With Techno its all about experimentation and within Techno over, the last 3 decades producers have continually pushed the boundaries of the musical norms. One clear example of this is making bass lines from soaking your kick in reverb a practise which in all music engineering books is frowned upon. 

But let's be honest the grey-haired folk who wrote these books have probably never been to a club in their lifes and therefore have never embraced the gut rumbling power this technique can provide.

We at Mind Flux have created an audio effects rack for Ableton that has adapted this power. The rack has a selection of tools that allow you to easily create techno rumbling kick drums that will leave your studio walls shaking. Simply load a kick of your choice and let it roll. 

In our last adventures into drum synthesis we looked at using synths to make our drum sound but you can also explore samplers to do the same. All you need is the raw material to get started. So for this kick we are just going to use a sine wave and Ableton’s Sampler.

For old analog synth users a happy accident occurred when increasing the resonance to the max. The cool and crazy result of this left a lot of synth lovers angry and confused, but the adventurous among us saw it as an opportunity to experiment and create weird and wonderful sounds!

In this ‘Drum Synthesis’ series blog post we are going to use this “mistake” to build a kick drum, without even using an oscillator or sample.

When creating dark techno sounds you can throw the rule book out the window. Most engineering books will say not to use time-based (delay and reverb) effects on low-end sounds but in techno, we say F that. So let's start breaking the rules.