I have another drum related mixing tip for you fine people today. Getting the kick drum to sound perfect in a mix involves capturing the right blend of attack (beater) and resonance (low end). If your kick drum is missing in the low end department, then today’s video is for you!
Artificial Low End To The Rescue
Sometimes EQ is not enough. If there just wasn’t enough low frequency information captured at the source, then there’s nothing helpful for you to boost. Enter a signal generator. You can simple use an artificial sine wave at a low frequency to blend in with your kick drum hits and you’ll have instant low end. Gotta love it! Take 5 minutes to check it out people.
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My name is Graham Cochrane and I'm the founder of The Recording Revolution, one of the world's most loved audio recording and mixing blogs with over 200,000 readers each month. 
Favorite tip so far. Thanks for doing this Graham!
My pleasure Justin!
Love this tip.
Never herd of a tip like this ever, all 9 so far are great tips.
For all you that use logic and haven’t figured it out, here’s how:
Create an aux track,
Add a test oscillator (under utility) and create a low frequency,
Like in protools use a noise gate after the signal generator,
Side-chain the noise gate to the kick drum channel (no sends needed),
Tweak the settings a bit and have fun.
Thanks for giving that info for the Logic users out there!
Oh wow, this is a really cool tip! but if your gate plugin doesn’t have a key function, is there anything I can do?
wow… that is really cool.. never seen that done before.. Graham.. thanx for all the tips so far, I have learned a lot… on this latest one, I am gonna have to figure out how to do it in Sonar, but it will be worth it.
Great tip, Graham. I haven’t done this in a long time…nice reminder!
If there’s no low end on the track, you can do all the 60 Hz EQ boosts in the world, and it won’t help. Great tip.
thanks for all the videos man! wicked stuff.
it’s worth noting pushing the dynamic range (on the gate) all the way up to get rid of the constant hum 🙂
please, how can i use this tip in ableton ??
Nice tip!
One thing I’d say on this is that you should also tune that signal generator to fit with the track. Even though it is to be used as a sub bass effect it can still cause tuning issues with the bass and kick already in the track. So listen by ear and tweak the frequency until it you feels it “sits” properly in the mix.
Just my 2 cents…
how do you do this on reaper? 🙁 i got to the part where i put in a tone generator or something with 60hz, i dont get the part where i put the trigger with the gate. sorry im a noob 🙁
Okay, I’ve got it figured out. CTRL+T to make a new track. Insert JS Tone Generator in it, and REAComp. I recommend REAcomp because it’s light on CPU.
You’ll need to fiddle with your controls, but here’s my settings for REAcomp and JS Tone Generator.
Tonegenerator – wet mix -2.0
dry mix -49.0
bass frequency 60 hz
note C
shape sine
REAgate
preopen 1 ms
attack 8ms
hold 13 ms
release 37ms
director input: auxiliary LR
setting up your gate trigger
click the black i/o box on your bass drum or drum track and drag it to the I/o box of your trigger track. A window will appear, and go to your track inputs. They’re set by default to 1/2. Change that to 3/4.
Once you set the REAgate to Aux 3/4, the bass drum on your track will trigger the sine. You have to play around with your settings to determine what’s best for the song, not the style.
Another great trick to do for full drum sounds is the free plug in Classic Autofilter…. I set up a high pass so that the bass drum is basically a click, and another patch for lows. I have a dedicated track for just a high pass filter and another for low pass filter. Finally, I have a track just for drum reverb. I was able to duplicate a number of famous drum tones with this setup. Remember, let the song dictate your drum mix and sounds.
Amazing tip. But like Martin, i experienced a problem with Reaper…
Kinda having the same problem with reaper… i’ll give it a go and see if I can figure it out…
I just discovered these 5-minute tips and they’re of such a great value to me! I’m recording and mixing for less than a year and I’m making so much progress thanks to the Recording Revolution!
Awesome!
Wow! One of the best tricks I’ve seen and easy to do.
Absolute Genus I never would have thought to do this in a million years and I can’t find anyone who teaches this stuff let alone in such an easy straight forward clear way like you. I hope to one day reach your level of mixing skills with hard work. Your a true inspiration. By the way did you ever think of releasing these vids to a DVD it would be easier to watch and if totally buy it or so you have a course or lessons to buy that show just about all this?
Hi Terry – you can check out my mixing and recording courses here: https://www.recordingrevolution.com/products/