DESCRIPTION:
Kick drums with low-end depth and high-end definition can often be achieved by layering multiple samples. In this walkthrough, we layer an 808-style kick with a mid-heavy transient-rich sample and a dirty hi-hat and then treat the grouped sounds to parallel compression and transient shaping to create a single punchy kick. The secret when layering is to ensure: a) the raw sounds complement each other; and b) that they don't overlap / fight in either the frequency or time domain. This means judicious EQing to sculpt each sound so they gel together and altering the transients / ADSR envelopes of each sample.