How to Make Rumble Kicks for Hard Techno

I route the kick into an empty channel with 100% reverb. Get ValhallaRoom, take down the pre-delay and make it a little bit longer. Then a Fruity Limiter where I automate the gain, so with the gain I automate the volume of the reverb.

Because it's a 100% reverb channel there's no dry signal. It's just reverb with this automation clip, and you can make it hit straight away or really fade it in. The kick also goes into another channel, because we want the dry channel too. On the reverb I get an EQ and get rid of the mids and highs.

Two things are very important here, and I've seen nobody do this before. Get an inflator and a soft clipper and crank open the post gain. It changes your waveform from a very weak rumble kick to a very powerful rumble kick that fills up the whole spectrum. If you do too much it starts to clip and loses the character of a nice rumble kick, so find that sweet spot.

Together they make a ceiling at zero dB. Add that setup to every kick you make, because if you change anything in front of it, the whole kick changes. If you don't have an inflator, Frank Pole made a free Patcher preset. It's a waveshaper on half sine mode.

What I feel is lacking is a high reverb. So I add another reverb channel, again 100% wet, with a limiter to automate the gain, the same as the first reverb. In this channel I add Pro-Q and get rid of the bass and the highs.

This high reverb affects the mid and the high frequencies, so I stereo separate it to make it wider. Find a sweet spot. Some OTT in front of the Pro-Q gives a little bit more air to the whole kick.

I duplicate the kick and get rid of the click, so there's no clicky sound in the beginning. Then I duplicate it four times, so you can make triplet kicks as well, or put it on third steps. You can do all sorts of rhythms, it really comes down to your creativity.

This kick roll goes into the final kick send as well. I add a Fruity Limiter and automate the gain, then reverb at 50% wet with the wet knob automated, otherwise it's just a really dry kick roll. On the Pro-Q I use a smoothened out shape instead of a brick wall, because you don't want to cut out the highs 100%.

Another trick. From our free hard techno sample pack I take a drum loop with very snappy hi-hats, make it short and make sure there's no top kick in it. It goes into the final kick send. You want to prevent that it's a normal hi-hat loop, otherwise I would just add a hi-hat to my kick.

First a gate automation, then the noise gate in Fruity Limiter. Open up the threshold, take down the gain, and now you control the tightness of this loop. Then an EQ to get rid of the lows and get these mids. We're looking for dirt, and dirt is around 300 to 3000. After that some distortion. I like CamelCrusher, it's free.