like to add this one as it is recommended by hardcore artists:
https://shop.ns-audio.com/product/the-beatkrusher-the-ultimate-distortion/

 

Here is some explanation. Works with other DAWs as well for most part i guess.

 

Hardstyle IS NOT 909@gabber style

 

I think it's best to go for serum 2.
There are so many possibilities with serum.
From what I see, some people can do with serum, it's fucking insane.
And you can always add your effects chain later. You can also recreate the 909 in serum, so no samples.

 

I’ve always been surprised by meaningless answers like yours. Can you explain WHY you would emulate a 909 in Serum? Why? Why not just use a sample (like people did in the ’90s — just look at the title of this thread) and distort it using the methods that were actually used back then (Mackie mixer overdrive or Pro Co RAT guitar pedals, both the original hardware units and their software emulations)?

Once again — WHY? With Serum you won’t get an acceptable result, it won’t sound like an authentic 909 or its proper, authentic distortion. It’s nonsense…

 

Hey, you don't have to attack me right away, but maybe you're right. If you want an authentic gabber kick, go for a 909 with the Roland 909 emulation or Drumazon, you still have more possibilities than just a sample, but my opinion is that Serum offers the most possibilities for kicks a sample is just a sample, you can't change much about it.

 

you should also get a mackie instead of a better mixer so you have the "right" desk clip distortion too.

if you do not copy other people's tracks from twenty plus years ago, they aren't right.

 

All good but here the real tip:

before any sound manipulation for your Gabber 909 kick, skin your head , drink your speed and chew intensely a gum to preserve your teeth while distorting a 909 bass drum.

You are now ready and the sound will be real!

 

So you think you need hardware for real hardcore kicks I haven't put much time into hardcore yet I would also like to produce hardcore but my kicks are not quite there I tried to make a hardcore track a few weeks ago and sent it to a friend his reaction was this track isn't hard and fast enough even though I was at 180bpm but I know what he likes we grew up in the nineties with mostly hardcore he likes those old punchy kicks

listen to this song proper oldschool hardcore from the nineties

i was wondering those filter sweeps over the kick was that done via hardware?

 

Find your own style. Be yourself and don't copy anyone else! I've never asked anyone what they think of my music.
What's the point of a negative review? I know some musicians who always say, "Please don't leave a rating."

 

No. I was commenting about this post below. I do not think you need a Mackie 1604 etc. to "correctly desk clip" kick drums to get good results.
I would venture to guess not very many people have ever shouted over a 30 foot long 8 foot high wall of speakers "you can tell the mixer they used to get that kick drum", or where they got the starting sample.

 

I absolutely don't mind a negative review; not everything in life is positive.
I just want honest opinions from people with good skills who can explain to me what's good and what's not, and what I need to change to improve that's how you learn.
And ofcourse lots of practice and practice makes you better.

 

I found that chaining a couple or 3 distortions (I like Fabfilter Saturn and Soundtoys Decapitator), with lower gain settings works better than one single distortion. (I realise these are VST not pedals, but I'm just talking from personal experience, I sold all my physical guitar pedals long ago)

Alter the position of them in the chain, add some parametric eq boosts etc, voila

But yeah, the right 909 character is really the key

 

Last edited: Feb 25, 2026 at 12:06 PM

I know I'm one of those dinosaurs, an almost extinct species of human who still clings to sound training, because I'm all for acquiring specialist books, i.e., the transmission of real expertise. Then, with a lot of passion, talent, a bit of luck, and hard work, you can go very far, maintain high quality in music, and perhaps even create something new.

Of course, I realize that most people make music that sounds just like everyone else's and nothing special comes out of it.
I always say that if it makes you happy and you're creative, that's also very nice and important.

So, how about @MindCtrlDel, why don't you try singing sometime...? To keep things interesting,
I suggest mixing jazz, blues, Latin and other elements of existing old music with modern music...!

 

Everything relevant has been said already. use a 909 kick sample, or something at least attempting to emulate the 909 properly if you go the algorithmic route. the sad thing is though, a lot of the algorithmic solutions don't, and mega ironically, not even the Roland Cloud version approaches the circuit properly for kick and snare.

The only thing that does that i am aware of is RaveGeneration's BDX 909 and the free Marvin Pavillion stuff. as has already been said though, very few people back then actually had 909's outside of people like Scott Brown, Neophyte, Promo, Bass-D & King Matthew, Paul Elstak, Marc Acardipane and other big names in the European Hardcore Techno scene. so depending on what you are going for, you might be better off with a one-shot from the Zero-G Datafiles or the other solutions.

Mackity sounds like crap unless you under drive it and stack them. if you want the genuine workflow ITB and the sound then i would also just grab RaveGeneration's Sonic Sweep 2. this is scary how close it gets to the Mackie CR series and VLZ sound to be honest. it's missing the tolerance drift, poor channel matching in the L-R and the crosstalk that plague all those small medium sized mixing consoles of the 80ies and 90ies, but other than that, it's bang on. it's an expensive plugin, but it's currently more than 50% off on Plugin Boutique.

If you are after the genuine article though, that's as close as you will get currently ITB. some people will recommend Misstortion, but that is generally for Hardstyle, and Hardstyle kicks whilst being somewhat analogous in process to old European Hardcore Techno kicks, the timbres and nuances in those timbres aren't the same. i personally abhor Hardstyle both the music, the ego of the people who produce it, and the production aesthetics it leans into sonically, but you do you do.

Before people come at me for calling it "European Hardcore Techno" i am using it as an umbrella term for the different variants of uptempo distorted kick driven dance music that did the rounds back then during the early to mid 90ies that was mostly coming out of Europe.

you had everything from Bouncy Techno in Scotland, Happy Hardcore in the south of England, Makina in Spain, early Hard Trance/Hardcore crossovers in Germany, German EuroDance(basically commercialised Happy Hardcore with pop songwriting), Rotterdam Techno and Hardcore. they are all pretty much using the same production methods with slightly different musical leanings, so it's much easier to just call all this "European Hardcore Techno"

 

Learn how to dissect, layer, parallel process and overall stack different samples/processes in x/Y axis (time and frequency). Get Ohmicide or any other multiband distortion and take the deep dive.

 

They're not filter sweeps as it's quantisation/low sample rate noise, they're hard clipped 8-bit samples. Put any kick drum with some long-ish pitch sweep (e.g. a 909 kick) and it sounds like that through a 8bit sampler at low rate when heavily distorted. Amiga was used a lot (the chip's filter and rough D/A adds to the charm of the Paula chip), but any rough bit depth reduction + overdrive will work.

Amisampler (free, Ami Sampler) or Amigo (£10, Amigo) will both do nicely for the sampler bit. Plenty of options for the distortion have been mentioned in this thread, but I use Airwindows' Mackity (free, part of Airwindows Consolidated) because it's just simple. I'd rather overdrive the mixers to get to that, but I'm not entirely sure if it's worth getting a cheap desk just for distortion.

Why not try synthesizing some beefy kicks with Serum and then trying those for mangling the sound to be proper 'ardcore?

 

Are you joking or not? I sing, even autotune can't help me with that. I'm from the Netherlands, Limburg, so you can assume I have a weird accent.

 

I'm just trying to encourage and motivate you; of course, it doesn't always work! I didn't know you were Dutch and had a dialect.

 

i've seen what serum is capable of and i kinda totally agree with you (you can build 808s, 909s "by the waveform" not samples)

eg.:
https://x.com/i/status/1986601427968352644

 

Last edited: Feb 25, 2026 at 4:13 PM