Do kicks need distortion? Risks, and how to fix a distorted kick

There’s a common belief that to make your kick sound “saucy”, you need to apply distortion.

While a bit of distortion isn’t inherently bad, things can get out of control pretty quickly.

The risks of distorting a kick

Here are some risks to consider when applying distortion:

• Aliasing: if your distortion plugin doesn’t have oversampling, it might introduce aliasing. In extreme cases, it can add unwanted low-end information.
• Loss of dynamics: your kick will almost certainly lose much of its dynamic range, which you’ll then need to restore using expansion or dynamic EQ.

Personally, I rarely use pure distortion on kicks. I prefer using parallel saturation (a lighter and more transparent form of distortion) and, more importantly, clipping.

What if you receive a mix with a distorted kick that doesn’t sound good?

There’s a simple solution using ShaperBox 3:

1. Load the filter module.
2. Enable the “audio trigger” option.
3. Set the sync to 1/4.
4. Create a downward curve to filter out the undesired frequencies.

This will restore your original kick sound while keeping the impact and bringing back some dynamics.

And the best thing is that the filter automation restarts automatically each time it detects a kick. Magic.

This ShaperBox module has saved me on so many occasions.