Hardstyle Kick Processing

Hardstyle kicks are made of three main things. The punch, the crunch and the punch reverb. That's a hardstyle kick. I grab all my sounds and put them in my mixer. The punch, the attack transient and the punch bass go into one channel, the main punch. The crunch goes into the main crunch. Then both go into one channel, the kick send. Nicely separate everything so you can easily digest it.

Then the punch reverb channel. I use Valhalla Room, but any reverb plugin is fine. Make it 100% wet, then add OTT. Always add OTT. Get rid of the bass and low mids, and get rid of those highs. Then add a Fruity Limiter or anything to control the gain, and make an automation clip of the gain knob so it opens up.

The first mistake is letting the kick go over zero dB into the limiter on the master. Never do that. The second mistake is using distortion to make your kick better without this in place. Here's the method I use all the time. Load up Oxford Inflator or a soft clipper, squash the post gain and open up the effect. Then I add another soft clipper, because sometimes you don't have enough volume. Now you can distort the kick in a very subtle way.

This creates a ceiling. Your kick can't go over it, so you can start to introduce stuff before the ceiling. Take an EQ before these three things and start changing frequencies. You'll notice your kick improves. I might remove some 300 Hz to clean it up, but in the crunch I'll add a little bit more 300 Hz.

When you layer crunches, normally it doesn't really work well. But because we added the ceiling it does, and it all clips together. That's the fundamental thing. You want to have everything clipped together.

Then play with the phase. If the waves cancel each other out, you get different sounds. I want more crunch at the end of the kick, which is nice for climax kicks, so I make sure the layers are out of phase only at the end. Another crunch I only want in the beginning, to enhance the start a little bit. They all go into the final crunch, because it needs to blend together.