Hi, Community.
I have a confession - my kick drums are boring. Thump, thump, thump. Boring. Falling asleep and losing the will to live even thinking about them.
I’ve tried automating the tail length, fiddling with the sub, adding the usual FX but things still sound dull and lacking movement.
Genre in question is EDM/Melodic trance and I was wondering if anyone can suggest some interesting processing tips or tricks to add some spice?
Thanks, as always. Carl.
go find some vsti’s that can synthersize kickdrums and use them/tweak them like you like
good luck
Lately with kicks I have been building them in VCV Rack using the MIndmeld Shapemaster Pro module for shaping - Befacto EvenVCO as the sound source - Then the Monsuta filter for nasty filtering.
Got a few stock presets for Serum. Probably a good starting point.
Thanks. C.
Kick oscillators and generators (such as the ones in Voltage and VCV / Cardinal) can be cool, but honestly you can just synthesize your own extremely easily with something like Vital or Serum (and create pretty incredible snares, too, once you master the dark art of percussive envelopes).
You basically just want a short envelope on the pitch and amplitude, along with either a sinewave or something reduced down to close to a sine with a LPF, and the rest is up to taste. Most people are afraid of using distortions and saturations liberally, but they’re your friend – especially if you’re willing to work with multiband routing.
Bonus point: very, very short envelopes on your noise oscillator’s amp will make that killer click sound everyone’s after. No need to layer additional shit, and if you set and forget the pitch somewhere cool or use a different noise source (even random WAV files will work), that will give you an entirely unique flavor.
It’s actually a lot of fun. Most people miss out on it by not diving in, but it’s not that scary 
I should also say not to be afraid of chorus, phasers, flangers, or even comb filters. Sometimes slapping weird and unexpected shit on the kick makes it sound like it’s actually coming from a real place in the world rather than front row and center. Even short-decay reverbs and delays work wonders to make things really interesting, you’ll just know when it gets to be too much 
With drums, I think most of the work is in the envelopes. Not just level and time, but you have to be very precise with the shape of every single stage.
I mostly use samples, so I don’t have a ton of experience with synthesizing drums from scratch. I can say that once you have the right kick, I tend to move other things around it rather than change my kick up throughout the track. I let the kick be the metronome and do interesting things with the snares and hihats. Or let the snare by the metronome and do crazy stuff with the kick. Most listeners are going to need at least one or the other to keep track of things.
Smart!
Compression/ limiter + eq/filter + layering samples+ maybe a scouch of distortion+ if you do add distortion…comb over it with a envelope.
Layer samples or layering your own home baked parts is usually the go to for dance music. My go to is usually a 909/707 top and 808 bottom. The above is the recipe.
Also, as a DJ, I would say a kick pattern in which something like the tail length varies too much is going to be a pain in the a$$ to mix with another track and sound good, potentially.
I don’t know if it is true and haven’t been bothered to do my own research, but I’ve often read that many top notch dance music artists have a baker’s dozen or so kick drums they’ve made and use over and over again–the dancers don’t care and at least for myself, unless the kick drum is wildly different than the typical, I’ve never bought a track to play out because of the kick drum.
Rhythms themselves can be a lot of fun, too. Anything that’ll randomize or roll dice is great. I’m also surprised nobody has mentioned euclidean or odd-metered rhythms yet; those are one hell of a drug. Some sequencers will even split into micro-meter territory for you so you don’t have to microedit quite as hard for interesting rhythms.
Depending on the genre, you can sometimes get away with sample cycling, too. Load up a bunch of different kicks and let them round-robin, or zigzag randomly every time the sampler is triggered. If you don’t have a capable sampler, there’s always follow actions and sample slicing later. Falcon’s slice sampler is basically the lazy person’s breakcore machine.
Also, don’t get me started on ratcheting. You’ll never hear the end of it
Make sure there is no frequency overlap between the sub bass of your kick drum and the bass of your bassline with an eq.
If eqing doesnt do the trick sidechain the subbass frequencies of the kick drum and the subbass frequencies of your bassline.
shit man, damn you trying to turn us on? I have to stand up soon…
uhhhh. hey in the future, please post examples of your boring ass kicks in the OP so we can hear what boring is to you. and maybe make fun of you and be like hey everyone get a load of how yawntastic this cunts kicks are lmao 
what an idiot, what are these pitched down snares jeez
i’m dumb, sorry
How to get a good kick? hmmmm ok welp…
first off you don’t need a lot
do you know how to make one from scratch with an oscillator, some ASDR action and a pitch envelope? doesn’t hurt to try that out. what the fuck is a good kick?
as for FX… KISS (keep it simple, stupid)
EQ
Compression
that’s it, honestly not even those.
raw dog it. why you need fx?
you don’t love your kick for who she is?
kicks are made “not boring” (still no idea what that means) by how they are blended into the song they are placed in.
what kind of kick you want again? what kind of music?
i’im fucking hammered. blame wife
honestly my dude, just steal someone else’s and fool around with it, just try to analyze that slutty cheatin kick, so you can see why you like it. call it a kick cuckold. kick cuck. and really… I mean really… anal. yze. it. bob marley - analyze it.
i’m sure one of these other shitheads gave you a better answer up there.
Excellent advice as always. Thank you.
I’ve just watched a couple of vids on the anatomy of kick drums and I’m on a mission to synthesise my own after reading this thread. Dissecting some Serum and Vital presets for starters then experimenting afterwards. Nothing to lose and much to learn, which is a good thing.
I will dive in and I’m not scared!
I am not a number, I am a free man. #6.
Carl.
This is really important point.
It had never occurred to me that it could be problematic for the DJ. I’m guessing that if the intro/outro to a dance track has a consistent kick tail, then it’s much better than going completely crazy with the production.
Here’s a kick drum to aspire to:
Ahh, the God deadmau5. I remember…
If you like kicks like that one, you might be interested in Punchbox
Yo i have a track where the it starts with a kick
There is definitely some wiggle room to play, but I’ve come across a track or two with weird kicks that made a mix sound a little sloppy.