In this article, we suggest some ways to impact your kick drums. From sorting the bottom end to sitting it in the track we offer strategies to put the four firmly on the floor.

The three principal elements of most drum tracks are the kick, share and hi-hat, neatly covering as they do the bass, midrange and treble, this triumvirate of rhythm tracks has to be right if the rest of the track stands a fighting chance of fulfilling its potential.

While social media regurgitates endless snare memes (admittedly some are pretty funny) if you go to a soundcheck at a gig you’re likely to find it is the kick drum that receives more attention than anything else. Sometimes more than the rest of the band!

In this article, we collect some tips for making sure your kick drum fits.

If you’re creating electronic music or using samples then the decisions often revolve around the selection and blending of sounds, in this article, there are tips that are just as relevant to people using sample and virtual instruments but it also covers issues that are more likely to affect real drums, captured live with microphones.

Add Depth

The top of this list is adding additional depth to kick drums and if you don’t have quite the amount of Oomph you would like the first port of call is of course an equaliser. A suitable boost in the bottom octave (40-80Hz) might be all that’s needed but alternatives I’ve found very useful in the past include the ubiquitous Pultec Low-End Trick, which uses a quirk in the design of the famous Pultec EQP1-A which results in a very pleasing simultaneous low-end boost and cut, which happens when low frequencies are both boosted and attenuated. It happens to sound great on kick drums so get yourself a Pultec EQ plugin and give it a go.

A second technique uses a different take on simultaneous boosts and cuts but rather than boosting the lows and cutting the frequencies just above the boost like the Pultec trick does if you use a resonant high pass filter like the free bx_subfilter you can dial in a low-frequency bump just above a low cut. This can help concentrate the energy where it is most effective and cut out any unnecessary subsonic information.

Create Sub

Of course, you can’t boost frequencies, which aren’t there but you can synthesise them and if you find you want to add some extra bottom end you can create it using a very old trick using a gate and a signal generator. Rather than explain it here’s a diagram:

The issue with this technique is that it creates a one-note effect, which sounds rather unnatural, for a more convincing synthesised sub-bass try Metric Halo Thump 2 which features two tuneable oscillators with pitch envelopes, allowing a more convincing pitch drop to get the characteristic ‘doooofff’ of a real kick drum.

If you have been recording your own drums but feel comfortable augmenting them with new sounds, why stop there? Layering kick drums is the route to complete control over your kicks, with multiple layers of samples all working together for a perfectly designed kick.

Audio To MIDI functions make this easy, even if your kick started off as part of a live performance. Pro Tools gained Audio to MIDI functionality in the 2020.11 update and once you have a MIDI track your options for augmenting your drums really open up. Adding 808 style sub kicks is addictive. You have been warned.

Add Saturation

If you’ve wound up the deep sub on your kick you might find all that low stuff isn’t making itself as apparent as you’d hoped. It is of course important to check the low end using whatever means you have available. If your monitors and room aren’t ideal for checking sub-bass then a combination of headphones and metering can help take some of the guesswork out.

Rather than winding up your sub kick, an effective alternative to add audibility without adding too much energy is some judicious use of saturation. Too much will not only add an obvious distortion to the kick but will kill the transient too so don’t go in too hard unless that is your intention. The additional harmonics added by the saturation give useful extra information to the ear and even on small speakers our brains can, to some degree, infer bass information which isn’t actually audible. The use of saturation is a big subject, Try this article from Tim Goodyer for a detailed explanation of the subject.

But if you want to get on with adding some secret sauce to your kicks, try Saturn 2 from FabFilter and if you want cool saturation for free then we recommend Saturation Knob from Softube.

Add Attack

Once you have your kick flapping the appropriate amount of trouser you might want to increase the impact of the drum. The first call is usually some EQ between around 2.5-4KHz to bring out the beater but if you really want to bring out some attack, rather than taking the long attack, heavy compression route, try a transient designer. The best of these offer forensic control over what gets enhanced. Try Spiff from Oeksound to see what a modern transient designer can do.

Side Chain To Clear Space

The temptation can be to pull you kick drum way up in the mix but this isn’t necessarily a good idea. If you are going for any kind of a natural sound then the loudness of kick drums relative to other kit pieces has to borne in mind, but even if you aren’t constrained by such considerations you still need to make sure you’re not squandering precious headroom in your mix.

An alternative approach is to turn everything else down a little to make space for the kick. This is easily done using judicious amounts of side chain compression.

The trick here is not to go in too hard, you’re not trying to create an audible effect like the common pumping effects side chain compression is so often used for. Instead just a dB or so of compression to push the rest of the track out of the way of the kick is all that’s needed. If you notice it, it’s too much.

Use A Drum Leveler

Consistent kicks are desirable but there are other options out there when it comes to controlling the level of your kick drum. Compression on the kick is de rigeur but it’s not the only option. Compression can change the tone and affects the envelope of the sound. Drum Levelers treat drum hits in their entirety and turn them up and down relative to a target level in a way, which leaves the tone and envelope unchanged.

The original and best of these is Drum Leveler from Sound Radix. This can be anywhere from a transparent leveller though with a little imagination it can be repurposed into a very effective gate, which can remove elements of a performance.

On the subject of gating, the extremely clever Sonnox Drumgate, which can best be described as a gate you don’t have to trick into gating all rather than just most of the hits you are chasing, also features an extremely effective drum leveler. Whichever you choose, drum levelers can fix inconsistent hits with the same directness as transient processors can manipulate the attack of hits.

The Contribution Of Bleed

The Sonnox Drum gate sets up a pleasing segue to the subject of bleed and as well as making sure that the low end of your kick is low enough and the attack of your kick is attacky enough, another frequent frequency issue with kick drums is boxiness.

The low-mid frequencies often need attention and it is for this reason that many dedicated kick drum mics are a little scooped in this area. A cut somewhere around 250Hz is a common EQ move on kicks but something to keep in mind is exactly where the midrange you’re hearing is coming from. If you EQ in solo but find the boxiness returns when you put it back in context then EQing that close mic isn’t likely to help. Are you hearing midrange from the bleed from other mics?

The control freak in all of us can tempt us into gating and trimming our drums within an inch of their lives but this isn’t always the best course of action. Bleed can be bad, but it can also be good. Check out this article from PureMix about how bleed can sometimes help rather than hinder a kick drum sound.

Match Phase Using Auto Align

If we are dealing with sounds arriving from multiple microphones, we need to pay attention to their phase relationship as the first thing to suffer when there is a phase issue is usually the bottom end. If the bleed from your tom mics or the contribution of your overheads is sucking out the energy from your bass drum, the choice available to an engineer used to be whether or not to the invert the polarity of any of the channels. Since Sound Radix introduced Auto Align back in 2010 there has been a semi-automated way to time-align drum mics against each other for maximum phase coherence.

Depending on how your particular sounds work together the effect can be anywhere from helpful to transformative but if you want your sounds to work together effectively Auto Align is the simplest way to get there. Or it used to be. Although designed for aligning the dynamic relationship between a boom and a lavalier on an actor on set. Auto Align Post has found favour with music mixers who have founds its “one button and it’s done” approach even more effective than the original Auto Align.

If your kicks are lacking there is plenty you can do to get them up to scratch. Exactly how much you do of course depends on context but with more options than just the EQ and a compressor of pre-plug-in days maybe that perfect kick is waiting to be discovered.