Bass drum tips.. - Need help with getting a good sound...

layers, layers, layers

thats all he wrote

lex horton[/color]

Can you explain layers a bit more for me?
Just so i don't make some wack sound...
Do i layer it on my MPC, how many layers, etc..[/color]

You can interlock 2 sounds so when you hit one kick it will trigger another sound at the same time. Basically you need to experiment. Maybe your best sounding kick will be made up of two actual kicks, a tom, and a cymbol. just keep trying new things. Sometimes I lose patience because I know exactly what sound I want, but it takes a lot of time to create it, but if you keep at it you will get it.[/color]

trigger 2 other pads off the main kick.
if you want to be well organised then assign to the correct note number on bank A and then put the kicks into the same pad for bank B and Bank C.
Make the pad on A trigger the other two.
Basically take your main kick sound and add an 808 or scimilar sound to give it some meat and then layer another kick to create your full & desired sound, keep switching the kicks til' you get what you want. Its good to load everykick you have get a sequence going and keep switching the sounds til' you get what you need

lex[/color]

Maybe layer a point in there, so that you have some click in there so it will cut through?? What I mean by a point is a kick sample with lots of high end.... the other sample will take care of the lo end of the kick, the shell sound[/color]

agreed on that
if you layer a load of scimilar samples it doesn't help alot, if i'm taking a kick from a drumbreak it's often not that meaty but has great presence at the top end, i'll just then look for something meaty to underpin it. It's interesting to cut a drum machine kick out of a rick james or roger troutman record and hear how little bass it's actually got yet it still sounds fat. When you've got bass like that i suppose you don't need the deepest kicks.

lex[/color]

another thing that can be useful with kicks is to turn the frequency down a little bit and add a suttle distortion to it.sometimes this does the job[/color]

Take two bass drum samples.  One with a lot of snap and high freqs.--a short, quick hit.  The other, a deep, low, bass sound.  
  Filter each to isolate their respective good qualities, snap from the first sample, bass from the second.
  Set each sound to trigger at the same time.
(via the program) set the snappy sample to have a quick (0) attack and fast decay.  Set the bassy sample to have a slower, delayed attack (3-7).   This will "make room" for each of the two sounds so that they won't interfere with each other's good qualities.  (time vs. amplitude)  The snap will have more headroom to sound-out since the bassier sample is silenced by the delayed attack.  Once the snap decays, the bassier sound sounds-out.  The trick is adjusting the cross-fade between the two sounds to shat the max. effect is heard.  So they sound like one phat-ass drum.  
This is just the basic idea I use, mix as many samples as you like, experiment with decay times.[/color]

you could also splice them together using the attack of one kick and the tail end of another. can't say i've tried it...[/color]

ahem, ok all peeps here are on point in a major way, just wanna add, the way I found works best for drums, and I found out like 6 months later that dan the automator does his simmilarly,
#1 layer drums, then compress 'em to bring out the meat.
then layer a clean, uncompressed set of 'em over that, then layer a set with some light distortion and mix these all together, keeping the compressed sound in the middle, the distorted sound low volume and the clean drums at the highest volume.  This REALLY gives drums a BOOOM sound, without being overpoweing (you know when the drums really boom, but the other sounds in the song get muddy, this allows the drum to boom without muddying up other sounds (a common problem programming drums)[/color]

How does one go about "compressing".  Is that a function performed in the MPC2000XL?  I understand the layering part, but what do you mean by compressing them?  Thanx for any help[/color]

This stuff aint rocket science, trust your ear and play around.
Play with the velocity, attack, and using 2-3 kick drum samples will do the job in most cases. One high and one low.

Compression IS NECESSARY TO KEEP THINGS FROM GETTING MUDDY. This is usually done externally.

Most mixing boards have an EQ or bass filter cutoff, that can do some light compression before recording. Dont think you can get that edge with raw audio straight out the MPC.[/color]

what i read was the automator compresses his aux send this in turn layers the compressed version with the original crisp one and it's nice.

If anyone know how compression makes something less muddy fill me in.

lex[/color]