hi, i followed a walkthrough from cm 211 magazine,page 77.
i have attached screenshot of the 4/4 kick. from looking at it does anyone have any suggestions why all the kick waveforms dont look the same?

 

I don't think that's the answer. It has nothing to do with layering. How is he supposed to get any drum samples in his substractive synthesizer?

I don't know the synth you used ( i hope YOU do, 'coz that's essential to find the cause).
However: Every note different might be a result from:
- Phase reset/phase shifting between each trigger
- free running LFOs doing somethin (pitch, filter, whatever)
- pitch randomisation/analog emulations
- effects: distortion, compressor, chorus
- (pitch) envelopes being sloppy/unprecise

- None of the above and the kicks are identical and just look different, because the waveform display in Cubase is inaccurate.

 

Do you mean the kicks from DS Diversion, showing the waveform in orange?

They do look the same to me anyway. But if all you want is them to be identical, chop the waveform into one quarter note in length. Delete the other 3 you didn't pick. Copy and repeat the one you did, or use the Loop function in your DAW. Leave the tail and the blank space for now, so the one slice you picked can loop cleanly. Doesn't get much easier....

 

yes the kicks showing the waveform. i just looked at the attachment,i dont think you guys can zoom in on it can u? its hard to see that they arent identical if not zoomed in ,

 

Our Ears can not hear phase. So an identical sounding thing could look totally different depending where the oscillator started his journey. (And this is best to be seen in stuff with low frequencies only because the wavelenght is big enough to make a difference in the drawing of the waveform)

 

Last edited: Mar 31, 2026 at 10:19 PM

Maybe it's oversampling

 

First: why should they look the same in the first place? If you can't hear it then it makes no difference.

Second: The way DAWs display waveforms might be the explanation, zoom fully in and inspect sample by sample basis if you want to make sure.

 

Put an oscilloscope on it like VPS Scope. If you still think it is different, null test them against one another. If you still care, chop into 1/4 notes and loop. Add any kind of fx you want, limiter, clipper, whatever.

That DS synth plugin looked really nice but never gained a whole lot of users; I don't know why you would even use it for a kick drum in a track. Make a kick in a 4 on the floor pattern using some other plugin. See how those look the same way you are looking at these. The real question to tackle is not why they look different, it is why you even care.