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MAXX8055
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Joined: 05/30/2020 - 02:12
How to make high quality Hardstyle sounds? Please give some ideas and suggestions

Could someone help about, how to produce high quality Hardstyle sounds, that's about the thumping distortion tuned kicks, reversed dark bass, high pitched screechy sounds, epic detuned plucks, cool supersaw leads and more. And please upload some great samples of Hardstyle sounds.

Amel
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Joined: 02/21/2015 - 10:00
Sample everything with

Sample everything with distorted overdrive fx and a bit crusher. That's what people usually use.

animeforthewholelife
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Joined: 09/08/2016 - 08:57
Theres a lot of ways on doing

Theres a lot of ways on doing that. I'll only explain the kick part and what I know.

First I'll just cover a basic distorted kick. After that I can describe the ideas that I know of reverse bass ones.

Ok lets begin.
I don't exactly know how it started but I have a really strong guess from the things I have seen that it started from a simple distorted tr 909 kick (the classic).

If you take the 909 Caustic Preset, and click on the gear icons at the top and then the kick sample you will be greeted with its waveform.
A thing to note right off the bat is that it has a long tail and thats really desirable.

Now go to effects and distort it. Simple ^^ You now have the sound that I think started a lot of the early hardstyle or gabber.

Just like a lot of Drum and Bass was made with the help of resampling so is hardstyle.

Lets push the kick further, we don't really have to worry about resampling it yet, but thats something that will come into play a bit later. What it is it "reuses material" aka our distorted samples in caustic all of this can be done really efficiently thru the wav editor (and beatbox when you start getting into layers).

Ok you probably have a distorted start, what you can do now is either start over from the 909 kick preset, (synthesize one yoursef if you are crafty) or work with the one you (hopefully) distorted.

With a parametric eq you can (and should) add resonant peaks at some places that will define the tone of your kick, if it doesn't seem like much yet, distort it (or saturate it) afterwords,  cutting out the mids boosting some areas and whatnot.
And repeat the process.

Reverse bass kicks are made out of two parts. (probably gabber kicks as well).

  • The punch - The start of the kick.
  • The tail.

Simple, the idea is resampling the kick you made and reversing it, cutting it shorter, adding some delay to it (either thru sequencing or other means) and you have the basis.
A lot of it revolves around resampling, and blending different layers.

The puch or the start of the kick can be distorted or can be simple tr 808 r anything else (maybe?) adding reverb with a delay as a last operation is highly recomended here. also playing with the decay knob massively helps here as well.

The tail is a bit harder to get right, as I mentioned before its the reverse distorted (or even more mangled) version of the tr 808 drum (this is also the reason you need to have a longer tail in your tr 909 sample most of the time). And here comes in layers. If you have your punch set up and a distorted reversed kick as a tail, configured the decay parameters and probably used some "fade in" in the wav editor you have a gerat start. (If not try doing that and don't worry if you don't get it at first). having a few more layers for your tail is really important.

I hope this helps. Read it, ask around and hopefully you'll come up with some high quality hardstyle sounds ^^