MrKicksy · sound design
Four sources, five rumble engines running in parallel, and an eight-stage master chain voiced for kicks. Each factory preset is one set of values for the same machine, so you can take any of them apart by ear and rebuild it as your own. The whole low end is synthesised, so it moves when you ask it to.
VST3 + CLAP · standalone studio app · 30 factory presets
Signal path
Four sources sum, the rumble engine adds a second voice, the master chain finishes it, and it leaves on a main output with an aux for sidechaining your bass.
Four sources
A kick recorded off a good record is rarely one waveform. Each source here has its own envelope, drive and filter, so the parts of the kick move independently, the way they do on the record.
A sine, triangle or saw oscillator with its own pitch envelope, amp envelope, drive circuit, filter and tail-damping delay. This is the weight: the part a room feels in its sternum.
Under the hood
Pitch envelope runs from a tight click to a long boom. A multi-segment amp envelope shapes each segment; a start-phase control sets where the cycle begins, aligning the transient for more or less click and punch; pick the drive model, soft, tube, tape, fold or hard.
A noise burst, sine impulse or saturated transient. The attack character that lets a kick cut through a dense mix without turning it up: the part the room hears first.
Under the hood
Independent ADSR, its own drive model and amount, and a filter (low-pass, high-pass or band-pass) with cutoff and Q. Stack a saturated transient for industrial weight, or pull it back for deep house.
FM-driven harmonics or additive synthesis for the mid-range fundamental: the tonal voice of the kick, the part that carries on small speakers, laptops and phones where the sub does not reach.
Under the hood
Choose the harmonic count and ratio and modulate the amount per voice. The Body is where a 909 gets its tone against a 606, and where a dense techno kick earns its density.
Optional. Load a WAV with per-layer pitch stretch and lay a 909 on top of your synthesised sub for a hybrid sound in one move.
Under the hood
A pitch envelope per voice stretches without resampling. Drop a favourite single-shot, layer it under the synthesised stack and blend to taste.
Five rumble engines
The rumble engine is the second voice of the kick, sitting under the sub and doing most of the work of making a room move. MrKicksy runs five generators in parallel, each with its own level, and they are meant to be blended together.
Impulse-response convolution: a real room placed around your kick. Pick a hall, a basement or a tunnel.
Algorithmic reverb decay: smooth, tunable and sub-aware, so the low end stays in front of the tail.
Pitched resonance, harmonic layers for that warehouse bloom. Tune it to the root of the track.
Tempo-synced tape echo, set the division, low-pass the repeats and raise feedback for rolling low-end movement that follows the grid.
Filtered distortion for the sub-bass weight under the transient: the “where is that bass coming from” trick.
The modulation matrix
A modulation matrix wires envelopes and LFOs to almost any parameter. So the movement in a kick can be as still or as alive as the track needs. Pitch drift on a psytrance roller, filter motion on an industrial tail, a resonator tuned to follow the root of the track: one matrix, and you pick the destinations.
The master chain
Each stage is voiced for kick drums and for nothing else. The dynamic EQ knows where the fundamental lives, the saturator sweeps from analogue warmth to digital crush, and the limiter is sub-aware.
| # | Stage | What it does for the kick |
|---|---|---|
| 01 | Master EQ (3-band) | Surgical low-mid carve, a broad presence shelf and a sub-aware lift. |
| 02 | Dynamic EQ | Frequency-selective compression: tame the fundamental when it spikes, leave the click alone. |
| 03 | Saturator | Five flavours, soft clip, tube, tape, fold, hard. The Analogue-to-Digital macro lives here. |
| 04 | Master filter | Low-pass, high-pass or band-pass with cutoff and resonance, tone-shaping after the saturator. |
| 05 | Bit crusher | Bit-depth reduction for grit, subtle on a trap 808, aggressive on an industrial kick. |
| 06 | Transient shaper | Attack and sustain control: sharpen the click without re-dialling the attack envelope. |
| 07 | Sub-aware limiter | A brickwall with a sub-specific safety net that knows where the fundamental lives. |
| 08 | Soft ceiling | The final stop: a tanh saturating stage after the limiter, so the output stays bounded and never clips hard. |
Two macros that do the work
Two macros aggregate the most-used moves into one knob each, so you shape character before you reach for the panel.
One knob sweeps the saturator across all five flavours plus the bit-crusher amount, so you find a genre’s signature character without re-dialling thirty parameters.
Dial in the amount of character, room simulation, rumble and transient shaper together. Plain for a direct hit, realistic for room presence.
Bass-collision view
Where the kick fights the bass, shown.
Sidechain your bass track into it and MrKicksy listens, finds where the kick and bass fundamentals sit in the same low octave, and tells you where to cut. It is a mixing aid built into the instrument, so there is no separate plugin to go and buy.
Translation
Built to survive the room it plays in.
A kick that reads on studio monitors can vanish on a club rig or a phone. So what makes it translate is the Body’s mid-range, which carries the fundamental on small speakers, and a mono-compatible sub that stays solid on a full PA. The sub-aware limiter is true-peak safe to within its look-ahead, and the soft-clip stage after it does a different job: it keeps the kick from clipping on the way there.
Start from a preset
Thirty kicks are already built. Take one apart.
The whole preset library runs through this same machine. Load one, take it apart to see how it was made, and save your own. The standalone editor gives you live audio while you work, so you can do that without opening a session.
From the Atelier
MrKicksy is a proprietary Flexiana Atelier product. Hear it, watch the walkthroughs and get it at liveset.app.
