The Massive V1.5 Update Is Here!

127 Modern, Solid Production-Ready Kicks, Expertise and Sampler Support

This is a sample pack I've wanted personally for my entire career. A hand-curated collection of modern kick drums that provide instant punch and perfectly controlled subsonic audio that won't swamp your production.

The V1.5 additions easily make this the most powerful kick drum designing sample pack on the market today. A brand-new Kontakt Kick Drum Designer meets 27 new kicks,, updated instruments, and selector patches wherever possible.

Whats new in V1.5:

• 27 Brand New Kicks
• Kontakt Kick Designer Instrument
• Serum 2 Support
• Selector patches (Logic, Ableton,Bitwig) 

Kontakt Kick Designer

Users of Kontakt 7 and onwards now have access to an amazing new tool. The entire library has been developed into a five-layer kick drum designing engine that utilises all of the main kicks, the transient and tonal body samples, alongside three layer slots.

We've even included drag-and-drop areas for all five slots, allowing you to easily add your own samples. 

Please note: a FULL install of Kontakt (often included in Komplete bundles) is required - this will not work with the free editions of Kontakt. 

Serum 2 Support 

Serum 2 is quickly becoming essential one-shot design. The sample engine is incredibly good at handling transience, and our new Serum 2 bank not only contains all menu mapping but also a unique selector patch that allows you to pick body and transient samples to mix and match inside Serum's audio engine.

Serum's UI even allows you to pick up a one shot of the last key pressed and drag & drop this Audio straight onto your arrange page.

 

Like all F9 releases, - we went above and beyond in the search for the ultimate pack of club-ready bass drums.

Resampling through one of the world's most revered sampling drum machines, separating the transient and body portions of every kick for endless mix-and-match, adding a whole collection of kick layers, and wrapping the whole lot up in our renowned sampler formats.

I'm immensely proud to present F9 KICK! - 127 kicks, all created to give you access to the finest foundation for your next production's bass end.

Included in this single-format pack:

• 127 x 24 Bit Kicks 102 Club Kicks, 25 House Kicks
• 127 x 16 Bit Kicks (Names compatible with vintage MPC and other samplers)
• 127 x MPC3K Kicks All re-sampled with our vintage MPC 3000
• Split Kicks - All core kicks have been separated into 'Transient' and 'Body' portions, allowing for mix-and-matching of sound
• Layers - A collection of overlays for your kicks, multiple forms of ambience and reverbs, digital elements, and grunge for additional customisation.
• Kontakt 7 Library ** (Updated in V1.5, see below)
• Serum 2 Library Included (new in V1.5)
• MPC V2.14 / V3 Expansion (Including the FREE MPC Beats)
• Ableton Rack (Live 12 Standard or Suite onwards)
• Logic Pro X Library (based around EXS24 / Logic patches)
• Halion Sonic 7 Library (Halion SE available FREE from Steinberg.com )

** Please note the Kontakt portion will require a full install of Kontakt and will not work correctly with the free/bundled versions of Kontakt. Please check your current Kontakt edition using Native Access.

127 Core Kicks.

102 Club Kicks start the collection off, every one of them created inside a working musical production—not in isolation like so many sample packs. Perfectly balanced transient and ambience layers were added during production.

25 House Kicks then top off this collection— many sourced from 909 and other analogue sources or recorded from several of our classic samplers.

We have covered a ton of sonic options here across this pack whilst making sure every kick is useable, punchy, and adaptable.

The kicks (and all main WAV files) are available normalized and also levelled -6dB from digital full scale.

MPC 3000 Kicks.

All 127 kicks have been re-sampled into F9 MPC 3000 and kicked back out through its legendary & punchy audio outputs.

Pre-amped via an API 527, we then added just a hint of presence and heft from a stereo pair of Chandler Lil Devil inductor EQs before adding a tickle of compression with a stereo pair of DBX 160Xs. The conversion from analogue to digital was handled by our Apogee Symphony system.

This folder of kicks will give you a slightly tighter bass end as the natural filtering of the analogue recording stages push the kicks forward, whilst the MPC's 16-bit converters add the slightest air of crunch.

Split Kicks.

All 127 kicks have been carefully processed to split the noise (Transient) and tonal (Body) elements into separate files. As the spectral process was identical for each kick, it allows for some almost impossibly-instant mix-and-match experiments.

You can also layer multiple transients against a solid body portion to really hammer home the aurally-vital initial 50ms of your composite kick.

The potential here for unique kick tones using these samples is huge - not every combination will work (that would be misleading to suggest), but in our investigations, it has never ceased to be fun to experiment with the split samples in this pack.

Kick Layers

Everyone wants to have their own unique take on modern music. That's why we added 190 layer samples to this collection. We encourage a lot of experimentation in this corner of the library‚a dusting of ambience, some grunge, and a tight digital top (carefully balanced‚you'll only need a whisper) will transform these kicks' character and perceived sound-field placement.

Sampler Formats

We've included enough sampler formats to cover every DAW. Direct support for Ableton, Logic, and Cubase (via Halion Sonic 7) is included, as well as MPC V2.14 and Kontakt 7 onwards (full version required).

Please Don't Key Your Kick Drums

For years I've been getting increasingly worried about the terrible information out there surrounding the precise keying of kick drums to the music root of your production.

Such advice is fundamentally flawed as in the lowest frequency ranges we simply do not experience harmony in the same way we do in the higher octaves for a number of reasons.

Phase is king and the most important concept to understand and control in the subsonic end of contemporary audio. Tuning your kick and bass fundamentals together throws up huge phase-related issues in these vital and often misunderstood areas. As energy increases the lower you go in terms of frequency, the problems start to become exponentially more important in your quest for a solid bass end.

Every single process we've ever seen to sidestep this involves enormous amounts of work and sets you up for danger later in the production/mixing pipeline.

After discussions with many producers who still cling to this, I can say for certainty that very few active producers fully understand the complexities of phase in DAW workflows (e.g. - did you know that 90% of EQs create a fairly dramatic phase shift the moment you apply a high-pass filter or raise the gain of any band on a bass or kick drum?)

Please do not 'Key' your kick drums. Use your ears to pick great kicks first, then shorten them as much as possible for your production/chosen genre (this is often the secret of landing your kick correctly), then use visual diagnostics to check how it's working across your track. Always trust your ears over the visuals—you don't hear music with your eyes or appreciate it via theory.

I understand there are a few extreme genres of dance music where the kicks are so heavily processed and distorted that the upper harmonics create a note in themselves, but the remaining 99% of electronic producers need only concern themselves with fine and coarse tuning, not keying.

At no point throughout the production of the audio demos above did we ever consider the key of the kicks.

Please don't believe everything you read in forums.

James Wiltshire - F9 Audio / Freemasons (Artists)

Please note: the audio demo contains drums, music, and effects from other F9 releases that are NOT included in this release. This is a pack of playable 808 bass instruments and layers.

* This release will not work with the free versions of Kontakt - it requires a full install. Please check your install type using Native Access before purchase.

Compatibility List:

• Compatible with Logic Pro X 11 onwards
• Compatible with Ableton 12 onwards (Standard or Suite)
• Compatible with Bitwig Studio V5.5 onwards
• Compatible with Kontakt 7.1.0 onwards

*Requires a fully paid Kontakt install, not the Kontakt Player editions.

• Compatible with MPC Live I and II*
• Compatible with MPC ONE*
• Compatible with MPC X*
• Compatible with MPC Key 61*
• Compatible with MPC Studio*
• Compatible with AKAI Force**
• Compatible with MPC Standalone*
• Compatible with MPC Software V2.14 and V3

*Requires firmware V2.14 onwards

**Requires Akai Force OS V3.2 onwards