How to Make Gated Kicks for Rawstyle

When I make these kicks, the first thing I always start with is the punch. It's so important to make a nice punch and a nice punch reverb. That's the whole thing. The crunch doesn't really matter at first.

I look for a dirty punch, something with a little bit of dirt in it. Route it to its own punch channel and distort it, with the EQ in front. Then another distortion and another EQ to distort it more. After that a limiter with the ceiling totally up, and I take the gain to make the punch stop at some point.

The punch goes into a Punch Reverb 1 channel with the reverb 100% wet. I like to work with Valhalla Room, but as long as it's a nice clear reverb it's fine. Then add Fruity Limiter with the ceiling totally off. We don't want limiting, we want gain automation. During the punch you want a little bit of reverb, and afterwards you really open it up to 50. That's the standard gain of Fruity Limiter.

Then I send that reverb into a second reverb channel, so it's a double reverb layer. In the second one I take Little AlterBoy. It's very controversial, but I just use it to take the formant down. Now we get a little bit of character.

Another trick. Take Serum FX or LFO Tool. I like LFO Tool, because I can see the filter I'm moving. In Serum FX you don't see that. Go into any flanger and make sure the LFO is doing nothing, so take down the volume.

Then just play around and find a sweet spot. Different frequencies have different effects. You get so many variations from this filter alone. Phasers are nice as well, but I think flangers are goated.

The cool thing is that the punch goes straight into the reverb channel and generates reverb in real time. We didn't use samples for the reverb. With samples, if you change the punch you actually need to change the reverb as well to make it match.

So first make this whole setup, then go back and change the punch. When it's good, render it, trim it and normalize it. Then pitch the sample down, for example minus six, and put it through the same processing again. It's immediately a new kick.