Side Chain Kick/Bass 'Trick'

Elektron Gear Digitone/Digitone Keys
#1

For those of us cursed to walk the lands beyond the cities full of 4 to the floor dance tunes, we carry the burden of not having the ‘LFO simulating side chain’ as part of our tool kit. Sure, we can maybe use it here and there, but it’s not something a breakbeat with syncopated rhythms can always get along with. Then there’s the simple fact maybe we don’t even want our music to ‘pump’, we just want the kick to land square in the chest and the bass to not be getting in the way of a clean mix.

Well, here’s something for you breakbeat folks that might help a little bit. The recipe starts with assigning your bass sound to it’s own track (don’t worry you can add other sounds on it, but to do this, the bass must be assigned to the track).

Make your drum sequence and pay attention when the kick triggers. Jump over to your bass track and for each step the kick is triggered, either edit the bass note trigger if there is one or add a trigless trig which lifts up the low end of the BASE FILTER to let the kick punch through it. Then in the very next step, add another trigerless trig and move it back to where it normally sits and THEN (important part) micro time adjust it to the left to land a 32nd note after the previous trigger.

Yeah, it’s a pain and you don’t want to start off writing your pattern doing this, but do keep it in mind to leave room to do it when you start finalizing everything in your pattern.

Taking it a step further, so that you can hide the fact you were sneaking in a fake bass/kick sidechain compressor (sort of), you can set them up to correspond to fill/non fill states so that when you drop out the drums, you’re not left with a weird sounding bassline that seems to think there’s a kick sounding off when there isn’t.

So that’s it for today’s ‘dumb tricks to fake features that don’t exist’. Ta ta!

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#2

Here’s an audio demonstration of it in action. Again, it’s not the best solution, but it might give your compressor something it can work with for better results than not doing it at all. No compressor or post processing was used on this demo, it’s straight out of the digitone without even using the global overdrive.

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#3

Sounds like a sliced up break rather than a programmed drum beat made on the digitone! Would be interested to see how you achieved such a sound on the dn, if there are tricks or it’s just careful step by step programming. Maybe you made a thread about that already.

#4

The trick to get anything to sound less ‘synthy’ is adding max speed noise LFO to one element of your drum sounds and only add as much depth as needed to keep things feeling less ‘synthy’. For instance, if you take your normal 909 style kick with just a sine wave and a pitch envelope done to taste, you can add noise to the same sine wave (not a lot, just a little, but must be fast, set LFO to free run 2k and speed all the way up) and just barely touch the depth, you’ll get something that feels more organic almost immediately. You can apply this noise to a variety of things on your drum. Did you make the thickness by cranking up the resonance of a high pass filter? Add noise to it. Add noise to operator C or B1 offset. Add noise to A or B levels on syn page 2, etc.

Just a little will make your synthy drums feel less synthy…imperfections are the key.

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