- 1). Launch FL Studio. Click "Channels," then click "Sytrus." Click the down arrow next to "Sytrus," hover the mouse over "Presets" and click "Default" to load a blank synthesizer patch. This allows you to start synthesizing the kick drum from scratch.
- 2). Click the "OP1" button -- which stands for "Operator 1" -- to open the first oscillator control panel. Click and drag the "Freq Offset" control up to approximately 60 hertz -- the typical primary frequency of a kick drum. Set the "Freq Ratio" control to zero. Turn the "PE," or "Pitch Envelope," knob all the way to the right: this tells Sytrus to fully apply pitch envelope modulation to the sound, thereby creating the rapidly sinking pitch typical of a kick drum.
- 3). Click the "Vol" button to open the oscillator's volume envelope window. Right-click two of the four yellow envelope points and select "Delete." Deleting these two points makes it easier to create a volume envelope that smoothly drops from the attack to the decay. Drag the first point, which sets the envelope's attack, to the upper left corner of the envelope window. Drag the second point to the midpoint of the bottom of the window to create a volume envelope that drops down smoothly.
- 4). Click the "Pitch" button. Delete two of the points on the pitch envelope as you did for the volume envelope. Drag the first point to the upper left corner; drag the second point to the intersection of the horizontal line and the left-most vertical line in the envelope window. When the point is in the correct location, the co-ordinates that appear in the upper left corner of the FL Studio window will read "0:100" and "0%." This creates a short, snappy envelope, causing the drum's pitch to quickly fade downward.
- 5). Click the "Filt 1" button. Click and drag the "Filter Type" control until it reads "LP." Turn the "Cut" knob down to about 40 percent. Turn the "Res" knob, which modifies the filter's resonance, up to approximately 55 percent. These filter settings remove undesirable high frequencies from the drum sound while adding a slight emphasis to the lower frequencies.
- 6). Turn the "Operator 1 to Filter 1" knob in the Sytrus matrix all the way to the right. Turn the "Filter 1 to Output" knob all the way up as well. These matrix settings send the sound that the oscillator produces to the filter, then send the filtered sound to the sound card. To see the name of a knob, hover the mouse over it: the name of the control appears in the upper left corner of the FL Studio window. Click one of the keys on the piano keyboard to listen to the synthesized kick drum.
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