The Syntakt kicks are pretty much all good. This isn’t a Sampler/ROMpler, it’s a synthesizer, you have to do a bit of the work. As mentioned above, using the high pass filter will help a lot. You can add a touch of extra transient motion that way, filter out some low frequencies that may be causing mud with your bass sounds. A very light touch on the overdrive is nice too, but keep it subtle (especially for funkier, housier stuff) Really take a light handed approach to parameters. Use the pitch envelope, but go a little lighter there. Crank up the snap/whatever parameters, to add a bit of click to the attack. The syntakt provides all of the tools needed to make pretty much ANY type of analog style (plus others) of kick. If you can do it on the 808/909, it can be done on the Syntakt with a touch of effort. Also as others have mentioned, those samples (whether they mention it or not) are generally processed to some degree. Even if they just had a limiter on them, it’s not the raw sound of the machine. There’s also no reason you can’t layer sounds. A lot of people writing these styles of music will use layered kick sounds, or add transient samples, to add texture to the drum(s). Keep in mind, you’ll need to do some work there too. A lot of EQing is required to do this sort of thing to make it all fit.
One last thing. If you don’t like the ones with the preset paramaters given, build your own! Use the impulse machine, ping the filter at high resonance, tune the envelope, use an LFO in one-shot mode to modulate the pitch a bit on the attack, and tune from there. Maybe sample it into your Octa to then go to work on it with other tools. You can also use the delay at the shortest settings to add some KS-style to it. Sparingly of course. (use the second LFO to tweak this part)
Sometimes kicks can be a bit tricky. The rest of your track’s sounds may dictate what you can get away with on the kick without it sounding like garbage.
Also, a lot of house music doesn’t always use TR-X0X type drums. Sometimes it actually uses ROM-based ones from things like the DMX, Linn, etc. Maybe get yourself some vintage ROM samples. (there’s a nice pack on the Elektron site called Vintage Drums I think (or something like that) that has LinnDrum, DMX, Roland ROM based, etc. Mixing some of these with the analog style sounds can really help get your percussion section sounding nice. Or strip out a bunch of the frequencies on these samples, and layer them with the analog ones. Or chop them down to just a few milliseconds and then x-fade/layer.
When you use samples, a lot of work is already done for you, but they’re a lot less flexible over time, since you can’t modulate many of the parameters that you could have before they were sampled.
