In this tutorial
My notes from this video
With a 909 kick it all started, so grab a 909 kick. If you don't have a nice one, you can literally take the Ekit Kick in the standard FL Studio folder. I route it into a clean channel, so we start 100% from scratch.
We're in 150 BPM and we just want to EQ, distort, EQ, distort, EQ, distort. Every EQ and every distortion plugin I call a chain. We use three chains alongside a few other effects.
Start with an EQ and just get the basics down. The first EQ has a steep bass cut, and a high cut and a low cut to control the highs. Then Misstortion, it's free, from Nimble Tools. In this one you just add a little bit of soft clipping, nothing much. That's the first chain.
In the second chain I add hard clip and soft clip. The combination is what makes it really spicy. In the EQ before this distortion you have three spots to boost, the high mids, the low mids and the bass. If we really boost it you get hardstyle kind of vibes. It's a subtle line between the two genres.
How I see it, the first chain is to control the highs a little bit and clean it up. In the second one you get the main character of the kick, and in the final one we change the tone. So we have three stages. Cleanup and the sub cut, the character stage, and then the tone stage.
If you cut the sub early, you need to boost the sub later to give it more power, because you lost the sub. In any EQ, if you really remove the sub you get more crunch. If you boost the sub you get more sine wave, squarey type stuff.
There's two more things you need to add. The first one is a combination of the soft clipper and inflator. You can put an inflator, and a waveshaper on half sine mode is basically the same thing as an inflator. I squash the post gain until it starts to clip too much, so we're really squashing it against the zero dB.
The final thing is the bit munch section in the waveshaper, which in FL Studio is very easy. I put it right after the three chains, because we don't want it to overpower everything, and take down the mix.
One more option to make it more crunchy is the symmetry. In each of these distortions you'll find a symmetry mode. It's asymmetrical distortion, where it only distorts one half of the wave.
Based on your sample, 100% or minus 100% works better. Only go for the one half. Don't do one on this one and the other one on that one, because then it gets weird. I think the last one works best, and maybe the second one as well. That gives you a little bit more power.
FL Studio·Fruity Parametric EQ 2·Misstortion 2·Fruity WaveShaper·Fruity Soft Clipper·Sonnox Oxford Inflator
Hardcore Techno Kick
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