Synthesizing kick drums with a "dull knock"

[catamorphism]

Hi, I'm into synthesis and can make a variety of synth drums but I'm curious if it's possible to synthesize something like the kick in https://d-b-1.bandcamp.com/track/mts-rhs-iv to give an example. Whenever I try to do this it is somehow off, the harmonics are not right etc.

I can achieve this with distortion afterwards but was wondering what would be the approach to do this purely with an fm synth?

[andivax]

Kick 3 is great for synthesizing any kick drum.
You just need "body" without a "click" + techno rumble tail.
Kick 3 has techno rumbles in the reverb module.

[LeoneKreiger]

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Hi, I'm into synthesis and can make a variety of synth drums but I'm curious if it's possible to synthesize something like the kick in https://d-b-1.bandcamp.com/track/mts-rhs-iv (https://d-b-1.bandcamp.com/track/mts-rhs-iv) to give an example. Whenever I try to do this it is somehow off, the harmonics are not right etc.

I can achieve this with distortion afterwards but was wondering what would be the approach to do this purely with an fm synth?

FM drums can sometimes be hard to tune to real drums, but if you use modulation index envelopes and pitch envelopes, you can achieve a similar drum sound.

[Ah_Dziz]

The answer is yes but you'd get better input with a post that doesn't involve going to another site. A multiband compressor and any flexible fm synth with resonant multi mode filtering will get you damn near any synthetic drum sound you can think of. Going to town with compression can turn almost any low frequency sound into a kick.

[Benedict]

That is a lot of layers we are hearing. Not layered drums but layers of work to get the result we perceive as one thuddy thumpin' thang.

I might start with a noise osc and a filter with high reso to create the 'falling sine' thing - or just a specialist sine that goes loooow. That is layer one. It is then a case of finding the 'right' balance of compression, drive, filtering, eqing, and not to mention reverbing. It is experience, not simply a recipe one can clone perfectly. A lot is done within the mix - or the rest of the track is forced to the magnificent drum (and often thin tripe as a result).

[BertKoor]

I can achieve this with distortion afterwards

That's a totally valid & reasonable approach

[supplanter]

Zion Jaymes on youtube has an amazing kick tutorial that might be able with this. It's more for acoustic kicks but he also comes up with all sorts of in between and electronic kicks by tweaking parameters. This sounds a lot like focusing on the "room sound" of the kick. in the tutorial he talks about how acoustic kicks are recorded, they are a combination of 1 or more mics on or near the head of the drum, but also 1 or more mics capturing the mic in the room. To me this kick sounds like a variation of the "room" sound.

I would try maybe taking a standard kick (like sine with a pitch envelope and amp envelope) then making sure it's fm'd with noise to get some of the room sound bloom / grainyness, then add some convolution reverb and pre delay to make it boomier and further away. Then also add saturation to make it "bigger" sounding and maybe haas delay. Maybe add envelopes for the saturation as well. Then maybe play around with changing the base oscillator to add more harmonics (switch from a sine to other stuff) and see if that helps as well.

[Dave_p]

A sampled kick is a composition of many different sounds - the room, the tap from the mallet onto the physical drum, the composition of the size of the drum, the reflections of waves bouncing in the room, etc.

Synthesising a kick drum is a bit different; consider how to map the sounds of a sampled kick onto a modular device (such as an fm synth). How do you create a nice "punchy" transient attack using fm synthesis? How would you make that "knock" sound "dull"?

[Agg]

After giving it a go, I don't think that specific kick was fully synthesized, at least not in 1 patch. If you listen to the beginning over and over for long enough, it doesn't sound like one continuous pitch envelope. It sounds like a filtered 909-style knock, that is less bassy (cut more) than "necessary", and the subby tail is a real or synthesized 808. It's kinda like it's missing some fatness between the knock, and the tail, so the Occam's razor says it's 2 different elements that just ended up interacting like this when the 909-ish knock was being highpassed and enveloped.

[Igro]

Sounds like a sine kick. I heard that type of a sine waveform in d16 Puncbox (it is not clicky there, as if it had a constant lowpass filter attached). Then tube saturation. Then probability lowpass filter again. And then a lowshelf filter boost to remove the low end fart created by the saturation (yepp, by boosting). Then playing with the reverb.

[Rastkovic]

Yep, it also sounds like a lowpass filtered kick to me.

I can achieve this with distortion afterwards but was wondering what would be the approach to do this purely with an fm synth?

Why FM? Because it would be more cool?

I'm not an expert, but afaik non-linear distortion adds odds harmonics (and depending on the non-linearity, sometimes a mix between odd and even). This is probably also possible with FM, but with distortion/saturation it is very easy and it sounds in most cases natural and pleasant.