Mission

I recorded quite a few drum sets and percussive instruments over the years and had GB’s of authentic and organic flavors at my disposal. I started with extracting original sounding transients, tasty overheads and stomps, rich drum-room ambiences and spills, and spicy thuds, smacks and slams.

Those exciting natural colors of real live elements screamed ‘Combine me with electronic samples!’
A borrowed 808, a recently snatched 909 from ebay and digitally generated sub waveforms provided a solid fundament for those bass drums.

I wanted to make sure you’ll find charismatic Kicks that are full of destinctive – sometimes weird and uncommon – elements. Kicks that reliably transport energy and punch, whether it be in clubs, your car, on headphones or on mobile devices.

A perfectly shaped low end combined with extraordinary ingredients that make every singular Kick highly recognizable. That’s what I call a Delicious Kick!

File Extensions & Abbreviations Explained

Production Notes

Key Labels _(A)

In cases the sub bass element got generated digitally, quoting the tune of the Kick was easy and accurate, of course.

In other cases, I used my ears (and a frequency analyzer) to determine the sub frequency and key of the sub.

There might be cases where the sub-tail shifted and moved so fast through adjacent frequencies that it might not be technically correct to even state a key but I did it anyway because I wanted to provide you at least a ballpark estimate.

Maybe it's just me but in 8 out of 10 cases I don't even look at existing key tags. This might be a genre thing.
But in general, if a Kick fits the style of the song and it sounds good, I try to not get sidetracked by paying too much attention to any key labeling at all. I won't remove a subjectively perceived great matching Kick just because the key label someone put on a Kick doesn't correspond to the tune of the track.
Listen to your gut. Trust your ears!

Grouped Kicks _var_1_var_2

In this sample library you'll find Kicks that are grouped together.
Kick_22_var_1_(F#) and Kick_22_var_2_(G), for example.
Although those Kicks might sound quite different, they share one or multiple elements.
Or they might have built upon each other.
_var_1 might be a more subtle version of _var_2.
Or _var_3 might have an additional element and another minor piece might have been taken away.
I wanted to make sure you can easily find Kicks that are in the same ballpark.

Pre-shifted Kicks _pre_3_ms (<5ms)

If you cut bass drums by eye too close to where the supposedly 'initial main action' is, you might cut away an important ('clicky') presence-part of the entire sound.
You want to leave the
‘main bass drum action’ at the bar’s starting point. The pre-presence-click-sound happens slightly before the main event. Just bring the whole sample forward.

Pre-shifted Kicks _pre_20_ms (>10ms)

Another reason why I pre-shifted some Kicks is that a few were layered with live-recording elements that had some kind of an interesting 'swoosh-in' effect.

In both cases just drag the Kick track the 'ms-amount' to the left or tell your DAW or (Software) Sampler to pre-shift/ bring the sample or audio/midi track forward.