In this tutorial
My notes from this video
I make the top kick in Serum with randomization down. An envelope on the coarse pitch, very short, so you have this attack to it. Then I render it out and make it a little bit shorter.
On resample that's just going to increase the pitch. On auto it tries to keep the same pitch, and that's great because it changes the waveform. You get a very thumpy kick. Then a transient shaper with some attack, an inflator or a waveshaper on sine mode, a bit of soft clipping, and distortion with the EQ in front of it.
For the reverse bass I use Serum as well, with randomization down, so I get the same crunch each time. It always starts at the same place in the waveform. Reverse bass kicks are most of the time in a higher pitch range, so I place a note in F or G, like an offbeat bass with this wonky feeling.
You want a very smooth transition between the punch and the crunch. So I use LFO 1 in envelope mode, and rather than an envelope for volume, this is going to be a filter. German low pass, because that's nice and analog, with the cutoff range from around lows to mids. That way I also have sub while it's playing. Then sidechain the crunch with Kickstart.
Punch and crunch go together into one kick bus with an inflator, a soft clipper and an EQ. Then distort the whole kick a bit. You don't want to distort it too much, because that's hardstyle territory.
Here's the trick. Instead of using Misstortion 2, get a nice tube distortion, something that's modeled against analog distortion plugins, pedals and systems. One that's really good is Decapitator by Soundtoys, with a lot of nice modeling modes. That's how you get that really nice analog drive. Waves BB Tubes is another one, you get all these different sounds.
Then some EQ in front, and with this one I add automation on the mids. I load up an EQ, select a mid range band and automate that band.
I have it move open during the kick, on the half time in my crunch, to make it a reverse bass. You can have it hit different places.
I noticed that the reverse bass kicks from old times have a little bit of a real kick drum feeling to it, very softly. So a thing you could do is use a few drum one shots, for example a hat on top of this. It might improve the kick a little bit.
If you have a real drum kit, find a kick drum and layer that on top. Just make sure you muffle it and remove the lows, you're not really looking for those.
FL Studio·Serum·Kilohearts Transient Shaper·Fruity WaveShaper·Sonnox Oxford Inflator·Fruity Soft Clipper·Fruity Parametric EQ 2·Misstortion 2·Kickstart·Soundtoys Decapitator·Waves Magma BB Tubes
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Reverse Bass Kick
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