In this Ableton Tutorial we take a look at a rack designed for kick layering drums and the theory behind it’s creation.
Kick drums can be split into three main parts, the initial ‘clicky’ transient that sits above 1khz, the ‘punchy’ body of the sound that sits between 100hz and 1k and the longer, ‘deep’ tail that sits in the sub region below 100hz. There are two methods for layering kicks, the first involves using filters to isolate the required frequencies of various kick drum samples before stacking, tuning and EQ’ing them to make them sit together as one sound. The second method centres around slicing the samples at zero crossing points in a sample editor so they can be pieced together to create a unique kick drum, again EQ and tuning will be used to complete this part of the process.
The next stage is to put the finished kick through a set of processors to help each layer gel into one coherent sound. Effects such as Ableton Live’s Saturator device can be used to add colour to the kick and an overall EQ and Compressor can be used to shape the final sample.
In this Ableton Tutorial we use a bespoke rack that offers quick control over filtering, tuning, phasing and amplitude envelopes to allow users a quick way to try out different combinations of samples when layering kick drums.
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This Ableton Kick Layering Tutorial is suitable for all varieties of EDM including deep house, tech house, progressive house, electro house, techno, minimal and trance.
