to see my rambles being the last thing i see in threads, i really do.

[Críoch]

Hey Martin,

I for one would love to see that. I've never worked in a wave editor that way. Its always great to see how other people work. The geeks say yes! Haha

you can UL the pic's as attachments directly here on subsekt.. So now hosting bullshit.

Great idea man!

[loopdon]

Thanks for the encouragement, John!

The unhealthy (!) amount of time i have spent ripping apart kickdrums in
Audacity must be of some use. It's all been done before, no doubt.
But the nerd in me would have loved to see that back then and the nerd
in me still enjoys stuff like that so i will try me best. What got me started
on this was a little tutorial by SonicAcademy. It was a revelation back then:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S12PDjOTUnk

Not long ago, i watched this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6wQf285UW8

Also in a similar vein:

http://audio.tutsplus.com/tutorials/pro ... fl-studio/

Audio Tuts, btw, is a site i have learnt a lot from and i love the clean layout.

I have some secret weapons, also, which could be helpful.
Extracting kicks is just a start. I shall try and make something.

Anybody got a track they can't manage to get a clean kick out of?
I could try and use that for my tut.

[loopdon]

Had some bad news, today. Generally going through
a highly stressful period, right now.

This means that the tutorial will have to wait.
I reckon the links i posted should do the job, though.

Must fix my life up, firstly.
I'll try and help with the cleanup
of kickdrums etc. if anyone contacts me via pm.

[Críoch]

Fuck man.. sorry to hear that. Hope you get on top of it soon!

[Adverse Event]

Cheers for that Steve - interesting

[daniaan]

This has been a nice read. Thanks for all the input guys!

[SigEnt]

Fantastic read, very helpful. Big thanks.

[kodebreakerpaul]

Great post!

Would also add that you can change the tonality of a compressed kick drum significantly by putting it through a limiter after the compressor. I use the LA2A sometimes for this and it does add a considerable thwack to the kick drum - albeit at a loss of some of the characteristics of the compressed kick drum sound.

[Lost to the Void]

a limiter is going to kill the transients, really wouldn`t do that unless you can push the attack waaaay back, and then you are just going into compression territory, otherwise, come mastering stage, your kick is gonna be flat and dead, and someone will need to use a transient effect to put life back into the mix.
There`s no real need to have a limiter after a compressor at all in fact, on your kick, either increase the comp ratio, or use a compressor with more bite, or use a limiter instead of a compressor.

[SpecialGuest]

Hello, I'm from germany and new to this forum and I was a silent reader for some month. I make music for about ten years but never played live and never had any release. I did stop making music for a year because it sounds shit to me. The sounds are not bad, but my kick had no impact and my mix was really muddy at the low end.
I'm into techno music which came out from 1996-1998. I like the style from regis, surgeon and female but also what came out from sweden and germany at this time.

I have problems with compression and I have understanding issues. Many howto's for compression are for rock songs but not for techno. You say to use compression to get the booom but not to limit to let the transients go thru. I have made some graphics to visualize that.


This is the uncompressed kick. The red area is the transient and the green line shows the volume of the boom we want to get louder so the kick would have a nice impact.

As I understand what you wrote a good comressed kick should look like this.

The transient go thru (red area) and the boom is shaped by the compressor (flat green line) and than fades out. It is more even and present at the flat green area.

But when I compress my kick or my drumbus it looked like this.

I let the transient go thru. But the difference between the reen line and the transient peak (blue line) is about 3-4db which is really annoying because it eats my headroom. If I want to go louder it clips and if I leave it there is no impact. What do I wrong? Should I give more gain to the comressed signal? I do gain how I read before. If my signal compress maybe 6db I gain the compressed signal about 6db. But if I do this I have these problems I wrote.

To avoid this problem I limit my kicks and even my drumbus. It sounds not bad at my monitors but I notice some distortion, color or saturation (call it like you want) thru my headphones. And in the overall mix I get the problem that my drums have not the impact I want or what I'm after all. I know it is because I limit all the transients out. But how can I do it better?

And there is another questin I have. When I use official samples for example from GoldBaby the drums are already compressed. But to me they are looked limited when I look at the waveform. It look like that. It is the same when I limit my drums.

So are they limited? If yes why they do so if it is better to let the transient intact?

And should I compress my Kick if I use pre-compressed samples? Or only when I layer whith other sounds to shape a new kick sound? And what about my drumbus. Sould I compressed it when I used only pre-compressed drum samples?

I know that there are no rules when making music. But I have my problems and I want to make it better and I really want to understand.


TIA

[Hepta]

I think you shouldn't bother much how the waveform of your kick looks like. It's all relative to what sits around the kick (other elements) and how you mix those that dictates how "fat" your kick will be. I'm not the expert here but It would be a lot easier to help if you had some kind of example to show us.

[Hepta]

Also welcome to the forum man!

[Lost to the Void]

Great use of graphics!!

One way to deal with the difference between the transient and the compressed body is to raise the gain makeup to bring to even out the difference.

I see no real problem with a 3db difference really, that's not a lot of headroom to eat up, if you are gain staging correctly you should still have good final level

Another way to shave down the level is to use saturation and soft clipping to (essentially compress) the transient but in a much nicer way than limiting.
Analog limiting will also work (not digi though).

You can also change the response curve of the compressor by using a high pass on the detector to stop the compressor from reacting to too much of the low end signal.

Really try to preserve those transients, if you ever come to getting your music professionally mastered, having that transient information intact will make a world of difference. The difference between an A standard master and a B standard.

[tuuluuwag]

cool 'article' as it were.. as i eat more knowledge daily.. always good to see the tips others take the time to write out.

[SpecialGuest]

Hey, thank you for your answers. Ok, what you say is when my compressor show a gain reduction about 6db I should gain about 8 or 9db to even out the level between transient and body? It sound logic to me but it is not what it is saying when you read tutorials and howto's. Often you read that you gain up that amount the reduction is. But I will try that. I will also try to use a sidechainfilter. At which Hz should I set it - 200Hz? I know it depends on the track but a little suggestion would be fine. What settings are a good starting point for attack for that kind of techno I mentioned above?
I know that many good people say use your ears but I think I'm more a visual guy who needs meters and sometimes looks to the waveform to understand the difference what I'm hearing when I use a compressor.

I use software compressors like fabfilter pro-c and cytomic glue but also have hardware compressors from FMR Audio RNC1773 and RNLA 7239.


Yes I have example tracks I can share. Should I post it here or on another tread? I know there are threads for bus compression and mix compression.

And I have another question. How do you mix. Do you mix without compressor on drum bus or with compressor at drums. I have the problem that when I mix or level without compressor and I then put a compressor to the drum bus ist some times sound really different and I must set all level again. What is better and how you are doing it?


TIA

[Lost to the Void]

Honestly I never have any trouble. I only ever use makeup gain to the same amount as the reduction, I have obsoletely no problem with the transients being louder, it never causes me any headroom issues.
I would say gain staging in your whole mix is the problem, if you are running out of headroom.
Turn everything down.

[rktic]

Now the release, you want to tune this so that the compression is pretty much finished before the next kick hits.
So you need to use the gain reduction meter now.

Watch the meter and move the release up or down until the gain reduction is near 0db just before the next kick comes in.

Here's a bit of advice for dealing with those arbitary MS settings on compressors, limiters etc:

Use a calculator to get tight timings. Something like musiccalculator.com or MusicMath Touch.

In order to preserve as much punch as possible i avoid overlapping kicks. When working with samples i usually trigger them for an 1/8th note and set the samplers release to the shortest time possible at which it doesn't click at the end. This is important for further, especially dynamics processing. Clicks = DC offsets. Which some plugins don't like at all.

When not working with samples i throw a gate before the compressor to gain control over the timing.

Why? To ensure the dynamics processor has a bit time to "breathe" in between duty cycles and achieve the best results on every single hit. Since you now know which MS range you're dealing with you can set attack and release milliseconds much more granular and get better results.

Hope this makes sense