5 Hardstyle Tips Every Producer Should Know

The first tip I have is to work organized. The most important thing is that you have your lead, your chords and your bass separated. What a lot of people tend to do is put the melody on top of the chords. Then one chord preset is working as chord plus lead, and that's not really efficient.

Create a lead, then take the chords separate and the bass line separate. They go into your mixer, so you make a really clear distinction between lead, chord and bass. Route them into one big mixer and apply the delay, reverb and all these things there. Once you start doing this, your workflow and your mix down get much better.

You don't need a huge layer. What people do is get 10 layers of leads and 10 layers of chords. First of all your CPU is going to burn down. Second of all it's not necessary. Play four notes on a plugin with two oscillators at a unison of 16 and it's generating 128 saws. Go back to 2008 or so. They had one synthesizer for the supersaws, layering was really hard because the computers couldn't handle it, and it still sounded great.

If you make layers, use the Layer plugin. Select the ones you want layered and click Set children. Keep them dry, put them on one bus and put the effects there. Five or six in a layer is more than perfect. If it doesn't sound right and you think you need more layers, the issue is somewhere else. It's your mix or the way you've arranged your song. Fix that instead of adding more stuff.

Hardstyle is all about music theory, and it's really only about minor scales. A natural minor scale is seven notes and it's always the same formula. Whole step, half step, whole step, whole step, half step, whole step, whole step, and you're home. Start at your key and apply the formula.

Every note in the minor scale represents a predefined chord. In F sharp minor that's minor, minor (it's actually diminished, but minor sounds better), major, minor, minor, major, major. If someone says play me a one, three, five, six, you just play these. Then start with the chord progression. The chords really drive the melody, so it's much easier than creating the melody first.

The melody is the super important part of hardstyle, so create it in your head first. If you're riding your bike or driving to school, just think about melodies. The moment you're able to hum it, you know it's a memorable melody. Then you tweak it in your DAW. In the DAW you come up with crazy melodies with 1000 notes in eight bars, and it's not the best melody.

This takes a while. You can't become a melody master in one day. Think 15 minutes per day about a melody. Everyone has 15 minutes. In one, two, three months you'll notice you get great ideas. Whistle or hum it and record it on your phone so you can come back to it.