MsTrisMusic.Com

Yesterday I was mixing a beat in Fl Studio 8, and when I exported the file, I noticed the kicks on the hook were knocking hard. I replayed the beat and I couldn’t figure out what I did to the kicks that made them sound great. I went back to fl Studio and I noticed I had 2 drum patterns going through out the hooks by mistake. This mistake turned out to be a treasure. I tried this again on a new beat and I’m super happy with this technique.

When you load up Fl Studio, add a sampler channel, the default “attack time” setting is slightly delayed. I want my kick attack time to be absolute, and hit as soon as possible. The first thing I do is adjust the attack time on kicks,snares, and all instruments I want to remove the attack delay.

In the image above, you can see the peaks are slightly to the right. I adjust the “ATT” by turning the knob all the left.

I don’t always start beats with the drum pattern, but for todays tutorial I will.
I lay a basic hip hop pattern without effects.

I add an additional kick so I can “layer” the sound. I add a Fl limiter, and a peak controller to the master channel in the mixer. I choose the preset “for drums” on the limiter, and left the peak meter at default.
Next I add a Fl compressor, a soft clipper, and a peak contoller to both kick channels and begin to adjust the kick using the parametric eq on each kick mixer channel.

At this point the kick is sounding much better,but still needs some adjusting. I can hear the difference on the monitors.(I also added a clap for some extra snare/clap action)

Next I add some piano chords and bassline. The bass and the kick share the same frequency range. Before I make the rest of the beat, I make sure the kick and bass aren’t canceling out one another. I adjust the parametric eq on the bass by cutting some of the lower frequency and boosting some of the mids.

I listen to make sure my kick and bassline can both be heard clearly.

Now I would continue to make the entire beat. After the beat is completed, I copy only the kick from pattern 1 , and paste to a new pattern 4.

I go to the playlist and add in my second kick pattern. Now I have actually ” Layered” my kicks a third time and left all other instruments the same.

Layered Kick Snippet:

From this point I would export each track into my editing software for further tweaking.

Many top producers layer kicks in order to achieve the knock factor. You won’t want to over do this procedure or the kicks become muddy. In this tutorial, I started with two kicks. After my beat was completed I copied one entire kick track and placed it into the song for a total of 3 kicks being played simultaneously. As always this is not set in stone, but it gives you an idea of how to achieve this easily in Fl Studio 8.

Happy Beat Making To All…

Pz Til Later…