Hey guys, sorry for the late reply, hope you're all doing great.

I've spent a lot of time yesterday trying out a lot of things and even tho I didn't got my kicks to sound at that level yet I'm kinda getting closer now, so the process became less frustrating and more fun. I'll try to share the things I've found out that seemed to work in case someone is interested in learning this kind of sound design as well or is just interested in trying another approach for it.

First of all, I decided to spend some time on Kick 2 and I need to say that that plugin is really amazing, if I wasn't getting the results I wanted before it was my fault cause I really wasn't using it to it's potential. So yeah, Kick 2 ftw. :p

Now when it comes to sound design, I started creating the kick itself from the sine wave pitch envelope and adjusting the amp as needed till t sound strong and punch but without much top end to leave room for saturation to do it's job in the next step, after that I used the built-in parallel wave distortion to get that big knocking sound, and yeah, even a little goes a long way here. I think the most useful feature from kick 2 kicks in here (pun intended :p), the ability to re-shape the amp section to select what is going to be distorted while leaving the sub clean and round, for that just reduce thesub part in the amp section and then you can drive the kick hard through distort to achieve a punch transient while retaining dynamics and not overcrowding the low end. From there you can scroll through your clicks to add more punch and presence in the upper midrange and to end to taste and if needed you can use the eq to clean it and/or pre emphasize some frequency before distortion.

From there you might already have a solid kick but you'll probably need to clean it a little bit with a post eq and treat it to improve the sound as needed, but since you already have a solid kick you have the option to do these improvements along the rumble, didn't tried that yet but I think it might work well.

I really appreciate all the help I've got from you guys, you did help me getting in the ballpark by keeping it simple, before that I was really going overboard and trying some crazy and complex things and ending up to something that didn't sounded as a kick anymore, haha. So thanks a lot for all your help guys.

And yeah, even tho I'm kinda in the ballpark now I'm always trying to improve my sound design skills so I still appreciate any tips or recommendations to get my kicks to the next level.

 

Last edited: Sep 16, 2022

This one might be interesting for the next steps
https://sinee-audiotools.com/

 

You can set the Hz/Pitch of the sub/rumble in Knock. I frequently mute the Sub inside Kick2 for other genre music. Sometimes I decide to add some back later. Try it with the Decap preset Kick to 808 for a quick idea of it. https://pluginsthatknock.com

 

Hmz seems interesting. Feels a bit like a Decapitator/Saturn2 combi.

 

It can do, what you might call a simplified version of that kind of saturations. The Saturn2 can get about as complex as you want. I miss Decap only from Soundtoys. Sometimes I use the Softube free Saturation Knob plugin for kicks also. It's very simple and lends almost no color to the sound (compared with the Saturn).

I bet some BX_Boom plugin finds its way on to quite a few of these.

 

Last edited: Sep 16, 2022

I usually skip these "automatic solution" plugins but the demos sound good so I'm downloading them to try'em out. Thanks for the suggestions guys.

 

Amazing bro, really helpful, there's a lot of valuable tips on your workflow. I was following the steps and I honestly wasn't expecting that final result to be so massive and punchy, great work bro, you really know your stuff. I still have a long way to go to get my kicks at this level, your's sound like a big unified thing, mine still sound like a kick and a rumble if that make sense. :p

Seem you have recorded this video only to help me out, so thanks a lot for your time and attention bro, I trully appreciate it.

 

yes i also would not consider this done and polished but rather a fast sketchup. if it was for a real production i would still spend some hours on it (bass / mid / high balance is off etc. in the vid) but was easier for me to just press record than to try to type it out especially because there for me is no specific plugin or chain i use so it's never the same. only thing that would be consistent would some convolution reverb for rumble / offbass. BTW i think kikzilla is overrated :P it's nothing more than gate + reverb (for which you cant change any parameters) + distortion + eq + volume shaper but there is nothing unique to the plugin

edit: when editing / layering it's really important that you are aware that at lower frequency you can mess up the phase of the entire kick / sub contruct easily with pretty much everything you do, but you can also use that to your advantage by playing with low cut filters or just resampling parts like resampling your rumble / bass and moving it just some ms to completely change the sound

 

Last edited: Sep 17, 2022

That is great. love it. (sorry off topic, how did you record?)

I am a big fan of Kick2, but I like to remove the "sub" from it. You can drag and drop wav files from the Mac Finder onto the clicks in Kick2, making it so flexible and fast. The sub is the only part of that plugin I think seems like an afterthought. The sliding bar to adjust sample length is genius as far as workflow, to me.

 

thx.

RME TotalMix loopback into reaper and shadowplay for the video part

 

Gotcha bro, and yeah, even if it's like an experimentation session it still has some really valuable tips and insights, and as a newbie to this genre I can say that have this kind of access and seeing an actual producer of the genre working is priceless. Besides that not much people would bother recording a video just to help a complete stranger from the internet, therefore I'm really grateful bro, you're an awesome person.

Good advice as well, I usually do that with basses when getting back to synthesis is not possible anymore or when changing the source would change the actual sound cause of the post processing. Just to add to this tip and possibly help other users, an all pass filter is worth a try on this type of situation as well.

 

I agree, don't use it myself, but for a 'newbie' it could be interesting as a starting point.

When it comes to kick processing with rumble I would suggest the following vids:
https://www.audiotent.com/production-tips/layering-processing-techno-kick/
https://www.audiotent.com/production-tips/create-techno-bassline-using-kick-reverb/

Audiotent is great btw, a lot of useful stuff.

 

especially for the harder side of techno you would want a kick/bass/rumble glue thing that can play solo and still sound good as the best parts of some of the all time best tracks are very minimalistic like the first drop in this classic and also every DJ will thank you for keeping your intros / outros clean

 

yeah of course, like i said

nice track thanks for sharing