In this lesson you’ll learn how to make a Serum hardstyle lead in FL Studio. In this hardstyle lead tutorial you can learn all the settings. The final lead is very well suited for hardstyle, but it can also easily be used for hardcore or rawstyle.
You don’t necessarily need Serum
Before we begin, let me point out that if you don’t have Serum, there are plenty of other lead posts available on Screech House. You don’t necessarily need Serum, or any particular plugin for that matter. You can use Sylenth1, Massive, Sytrus, 3x Osc or anything else.
If you happen to have Serum, but you don’t have all the third-party mixer effects, that’s okay too. In fact, for this lesson I don’t use any external mixer effects (except for 1 limiter, but it doesn’t change the sound). The result you’re hearing is 100% Serum.
How to make a Serum hardstyle lead
To make the Serum hardstyle lead I’ve first made a melody. It’s always good to have a melody playing while creating the synth. This way you can listen to it into the right perspective. If you want to learn more about making melodies, please visit my How to Make a Melody in FL Studio lesson.
For the Serum hardstyle lead I’ve enabled 2 oscillators. They’re both aggressively detuned, have 16 voices, and just have the same settings. Except, the second oscillator plays 1 octave higher.
I’ve also opened up the “PORTA” knob quite a bit. Porta means portamento. Portamento creates that glide in your lead. For this Serum hardstyle lead it fits really well.
Serum hardstyle lead FX section
On the FX section of Serum I did quite a bit of tweaking. These are all the things I’ve did:
- Using a HardClip distortion with quite some drive.
- Applying the Hyper/Dimension to create more detune and fullness. I set it to a quick rate and quite some detune. The unison is set to 7 voices with a 50% mix.
- Next in line is the reverb. Each synth just needs reverb to give it a sense of space. The settings aren’t utterly important here.
- Then add the EQ. With the equalizer you want to add a bunch of high frequencies and possibly remove some lower frequencies.
- The last thing in line is the compressor. The compressor basically limits the signal and crushes the sound a bit. I typically use a medium threshold and ratio, with a fast attack and a pretty fast release.
So, with all these settings in place, you now have yourself a nice Serum hardstyle lead. You can just as well use it for hardcore or rawstyle.
More Serum lessons
If you’d like to learn more about Serum, please check out my Serum Hardstyle Screech lesson. It’s actually the previous lesson where you can find out how to make a hardstyle screech with Serum.
Plugins
In this lesson, the following plugins were used:
- Serum
- Fruity Waveshaper