How to Make Rumble Kicks in Serum 2

I change oscillator A and oscillator B to a sample and load up a kick one-shot. You can load in any kick you want, Serum 2 comes with a bunch of one-shots. First thing I do is disable the pitch tracking, so whatever pitch I play it at, it keeps the original pitch of the sample. I can tweak the tone later with the semitones.

A is the punch, routed to none and bus one. B is the rumble, routed to none and bus two. They don't go to main as well, that's a duplication and you don't want that. Then I take LFO1 on envelope to the level of A, from zero to open. That's the volume of the punch, so I can blend it with the rumble later.

In the effects of bus two I make the rumble. First I add reverb, and I really like the hall reverb. Increase the decay, but keep the size low. With a high size the reflections are spaced out a bit more. Take down the size and they're a bit faster. This is good for a rumble. Then an EQ to roll off the highs, so we mainly have lows.

It really matters which distortion you choose. The tube is not bad, the Diode 2 is a bit squeezy with a lot of highs. Something that works really well is the soft saturator. At 50 it sounds pretty solid. I roll off the highs once more and distort it again, for example with a soft clipper. Keep distorting without adding that really crunchy sound. Dial in your distortions very carefully.

Once I have this, I make sure the low frequencies in the rumble aren't stereo. It really messes up the phase and it sounds trash on big systems. So Utility, mono bass, and put it at around 300 hertz.

It will absolutely make a difference where you put this. The best place I have found is in front of the first distortion, as long as it comes after the reverb. You can improve the stereo image of the rumble by taking it down a bit, but never go into the sub. Maybe 190 works.

I add a splitter, low mid high, and put it in front of the last soft clipper. In there I only want the mids to get reverb again. Play around with all the modes. I try vintage, which gives that aired out reverb the kick is missing a little bit. Then I create a shape to control the mix of the reverb, so it opens up during the kick. Make sure it's on envelope.

Make sure the crossover frequency is really not in the bass, because crossover frequencies create phase shifts. You don't want to reverb the bass, and not the highs either. It's really just that very small mid area. To be safe I add a Utility after this and make the bass mono once again, at least 130.

Instead of playing a pattern non-stop, it's way better to play your kick once and render it. Take it into your playlist and keep rendering kicks until you find a perfect one. Every time you play the kick the phasing changes, because you're reverbing something and it has different reflections.

A lot of phasing issues you can fix by clipping it enough. If it isn't clipped enough, the phasing issues are more prominent. So at the end I clip it a little bit more and render it out one more time. That lifts up the lowest decibels and brings back the power in your kick. With rumble kicks you always have phasing issues, because it's rumble, it's reverb.