Defense Mechanism — Making every LSDJ kick I can think of (video, 2024)

A compendium: every kick he can build, one per channel and per method, on LSDj 9.4.0 — the newest version any source in this wiki uses. The project file is offered in the video description.

Key claims#

• Kit sample kick. The simplest route: LSDj ships 606, 808 and 909 kits; playing the same sample in both note columns makes it "twice as loud". The kit he demonstrates came from SEO.
• Wave synth kick — P and L. P alone pitch-slides down and will wrap if pushed too far; L with transpose 80 slides "all the way down to the lowest note possible", C1, so the note in the phrase sets only where the slide starts. Combining them gives separate control of the transient's pitch speed and the body's slope. PITCH is DRUM ("that nice logarithmic pitch"); FAST gives "a zappy kick", TICK is "pretty wild".
• Tune the transient with the note, not the transpose column. Because L80 always ends at C1, "that allows me to actually tune the transient of the kick using the starting pitch in the note column" — higher octaves add high end, and the difference is bigger with a slower pitch slide.
• Transient by waveform. Put a harsh wave in the synth's first frame and step off it with an F command on the first tick; copy the frame you want to keep before editing the synth, since the synth screen regenerates the bank.
• 808 kick into a bass note, two ways: (1) one instrument — FAST pitch, a slightly clipped sine, transpose down two or three octaves and an L to the target bass note, with F commands (or E) thinning the volume as it goes; (2) two instruments plus a groove — a standard wave kick and a separate 808 bass, with groove 10 set to 3 9 ("I want this kick to play for three ticks and then the bass for the next nine") and groove 11 to 3 9 6 to make the following bar's timing work, returning to groove 0 after. The second costs grooves but gives independent control of kick and bass, plus the W command to set how fast the bass synth decays.
• Stutter kicks. Before 9.4.0 the R retrig command did not reset the pitch, so the workaround was an L 00 00 on the tick where the kick should restart. "Now we actually don't have to do that" — in 9.4.0 R retriggers the pitch, so a plain R on the kick table gives an instant stutter (retrigger).
• Pulse kick by hardware sweep — pulse 1 only, "it takes like no CPU whatsoever", and the pulse channels' hardware envelopes are "really smooth". He lands on sweep value 64, calls it very tunable, and prefers it for toms over kicks.
• Pulse kick by P+L, same as the wave version but the pulse channel only reaches C2, so it lacks the wave channel's low end; 50 % duty is "the beefiest". A Kyoto-style waveform shift on the first tick is offered as an untested way to add a transient.
• Pulse stutter kicks follow the envelope, so the stutter stops when the envelope does; cut with K or with the hardware LENGTH. His table hops to row 0 to reset the pitch, or to row 1 if he needs to free a command column.
• The R80 gabber kick — "the game changer of the pulse channel kicks". R8x is resync (R8F = resync off): it rings the pulse channel at a very high frequency that then drops about half an octave, which "allows you to get that much deeper, get a little bit more range out of the pulse channel — not quite down to C1, but around F1". Best placed around tick three.
• Noise kick with PITCH SAFE: safe restarts the noise channel on every pitch change "including during pitch slides", which "offers this almost tonal aspect to the kick"; on FREE "it just completely loses its impact". Modern P commands make noise kicks far easier than the old transpose-and-S method.
• A kick with a hi-hat inside it, credited to nintendo kwondo: add a transpose on tick three of the noise kick's table so the tail reads as a separate hat — "it kind of allows you to squeeze an extra thing in there".
• Arrangement note running through the video: which channel a kick belongs on is an arranging decision — "do you need to use the wave channel for a lead sound and throw some of the percussion off to the pulse or noise channel? These are good arranging techniques to have."

Practical takeaways#

• L with transpose 80 is the reliable kick: it cannot wrap, and it frees the note column to tune the transient.
• Two grooves (3 9, 3 9 6) buy a real 808 kick-to-bass with independent instruments.
• On the pulse channel, R80 is what gets a kick low enough to matter.
• On the noise channel, SAFE pitch is not only about reliability — the restart is part of the sound.

Notable quotes#

"You can tune the transient of the kick using the starting pitch in the note column."

"The R80 gabber kick — this is like the game changer of the pulse channel kicks."

Relevance to the wiki#

The wiki's kick material stopped at LSDj 7 (s-intense-tech-10-kicks-part-1, s-intense-tech-11-kicks-part-2). This adds the pulse-channel kicks (sweep, P+L, R80), the noise kick with SAFE pitch, the groove-based 808, and the 9.4.0 change that makes R stutters work without the L 00 00 trick.

To verify#

• Sweep value 64, groove values 3 9 and 3 9 6, and the "around F1" floor of the R80 kick are spoken while editing, from an auto transcript (unverified).
• LSDj 9.4.0 is the version on screen; the wiki's version history otherwise ends at 9.2.6, and no source here describes 9.3 or 9.4 in general (unverified beyond the R-resets-pitch change he demonstrates).

Pages touched#

instrument-design · retrigger · pitch-slide-and-portamento · shuffle-funktempo · wavetable-programming · pulse-width-modulation · game-boy-apu · lsdj · defense-mechanism · octave-bass