KICK 2 Review
Kick 2 by Sonic Academy might at first seem redundant, as you likely know, you can make a kick in nearly any synthesizer. But when we step past what we simply “can” do in other synths, and look towards what we want to do, Kick 2 starts to make a lot more since. You may be able to make a kick in any synth, but can you make the kick you want? Most synths lack the control necessary over envelopes to really sculpt and design the contour you need, on top of that, many synths don’t seem to reproduce transients and shorter segments of audio as precisely as we’d want. Kick 2 addresses all this by not only having an incredibly stable and predictable sound, but also a very large display for editing envelopes. This display even gives you active feedback, showing you what your kick waveform will actually look like, this is perfect for designing amplitude contours and avoiding over sharpened transients.
Click: Beyond this Kick 2 provides 3 sample layers, with the intent of adding transient and acoustic layers to your synthetic kick. The included collection of “click” samples isn’t much, it’s enough to get you started, but leaves a bit to be desired. You can however adjust the start time. length, envelope, filter, and pitch of each sample for a bit more variation. even slight amounts of click samples mixed into the kick can go a long way to emphasize and add punch.
Sub Control: A small feature of kick 2 that might be overlooked is the sub control, a minimal harmonic editor for the kick synthesizer. By default it starts on just a sine wave, but you can mix in up to 7 harmonics to get more tone. The harmonics dial allows you to dial back or push forward these harmonics with out having to adjust them one by one. It may seem subtle at first, but this tool can really help your kick frequencies fit into the mix, or give the distortion a bit more to bite into without going over board. My only complaint is that you have no control over the phase of each partial, meaning all harmonics trend towards a saw wave, when ideally we could offset some of them to control clipping.
Effects: The last touch Kick 2 adds is a few effects, there’s a compressor, drive and limiter, to control the end results. You also get a distortion with 4 shapes to choose from, these can really change the character of your kick, but of course a few more is always welcome. Also a 4 parametric EQ, so you can actually save the appropriate EQ curve with your kick preset, something that always annoyed me when making kicks on synths was that I couldn’t save the necessary EQ I had to add in afterwards to the preset.
It’s this combination of features that really makes Kick 2 great for kick design. There’s some nice controls to change the length and sweep depth of the entire curve without having to manually go in and adjust everything. There’s also a nifty little render tool, which renders the kick out as a sample that you can drag and drop into your project or export into a library. One of the other reasons I like to use Kick 2 is simply because sometimes I just want a kick, I don’t want to dig for one, I don’t want to build one. So I’ve set up Kick 2 to have a pretty universally useful default preset, and this gets me a kick fast. Later I can go back and tweak/ adjust it to my needs. One thing I’ve yet to play with is using Kick 2 as a Bass synthesizer, you aren’t restricted to one pitch, and can have the sub synth follow your keyboard, and there’s even a glide control. It’s obviously not the most powerful synthesizer out there, as they’ve limited the tool set to make it ideal for kicks, but still, the option is appreciated.