Rumble Forge

Rumble & Sub-Bass Generator für Techno

Kick in, rumble out.

The rumble is the foundation

Listen to a techno track without rumble. There's a kick, a couple of hats, and nothing happens. That deep, sustained, vibrating thunder underneath the kick is what gets the floor moving. It's not an effect on top, it's the foundation the whole track stands on.

The thing is, building one by hand is a grind. Layer a sub, tune it to the kick, draw reverse-reverb tails, saturate, sidechain, mono the bass, time it all together. An hour later you've got a rumble that sounds okay, and on the next track with a different kick you start from zero again.

Rumble Forge does it in one click. Drop it on your kick channel, pick a preset, and the plugin listens to your kick, transient and pitch, and builds a rumble that automatically fits that exact kick. Harmonic, because it's tuned to the fundamental of your kick. Solid, because it grows out of the kick body instead of sitting next to it. And fat, because there are nine parallel DSP pipelines behind it.

How it works

RUMBLE FORGE is not a sub-synth you retune to the kick by hand every time, and not a saturator that smears across everything. The plugin sends your input down two paths: one is the clean kick, the other goes into two analysis modules.

The KickDetector spots every hit via the amplitude envelope. It only reads the low-end energy, so it's robust against hats and percussive bleed. The PitchDetector tracks the fundamental of the kick in parallel using a YIN algorithm, typically 40 to 80 Hz. Both run fully automatically, you don't set anything.

And that's the trick behind the harmonic sound: because the rumble is tuned to the tracked kick pitch, it always sits cleanly under your kick instead of beating against it. A preset works on any kick as a result, no retuning needed.

The 9 rumble pipelines

Nine parallel pipelines each generate a different flavor of rumble. Important: this is not a multi-effect. All nine chase the same idea, a coherent kick tail in the sub and bass range, they only differ in how they create it. You mix them freely, from subtle sub-octave thickening with two pipelines to a full wall with all nine.

Each pipeline has its own output lowpass that cuts it off up top, so the rumble stays in the basement and doesn't muddy the mids:

• P01 SOG, Reverse Reverb: the reverb builds up before the hit and resolves into the transient. The classic whoosh run-up for roll sounds and build-ups.
• P02 PULS, Delay Rumble: tempo-synced delay with dirty feedback. Gritty, percussive, Birmingham industrial school.
• P03 FUNDAMENT, Sub Synth: wavetable sub, tuned to the kick and mixed into the body. Makes thin kicks fat and breathes with them.
• P04 ROAST, Saturated Feedback: saturated tail with four characters, from soft tape saturation to wavefolder. For industrial walls with bite.
• P05 GRAIN, Granular Texture: granular cloud from the kick tail. Smeared sub textures and drones.
• P06 PHASE, Phase Rumble: five phase modes, including Reese with detuned comb filters. Wide, hypnotic sub movement.
• P07 FREQ, FM Rumble: FM synthesis with sidebands. Thickens the tail harmonically, from sub to metallic.
• P08 PULL, Reverse-Swell Sub: tempo-locked sub swell that sucks in before every beat. Continuous build-up breathing under the kick.
• P09 SHIFT, Frequency Shifter: SSB shift that moves the overtones inharmonically. Slow alien drift on the tail.

Breathing between kick and rumble

A built-in rhythmic sidechain ducks the rumble bus relative to the kick or the tempo grid. That's the signature pump that gives kick and rumble room to breathe. Trigger classically off the kick, or lock to the grid with 1/4, 1/8, 1/16 including triplets, swing and a phase offset for off-beat pulses. Four release curves from exponential to S-curve.

Club-ready at the output

The master section makes your rumble PA-ready. Bass Mono folds everything below 120 Hz to mono, mandatory for vinyl and a club system. On top of that, Sub Cut against inaudible subsonics, Dry/Wet to blend it under the kick and a solo mode for auditioning. If you don't have your own bus processor running, for example in a standalone live setup, dial in the channel strip too: glue compressor, saturation, tilt EQ, stereo width and a final limiter at minus 0.3 dB.

51 factory presets

Curated by genre and pipeline focus, every one track-ready right away:

• Rolling: classic techno rolling rumble.
• Pumping: sidechain-driven breathing.
• Delay: PULS-focused echo rumbles.
• Industrial: hard walls.
• Sub-heavy: FUNDAMENT-focused sub thickening.
• Granular: smeared textures and drones.
• FM: FREQ-focused inharmonics.
• PULL: sub-swell templates.
• SHIFT: drift textures.
• Composite: combined multi-pipeline sounds.

You can save unlimited user presets. A/B compare with two parameter slots is built in.

Technical highlights

• 9 parallel DSP pipelines, freely mixable, each with its own output lowpass.
• Fully automatic kick detection and pitch tracking, no tuning needed.
• Rhythmic sidechain with kick or grid trigger, swing and four curves.
• Master section with Bass Mono, Sub Cut and a solo mode.
• Mastering channel strip with Comp, Sat, Tilt, Width and limiter.
• 51 factory presets plus unlimited user presets.
• MIDI Learn on every knob, stored per instance with the project.
• RT-safe and light on CPU, around 3 to 8 percent on an M1 at 48 kHz.

Formats and systems.

• Formats: VST3, AU (macOS), Standalone.
• Systems: macOS 10.13+ (Universal Binary, Intel and Apple Silicon), Windows 10+, Linux from Ubuntu 22.04.

License and demo

The demo runs with the full feature set, nothing is locked. Every 30 seconds a quiet noise burst mixes in for a few seconds, and it disappears for good the moment you enter your serial number. Activation is fully offline, no online phone-home.