Every kick, from the first thump to the last rumble.
Substrike is a kick drum designer. Not a sample player and not a model of one machine: every kick is synthesised from scratch, and it can be almost any kick you need. The soft round thud of deep house, the dusty knock of a hip hop loop, a long tuned sub boom you can play as a bassline, the overdriven brick of hard techno with a deep rumble floor underneath it, the zap and the screaming tail of hardstyle, the buzzing wall of gabber, an acoustic bass drum in a small room — or something that was never a kick before.
A kick is built from up to eight layers: a tonal body with a pitch drop you can draw, a click, noise, a struck resonator, and bus layers that take the others as their input. Every layer has its own chain of six effects in any order — distortion, clipping, filters, compression, reverb, delays that climb in pitch or play backwards, and more — each of which can work on just the lows, the mids or the highs. The rumble comes from the kick itself: a copy driven into a dark reverb, flattened into a deep floor and tucked under the next hit.
A modulation matrix lets velocity, the note, chance, LFOs, drawn envelopes and macros move almost every control, so a kick can respond to how hard you play it, drift from bar to bar, or never sound the same twice.
- Eight layers, each with its own sound source and six effect slots, plus a master chain
- Rumble layers, a transient guard and per-layer ducking for kick and rumble that stay out of each other’s way
- Draw the pitch and the level of every hit; tune the whole kick to the key of your track, to the cent
- A 32-route modulation matrix with LFOs, envelopes, macros and per-layer velocity
- Over a hundred presets in eighteen styles, a browser that plays as you click, and presets in your host’s own browser
- Drag the finished hit straight into your arrangement as a WAV, or send every layer to its own output
- Undo, a live oscilloscope, and a limiter for when it gets out of hand
Free. CLAP and VST3, for Linux and Windows.