How do you do it? Synthesizers? Samples? This can be a sort of general discussion thread for how you create your kicks or how to create your kicks.

Right now my kicks are split into two parts: The top, and the body/tail. The top layer is a sample - something with a super snappy click or a nice acoustic airy top end. I program all my sampled drums in Maschine, so I'll use the sampler's built in filter to high pass off everything below about 100Hz or so. Then I layer it with Sonic Academy's http://www.sonicacademy.com/KICK/ synthesizer, which really is the meat of the sound. I'll skim through the presets to find something that's close to what I'm looking for then start tweaking the note values within the kick's parameters and figuring out how long I want it to be. I feel like this gives me way more control over the low end than just layering a bunch of samples.

I've tried a lot this Kick thing but I don't really like it , what you can do if you're like me bad at making kick and drum sample, just sample one for your favorite song , I usually sample a Kick from a song I like ending up editing it a bit and there you have a really great kick without torturing yourself

The interface is great whatever but in my opinion it will never sound how I like when i do it , so when i do a kick I'm kinda never satisfied so I prefer sampling , it's different for everyone

you can always start to experiment with synthesizing kicks using a vst. massive is a good one for it. u can make most of the kick in there, and then do some post processing to make it phat (depending on the kind of kick you would want) i sometimes do this.

but most of the time i just pick a high quality sample, tune it, add a top kick, eq and sidechain and voila. i have my kick. but that said it really depends on how meaty you want your kick to be. sometimes parallel processing is a great option to get that extra oomph your looking for. also if you use trash by izotope you can get some super interesting results.

also im a huge fan of transient master

Quote from: clearskys on January 06, 2016, 03:55:39 am

4. Use surgical EQ to remove noise, other artifacts

probably a really stupid question, but what exactly is surgical EQ'ing?

Surgical EQ usually refers to EQing using really narrow bands of resonance (high Qs) to isolate a particular frequency that needs removing.

I pretty much use the same layering technique, and I use metrum a lot for the low end/mids/tail because you can add a slight delay within the plugin which is very useful for aligning everything and sorting out phase issues

Other times, I just take non-kick like sounds and just squeeze and warp them in any sample editor until they sound like the various parts of a kick.

What kinds of non-kick like sounds do you find gives you the most interesting results? Like short organic samples of random objects? I've gotten some pretty cool snare sounds by layering them with recordings of the crunch of me biting in to a chip..

How exactly would you run into phase issues when building your layered kick? Or how do you avoid it? Or know you have phase issues?

I use a wave scope analyzer such as s(M)exoscope on the kick bus, and then just tweak the relative delay and/or attack of individual kick layers until it sounds and looks right on the scope.  I found that when I use just my ears, I sometimes end up with uneven waveforms with dips etc, so using a waveform analyzer helps avoid those issues.