RAW-Kick

If you’re from the Netherlands, then you are surely familiar with hardcore and hardstyle. If you’re from anywhere in the rest of the world, then you may have occasionally heard the aforementioned music genres played at a rave or two. You either hated the loud distorted kick drums and high tempos, or you instantly fell in love with what you heard and are now saving money for a trip to a festival in the Netherlands.

I’m exaggerating of course, but the point I’m trying to make is that “the harder styles” represent powerful genres of electronic dance music, and this is mostly due to their powerful kick drums. If you’re a music producer and are interested in these styles, then you should definitely work on creating world-shattering kicks. You could do so with a plugin called RAW-Kick.

RAW-Kick can be considered a follow-up to RAW, a synth developed by Rob Papen with the help of DJ Free-K and hardcore legend DJ Promo. While RAW was designed to help producers develop the overall sound of their hardcore tracks (loud leads, screeches, distorted kicks), RAW-Kick was created to allow them to focus on the kick drums – which as I’ve already suggested, represent the essence of the harder styles.

Like its predecessor, RAW-Kick comes with an intuitive interface, although it may take you a little more to get the sound you’re seeking. This is because hard kicks are a bit tricky to produce, and are usually made of more than one layer of drum sounds. The developers know this full well, so the plugin allows you to create powerful bass drums out of three layers. You can use either a “kick model” – which is a drum that the plugin synthesizes – or a sample – which you can choose from the plugin’s long list of sampled bass drums.

As you’d expected, RAW-Kick provides many advanced parameters that allow you to modify the waveforms, add noise, distortions, EQ, and plenty of effects. There’s even a warning on the plugin’s website which states that the presets are really loud; this is no surprise since some of them are made by very well-known DJs and producers in the scene.

RAW-Kick won’t make you a famous producer overnight, but it may ease up your workflow and give you a good starting point if you’re still struggling to create a distorted bass drum that you’re proud of.