How to Make Rawstyle Fakedrop Kicks for Hard Techno

I start by placing down a note, for example an F sharp, at 155 BPM. Then I open two oscillators. The first one is a saw wave, that's the punch. The second one is a more rolled off, siney sound, that's our crunch. Take it down two octaves relative to the punch and remove the phase randomization, so the kick has the same phase point every time you play a note.

Oscillator A goes to nothing and to bus one. B doesn't go to anything and goes to bus two. Now we've split up the punch and crunch into bus one and two. Then I create an LFO on envelope and add that to the volume of A, because this is our punch. That way it blends in with the volume of the crunch.

Then I add some pitch automation. I use LFO3 with a sort of transient and then a pitch curve, and add that to the coarse pitch of A. You can go up an octave. Then one more pitch curve, which can be a lot more snappy. In the matrix, LFO4 goes to the global main tuning.

Remember that we don't want pitch automation on the crunch, so that's why I have it stop before the crunch. A little bit of pitch modulation there is fine, it adds a bit of a humph in the kick. Just nothing too much.

Before I process the punch and crunch on their own, I add effects in main. The type of distortion you use has a big effect on how the kick sounds. You don't want to distort it all the way, you want to do it in a subtle way. So I use the soft saturator, not too much.

Then I work on the ceiling of the kick, a distortion on soft clip. Don't add too much drive, it's just there as a ceiling. In front I add an EQ that follows the shape of the punch and crunch. However long LFO1 is, is how long LFO5 is, and I add that to the sub. So it boosts the sub in front of a soft clipper, which adds that character to the kick.

On the crunch you want to add tube distortion, to add a bit of overtones. Look at the difference in an EQ, it adds a lot of overtones, which is good. Then I add an asymmetrical distortion. This adds a crunch to your sound, and you can boost certain frequencies in front. It's kind of a hit or miss process, but if you play around with distortion, EQ, boosting certain frequencies and distorting asymmetrically, you can get very far.

If you can't really dial in that crunch tone, go back to your crunch bus and use the asymmetrical waveshaper, X-Shaper (Asym) in Serum 2. If you shape B, you shape the drive side on 100%, so keep it on 100%. Anything on the right side is the positive side, so make sure you only do the right side.

In the main mixer I like to use a splitter, low and high, with the crossover frequency at around five, six hundred. In the highs I add some reverb. The plate reverb is fine, with an open size. Then LFO7 on envelope, and you can add that to the mix. After that a distortion on soft clip, so it's clipped again.

It's a very mono kick, so I go into bus one and add a simple chorus just to the punch. Take the mix down a bit and the rate down. Notice how I put this on a high pass filter. We're high pass chorusing the sound instead of low passing, because we do need to boost in the highs.