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5. Thump by Metric Halo
1 Are your basses anaemic? Do your kick drums feel as if they were delivered by a malnourished member of the IT support staff? If so, you may want to look into a subharmonic synthesiser, and Metric Halo have a free one for you in the shape of Thump. Get it at mhsecure.com/metric_halo. Let’s use it to beef up a weak kick track. 2 Load our kick drum track ( WeakKick.wav) into your host of choice, and have a listen to familiarise yourself with its un-enhanced sound. It’s pretty flimsy! Loop a section of the song so you can let it run indefinitely while you tweak the plugin, and load Thump as an insert effect. 3 Take a listen to the default patch. It’s actually not too bad – if, that is, you’re looking for a booming 808-style kick. However, we simply want to add some oomph to our original recording without losing the flavour of the actual kick drum. Let’s start by muting Osc 2, so we can concentrate on one bit at a time.
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Turn the Attack Frequency down to around 61 for a heavy thump. The
Sustain Frequency is crucial, because it’s the bit that rings out – set it to just below
60. It’s obvious to our ears that we’re on the right track, as we can already hear much of what the original was missing. Let’s adjust the Wet/Dry Mix so that we can hear this new tone mixed in with our original audio. That’s a huge improvement over what we started with! 5 Crank the Dry/Wet Mix knob back up to fully wet, then engage the second oscillator. Ouch – and we were doing so well. Clearly, there’s work to be done, as oscillator 2 has introduced a higherpitched tone that doesn’t work with the kick. Set Osc 2’s Attack Frequency a bit higher than that of Osc 1 – in this case, around 94. The Sustain Frequency sounds about right at just under 90. 6 The Amplitude Followers section determines how Thump reacts to the incoming signal. The default settings are fine for our needs, but have a play with the various parameters to hear how they affect the sound. Once you have something you like, adjust the Dry/Wet
Mix again to blend in the original signal.