How To Make Any Imaginable Kick Drum Sound

In this video Anthony shares how to make any imaginable kick drum sound on his Tonus Arp 2600.

Anthony's musical touch as both composer and performer is connected with some of the most influential creative minds over the last 40 years. He’s composed and conducted original orchestral scores for over 80 feature films including Young Guns, Internal Affairs, The Man From Elysian Fields, 15 Minutes and Planes, Trains & Automobiles, been commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic for his symphonic work "In the Family Way", written over one thousand TV commercials in a myriad of musical styles, co-founded Levels Audio Post (LA's premiere post production facility) and performed and arranged on big-box-office films and influential hit records such as Michael Jackson's Thriller.

His extensive work as a young arranger, orchestrator and performer for Quincy Jones, Jack Nitzsche, Lamont Dozier, Arthur Rubenstein and Giorgio Moroder was vital in launching his own career. His early years pioneering modular analog synthesizers along with his wide-ranging music scholarship positioned Anthony at the center of the music technology revolution. He attended the University of Southern California School of Music as a piano and composition major.

[edsohovocals]

Wow. You have just totally deconstructed not just electronic drums but also what makes a real drum sound. The minute you added white noise it went from electronic to real. Incredible. Watching the whole thing again now...

[chenguefer]

This channel is getting better and better. Many thanks maestro!

[fender]

Another master class from a legend many didnt even know about until this channel dropped on Youtube. I would love to see how the bass was done on "Wanna Be Starting Something". Another killer groove on Thriller.

[lupe]

Okay so I’m seriously considering buying an ARP 2600 after watching your videos! Loving the sounds and flow of it! Thanks for sharing

[SmethwickCouncilmanBint]

I have been taking a digital sound synthesis class at my college and your channel has been a huge help understanding the practical applications and practices on hardware. I use VCV Rack for everything I do right now, but I would love a classic analog synth at some point.

[MaxFury_Official]

What i love about modern software is that you can zoom in on the wave file and just normalise the attack of the kickdrum however you'd like, no need for compression or limiting or transient designers, when you can control it yourself exactly how you want! The impact of a kickdrum is very important, and the duration of the highend energy aswell! Bad Kicksamples tend to have less highend duration. Cause that's what cuts tru the mix in the end "the noise" on the top of the oumph. You need at least 15milliseconds of noise highend layered into your lowend sample. If we are talking a modern kickdrum sound, that is!

Experimenting with sharp high-hat sounds, or long reverb tails or equed white-noise reverb tails is a good place to start, and using a spectrum analyzer is a must to study the curve of good samples! It's actually quite funny creating your own kicksamples from scratch once you start doing it. I was obsessed some years ago! VST BazzISM is greate for that lowend fundamental!

[Bata]

Great video! When making kicks on 2600 style synths I'm generally running the kick into the pre-amp prior to the output mixer for extra saturation. Audio-rate mod of the filter can add some spice to these type of sounds as well.

[ollikru]

Thank you very much for inspiring us. Showing this on a semi modular synth shows the „how“ and makes it easy to replicate your approach on many different systems. 👍

[Gerald_Daniel]

Those earth quaking low frequencies from the 2600 still are true balm for the ears.

[jimlemons]

Another master class, we should all realize how lucky we are for the awesome sharing Anthony does! Great stuff!

[Matt-Hazel]

I'm incredibly thankful for your guide to Kicks here. I'm trying to design a way to make kicks through synthesis within my DAW and a lot of people just push specific software to make basic kicks. What I want to do Is edit these core values on the fly with automation within the DAW and this was the deep knowledge that I needed to get me on designing it. Thank you. <3

[asdifasi]

anthony you are a living legend and a real goldmine for us
in late 90's i used to make the same with cs5 .the chain was cs5, alesis 3630 compressor and the akai s900 sampler.i tried last week the same with beri ms1 with very good results. god bless

[monsieursolitaire]

Update: I tried it on my JU-06a (which unfortunately doesn’t have triangle or sine, so let’s sub-square it!), with the noise trick… oh my god it WORKS!!!! Thanks again!!! 🙏🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽

[monsterjazzlicks]

So many excellent videos multiple times per week! 👍

[edmx]

A good tip for kick drums on the 2600 is to run the output back into the preamp input and mix a bit of that into the pre-filter mixer. The feedback gives a nice natural attack and a bit of dirt.

[digicat]

This technique can be applied to things in Ableton or even to samples on something like Digitakt; its really about applying the envelope to a sound source.
For Ableton, consider doing exactly this same technique with a raw square or triangle with an envelope.

I'm mostly using a Moog DFAM but this also still applies to add even more crazy to it.

[DJ-UrbanEcho]

Hello Anthony, is it please possible to write it down in Short so i can recreate it?

[Jacob-urlh]

Thankful for your channel. We need more videos like this that show real synthesis!

[battledj]

Thank you for all the tips! I love Tremmor2 on VCV rack 2, maybe a little tip demo for hihats in the future would also be great! Cheers !

[tomasshannon]

excellent and super clear explanation, thanks! so many great kick sounds in this video