In this video for Studio One Expert, Brent March shows you how to use a tried and tested method of adding low-end punch by augmenting his own kick drums using a test oscillator in Studio One.

Capturing the thump of a good kick drum may just be one of the toughest challenges when recording, and when mixing a track you realise your recorded or sampled kick drum sound just isn't cutting it. There are multiple techniques that you could employ to beef it up.

This is easily achievable with Tone Generator in Studio One, using a simple gated oscillator triggered from the kick drum. Set up Tone Generator to output a low-frequency sine wave — somewhere between 40Hz and 80 Hz— and then run it through a gate. Create a new send on your kick drum channel, choosing the gate sidechain as the destination from the sidechain drop-down. Now, when you play through your track, Tone Generator will be triggered, and you can adjust the send level, gate parameters and sine-tone levels to suit. And that’s it.

However, if you want complete control over the sound of your kick drum, then you can use Tone Generator in Studio One to create them from scratch, as I show you in this video.

Watch on!