Hi guys, I was wondering if anyone might try their hand trying to recreate this kick on digitone 2? I know it’s processed quite a bit but I’ve never been able to come close to having quite the same sharpness in the transient on digitone.
Try a simple sine or square wave, with a snappy transient sample, and play with overdrive and compressor settings.
This is a very snappy and boxy sound, so make sure your amp envelope settings have a near 0 attack, adding a little bit of decay, sustain and release to taste.
To accentuate your transient and give a lil movement to the sound, you may also want to use an envelope, with really quick adsr settings to modulate pitch and/or filter cutoff and overdrive.
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Thanks for the tips but believe I’ve tried far more than that 
. I’ve even tried lfo’s for an extra pitch envelope to get that chirpy click, but can’t quite nail that mix cutting snap.
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Haha, all good.
Sometimes if I can’t get a sound quite right, I find it also helps to start simplifying settings.
I would start with finding the right transient, get that popping with envelopes and overdrive, and then slowly add oscillators to fill it out.
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I like to look at the sound in Audacity for things like this… helps you see the waveform and how it evolves.
Here’s your kick:
The frequency in the middle is about 60Hz.
I might have a go at making it later.
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FM Drum, Sine Wave, pitch envelope on page 1, then play with the FM values (quick sharp envelopes) on page 2 to recreate the characteristic transient sound.
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This is pretty close for a first attempt…
KICK.dn2pst (557 Bytes)
nb. The original might have a compressor on it or something. The only way to get the exact sound might be a Digitakt. 
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Thank you, overall this sounds close except for the transient which isn’t quite the same snappy chirp. The transient is the main thing I’m trying to match, the body of the kick is less important for what I’m trying to do. Which is what I’ve always had trouble with with digitone 2. Digitone transients seems a bit smeared and soft and sometimes incoherent to me. As a wierd analogy: it’s like the difference between the sound of a belt snapping or a hand clap vs hitting something with a straw broom.
I wonder if a Roland TR8s or TR6s might be more suited for these kinds of kicks?
I’m gonna keep trying to see if I can find some trick for getting it right… maybe layering two tracks
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This is probably the answer. The problem is it needs either AMP envelope or high pass filter to tame the initial pitch sweep (red lines) but either of those will kill the transient (green).
This may not be exactly what you’re after but at least the transient is snappy. Here’s what I do:
- Short noise burst
- Ultrafast filter sweep from fully open to desired (resonating to taste) frequency – BP in this case
- Secondary slower filter sweep on the same filter for pitch
- Oscillator tri or sine to target frequency – maybe LFO sweep to this, too.
The trick is to initially allow as much mid to higher frequencies as possible. Many synthesised kicks focus only on the body and cut way too much of these.
[Disclaimer: The audio example was done with A4 but DN is very well capable of this – maybe even a little more straight forward.]
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Just thinking… the filter envelope has a secret delay parameter!
You might be able to delay the low pass filter until after the noise transient ends.
Will try later.
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Have you tried layering two tracks (one for the thump and one for the transient)? I’m thinking the thump track could be a sine or lp filtered square with a slight pitch envelope assigned via lfo. Once you get the thump right you can find an appropriate transient.
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Thanks for the tips guys, these are definitely getting closer. I gave it another try and tried some different methods than usual and now I’m satisfied with the results as far as getting a sharp transient goes. Not exactly like the sample but in the right ballpark. I use the first FM drum page primarily to make the transient potion with a very steep and fast pitch sweep and then fine tune the timbre of the transient with the modulators. For the pitch sweep of the body I just used an LFO. And another fast ramp LFO with a quick fadeout to sharpen the transient more. And then a bell eq to correct any frequency imbalances
I have in the past and likef the results, gives a different flavor of kickdrum. But not specifically to make this kind of kick.
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Had a crack at this using FM Drum, sounds fairly close on headphones, might be way off on speakers though…
One trick for good transients is using a tiny env on Ratio B to add that extra snap.
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Sweet, thank you :). Getting closer. That’s about as close as I managed to get as well after an hour of tweaking, also used the same trick actually with the short envelope on the modulators. But regardless the transient is still always a bit different from the sample, and it seems to be an inherent character thing with digitone, it always has the same kind of analog drum machine transient vibe. Hard to explain but it seems rich sounding rather than sharp and concise. Vs the digital sounding plastic transient of the sample kick which sounds like it was made with a vst plugin like kick 3. In either case, ironically I’ve discovered that BD Sharp on syntakt seems to come closer to what I need .
BD classic on Analog tracks does it, too.
Why didn’t you tell us you had a Syntakt?? 
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