How to Get a Big Bass Drum Sound

A Big Room Kick, booming bass drum sound is essential to many genres of music. Techno, house and breaks are especially reliant on a thundering kick. Whether you're working with recorded samples of a physical drum set or with a drum machine, and whether you're using software effects or hardware devices, following some basic principles of using compression, equalization and reverberation will help you produce a gigantic bass drum sound that cuts through the mix.

1. Apply an equalizer, or EQ, to the recorded bass drum. An equalizer lets you boost or reduce the volume of certain parts of the sound's frequency spectrum. To make the bass drum sound bigger, increase the volume at around 50Hz to 60Hz. Cut everything below 30HZ: this frequency range can sound "muddy," and doesn't add anything to the drum. Reduce the volume in the higher bands to emphasize the punchy attack of the bass drum.

2. Compress the bass drum sound. A compressor reduces the dynamic range of the bass drum, meaning that parts of the sound that are too quiet to hear become apparent. Set the compressor's attack to the shortest setting possible; this causes the compressor to activate as soon as the bass drum sound begins playing. Reduce the threshold by about 10 decibels. Set the ratio to 4:1, then slowly turn it up until you hear the compressor bringing out the "punch" in the drum.

3. Put a reverb on the bass drum track. A reverb uses a series of differently-timed delays to add an echoing ambiance to the bass drum. Reverb can be highly effective, but can also muddy the sound of the drum track, as the echoing sound can overlap with the next drum beat. To prevent this, use a room or plate reverb, and set a very short time for the reverberation. If your reverb effect includes filters, adjust their setting to remove undesirable frequencies from the reverberation.

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