Has this ever happened to you??


Odds are is when you layered the two kick drums, some phase cancelation happened a few times in your life.
This occurs when two wave forms are stacked on top of each other & the waves are exact opposites of each other.
What happens is the waves start to weaken each other's signal & if it's perfectly out of phase, the result will be silence.

It's a quick fix though! If you find your layer is not quite as strong as you thought it would be, just flip the phase on one of the samples & there is a good chance your layer will sound stronger!

Most EQ & utility plugins have a phase invert switch on it, so you will be able to do this in any DAW with any stock or 3rd party plugin.
Just locate the phase symbol that looks like this "ø"

If you do a lot of layering or mix professionally, we recommend grabbing a phase alignment plugin sometime in the future. Our favorite is one by Sound Radix called "Auto-Align"
Most of the stock plugins will only allow you to flip the phase by 180º - exact opposite of what it was.
This would work great it the phase was always off by 180º, but often times that's rarely the case.
You will find that some layers may only be off by 40º or maybe by as much as 220º.
Phase alignment plugins will detect exactly how much the drum layer wave is out of phase from the other drum layer wave & change the phasing, so you're perfectly in phase.
The result: HUGE sounding layers!