anonymous
15 May 2004
On the sevendust album "animosity". does anyone have any idea how they got that kick sound, its HUGE and full of very nice chunky bottom. i'm takin a guess at this but sounds like they had a speaker woofer or something, i have no idea though, just wondering if anyone would happen to KNOW what they used on it. or have some ideas on how to get somethig simalar. thanks
Comments
Hey Shaun, you got a number of things going on in that album. To
Hey Shaun, you got a number of things going on in that album. To start off with is the often underestimated impact of tightness. This album is recorded cleanly, heavily quantized and most likely involes the use of samples.
To get you closer to that sound I suggest you experiment with the following techniques. This presumes that you are mixing "in the box" ie. inside a DAW. the same techniques will work similarly in the analog world
First quantize. you must have "metronomic" time you can do this via "beat detective" on protools, there may be a similar application on other DAWs, if you dont have such a critter you have your work cut out for you slicing up the drum tracks and "nudging" them into time.
Secondly you will have to experiment with lots of eq to get the kick sounding tight narrower cuts and boosts toward the low end may help depending on the source material.
Third, multiple compression schemes. To do this you will need to have duplicate tracks of the kick (two or more...). one may be lightly compressed if at all. the other will be heavily compressed this. this type of compression scheme allowes the natural sound of the uncompressed (lightly compressed) kick to mix with the fatter (albeit duller) compressed kick.
Whats critical here is time alignment. If your DAW doesnt have automatic delay compensation for the delay induced by plugins, you must nudge the tracks to make sure they are playing at the same time.
Im sure you may know this but this last is the "dirty little secret" of the professionals is used on most heavy music production. Sampling. This involves using a kick sample in conjunction with the "live"kick that was recorded in order to tighten up the sound.
This can be a sample from a library or my favorite is to sample the kick alone before any real tracking begins. This allows me to have the same kick without any of the cymbals and snare ringing in the background.
There is sooooo much more to this than I just covered, but I hope this gets you started in the right direction. If you have any questions just post.
- Sean