how to get the kick drum to stick out in the mix

  • Thread starter Thread starter Nick The Man
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Another kick trick - one of my favorites

Low shelf -2db or so below 60Hz, slight boost at 80-100Hz, cut mud at 400-500Hz, little boost near 4-5K for beater click....

Copy the track. On the 2nd kick (clean), roll off all the low end so all you hear is the click, or slap....smash the hell out of it with a limiter (10:1 or more)...blend to taste with kick 1.

I do the same thing with bass, cutting a little where I boosted the kick on track 1, then shelving a +2db or so at 60hz so it occupies most of the bottom registry.

(frequencies given are totally subjective to material content)

-LIMiT
 
Nick The Man said:
anyone on the listen?
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I can certainly hear the kick just fine. The drummer is very inconsistent. You really need to cut-and paste good hits over the bad ones.......

It wouldn't hurt if the band could play together a bit better as well. :)
 
then why don't you try to start building the mix from the kick?


It's a very popular approach and works well with practice...
 
Oh, also, if I'm having a little trouble with the kick or snare a little parallel compression usually helps them pop out, also. I usually like the UAD-1 1176 with all buttons in mode for this.
 
Nick The Man said:
lol i recently downloaded the drumagog plug in demo... i dont like it one bit its cheating in the worst way... so i dont use it, i was just curious ;)
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I would also rather be able to make a kick sound good than use Drumagog.

But......

When you have a high school band come in and the drum set is used and abused and sounds like a trash can and you aren't about to tune their kit for them, Drumagog is life saving!

Just as you can clap your hands and turn it into a kick drum, You can beat on a piece of $hit Drum kit and Turn it into a nice sounding one!

I'd say that helps business for me.
 
Nick The Man said:
so i should compress it during mixing then so i can raise the level. and do some eq adjustments, i'll have to tell the drummers that come through here to play it hard.
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Its more about consistency than hardness.
Although a hard consistent kick will shine through, but I know that is hard for less professional drummers to acheive.

Eck
 
The kick dissapearing is the least of this bands worries. The recording sounds fine, the musicians need to play the song better. When that happens, the mix will just come together.
 
Farview said:
The kick dissapearing is the least of this bands worries. The recording sounds fine, the musicians need to play the song better. When that happens, the mix will just come together.
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+1

The first thing I do (in the limited experience that I have) when the kick gets lost is high pass the guitars at around 100Hz, and do a generous cut in the bass at around 80Hz. This usually brings the low end of the kick out, lets the guitars sit on top of everything, and gives the bass definition, all in two easy steps! The biggest thing is playing with consistency, though. Great musicianship will come through on the shittiest of recordings, but it doesn't really work vice versa.
 
IronFlippy said:
Great musicianship will come through on the shittiest of recordings, but it doesn't really work vice versa.
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I disagree, bad musicianship will come through the best recordings just fine.
 
lol yeah auto tuners and quantize everything lol there ya go
 
Farview said:
I disagree, bad musicianship will come through the best recordings just fine.
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Maybe I worded it wrong. I meant to say that good musicians can make terrible recordings sound good, whereas terrible musicians can't make a good recording sound good.
 
Nick The Man said:
lol yeah auto tuners and quantize everything lol there ya go
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Even if you quantized the performance of that song, it still wouldn't sound great because the musicians didn't attack the instruments well enough to make them sound good.

You can't fix a crap performance. You can only make it in tune and on time.
 
kick sounds good .. cutting through pretty well, but the bass guitar has no definition - it sounds like it has a large bump at 500hz ... which is likely from that 100hz - 1Khz boost.

Try running the bass with the only EQ being a HP to 55hz, then make cuts that only correspond to what is needed in the context of the music - i.e. if you can't hear the kick, cut the bass at 60hz with a 1 octave bandwidth

You can get more attack from the bass by boosting 1khz, and you can get some string noise from 4-5khz.

Depending on the original sound - if it was a cheap bass with crappy pick-ups, then it will likely be more mud than bass.
 
it seems like with alot of these ideas im getting alot of a click but im having a hard time getting that THUMP!
 
well, the THUMP comes from having a properly tuned drum with good heads in a good room with a good mic that's properly placed, and with a drummer who's hitting it hard enough to actually make the head go THUMP

otherwise, boosting around 80db is your best bet, but if the true thump isn't already there, you'll probably just be boosting muddy/undefined shit

edit: most of the attack from that thump comes from the high mids, anyways...it's when you boost that 2-4k area too much that your thump can turn into a typewriter click
 
yeah maybe tune down the resonant head to the lowest pitch you can get. do you have a hole in the reso head?

you're using the PDP birch kit right? the stock kick heads on that thing suuuuuucked. i switched to a Evans EQ3 reso and EMAD 2 batter head and now it has plenty of thump. i was surprised by how much better it sounded. it also improved the feel of the kick, making it easier to play more consistently.


another thing, don't over-muffle the kick drum. if you stuff the whole thing with a blanket, you might as well just have your kick pedal attached to the wall or something. it will kill the character and resonance of the shell. i had a small drum pillow in my kick before i switched heads, after the switch i play it without a pillow (just using the muffling ring on the EMAD head) and it sounds awesome.
 
Nick The Man said:
anyone on the listen?
Click to expand...

Yeah.....
I read the whole thread up to this point.
Finally listened to the sample of the band......jesus man. :rolleyes:
Am i wrong or did the original post ask how to make the kick more prevelant??
I heard plenty of kick in that sample.
I dont see the problem.
Well, other than the fact that the musicians TOTALLY SUCK!!

No offense intended, im just a little frustrated by the thread.
 
wow i wouldn't think changing the reso head would make that big of a difference, ill have to look into that... I've heard a lot of good things about the EMAD head too... i gotta choose what to spend my money on here

its about 40 for each of those heads... 80 bucks for 2 head, damn lol Ill have to see how the budgets doing



As for the most recent post:

No offense taken, not my band or any of my friends really. Just inconsistent players i suppose, but yeah that was my first test on eq-ing differently so things have changed since then.. but i don't know why your frustrated with the thread? I'm just trying to learn here.

Thanks again for all the replies
 
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