So I have this problem of being unable to get that tight dark kick sound out of any of the built in synths in ableton. Any tips on free VSTs/presets that will help me with this sound.
MeditationProfonde
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Posted : Apr 5, 2010 13:29
Take a synth. Choose a sine wave and modulate the pitch with an enveloppe (usual way to do a kick).
To have a kick your enveloppe must have no attack, 0 sustain value and a short decay. Just play with the decay value until you get what you want.
You can modulate with several combined enveloppes to get a better result.
There are VSTs that do that automatically for you like Bazzism or Psykick(i guess but never used it).
You may want to look into seperating the sub freqs of your kick from the rest of the sound. Alot of darkpsy has a wonderful rolling sub section so, while you may want a super punchy hi end to your kick, a super smooth almost sub-bassy sound can be good for the low end. I've started using this http://abnormalaudio.110mb.com/PKickLayer0.2.dll (as recommended in another thread) because it does the sub/hi end seperation for you... sweet rolling sub bass mmmmmmm
Maine Coon
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Posted : Apr 5, 2010 16:37
Making a couple of kicks in Ableton is my only experience in music so far, but it seemed to work.
In Operator, set your oscillators to work in parallel (the little icon should show a single horizontal row of colored squares). Use three oscillators:
1) Main kick – a sine wave, 0 ms on attack, about 150 ms on decay (to 0, i.e. –inf dB), another 150 ms on release. You may have to shorten D & R times for fast dark tunes, I don’t know. One very important thing is to set phase of the wave to 25%. This way, it produces a loud click before you hear anything else. If this click is too loud, you can muffle it a bit by a low-pass at about 2 kHz (or maybe somebody has a better way?). But without this click a kick doesn’t sound real, IMO.
2) White noise. It should kick in a little bit after the initial click and be short. I used 10 ms on attack and 40-50 ms on decay (to –inf dB). It doesn’t seem like many people have it in electronic music – but you can hear it in real rock bass drums, so I added it.
3) After-touch of sub-bass. Tune the oscillator frequency to 0.5 (i.e. an octave lower than the first oscillator). Sine wave. Phase at 0. Long-ish attack (I used 80 ms). Long decay and release (I used 200 ms). You will have to turn it down in volume, but I don’t know by how much – I can not hear it well on my crappy earphones. Otherwise, it may drive your volume meters to the top without contributing much to the audible sound.
I used no LFO. No filter either – but that’s only because I've never used these kicks in a track with other sunds. And I used a pitch envelope, like all tutorials show: quickly going from top to the normal pitch in about 70 ms.
That’s it. It sounds good by itself. Maybe it will sound like total crap in a track. I am not there yet. Hope some of this is helpful.
(And I would appreciate any suggestions from the veterans on what I could do differently)
soulfood
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Posted : Apr 5, 2010 17:33
I highly recommend the psy kick vst.
fast decay down from about 12,000 then a slower sweep from around 3000 to 150, then have the subs tail out to around 40hz.
Simples.
geekhorde
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Posted : Apr 5, 2010 18:22
Main Coon, I did what you did there, but I added a Dynamic Tube and a Saturator (both on warm low type of settings) and then a low pass Auto Filter with a little bit of resonance. Try that out. Kind of liked the results.
Nectarios
Martian Arts
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Posted : Apr 5, 2010 21:03
Everybody has their own idea of a dark kick.
This is my idea of a kick that is suitable for a tune with a dark vibe.
But will it sound OK at 170 BPM in a darkpsy tune? Mine probably won't work in fast craziness. But it was a good first lesson in Ableton for me anyway.
BTW, how did you make yours?
Speakafreaka
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Posted : Apr 6, 2010 11:22
In addition to Maine Coon's way, there is another way of making kicks, by stacking up operators. Here is what I posted about this on Psy-Music:
Quote:
Your technique is all good RE the fixed osc pitch - essential in my mind.
I reckon its difficult to get a decent kick with less than three operators myself though - because you can only ever pitch bend the sine by a maximum of four octaves on any one operator.
If I start at say a fundamental of 15hz on the osc freq control, then the pitch shift goes to 240hz, max which is although probably too high for the sub giving me a good area of freqs to play with on the sub.
So then I stack up another operator in the instrument rack with a fixed freq osc starting at around 120hz - which is the lowest sort of freq I'd want something that isn't explicitly going to be making actual bassiness on the kick to have.
4 octaves above 120hz is 960hz .... which is only just getting into the meat of the sound and where things start to sound attacky ... really, I think I'd like another stage here but it'll do.
However, obviously, a kick drum needs more upper freqs than topping out at 1khz!
So another one goes on there fixed freq at 1khz - which goes up to 8khz four octaves above it, and is pretty much exactly the required range to build kick attacks, if not again, slightly too much!
and here is a link to an Ableton set with the technique being demonstrated.
But will it sound OK at 170 BPM in a darkpsy tune? Mine probably won't work in fast craziness. But it was a good first lesson in Ableton for me anyway.
BTW, how did you make yours?
I used Logic's native drum synth, Ultrabeat. Did not do any layering, just a single sine wave oscillator. I then used Logic's native compressor with the FET circuit engaged and Logic's native Channel EQ.
Have no clue if its going to work in a tune as fast as you say though...at them BPMs things get way too fast to enjoy a nice bottom end. My guess is that you would have to sacrifice the bottom end of either the kick, or the bass....I mean even for 16th basslines, the tempo is too fast to get a nice fat 16th bass note. You could have a nice fat kick with the tail crossing over to the bass notes, that would occupy the low mid and above, part of the spectrum, but that is just my assumption. I have made drum n bass tunes at that tempo, but the bassline and drum patterns do not follow the trance, production manual. Long legato notes overlapping with the kick, which is not nearly as big in the bottom end as the trance kicks of tunes in "normal psy-trance" BPM.
http://soundcloud.com/martianarts
Freeflow
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Posted : Apr 6, 2010 19:39
So in the past week, after struggling to get close using ableton's built-in analog synth, I switched to Crystal, where I got the sound I wanted in about 10 minutes.
It's the difference between using a drill press to make a nice hole in a piece of wood, and trying to use a knife to make that same hole.
