KICKFIXATOR - WINDOWS ONLY

Most EQs boost where you tell them to. KICKFIXATOR measures where it matters.

Rawstyle and hard techno kicks are distorted, clipped and tuned — the frequency that carries the weight moves from kick to kick. A fixed 50 Hz boost either misses it or buries it. KICKFIXATOR runs a filter bank over the incoming signal, locates the real fundamental and places every band in relation to it.

BASS — the analysing knob

An 11-band filter bank tracks the fundamental of your kick across 28–135 Hz in real time and interpolates the peak in log-frequency space, so the detection lands between the bands, not on them. The boost — a +9 dB bell with Q 1.0 — sits exactly on that frequency, with a −3.5 dB dip at 2.7× above it to keep the boost from smearing into the body.

At the same time the sub band is used to synthesise its own 2nd and 3rd harmonic, band-passed at 2.3× and high-passed at 1.6× the detected fundamental, level-matched to the sub envelope. This is the missing fundamental effect: phones, laptops and small monitors cannot reproduce 45 Hz, but the ear reconstructs it from the harmonics. Your low end keeps its weight on a club rig and stays audible on a phone — from one knob, without a separate sub layer.

REDUCE MUD

Nine detection bands across 95–320 Hz, weighted toward the 100–150 Hz box zone. The dip follows the loudest mud peak of each kick — up to −10 dB at Q 1.3 — and only opens up when there is real energy there, measured as the ratio of mud-band energy to broadband energy. A clean kick stays untouched.

LOW PUSH

Passive Pultec-style boost & atten: a low shelf of up to +8 dB at 30 Hz, 60 Hz or the note of your project, with a −4 dB dip at 3.4× the shelf frequency. Shelf up, dip just above — the trick that makes a Pultec bottom end sound big instead of thick. In key mode an additional +5 dB bell at 60 Hz locks the pressure to the system range.

AIR

Passive 12 kHz high shelf, up to +7 dB at Q 0.7, for the click on top of the kick.

SPLIT — punch stays dry

The waveform display shows the kick 1:1 like your sampler, locked to the project tempo via the host's transport position. Drag the split line: everything left of it stays 100 % dry, everything right of it is processed, with a 4 ms crossfade at the boundary. The tonal punch keeps its attack and its tuning while the tail gets the whole treatment. Punch lengths differ from kick to kick — this is a slider, not an algorithm guessing on your behalf.

MONO LOW & SAFE CLIP

MONO LOW collapses everything below 120 Hz to mono for club playback. SAFE CLIP holds the output at −0.04 dBFS with a tanh curve whose slope is exactly unity below −0.72 dBFS, so it stays out of the red without touching the signal until it actually has to.

Under the hood

Analysis runs at control rate, all filters are TDF-II biquads with smoothed coefficients, all parameters are host-automatable and click-free. The UI scales to your screen and is resizable from the bottom right corner.

Specs-Block

Format: VST3 · Standalone
System: Windows 10 / 11, 64-bit
Channels: mono & stereo
Latency: zero
Installation: copy the .vst3 into your VST3 folder — no installer, no runtime, no dependencies