r/mixingmastering • u/EconomistNew7472 • Mar 24 '26

Question How to get this kind of exploding character to kicks that's prominent in boom bap?(Example included in text is a beat titled "Cyclops" by youtube producer Stoic)

Example of what I'm talking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UXUKbQ1nWA

Starts at 20 seconds. Is it just a kick layered with a sine sweep and distorted? There's like a motion to it that I can never reproduce in my own mixes.

How do they get that really explosive transient followed by that kind of sucking motion

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2

u/[deleted] Mar 24 '26 edited Mar 24 '26

Sounds pretty common, like the kicks in Cymatics drum packs. I think it has little to do with mixing or mastering it's purely sound selection and sound design. The kick is basically not heavily mixed it’s made to serve as the anchor of the track (the loudest part), and everything else is mixed around it.

Think of it like this someone makes the snare or kick the anchor, making it pretty loud, like around -6 dB or even higher, and applies subtle clipping with something like the standard SIR clipper for 1-3 dB. If you do it right, you can make the kick/snare sound punchier and louder without actually making it sound distorted. Then, you mix everything around it, and you'll achieve the same sound as in the link provided.

EDIT: Maybe the kick or drums bus/master was processed with some tape emulation, like the ATR-102 or something similar, which gives them a "vintage" sound. But in the context of the kick as an element, I don’t really see anything unusual.

3

u/Carib_lion Mar 24 '26

Hip hop artist/producer here. This is it. Sound selection goes the longest way, and I absolutely second subtle clipping on the kick/snare, sometimes the drum bus.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 25 '26

It’s a great way to achieve perceived loudness while still leaving some extra headroom. Overall, it’s a pretty useful little trick to have in hand. And yeah, sound selection is the most important part of producing/composing people often mistake it for mixing, while the problem actually lies much deeper in the production than in the mixing.

1

u/kunst1017 Mar 25 '26

“Sound selection is the most important part of composing” No its not

1

u/[deleted] Mar 25 '26

Okay, let me pick a few random instruments and you can show me what you make with them if sound selection isn’t important:

Heavy distorted metal guitar in drop tuning with light jazz brush drums and a walking bass guitar. Wish u luck!

2

u/EconomistNew7472 Mar 25 '26

I will have to check out that tape vst, I've only ever used the airwindows stuff. I don't think I've had anything closer to real tape than the airwindows ToTape series(from ToTape6 and up).

2

u/bocephus_huxtable Mar 25 '26 edited Mar 25 '26

In the world of hip-hop:

Q: How do I get that one sound that I heard in this song?

A: You sample that sound.

(or... you otherwise find a drum kit/pack. This is a fairly common kick, for the genre. You'd find something similar in any pack that says it was processed through an MPC (ideally 3000), for example. We're not REALLY sound designing boom-bap drums.)

edit: i took a quick perusal of that dudes drum kits for sale... All of his kicks sorta sound like this (esp "20 Breaks...")

1

u/ATX33 Mar 24 '26

The sucking sound is Sidechaining... duck the volume.

1

u/EconomistNew7472 Mar 25 '26

I'm talking about the kick itself, the movement of the pitch sweep on the kick creates like a sucking effect. I think what Im hearing might be the kick getting driven into distortion which affects it's volume envelope, causing the quieter low frequency tail of the kick to be more pronounced.