FUNDAMENTALS IN SYNTH PAINTING - Part 2: Kick Drum Architecture with DJH
Added 2021-04-14 18:13:25 +0000 UTC
In this Lux Cache tutorial series, we dive into the essential components of synth painting, training the ability of being able to create the sounds that are in your head. In this tutorial, industrial club sound architect DJH goes over how to build your own kick drums from scratch using Ableton stock instruments effects as well as how to add spatial flair and texture to them. This tutorial is available as both a Patreon text post and .pdf document format.
We ask you kindly to not share Lux Cache content outside of the Patreon, our contributors rely on your donations. All preview sounds/clips mentioned in this tutorial can be found in this private SoundCloud playlist or this accompanying Google Drive folder.
- 10 DJH designed kick drums are available for Premium Subscribers on the Lux Cache Patreon.
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Preface
In this tutorial I am going to focus on my process of synthesizing kick drum and other adjacent low-end percussive sounds. I am going to primarily focus on the particular ways I approach drum-design in relation to my music so I won't go into any detail on the physical properties of real-world percussive instruments since this would exceed the scope of this format. Since lots of the kick drum sounds utilized in modern electronic music and rap/pop-production are derived from classic drum machines, this tutorial will aim at taking the most basic staple of kick-synthesis imaginable,(the sine wave sweep), and present ways to diversify and re-fine this fundamental sound through iterative processing, re-sampling and a variety of other techniques.
I have always been fascinated by the way in which most of the iconic sounds in modern rap-production particularly can be traced back to the iconic lex luger and shawty redd drum kits that have been shared on the internet since the early-aughts. The enigmatic genealogies of some of these sounds,(The rack kick, the plugg 808, Lex Snare 4 etc.), which are more omnipresent than ever due to the sway that rap-production and its paradigms came to have over pop music within the past decade would certainly be more than enough to fill an entire investigative docuseries, but at the heart of the creation and permanence of these sounds lies an ethos of constant re-iteration. The patina that decades of iterative processing can give to a trivial one-shot sample from a Tr-808 drum machine, gradually removing it further and further from its source, was something that fascinated me ever since I started making music and heavily inspires my way of creating sounds to this day.
0.Building Blocks
Most of the time I tend to start making kick drums by simply constructing a basic sine wave sweep in Operator or Serum. Sometimes it can be beneficial to add some upper harmonics into the configuration but I usually try to keep the initial setup as simple as possible. Using Oscillator A on fixed mode allows me to Dial in a fundamental frequency. I usually go for something between 42 and 60 hz since that tends to be the sweet spot for kick drums to translate an audible “knock” to the widest range of speakers but there really are no rules. In this case I set the pitch envelope’s peak parameter to a fairly extreme parameter since I wanted the kick to have a strong initial punch. Trying out different decay lengths and initial positions is a great way to explore different shapes of kick drums so I strongly encourage you to play around with these settings. The Amplitude Envelope is not of utmost importance since we are going to resample the kick drum multiple times down the line, but fine tuning the attack parameter can result in very different sounding results. I usually tend to give a 0.5-2ms attack to soften the initial transient since we are going to modify it later. The Phase dial can also be tweaked and sometimes yields
As a first step towards imbuing our sine wave sweep with character and starting to define the shape of the kick drum, I like to employ Operator’s Filter section as a Distortion Utility. I usually flick through the 4 available character modes in the Filter section and push the drive of each one right before the kick is sounding too tonal and then decide on whichever one sounds the most pleasant. Additionally, the Shaper provides additional distortion, although I often find that they are too harsh when used in the initial stage of kick-design. The “Soft” Shaper mode can give some nice grit to the initial transient of the kick when worked into the sound in parallel via the Dry/Wet Knob
Depending on how much high end transient information you chose to add to the initial configuration through upper harmonics and/or noise, a light lowpass filter connected to an envelope can also serve to further shape the kick. In this example I went for a cutoff at 10 khz and a gently applied envelope.
So far our kick does not really sound all too impressive. Although an initial clicky transient is present, the kick lacks presence. If you observe the waveform, you`ll notice that the tail is faintly trailing off for a significant amount of time after the transient.
Luckily, bouncing the kick to audio opens up the possibility to dynamically trim the length of the kick to our liking via fade-outs. I prefer rendering the Kick out as soon as I'm happy with the initial synthesis step but keep the synth device on a separate midi track in case I want to go back and change something.
1.Shaping
After rendering I usually cut whatever overshoot tail and consolidate the sound again. I often experiment with slight fade-ins and fade-outs on the audio clip since even marginal fades can have a big impact on the character of the kick. Placing a small fade-in on a clicky transient can turn a “pointy” kick into a more “heavy” kick while a longer fade-in results in a more muffled sound.
When satisfied with my edits on the audio clips I drag the kick into Ableton’s sampler device so it can be looped in a midi clip. The Sampler Device offers many parameters which are identical to operator (Pitch envelope, filter with envelope and different modes etc.), but using them on our truncated sound oftentimes yields much more dramatic results. I often find myself using a pitch envelope again in this stage to further accentuate the punchy lower midrange of the sound. Adjusting the pitch envelope while transposing the kick up and down a few semitones is a great way to explore how the settings translate to different pitches.
To further shape the kick I make use of the Samplers Aux Envelope in conjunction with the Filter Drive Section to drive the first few milliseconds of our kick into the simulated filter circuit. For neutral-sounding kicks i tend to avoid the filter drive section since it can add a “driven” quality to the lower midrange, but in our case it complements the sound since we are going for a “aggressive yet clean” type of kick drum.
After I am satisfied with the shape of the kick determined by my decisions in the Sampler, I usually process it before resampling again. I usually use ableton's eq to low cut the kick on the x4 setting. I utilize the localized bump in volume that is caused by the steeper cutoff to really accentuate the fundamental of the kick. I then use a bell curve in the eq to find frequencies that can be attenuated or pulled up. I often like notching out certain frequency areas between 100-300 hz but there is no fixed rule for this step of the process. One part of drum design that makes it so fun to me lies in the possibility to use Eqs, Distortion Effects and Compressors in a more extreme way. In the case of our kick I went for a rather extreme boost at the cutoff at 37.5 hz and an aggressive cut around 150 hz because this range sounded muddy to my ears. I used the max 4 live envelope follower to momentarily increase the gain of eq band 3 whenever the kick gets triggered, resulting in a more dynamic “knock”. Enveloping eq parameters like that is a great technique for shaping sounds and adding frequency dependent movement, whether it is mapping the envelope to a high shelve to add a bit more excitement to a transient-heavy sound or moving notch filters in accordance with the input amplitude.
After doing some EQ-shaping I usually start applying additional compressors and saturation effects to further enhance the kick. In this case I went with Ableton's Glue compressor which does a good job at tightening things up and giving them some additional drive. In this case I also used the infamous “Kick Tight” Corpus preset to make the low-end a bit boomier. I shortened the decay within the corpus section so the boominess does not ring out for too long. I found that the Ableton Corpus device always lends a subtle body to kick and bass sounds even when only used on 2-3% so it can be a great way to make your low end sounds more impactful, especially considering the handy midi-input feature.
I then apply a utility to make sure the kick is in mono since the corpus effect can sometimes introduce weird phasey artifacts on the sides. The final step in the chain is Ableton's Drum Bus to do a last step of Transient Shaping. I am not the biggest fan of Drum Bus’ Sound but i wanted to limit myself to Ableton native effects for this tutorial. Normally I achieve final coloration and transient Shaping of percussive sounds by employing a combination of Black Box Analog Design HG 2 and Kilohearts Transient Shaper.
After our Second round of processing, the final results sounds like this;
This is where I usually open a new Track and re-sample the sound multiple times while changing individual parameters such as the pitch, the drive of the different distortion stages and the transient amount in the drum bus device. This leaves me with a variety of different kicks that I can then further process and turn into different iterations of themselves. The upside of having a rather elaborate processing chain is that even tiny changes within the sampler device can have quite significant effects onto the sound of the kick.
From this point on out there are not really any conventions to my kick design. I usually experiment with all sorts of effects, route things into fairly extreme parallel busses and try to make the kick drum unique while still retaining a grounding to make it as versatile as possible when used in a song. I will conclude this tutorial by sharing a few of my favorite situational techniques to make my kick drums more interesting. That being said, remember to always retain a certain level of restraint and tastefulness. I often make kick drums that sound very cool on their own but are nearly impossible to fit into the mixdown of a track. Make sure to not overprocess sounds just for the sake of it.
2.1 Technique 1: Haas widening
The Haas effect is a well known technique aimed at widening the perceptive stereo field. It works by splitting a sound up into Left- and Right Channel and slightly delaying one of them by an amount between approximately 10 and 40 milliseconds to create a sense of width.
I applied this effect to our kick by creating a rack with 2 chains, one of them containing our dry, unprocessed sound and the other one containing the discrete channels with respective utilities on them that are set to hardpan the sound to the left and the right channel. I then delayed the right channel by around 30 ms utilizing Ableton’s Delay Effect and finally mixed the stereoizer signal with the unprocessed dry kick sound after taming some frequencies with an EQ. Some mixing purists will flinch at the idea of applying the haas effect to a low end sound but it works really well for certain styles, especially when the kick is brought to the forefront with heavy sidechaining.
2.2 Technique 2: Reverb widening
Another way to spice up a dry kick sample is to utilize a small room reverb in parallel to widen the sound and imbue it with character. I really like to subtly apply this technique to dry, synthesized kicks to give them a subtle sense of “place” while still making sure that the transient sounds punchy and checking in mono to ensure that there is no phasing.
For this example I used the “Dark Small Room” preset in the Ableton reverb as a starting point and tweaked the EQs to only affect Frequencies below 200 hz. I turned up the early Reflections and the Diffusion to increase the density of the reverb and make it sound more “roomy”. Experiment with size and decay time while playing your kick to find a sweet spot. I really like how the reverb increased the boominess of our Kick in a pleasant way. Different Reverbs such as Live 11s Hybrid Verb on the Convolution Setting can also produce a wide variety of timbres, although I prefer algorithmic Reverbs such as FabFilter’s Pro-R to convolution reverbs since convolution tends to introduce unpredictable peaks dependent on the impulse response.
2.3 Technique 3: Transient Replacement
As soon as i have a few promising synthesized Kicks together i usually start bouncing different iterations of them featuring alternative transients. It is surprisingly easy to completely transform the feel of a kick by replacing the first 10 seconds of it with an arbitrary transient. I sometimes use snare transients from my synthesized snares if I need a kick that has an edm-y punch to it or use the first few milliseconds of a cinematic impact to toughen up a muffled sounding one. I tend to keep my transient in mono to avoid phase issues.
2.4 Technique 4: Multiband Distortion
For the Type of heavy Kick Drums at home Cinematic Music and Techno-adjacent styles, Multiband DIstortion is a great way to achieve a uniform thickness. By splitting the sound up into 3 or more bands and processing each frequency region with distinct distortion utilities, the kick is being made more impactful without the distortion artifacts that would appear if we would push the full spectrum of the kick through an amp or a pedal. I usually use multiband FX plugins such as Kilohearts Multipass to apply multiband distortion but ableton’s Audio Effects Rack is a good alternative.
In this case I used on of the kick-takes with a replaced transient and ran the low end through Ableton's Amp Effect on the blues setting, pushed the midrange with the pedal and brought out some sizzle with the “Wide Noise” setting on Ableton's Erosion on the High End.
🔈Hard Kick Multiband Distortion🔈
2.5 Technique 5: Distorted Sidechain Reverb
For large, cavernous kicks that imply a sense of abyssal space, sidechaining a distorted, heavily low-passed reverb bus to the kick is a very effective technique. I used the multiband distorted kick from the previous example and ran it through an Audio Effects Rack with a Reverb followed by an Amp that heavily distorts the tail of the reverb, effectively leveling the dynamic range. This gives the kick a more consistent sound. A lowpass filter is applied afterwards to make sure that only the deep low end is allowed to pass through, resulting in a deep “rumbling” sound. Afterwards the Reverb Bus is sidechained to the dry kick Pre Fx to make sure that the initial transient is not getting muffled by the strong reverb tail. This technique also works really well when making impact sounds. Just use a tom or some other more textured sound, apply a long reverb tail onto the parallel bus and layer it up with foley. The sky's the limit.
3. Conclusion
Everything that I have showcased in this Tutorial is 100% subjective to my workflow. I am aware that tools like Kick 2 or Punchbox offer a much more streamlined interface with effects that are tailored to kick drum design. I´ve dabbled with these all-in-one solutions before but found that the iterative process of resampling and re-resampling was the most efficient for me because of the way in which it encourages me to constantly re-combine sounds from my personal sound-design folders and try out esoteric combinations of effects that would be out of place when applied to the framework of a musical piece. Making drums to me is a process that, although using the same surface level tools, is very distinct from making coherent songs. On days where I feel uninspired to work on timeline based music I very much welcome the Zen-like trance of making drum sounds, listening back to the same sound for 20-30 minutes and tweaking away, getting lost in ridiculous racks and trying out new approaches to generate exciting sounds. I still use a lot of third party samples and download splice sounds from time to time but to me, having a little collection of sounds that are entirely your own, that feel like home and that you can use as building blocks for continued iteration and self-sampling is something i enjoy the most about digital music production.
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DJH is a musician, sound engineer, and visual artist. His recent record, as part of SCHISM, 'FOURTH' is available on bandcamp.
You can follow him on Twitter @DjHeroyn and Instagram @1djheroin1
