In this tutorial
My notes from this video
For clean leads it's very simple. I don't really do anything else than adding a little bit of detune, not too much. Here's a cool thing people don't really know about Serum. If you detune, you can see how the saws are stacked against each other, and you can change that mode, to Super for example. It changes the way the detune is stacked. If you want slight variations, take a look into that.
Something cool you can add on top is Hyper/Dimension. I don't want the dimension, I just want some extra detune. I open the mix to 100 so I hear what kind of effect I'm making, and then I just take down the mix. A little bit of soft clipping, nothing too crazy, and that's about it.
What you want to do with a classic hardstyle lead is create a random LFO that affects the pitch. I feel like a hardstyle video on leads wouldn't be complete without this lead. Add the random LFO to the coarse pitch, then go into the matrix, take down the output and increase the rate.
There's multiple ways to get this sound. I don't recommend making an LFO like this, actually. You can mod source it from Chaos 1, which you'll find in Global, and increase the rate to very high. It's doing random stuff. In the matrix take down the output and you have that same effect.
On the semi raw lead you can start to see the effects detune has on a saw wave. Try a unison of three and play around with the detune. Really try to hear how the movement or the wobbling sound changes. It kind of sounds like it's slowing down. That has everything to do with phase. I don't even know what's going on, but I do know the effect.
If I detune it too much and have the blend equal, you can hear it's out of tune. So don't detune it too much. But if you take down the blend you can, and you also get the movement. That's a nice win-win.
On the very raw lead we're cutting highs and lows with the filter, so we really need to reintroduce those harmonics. Distortion brings them back up, but we need a lot of distortion for that. I use Zero-Square because it preserves the highs. Then add a little bit of modulation on the cutoff, so it moves between different mid frequencies. That results in this talking sound.
You can really go overboard if you add multiband compression and take down the highs. But that's if you want to make screeches. I don't think a lead needs this much power, because it's just too much. Get rid of the multiband and just add basic compression.
The final lead uses a square wave. An envelope on LFO 1, very fast, goes to the global master tune, up 38, so two octaves. Now we have a really nice click in the beginning already. Then LFO 2 goes on the coarse pitch at 11 Hz or something like this, and the trick is to add the rise. It rises until it gets into that wobbly sound.
By default the matrix puts it on bipolar, and during the first 0.7 seconds of the rise that results in an off-key sound. Set the type to unipolar and the rise sounds good, but after that it starts to wobble above the zero instead of around the zero, and it gets off key. That's why you don't want long notes if you use this. No longer than the rise. In Spire this is so much easier. It's a fade in on the LFO and it stays in key.
Serum·Spire·FL Studio
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