KickDrum

A dancefloor kick is basically a sine wave sweeping from a high pitch to a low pitch. But when it comes to shaping the pitch curve and timbres, introducing harmonics, EQing, layering samples, or applying effects, a dimension of endless creative possibilities opens. KickDrum was created to achieve maximum precision and sound quality with an intuitive workflow while exploring this dimension, aiming to reach the desired sound quickly.

Core Architecture:

• Modular Nestable Device Architecture with copy/paste across devices and presets.
• Full look ahead 64-bit floating point Audio Engine.
• Internal automation system for all parameters.

Devices:

• OSC: Wavetable Oscillator with harmonic distortion, phase control, and a dedicated wave-editing mode.
• SAMPLE: Sampler for trimming, moving, stretching, and phase-inverting .wav/.aiff files.
• EQ: Linear-phase equalizer with unlimited bands and multiple filter types with slopes up to 96dB/octave (lowpass, shelf, bell, notch, highpass).
• ENV: Gain envelope for precise volume shaping.
• SAT: Tanh-based saturator for mild saturation up to heavy overdrive.
• CLIP: Clipper ranging from soft to hard clipping.
• PITCH: Spectral pitch device for detailed frequency-domain pitch shifting.
• DISTORT: Wavetable-based distortion, allowing the creation and editing of distortion curves similar to OSC wavetable editing.

Sound Design & Editing:

• Wavetable Editing: Dedicated wave-edit mode in the OSC's wavetable, including per wave device chains to sculpt custom waveforms.
• Analyze Function: converts a sample into an editable patch (OSC/ENV or OSC/EQ/ENV + SAMPLE/EQ) - with optional Wavetable creation.
• Bézier Curve Features: Freely movable Bézier points between nodes, optional logarithmic time spacing, and the ability to lasso multiple nodes to smooth transitions, fine-tune positions, and snap to key.

Audio Engine

KickDrum's audio engine processes individual device stages from start to end before moving to the next layer. In contrast to conventional synthesizers that produce audio block-wise within a given time budget, KickDrum renders the audio on a non-DSP thread and fades the fully rendered sample into the live-output. This way, KickDrum can perform computationally expensive processing without exceeding the DSP thread's time budget. This approach is great for sounds that don't change over time, such as kick and snare in most EDM genres. Think of a sampler that, every time you make an edit, rebuilds the sample from scratch — enabling high-quality processing in a non-destructive workflow. This novel approach allows for some unique features, such as an in-time pinnable zero crossing, linear-phase equalizing without playback latency, steady master out, and negative pre-delay in the reverb.

Workflow & Utilities:

• Compare States: Three compare slots (A, B, C) let you copy and switch between states to compare iterations.
• Preset Management: Load, save, and update presets with the preset manager. Organize by folders and search by name, author, tags, key, date, or length. Cycle through presets and update them directly from the main menu.
• Undo & Redo.
• Fast, easy, and unbounded vertical and horizontal zoom.
• 32-bit drag-and-drop WAV export.

Visuals & Metering:

• Signal path visualization with customizable oscillograms (color, transparency, line/filled view).
• Togglable and freely spaced grid lines.
• OSC pitch node tags (key, Hz, ms) can be toggled or resized.
• Togglable decibel scale.
• Accurate sample-level navigation for oscillogram, pitch keyboard, and EQ spectrogram.

Length & Output:

• Length can be specified in milliseconds or tempo-relative (e.g. 1/4, 1/8, 1/16 etc.).
• AutoGain maintains peak level at a specified dB.
• ADSR: Dedicated Note Envelope with Attack, Decay, Sustain & Release.

• Velocity sensitivity allows note velocity to affect output gain.

  {See video at top of page}