Question about kicks

[Kozak]

Everyone is saying how easy it is to tune a kickdrum or get the tune of a kickdrum but how would I go about doing this is practice?

Should I check the spectrum analyzer and find a peak in the sub 200hz section and that peak corresponds to a note? Where can I find which peak corresponds with which note?

[Kozak]

This would also mean you have to take into account the original tune of the kick when layering a since wave...right?

[AK]

Everyone is saying how easy it is to tune a kickdrum or get the tune of a kickdrum but how would I go about doing this is practice?

Should I check the spectrum analyzer and find a peak in the sub 200hz section and that peak corresponds to a note? Where can I find which peak corresponds with which note?

Look at the advice above, if like most people you find it hard to establish any tonality in low freq regions, simply notch it up an 8ve temporarily, this helps the ear to hear the tone more clearly as it's then within our everyday freq range. What I didn't know before this post was that adding distortion ( not a huge amount ) seems to act as some sort of compression of tones within the kick so as to bring them out and make the overall tone of the kick easier to identify. It does work.

Obviously, if you are synthesizing kicks then you have full control of the sound anyways so it's completely down to you.

I don't think anybody really means it's easy but don't forget there are differences to each kick type. If you have a really short kick with hardly any decay, any sense of pitch is very difficult to establish so a simple tweak so it sits right in the mix is perfectly fine. Whereas kicks with a decay of any length are going to carry a tone, so you might well spend a little more time over that.

I am of the opinion that kicks are kicks and it's a mix decision whether they need tuning or not. Not every kick does but then not every kick is the same. It's certainly not hard to hear whether it requires a tweak or two.

Also, don't forget that a lot of kicks will have a different sense of pitch over their short duration. Some kicks which have been made with pitch modulation will ramp down after the initial transient, so effectively, you have a pitch bend going on ( albeit very fast, hence the punch ) There's not a lot you can do there other than to tweak by ear and if the kick has any decay, take the finishing tone of that into account because that's what will linger with low frequencies.

It's never bothered me personally but then I have always preferred shorter kicks and less kick tonality and just punch. I find it quite musically constrictive to have a kick that plays a specific note. But that's just my own pref.

Your last question isn't anything I am familiar with. I don't layer my kicks with sine waves, I sample kicks and I synthesize kicks and often it's a combination of the 2 but there's always weight there. There's no need really to have to stick a sine under a kick. The only reason for doing so would be to give it low freq weight and really, those freq should be there in your kicks already. You want a library of good full kicks that you can HP filter if necessary, not be adding this and that to add weight. You will always end up in a low freq muddle trying to add weight to kicks or to boost freq that aren't really there by all these modern psycho-acoustic anomalies.

A full usable kick will have the weight, I never need to boost or layer in a sine, if anything I HP filter. Where are you sourcing your kicks?

Some people use slightly 'lighter' kicks and sit their bass underneath, others use equally weighty stuff but ensure bass and kick never happen on the same midi event. You can also sidechain - but that's nothing you couldn't do with automation and then there's the mix factor. Ensure nothing is in non bass instruments at a frequency of at least 100hz. At least. That clears the way for your kick and bass to be mixed. If you are still having issues after that, you either have a terrible acoustic environment, or you are using terrible kick drum samples or synthesizing them completely wrong. You can mix anything into a track providing you make the room in the audio spectrum for it.

[Kozak]

Ahh thanks for the tips. I think I know what you mean that some kicks need tuning and some not. I was afraid all of my not working songs needed tuning but that's not the case. Most of the times it's obvious when a kick doesn't sit and I used to discard those kicks.

I use samples from the vengeance minimal and house packs and I usually layer those with a sine because I don't think they are full enough...atleast when compared to pro tracks....or is this because of mastering/compression, etc?

[Atheory]

@AK

excellent post.

[damagedgoods]

Sometimes it can be difficult to tell what the exact pitch of the kick drum is. I often use a distortion unit (temporarily) to add more overtones which makes the pitch easier to distinguish. Combined with this, transposing it up an octave or two and back, and playing different pitches while you fine tune can sometimes help.

Here's another clue to some of you why your kicks may sound quiet. If you can't tell what the note of the kickdrum is then it's not a good one. Bass isn't bass if you can't hear the actual note, it's just rumble. If you need distortion to hear it then you should just scrap the kick.

I'm not sure I completely agree. Plenty of great-sounding kicks have a fundamental that's quite hard to discern. Yes, obviously there's a fundamental frequency of the waveform that's been modulated to create the kick, but it could be enveloped in such a way that the amplitude decays before the frequency approaches a constant, or have a lot of other sh!t layered on top, etc. It is, however, true that a lot of kicks in minimal techno have a pretty clear fundamental tone.

Maybe the following would be of benefit to this thread. (Not aimed at you Torque, you obviously know what you're talking about!) This assumes you know how envelopes work and what attack, decay, peak, sustain etc mean.

Pretty much EVERY kick drum consists of:

1) A note, of some basic waveform (eg sine, triangle), that starts at a high pitch and finishes at a low pitch.

(The wave is generally one without too much harmonic content (hence sine/triangle). However, you could set up an enveloped lowpass filter and use (eg) a square or sawtooth wave too. Working out the filter envelope can get a bit tricky if you're not used to it.)

2) Other sh!t layered on top - noise, reverb, distortion/waveshaping (this is just added harmonics of the basic wave), etc.

And pretty much without exception, (1) is THE MOST IMPORTANT BIT. If your kick drum doesn't sound good without (2), it probably won't sound good at all.

Some details on (1):

- The most important factor is the PITCH MODULATION. This is generally in the form of an exponential curve from high to low, although of course you can play around with this (eg by slightly extending the attack so that the initial descent is linear, or by modulating the later decay somehow so that the pitch does something other than slowly approach an asymptote)

- The pitch modulation is what makes or breaks the kick drum. It's the rapid descent of the pitch from high to low (over about 2-4 octaves) that gives the front end click (typically 50-300 ms wouldn't be a bad starting point for the pitch decay), and the slower subsequent descent over the remainder of the envelope that gives the oomph. The FUNDAMENTAL is the final pitch that the decay of the pitch envelope approaches asymptotically. This is assuming an attack time of zero and an amplitude envelope with zero release time so that the pitch release doesn't matter. You can extend the attack time, though, if you make sure the initial pitch is at least as high as the "peak" pitch (ie the pitch where the "decay" section starts), otherwise it'll go up before it goes down.

- A faster pitch envelope gives more of a "click" and less of a "djjjiiooouu". A *greater* pitch envelope (ie one with greater amplitude) gives more oomph. Too much pitch envelope and it starts sounding silly.

- The next most important factor is the VOLUME MODULATION. If your volume envelope is long, you can hear the effect of the entirety of the pitch envelope, so the volume is still up when the pitch reaches the low point in the pitch envelope - this generally means you can hear the fundamental quite clearly. If it's short (ie short decay), the volume will fade earlier, so the eventual fundamental is less obvious because the pitch is still dropping as the volume fades. Either can be desirable depending what you're looking for. For example, a long amplitude decay and fast pitch envelope will give you more of that 80s electro, miami bass type sound, whereas a clicky minimal kick would probably necessitate faster envelopes allround. You probably wouldn't really want an amplitude envelope any faster than your pitch envelope because then you wouldn't get any bass.

- With the pitch envelope, 90% of the time you'll just want the standard exponential decay curve: generally speaking, it just sounds best. However, playing with the shape of the amplitude envelope can work quite well - for example, try setting the initial amplitude to maximum and increasing the attack time (this is useful for finer control over long kicks because you can set the exponential decay to only start after a preset time, rather than from the very first instant). Or set the initial amplitude to zero and increase the attack time if you want a softer attack (dub techno anyone?).


IMHO, everything else is filler. DON'T TRY ANYTHING ELSE KICKDRUM-RELATED UNTIL YOU CAN MAKE A GREAT-SOUNDING KICK USING ONLY A MODULATED SINE WAVE. A pitch-modulated sine wave is at the heart of EVERY kick drum, even samples, because it's the fundamental frequency of whatever waveform you use. Layering more complex sounds might give you a more interesting texture, but it WON'T FIX THE BASIC SOUND OF YOUR KICK DRUM.

If I remember correctly, there is a metric shitload of video tutorials on the web detailing how to make a basic kick drum out of a sine wave. If you've never done it before, they're definitely a good starting point. Everything else is an embellishment on the basic formula of "sine wave + pitch envelope + volume envelope + maybe a little bit of EQ".

Here's a fun trick: sample a relatively pure-sounding acoustic instrument with a constant-pitch sustain (a bell, flute, opera singer with no vibrato, etc), pitch it down and use that as your waveform in a decent sampler with pitch modulation. Set up a lowpass filter envelope to follow the pitch envelope exactly. You get a lot of extra fullness this way - what you're basically doing is using a more interesting waveform than a sine, but one that doesn't have too much high harmonic content (because of the filtering).

Hope this helps. Maybe I'll add more sometime soon, when I'm not meant to be revising constrained optimization techniques.

TJ

[kylemcsparron]

Normally I have my bassline wrote before spending time selecting a sample, then I systematically sprawl through al my samples until something just seems to fit the hole nicely.

Then I set up a side chained sine wave tuned at the frequency of the root note of the track -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_pitch_notation

I normally use a standard compressor on the kick but I always find one of the most important things to remember is to allow enough attack time to let the transient come through so you get the smack.

[Torque]

This whole thread is overthinking this subject x10...........