if bruce dickinson – yes, the bruce dickinson – had been a dance producer, he no doubt would've asked for more kick drum. in a previous post, i detailed some of my techniques for getting kick drums, and now i'll share an operator kick drum patch with presets and a bit of explanation. because if bruce dickinson wants more kick drum, i should probably give him more kick drum!

hey fellas, guess what? i got a fever! and the only prescription... is more kick drum!

using an fm synthesizer like operator for kick drums might seem a little odd, as fm is primarily known for precise and sharp - some would say thin - sounds. it's for instance how the kick drum in elektron's machinedrum is synthesized. considered by some to be its achilles' heel, others have embraced the refreshing take on kick drums. fm surely allows for a wide range of non standard kickdrums, but that might not be what you're looking for when you simply want your kick drum to have that dynamite sound.

unfortunately, if you want to use the obvious alternative, subtractive synthesis, you'll need a few features generally only found on modular systems, like multiple oscillators with dedicated amplitude envelopes and a few spare envelopes for pitch and filter modulation.

but this is exactly what even the most basic fm synth offers, and operator adds a few useful extras. you need a few special tricks though, to come up with a kick drum that can compete with the genre defining 808 and 909 kick drums. and it helps to know how those were created.

according to the waldorf attack's manual, the 808 feeds an impulse into a ringing analog lowpass filter with resonance, which gives the 808 kick drum its booming character. the 909 is a bit more elaborate and features 2 analog oscillators, one of which is a sine oscillator with a quickly decaying pitch. it's this trick that gives the 909 its punch. it's also the trick used in bazzism, the vst kick drum plugin that i raved about last time. over time, i have found though that it is a bit too techy to cover all my needs. so that was one of my reasons to have a try at it with operator.

to turn operator into a useful kick drum synthesizer, i started with a sine, set a short decay on the amplitude, and used the pitch envelope to quickly drop its frequency. to create a click at the start of the sound, i used another sine to briefly frequency modulate the first sine. finally i used operator's ladder lowpass filter with a quickly dropping frequency to beef things up a bit. this is quite important, as you will find out for yourself when you deactivate the filter or choose a different mode.

after that it was time to listen and tweak. this is especially important with fm, as a small change of a parameter can hugely change a sound. this is the beauty of fm, but also what makes it difficult.

to make this kick drum generator usable for others who don't want to delve deep into fm, i set up 8 macroknobs. the goal was to create a wide range of sounds, but also a big sweet spot: almost any setting should yield something usable. i also added some dependency on velocity to make things more alive.

to give you an idea, here's a couple of them. no compression or saturation was used, although that could be a useful addition.

keep in mind that with this patch, contrary to most drum synths, it does matter how long you hold a note. this may need some getting used to, but the advantage is that you can program patterns with some long and short kicks, which can help to funk things up.

after downloading the zips, you can just open the ableton live project. it will have a track with the operator patch and a few clips to get you started. if you want to use the additional presets, you can either drag them onto that track directly, or place them somewhere in your live library and load them from there.

once you have everything up and running, i recommend you just turn those 8 macroknobs, play around with velocity and note length and really explore the studio space.

quick download:

• minz operator kick patch (live 8)
• minz operator kick presets (live 8)

more downloads and terms of use in the goodies section.