Having not found the kick drum I was looking for in the Bass++, I looked around for other analogue bass drum circuits and found the Barton Musical Circuits Analog Drum and FM Drum.
They looked like fairly simple through hole builds, so I decided to give them a try. I started with the Analog Drum.
Most of the build was very straightforward, but there was some fiddly wiring which I’m not proud of!
I had an issue with this module – it wasn’t quite working as expected. I reached out to Michael Barton, who designed the circuit and he very kindly spent an evening exchanging emails with me while I debugged the circuit. As with two of my previous troublesome builds, the issue turned out to be a faulty component, this time one of the pots. Replacing it fixed the issue.
I think I may have found the kick drum I was looking for. This does a full range of awesome analogue bass drums, from rock hard 909-style techno drums and harder still right through to deep booming 808 thunder.