How to Make a Rooler Type Kick

I start off in Serum and create the punch there. Go to a sine wave, take LFO 1 and make it look like this. Put it on envelope and add it to the coarse. Then a very subtle distortion. That's already sufficient for now.

Put it in the mixer, normalize it and make it shorter. It's not really a kick yet. Watch what happens when you turn the Pogo knob. It suddenly is that kind of Rooler kick. It's nearly impossible to create the exact same punch he makes, but change the Pogo or play a different key and you get a lot of different kicks out of this.

Put the punch in your playlist and open up another Serum. What Rooler likes to do, I think, is play something like this in his piano roll all the time. So don't render out this crunch. Just use the piano roll. The punch plays on every beat and the crunch is only a saw wave, pitched down. Select all the kicks and make them shorter until they blend nicely into the second part. It's really simple but it really works.

Your saw wave needs to be sidechained for that offbeat vibe. You could use Kickstart for this, but I just like to use an automation clip. You really want to control this yourself. I automate the gain of Fruity Limiter on the crunch and make it look very smooth. You want a very smooth kick.

You can still enhance the crunch, which is pretty important. It's just a saw wave right now and that's kind of boring, so add a chorus. Then boost the sub of the crunch on its own channel, not on the total kick where everything comes together. You'd rather boost the crunch. Now you have the nice low end.

It's also important that you stereoize this stuff. There needs to be a stereo element in here. That's kind of what makes this kind of kick. MicroShift is fine.