by djnarrative | 29 Mar, 2011 | Reckorder Tutorials
If you're making electronic music you generally need a great kick and a great snare. A lot of work can go into making just those two elements in a lot of underground dance music tracks, but once you've got a few your happy with you can use them again so it's worth spending some time on it. There are a different styles of Kick for different genres, but basically the 3 elements i look for are punch, body and weight, so one approach is to first find, tune and eq, 3 sounds in drum rack which have those characteristics. Then layer them on top of each other and add another eq and compressor to that kick channel. Generally speaking i'm looking for the kick to punch at 80 - 100hz so i use a frequency analyser and eq, always rolling off as much as possible underneath to leave room for the sub. its also worth noting where the higher snap punches through in order to give it presence in the mix. And the other thing i do is make a dip in the eq of the bass where the kick punches so that they can exist together, or sidechain if more bass genres. I'll drop some side chaining info in another post as it can be a bit confusing if you've not heard about it, but very effective in getting your kick to punch through. Anyway for now load up a few sounds, tune and eq them so they make up a much better sound, group, and see where its punching, eq /shape as neccesary and drop a compressor...
