For today’s production tip I want to talk a bit about how we can combine multiple drum samples properly.  If you really want your tracks to compete with the pros, stacking multiple samples, whether for your kick, snare, or any percussive sound, is really important.  The problem is without a solid understanding of the common mistakes most people make when stacking samples, this can be extremely hard to do well.  Today I want to talk a bit about phase and it’s extreme importance when making drum samples.

Phase cancellation is the most common mistake people make when stacking sounds.  Take a look at the bottom diagram in this photo:  notice how the two sine waves (which could be the beginning of any kick sample) are in exact phase cancellation: when one sine wave goes up over zero, the other sample goes below zero (zero is the middle line).  This becomes basic math:  when you add a positive and a negative of equal value, what do you get?  Absolutely nothing.  

Now take a look at the top diagram.  This is what often happens when people create their own drum samples from multiple sounds.  Although the phases between the two samples don’t cancel completely, they do cancel partially which weakens the sound of the resulting waveform.  Have you ever combined two solid drum samples that on their own sound quite powerful, only to sound mushy or muddy when combined?  This is why.  If you don’t pay careful attention to the phase relationship of your samples, you will actually end up with a very weak resulting kickdrum.  

In the first audio clip below, you’ll hear two nice 808 kick samples that I want to combine. One is at C3 and it adds some tonal color to the sound, while the one on C2 is a heavy, powerful sub bass kick that will really hit the subwoofer of any club.  

In the next clip, you’ll hear two versions of these kicks stacked together, and with their releases turned down.  The first is what happens when I simply layer them up in a sampler, without attention to phase.  Notice theres a phasey weirdness in the sound, and the low end of the kick is less defined - definitely not what we’d want driving the low end of a club track.  In the second clip, I’ve aligned the samples phase more precisely, and the result is a much punchier, deeper, and more firm kick.  We’d still need to envelope this second sample a little more, and it would need a hi hat or topkick sample before it would be complete - but hopefully you get where I’m going on these examples with regard to phase alignment.  

To make this more clear, take a look at these screenshots from Ableton.  The first pair is the low kick (C2) and the high kick (C3), with their start points set at how they are in the first “phasing” clip.  Notice that while the C2 kick’s waveform initially goes above zero, and then back down below, the C3 kick’s waveform simply starts going below zero.  This results in the partial phase cancellation you hear in the phasing example above.  In the third photo, you can see that I’ve adjusted the start point of the C2 sample so that it also goes below zero at start - meaning these two kicks now add to each other, as their initial phases are in line, instead of weakening each other.

First sample fixed:

Once we have a good sounding sample for our kick, there are a number of ways we can enhance its clarity and punch in the mix.  

The first thing to do is to use an EQ to remove any excessive sub frequencies.  Depending on the EQ you’re using and the sample, you should cut anywhere from 15hz and below to 30hz and below to remove excessive sub rumble.  Frequencies below 20hz are not even audible and unfortunately subs in this area have a nasty habit of distorting your frequency balance and eating up massive amounts of headroom unnecessarily.  

The second thing to consider is the relationship of kick and bassline.  Typically, we want the kick to peak around 55hz, as this is precisely where large club systems have their most powerful low end.  The bass should sit around 90hz and up, and because of the frequency overlap that naturally occurs with these two elements, you really have to be smart about the composition of the track in general.  A long subby kick will not mix well (regardless of punch enhancement) with a big, subby, long release bassline.  The push and pull between the kick and bass is one of the most crucial elements in dance music and is something you should always consider before trying to enhance punch, as a proper kick/bass relationship will naturally allow more room for the kick in the mix.

The most obvious and easy way we can enhance punch in a kick is the proper use of a compressor.  It’s important to remember that proper compression will not only shape the attack of the kick we’re using, but also the body and tail of the kick as well.   To enhance the snap of a kick’s attack, we want to use an attack time on the compressor which can range anywhere from 5 to 30 miliseconds.  This will allow the initial snap of the kick to pass through the compressor relatively untouched, which helps us preserve and enhance punch.  If you’re using a compressor with an internal sidechain feature that’s tied to a highpass filter, use it.  One major problem you’ll run into when compressing kicks is that heavy compression can really kill the sub element of a sound- using the highpass filter built into your compressor can help reduce this.  Also, it’s usually good practice to blend some dry signal (assuming your compressor has a dry/wet mix knob) back into the kick after compression: this helps us preserve transients, keep some sub frequencies intact, and avoid over-compressing the kick, which will actually suck all punch out of the sound. Below is a clip of the uncompressed kick, followed by the same kick compressed with the Klanghelm DC8C compressor (70/30 dry wet, 3db of gain reduction).  

A quick but essential point to make here: use your ears, always.  This kick is sampled from the intro of a commercial track, so it’s already had a ton of processing applied and been mastered.  Kicks like this not only don’t need much further processing, but too much will actually degrade their punch and quality.  Go easy on compression if the kick is already processed!

Another excellent way to enhance the punch of the kick is to use a transient designer plugin - the best on the market in my opinion is the SPL transient designer, although many built in plugins like Logic’s Enveloper work just fine as well.  The SPL is an extremely simple but powerful plugin, so long as you don’t overdo things.  Simply increase the attack knob by just a bit, and you’ll hear the initial snap and punch of your kick slice right through the mix.  Below you can hear the original kick, followed by the SPL transient designer.  It’s followed by a clip of the kick with slight compression and transient enhancement.  Notice how you can really hear added snap and punch on the kick’s initial transients.

In a post coming up later this week, I’ll be going into great detail about another technique we can use to enhance punch - parallel compression.  It’s a bit too much to go into here but definitely stay tuned for that tutorial as well if you’re interested in this topic.

One warning: be careful not to overdo things.  As you will quickly see when experimenting with compressors and transient designers, there is only so much punch you can add before the kick starts to sound strange, distort, or completely loses it’s low end to an unacceptable level.  If you’re using Vengeance samples, or samples from commercial tracks, again be very careful here: these samples have already been highly compressed and additional compression will likely do more harm than good.  

Finally, be aware at all times that the most important thing with any mix is it’s balance and overall structure.  I might have a kick sample that sounds great in a properly balanced mix without any compression or transient enhancement, because the levels of it’s surrounding elements are correct and not overpowering the kick.  If I put the same kick into a cluttered mess of a mix with no frequency or level control, it’s likely going to sound like it doesn’t have nearly as much punch - but this has nothing to do with the quality of the kick.  If there’s one technical thing you guys take away from this or any of my tutorials, let it be the following: always, always be aware that when producing music, you are working with a fixed and limited amount of headroom.  There is no plugin, transient designer, or trick that lets us produce over 0dB without clipping or needing to lower the master.  Because we’re working with a fixed amount of headroom, this means that we can only fit so many elements at a certain level into our mix before we start crowding the mix, leading to masking, distortion, loss of punch and clarity, and a whole host of other bad things.  Always remember that less is more, and even the punchiest kick in the world will lose it’s power if it’s placed in a bad mix.  

Hey everyone!  My apologies for the long wait for this new tutorial but I’ve had an extremely busy past few weeks.  I’d like to thank everyone for their support on the Fleetwood Mac “Dreams” remix which peaked at #8 on HypeM’s most popular chart and #2 on We Are Hunted!  Next week I have another great tutorial coming, featuring an interview with my mastering engineer, multi-platinum producer Holger Lagerfeldt.  This month will be exciting as I have a bunch of new tutorials (including a very detailed YouTube tutorial on Sidechaining), a new remix, and my first podcast in my new monthly mix series which are all coming soon.   As always you can keep up with my latest news on Facebook or Twitter.  

For today’s tutorial I wanted to address something that someone asked about on Facebook, which is how to avoid muddiness and get a kick to really punch right through a mix.  In dance/pop production your kick is truly the anchor of your track and in my opinion it’s the single most important element, so this is a very good topic to get into.

Before I get into the various methods we can use to enhance the punch and attack of our kicks, it’s first important to consider the kick sample that we’re using.  When I was starting out with producing, I would constantly struggle to understand how the producers I was comparing myself to were getting their drums so huge and punchy in the mix.  I constantly read compression tutorials, eq methods, and all kinds of things thinking that the problem was in my compression techniques or something technical like that.  It wasn’t.  The real problem was, my samples were crap.  When I began to track down stems of major artists such as Kaskade, and I listened to their drum stems, I realized that while they were certainly better than me at compressing, their samples were just infinitely better than mine were to start with.  This taught me a valuable lesson, maybe the most valuable  tip, that I can possibly pass on to you guys: the quality of your sounds and samples is a thousand times more important than your processing techniques.  There’s a lot of reasons “pro” productions sound so good, but no single thing is as important to the pro sound as picking amazing samples right from the jump.  There’s only so far you can go in trying to turn a poor sample or sound into a good one with effects and processing.

So what makes a good kick sample?  To put it simply, great low end power, snappy mid/high range punch, and proper enveloping/release time.  The low end (the sub component) of the kick is obviously responsible for the weight and body of the kick, and it’s what makes a kick thump on a big club system.  Equally important is the snappy and punchy mid or high range element(s), which can be hi hats, click sounds, cowbells, or any number of samples that have a nice sharp attack and mid range punch.  Many young producers leave out or don’t focus on the mid range component of their kick enough, assuming that if the sub is powerful it will cut through a mix regardless - unfortunately this could not be more wrong.  If you listen carefully to your favorite dance records, you’ll notice that the producer almost definitely used a very powerful hi hat or mid range layer to the kick which allows it to slice through the often congested 1k-4k area of a mix.  

The final element of a great kick is it’s enveloping - its attack and release characteristics, or to put it simply - it’s length.  The part of this where I hear a lot of mistakes made (and where I used to make many mistakes myself) is on the release part of the kick.  I cannot stress enough how massive of an impact on your track the release and length of a kick will have.  The duration and release slope of your kick will have more of an impact than anything else in your track on the groove, the feel, what kind of bassline will fit in the mix, and many other things.  As a general rule, when making my own kicks (I use the Metrum plugin by Vengeance Sound), I start enveloping by setting the kick to end at 235ms or somewhere around there (this is an eighth note at 128bpm), and then start playing with both the release time and the release curve.  For snappier, french house style kicks (like those used by Madeon) you often want a very short kick, often as short as a sixteenth note, or with a sharper release curve at 1/8th.  These types of kicks are very short, snappy, tend to have less sub content, and are enveloped very precisely to cut quickly in and out of the mix.  For kicks that are more common in electro house (Mord Fustang comes to mind here), I often hear kicks with a more generous release time (1/8th note and a pretty full release).  These kicks consequently carry more low end weight and occupy far more room in the mix, which means there’s less room for other elements.  

In the audio clip below, you can hear two different versions of the same kick: one with an un-enveloped and quite long release, and one with (to my ears anyway) a more preferable shorter release time and sharper release curve.  You can also hear quite clearly how even without compression or manipulation of the kick aside from it’s envelope, the whole groove of the kick and top loop changes.  Notice how when the end of the kick is trimmed shorter with a quicker release, there’s a nice push and pull that emerges between the kick and snare.  The final point to make here is that there is no right or wrong, as the duration of the kick is completely up to you and what kind of track you’re making, and what you want the mix to sound like.  I merely want to point out that getting a punchy kick and clear low end starts with using the proper kind of sample and realizing the impact that this sample will have on the rest of the mix.  Clearly, if we use the super long version of this kick, there’s going to be very little low end room left in the mix for a bassline, and so on.  

In part II, I’ll move on and discuss some techniques we can use to actually enhance the punch of our kicks and make them sit better in the mix.