Hi,

I am a newbie in the marvelous world of electronic music composition. I’m currently gently discovering the basic joy of playing with compressor and eq to obtain several kinds of effects.

Now I really would like to design a very powerfull “banging” bass drum like used in the track called “Empty State (feat. Mic Burns)” by Armin Van Buuren. You know, this sounds like a very boosted and compressed 808 bass drum mixed with a regular bass drum resulting in a sort “woooooooosh” effect.

Please, follow this link to download a mp3 sample of what I mean : http://onyx.t35.com/mp3/sample.mp3 (22 kb)

So I tried to experiment equalization and compression but didn’t succeed in obtaining a really powerful bass drum.

So I have 2 questions:

1) Are there refills which offer this kind of bass drums?
2) How to design this kind of bass drums beginning with a basic drum kit?

In advance I thank you for your kind help.

Just sample the bassdrum from your favourite AVB track..

I can send you a bass drum sound from Reasons that combine a couple of them, then all you have to do it just EQ it to your taste,provided that its somewhat closer to what you want.
Gene

One trick I've heard about is to bounce a basketball on a hard concrete surface, sample that, and filter it. Never tried it myself, but I know people who swear by it.

Never heard anything like that basketball thing. I am gonna have to try that just to see if it works, COOL!

You can layer different BD that have part of the character you want (say attack, decay) then filter.

if you just sample AVB (beside the rights problems eventually) you'll never learn how to…

For the refills, there was this 260db drum'n'bass refill which has good banging BD if my memory is correct. anyways, there's soooo many refills on the free market now...

However, you can reach real good things with eq and compression if your base sound is workable. try a slow attack and fast release on the compressor. boost the compressor output just before it clips. Play with it and listen to the results. For the eq, depending on what you want to enphasize, listen while slightly boosting at wether 40-50hz, 80-100hz or 150-175hz. but remember that while eq-ing, it's often better to cut frequencies so to enphasize others than to boost those to be highlighted.