Why Most Kicks Don't Work

thank you

Wouldn't you just turn the decay knob on the 808 anti-clockwise to shorten the decay time before recording it? Seems like it would save a lot of hassle down the track.

Thanks for taking time out from defending Ukraine to share mastering tips!

When I make beats before mastering, I started shorten the kick and even cutting of transit. I noticed when I mastering the beat, the beat sounded more fuller. Before I used that kind of kicks, just to get that umpf. But when I went to a real studio I was like you: wth I've done?

Ngl, I saw the thumbnail and thought this was a shoe care video

Life changing stuff! Thank youuuuuuu🎶😎🎶😎💚🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶

how did you change the clip envelope straight from arrangementview? that roll of, you just dragged a fade out with a click

I prefer to get my kicks from a drum machine or drum machine plug ins. Sample packs are better for extra mid or high percussive or unique sounds. One also has to consider with sample packs is that most of those sounds might be compressed which ads more issues to the mix later on. 👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼

if people would reference their music on subs they might understand why this matters so much. also people need to work on grasping the nature of transients in music.

Thanks Karl! Tell Ricky I said hi will ya.

I have ADHD and I never knew that all I needed to make me watch a tutorial all the way through was a handsome muscular man to tell me what I need to know. So thankyou Alfonso! On a serious note, great tutorial!

Very well done video! Thank you!

'Just cheeeeeeecin' in on yaaaaaaaaaaa'
Nice try Bill..

GAME CHANGER

Thanks for the tips (and super clear demonstration/theory)

One of the best tutorial that i've ever seen 🏆.
Most beatmaker, include myself, given me the tought that most people try to go to college before they go to elementary school! Crazy. We always try to paid the best "drums kit", applying eq, comp or clippers, pending hours before doing the super-simple but most important thing to do, like cutting the tail of our sample drums for resolve the problem.
I've been trying to find the errors in my mixes for years, i'm talking about the distorsion on the master but they weren't in the mixes 🤦‍♂man...

Thanks a lot Alfonso Muchacho for the gems... the real ones!

It's funny how, eventually, most producers figure out that short kicks are the ones that work (of course, there are times when a longer, more tonal kick is appropriate, but not often). This also reveals that "tune your kicks!" is, generally speaking, bad--even futile--advice. Thanks for a good video. If you search for it, you can find deadmau5 explaining how he learned this lesson. Spoiler: Steve Duda told him the kick on his song--the one he was playing in a club--sucked and why. 😏

Great video, thank you for posting this. This will change the way I build my drums in all my tracks going forward.

don't be shy.. upload the kick

good video man

Teeyeeew

i don't completely agree with the kick+hihat thing being bad. i mean sure, i can hear how that kick is just sampled from another record, that has multiple percussion sounds on top of each other. but it's still a good sound in itself and for production. cause you do wanna have some noise in the highend that better not be just the harmonics of a saturated 808 or a white noise generator, as that sounds way too generic most of the time. so using hihats is a way to do that. by making them shorter than a real hihat it becomes more of a kick transient. i would even say that this kick here could have had it shortened even more. so rather than cutting it off with a filter completely i'd use a multiband expander with lookahead to make the transient much more snappy compared to the body and tail of the kick, so that it just pokes through the mix without getting in the way. that will make it work better with the rest of the percussion that you add on top. phasing issues are irrelevant, because you can change the phase of everything as you compose sounds. and if a part appears that requires a softer kick you can just automate an eq into it that either filters out the bass or the highend temporarily, or directly work with layered kicks and turn on or off some of them for a while.

but i agree with all the things you said before. it's kinda annoying that samplepacks and presets always pretend to be super big, when you don't really ever need that irl

No wonder I couldn't ever utilize most of the kicks I ever got. I suspected something like this was always the issue, but I didn't have the wherewithal to make the necessary changes.

I’m gonna disagree with this one. While he’s absolutely right that short kicks will work for most dance genres, you’re gonna really miss that body. Sure, maybe your electro track will sound banging with a tiny kick and a lot of sidechain, but actually a lot of the time in techno you want that long kick to bleed over into the next kick, as long as it retriggers. You can high pass your melodic content to allow the kick to take up all the space in the low end. It actually sounds really cool and boomy like that. Short kicks are actually a bit dead in techno I’m not gonna lie.

Right on bro 💯 🙏 💪

The MOMENT i saw the Ozone 5 plugin I subbed! 😋 I feel like that says a lot and for a number of reasons

Love child of Karl Pilkington & Andrew Tate

Flashcore is my jam, and I keep tryin' to tell people exactly what you're sayin'. When they tell me "your kicks can be in c3 or c4 so what do you know?" I can now direct them here. Thanks for that, it'll really help me curtail some long arguments in the future.

Very informative video. Thanks man.

Hey Muchacho,
Really get what you're trying to say, but that is just a prog house thing: to keep breathing space for arpegiated basslines, big reverbs, pads, etc -
The result is clean mixes, few cool psychoacoustic fx but overall nothing original.
IMHO it makes the whole genre kind of boring and generic. Look at Daft Punk, Prodigy, Chemical Brothers or other artists who actually have a musical identity because they dare tear down their sounds :)

“There’s not track in the world where that kick would work” followed literally by an example (hip hop) where it would work… ok bro

Thanks, Alfonso. I Been Choosing Kicks Based on How They Sound on Their Own--blowing my Mixes.
I'm going to Try This--and, Hear the Difference.

Thank You, Alfonso.
Make It a Great Day.

Smile on~

Matt
Detroit

I feel like this is an important tip that is overlooked quite often. Thanks for pointing this out!

context is very important. source better samples.

Thanks a lot!

Could you also make a video about mixing kick and bass from your point of view?

sorry but the idea that you have to take stuff out of a kick before even knowing which track you'd use it for is a bit misleading... If you sidechain bass and kick and/or you want to have snappy/short basslines and big kicks , there'd be nothuing wrong with having a subby or wide or whatever kick, it all depends on what other sounds you'd want it to mix with... "cutting the low end off" would turn your kick into a perc like sound, a kickdrum is known for subby vibes, that's why 808 basslines are derrived from extended kicks with a lot of sub-tail... whole genres of music are based on bassy kickdrums... so yeah technically you have some good info in here but you're viewpoint is a bit biased towards certain genres or styles of music ;-)

Thanks for teaching me about kicks, buff Karl Pilkington

good explained!

Yeah in like 90% of all the songs you hear the kick is like too BOOMY OR too much low end or too big or too much punch lol

It would be great to get more of these tips. Thank you!

I dunno if you get this comment a lot but you have the best name and I spit out my drink when I hit play on this video

10/10 for the video I found this late at night and then spent hours yesterday trying to find this video. I have now saved the link to my inbox 😊

What I also don't like about many kicks from sample libraries is that they seem to be layered in a unfavorable way – cancelling out parts of low energy and/or lost cohesion between each attack portion so it sounds almost like a flam which is something I would want to avoid for a driving 4-on-the-floor beat.