Just using a 909 synth and then using multiple eq and distortion to try achieve the Noisecontrollers So High crunch sound which I haven’t been able to do yet. I have a few questions to ask and if yall have any tips please feel free to share.

1. What is the difference between the order of these fx chain that I see some producers do: eq>dist>eq>dist vs. eq>dist>eq>eq>dist?

2. When eq and distorting a 909 how do I get a full sounding aggressive crunch character? Mine just sounds thin and like a saw wave? I have tried many eq and asymmetric distortion variations and it’s all sounding the same…

3. Many producers will say to use like 10-15 eq and asymmetric distortions on the 909 but when I do this how come the kick just sounds more messy, muffled and less clear and the more eq and asymmetric distortion units I use it doesn’t change the sound much anymore?

 

you are overthinking it. it doesnt matter what order anything is in, or how many, as long as it works. what you are describing is push / pull technique.

Use one eq to shape the tone going into the dist, use another eq to cut out whatever frequencies you dont need after the distortion, repeat again and again until you have that crunch.

Try saturators, clippers, limiters as well.

if your kick sounds muffled, try cutting the low mids in between the distortions. boost them at the final phase if needed.

try a narrow band eq, and sweep to find the resonant frequency of the kick, boost there a lot with a medium wide band in your first or first few of the chain.

from another thread :

 

this is the kind of thing you end up with when you have people mindlessly copying each other.

the reason why someone's <whatever part> sounds interesting is because that producer did something a little different. it's a good way to end up with gigs upon gigs of samples that all do the same thing. It's a much harder thing to copy someone else's results trying to get it exactly the same, because they were not bound to some "recipe" that someone else cooked up. it's also how you end up with "the magic plugin". You know what works exactly the same as 20 alternating instances of the same plugins in serial? Resampling. Bounce in place a bunch of times rendering it with the same plugins.

if you are going to copy something from someone, sample it. It doesn't matter how you get it there, because it's still just a copy of something made by someone else. There is close to 0 skill required either way. It's nothing but an elaborate preset.

 

You can make 100 variations of channel order, in all of them you achieve different things. Sometimes they are more noticeable, other times less. The important thing is the final sound. It doesn't matter how you do it. If you like it and it sounds the way you want, that's what's important. Think that each plugin is a tool, depending on how you use it you will get a "sound" no one knows if it is better or worse. you decide that. You have to know what sound you want.

Sometimes I have tried chains with 20 plugins and I have arrived at a "sound", another day, with 1 or 2 plugins I got that very very similar sound. What is better? have fun and learn. Know what you play in each plugin.

It's very good to see producers or people doing things that you want to learn. But then you have to do it yourself. and think that something that works for one, may not work for another. For 909 hardstyle kicks, what you need is: Create a lot of resonances, (eq or filters) and distortions. Play a lot in the position of the freq eq and the q curves.

Nice to try:
Tone2 FilterBank
Izotope Trash
Ohmforce Ohmicide

 

I'm no authority on hardstyle but isn't it just easier to synthesize the kick rather than processing it? It seems ridiculous to chain plugins like that. It strikes of not knowing how to achieve the desired result in the first place. Also, there must be a million and one sample packs with hardstyle kicks, why not use those if you're not actually looking to synthesize your own? One thing I will say, and this goes for all kicks in any genre, is to leave the fundamental sub clean by parallel processing, this will leave more meat on the bone and help stop the kick sound thin and weedy.

 

I'm not entirely sure what character you are after but I'll try anyway.

In the end a kick is just a pitch envelope and a amplitude envelope (volume) modulating a sinewave.
At the core, you can layer a click to get a better transient or add some harmonics to the sine but it's still a pretty simple sound.

If I'm way off please provide an exemple of what you are looking for.
For now I just init Kick 2, pulled the length at about 600ms and added some distortion, wavefolding and clipping.
No compression or EQ.

Tell me if that's crunchy

 

I think what you want is to get a sound like that. And to get this sound, you need several eqs + several distortions.

 

Oh okay, my bad so way more distorted.

Lot of tutorials available to make those very aggressive kicks on youtube.

The formula for this seems to be EQ -> Distortion EQ -> Distortion + hard clipping.
Then layer it with another kick so you get more punch and sub (missing from the frequencies you carved on the first one).

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=virus+hardstyle+kick

Most comprehensive video would be this one but unfortunately it is in French (guy is an established audio ingeneer) you can still see what he's doing and trust your ears.

He have 5 to 7 different kicks layered, with different bodies, tails subs etc to get this result.

 

The kick is probably one the most important part in hardstyle... using a sample pack limits your track by a lot. synthesize such a kick is probably a lot harder than just using a few layers of vengeance kicks/909s and random samples, distorting them and eqing them.
chain order IS important, try moving an EQ before a distortion plugin...
like ZUK said, Izotope Trash is a good distortion plugin in this case because you have a lot of options, and ohmicide even though it's pretty old i remember a lot of pros were still using it
remember to separate click, attack, body, bass/release, so you have more control, especially over the release.

as the wise clone said, just resample after a few plugins, otherwise you might end up wasting time fine tuning things that don't really matter or that you may scrap anyway

 

boosts and cuts by 30dB, love it!