gabber / speedcore

[Dstone]

I've looked through wiki and a few other sites, and I am aware that the characteristic sound for breakcore and gabber is a synth drum that's heavily distorted, I want to know how exactly to go about this, e.g what plugins with what settings to use to generate this sound, no matter what I do I cant get it exactly right, in fact percussion seems to be a bit of a pain in general.

[Saga Musix]

Well, "magically" getting typical speecore sound by pushing some sliders just doesn't work. There's some work involved. For a start, it might help to use the amplification and sign/unsign tools in the sample editor. This should work especially well on drum samples - see here for example. You might want to aquire some sample libraries for this, f.e. the kb6 drum samples collection or the Vengeance club essentials (which already come with many distorted bass drums). But more important, what you need is experience, which you just get by doing, not by watching. Generally, if you want more complex distortion, any plugin will do, there is no magic plugin that can do everything, and while someone might recommend a certain distortion plugin, you might prefer a completely different plugin for some reason. A nice plugin for crushing, amplification and distortion is f.e. CamelCrusher.

[herodotas]

Classic gabber bassdrum is distorted, equalised and compressed 909 bassdrum. You can add layer of couple bassdrums or create own bassdrum with any substractive vsti synth with  pitch modulation + distortion plugin. If you want simple terrorcore bassdrum like Nasenbluten, just amplify any synthetic (not acoustic) kick with good punch in OpenMPT sample editor.