Hi there,
I’m a weekly (almost daily) user here on this forum. I didn’t post so much. (I experimented a lot on myself).
Now on topic. I’m making Tekno (some European music ), it’s music with a lot of bass, distortion, layered kicks…
I’m also layering my kicks, it sounds nice but I think on my second kick (my sub layer) I use low pass filter but it’s so quiet then… (yes I have monitors).
Do you guys layering 2 kicks on each other with an analog rytm?
Turn all the track volumes down. Turn up just the sub kick volume to where it is just kissing the threshold of the compressor, mix everything else around that and use the compressor makeup gain to bring it up to whatever loudness you want
…pretty much all kiks in four to the floor productions tend to be waaaay to long at first sight…especially if ur working with such raw powers from hw devices like a rytm…and extra especially, this becomes an increasing lowend mess, the faster ur four to the floor bpms used to climb…
took me years to nail the lowest octave…to sort out, where and when is the bassline ruling the kik and/or the other way around…and discovering how short in fact each single kik can/must be to really work and do the “perfect” job…turns out, waaaaay shorter than i thought, since my ears always told me, that’s fine the way it is, perfect level of boomy bomp, only to find out later how on bigger soundsystems everything translates into an overblown blurry bottom mumble grumble…
as knobgoblin states rightly so, if ur style assembles around a prominent kik, it’s that kik all ur mix must be assembled around and is making the calls for all other volume levels according to it…
layering kiks are only out of discussion, if u’d find that one perfect kik sample each time u go for any walk of house music…but that’s hideous…
shape and tame ur very own one is always the goal…so keep in mind the three elements that make the perfect smack kik that pushes, rumbles swings and sings…transient, body and tail…
on something like a rytm, i’d suggest, take a sample for the transient and a synthvoice for body and tail…that transient sample should really just do that very short first smack transient and nothing more…
while the synthvoice delivers a boomy bottom body and a tail, that’s always tameable from hyperboom long ringing out aaaall the way down to an also tiny shorty of almost nothing…
that way, ur always ready to nail it and succeed in the biggest challenge every four to the floor producer has to face…the perfect translation of the lowest octave, wherever u may roam…
and when it comes to the eq curve, don’t focus too much for the real low end, it’s the low mids u want out of the way to get a real grip on the sub…
I rarely layer kicks because i like the internal synths and being able to add a sample on top is enough for me. Also I like deep bass (as in melody), so I don’t like the kick to be too deep or the two instruments will be fighting for space and it is tiring for the ear.
However if you are looking for deep subs, don’t use a lowpass. Use a highpass (or sometimes a bandpass/peaking filter) and push the resonance. With the lowpass you are pushing down the higher frequencies first, so even if you have a loud signal with a lot of sub bass energy, your ear will reject it, like closing your eyes against a bright light. With a high pass the higher frequency information is still there and your ear will ‘open up’ to listen to it. For the same reason, if you use samples it’s not enough to just play a single deep sinewave to get good sub bass. You should layer it with some higher harmonics and/or amplitude modulate it with a subharmonic to get that feeling of size and weight. However on the AR you just have a single filter so you will have to make some trade-offs on how you shape the sound.
In short, it’s not just about loudness at a particular frequency but the spectral balance of the sound.
my ears always told me, that’s fine the way it is, perfect level of boomy bomp, only to find out later how on bigger soundsystems everything translates into an overblown blurry bottom mumble grumble
Very true. How do other people test this? I listen on headphones to find a nice balance but I don’t like to do that too much, it’s bad for your hearing over time.
I rarely if ever layer my kicks unless I’m ITB. layering kicks properly requires quite an extensive toolset which is rarely easy to come by OTB.
IME, the easiest way to make the kick cut through in a mix when using Rytm is multing out the kick on to its own mixer channel and taking it out from the internal Rytm stereobus. This will give you so much extra headroom on your stereobus it aint even funny. YMMV
Forgive me if you already use this method, but have you tried sequencing one kick track and then live recording the second one? Then you can quantize the live one somewhere around the halfway point and you’ve got a natural chorus effect. I’ve found this will also help with tone woes that can arise when you layer two kicks “directly” on top of each other. This way they’re not eating each other’s frequencies as much. Surprising how much control literally like 5 or 8 milliseconds of separation can give you.
Hi there,
What do you mean with live record a track? You mean with finger drumming? I also can make the pattern and then use micro timing to move them a little? I sometimes do this if the 2 kicks are phasing together.
What producers do you typically listen to? For me it’s all about layering… I have my kick going trough MAIN and a portion off it with HP filter & fx on individual output. That way I have control. Everyone has a different way of accomplishing the “perfect” kick!