Tag Archive for kick drums

synth tutorials

Getting powerful kicks out of the Monomachine

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The Monomachine is an interesting instruments not only for “classic” synth sounds but can even work as a 6 elements drum synth sequencer.
The Six machines are not a great restriction for rhythmic composing, as the beatbox on one track only can keep the rhythm busy, while I can synthetize kicks snares, percussions and cymbals on the other channels/machines.

In this post I want to examine the monomachine as a “kick generator”.
The best “Kick machines” are without any doubt the GND-sin and the EFM machines.
The best way to start is to genearate the SINE wave, with the envelope with the decay  set to do a 808 type kick and hold and release at ZERO.
The first thing to understand it’s that the punch in the sound is given by the typical pitch sweep.
Faster is the sweep , harder is the punch.
So to make the pitch sweep you can use the LFO , set to TRIG , with the EXP wave, getting the right amountand the right Speed.
As you have created your kick sound , then applying the “dynamics” efx in neighbour mode (on the folloowing track ) and setting the compressor to work in a rude way with a high ratio, medium attack and short release you get the final punch to the kick.

modulars, synth tutorials, Tutorials

Making Kick drum using an LFO (in a modular synth)

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The kick is a relly important percussion sound in electronic compositions, let’s get a different way to make it.

Usually to synthetize a good kick we use a sine wave layered with a square, and balance the two if we want a softer kick or if we want more attack.
VCOs tends to be harmonically rich so it’s not simple to get a kick that sounds not clearly tuned.
To get a more “percussive & less harmonic” kick (but it is even useful to create percussions like toms or bongos) I use an LFO.
LFO sounds more clinic, not many harmonic content on the wave generated.
Using a simple SINE wave on the DOEPFER A-145 can lead to interesting kicks and percussion.
The path is really simple A145->A132-3 (vca) and an env to control the vca.
The A145 is interesting as a sound source because it can work very well into audio frequencies, the only downfal is the fact that it has no freq. modulation capabilities.

Using the LIVEWIRE VULCAN MODULATOR  we can go further into sound design as the vulcan has cv inputs for the frequency mod.
Using the same signal configuration we can notice that the vulcan sounds more organic, the wave is not a perfect sine, it has some fluctuation too.
The result is a percussion that is not rounded as the 145 but with more punch and more attack.

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