12-Steps to Hard-Hitting Kick Drums!

In this tutorial I will show you a widely used technique that has been a part of studio mixing and engineering since the days of Motown. The basic idea is to take a side-chain signal of a kick drum and have it trigger a gate that opens up a low Hz signal. Depending on the Hz signal you select, it will give your kick drums an additional “boom” or “knock” that most urban and dance music producers demand. We will go through the basic steps of how to set this up in Pro Tools, but note this application can be used in nearly every digital audio workstation and production software available today. For any questions or clarifications, please don’t hesitate to send us an e-mail at darkstylez@gmail.com -Gerritt Tisdale

STEP 1:

Launch a new Pro Tools session an import the Kick.wav and Clap.wav files provided below.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD SOUNDS

File > Import > Audio

STEP 2:

Once your sounds are imported, mute the track titled “Clap” and select the Kick loop. Make sure that your play-pack is set to loop so that you can keep the sound going without having to copy and paste the loop.

STEP 3:

Create a new mono Aux track.

Track > New

STEP 4:

After you have created your Aux channel, add a the Pro Tools gate plug-in to the second row of the inserts.

STEP 5:

Set the key input on the gate to bus 1 mono.

STEP 6:

Click on the SIDE-CHAIN Key button to activate it. Make sure that the blue button is lit.

STEP 7:

Now set the Range, Attack, Hold, Ratio, Release, and Threshold accordingly. This will be a starting point that you can adjust to better suite your production.

******WARNING******

-Turn your speakers all the way down before opening up the signal generator to avoid damage to your monitors.

-Be sure that you add the Signal Generator before the Gate or the effect will not work and you will just hear a constant buzzing sound.

STEP 8:

Now that we have our gate setup, lets add a signal generator that will give us our Hz sound. Go to plug-in > Other > Signal Generator (mono)

STEP 9:

For a reference point, set the Signal Generator to 70Hz and bring the volume up to -3dB. At this point you should not hear any sounds, if you do hear a signal you should double-check your gate settings with STEP 7.

STEP 10:

Now that we have our Aux track setup, we need to go back and send a signal from the Kick drum track to the key-input on our gate. Earlier we set the key-input of the gate to receive a signal from Bus 1, so now we need the kick to tell the gate to open when it hits. On the Kick track click on sends and select Bus 1 mono.

STEP 11:

Now we need to bring the up the volume on the Bus 1 send. At this point you can go ahead and play the Kick drum loop as you slowly raise the Bus level. You should start to here the Signal Generator sound at the same time that the kick drum hits. You may set the Bus level to your liking, but for now I have set it at -17.5dB.

STEP 12:

Now we can un-mute the Clap track and play the loop back. Adjust the Hz on the Signal Generator to a level that you desire and experiment with the Attack, Release, and Hold settings on the gate to find your desired effect.