Mixing Dance Music Essentials: Compressing The Kick

In this video tutorial dance music mixing and mastering engineer, Daniel Wyatt, shows how to compress a standard EDM kick, the settings to start with, and reasons behind them.  

He talks about why you’ll want to use a compressor on the kick where most kicks have been programmed in so don’t have the issues from a live recorded kick drum of differing levels, or being unquantized. In this case Danny uses the compressor as an envelope shaper to keep things tight.

The video is shot using Fabfilter’s Pro-C2  which is a fab compressor(!), but you can use any compressor you like, including those that come bundled with your DAW.

He continues to show the settings he uses to sculpt the overall sound of the kick. This is a really useful tutorial video for anyone producing or mixing dance music… and the complete course this video is from, MixMaster 101: Mixing Dance Music Essentials has 33 more video tutorials that will teach you all kinds of top-notch mixing techniques. Highly, highly recommended!

Rounik is the Executive Editor for Ask.Audio & macProVideo. He's built a crack team of professional musicians and writers to create one of the most visited online resources for news, review, tutorials and interviews for modern musician and producer. As an Apple Certified Trainer for Logic Pro Rounik has taught teachers, professional... Read More

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