Here’s a short writing about a trick to mixing hip hop kicks. Usually in Hiphop, especially nowadays, the kick is almost always accompanied by booming 808 or subbasses. The problem with that, is that the 808s would often cloud out the punchiness of the kick, rendering the kick weaker or hidden in the mix.
The trick with mixing kicks, except for sidechaining, would first be levelling. When you start a mix, it’s generally a good idea to level the Kick and Snare at 0db, making them the loudest signals on the mix. This allows you to mix the other elements in relative to the two most important parts of hiphop, rather than having the order reversed.
Secondly, we can also use clipping to help our kicks cut through our mix like knives on a cut of butter. There are alot of ways we can do this, but generally for me, I like to just throw a compressor onto my kicks and pump the gains all the way up. If you’re into free plug-ins, the Sausage Fattener is a good plugin that you guys can check out, as they sort of specialize in clipping kicks to insane levels.
For all you new producers out there, try this trick out, and let me know what you think of the trick!
