 Hello oscillators in here and welcome to a series where we're going to be talking about synthesizing drum sounds. In this series we're going to be making use of the Korg Volcker drum in our examples but the techniques and ideas that we'll be talking about will be transferable to any other synthesizer whether or not it's really meant to be a drum machine because remember anything's a drum machine if you're brave enough. So let's kick this series off appropriately enough by talking about kick drums. As a kick drum is a physical thing that exists in the real world let's start off by actually taking a listen to an acoustic real-life kick drum from a drum kit. So I kind of think of a kick drum as having two distinct parts. We've got the attack that's that thwack as the beta hits the skin of the drum and then we have the tone that's sustaining part that gives the body of the sound. And those are the two ideas that we're going to think about when we are synthesizing our drum sound. So in these examples I'm going to be making use of my free online patch editor for the Volcker drum. It's free for you to use there's a link in the description of the video but there's nothing here that I'm doing that you can't do on the unit itself it just means I don't have to scroll and click about so much. So let's make our way down to part one which is traditionally where you put your kick drums and let's start thinking about how a kick drum sounds. So the traditional way to make a kick drum sound you can do all on one oscillator if you like. So I've turned layer two down all the way and I've just got a sine wave just bonging along here as my kick drum sound at the moment. Obviously it's not particularly kicky although it's in some instances it could still be pretty workable actually. So let's just start by taking a look at our sound source. So I've got a sine wave. Sine wave it's certainly kind of the traditional place to start with kick drum. My mod type at the moment is set to the attack decay and my ampigee at the moment is set to my linear attack decay although we'll have a play with the exponential as well as we go along. So I'm just going to start by just shortening this a little bit and I mean that itself is kind of a kick drum sound we'd probably maybe pitch it down a little bit lower. That's workable. The reason that that's workable on the Volker drum in particular is because when you've got the attack of the envelope generator down so low it's really really attacking you kind of get a click at the start of your sound anyway and that gives you a sense of attack but let's talk about the traditional way of making a kick drum sound and that is by putting a short and fairly big pitch envelope at the start of the sound. So our mod type is attack decay which is what we want and as we come over to our mod amount here when we start to turn it up you'll start to hear that you'll get a pitch up at the start of the sound if you're quite a big pitch up and we get sort of biblibobbly tom sounds. Now you can hear at the moment that pitch is dragging off quite slowly if we open up the envelope generator you can hear that that is a slow descent down but if we make that much much faster take a listen to what happens as we start to turn it up we get that zappy sound so here we are kind of a zappy kick drum sound and as we make it go faster that very fast pitch there almost doesn't sound like a pitch slide anymore it sounds like a a thunk and with this real basic way of thinking about kick drum sounds everything about the character of the sound comes from balancing your mod amount and your mod rate essentially so how much pitch bend you're doing and how fast that pitch bend is happening so at the moment we've got a quite a big amount of pitch bend here and a pretty fast decay there if we were to lower the amount you don't get as an attacky sound but we can maybe make it slower to make it more about the body and less about the attack obviously that sounds a bit weird now because it's so uh such a big pitch bend there that's a bit if we make the mod rate much faster you get a real obvious click there really really obvious click there and sort of deciding how you want to deal with this sort of front end of your notes here is kind of the the crux to this whole thing a bit more natural but still quite a lot of punch there if we lower this down to zero you can hear how much even that what seems like quite a moderate amount of pitch bend at the start of the note is is is creating i mean with this we could go slower and make it start to hear a boom at the start of the note more of a soft drum sound you can even take some of the attack for the front there you've still got that pitch bend but we're not getting that clicky envelope sound so much anymore which is pretty cool and we might want to make it much shorter don't need big 808 long drawn out sounds every time maybe here we'd want to actually make it more clicky and it really is all about balancing your pitch bend here if you're just using the one oscillator that is but of course on the vulgar drum at least we actually have our two different layers and what that means is that if we want we can dedicate one of our layers to dealing with the tone part of the sound and the other layer to tailor the attack and it means that we don't have to use that sort of pitch bend approach to get our attack we can but we can maybe tailor it in a slightly different way so let's take a look at working that way instead so let's start by adjusting layer one to be much more about the body of the sound and less about that attack so we can still have a bit of a mod drop off we kind of want a bit of a pitch bend anyway because you kind of get that from a kick drum anyway just soften the attack here so we're going to work with the attack on the other one maybe a bit longer okay so here we've got something that's very sort of soft sounding so we've kind of lost our attack at this stage so let's bring back some of that attack with layer two and we can do that in a couple of different ways so let's start by thinking about sort of working a similar way that we were before but being able to kind of tailor it a bit more because we're not having to worry about the rest of the sound so let's bring up this other one here and it's pinging away like that that's not what we want to do so the first thing we could do is we could work in exactly the same way to get our attack by having that sort of pitch bendy kind of thing happening but because we are only worried about the attack we could use a sawtooth wave perhaps instead which has a bit more harmonics so let's make this much shorter for the moment and we'll go over the short on that probably but just for the moment and we can do a similar sort of thing here with our mod rate we can set it quite high and start to get that attack with but of course we probably want to make this really really short with our aeg and now because we have this kind of attack on a separate layer we can fine tune how much of it we want to bring in so we can choose the tonality separate to its level so we can be a bit more subtle there get a much more high-pitched sound in there if we want to just bring a tiny bit of it in perhaps we want something that's less hanging in a bit more sort of almost like a squelchy sound there which is kind of cool we bring more that in interesting sound cool so the other way that I like to add an attack to my kick drum sound is actually we're making use of noise which is a slightly different approach let's just um get the amount and write down zero for a moment so we just have another oscillator going on top there just make it more obvious I'm going to switch over to the band past noise because I think that's often the one that I go towards so now we have a almost snarey sound I guess but when we make that much shorter I think this works well if the body's a bit shorter as well see that's a bit loud maybe and remember with the noise source it's the pitch which will adjust basically the filter cut off so band passing here they're nice there even shorter and of course we could combine the two ideas so we could have a layer one doing the pitch bendy type of attack and also having a layer two adding that additional noises so if we just so we're now getting that sort of classic kick drum sine wave approach but with that noise over the top to give it that little bit more sort of punch actually something about that makes it feel more real to me or acoustic I don't know why that is in particular perhaps that's an effect of the fact that if you tend to listen to a kick drum in a room there's usually a snare drum in the room as well and that's going to be rattling along with it and you've got the room tone as well I think that's pretty cool so without the noise back to our sort of tubby kick drum sound we can bring that attack in there which is quite neat of course the other thing that is cool if we're making use of a second layer to give our attack and I'll just move back to using a sawtooth for this for a second yes something like that it means that we don't have to be thinking about our tonal bit in a plain sine wave approach so for example what we could do here is we could switch over to our mod type being the frequency modulation LFO and if we go real fast here and get into FM we can start to define our body of our drum in different ways it doesn't have to be about that classic and we can introduce FM to get a different feel and of course another thing that we would often do on a kick drum of course is give a bit of a drive give it some meanness that way you try the wave folder but it's going to introduce quite a lot of higher harmonics but it's kind of working here yeah weirdly almost almost brought in like a reverb sound to it hasn't it it's pretty interesting if we wanted to be eight bit then we could reduce the bits that's another way that we can use to bring in the approximation of noise as well so we're now quite a long way away from that traditional single oscillator sine wave kick drum sound but it's still pretty cool anyway i hope that was interesting and useful if it was please do take the time to click on that thumbs up button thank you so much and also make sure you subscribe to the channel because we've got some more synth stuff coming up as always as we make our way into the new year hopefully get another one of these videos out before the end of the year hopefully and then i guess we're into january i don't know how i'm going to manage that with a one-on-a-bit year old in the house but we'll see how many jams i get out in january if there's any of my equipment that you particularly want to see in january then do let me know in the comments i've got a feeling it's going to be pretty centered around the opz maybe it's some of the electron stuff just because it's so self-contained and i can do it in any room in the house but we'll see enough of my rambling as always thank you so much for joining me today take care of yourselves and i will see you again bye