How to make Melodic House & Techno like: ARTBAT, Monolink, Tale of Us *Project & Presets Download*

hey everybody my name is down and this is what you're going to learn how to make in this video [Music] alright so this is the first video i'm doing of this series we're going to be discovering the style of artback the progressive duo that has been really really slamming uh festivals and clubs in the past a little bit before obviously the pandemic but they have been just banging out track after track that has just been uh in the top ten of the port charts all the time so uh this is a really really cool style it's a lot of fun to make and it's super simple um let's just go ahead and get started so i'm just going to grab first thing i'm going to do is kick kick and bass and the main element of this of a lot of the art bat tracks or a lot of these melodic houston techno or techno tracks in general are they have a really really good foundation of kick and bass so first things first kick and i know i have one in f sharp for my last track that i was working on i'm gonna drag and drop that in i'm gonna duplicate that cool let's get rid of this for now actually uh okay so now we just have this kick does the trick it's nice and punchy we want um for this genre we want a kick that is going to be punchy but obviously have that low end as well just like most kicks that we choose but if we have it a little bit too muffled out it's not going to carry with the rhythm of the bass so much so we want one that's not too snappy not too too punchy in the high end but just one that's going to kind of blend in with the bass a little bit unless this one doesn't have too much high end it's not too too cracky snappy so next i'm going to do a base because it's just the the next thing that i'm going to cover just to get that groove going i'm going to move the kick to the top and make it dark blue okay uh next base so i'm going to be using serum for all the patches in this video because i like the way the serum looks i think it's really easy to follow it's really affordable if you want to invest in purchasing serum and if you are using wavetable it is similar to wavetable and you can kind of get a sense if you don't have the synth um so let's go ahead and just use like a sawtooth wave you need a square wave as well but i'm just gonna use sawtooth with a little bit of um filter on it as well so i'm going to turn the filter on and put my low pass uh let's go low pass 18 i'll be cutting 18 uh and then envelope two i'm going to drag and drop that on to the cutoff sounds let's change the decay and sustain all the way down cool and then drink this stop down a few octaves [Music] cool uh next i'm going to add the sub and drop that down to octaves as well okay i'm gonna draw the three octaves put this to two voices i'm not gonna have the the d tune though and i want this in mono uh okay cool let's just keep one one of ways for now uh next we can add a second octave and turn the volume really far down we want to make sure we have our filter on both a and b oscillators [Music] okay cool that's just going to add a little bit more in that second octave all right and then let's add a midi clip control or command shift m new midi click new midi track new midi clip sorry and then um let's draw out our bass line so a lot of these bass lines are very um they're very groovy and uh they're they're staccato so they're kind of broken up [Music] um turn this on so we can hear it [Music] one more octavir okay let's go let's go 16th notes [Music] okay that sounds like a very art bat baseline [Music] cool i want a little bit more release on that it sounds like it's a bit too dry there turn the filter down as well a little bit i'm gonna go to my emblem two take this down a notch okay sounding good uh next what we can do is that a second octave so i'm going to duplicate this and i want this just to be the low end i want this just to be the sub frequency of that uh of the bass so i'll put um sub here this one will just be bass [Music] what i'm gonna do now is i'm going to turn off this oscillator for now we're just listening to the first oscillator i'm going to bring it up an octave and bring this one up an octave and i'm going to turn the unison on and detune it a bit so i put this up to five make sure to drop that one i don't need my sub for this one either into the second house later on cool and what i'm going to do now is i'm going to add a um a fifth by adding seven semitones and that's going to give us more of a a more of a note that sounds a little bit more for the molecules and techno vibes we're going to be in a minor scale but i'm not sure if i'm gonna leave that on the base just yet i'm gonna do that for our lead but let's actually let's take it off right now let's take this off at the base we just want this on the base right now i'm going to go to the effects add a little bit of distortion and i'm going to filter out with a high pass i'm going to filter all the low end of the sound maybe take the cut off down a little bit more and then we're going to add an echo onto it and want to make sure that we're not leaving any of the low end in our echo because we don't want to get that phase cancellation so i'm also going to add an eq and i'm gonna put it in mid side and go to my my sides i'm gonna remove the low end and boost the sides of it okay and turn the dryer out of this down cool now let's listen to them together [Music] and with the kick [Music] cool so you get the idea now it's already starting to come along so we have the most important elements for this artback stuff artboard style track is just that kick and that bass relationship [Music] we still have a little bit too much high end in the in the sub so i'm gonna turn that down [Music] i'll grab an eq [Music] a little bit saturation is good a little bit of that high end but we do have that second layer here with a lot of that high end and then of course we can group these together switch them both blue and i'm going to compress them together [Music] cool next we can add um maybe a pad so i'm going to go into my serum again and with a new patch i have just a sawtooth here i'm going to turn up that units into five again and i'm going to really really detune this at a second octave a little bit higher a little bit lower volume five units in and quite detuned well we can add a little bit of attack to this but uh for now i'm not going to because i'm just going to have it sitting in um in this loop here i don't want to keep on rising in with the attack [Music] and i want to make a minor chord so i'm going to go the f sharp [Music] and i'll do this i'll do the c sharp on this lower octave [Music] turn on here volume and i'm going to grab a reverb so i'm going to grab this reverb and really help soften the sound of this little bit it's really really sharp sounding so i'm going to crank that reverb up put a filter on it [Music] there's some chorus [Music] cool and then i'll grab an eq and just throw that on the pad as well it's gonna give us a bit of atmosphere so that's the next thing that we have to start to focus on is we already have the kicking base we have the groove we need some atmosphere to give it that melodic houston techno vibe that eerie sort of vibe [Music] cool next we can dive into a lead sound so let's go ahead and grab another serum you guessed it so for this lead sound i'm going to do like a a pluck with another sawtooth just to keep it really simple for us and i'm going to add a bit of unison a little bit of detune horse layer filter envelope two [Music] change the decay and sustain makes a little bit longer [Music] okay so this one we're actually gonna add that fifth seven semitones and quite a bit of d2 actually and i'm going to add an lfo onto the actual fine pitch a little bit of vibrato and we have this simple simple lead nothing too special maybe go up an octave [Music] i like it where it is okay this is where the magic comes in that makes it sound really really nice and what we're gonna do is just simply add in some um reverb and delay so i'll do that with another echo or i can just do this with uh let's go with another echo actually let's go with delay oops [Music] and one go ping pong [Music] okay great so let's listen to the track and i want to start to write a lead but say you're not good at writing leads uh say you're not gonna be staying in key you don't know your scales very well and things like that what you can do is grab a midi scale uh a midi effect called scale so i'm gonna search scale and i'm gonna look down here there's a c minor f major i have f sharp minor here so what i did is i went to the c minor i drag and drop that on and then i just change the bass root note to an f sharp that's the track uh to keep the track that i'm in so now what happens is every time you play a note on your keyboard which i have to my left you know you can't see it but on the left i have this keyboard and when i play these notes i can show you inside of the piano roll here when i play these notes it's going to change them to what they are inside of the scale to match an f sharp minor so if i play the b and the c it plays the same note so if i go maybe to an e then an f sharp but the f is the same as the e so it's just that make sure that you're always writing in uh in key in the scale that you want to be writing it so f sharp minor is what i want to be writing in and when i play on the keyboard i can't play a wrong note inside the key which is is really great for writing melodies so we can go ahead and play [Music] pretty cool right next what you can do is add an arpeggio or an arpeggiator and we're going to add that onto the serum and this is actually really really great when they work together so i'm going to change this to re-trigger on the beat and the beat is going to be 1 8. so now when i play if i play really really fast on the keyboard not sure if you can hear it playing really really fast it's only going to play on the eighth notes and it says stay quantized with the song this is really great for if you uh you know have latency issues so if i play [Music] it's gonna be perfectly on time and one last thing that we can do here is put on our repeats here this is gonna sound pretty cool [Music] maybe i'll go to sixteenths [Music] cool and then we can just start recording whoops i'll put on my repeats let's do three ah let's do four [Music] try it again sounds all right [Music] then you can play around with your arpeggio a little bit more maybe add some steps [Music] then of course if you want to you can automate this as well which is really cool so we'll save that for a little bit later we'll go up to maybe two steps on the second phrase here and then right here we can go to let's go all the way to four that'll be crazy okay and then let's duplicate this um actually you know instead of duplicating it let's duplicate everything else and let's record over the second portion here and maybe change up the melody a little bit whoops start from here get this as well [Music] cool so we listen to the whole thing [Music] cool not the uh not the catchiest melody but for the sake of time we're just going to leave that as it is it is something pretty interesting so far so add a little bit more to this lead i'm going to make it a little bit more interesting let's add an lfo2 um already have it to the the fine pitch here um we could add a bit to the pan [Music] slow that down [Music] and a little bit to the cutoff as well just a very slight amount cool and i want to detune it even more i want it to be even more wide sounding and then last not least i'm going to add some white noise to it [Music] i definitely want to put the envelope on there as well [Music] okay cool so now we have a pretty good lead going on um and what we can start to work on next is the drums so obviously we have our kick and bass everything good let us start with the most simple thing um just a hi-hat so we go drum bus or a drum rack sorry and uh let's add the off hat first because it's just going to be the most grooviest i think um so let's go type in hat what i like to do uh and i've done videos on this as well uh too much tutorial on this is i like to grab a bunch of hats and just drop them all into my drum rack and then see what fits best by cycling through them so let's do oops ah where'd it go here we go [Music] so i actually like that one a lot um we'll keep that one for now let's set up a loop here and then i'm going to cycle through them by going into the actual midi information and cycling through [Music] oops [Music] okay so these are actually pretty nice i'm gonna keep this one and then i'm going to add a second little hat here turn the velocity down [Music] cool that's good like that i'm going to extract i like to actually extract my um my chains from here so i'm gonna go and um open up the chains list and it's this one here i'm going to extract chains and then i'm going to name this one at one let's keep my hats yellow and now we have our drum rack again so i did like some of the other hats in here and what i'm gonna do with these hats is i'm gonna make them a little bit more interesting i kind of shake a groove but a cool technique is actually adding a few different hats and uh and then kind of messing with them that way so i'm going to make the minute track a little bit longer let's go back to let's go actually we'll see at 16. like this one that one and that one okay okay cool so these three hats so i'm gonna get rid of everything else so this one can go cool and then we just mess with these a little bit to all right make this a little longer throw it in the loop [Music] the idea is that we're adding these little hats as like accent pieces like they're they're not the main uh the main groove they're kind of just there to complement it and uh of course you can do more things with this you can pan these differently um you can do uh you know let's let's filter out some high end of it actually and of course my filter is from low end as well [Music] and i love the house effect stereo width drag them on as well oh that is not the right one nice and one last thing that we can do is add a little bit of delay um actually we have a return track here i'm just going to add it on to there um actually no i'll add it right on to this just so we can get a real good strong groove out of this one [Music] and then we can send it for a little bit of reverb i'm just sending this to the reverb track so i'm getting a little bit of reverb on it actually i won't use sends just i don't want to confuse anybody uh i will use a reverb on the actual channel cool uh next we can do a clap so i'll do well first i'll do a snare i like this one and i'm going to layer up two snares together so i have my dramaac we'll call this one hat accents and then we'll do another um and we'll do clap snare i like to make my snares orange hats yellow excuse me let's get rid of that okay get rid of all this information here and drag and drop that onto uh this chain here and then try and find a nice snare ah sorry nice clap after this i like that one we'll go with that one okay and another trick i'm going to show you right now is if i go into the i o to the ins and outs i can actually change this so it says receive and play f2 and g2 so i'm going to change this one also to f2 and now what's going to happen is both on f2 both these instruments are going to play at the same time so i'm going to get rid of the processing i have here the delay and the haas effect and let's meet this one over here cool um and then i'm gonna eq out some of that clap because i don't like the low end there and the clap is a little bit too long for me so i'm going to fade out just a little bit of the tail okay and go into the eq of the snare because i do want to layer these together i want them to fit perfectly i want the punchness of the snare the crispness of that hat screw them together cool they work well together and then let's hear how it sounds like together so first without the clap and then with oops cool it sounds pretty good um i'm trying to think one more thing that we could add to make this more complete would be maybe like an arp or something that is going to kind of carry the rhythm a little bit further than the bass and um the lead so if we don't have the lead per se and you want more than just the the the baseline uh let us go to another serum and drag that down to here and i'm going to do like a nice soft attack arp so i'm going to grab um my arpeggio again or my arpeggiator and i'm going to play that minor chord again [Music] okay and the eighths are fine repeat doesn't need to repeat i'm going to put three trigger synced onto the beat so that it stays on top of the track filter and this is um essentially what i'm gonna do actually instead of instead of re doing all this i'm just going to grab this serum and i'm gonna duplicate it and then in this one we have the arpeggio already we have the c minor scale which is actually f sharp minor and we have the delay so that will save you some time here and the main thing i'm going to do to make this uh a different sound and more of a wafty sound is just increase the attack a little bit so let's listen to how it sounds on its own um just going to draw this out really quick [Music] okay and [Music] how much that way now is off as well i don't even want the white noise and that gives us like a nice wafty arp let's listen to it in the context of the track a little bit too much attack so it sounds kind of offbeat i'm actually going to take off that [Music] i go back to where i was that sounded really good i kind of just messed it up there so i want to go back to where i [Music] was [Music] there we go i'm actually put this up uh another note here i'm gonna go up [Music] i want to make it a little bit more uh interesting in the actual melody of things i'm just gonna rely on the same minor chord i'm gonna bring this down i get this to work properly so these don't line up properly for the arpeggio to work properly and then we should be done [Music] then now with the lead the problem i'm seeing now is that we have a lot in the high end actually so i'm going to maybe drop this down a full octave and see if that fixes that there is a lot of uh high-end melody going on with the pads and this so let's drop this down an octave to see i'm also going to turn off the the fifth there um okay so i am seeing that there is a lot of high information going on we don't necessarily need that for here because it's going to kind of cloud up this is actually quite quite a good way to kind of intertwine melodies so we have this melody and we also have this melody so they actually they sit together quite nicely um again i would definitely definitely go in with some eq and make sure that they're not taking up too much uh of each other's space let's do that really quickly so i have this eq here you can see it's at that low end here [Music] all right let me throw a compressor on this hat here just to wrap things up i want this to be nice uh because it's pretty punchy hat i'm gonna compress it so that it's not so punchy and i get more of that tail end duplicate that and i'm gonna put a really hard ratio with a really low attack fast attack rather try to take off that last tail end all right and what i'm going to do now is just kind of just kind of arrange it just a little bit so that we have just a little bit of a track here um just to give us an idea of how it could be kind of built [Music] and then here [Music] we'll automate the volume of this a little bit [Music] so we have our sub coming in there that's fine our base come on there we go almost done here automate the cutoff a little bit [Music] i'm going to kick out here make a little breakdown and then we will be finished [Music] um [Music] [Music] [Music] so and that is pretty much it alright guys thanks so much for watching i hope you enjoyed the video if you have any other track genre styles that you want me to cover definitely comment in the comment section below and i will do my best to replicate those styles and replicate those genres and make a video for you if you're new to the channel make sure to subscribe and if you like this video give me a thumbs up

Channel: Dowden Production Academy

Views: 12,637

Keywords: Fl studio, Ableton, Live, 10, Tutorial, Tips, Two, Minute, Tutorials, Producer, Production, Music, Produce, Compression, Techniques, EQ, Equalizer, DAW, DJ, House Music, Progressive House, Deep House, Learn, Dowden, Academy, Reverb, Plugin, VST, Bit Rate, Delay, Effect, saturation, compressor, eqaulizer, eq, equalization, drums, snare, clap, hat, hats, hihat, dance, groove, how to, make, music, like, artbat, monolink, tale of us, afterlife, records, moonwalk, camelphat, melodic house & techno, melodic techno, house, steyoyoke

Id: 8H_UNWGohYE

Length: 45min 14sec (2714 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 12 2020