The kick drum is one of the most important elements in any beat-driven music, and something you just can’t make compromises with. When you’re ready to move beyond sample libraries and start designing your own, these thumping virtual instruments should be on your radar.
1. Vengeance Sound Metrum
Long before they moved into plugin development, Vengeance Sound found huge success in the soundware game as one of the world’s leading producers of samples for dance music production – and their blockbuster bass drums played (and, indeed, still play) a major role in that, gracing countless hits over the years. The oldest entrant in our round-up, Metrum encapsulates the sound design process used to make those seminal kicks: that is, the blending of a synthesised ‘body’ layer with up to three sampled ‘attack’ layers. The synth is, as you’d expect, a relatively simple affair, featuring a single sine wave oscillator, pitch and amp envelopes, and the kick-focused Punch and Spike controls; while the sample playback engines also house pitch and amp ADSRs, as well as facilitating panning, filtering and more. Then there are six distortion, delay, reverb and mid/side effects, to which each layer is independently routed, and a modulation matrix for assigning envelopes, macros and MIDI CCs to any and all parameters within the plugin.
With 330 presets onboard, Metrum delivers no shortage of quality sounds right out of the gate, but building your own using the 1800 included samples and synthesis controls is intuitive and fun. An immense source of hard-hitting kicks for club-bound choons of all denominations.
2. Sonic Academy Kick 2
Launched in 2016, Sonic Academy’s second-generation plugin takes its conceptual cue from Metrum, again enabling the composition of high-impact bass drums using a synthesised sine wave Sub layer and one to three sampled Click layers. The Sub synth boasts an additive editor for introducing up to seven partials above the fundamental frequency (with a visualiser showing the resultant waveform), and powerful multi-stage pitch and amp envelopes with adjustable curvature. Each Click layer gets its own amp envelope and Pitch, Length, Start and LP/HP filter controls, and draws on a sizeable, diverse and user-expandable library of sampled hits and noises. Signal processing comes in the form of distortion, four-band EQ, compression and filtering, and export is via drag and drop, with the ability to specify MIDI note and velocity beforehand. Add to that a wonderfully intuitive multi-waveform display, and an excellent library of presets to get you started, and you have everything you need to craft punchy bass drums for house, techno, hip-hop and other dance styles.
3. Plugin Boutique BigKick
Developed by Credland Audio and hitting the market at around the same time as Sonic Academy’s original Kick, BigKick sets you up with a synthesised Body layer for defining the sustain of your kick drum, and two Sample layers for the transient/attack stage, with a factory library of over 300 samples and the means by which to import your own WAVs. Sample layer tweaking is comparatively rudimentary, limited to Decay, Gain and a High Pass filter; but the Body layer offers editing of amp and pitch envelopes, pitching of the drum to a discrete note or via MIDI input, and two character-defining modes: ‘Original’ and the descriptively named ‘Tough’. While BigKick is obviously not as in-depth or flexible as the other instruments here, its simpler UI and functionality yield a faster, more direct workflow that many will find compelling, and the end results sound fantastic. (Note - the plugin is actually a long thin GUI which does not lend itself to a full width article like this)
4. Rob Papen Punch-BD
Extracting the bass drum generating system from Rob Papen’s Punch drum machine, Punch-BD is a staggeringly deep plugin, providing far more kick layering and sound shaping capability than most people will ever need. Six ‘pads’ can be layered, cycled through with consecutive incoming notes, or triggered entirely independently, and each comprises an entire synthesis/sampling engine in its own right, bristling with parameters and outputting through a 19-algorithm distortion module. Four varied synthesis modes broaden the sonic base; two samples can be alternated, mixed or velocity-split on a single pad; and a rich array of effects and modulation options bring it all together.
Serving up kick drums of limitless complexity, Punch-BD is clearly the most versatile plugin in our list, and a fine choice for electronic music experimentalists as well as dance music producers. Its potentially overwhelming complexity won’t be for everyone, however.
5. D16 PunchBox
Despite being another kick drum instrument based on the mixing of one synthesiser and three sample-based engines, PunchBox takes a very different approach to Metrum and Kick 2 in both its architecture and interface. Each sample engine is dedicated to a specific component of the hit and draws on its own library of samples designed specifically for the job: the Click and Tops engines take care of the transient and high-frequency elements respectively, while Tools introduces noise and other supplementary tones. Alongside those, the Kick module switches between synthesised emulations of Roland’s TR-808, 909 and 606 bass drums (pulled from D16’s Nepheton, Drumazon and Nithonat instruments), a highly adaptable sine wave generator, or a fourth sample player. There’s also an effects rack, hosting reorderable Distortion, Bitcrusher, Filter, Equalizer and Limiter modules.
With 1100 samples in the clip (plus WAV import), and D16’s analogue modelling expertise shining through in the synths and effects, PunchBox is adventurous and comprehensive, and sounds superb.
What virtual instruments, if any, do you use to make your kick drums? Let us know in the comments.