How to Create a Kick in Kick 3

Tired of digging through endless sample packs to find the perfect kick? Kick 3 by Sonic Academy puts the power of precision sound design in your hands, letting you craft custom kicks that hit hard and fit seamlessly into any mix. Whether you're producing in different keys, genres, or moods, Kick 3 helps you create kicks that are unique to your track.

Jordan Wu

3 min read·Posted Jul 8, 2025

Kick 3

Kick 3 is a powerful kick drum synthesizer plugin developed by Sonic Academy, built for music producers who want complete control over the sound and shape of their kicks. It enables users to craft professional-quality kick drums from scratch using a fully customizable sub oscillator combined with layered transient samples. Kick 3 includes advanced features such as pitch and amplitude envelopes, distortion modules, drag-and-drop import/export, and precise editing tools. Its intuitive interface allows producers to sculpt every part of the kick, from the transient and body to the tail and tone. Ensuring it sits perfectly in the mix. Whether you're producing EDM, hip-hop, techno, or any genre in between. Kick 3 is a go-to tool for creating unique, hard-hitting kicks without relying on generic kick samples.

Import Kicks

I’ve been learning how to use this tool to avoid relying on buying or searching for kick samples online. Finding the right kick for a track can take a lot of time, but once you master this plugin, it streamlines your workflow and it’s well worth the investment.

What you can do is take a kick loop that you like and most of the time the kick is layered with a clean kick and a transient click sample.

Here's the kick in the loop.

Then you can import the kick into Kick 3 and get both the clean kick and the layered transient sample.

Now you have the clean kick sample.

And you have the click sample.

Now you can reuse the clean kick or click sample depending on what you want your track to sound like. For example, I can take the following click sample of a punchy kick below and use it's click sample with the clean kick.

Here's how to mix between clean kick and click samples.

What make this tool powerful is you can tune the clean kick to the key of your track. That way all the frequency in your track works together in harmony. For example, the the kick is tuned to E1 at 41 Hz and works with any E Minor Scale or E Major Scale.

Summary

Kick 3 is an incredibly useful tool for designing custom kicks that are unique to each of your tracks. Since your music will likely span different keys and scales, having the ability to tailor a kick that fits perfectly in the mix both sonically and tonally, is a huge advantage. You can also import kicks from your favorite songs and save the click samples you like for future use, giving you even more creative flexibility.