KICK 2

When making electronic dance music, the first element you should work on is the kick drum. This is the element that defines the track; there are dance floor hits that don’t even make much use of melodies but have kicks that are powerful enough to make crowds go wild.

Any digital audio workstation will allow you to take a basic drum sound and tweak it until you get what you want from it. Many virtual synths also enable you to create drums and even come with powerful kicks included in their factory presets. But there aren’t that many plugins that are designed specifically to help you work on your kick, which makes this plugin that I'm reviewing rather special.

Kick 2 couldn’t have a more simple and fitting name. When you open the plugin, you’ll be greeted by a pretty waveform that you can start modifying immediately using a frequency curve that’s very easy to manipulate. In fact, the whole interface is intuitive, and even if you don’t know much about sound design, you can quickly make a punchy bass drum with this powerful synth.

In order to shape your kick, you should experiment with different clicks; these can be defined as extra layers of sounds and effects that you add over the kick to enrich the sound or take it in a different direction. You can add as many as three clicks.

Other parameters which you can use include a four-band EQ, a distortion unit, a drive knob, a compression unit, and a sub harmonics control that you may use to add more depth to your sound. Finally, Kick 2 comes with a few hundreds of presets that you can incorporate into your compositions, or use a starting point for your creation. It’s quite easy to recommend this plugin to any producer who wants to improve the sound of their bass drums.