I used Fruity Loops to explain some things, but I guess you'll be able to follow me, regardless of which sequencer you use! Chords
At first, you got to understand a bit of musical theory in order to follow my tutorial. I tend to think in chords. For those without any understanding of the theory behind music, a chord basicly is a collection of notes, which will sound good together. For the more experienced ones, I know this is kind of a lacking description, but I also believe it's best for beginners to find out things by themselves.
Now there's a lot of chords. Every note has it's own chord (so, there's an A chord, a B chord, etc) and each chord has its own variation. The most common variations are the major chord, which is slightly more happy sounding chord, and a minor chord, which has a more tragic feeling to it.
The best way to fully understand chords, is to simply play around with them. You can find which notes form which chords here. For now, it's best to simply focus on the major and minor (which are displayed simply as m at the given website) chords, they'll give you a proper basic understanding. If you feel the need to it, you might want to play around with some more advanced chords later on, but that's not really fundamental within Hardstyle
Scales
Just a short notice on scales. They are important to keep in mind as well. You have a set of regular notes, ranging from A to G. In your pianoroll in Fruity Loops, these are the white keys, displayed below.
The black keys which are in between, are either notes which are lowered by a half, or which are raised by half a note, depending from key you look at it. For instance, when you raise an A by half a note, you'll get the same note as when you lower a B by half a note.
Now, as for the important part, there normally is a certain order in which notes are lowered or raised within the scale you write your melody in. I'll sum them up below:
lowering:
1: B becomes B flat
2: B becomes B flat and E becomes E flat
3: B becomes B flat, E becomes E flat, A becomes A flat
4: B becomes B flat, E becomes E flat, A becomes A flat, D becomes D flat
raising:
1: F becomes F sharp
2: F becomes F sharp and C becomes C sharp
3: F becomes F sharp, C becomes C sharp and G becomes G sharp
4: F becomes F sharp, C becomes C sharp, G becomes G sharp and D becomes D sharp
If you want to get further into this, there's a nice picture of it on wikipedia, but this'll be enough for you to understand. What's important to understand, that, in principle, an E flat and a normal B don't go well together. If you would play them together, it'll result in something called dissonance. Generally speaking, dissonance creates what people would define as false melodies, but dissonance isn't bad in general. Go and play that E flat and B together and notice the difference with playing an E flat together with a B flat. Dissonance is generally involved in the darker melodies used within hardstyle. I can't really teach you how this works exactly, if you have a feeling for music and train yourself in writing melodies, you'll learn what you can do and what will work by yourself. If you don't have a feeling for music, well, yeah, you should be wondering whether producing is a good hobby for you at all
Rythms
Now, for the main part of this tutorial, I'll use one basic melody, and work it out at different ways. I'll use a chord progression which goes like Am, G, Am, G, F. All the melodies I'll refer to are in this midifile. They're all on different channels, so you'll be able to import just the melody I'm talking about
Btw, the melody is from an older track of mine, Hardstyle Emotion (don't look it up, it sucks 
)The first thing you got to understand is the difference between a straight melody and a triplet melody. The basic main melody is on channels 1 and 2, whereas channel 1 is straight and channel 2 is triplet. Be sure to notice the difference, the triplet melody has a more funky sound to it, whereas the straight melody has more drive. I'm not saying one is better than the other btw, just telling the differences
I used both in the past and will use both in the future.The actual melodies
So, now for the actual melodies. I'm going to apply three ways which are common within hardstyle, keeping in mind which chords I use. Here we go
Normal main melody, with bass notes
I think this is the most use technique in hardstyle. It is effective, yet used a lot and therefor kind of predictive. Most likely, you've noticed that the melodies in channel 1 and 2 sound kinda empty. To solve this, producers mostly add bass notes.
Now, this is where the chords come in. The Am chord is included in the first two bars, the G chords in the two bars after it. After the G, there's two more bars of Am, a bar of G and a bar of F. Now, what we are going to do, is simply add the root note of your chord (so, respectively an A, G and F) to fill in the gaps, tho we're doing so one octave lower than the main melody. I don't really think I can explain it much better than this, simply check out the midi file and you'll know what I'm talking about. Channel 3 has a straight melody with bass notes, channel 4 is in triplet.
Driving Chord Melody
So, for the next technique, we're going to apply something which might sound quite complex to most of you guys, but is in fact quite simple. Instead of the normal triplet method, with bass notes, we're not going to add just one note, but two! Since we're following our chord progression, the third note should be in our chord as well. The chords we're using, are Am (which consists out of A, C and E), G (consisting out of G, B and D) and F (consisting out of F, A and C). As our melody starts off with an A and has an A as bass note as well, we want to add either the C or the E as a third note, in between. Now, it mostly is the best to use the note which on average lays in the middle of the two other notes. In this case, the E for the Am chord. I can't really explain why, but you'll notice this will sound better
In the same way, we'll add a D to the G chord, and a C to the F chord. The example is in channel 5
Entire Chord
The last option, is playing the notes we talked about in the previous part, all together. The example of what I mean is in channel 6.
Now, to make it really cool, we should combine this method with the bass notes. What I also like, is to add some of the chords' notes as short single notes in between the entire chords. I kinda played with that a bit, the result is in channel 7:)
Final tip
A final tip. Be sure to experiment with the lengths of your notes! You can easily highlight some notes by making them a bit longer than the others.
Furthermore I hope you could follow this tutorial, I kinda wrote it in one piece without preparing it that much. If you have any questions whatsoever, just ask, and I'll kindly answer them for you
