One of the most essential elements in any kind of music, the kick gives not just a consistent feeling to a track but also transcends the grooving sensation to the listeners.
Why trouble yourself searching for samples when you can create your own kick with the Heisenberg? This tutorial will guide you how to craft one of the fundamental sounds for a kick. You can then layer more sounds and perfect it.
Let’s get started!
Before we actually start, take note that this tutorial will not give you the exact values for the parameters; you will tweaks the kick to your own taste later anyhow.
Give it a punch!
While it’s not impossible to craft a kick drum with the Pulverisateur, the Heisenberg gives more capabilities such as three filter/amplitude envelopes, and a pitch envelope.
Most kicks in trance music have their punchiness very noticeable. The punch is the drop from high frequencies to low frequencies in a short amount of time. Thus, the shorter the time it takes to sweep and the more frequencies it sweeps through, the punchier the kick is.
A punch can be made using the Pitch Envelope of the Heisenberg. We'll only need to assign one oscillator (operator) to the Pitch Envelope.
We are using a short Attack time indicating that operator A should sweep from high to low. Hover on the node at the beginning and the end of the Attack phase should tell you how many semitones above and below the played note are being swept through. Since you want the punch of the kick to be static, set the Semitone of the punch operator to none (Ratio: 00.0000). The offset when the ratio of an operator is zero tells you that: whenever it the synth plays a note, that operator will always play that waveform at that offset frequency, regardless of what note is being played.
Referring to the the first image and this one, you can see that operator A will sweep from 36 semitones above 60 Hertz to 36 semitones below 60 Hertz.
And there you have a punch! ; )
Add some bass!
This is optional. If you’re going to make hip-hop or trap, this is immensely useful to control which note your kick bass hit. Adding a sub-bass to your kick is as easy as turning on the level knob of Operator B (or any unused operator). It’s best to use a Sine, Parabola or Circle waveform as they don’t have too many harmonics.
Finished? Try your kick with a low note, the punch above should play well with the bass oscillator.
Envelopes & Tweaks
Envelopes
Imagine this: You want your kick note to last 1/2 bar, at a C2 note. The punch would last less a fraction of a second, and it’s gonna stay there at 20Hz or something with your bass; the left-overs of the punch will affect the rest of the kick. To cope with this, you apply the punch’s operator to 100% use the second or third envelope. Then, you modify this envelope so that it would have no sustain and short decay, so that the punch would stop soon after the note is triggered.
You can also set the bass’s operator to an envelope and modulate it, probably give it a little LFO, some release, perhaps? Just tweak it to your taste!
Other tweaks
After finishing with the basic sounds, you can boost up the kick by using effect stomp-boxes. Typically, we usually use the Tube or Exciter.
You can check out several tracks that uses Heisenberg as kick:
Unscalable Sky from André Michelle.
A-3eK from Potasmic.
Noisine from Inavon.
Have fun Audiotooling! ☺
