The kick drum we’ve made so far is nice and punchy, but it doesn’t have a ton of low end. For some situations, this can work well. The kick can be a sub-heavy monster that holds down the bottom of a track, or it can be a higher pitched accent that leaves room for a massive bass part.
The first technique to get more low end in our kick drum is to tweak the Decay of the Pitch Envelope. As things stand so far, the decay time of both the pitch envelope and the volume envelope of oscillator A are set to 600ms…
This means that as the pitch is dropping three octaves, the volume is also decaying to silence at exactly the same rate. Therefore, one way we can get more low end is to make the pitch envelope faster than the volume envelope, so we hear more of the pitch drop.
Fire off a MIDI clip to trigger the kick drum. While it’s playing back, slowly lower the decay time of the pitch envelope. What you’ll probably find is that there’s a sweet spot where it really starts to whomp. Interestingly though, when you make the envelope any shorter it will start to get thinner sounding again.
In the next tip, we’ll take a look at why this is and explore pitch a little more in general.
