Mix Kicks Like A Pro | Full Masterclass

I hope you realize by now that kicks are sometimes literally 40% of your whole track it would be cool to know how to perfect them right welcome to mix elite.com and in this video we are going to uncover how to master kick sample selection how to shape them to always fit your track and I will give you some secret mixing tricks to put all of your friends on their knees begging for tips so Ki is technically made out of three parts your transient that will be cutting through your mix then your body that will be the most AUD basically and then the tail and this low end that kick creates each of these parts live in three different spectrums transience in highs body in mids and Tails in the sub and now knowing that how do you actually choose the best one for your track and I could go on around here that for example trap kicks usually don't have this very rich he and have really distorted body and for example ADM kicks will have much higher transient and less distorted body but I believe that the best way to learn is with your hands on that's why I've made for you a threee pack with 50 best kick samples that we cannot go wrong with check the link below for that because there are no specific rules I can give you to follow when choosing your Kick Drum it's best to just listen for the differences over here and later in the video I will show you a 100% definitely legal technique how to always get proven to work kicks the next step is correcting the length of your kick depending on the style of your base it's not a kick and base mixing tutorial we focus only on Kick but if you have a long sustained base then a shorter kick will work better if you have a short pluy base you can safely use a longer kick a rule of thumb is always to make sure that you don't overlap the tail of your kick with your base but we'll cover that more in depth in a second now even though you use a cool sample you can always layer a lot of cool stuff over it like some organic recording can always shorten that or some vinyl noise for example and shape the envelope like that you can always also just layer another kicks transient but make sure to not layer any Basse [Music] sounds another cool technique is also taking a Transit just like that and reversing it and placing it just before your actual cick starts just a tiny amount like that will definitely make your kick pop out a little bit more of course you can also layer reverse body of another kick but you should not use it on every single kick hit in your track now the next most important thing is choosing the correct volume level and how loud your kick should be depends on the style I could tell you that oh your kick should Peak at minus 60b but peak level is way different than the actual perceived loudness and that's actually what matters there's lfs that is actually metering the perceived loudness and well I could tell you okay your kicks should pick at minus 7 or eight lfs but there are a few things that make it really hard in ADM for example the kick dominates right that's where you will put your kick really loud but in style like rock it would not be that loud right I would normally tell you to choose a reference track but in that case it's also not the best idea since the reference tracks will be mastered already meaning that the kick will be squashed together with everything else in terms of Peaks right the best and fastest way to master your kick drums is just to First Trust your God and second seek feedback that's actually why we created mix elite membership where one of the perks is that you get unlimited one-on-one in-depth feedback from our team personally so for example you could render a part of your track five times with five different kicks and we can tell you which one is best or if it's too loud what to fix Etc so there's literally no way you don't start produce professional trucks let's try that together for example here yeah in that case we are actually peeking atus 60b and we can bring it up or [Music] down yeah as you can see if we put it plus 3dv yeah well it's too loud but if we put on some [Music] maximizing sounds pretty balanc already and if I put it minus 60b [Music] down it's perfectly fine as well so as you can see you have a ton of room for quote error unless you don't get right the next two steps we are going to talk about no matter how perfect your kick would not be you always need to fit it into the tunel balance of your track so in your sub area this is your deep Rumble part it adds power but can mdy up your mix especially if your room is not treated well then we have base which will be from about 80 to 150 200 htz and this is basically where most of your low body of your kick lives in this area is really important if you want your kick to be felt in your [Music] chest this you will feel more sort of in your stomach right then you have your low Ms it's more sort of like higher body of your kick if you have too much of it it will overpower these two right so sometimes you want to keep this part [Music] minimal then you have your mids this is where the transients will start to really shine some kicks you will find that have really minimal amount of Ms especially when there's a lot of stuff going on in other elements in this area over here but if you're working on a tech house track for example or a track that needs gritty kick this is where your kick should shine this is where this greediness actually starts you should have pretty rich amount of Ms to make your cake really pop out and fill the mids which are the meat of your track and then we have a really important part which are high mids and this is actually the definition of your cake cutting through the mix with also have those traveles that some people really like to [Music] boost to add some kind of air to the kick this is also something you will see people do to shape their kicks so we could definitely bring up a little bit more of the [Music] subbase then we have a little bit of the mod over here that's where you can cut it slightly you don't want to make those changes while listening to only the kick you always want to make sure it fits the whole mix that's the purpose of this EQ over here [Music] right for example with this boost in the mids it actually sound a little bit better but by itself not necessarily [Music] right in this track over here we actually don't have a lot of stuff going on in the mids and we have a ton of those mids here in this kick that makes the kick actually pop out a little bit too much right that's why for example in this specific scenario even though the kick sounds actually super nice we would like to bring down those mids over here and that will shape the kick to fit much better listen to [Music] that another EQ technique is to carve out from the base the resonant frequencies that our kick has so our kick hits at around as you can see C2 something like that right and we can just take this frequency which as you can see is at about 62 Herz let's try to listen to [Music] it if you feel like your kick laxes deep ramble part this is when you can actually boost it like two or 3db and then we go to our base and make the exact same Bell shape but into the opposite direction this is really small difference but I actually prefer how it sounds with this EQ Bells applied another nasty fact about your kick is that sometimes you will have this bleeding and a lot of unwanted subb from your kicks this kicks are actually designed to go from high pitch to low pitch that's when it can bleed this unwanted subbase and if you look at our red waveform this is our kick over here right so it's usually not a big deal but it can make a difference how you can deal with this is of course applying a low cut on your Kick Drum as you can see here if I turn it on it starts to go out and if we go to about here we have no bleeding at all all so we basically have cut everything below this resonance frequencies that we have over here now if you do it like this without any linear face turned on you might have some unwanted artifacts and actually make your kick s really weak that's why actually the safest way is simply to change it from low cut to low shelf as you can see we have no bleeding at all it will also give you more Headroom and will clean up the very lows which matter a lot in clap scenarios especially now one of the biggest reasons for great kick drums is compression however I never actually compress kick drums in a normal way that you might think about when using compression on a kick drum especially if you're working with electronic music right so trap ADM pop whatever where we have an actual electronic kick without any room sounds and without any ambiences under it you don't actually have to really compress your cake because in like instant attack scenario you would just pretty much just lower the volume of your kick which you can just do with your volume and if you want to like play with the tail you can definitely also do it with just your kick sample itself right and yes you could actually go and compress your kick so that for example your low end over here is not higher in Peak than the transient over here right but let's listen what actually happens when I start to lower the trash [Music] hold you actually start to just hear this attack right so even though we've set the attack to the lowest amount you can actually still hear it right also the release settings need to be short enough so that the compressor stops working before the next kick starts because that could also lower your transits right to tackle this click turn on look ahead and increase it until you actually don't hear any of those clicks but overall you'll never use a compressor like that a compressor just like that you would rather use on your lowend bass to lower the dynamic range between your kick and the base to glue them a little bit more together yeah you could do it also on the kick itself but that really really depends on how you tend to produce most of the time as I said simply leveling your kick right should make it sound really great already compressor is extremely useful when you want your kick to cut through the mix and this is a really interesting concept what we want to do is decrease the threshold and increase the ratio and start increasing the attack at about 20 to 40 millisecs you'll start to hear this exact transient coming through that's exactly when you can start increasing the dry gain to make this kick pop through your mix much more you can do it with every compressor you use you can just increase the output and then play with the [Music] mix pretty face I can't live without la la love I can't live without la love I can't live without very similar thing you can get with any transing straper for example this is a free one what I suggest you to play around with is multiband compression on your kick with simple two bands one will cover just your very low end so to just about 150 depending on your Kick Drum and the Order band will tackle the transients that will also allow you to shape your kick however you want with simple compressor we were limited by the volume of whole frequency spectrum of your kick and here we can just divide that and for example if you want to bring the transit a little bit higher and flatten a little bit of the low you can exactly do this with a multibond compressor just like that so let's see what's happening when we start to compress it right so in this extreme example you could see that we had only our Transit com through right so that works very very similar to the transit shaping and compressor with a longer attack but actually is a little bit more accurate and in case you also want to shape the higher end of your kick you can do so maybe even with three bands so you have a separate band for your body of your cake and separate band for your transients and now coming to the most important part of making your cake shine in your mix is the fact that everything in music is relative you will say oh this Ki is really loud which is not true at all it's actually that everything else in that moment when the kick play is really quiet and the easiest way is just to listen without right away Ki doesn't sound that loud at all so you need to sideen your cake to your Melodies and bass and I have a couple of tutorials on how to Cen so I will not get in depth into this what I wanted to show you is Fusion between multiband compression that we just did and side chaining so in per MB of course we just need to side chain and set the correct side over here and in the band just change it to external if we just do a normal side like that so we are losing also this nice transients from the base and we don't necessarily want to lose them right so in that case we can do the exact same thing we've done with the kick previously and that is compressing your base with the signal of the kick only on the low end as you can see it works here without a side chain which is actually also cool but we can make it work just a little bit in the transients and cool thing about that over here is that you can actually EQ out the side chain signal so we are not triggering the compression with the whole band over here from the kick which as you know has a tone of the slow end we can move it a little bit to the right and that will make the signal a lot [Music] shorter if you don't have Pro MB you can of course just play with the release and you should be fine without needing to EQ out the signal it's also possible to just send the signal only and Eco it out and then set it back again to reion compression you can do everything in your stock plugins NFL or Ableton by the way all the templates we use in all of our videos you can get completely for free just for trying out out our mix elite membership when you get access to all of our courses weekly life coaching Calls Unlimited one-on-one feedback on your music and mixes and all the templates you can keep forever when it comes to effects on your Kick Drum you can definitely do it for example with Reverb you can add some kind of room effect and it can actually help kick to sit better in the mix depending on the track we always want to make sure that we cut out all the low end from the Reverb that's why you could make the Reverb in a separate mixer track and send the kick to your Reverb make sure then the Reverb is 100% wet just be mindful about this area over here it can muddy up your mix really really quick you could also make it longer but then make sure to side chain the Reverb with the dry signal of your kick so in the moment when the kick plays there's no Reverb at all adding Reverb and to your kick is actually how you make those techno [Music] rumbles a cool Pro tip here is actually that you can change how your kick sounds with the pogon knob here instead of pitching it up or down you can just use this knob to give you really cool results and Distortion of course really powerful tool especially if you have fairly clean kick and want to add this harmonic content to make your cake fill out a little bit more of your body and of your transients it actually works wonders when you group your kick and clap together and then distort them together creates this really nice gritty harmonic effect so in that case you can actually hear that base has a lot of those 200 to 400 Hertz that actually is bad in our kick and if we would not distort our kick sounds perfectly fine but if we add a little bit of distortion we kind of make the kick a little bit more similar to the base in terms of those frequencies over here attention please and my secret technique on how to drastically improve the quality of your kaks you just find a track in your style that you really love so what you want to do is separate the kick from the track just like that in Ableton you will be able to easily zoom in in FL you might need to increase the time based PPQ and then with the slip tool you just want to make sure you're starting somewhere where the kick start it should look something like this open any multiband compressor and then just solo the bands one by one and record how each one of those sound so we can do it inl really easily like this we record and start playing the song with low solo load mids and highs and then we'll get three perfect samples that we can now simply shape just like that so then we have something like this and always if you want you can take another kick and Crossfade it with the low signal of your extracted kick so it will look something like that and you can always make sure that the phas is correct you can save this kick or or go to your library and just search for something similar or even you can get rid of the low end and just layer the mid and high with another kick [Music] sample now knowing how to mix your cake is great but to get the most out of it you need to watch this video next

Channel: Mix Elite | FL Studio Tips

Views: 29,886

Keywords: fl studio, Fl studio tutorial, How to make trap, Future house, music production, music producer, trap producer, rap, trap, hiphop, how to, tutorial, hacks, fl studio hacks, fl studio tricks, fltips, fltricks, edm, how to make trap, trap tutorial, rnb, stock plugins, only stock, how to sample, How to mix, mixing in fl studio, how to master, free flp, flp, progressive house, vocal, acapella, vocal chops, chops, martin garrix, fl studio vocal chops, free, mastering, vocal mixing, mixing

Id: ZKR8ODDIWqE

Length: 21min 52sec (1312 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 05 2024