the obsession with kick drums in dance music production never fails to amaze me. while technically it only serves to accentuate the pulse, many producers i know spend a great deal of their time on that perfect kick drum. in this post, i'll explain some of my strategies to get a good kick drum and share some kick drum samples.

i think the easiest way to obtain a good kick drum is to find samples of the ever popular 808 and 909 kick drums. these sounds have been used so much in dance music, that they've almost become the standard against which all other kick drums are measured. as you may know, the 808 kick drum is known for its deep, rolling quality, while the 909 kick drum is more aggressive and punchy.

while it may seem boring to walk the trodden path, it helps to give a sense of what kick drums work in what context. once you get a feeling for that, you can always go your own way. i used to be a purist that even refused to use samples, but i must say that just a few months of using the standard 808 and 909 samples has taught me more about dance floor politics than many years of stubborn purism.

if you like your palette a bit richer, there are tons of drum sample libraries out there to suit your needs. many libraries sample their kick drums from records, and nothing stops you from doing exactly the same: when you hear a track with a nice kick drum, start looking for one that is isolated. these can usually be found at the beginning of a track, but sometimes they are hard to find. if the kick drum always coincides with other sounds, you might have to give up and look for a different track. of course, a stray hi-hat or some background noise in a kick drum sample doesn't always have to be a problem. if it works, it works.

i prefer clean, isolated kick drums, as this gives me the most flexibility. a trick that can sometimes work miracles with hard-to-isolate kick drums, is to low-pass filter everything but the attack: pick a kick drum that doesn't coincide with a bass sound, open it in a wave editor and find the first zero-crossing where the waveform has settled on a steady low-pitched tone. now select everything after that point, as seen below, and apply a 24db/octave low-pass filter to the selection. sometimes you can go as low as 60hz and still be left with a clean and powerful kick drum.

low-pass filtering the decay (click to enlarge)

if you want to go beyond prefab kick drums, a good way is to layer 3 or 4 of them. simply layering usually just results in a loud mess, so you need to apply filtering, eq and volume to all the components in a sensible way. considering that a kick drum can roughly be split up as: sub 40-65hz, body 80-200hz, kick 250-750hz and presence 1000-5000hz, it becomes easier to decide what to do. i usually start with a good sample for the body and layer it with a low-pass filtered kick for the sub and a high-pass filtered kick for the presence. 808 and 606 kick drums work great for that, respectively. sometimes i'll add another kick drum, just for flavor.

the final goal is to make the component kick drums work together by fine tuning them. the first step is to align the separate samples, to prevent serious phase problems. this is done is by trimming the component kick drums in a wave editor. after that, it's a matter of carefully setting the pitch, attack, decay, low-pass filter, high-pass filter and volume of each component kick drum. subtly offsetting the sample start time of the component kick drums can give surprising, though not always useful results.

building a kick drum this way may seem like a lot of work, but it gives you a lot of control over the final sound of the kick drum. and with a bit of practice, making original sounding kick drums is quite easy this way. the bonus is that once you find components that work well together, it's easy to make a lot of variations by just changing a few parameters.

finally, you can synthesize your kick drums, which gives you the most flexibility. it can be hard to get it just right, but remember that the influential 808 and 909 kick drums were also synthesized originally. so it is possible. some options are ephonic's free drumatic, ableton live's own operator, microtonic or fm8, which are all perfect for small, minimal-style kick drums. for more beefier stuff, waldorf's attack does the job, although it has a limited amount of parameters. another synth that can do some serious damage is the free standalone windows application stomper. but unfortunately, an application outside of your host doesn't exactly keep the flow going when jamming, so chances are you'll only use it on those rainy 'let's make samples' afternoons.

my weapons of choice right now are audiorealism's adm and ism's bazzism, both available for mac and pc. the former does a fine job of synthesizing 808 and 909 kick drums, while the latter is a dedicated kick drum synthesizer that offers an incredible range of good kick drum sounds. in fact, since the discovery of bazzism, i hardly use samples anymore, except for some sporadic layering.

like most synthesized kick drums, bazzism consists of a simple sine whose frequency is quickly swept down. the main page of the synth, seen below on the left, shows the obvious parameters, but the key to success is on the envelope page, shown on the right. here you shape the volume envelope of just the frequency sweep, which allows for precise control of the tone of the attack and the volume of the sustain.

the 2 pages of ism's bazzism (click to enlarge)

whatever way you use to get your kick drums, be sure to build up a well-organized personal collection. it's no shame to reuse a kick drum that works great, but be aware that the sound of your kick drum influences the mood of a track more than you might think. in that sense, it can be great to start the creation of a track with a kick drum you normally wouldn't use, just to see where it takes you.

maybe there's something of use in this collection of 30 kick drums, which i've created with the techniques described above. just bear in mind that they reflect my taste in kick drums, so your mileage may vary.

• minz kick drum samples

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