The kick drum… might appear to be one of the simplest sounds in the mix, but the kick is utterly central to the all-important feel and groove of any track. Here are six techniques and tricks to help you build better bass drums.
1. The Right Kick For The Job
Although there’s no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ kick drum for any particular style of music, it helps to know what the standard issue sounds are in your genre of choice, as starting points, if nothing else.
In electronic music, for example, a Roland TR-909 drum machine emulation should be in the toolbox of every techno and house producer; and the TR-808 kick is, of course, still a must for hip-hop and trap, 40 years after its invention.
When dealing with sampled acoustic drum kits, selecting the right bass drum becomes a rather more nuanced process. Don’t assume that you should stick with the default one that loads with your virtual kit – real drummers mix and match drums as required, and so should you.
Generally speaking, if you’re after punch and power for a rock or electric pop track, opt for a ‘modern’ 22” kick with a holed front head. For a gentle singer-songwriter or jazz-influenced track, on the other hand, try a smaller (18-20”) ‘vintage’ kick with a closed front head for a livelier, more dynamic sound.
2. Layered Kicks
As with many other sounds, the key to great contemporary kick drums is layering: shaping and balancing two or more component parts to achieve the perfect combination.
You could mix acoustic and synthetic kicks to get the visceral transient of the first with the bottom-end energy and controlled sustain of the second, say, or merge the low frequencies of one acoustic kick with the higher frequencies of another… or the front end of a DMX with the body of a 909, the tail of an 808 and a low-level envelope-modulated noise layer for presence. And so on.
Indeed, there are a number of virtual instruments out there geared up specifically for compositing kick drums in this way, including Sonic Academy Kick 2, Plugin Boutique Big Kick and D16 Group PunchBox, all of which we’ll be looking at in detail in a forthcoming round-up. Also well worth investigating are sub-bass reinforcement plugins, such as Boom Library Enforcer and Waves Submarine, which simplify the process of adding a sub-layer to any kick.
3. Variations And Round Robins
Even in House and other four-to-the-floor dance music styles, a touch of subtle variation between kick drum hits can bring a beneficial sense of progression and dynamism to the groove – and if you’re looking to emulate a real drum kit, it’s essential.
For electronic sounds, you could just randomly modulate or manually automate very slight filter or envelope movements from beat to beat; while any sampled acoustic kit worth its salt will feature a round-robin’ sample pool – that is, multiple recordings of the same kick drum for each velocity layer – from which the playback engine will make a random selection for each hit, resulting in a more ‘human’ performance.
4. Distortion FTW
The raw sound of the acoustic bass drum invariably demands the careful dialling in of EQ and compression before it can be taken seriously in the mix. Furthermore, though, almost any kick – ‘real’ or synthesised – can be improved with the application of distortion.
Tape and tube-style analogue saturation work wonders, giving solidity and warmth, while waveshaping distortion, bitcrushing and/or sample rate reduction can turn an overly clean dance music kick into a face-smashing piledriver of a thing. If your kick drum is a fusion of several layers, as described above, experiment with distortion on individual parts, as well as using it to glue the group as a whole together.
5. Don’t Stress Over Kick Drums
Having said all that, there really is no shame in disregarding the previous four tips and grabbing a fully produced one-shot kick drum from a sample library for playback directly on an audio track or triggering in a sampler.
Forming the rhythmic bedrock upon which the whole rhythm section sits, the kick is one instrument you absolutely can’t afford to get wrong, so if you’re at all in doubt as to the results of your own sound design efforts, rather than spend any more precious studio time on what is, in coldly literal terms, the most monotonous element of the mix, just substitute a prefab sample and move on. You can always return to it later if the guilt proves too much to bear.
6. Work With The Bass
Being jointly responsible for the overall shape of the groove, the kick drum and bass should always work together as a partnership, rather than fighting for space.
While much of that comes down to the positioning and interplay of the two instruments on the timeline, this collaborative concept extends into sound design and mixing, too; and with regard to the latter, as a rule, the kick drum should take precedence over the bassline whenever the two coincide, punching through to nail down the beat.
The easiest and most effective way to make that happen is to use sidechain compression to duck the bass signal whenever the kick hits, via an actual compressor or a ‘sidechaining’ plugin such as Nicky Romero Kickstart or Xfer Records LFO Tool. Tailor the shape of the ducking to suit the tempo of the track and rhythm of the kick and bass, and pay close attention to the amount of ducking taking place – you want the process to be as non-destructive as possible.
Do you have a never-fails kick drum engineering technique to share with the world? Pass it on in the comments…