How to Make Industrial Techno Kicks in Serum 2

In bus 1 the basic setup for the punch is sine shapers. This sine shaper really shapes an industrial kick, it's genuinely a cheat code to achieving this sound. Increase the effect only a little bit and you get that very characteristic industrial kick.

Add an EQ in front with a boost, but don't add too much. It's the same as opening the drive too much, you get a very high and dirty distorted sound. It's about small and subtle amounts. After all the distortion I take a utility and assign LFO 3 to the level, because the allpasses filter smeared out the punch and suddenly we have a very long punch.

For the rumble I enable oscillator C with a kick sample and disable pitch tracking, so it's always at the same pitch. It goes to bus 2, and the first thing you need there is reverb. The hall reverb is great for this. Take the rate and depth down so there's no spin modulation, open the mix all the way and roll off all the highs with an EQ. A tip on screen says the convolver reverb gives a more steady rumble output, so maybe use that instead.

Then clean up the stereo imaging with the splitter on mid-side. On the side an EQ with a high-pass filter at around 300 Hz, so the lows will not have any side information. This really fixes phasing issues. For distortion I really like the soft saturator, you can really blast this.

With every kick you make in Serum you can apply this trick. Use an equalizer and an LFO on envelope with a shape that represents the shape of your kick. Here's the punch and then this is the rumble. Add that to a low shelf, unipolar, not too much.

At the ending I just add a soft clipper. Don't even have it distorted. It pushes those low frequencies into the soft clipper, and it's a very clean distortion, so it adds a lot of low end without making it very distorted.

The main thing missing now is reverb. The first one goes in front of the distortion. I don't like the plate, the one that really works well for this is the vintage reverb. The key to making this work in an industrial context is having it very wet. That's why I already add reverb during the punch and a lot during the rumble.

After the last reverb I add the splitter on mid-side once again, with a high-pass on the side at around 300. The place where you remove the side information of the sub is really going to influence how the kick sounds, so that's why I do a double.