fast kick drums

Well, the fact is that on a "real" drum, when you play faster, the attack and resonance are TOTALLY different than a single hit. Also, the way the drum phase cancels and also reinforces the the sound as each hit is resonating totally effects the tone. The drummer will also strike the head with varying velocities. How well the drummer interplays with all of that has to be taken into account too.

It is not simple to make a drum machine sound like a "real" drummer. A blend of samples helps, meaning, rather than only one sample being used to each hit, you could have multiple samples that are randomly (whatever "random" is in the digital world...:) ) selected for each hit. Also, having velocity differences between the hits helps distinguish them from each other.

Personally, I would try outputting just your kick drum to it's own .wav file, then run that through Drumagog with "Dynamic Random Multi Samples". This will give you the closest thing to "realism" you can right now.
 
Well, are you varying the velocity of the midi or are you triggering constant hits at 127?
Keeping the velocity much lower and varied during the fast parts sounds alot more realistic. The thing is, alot of people don't like realism with super fast kick drums (I'm assuming you're talking about a metal context here) they want punch and power, and not many drummers can do that at 200+. Most of them trigger if they play routinely above those speeds. Hence, people are used to an unrealistic sound.
 
how much do you vary velocity? I tried a couple of times but it didn't make it. I also a bit of random quantification, doesn't make it much. Different sounds for a kick aren't much good, especially on ezdrummer dfh, even thought I run like 4 kick tracks and vary sample in one or two.

Don't know, hear this song http://www.myspace.com/kataklysm (like angels weeping the dark)

at 25 seconds, this kick is trigged, and I really like the sound, the kind of floff it does rather than click click click ( ok I admit it this was pretty freak)

anyways

thanks for taking the time to read and answer
 
you're gonna have to compress and EQ the kick track to make it sound like that. it's not gonna just sound that way by itself with just the plain dry sample.
 
If you want to sound like Kataklysm, I don't know why you're worried about humanizing the kick drums. ;)

I'm no expert, but when I do death metal with DFHS, the kicks are the one thing I don't worry about realism with. I put all the velocities at around 105 to 115 and keep them consistent. I'll also keep them pretty much perfectly quantized. I'm just sure to use the alternating right / left hits.

I don't compress the kick drums from DFHS because obviously I don't have any dynamics to keep under control, and I don't want to change the sound. I just EQ out a bit of the cheap sound around 300 hz and boost it quite a bit up around 4 to 5 k. I also high pass usually around 30 Hz because I don't like the low end to build up on fast bass parts. If I want a more realistic sound I don't scoop the mids so much, and if I want an even clickier sound I usually layer another sample on there using drumagog.
I also usually split or duplicate the kick track and do some automation during the fast parts to bring down the volume. I might have a "thumpier" track that I just turn down during those parts.

Also, keep the kick out of the overheads (or all the other drum mics if you want to) and don't put any reverb on it if you're adding reverb to the kit.
 
wannabecomedeat said:
hey metalhead, i remember going to your soundclick page, I remember your kick sounds were good, but can't find it. what was your page again?

http://www.soundclick.com/bands/pagemusic.cfm?bandID=419430 here's mine, the mp3 isn't my band, it's a band I recorded, pretty slow, but still the kick misses something at 1min or so.

i'll have to try your eq setup this weekend

thanks bud
Click to expand...

I noticed that the whole mix is VERY lacking in low end.
 
Here's my recently recorded hardcore/metalcore/whatevercore band that uses a lot of double kicking:

(choosing the song with the most double kick)

Clicky here.


If you're going to use samples a good idea is to get some really good sounding samples of the kick and snare (maybe toms too if you're going to replace those) and use those as the sample .wav files, that way you're not using the exact same snare on every project, etc.
 
wannabecomedeat said:
hey metalhead, i remember going to your soundclick page, I remember your kick sounds were good, but can't find it. what was your page again?

http://www.soundclick.com/bands/pagemusic.cfm?bandID=419430 here's mine, the mp3 isn't my band, it's a band I recorded, pretty slow, but still the kick misses something at 1min or so.

i'll have to try your eq setup this weekend

thanks bud
Click to expand...


I don't have anything posted anywhere right now that is a decent example.
I've got a couple death metal tracks up on this Myspace page:

www.myspace.com/blackprophecy666

But I don't think they are very representative of a great kick sound (or any sounds for that matter, they are just thrown together)
 
wannabecomedeat said:
hello,

I use toontrack ezdrummer for my drum sound. When you pass de 200 bpm with kick at 1/16 note, it sounds really fake and bad. Anyone knows how to get it to sound good at that speed???

any special trick?

thanks
Click to expand...


Well it's like sound design for movies...think about it this way:

Take two scenes that have gunfire in them. One is slow gunfire, like a shotgun. The other is fast, machine gun fire.

Now if you're spotting that scene from scratch, what do you do? Do you match up a sound with each and every frame? Or do you hold various different samples and alternate them?

When is it better? When is it not?

What you're experiencing is the washing machine effect, this term is brought up in sound design. That's when you take a loop that's perhaps too short, then consistantly played over and over again.

The difference between the machine gun and the kick drum being that one pattern is machine based. The other is human based. Machines are "perfect", humans aren't.

The result is a mechanical and very apparent repetative loop. The shorter the loop, the worse and more apparent.

So it's a matter of switching up the kick pattern every so often with slightly varying samples. So like was said, you have different velocities, different intensities of volume, and that even effects your EQ slightly from hit to hit.

Just reference a live kick drum pattern, you'll hear it very easily.
 
hey metalhead28 again, the kick from virus of "faith" is pretty convincing, it's sound lowripped a bit, but pretty good. What samples were used? (not that I want to steal it from you, I just wanna have a basic step to how it sounds before being mixed)

ford van, I understand the principle of velocity and multisample, (there's allready an option called random multisamples in ezdrummer) but don't know if it's just me, it just sounds not so good, like there are samples that click like crazy, and other that oumfff. Let's say you remove the random samples, there's a big diffence between velocity 126 and 127 in terms of how it sounds. arrrrghhhhh, don't have access to my recording computer till friday night, can't post samples.
 
here's a suggestion...lets say the tempo is 220bpm for ex...
make 2 kick Tracks...T1 @ 110bpm, T2 @ 110bpm...mix together (staggered)= 1 kickT @220bpm...this may help...?? you could use two different kick sounds, also...and use an expander to control kick resonance...you can also try an effect like a tape echo to get variations in the sound...i do this for my hi hat tracks and it works awesome...
 
wannabecomedeat said:
hey metalhead28 again, the kick from virus of "faith" is pretty convincing, it's sound lowripped a bit, but pretty good. What samples were used? (not that I want to steal it from you, I just wanna have a basic step to how it sounds before being mixed)
Click to expand...


I use the Sonor kick in DFHS with the wood beater, and since I wanted an exhagerated click to the sound, I layered another sample using drumagog. It's just a mixture of a couple sounds I made with some drastic EQ. It's mostly high end.
 
bezusheist, easier than that, my kick track is splitted in "left and right foot", no need for 110 bpm, it's all at 220.

sorry not much time, gotta get to school. when I get back, it will be REP POINT FRENZY!!! ;-p
 
wannabecomedeat said:
hangdawk, Tell me, i'm pretty curious how you got that high end sound
Click to expand...


If I'm doing heavy shit that needs samples, I prefer to use the kit that is going to be played and get the samples from them. Unless they sound like shit and there's no hope.

I used 3 different mics in different placements to create 3 samples. It was a sm57 on batter side picking up the mallet. Audix D6 inside. GT-55 at the end of a 4 foot tunnel made of rigid fiberglass. All samples recorded separately. Sm57 was high passed somewhere crazy like 1khz and gated. The GT55 was low passed somewhere around 500hz and squashed fairly hard with a medium release time. I spent a fair amount of time with the D6 to get the placement right. That one sounded good enough to be used by itself really. I think I took a bit off around 300-400. My kick has a honk around there. The D6 is the majority of the sound the 57 is of course the click and the gt55 gets the low end resonance. I just blended them together and there was my sample to be used in Drummagog.


Oh, I forgot to mention. Nice Tama granstar custom drums with new heads and tuned for days really helps.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top