Monstrous bassline and minimal beats

1 Tonal 808 kick

The beat of „Godzilla“ is based on a distorted bass drum as well as clap and hi-hat. For the tonally played bass drum of the 83 BPM song, you can use a kick sample from Roland’s TR-808, distort it and play it tonally with a sampler. Instead, we use the “808 Oxy” preset from the FAW sublab sub-bass synthesizer.

2 Bass drum and clap

To prevent the tones from overlapping, we shortened the release time of the volume envelope to 21 ms. The bass drum plays on the sixteenth counts 1 and 14 as well as 1, 11 and 14 in measure 4. For the other drum sounds we use samples from the NI machine library . The clap sound complements the beat on every other quarter count.

3 Hi-hats

To make it even heavier, we double the clap sample with another clap sound, which is played 8 milliseconds earlier. The beat still sounds rather sluggish. This changes suddenly with the closed hi-hat, which plays a continuous sixteenth-note rhythm. Unlike many hip-hop tracks, „Godzilla“ relies on hard quantized drums.

4 Variation

The groove gets even more drive with four 1/64 beats at the end of every second bar. A lofi snare on the sixth and a “Hey” shout on the second eighth count provide rhythmic variety. Now the most striking musical element of the hit is still missing, namely the bassline, for which we use the Synapse Audio The Legend synthesizer.

5 Bass sound

Load the „Init Patch“ and activate the key tracking for oscillator 3. We set the level of each of the three oscillators (volume) to about 7. Select the waveforms and octaves shown and detune oscillators 1 and 2 for a livelier sound for just a few cents. A drive value of 2.3 gives the sound more bite.

6 Bass line

Adjust the filter and the envelopes of the Minimoog emulation as shown for he desired snappy sound. In addition, select the Retrig setting for mono mode on the „back“ panel of the synthesizer. Then program the bassline shown, which is simple but very effective and also hard quantized.

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