Midintro Kicks in Serum Made Easy

Take oscillator A with a sine wave. That's the initial punch. I like to take envelope 2 and envelope 3 and send both to the global master tune in the matrix. That gives a nice pitch automation. Then LFO 1 goes to the level of oscillator A, because we want an initial punch and then a crunch that comes afterwards. So we separate the two. Put the LFO on envelope, and you can even put oscillator A three octaves down.

The crunch is oscillator B, the same way around. LFO 2 goes to its level, so it opens up when the punch stops and they blend together a little bit. Now you have a mid-intro vibe, but it's still a reverse bass kick. So I get a different waveform on oscillator B. This is where you go completely nuts and do weird stuff.

The processing is where we make and break everything. Open up the distortion, but we're not looking for hard clipping. Different modes give different variations. Sin fold or linear fold, and you just open it up very slightly.

Then the most important part is the compressor on multiband. Take down the threshold and control the highs. There you go, we already have a very nice mid-intro kick.

The filter should affect oscillator B only. That's why it's nice to have oscillator A and B separated. Go into the flanges, or take something like a band pass where you boost the band a little bit. I could literally sit here for hours playing with this.

Then take another filter with a flanger and put it in front of everything. A static flanger kind of cuts frequencies in the kick. The first filter is for movement, this one stays static, and I really crank the resonance and the drive. As long as you change everything in front of the distortion and compression, it's all good, because that really cranks the volume.

Finally some reverb. LFO 4 goes to the reverb mix. The punch ends here, so the reverb starts here. Put the reverb after the distortion, because I really don't want distorted reverb. Then tweak it until it sounds clean.

Then take the EQ and put it in front of the distortion. With LFO 5 on the gain you can boost the punch, or boost the mids during the crunch instead. LFO 6 boosts the highs a little bit in the beginning. Really boosting the highs, but not too much.