The Kick Drum is one of the most important instruments in most mixes. In some genres of music the kick drum is the sound that drives the low end and the overall feel for the track. In other genres where the kick takes a lesser roll in the mix compared to other instruments, it still needs to stand out in the mix to make a good sounding track. What’s makes matters even more complicated is that a kick drum is not only something that has to sound good, it has to “feel” good as well. So after you’ve recorded/sampled a great kick, EQ’d as well as you can, added your compression, gates etc., and you still don’t have a kick that you’re satisfied with, what are you supposed to do?
There’s a trick that mix engineers have been using for years to fatten their kick drums and it consists of adding 40-60Hz signal to the kick to give it that extra thump. In the past this technique used to be performed using the signal generator of the mixing console, but now we can recreate that in most DAWs.
You Can’t Put Lipstick On A Pig
Or as we were taught in audio school multiple of times: “you can’t polish a turd.” What we mean by this is that no amount of tricks is going to make a terrible kick drum sound good, so you need to start out by processing your kick to the best it can sound(as we mentioned previously) before moving on to adding stuff to it.
Adding The Signal
To add the signal you are going to need to create a new track. On this track you will insert your DAWs signal generator(here we have a pro tools signal generator pictured but other DAWs work in the same manner).
The next thing you need to do is create the signal from the generator. You want to choose somewhere between 40Hz-60Hz. We typically try to stay towards the lower end of the range, between 40 and 50Hz, as we’re typically trying to add a low end feel as well as sound. The type of signal to choose is a sine wave. Be sure to select the sine wave option specifically because it is the simplest kind of frequency that won’t add any extra harmonics to the rest of the track.
Gating The Sine Wave
Once you’ve got the signal going you need to gate it. Do so by inserting a gate onto the same track after the signal generator. Next you need to adjust the threshold until the signal is completely muted, probably somewhere around -9db.
Side-chaining
Now that the signal is completely muted we need to side-chain the gate with the kick drum so that it opens every time the kick plays. To do so is very simple, just look for the side-chain option on the gate, select it, and choose your kick drum track to trigger it.
Tweak Your Parameters
Now we should have of the technique down and all we need to do is adjust the parameters on the gate to make it sound the way we like. Adjust the threshold so that the gate will open in sync with the kick drum. Your attack should be set to almost zero, only adjust it slightly in the event it doesn’t sound natural. Lastly adjust your release to taste as well. You want to open your release far enough to where the gate sounds natural, or some people leave a longer release to create that 808 type sound. Either way just adjust your parameters to taste and you should be good to go.
Now you have successfully fattened your kick drum. This technique works for a variety of other things, like adding white noise to a snare to make it pop a little more. It really works well on acoustic kick drums that, once recorded, lost a little low end. Now you can add as much oomph to your kick as you would like. Please comment and share your thoughts.
