> Step by step
Synthesising a kick drum
1 Kicks vary from machine to machine – the thud of the Roland CR-78, the extended boom of the TR-808, the aggression of the MachineDrum. You can achieve all of these by tweaking the patch that we’re going to be making here. Fire up Dune CM and load the Dune_INIT patch.
2 Our filter won’t act as an oscillator, but that’s no problem – a self-oscillating filter just produces a sine wave, and we can easily do that. Look to the Osc 1 side of the oscillator section. Select the sine wave in the waveform selection area – it’s the third one from the top. Now, turn the Semi knob fully counterclockwise. This lowers the pitch dramatically.
3 Play a note on your keyboard controller. That’s already sounding a little like a kick drum, even if it does double-trigger. We need to adjust the Amp Envelope in the lower-right corner – set the Attack to 5% and turn the Sustain fully counter-clockwise, then set the Release to 9% and the Decay to 65%. Now play a note. Not much of a difference – yet!
4 We’ve lost a lot of volume, so before we proceed, we set the Output Volume knob to about 64%. That should be nice and loud without breaking the speakers. Now let’s think about giving the filter something to chew on. Head up to the Osc 3/Noise section and fully crank the Noise Level. It’s the knob on the right of that particular section.
5 Watch those speaker levels before triggering the sound. The noise is quite loud now – it’s really only there to provide some atonal grist for the kick. Let’s move to the filter section, where we select the LP Ladder 12dB mode from the dropdown menu. This is a classic Oberheim-style filter that will roll off the top end, leaving the bass intact.
6 Now let’s lower the filter Cutoff knob to about 25%. This will filter out the high end of the spectrum. Try playing the sound to see what we mean – it’s nothing like a kick drum! Don’t worry, we’ll get there. Play and hold a note, then play and release quickly. The latter almost sounds right. All it takes is a little more shaping.
7 Set the filter’s Resonance control to 94% and play the sound. As you can hear, some of the low frequencies are now emphasised. That’s what the Resonance control does: it boosts the frequencies immediately surrounding the Cutoff frequency, even as the frequencies above the Cutoff are filtered out.
8 Next we want to control how the filter changes the frequency content over time – and if you’ve read the introduction on the previous page, you’ll know we’ll be using the Filter Envelope to do that. First we need to tell the filter to respond to it, and how much. That’s what the filter’s Env knob is for – turn it up to about 63%.
9 Play a note. Ouch! That’s almost like an electronic cymbal – and we’ll come back to that later. For now, though, we adjust the Filter Envelope to control the frequencies by our selected amount. We leave the Attack parameter alone, and reduce the Sustain to 0. This allows a fast attack and ensures that our steady state matches the current Cutoff setting.
10 We want the Filter Envelope to slightly outlast the Amp Envelope when the note is released, so set the Filter Envelope’s Release to 13%. The Decay should be at no more than 8%. Now play some notes and carefully reduce the Noise Level until you have just the right amount of grit – we like it at 67%. Small tweaks will result in a variety of different-sounding kicks.