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Creating a simple kick drum with a modular synth is easy if you have the right tools. You will need an oscillator, two or three envelope generators with control over the shape of the decay (linear vs exponential), two or three vcas, a noise source (optional), your trigger source and stack cables or a multiple.
Start by patching your oscillator into your vca and out to your mixer. Set your oscillator to a relatively low 808 range pitch. Oscillators that have control over the shape are useful for shaping the pre stage distortion of your kick. You can always put the final kick through a distortion of your choice. Oscillators that morph from sine to square are ideal, but experiment with different waveforms. If your oscillator has individual outputs and you want to achieve waveform morphing you can try patching a the sine and square output into a crossfader and use the out of the crossfader to go into your vca instead.
Next chose your trigger source, this can be a looping square wave oscillator, a gate from a sequencer or clock divider or an envelope with a sharp or short enough attack stage. send your trigger or gate to an envelope generator. We will only be using the decay stage of the envelope, so an attack decay envelope generator will work perfect. patch your decay envelope in to the vca, this envelope will control the overall decay of the kick, this envelope should be linear or somewhere between linear and exponential with a slightly long decay.
Make a copy of your trigger source with a stack cable or multiple and patch that into another decay envelope. This envelope will control the punch of the kick. Patch the output of the envelope generator into a separate vca or attenuator, to have control over the amplitude of this envelope. Then patch the output of the vca or attenuator into the pitch of your oscillator. (note if your oscillators pitch input quantizes incoming voltage, you want to go into the FM or frequency modulation input instead. If your FM input has a dedicated attenuator, there is no need to patch the envelope into a vca or attenuator beforehand). This decay envelope should be exponential, we want it to be fast and snappy, to add punch to the very beginning of the kick drum. Slowly let in (open your vca or attenuator) your snappy envelope to control the pitch of the oscillator and ajust to taste. This should give you a basic snappy 808 type techno kick.
To add transient to the punch of the kick, use the same envelope controlling the pitch and another vca with a noise source patched in and mix in the enveloped noise to your kick signal. Play around with the oscillator wave shape to add distortion pre-envelope, and play around with envelope decay times for longer kicks.
updated 03/27/24 – femi.fleming@gmail.com