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 centrepiece of the modern drum kit. Now, of course, it also exists as a sequence of zeros and ones, filed away in your sample collection.
“Getting the perfect kick drum sound begins with balancing sub, punch, honk, mid and top”
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.