Brian’s Bedroom

The bass drum, which many know as the kick drum, plays an important role in music. It stirs emotion in the audience, making them want to dance as it thumps through their bodies. This is of course, what it’s supposed to do but if the kick drum is mixed incorrectly, it will leave the audience feeling pretty bored – no matter how good a song might actually be. Don’t worry though, because that’s why I wrote this post. To help you learn from my bad experiences…

Okay, so it’s called the bass drum… So, if you’re anything like the younger version of myself, you’ll be thinking that the more bass the better, right? Well, I’m afraid not, but I won’t just tell you, I’ll show you. Below is a picture of the EQ settings for a kick drum. It is evident from the picture that only the bass frequencies (100 – 200 Hz) have been boosted.

EQ for a kick drum, where only the bass has been boosted. Click on Image for full size.

One would think this would make your kick drum more lively. Don’t get me wrong, it does give it some thump, however, when added to the rest of the instruments, the bass gets lost and the beat with it. Below is a link to an .MP3 extract from a song where the above EQ has been used.

kick-with-only-bass.mp3 (588 KB)

Okay, you might be thinking that it didn’t sound too bad, but if you play around with some of the higher frequencies (3000 – 5000 Hz) you will find what many call “the Click”. The Click is the sound of the kick pedal’s beater hitting the drum head, and it gives the bass note more definition. The picture below shows the EQ setting used to get the Click.

EQ for a kick drum where both the low (100-200 Hz) and high (3 - 5 kHz) frequencies have been boosted. Click on image for full size.

When this EQ is used, the bass drum cuts through the mix in a good way and if you look carefully, you might even see your audience clapping their hands. You can hear what this EQ sounds like by listening to the .MP3 extract below:

kick-with-3kHz-boost.mp3 (588 KB)

If you have trouble believing my theory, you can go listen to almost any well-produced song out there and you’ll hear the famous Click cutting through the mix. Sometimes it’s really quite emphasized but hardly ever in a bad way. In recent productions they even overlay each bass note with a MIDI kick drum sound to improve the fullness and to get more Click… so get creative and go crazy!

Why do guitarists put drumsticks on the dash of their cars?

… So they can park in the Handicapped spot!

Lame, I know – but I kind of started a theme here with these drum beat templates and I didn’t want to let you down. So seriously now… I’ve been working on another beat template which uses Jazz and Blues rhythms. But I tried something new this time – I noticed that in my beat templates a lot of the beats had similar characteristics and it made things really bulky. So with this template, I’ve made patterns for both the right and left hands as well as for the right foot (i.e. the kick drum). This means that you are able to make many different beats by just playing any R-hand, L-hand and R-foot combination simultaneously. Follow the links below to download these new templates:

The actual template: BriansBeatsJAZZ.h2song.zip (4 kB)

Note: These songs require the YamahaVintageKit available for download from here.

A MP3 sample of the template: JAZZBeatsExample.mp3 (556 kB)

I thought that would be pretty cool, but check it out and let me know what you think by leaving a comment… if you prefer the older style of beat templates, I would be happy to make it like that again.

Other posts you might find interesting:

Rock Hydrogen Drum Beat Templates
Funk Hydrogen Drum Beat Templates
Pimp my Hydrogen Beats
Making a Roll Sound Realistic
Sunday Bloody Sunday Hydrogen Beat

Sorry I haven’t been writing posts in a while, things have been really hectic on my side. However, my guilty conscience has got the better of me so here I am.

For my wedding in December, my wife decided to walk down the aisle to the song Everything by Lifehouse. If you know the song, you will realise that it takes about 2 minutes to get to the chorus which is the part we wanted to hear. With the chapel being a total of 10 meters long, it means my poor wife would have to walk at a snail’s pace of 5 meters a minute (or 83.3 mm a second) whilst all of the audience die of boredom…Sorry, I’m an Engineer :-).

My point is that the song was too long and I had to shorten it. So I dusted off my computer and started my creation. First I had to get the song off the CD. I did this by inserting the CD with Ubuntu Studio running and up popped a cool little program known as Sound Juicer. All you have to do is tick the tracks you want and click on extract. But wait, before you click extract, quickly go to preferences and change the output format to: CD Quality, Lossless (FLAC Audio). This means that when your song is extracted it will be of the highest quality possible.

Cool, so we have the song extracted, now we can start editing it. Start up Audacity and open the .flac file you just extracted from the CD. Basically what I wanted to do was shift the second verse so that it started after the second bar of the intro (As seen in the figure below).

The red arrow shows how the second verse will be moved to just after the intro.

This is quite easy to do. Simply select the area between the two points you want to join and press the Delete button on your keyboard. I recommend that you zoom in to make the selection of the area more precise. Note that you should try to split the song between notes, that way you won’t hearing a clipping sound when the switch is played backed.

If you do hear a clipping sound at the point where the two pieces meet – don’t panic, there is a solution. You can zoom in very close to the area where the two points meet and correct the wave by drawing it in. Let me show you… In the figure below you can see that I have zoomed in to the waveform so closely that I can see the step where the two parts of the song meet badly. This step is what causes the clipping sound.

When zoomed in closely, the connection between the two waves is clearly mismatched. This step causes a clipping sound when the song is played back.

Using the draw tool, which is shown in the picture below, I can simply draw over the step and make it smoother until the clipping noise goes away.

The draw tool

Below is a picture showing where the one channel has been corrected with the draw tool. Don’t forget to correct both channels if you’re working with stereo.

The wave on the top has been smoothed out with the draw tool to stop the clipping noise.

Below I have attached a short .mp3 clip of the edited intro just to show you how it sounds. Take a listen and try to find the point at which the two parts meet.

EverythingEditedIntro.mp3

Other posts you might find interesting:

How to Capture Audio from Video
Beginner’s Guide to Ubuntu Audio Recording
My Favourite Linux Audio Effects
Hydrogen Drum Machine Basics
Microphone Review: Shure’s SM57

Hey guys,

We are currently transporting our blog from Blogger to WordPress. This means that some of these posts will have incorrect links. We are in process of correcting this, so please bear with us. You can either browse this site with a bit of patience or check out the original site in Blogger: http://briansbedroom.blogspot.com/

Thanks,

The Brian’s Bedroom Team

Hey guys,

Sorry I have been neglecting Brian’s Bedroom for a while. There is, however, a valid reason for this: I’m getting married in a week and a half. So, unfortunately there will be no posts until next year. But don’t fear, I have a lot of things planned for next year which should improve the whole Brian’s Bedroom experience.

If you’re looking for stuff to read though, try some of my older posts like:

• Sound mixing tips
• Recording Articles
• Mastering Articles
• Ardour Articles
• Hydrogen Articles
• Room Acoustics Articles

Have a fantastic Christmas and see you next year,
Brian