How do i properly layer kick drums to get a huuuuuge house kick???!

B

Bryan Green

New member
I use ableton and reason.

any tips are appreciated. im getting better with synths, i just need to know how to get that huge boomy percussion. and also, once achieved, what is your preference on sidechaining? (threshold, gain, attack release , etc. whats your ideal setting)?
 
Find kicks that, first, kicks that sound good together. Second, make sure you have one that you cut all the high end from so it's only bass and boost the volume. After that, just mix the ones after that to preference. Turn up the volume on all of them and run them through some compression. Take away some of the stereo on the kicks.
 
There is no ideal sidechain setting... it depends how obvious a sidechain you want, the tempo of your track, your kick pattern, the length of your kicks, the volume of whatever you're sidechaining and probably more.

As for layering, I'd say separating out the elements of each layer is the most important. If you're using a layer cause you like the snappy attack, highpass it and fade it out after a few milliseconds to remove all of the sound except the attack. If you like the powerful low end, lowpass it and chop off the attack.

Then once you have layered, compress and maybe saturate a little: you don't want to actually distort your kick, just make it a touch 'louder'.
 
To start with, you need good samples.
Then you need to pick the right samples.
You also need to treat them well.

The subkick will need to be a kick which lowend match your idea.
Tune the subkick so it's in the key of the track.
If you want a long kick, leave it like that (though you might want to gate away some of that last oomph which can make it sound loose).
If you want a very short kick, pitch it down until the bass attack which commonly lies right below 100 Hz or so, gets down to where to oomph usually lies. Highpass and gate the oomph tail away completely, and you have a very short and tight kick.
Personally I tend to EQ boost the bass around the key frequency.
Sometimes I also boost a bit if there's a little weak spot somewhere (for example between the bass hit and oomph). Imo it makes it tighter most of the times.
This one is lowpassed, though you don't always have to lowpass it completely (as long as it sounds good).

Then the most common thing is to layer a 2nd kick, a topkick, which character also should match your idea.
Then you have additional things you can do to the topkick (not the subkick):
- Instead of one topkick, use a mid and a highkick. You simply pick a kick which match your idea of the character in the final kick in the midrange, and one for the highend.
- Use more than 1 topkick. Add further topkicks that complement eachother until you have the full sound that you want. Note that it would most likely be recommended to have a primary topkick, which is less highpassed (highpassed to a degree that would use if you were only to use 1), and the rest being secondary, i.e being more highpassed, so they don't change how the final topkick sound cooperate with the subkick.
- Stack more than 1 MIDI-layer. More than just keeping 1 note on middle C on the topkick(s), stack a bunch of MIDI-notes on different pitches to give a more full sound, this also applies to percussion of course.
Lower notes tend to give fatter sound, and higher notes tend to add better definition (at least to my experience when doing this on percussion, haven't tried this tat much on kicks). Not to mention that this is another option to shape your kick's character more perfectly.
- Add snares, claps, hihats, or other percussion ontop of the kick. White noise works perfectly as well. Make sure that the sound is short, more like the final touch of highend aggression, so you might want to gate the sound (or use a very short decay if it's white noise).
- Just as you can use different timings on clap or snare layer to give it a fatter sound (think of deadmau5 signature claps/snares), you could try to do the same thing to the kick-percussion sounds (or even topkicks I think) to give the kick a more fat sound. However, I haven't tested this that much, but you get the idea.
- Try different polarities and phases until the sound is perfect to you.
Make sure your kick also has a good transient and thump. My own technique of adding transient to the kick is the route it to a parallel channel (after the kick submix) and compress it all the way, increase the attacktime a hint, and gate away the rest of the body. Now you only have the transient left, of which you can do whataver you want to (EQ etc). Then you simply blend it in. There are also occasions where i have done something similar to add other stuff to the kick, such as punch (longer attacktime and more lowend).

As for sidechaining:
- Go all the way with the ratio, and then dial it back, rather than dial in more and more (which often result in a too weak sidechain sound).
- This is personal: I prefer to add some hold time in the compressor (time before release is initiated), I would say 80 % of the times I dial in sidechained compression to more important sounds in the track, so try that and see if you like it.
- One thing that many producers recommend is to nudge the kick furth a hint (no more than 1 millisecond), or nudge the sidechain trigger back a hint (also no more than 1 millisecond), since the sidechained compression still takes a little while to reach full reduction, which can drown the transient in the kick.
- However, you can also go the opposite way, and add attacktime to the sidechained sounds so they contribute with a transient to the kick as well.

One additional thing you can do is to make a huge reverb of something (I mostly do it on the kicksound) that completely drown everything out, distort it to make it even more aggressive, EQ it, then add a plugin which controls the volume, and make a small sweep right before the kick (very fast). It should be very quiet, barely audible. Though it might still give the kick a little extra groove.

Oh my, I don't think I have written this much about kicks ever before...
 
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first find the kick you want to be the 'lead kick' or the prominent kick in the kick mix. This might be a kick with a nice attack, thud, whatever. Then your second kick might be one with a nice 'click' to it. Then your 3rd kick might be a nice subby kick. Instead of using the Sub kick you could use a sine wave and tune it to the track. Either way tune the sub portion.

Id high pass the 'click' kick so you're only getting the click part you want. Low pass the bass kick(or sine). And EQ the main kick to taste. Next you wanna put all the faders to 0. Bring in your main kick as the most, then slowly bring in your other kicks until they are doing enough of their job to supplement the main kick. If volume goes DOWN when you are ADDING kicks its because of phase cancellation. Go into an EQ plugin or something and Flip the polarity (the button looks like a o with a line through it in most of my scenarios) of the kick that is causing phase cancellation. This will make the phases line up and amplify off each other.

Process to taste with compression, distortion, whatever. The above is just a way to get you started the rest is all to taste.
 
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Or ditch all your samples and start using a proper drum synthesizer (I use xoxos BONG) and postprocess it to taste. Mostly compression (read this thread), filtering, distortion, gating...stuff like that. For some extra low end bump use a resonant highpass filter on your kick at your fundamental freq (eg 50hZ) and raise resonance (be careful). No need for layering anymore.

Cheers
Sebastian
 
Halma said:
Or ditch all your samples and start using a proper drum synthesizer (I use xoxos BONG) and postprocess it to taste. Mostly compression (read this thread), filtering, distortion, gating...stuff like that. For some extra low end bump use a resonant highpass filter on your kick at your fundamental freq (eg 50hZ) and raise resonance (be careful). No need for layering anymore.

Cheers
Sebastian
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great, problem solved for everyone. Just ditch all your samples and get this plugin wohooo!
 
Don't get me wrong, I'm all about synthesis and am spending lots of time trying to do things myself in the music. But getting rid of all your samples?.. Come on.
 
Wallengard said:
Don't get me wrong, I'm all about synthesis and am spending lots of time trying to do things myself in the music. But getting rid of all your samples?.. Come on.
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I think you can do either. I think I remember noisia saying they've done both synths and samples and a kind of hybrid approach with both- and their drums are the best in the business.
 
I'd go one step further and suggest that the phrase "ditch all of your samples" is more about stop thinking layering samples is the first thing to do rather than literally trash and delete them from your computer
 
scrapheaper said:
I think you can do either. I think I remember noisia saying they've done both synths and samples and a kind of hybrid approach with both- and their drums are the best in the business.
Click to expand...

Who?

bandcoach said:
I'd go one step further and suggest that the phrase "ditch all of your samples" is more about stop thinking layering samples is the first thing to do rather than literally trash and delete them from your computer
Click to expand...

In that case I agree. Lately I have really started to realize the importance of having the perfect sound before anything else.
 
Sry guys,

did not want to appear like a douchebag. :D

But what´s wrong about going 100% synthesis? And of course you don´t have to use that drum machine in particular. There is lots of stuff around like the d16 emus etc.

The thing is: those units come with a dedicated algorhithm that does everything for you (knock, punch etc). You just need to to finetune it a little bit and you are mostly done.

Heck most real big housekicks are derivates from some x0x anways. So why not start making your own instead? It´s not that hard. And eg with BONG my fundamental can go way below 50Hz and if I like with optional noise up to 20kHz. It´s all about the envelopes and how they sweep through all of them. I don´t need a sinewave or waves renbass for "some lowend". Most of the time I need to find a way to tame all those dynamics. I can make my kick peak @ -0.7dBFS while haveing and RMS value of -18dBFS. That´s 18dB of dynamic range to work with. I have never had that huge DR while I worked with samples.

And I find it harder to "merge multiple layers into one kick" (and finding the samples) then loading my drumsynth, turn a few knobs (that can be modified later as well), grab my favorite compressor and eq, process it and route everything though my drumbus with my next postprocessing units.

I just wanna give the OP another POV in achieving big sounding house kicks.

Regards
Sebastian
 
I really don't think there's anything wrong with doing things 100% synthesized, except for when you need a more natural drum sound maybe.
 
Wallengard said:
I really don't think there's anything wrong with doing things 100% synthesized, except for when you need a more natural drum sound maybe.
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True. Though I think there are some great physical modeling synths out there that can sound pretty authentic as well. Eg. the OP has Reason and that comes with KONG which has a pretty badass PM Bassdrum, Snare and Tom module. Put the "Rattler FX" onto the snare, some additional noise on your kick, modulate everything via midi triggered envelopes and you can get some really great sounding drums.
 
Halma said:
Sry guys,

did not want to appear like a douchebag. :D

But what´s wrong about going 100% synthesis? And of course you don´t have to use that drum machine in particular. There is lots of stuff around like the d16 emus etc.

The thing is: those units come with a dedicated algorhithm that does everything for you (knock, punch etc). You just need to to finetune it a little bit and you are mostly done.

Heck most real big housekicks are derivates from some x0x anways. So why not start making your own instead? It´s not that hard. And eg with BONG my fundamental can go way below 50Hz and if I like with optional noise up to 20kHz. It´s all about the envelopes and how they sweep through all of them. I don´t need a sinewave or waves renbass for "some lowend". Most of the time I need to find a way to tame all those dynamics. I can make my kick peak @ -0.7dBFS while haveing and RMS value of -18dBFS. That´s 18dB of dynamic range to work with. I have never had that huge DR while I worked with samples.

And I find it harder to "merge multiple layers into one kick" (and finding the samples) then loading my drumsynth, turn a few knobs (that can be modified later as well), grab my favorite compressor and eq, process it and route everything though my drumbus with my next postprocessing units.

I just wanna give the OP another POV in achieving big sounding house kicks.

Regards
Sebastian
Click to expand...

Totally agree ! Some drum synths are so powerful, I use sonic academy's "Kick" plug in and it is amazing, you shape, tune and process your kick all one plug in ! I literally spend a few hours when im bored just making kicks in different key etc and then bounce them into audio to use in future projects, saves me a lot of time in production stage when you have a nice selection of kicks to start your track :)
 
I use the Vengeance sample pack for most of my kicks and i am trying to figure out what Reason has to offer as far as some of their default kicks. sidechaining im getting the hang of.

My main thing is getting the crunchy nasty "basic" sound out of the kicks and getting that big thumping boom kick. I like doing kickless buildups so has far has for the first 8 bars for the intro should i jsut highpass the kick and then for 9-17 take the filter off? the main thing with layering kicks is i want top make the biggest nastiest heaviest drop ever.

Alot of big room house is super repetitive as far as the melodies go but one thing i can definately appreciate is the huge kicks. thats what im trying to achieve.
 
You can use dedicated plugins like BigKick or Nicky Romero's Kick.

Otherwise you simply layer your kick - bass & 'click', you may add sine-wave for more "thump". There are many techniques, you have to experiment. :-)
 
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