Sonic Academy Kick - Nicky Romero Artist edition is a kick drum synthesiser allowing you to quickly and precisely create kick drums and tune them to your tracks. It combines a synthesised sub oscillator and sampled clicks to create a wide variety of kick drums, percussive and even bass sounds.
With Pitch, Amp and Click envelope editors, drive, pitch control and the Nicky Romero designed distortion section, Kick promises to be the new essential go to tool in every producer's arsenal.
With over 150 factory presets and 40 exclusive Nicky Romero presets you can access that special Protocol sound right out of the box. In addition kick comes bundled with 32 Nicky Romero clicks lifted straight from his productions. The user can also load their favourite clicks, kicks, and even fx to create truly unique personal sounding kicks.
Other features include on board EQ, sub drive, distortion section and a internal master limiter allowing to you drive those kicks without worrying about your kick channel. Sampled kicks are now a thing of the past.
Reviewed By noiseprovesnothing [all]
February 19th, 2014
Version reviewed: 10.9.1 on Mac
There are several developers that have built VST and AU drum synths - this is nothing new. Where Kick stands out is ease of use and a unique take on building the perfect kick for a track.
In essence, you can work with one of the presets, and there are a ton of good ones, including some from Nicky Romero, and either leave as is or tweak to your satisfaction. You get to pick the "click" - the top part of the kick - from any of the included samples or supply your own. Then you add the sub to taste. You get pitch and amp envelopes, and the pitch even snaps to note values; if you haven't discovered the value in tuning your drums to the key of your project, I encourage you to try it.
Distortion and a limiter are also built in, and work flawlessly.
Your use case may vary - for Ableton Live users, it's painfully simple to add kick to a Drum Rack to either replace an existing kick sample or build your own rack.
It could be said that $40 for a kick drum VST seems a bit excessive. However, I'd encourage anyone producing in a genre where the kick drum is prominent, and that's more or less any EDM genre, to pick this up without hesitation. You get VST and AU, Windows and Mac. It's worth every penny.
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