Cool-down tricks with kick drums

Many 4/4 genres employ the use of filtered bass drums – here are six tips for doing it creatively

01 Genres such as disco house, tech-house and techno rely on the classic ‘filtered kick’ trick. In its simplest form, switch on a high-pass filter plugin on your kick’s channel. This carves away bottom end, cooling down low-end impact for a while.

02 To customise the kick filtering, don’t use a heavyhanded filter – try a parametric EQ instead. Use the low band to remove bass frequencies, then add a little resonant bump around the cutoff frequency for added oomph. You can slightly roll off some pokey treble, too.

03 To help make your filtered kick edit more of a feature in the track, have a go at applying a splash of distortion or saturation pre-filter. This’ll help your filtered bass drum pop out of the mix. Place all these effects in some kind of rack to help control all their parameters at once.

04 Automate those filter settings over time to give your pseudo-breakdown a sense of flow. Even subtle changes can make a difference here, so use headphones or decent monitors to judge low-end impact. Alternatively, automate volume for an even subtler effect.

05 Instead of simply bypassing the filter bang on the drop, think about how you can reintroduce the kick’s weight in a creative way. Try bringing the bass back a beat before it kicks back in, then reverse the full-frequency kick into the downbeat; or draw in a mini kick roll/fill.

06 Finally, instead of filtering the kick, try shortening its length via your sampler’s amp envelope parameters. Reduce it to a tiny click, then automate those settings to extend its tail more as a breakdown progresses.