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Hi everyone,
one of my problems when producing is giving my kicks and snares some punch.
How do i make them sound punchier?
Ive messed around with eq and compression but im getting no where. if so are there any free plugins to help me or could i do it with fl studio stock ones?
Are there any free samples of kicks and snares to start me off? if so could you link me?
Thanks

Light distortion and dynamics shaping. While compression is a form of dynamics shaping, I'm referring to something more precise and hands-on. While compression can add a lot of certain types of punch, it can also take it away other kinds of punch...so hand-automation would be your best bet unless you're feeling too lazy. For distortion, tape saturation is great.

Sorry if I said something wrong, I'm tired as crap.

Layering kicks, using a low end thumpy one, and a nice high end clicky one, It's all about EQing it as well.

My FX chain for my kicks look like

EQ, Auto Filter, Reverb(on the thuddy kick.) and more EQing
Punchy kick usually has a EQ, Auto Filter and maybe a limiter, when I do a mixdown I keep my kick peaking at -15 dps though.. so I take off any compression, limiting until the mixdown is complete.

Just a little tip! :p

Watch Malleus drum production tutorial for Reason. Even if you don't use reason, It'll help you out.

saturator works well
EQ boosts
Layering

something I like to do sometimes to add a more natural feel to the drums (but also makes them a bit more punchy) is slap on a waveshaper and shape it like a staircase with 8 steps...then turn the mix of it down to where it sounds good. It adds a subtle breathiness to the percussion that I really like.

Parallel compression / distortion

Send a bit of your kick and snare to an aux channel that's got heavy compression, distortion and/or something like a cab emulation maybe

TRANSIENT SHAPER

parallel comp on the drum bus.

And one of the most basic things you can do to make them sound punchier is to simply turn down everything else, because loud = punchy

^ i like the way this one thinks.

i layer my kicks and snares with white noise quite a bit, also sometimes overdriving, slight bitcrushing, and tape saturation.

Use better samples. If you find the right ones you wont even need to put any effects on the track.

Yeah picking the rite samples will get you half way there,read up about where in the frequency spectrum the punch resides and then its just looking for samples that hit around this area.Also cutting other elements within the mix around said punch will help your hits cut through the mix.
There is a decent sound on sound tutorial knocking around the interwebz about ho to eq your kiks to get a certain sound,some of the techniques described have helped me no end.I think all i searched on google was kik drum eq or something like that and it was in near enough the first page i come too so find it and read you will get a wealth of info.

Arranging a track such that the drums have more rhythmic space will make them seem more intense and present, too.

I usually take out the very bottom end of kicks, like anything below 90hz. Cause honestly that super low sub makes them a little, messy sounding. And if you have sub and plenty of bass in the rest of your mix, it won't matter. this will have your kciks coming through a whole lot cleaner.

And samples samples samples. I've got no clue how to make entirely original drums from scratch, but using the rights samples that fill out the right frequencies will help.

On the note of kicks: I would give anything to know how to make kicks like this, seriously the most powerful beautiful kicks.

At 0:39-0:42 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xt-lV5vrFkE

scooping kick frequencies between say 200 and 1000 can make the kick sound cleaner as well, which to me translates into punchy. There is a good tutorial based in FL about this by imageline.

I also do as Ollie said and layer a specific hihat sound or white noise on top of the snare can give the snare more life.




But, if you are looking for the brostep thwack drumkit ( i don't know if you are ), I would just go and find those samples.

Exciter.

Distortion on snares is great,

Bit harder to get away with it on kicks, brings out some nasty overtones in the midrange, you can get away with limiting / clipping to a certain degree mind

transient shaping is by far the easiest way to make things sound more punchy (imo)
its also good for making things LESS punchy, really usefull to turn down the attack on crashes, hats that hit too hard but sound nice, fx, etc. I find it sounds more natural that using envelopes