Rawstyle

What it is

Around 2010 the euphoric side of hardstyle had become very large and very polished, and a group of producers reacted by removing the thing that made it dance music. The reverse bass went. In its place came a kick with a distorted, pitched, screeching tail long enough to fill the offbeat by itself, so nothing needs to sit there. Radical Redemption, Ran-D, Adaro and the Minus Militia records pushed it darker and slower than mainstream hardstyle, with spoken-word intros and no euphoria at all. The scene calls the euphoric side and this side by different names and treats them as separate genres, which is fair: they are built differently.

What it sounds like

A kick that is really three sounds welded together, and the last of them is a distorted tone rising in pitch across half a beat. It sounds like a diesel engine complaining. Hats sit on the sixteenths between the beats rather than on the offbeat eighths, which pulls the loop forward without adding weight. The clap is on beat 3 as in hardstyle. Above it, a screech, a growl, a pitched-down voice reading something ominous, and no melody to speak of until the last third of the track.

Key elements

• No reverse bassThe defining absence. There is no lane for it here because the kick tail already occupies the offbeat, and putting a bass note there fights the kick rather than answering it.
• The screech kickA kick whose tail rises five to eight semitones through half a beat while distorting further as it goes. Three or four separate layers, each processed on its own bus.
• Sixteenth hatsHats on the e and the a of every beat, skipping the beat and the offbeat entirely. Quiet on the e, louder on the a, so the pattern leans into the next kick.
• The kick stutterAn extra kick a sixteenth or an eighth off the grid, once a phrase, at reduced velocity. In a genre this rigid it functions as a whole fill.
• Spoken introThirty seconds of a pitched-down voice over a drone before any drum arrives. It is a convention of the style rather than a flourish, and almost every release has one.

How to get them

• Build the tail separatelyMake the kick body as its own sound: a sine or saw tuned to the root, a pitch envelope rising six semitones over 300ms, then three distortion stages in series with a filter between each. Print it, then layer a punch and a click on top.
• Distort in stagesNever one plugin at maximum. Soft clip, then a tube stage, then a waveshaper, each adding six to eight decibels, with a low-pass between them to control the fizz. One hard distortion sounds thin no matter how hard you drive it.
• Hats on the e and the aClosed hats at around 54 on the e and 68 on the a of every beat. Nothing on the beat and nothing on the offbeat. That asymmetry is what gives the loop its lean.
• Do not put a bass under itAnything you add below 150Hz between kicks will phase against the tail. If the low end sounds empty, lengthen the kick rather than filling the gap.
• Screeches from the kickResample your own kick tail, pitch it up two octaves and play it as a lead. It guarantees the screech and the kick share harmonic content, which is why the good records sound welded together.
• Roll into the loopThree kicks on the last beat, then leave the final sixteenth empty. The silence before the downbeat does more work than a fourth hit would.

Reference points

Radical Redemption, Ran-D, Adaro, Warface, D-Sturb, Rejecta, and the Minus Is More, Roughstate and End of Line catalogues. Reference points for the sound, not endorsements.