Tags: posts polarity-music Bitwig Tutorial VST-Plugin Sound-Design

KickDrum VST by AUDIJA - Precise Kick Drums

Tutorial | Apr 08, 2024

In this video, I showcase a new plug-in from a German company that costs $22. It is a kick drum generator with a user-friendly interface and precise kick drum generation capabilities. The plug-in allows for easy alignment with the bass and offers unique features such as frequency and gain envelope shaping, as well as an auto gain function.

You can watch the Video on Youtube - support me on Patreon

I've explored a new German-made VST plugin designed specifically for creating precise kick drums, priced at only $22. It boasts an impressive interface that is fully resizable, offering flexibility in visual management. This plugin is equipped with standard features like pitch and gain envelopes for shaping the kick drum's sound. However, it stands out due to its unique functionalities:

While the plugin excels in creating tailored kick drums and can be adapted for snare drum synthesis, its notable drawback is the lack of layering capabilities, relying on a single oscillator. This limitation, however, can be mitigated by using additional tools within a DAW like Bitwig for layering sounds. The video also highlights the plugin's efficient integration with Bitwig, showcasing techniques for enhancing kicks with additional sounds and processing.

The plugin is part of a small product line from the developer, which also includes an oscilloscope tool, emphasizing the company's focus on quality and specialized utilities for music production.

Questions & Answers

Maybe you dont watch the video, here are some important takeaways:

What is the main focus of the plugin being showcased in the video?

The focus of the plugin is on generating precise kick drums. It allows users to shape the kick drum's pitch, volume, and frequency distribution, giving them control over the sound and allowing for alignment with other elements in a track.

What unique features does the plugin offer?

The plugin offers the ability to resize the interface, allowing for customization. It also has a feature that keeps the tail of the kick drum rock solid while allowing changes to be made to the beginning, providing flexibility in shaping the sound. Additionally, it has an auto gain feature that ensures the sine wave never exceeds a specific level, avoiding the introduction of unwanted artifacts.

What are some limitations of the plugin?

One limitation of the plugin is that it does not offer layering options, meaning users can only work with a single sine wave generator. This may limit the complexity and depth of the kick drum sounds that can be created. Additionally, there may be some usability issues with certain features, such as difficulty in using the mouse wheel or modifier keys for certain adjustments.

Where can the plugin be purchased and what is the cost?

The plugin can be purchased from a German company, and it is priced at $22. The specific website where it can be bought is provided in the video description.

Transcription

This is what im talking about in this video. The text is transcribed by AI, so it might not be perfect. If you find any mistakes, please let me know.
You can also click on the timestamps to jump to the right part of the video, which should be helpful.

[00:00:00] You know, you're all kind of sick and tired of installing and buying and learning new plug-ins and it's kind of the same for me
[00:00:05] But there's a new plug-in. I want to show you please don't get mad. Okay?
[00:00:09] It's by a German company and by the way, I'm not affiliated. It's not a sponsored video or anything like that
[00:00:16] it's a new German company and this is
[00:00:19] There's no I look it's only 22 bucks. It has a great interface. It looks great. It sounds great
[00:00:25] and it's about generating kick drums and to be specific. It's about
[00:00:29] Precise kick drums. We all know how important it is to have precise kick drums and all the tracks, right?
[00:00:35] It's actually the most important thing ever besides, you know, side chaining
[00:00:40] So this is how it looks like and the first thing I want to show you is that you can resize this interface to any shape
[00:00:48] That's pretty great in my opinion
[00:00:50] There are no limitations to that and inside of this plug-in you have our usual suspects
[00:00:57] We have a pitch envelope here, right going down in pitch and
[00:01:00] We have a gain envelope to shape actually the volume of the kick drum
[00:01:06] but there are some specific things in there that are unique to this plug-in and
[00:01:11] The first one is I want to show you how it sounds like. So this is the kick drum here
[00:01:17] So the first thing I want to show you is actually we have these notes here, right?
[00:01:21] And we can create new notes by just double-clicking here and move this around double-clicking to remove
[00:01:26] You can also change it the slope
[00:01:28] to any position so it's pretty neatly to
[00:01:32] Interact with this
[00:01:35] but let's call up here kick - and this is how kick - looks like and
[00:01:40] Sometimes you have to align the kick drum to your bass, right?
[00:01:44] And then you align the bass sound with your kick drum sound and everything fits together
[00:01:49] And then you think maybe let's change actually the attack phase of the kick drum here, right?
[00:01:55] You can see the whole face the whole tail shifts around
[00:01:59] So you have to redo the aligning
[00:02:02] Every time you change something here to these notes, right? It's it's a bit annoying and
[00:02:08] Inside of this plug in here
[00:02:11] It works differently so here when I change something in the beginning of this kick drum
[00:02:17] You can see the rest the tail of the sound or the wave shape stays rock solid in place
[00:02:24] Which is pretty neat so you align basically the tail
[00:02:30] of your kick drum to your bass and then you can make changes here to the beginning
[00:02:37] Change a bit, you know the sound the tonal initial transient click to the kick drum
[00:02:43] Do have a different taste to it?
[00:02:46] So that's the first neat thing of this plug in that it stays rock solid with the face
[00:02:52] If you want to change the face you can do this separately
[00:02:56] By using here this P slider you can drag this in and can
[00:03:01] Yeah, use this to align
[00:03:03] the kick drum to the bass
[00:03:05] Face and you know play around with this a bit so separately
[00:03:10] separately
[00:03:13] sliders for
[00:03:15] Frequencies and the face and also the gain of course
[00:03:18] So the gain
[00:03:20] Amplitude has also some specific things to it. So let's say we have a dispatch envelope, right?
[00:03:26] So we travel here through all these frequencies
[00:03:28] Down to the root
[00:03:31] Frequency so we touch a lot of frequencies in here
[00:03:35] And if we switch over to the gain envelope here, we also see this here reflected at these
[00:03:41] Overlays or these tooltips we can say at this point in time here
[00:03:46] We are at G sharp 3 or 300 203 Hertz
[00:03:50] And if we go here, right? We go up in frequency and here we go down in frequency
[00:03:55] So this kind of note here also represents kind of the amplification of certain frequencies
[00:04:02] so
[00:04:05] if we amplify the kick drum at this position or decrease the volume at this position
[00:04:11] We get rid of certain frequencies in loudness and this is reflected down here in this spectrum analyzer
[00:04:19] You can see here then how it looks like then the frequency distribution
[00:04:23] So we can get rid here of some of the 200 Hertz frequencies or here 100 Hertz frequencies
[00:04:29] I can see here 100 Hertz goes away or goes down and
[00:04:34] Yeah, you can basically shape the kick drum and see how it looks like in your frequency distribution
[00:04:41] Also indirectly you can shape this curve down here
[00:04:45] So you can put a note on there and you can see I want to amplify everything that's down here at
[00:04:51] 35 Hertz low end, right?
[00:04:54] You can see it shapes basically here the amplitude envelope indirectly and
[00:05:01] When we amplify here the low end, of course it amplifies only the tail because that's where the low frequencies are and it
[00:05:09] Decreases the volume of all the initial parts of this kick drum because that's where all the high frequencies are
[00:05:16] You know, you remember the pitch envelope here, right?
[00:05:18] So this is kind of an indirect way of shaping your amplitude envelope or shaping your kick drum in general
[00:05:26] It's actually not a post process EQ attached on
[00:05:30] It actually changes the synthesis. So this is pretty genius in my opinion
[00:05:36] Also on top of this we have here at the top an auto functional auto gain feature
[00:05:44] If we switch this on this synthesizer makes sure that the sine wave actually peaks at exactly
[00:05:52] -1 dB we can also put this here to 0 dB and
[00:05:56] Again, this is not a limiter or any post process attached on it's actually baked into the synthesis process
[00:06:05] It just makes sure that the sine wave never exceeds 0 dB
[00:06:09] So it's not like a limiter where you put a limiter on or maybe a clipper or anything like that and you introduce a lot of
[00:06:17] overtones or harmonics or
[00:06:19] Antializing or artifacts or anything like that. It's just baked into the synthesis process
[00:06:25] so this is a
[00:06:27] Very neat way of treating this actually
[00:06:30] But there's one downside to this plugin I have to mention and that's that there are no layers
[00:06:37] It's just one pure sine wave generator. It's just one oscillator
[00:06:43] Basically, there is not something like in two year. We have here
[00:06:47] Do you have here like a click layer click one click two or click three and you can play us some noises on top or some initial
[00:06:54] transient clicks or anything like that
[00:06:56] There's nothing like that in this plugin, so it's just a pure sine wave generator, but what it does it does it actually pretty great
[00:07:07] Okay
[00:07:10] Okay, we can also switch it to Q off. We can also switch here the
[00:07:14] Snapping off if you want to we can change here the drawing style of the oscilloscope
[00:07:21] We can change the size of the text here by clicking and dragging
[00:07:25] We can also remove the text by just clicking this once
[00:07:28] We can remove here on the left on the right side here this DB meter
[00:07:32] We can change the size of the grid if we want to and we can change the length of the kick drum here in milliseconds
[00:07:40] Right, we can just click and drag and
[00:07:42] Make this longer or shorter and now comes to the best part. You can also dial in here a time frame
[00:07:51] That's yeah dependent on your BPM, right? So if we have here one sixteen
[00:07:56] Let's say one eighth note long so this kick drum now is exactly one eight note long and
[00:08:04] If we change it the BPM you can see one eight stays the same because it's always one eight
[00:08:11] But the milliseconds change
[00:08:14] right
[00:08:15] So this one is basically dependent on the BPM of your project
[00:08:20] And MS is completely free
[00:08:23] Independent of BPM. So you either dial in one or the other
[00:08:28] So if I do drum and bass, right, I'm usually at 172 BPM and I know my kick drum is probably I don't know
[00:08:36] 160 note long, right and then there's here this thing. I also can show you this
[00:08:43] This wave file export and it works a bit differently
[00:08:48] Normally you are used to clicking and tracking this into your door
[00:08:52] This one actually is just one button press and then it's copied over to the clipboard
[00:08:58] and now we can go over here and maybe use an audio track and position here our
[00:09:04] Marker inside of Bitwig and then use control and V to paste it in
[00:09:09] like this and
[00:09:11] the benefit of doing it this way is actually that you can click multiple times here and just you know
[00:09:18] This is good your kick drums at different points in time on the on the thing
[00:09:23] You don't need to click and drag click and track click and track. I don't know if it's if it's better, but it's actually
[00:09:28] It's a good idea to think about this right to do it a bit differently
[00:09:33] So just you click once and then you have it in the clipboard and then you can paste it into
[00:09:38] Your project. So this is how it works in Bitwig at least
[00:09:43] Yeah, then is here a mode you can switch between preserve and scratch and
[00:09:48] preserve actually
[00:09:51] extends only to the block space
[00:09:54] So we can change it the length I think right and see the kick drum stays basically in the same length
[00:10:01] But then your rock space increases and I think also the wave file increases in length
[00:10:06] Let me put this here
[00:10:10] It's on there. Yeah, I can see now here the kick drum basically stays the same
[00:10:14] 116 note, but the wave file increase the work space increases. That's basically what they mean with this
[00:10:20] But I put this most of times on stretch here and then that in my length
[00:10:26] One 16
[00:10:29] But it's there nice
[00:10:32] So yeah, so this is this is how it works
[00:10:35] then there's here also this
[00:10:39] Yeah, ABC
[00:10:41] Thing you can say we have one kick drum here at a
[00:10:44] Kind of like it and then you can copy this over to be
[00:10:48] Then you go switch to be and then you make some changes and then you can quickly compare these two kick drums
[00:10:53] Also undo and redo
[00:10:58] Do all kinds of things. There are also some presets in here if you click the logo
[00:11:03] You can save some presets if you want to
[00:11:09] Probably need some redesigning here of this part. It looks a bit loose in my opinion, but it kind of works
[00:11:15] Also saved you some presets already
[00:11:18] You also have some settings here
[00:11:21] You can also save an initial state. I only knew this from
[00:11:25] Bitwig you can do this in Bitwig, but here you can also do it with the
[00:11:32] VST itself so you can dial in maybe kick drum you like and then say this is my initial drum or my initial state
[00:11:40] And then you go from there always
[00:11:42] Also some options here you can see it
[00:11:45] Yeah, that's about it. Like I said, the only downside for me is actually there are no layers in here
[00:11:51] But maybe it's not needed. You can also layer inside of your door something on top
[00:11:56] I can also show you this here quickly how I do it. So this is here the kick drum
[00:12:01] Right and here you can use let's say something completely stupid and you can use a tool device
[00:12:07] I'm not a tool device. I'm a test tone device
[00:12:10] And that's how the device generates just a test tone, but we can switch this here to let's say white noise
[00:12:17] Right, you have a mix knob here. So you can pull up here the volume
[00:12:22] and then you put here
[00:12:25] let's say an
[00:12:27] envelope for law on that
[00:12:30] Make it pretty quick and every time you trigger this you bring in the mix
[00:12:35] You can change the loudness here with this
[00:12:43] If you want to you can just put this here into a chain device and then whatever put an EQ on this you want to
[00:12:59] You I probably want to have this on here, right?
[00:13:02] Instead of this we bring the mix down here bring the mix down up here
[00:13:08] then
[00:13:09] like this
[00:13:11] And here you can a queue
[00:13:25] Yeah, so this is kind of possible inside of bitwig and then you can bounce it out or just leave it on
[00:13:30] That's how I did it. You can also generate kick drums not not only kick drums, but you can also generate snare drums
[00:13:38] I did something yesterday
[00:13:40] Let me see you snare here. That's how it looks like
[00:13:44] You can also put here
[00:13:52] And then maybe some kind of clip on the end
[00:13:56] And again, you can go into the gain section here put something on the EQ and then amplify certain frequencies
[00:14:17] You can change the queue factor here, but you can't change it with a mouse wheel and you can't use alt or
[00:14:23] Control anything like that. You have to use here the queue thing at least for me
[00:14:28] Maybe just needs to needs to be fixed
[00:14:31] Right so you can also make some bottom ends of snare drums with this and then lay out a bit of noise on top and you get a
[00:14:42] perfectly nice
[00:14:45] synthesized snare drum
[00:14:47] So yeah, I put the link in the description below
[00:14:49] This is the website here, they have only two plug-ins they have also an oscilloscope here
[00:14:55] Which is pretty neat and looks like the same as as this one here
[00:14:59] It's only four bucks. This one here is 22 bucks the kick drum synthesizer
[00:15:04] Like I said, I put you the link in the description below leave a like if you like the video subscribe to the channel and
[00:15:15] I would say thanks for watching and see you in the next video. Bye.