How to Make and Mix a Hardstyle Break

Before you do anything, think about what the layer is going to be. In this case I want two leads, two chords and one bassline. The thing about hardstyle is making your layer bigger and bigger, but not too big, because you don't want your PC to burn down from too much CPU stuff.

Then prepare your break in your mixer. That's the most important step here, because it makes it so much easier to apply effects and mix it down. The chords go to one mixer track, the leads to another, and those two go to break harmony. The bass and break harmony go to break everything. Before you put any effect on it, open an EQ and cut the bass on your chords and leads.

The basic idea of reverb and delay is to fill up the room. Where most people's mixdown goes wrong is the reverb and delay. What you need is a ducking reverb plugin. I use Waves H-Reverb a lot, it has a ducking effect built into it. I made a Patcher preset with it. It's a dry signal and a wet signal with 100% reverb, so I can control how much reverb I want. A manual side chain gives it more of a ducking effect, so it really opens up on the offbeat. Because it's 100% wet, I remove the frequencies I don't like off the reverb.

You can also do it with ValhallaRoom and the pre-delay. At 150 BPM one beat is 400 milliseconds, so the half beat comes at 200. Open the pre-delay to 200 milliseconds and the reverb opens up halfway. You get the same idea, but it works better with the ducking plugin.

I want people to notice the lead more, so I put extra delay only on the leads. That's easy because I already routed it this way. The whole thing gets a little more delay too, so it bounces a bit more. I put it before the reverb, because I want the delay to be reverbed too.

You need to visualize how it looks. The leads and chords are one thing, and around them it's surrounded by reverb and delay. But the reverb and delay shouldn't overpower the dry signal. What people tend to do is put too much reverb and delay on it, and it just sounds really bland.

This sounds pretty full already, but you can give your chords more of a plucky effect with a compressor. Here it's Fruity Compressor on the chords, with a 15 ms attack and a 200 ms release. The attack means it takes 15 milliseconds to get to that level, so you kind of create spikes, and that's what you want.

This way your chords get a little more attack. It makes them a little more crisp and accentuates each note.