How to Make Wet Hardstyle Leads in Serum 2

I start with my dry lead, remove every oscillator from main and split them up over bus 1 and 2.

Bus 1 is sort of going to be a tape delay. I add the delay on 1/4 and 1/2 dotted, which for me works best for hardstyle leads, and afterwards a distortion on tape saturation. Just make sure the delay is 100% wet.

Bus 2 gets a reverb on hall mode, with the size on 50% plus and six seconds of decay. To make it breathe a little bit, add pre-delay around 100 milliseconds. Increase the mix and add a high rate, but not as much depth.

On main I add another delay, which delays over the reverb and over the tape delay. I put this on 1/4 and 1/4 dotted, on ping pong.

The icing on the cake is the compressor on multiband. Instead of upwards and downwards compression, take down the threshold, leaving only upwards compression, enabled by using the below. It pulls out all that wet sound and adds that high-end modern edge you need to make these leads pop.