Creating Sound FX – Boom Impact FX With Synapse Audio EKS Pro

We’re going to take a look at making those super high impact boom sounds that so often punctuate the beginning of Trance breakdowns, it’s often called a ‘hall kick” we assume as this it’s because its drenched in ‘hall’ style reverb, however you can never be sure. We didn’t put it through google translate. Yet.

Lets start off with a suitable kick, we’ve made one using Synapse Audio’s awesome kick synth EKS Pro but anything you like the sonic qualities of will do.

Slam your chosen kick drum on an audio channel…We’re using Apple Logic Pro here, but you can the same result with any DAW sequencer.

Next we’ll insert a reverb plugin on the channel followed by an EQ. You can also experiment with distortion plugins here too.

We’ll leave the EQ for the moment as we’ll use that for any sonic sculpting needed later on

Open up the reverb plugin, choose a preset that’s going to give you a big sound straight off, these usually have names like ‘Bright Hall’ or something similar on almost every reverb plugin available! Next set the wet/ dry signal mix to around 50/50. You can adjust this later to your taste. We prefer more of a ‘Dark Hall’, but that’s just us….you can always use your post processing EQ to kill some high frequencies if your reverb plugin doesn’t allow you to filter it’s output.

Here’s the settings that we’ve used for Logic Platinumverb, but as always – use your ears!

To enlarge the sound of this mighty boom we’ve added a little low end EQ around 120 Hz, then used Logic’s magical Adlimit plugin to prevent any unwanted clipping, you an experiment with compression here too.

We’ve added a splash of aux bus send to the track’s main reverb – this will really help gel in with the overall ambience of your production, especially when used in breakdowns that use the same main reverb aux bus.

Who says you have to sample everything? Remember: use your ear, experiment and most of all – have fun with it!

You can download our Logic Pro project here. If you don’t own Synapse Audio EKS Pro we’ve included a sample we created for the project too.

DMS over and out! =)