Add Subtle Saturation to Your Kick Drum

The kick drum is one of electronic music's most vital components (of any genre). The dance floor won't bounce if it can't get through the mix. There are numerous tools and alternatives for processing the kick drum, but subtle saturation works wonders when used correctly. In this article, we'll show you how to add subtle saturation in order to make your kick drum fit perfectly in the mix.

As usual, we have prepared a short sequence in our SoundBridge: DAW containing all essential elements of the full mix. Let's listen to it.

As you can hear in this audio track, the kick drum doesn't cut through the mix as it should. In order to fix that, we will use the saturation effect. Saturation will definitely provide more harmonic content so that it may respond well to subsequent processing. The idea is to put it before any additive EQ but potentially after any subtractive EQ correction. This is because we don't want to add more harmonics to the frequencies we don't like. We can also add the saturation directly on the kick drum's effect rack, but it sounds much better when added over the send/return channel.

Let's do that by clicking on the plus sign in the top left corner of the SoundBridge: DAW's interface. We will select "Return" in the offered track types and name it "Saturation."

We could add a single band saturation plugin to the return channel's effect rack. But we believe the multi-band provides many more possibilities. So, our choice of effect will be Izotope's Ozone 8 Exciter. On the Ozone 8 Exciter, we can observe four different bands, each with its own saturation modes (Analog, Retro, Triode, etc…). These modes add a unique character to the processed sound. Since we don't want our kick drum to sound overly saturated, we'll use the Retro and Tape modes (which sound the most subtle of all). Our return track fader will control the overall saturation level, so we will set the amount and mix of each band to its maximum, as shown in the image below.

Since we want a subtle effect, we have just increased the send value by 25%. Let's compare our kick drum before and after processing it with multi-band saturation.

By doing this, we've already improved the sound of our kick drum. Now, we can add EQ and compression to the channel's effect rack directly. Finally, let's create another compartment to differentiate the full mix with the unprocessed kick drum from the processed one.

If you liked this article on saturation, here are some more on the same subject:

• 4 Tips on How to Effectively Use Saturation in Your Mix
• Use Saturation to Enrich Your Mix
• Get Vivid Drums by Using Harmonic Saturation
• Tape Distortion / Saturation