By the end: a club kick built from a single sine wave — click, body and tail shaped independently, then tuned to your track — plus the three checks that fix a sampled kick instead of sending you back to preset scrolling.
A kick is three parts, and you shape each one independently: the click (the 2–5 kHz attack transient — the punch you hear on earbuds and laptop speakers), the body (the tuned low-frequency weight, roughly 50–90 Hz), and the tail (how long the sub rings out). Tech house wants a strong click, a solid but controlled body, and a short tail — at tech-house tempos the next kick lands fast, so your kick’s sub must be substantially decayed before it does. Length is the genre difference. Now build all three.
Step 1
One oscillator, sine wave, nothing else. No sample, no layers yet. A synthesized kick is mostly a single sine that falls in pitch very fast — everything else is shaping.
Step 2
That fast drop is the punch — the ear reads the sweep as impact. The 48 Hz landing point becomes the kick’s fundamental: the note it will be tuned by in step 6.
Step 3
Our lab recipe runs a ~90 ms body decay on the synth patch — tight and controlled. Then audition the finished kick against the genre window from the Handbook, and adjust the tail until the sub has clearly decayed before the next kick would land:
Step 4
Layer 4 ms of noise at 0.35 level at the very front of the sound. That burst is the 2–5 kHz attack from the anatomy lesson. Skip it and your kick is all feel, no definition — it will vanish on earbuds no matter how fat it is on monitors.
Step 5
Run the whole kick through a touch of tanh saturation. This fuses click and body so they read as a single hit instead of two sounds holding hands. Glue, not grit — if it sounds distorted, you’ve gone past the recipe.
Step 6
The landing pitch is the kick’s note. Transpose the recipe so the fundamental lands on your track’s root note (or its octave or fifth). A kick has a pitch whether you choose it or not; an untuned one fights the bass root for the entire track, and a tuned one locks the low end together. This is the Handbook’s first rule of the chapter: tune the kick to the key; keep its tail short.
Step 7
Split the jobs across two layers: a top/click layer high-passed so it lives above ~150 Hz, and a sub/body layer low-passed so it stays underneath. Align their start points exactly — phase — so they hit as one. Tune the sub layer to the key; the click layer stays un-pitched. This is how you get a kick that’s deep enough for the club and sharp enough for a phone at the same time.
Step 8
Play kick and bass together, in mono, at low volume. If it rumbles, work the fix list in order: (1) shorten the kick’s tail — often a bigger fix than any EQ; (2) deepen the dip you’ve EQ’d in the bass where the kick’s fundamental sits, so the two curves interlock instead of stacking; (3) increase the sidechain ducking on the bass.
Check your work
A kick with a 400 ms tail in a rolling track is still ringing when the next bass note lands — no cut fixes a tail that hasn’t finished. Second failure: building the two-layer version and nudging the layers apart “for groove.” Misaligned starts don’t groove; they turn one kick into two weak ones.
This lesson is one slice of Chapter 5 — The Kick & Bass: Anatomy & Tuning in the Handbook. The chapter goes the full distance: the six kick types and which tracks each one is for, designing vs. picking (most producers pick a one-shot, then tune it, shorten it, and layer a click — the chapter covers both paths), and the complete kick↔bass relationship. And you don’t have to buy anything to check the standard: Chapter 5 is the Handbook’s free excerpt — read the whole chapter free, then the full book is the tie-in below.
Go deeper
The complete visual guide to tech house production — 69 pages, built to be looked at, not just read. Chapter 05 is free if you want to see the standard first.
How-To · Next
Your kick is built and tuned. Now run the five construction checks on the bass it has to live with.
Read the how-toTutorial · Related
The bassline built to interlock with this kick — zero of its 18 notes land on a kick step.
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