Creating a Layered Techno Kick Drum

Techno is famous for its huge and ground-shaking kick drums with powerful low-end frequencies. Producers usually dedicate much of their attention to creating solid kick drums because, in most cases, one kick drum sample is not enough to achieve the desired sound. In the following tutorial, we'll show you how to create a Techno kick drum using layers.  

Mid-Range Kick Drum

LaLets start by choosing a mid-range kick drum sound that will be the body of our final kick drum. The sound you can hear as an example is adequate for this since it possesses a well-balanced body in the low-mid frequency range and some frequency content that spans up to high frequencies. Generally, it could be labeled as the kick drum used frequently in the Electro-Pop music of the 1980s.  

~ Mid-range kick drum - unprocessed  

Low-Range Kick Drum

The base of every right-sounding kick drum starts with carefully tuning the sub-frequencies. Moreover, one of the best and most straightforward approaches would be to generate the desired sound by adjusting and processing the simple sine wave. The tool for this task, whose interface is straightforward, is KICK 2 by Sonic Academy. 

After creating a new midi track in SoundBridge, we will select a preset from the upper menu, essentially a traditional-sounding 808 kick drum or a tuned sine wave. Hearing it with the mid-range kick drum, we can see that those two sounds fight for dominance in the frequency spectrum. They sound pretty hollow together.  

~Mid and Low range kick drum - unprocessed  

To fix that, I'll open the amp section of the KICK 2 plugin, which contains classic envelope parameters. Then, I will reduce the attack as well as shorten the release. Processed like this, we can hear that our two layers already sound better.  

~ Low-range kick drum with altered Amp envelope  

After this, I will switch to the pitch section of the KICK 2. Here, we can see similar curves as in the Amp section. Now, I will further tune the sub-part of the low-end kick drum to glue it better with the other layer.  

 

Mid-High Range Kick Drum

The next step would be to add our 3rd and final layer to the kick drum sound. Alongside the low-end base, KICK 2 can add three more layers called "Clicks. "I will browse through the presets and find a suitable one. In the first click layer, we can see the global pitch, length, start position, and low and high pass parameters. After tweaking the settings of the mentioned layer, our kick drum now sounds like this.  

~Layered kick drum without additional effects  

Final Processing

Compressor and distortion units found within the KICK 2 plugin are handy tools that you can use to shape up the Techno kick drum further. Finally, by processing the kick drum with some additional EQ-ing, here is the result.  

~Final layered kick drum with additional effects