Just curious as to how many of us Elektronauts run their kick drum on a separate track? I’ve always ran my drums in stereo on 1 track, so it’s very difficult to do sidechain compression and sometimes the kick drum just generally gets buried in the mix. Also, the Machinedrum’s on board compressor is hard to wrap my head around.
Since I have an extra input available on my interface, I’m thinking of running the kick drum separate and have all other drums in stereo running through my strymon deco, then mix them ITB. Any tips, thoughts, or general experience with this type of setup? I make techno, electro, idm type music. Thanks!
Yes the kick drum separate is a good idea, it give access to fast mixing on the mixer (sound card of desk) when performing Live I found that best way… it’s also great to have it’s fade-in fade-out in hands
it’s better also because you can focus creatively on its processing (Distortion, Tape Saturation, Transients shaping, wave shaper, Compressors, EQ… etc…). with a effects chain (soft or hardware) and it gives you a sound no-one have because of you personal way to process it.
Even in a DAW I usually have the Kick separate and the Drum Bus that’s my favorite way of working Drums.
The kick is very important to me so I like to give it some extra
(but you shouldn’t be stuck on it either)
But the music genre affect the way we work the kick, in electronic/urban music we mix everything based on the level of the kick so it’s the reference for rough balance (with sub bass/bass for the overall energy)
Half a year ago, I started to track as many individual channels as possible (again). Certainly the kick, sometimes other percussion elements as well. Depends. Usually snare, hats etc. on a stereo, though.
DAW arrangments are much larger, sometimes difficult to find the right track for editing automation lol^^
More work on individual channels, more possibilities working with fx, easier to fix stuff ofc, overdubbing sections etc…
Worked a few years with tracking OT on one stereo track, AK on a stereo track + synths through Octa Thru Machines (Cue Out) on another stereo track.
I enjoyed the speed at which I could finish tracks! Can be a pain in the ass if you gotta fix a mistake, though.
Especially sucks if it means losing a good performance due to a tiny mistake…
For me on the Digitakt, the kick almost always gets track 1 to itself.
The benefits include sidechaining, quick sound/sample replacement and tweaking for (arguably) the most fundamental part of modern dance music, muting/unmuting JUST the kick, easier overall level control and more.
If I’m doing a Digitone-only thing, then it sometimes becomes more of a free-for-all because there are only 4 tracks for everything.
If I’m outputting to or using a DAW, everything gets its own track where possible. It wouldn’t even occur to me to have a single stereo track called “drums” except as a mixer destination for the individual drum channels.
When I can, I put the kick on its own channel. I don’t have that luxury at the minute as my Digitakt is my drum machine and I don’t use a laptop, so I use the envelope follower on my Analog Heat to make a bit of space for the kick in my mixes. Works pretty well.
Depends what I am doing but I print everything on a dedicated track these days, bouncing back and forth between Ableton and OT or other hardware if I want to. Even little free Lyra jams go on tape, never know what comes out of that thing
I still suck at Ableton though, maybe I will swap back to Logic.
Thanks for the replies! It seems like the kick being such a fundamental part of electronic music, deserves it’s own channel to let it breathe and for the ability to mold it to taste. I’ve always ran out of inputs and now I can run the kick on it’s own track. Does anybody also run the Snare / Clap on the same track as the kick? That might also be a good idea because they both represent more of the lower - midrange frequencies, though this depends on choice of those elements of course.
On A4, which can synthesize excellent kicks, I would often put some interesting blips and bleeps on other steps to come in (while the kick went out) by using FILLs.
Using negative fill to remove the kick is a bonus here, as once you record these tracks individually, you can easily separate the sounds on the kick track, a track that sees little variation, into their own tracks.
This is possible on any Elektron with fill capabilities.
Otherwise, it’d have to be a pretty short decay kick to fit other sounds on the track (but not in FILLs) without disrupting the kick or getting off envelope behavior on the other sounds. Micro timing and swing can help here, sometimes. Some musical styles are okay with shorter kicks.
Other options include using MIDI tracks to trigger any Kick sample in your DAW. That way it is individualized to its own channel, already in your DAW. Skip the A/D conversion
I really like this on A4, since you can use both FX and CV tracks to send MIDI now. It’s become my favorite sequencer for DAW plug-Ins.
As other mentioned, being able to process the kick separately is crucial.
I am currently reviving a 3 year old track I found on an old Time Machine backup disk.
The kick is hard , too loud, and has a lot of knock in the midrange. Lots of filtering, notching, and sidechain (keyed from new 808 kick) compressing, and expansion.
All the time I’ve had to put into it would have been saved had I just ran the kick separately when recording.
On one hand, it has helped me keep those Rx skills fresh. On the other hand, I’ll never be able to get it to sound the way I want.
I ll play the dissonant here and say I have my AR and MD kicks mixed in on their stereo master outs. I simply don t have the channels on my Xone96. But I m also often not after standard kick sounds and like to process them together with the other drum sounds. It surely takes more work to balance things. Especially with my MD which is ran hot into a tube overdrive. Frequencies duck each other out so great care has to be taken to keep the punch, when that s what i m after.
When I could, I would put the kick on its own track, driven a bit (or a lot) for impact and the snare and clap on another track with a tiny bit of delay and reverb send on it.
I’ve noticed this with the MD internal compressor. The high end frequency gets ducked very much when the kick is going hard. Then you mute the kick and all the high end bleeds through. It changes the sound almost too much if ran hot. This might be reason alone to run the kick separate.
Technically I could run them on the same track if I’m doing breakbeats with low decay on the kick because they’ll typically not overlap too much. Though I think I just focus on the kick on it’s own track for now.
Whenever I’m jamming (bass guitar/bass synth) with my Drummer he’ll always get up and switch on the high pass filters on my mixer. According to him, high pass filtering be a drummers best friend.
Same. Always always always have my kick on track 1 on my Digitakt, simply because regardless of what’s going on in my performance I can easily and reflexively simply mute/unmute the kick for instant variation. Dance Music 101, if you will.
I play primarily deep house and occasionally I’ll place “sub” kicks on other trigs around the kicks. I’ll find another kick sample, lower its volume to about 25% of what my main kick is, then using p-locks add an alternate kick pattern on the same track. It helps liven up and give character to an unrelenting and somewhat monotonous 4/4 kick.
I have both - I guess the kick gets alot of attention in my set up…
The kick on my ARmkii is going to the stereo bus and is very much triggering the compressor so that the rest of the drums DUCK in volume…but I also split it out via it’s analog out and feed that to 2 cheap alesis 3630s to duck pads and cheap outboard reverbs…
Also sent to a silent channel in FL via my desk. The silent channel feeds a peak controller, which rolls off from 0Hz to 250Hz, cutting those frequencies everytime the kick is triggered on every other track. So only the bass DUCKS…it’s less annoying…and de-clutters the bottom end…
And I copy the kick to the DT! But do not send it to the master out but use it to trigger the compressor, it takes a whole DT track but I have it spare becase I have the luxury of the AR and DT…
Like the above, when I can, definitely! Especially when using an analog mixer. Having that bit of control over overdrive, EQ, and volume helps a lot. It also helps the stereo drum track too because you can press it more without killing your kick.
I always have the kick on a separate track. I used to have a separate for clap/snare as well but lately ive been using a single stereo for everything else
I do some volume ducking to mimic sidechain compression , in my setup it’s Digitone -> audio into Octatrack and my kick is running into either OT or more recently my audio interface and I’m looking at my kick trigs on the rytm and copying those trigs to the audio thru channel on the OT and then I mapped an LFO to amp volume to duck with an ramp/exp or square waveform and it’s sounding great so far and works great with lo-fi / idm / techno / anything!