In this tutorial
My notes from this video
You have your crunch and now you want to make a psy kick. What people generally do is take the crunch and just duplicate it. I hear a lot of kicks like this, and it's not how you want to do it. I want the first beat to introduce the kick, and then do something similar the other way around. Now you have a crunch that is evolving in the quarter notes, instead of a static one.
Then work with the length of each note. It doesn't have to be equally long every time. I generally use a little bit of room between each note, so I have a really tight kick. You also don't have to use the same space between each note, so play with the timing. And you can do triplets too. Put your crunch on thirds and divide it into thirds.
First thing I always do is get my punch in one channel and my crunch in one channel. Both go into the kick bus. Super important to always work organized. Then, to improve the sidechain, I add a limiter on the crunch. I automate the gain and get rid of the ceiling, so it's not limiting anything. Even if it's subtle, it makes a big difference.
At the end of the chain I always throw a soft clipper and an inflator. If you don't have an inflator, put a wave shaper on half sine. It's very similar. Then an EQ, and a transient shaper to add some attack. The transient has more volume, so it gets more clipping and you get a nice clipped punch.
Get one clean channel next to the punch and one next to the crunch, the punch reverb and the crunch reverb. Both go into the kick bus. The punch reverb is 100% wet, with ValhallaRoom. Then I always add OTT, an EQ that removes the bass and the highs, and a limiter with gain automation and no ceiling.
Duplicate the same thing for the crunch reverb and automate the gain again. The punch reverb just opens up at the end. For the crunch reverb I want something else, so I take the quarter note and have it open up from there. It was still too muddy, so I threw in another EQ and opened up the stereo separation a little bit to make it wider.
Next step is improving the transient of the quarter notes. You can use your punch for that. It works especially well with a rawstyle punch. Duplicate it and you get a really nice bouncy rhythm. You can also add another mid-intro punch and use that click instead, because it has a nice transient. Then just accentuate those quarter notes and add it to the kick bus.
Since you add a quarter note transient, you do have to get it through a limiter or Kickstart. It will cut into that transient a little bit.
A final thing you can do is take your same crunch and stretch it a lot, on E3 mono. You get a very stretched out, robotic version of your crunch. Add it to the crunch in the mixer, cut the bass and add some asymmetric distortion.
Then widen up the stereo image with a chorus. I like to use the Hyper/Dimension in SerumFX for this, but you can use any chorus. The goal is a very wide crunch that goes on top of everything to glue it better. You don't hear this subtle layer that easily, but it does make a difference.
FL Studio·Serum·Fruity Limiter·Fruity Parametric EQ 2·Fruity Soft Clipper·Sonnox Oxford Inflator·Fruity WaveShaper·Kilohearts Transient Shaper·ValhallaRoom·OTT·FabFilter Pro-Q 3·Kickstart·Disperser·Misstortion 2·SerumFX
Psy Kick Template
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