How To Melodic House - 7 Elements of Anjunadeep (Yotto, Lane 8)

[Music] hey guys my name is bound to divide and i'm here today with production music live to break down what i believe to be essential components of an anjuna deep style melodic house track now there is no rule for what what sounds and what elements you need to fill out a track like this however i know that there's a lot of beginners out there who want to make this sound or the style and they kind of just get stuck and their tracks feel empty and they're not sure what to add um and how to add it so this is more for the beginner who just wants to dive in and make some and june deep style melodic house i'll play you the loop that we have and then afterwards we'll break it down and it sounds like this [Music] okay so first and foremost i always make some sort of harmonic drone to write to i just find it's easier if you have some harmonic context when you're writing your melody rather than just writing a melody with no other sounds it's kind of uninspiring to do it that way so yeah this is always the first thing i do uh so it's just a basic like soul wave synth um with the notes a e and a again and that's just your perfect fifth because the e is the uh the fifth note in the scale um and that sounds like this so it's just the default diva preset with some reverb on it um and some changes made to it so if you just basically reopen diva if i delete it and then go into diva uh the sound sounds like this so all i did was just add um the second oscillator and pitch it up an octave [Music] um and then turn up the volume on the first one so it comes in a bit too [Music] um and then i just played with this cut off basically this cutoff filter just opened it up a bit [Music] and reduced the envelope amount then that's basically the sound done and all i did was just add some valhalla shimmer just to brighten up that reverb a bit [Music] and these are the settings the only thing i did was just add a low cut and the thing i like about um valhalla shimmer is that it has this shift feature here which basically shifts the pitch of the reverb up over time so here it's set to 12 semitones so it's going to go up an entire octave over the course of the reverb and then i just cut out some of the low end using an eq [Music] and yeah so now we have a nice little harmonic bed that we can use to write our melody on just to add was like a bit of rhythmic texture and i found this loop uh pipe dreams inside of this production music live this dark textures and soundscapes pack and that's called pipedreams so i will add this to new channel and if we open this up we'll see if you compare these two waveforms over here you can see they are timed differently and all i did was just quantize this loop so this is what it sounds like my version [Music] yes that just adds some nice texture and like sort of fills out the sides of the mix a bit and then the what the original sounded like was this so all i've done is i've gone in and hit ctrl a just to select this entire loop and then if you hit ctrl i it adds all these little points these are called warp markers and they are sitting on basically every single transient um so then what i did was i just divided this up into 16th grid and then you can select everything again ctrl a and then you hit ctrl u and that will quantize it so now all the peaks are sitting on the grid um and then you'll notice that it kind of has rhythm to it i heard over here kind of rhythm so i thought i would just loop that section so what we can do to loop that is to just bring these two points down to here and then the rest of the clip will be just the section looped okay so now we need to get that sounding like this and to do that all i did was add some corpus to get that nice tone out of it corpus has a great effect in in ableton live i think it's quite a unique effect that you don't really get anywhere else it almost adds like a certain tone to the original sound and you've got these different like models of tones so like this beam sound sounds like this you got marimba each one's unique um and my favorite one for these kind of loops is pipe so i used pipe and then you can tune this to the key of the track and uh so i just went up i think to yeah 466 17 hertz which is a sharp three now the track is in a but i think because of the way the loop the key that the actual original loop is in i for some reason i had to pitch it up to a sharp for it to sound right you'll notice if i play them together that sounds in key but if i pitch it down to a [Music] sounds out [Music] and then if we increase the radius that'll let it just that tone ring out a bit longer [Music] i think i had it yeah it's 68 percent okay then i just added this eq8 [Music] and lastly a delay basically on this measurement of three and the dry weight set down to 29 and then this eq curve is just cutting out the lows and the highs and it's also set to ping pong mode let me just turn it down a bit [Music] okay um and then so that's basically just that sound over there the texture i'm just going to delete this version and then go back to this one then the next thing i had i added to this now that we've got this nice harmonic bed to work with i started making the hook so the hook is just a melodic idea that kind of repeats itself over and over again and has some slight changes and when you're creating a hook all you want is basically something that the listener can remember like a melodic idea or an arpeggio or something uh that sort of just draws the listener in and something for them to focus on so just think of it as like the main melody of the track and uh in this sort of engine indeed melodic house style i've noticed a lot of the time this melodic idea will repeat throughout the entire track just constantly evolving and changing but the actual melody doesn't really change it's usually just like the synth that gets automated and changes over time and then everything else around it is also changing so it feels like the melody is constantly fresh so this is the melody that i came up with so the basic idea is just this one repeated over and over again for the first four repetitions it doesn't really change until the last bar i've got these two notes that come up here and then i've also got the velocity a bit higher on those ones and in the synth the velocity is mapped to the filter cut off so that they are a bit bit brighter than these notes [Music] so you can hear they're a bit louder and a bit brighter and then from for the next repetition of this instead of just repeating the d every time we're now going up to the e then the g back to the e and back down to the b so slight variations but the main melodic idea doesn't really change much uh then just looking at the processing and the actual synth i used from the production music live i believe it's called circle yeah circle which is a diva melodic techno um preset pack for diva uh the presets called dmt ld dusty and i really like the you know the noise and and the grittiness of this synth i think it sounds really nice and warm i think i made some basic changes maybe to the adsr of the sound so that's the envelope the shape of it um if i just solo it and sort of change the decay [Applause] yeah you'll hear that kind of changes the shape of it a bit makes a bit shorter and longer whenever you you know you just go for a preset i always advise you just try and see if you can adjust parameters like this that make the sound fit better in your track [Music] [Applause] another thing i changed was it was set to a pulse wave like that and i think it had a longer glide on it so i just brought down the glide to get rid of those like pitch bends will not completely get rid of them but make them a bit shorter so they're not as obvious and then i just turned off this pulse wave and we only have the sword teeth okay um and then the second sound the second main sound is this arp [Music] okay and that's also rising up in velocity so it gets brighter towards the end and then fades back down and goes bright again and you want to focus on doing things like that because it helps keep the loop evolving and changing um and that's just playing your a d and e which is the first the fourth and the fifth notes in the scale uh they're all pretty powerful notes in the scale so you know it it fits pretty much any chord in the scale and this one is just a bit quicker than the melody and the idea with this is this harp is just kind of again helping to fill out the background along with the harmonic drone and this texture and that's the same preset pml dmt dusty but that's got the pulse wave um a bit of glide and i think that's about all i changed for that one so yeah then all i did was oh so sorry i completely forgot to go through the processing of this sound all that all that i did was uh add a delay with these settings so it's set to three with 37 dry wet cut out some of the low end and then i've added a glue compressor to just um control the the volume of it because it was getting very loud at points you can see the needle is kind of pushing it down some points because some notes are quite a lot louder like they they peak louder than other notes um which can be kind of difficult to mix with uh especially when you when you're mastering you you don't really want notes peaking out too high um because they'll hit your limiter and then uh basically squash the entire track down so we just try and reduce those dynamics a bit not completely but just with some gentle compression and how i set up the compressor was it's just left on the original settings and i've just brought down the threshold until i can see the needle moving a bit i've done a bit of makeup gain okay back to this sound um so yeah same preset uh again same delay we've just cut out quite a bit more of the low end because that is being taken up by the hook so if i turn off that if i just disable this one and three then you'll see how much of the low end gets filled out by the sound [Music] all that noise is like creating this rumble um and these harmonics i felt like they were kind of interfering with the hook [Applause] so that low pass just made room for that um and then i even squashed it down a little bit more with the with this bell curve and then again this compressor just controlling the dynamics very slightly okay next up we've got another up and this is just more of a rhythmic arp you can hear it's not very tonal and it kind of bounces all over the place and i really like that i felt like it fit really nicely with the texture [Music] and with the uh all the other arpeggios yeah just fit really nicely and that's just a single note holding the a3 note and using this pml dmt up what's it called mushrooms and i really didn't change anything in this this is just the preset as is all i've done is just cut out some of the low end you can hear there's a lot of a lot of sub if i turn this on you'll be able to see it if i just disable the first eq curve yeah there's all those pops down there so i just got rid of that okay um final thing i added was the bass and this is like the most important part of the track i find okay so this is how the bass sounds and the bass is a really powerful element in these kind of tracks because there are no chord changes anywhere else the bass notes create implied chord changes because each one of these notes will be harmonizing with the melody and the arpeggio for example the first one is a and then second note is f when you combine that with the hook we have the a from here and we've got the c and the d from there so that's a chord in itself and then we're going down to the f on the bass note and that f is harmonizing with the melody again the melody goes a c and d so now we're going f a c d which is well f a c is a an f major chord so while we're not creating chords per se on a specific instrument the combination of all the instruments are creating this kind of harmonic change and the bass itself and this is detuned to a fifth perfect fifth uh which in itself is a power chord um so again that's helping with these uh implied chord changes so yeah the bass is something i like to do last because once you've got this entire harmonic structure you can just do this by ear you can find the notes that that feel the best uh in the bass line so just all together this entire loop sounds like this [Music] so yeah the bass definitely adds a whole lot of power and movement to the track to the loop all right so in terms of the sound design for this um this is again diva and we're using the pml dmt uh preset pack uh what's it called circle and um this is the preset uh pml dmt bs moogie so sound of kind of sounds like a a moog preset um and that's probably because it's using the the moog filters and oscillators and envelopes and stuff so if i just go and uh select that again hopefully that resets it [Music] okay so this is what it sounded like originally when i loaded it it's quite dark so the first thing i did was to just open up this cutoff so that we could hear it and the feedback was a bit high so i just turned that down [Music] okay um and now we've got two oscillators what i did was pitch up the second oscillator to two octaves [Music] and then just detune it down five [Music] semitones [Music] okay um and then brought the cutoff down a little bit and another thing i added was just a bit of distortion using rotary so if we just play with the drive here [Music] it had some really nice distortion and then the balance kind of just controls the the shape of the sound in terms of the eq or the frequency spectrum so if i just turn that down gets a bit um cuts out the low end a bit over here turn it up we get a bit more sub back so i just left it around about there just based on you know i wanted that sub to come through a bit more um i think that's about it for this actual sound then uh after that i just added some more eq let's just cut out a bit more of that that high end and then a bit of the 100 hertz like the mud over here and that's how that sounds [Music] okay um so those are the first five sounds i would say that you you need for uh melodic house um so we've got some sort of harmonic drone to write with and then we've got the texture that's the second one the hook third very important up the fourth which is optional but i just added it because it just created some more um harmonics for the sound so if it's feeling empty add the arp second up is also optional so i just bundled these into you know the fourth main element uh and then the bass the fifth and that's also very important so in terms of synths we've only got really five elements and the track is sounding nice and full and if you look at it unlike a span over here you can see we've pretty much got sounds filling out the entire range over here okay next up is the drums and uh drums are often really overlooked by beginners they don't pay much attention to it usually they'll just put in a kick a clap and a hat and call it a day but it's very important to focus on these and try and get sounds that work well with your track so the first thing i added was the kick because it's the most important drum in the track um you really have to get this right and i just went through this entire pack this dpv um what's it called um yeah so in deep premium volume one the first kick i just really like it because it's got a nice powerful punch in the sub and not too much top end on it and the top end also has like this little stereo click to it which sounds really nice so i just found that the the kick fit really nicely with the at the base and the rest of the track sounds like this all i did was just boost the top end a tiny bit because it was pretty inaudible [Music] okay then the next thing i added was in the percussion group this top loop uh pml top 123 and that's from that's from the pml tops and loops pack volume one so this is the 14th one over here sounds like this so i just felt like it fit really nicely with this kick and it sounded great with the rest of the track too [Music] um i did add a bit of sidechain compression just so that the kick can punch through um the loop because sometimes the loop kind of hits at the same time as the kick and then yeah we don't really hear that the bite of the kick at all so i just side chained that to the kick um and then the next thing i added was the clap very important to get a nice sounding clap with your track don't just drop any old clap in there um here you can see i layered a few together to get a sound that i like so that's how the clap sounds and these are the layers so the first layer is this really dark clap then the second clap that i added was this one [Music] i probably should have just cut out some of that low end i'll do that now okay a third clap i added was this one [Music] this is the third one it's just a hand clap and that just fills out the sides at the moment the drums are sounding like this so a nice groovy loop all right the next main element i added was the hat and this is made up of two layers again uh it's also from d premium volume four we've got this closed hat 002 and that sounds like this originally all i did was just take out some of the low end and then i laid it with this this one because i thought like this hat was just lacking a bit of um yeah a bit of the very high end above 10k over here so together it sounds like that fills it out nicely okay and then i added a closed hat and that's from d premium volume one and that's just playing sixteenth notes um but what i'm doing here is i'm just adjusting the velocity of each note so that it's kind of fading up over time gives you kind of like a pumping feeling and i pan that one left then i found another one and just took out some of that low end and then panned it right the same thing with the velocity so they're both going up and down yeah so all together the drums sound like this and if you look at the span the whole frequency spectrum we can see you know it's been filled out by all the drums so the drums are nice and full and the synths are nice and full and together we have a nice full loop that we can use to start creating a full track from okay thanks for watching uh my name is bound to divide you can always check out my youtube channel for more tutorials um hope this was helpful and you learned something and have a nice day [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Production Music Live

Views: 63,342

Keywords: Production Music Live, Ableton Tutorial, PML, Tutorial Ableton Live, How to make a track in Ableton, Music Production, Track Start To Finish, ben böhmer, anjunadeep ben bohmer, anjunadeep, anjunadeep tutorial series, anjunadeep tutorial ableton, ben böhmer tutorial, melodic house tutorial, melodic techno, melodic techno tutorial, yotto ableton tutorial, lane 8 ableton tutorial, lane 8 tutorial, lane 8, yotto, yotto tutorial

Id: dDsujkmreZc

Length: 33min 16sec (1996 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 15 2020