Kick & Bass Secrets For Music Producers - Part 2 Kick Drums

[@mavicsofficial]

Absolutely agree ! Kick synths like Kick 2 sometimes work really well and you can easily change the kicks just as with samples, but nothing beats good samples.

[@basskleph]

You know it! 😃

[@claysoul_music]

It's difficult when starting to go against the plethora of "advice" & tips out there. Everything you have said here goes against a lot of the advice but it makes way more sense. Cheers

[@basskleph]

I hear you. I’m glad you find it makes sense. I recommend testing each of these things out vs the alternatives. Then you can make a good decision on what works best for you

[@jdubbz_uk]

Great tips. 100% agree that good drum sample selection makes your tracks foundation. Other than some corrective eq to complement the bass, I wouldn't ever put a chain of plugins on a Kick channel. At a push, maybe a bit of transient shaping to increase the attack or shorten the decay, but that would be it. Oh, and use midi 100%. Too many issues arise when building a track using kick loops or 1 shots in audio

[@basskleph]

💯 you know it. Sometimes you might get better results simply using an ADSR envelope rather than a transient designer. There’s a trick I should share ;)

[@gianmarcobazzoni]

I tried many kick presets, but the problem is that most of the time you get them as already mastered sound samples. Going through my mastering, they lose their initial nice sound. I prepare my kicks with the standard kick plugin function of my DAW (FL) and apply one equalizer and one multiband compressor/limiter on it. However, most of the times how it sounds is a matter of sidechain... Thank you anyway for the video👍🏼🔝

[@basskleph]

If your kick needs anything more than a subtle EQ then it is not a good kick. Just change it. Start from the best sounds possible

[@piotrbukowski9566]

The most annoying thing floating around the internet is the advice to tune your kick to the key of your track. Why would you even want to do that, if in 90% of cases it's an atonal sine sweep with no defined subbass/key frequency at the end... Regarding layering, it depends. For example F9 Kick (a really awesome library!) has separated kick transient and body folders which layer really well with each other (mainly because the transient kicks really don't have any sine/tonal element, it's just the noisy, percussive element).

[@basskleph]

💯 Right? It’s a shame because people listen to this and it is hurting their songs. Yeah layering is possible, it’s just harder to do correctly than most people think. I’m sure James from F9 did a great job as he has decades of experience as The Freemasons and loads of good hardware. The problem is more when new producers try to do this, and are fooled into thinking they’ll get a better result than using a single sample. There is a weird theme I notice on KZbin where people try to make music production unnecessarily difficult. They over complicate everything. It’s hurting their final result and takes way longer for them to finish songs.

[@DJABEATS]

That’s what’s up

[@RoccoKOfficial]

so what about dragging a kick drum sample from programs like ADSR to a sampler, and creating your midi in a step sequencer from there?

[@basskleph]

That’s fine. Is just another place to find a sample. Why limit yourself though? You could also add a few kicks from splice, loopcloud or anywhere else. Compare many to find the ultimate kicks for you and your music 🙂

[@RoccoKOfficial]

@@basskleph did you try out the plugin Kick - gumcuisine?? Fully customisable kicks from a single vst - no more using samples. Wondering what you thought of it>?

[@evenstyler]

If you do program kicks in audio, you can use the "manage samples" function in Ableton to hot swap them all at once.

[@basskleph]

Yes, but then you can’t compare them. That’s the key part of this. You need to be able to quickly and easily compare many samples, at the same volume and in context. This makes it massively easier to choose better kicks. Or anything really.

[@0x44Monad]

@@basskleph press Q