On The Fifth Day, I Equalized

The main objective today was to apply equalisation on the kick drum and bass guitar to prevent their harmonics clashing with the higher instruments and side chain compression from the kick to the bass to prevent them clashing with each other.

Before I could do this though, I wanted to select a drum kit that had the sound that I wanted, and tune the bass drum to the key of the song, C major. This involved a rather lengthy exploration process of learning about how the Drum Kit Designer in Logic Pro works.

After auditioning all the kits I could find in the Logic Pro library, I settled on the Brooklyn kit as having the kick and tom sound that I wanted. However, I couldn’t for the life of me work out how to open the Drum Kit Designer window to access the tuning feature. I realised after a Google search that I needed to use the Producer Kit version Brooklyn+ to apply different equalisation and panning settings to all the different instruments in the kit, but I still couldn’t work out how to tune the kick on it. I switched to the Birch kit in Drum Kit Designer that had a similar sound; although I had to compromise on the kick sound I wanted.

Eventually I got so fed up and frustrated, I went to the beach.

Going to the beach turned out to be a key element of the creative process in this project, because it was out on the waves on my body board that the best creative ideas for this track came to me. Plus, fatigue sets in after a few hours listening to the nuances of drums and I can’t tell the difference anymore.

After coming back, I worked out how to open the Brooklyn+ kit in Drum Kit Designer and tune the kick drum. It was actually quite easy. I should go to the beach more often:

I also wanted to pan the low tom left and right on alternate hits to give another slightly disorienting feel to the track. Initially, I duplicated the entire kit so that I could have the same low tom instrument panned differently and split the MIDI data into two tracks with each alternate note. This worked but turned out to be overkill since the Brooklyn kit does have two floor toms on different MIDI notes which can be tuned to the same pitch in Drum Kit Designer. I tuned the mid tom to the same frequency as the low tom and cranked up the dampening so the sound will ping-pong between the two speakers without ringing.

After fritzing around for a while tuning my kick drum, I did a little more research and came across an article pointing out that tuning a kick drum to the key of a song isn’t always a good idea, and decided to focus on using equalisation to prevent it’s harmonics clashing with the higher instruments. I didn’t want to overkill things and end up with an unnatural sound, so I kept my equalisation pretty simple with a peak on C2 (65.4 Hz) and rolling off above 200 Hz:

Finally, since the bass guitar and kick drum are in the same frequency range, I applied side-chain compression from the kick to the bass to prevent them clashing. Ideally, I would have used a spectral compressor, but Logic Pro doesn’t come with one and I’m a poor full-time university student subsisting purely on white rice so I can’t afford to buy third party plugins.

I toyed with applying Disclosure’s sidechain compression technique of using a separate MIDI instrument track to generate the sidechain signal, but concluded it was overkill here since this isn’t really an EDM track and I don’t need that level of control over the compressor parameters. Here’s the compressor in action:

And here’s what the track sounds like now: