4. Key techniques for kick drum layering

1 The key to successful kick layering lies in careful selection of two or three sounds that work well together – any more is probably overkill. Each one should contribute something different: one might supply low-end oomph, another the treble crack, and perhaps a third for midrange character (sampled real kick drums are great for this). We’ve layered three such kicks using a Drum Rack in Live, although you can do the same in your own sampler. 3 Tuning your kick sounds to fit each other will help them sit together as one cohesive kick. We Transpose them all up two octaves ( 24 semitones) until we can hear them playing identifiable notes. We then pick one and tune the others to match it before tuning them all back down 24 semitones.

2 A sampler’s low-pass filter can be used to remove excessive noise and unwanted top-end reverb ‘air’ from sampled kicks. Begin by lowering the cutoff until the unwanted noise is removed. Apply a filter envelope with 0ms Attack, Sustain and Release, then raise the envelope modulation Amount and Decay until the crack of the kick cuts through before the filter drops, removing unwanted noise. 4 It’s often a good idea to EQ each kick layer to isolate the elements it was chosen for. This helps avoid frequency overlap, which could potentially cause muddiness and phase cancellation. We use EQ and high-/low-pass filtering to isolate the part of each that we want: first, we roll off the top end on our beefy deep kick, the snappy transient layer is highpassed, and we roll off some top and bottom from our mid kick. 5 An alternative to low-kick samples is a synthesised kick drum. 808 kicks work great but can be a little tricky to accurately tune, so we get ours sounding roughly how we want, render it to audio, then add it to a sampler to tune. It’s often a good idea to EQ and compress such kicks separately (before or during layering) as they tend to be more unruly than kicks sampled from other tracks.