Let the Bass kick! Make your drums fatter with Sine…

Hi guys, it’s Andre.

It’s now my 42nd week at the Benztown studios, so it’s the 42nd issue of my production diary, where I share all the things I learned every week.

Finding the right drums can be a freaking pain. Sometimes there are days, I skip through my whole drum sample library and I just don’t find the right one. The kicks might sound sweet, but that punch is missing.

Here’s a short tutorial how to create that punchy bottom on your own without layering kicks. You just need a low frequency sine wave and a gate, which is able to sidechain and you’re redy to go.

See how, I add some deep bass to these kicks in the track below.

[soundcloud width=”100%” height=”81″ params=”” url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/27819884″]

I’ve already got some kicks as track in my session. First, you need to EQ your kicks to make them sound the way you want them.

Now, add a sine wave in a second track. I used the signal generator in this example. Just make sure, your sine wave is deep (I used 50Hz in this example) and hearable.

Now you’ve got a low frequency sine track under your drum track.

Of course, you don’t want to play a long low frequency tone together with the kicks, so you need a gate on your sine track. Make sure, the gate is able to sidechain.

Tweak around your settings, until the gate mutes the sine wave completely. The sine wave should only be hearable, when the kicks play, so you need to sidechain the gate with the drum track. Switch to the mixer window and send the signal from your drum track to a bus.

Now, the gate needs the drum signal to work. Click on the gate, enable sidechaining and choose the bus with the signal from the drum track.

Tweak around the settings of the gate, until the sine wave is hearable when the kicks are playing. Your hear how the low frequency sine wave adds some bottom to the kicks. Tweak around the gate settings of the sine track and EQ settings of the kicks to get the result, you want to.

Here’s an audio example of my tutorial session.

[soundcloud width=”100%” height=”81″ params=”” url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/27819914″]

But that’s not all. Play around with different frequencies and waveforms to add some characteristics to your kicks. Here’s an example with white noise instead of a sine wave.

[soundcloud width=”100%” height=”81″ params=”” url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/27819926″]

That sounds evil…

Create your own characteristic drums with a few wave forms and noises and a sidechained gate. Just play around and see how you can improve your drums.

Cheers and have a nice weekend.