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Lesson 5: Creating Synthesized Kick

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Before we make a kick drum, we need to learn a little bit more about waves and speakers

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Recall, this is a waveform, it tells the speaker how to push out and pull back

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When the speaker is pushed all the way out, the amplitude is at 1

Amplitude of 1

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But what if we create a digital signal and make the amplitude greater than 1?

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The speaker can only push out so far…

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When the amplitude is over than 1, we say the signal is “clipped”

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The blue parts of the wave are clipped

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Clipping turns the wave into a square wave

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Clipping is sometimes intentional, the famous guitar effects: overdrive, distortion, fuzz, all use clipping to get their tone

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So how does this relate to our kick drum???

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Well, to get the sound of the kick, we need to turn the low frequencies up really loud… this will cause some clipping

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Create a new patch called:

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kick.pd

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Notice the clip and the amplitude increase

clip~ takes in an amplitude and outputs an amplitude between the two number parameters. This will still clip our signal, but in a more controlled way

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Replace the x’s to make a kick sound

Listen to this sample from the Volca analog drum machine