making kicks

[loopdon]

The 909 kick alone will do. What's cool about the hardware is you can
adjust it by twisting knobs whilst the rest of the track is chugging along.
That's a big factor. The best thing to do is dabble in other fields of interest , say grow some plants , do some workouts, whatever. You easily get trapped when you make you hobbies a 'mono-culture'. Let things settle, pursue other interests and then come back and notice kicks aren't exactly rocket-science.

"The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom."

[5meohd]

notch filter in the low-mid range to taste. this might free up some energy so that the overall volume can be boosted... or saturated.


but I still don't see how the tech-house big guns are makes such slamming kick drums. even the ecochord guys get thick round sounds that I can't seem to reproduce.. which in the case of dub I'm sure its likely the context of the mix.

the tech-prog house/trance kicks really do have me stumped though.

[simonb]

notch filter in the low-mid range to taste. this might free up some energy so that the overall volume can be boosted... or saturated.

Yep, a bit of reduction around 300-400Hz can often help. It helps for a lot of sounds/instruments actually, to me that 200-500 region seems like the "mud range".

[steevio]

notch filter in the low-mid range to taste. this might free up some energy so that the overall volume can be boosted... or saturated.

Yep, a bit of reduction around 300-400Hz can often help. It helps for a lot of sounds/instruments actually, to me that 200-500 region seems like the "mud range".

it can also be the 'punch range'

if you cut that range on a 909 kick, it loses all its character.

its not good to have too much in that area for the tune as a whole, but you have to have something or your track will sound weak. the whole 'mud range' thing comes from standard sound engineering philosophy, which imo doesnt necessarily apply to minimal music, where there isnt much stuff going on anyway. its important if you have say 6 instruments / vocals etc all using that part of the spectrum, but not as relevant if all you got is a tomtom and a few harmonics from the bass and kick

[arkhaios]

I think maybe ( I'm guessing here ) is that you're making kicks in isolation. meaning, they're without context and NOT in a mix. In my book, it's how they work in the mix, not how they sound in isolation. I have sampled hundreds of 'perfect' kicks off heaps of stuff only to think, 'hey, these are sh!t'. In isolation, they might not be anything like they are in the mix.

My input on this, is that it's all about context.

for sure! i always just make a basic kick in operator/soundforge/whatever just enough so you can tell it's a kick as opposed to a long sine wave or whatever.. then after i have some other elements in the track (chords/pad etc... something that fills up the lower mid and mid spectrum a little) then i delve deeper into processing and maybe frequency splitting the kick adding light saturation/compression if needed~

as for getting that high end click, personally i prefer a short noise burst over the top if i feel the kick doesn't stand out enough in the mix ie. lots of bassy stuff going on making it hard to distinguish the kick from the bass... so my personal solution to get around this is to copy the kick channel and high pass to maybe 500-800hz or so, then i resample it to a fairly low bitrate which turns it into a kind of noise whilst still keeping an identical envelope to the kick, making it fit better than just layering some noise over the top in my opinion.

[AK]

Yeah, I think you need some higher end going on, but like I was saying before, I am not sure what some people meant by 'click' in certain contexts. I've done kicks in isolation loads of times, esp. when I'm bored or whatever but I never seem to be satisfied with them when I come to use them in something. Always have to tweak them or end up creating new ones which ends up being time consuming. Thing is though, if I'm not happy with the kick early on, it does my head in and I can't concentrate on anything except the fact that the kick is annoying the hell out of me.

[steevio]

when i was studio engineering, we always looked in the 2.5K area of the spectrum for the 'click' or attack.

[AK]

You studied sound engineering? fair play! I studied art/art history and graphic design. Man, I didn't realise back then that music was gonna be my art love though.