Hardstyle Drop From Scratch

I started with a reese bass here, but I changed it to an up down bass. It's a pretty long melody with lots of spaces in between, so that's where the bass fills it. I think that works a little bit better.

Then I give the leads some more power and glue them together a little bit more with compression.

Now I automate the pitch bend of every plugin. That already makes a world of a difference. It really accentuates the ticky part in the beginning, otherwise it's a really static sound.

The compressor really helps with that too. It pulls it down to the threshold, and if I do it really drastically you can see the volume spikes being created.

I route all the melody channels to one channel, so the whole break is playing in that channel. I call it harmonics. Then I can easily cut the bass from all of it and add Kickstart slightly, because when the drop kick comes in we want some room for it.

What I figured out is that the reverb and delay sends need Kickstart as well. Then the empty spaces get sidechained on the reverb too.

For the kick I combine some kicks from other packs and see what happens. Take a tok, add the bass, add a punch and keep adding automation clips in between. Keep doing that. Then render it, separate the tok and the bass again, boost the sub frequencies in the EQ and keep adding distortion. You just keep going.

Then I add reverb, because it really fills up the kick. Reverse the reverb and add an automation clip so the volume only moves at the beginning. Boosting the sub in Nimble Kick made it much better too.

For the kick rolls I render a kick from every key, six kicks. Now I have a kick for every part in this drop and I can just put them in. I love kick rolls.

Then I add some crashes, just to accentuate the kick rolls. This is the most classic 909 crash there is. It's always a good one. Then I put a Fruity Filter on the harmonics channel and automate the cutoff frequency to open it up.