Intermediate FL Studio Guide Mixing Your 808

I love the warm character of the 808 and got myself the Tape808-Package (cheap & great stuff btw the samples are tuned in G).

I always do my projects from the scratch and ended up in totally different chains of my 808 kickdrum mixing. Usually the 808 kick is lacking of "snap" on "boom" which means they always need some editing.

some example

3 layers:
1. pitch to key - natural sample, no editing
2. pitch to key - natural sample but a lot of distortion for the "boom"
3. pitch to key - heavy lowcut, heavy compression for the "snap"
- mix to taste all 3 layers into a bus, with EQ some peak around 100 htz (usually 110 for track-key is A)
result: is ok , then it depends on finetuning each layer an eq.

there is a lot more possible i am sure, any suggestions? the method from above is ok so far but it needs some hell of fine-corrections. it also offcourse depends on the bass (which makes me dipping the kick around 60-80hz often to make room for the bass)

Compression EQ and Layering is applied to bring out the best in sampled drums. 808s are created. I'm pretty sure if you get better samples and take 10 mins out of your day to google and download some free 808 kits. You'll get the sound you're looking for way faster than Layering EQing and Compressing everything.

Eq-ing a 808 kick with a high pass filter around 60 hz is not a bad idea. So it is not bad to eq drum samples. And I sometimes filter off the air that is in some 808 kick samples due to the fact that my samples are not off of already mastered tracks. They are raw. and there are lot's of people that use a 8:1 at the top of a kick to get it some more boom. Example... lil Jon uses kicks that are compressed to hell and back. It is true that many samples floating around on the internet are already mastered and compressed but not all are. Remember that engineers can do more with something that you spend more time making perfect. G.I.G.O ( good in good out, garbage in garbage out)

I have found out that you can compress an 808 kick all day long and lower it to fit in the mix and it will still be prominate on a good monitoring system that can handle the freq.