My Little Kick Drum trick - is this crazy????

[wishfulsinful909]

Here I am mixing in the basement by myself at 2 in the morning wondering why the kick drum doesn't move air the way I envision it to, even after pretty careful EQing...I wanted the natural acoustic kick drum to boom like a 909 kick drum...

 

And lo and behold, all I did was add a bit of reverb to the kick's track, and it did the trick!

 

Is this a typical trick of the trade?

All I knows is that it sounds good.

 

What are some other ways to get that "air moving" kind of effect?

 

Danke!

[Phil O'Keefe]

I'm not a big fan of reverb directly applied to a close mic'ed kick drum, but getting some from the room mics and overheads is fine by me. If you want to experiment a bit more, try a little bit of an early reflection effects algorithm instead of the reverb and see if you prefer that.

[UstadKhanAli]

Obviously, what matters ultimately is whether you are happy with the sound or not.

 

It's not a common thing to do, although some people do it upon occasion (Sting is one example). You have to be careful that it doesn't add too much mud or mucky up your groove or the bass/kick drum sound.

 

Like Phil, I typically don't add reverb to the close-miced kick. However, for some really spacious songs with that certain aesthetic (things like Sigur Ros "( )", for instance), I will add reverb to either the room track or the outside kick drum mic. But we have one song where the kick felt really "disembodied" from the rest of the kit somehow (the rest of the songs were fine, and it was just this one song - odd how that happens sometimes), and I sunk it back into the mix by adding a short reverb. This really helped and the drummer was much happier.

 

 

[where02190]

I too usually don't add reverb to the close mic, I run the overheads in stereo through a stereo room(preserving the imaging). However when I do put reverb on a kick close mic, I love the sound of a PCM60 hit hard.

[Kiwiburger]

Yeah - I love that PCM60 grainy sort of sound. It's more like a gritty early reflection sort of sound. The closest i've found in plugins is the PSP Easyverb ambiance setting.

 

Although I re-visited FreeverbToo recently, and found that has a gritty sort of texture that is great for drums. The gating feature is also excellent for drums.

 

A cool trick for reverb on a kick drum is to use an Inverse algorithmn. Normally you need expensive hardware for this, but www.artsacoustic.com have a great plugin that does inverse reverb. You can make a reverb tail that actually ramps up over time before it decays. Boomf ... kkkKKK

[Eric Dahlberg]

It might help if the reverb is mono, panned center, with the mids & highs shelved off. At least that way the reverb would act more to extend the decay rather than to create space around the kick. I've never done this before but it seems like a nice trick to try.

[Kiwiburger]

+1 Same if applying reverb to a bass.