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SERUM HARDSTYLE SCREECH | Rawstyle Screech Tutorial | Hardstyle Serum Tutorial (Rawstyle Serum)

In this lesson you’ll learn how to make a Serum hardstyle screech in FL Studio. In this hardstyle Serum tutorial you can take a look at all the settings to create your own hardstyle or rawstyle screech.

Serum is a very popular plugin these days, especially for producers of the harder styles. Serum is very flexible, versatile and has countless options. It’s quite comparable to Massive (from Native Instruments).

How to make a Serum hardstyle screech

To make the Serum hardstyle screech from the video, I used 2 oscillators with weird looking waveforms. You don’t have to model these exact waveforms. Just pick a few and experiment how they sound. Each has their own value.

Now the biggest “trick” behind this screech is the LFO being applied to the filter cutoff and to the waveforms (WT POS). The LFO creates a movement. When you apply it to the filter, you’ll get a filter sweep. When you apply it to your waveforms, they will change in shape (depending on your LFO speed).

You could add some additional settings, like some resonance on the filter, a bit of drive/fatness or a phaser. In the bigger picture it doesn’t matter too much, but each setting gives a slightly unique twist to the hardstyle screech. It just depends how they impact the overall sound.

Serum hardstyle screech mixer effects

After the initial Serum settings, route it to a free mixer track. On the mixer you can add effects. It’s where the real magic happens…

For this particular hardstyle screech, I started with the iZotope Trash for a good amount of distortion. Any distortion unit can do the job though. The distortion is what really gets the screech to pop.

To restore the balance in the frequency spectrum, it’s often a good idea to use an equalizer. Typically, after you’ve aggressively distorted the signal, you need to remove some mid frequencies and/or add some higher frequencies. Optionally, remove some low frequencies.

To prevent your Serum hardstyle screech from shooting above 0 dB (into the “red”), use a limiter to brick wall those peaks.

Play with your hardstyle screech settings

In the video I will also play with all the hardstyle screech settings. This gives you a better idea how much options you have and how these options change the sound. For example, using a much lower filter sweep with this screech sounds really epic too. You can only find out if you try.

More Serum hardstyle screeches

If you want more Serum hardstyle screeches, or just any samples in general, you can download my free Hardstyle Sample Pack. Just click the link. It’s great to get you started with high quality hardstyle samples. But please, also strive to do your own sound design.

If you want to learn more about Serum, please check out the next lesson. In the next lesson you can witness the creation of a Serum Hardstyle Lead.

Plugins

In this lesson, the following plugins were used:

  • Serum
  • iZotope Trash
  • FabFilter Pro Q
  • Fruity Waveshaper

If you have a question you would like me to answer in a future video or article, you can send it (3-4 paragraphs/500 words max) to this email address: cep@screechhouse.com

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Thank you for your support and please, keep practicing!

– Cep
Music producer & creator of Screech House

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