Kick drum is the heartbeat of the song. A perfect Kick drum sound is important to a rock mix, pop mix, hip hop, R&B or Jazz, and the character of your kick drum can either make people go wow, or just up and leave.
Basic Kick Drum Sounds
Kicks usually have some sort of subwoofer action. Between 40 and 100 HZ you will find the heartbeat of the kick drum. Around 1.5k to 10k the “attack”. The space in between at say 500 HZ is either complete garbage in some cases, or just very slightly there.
Kick Drum Tones Dynamics
vary in the balance of the lower and higher register. Kick drums that are all low end, won’t survive on the iPhone speaker test. Compression of the high and lower frequencies can even out the tones for a more consistent hit, but the adding compression generally makes it sound more modern, the more compression you add. Dance or Electro type Kick drum is 100% slammed with every possible compression you could imagine. Likewise with Metal, and a lot of other loud heavy styles.
Some genres like metal have a ton of attack around 8k. Other milder R&B and Natural Jazz tones will have more of a mid range, but balancing and comparing these 3 areas will result in a lot of variation in kick drum tone.
Samples and Recording Your Own Kick Drum Sounds
You can use your own sounds, or use pre-recorded samples. Either can result awesome results. You can even do both, record your own sounds and add samples to compare. It doesn’t make you any less of an artist to use samples, and recording real drums should be looked at a starting point for performance rather than an ending point for sounds.
Best Mics for Recording Kick Drum
You can record with one mic or 2 mics. For some reason, they always seem to make kick drum mics huge, but if you can fit one inside as well, the inside microphone will have a lot more of the attack sound. Inside, I usually prefer Shure Beta 91. Outside, on the hole, I usually like a dynamic mic like Shure Beta 52 or AKG D12, I really don’t like D112 for some reason. Audix D6 is ok, but is really scooped in the mids comparatively. MD421 or RE20 Is also nice for a rounder softer tone (compared to the Beta 52). Some people like a big condensor like Neumann u47 about 2 ft away, but that’s a little too fancy for me.
Using the Best Kick Drum Samples
Kick drum samples can be triggered from a keyboard, or triggered from actual drums and layered in real time. This allows us to layer in samples of other drums, or trigger sounds that no drum would ever make. Some genres like Hip-Hop and Dance are completely reliant on the samples.
Best Kick Drum Samples for Hip Hop
808s and varient’s are popular, as well as low sub bass pulses and distorted Kick drum sounds. Try adding compression or side chaining an element of the mix to the kick drum signal. Get that red hot sound with an amplifier simulator effect or all kinds of weird stuff can be done to mix up the kick drum sounds in the mix.
Rock Kick Drum Samples
Check out our Kick drum sounds recorded at Bad Racket Recording Studio.
And a Second Page with Drum Samples here on this page: Free Drum Samples Pack Download: https://badracket.com/free-drum-samples/