Uptempo Kicks in Serum 2: Bounce, Zaag and Piep

I make it in F sharp, and the BPM of the kick is the same as the BPM of your song. For me that's 180. Take oscillator A down two octaves and oscillator B two octaves down as well. Then remove the phase randomization, so the kick always starts at the same phase point. Otherwise it's not consistent and it ruins the phase.

On B I remove the sub harmonics. We're going to detune B, which fills up the left and right channel and makes these kicks a lot better. If you already have a sub harmonic in A and then detune B, it screws up the phase of the kick.

The effects are four distortion stages, each with an equalizer in front. The first two are heavy distortion, Zero Square all the way, to really shape the kick. The final two are soft clippers, to change the tone and the mix of the kick. Before the final distortion I add a Utility on bass mono.

In the second stage I use LFO 1 on the gain of the EQ. When the bass is low the mids take over, and when the bass is higher the mids don't take over. That's what creates that drive in an uptempo kick. This is the basic setup for any uptempo kick. Change the LFOs, the peaks or the filters and you completely change the kick.

For zaag, the first thing is taking LFO 1 down a bit so we have more mids, and making it shorter so we have a very fast attack. This is the sub. The more sub we have, the less mids we have, and that changes the flow of the zaag. You can change the tone by playing with the detune too. It's important you don't push this one too much.

Then add an equalizer in the second distortion stage, add a peak and go frequency hunting. You can do this in any stage of any uptempo kick. That's the beauty of it. You hunt frequencies, boost the right ones and you get a ton of different kicks.

The first thing you've got to know about bounce kicks is the shape of the LFO on the sub. If the LFO is low, the sub is low and the mids are prominent. If it's high, the sub is high. For bounce kicks you want a shape that is almost 90 degrees. That gives you the offbeat vibe. You can change the tone of that offbeat by changing where it lands.

The initial punch comes from the peaks. I like them very similar and a bit lower, so we have a blunt, in your face kick. Open both frequency spectrums and make sure the peaks are boosting the same thing, like 412 and 406. Then boost the sub once more and maybe soft clip it a bit.