Can't get the kick to sound right!

I’m pretty sure it’s me and not the AR, but for some reason I can’t get the kick sound right! I’ve been trying for a long time but somehow the sounds I get have a a lot of subs and highs, no presence in the mix, just filling it up. It’s not controlled enough. No matter which synth engine I choose I end up with a sound that I just replace with a sample. And I don’t want to do that. It could be the fact that I’m working on NS10s but still.

If anyone can help out with a few tricks it would be greatly appreciated!

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I like the plastic kick, with a bit of filter + overdrive…
Maybe you should drop a few samples of what you’re aiming at…

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For some, getting the kicks to sound “right” without resorting to samples is a lifelong journey. Keep at it and be kind to yourself.

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^ Wisdom :pray:

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Yes, they have a lot of bass… :slight_smile:
try a high pass filter @30-40 HZ (in AR or later in DAW).
also eq the mid/high between 3-6 Khz up… if you want it to not fill the whole bass frequencies, eq out at 120-600, depending on your other sounds (bass, low strings)
In general the more presence you have, the harsher the BD engines sound. sometimes the Compressor in Sum is two heavy on the kicks… often they wash out the clear attack and make the sound muddy.

to have more presence i mostly add a high value in click, so you really hear the kick attacks.

if you search for more “real” BD, add a sample on a different track, set a high pass and mix it to your liking (you can copy/paste the pattern to second kick)…

and, well… yes… the bass parts of a song always keep driving me mad :-))… i often feel i spend 6 hours for arranging and 4 weeks for mixing :-)))… hail to the mix-professionals :slight_smile:

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I find that the overdrive gives you a lot on kicks, sometimes only a tiny bit like 2-3% will drive your kick forward in the mix and make it pop out more.

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Have you checked various “sweep time”/“decay time” settings. Makes quite a difference - as well as the type of “WAV” combined with “TIC”.

A pinch of overdrive is definitely giving more density.

Sometimes I use the “snare trick” on the BD too … which is some gated reverb … I use a one-shot-lfo performing the exponential envelope

The compressor can easily kill the punch of the BD, if the “SEQ” (Sidechain EQ) is not optimized for the kind of overall sound you are after. There are four different settings described in the manual and maybe one of those get’s you closer to your sound.

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I wonder how many awesome BDs you hear on records where the producer thought “It doesn’t sound right.” :slight_smile:

But, yeah, the AR is a monster in bass. I often find myself using the HP filter. And then maybe a faded LFO to give it more control (on decay or filter/envelope)…but that’s more a thought experiment as I’ve never actually employed that method. Definitely figure out that compressor. You have to on this machine.

Could be your room is boomy? God knows. Whatever you do, in line with what Tsutek said, don’t let it kill your drive. I think it’ll get easier overtime.

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Nailing the kick has been a challenge for me also. I notice sometimes I think, my god, this is a bass monster, and then other times it sounds like a wet cat fart coming through my speakers. If I were smart, I’d note which Kits and Sounds contained the kicks I like and jot down settings to be used again in the future.

I agree with others that the compressor & overdrive can drastically effect kick behavior. Play around with that. But a lot of times I don’t want any grit to it, just a nice loud punchy clean kick sound, and it’s very hard to achieve, for me. I usually end up resorting to samples in that case.

Also, when I use OverBridge and separate out the kick it always seems a lot weaker to me rather than just running everything through the Stereo Outs. I have not tested this rigorously, just my impression from working on things recently.

Plastic can get crazy. I like Dusty for 808-ish sounds as well.

I wish Elektron would do more Workflow videos and other short practical tutorials.

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I mean I don’t know what samples people are using, but I think people might want to remember/assume they’ve been processed.

Which is not to say anything about using samples, just that without processing I think one may find it more difficult to get the AR to sound like them.

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Note that layering can be the key to get good sounds.
e.g. work both on the kick and snare tracks to get a kick you like, the snare part focussing on the medium + treble…
You can achieve pretty rich sounds like this, I found.

You may also use the LFO with FM-like speed and a fade out to add some dirt on the attack.

On the AR, the envelopes have a default value for HOLD. You might want to tweak this parameter + the decay to get it exactly how you want it. you can really change the sound a lot by playing with the AMP envelope, especially for uncommon sounds.

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I’m not trying to get the AR to sound like a sample without processing. I’m trying to get a controlled kick sound from the AR without having to resort to heavy processing in the DAW. I mean it’s a dedicated drum machine. I should be able to use the sounds it makes without a plugin chain. Or at least this is what I assume :slight_smile:

I will definitely try the tips guys, thanks to @LyingDalai, @xidnpnlss, @SoundRider, @pulsefrequenz

I know. I was just saying why samples might work better is because they’ve been processed. That’s all I was merely saying.

fwiw here’s my method:

I have a few go-to sounds in my sound pool that I turn to whenever I feel like playing it safe with a kick in a pattern. So, whenever you get a kick going that sounds better-than-usual, save it as a sound to your sound pool. Then, when you reuse that sound, if you manage to tweak it even further, re-save the sound to the same slot (overwrite). Little by little you will accumulate a nice collection of go-to kicks that you can just load as a sound and go

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Gotcha, yeah, for sure. You see I have this guilt whenever I end up putting a sample in instead of using the AR for drums… #sampleshame?

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hehe, no shame in that man! Ultimately the AR is at its strongest when you combine samples and synthesis.

Sometimes I like to load up a solid (soft-ish) kick sample and add a transient to it using the noise machine. This can work really well!

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Aint no shame when it comes to this here music game.

Layering drums is how it’s (often) done. I think the AR was made to layer. If it works with or without or only, it works.

discussing this here too

but for me layering is the way to go. Usually running a analog kick + sample and low tomb. So usually layering 2 or 3 kicks works best for me. been using d16 punchbox for the samples which is great! but just using one plain analog drum from the AR never really worked for me.

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Seems Autocorrect got you, but “tomb” is pretty accurate.

I find this very hard to believe tbh. Care to post an example of such a kick?

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