Hey guys, it's Will from EDMtips. Today I'm going to show you how to get your kicks hitting
harder in five minutes. If you want your 808 kicks and your 808 bass lines hitting really
hard, this video is going to really help you out. In 5 minutes I'm going to show you how
to get your beat from sounding like this, to getting your kick sounding massive like
this, and I'm just going to be using free plugins so you don't have to shell out loads
of money for expensive third party plugins.
Now, whether you're producing Trap or Future Bass or House or Trance or whichever genre
of music you are producing, these tips are going to help you get your kick really punching
through your mix. I've got something to give you at the end of this video, so stick around
for then. It's going to really help you get your kicks punching through your mix. In fact,
it's going to help every element of your mixing. Thanks for sharing and subscribing, and without
further ado, let's hop into the DAW and get it done.
The very first thing to consider is actually choosing a really good sample that works with
the rest of your track. It's the best way to get it punching through your mix. Everything
else is so much easier if you pick the right sounds to begin with. Okay, guys, so the first
step is to realize that it's not the peak loudness that we're trying to increase, it's
actually the average loudness. Because you can't get above zero decibels. Otherwise,
it starts to clip. So, let's look at what I mean quickly...
If we zoom into our kick, I'll open the sampler. Remember, this is the same for any sampler
in any DAW. You'll be able to see the shape of the kick, which as you can see that there's
a peak at zero dB, and then it tails off. The idea is, of course, that we want to make
the kick punch through the mix. This is our kick drum, and this is what happens if we
just increase the volume.
You can see in that diagram it's actually clipping. This is what it sounds like when
it clips. Obviously, we want to avoid that. This is what we actually want to do which
is to increase the average volume so it actually sounds fatter without clipping. This is hard
clipping, where it completely levels it off like that. We can use a bit of soft clipping,
just to round those edges off and make it sound a bit smoother.
Now, what I'm doing in Ableton is I've assigned to shortcut to my fatten chain. When I show
you these tricks on a different elements, I can use the shortcut so we can A/B test
the sound which is what you always want to be doing. Remember, it's not just the kick
that we need to process to actually make the kick more punchy. But first we ARE going to
process the kick. Remember, this is using all free plugins so you can either download
them for free by using the links below, or your DAW will already have an equivalent for
free as a stock plugin.
First in our chain is saturation. Saturation is just like enhancing the frequencies that
the kick drum already has. This is a great free plugin, it's by Softtube, Saturation
Knob and let's see what happens. You can hear that is becoming distorted. This is what's
happening in diagram form. That's our sweet spot. Next I'm putting in a gain plugin, just
to turn the gain down by the amount that the plugin has increased it. That's so we can
actually just hear the coloration of the sound rather than increasing the volume. Let's have
a look at what that's done in terms of levels.
This is with the saturator off, we can see we're peaking at -3.7 decibels there. Let's
turn it on, and actually we're peaking at -5.73 decibels there, even though it sounds
so much louder, listen to the difference. What that means is that we can then turn up
the kick drum in our mix and we still got headroom. It sounds louder but it's actually
peaking at a lower level because we've sausaged it out a bit. That's number one, saturation.
The next thing is to layer your kicks. Now, you don't always need to do this. Remember,
sound selection is really important. You might already have found a kick that you really
like and you might not want to layer it. But in this instance I'm going to show you what
happens if you layer a kick. There's our kick with some saturation applied.
Now, this is a loop I made before and it's got a kick drum in it. So, let's listen. It's
just a really high end. It just adds more character to the kick drum. Okay, number three
is EQ. This is where we carve out space in the other elements for our kick to punch through.
Let's have a look at the frequencies out kick drum is hitting. I'm using this free plugin
by Voxengo called SPAN. It's just a spectrum analyzer.
Our kick drum's fundamental frequency (which is the main frequency) is about 53 hertz.
What we're going to do is go to our bassline. That's our bassline without kick drum. All
we're doing is going to use an equalizer. We're going to select 53 hertz because that's
about what our kick drum is hitting at, and then notch it down a few dB. It might not
quite be audible. But these are very small changes that's going to help your kick punch
through the mix more.
Remember, you can do that with other elements as well. If you've got other instruments that
are hitting about 50 hertz or whatever your kick drum's fundamental frequency is, you
can notch those down a couple of dB as well, just to carve out more space for that kick
to really punch through your mix.
Okay, next is limiting. If we go to our kick, we can use a limiter just to get another dB
or so out of it. We can push it up louder with a gain, and wait till we've got one or
two dB gain reduction, and we put a gain plugin afterwards just to notch it down again so
we're just hearing the difference and not the increase in volume, which is going to
kid our ears into thinking it sounds better anyway.
If we look at what kick drum is peaking at before we put the limiter on, -4. I'll put
the limiter on, and then the gain plugin afterwards and make sure it's peaking at -4 still. That's
close enough. Remember, you don't need to use all of these tips every time you make
a track. It's a tool kit that you can draw from. Sometimes you might want to use them
all, sometimes you might just use one or two.
Okay, sidechain compression. You've probably all seen this before but let's have a quick
look. We're going to sidechain our bass from our kick drum or our trigger channel here.
I'm using the Ableton Live sidechain compressor, but your DAW has a sidechain compressor as
well. FL Studio, Logic X, they've both got sidechain compressors. We're just taking the
audio from our sidechain trigger, which is playing the exact same pattern as the kick.
You can take it from the kick, but I'll link to another video on why I prefer to do it
this way.
So, let's put the kick on. This is no sidechain compression compared to sidechain compression.
You can see the kick is ducking the bassline, and allowing the kick to pop through the mix
more. My sixth tip for making your kicks to hit really hard is using Buss Compression.
What I'm doing is I'm going to route the bass and the kick to their own buss together, "kick
& bass buss". In Ableton Live from the kick, I've just done K and B and from the bass,
I've done audio to K and B and then turn the monitor on. Now, my kick and bass are going
through this audio channel.
This is a bit of a bonus tip, but I'm processing the kick and the bass together to really gel
them and make them sound like they're stuck together. All I'm doing is I'm adding a bit
of buss compression. I'm using Ableton's Glue Compressor, but you can do this with any compressor
really. All I'm going to do is activate it, set the release to automatic, ratio to four,
and then just bring down the threshold until I'm getting about two dB of gain reduction.
I've got soft clip on for the reason I said earlier. And then I'm just going to do the
makeup by two dB, because that's what I'm reducing the gain by, and let's compare.
Again, very small moves at this stage, but they all add up together to help your kick
really pop through the mix. So, let's hear where we are now. This is no "kick-punch-harder-er",
and this is with it. If we look at our master channel here, this is with none of our kick
processing on. We're peaking at -6, and without kick processing on, just above -6, but listen
how fat that sounds. Nice.
There you have it guys. I really hope that you found this video useful. If you want to
learn how to make a Trap beat, maybe the beat that I used in this video, hit me up in the
comments below, let me know and I shall make it happen.
I said at the beginning I've got a free gift for you, which is going to help you get really
shiny punchy mixes. It's my Ultimate Mixing Guide, which you can download for free below
this video. Until next time, cheers for watching and happy producing!