Producer Masterclass | Metrik | FULL VIDEO

[Music] hi this is metric and i'm here at my home studio in london and i'm going to be talking about my latest single hackers the creative process behind it as well as the production techniques some of the mixing techniques can be talking about sort of synthesizing drums and how i go about getting my drum sound and yeah some hopefully some useful bits along the way so hope you enjoy the video okay um so i'm going to talk a little bit a bit about the creative process of how this track came together and um it started off um with a concept and the concept was to create a track that was incredibly simple based around uh one riff and one riff only so essentially the riff is the baseline and the main hook so in order for that to work i needed to create a sound that was big enough to fill up the frequency spectrum um and yeah so that started off with uh this riff and uh the actual sound itself i think this may even be an older version of the riff but it'll give you the idea uh so yeah so that sound um it's it's quite interesting because um it that there's there's different articulations of it depending on uh where they were played um or which octave they were uh played on um so i created um an instrument rack and i essentially had um i separated the instrument rack so by key so so essentially in ableton what you can do is when you when you create an instrument rack is you can assign ranges of midi notes to groups of instruments so what i did here was i took the first sort of in in the lower registers um i've got the sub here and then the mid bass patch which i made in serum which kind of is is the more kind of staccato sound and that that was essentially a sawtooth with 16 voices laid up in unison detuned with a pretty harsh resonant filter on the attack which is controlled by this lfo here so kind of has that plucked kind of grungy sound to it that is then underpinned by the sub which is sitting underneath it there and that's very simply a sine wave again in serum and just talk a little bit about subs as well because um if you use just a pure uh sine wave then you're essentially only getting the fundamental of of the wave um and this can be fine in some cases but a lot of the time you know you kind of want your sub to fill out a bit more of the low end um not only because it it can sound bigger but also it will translate better onto systems which aren't capable of reproducing that sub for example iphones or laptop speakers so in order to give give the bass a little bit more presence um i'll often open up the wave table editor and here you can actually control the fundamental and the harmonics of the sound so here i've added a bit of the first harmonic here obviously you can add more in and you kind of you can give the sound a little bit more body and tone so you can hear the sound changing more harmonics going up the frequency spectrum but yeah in this case i just used the first harmonic layer with the fundamental so that fills it out nicely and then obviously combined with sound and then um so the riff itself it kind of goes up into the uh the next octave so i wanted to have a slightly different articulation of that sound so to go into a bit more depth about that so on this version of the sound you can hear that the cutoff is a little more open so it's essentially the same sound as the more staccato version except that there's a far less kind of harsh sort of attack on the filter cut off so when you play these together and hear the whole riff together and you can kind of see the midi notes moving up there based on the assignment and yeah just kind of go into a bit more detail about how i came up with the riff i actually used this kind of comically looking but very very useful midi guitar i'll show you there you go i mean it kind of looks like a toy on first glance but it's actually very powerful because it's it works as a uh a midi instrument as well and uh what i did with this so i i kind of created the patch and then i guess because guitar is is the instrument i'm most comfortable with uh it was a lot easier to i often find a lot easier to come up with riffs and stuff and uh yeah so i literally just kind of jammed away it was like so that's the kind of vibe and then obviously recorded in the midi um and then so obviously there's like a lot of processing on that sound to kind of make it full and to try and help it fill up as much of the frequency spectrum as possible um so often what i'll do with uh those kinds of sounds because you know i'll be adding like a lot of um you know like distortion and saturation um i think within the patch itself there's like a lot of distortion there's a dimension expander and uh sort of using the built-in multi-band compressor in uh in serum so it often sort of extends the release of sounds uh quite dramatically so you're getting lots of kind of tails and kind of unwanted um sort of noise uh in sound so what i'll usually do is i'll i'll get the sound kind of you know as overdriven as as i need it to be um and then i'll bounce it as audio um so so then you'll have a lot more control over you know like the tails of the sounds and making sure they don't bleed into each other um so in this case what i did was i separated um like the staccato notes so you can hear there and obviously the higher ones on the octave um essentially what i did once i'd i'd bounced out the audio was was kind of auditioned um you know which which of these bass notes sounded the best and also kind of checked things like phase and made sure that you know they they have had the strongest amplitude um so once i kind of taken the strongest notes and what i did here was just like like repeated quite a few of them so it kind of gives it quite like a almost synthetic robotic edge you know rather than just letting the riff play up by itself and you know each kind of instance of the note will have a slightly different character because the oscillators are starting at different points so this way you can get you know the the sort of optimum levels of amplitude per note um and yeah so that's that's kind of one of the advantages of of you know bouncing it down to audio and you know with each instance you know i i've kind of eq them differently um and yeah so when they all come together you know you're gonna get a much cleaner sound um okay so uh once i had the uh sort of main riff uh bounced down to audio and separated kind of an eq'd in its different uh you know it's different states and then group those tracks together and did a bit of further processing um so i mean one of the kind of obvious things you would need to do with a sound like this is to kind of monetize the lower frequencies and ableton's utility plug-in actually does that really quickly as you can see here we've got the base mono switch here which will essentially put everything depending on what you choose here and in this case below 500 hertz into mono so that kind of reduces any or sort of eliminates any phase issues you might have with those lower um harmonics i then uh use this eq here which is great this is a soft tube i think it comes with the native instruments complete but it's really good for like adding kind of top air you know really high frequency stuff and here i kind of gave it a boost at 12k like a high shelf which um i've actually turned off these effects you'll be able to hear what i'm doing a bit better so before using that kind of [Music] just kind of lifted those tops a little bit more um and then next uh i had a mid-side eq and i'll go into a little bit more detail about the mid side processing a bit later because that was quite a large part of the the mix down process um so just to keep it brief in this case i just used ableton's eq8 put it in side mode and just rolled off some of the tops and the high mids because i wanted a bit more emphasis on on the lower mids when it came to the stereo content of this sound um and then essentially what i had after that yeah so just a simple roll off on the lows and the api 550a which is a great sort of eq by waves sure kind of a have more of a colorization eq so i quite like to add add in quite a lot of stuff with with this eq um [Music] so yeah that's really just giving it a bit more presence um so i've boosted up here around 12.5 kilohertz getting it three kilohertz and at 400 uh because i felt that the sound was perhaps lacking a bit of that um and then next up um i've got an elephoto and this is actually again part part of the mixing process but um you know i find it a really good way um instead of you know traditionally using side chain compression to duck against the kick and the snare um i actually prefer to do it in ella or at least at the time of making this track and what this gives you the ability to do is to you know you can actually put in your own curves and tell the sound to how you know how you want it to dynamically change when the the kick and the snare hit so you don't always you might not necessarily want the same amount of um volume reduction on the kick as you do the snare and similarly on the second kick in the sequence because you know for example if i play this to you without telephoto so you're hearing the riff with with no ducking at all and then if i switch it on [Music] so you know you can really hear how it's stuck on the kick and it's ducking slightly less on the snare and then again when the next kick plays we're doing slightly less ducking because i find that you know for example if this was a side chain compressor you'd have something essentially like this so both each time the kick drum plays you're getting quite a dramatic ducking on the sound and that and that can actually it can it can actually ruin the groove of the riff like in this case if i play it with the drums see that doesn't sound quite right because it's ducking too much on the second kick so you know here i would actually just make that curve less extreme [Music] um so yeah that that basically is a really good way of resolving that that issue and you know you're getting really clean cuts then um but the one thing you you really need to be uh aware of when uh cozzella photo is is a midi synced effect so it essentially uses your host's clock in order to accurately reproduce whatever it is you're telling it to do so in in the case of ableton um it's actually subject to um to delay like latency essentially so if you put anything uh prior to it in the chain that introduces latency then this plug-in will either be essentially not not be in sync and it won't be perfectly compensated for um so if i just give you an example of that make it kind of a bit more extreme to demonstrate the effect if i put like an ozone maximizer here and because this is it's a limiter it's going to be introducing quite a lot of latency and if if you hover over the plugin in ableton you can actually see how much latency that is creating so in this case it's 721 samples so that's introducing a latency of that value now if i then play the sound [Music] you hear how the ducking is now out of time and uh you know that that could actually you know that's quite a crucial thing when you're doing your mix is because you know you want your transients to be clean you want everything to be synced up and perfect um ableton does an amazing job of that otherwise with its plug and delay compensation if you're using kind of audio based effects such as compressors and but as soon as you introduce a midi uh based effect you are gonna gonna get this latency issue so a really easy way of solving that is uh so you see here we've created 721 samples of latency and lfo tool very conveniently has this offset here so what you'll then do is just match that with the uh with the latency readout say in this case it is it's 71 i think there's a bit of latency somewhere else as well on the pacific key so be 75 latency [Music] and there you go we're back in sync again so yeah always good to be mindful of that when you're using the photo especially on groups or if you're introducing other plugins in the chain that that cause latency okay so moving on um yeah so the next thing once i'd established the riff um was to get the drum track going and um yeah and and again sort of in line with the concept of the track i wanted the drums to be as simple and as punchy as possible so it just expands a little bit on the drums [Music] so very simple just kick a snare and a hi-hat and yeah just kind of delve a little bit deeper into what i've got going on here um i'm going to talk a little bit as well about sort of how you know my approach to sort of synthesizing drums as well and how i kind of get my drum sound um but yeah if we listen to to each hit in isolation um so this is the main kick and you know i like to have quite a synthetic sound to my drums but also uh with uh like a live feel too so they're not they're not too synthetic you know they still feel that you know they're they could be coming from a live drum kit but i like to have as much control over them as possible in order to you know create a kind of as clean and clubby sound as possible um so yeah so that's that's my kick drum and i'll go back into a bit more detail about that in a sec my snare drum here so that's the first layer and that's that's essentially a snare which i probably took from another project but you know what ends up happening a lot of time is you know these kind of rendered snares will be mixed with other snares from other projects and an enveloped and you know various different processes will happen to them along the way to create their results so it's often not um a kind of linear approach to making uh to making snare drums or kicks for that matter um that's then layered with this kind of 80s layer here to give it that kind of like wide sort of roomy kind of phil collins sound it's quite kind of typical of my production style to to use that that kind of aesthetic with my drums um and yeah just a little bit processing uh went on here so using the ds10 drum shaper i just eased off a bit of the tail because i was actually going to add more tail to it with the other layer so it was important to get that down a bit and then again i used lfo tool here um just to just to shave off a bit more of the tail more accurately and you know again ds10 drum shaper down here is introducing 416 samples so i made sure i inputted that into elephoto in order to keep everything in sync um then on the the 80s layer um i yeah because all the attack is coming from the other layer so i wanted to carve out a bit of room for that you know and also to avoid any any phasing issues um rolled off a bit of the tops and again ds10 drum shaper bring that that's that bring the sustain a little bit down and then combined you know they kind of sound quite quite weighty together um so yeah i mean i mean it is uh i've wanted to kind of go into detail about making my drums for a while now and uh i figured this would be a good opportunity to do that um i've got a bit of a his one i made earlier uh example of of how i would typically make a snare drum so um for this i'm actually only using operator to do it so but this can be done in any synth whether it's serum or whatever it is is your sort of most comfortable um sort of plug-in to work in um and yeah i guess with drum hits you know i i think of them as three main components so you've got your transient which is when the stick hits the snare drum the initial attack of the sound um your fundamental which is like the the note of the drum the the kind of the the resonant boom or the sound it makes uh that resonates with the drum um to kind of create the tone of the snare and then you've got the tail which is essentially the the ringing out of of the snare drum and the kind of fizz um and then you know obviously you i like to add other layers too to kind of fill out the mids a little bit more and give it character so um so yeah just to go into it into how i would typically create those sounds so here is the transient so obviously it doesn't sound too much by itself but um if i kind of reverse engineer how i went about making that sound so so here on operator you've got your your oscillators and um before you start working on a sound like this it's quite crucial to put the synth in in sort of series mode here otherwise what will happen because it's an fm synthesizer you'd essentially be layering waves on top of each other to kind of frequency modulate each other and that won't create the desired uh sound that you you'll need to make drums um unless you're going a bit abstract of course but in this case we're just creating a transient so if you listen to this one here we've got essentially uh i've just pulled up a sine wave here and i've cranked the decay right the way down to 113 giving it a quite short release and then essentially the kind of the the the byte of the transients coming from the pitch envelope here so you can assign the pitch envelope to whichever destination or oscillator you want so in this case it's assigned to a and then we've just got like a very very very quick sharp attack on this sorry decay the peak is where the note starts so here it's starting at 48 and uh yeah so essentially it's starting from 48 semitones up and then it's arriving here at the at the sort of the frequency which is at 285 hertz um so there so there you have it that's our the first part of our transient um and if you know you can kind of see on the frequency analyzer that you know it's mostly sort of hitting around you know 2 to 3k as the main sort of bite of it you don't want too many tops but then you will want to fill out the tops just a little bit so then what i'll do is i'll layer that with a bit of white noise and the good thing about operator is you can actually choose noise loops as opposed to noise white and what noise loop does is it essentially you know it's it's creating it's generating white noise based on a particular sample and it's it's starting at the same point every single time and if i play that by itself it's a tiny bit of white noise there obviously you can change the phase here to kind of start at a different point but when i lay those two together we then got our transient and again like this is a very you know the envelope i put on this is similar to what i did with the sine wave except to crank the attack up a bit because i wanted the there to be you know the sine wave to to occupy more of the attack and so yeah once i've got the transient done i'll then go to the fundamental so uh you know very similarly i um created just a sine wave here and then you know we've got our decay down at about 95 um and you know you really you want this to be uh a fairly you know obviously needs to be longer than the transient um but you know with a bit of sort of um trial and error you know you can get it to the right sort of length that you want it to be um and you know in this case again just very simple just a bit of a bit of a pitch envelope on the attack of the sound and that's only coming from 12 oct uh sorry 12 semitones up um and again i i didn't use fixed mode this time obviously you can use fixed mode to determine the exact frequency you want the snare to hit at so in this you know for example here the the tune is in the key of f and therefore i probably try and tune the drums 2f one seven five hertz is around about f um so you know probably a good good place to start you know obviously if you wanna pitch the snow slightly higher you know you can crank this up but yeah so in this case snare chain to f and then if you look at the midi it's sitting at f um and yeah and what i did here was just put a little bit of the gap between the transient and the fundamental so these two guys aren't on kind of over overlapping and phasing and that's something you need to be really careful about when you're creating these individual layers is that they are they're not sort of you know you're not getting any phase cancellation through either layering them together or putting them in sequence and yeah just moving on into the tail now which is a little bit more of a complex sound duty quite a lot of the processing i did afterwards but if i switch that off um we can have a look at that in a bit more detail so yeah we started off with again uh noise looped um you can actually go from noise white with this one but you just gotta be aware that each time it plays it will sound a bit different um so i'll keep it on that for now um obviously we've got the frequency up quite high but as i turn up it's going to be a bit brighter so yeah we're starting off a very basic white noise um again here we've got the uh the the envelope of the sound with a slightly longer attack in order to let the transient and fundamental come through um with a with a longer decay and a longer release because you know if you think about a snare you've got that the kind of ringing out of the snare in the tops can i put you together kind of very basic kind of synthetic sounding snare it doesn't sound like much at the moment but um we can go into just a few of the steps along the way to help it along and yeah so what i did here i literally just gave it a bit more presence there around 5k i think it's quite crucial to have that that sort of presence up there you don't want it to be too too high like fizzy tops because yeah that can sound quite unnatural and harsh and a lot of snares have their presence around sort of three to five k even going up to like 8k so the little boost there helped i've got an auto filter here which essentially just did a very quick sweep i go um just kind of like add that character in a little bit turn the resonance you can hear it a little bit more but yeah i wanted to kind of take away a little bit of that low as it's as it's kind of as the sound is progressing um obviously i've got a utility there just to bring the volume up a bit um what i can't like to do with my tails is to just uh put a lot of saturation on them and this can actually you know help fill out the tail a bit more and and kind of help glue it together and and just create more of like a unified sound so yeah yeah that's it's actually increasing the the the release of the toe a little bit there you've got your reverb here i mean like normally i probably wouldn't go for something like just the stock ableton reverb although it is good um i'll probably draw for something like the valhalla vintage which is actually my current favorite reverb but that's that's going to give you a bit more of a realistic kind of room emulation um i'll just fire up a preset quickly here say i don't know and i like it because obviously it's got you know a 1980s setting um but yeah that that's gonna you know really help bring your snare to life and give it put it inside of space essentially make it so more realistic and not like it's come straight out of a synthesizer um so yeah again here i'll just switch back to how i had before i'm just like filling up a bit of the low mids here taking away of a lot of that really really high stuff i mean essentially when you when you're working with white noise it's going from zero here it's right the way to the top so there's a lot of unwanted high stuff there so yeah you're really gonna take the top off there um and then yeah just to finish that sound off a bit more control on the dynamics so i added a utility at the end of the chain and then i've essentially just drawn in this curve here so if you kind of bring that out a bit more and that's again that's going to control the tail of your sound you can get really like precise sort of um you know over the the dynamics of the sound simply by using you know utility um moving on to the clap i mean obviously this is done in a in pretty much the same way although it isn't actually a clap it's just again a bit of white noise and yeah so that was created with um just simple white noise i then added a filter and using the envelope of the filter um it's sweeping up through the sound with quite a high resonance if i take it off for example turn it on got a band pass filter here that's kind of you know giving you that that sweep up around the frequency range which is kind of like arriving at around 1.5 k which is pretty much where a clap should be um you know i think a lot you know a lot of time a lot of the time these days i like to have a lot of presence around 1.5 k because you're kind of giving your drums that presence you're filling up the mids and you know it it does add a kind of perceived weight to them um so again here uh what i did with the actually created an audio effect rack so then this gives you um ultimate control over you know the dry and wet of a sound without needing to use uh sends and returns um so i often like to do it with when i'm processing drums like this um because essentially what i've got here is i've got a 100 wet reverb and not entirely sure why that says try i should say what we'll just change that there we go um and yeah so i can basically have the sound dry and then i can have full control over the wet there and again what i've done to you know adjust the dynamics of that is just to do a simple volume curve on on the chain so i'm actually controlling the the the level of the chain here and then yeah just finish off again rolling off the tops um and that you know that's that's it pretty much if we play all those layers together i mean it won't sound you know like like a fully uh polished or um realized snare like the one i've used in the track but you know this is really just to give you an idea of where it starts and and how i i come about these sounds um so yeah it's all together that kind of sounds like that which you know given that there is there aren't any like live lives going on there at all that's coming 100 out of the synthesizer it doesn't sound too bad um and you know a few take like main takeaways from this are you know uh different tracks will will essentially um commands different aesthetics of snares uh though you know different tunings you know for example in this track i needed a snare which was in f um you might write a track in g and you'll have full control over what pitch the fundamental sits at so yeah you can really just get go go deep and really find your own sounds with with your drums by synthesizing them from scratch not only that you're also gonna get a much cleaner sound and you know you're gonna be able to deliver um sort of quite a lot of like sonic um accuracy when you're making it yourself um and then yeah just like the final step of what i would do here is i i would probably well i would definitely freeze them um and start working with them in audio because again what i've referred to earlier about kind of you know phase cancellation when working with layers that's really crucial when you're working with drums so i'm looking at uh look i don't know what fundamental looks like that uh that bounce along one so here we go if i just bounce these as audio okay so right we've now got these as audio and this is a crucial part of the process because as i mentioned earlier you need to be very aware of phase cancellation when it comes to you know layering drums and and synthesizing them so you know in in this case you can see here that the transient is actually overlapping a bit with the fundamental and if you look at the peaks and troughs of these uh of the waveform here um obviously we've got kind of full polarity here and we've got negative polarity here so yeah so those two will give you problems so you know very quick and easy way to overcome that you can just use volume envelopes like this and again you're still getting a bit of overlap there but if you're fairly happy with the levels of these then you can actually just put them together put a little crossfade there there you go zero phase cancellation issues there you go it's kind of yeah a lot again a lot of it is trial and error and you're kind of working on a macro level so um i i you know try not to be kind of intimidated by going into this kind of level of detail uh because once you've done it a few times done a bit of practice it can become quite easy and quite quick so yeah then you've got your tail then you clap there so yeah and they got those together you can really just kind of go in and just tweak it you know tweak it to your taste and your style you know at other times you might just want to completely throw out the rule book and i quite often do this just you know saturate the whole thing distort the whole thing bring out more harmonics in in the fundamental you know you can either do that with something like overdrive if i just isolate that for a second we'll bring that down to 174 where the fundamentals that bring the key down take the tone away uh right so if i bring up a analyzer i'll show you a bit more detail about how we can add some hormone looks into that sometimes i'm cranking up obviously it doesn't sound amazing at the moment but yeah so here we go we've now introduced a few more harmonics into the snare drum yeah which can help fill it out a bit and a real snare drum will have harmonics like that too so um and yeah you might also want to consider you know layering with some live snares as well which is pretty much what i do quite often um addictive drums is great for this just for sourcing very clean well-recorded drum hits um we'll just find the snare here bring the velocity up there you go we'll just use that time being um and then in here we'll choose our snare just take everything off it because essentially we're just finding a good snare drum here take all the effects off meet the overheads the room and the bus and there we go nice clean snare there you know you might want to mess around with the snare buzz a bit i mean in this case we're just yeah we're just looking at the set of harmonics and kind of adding a little bit more realism into the snare around the transient and the fundamental not so much the tail i don't think for a snare drum like this so yeah once i'm i'm happy with that i'll then re-sample it now i've got it as audio and then you then you can line it up with your your transient and your fundamental and just check out the phase see how these these are interacting with each other um obviously at the moment it's actually a different pitch i believe yeah so we need to go a bit lower actually so if i take that down a good way of finding matching the pitch of lowering drums is simply just to you know drag drag the d tune up and down and see you know do it until the waveforms line up and then you can see that like when they're perfectly in phase so now these two should yeah so now there they are layered nicely and you'll know when they're not laid nicely because if i invert the phase here with utility you can hear the fundamental just disappear if i put it back on sorry if i take it off there you go we get a fundamental back so yeah those two are layered now layered quite nicely i probably you know do something i'll probably take the the top end off another thing to be aware of as well like when using like ableton stock eq i'd probably go for something a bit more precise with this like um probably go for like pro-q pro q3 is pretty pretty good these days um you know you could you could put it into natural phase mode just to remove any sort of phase issues going on which will again introduce a bit more latency into your project so if you're if you're mixing with tracking i probably wouldn't advise doing this this would need to be a process that would happen in a separate project um so yeah here we can just bring out some of those harmonics that's really going to help it sound a bit more organic go for a more extreme curve yeah so yeah a lot of trial and error but these are the fundamentals of of how you get there and if we then play all those together not too bad take your tail there maybe and that one yeah so that that wouldn't you know that's not a bad place to start for a for a d b snare um again here i'd you know so there wasn't any kind of conflict between the transient and the live layer i just introduced i'll probably just put a little fade there take off some of the tail there and remove it it just it just it just sounds a little bit empty a bit flat doesn't sound very real and with it kind of sounds a bit more like a snare and so yeah that's pretty much um you know how i go about making my snare drums uh you know obviously like i said earlier a lot of the snares i'll use in final tracks will be sort of frankensteins of other stairs that i've made across different projects and layered them together and you know kind of found um you know new snares out of that process um yeah essentially that's that's how i start and then you know going into the kick as well so it's a much simpler sound i i think uh but it's done in very much the same process you know you start off with your transient but you know your kick drum transients are you know usually they're sort of like biased around the kind of 2k 3k range to get that kind of click um fundamental again i mean this is actually i'll use a different plugin for this often uh kick t this this is still really good for making snares actually so you definitely bear that in mind um when when trying the site yourself but with the kick drum here again it's kind of a his one i made earlier but i've used this curve here to essentially control the pitch envelope of the kick drum um and it you know it basically is just a sine wave um which you can you choose here and then you know you kind of want to tell it what length you want the kick to be so you know i've chosen here around very good for like yeah even sort of one four four milliseconds is quite a good length for a kick so you don't want them to be too long so that you know you're filling out your low end too much not giving enough room for your sub to really uh come through especially if you're working with like long sustained notes in your sub um but yeah so 142 is quite a nice little area you can go for um you know you're starting off the attack of the sound here i've started about one sorry 988 and then we're arriving down here at d1 but actually you know i'll often land if i've written a tuning f i'll land at low f f1 at around 44 hertz especially in this track i think i did that because you know my sub is on that low f and if your kick is arriving at that low f then you're going to avoid a lot of phase cancellation with your kick and your sub and the overall effect should be a bit more harmonious um so yeah there you go that's that's how i build the fundamentals of my kick in kick 2 and yeah so now we've got our fundamentals sorted moving on to the tail so this um is done in very much the same way as a snare tail but because it's a much shorter sound you know you're i've i've used um a kind of shorter decay on the white noise here in operator giving it some room on the oh hang on and then taking away a bit of a low in content um again i've added another part to the tail there because i felt like it sounded a bit too artificial so i've got layer here which is that's just like a live layer taken out of addictive drums and again another live layer here too you know so that's giving you a bit more mids in the kick as well and i think that's quite crucial you know to help it sound like a real kick drum you put them all together they go you've got got a half decent kick there um yeah again like main takeaways of building your own kicks like this you can tune them to the key of your track you can control the pitch envelope and the dynamics of how you want them to sound um i think really like more importantly for me is like you know when you when you've got full control over the fundamentals of both the kick and snare you're just removing any phase issues so you know your tracks are really going to connect in the club on a big system and have that weight because you're able to let the waveforms have full amplitude um on either polarity without any phase issues and um you know you're kind of delivering maximum kind of sonic accuracy so yeah that is uh the kick and the snare more or less discussed um yeah so obviously that's not the kick and snare made in uh for this track but uh used a very similar process to get there um so yeah now just kind of going back into the main kick i uh sorry the main kit i used on hackers let's just meet some of these layers [Music] um so yeah uh in addition to the kick and snare um all there really is going on is a hat which i'm pretty sure i took from another project i think it was my collaboration with um with tc uh but this this is just a simple live hi-hat it's very straight got a bit of a bit of a fade in there so we let our kick drum cut through yeah that's what's going to give you that kind of weight as well with your drums when you're you're sort of ducking the kind of higher frequency elements against you know your kick and your snares exaggerate that can't really get in that punch there less so when it's like that but yeah with this track i kind of wanted there to be um a bit of hi-hat present on that drop so you know kind of it really feels like there's a strong kind of straight hi-hat groove running through it [Music] so yeah so that's that's kind of how the track started i mean i i started with the the riff and then went straight into the drums and just got those two kind of working well together um so if i play them together you'll hear oh that's not the right one we'll go for this one there we go [Music] so literally with the riff and three drum parts we've got pretty much the entire song well not the entire song but at least the drop and and that that is what i was aiming for with this track just to you know center it all around very very simple and minimal parts you'll also notice as well like there's no sort of crashes or symbols or anything like that going on on the drop um you know this obviously has the benefit of not taking up extra headroom but um you know i think in this track like it worked you know i didn't need to add loads of crashes and symbols um i think you know more or less we're filling up the whole frequency spectrum if i just pull up span again we can see just from these few elements [Music] and the curves looking pretty nice um so yeah moving on to uh other areas of the track um i mean i should probably just just you know go through what else i added to to the drums as it progressed so you know i mean this this track is kind of like a drawing bass track arranged like a techno track uh in the sense that you know i'm bringing in other percussive elements as it progresses um and in this case i've got here just really simple shaker and that you know that's that's kind of on on the on the offbeat so that kind of really helps to groove along uh it kind of increases the pace so when you hear it just as a straight beat [Music] then when it comes in you kind of have that more you know eighth note feel to it and um yeah so i mean this is a shake of that that's kind of just a stock uh shaker that i've got in my library um which i use in quite a lot of tracks and i wanted to make sure that it um you know i wasn't clashing with the kick and snare so anything i'm kind of adding into the draw at the drum track i'm going to want to duck against a kick in the snare and this applies to cymbals hi-hats or or whatever um so here lfo lfo tool is doing the work for me it's literally just in this case just ducking on on that second kick drum there um so yeah the the shakers uh it was actually a mono shaker to begin with but i wanted to add a bit of stereo whip to it i normally shy away from uh sort of stereo widening plugins because they can offer you know they can introduce a lot of uh phase side effects um meaning they won't sort of go down to they won't work well in mono um but ozone have seemed to have overcome this actually with their ozone imager and i use it a hell of a lot and um you know if i take it off just got like a bog standard mono shaker whack it on and now it's nice and wide and what i've done there i think it uses like a version of the hass effect but the hass effect when you when you sort of delay two sounds and pan them hard left and right that that will uh create pretty pretty bad phase issues when you put it down to mono and also you get a bit of flam because it's essentially two samples happening in first uh secrets of each other but with this it it does seem to work quite well and you know what i've done here really is i've just stereoized it a bit of delay going on there and then just push it up now we've got nice wide shakers um moving on to yeah so here we've just got some toms this is kind of like filling out you know introducing the next section [Music] and yeah this is very typical of my my style i guess you know these kind of big 80s toms this is from a pack called uh sennheiser which i really rate um and yeah there's just so many good 80s drums in this one um yeah as you can hear and that's you know that's just taken straight from the pack a bit of a fade there to let the snare pop through and then next we've got a nine ohm ride because again that that was kind of one of the the that was one of the things which um i established after i'd got the basic concept of the track was to go right well now what is the theme of this track going to be like what aesthetic do i or you know what what filter do i want to put on this or what you know so i was kind of thinking i was a you know kind of big into sci-fi and sort of like you know a lot of kind of early 90s uh references that inspire me um you know such as the game wipeout um like the chemical brothers the prodigy uh also a lot of the like cyberpunk films um there's a film that came out in the 90s called hackers which kind of rings a bit of a bell with me and um yeah i just thought oh yeah i like the idea of hackers like i think that would be quite a strong concept for a track so i kind of built a lot of the the sort of the sounds around this track to kind of fit in with that that 90s kind of you know techy sort of cyberpunkish vibe um so you know instant sort of go-to would be you know 909 rides um which i've added into the drum track here again i've used that widening thing so yeah and very much like the identity of the track was that kind of 90s kind of cyber inspired thing um which i wanted to get across and um first port of call really was to call up the 909 and as you can hear here in the build up so you've got like you know these distorted kitchens here these were lifted straight out of the vengeance pack actually you know i've got that kind of very very sort of typical sound i want to go for there got your 909 hats 99 rides 909 clap so yeah those those i think helped a lot in in create in creating this track's identity um so if i if i run this from the build up into the drop you can hear how they're sort of like doing their thing there you go there's the build up [Music] um so yeah though that was essentially you know the drums um i made around the main drums on the drop uh just to sort of you know um help along with the theme and and just to you know have something a little bit different other than the typical sounds i might use in a drama bass track um so yeah just to kind of like work backwards from the drop which is pretty much how i made this tune [Music] now we've got going back to the main riff uh so let me just play that [Music] and so i think originally i actually had like a synth thing going on before the drop which sounded a bit like this [Music] but it wasn't exciting me that much so uh instead um yeah i kind of felt like there's obviously the track started on the guitar so i wanted to kind of bring a bit more of that guitariness in and uh in order to do that instead of i actually tried playing in some guitar originally but i found that the the answer was a lot simpler than that so what i ended up doing was taking the riff itself bouncing its audio and essentially running it through a guitar amp so i just take off all the effects here yeah so here we've got the riff and what i did was i pitched pitched that up 12 or pitched up an octave sounds a little bit bloated doesn't sound too clever at the moment but um i put it on the uh complex pla pro algorithm because what that will do is it will sort of maintain a lot of the performance of the sound so instead of pitching it up into the traditional audio sense you know you're moving everything up the frequency spectrum uh relative to what pitch you set out whereas in complex pro mode you know it's it's good because it maintains the the sort of the frequency content above the uh the fundamental um so in this case that is what i needed it for and um yeah essentially i ran it through uh i didn't use guitar rig in the end but i used uh the ableton amp um but before taking out quite a lot of the low end so as you can hear that that amp's actually making it sound like a guitar and i've had quite a few people say to me oh was actually a real guitar but yeah it's the synth being run through the soft tube ableton amp obviously i didn't want to overcook it too much and um yeah there you have it that's that was essentially the um i guess i guess with this track similar to some of my other tracks i quite like the interplay of having you know uh the main hook of the track um an octave above in the build up and then an octave below on on the drop so you've got this kind of like high low sort of juxtaposition thing going on um did that in like my track fatso and quite a few others but yeah sophie here those together [Music] and then incoming [Music] so there's a real synergy between those two sounds because obviously they are the same sound and um yeah so that that was kind of um establishing the build up um and what i quite like what i want what i wanted to do in this track was actually to have um quite a a sort of obvious quite a crude introduction of this sound so rather than have all the bells and whistles you know big booms like white noise sort of sweeping down and all that stuff i literally just wanted the sound to be like there like by itself sparse and i kind of in a way it kind of has more impact because of that if i run into when that happens you'll get an idea of what i mean say [Music] so yeah that was really just a creative choice just to just flip it the other way you know instead of going for the big obvious bells and whistles just see if that if that works better um so once we've heard that riff for eight bars and the main hook's been established i then started to introduce the sort of rises and the build up so yeah all of that comes from here uh listen to that [Music] [Music] yeah so again not a lot going on here but um i'll just expand a little bit into sort of how i made these rises um you know again making your own risers you can start the pitch of them in the key of your track so they sound a bit more cohesive and yet you know you can just re-sculpt them to fit the overall um energy of what it is you're working on so yeah if i break down the riser here essentially just uh like a sawtooth which i made in serum [Music] which is really simple uh it's not even it's just one voice um here we've got the the sort of pitch and uh pitch in the the midi clip we've been a bit of a lift at the start actually just uh gives a bit more character you know rather than starting the track at the you know the starting pitch um and yeah that's just rising up uh that's why he's got nine semitones so it's like nearly getting to the to the top of the octave but it's not quite getting there which mean which gives you that kind of anticipation of of the the the drop coming which will then be resolved when it hits the base hits on the tonic so yeah so that's pretty much the saw and what i've got going on there is a frequency shifter so i'm essentially like you know pushing the frequencies up as it rises that's just stableton's stock frequency shifter here [Music] you kind of hear that it's giving it quite uh an interesting tonality as it moves up as well it's quite a metallic effect and then i've got this just very simple call it jet but uh yeah kind of mimics the sound of a kind of jet taken off which again and all that is two sword teeth an octave apart and also a fifth apart but two voices each detuned and yeah that's uh pretty much that sound um again uh i actually didn't put that one through a frequency shifter but i grouped those two together the saw and the higher saws and uh and then what i did was i automated uh some of ableton's overdrive just to kind of give it a little bit more intensity as it approaches the drop so you're not just uh you know having these sounds quite raw and clean as they're going into it you're actually changing them over time to make them more intense [Music] there you go and uh nothing i did there you probably heard it kind of ducked down a little bit at the end and the reason why i did that was to actually carve out a little bit of room um for the vocal which i put before the drop and the vocal um i tried various different things before the drop uh some of them quite comical but the first one i tried out was uh just to have uh quite a sort of like robotic voice talking before the drop um i think it yeah i just made it say that i am electric or something like that and it wasn't quite grooving right with me but i just i'd play it anyway just to show you the kind of creative process i went through so i thought i'd try and synthesize this robot voice if i play it to you right so i mean it kind of sounds a bit lame but um if i whack on the uh effects chain sounds a little bit better [Music] so that was the original idea i had and i kept it in for this tutorial just because i thought it was quite uh interesting how i put it together um so i started off with just me talking kind of crudely into mike so i am electronic which sounds pretty pretty rubbish but what the the idea of that was to um essentially just uh create the sibilance of the sound to make uh make it sound a bit more realistic so you're getting the s's and the t's so completely you know high past that and then underneath we've got this patch i made in serum [Laughter] so it's kind of made it talk um which and how i did that was uh just essentially using the formant filter here and then modulating it with lfo one and here you've got it kind of sweeping down to create the eye yeah based on where that where the filter is at it will make it sound like you know like a vowel sound like vowel shape obviously with the resonance cranked quite far up so yeah that's essentially how you do it and you know you can move these around you know without getting into um sort of you know 2013 dubstep territory but you know again that is kind of how that that sound was created as well using these formant shifting techniques and um yeah i essentially just married that up with the the audio yeah so essentially you know you're kind of creating uh you know sort of a half human half computer talking voice um and then yeah it's just a case of like you know piling on loads and loads of processing starting with a redux to bring the bit reduction some chorus some overdrive vocal synth here by isotope which is really good if you're kind of into your vocoded stuff um which isn't actually adding anything i think i use that for the the voice itself for the sibilance uh little boy which is really good just for like shifting formants around um ott a ot map this is actually just a macro i created with uh just the ott preset on the ableton's multiband compressor uh rooted on the macros here just so you got full control over it combined with the reverb just to be like push things and make them very extreme sounding again just some eq more ott finishing off with waves um arvox compressor which is great for like bringing vocals up really loud so anyway um without sort of you know talking too much about that song i didn't actually use that in the final uh version uh what i went for was just a simple spoken word saying hackers which was this so actually i i was listening through a lot of um uh mr robot um just trying to find somebody saying hackers and um got the lead character actually saying that um as part of a full sentence so i was originally using that but i actually got the vocal uh got it re-recorded obviously to not infringe on a new copyright um and yeah so very simple just added there goes added a lot of you know sort of compression multiband compression some eq pretty wild i actually matched the eq with the original sample i used hence why you've got these kind of crazy nodes here um yeah i kind of wanted it to sound as close to the original sample as possible so using match eq is quite a good way of doing that and then yeah just like throw it through k-clip which is gonna you know kind of crush it or you know clip it quite quite to make it louder anyway very good so you go that's the pre-drop sample it kind of brings the whole kind of theme of the track together it gives an identity and um you know we hear that before you know each drop [Music] cool so um that's probably quite a good uh jump off point to talk about to kind of go into the intro and talk about the vocal that i used in the intro um so kind of in line with the theme of the track you know the kind of 90s cyber aesthetic um i wanted to go for sort of quite an ethereal sounding vocal you know kind of reminiscent of uh sort of early orbital tracks and i use this really good library i played i played a vocal first yeah so that was that was taken from a library called um ethera which uh i've used quite quite a lot over the years um it's really great um content library oops yeah so there it is dry i really recommend this pack for anyone who's looking for this this type this style of vocal um and then yeah just put it through a lot of processing and um i kind of wanted it to have this kind of like stutter effect this kind of trance gate um effect going on so i created an uh an effect chain separated into two and one chain we've got ableton's delay and the second chain is where it gets a bit more interesting um again we've got a delay here big big like long reverb there that seven seconds uh take away a lot of the lows metaphalanger which gives like a really extreme kind of chorusing flanging effect um and then elephotil which this is what i use to create the the kind of trance gate effect if i solo that [Laughter] yeah so i only wanted that that that sort of trance gate on the reverb delay to come in at certain points so i automated that chain to kind of fade in and out and there's also a second sort of trance gate thing going on in there which is on on the on the main sound on the overall sound um this one's at eight no eighth notes and it kind of comes in a little bit earlier you can see here i've automated it to come in on the first four bars let's turn that off uh so you can hear the the two trance gates coming in at different times one after each other there that kind of gives it it helps it sound less like just a sample out of a library or it helps it give it a bit more identi identity and a bit more you know dynamic interest and that's also being sent to um we've got a bus down here which is running uh valhalla shimmer which is an amazing sort of long spaced out reverb i use it on on so many things combined with uad mxr flanger and doubler again kind of like a vintage flanger um you combine all those together and then you know you've got really the aesthetic of of the vocal nailed um and yeah throughout the intro i actually sent a lot of the sounds into into this uh shimmer and flange accommodation to kind of you know give that that nice kind of flangy effect um and uh yeah and if we kind of work our way back as well you know there were a lot of other sounds i put into this which you know fitted in with the theme and um you know one of those was this kind of like acid arp this is kind of like the the first hook that you hear like the first melody which kind of establishes the theme of where it's going [Music] yeah so again you know we're really harking back to these this kind of early kind of you know cyber trance era here and this is sounds which um again it's quite like it's very resonant sound i wanted to have quite a lot of like acid acid resonant sounds in there um which you know kind of had that you know like i said said earlier kind of wipe out kind of chemical rubbers you know feel to them underworld and um you know this sound was created a massive and you know a couple of key interesting things i did here were so here i've got like quite a lot of resonance uh applied to the filter uh and it's a low-pass filter and then we've got that assigned we've got that modulated by massive uh step sequencer here so it's arriving at different um different levels of cutoff filter for every sort of uh i think we've got eight eighth note here um so that's kind of moving as as the melody progresses and then also i've got the uh the pitch of the midi uh which is uh modulated by assigning this down here this ktr to and that is essentially modulating the resonance because in the in the lower registers i didn't want the sound to be as resonant and then as it moves into the higher registers i wanted to get more resonance so essentially i did that by assigning ktr here uh so that's that's our arp which is running through the intro um and yeah just to kind of like add into the soundscape of the track i've i wanted a lot of like 303 acid sort of sounds so you've got this this sound here yeah these are kind of textural really you know and they're kind of just adding to that to the soundscape and yeah this this one was uh done in silence here and it's really all about uh the r arpeggio here with the velocity um which is you know essentially you know we've got that controlling the resonance the really cranked up high resonance here um to give you that kind of real acid sound um yeah not not a lot going on with that sound otherwise um again you know other sort of you know times i've used sounds like that some monopoly there's a korg it's an emulator and you know this again this is quite a random sound really you know and i basically just um it just kind of like evolves over time and does its own thing and um you know i essentially just recorded you know 16 bars of it and then you know picked out a few of the good phrases you know to um yeah i picked out the the best best phrases to use you know in the actual track so i ended up arriving yeah just like little like sprinkles little kind of tastes of of those sounds kind of put throughout the track um so yeah then we've got the the vocal here this was just you know the vocal pitched up with with some effects on it kind of pan left and right quite quite dramatically and then in addition to that we've just got like a kind of like a long sustained base and that was created in serum uh which you know is obviously great for doing those huge kind of super saw wide unison multiple voice sounds um you know in this case we've got you know 16 voices of the first oscillator 16 of the second oscillator and then you know as many voices as we can find really you know we've got one here coming from the sub got some noise in there and yeah just like a long sort of decay on the filter to kind of because you know a lot of the tracks back then it was all about the the big super superstars um so i was trying to bring a lot of that in as as possible um and yeah again we've just we've got like a little bit processing on there because i think when you're layering up lots of voices together you're going to get a bit of like you know inconsistency with the um the phase on on the fundamentals of the sound so i wanted to try and level those out a little bit by putting some multi-band on the low end as you can see it here working on the levels of the lower sort of harmonics and fundamental there and just like even out a little bit and again more of just a little bit of ott there to straighten it out um so yeah that is more or less the intro um i mean again like to kind of help the theme of the track i added in quite a lot of sound effects and i suppose the most prominent ones are these like hacking sounds which i found from a pack and yeah they're just like running through the intro just to give it that that theme here you hear them all together yeah very very kind of subtle texture ear candy just like wide just you know to uh you know just really hit home and look at the hackers theme really and again just various kind of sounds i've i've found that suit the the soundscape of the track we've got a it's a reverse clap running into some white noise which is still very standard you know stock sounds which i'd use at this these kind of stages of the track [Music] yeah so i mean yeah these are very they're ready to go too much detail about these because they're just very simple sounds to make with white noise a few little rhythm rhythmical white noise chops which kind of kind of like high hats you know it's kind of more really part of the drum track i guess these two up here so yeah all of these little things just to help it along make it sound less less rigid um and then as we lead into the the main uh hook section um so we have this like very ethereal intro with with the the the vocal and the kind of acid sounds and the arp and i you know i was kind of thinking how do i get from a to b you know well you know one way of doing it would be to have loads of like kick drum fills and rolls and snare rolls and then you know you click that all comes together and you end in the climax of the hook coming in and but that kind of felt a little bit too much and i felt again you know rather than doing the obvious just go the other way and all i've done really here to get to that stage is to just use some white noise traveling up and then with my drums again they're not really too much they're just fading down and then i suppose where it gets more interesting is what i did with all the musical elements so i grouped all these together and then what i did was i used this great plugin here called endless smile by dadalife the guys that make sausage fattener and um it creates buildups essentially so you know i put all those sounds together and then if i turn the intensity up you know you can choose a variety of different styles here and you can actually turn sounds into risers [Music] so yeah and that was that's quite a subtle one i mean i think it's compressing the sound as it increases and it's also you know filter it's sweeping up with a filter uh with increasing resonance and then yeah just because i thought you know another trademark of this track is is the kind of stutter effect that i used elsewhere of the vocals and some of the synths i'll then introduce that as a way of you know um sort of um you know decaying this this section as it goes into the next one so again i used a photo for that and and i essentially just automated the volume here with a fast sort of volume envelope on on the 16th [Music] so you go and that's how i got from a to b with this part [Music] going back into the drop section um i want to discuss just a few of the extra sounds if you're the complimentary parts that kind of gave it gave the tracker a little bit more interest as it moves along and um yeah i guess one one of the the main ones here is uh this complementary synth which um it's like a kind of stab sound uh so listen to that and that works in conduct in conjunction with the main riff if we listen to those two together [Music] so yeah that was that was again a very simple sound made in massive and we've got we've got here just a square two squares actually three squares all laid up and they're at different pitches one's at fifth and yeah simple kind of uh filter cut off going on there on the envelope and added a bit of valhalla room [Music] so dry it's like kind of going to give it that space um again elephant tool here kind of doing my side chaining for me and this this is plugin's awesome uh clariphonic by kush audio uh again like this is this is a really good plugin for giving that top end air to a sound as i was using passive eq earlier in the track but yeah this one's modeled on an actual piece of hardware and um yeah you can control sort of where you want that sort of air to be added by you know choosing these shimmering silks you're not actually given much option to work with but it's that for that reason it's good because you know it's like you usually know when a sound needs this plug-in uh as its treatment um so yeah with this one need a bit more brightness called up the clarifonic and then the other interesting thing going on here is that i needed the the rift to basically duck when that sound came in so it kind of came up to the front a little bit more and i did that using a track spacer which is essentially a multi-band sidechain eq and um in the new version of ableton i'm currently beta testing at the moment but you can actually root in from audio other audio tracks which is a bit of a game changer and here i've chosen the audio from that stab and use that to control track spacer it's kind of dark the exact frequencies that that sound is making in order to create room for it without you know removing the sound entirely which is what would happen with standard side chaining [Music] so when you're hitting together [Music] so yeah kind of uh you know it's more transparent way of of you know mixing elements in if they're working against each other um so yeah and there's not a hell of a lot else going on on the drop we've we've talked about the intro talked about all the stuff going on in the drop um so yeah all that really remains is a few of the kind of like mixing uh points that i wanted to go through um and i touched upon earlier about the kind of mid-side uh mixing that was was going on in this track and essentially what i what i wanted to do in this track was to you know um create create the the best balance possible between um the the main riff and the drums and where they occupy the mid and the sides so if i just play the track to you um we're basically playing just the sides um and i use a plug-in here called um mscd by voxengo for that's a free plug-in it's really good it's just going to isolate the sides here so you can hear what's going on in the sides so we've got going on there is you know i wanted the drums to because the drums are essentially like a lot of the the side content in the drums is is in the top end like from the hi-hats there's a bit of the snare in there as well that kind of like wide 80s snare um so you know really we're looking at if i bring up span quickly so we can have a look at what's going on in the frequency spectrum so we've got quite strong bias around sort of 170 180 200 annex of the harmonics in the snare here um and then also where the hi-hats are around well 5k upwards really um so i wanted to kind of like emphasize those in the sides um and you know make sure they were sitting there quite quite clean and it was all about really eq'ing them against the the main riff so as we can see the main riff here it's taking up most of the room around here in the mids you know we're looking from like kind of 400 up to about 2k um really that's where a lot of the emphasis is there and and i wanted to like carve out the room in the sides for the tops and the lows of the drums to kind of shine through and have their own space so the way i did that was to use ableton's eq8 put it in side mode just rolled off all of the tops which is quite an extreme thing to do and i wouldn't do that on the entirety of the sound because it would sound weird but as the sound already sounds strong in mono for frequency i thought well i can get away with actually just taking away all of the tops here and allowing the tops of the drums to fill up that space in the sides and then you know similarly i've taken away a lot of the high mids there so you know when they're together i mean but by itself that sounds quite quite like a harsh cut but if you're playing together like the tops of drums are thing out that space so what you got going going on there is just like i was trying to achieve as separated um information as possible in the sides to create like an even balanced stereo field and obviously when i take that off oh so i went [Music] so yeah that really helps you know your mix to communicate well in the stereo field and obviously there's like literally zero content there in in the subs everything from about you know about 170 down you know you really want to keep that phase absolutely locked by removing any content below those frequencies yeah the next uh crucial part of the mixing process um i looked at is uh the sub and uh its relationship with kick and snare because obviously these are the two uh loudest elements in the mix with the drums with the kick and the snare you're fundamental and you know in this case if i have a quick look at that i'll pull up uh let's have a little pull up x escape here right so i'll put low pass on that just to show you what's going on so yeah that's where our fundamental is and you know that's taken up a lot of room in the mix you know that's nearly it's hitting about minus 2 db um equally with a snare drum pretty pretty loud i forget the uh there you go and i like to keep those fundamentals as close in volume as possible um um so yeah if we have a look at the kick and the snare and the sub together we'll see that it's causing all kinds of like phase issues oh hang on yeah sorry literally that's maxing out the head when we don't we don't want that at all so at the time of writing this track um i was using ella photo to carve out the room for the fundamentals of the kick and snap with the sub if i switch that on we can see what it's doing so yeah that's that's quite nicely just carving everything out and um now we can get our track nice and loud because the you know the the fundamentals of the kick and snow are mixed nicely and i did want to bring to your attention my new approach of doing this which is using a plugin called change shaper which i'm currently beta testing but um i think by the time you hear this it will be out and it is essentially it's like ableton's compressor you can use it to sidechain you can assign it to any uh track in the arrangement but the beauty of it is you can use it like hello photos so you can actually draw in your own custom curves in order to you know create the ducking that you you want so if i just give you a quick example um i'll turn off lfo tool here we've got an instance of change shaper and i'm going to assign that to our kick drum so let's find a kick drum there we go and then the great thing about it is it's got an oscilloscope built into it so you can actually see what's going on and here you can actually you can draw in your curve so and then we've got like sample accurate ducking literally in seconds like really really good and yeah the great thing about it is because it's actually reading the transient of the audio file you know you can actually bring the ducking right up to that transient if you if you need to like if you're applying this like mids and tops and stuff that we don't want as extreme ducking you're going to be able to like just bring it right up to the transient there um so yeah and that is really like solved a lot of the the side chaining issues i think enabled him you know with regards to like plug and delay compensation like for example i could introduce a limiter in front of this and the uh the latency will already be calculated so we need not worry about that so yeah very effective um and then when it comes to uh sidechaining against my snare drum pretty much the same principle attach that to my snare a bit less of a cut on there so you go uh we've sidechained our kick and snare can then go a bit deeper if you're sort of working with you know fuller frequency sounds and um you know you can delve into uh the multiband uh section of it as well which will allow you to sort of duck low mids and highs independently so often what what i do these days is actually like bus or you know send all of my musical and you know everything apart from the drums into its own chain track so i'll give you a quick demo of that route that down into side chain then we'll work a change shape on there route that's what kick and snare and obviously in this case let's take off our effects on this don't use lightning those anymore um [Music] so yeah yeah in this case we've got like literally everything running into uh chain shaper everything into one one channel essentially um [Music] so then we can actually harness uh the multi-band so in this case i'd want the one so i'd want the uh essentially the lows to be you know cut quite harshly so we'll do a curve maybe like that the mids you know less harshly so you know that can sound a bit pumpy if you have that in too hard and highs obviously you really just want the transient clicking through so we'll put that about there and then essentially what we have there is you know quite nice transparent accurate side training yeah and obviously just i did that for demons demonstration purposes but yeah you get the idea and um you know it really makes that kind of sidechaining thing uh less of an issue because you just have that sitting on one channel that everything's rooted into and it's doing the right things with your um you know the different bands of the spectrum so yeah i mean that's that's pretty much it with with regards to mixing how i'm went about mixing this track and you know just going into a little bit more detail about how i do it um these days and um i suppose the only the only other thing to touch upon is what i've got going on on the master bus and uh yeah i mean in this track i tried to get and generally try to get the mix downs to a level where they actually don't need any additional eq or compression um at the final mastering stage um and and this this track happened to be one of those and you know it required very little so yeah these these utilities are just very functional just to like you know just to kind of decay the chain at the end of any like reverb tails at the end of the track so as you can see there that's what that gain is doing another gain here uh sorry another utility here just to bring the level down a little bit and i'd use this to maybe check you know the sort of the mono compatibility here um obviously voxengo mscd to check the sides but you can also do that in utility um and then yeah just like ozone ozone maximizer on on the final and you know i usually run it in um sort of modern mode with the character right down which is it's kind of clipping but it's it sounds good and it's transparent and um you know i like things to be um you know quite clean and transparent so so yeah there you go that's it okay guys that's all we've got time for and thanks for watching the video and i really hope you enjoyed it and if you want to find out more about me check out my website www.metricmusic.com and yeah all the best cheers

Channel: Computer Music

Views: 23,161

Keywords: computer music, synth, synthesis, ableton, reason, cubase, logic, nuendo, pro tools, waves, ssl, neve, uad, fabfilter, xfer, serum, sylenth, massive, ni, vengeance, avenger, kontakt, u-he, uhe, diva, bazille, hive, mix, mixing, composing, theory, parallel, compression, eq, distortion, gate, filter, saturation, production, producer, studio, session, interface, keyboard, monitors, vst, au, aax, plugin, plug-in, tutorial, video, in the studio, track, masterclass, dnb, house, techno, trance, break, beat, drums, kick, snare, hats, groove, swing, cm273

Id: olmX2RdZD08

Length: 94min 2sec (5642 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 27 2023