the 808 in the beat (starts at 22 secs) is defying all my attempts to recreate it.

any help would be greatly appreciated

 

might be able to do that to a long 808 kick just with some overdrive and I think tremolo, depends on what the overdrive or POSSIBLY distortion you use sounds like, the tremolo might just be the frequency of the low mass popping out from the overdrive too, but yeah I'd run it through a few different valve, tube, and overdrive plugins, they're all going to sound bit different.. If you have an old analog mixer you might be able to get this just by overloading the channel even.

 

Just double the kick and use ring mod on the second copy, filter out the lows and blend them together. Thats one of many way to make it.
Another option use multiband Ring Mod and apply RM only on higher band and adjust the band split to taste.

 

It sounds like a synth to me. later in the track, it sounds like it has an odd high end oscillator almost spinning; which to me is why you are guessing fm/ringmod maybe? That can also be amplitude or lfo modulation but because of the high frequency of it its sounds going faster than it might with some dubstep bass. It seems like some of the lowest notes are wanting to "vanish" due to phase cancellation, which again I would think the ringmod diagnosis is a decent guess. That could also be because I do not have my subwoofer on right now.

The track is on amazon music. I'd grab a link, throw it into lucida to get a flac file and then stem separate it and look at it by itself. Or closer to it, anyway.

 

The 808 bass kick is actually a resonant (tunable) filter network.
It relies on feedback resonance triggered by a small burst of noise.
Search for bridged t network.
Also:
Kick drum synthesis and Bridged T Networks

 

^ I actually looked it up because I was wondering how the 808 kick could sound so smooth if it came from a noise burst. Like you said, all the other drums use noise, but the kick is different. it’s a triggered pulse. It's splitting hairs, but I don't really see how either end up sounding like the bass used in this track.

 

You mean this?

 

Bass layer: Lowpassed square (single oscillator). Keytrack the lowpass cutoff. Add some chorus.

To make it into a "kick sound": Trigger/layer a lowpassed fixed-pitch kick sample (or suitable kick, with emphasis around 100) on the note-on. Increase a little attack time on the lowpassed square synth to create room/space for the short kick/transient.

No need to make it more complicated than it is.

 

Last edited: Sep 15, 2025

Here is how I did it, just a saw and a filter bank (vocoder filter) and then Redux on top to get that brightness