Hardstyle is an electronic dance genre mixing influences from hardtechno, hard house, hard trance, and hardcore. Hardstyle typically consists of a deep, hard-sounding kick drum, intense faded or reversed basslines accompanying the beat, a synth playing a melody, and detuned and distorted sounds.[citation needed] It bears some similarities to hard trance. Many hardcore artists produce hardstyle tracks as well, and many newer Hardstyle tracks are written in tuplet.

History
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Hardstyle takes influence from hard trance, gabber, acid house and Hard House. The Hardstyle scene began in the Netherlands when artists like Dana, Pavo, Darkraver, Luna and The Prophet, who produced hardcore, started experimenting while playing their hardcore records. The first hardstyle events, like Qlubtempo,[1] took place at the end of the 20th century. The first few years of Hardstyle were characterized por a tempo of around 140 BPM, a compressed kick drum sound, a short vocal sample, a screech and the use of a "reverse bass", which can be heard on the offbeat after each kick.

Around 2004-05 the genre became mais melodic and uplifting, somewhat faster (usually 150 BPM), and distorted, sharp kick drum sounds were added. Many producers started to pitch-shift a distorted kick drum to create a melodic bassline that usually plays in pitch with a supersaw or a thinner Electro House synth melody. The melody often is in tuplet form, which gives the genre a pulsating rhythm, whereas older hardstyle as well as other genres such as Jumpstyle have mais basic melodic structures to them. Thus, nowadays many people refer to the older style as Early Hardstyle.

Since around 2008, mais terms to identify developments of hardstyle were introduced. Rawstyle is a type of hardstyle influenced from Dutch hardcore or Older Hardstyle resulting in darker melodies and deeper-sounding kick drums with mais distortion through VST plug-ins such as Devastator, CamelPhat,Ohmicide & TriDirt.[2] Even mais recently, the term Dubstyle[3] was introduced. Dubstyle is a fusion of elements of Hardstyle with a Dubstep rhythm, usually a 2-step or a breakbeat rhythm. Because of the non-straightened beat in dubstyle, the baixo is often mais dragged out and/or it doesn't follow a strict offbeat pattern that regular hardstyle incorporates, which in turn results in Dubstyle basslines bearing similarities to dubstep basslines. The first mainstream dubstyle track was Headhunterz & Brennan Heart's "The MF Point of Perfection". During 2011 many hardstyle producers such as Zatox started to incorporate half-dubstep, half-hardstyle sounds into their tracks.