How to Make Music Like: Guy J *Project & Presets Download*

hey everybody my name is dowden and in this video we're going to be learning how to make music like guy jay this is a highly requested video that i'm really excited to share with you first we're going to be looking at the bass line which is a little bit intricate but very groovy and exciting then we're going to look at the detailed drums and the heavy layers of percussive elements that are used in gaijin's tracks last we're going to be looking at the melodies that give this type of progressive house and especially guy jay his identity okay so i'm going to get started but before i do i wanted to kind of explain how this video is going to work it's a little bit different than some of the other how to make music videos that i have and the reason being is this one is pretty complicated uh when the tracks are overly complicated and it has a ton of information i would rather give you the best quality of an explanation that i can give you instead of actually writing out the track um i will show you all the different instruments all the effects i'm using and the sounds that i'm using i'll include it in the download of the actual file the project file the any samples that i can give to you i will and uh any um any of the pads and sounds that maybe you don't have the synths for i'll bounce that out to audio so you can still hear what it sounds like in the project i would have liked to rewrite the track along with you but i think it would just take too much time because there is a lot going on there's a lot of layers and it did take me quite a while to kind of make everything fit and sit properly because the track is so intricate and that's one of the things that we love about guy j is that this tracks have just so much information in them but it all just fits so so nicely and it just makes for really really good music let's go ahead and get started i'm going to go through every channel from top to bottom and explain how i was able to either create this sound or resample the sound to make different different pads and different instruments and things like that and the importance of each of these layers the first thing i'm going to show you is the kick and the kick is very important in terms of the style of music for being really really nice and punchy without being too overpowering in the sub this progressive that's a bit more floaty and a bit more groovy and it's not so uh you know choppy it's more a full on long kind of progression and it's a full-on kind of sound where nothing really stands out that that much it's not like it's very very powerful sound here and very powerful sound here it's a lot of instruments coming together and because there's so many instruments a nice punchy kick can really help drive it through the mix so let's listen to this kick real quick it's three layers here and i will actually combine this into one so you can have the sample uh for your project but it's just gonna be this kick here layered with this one and then some eq and then i'll actually add a compressor on top of that as well which i forgot to do just really really hard and slight compression just to kind of glue it all together really really subtle and i'm putting a fast attack time because i want to grab the instant transients i want to grab the immediate sound here i don't want any peaks kind of getting through and then i'll just boost that by maybe one db only 1.5 it's pretty probably going to be inaudible uh it's just kind of to make sure that the kick is not peaking anywhere and that it's a little bit more flat uh in terms of the transients it's all kind of one sound okay pretty pretty basic um the three layered kicks i just took this bottom end and a little bit of the high end of this one i took the mid of this one around 400 hertz 500 hertz up to about 1.5 2000 and then this layer i just took this kind of the same thing don't want that low end so i'm just gonna like that and now we have the high end of this click mid maybe a little bit lower and then the bass and the punch a lot of punch in terms of this kick can usually come around the 100 to 200 mark but you also have to be careful that if you push it up too much you kind of get a little bit of boxiness let me take a little bit over here it's already pretty punchy as is so i'm not gonna put too much eq on that but if you find that your kick is lacking a little bit of punch it could be because of this area here it's just lacking a little bit it kind of uh especially with these kicks it's a really short almost like a stab of that mid octave bass 100 maybe 80 hertz to 150 200 hertz uh a really nice punch can sometimes come from that especially in progressive where it's like that that punch just hits really quick and it's just enough to really bring that kick forward in the mix usually the sample selection plays a really big part of that as well so choosing the right uh sampled kicks that are punchy already will be a way easier than trying to make your kicks punchy in the long run okay moving on to the base the bass is uh has quite a few layers here and when you're working with your base in terms of gaijin tracks and these progressive house tracks you want a lot of layers usually because you want it to be very interesting to the listener and you uh want it to sound really intricate but not overdoing it so it's really important to make sure that the bass lines that you have are groovy that they're catchy and they're hooky and you're not just putting in a bunch of layers just to fill in empty space but on the other hand if you put too little or too much it can sound either overcrowded or not really interesting enough i personally put quite a few layers in this one so let's take a listen to it and then let's do it as is and then break down each of the layers [Music] along with the kick let's go to this part here without the kick so you can hear that it's groovy and it's catchy it has quite a few hooks inside of it so let's break it down a little bit more i'll open this up we can take a look at the midi information let's go to the first layer here so this is the base top and this is going to be the high end of the base uh that is going to be more noticeable to the ear and it's going to carry most of the tonal weight but if you notice that it's not the exact same as my sub here so my sub goes like this so that's my base line that's the main part of the base we have the kick and the bases listen to just those two together again i'll shrink this kick down very froggy bass line you hear in a lot of songs now it has some harmonic information as well so if we look at the sound we have our sub here we can turn this off and listen just the high end of this the sub bass here it's still very subby i didn't realize how much sub it actually has on it there but just in case we have this extra side here to give it a little bit more volume but this sound itself is full of harmonic content you can see the waveform itself it's the monster one inside of serum uh it has a ton of harmonic content so we have uh a lot going on to give it a sense of depth and in terms of being able to actually hear it come through the speakers if we're not just using just a solid sine wave for the sub base which you definitely could use but adding this harmonic content gives us a little bit more oomph and it comes through just a little bit harder but we have to be careful because if you look closely you can see there's some bumps around here as well let me make sure we key i'm in here so i'm in i'm in d so if we look at the sub we have right here this really hard to turn this down for a sec we have this really high frequency in d right here d 36.5 hertz then we go up and the octave will have another d and then we'll have another octave here right here for d so those are all good because we're adding that sub layer we're adding that mid bass then we're adding another layer of sub of bass rather but i don't know why i've taken this up this should actually be down uh right here we have a little bit of content on the harmonic on the a and then we have it again here and because it is uh it's in the same key as the d is the d minor it's still gonna sound pleasant but it's gonna muddy up our mix a little bit because we're having too many strong bass notes you have these bass notes that you know your sub frequencies you should really only be having that one main sub frequency because you don't want to be competing for sub frequencies so uh what i would do is i would actually just make sure that i'm cutting out this information here i don't want that low sub a i'm going to duplicate this because i really want to make sure that i'm removing as much of that information as i can and i'll definitely go back in when i'm doing my final mixing stages and really making sure that we're not getting any issues here maybe use a stronger eq that can remove more information um and then right here i have this a i'm not so worried about this a because it is a bit higher and i can kind of get away with it but i am going to actually remove a little bit more [Music] as well from there so let me open up this one number three make this really narrow and i'm going to remove a little bit of that a where'd it go right here and i'll replicate that again here number three and remove that a you can see all the little harmonics here as well they're very quiet but they are adding a bit of richness and i'll show you what the difference is but just by i'll cut out all the sound here i'll do the same for this one that's more pure it has just the sub uh sine wave here and then the octave and then a little bit of information here try and get rid of all of it there so we're just listening to the two but i want a little bit of that harmonic content um there we go back to where we were and that's gonna help us keep our mix just a little bit cleaner okay moving on to the next sound okay so i have this bass accent we can listen to it you see that has a bit of sub content so i want to remove that sub content because i don't want it to interfere with the other sound but if you look closely it's not actually hitting the same time as the sub so we can leave a little bit of bass content in there it's not going to interfere too much it's there just to give it a little bit of an accent and that's what's important when we're writing these bass lines like i mentioned is keeping them interesting and making sure that we're not just adding random notes in but we're adding notes that help it maintain that groove that keep it rolling like keep it interesting last we have this last accent here [Music] just a pluck i'll actually show you how this pluck was made uh really quickly inside serum it's just a preset apology that i tweaked a little bit pretty simple it just has a filter on here uh some delay i actually turned the delay off so i can just get rid of that it's just with some multi-bank compression and this filter on here we can hear without much different and then the oscillators are just this four zero eight eight one and then i'm not really sure what this oscillator is here but um just two oscillators on with this filter cut off um being attenuated with this envelope two so without that and then with and envelope one just looks like this so i will include these into the uh the project file um but i won't go into the nitty gritty of every single synth um i won't recreate every single synth because it would just take too much time for this this video but i will show you basically how the sounds are made then we have this other accent like i showed you [Music] again adding value to that sound adding value to the baseline it's catchy it's groovy just make sure that when you're writing these bass lines you're choosing the right uh the right placement and arrangement of these sounds so that it's interesting it makes you want to bob your head it makes you want to dance uh to make this sound just a simple pluck i probably yep i use ampology again it's a really nice it's a really nice preset that i start with a lot of the time because it already has the plus kind of built into it with the envelopes and the amplitude and the filtering and then i just change out some of the wave table positions here oh sorry the wave table so this is sludge crank and this is the 4088 again [Music] moving on to our drums the bread and butter of guy j tracks are his percussive elements his drums are always so on point to get these progressive house drums you need a lot of groove a lot of swing and you need a lot of airiness but also enough punch that is carrying the track so let's listen to the drums on their own in the full the full area here and then again with the kick there's a lot to cover so let's just go ahead and jump right in we have this hat that is wide this is uh one of the more important elements of the the hi-hats and the percussive elements in here and this because this wide hi-hat is really good at making it sound more interesting and really really nice to the ear pleasant to the ear if you're using headphones or speakers not so much in mono but it's that nice wide spread that's going to give it a bit of swing because it's using a stereo delay it's not going to be exactly on time it's going to be a little bit delayed on that stereo delay from either the left or the right ear and i'll show you that right here with this hash effect so that is delaying 24.1 milliseconds from left to right so it's going to play in the left then 24.1 milliseconds it's going to play in the right and this is going to make it sound nice and wide and also give us a little bit of that swing if we look at the midi information i also have this second hat and the velocity is really low on these nodes and they're there just to give it a little bit more of a swingy organic feel a little bit more interesting to the ear that is also really important in making these tracks really great it's having these little accents these little little things here and there that are so subtle that you don't really hear them until you take so many of them away or put so many in that it's just it's almost like you don't pick up on them they're ghost notes but they're there and they make it much more interesting so we can listen with and without and see if you can notice the difference obviously you can notice the difference but you can pick up that with those little notes it's a little bit more swingy and a little more interesting so again the white hat is going to be important because it's going to give us a sense of that width and then allow us to have a more mono or centered hi-hat to give us that punch so what i've done here is uh actually one more thing i want to note is that i did put a vocoder on this hi-hat and let's listen with them without the vocoder big difference so this is doing is actually filtering out a lot of that low end and then rising up in the high end and then i've added this release to 329 milliseconds so this makes the sound have a little bit more tail end this hat's pretty punchy we kind of want to filter out the first you know thousand maybe the bands going up pretty high the first half or three quarters of that sound to be filtered out so we're just getting that nice high end because we don't need that punchiness or that lower section of the sound because we're gonna have that in the rest of our hat here in the punch hat i don't need to use a vocoder for this you can actually use an eq but with the vocoder i can add this release and it gives me more tail end to that sound which makes it more of a long hat okay moving on to the punch hat this one is uh two hats actually so if we listen to the one nice and punchy crispy hat not much going on here just some eq filtering with that low end but what's important is adding this second little groovy swingy hat and it's just the exact same hat but the only difference is i've added a bit of fade in and i've moved this up so that it's just the tail and the back uh like the last three quarters of the sound and that's just so we don't get that punchiness twice if it's the punches twice it's a little bit too abrupt and then with the fade in a little bit more uh subtle a little bit calmer and it's not so aggressive going into the shaker groove so i use loops a lot of the time for the shaker groove because there is some really really really great loops that i just don't have the patience or the skill to make as good as these people that make these sample packs they spend a lot a lot of time and practice making these amazing sample packs this is a pml shaker and it just sounds great it's got a lot of swing to it i also have a vocoder on it i'll turn that off and then the vocoder just to give it a bit more crispiness and make it my own next is going to be this shaker accent and this is going to give it just a little bit of low end uh nothing too crazy and then if you look at the actual midi information i have this velocity on here this velocity is going to change the velocity of the the hi-hat so that it plays a little bit different every single note and that's with the random setting here so we turn this random setting off it's going to be the same repeated four notes and we can look at the midi information you can see quiet halfway high halfway quiet and that's a pretty common groove kind of like a wave uh but with this velocity plug-in this midi effect it's going to give it a bit of randomness as well so now we have this 21 it's going to allow those velocity notes to move up and down randomly and around i'm assuming 21 of the time or is it 21 of the velocity information so that gives it a little bit more of an organic realistic feel it's a bit more random now then we have the shaker wide i have this hi-hat here and i've just taken the sample of an open hi-hat filtered out a lot of the low end compressed it auto pan has effects this is that stereo delay i was talking about let's listen with them without much wider and then i have that fade in so without the fade in and without this being kind of pulled up here it's much more aggressive but with the fade in and it moved up here it's much calmer more subtle more of a shaker sound and this compressor is actually a sidechain compression for the kicks when the kick's hitting that click is coming through on that kick and it's kind of pushing down those shakers to make it a little bit more groovy as well so it's like shh right when that kick's hitting it's that's the way it was supposed to go so it's a little bit quieter when the kick hits and then it comes back up in volume and it's a little bit quieter and it kind of gives it a swing feel as well moving on to our clap actually let's listen to all of these sounds individually with and without so we have all the shakers and the hats moving at the same time let's take a listen record right lots of information going on uh lots of instruments but they're all in their own place they're all doing something that's adding value to the loop next we have our clap and the clap is super simple just clap two claps it looks like that i've layered up but if you look closely i've actually nudged one forward a little bit to make it a little bit uh more interesting to the ear so it's a little bit like two claps going on at the same time it's a little bit more interesting a little trickier to the ear and then i've added this erosion plug-in and then i've sent the claps to the erosion plug into the erosion let's turn it off and on and see the difference it's very subtle but it's adding a bit more crunch to the clap using this erosion tool so it's a it's essentially a distortion uh filtering plug-in it's giving just a little bit of um an oomph to these claps i actually do a two-minute tutorial on erosion so you can check that out and i get the full breakdown of using erosion but it's just adding a bit of uh mid weight to these claps uh pretty simple there's not really too much going on with the clap aside from that and let's go into the percussions i have i think it's just two here so i have very simple this is just one layer of many so again if we listen with uh we just turn the metronome on for now you can hear that it's groovy again that it's not just randomly placed that it has its place in the loop you always want to make sure at least in my opinion that when you're adding something it is you know to benefit the loop and it's not just to fill space so if you just throw these in randomly it's not going to sound nearly as good let's try it maybe over here right doesn't sound nearly as good as okay moving on to the perk roll so this is a little uh filtered loop that i got and i didn't make this myself but it is a loop that sounds like what they did is just took a bunch of claps and maybe some toms and some slapping noises played them along and then put an auto filter on that uh i also added my own effects so i compressed it and let's turn everything off let's group this all together and listen without it's a lot of low end very dynamic with this i took the eq i took out the low end i pushed up the high end i compressed it so it's less dynamic a little bit more fl flat sounding uh which is sometimes what you want and then multiband dynamics to uh really change the sound as well and then some more eq okay uh and let's listen to the difference that just this one percussive loop makes to the entire drum loop it's actually a really really important part of this loop pretty big difference so the percussive elements are giving it that rolling feeling it's giving it that that bit of mid section that's kind of uh unique to the to the track it kind of stands out in a way that makes your track sound different than any other track by not just relying on shaker's hi-hats and a clap there's some percussive elements there too but this perk roll as i called it it's very interesting to hear to listen to and guide you does this in a lot of his tracks he does this in pretty much every track a lot of his ids especially more of his club oriented tracks he puts these weird percussive loops these weird things in the background people talking things like that and it makes it really interesting to the ear and really groovy so i definitely suggest doing this for your own tracks grabbing random loops playing things in groovy fashion and then recording them and putting them in the background okay moving on to the toms this is important to note as well when you're putting in toms and bongos and things of the thing of that nature it can really help elevate your track to have it uh tonal so have it in the tone of the track the key of the track and if you listen to these toms they're not just random toms they actually uh they actually accent the track in a way by being in key with the track you can see the tuner down here is that d and it's that total weight that that elevates the track whoops sorry i'll listen to the drums and the kick in the bass so having that in the same key is going to kind of let the listener know even before any of the other notes are in play just the drums we can even turn the bass off you can already have an idea of what the tone is going to be at the track and the key very progressive very very popular for uh progressive houses those little toms there moving on to the synths so now there it actually isn't too too much going on with the since for the most part a lot of this track is percussive driven but there are some really important elements in in the actual rhythm of the track that are due to these rhythmic plucks so i've noticed this in a lot of guys tracks that he does um not just percussive elements to keep the rhythm going but he uses plucks or pads and things of that nature to keep the the melodic side of it forward as well as the rhythm so let's take a listen to this plex here [Music] they're quiet they're subtle but if you listen to it in the context of the track they're just ear candy they're they're just in the background right now at the beginning of the track and it sets the tone of the track it gives you the key of the track gives you the vibe of the track and it is really just there to keep the listener engaged and interesting and it sets a precedent for the track uh so as the track progresses it opens up the filter a little bit [Music] it's really really simple all it is is this little kind of rp type sound that i made just going from c down to a up to c and then d [Music] lots of delay on there and it's just a simple simple wave table shape sawtooth wave here with some filtering and then i have in the matrix filter going in the amplitude envelope too so it's just a little a little bit of a plucky sound that is inside of the wave table super simple to make and i will include that of course in the the project file some other elements that are kind of progressively uh well they are progressively they're almost drums i guess is this up thing and i i believe i include this in another video that i did where i just recorded myself saying the word up i don't know why but it worked out and this is what it sounds like has a hass effect on it which is that stereo delay and the reason i eq here is to get that resonant frequency and really push it up going back to the rhythmic plex here i have the eq uh this is some mid side eq so i'm pushing the sides of the stereo mix and i am reducing the um these mid of the signal in both the sides and the mid and that's going to make it sound wider while retaining um the mid information that i have here and it's going to sound hopefully sound really good in both mono and stereo due to this then i have some compression which i don't even think i'm using uh no it doesn't look like it and then uh replica which is just a delay plug-in so i'll i'll swap that out for an actual delay before i export it uh for you next we have these what i just called noises and uh the best way that i can describe these are just little atmospheres in the background little sounds that are gonna make the sound more interesting guy does this a lot especially in his darker tracks where he takes really creepy eerie sounds and throws them in randomly and it just uh it just elevates the track a lot and it's it's really really cool so we'll just take a listen to a couple of these so i i don't remember exactly how i made those but i'm pretty confident that i used uh a uh delay plug-in granular or the grain delay and it's just a delay plug-in that you can put different noise uh different sounds on i use it in one of the other sounds uh going forward so i'll dive into it a little bit more once we get there but it just it gives you a ton of pre um a ton of parameters that you can mess around with and make really interesting and really creepy sounding uh sounds and then you can just throw percussive elements in there and re-record them going on to the pad here this is a preset and massive that i've tweaked a little bit [Music] and then i have my eq'ing and then vocoder [Music] not really what the vocoder is on there for so i'm probably just gonna remove that okay moving on to the fill pad so the the fill pads are there to uh carry the melody of the track a lot of these tracks uh they won't just rely on lead sounds they'll rely on little atmospheric pla pads and plucks and things in the background that are carrying the track a lot of these tracks are like seven to nine minutes long and the reason for that is that they can maintain that interest by doing things like adding these pads so if i go in and just take a listen to this very angelic sounding [Music] and 90 of that is from the reaper plug-in so i'll get rid of the round uh just the reverb here without reverb end with right it's a pigments preset uh ancient beings and i believe i added a second i might have added the second engine on here but i can't remember uh usually what i like to do when i use presets is i like to tweak them i like to make them my own um putting different wave tables different uh sounds in there and i can't remember if i did it with this one but uh something that i recommend you do as well so you're not just grabbing presets out of the box and using them make them your own add a lot of effects and processing to them so that they're not just you know you're not just taking presets and writing tracks with them but in this day and age there is you know so many amazing presets it'd be kind of silly not to use them but definitely do learn how to make your own presets so that you don't rely totally on them a little disclaimer uh so yeah these these little fill pads they're just making sure that you're in the right key this isn't this is a d and i think it's c yeah c a g just keeping in the right key of the track and just literally just play along the track just play the track grab your keyboard right playing different notes and then just recording them either by clicking record here or putting in an audio track and just recording a bunch of different sounds that's what i actually love to do and that's what i did down here so i took different pads i just show you really quickly what we can do it's actually a really great great exercise so let's go let's rename this one to pad resampling and then what you're going to do is just grab uh we'll just duplicate this one for now get rid of the midi information we don't need that and just go into this pad and we're going to record here and change this one to the where is it full pad 2 hit record hit record here and then we're just going to arm both the tracks and then just play something [Music] okay and now we have this audio sample and all i did was put a pigments in there choose a random preset and put a ton of reverb and delay on there then i go in here change the preset grabs anything i saw it coming sure hear how it sounds cool that's another sound then go back hit record [Music] not the best example but you get the idea now we have this second pad when we're playing the track that again [Music] cool now we have another sound let's put that into the uh this delay and reverb here [Music] there you go now you have these two sounds to work with you know what i'll keep that in just for the sake of it sounds good believe this one the two why not so it's it's a great it's great practice to uh not even practice really it's a great technique to get a lot of sounds inside of your tracks that you can use as these atmospheres just testing all these different presets and different sounds that you can make different vocal samples different percussive elements throwing a ton of reverb and delay on it and then resampling it and then adding it later and uh that's definitely what a lot of progressive artists do that's definitely what i'm assuming guy j does because in a lot of his tracks he has these really really interesting sounds that come and go throughout the track um going back up to this pad 2 here we have [Music] this right here so uh this is something that i definitely want to touch on so again going back to what we just did by resampling something what you can do now is insert a midi track grab a sampler throw that in there and then grab that audio and throw it in the sampler and now when you play the sampler you play these different notes [Music] right but the beauty of this is that you can make some really cool atmospheric pads by doing something with the sustain mode so we have the sustain on here and we're going to create a loop and then we have a crossfade and now this is going to kind of loop back and forth [Music] and we've created a pad with this resampled pad that we have here and then we can play chords with that as well if we want to then you add a ton of reverb onto there and you've just created yourself an even better pad and it's moving it's organic it's kind of modulating back and forth and you can add modulation as well make things even more interesting to that pad but that's what i did here okay moving on to we'll get rid of this pad resampling we don't need that anymore these are some pads that i just recorded in the way that i just showed you and then going further you can actually take them and transpose them it's not just the same pad but i've duplicated it and then transposed it down a whole octave and then now we have two pads two atmospheres [Music] and this is being sent to this delay right here and that has a huge feedback of 90 percent we're getting near the end we're almost done and we're gonna kind of just let the track play out and explain uh some things about the track being played out okay we have this i call it poc because it's just like a i don't know it sounds like a robot's version of a [Music] just a percussive element i made i put some heavy compression on it with zero attack because i don't want it to be uh oh nevermind it's being sidechained oh because it's hitting at the same time as the kick so if you listen i don't want to affect how the kick sounds so i'm side chain compressing i'm going to do a little bit more actually okay and uh moving on to we have all these atmospheres here so these are all just sounds that i put in the background [Music] same as before just different pad sounds that i've recorded and just put out put throughout the track to make it more interesting they're pretty quiet they're uh definitely just there to add a bit of variance to the track uh then i have my white noise which is pretty self-explanatory um and that is it i have this big delay just another another one of these atmospheres here okay so oh the last thing that i didn't actually touch on was this pigments here um just another pad that i've chosen and that's in the breakdown we'll get to that in a minute [Music] and that's just uh another element that you can add somewhere in which i did it in the breakdown uh to make it a bit more of a breakdown and to give it a bit more to the track hey everybody i just want to take a second to interrupt the video to let you know about the online monthly coaching one-on-one lessons and online production courses that i have to offer i offer one-on-one video lessons via skype so we can work on your track feedback mixing mastering anything that you want to learn we can tackle in a one-on-one video call session monthly coaching includes these video sessions as well as email feedback free downloads among other things and the online courses are a learn at your own pace method that you can dive into and take as long as you need and go back as often as you want to learn as well check the description below for a link to those as well as some free downloads in the description as well i do have this lead sound as well this lead sound is the same rhythmic plugs here but now it's more of a lead it's more aggressive it's more uh energetic i'm gonna filter out a little bit more as it's building up from the track and then i'm going to have it play out in the drop so we haven't listened to a lot of the track in most of this video so we're going to listen to this now and i'm going to uh explain parts of the track that i chose to do as i'm going go ahead and listen uh actually before we listen i'm going to explain something that i did in the actual breakdown you can see the automation here taking the kick out of the breakdown and as the breakdown is opening back up into the build up and then into the actual drop of the track you can see that this base accent is getting a little bit louder so when you're making tracks and you want to make them a bit more interesting you don't always have to be adding new elements new sims news leads and things like that you can just change the sounds that you already have so i've made this pluck uh open up and cut off and you'll hear how it sounds and that gives it uh just like another element to the actual drop but without adding a you know a whole nother sound because sometimes when you add too much it can take away from the track it takes away from the story of the track of course the opposite can happen too if you don't put too much in the track then that can happen and let me tell you guy jay puts a lot of stuff in his tracks but dang he's good at it and uh it works for him but okay let's take a listen to the entire track and i'll just try to give maybe a couple notes as we're listening through [Music] so so we're keeping it interesting we're adding in that extra element some atmospheres [Music] another element [Music] [Music] there's a small break down here just taking out and bringing back in slowly introducing more and more elements and those atmospheres are just carrying the track keeping it interesting telling the story of the track [Music] another pad coming in with some automation turning it up slowly [Music] adding the second lead accent keeping it more interesting building the track using the same [Music] the same melody just another layer [Music] and we also have this shaker that we've added to make it a little bit more interesting [Music] all these little atmospheres adding [Music] depth this lead is getting more and more open with the cutoff filter to keep that track progressing forward keeping it interesting cut out the kick to make it a transition into the breakdown filtering out the drums putting a little bit of delay on the drums you can hear that again here we're sending it for delay [Applause] that's a good transition into the breakdown [Music] [Music] [Music] so you'll hear this lead building up and you'll also hear that base accent kind of opening up to make it more interesting in the actual drop [Music] and then i have this lead coming up to kind of carry the track as the lead does so [Music] and in the uh in the full version of the track i would have this go a little bit longer but for the sake of time in the video i shortened it a little bit and uh when i do finish this track because it will be one of my tracks uh definitely um i definitely will have this uh go a little bit longer as well so uh last thing that i wanted to touch on um is the drum buss that i have here that i didn't talk about i didn't talk about all the buses so i have the bass bus uh just a multi-band dynamics on here so it's just going to be just like squishing the three bands the top mid and the low and then adding some value to them adding some gain clipping a little bit so i'm going to reduce that and then my drum buss here i have a glue compressor and this is really important too because the glue compressor really helps glue all these sounds together obviously but it's really great for just making all of the drums and the top end sound very very together and very very fluent and uh it just really helps it sound like one solid layer i know that sounds pretty obvious but there is a quite a big difference between having it off and on i find it just really brings it a bit more to life even though it's actually technically squishing the dynamics of it it does sound a little bit more progressive is that an adjective i can use i'm using it then we have this gentle squeeze preset it's just going to squeeze that top a little bit more and compress a little bit more i usually take this off this is just for my playback i might use a second compressor a second compressor but i'll usually take this off and then uh on my base i also have the sidechain compression from the kick so when the kick is hitting it's going to be reducing the entire bass bus so that the kick can punch through a little bit better i've included the project file for you to download in the description below so that you can take this track and make it something of your own using your own samples and some of your own sounds as well i've also included the presets but if you don't have the synths that i'll be using inside the video that's fine you can just use the exported audio of those exact stems that i have alright everybody thanks so much for watching i hope you enjoyed the video if you're new to the channel make sure to subscribe with notifications on if you liked this video and learned something make sure to give me a thumbs up you can also comment below any artists genres labels or styles that you'd like me to cover and i will consider them and potentially do them in the next video

Channel: Dowden Production Academy

Views: 11,330

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, guy j, lost, found, sudbeat

Id: 7W144ENA3PY

Length: 52min 28sec (3148 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 28 2021