Getting a fat compressed 909 kick.

[Milesy303]

I have just bought the gold baby 909 samples to hold me till I get my 909, and I am trying to get a fat club style 909 kick with them.

I am routing a Battery output to a buss which is routed to a channel on my outboard mixer where I have a channel of the 3630 compressor.

I know the 3630 is not the optimal compressor but as far as I have read it should be good for getting fat kicks and snares happening.

Just looking for ideas and pointers

[kikumoto]

I actually pulled this from the tips section of this website... It really works wonders on all kicks...

R&B - mixing - Kick drum
OK, so this time let's focus on kik drums. Make sure you can hear the kik all the way down to 40hz. If you can't, get a synth and make up a sine wave based sample kik from about 80-40. EQ your original drum the best you can. Don't compress it, just pick a great sample. Now, take a piece of that drum (mult it, use a send etc. or if in PT make a time aligned copy) and compress the dog snot out of this "copy". A good starting point is fast attack fast Release, ration of 7-10. and knock off about 6-10dB. This will be your midrange knock, and the frequency that makes it sound loud. Add this back to the original sound. Now take another copy and compress 20-30 dB and roll out all the midrange, say 600-2K. This sound should only be a "tick" and a thud. Add this back in. Add the sub (sample from synth), the knock, and the tick while in the mix, so you can really tell what's going on. If I need to explain this more, let me know. Fat lo-end is a lot of work.


Also try dramatically dropin some frequencies around 150 - 250, will really tighten things up... and good compressor to use is a UA 1176 copy (or real thing if u lucky enough !)
just make sure the kicks are proper time alligned, no phasing etc !

Hope this helps

[Milesy303]

Thanks..... I will try that.... My monitors only go as low as 56hz though.

[rhythmtech]

i usually blend a 909 with an 808. high pass filter the 909 kick and place a heavily compressed 808 underneath (tuned to match).

[atsushi_hoshiai]

+1
1176 - it does a really fat compression to the 909. Try it with induvidual instruments and complete drumloops

[Johnny Wrong]

Not sure where I found this out, maybe here, but the UAD 1176SE, the free version actually seems to do a better job on the low end.

Probably because it hasn't got the same amount of "character" as the full version, but for kicks and bass that could be a good thing.

I like it a lot anyway.

Oh, and BTW for anyone who like me doesn't like manuals much, on the 1176 plugins the attack and release functions are back to front. (I guess the same as the hardware)
The higher the number, the shorter the attack or release, weird!

[Milesy303]

thanks folks. anyone tried with the 3630?

[Johnny Wrong]

Not recently.

I did about 5 years ago, real 909 compressed with a 3630.

I didn't like what it did, I wanted a punchy but still squishy kick, and all I could get the 3630 to do was really hard sounding kicks, maybe user error though.

Might be alright for hardcore etc, but I make less frantic stuff, and it didn't do what I wanted.

For what its worth, I prefer limiting 909 type kicks anyway.

[SonOfSteven]

A cool thing to do is to layer completely diferent kicks and mess with the envelopes in the sampler, so use your 909 kick , then get a kick that has a nice attack to it and reduce the release so you just use the front knock of it, then maybe get another kick with nice texture and reduce attack and release just to get the mid sound from it etc,

[tehlord]

Originally Posted by SonOfSteven

A cool thing to do is to layer completely diferent kicks and mess with the envelopes in the sampler, so use your 909 kick , then get a kick that has a nice attack to it and reduce the release so you just use the front knock of it, then maybe get another kick with nice texture and reduce attack and release just to get the mid sound from it etc,

+1

I found this is the easiest way to start off. And I know less about compression than I do about alien life on the small moon Io. I was still able to get a very tight and punchy kick with little compression tweakage, using Cubases' own compressor.