Kick attack sound!

Sampler and Sampling discussion (techniques, tips and tricks, etc.)
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Producers, wannabe producers, sounddesigners, engineers, international players! Help me out with this sound!

http://hem.bredband.net/b101643/kickdrum.mp3

I have a bunch of this kind of kickdrums and I can pick the attack from one of them but I like to know what sound it is, it´s origin!

On other kicks you can tell the attack is an hihat, snare or something, but this is an unidentitfied sound to me!

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These sounds are made by layering sampled kicks. Its unlikely that the attack is a seperate elememt. This type of sound design has been going on as long as dance music itself. I would wager that the producer of that track created the kick from a couple of samples that he took from similar records.

You are correct though, some kicks are better created by crossfading a sampled attack into another kick. This works well for cleaner sounds. You can sample a nice punchy attack, then crossfade into a synthesized decay.

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Ach -- I was thinking Bruce Lee or Jean-Claude van Damme. Never mind.

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No, no, no!!!

Van Damme sounds warmer with greater depth. You just cant get that with software.

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A compressor would help too, to give a more punchy pumping sound...

Winegums100
Don't eat all the red ones - they're mine!!!

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Don't forget distortion; that mp3 sample is pretty fuzzed up. You can hear the tail end of the sample being amplified by the distortion/compression. Camelphat (free, even) on a typical electronic kick sample would do the trick quite nicely!

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it is a synthesized kick made with a pitch envelope a compressor and possibly a wave sharper. That strong attack is the pitch enveope. To make sounds liek this for free check out stomper
http://www.lysator.liu.se/~zap/stomper/index2.html

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No offence guys, but if you can make a sound with the same characteristics as that using sine waves, then I will be extremely surprised. Not saying you cant do it. But I dont know any professional trance producer who would attempt to synthesize that sound.

Sampling, my friends, thats the order of the day. Yes, distortion is involved, but the source material is without doubt sampled drum sounds.

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kick layering is the key, compression and distortion etc, the key is to experiment.
dont try and imitate a specific kick as you will probably fall short, experiment doing your own kicks, you might come up with something better :) have fun
:: The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return ::

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Yeah, sounds like a sampled edit to me (you can practically hear the scissors at the end of the kick)! That'd be a quick way to do it, too.

I know most 'big' producers cut the kicks from other songs. But I see little reason why you couldn't make something close - or maybe better! - on your own. Heck, try both!

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What they said.

Layer, distort, eq/compress/eq (which ever way works), voila.

Note that some dance producers (Junkie XL for instance) are notorious for layering an upwards of 30 some odd kicks, meticulously juggling the frequency ranges and start times of each to get the best sound.
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Lol, I dont think he ment he layers 30 kicks at one time. He imports a load of kicks into the audio sequence, then experiment with 2 - 4 kick stacks (EQing and compressing so that each represents a certain element of the sound).

I have never needed to use more than 4 kicks in a particular sound. More often two or three.

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In the example he used in the article I'm sure both of us are referring to, he chose about 8 if I remember correctly. That's for "house kicks." For that big hardcore sound in that example, it will probably take a few more to get the right amount of harmonic content, with 1 or 2 distortions on top.
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well i rarely use a sampled kik.
never bought in to the layer a bunch of kiks togather
almost always reach for waldorf attack
and start with one of their presets and tweak from there.

then varios eq/compressing and other digital slaming.

sometimes the huge kik sound isnt all just about the kik
its about the other frequency around the kik that make it appear huge.

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Agreed.

But the kick he is after IS one of those layered sampled sounds. Ofcourse you can make perfectly good kicks using only synthesis. Just not this particular flavor.

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