The Classic Oldschool Kick in Serum 2

Place down a note on F sharp at 150 BPM and loop it. It's important you do two beats, because it rings out the tail and gives you more information later to build the kick with. It's the old way of making hardstyle kicks.

Initialize your preset and put it on a sine wave with no phase randomization. LFO 1 is an envelope over two beats on the coarse pitch, one more octave down so it's low. LFO 2 is an envelope on the volume. I disable it from the main and send it all the way to bus 1. Then tube distortion on a low amount, just for the overtones. The good thing to take away from this tutorial is do not push your distortions.

I add two EQs between the asymmetrical and the tube. The first one boosts the mids, and next to that boost I use a high pass filter. A high pass filter will naturally phase shift the kick. First of all it removes a bit of the bass, which changes the whole composition of the kick. Secondarily the phase shifts change the tone. It's a tone control we can use later. Move it around, but you might remove too much and ruin your kick.

On the second EQ I boost the mids again, and really boost the second fundamental. If you don't boost the second fundamental, you get more of a classic rawstyle kick.

There are so many tweaks that completely influence the sound. This is where it gets very discouraging, because you can't get the sound right. It took me a lot of time to get to the point where I know what to tweak.

What you can copy is the chain. Tube for overtones, boost the mids, chorus to make it wider, remove the side information from the bass, asymmetrical distortion for crunch, linear fold for extra crunch, mids boost, high pass filter, second fundamental, mids boost, another tube, mids boost, main bass boost, another shaper and a hard clipper. If you're stuck, download the preset and study it. Know this chain by heart and you're going to be good.

For the second part I add a second oscillator one octave down, a sine wave with LFO 1 and LFO 2 assigned the same way. Remove it from the main, send it to bus 2, then copy bus 1 and paste it into bus 2.

In the third stage you change bus 2 compared to bus 1, which stays static. The peak, the depth of the chorus, the linear fold, the asymmetrical distortion, the high pass filter. That completely changes the kick. You can also change LFO 2, which is the gain control. Less gain means less distortion, and playing around with this gives you a lot of different sounds.