Chow Kick

Chow Kick is a kick drum synthesizer from Chowdhury DSP that models elements of classic drum machine circuits. Its pulse shaper and resonant filter give producers a way to design the transient and body of a kick instead of searching through a folder of samples.

The filter offers several nonlinear modes, while incoming MIDI notes can tune the drum to fit a track. That combination makes it useful for creating pitched low-end hits as well as more conventional electronic kicks, with room to change the character as an arrangement develops.

The interface includes factory presets to get started and supports saving your own settings for reuse. It also supports Scala tuning files, so producers working outside standard twelve-tone tuning can adapt the instrument to their project.

Chow Kick is a focused instrument rather than a complete drum machine: its job is to generate and shape kick sounds. Use it when you want direct control over a synthesized kick, whether you need a short, punchy hit or a more sustained bass-heavy sound.

The developer distributes desktop builds for Windows, macOS, and Linux, and also offers an iOS version separately. The open-source project is available under the BSD 3-clause license, with public desktop releases on the developer’s GitHub repository.