Audio Recording Tips

Ever wonder how to mix kick drums? If you are thinking on how to approach kick drums in the mix, you should mostly be considering how to set the drum EQ settings and compression.

As a start, the kick drum equalizer settings and compression depends on the song genre. For example, your kick drum sounds different in rock versus jazz or country music. It is because of the way it has been approached in the audio mixing process.

This short guide emphasis the mixing of kick drum with strong perspective to modern pop and rock music. The suggestions below does not apply to country or jazz music, however you are free to experiment the settings in order to come up with the sound you need.

Credits: http://www.flickr.com/photos/chidorian/

Suggested EQ Settings for Kick drums (targeting rock and pop music genre)

You need to have a parametric equalizer in order to use the following settings below:

Cut -9dB Q=3 Center Frequency=400Hz
Boost 9dB Q=1.4 Center Frequency= 100Hz
Cut -6dB Q=1.4 Center Frequency = 50Hz Read the rest of this entry »

OK, say you are using drum samples to power your drum tracks of your produced song. First, let us define what is a drum sample? Drum sample is complete clip of a certain piece of drum parts. In most cases, a drum track can be define by the kick, snare and hi hats for most of the time, so we can say that there are 3 basic drum samples needed to define one complete drum loop.

Using Adobe Audition multi-track software, you can assigned each of those drum samples its own specific track so that you can mix them better. For example, assign track 1 to kick drum sample, track 2 to snare drum sample and finally track 3 for hi hat drum sample.

So when the time comes for mixing, it will be very easy to apply EQ/Compression/effects to each of those drum sample tracks.

What if you asked the question, how do I create drum samples??? There are a lot of ways to do this and it depends on your drum sequencer/software. I am using hot stepper and you can read the procedure here for creating drum samples: Read the rest of this entry »

Wanna produce hip hop tracks? I am not a hip hop producer but I can teach you the basics on how to create hip hop beats using hot stepper and Adobe Audition. First, download Hot Stepper here.

Second, launch the program and it should look like below:

Third, experiment with your favorite drum loops right directly in the hot stepper; you can use the mouse to create your own nice musical arrangements.

In my own example:

Fourth, do not forget to save your file. Click File – Save as –, then type the file name; in my example I name it as mylooops.hpa. The file extension should be there: *.hpa Read the rest of this entry »