Hardstyle Kicks?
Hardstyle Kicks?
Hi everybody, im wondering if anyone have some good hints or tricks, to make a nice hardstyle kick, in ableton 7?
-
chevthewizard
- Posts: 256
- Joined: Fri Jan 18, 2008 1:21 am
- Location: Bristol, UK
- Contact:
compressor, whack down the threshold, then adjust the rest of the settings to taste
or redux
please for the love of god don't overdo it
or redux
please for the love of god don't overdo it
My Website | Myspace | Soundcloud
birdhouse19 wrote:i was playing a club last night and had to play some rap, and i know ableton live isnt very good with rap without a sound card.
Devio,
chevthewizard is absolutely right on a general level. But if you've never made a kick sound before I would recommend you use samples for the moment until you can hear what you're looking for.
You can either just sample a kick from your favorite track (beginning and end of the track are usually just kick & hats, that's the best place to look) or find a sample library that has kits which are already matched. (Ableton also has a number of nice drum sounds. I have both Session Drums and the standard Ableton sounds and, personally, I tend to either cook up a synthesized kick sound or cannibalize the standard Ableton drum racks. The standard sounds are pretty sweet.)
It's a lot harder than one would think to make the various percussion sounds in an arrangement work together, and my advice would be to concentrate on other stuff first. Once you can lay down the standard beat in whatever genre you're working in without even thinking about what you're doing is probably the best time to move on to assembling your own kits.
If you do end up making your own sounds, couple of tips:
- don't forget the reverb! the ambience is what makes sound, and particularly drums, sound real. put your entire kit or kits onto the same return chain (at least partially) in the drum rack so that they'll sound like they're at least being played in the same room. the one instrument most people like to give extra reverb is the snare. that way you can keep it soft but it'll still carve out a liitle place in the mix for itself with the extra verb.
- don't over compress! it sound much better putting a couple of soft compressors around different parts of the drum kit, you can even stack them if you keep the compression down, and then using a second send to route all of your kit to a parallel return that's being compressed. experiment with the routing,
- don't obsess over individual samples. when you put together a kit, think of it like brainstorming, pull together a bunch of drum sounds you like, pop then all into drum racks, drop a midi beat, and then just go through the different sounds with the same steady beat. (i usually iterate through them with midi modulation effects, you can either do that or build a drum rack with a macro to switch between your samples) you'll quickly identify which ones work well together.
HTH,
Chris
chevthewizard is absolutely right on a general level. But if you've never made a kick sound before I would recommend you use samples for the moment until you can hear what you're looking for.
You can either just sample a kick from your favorite track (beginning and end of the track are usually just kick & hats, that's the best place to look) or find a sample library that has kits which are already matched. (Ableton also has a number of nice drum sounds. I have both Session Drums and the standard Ableton sounds and, personally, I tend to either cook up a synthesized kick sound or cannibalize the standard Ableton drum racks. The standard sounds are pretty sweet.)
It's a lot harder than one would think to make the various percussion sounds in an arrangement work together, and my advice would be to concentrate on other stuff first. Once you can lay down the standard beat in whatever genre you're working in without even thinking about what you're doing is probably the best time to move on to assembling your own kits.
If you do end up making your own sounds, couple of tips:
- don't forget the reverb! the ambience is what makes sound, and particularly drums, sound real. put your entire kit or kits onto the same return chain (at least partially) in the drum rack so that they'll sound like they're at least being played in the same room. the one instrument most people like to give extra reverb is the snare. that way you can keep it soft but it'll still carve out a liitle place in the mix for itself with the extra verb.
- don't over compress! it sound much better putting a couple of soft compressors around different parts of the drum kit, you can even stack them if you keep the compression down, and then using a second send to route all of your kit to a parallel return that's being compressed. experiment with the routing,
- don't obsess over individual samples. when you put together a kit, think of it like brainstorming, pull together a bunch of drum sounds you like, pop then all into drum racks, drop a midi beat, and then just go through the different sounds with the same steady beat. (i usually iterate through them with midi modulation effects, you can either do that or build a drum rack with a macro to switch between your samples) you'll quickly identify which ones work well together.
HTH,
Chris