Yesterday we took a look at filtering and layering to transform a kick drum sample. Today we’ll fill in the midrange a bit and look at a couple of other pieces of technique.
I’ve duplicated the chain again, so now the Rack looks like this:
The purpose of this chain is to add midrange punch to the kick, so I’ve used the filter yet again, and transposed the sample up to bring out some different frequencies:
The High Pass filter leaves too much high frequency content in the sample, but that’s OK – that gets dealt with in the next step. To make this layer more aggressive, I’ve added an overdrive to this chain:
Notice that I’ve got the Tone turned down pretty low and am using the band pass fairly aggressively to control the high frequencies.
Now the volume envelope of the mids layer needs to get shaped, or the whole thing gets too messy sounding.
Like the high frequency click I created yesterday, there’s a nice fast decay time, but notice that for this layer, I’ve increased the Attack to about 6ms. (This means that the mids layer will fade in over 6ms). When you’re working with multiple layers, the attack of a sound can start to sound sloppy. So, in this case, I’m letting the high frequency layer stand out as the transient attack, by softening the attack of the mids layer so it doesn’t compete.
With today’s tweaks I’ve gone from a kick that sounds like this:
To one that sounds like this:
