How hardstyle began: slower than hardcore, and just as hard

Hardcore kept getting faster. By the end of the 1990s it often ran at 150 beats per minute, sometimes more than 200. At that speed the kick drum fills almost the whole song. There is no space left for anything else.

Some Dutch DJs did the opposite. They slowed the music down to about 140 BPM, but kept the kick drum just as hard. Now there was a small gap between the beats. What they put in that gap became a new kind of music.

The idea was simple. Take the same hard kick drum, play it backwards, make it lower, and put it in the gap between the beats. Played backwards, the sound grows louder instead of hitting hard. So the kick hits on the beat, and the low backwards sound fills the space after it. This is called the reverse bass, and it is the sound that makes hardstyle easy to recognise.

Then came the step that turned it into music. A low note like that has a pitch, which means it can be tuned, like any other instrument. Tune it to the notes of the song, and it stops sounding like a drum. In hardstyle, the kick drum plays the bass notes of the song. That is the real difference between hardstyle and hardcore, and everything else in hardstyle comes from it.

Most of the people doing this were hardcore DJs who wanted to try something new. One of them was Pavo. He had already been playing techno, hard house and hard trance at parties in Zaandam, a small city just north of Amsterdam, the capital of the Netherlands. The parties were held in a big hall that used to be an indoor golf centre. In 2001 Q-dance went looking for Dutch DJs who were making a harder sound, and found Pavo, along with Lady Dana and The Prophet. They added records from Germany and Italy to what those DJs were making. The one usually named is "Ravers' Rules," by an Italian producer called Technoboy.

In 2001, in that same building, Q-dance started a party called Qlubtempo. People still call it the first hardstyle party. The building had already been used for hardcore parties for six years, and it is still open today.

The Prophet had played hardcore for years and wanted to make this instead. In 2002 he started his own record label, Scantraxx, and released the music himself.

The kick drum kept getting better too. A teenager called Sjoerd Janssen, who made music as DJ Duro, tried something different. Instead of only making the kick more distorted, he stacked several copies of it on top of each other, each one at a different pitch. His song "Just Begun" came out on Scantraxx in 2003. It became one of the biggest hardstyle songs of the year, and it showed everyone what a hardstyle kick drum could sound like. His older brother Wouter made hard trance under the name Walt. Later that year the two brothers remixed "Just Begun" together, using a new name: Showtek. They became one of the most famous groups in the genre.

Q-dance held the first Defqon.1 that same year, 2003. A teenager named Willem Rebergen was standing in the crowd at another Q-dance party, Qlimax, when he heard hardstyle for the first time. He decided that night to become a DJ. He later took the name Headhunterz.

In 2008 he and Joram Metekohy, who DJs as Wildstylez, started working together as Project One.

Hardstyle did not come to Japan the way hardcore did. Hardcore arrived on a record that a Japanese company had bought the rights to, with a Japanese name already on the cover. For hardstyle there was no moment like that. It grew slowly instead, in people's houses. Ryosuke Tachibana and Ayato Shinozaki had been playing hardstyle as DJs in Japan for years, and in 2011 they began making their own songs as Massive New Krew. Today they are the best known hardstyle group in the country. Other Japanese producers followed later: Laur from 2015, and Odeta from 2017. In 2018 Yuta Imai started a record label called TOKYO HARD DANCE on his own. Other people joined him later, and the group played its first club show four years after that.

In Zaandam, hardstyle started with party organisers looking for a new sound. In Japan, it started with the people who make the music.