5 Hardstyle Screeches You Should Know

I use Serum, and the first screech is a detuned one. Saw wave, unison goes up, and I detune it all the way. Then I always like to add FM from the noise oscillator, with the noise itself disabled. LFO 1 goes on a low rate, on the fine tune.

The effects are simple. A compressor on a low threshold so you get a nice snappy attack. The attack can go down to around 50. Then reverb with a lot of decay, a lot of size, a low cut and a little bit of high cut. The delay goes in front of the reverb, because I want the delay to be reverbed as well. Ping pong it and keep it nice and long.

Saw wave, unison of three but with the blend down so it's barely noticeable, and some detune. Then distortion on Tube. I add a phaser in front and have it move around 0.5 Hz, not too much. I'm not looking for the highs here. I'm looking for these low mids.

The final trick is in the mixer. Open Fruity Limiter, automate the gain, double click the automation and click on LFO. Automate the amount from 50, where nothing happens, to all the way open. Increase the speed even more and you get this crunchy ring modulation type stuff. Just make sure the ceiling cuts, because the gain now goes from zero to 100% instead of zero to 50%. I cut it around 25%.

Start with a saw wave and add distortion, something like Diode, so you immediately have that power. Then I put envelope 2 on the global master tune in the matrix, two octaves up. Double click the amount and type in 24 semitones.

Moving the detune changes the speed, so I assign envelope 2 to the detune as well. It gets very fast in the beginning and you get this slow down effect. For weird sounds, add FM from B and make oscillator B a spectral one. With oscillator B on octave minus four I get very nice sweet spots.

Unison all the way on both oscillators, with oscillator B one octave up. On the coarse pitch of both I add Chaos 1. Chaos assigns a random LFO to those knobs. Then increase the rate, and add FM from noise to get even more chaos.

Then a filter to accentuate it. I just try to find something that's dope, and get rid of the bass. I also add envelope 2 to the master tune, just to make sure the whole plugin responds to the pitch changes.