yo, can someone here just rate this track or kick? i loaded the punch of a sample into Serum2 and attached a tail to it i thought it was pretty decent but when i looked at the analyzers while making the track there were barely any sub frequencies in it its about the first kick im starting with i dont have big speakers making the kick and bass through headphones is definitely a no go for me ill just ruin everything so give me plz some advice what to do

 

The sub tail is too "late", "slow". So it clash with bass.

It is the usual kick vs bass battle that can be solved by a LOT of different tricks, from counter time bass to multiband comp, side chain ...

But here you need to fix your kick first.
If you really want to create a kick by yourself, there are several methods.
The main key is TIMING. Not frequencies (unlike what most ppl think).

When you have a fast tempo, you need a fast kick, so a fast sub just after the "click" attack.
Something like a fast 909 (whereas a slow 808 is more for slow hip hop ... timing is key).

Take a listen to "bouncy" examples here (bouncy are "pumping", with a small "hole" between attack and sub):
https://samplefocus.com/samples/909-kick-d

Shorten your sub and put it JUST after attack click.

 

I do use Serum to make kicks, but I do not try to assemble them from individual elements from samples inside Serum. Serum 2 is very heavy cpu-wise compared to v1, so I stick to v1. If I was just trying to do some sound design and bounce to samples, Serum2 would be more interesting, but i'm not leaving a Serum 2 instance in my project if all it is doing is a kick drum.

I'd rather use Sonic Academy Kick3, or Sinee Chop Suey to "assemble" and layer kicks. Frequency content is obviously important, but I'm more likely to use an oscilloscope like VPS Scope to really look at the kick while making it. If I had Oszillos, I'd use that. I like to use Sonnox Claro because it is lighter than Fabfilter Pro-Q4, and can also look at multiple channels to look at their masking and frequency content to do complimentary EQing. But all this kind of stuff waits until I have other content to even worry about clashing. I make the kick sound like I want it and that's it. I will always put a somewhat severe dip somewhere around 200-300hz, close to 250hz, because that is often where low-mids stack up later on creating mud.

These are the frequency ranges I look at, but an EQ is all I bother to use:
25-30 Hz highpass
50–80 Hz - sub weight
90–150 Hz - punch/thump
200–300 Hz - boxiness/mud
2–5 kHz - click/beater/transient definition

If you are running into kick length as a concern, take a tip from Larry Holcombe on it and get either Music Math for Mac, or Studio Calculator for Windows. It can be helpful to check when you are making tracks at various different BPM. Especially with Kick 3, since you can adjust down to milliseconds.

If you are using other than Kick 2/3 for layering, you can use Sound Radix Auto-Align if you have it, or use Voxengo PHA-979 to handle phase rotation issues. The more you stack at the low end, the more likely you can't avoid doing some phase management. This is probably where your sub freqs in your kick are "disappearing".

Another thing to avoid is throwing a compressor on your kick right out of the gate. If you can't answer what the compressor is actually fixing, don't even add it. Go to saturation and clipping instead.

 

Sounds great. Mix is great. Ofc your kick doesn't have any sub frequencies, it's tail is at least octave higher, so falls in bass range, but it sounds nice and is layered nicely in the drop @ 2:05 when sub is introduced. Then at the drop it's a different kick without the tail. So it is hard to understand what your question exactly is. Is this mix ok? Yes.

 

Here is another version i tried to improve the sub of the kick

 

I had to reboot to listen closer, a lossless format would be better for some of this.


I think part of the issue is that the distortion/bit reduction on the kick-bass is kind of overpowering the actual low-end weight. I can hear a lot of upper harmonic content and what sounds like aliasing or bitcrush artifacts in the highs, that metallic digital ringing/fizz kind of thing. It sounds intentional stylistically, which totally fits the genre, but I think the top-end texture is starting to dominate the perception of the sound instead of the fundamental low-end punch.

Right now the kick sounds aggressive, but not necessarily heavy. A lot of hard techno and hardstyle runs into this because distortion creates perceived loudness and energy really fast, especially in the mids and highs, but it can flatten or smear the actual low-frequency impact if the low-end is getting processed too hard too. Sometimes the sub and body need to stay a little cleaner and more stable while the mids/highs take the abuse.

It also feels like the crushed harmonics are pulling attention away from the transient and the fundamental. The ear kind of locks onto the digital texture instead of the low-end movement, so even if there is enough bass technically, it does not feel like it hits as hard as it should.

I would probably experiment with backing off the crusher/distortion slightly on the low-end path, or splitting the processing so the sub stays more controlled while the upper layers keep the grit and aggression. Could also be worth checking if any of the distortion stages are aliasing heavily without oversampling, because that can add a lot of harsh upper junk that makes the bottom feel weaker.

This reply was about the prior version. I will check the new one.

 

Nice kick "punch"
You are on the right track