Making A Techno Rumble Kick In Ableton Live – step by step

Welcome to our step by step guide to setting up a techno rumble kick from scratch in Ableton Live. I’ll show you wow to make a sub bass from your kick drum by processing it with reverb, filters, compression and distortion for that heavy pumping techno sub bass.

The point of this is to make a booming sub bass that is in the same key as the kick, as it is made directly from the kick itself. They’re processed together, the kick and the rumble so they sound ‘as one’ and you get a booming sub on the kick that pumps rhythmically off the beat.

There’s going to be lots of reverb and then adding layers of distortion and filtering it down and then more layers of distortion and filtering to taste, to get the right sound, we’ll get into it below…

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See also: all our other techno rumble articles. You can subscribe for free kick drums each week and Ableton racks here. You can find all the free Ableton presets here.

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Step By Step Making A Techno Rumble Kick In Ableton Live

Here’s a step by step guide to setting up a techno kick drum and accompanying pumping ‘rumble sub’ bass…

Step 1 – set up a four to the floor kick drum in a Sampler.

I used a kick from my own 909 sample pack which you can get for free here. I use a standard techno ‘four to the four’ drum pattern – a kick on each beat.

Step 2 -duplicate the kick channel

Copy the kick channel to a new copy. This will be the rumble. Add a low pass filter. And cut off the top frequency, as we don’t need it. I give it a bit of resonance to boost the bass. I add some drive distortion at the filter too. You can see my settings below (don’t worry about the amp and EQ8, I’ll add those later).

Step 3 – add a reverb

Add a reverb with a long decay (I’ve used over 3 seconds here). It should be fully wet. I then copy the first filter and add it after the reverb, so you only get a low bass tone from it. You can start to hear the boom now. You can tweak both filters to taste.

Step 4 – add a sidechain compressor

Then I add a compressor which will turn the volume down on the reverb for a split second whenever a kick drum plays. This means the kick and rumble sound good in the mix as they do not get lost in each other, as only one plays at one time. And you also get a really nice rhythmical pumping as the sub bass pulsates after each kick.

I switch Sidechain on and set the main kick drum as the source. I turn the ratio up to 4 and the then the threshold down until it starts pumping. You should be able to hear it start pumping with the kick and you can see it on the compressor too. You can then tweak the Attack and Release of the compressor to control how it pumps. You can see these in the images below: the compressor should be pumping with the kick.

I copy the Auto filter again and add one after the compressor. So there’s 3 now. We don’t need any top end in this.

Step 5 – process the main kick drum

I then go back to the main kick drum and tweak it a bit so it stands out a bit from the sub bass, maybe add a distortion – I use the Amp in Blues mode. You can see this in the kick image above.

Step 6 – group and distort both channels

Then I group the kick and rumble and distort them together using a Drum Buss. Tweak it until it sounds good – it’s easy to over do it at this stage and get really industrial and distorted!

Step 7 – EQ both channels for a cleaner mix

Then I add an EQ boost and hole to further mix the kick and sub better – I add an EQ8 to the kick and make a very narrow boost, and sweep it until it make the kick more punchy. You can see this in the image above “The main kick drum with processing”. You want to bring out the kick, but with a very narrow speak.

Then I Copy the EQ8 and dd it to the rumble channel at the end. So the same EQ8 is at the end of the rumble channel. I take the bass boost and I turn the gain right down. So instead of boosting the it cuts. You can see this in the images below.

So now it cuts a hole in the bass, exactly where the kick is punchiest. This cleans up the mix even more and allows the kick drum to thump through the sub bass.

Step 8 – tweak everything to taste

Then I add another Autofilter with more distortion and I tweak the cutoff to taste.

At this point you can go back and tweak everything. Changing the filters, distortions, reverb and compressor settings can have dramatic results on the sound. You can have subtle sub bass or a huge industrial distorted wall of sound!

There’s a video below of me making this from scratch, and a lot of other tutorials on our youtube channel, you can check that out here if you’ve not done so yet.

See also: all our other techno rumble articles. You can subscribe for free kick drums each week and Ableton racks here.

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Making A Techno Rumble Kick In Ableton Live – Video:

Here’s a step by step video tutorial of making a techno rumble kick from scratch….

Please subscribe to the youtube if you haven’t yet: youtube.com/@studiobrootle 

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