Kick 2 - how make kicks good

[Unaspected]

Unless you have a sound that you want to replicate precisely, I would suggest to simply use your ears and personal taste. If you do have a specific sound then you can use FFT analysis to acquire the partial data. If you only want the spectrum and not the decay times then you could just use a frequency analyser, such as SPAN, set to hold the input values so you can see the rough values of frequencies in dB.

I would definitely read up on how to gain stage in your plugin though. The manual might also have some additional advice when it comes to plugin specific tricks.

[mitchiemasha]

Double... Delete!!!

[mitchiemasha]

You mean the main kick layer within Kick2

Yes within kick 2... I remember having the same issue and struggling to find it first time i went to do it. The volume knob is the volume display, it's combined. (I think. it's been a month or 2 since i used it, i'm going off pictures).

[mitchiemasha]

Another essential tip... Get Shaper Box from Cable Guys. Put Volume Shaper on the Master Buss. Set it to 1/4. Use this purely as a visual reference. Now you can trim the length of your kick, in kick 2, in relation to other parts, like your bass (by soloing them). You will able to see with cycle precision how these parts interact and tune, trim, eq accordingly. You will also notice how certain decision later in the chain can shift the low end, a shift that will move it outside, inside the pump of your sidechain, exciting the transient of the next kick. You will be able to see with cycle precision which parts of the combined sound are cancelling or adding, with the adding with certain notes resulting in high peaks over working your compression. You will be able to see with cycle precision which cycle is resulting in that specific sound you don't like and when you reach for the eq, if you're at the exact right frequency to remove it... or, if still in kick 2 reshape until it's not there.

As for your understanding, wizardry of sound, doing this will easily step you white from grey.

[Butwug]

Fyi with Kick2, clearing the Cache on Kick2 deletes everyrhing across all projects. I found this out the hard way lol. Thankfully I had made notes in my folder about what key kicks were in, so it took me about two hours to rework some kicks for a couple projects after the files were “missing.” I thought rendering them was exactly the same as bouncing . The good thing is I actually like the kicks more the second time around. Much safer to bounce an instance, vs rendering in Kick2.