First thing to mention is you should always take into consideration the Kick Drum as mentioned “Approaching a Sub Bass Patch”
Because the Kick is part of the LowEnd
As we can see in this picture the Kick Drum or Bass Drum is part of the Low End just after the sub bass range of frequency. This is a concept I discussed in the “How to approach a Sub Bass patch” (from the eBook Introduction) the 808 Bass Drum can be as low as the sub frequency range…
Design your kick with your bass sound in mind.
One good rule is usually to design your sounds in a context, that’s true also for the kick and the bass – they always need to pair well
You should design or shape a kick corresponding to the bass (and vice versa)
There’s a common accepted idea here. When pairing a kick and a bass sound they should always play nicely together without the need of too much processing. The opposites do attract meaning on harmonics and waveforms. An 808 Kick with a sine wave bass patch will be problematic and tough to mix the tracks without any external processing. Sometimes the external processing takes minutes other times it can take hours to figure out the frequency clashing and what you can do to fix it. You might as well not put the square peg in the round hole from the start of the composition phase.
What’s a Kick Drum
A kick is punchy, is huge sounding in the low end territory with a short and clicky transient – generally it is described as 2 or 3 main parts :
The timbre (Tone. The punch is mainly the behavior of the pitch envelope)
The Attack (Transient. A short pulse at the beginning)
The Body (Sauce or Tuning part – if it’s a medium or long kick it is its stabilization and probably need to be in the key of the song/track)
You should take care of timing of the kick for its ADSR regarding the tempo. This is so the track keeps it’s rhythmical structure. Don’t forget you’ll end up for the rhythm with few drums on the kick itself and in between. If the kick is short tuning it in key is less important as it is more noise than note, however if the kick is boomy and 808-ish you should probably tune it to the key of the song (or harmoniously). That’s where a waveform visualization plugin to pass your audio through becomes a handy tool to make the ADSR envelope of the kick drum correct.
If you get those tools from “How to Approach a Sub Bass Patch”, I have in mind Vengeance Spectrum and Bram s(M)exoscope (a 64bit version from armandomontanez.com is available)
> I put the full list at the end of the post
Looking at the example of an 808 kick drum and a 909 kick drum not all people agree on tuning the kick. Just remember drummers tune their drums for the song they will play as well as percussionists. Whether you play a drum machine based on synthesis or samples you should practicing tuning your kits so you are comfortable with the sound’s range.
Designing a Kick on the Analog Four
When designing a kick drum on the Analog Four I recommend to start programming a Four to the Floor sequence. You can also program a more broken style like hiphop… where you tap in the trigger points and set the note to 1/8 (or a bit longer than that). Try to save these patterns as your “go-to” patterns so that you can have it play and you will understand what each parameter change does to your “go-to” pattern.
You can keep OCS1 for taking care eventually of extra-harmonics later so generally we tune our oscillator 2 octaves down. If you want a clean and deep House Bass Drum it’s best to start with a Sinewave… As we already see that few times before you don’t have it so … TRIANGLE filtered or Self-Resonating Filter (you will get an infocard on that next lesson). We are gonna end this tutorial with a classical BD, for a more Hard BD we start with more harmonics in the waveform, overdrive, etc. Those elements are the key for designing a Hard BD. (Or external processing). In future lessons I will refer to the Bass Drum as BD and they are interchangeablly used the same throughout this book. Even when you use software based drum synths it is referred to BD along with drum libraries you are buying. It is also good housekeeping to name your audio files with a BD somewhere in the nomenclatur
Normally we just need the DECAY on both AMP Envelope and ENV2 (or LFO) assigned to the OSC1, OSC2 or OSCX Pitch to get something working and get the Anatomy of a Bass Drum…
Therefore it’s the basics !
feel free to explore more advanced shaping with the ADSR envelope or by adding an LFO !
Both Filters in the A4 will really help in sculpting original kind of Bass Drum sounds. This is like like EQing the sound and boosting the percussive nature of the sound to the front of the stag. If you analyze Bass Drum design with the A4 you will see filters are usually used a lot in regards to Depth & Envelopes or LFO. All sorts of waveforms can altered by the LFO even when tracking filters for FM’ish Bass Drum sounds.
Generally we don’t use delay, chorus or reverb on Bass Drum. Keep the Bass Drum clean & mono is a good idea when writing on the A4). However, you may want to reproduce an old-school gated reverb kick. This can be done by p-locking the reverb in the sequencer.
External Tutorial
Recommended Sound Pack for Bass Drums
You can buy the divine Sound Pack from Daren Ager who done an incredible job on Drum Design : Bought it here !
Going Further
When starting to sound design the Bass Drum I advise you to design through Spectrum and Oscilloscope with your setup, it will help you to handle timing with ADSR because we all know that is what a Bass Drum looks like, you can see the Filters shaping and how crazy you have gone with the transients or something. You will need to adjust when you realize that you have gone too far with a setting. It’s good to get the big picture of the sound with your ears but take advantage of visualizations and associate the sound with the visual.
Also good starting points for the Fundamental of the kick design are A, G, E, C and for the amount of Pitch modulation can be 24 semi-tones or even more (24,36,48) depending of the ADSR/LFO shaping then and Filters. You can use fixed oscillators too by deactivating them on OSC pages TRK option.
Don’t forget the envelope shapes should be on page 86 of the manual (this may change in future manual updates) so look at the end of the manual to find : Appendix A: Synth Track Parameters and Envelopes the parameter is : “SHP” stand for shape Model 2 and 3 seems to be dedicated for drums. And 8,9,10,11 to try as it’s useful for percussive sounds.
Tools for Designing Kick drum
A waveform visualisation plugin (there’s few i like those)
1/ http://armandomontanez.com/smexoscope/
2/ https://www.vengeance-sound.com/plugins.php?sub=FREE%20Scope (free but you need at least one dongle plugin from vengeance Metrum is my recommendation (it is a specialized plugin to make Kick – Drum Layering method with the Sauce or Body generated by a real synth)
If you design your kick in the DAW with a dedicated Plugin – I advise a wave shaper it’s better than a compressor to catch peak :
1/ Waveshaper CM from Cableguys (computer Magazine FREE)
On the opposite when shaping a already synthesized kick I like a Transient Compressor. (something like Boz Lab Transgressor 2)
2/ Transgressor 2 from Boz Digital Labs (act fast it’s only 29€ instead of 149€)
