How to Make Rawstyle Kicks in Serum 2

I open two oscillators right away, A and B. A is our punch, B our crunch. Oscillator A goes into filter 1, and the filter goes to nothing and bus 1, so it doesn't get split up into bus 1 and main. Same for oscillator B, nothing and bus 2. Now the punch and crunch are separated.

Then take down the phase randomization. That makes sure the phase doesn't change, so your kick stays consistent every time you click a note. And design the preset in the BPM of your song, 155 in this case.

Bus 1 is the punch. I put a hard clipper all the way, with an equalizer in front of it and a tone boost on a pretty wide frequency range. Then a Utility at the end to shape the length of the punch once more. LFO 5 goes to the level, shift alt click to make it unipolar and take it down a bit. Same thing in bus 2 for the crunch, with tube distortion.

The reason is that distortion reacts differently to volume changes. The LFO on the oscillator level reacts with the first distortion and changes the tone. The LFO on the Utility after it creates the blend, so the punch and crunch blend well.

The final processing in the main channel is a very important stage. I want to lock this in first, so I can dial in the effects later. Distortion on soft clipper, with an equalizer in front. I boost the sub during the crunch and not really during the punch, which adds that humph sound to the kick. It takes the reverb and the sub together and distorts and clips them together.

At that point it's a pretty squashed kick. So I put a Utility in front of the equalizer, with LFO 9 on envelope. Create a transient, open it up again and take down the volume slider of the Utility. It doesn't have any effects, it's only there for volume. Listen to the difference. That's a way better kick.

With the asymmetrical distortion, an equalizer in front and two crunches being pushed together, I can get a very specific crunch tone just by reducing very specific frequencies in the sub. When you reduce the sub it opens up the mids more, and that brings out certain tones in your crunch.

The only thing you have to think about is how the sub and the mids play together. When you have a lot of mids in your crunch, or a very noisy crunch, it's because the sub isn't loud enough.