Sonic Academy Kick2 - pitch/length/amp confusion :D

[psydave]

Hi,

in (psy)trance it is important that the ending of the kick is in the same key as the bassline.

Sonic Academy's Kick2 is an awesome plugin for that, but I have some problems to understand how the relationship between the time / amp section works.

I just scrolled through the Trance 138 BPM presets and got confused:



as you can see the LENGTH of the kick is 2371ms - pretty long - and it ends in key A0/28Hz. Timegrid -> 2.2+

Now let's look at the AMP tab:


The volume of the Kick ends already at Timegrid 1.3.3

Wouldn't that mean that the key of the Kick ends inbetween A#1 - F1 ?

...well to me it doesn't make any sense at all because the ending freq of the kick is now unknown and wouldn't fit to an A0 bassline.

Can someone enlighten me on that?

[_pix_]

curious about this as well

[psydave]

curious about this as well

bump!

[Synthman2000]

Kick 2 is great but I have felt I had to work against what the GUI and intuition has
suggested to get the top grade kick drum for psy. In the end it took a long time to
get what I wanted but I got there and fatter and better than Bazzism IMO.

I recall that amp envelope can also affect pitch vs time.

This has also come up with another psy producer that frequents the forum so any
input from SA would be well received.

[recursive one]

What if you adjust the pitch envelope of this preset so that the F1 value would be right at the 1.33 mark& The kick tail should be tuned to F then. Or not?

I think the length in ms (2371) is just the length of the whole sample while the actual sound ends where you set the lowest point of your amp envelope.

I downloaded the Kick2 demo just yesterday, need to spend more time with it.

[djscorb]

The trance/psy presets in KICK are really shitty and as you can see from the one above, a bit illogical looking for beginners trying to understand the reasoning behind the way they are constructed.

The time is not represented in a linear manner across the main window either in order to make the initial portion of the kick more controllable. This means the points on the graph do NOT correspond to the rendered waveform. Takes a while to get used to!

Tuning the end point of the kick by key is not necessary for psy. You are better off tuning the kick by ear and by eye (with a scope plugin) until the phase of the kick locks in with the bass and causes the least cancellation. Then finetune the amp envelope so there's not too much "swell" on the overlap

Cheers

Scorb

[Phil Sonic Academy]

Hey Guys,

Yeah we struggled a lot with this issue when making kick 2... the main window is Logarithmic as you have noticed.

While the waveform and Amp modes are linear time.

This was the only logical way to be able to have fine control of the high frequency areas of the kick.

we did have a linear/log switch at one point but it was far too messy and was hard to edit nodes.

If you notice in the top right corner when you click on the Pitch (main) screen.. we display pitch and time info.

You can use this to compare the timings of the amp (linear) windows with the pitch (log) window.

In the example above 138 Trance 08... i can see the decay ends about 0.260s which corresponds to 49hz (G)

to add tonality to your kicks generally you want the last 2 audible nodes to be the same pitch so I would add a node at the decay point and adjust the previous node to the same note. see the image


edit: I agree with above that "tuned" kicks arent always the best solution... especially for shorter punchier kicks... its more important to just get it sounding good by ear.

[djscorb]

Thanks for chiming in Phil.

Love KICK2 since the initial early updates, keep up the great work

Cheers

Scorb

[vinx98]

This video might help with the questions