How to make drums hit harder

What makes drums hit hard?

Every drum hit has two parts. The transient comes first: the click of the beater, the crack of the stick on the snare head, a few milliseconds long and much louder than anything after it. Then comes the body, the boom of the kick shell or the ring and rattle of the snare, which fades away until the next hit.

Punch is mostly about how far the first part stands above the second. When the front of each hit is loud and the body falls away quickly, your ears get a sharp jump in level on every beat, and that jump is what feels like a hit. Shrink the gap, by squashing the front or by letting the body ring on, and the same drums sound softer and further away, even if they're just as loud overall.

The lab measures that gap and calls it hit vs body. For every hit it finds in the loop, it compares the average level of the first 20 ms with the average level from 50 to 200 ms after the hit starts (or up to the next hit, if that comes sooner), then averages the result over all the hits. The original loop scores 16.7 dB. Anything that raises the number makes the drums punchier, and anything that lowers it softens them.

Level is the other half of hitting hard, and it pulls the opposite way. Your ears judge loudness over a stretch of time, roughly a tenth of a second or more, so a spike a few milliseconds long adds a lot to the peak level and very little to how loud the drum feels. A punchy drum has tall peaks, and tall peaks hit 0 dBFS long before the track sounds loud. Most of this page is about getting both at once: a bigger front on each hit, then a way to stop those fronts using up all your headroom.

Reading the lab

The three cards along the top are the chain, in the order the sound passes through them: transient shaper, compressor, clipper. Click a card, or press 1, 2 or 3, to switch it on or off. Each card draws what it does and shows one measured number, and the knobs belonging to a card that's off are greyed out.

The big screen shows the whole loop, with the original in pale grey and the output of the chain in pink, and the amber lane underneath is the compressor's gain reduction. The screen below it zooms in on one loud hit, 220 ms of it. Two shaded strips mark what the hit vs body figure compares, the front and the body, and a violet line shows the transient shaper turning the hit up and down.

Everything you hear is matched to the loudness of the original, and A/B switches the chain off at that same loudness. Without the match, the processed version would win every comparison just by being louder, which is the trap the mistakes section covers. The panel marked Right now describes what the chain is doing with numbers measured from the loop, and the three stats under it are hit vs body, the compressor's gain reduction and how much louder the chain plays than the original when both peak at the same level.

The loop is from the Wonky Percussion pack, and you can switch to the percussion loop, a distorted kit or a full mix with bass and chords. You can also upload your own drums or record something for eight seconds, and it loops through the lab in place of ours without leaving your device.

Start with the sounds

No plug-in will make a soft, woolly kick sound like a hard one, so the biggest gains usually come before any processing. Listen to the sample on its own first. If its front is already blurred, because it was recorded far from the drum or compressed hard when it was made, a transient shaper can only do so much with it.

Check where the sample starts. A few milliseconds of silence or low-level noise at the start of a one-shot delays the transient and makes the hit feel late and soft, so trim the start right up to the first movement of the waveform and add a fade of a millisecond or less to avoid a click.

Tune the kick to the song. A kick whose body rings at a note that clashes with the bass line muddies the low end on every beat, and one tuned to the root of the key sits with the bass instead of fighting it. Shorten the tail too, with the sampler's amp envelope or a fade, so the boom is over before the next note. A tail that runs into the next hit fills in the gap your ears use to hear the hit at all.

Layering helps when one sample has a good front and another has a good body. A short click or a tight snare on top of a fuller one can give you both, as long as the two layers line up. If they're a few milliseconds apart, or one is upside down compared with the other, they partly cancel and the result is thinner than either sample alone. The drum phase alignment lesson shows how to line them up.

Turn up the front with a transient shaper

A transient shaper has two main controls, usually called attack and sustain. Attack turns the first few milliseconds of every hit up or down, and sustain does the same to whatever follows. Most have no threshold, because the shaper follows how fast the level rises whatever the level itself, so a ghost note on the snare gets the same treatment as the backbeat.

In the lab, an attack of +6 dB takes hit vs body from 16.7 to 21.3 dB. Pull the sustain down to −6 dB as well and it reaches 24.8 dB, 8.1 dB more than the loop started with. Watch the zoomed hit as you do it, because the violet line shows the shaper at work: it jumps up at the front of the hit, then dips below the middle for the rest of it.

Then look at the third stat. With the shaper set that hard, the peaks have grown so far above the average that, if both versions peaked at the same level, the shaped drums would play 3.6 dB quieter than the original. That's the price of punch, and it's why the chain ends with a clipper.

Many DAWs have a transient shaper built in: Logic's is called Enveloper, Cubase has EnvelopeShaper and FL Studio has Transient Processor. Ableton Live's Drum Buss has a single Transients knob instead, which only works above 100 Hz and moves the attack and the sustain together. The SPL Transient Designer is the hardware unit that made the attack and sustain layout familiar. Start with the attack between +3 and +6 dB on a kick or snare and push it until the drum starts to sound clicky, then back off a little. The transient shaping lesson covers the controls in more depth.

Use a slow compressor attack

A compressor can add punch too, as long as its attack is slow enough. When a hit crosses the threshold, the compressor takes a few milliseconds to turn the sound down. With an attack of 20 or 30 ms, the transient is mostly through before that happens, so the front keeps its height while the body gets turned down.

In the lab, a compressor at 4:1 and −20 dB with a 30 ms attack takes up to 5.1 dB off the loudest hits and raises hit vs body to 17.6 dB. That's a smaller gain than the transient shaper gave, because the compressor only works on hits that cross the threshold and some of the body is quiet enough to slip under it. It also evens out the loud and soft hits, which a transient shaper never does.

Turn the attack down to 0.3 ms and the same compressor does the opposite. It now catches the front of every hit as well as the body, hit vs body falls to 14.6 dB, 2.1 dB below the untouched loop, and the drums sound flatter and further away. A preset with a very fast attack, or an attack knob left at its default, is the most common way a compressor takes punch out of drums.

The release matters as well. It needs to let go before the next hit, or the compressor is still turning the drums down when the next transient arrives and that one gets squashed. At 120 BPM a sixteenth note lasts 125 ms and an eighth note 250 ms, so a release of 50 to 100 ms suits a busy pattern. Watch the amber lane in the lab: it should spring back towards zero between hits. The fast vs slow attack comparison goes further into the timing.

Add weight with parallel compression

Parallel compression blends a heavily compressed copy of the drums with the untouched ones. The copy has no punch at all, because it's squashed flat, but it's dense and loud between the hits. Mixed in underneath, it thickens the body and brings up the room and the quiet notes, while the dry drums keep the fronts on top.

In the lab the compressor is set to 10:1 at −40 dB with a 1 ms attack, which takes up to 32.7 dB off its copy. On its own that would wreck the punch. With the Mix at 40%, hit vs body stays at 16.6 dB, a tenth of a decibel from where it started. Used on its own, the fast compressor in the previous step cost 2.1 dB of hit vs body with 13.2 dB of gain reduction, well under half as much.

On a compressor with a Mix knob, turn it down to between 20 and 50%. On one without, send the drums to a second bus with the compressor on it and blend that bus in with its fader. The parallel compression lesson covers both ways.

EQ for punch

EQ can't change the shape of a hit over time, but it decides which part of the hit you hear. The front of a kick lives mostly in its click, high up, and the body lives in its low thump. A small boost to the click and a cut where the drum sounds boxy often does more for punch than a big boost in the low end, which mostly makes the body longer and louder.

These ranges move around from one kit to the next, so sweep a narrow boost through the range until you find the spot on your drum, then widen it and pull it back to a few decibels. The frequency ranges lesson covers the rest of the spectrum.

Clip the peaks and turn the drums up

Everything so far makes the peaks taller against the average level. In the lab the crest factor, the gap between the peak and the average level, grows with the transient shaper on, and that's the cost the third stat shows: at the same peak level, punchy drums play quieter. A limiter on the master will claw that level back by turning the whole mix down around every hit, which you can hear as pumping once it's working hard.

A clipper is the usual fix. It cuts off the top of any wave that goes over its ceiling, instantly and without turning anything down over time, so it shaves the tallest few milliseconds of the loudest hits and leaves everything else alone. Those few milliseconds are what your ears barely notice, so you lose very little punch and gain a lot of headroom.

In the final step of the lab the shaper is at +6 dB of attack and −3 dB of sustain, the compressor is back on its slow attack, and the clipper takes 6 dB off the loudest hit, with only 0.22% of the samples in the loop going over its ceiling. Hit vs body is 23.8 dB, 7.1 dB more than the original. Switch the clipper off and the shaper and compressor alone leave the drums 5.1 dB quieter than the original at the same peak level; switch it back on and they play 0.6 dB louder. The clipper costs 0.2 dB of hit vs body and wins back 5.7 dB of level.

Clip the drum bus, or the kick and snare, rather than the whole mix at first. Clipping adds harmonics, and on a drum transient they're over in a couple of milliseconds, so they mostly sound like a slightly louder, denser hit. On sustained sounds like bass and pads the same harmonics are easy to hear as distortion. The soft clipping vs hard clipping vs limiting comparison shows how the three differ, and clipping covers it on its own.

Make room for the drums in the mix

Drums that hit hard on their own can still sound weak once the bass and chords come in, because those parts fill the gaps the drums need. Your ears hear the front of a hit as a jump in level, and the jump is smaller when other sounds are already loud at the same frequencies. That's masking, and it's the most common reason a kick vanishes in a full mix.

The kick and the bass fight hardest, since they share the bottom octave or two. Sidechain compression turns the bass down for a moment every time the kick hits, so the kick's front lands in a gap. Even 2 or 3 dB of ducking with a fast attack and a release of 50 to 100 ms makes the kick easier to hear. The kick and bass lesson covers the other ways to make them share.

Reverb fills gaps too. A long reverb on the snare smears the body out across the beat, which lowers the contrast between the hit and what follows. Keep drum reverbs short, add some pre-delay so the dry hit lands before the reverb starts, and high-pass the reverb return so it doesn't build up in the low end.

Arrangement does some of the work as well. A kick sounds bigger after a bar where it dropped out, and a snare sounds harder when it's the only thing on the backbeat instead of being doubled by a clap, a tom and a crash. If every drum is shaped for maximum punch, none of them stands out, so pick the kick and the snare and let the hats and percussion sit back.

How to make drums hit harder, step by step

This order works on most kits. Do it on the kick and snare first, then on the drum bus if the whole kit still needs it.

1. Fix the samplesTrim the start of each one-shot to the first movement of the waveform, tune the kick to the song and shorten any tail that rings into the next hit.
2. Turn up the frontPut a transient shaper on the kick and the snare and raise its attack 3 to 6 dB, then lower the sustain until the drum sounds as tight as you want.
3. Compress with a slow attackIf the hits jump around in level, add a compressor at about 4:1 with a 10 to 30 ms attack and a release that recovers before the next hit. Aim for 3 to 6 dB of gain reduction on the loudest hits.
4. Add weight underneathBlend in a heavily compressed parallel copy at 20 to 40% if the drums sound thin between hits.
5. EQ the click and the boxinessBoost a little where the beater clicks, cut where the kick sounds boxy and keep the low end from ringing on.
6. Make roomDuck the bass from the kick, keep drum reverbs short and turn down anything that covers the drums in the same range.
7. Clip the peaksPut a clipper on the drum bus and push it until 2 to 4 dB comes off the loudest hits, then turn the bus up by the same amount.

Starting settings

These are places to begin, set far enough that you can hear each processor working, and you'll move away from them once you start comparing with A/B.

The drum bus lesson covers the bus chain in more detail, including where saturation fits.

Common mistakes

Hearing louder as punchier

Turn anything up a decibel and it'll sound better on a first listen, so a transient shaper or a compressor with too much makeup gain wins every quick comparison. Compare at matched loudness, with the A/B in the lab or by setting the output level of each plug-in by ear, before you decide a change helped.

A fast attack by habit

A compressor attack under a millisecond catches the front of every hit. In the lab it took hit vs body 2.1 dB below the original. If a drum sounds smaller after you compress it, slow the attack down before you touch anything else.

Too much transient boost

Past a point, a boosted attack turns into a thin click with nothing behind it, and the peaks it creates cost you headroom. In the lab, the shaper set to +6 and −6 dB left the drums 3.6 dB quieter at the same peak level. Raise the attack until the drum sounds too sharp, then back off.

Boosting the low end for weight

A big low boost on the kick mostly makes its body longer and louder, which shrinks the gap between the hit and what follows. It also eats headroom fast, because low frequencies carry a lot of energy. Shorten the tail and lift the click before you reach for more lows.

Shaping every drum

If every hat and percussion layer has its front boosted too, the kick and snare lose the contrast that made them stand out. Keep the strongest punch for the drums that carry the groove.

Train your ears

The quiz under the lab plays the drums through a hidden setting that makes them punchier or softer, with the screens covered and the loudness matched, and asks which way it went. Some rounds use the transient shaper turned up or down, and some use a compressor with a very fast attack. Press A/B as often as you like before you answer. Eight rounds take a few minutes, and your best score is saved in your browser.

Questions people ask

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