Kickdrum Attack/transient extraction made simple.... WIN/MAC

[AK]

I was doing something similar for a number of yrs, but just used wavelab 4 (well version 4 at the time)

Asuming I was just creating kicks, Id get 2 samples, as an example, we could say sample 1 was an 808 kick and sample 2 was an acoustic kick with a great attack transient.

Id zoom in on the acoustic kick and highlight the attack portion of it, when it smooths out in the waveform you know you are getting to the body and tail of the sound, so my cut would usually be in the 20ms to 40ms range or thereabouts.

With that copied to the clipboard and the cut made at the zero crossing, Id delete the attack portion from the 808 kick and also at a zero crossing so the joining of the 2 resulted in a natural curve of a kick type waveform.

Sometimes I would increase or decrease the volume of the body to ensure theres balance and cohesion in the final waveform and its easy to obtain a time based manual compression effect on the kick too - which made for some punchy sounds that were better than my other kicks in my library.

Took a bit of getting used to and trial and error to know instantly what would work but once I did that, Id be doing it in no time at all.

Worked on other sounds too, snares and bass to congas. In fact some of the conga sounds came out really punchy when given attacks from marimbas or xylophone samples. Experimentation always yeilds interesting sounds. But I never bothered with hp filtering this or layering that etc, just the attack and body of various sounds. If you use a lot of sampled sounds its def worth experimenting with when you feel like an edit freak mood coming on.

[Phase Ghost]

I generally do things this way (but with a different method). I've been making my own kicks for years and always try to get better.

I made a pretty good kick the other night by doing the following:

Turn the resonance up all the way on my mopho with both oscillators off and adjust the envelopes to my liking. Record.

Then I cut off the beginning and ran the new wave through a pitch envelope where the pitch went high real quick to make a snappy attack and then low passed to taste.

Finally I highpassed a kick I sampled off a record (I think it was off a old Herb Alpert record) and layered them. Came out pretty good.

Just make sure everything under 200-250 is one sound. If your synthesized kick and sampled kick are firing in that range, it's gonna sound like mud. I always run my freq. analyzer to make sure I see a nice smooth roll from 250-50 when the kick fires. Analyze a 909 kick and you'll see what I mean.

[loopdon]

Now that's what i was hoping would happen in this thread...
Two other aaproaches are the use of a transient designer to extract the part of the sample you want to be using. Or a cleverly set compressor can yield pretty similar results. So you end up with just the part of the kick you want.