Hey, what's up guys?
My name is David Glenn for theproaudiofiles.com and davidglennrecording.com, home of the free
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The topic of this tutorial is how to pinch a kick, and may be somewhat controversial,
so use at your own risk, but I've got a session here where I was mixing away, and I thought,
“You know, I don't really like the kick that I was given, and I really love the kick
in the reference track.”So rather than go through my sample library and find something
that's close or similar and do my thing, I was like, “Why don't I just pinch it?”
So I went to the track, I stole the kick, and I'm going to show you how to clean it
up a little bit so that it works better in your mixing.
Let me go ahead and I'll play you a little snippet.
I'm mixing this song for a buddy.
I'm on a really tight time crunch, and actually it was due fifteen minutes ago, so I'm going
to hurry up with this tutorial.
I'm going to play you a snippet with his original kick, and then I'll show you my kick pinch.
[music]
Okay.
Then now I'm going to play it with his kick, but then I'm going to switch to my kick pinch
here.
[music]
Okay.
To my ear, to my taste, way better.
I think it fits the track excellent, so I'm rocking with that.
Irregardless of if you like that or not, I'm going to show you the technique of what I
did.
I've got this track that the client referenced.
It's called, “This is Living” from Hillsong Young and Free.
It features Lecrae.
All I did was I heard at the beginning they had these kicks kind of hanging out loose
like so...
[song plays]
C'mon.
That's too easy, right?
So anyways, you could just Tab to Transient, copy that, create a new stereo track, drop
down...
What are we at here...
And paste that bad boy.
Kind of slide it over, make it bigger so we can look at it real close.
Let's just hear that kick.
Let's route it correctly for the recording of this video, and let's check this out.
[kick drum]
Okay.
Snares are tougher, but with this kick, there's a really easy thing that we can do to get
that swelling, high frequency, synthy transitional effect – whatever you want to call it – out
of the way.
So, we've got the right amount of low end, we've got a really great transient here, and
it fits the song, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to first add just a little bit
of a fade, and then I'm going to zoom in and I'm going to click just behind the transient
of the kick.
Just behind the attack, and I'm going to select from there, right?Well, then I'm going to
go in Pro Tools to my Audio Suite, and forgive me, this may be different depending upon your
DAW.
I'm not sure of the process for you other guys, but Pro Tools we have Audio Suite, so
that's what I'm going to do.
Then I'm going to come over here, I'm going to delete that band, and all I want it a high-cut,
low-pass filter.
I'm going to go to like, 100, 150...
Somewhere in there.
Maybe tighten up that Q a little bit, and I'm just going to process this.
Okay.
Now, we've got two separate clips, so I'm going to go in and add a fade.
Something like that.
Nice, tight fade.
Now, let's take a listen.
[kick drum]
It's magic, right?
So, here, one more time is before any of it.
[kick drum plays]
And then after.
[kick plays]
It's that easy.
So, high passing you get to hold on to the sustain of the kick and you get to have all
of the extra love that comes with that.
So, without doing that trick, you'd have to cut the kick and fade it out, and it'd be
a little bit chopped and weird, but anyways, so now what I'm going to do is I'm actually
going to consolidate that.
Then I'll give it a name.
We'll call it HS Kik Pinch.
Kick without the “c.”
I've already done this, but anyways, I'm going to rename it, then what I'd do in Pro Tools
is Command+Shift+K, I'll export that to the folder.
I'll go ahead and show you where I put it.
I've got my Trigger 2 folder with all my different sample libraries.
Shout out to the guys at That Sound.
I've got all of their stuff.
Then I've got a folder here called DGR pinches.
So I go in there and there's that kick.
HS Kik Pinch.
Then what I did for this track is I used Trigger from Slate, and drag and drop that in, and
then I did a little bit of manipulation.
This – the song that I pinched it from is a slower tempo, so the low end can sustain
and it's okay in between beats.
But for this one, I wanted to tighten it up, so I just went to the sustain and release
here on View Curves in the Mixer View.
Go to View Curves, go to Sustain and Release right there and pull those back to taste.
Usually somewhere between 10 and 20 works really well to tighten those up.
So a faster tempo song, and the kick went from this...
Let's go out here.
[kick drum before]
To this.
[kick drum after]
Kind of fits the EDM, Dance vibe of this particular song, so there you have it!The only other
thing to note is I mentioned this in a Facebook post...
The stereo buss for me, usually I boost low end and I boost top end, and there's harmonic
excitement and stuff that I'll use for top down mixing.
I'll have that on from the beginning.
Depending on the song, I may or may not use it, but for the most part I use it.
Well, this kick we pulled from a stereo master that was treated it's way.
Well, pulling it in, if I've got low end boosted and top end boosted on my 2-buss, then now
I'm going to have more low end in this kick and more top end.
So what I did was I pulled in an EQ and just kind of tweaked to taste.
It looks like a spaghetti mess, but I pulled back a couple of dB of the lows, a little
bit of the top, the click was kind of weird, so I pulled that back, and if you guys know
or have followed me for any amount of time, I use the Slate Revival, and now Custom Lift
on my two-buss just a little bit to give it some love.
So there was some mid-range differences, but a little bit of EQ love goes a long way, and
if I come out here and hit play, let's see how I did.
[new kick drum]
Okay.
There's my pinch, then here's the original.
[original kick drum]
Pretty similar.
I tweaked it to fit within the context of this song, and there you go!So it sounds pretty
cool.
I hope you dig that.
How to pinch a kick.
Don't forget to check out the free bundle at davidglennrecording.com, and I'll catch
you in the next tutorial.