Gated Kicks for Rawstyle in FL Studio

The first thing about gated kicks is you need a punchy kick. You can find a lot of these in the standard FL Studio samples. I take this kick and put reverb on it. I used ValhallaPlate, ValhallaRoom, and ValhallaRoom again with a different preset. So I get three different reverb tails, and I render these.

You can choose reverb modes as well. I went with Nostromo, I dig how dirty that is. You can do it with stock plugins too, like Fruity Reeverb. I make that one mono, because I want the bass.

The reverbs get less volume and go to one reverb bus. Then the reverb bus and the normal kick go into one bus. I remove the punch from the reverbs, because we already have the punch right there.

Then I make automation clips. This reverb doesn't need any kick in the beginning, same goes for this one. Now I can easily control each reverb volume. If you want to create different kicks, play around with the reverb time. If you put it at a different spot, it gets a different drive.

I don't want reverb or bass on every sound. It needs to be a little bit organized, so one can have zero bass. This one here can be super distorted. Fruity WaveShaper is perfect for this, you can just squash it.

Then I take Ozone, or any plugin with an imager, because just the sub needs to be mono. On the first kick there was too much width on the sub, so I made the sub mono. It's just a little bit more tight.

Render this just to be sure that you have every possible render available. You need to do this a lot, because then you can go back versions and change things. It's really important that you keep rendering.

It's nice to have these renders. If you do this daily, at some point you'll have 1000 samples to create other kicks from.

Then we post process a little bit. That just means adding some more distortion, OTT, compression, all this stuff. I automate the distortion to make the tail more distorted, because I don't want the punch to be distorted at all. Then a parametric EQ, so the end part gets more drive.

We add compression and limiting because it starts to clip. Make sure the punch and the bass tail are equally as loud.