How to Make Gated Kicks in Serum 2

I set this up the same way we always do in the playlist. Punch, rumble, reverb. Visualize it that way in Serum 2 and it will help you a lot. Oscillator A is the click, a sine wave. Oscillator B is the rumble, and instead of a waveform I use a sample. Just use a normal club kick. Oscillator A goes to the filter, and the filter goes to nothing and bus 1, our punch channel. Oscillator B goes to nothing and bus 2, our rumble channel.

Then I add some basic processing in main straight away, so I know what I'm tweaking and how it will sound in the end. A hard clipper and a multiband compressor. I remove the downwards compression because it's too squeezy and open the upwards compression. This plays with the phase though, so render out your kick as a final instead of playing it in Serum 2.

For the rumble I take the level of B down a little at the start, because I don't want to rumble the top click of the punch. In bus 2 it gets a combs filter, a hall reverb, tube distortion, an equalizer to cut the highs, a Utility on mono bass, more tube distortion, another equalizer to control the mids and a multiband compressor. On the reverb I take the rate and depth off, so it's very consistent.

You might think it's blended in by then, but it got distorted and rumbled, so you have to control the volume again. LFO 8 goes to the Utility. Changing the blends between all these LFOs is a very, very important part. When my kick was too impacty, I opened up LFO 6 and LFO 8 a bit. More rumble information and a longer kick.

These kicks get good because you hollow them out. Take away frequencies instead of boosting them. I put an equalizer in front of the distortions and really cut into the low mids and high bass. Then a filter on phaser mode in front of everything. Use a plus one, or a minus one with the mix down, because otherwise it cuts the lows away and your kick loses power.

Listen to the kick without the phaser and the equalizer and it's incredibly muddy. But make sure you have some sub. If you move the high pass and band pass filters too far to the right, you remove the low frequencies and the punch doesn't work.

Always mono the bass, with any kick actually. Reverb especially creates phase issues in the low end. If you put your bass on mono you're collapsing that, and you can fix your phase issues a bit. After the reverb in main I put a Utility on mono bass, with the crossover around 300 hertz.

Then the final LFO goes on the Utility volume, in a sort of fish shape on envelope, to enhance the transient. This is important to add dynamic range. The deeper you cut it, the more dynamic range you get.

A very cool trick I found, for the kloenk type kick I played you. At the start we added two pitch automations to the coarse pitch, for double control. If you just reverse one of them, you counteract the effect and it sounds pretty kloenky.

Then the punch needs some work. I go to the bus 1 punch channel, add distortion and change the tone a bit. The kick sounded a bit mono, so I took the bass mono down a bit.