This time I will show you one of the many ways of how to make a psytrance kick drum. Though the example sound is quite genre specific, you still might learn some useful general information from this post. We will check out the nice Kick 2 plugin from Sonic Academy and see how I made a kick drum with it to one of my currently unreleased tracks. You'll also get a link to the example preset I made.
The genre "psytrance" could be a whole another long story post, so I will leave that part out from this one and assume that those who are interested will seek information about it by themselves. Let's just say that the kick drum and bass synth play an essential role in this genre, like in any other club music style.
Also, this post is not about "how everybody should make the kick sound like". It's just a one example that I have made. I often make a new one from scratch when I start a new track, so my kicks differ from each other as well. Obviously there's no single "right way" of doing it.
Kick 2
https://www.sonicacademy.com/products/kick-2 (14 Day Trial available)
This kick drum synthesizer is one the most in-depth tools for anyone who wish to design and sculpt their own kick sounds. The tuning has made very easy with the pitch curve that also shows you the notes, there's plenty of layering possibilities, signal harmonics shaping and lots of other cool things.
I have been using it for some time now and can't think of anything that it lacks. I had the first version of Kick and it was fairly cheap to upgrade to this version 2. I think it's well worth it's full price too. It comes with a big pile of click samples and presets to start tweaking for your own needs.
Many producers use readily made kick samples for their tracks and that's totally fine. I do it often too. It can save you plenty of time. But I also like to craft my own sounds and as I found Kick 2, the tuning and shaping has been fairly easy with it compared to other synths and methods I've tried before.
Psytrance kick
The kick in psytrance is mostly just a sine wave with a pitch modulation. The main signal starts from a very high frequency point and ends to a lower sub frequency. It's often quite snappy and punchy. Psytrance and Goa trance have many sub-genres nowadays and the kick sounds differ between them quite a bit.
Producers often layer the sine signal with some kind of extra transient such as hi-hat or some other suitable sound. Also spicing up the higher frequencies with a slight short reverb or a bit crusher for example can give a nice result. Nothing stops you from compiling the kick sound from as many layers as you want, but it can be a difficult task to make it sound great. Anyway, experimentation can always give birth to some cool new things.
Making it sound alike enough
When I'm working, I often choose a track that I have heard from a big sound system and know that it is well mixed and mastered and compare my work in progress to this reference track. This helps me to keep the kick sound and overall balance in the mix hopefully quite healthy. It gives me a hint if my kick is too thin, too bassy or in some other way weird. The point is not to make clones of other kicks, but to make them sound compatible with other tracks. In this genre the tracks are meant to work as a continuous mix of multiple tracks.
Kick and bass are probably the most difficult elements in this music to get to sound great, so for this you need good room acoustics and a decent pair of monitor speakers. Visual analyzers are of course also a big help. I also send my tracks to some of my trusted fellow producers who have good ears for these things and do some sound checks at venues before my gigs.
Example
This kick is from my currently unreleased track "Cryptowave" (clip in soundcloud:)
At first I used a kick sample from one of my earlier tracks, but ended up changing it to a new one. I wasn't happy of the transient of the original sample and it also sounded a bit too heavy for the vibe in this track. Here's what I made instead:
(you can download the preset from here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/phfflh3febvmb8z/cryptowave.preset?dl=0)
As you see, the pitch curve tells you both, the frequencies and the notes. This helps a lot with the tuning and making it sound good with the bassline. Looks like the final point is D#0 instead of G (the main bass note), but that doesn't really matter as the signal doesn't carry on that far.
The first two circles G7 and G4 make the transient. There is also an active click layer in the sound but it's almost inaudible in this final version. After the attack the pitch descents to more bassy levels. What happens between the first and the last circles is a result of multiple sessions of tweaking and listening. I have no scientific explanation of why I ended up using these exact parameters with this particular track. This way the kick drum just sounded nice to me and fit to the mix. The second and the third circle were the hard part and took most of the time.
You also might have noticed that the length of the kick is a bit funny. It doesn't really need to be that long in milliseconds. This is also a result of me experimenting with the length as when you increase it, it gives your kick more cycles and affects to the heaviness of the sound. I ended up bouncing the kick from the synth and cutting the length a little bit more as I felt it was overlapping a little bit too much with the bass synth.
This page shows you the volume curve of the sound. The first circle is the peak volume point of the attack and in this track it has full volume as I wanted the transient to come nicely through in the mix. The second circle is sort of an equalizer, I've noticed that this kind of dip makes the kick usually sound nicer.
I didn't use any effects with this kick, not even EQ. I used to have plenty of processing on my kicks before but with this synth I've started to get nice, clean and strong kicks as such. The only thing affecting to it is a limiter in the master output.
Hopefully this gave you some more insight in to the world of kick synthesizing. Let me know if you have any questions, suggestions or other comments. Have fun and experiment with the preset, improve it for your needs.