Yeah and it’s that cold and plastic like sound that I’m not into. M:C seems to have less of that for several of the kicks I’ve heard.
Actually I find Digitone a little too dificult to blend with other sounds that I make with samples and analogue sounds. But of course, I could start on the DN before going to the other sounds. But my inspiration mostly comes from using samples.
The only organic type of music where I think cold sounds fits well, is dub house/spacy deep house (or what you wanna call it).
Because of the deep and dubby atmosphere, the coldness adds to the associations of several quite specific things:
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outer space with it’s wast black emptiness, yet with small lights and a few planets in the very far distance. In my mind Satelites, sputnik and a floating lonely astronaut usually appears.
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Ports at a silent, grey and very foggy day somewhere between 9 and 12 am. You have windmills and maybe even a bridge with blinking lights in the top for airplanes to see, standing far apart from eachother out in the distance in the wast water.
At land, you have the container terminal with (well) containers, tall cranes and ships docking and loading off cargo.
In the very near area there will be modern architectural housing for offices and expensive apartments, while yet again here and there tall cranes either stillstanding or in use, are there for the current building projects.
In the habour right next to the area with apartments, there’s this bathing-pier and wooden stairs along the seaside for people to use. Maybe with a few additional bathing piers attached.
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Riding a train at night while starring out the window at the black contryside with it’s few lights here and there in the distance.
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Trucks driving at the semi-empty (relatively far between each truck) and dark highway at a starry night with an occational blinking airplane in the distance.
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Areas at night with large and open looking modern architectural office buildings with the clear lights turned on in the hallways and a few rooms. And with almost no people in the area. Preferably right next to seawater with a clear and starry heaven. And with the occational blinking airplane and seemingly lonely truck passing by on the road.
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Standing at a beach either at a starry night or in deep fog between 9-12 am. Along the coastline there’s modern architectural apartment housing with a small road in between the beach and the buildings. At the foot at some of the buildings there’re small patches of beach grass planted in an evenly spaced pattern, so that it’s clear that humans did it.
Out in the far distance of the water, there’s a blinking bridge and windmills. Also a few low flying blinking airplanes are landing in the airport nearby.
The beach is deep and very wellkept with clear signs of human intervention. There’s a few modern looking bathing piers. Those with like a small Island in the end and maybe additional attached bathing piers from that. There’s a wide pathway for walking from land to the beach. It’s made of completely flat, smooth and bright grey concrete.
All of these associations clearly has a connection to eachother. The blinking airplanes at night for once, gives me associations to satelites and sputnik. Like a bleepy techno/fx sound also would do.
But everything seems to be connected to the shipment of cargo and the upbringing of modern and clean looking society, where a big, clear and seemingly empty space that connects it all has a keyrole. And all those transportation vehicles also connects everything together. At night it’s seemingly more silent in the atmosphere around us, yet someone here and there are still awake and at work. It gives the feeling of being alone in a big empty space. And all this human-made stuff placed around in nature becomes more clear, yet also more coherrent. It’s this blend between a silent, soft, open and clear atmosphere and a few noisy inorganic vehicles and humans in contrast to eachother that gives this mixed sensation of, well, organic in a cold, soft, silent and open way. Just as that type of music does.
I know that I’m not the only one who gets similar associations. Also some techno and dub techno gives me similar vibes.
I’m not really doing that clean, deep and open type of music at the moment. But yeah an fm synth fits very well in that context, when the sounds are made to fit the vibe. For once, you usually want your kick to be deep, round, not too much pitchbended body and not too overdriven. Saturated at most.
I did try and make a kick out of a single cycle wave on DT yesterday. I thought it sounded closer to what I wanted in terms of full body and round transient, similar too the caracter of a 909.
Then I tried to make one on DN without any fm to see if I could match the one on DT. First I tried to match settings for amp, filter, envs and lfo’s exactly by number. And tried to approximate the basenote. But it was nowhere close in terms of vibe. So I tried the fm options, and here it obviously started to open up and sound better. But still not the vibe. After some time I realised that the 100 hz hp on my mixer was on, plus a very slight amount was taken out of the mids. God damn it. Had forgot to reset the strip🤦♂️
After resesting it, my kick had way too much low end. I had done the res hp sweep thing, and it did sound more subby than the DN kick when 100hz hp was on. When turned off, it was dificult to find an amount of res or different frequency that made It sound great again. It still had the fundamental body I was after, just more muddy and unpleasant 
so after some more tweaking I ended up with a more satisfying sound on DN. Still not the vibe I was after. But I’d have to post process it significantly with eq, saturation and maybe compression to get there. Not something I would record into my mixer with only master as recording outputs. Overbridge, I know. But fiddling around and setting things up, you know.
I tried stacking voices, but after a/b’ing by volume matching the output, I learned that this only makes the sound louder. At least to my ears. And if I can’t hear it, then it doesn’t matter enough to me. But I did also learn that the curve for velocity to volume set to its fullest, actually makes the sound thicker. Not just a bit louder. I would’ve thought it wouldn’t, and that it just amplifies it to it’s fullest volume. And maybe that’s before amp, filter etc. So that it would push the sound and make it thicker, I don’t know 
But then again, wouldn’t voice stacking have done the same? 
so that’s probably not it. Maybe I’m just imagining the effect 
It’s probably the closest result that I’ve heard. It sounds great. And yeah, the M:C probably still sounds a little better in many demos.
I did have a rack saved in Ableton with the regular compressor, saturator and EQ8 on settings that worked nicely for me on most kicks. Especially 909 ones that I used mostly at the time. Sometimes with a little of tweaking. I think the order goes, Saturator, EQ8 and Compressor. Don’t know if I still have that rack saved somewhere. Haven’t used it for a long time, because I didn’t want to be lazy 
