The kick drum, inside and out
Starting off with the very basics, the kick (aka bass) drum is the big outward-facing tub at the front of the drum kit. It’s struck with a pedaloperated beater under the right foot of the (right-handed) drummer, and the larger the drum – in both diameter and depth – the louder, more boomy and more rounded it will sound. The vast majority of drum kits will hit the engineering sweet spot for both live amplification and recording, sporting kick drums that measure 22" in diameter and 16” deep. However, those numbers can range anywhere between 18-28” and 14-20”. The wood used in the manufacture of the kick also has a major impact on its sound, with maple and birch being the two most ubiquitous options –
“The role of the kick is to mark the main beats of the bar”
the first for its warmth and sustain, the second for its brightness and power.
You’ll often notice that there’s a hole cut out of the kick drum’s front head (skin): this allows air to blast out of the drum rather than compress within it when it’s struck, for a more punchy sound. As well as that, it also enables a microphone to be placed right inside for a tighter recorded sound.
In electronic music, kick drum sounds are rather more diverse and colourful than their real-world counterparts. They can be synthesised by drum machines or general purpose synths, for hyper-real, highly manipulable tones; or sourced from samples, either placed directly on audio tracks in a DAW or loaded into dedicated drum sample playback instruments. Those same sample players can also be used to emulate acoustic kick drums (and the rest of the kit) to an astonishing degree of realism, as discussed in Drum ROMplers.
The role of the kick in all styles of music involving the drum kit is to mark out the main beats of the bar – beats 1 and 3 in a backbeatstyle groove, with the snare on 2 and 4, for example – and support and complement the bassline, but there’s plenty of intricacy and nuance to the instrument within that framework, as we’ll see over the next few pages.