Kick Drums

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Lost to the Void
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Re: Kick Compression Guide

Post by 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.
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Re: Kick Compression Guide

Post by rktic »

Lost to the Void wrote: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 :)

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Re: Kick Compression Guide

Post by Críoch »

Gate before compressor.. Like that idea.
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Re: Kick Compression Guide

Post by SpecialGuest »

I am still experimenting with attack and release time. But it helped me a lot to turn the volumes on my bus channels down so I don't need to limit how I did before.

Still I think the limit drum bus sounds punchier but in the whole mix the drums are now more present. But I think that I do many things wrong or could do better If I knew better.

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Re: Kick Compression Guide

Post by Lost to the Void »

You don`t need to limit your drum bus.
Compression is fine, limiting is killing the transient.
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Re: Kick Compression Guide

Post by TomasHD »

You don`t always want massive thumping kicks, so you don`t always want hard compression on your kicks, but generally a little compression will always benefit, you don`t have to have everything running at 11
Really interesting advices, I will definitely try them out. What I usually did is to make a parallel compression of the kick, and it kinda worked for me.
but sometimes the kick lacked of that body or punch you said.

Just really curious about what you said of not always wanting thumping kicks, it comes to my mind this track in which you hardly feel the kick but its really good in my opinion. It isn't better to have a good punch and a kick where you can feel more the attack?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aR9IoKN1mhw

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Re: Kick Compression Guide

Post by SpecialGuest »

I am not an expert but I think it is a layered kick. There are lot of tracks from Regis and Surgeon especially the older ones that are build so. They have a huge amount of baseline from a synth or from a 808 with long decay bassdrum or tuned lotom and in top of that only the attack of the kick which have the impact but also build a body with the underlying heavy bassline.

http://youtu.be/TC9ly3cOMdE

http://youtu.be/TVVm_0Lx9e4

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Re: Kick Compression Guide

Post by Aline N »

very informative , thank u for the knowledge !! now about the Drum Busses. what is the goal to compress a Drum Buss ? i mean , i hear some people say to glue things down . and other
say to pump the drums and make it more bouncey . compression sometimes confuses me :(

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Re: Kick Compression Guide

Post by yentz »

I hear very few long decaying kicks in electronic music these days. Most of the records I hear have a short kick almost consisting just of the first hit with little to no body.
Not completely sure on how those are archived. Using an analog rytm from electron I have quite nice control over the envelope as there is a separate aeg to the decay parameter of the synth engine itself.
I tried trimming those to get the desired effect which works kind of ok.
However with the drum compression I should be able to get a more attenuated and longer "hit" shouldn't I? Just wondering what happens to the initial transient which passes the compressor (I suppose this ideally has to be left to sound like a drum and also is needed to trigger the comp if it is not using any delay to look ahead) when gaining up the compressed "tail" i might end up driving the transient too hot into the reds.
Another possible reason for the kicks sounding the way they do I thought might be that they are just tuned to the bass underneath and the side chaining off the bass makes it sound like kick + bass instead of short bass drum and following kick.
Hmm compression sounds so easy in theory but is rather difficult to translate to real world use.

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Re: Kick Compression Guide

Post by Chael »

Awesome guide thanks for posting

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Re: Kick Compression Guide

Post by surface »

@yentz

http://theproaudiofiles.com/compression-techniques/

Someone (maybe Planar?) posted this link earlier and it helped me get a clearer "visual" understanding of what was involved.

I knew the effect of compressing and the various settings and was reading through thinking "ah yeah, basic stuff" but I guess I never considered different specific settings for specific situations as clearly as they are shown here.

There was also a seperate upwards compression article on there that's interesting ..

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Re: Kick Compression Guideha

Post by yentz »

Thanks a lot. Checking it out straight away.

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Your kick drum processing chain

Post by The_G »

Goes without saying that a well designed/processed kick drum is vital to the harder styles of techno, maybe more than to any other genre or subgenre of electronic music. So what are your go-to techniques for turning a dry sample/synth patch into a kick that is "big" enough yet won't overwhelm club speakers?

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Re: Your kick drum processing chain

Post by Lost to the Void »

kick -> console emulation -> (distortion/saturation/noise generation) -> pre-emphasis EQ -> compression -> Cleanup (EQ, stereo image, low cut etc).
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Re: Your kick drum processing chain

Post by msl »

"Big enough" is only relative to the other elements in your track. So I make sure it works with my bass sounds. Sometimes I'll layer two. High pass at the right point, simple as that really no special processing needed usually.


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Re: Your kick drum processing chain

Post by tsaro »

Depends on a lot of things, but mostly the characteristics of the sound you're using. You probably won't find 'one weird trick to make your kickdrum sound awesome every time' :P

If you are using a synth you can do a lot of things at the source, so you probably won't need as many effects to make it do what you want (assuming you already know how to program drums on a synthesizer, or have a drum synth doing most of the work for you). Your sample selection could be spot on (rarely, but it happens), and some times you will be fighting it all the way, in which case you're better off searching for another sample. Realising you need to bin it can be hard, but it saves a lot of time.

For example, the last kick sample I used had this chain on it: transient designer, compressor, saturation and eq. And the one before that I started with a short reverb, then distorted it to hell, lowpassed it at about 7 khz, saturated it again to get some higher harmonics back, and then eq, compression and I think in the end I hipassed it and layered it with a more subby kick sound. It did work out in the end, only in hindsight it might have been a bit convoluted....

So I guess what I'm trying to say is that selection is key, listen to what your sound needs to make it fit your track, and use effects accordingly.
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Re: Your kick drum processing chain

Post by rktic »

The two things with the biggest impact on my bassdrums are:

- the pitch (fine-tuning)
- a properly timed and defined envelope

Proper setup there saves a lot of work and fixing, makes the dynamics processing easier and leaves the rest to coloring. Give the processors something they can easily work with and not against.

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Re: Your kick drum processing chain

Post by kertikristof »

rktic wrote:The two things with the biggest impact on my bassdrums are:

- the pitch (fine-tuning)
- a properly timed and defined envelope

Proper setup there saves a lot of work and fixing, makes the dynamics processing easier and leaves the rest to coloring. Give the processors something they can easily work with and not against.
These two small tips are very important in my opinion. After making this kind of approach, my kicks sounded better. I add after these steps ->compressor -> eq -> saturator -> eq -> trasient shaper -> reverb
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Re: Your kick drum processing chain

Post by Lost to the Void »

Why a tansient shaper after a compressor?
What are you doing with your compressor that is requiring a transient shaper on a kick drum of all things? anything your transient shaper is doing, your compressor can do, or undo.
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Re: Your kick drum processing chain

Post by gedda »

Kick or Synth Sample or Field recording > Corpus> Maybe filter it down if it's a field recording> Maybe Maybe EQ > Maybe Delay (to resnoate itself) > Maybe a filter delay to give it a low end tail > Saturator (not necessarily at the end though)

Then I layer it sometimes.


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