Making Love Story’s kick and bass in Logic Pro

Victor uses processed kicks to create his booming techno rumble, plus some tasty synth work

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“The kick is a sampled 909 with a bit of distortion and EQ,” Victor begins. “Since this kick is quite short, I decided to make a rumble out of a different sub kick. I just stretched it a bit, cut it, and did a fade out and fade in.”

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“Then I did a little EQ on the rumble, I removed some of the highs, I did a low cut at 30Hz, and I cut the stereo under 100Hz, just so I can have my low end in mono,” Victor reveals. “I do this with the kick and the bass so that when you’re in a club you can always be sure that they’re not going to have any phase issues.”

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“I do the same with the kick, removing the stereo under 100Hz, and have just a little EQing,” notes Victor. For the bassline he uses the SEQ Bass Driver preset from DS Audio Thorn that he tweaked slightly, and played on 16th notes to create a rolling feel.

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To bring out the bass’ mid and high harmonics, Victor applies UAD Thermionic Culture Vulture. “It’s amazing, it’s my favourite saturation!” he enthuses. Once again Victor applies FabFilter Pro-Q 3, this time to cut out the sub frequencies and highs from the bass.”

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Logic’s ChromaVerb reverb is used to give the bassline a touch of stereo width, then Xfer Records LFO Tool ducks the signal aligned with the kick sidechain, compression-style. Finally, Victor uses another instance of Pro-Q 3 to help him tidy up the lows after the rest of the processing.