ok guys. I thought it might be cool to talk about how we get wider sounds on kicks or anything else really. I know I would like to learn a few things and I am sure others would as well.
For vocals I uses 2 different verbs (1 on each side) and it gives it a wider feel to it since it's not the same on both sides.
Anyone do anything cool on kicks?
Some kind of stereo early-reflections program maybe? You could always setup a send with a HP filter going into a Dimension D, which might sound pretty damn strange on a kick. It does a good job at making basses wide used this way.
When mixing acoustic drums I love how the overheads and room mics provide spaciousness for the kick and snare. When I mix drum machine or sample based tracks I tried a million things to try to make the Kick and Snare stereo. While I've succeeded in making them sound wider the center punch always seems to be the trade off.
Finally there are some really conveincing room verbs out there, but triggering samples of ambient hits is about the easiest way for me to make it sound like a record quickly. Sometimes I use an inverse or a gated reverb with a little HPF, sometimes flip the polarity of one side of its return. At times I've slight panned the kick to one side and used a 15ms delay time on the opposite side. The snare chain would mirror this, making the beat go left to right with the kick/snare pattern. Sometimes these things work other times it doesn't make that much of a difference within the context of the track.
I like to use Altiverb on kicks when I think it's required, usually when the kick is too dry in the mix.
I have been using a few of the studio live room IR's and I take out both the direct signal and the tail, and just use the early reflections.
It takes away that feeling of the kick being alien to your mix and it is amazing how loud I can get it without it being overbearing, but you quickly notice it has gone when it's muted...
Why not copy and paste the kick drum sound onto a different track then play around with panning & effects techniques. You could also use two microphones placed differently at tracking to gain a similar advantage? I've done this successfully with guitars, basses, etc.
I find that ambience on the kick makes it indistinct in the mix. Maybe a little bit of short room sound, but if the mix is very dense it needs to be dry and compressed.
i like to use 16 different kicks panned across the field, starting of course with hard left, working around to hard right.
if it's a quieter track, like a solo flute w/kick kinda thing, i'll eliminate maybe two of the kicks.
maybe.
gregoire
del ubik
Yea, I do that all the time too. LOL! Funny. I work with alot of HipHop. I like kicks with some width to it. SOmetimes they have a sound on the end (paned left and right) that makes them sound wider. So I wanted to see if anyone had any cool ideas.
sounds to me like you are using samples of mono kicks with some reverb on them and whoever created it made a stereo file out of the sample w/verb.
This sis an interesting point. If you are running your kiks out of a sampler, are you mixing them down to a mono track? On the sample cd's I have been using the wavs tend to be stereo however I usually output to a mono chanel when I am sequencing and then mixing down the midi....Am I missing some width?
14th July 2005
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