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I'm still kinda new, and I've noticed that my drums usually sound kinda weak, especially the kick. I sidechain a compressor to make the bass duck out when the kick plays, but it still is kinda weak and flat. Are there any tricks to make punchier drums?

Adecuate compression and EQing.

Layering your drums too can thicken up the sound and the most basic of things is picking the correct drum samples in the first place.Simple explanation would be to pick to kick drums,one with a lot of snap in the midrange and the top end.The other more thumping,so you want more punch around the bottom end.Layer them in your daw then eq each so you can hear the elements of both.
You can use the layering idea with all approaches to building a track,once you start to crack it you will realise there isn't much to getting bigger sounding tracks other than techniques to achieve it.
Hope this helps,if you need any more help sound on sound does pretty decent articles on different techniques to get bigger sounding drums.I have some saved in my bookmarks,if i come across them i will post links for you.

In no particular order -

1. Parallel compression is a must.
2. Tape Saturation can thicken them up.
3. Transient shaper (if you have Ableton there's one built into the sampler which is fantastic on the 'soft' setting).
4. EQ (Boosting & then making room for other drums).
5. Layering (personally I'm not great at this but it can work wonders).
6. Compression on single drums.

^ mix everything quieter than your drums to start. big solutions before small.

Lowpass your kick and listen to the low end of it. In my opinion, the ones that have a quick pitch slide down sound especially strong to me and I think that works best for the sidechain duck stuff. Sometimes it's just a matter of getting the right sample and then you don't have to do as much work with it.

Agree with a lot of the above. When I first started out, I used some pretty basic samples and a lot of the time my drums either sounded really electronic or "flappy" and lacklustre. I'm defintiely one for finding nice samples to work with.

One thing that I don't think has been mentioned is try parallel compressing your drums (firstly route your drums to a buss, then route this to another mixer channel and add a compressor basically). I mean compress them to hell, now use an EQ to scoop the mids and add some distortion. Mix this back in with the original "dry" drum buss to taste. Also a disto or bitcrusher on a tight reverb send for the drum buss can sounds nice too.

I like to apply inserts like an subtle eq boost and saturation on my drum buss, helps pull it together

Awesome tips here, guys!

Get it sounding big and fat to begin with (*if that's what you're after). Then try to have them as exposed as possible... no point in getting it sounding good then masking it over with something else - this is especially true of the kick, where bass frequencies are at a premium because of their energy expenditure. Sidechaining is the common solution but remember arrangement here.

Sometimes beginners don't really know what a fat drum sounds like (even if they imagine they do). Not saying this is you, but we all have to learn... so do some A/B testing in your session with a tune you really like the drum sound of, and see how yours compares.

Praxisaxis wrote: Sometimes beginners don't really know what a fat drum sounds like (even if they imagine they do). Not saying this is you, but we all have to learn... so do some A/B testing in your session with a tune you really like the drum sound of, and see how yours compares.

THIS! i was listening back to old tunes and was just thinking "how did i think that sounded good."