How to Make Rawstyle Kicks

We're going to make some really dope rawstyle kicks. I feel like they have a little bit of a rebellion feel to them. I make them from scratch, mainly in Serum.

In this tutorial
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    My notes from this video

    01

    A flanger punch in Serum

    Watch 0:18

    First I make the punch. I load up the Analog BD sine wave. LFO 1 acts as an envelope, and I add it to the coarse pitch at around 29. Then I distort it with Diode 1 immediately.

    Then I load up the flanger, the HL6 minus. Crank the drive all the way, add a little bit of high-pass, and finally a compressor on multiband. In LFO 2, make it look like a punch and add it to the level. You immediately get that very characteristic sound.

    Serum with Analog_BD_Sin on oscillator A, the filter on Flg HL6- and LFO 2 drawn as a punch shape, a rawstyle kick punch
    The punch in Serum, with the filter on Flg HL6-.
    02

    The crunch comes in later

    Watch 2:30

    The crunch is very easy as well. I open Serum and find the Analog BD sine wave again. Envelope 3 gets a very long amount, like 2.7 seconds. Add that to the coarse pitch and take it down. It's kind of our pogo effect.

    Render it and put it in the mixer. I don't want the crunch to play at all in the beginning, but I do want it to start playing a bit later.

    Serum envelope 3 on the crunch of a rawstyle kick, with a long decay of 2.77 seconds
    Envelope 3 on the crunch, decay 2.77 s.
    03

    OTT on the punch reverb

    Watch 3:40

    I duplicate the punch into the punch reverb channel. ValhallaRoom on it, then OTT. That one is very important. Then an EQ, any parametric EQ is fine, just cut the bass and cut the highs. In Fruity Limiter make sure there's no ceiling, so it's not limiting, and automate the gain.

    The punch reverb also goes into a channel with the crunch. In that channel nothing plays except the reverb and the crunch, and all I add there is distortion.

    04

    The kick bus chain

    Watch 4:32

    The punch main and the crunch go into one channel, the final kick bus. There I always add a few things. First Pro-Q on the side, just to make the sub mono. Then the kHs Transient Shaper, which is free I think, with attack, pump and a high speed. At a high speed it only affects the kick transients. I want the punch to duck a little bit so it has more attack.

    At the end of the chain I add an inflator, and a soft clipper to squash it where needed. Then an EQ. Generally, removing the low mids gets you that very clean kick.

    Rawstyle kick bus inserts: SerumFX, FabFilter Pro-Q 3, kHs Transient Shaper, Parametric EQ 2, soft clipper, Oxford Inflator
    The kick bus inserts.
    05

    Render the kick to keep the phase

    Watch 6:01

    One more thing is Serum FX. Add a multiband compressor, take down the threshold and enable multiband. I put it in front of everything and take down the mix. This does play with the phase, so render the kick. Don't use this as your final kick channel. Then you've snapshotted the kick with the same phase each time.

    Then I can go back and change the kick. When I change the sample start of the crunch, I'm looking for the punch and the crunch to blend together properly in terms of phase. You want it consistent, so it's not ducking at certain points.

    What I use in this video

    FL Studio·Serum·ValhallaRoom·OTT·FabFilter Pro-Q 3·Fruity Limiter·Misstortion 2·Kilohearts Transient Shaper·Sonnox Oxford Inflator·Fruity Soft Clipper·Fruity Parametric EQ 2·SerumFX

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