Ableton Forum

Hey all im trying to recreate the heavy sub kicks heard in a lot of house music songs, most notably in this song at 1:22.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksocjhxX_DQ
What I am thinking in find a short punchy kick at around 60 hz and use Gate with a sub layer below. I think that how it's done..

Link please.

Sorry about that, fixed.

Hmm, I tried with a sine wave, and went down until it got really subby. Played around with LFO and phasing to get some interesting results, depending on how clicky you want the sub to be. Release/cutoff can be fiddled with until it matches the length of the kick drum.



OR, you can take a kick sample. A good fat one. Set velocity in Simpler to 100 and turn up the release, and you should be able to squeeze out a lot of heavy sub. Add compression, EQ and salt to taste.

Bump, still looking for help.

Getting a really fat punchy kick is half about the original sound, and half about the production techniques applied. I find that I can get a really hard, punchy kick from something that originally sounds weak and like the sustain time isn't quite long enough, by applying proper compression and equalization. It's also very common in electronic music to apply not only compression, but limiting to the kick drum. I often like 2-3 dbs of light limiting (ie long release, smooth sounding) as the final effect. Have you tried layering kick drums?

Also most "synthetic" kicks need a good EQ cut in the 300-2K range and a boost in the 8-12K range. A lot of good kicks aren't very midbassy; mostly you just hear the pop in the high end ~10KHz and the low bass ~50-60Hz.

Vios wrote: mostly you just hear the pop in the high end ~10KHz and the low bass ~50-60Hz.

A pop at the 10KHz is not a pop but a hiss. As a thumb rule boosting a sub kick at 8-12K range sounds very strange. Most of the times they don't have any information left that high.

In that Afrojack track the main kick actually doesnt have much sub at all as it needs to leave room for the bassline. Half way through the track though he has a totally different kick sound which is dead easy to create-youtube creating a subkick using operator.

+1 to operator for kicks.

I started creating my own bassdrum two weeks ago with Operator.
Set a short/mid decay and you could be very happy with the result, the note lenght adding some bass or not, very useful.
You can really have some cool sound and even add bass line by playing with sustain level, main osc set to fixed.

Operator is also a killer with snares and hihats, in fact you can achieve very good percussion sounds with only FM synth.

add some compressor on kicks, you can even boost the lo gains with an Eq8.

If you want my Operator kick instruments, tell me and I'll upload the packs, you could start with it and tweak at your taste

To add some subkick to an acoustic kick sample, I also use Corpus as a parallel effect chain. Use membrane material, tune and tweak. Maybe add a little dirt and LPF.

Hermanus wrote:
If you want my Operator kick instruments, tell me and I'll upload the packs, you could start with it and tweak at your taste

I wouldn't mind checking them out if you ever uploaded them.

Thanks guys I created a really punch sub kick on massive. Let me know if you guys want the wav. file

kanuck wrote:

Hermanus wrote:
If you want my Operator kick instruments, tell me and I'll upload the packs, you could start with it and tweak at your taste

I wouldn't mind checking them out if you ever uploaded them.

You dislike Operator?

EDIT: man I was in the cake that day, totally understood the opposite.
uploading scheduled, i'll send you a pm this weekend AND will post a topic on the forum
cheers

eight oh eight

ned rush wrote:eight oh eight

QFT!!! nothing quite like it for real sine sub