Frenchcore kicks with serum?
Let’s start with the most important thing, volume envelopes. This is just continuing my YouTube Video about this topic.
This is how i do it. The punch envelope shape will be different because different volume envelope shapes will affect the distortion style. The tail envelope will stay most likely like it is shown here. (How i do it, at least)
Filter
Using some sort of a resonance filter before the distortion is of course pretty familiar stuff for most of the guys making this sort of sounds. In this patch i am using “LH 12” Filter. LH Standing for low, high pass? Maybe. At least the filter type has High and Low pass filters. This filter is only applied to OSC B And SUB OSC i am running OSC A directly to the effects. With this way of routing i am keeping the low frequencies in the punch.
The wavetables
It doesn’t really matter if you have particular wavetables, i think you are pretty much good to go with serum stock wavetables. But it is nice to have a good quality wavetable with complex morphing, but why? Well you can easily throw an LFO to the WTpos parameter and by moving that LFO around you can get a lot of different textures from that one wavetable.
The effects. This is pretty simple stuff, the EQ is driving a resonance frequency in to distortion [ZERO SQUARE] and this signal runs trough the phaser and in to the mixer effects. Notice that the “PRE-Filter” is on in the distortion unit, this is just a peak filter before the distortion!
Here you can see how i am adding movement to the sound by moving this EQ Peak with LFO 3 like shown here. Try this out with kick making, this trick can take your kick to a new dimension.
ENV 2 is controlling the master tuning of the kick aka “The Pitch”. The type is set unipolar so the pitch info moves only in one direction after “Zero” point. If we use the bipolar mode here the pitch moves from + to - and we really do not need that here! I also like to draw red lines with ms paint.
Here you can see the mixer processing in order from top left to bottom right. Yeah i know it is useless for you but i go through this in my YouTube Video with more detail. In this post i just wanted to go more clearly over those matrix parameters and the basics. I think frenchcore kicks can be done with FL Studio stock plugins pretty easily (Harmor for example) but i wanted to focus on serum, because everybody can use serum and it is much more common with these types of sounds.