"put your HANDS in the AIR!!! and put the FIDDLE DOWN"
"……i would rather die than get jiggy with the likes of you."
so i started working on this after stumbling upon some jokey hardstyle songs on youtube, thinking i could flip these two samples into some straight and narrow hardstyle myself. but sometimes when you try to write a hardstyle track you end up with an irish jig melody on a saw wave fiddle. these are the things that adults have to deal with sometimes.
obviously most of this stuff sounds fairly apache and/or saw but there are two biguns that i’ll explain nonetheless
first, most of your usual apache chopping is hi-passed to make room for a fairly heavily sound designed bass drum. most of this thing is just the first bass drum in the sample, with the first tiniest sliver of it cut out and pitched up to give the bass signal a bit more high-end oomph. then, as hardstyle requires this thing gets crunched into oblivion with a bajillion things of compression and distortion. its signal chain: OTT → EQ (bass boosted, mids lowered) → Distortion (ft. Patcher EQ BS) → a send, via which it wrestles the bass into submission → More Distortion → Maximus (bass boosted, mids lowered) → Bitcrusher. So uh. Yeaaahh lol. (notably, several of these plugins get automated in and out depending on context).
next, the synth bass! this is, similarly, a creation courtesy of taking the basic saw wave sample from the bitpack and beating it to a pulp with effects processing. most of the different sounds here are produced by compressing the shit out of the signal with a limiter and then seeing what kinds of sounds come out by tossing a bunch of saw waves at different octaves from the bass note and then fudging with the relative velocities until it sounds sufficiently weird for my tastes. its signal chain: Limiter → Stereo Widener → EQ (boost low-mids, lower highs) → Distortion (ft. Patcher EQ BS) → Pitch Shifter → EQ (high end automation)
across the board though, no wavetable resampling whatchamacallit (if you’re not into that kind of stuff in remix battles), just some hefty effect abuse.
hopefully you liked it!! i’m real proud of this one.
