The Formula for Full Hardstyle Leads

I make one Serum lead and keep duplicating it to create my other leads. Start with the cutoff. Add a filter on MG Low 12 with envelope 2 at around 700 milliseconds of decay. At the lowest point that's the pluck. One macro goes to the cutoff and to the mix, so at the end I don't have the filter anymore. That should be my lead.

Then I take LFO 1 to the coarse pitch. Alt shift click so it only goes up. Now it sounds much better, because we have this attack.

Then I simply duplicate the lead and detune it more. Duplicate it again and detune it even more.

For a raw kind of lead, take oscillator B down and put it at a unison of three. LFO 2 with BPM off, on a high rate, goes to the fine tune. Add the distortion on Zero-Square in pre mode. I use that one in the background. The last one is a square lead with more detune, the noise down, and no filter or compressor.

When I have enough leads, I open a Layer, click on it and set children. Now you're playing everything at once. Route all the leads to one mixer channel and call it leads. The chords get their own channel, and both go into one channel, lead plus chords. I do this before I do anything else. It's important to work organized.

For the chords I duplicate the lead layer and take the mono legato off. The chords are literally just the leads, but bigger. At the end the reverb, the delay and the leads all go into one total channel. Side chain that to the kick and you can immediately make a drop.

The reverb gets its own channel next to the lead and chord channel. It's 100% wet, around seven seconds. I use ValhallaRoom and I add it double. It's crazy but I do it.

Then a Fruity Limiter on compressor, side chained to the leads. Whenever the leads are playing the reverb is ducked down, and when they stop it opens up. Threshold totally down, then open it up until it's not too wet but not too dry. It needs to be very smooth, so you're not really hearing the reverb until the leads stop playing.