how does one "reinforce" the kick with a sine wave?

ive heard of people doing this to make the kick more present in the mix. i dont really understand how to do it though, im mainly looking to create daft punk style kicks in the way they cut through the mix. ive been doing some sidechain compressing with a 909, but i want it even phatter! is this sine wave reinforcing technique relative to my interests?

one way to do this is to use a sine tone with a gate on it, sidechained to the track with your kick. you could also just sample a sine tone, adjust its envelope and put it wherever you want. remember to tune the sine to your song. what you get is a nice clean boost in the bass since there are no other harmonics.

  posdit said:

remember to tune the sine to your song.

Sorry, I may sound a bit stupid here, but do you mean matching the tune of your sine wave with the scale of your track? So choosing a note for the sine wave that fits your scale?

you could do that, or you could change the pitch of the sine as the track goes along. if you are using a very short envelope this would matter less, you might be more concerned about the timber of kick you are creating rather than having it harmonize with the song. something to consider anyway.

the pitch of the sine is something im not sure about either. does a kick even have a pitch or is it just noise kind of like some percussion instruments are? and kicks usually arent changing in pitch during a song anyway, so why should the sine?

  posdit said:

you could also just sample a sine tone, adjust its envelope and put it wherever you want.

This - and of course sidechain the hell out of it.

sidechain it how? from what? or whatever you know what i mean

Instead of doing this, maybe a use a kick sample that doesn't suck? I mean, I don't understand the point unless the sine wav is going through a different effects chain or has a separate purpose from percussion. Otherwise the sine wave is immediately being mixed into sound of the kick meaning the sample sucked to begin with. In the art of sample and percussion sound creation, I think this is a valid question, but in the art of track production, it sounds like a workaround for bad source material.

just because you want to add more bass to a sound in this way, doesn't mean that the original sound sucks at all. why would it? it just adds a pure bass tone. i don't understand why you would do this only if the sound quality was bad. people actually use the gated technique quite a bit on live recorded acoustic kits.

  ET said:

sidechain it how? from what? or whatever you know what i mean

use the original kick sound to open the gate that is on the sine. that way they play at the same time

  posdit said:

just because you want to add more bass to a sound in this way, doesn't mean that the original sound sucks at all. why would it? it just adds a pure bass tone. i don't understand why you would do this only if the sound quality was bad. people actually use the gated technique quite a bit on live recorded acoustic kits.

Yep. The sine wave just adds an extra punch to the bass. It's a great technique, especially for hiphop.

I'm not saying its a bad technique in terms of creating a kick drum sound, I'm just saying this lies more in the realm of sample creation than in production techniques. If this kick drum sound is so much superior to the sample you are using on its own, then why wasn't the sample created like that in the first place? Many times, I'm sure this is the case that the sample was created with sinewave reinforcement beforehand. So yeah, if you are creating your own drum sounds, cool, good, thats what you should do, but I would argue that a lot of drum sounds are already created to sound fat and reinforced and that this idea doesn't apply to all kick drum sounds, why would it? It just doesn't seem like a general technique that you should use on all your kick drums in order to create phat electronic music. In the specific case of a raw 909 kick, it may be common to use layering, but for the case of any kick drum sound, this advice just sounds like nonsense, its totally dependent on the kick sound itself and if you like the actual sound it produces.

Also, I'd like to say that a synthesized kicks are often created from one or more sine waves to begin with.

For some reason my edit didn't show up and it won't let me re-edit the post now. but yeah here is what it said:

EDIT: I also wanted to add that in the case of posdit's idea of pitching it in tune with the song is perfectly valid, however I would classify it less in the category of percussion and more in the category of sub-basslines. Layer sounds in musical ways is always a legit idea. Basically my point is kickdrum + sinewave = new kickdrum, this new kickdrum is still a kickdrum, however you don't need to add more sinewave to it just because it is a kickdrum, therefore it is bad general advice to follow, but perhaps good advice when talking about a specific kickdrum such as a 909...

I think adding a sine wave is most useful when using acoustic drum samples for the most part.

true enough, i wouldn't put it on anything and everything. its just another thing to put into your bag of tricks.

i agree with bubba69 - this is more in the realm of sample creation that a live production technique. ie treat your kick first in soundforge or something with an added sinewave or whatever, then save the augmented sample as a .wav and use that as your kick in FL etc...

sample creation and production should be inextricably linked. you're severely restricting yourself if you have that sort of mindset about it. for example, you can use that sine kick only on certain kicks, giving emphasis. you can side-chain only that sine too to add even more emphasis, distinguishing between a more percussive kick and a punchy one that cuts through the mix. i really don't understand how someone can think layering sounds is a completely different discipline. especially this bubba fella's utter tosh about sourcing a 'phat' kick in the first place. this thread just made me cringe.

i agree, isn't music production just making one huge sample that we call a 'track' these days?

yeah, you could well be right - i'm old fashioned and conservative about things and use mainly hardware now so probably behind on my computer production knowledge. i also have no idea what sidechaining actually is.

i am right. you want a punchy clap so you run CP through some EQ and lay a velocity heavy SD underneath with short decay. maybe you also record this off onto tape and back into the mix for some nice compression? would you count this as 'sample making'?

sidechaining is simply using a sound to trigger compression on another. it's used most heavily in french house where the a long held pad/bass/lead drops in and out on the kick to make a 4-to-the-floor that sounds like BD-NOTE-BD-NOTE-BD-NOTE-BD-NOTE. been using this technique more recently largely because im not very experienced with mastering, so instead of trying too hard to mould sounds into slotting together you can occasionally just squish them out.

  idrn said:

i am right. you want a punchy clap so you run CP through some EQ and lay a velocity heavy SD underneath with short decay. maybe you also record this off onto tape and back into the mix for some nice compression? would you count this as 'sample making'?

alright mate chill out, i'm not arguing with you! what's got you so worked up anyway? you seem unjustifiably angry about this thread....go smoke a joint!

neither was i! sorry if i seem aggro, im really not. i think some unrelated stress is seeping out as i type.

*manhug*

sometimes it helps to add a small notch to your kick if it's not sitting well with the sine, or even roll of any muddy freq's with a gradual slope.

  idrn said:

sample creation and production should be inextricably linked. you're severely restricting yourself if you have that sort of mindset about it. for example, you can use that sine kick only on certain kicks, giving emphasis. you can side-chain only that sine too to add even more emphasis, distinguishing between a more percussive kick and a punchy one that cuts through the mix. i really don't understand how someone can think layering sounds is a completely different discipline. especially this bubba fella's utter tosh about sourcing a 'phat' kick in the first place. this thread just made me cringe.

This man knows.