… In 5 Easy Steps!

Easy money, f#ck bitches, snore coke – It’s no longer just a dream

It’s that time of the year again, Q-Dance is asking about your top 10 tracks of the year. The question is are you Team Euphoric or Team Raw? With fast rising talents and surprising performances, you might thought, that takes a lot of dedication. No, we are here to tell you the truth! Because everyone deserves to be a stage-diving-leather-jacket-wearing raw hardstyle DJ!

Today we’ll give you an insight view of 5 easy steps to become the ultimate raw hardstyle dj and producer! We take the risk of mad agencies, companies and labels, the risk of a strike or claim, just to tell you how to produce raw hardstyle in 5 easy and secret steps, never been revealed before!

The Kick

The most obvious criteria to become a successful raw hardstyle producer and dj within weeks is the kick. People won’t judge your melodies, people won’t judge if the track has vocals or not – people will judge your track by its kick and kick-rolls. By the way, those don’t even need to fit the track, the additional sounds or the build up and drive. Make sure people are able to do them during events! That’s exactly what you want to deliver.

Try to release the craziest kick, try to experiment with different variations – create the most insane bass and the hardest motherfucking punch they ever witnessed. Let the focus of the track be the kick. Currently laser-sounding-like kicks are highly appreciated. So, give a shit about your own musical vision and create what the people want! If you have a proper kick, you think speakers can be destroyed with, it’s time to work around the kick and build the rest.

Keep an eye on the ratio – the kick is the focus, the rest boring and actually not even necessary. Don’t waste too much time on atmosphere, melodies or the right chords. The kick should be in the foreground of your track, simple sounds and additional screeches play a supporting role. Basically you’re done now, lean back, order the first bitches, create your social media account. But, read further if you want to let some real magic happen around your DJ and producer name.

The Sounds

Let’s get this straight – additional sounds are somehow necessary to fill empty gaps in your track. So you also have possible hater comments covered. But still, you shouldn’t go into detail. By using extremely boosted or aggressive sounding snares in between kicks, kick-rolls or after every 32 beats f.e., you make the whole track sounding wide and full, with exactly zero effort. A secret pro tip? Make the snare an essential part of your track, use the same rhythms and beats of the snare before a new 32 beats part starts, after 16 beats for a short break or within the build up for the climax.

By the way, dub, breakbeat or even hip hop elements are super sick at the moment. Your track might even be considered as “out of the box”, which is nice!

But, sadly it’s not all about kicks and snares. That would be too easy right? You need some minor additional sounds like screeches in between or at least in the intro part of your track. The chords of your screeches should be extremely high or represent the lowest frequencies of the audio spectrum. Your track becomes special, the crazier it is!

So, basically you have two options: using sustained or short and fast screeches. Either way, designing them easy, for the crowd to scream along, gives your track a “potential hit” bonus. Combining both styles of screeches in two different intro parts will make your track sound even better! It doesn’t even matter then if it’s the same sound throughout the whole track. Still, the professionals highly recommend to just let the kick do his job. Why losing time on this shit, when you have a crazy kick who’s the basement, the pillar and roof of your track?

If you’re having problems creating your own screeches. Maybe you should think of ripping existing sounds from movies, other audio files, games or anything the listener realizes. Just think of siren sounds, weapon sounds, funny vocals (although that’s a point later in this article), well known classic tracks like Tic Tic Tac, Y.M.C.A or The Ketchup Song – these tracks literally scream for a raw hardstyle bootleg!

Combining snippets of vocals, ripped from movies, your kick and a snare is the absolute maximum of effort you should invest into your tracks! Who needs an atmosphere if you do not even have a theme for your track, who needs complexe vocals or a build up, if you can retouch gabs with a loud snare, string together the single parts of your track or have a climax part with just the kick and kick-rolls.

The Vocals

We already mentioned the usage of vocals within your track in the previous paragraph. But there is a little more to say about vocals. In case you really want to use vocals, which is basically not even required, search for vocals with an aggressive theme, something with destruction, devastation, hate, killing everyone or something with war works smooth as fuck. Don’t even try to think of the cords, keep it simple, let the vocals play either with no background sounds or just a generic and easily created bass.

If you’re not in the mood for war, further great topics would be the demon possession, monsters, the ghetto life or that you’re the hardest mf around the corner. But, simplicity is the key. Use the 1 sec. snippet of vocals throughout your whole song. Cut it in some kind of synth and let it play during the intro.

You want to know what’s going great at the moment? Try to find some screaming vocals, either from a rock song, or again from a movie, something people can scream just before your ultimate kick drops. this will let the crowd appreciate your song. Underline the main focus of your kick with your vocal – making the crowd go insane, doing the kick rolls and make them look like they want to smash someone’s head against the wall! Something like “WE ARE KILLER”, “DIE MOTHERFUCKER” or “AGGRESSION” is perfect!

In addition, as mentioned earlier, you can grab one hell of a classic song and turn it into a raw hardstyle monster. People will recognize it and at least smile once. We already a few hints in the previous paragraph, in case you need some inspiration. Again, it is absolutely not required to work around these vocals. Just end your intro part with a heavy impact sound and play your ripped classic track with all its background music. Release it as a bootleg, free release or keep it exclusive for your sets and you do not even have to think about copyright claims!

The classic build up

Now that we covered all options you have to actually build a track, we still need to put at least some of our thoughts into the perfect build up. Forget about complexity, smooth transitions or enhanced sound design. What we want is to simply attach one part after each other. Some sort of impact sound will do its job and end the 32 beats long parts.

Starting with the obligatory dj intro, followed by a short break of 16 beats, right into the intro part of your track. The people want the kick, so you gotta give it to them!

After the intro part another 16 beats break, leading straight into the second intro part with one more sound/synth or screech. We highly suggest to add max. 2 sounds!

Let’s move on to the main part. Some bla bla vocals, here a snare, here a synth. Now, referring back to the vocal part of this article, you see the importance of ripping existing sounds. You do not even have to lose one single thought into your main part. Copy & Paste, easy as fuck.

If you really want to make people go nuts during your track, make sure you create a big phat synth for the main part. With the right effect and melody you can make people scream along this synth. During events DJs can pull off the sound and there you go – 20.000 people screaming your track! Great examples are Das Weite Land.

Although this takes a little longer, we highly suggest you to invest the time!

After the main part is done, the first climax part will follow. As said before, the kick plus max. 2 sounds is enough. To fill some gaps, put in your snare or some parts of the vocals. Slightly adjust the kick or sound for the second climax, coming after another 16 beats long break.

Just for the ones who really have too much time in their lives: Use different variations of your kick!

By the way, mastering and mixdown is not essentially required! Just export your track as 320 Kb/s .wav and .mp3 and you’re done!

The perfect marketing

Some last tips for the perfect marketing. First think about your producer and dj name. Do we have any tips? No, just choose what you like. As fast as you have your Instagram, Snapchat and facebook account ready, start posting! Shitty iPhone previews, funny videos where you do the kick rolls or what ever, live Q&A videos and pictures telling the people how devastating your kick is.

Always try to sound aggressive in your postings, that’ll keep the people tuning in and following you. Some hashtags can do a great job as well. Don’t hesistate to ask other DJs to collab. Always bash against euphoric hardstyle.If you follow all these secret steps carefully, it is pretty much guaranteed that you’ll have success! Playing in the Blue Tent at Defqon.1, playing in the second area of Qapital are just one day of work ahead! Follow these just revealed rules companies don’t want you to read and become the greatest raw hardstyle dj and producer in the scene!