Kick-arse kick drums
 

Hi all, been playing around with XOX-KICK in H sound bank and got quite a nice tight kick drum and overlay that on top on of a deeper kick and its sounds alright..BUT, is there anyway I can make it punchier on the virus at all. I have the punch intensity on max as well as 4/5 on unison.

Also when I sequence it in SX, say out of 16 beats, 2 or 3 are out of sync.
How do you start the cycle on each midi note played, I cant find the bit in the manual :oops:

Re: Kick-arse kick drums
 

Under the osc edit menu, something called osc intital- try changing that to 127.

Re: Kick-arse kick drums
 

Did you used any compressor on virus audio channel ?
The "punch intensity" together with proper compression can make it punchy.
Another option is to cut some freqs with parametric eq, some cut at around
250hz can add lots of punch to almost any bassdrum.

Just resample your kick and process it with eq/compression,
if it doesn't have to be played "live" from the virus trough your whole tune.

I noticed long time ago that 50% of sound design is the processing afterwards.

:D

Maybe turn off unison. Unison with some detune can cause phase cancelation on the low end and actually weaken your sound. Maybe what you like about unison on this patch is just the volume boost. Kill unison and turn it up, see if that helps.

Otherwise, an outboard compressor may work.

Or try this: Set your amp envelope to a 0 attack, a quick release and a medium sustain level. Set your mixer's preamp so that the louder, decay portion of the sound causes your mixer to clip, but so that the sustain portion does not. The added burst of distortion should provide some good punch. It may not be exactly what you're looking for, but it's still fun!

well i think u can use unison, but set detune and stereo spread to 0, this will stack oscs without any phase cancelation, it can also work that way.
and of course as tranzash said, set the patch phase init to a static value

as long as it doesnt phase it'll be fine using unison. you know if you spread bass around the stereofield it skips the needle on a turntable? well it doesnt skip but in some cases the phase destruction eliminates part of the sound and with the low frequency oscillations coinciding with sparse, unwavering grooves on a record, needle on a record player ends up falling into the next groove.

most of the punch you'll get is from the compression. undoubtedly. if you listen to some hard house kicks they are punchy as hell. pretty much all of them use hard compression with a middle to low threshold (try between -10dB and -40dB) with a 1.5 to 1 to 5 to 1 ratio depending on the threshold. whack the release up a bit and keep the attack low. it'll flatten out the kick and turn it into a hard THUDDING kind of sound. gain up till its as loud as you can make it without it clipping and you have the basics of a devastating kick drum.