Kick 2 - worth it?

[PieBerger]

I'm very fussy with kicks for psytrance too, but luckily my favourite artist and maker of amazing kicks released a quality sample pack so I pretty much use these exclusively now.

https://futurephonic.co.uk/item/foundat ... tion-vol-1

My success rate with Kick 2 is pretty poor even after many years of using it, I get maybe one decent kick for every 25 or so I make and I don't see that as a good enough return on investment, especially as a hobbyist. If I was doing this fulltime I could probably justify spending one day a week making kicks and cherry picking the best ones to use in tracks for that week/month, but not when I'm spending an hour every evening and maybe 5-10 hours at the weekend.

I'd rather focus on making actual music, which is what matters most in the end. Since I stopped wasting my time trying to make the perfect kick every time, I released 2 tracks this year and have another 4 (maybe 5) scheduled for release in the coming months. This is a much bigger motivator to continue writing than crafting a nice nick, ymmv of course

Edit: added url

[andymcbain]

I'm very fussy with kicks for psytrance too, but luckily my favourite artist and maker of amazing kicks released a quality sample pack so I pretty much use these exclusively now.

https://futurephonic.co.uk/item/foundat ... tion-vol-1

My success rate with Kick 2 is pretty poor even after many years of using it, I get maybe one decent kick for every 25 or so I make and I don't see that as a good enough return on investment, especially as a hobbyist. If I was doing this fulltime I could probably justify spending one day a week making kicks and cherry picking the best ones to use in tracks for that week/month, but not when I'm spending an hour every evening and maybe 5-10 hours at the weekend.

I'd rather focus on making actual music, which is what matters most in the end. Since I stopped wasting my time trying to make the perfect kick every time, I released 2 tracks this year and have another 4 (maybe 5) scheduled for release in the coming months. This is a much bigger motivator to continue writing than crafting a nice nick, ymmv of course

Edit: added url

The exact same advice I got in my limited time trying to make psy... from one of the makers of this pack, I think xD

[PieBerger]

I'm very fussy with kicks for psytrance too, but luckily my favourite artist and maker of amazing kicks released a quality sample pack so I pretty much use these exclusively now.

https://futurephonic.co.uk/item/foundat ... tion-vol-1

My success rate with Kick 2 is pretty poor even after many years of using it, I get maybe one decent kick for every 25 or so I make and I don't see that as a good enough return on investment, especially as a hobbyist. If I was doing this fulltime I could probably justify spending one day a week making kicks and cherry picking the best ones to use in tracks for that week/month, but not when I'm spending an hour every evening and maybe 5-10 hours at the weekend.

I'd rather focus on making actual music, which is what matters most in the end. Since I stopped wasting my time trying to make the perfect kick every time, I released 2 tracks this year and have another 4 (maybe 5) scheduled for release in the coming months. This is a much bigger motivator to continue writing than crafting a nice nick, ymmv of course

Edit: added url

The exact same advice I got in my limited time trying to make psy... from one of the makers of this pack, I think xD

Ady and Santos tried 40 kicks before settling on one of the tracks in the last Squid Inc album. That's fair dos if you make a living from music, but I'd never get a track off the ground if I took things to that level around a fulltime dayjob

[kvrmichigan]

Sorry if I missed a mention, but any thoughts on how this compares to NI's TRK-01? I have had it for a while and haven't even tried it, so I'll bust it out after work!

IMO, TRK-01 seems more like a sequencer to me. I've read in the manual you can load your own samples, but I've never tried it. TRK-01 hasn't inspired me, so I've never used it in any of my tracks.

[andymcbain]

Ady and Santos tried 40 kicks before settling on one of the tracks in the last Squid Inc album. That's fair dos if you make a living from music, but I'd never get a track off the ground if I took things to that level around a fulltime dayjob

I would expect nothing less than that level of geekery and attention to detail from Ady!

But yeah I understand the reasons why people want to make kicks (both technical and personal) but I can just never get them to hit as hard as stuff from sample packs so I stopped trying. When asking around the psy scene it seemed most folk who were releasing the major label tracks were doing the same thing, or even ripping kicks from released tracks. Whether this still goes on now that knowledge has spread and skills have developed, who knows

[dangayle]

40 kicks doesn’t seem like that many, TBH. 40 full track renders, sure, that would suck. But flipping through them over a 4/8/16 bar loop isn’t too much to ask. We spend an insane amount of time working on kicks in the techno world, it’s like getting your guitar tone correct if this were rock and roll, you just do what it takes to get it right.

[pixel85]

Making your own kick is often more easy than searching through 500 samples (which can be super uninspiring when you search for too long). First of all, control over kick/bass relationship, phase of both etc. With Kick 2 its super easy to manage tight, solid and problem-free low end. Especially with tools like s(m)exoscope if someone doesn't have great room acoustics and/or great monitoring system.

Bazzism was great for psytrance but Kick 2 is even better.

[Dombaeb]

Totally. I'm crafting kicks only because I had an experience of wasting a huge amount of time choosing, setting the pitch, dereverberating, EQing just for one kick. While I do all this, I manage to get hungry and forget that I was not going to correct other people's kicks, but to make my own music.

Kick 2 allows me to make right-pitched, clean, unprocessed kick in no time. Extremely effective focused tool. It's a relief

Making your own kick is often more easy than searching through 500 samples (which can be super uninspiring when you search for too long).

[PieBerger]

40 kicks doesn’t seem like that many, TBH. 40 full track renders, sure, that would suck. But flipping through them over a 4/8/16 bar loop isn’t too much to ask. We spend an insane amount of time working on kicks in the techno world, it’s like getting your guitar tone correct if this were rock and roll, you just do what it takes to get it right.

40 patches with processing from scratch AFAIK. Even if you only spent 10 minutes on each one, that's nearly 7 hours or an entire week of evening sessions for me. I can get the foundations of an entire track down in the same time i.e. kick, bass patch from scratch, core drums and main lead ideas etc. That's a much better use of my time, than one, albeit important, single element to a track.

[PieBerger]

Making your own kick is often more easy than searching through 500 samples (which can be super uninspiring when you search for too long). First of all, control over kick/bass relationship, phase of both etc. With Kick 2 its super easy to manage tight, solid and problem-free low end. Especially with tools like s(m)exoscope if someone doesn't have great room acoustics and/or great monitoring system.

Bazzism was great for psytrance but Kick 2 is even better.

Smex is old hat you should try Psyscope by FX23 for PC or occularScope by Bom Shanka Machines for OSX/Win/Linux. Both are free and can be synced to host tempo.

[PieBerger]

Making your own kick is often more easy than searching through 500 samples (which can be super uninspiring when you search for too long).

This is why it's a good idea to spend some time to curate a library of quality kicks that fit your tastes. I really like the Foundations kicks, they are perfect for my style, as are some of the kicks from the Progressive (Zenhiser) pack made by Sinerider/Divination. Put them all in a Rack, spread them one per layer and then map the Selector slider to a Rack macro and scanning through samples is a piece of cake, even more so when used with a good scope and Voxengo PHA-979. Find something that is close, tweak the phase and boom, you're done!

[PieBerger]

https://u.pcloud.link/publink/show?code ... yPHhK1PKYV

You can make decent kicks with Vital too, for free as of tomorrow For best results place a MIDI note somewhere in the C3 octave (or the upper end of C2 octave).

[Igro]

Indeed. Vital has Msegs. You can play with the pitch envelope in a same way as in Kick2. And it will be cheaper.

[pixel85]

Making your own kick is often more easy than searching through 500 samples (which can be super uninspiring when you search for too long).

This is why it's a good idea to spend some time to curate a library of quality kicks that fit your tastes. I really like the Foundations kicks, they are perfect for my style, as are some of the kicks from the Progressive (Zenhiser) pack made by Sinerider/Divination. Put them all in a Rack, spread them one per layer and then map the Selector slider to a Rack macro and scanning through samples is a piece of cake, even more so when used with a good scope and Voxengo PHA-979. Find something that is close, tweak the phase and boom, you're done!

I checked many kick libraries over the years. I don't like 99% of them. Also tweaking let's say last 20ms of sample to match it with phase of the bass is not that easy as doing it by synthesis.

[gondii]

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