Recently I was reading up about the 808 sub bass/808 kick sound that has been popularized in modern Hip-Hop, Pop, and EDM. I figured it would be possible to imitate this booming sub bass sound on the QY70 and QY100 too. With a little research into the history of this sound’s design, I was able to make it happen!
Note: You will definitely want to wear headphones for this one, otherwise you will probably miss out on the lower frequencies.
It turns out the iconic sub bass sound of the Roland TR-808 is in fact a kick drum sample played back at pitches in the lower register with a long release. This seemed easy enough to emulate, however the QY sequencers don’t have a kick sound that can be played across all pitches of the keyboard, only the XG Drum Voice List contains kick sounds.
Instead, I chose the next best thing. I realized the XG Normal Voice List contains a voice called “Ana Tom” which can be played at any pitch along the keyboard. Toms have very similar characteristics to kick sounds. I turned down the octave very low, cranked up the release, and was met with a pleasantly accurate recreation of the sound.
Pushing this further, I applied an overdrive effect to the voice and used the variation knob to give the sub bass more punchiness. Since reverb isn’t too desirable for sub bass sounds, I turned it down to reduce the muddiness.
One final tweak I noticed when playing back the sound through recording software is that the “Ana Tom” voice is slightly skewed to one side to imitate it’s position in a real drum kit. I compensated for this by panning in the opposite direction until the left and right signals were balanced.
In the end, this is a voice that I can see myself using again and again. I will definitely be revisiting this line of thinking for future sound design to see if I can create more sub bass sounds or further enhance this one.
