How to Make Raw Sounds for Hard Techno

In Serum I'm not going to focus on the punch first. I worry about a full kick. Open oscillator A and B and take down the phase randomization, so we have a consistent kick every time we hit a note. A kick is made with a punch, a top part and a low part.

LFO 1 acts as the punch envelope, on the level. LFO 2 is the crunch envelope. Make these two blend together, both on envelope, and you kind of have this kick sound already. Then go into distortion, add Diode 2 to get this very up-tempo feeling, and a compressor with the threshold down.

The punch just needs to go through a filter. Make sure only oscillator A goes through filter A. Get something like a high pass filter (High 24 here) and add resonance and drive. You can really experiment with the filter for the punch, but let's stay with the simple one.

In oscillator B, find a waveform that looks a little bit like a square, or a little bit like a sine with an overtone thing. What I'm looking for is most likely this Dist 8bit Fwap, a great one to start off with. Then take the warp mode of oscillator A and FM from B. Every little tweak results in a bunch of different sounds, so the FM is a very big macro, FM punch.

LFO 3 just adds a little bit of movement. Envelope it and add it to the cutoff slightly. You can also add it on the FM. Movement in the punch is very important.

LFO 4 is pitch automation, only on the pitch of A. Make sure you go up octaves. That's where you get these gated kicks, but here it's for movement in the punch. Later I add a chorus and use LFO 1 to enable it only when the punch plays, for like 50% or even 20%.

I'm usually not adding reverb in the beginning, because I don't want to overwhelm the sound. Size and decay, and most of these can go to 50 in this case. LFO 5 is the reverb filter automation, on the mix.

You can add the reverb before the distortion or after. After, it's clean. If you want that very overblown driven effect, add it in front, and you get the very crunchy crunch, very extreme. You can also add a filter with a flanger. The Flg L6+ is very very good, with resonance and drive.