Tyrell N6 & Massive X: Kick Drum Sound Design

How to create a deep and punchy kick drum with the free synth Tyrell N6 and only stock plugins. Or take a deep dive and create your own kick drum with advanced synths such as Massive X.

I find the process of searching sample packs for a suitable kick to be very time consuming and boring. And often you still need to tweak the sample yourself.

You can easily create and design your own kicks in a matter of minutes. And you don’t have to break the bank for it because it is doable with free and stock plugins.

What do you gain from this? Well you can learn how to make a unique kick for every project that you work on. Which in a way gives you ultimate flexibility.

In this tutorial I show you how to make a kick with the free synth Tyrell N6 but I also show a more advanced approach using Massive X. These steps can be applied to any synth that you like!

How to create your own kick drum with a synth. All steps laid out:

For the people who cannot watch the tutorial or want to read. Here are the steps:

1. Put the synth in mono mode and use one oscillator and set it to a sine wave.

2. Adjust the amp/volume envelope to turn it into a pluck. No sustain and a short decay time.

3. Turn the pitch of the oscillator up by +24 or 36 semitones and automate that with another envelope/modulator.

4. Set that modulator to short decay and no sustain.

5. Automate some white noise with the same modulator

6. If possible add another noise sound for more attack (a transient)

7. Automate with same envelope.

8. Add some gain or feedback to the synth/filter

9. Boost the lows and highs with a shelf EQ

10. Add compression if you like

11. Add distortion/overdrive to taste