hello, it may be my knowledge of synthesis, but I always end up with dull kicks, stuck in caves and not big at all. How do you do to make kicks? do you recommend any tutorial? I want to make 909 style kicks, but I end up with a super weak kick and when I create the rest of the sounds, it’s the one with the least power. Can anyone give me a clue?
You can start with a kick preset you like, and see how it was made. That’s a good start. There’s often a lot going on in the assignable envelope section.
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can you post some snippets with your kicks? would love to hear…
There’s a lot of discussion in this AR thread specifically around 909 kicks, also refers to a soundonsound article that describes the technical architecture of the 909 kick:
If memory serves me right, pitch envelope on a triangle and some hipassed noise for the click. But read through and see.
From my own experimentations you quickly end up fine tuning pitch envelope release, amp envelope release, amount of applied pitch, base pitch etc to find the optimal thump for money. Then try to amplify that with whatever tools are at your disposal (bell curve boost filter etc)
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i don’t know, i have tried pitch envelope + filter envelope but nothing. with an ableton operator i get much more decent stuff, but with A4, it’s like it has a weakness there, i would post something i have done testing but you would really hear low bass, or sub bass, but definitely no hard kick.
I was saying to another user, that I only manage to make kicks that look more like a bass or a sub than a kick, clean, hard and round. when you get a “decent” kick you realize that it is very low and that the rest of the elements in the track you have to lower it by 50% to match the kick, and even then if you get off track you lose the kick. Definitely in my opinion analog4 is not made to build easy kicks at least with the 909 style. I was looking for performances of the a4 and the kicks that I hear are not usually convincing, even so I’m still looking for someone to explain to me how is it possible that in ableton in 4 min I make a decent kick, and with the A4 I spend more than 30 min just trying to get power from somewhere to kick and I get nothing. It’s as if they had filtered the low register, it’s curious. With the treble and resonance you hear perfectly the whole spectrum, but with the kick part, it’s null. weird.
Hmm i remember having similar experiences now that you mention it.
I think changing the slope type on the envelope helped a bit with the snappyness
Few things that I start to understand after few years:
1: kick alone means little
2: tune your kick
3: layer your one kick with (usually three sounds, attack high click, medium tone, decay boomy sine. Mix to taste
4: set the right decay time (usually shorter unless the kick is the bass too)
5: distortion from a bit to a lot depending to taste
6: dynamic filter to make it move through the bar or the song
7: why one kick? better three four or even fives through the track
8: heavy compression with the OT
9: Don’t get your kick be eaten alive by others section of your track
10: fine tune your kick once more after everything have been lay down
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Great, but my point is different
because what I want to do is make live sets on the A4, not create samples.
I just want to create decent drums.
yes I also tried, but no acceptable result
High-pass filter with lots of resonance at your desired fundamental frequency goes a long way.
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without pitch modulation?
In addition to. Do all the LFO and amp envelope things to get that initial snappy thump. Once you have that starting sound, set the 2nd filter to HP, crank up the resonance, and lower the cutoff frequency until it THUMPS.
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I have tried to do it. my basic recipe is
drop an octave or two on oscillator one and square wave, the second oscillator is still without volume as I think it just messes it up (I want a clean kick).
Second step on the envelope I set it to 65 (3 oclock) and give it a low pass filter.
I go to the filters and adjust the first filter, and the second one I look for the resonance of the low frequencies (why I can go lower or higher but the resonance is only noticeable in one point of the left zone in the filter?).
I go to lfo, pitch modulation, exponential curve, and the trigger mode is set to one.
play the overdrive just enough to make it sound good and not like a bag of potatoes squashing together.
result-a crappy kick
(I just listened to a jam of A4 and AR thinking that did the kicks with the A4, but no the kicks are with the AR, why A4 cant do this acceptable kick?)
EHL
finally i learned, its possible!
as someone says i download a pack for analog 4 for drums, and i learned from there!
(works great a midfilter in triangular shape 
)
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@darenager https://payhip.com/b/aQB1 this thing i still use on my a4 for what feels like a decade now haha. just a recommendation if anyone is reading this thread and wants to be pointed to a good set specifically for the analog four. Really nice snares hats cymbals rides etc that i used in lots of my work, taught me alot about drum synthesis too
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this pack sounds great!
can i ask what dots the sound pack helped connect for you that got you the results you were looking for? i don’t have an a4 but mess around with drum synthesis a lot
who is the person of your avatar?
i just downloaded a free pack of drums from elektron, (drum enthusiast)
What I’ve really learned, is that the A4 is a very precise machine, and for certain sounds, very small values can make you go from a potato, to an incredible sound.
In the octatrack I have also done sound design with scw and lfos and you can get pretty big things, but not as clean or with that texture that the A4 has.
in ableton operator, it’s very easy to get a kick and if you start adding effects…
my goal with the A4 has been realized. and it has left a very good taste in my mouth. I will upload a video soon, I was looking for a hard and clean kick like a 909, or a techno that has the kick present and it has fulfilled my goal.
if you don’t have the A4 how are you going to learn it?
(I think that in the pack that I mention that is free come the wavs so that you can use them with a sampler).
but a kick is with a pitch envelope, or if you do it with lfo that is exponential, the adsr very short and you will already have the blow of which then you will go sculpting, my problem is that before instead of kicks, I got potatoes.
You were right! just put on track two, the sound to learn and on track one the “draft or student sound” and compare one with the other… you learn a lot!
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