Audio Recording Tips

Metal Bass Drum sound

Get yourself a good mic (AKG D112 or better) and tweak the frequencies with an EQ (usually cut 125-160, boost 40-80 and some mid high for presence but the rest depend on tuning, room, mic, player ...). A compressor can make the note longer but reduces the dynamic. A gate won't affect the sound but only the leakage so it doesn’t really matter unless you pick too much of the other drum parts. Now, some may add some short reverb, listen carefully

Here is another way to a short powerful no nonsense kick. Compress the kick -> boost at 100Hz -> send it to a gate after a few milliseconds have the gate shut it off-> boost the volume and beware.



A lot of metal stuff that I've heard, I'm quite sure, a lot of times the kicks are ran into a triggering type drum module creating that HUGE sound.
And another option.

A lot of those metal heads play so fast that a long decay on the kick would turn the song to mush... so it's all about making short quick kicks, with lots of top end to make them easy to pick out in the mix. So if you have a D112 that will make your job easy (because of its big low, big high, and no mids). Point it through the hole at the beater. In fact if you can get the whole thing in there to get it closer to the beater you'll get more attack. Mute the drum a bit so it's quick and doesn't ring a bunch. Maybe mute the drum A LOT. And tune it right. Run that to tape. In the mix gate it... you just have to play around with settings... so it's nice and tight. Compress the shit out of it, but maybe set the attack so a bit of the initial drum hit squeezes through. Do a 60-80hz boost if it needs it, and a top end 1-6k boost for more attack. A lot of these major label metal heads also use synthetic tones underneath the real kick to give it more power.

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by Dan E. Monk. copyright © 2003
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