Little Foot

Easy-to-use kick drum enhancement plugin

Contrary to what the name suggests, Little Foot is only small in terms of CPU usage and focus. The single-minded son of Boz’ Sasquatch 2 Kick Machine, it has just one job to do and it does it extremely well—that’s to put hair on your kick drum. Little Foot takes sub-bass drops, a time-honored studio technique, refines and streamlines it, enabling you to seamlessly blend a tunable low-frequency sine wave with a kick drum for added power, punch, and deep low end—in one simple, straightforward GUI. Not just for extreme lows, in these days of earbuds and iPhone speakers, you might want to bring out an octave above the fundamental in order for kick to be heard on tiny speakers. Little Foot can help you there, like no EQ can.

Boz Digital Labs Little Foot - Just the Facts:

• No-manuals-necessary layout
• Instantly add punch and body to your kick drum
• Easily go from natural enhancement to extreme sustain
• Tune your kick drum to match the key of the song
• No time-consuming scrolling through samples, no flams, no phase issues
• Very low CPU usage

Cracking the Code

As every professional mix engineer knows beyond any doubt, you can’t EQ what isn’t there. If a producer tracked a drum kit using a 20″ kick drum with a single-ply resonant head, there’s not going to be very much going on in the sub frequencies. An old trick in the studios to bring out sub frequencies of a kick drum was not EQ, but rather to gate a low-frequency sine wave tuned to the drum’s fundamental to be triggered by the kick and sent to another channel for blending purposes. The combination of natural kick and low-frequency fundamental added “Oomph,” as Boz Digital calls it, without crazy boosts in EQ to eat up headroom.

The standard procedure for sub-bass drops is a tad complicated involving a CPU-hungry virtual instrument channel, aux channel, sidechain gating, busing, pre-fader sends to hear the effect in solo, high-pass filtering, and so forth. With Little Foot, you get the effect without having to tweak noise gates for attack, hold, and release to get the proper sustain; no going back and forth between sine wave track and kick to check results; and no need for additional plug-ins to tune the sine wave or modify its envelope. Little Foot lets you do all of that with one simple interface, plus it enables you to individually tune, add sustain, and level-control the “Oomph” signal, and treat the original kick for resonance (which is where the money is on drums). With Little Foot, all you have to do is drop it on your kick drum track and adjust to taste.