Four Ways to Make Hardstyle Leads More Interesting in Serum 2

I start with a simple saw wave that got distorted, with some reverb, delay and multiband compression. First method: change LFO 1 to chaos Lorenz, put it on free, enable Hertz mode and go all the way to 100 Hz. Right click it and click on 10x, so we're at 1000 Hz.

Add either the X or Y axis to the coarse pitch, and go to the matrix to control the output.

Put LFO 2 on free, on Hertz, around 7 Hz. In the matrix, assign LFO 2 to the global main tuning, put it on bipolar so it stays in key, and open it up.

Then put LFO 3 on envelope and make a shape that doesn't enable the effect at the start and increases over time. Put that as the aux source for LFO 2 on the main tuning. Change this based on the pacing of your melody.

To add more transient, take envelope 3, take the curve down so it's very tight, take the decay down to around 20 milliseconds and add that to the coarse pitch. Shift alt click to make it unipolar and increase the output.

Last, use a white noise and set PD on oscillator A, based on the noise. It phase distorts oscillator A with white noise and adds a little bit of white noise warmth, if you don't add too much of it, especially combined with the chaos LFO. These four methods work on almost every hardstyle lead.