STOP COMPRESSING YOUR KICK DRUMS!!

yo yo yo what is up it is Cloverdale welcome back to another Cloverdale Studio tutorial so pumped today to be telling you guys why you probably don't need a compressor on your kick drums for real I I've opened up a million projects and you guys all put compressors on your kick drums and you usually don't need them but let's talk about you know some instances where you might need them first let's talk about what compressors do actually no first up there the Subscribe button if you're enjoying what you're learning that's that's what first okay up second compressors let's load up a compressor right here and we got a kick drum and let's just take a listen to it with nothing first right and so this kick you know the kick sample looks pretty great so I got to figure out why am I adding a compressor in the first place right and when I'm looking at the shape here up at this plug-in this is called mini meters by the way I recommend if you produce music to get this plug-in it's only 10 bucks they didn't even pay me to say that but they should have uh just kidding love you guys it's a great plug-in um okay so a compressor you know maybe I want to you know tame the tail end of it right so basically it's saying if the signal goes above this line apply compression and this says okay how quickly do we apply the compression and then this says how quickly do we lay off the compression and what is compression it's just turning the signal down so just picture it like turning the volume down right but it turns it down then it bounces back up and then turns down bounces back up turns it down bounces back up right but in this case we're dealing with just the same kick sample over and over and over again so we really just need to worry about the compression over the span of one kick sample right and so here look it's look at how this is now changed the shape of My Drum and no wonder it's changed it that way because it's saying okay attack time is you know two was you know say seven milliseconds very very short but that seven milliseconds that's that transient right so that's why that transient there is still very loud and then the body is being tucked it's because you have seven milliseconds which the transient can go through the compressor and basically it's just compressing everything after seven milliseconds so that's why the kick looks like that now does that kick look that great not really it looks like it's a very thick transientt kick I would argue that this kick looks much more balanced and you know the transient is kind of the peak and then the body kind of feels the same and then it kind of tails off you know I'd say that looks like a a good looking Kick Drum so you know maybe a kick like this and probably most of the samples that you're downloading from splice or from wherever you're getting your samples from are already compressed the sound designer that made the samples already compressed them and they're probably pretty balanced okay well let's let's just take a look at this one here okay so this kick is is is not as as great it's not it you know there's some maybe some some issues with it and we can look it kind of looks like an eyeball here and the body is much much louder than the transient and it's going to kind of sound like that it's not going to have as much punch because the initial hit of the kick isn't as loud as you know the body of it okay so this is probably an area where we could use a compressor right and how we do this right we're going to balance this out so same way we're going to let the attack time be a little bit longer and then we're just going to kind of compress the tail and let's take see if we can do that so we're just going to bring the threshold down have a longer attack and even wow look at that that kick is starting to look much more balanced and then at the end you know so now obviously that kick is much louder than this kick because we've turned the volume down that's all we're doing when we're compressing we're just turning the volume down and now I can turn the output back up and now we have kind of a much more balanced transient full kick than what we had before [Music] voila you know that's that's that is some Kick Drum Basics with a compressor okay let's let's look at the inverse now so we this is a kick here that maybe the transient is a bit too or too hard too harsh too loud right so maybe we'll add another compressor here and in this case we want a very very short attack time probably a pretty short release time because all we're trying to compress here is just this initial bit so then it'll be more balanced with the rest of the kick drum so I'm just trying to turn that little blue part down is all I'm going to try and do so I'm going to bring the threshold down as I bring it down oh look it's not really working it's kind of just you know that first initial hit is still kind of going through why is that and that's because computers are only so fast right Ableton is just sort of reading this information I could be routing this my voice and it would be doing this all in live time right in in real time but uh so because computers can only read information so fast we need to actually give it this little look ahead thing and what it does is it says okay I'm gonna I'm gonna skip ahead in the digital information and I'm going to look ahead 10 milliseconds just so I can preemptively apply the compression so that I can catch that initial transient so if I turn that look ahead to 10 milliseconds basically it's going to start looking to apply the compression a little earlier and look now you know now we're starting to see a much more balanced signal you know we don't have that crazy transient Spike that we had before maybe we'll apply a little bit more compression that way and then we can turn it back up at the end and now we have a lot a much stronger low end than we did before we're really pulling out that sub we've really pulled out the sub and kind of balanced that kick drum a lot better um so you know that is probably those are the reasons why you would compress a Kick Drum and for the most part though you don't really need to you know I I think you guys should be looking at the kicks that you have taking a listen and realizing that most of it can kind of come from eq'ing and sculpting it that way and then after you've done some EQ maybe just take a look at it to grab this mini meters Plug-In or just look at the waveform of it and say okay is my transient much louder than my body of my kick or is my transient much quieter than the body given my kick and if so maybe you might crack out a compressor to apply it that way if not just leave it it's great delete those compressors stop confusing yourself stop adding on plugins and effects and stuff that you don't need that's it all right uh I hope you guys enjoyed this tutorial and you learned Lots uh be sure to subscribe up here or watch some other videos up here or if you want to book some private lessons uh the description is in the bottom I do one-on-one Ableton lessons load them up uh also check out some of my music or buy the high octane Tech house drum kit it's all in the description uh I'm Cloverdale I hope you guys learned Lots I'll be back next week okay peace bye

Channel: Cloverdale's Studio

Views: 11,104

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Id: g7tLy_SB7CA

Length: 7min 35sec (455 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 15 2022