Kick getting lost
- Thread starter bartek95
- Start date
Mad Phonetics
New member
Obviously the other sounds masking important frequencies of your bd. First step to avoid this is to select sounds that fit together. Next step is to equalize the sounds to give everyone a certain space in the frequency spectrum (boost important frequencies, cut unimportant ones).
Hope that helps.
Hope that helps.
Last edited:
StudioSoundsLLC
New member
Usually I've noticed this happens when other elements are being turned up too far. Keep an eye on the levels and make sure after every element you add that your kick still has that sound you wanted, if it doesn't then its time to turn things down a bit to keep the punch of it.
MajeztyMusic
New member
if you want the kick to stand out what i usually do is give it some nice parallel compression and really hit the compressor hard. This is usually done on a bus. Then after the compressor i would put a pultec emulation and boost +5 at 100 and boost +5 at 10k with a bandwidth at 5. If thats not enough i would throw on bass enhancer like rbass and find a good frequency. Maybe even add a transient designer for punch. Or some type of fast compressor to bring it out.
i 1000% concur with this statement...there's a real good tutorial on YouTube on how to set this up...after you set this up you'll instantly will hear a big difference
Laureat Ramadani
New member
to add more presence of the KICK
what you can consider is
1. the envelope:
if a sound ( whatsoever that is: kick , pluck, bass ) happens to be dominated from others what you can do about it, is choose between reducing the volume of everything else, or maybe you want to EDIT the sound to make it compete with everything else and something cool to start with is the ENVELOPE of the sound, if you bring up more attack, more sustain on the sound it happens to become more dominant
and you do that by setting different VOLUME ENVELOPES on the synth,
or you may want to use a COMPRESSOR on the samples to bring up more sustain of the kick, o-hat, ride,
2. the frequencies of the sounds:
the sounds that have more frequencies sound louder
if I want a Saxophone like IN YOUR FACE as a LEAD , it already has good enough frequencies, it has good enough presence, and it is easy to do
but something like a FLUTE, may not have too much power to stand in the front, and may easy be dominated from other sounds, but if you add a little distortion you can make it a little more powerful, more frequencies, more louder
it is good to understand the body of the sound, from frequencies perspective for example a snare has: pulse, smack, wires, head, and when you play with these frequencies by increasing and decreasing you get to feel that what is that you want more of that, if its pulse, smack, wires, head
or if we talking about kick drum, is it more boom that you want, is it more punch, more mid, more of high ( 3K, 5k )
but you also need to understand that where the sounds should sit on the mix, if you have something like a pad playing to loud and masking everything else, that can create problems you may want to reduce the volume so other sounds don't have to fight so bad to get attention
so you may simply need to reduce something that is masking everything else, and problem solved
what you can consider is
1. the envelope:
if a sound ( whatsoever that is: kick , pluck, bass ) happens to be dominated from others what you can do about it, is choose between reducing the volume of everything else, or maybe you want to EDIT the sound to make it compete with everything else and something cool to start with is the ENVELOPE of the sound, if you bring up more attack, more sustain on the sound it happens to become more dominant
and you do that by setting different VOLUME ENVELOPES on the synth,
or you may want to use a COMPRESSOR on the samples to bring up more sustain of the kick, o-hat, ride,
2. the frequencies of the sounds:
the sounds that have more frequencies sound louder
if I want a Saxophone like IN YOUR FACE as a LEAD , it already has good enough frequencies, it has good enough presence, and it is easy to do
but something like a FLUTE, may not have too much power to stand in the front, and may easy be dominated from other sounds, but if you add a little distortion you can make it a little more powerful, more frequencies, more louder
it is good to understand the body of the sound, from frequencies perspective for example a snare has: pulse, smack, wires, head, and when you play with these frequencies by increasing and decreasing you get to feel that what is that you want more of that, if its pulse, smack, wires, head
or if we talking about kick drum, is it more boom that you want, is it more punch, more mid, more of high ( 3K, 5k )
but you also need to understand that where the sounds should sit on the mix, if you have something like a pad playing to loud and masking everything else, that can create problems you may want to reduce the volume so other sounds don't have to fight so bad to get attention
so you may simply need to reduce something that is masking everything else, and problem solved
Milo Burke
New member
Why doesn't turning it up help? If something is too quiet, turn it up.
Some of the tips others are giving may be useful, but they're largely just making the sound louder.
Like a couple people have said, you may need to make room for it in the mix. If you have heavy basses and synths and guitars, basically anything with a lot of low frequency content, it's going to bury your kick. Roll off the bass for every track as high as you can get away with. And if you need to, side-chain the bass or bass synth to the kick drum to duck them out of the way the moment the kick drum hits.
Some of the tips others are giving may be useful, but they're largely just making the sound louder.
Like a couple people have said, you may need to make room for it in the mix. If you have heavy basses and synths and guitars, basically anything with a lot of low frequency content, it's going to bury your kick. Roll off the bass for every track as high as you can get away with. And if you need to, side-chain the bass or bass synth to the kick drum to duck them out of the way the moment the kick drum hits.
I just posted an article about that topic on my blog. In case you're interested you can read it here:
How To Properly Mix Kick & Bass For A Punchy Low End ? SuperHeroSamples
Hope that helps.
How To Properly Mix Kick & Bass For A Punchy Low End ? SuperHeroSamples
Hope that helps.
hi
scooping out the bottom of sounds that don't need it helps. for example, hihat samples usually have some useless low harmonics that are either just noise or don't contribute the overall sound in a nice way. eliminating these with a low cut around maybe 200hz helps clean up the sound and make room for kicks and bass.
using a punchy kick helps too. as far as processing, i usually don't touch my kicks. I just try to pick ones that work for what I am going for.
compression on some kicks can fatten them, but be careful not to smash the life out of them. i usually use the fastest attack and release setting possible with the goal of just compressing the spike of the transient. this can make the kick sound fatter. but again, i rarely need to do this.
cutting the highs on your bass could help, depending on the genre you are making. a lot of the punch you are looking for out of the kick comes from the upper end of the freq. spectrum.
also, if you are turning up the kick and it is not punching through any more, try giving yourself more headroom (turning everything down) no matter how cluttered your mix is, if you have enough headroom and turn the kick up high enough, it should punch through to some degree. if that doesn't do it, make sure you don't have a limiter on your master channel. a lot of daws throw one on there to keep you from blowing your head off if you play something thats way loud. but the limiter can screw your mix.
hope this is helpful
scooping out the bottom of sounds that don't need it helps. for example, hihat samples usually have some useless low harmonics that are either just noise or don't contribute the overall sound in a nice way. eliminating these with a low cut around maybe 200hz helps clean up the sound and make room for kicks and bass.
using a punchy kick helps too. as far as processing, i usually don't touch my kicks. I just try to pick ones that work for what I am going for.
compression on some kicks can fatten them, but be careful not to smash the life out of them. i usually use the fastest attack and release setting possible with the goal of just compressing the spike of the transient. this can make the kick sound fatter. but again, i rarely need to do this.
cutting the highs on your bass could help, depending on the genre you are making. a lot of the punch you are looking for out of the kick comes from the upper end of the freq. spectrum.
also, if you are turning up the kick and it is not punching through any more, try giving yourself more headroom (turning everything down) no matter how cluttered your mix is, if you have enough headroom and turn the kick up high enough, it should punch through to some degree. if that doesn't do it, make sure you don't have a limiter on your master channel. a lot of daws throw one on there to keep you from blowing your head off if you play something thats way loud. but the limiter can screw your mix.
hope this is helpful
Last edited:
First of all never mix in solo, unless you're trying to pull out a nasty frequency. Second, you need to make sure you're whole mix isn't hitting zero db when you try to turn the kick up to fit otherwise it's gonna distort and sound like crap, and it's gonna chop off whatever transient you try to turn up. If you mix is at a reasonable level, then do as some others have suggested and try to add a parallel track and send signal to it pre fader. Also, what I have been doing lately is doing parallel expansion. Put an expander on a parallel track if it's the transient that's not cutting through. Or you can do both, parallel compressor and an expander on two separate tracks and mix to taste. And remember, you don't have to keep the main kick track at the same level if you use parallel processing. Often times I end up turning the main kick half way down and adding more of the parallel compression, or more of the parallel expansion. Just mix it until it sounds right, just make sure they are prefader sends.
Epsilon-144
Musician and Producer
give it its own, or as much of its own, frequency area as possible. Somewhere around 60-70 Hertz should be cool for a kick. Cut your bass out below there (at 30-60 Hertz).
Last edited:
scrapheaper
Moderator
First thing to try is turn it up.
Second thing is to change your arrangement to get rid of things that are playing at the same time as the kick. This isn't always possible but makes a huge, huge difference if you are prepared to change the rhythms of parts up a bit.
Third thing is to use a highpass EQ to get rid of the low end of anything that isn't a bass. (Obviously you can't get rid of the bass frequencies of the bass cause then you won't have any bass left)
Fourth thing to try is to use some subtle sidechain compression to duck the bass when the kick hits. You want a very short attack and a moderately short release on the compressor, the ratio and threshold depend on how loud your kick is.
Last thing is to try sidechaining other elements that are obscuring your kick (go easy otherwise your kick will be loud but the thing you sidechained will disappear)
If none of those things work, you either aren't doing them right or have a rubbish kick, and you've already mentioned that the kick sounds good so it must be one of these things here.
Last edited: