How to create that perfect crispy kick drum sound?

[Cheaper]

load a 50Hz sinewave with duration 1sec. in Kontakt, then apply a pitch modulation by envelope. tweak, tweak and tweak again.

you can also watch this useful video tutorial

[Atheory]

I've been trying to recreate it microtonic and operator etc.
But I can't seem to achieve that crisp thud in the beginning of the kick. When I try to create a kick drum it's either a straight kick without bass or a kick without crisp kick and deep bass. I can't combine the two.

why not combine the two things you make if they each have 1 of the characteristics of what your trying to do?

or

open impulse.
take 2/3 kicks that have different qualities.
1)subby
2)clicky or you could use any high pitched noise like a hat, cymbal or actual noise
3)more middley- or some where between those 2 or maybe with a nice decay

so load them all into the first 3 slots and have the piano roll hit all three doing a straight 4/4.

then the options you need to be looking at with those 3 are the

i)sample start
ii)sample decay
iii)filter
iv)pitch/transpose

1)so the subby hat, set the lowpass to something low like 80-100 or thereabouts, push forward the sample start if you want.

2)the click high piece, set the highpass to around 1k-4k and turn down the volume and also reduce the decay loads until the your just hearing the inital click

3)the middley one depends on you but for example you could high pass it to the same place you lowpassed your sub kick. and try a few different settings with the decay and the start time.


if it sounds bad you might need to transpose them individually so they gel better.

thats a really common method that alot of people do for their percussion. and you can do it for all percussion esp snares to get them really hiphop fat.





however, its better to keep on what your doing with synthesising them but if you need a quick and easy result.

[Opuswerk]

you can do such a kick with operator quite easily i reckon. Have a look at the gustavo bravetti tutorial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFiuKTOCdFk and you'll understand it pretty quickly how to do it. Also don't forget that you can have several oscillators running together. One for the thud, maybe some slight noise with a very short decay, and one for the thump, to which you apply the pitch envelope.
And if you're running out of envelopes, you can still draw those in the clip's envelope, where you can really control the shape of the kick.

About microtonic, it is quite a great synth for synthetic cymbals, hats, claps, snares, but it sucks at kickdrums. I really tried it for a long time, with the goal of making it my one drum machine, but it simply doesn't do good kicks.

[boudo]

Don't forget that EQ and compression can do wonders once you understand them.

[lcvl]

yeah, definitely.
apply some hipass filtering at about 25-35 hz, depending on the layering results.
then some gentle master bus compression on all the layers to gel them together.

[Raddler]

Hey dude,

I too spent days trying to recreate a kick similar to the one you posted on you tube, and I never quite got it right either. I came close screwing around with an 808 kick in Ableton's sampler but not quite exactly the way i wanted it.Check out my thread on this forum at

http://www.mnml.nl/phpBB2/viewtopic.php ... ht=suction

And if all else fails i've uploaded a kick for you. It's a sample i found and i tweaked it a bit


http://www.4shared.com/file/160939096/2 ... 009_0.html

[Shepherd_of_Anu]

The kick sounds like its got a bit of snippyness at the beginning. Try taking a look at the actual waveforms of the kicks you are working on then compare them to kicks that are similar to the ones you want to produce. The problem with making kicks using software is that often they are lacking in natural transient sounds. If the kicks you are making look really smooth then you are probably not going to get that little texture to the sound in the early stages. I agree with those that suggested laying a sound with your kick but keep it subtle.

There is other thing you could try. If you just want the sound and are not totally focused on getting the sound through this particular software then your could try taking a more natural drum sample and play it in a sampler with a really short sustain, decay and releases. (or whatever freaky quirky setting gets the sound you want) Maybe layer it with sine-like kick that is filtered to a very narrow band that emphasizes or fills in the sound what is missing from the truncated sample.

I rewrote this because it was so poorly worded...

[Phase Ghost]

synthesis + sample layering is the key, IMO.
check my sig for that old free kick drums sample pack. More than 50 kicks in there.

This man, this. However, don't layer for the sake of layering.

Synthesize a kick, then identify where it's lacking and find a sample to compliment it. Also, don't forget to tune the two drums together. Just experiment until they sound right.