THE PERFECT KICK DRUM

A good drum track starts with the bass drum – find out here how to make sure yours kicks ass

The kick drum, or bass drum, is the powerhouse behind the music. In a club, it’s the kick that’s nailing the four to the floor, and at a rock gig it’s the kick that’s making your chest compress.

The kick started life as a hollow log being whacked by one of Dave Grohl’s ancestors about 60,000 years ago and evolved via marching bands to its current status as the logo-bearing centerpiece of the modern drum kit. Now, of course, it also exists as a sequence of zeros and ones, filed away in your sample collection.

The kick drum is all about low frequencies. It has mids and highs, but its full weight can be felt from 150Hz all the way down to 45Hz, where your speaker cones (and possibly you if it’s too loud) will start farting uncontrollably. This ‘bottom end’ is a wild beast – it’s the hardest element to contain within a mix, demands the most power to deliver live through a big sound system, and is the area in which most rooms will misbehave when monitoring or performing.

The spice of life Of course, despite our snappy title, there’s no such thing as the ‘perfect’ kick drum – a subby 808 from a minimalist electro-house anthem won’t work in a metal track. We have the basic acoustic kicks that the drummer plays using his foot and a pedal. We also have electronically synthesised kicks like those of the classic Roland TR-808 and 909. Then we have amazing hybrid kicks sampled from acoustic kits, machines, and records then blended and resampled into infinite variations on the bass drum theme. Context is key, as anyone who’s trawled through 300 kick drum samples and still not found the right one will know. So how do you control and perfect all these different sounds?