Building a kick you can rewire while it plays
Most kick-design sessions end the same way: nine plugins in a chain, a folder of forgettable one-shots, and a nagging feeling that the low end is fighting itself. Bombo is my attempt to put the whole job on one page.
It’s a free, open-source kick plugin: VST3, AU, CLAP, and standalone, Linux first. The full spec and the download live on its page. This post is about three things inside it I actually spent the time on.
Rewire it while it plays
The rack reorders. Drag any FX section above or below another and the signal path rebuilds in real time, on the next sample block, no reload. Reverb into drive sounds nothing like drive into reverb, and Bombo lets you hear that difference on the next hit instead of after a menu dive. Tap a section header to mute it.
It wasn’t a hard thing to build. It was a hard thing to decide was worth building. The safe move is a fixed chain that never surprises anyone, and I wanted the order to be part of the instrument, because on a kick it is.
Stop the tails smearing
The thing that’s easy to get wrong the moment you let the rack move is retrigger. Audition kicks in quick succession and the reverb and delay tails from the last hit smear into the next one, turning a tight kick into porridge. So every new note flushes those tails before the new voice starts. What you hear is the kick you designed, not the kick plus whatever was still ringing out from the one before it. It’s a small piece of bookkeeping that makes the whole thing feel solid instead of soupy.
Get the sound out, then back in
When you land on a kick you like, the BNC button bounces it to WAV or AIFF without leaving the chassis. The bounce renders the whole hit, watches the tail down to -50 dB, and trims exactly there, holding a hair of post-roll so a fade never gets cut mid-decay. The file ends where the sound does: no hard chop through a reverb tail, no half-second of dead air stuck on the end.
That clean bounce is also why Bombo will happily eat its own tail. Drop a sample into the slot (WAV, AIF, or FLAC), push it through the rack until it stops sounding like the thing you started with, bounce it, then load the bounce back in and go again. That’s resampling, the old hardware-sampler move, except the whole loop stays inside one plugin: load, mangle, bounce, reload, repeat. The sample slot can run on its own, no synth body under it, for when you’re a few passes deep and just abusing an 808 for sport.
One more thing
There’s a door in this chassis that isn’t on the front panel. Something from 1992 lives behind it, and it keeps its own hours. Bombo won’t tell you how to knock. Neither will I.
It’s in the KVR Developer Challenge
Bombo is an entry in the KVR Developer Challenge 2026, the free-plugin competition KVR Audio runs every couple of years. Voting is open now and runs through August 3: KVR members pick a top five, awarding five points to a favourite down to one for fifth. A free KVR account is all it takes.
If you’ve got three minutes and a spare vote, Bombo’s entry is here. And if you don’t vote, no hard feelings. It’s free either way.
→ Bombo: what it is, the specs, and the download.
→ Vote in the KVR Developer Challenge 2026 before August 3.