Best settings for a hardstyle kick in Kick 2

Hello! I’m new to the producer world, and also new to this forum. I bought Kick 2 to hopefully make some kick ass hardstyle kicks, and besides it’s adding like 20/30 eq’s, i hope there is a nice setting for Kick 2 to begin with.

Who has experience with Kick 2 and making hardstyle kicks? And what are your settings? And if your typing already, what plug in can’t be missed for a hardstyle kick?

Thanks! From the Netherlands,
Jeroen

Hello @Moinkey and Welcome to SA community & Forums !

Congrats for your Kick 2 purchase, you’re going to love it, that’s for sure :wink:

Kick 2 is a very powerful soft synth, with amazing functions under the hood but also very intuitive sound design features once you get used to it.

And that is a general rule about soft synths & plugins, since I read that you’re new to the music production world, the first advise I’d like to give is that there’s no secret : it takes some times to get there and you have to learn !

So learn your DAW, your controllers if you have any, and don’t be overwhelm when it comes to getting more gears or plugins thinking that it will make things easier. Learn what you have, spend time and dive into stock plugins that comes with your DAW and 3rd party plugins you could already have.

It is good to have a pallet of good plugins, but keep in mind it’s a budget and getting too many plugins can get you lost and disappointed when you’re starting because it will give you so many options to start and so many settings to deal with that it can slow down creativity.

All decent soft synths & plugins have good presets to start with, but if you don’t want to sound like everyone, and tough they could be a good starting point, there’s nothing better that knowing your software and being comfortable with tweaking settings and really take advantage of their full capabilities.

So to come back to KICK 2, if you have not done it yet, I invite you to watch those 2 free tutorials :

Next to that, many soft synths will allow you to design hard style kicks and there’s a video for subscribers demonstrating this with KICK 2 & ANA synth.

Really consider the subscription option with SA ( and this is not marketing bullshit since I’m just a subscriber having a moderator role here on the forums to try to help ) there is a ton to learn on Sonic Academy and you’ll get also some pricing benefits on their plugins and presets packs, as well as sound packs and other plugins presets.

Following my first advise about learning and not thinking that getting the greatest plugins will make your journey easier, it really makes sense to me to put your money in valuable learning resources than software & gears that you won’t use at their best. I started myself the wrong way and if I think about the cost so far, I get mad at myself because now I have so many plugins that I just don’t use !! :blush: Getting a yearly subscription with Sonic Academy was really one of the wisest purchase I made. There’s so much to learn here !!

So, dive into Kick 2, the presets that comes with it are a good point to start but really, the key is that simple : if you master this soft synth then you’ll be able to design any kicks in any genre, and that’s true for any soft synth of course.

So no secrets : learning is the path, it takes time and you won’t be able to produce the next top 10 chart in a few month, but the journey and what you’ll learn out of it is far more interesting than the destination.

And since you’re in the Netherlands, you are very well spotted for great electronic music references & facilities and that’s the other secret : listen to a lot of music, open your music related social circle, feel & see what’s working in clubs…I wish that amazing places like the Armin Van Buuren ASOT in Utrecht were existing when I used to be there… :smile:

Sorry for the long post man…

vrolijke muziek maken !!

Doie