Boom At The Begining Of A Breakdown?

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horizon_scott

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its been driving me crazy lately. to add umph to a breakdown on some metal songs a kindof sub woofer is added, i cant pinpoint it or find anything on the net about it.

a good exaple is listening to the postmortem promises EP myspace.com/postmortempromises.


the other day at a show i was playing, the headline band had a footpedal that the bassist pressed down to make this sound but i forgot to ask what it was it was like a brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrroooooooooooooommmmmmfffffffff sound hahah!

any ideas?

:confused:
 
Generally, to pull this off, I do one of two things:

A: On the kick channel, I'll automate a route to a send channel, so that only the kicks I want (e.g. the down beat of a measure) make it to the send channel. Then, in that send, I pull up a reverb unit, kill the dry sound, and get a real warm, clean reverb going. Put the decay at about a second or so. Next, put an EQ on there, and notch a little out where your kick is actually hitting, and then boost below it. Say... 30-45hz.

B: Same thing, except this conserves a little CPU. Instead of having a whole channel devoted to just that sound that may only happen once during a song, you repeat everything above, and then bounce that to it's own wav file, and make that its own track, so then you can delete the reverb/EQ units in that send, and also do away with the automation.

I find that almost always, you're gonna want to set this at about 50%-60% of your actual kick volume, or else it's just too much. Also, be sure you have some sort of compressor/limiter in the master, or you're gonna have problems.

Hope that helps!

ninja edit: As with anything, when you EQ that sound, a little goes a long way. Maybe 2-3db of boost in the 30-45hz.
 
an efficient way to go about it is automating an FX send to a gated signal generator, which would be most ideally triggered to the kick drum at that point. Its almost the same approach you take to beefing up a kick drum.

Of course, you'd have to adjust your decay times to a point where it fits in the song and trails out long enough to really have impact.

However, if you want that subtone of epic proportions, then your talking sound design.

That could involve anything from layering a deep signal generator with a subkick sample (that 808 is a good place to start) to heavy compression with a solid reverb timed just right. Light distortion helps intensify the effect without sounding crunched. Its not hard to do, just requires some tweaking.


The subtone legend holds about the same weight as the ghostly "reverse reverb" legend as made famous in many tool songs. Again, easily broken down with practice.
 
thanks a lot, i found a load of samples for subdrops (theyre called aparently) on the ultimate metal forum, the only question i have left is, what on earth was the pedal he used? it looked like a one channel footswitch pedal, home made?


x
 
It's possible that he triggered a sampler with a basic foot switch... some samplers and sequencers have the option to be triggered that way.
 
it could have been a divebomb effect too. I've seen the effect on a lot of different bass pedals, but not as a stand alone. I know the older digitech pedals had some of that stuff on them.
 
soldierone said:
It's possible that he triggered a sampler with a basic foot switch... some samplers and sequencers have the option to be triggered that way.
Click to expand...

This is the most likely answer.

Again though, the "sub drops" are usually from an 808, or are mimicked, to sound similar. The Roland TD series brains have some great ones as well, and are very editable.
 
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