RUMBLE FORGE: Rumble & Sub-Bass Generator for Techno

Kick in, rumble out.

The rumble is the foundation

Listen to a techno track without rumble. There's a kick, a couple of hats, and nothing happens. That deep, sustained, vibrating thunder underneath the kick is what gets the floor moving. It's not an effect on top, it's the foundation the whole track stands on.

The thing is, building one by hand is a grind. Layer a sub, tune it to the kick, draw reverse-reverb tails, saturate, sidechain, mono the bass, time it all together. An hour later you've got a rumble that sounds okay, and on the next track with a different kick you start from zero again.

RUMBLE FORGE does it in one click. Drop it on your kick channel, pick a preset, and the plug-in listens to your kick, transient and pitch, and builds a rumble that automatically fits that exact kick. Harmonic, because it is tuned to your kick's fundamental. Solid, because it grows out of the kick body instead of sitting next to it. And fat, because up to nine modules work on it in parallel.

RUMBLE FORGE in Action

Kick in, rumble out: the plugin at a glance.

How it works

RUMBLE FORGE is not a sub-synth you retune to the kick by hand every time, and not a saturator that smears across everything. The plugin sends your input down two paths: one is the clean kick, the other goes into two analysis modules.

The KickDetector catches every hit through the amplitude envelope. It only evaluates low-end energy below 200 Hz, continuously adapts its threshold to the running level and locks out for 80 ms after each hit, so it is robust against hats and percussive bleed. The PitchDetector tracks the fundamental of the kick in parallel using a YIN algorithm, typically 40 to 80 Hz. Both run fully automatically, you don't set anything.

And that's the trick behind the harmonic sound: because the rumble is tuned to the tracked kick pitch, it always sits cleanly under your kick instead of beating against it. A preset works on any kick as a result, no retuning needed.

Your dry signal is never touched. It is copied at the input and passes through at unity gain all the way to the output. Everything the plug-in does happens on the rumble bus alongside it.

Eleven modules, nine free slots

Nine slots sit side by side, and every one of the eleven modules fits into any of them. Several times over, too: you can put the same module in three slots and tune each differently. Slots may also be left empty. All of them run genuinely in parallel and sum onto one shared rumble bus.

Important: this is not a multi-effect. All eleven pursue the same idea, a coherent kick tail in the sub and bass range, they differ only in how they produce it. Each module has its own output low-pass that cuts it off at the top, so the rumble stays in the basement and does not muddy the mids, plus its own amount control.

• SOG, reverse swell: Records your kick's reverb tail and plays it backwards into the next hit. The classic sucked-in lead-in, exactly one beat long.
• PULS, echo rumble: Offbeat delay whose feedback path runs through distortion and filtering. Gritty, percussive, Birmingham industrial school.
• FUND, pitch-tracked sub: Sub oscillator that retunes to the kick's fundamental on every hit and is mixed into the body. Makes thin kicks fat.
• ROAST, saturator: Saturated tail with four characters, from gentle tape saturation through tube to a wavefolder. For industrial walls with bite.
• GRAIN, granular texture: Freezes 150 ms of kick body and sprays it back as up to 32 overlapping grains. Smeared sub textures and drones.
• BEAT, phase rumble: Five phase modes, among them Reese with two slightly detuned comb filters. Wide, hypnotic sub movement.
• DRONE, FM voice: FM synthesis tuned to the kick, with carrier feedback. It sustains between hits and carries a constant tone.
• PULL, tempo swell: Sub sine that climbs from silence over any chosen note length and lands exactly on the grid line. The only pure generator.
• DRIFT, frequency shifter: SSB shift that moves the harmonics inharmonically. The slow beating between shifted and unshifted signal is the rumble.
• KESSEL, feedback tunnel: Three tuned echo loops with saturation inside the loop. Past 100 per cent feedback the tunnel self-oscillates and howls on its own pitch.
• WALZE, crusher: Rectifier, wavefolder and octave sub whose intensity follows the kick envelope. The mangler for an already thick sub.

SOG, GRAIN and DRIFT are true stereo, and KESSEL and WALZE additionally have an OFFBEAT control that pushes their energy up to half a beat between the kicks.

Groove pump per slot

Every slot has its own GRV switch. With it on and the transport running, that slot's output is pumped in sync with the tempo: the level ducks on the beat and blooms towards the offbeat, so the rumble breathes exactly in the gaps where the kick is not masking it. Two global controls, PUMP and SWELL, set the depth and shape for every pumped slot.

The pump reads the bar position directly from the host, so it never falls out of phase during loops or scrubbing. With no transport nothing happens and the slot passes through untouched.

Breathing between kick and rumble

A built-in rhythmic sidechain additionally ducks the entire rumble bus, either relative to the kick or to the tempo grid. Trigger classically from the kick, lock onto the grid at 1/4, 1/8, 1/16 including triplets, or route a foreign kick in as a trigger through an external sidechain input. Plus swing, a phase offset for off-beat pulses and four release curves from exponential to S-curve. Your dry kick is never ducked.

Club-ready at the output

The master section makes your rumble PA-ready. Bass Mono collapses everything below 120 Hz to mono at 24 dB per octave, mandatory for vinyl and club systems. Plus Sub Cut against inaudible subsonics, Wet to blend it under the kick and a solo mode for auditioning. If you have no bus processor of your own running, in a standalone live setup for instance, add the channel strip: glue compressor, saturation, tilt EQ and stereo width.

At the very end sits a true look-ahead brick-wall limiter on the total output, dry and rumble together. Not a single sample leaves the plug-in above the Ceilingyou set. Below the threshold its gain is exactly 1.0, so a signal that never asks for limiting comes out unchanged. The 2 ms of latency this requires is reported cleanly to your DAW.

Meter view

One click on Meter swaps the nine slots for three analysis displays: a stereo width tree with per-band phase correlation, a goniometer and a curve display of Bass Mono and Sub Cut. That shows you directly whether your low end is mono-compatible. The analysis only runs while the view is open and costs nothing the rest of the time.

115 factory presets

Curated by genre and module focus, every one of them ready for a track:

• Rolling: classic techno rolling rumble
• Pumping: sidechain-driven breathing
• Delay: PULS-focused echo rumbles
• Industrial: hard walls
• Sub Heavy: FUND-focused sub thickening
• Granular: smeared textures and drones
• FM: DRONE-focused inharmonics
• PULL: sub-swell templates
• Shift: drift textures
• Composite: combined multi-module sounds
• Walzwerk: KESSEL and WALZE racks for schranz and hard techno

You can save unlimited presets of your own, they land as XML in your Documents folder and survive any uninstall. A/B compare with two parameter slots is built in, plus a panic button that resets everything at once.

Technical highlights

• Eleven modules, nine freely assignable slots, all genuinely parallel, multiple instances possible
• Fully automatic kick detection and pitch tracking, no tuning needed
• Groove pump per slot plus rhythmic master sidechain with kick, grid or external trigger
• Master section with Bass Mono, Sub Cut and a solo mode
• Mastering channel strip with comp, sat, tilt and width
• Look-ahead brick-wall limiter on the total output, 2 ms reported latency
• Meter view with stereo width, goniometer and mono compatibility
• 115 factory presets plus unlimited user presets
• Scalable interface at 100, 125 and 150 per cent, dark and light theme
• RT-safe, no allocations on the audio thread

Formats and Systems

Formats: VST3, AU (macOS), CLAP, standalone
Systems: macOS 11 Big Sur or later (universal binary, Intel and Apple Silicon), Windows 10+ (64-bit), Linux from Ubuntu 22.04

License and demo

The demo runs with the full feature set, nothing is locked. Every 30 seconds a quiet noise burst mixes in for half a second, high-passed at 200 Hz so it does not bury the sub you are judging. The demo allows 30 launches, after which it stays silent until you enter a serial number.

Activation contacts the license server exactly once. After that the plug-in starts with no network access at all, it never phones home. Your serial allows three concurrent activations. The only data transmitted is the serial number, an anonymous hardware fingerprint and the product name, never audio, project data or analytics.

•  Demo – 0,00€
•  Full Version – 49,00€

Purchase Checkout Added to cart Includes 19% tax