Producing a Future Rave Type Track (David Guetta & Morten) Tutorial

hey what's up everyone this is ill factor from bdacademy.com welcome to the channel in this video we're going to be producing some future rave for those of you who are not aware future rave is a style and genre or a sub-genre of edm that's been mostly popular and brought to the scene by david guetta and morton the style is a little bit of a mixture of techno and progressive house focusing a lot on the aggressive arpeggiated leads and really fat saw heavy bass lines so i'm going to play something that i'm working on and highlight throughout this video some key principles that you can apply when trying to create music in this genre [Music] we have so much [Music] i'm very fine all right so let's start with the arpeggiated synth that we can hear in the drop now before i get into the sound design i want to focus in on the pattern i also want to share with you a principle that can be really helpful no matter what genre of music that you are creating so let's double click this region and let's hit the fold button here so we can focus in on just the notes that are being played now this pattern was played by hand on my midi controller and what i did was i slowed the tempo down of my project because we're currently at 124 bpms and at that tempo it could be really tricky to play a pattern with my midi controller so what i often do is i'll slow it down dramatically so from 124 let's say all the way down to something like 92 bpms and i'm literally just recording by hand that specific pattern note by note now it is very helpful to have things slow down dramatically so that you can play and articulate the pattern and riff and the overall melody that you're looking for then speed it up so that you can find the right pocket and see if that riff makes sense at that tempo sometimes when you do this the riffs and patterns don't translate well and that's because we have to be mindful that when we are playing something a lot slower of the subdivisions so you don't want to play something even though you're playing it slower you are also performing that riff slower as well so knowing that now it's perfectly fine if you're drawing in the notes too this has just been a helpful thing for me personally that i like to do that helps me create the right type of patterns that i'm looking for also when you're trying to create patterns you can start by just the rhythmic pattern first and then by using the scale feature in ableton live or in any diw you can use programs that allow you to see what notes belong on the scale then you can kind of identify and move notes around so let me give an example here on this track i'm in my session view so i'm just going to create a blank clip right here this is going to give me a one bar clip and what we can do is just create a simple rhythmic pattern and i'll use the pencil tool to draw this in it'll be a lot easier and once actually once i draw my first note i'll hit the fold button that way it's just focusing on that one note that way i can draw in my pattern without having to go to multiple different notes now i'm going to go ahead and preview this pattern that i'm creating so you once you come up with a pattern that you would like go ahead hit the scale button and in this case we'll be in let's say g sharp minor and then we'll hit scale and this will give us all the notes that belong in that scale so you can simply now just take your pattern and identify some notes that you want to try messing with and so on and so on so these can be really helpful when you're trying to identify the notes that you're trying to lock into a specific pattern all right now over to the sound so we're going to be using serum and to create the sound patch here and i'm using oscillator a i have that set to analog and using basic mini wavetable i've got it set to the first one and i'm going to repeat the same process for oscillator two so both are set to basic mini and we're going to crank the unison on the second one to five we're going to add five voices in unison and just move the detune slightly here this is all really kind of just done by ear and i'm slightly changing the fine tune here about 32 cents and adjusting the level so this is just with oscillator a i'm going to slightly bring up the level of oscillator b so it creates that nice stereo depth that we can hear and feel winds up the sound a lot then then we're heading over to the envelope because we want to actually shape the body of the sound so this is a really short lead so you can see here we've got the envelope and we've got the sustain all the way down and the decay right around here and just a really quick release [Music] and then once we've got that set in place i'm gonna make sure i set the the sound over to mono from polyphonic to mono so we don't have any overlaps so we have distortion going on i have it set to diode one and i'm really just kind of combing through some of these settings to feel like okay that's adding the right type of texture that i like and then using the multi-band compression setting here and that's what's really going to give that nice elastic rubbery type of texture to the sound and then you're just using an eq to cover some of the bottom end here and that's about it i have some other plugins here but as you can see they're not turned on they weren't being used it was more trial and error so once i've gotten that set in place i'm actually going to be duplicating this track so we have the main lead here and i'm going to duplicate that track same riffs underneath here same serum but in this case all we're really using we're turning both oscillators a and b off and just using a compressor and the eq effect here but all we're using is the noise i'm using the arp i'm going to analog the arp white noise here because i just want this to be the actual same pattern but just triggering the actual white noise now we could have added this in the first serum but i want a little bit more control over the balance between the noise and the actual main synth now what's really going to add the drama to the synth is the reverb and the space that you can often hear in a lot of future rave type of tracks so as you can see i've grouped all the synths up to a lead bus and that's this track over here and let's go ahead and focus on the processing here so on this lead bus i've created a an effect rack because i wanted the dry signal and i still wanted to be able to blend a little bit of the affected reverb signal so i'm going to turn this on i'm going to focus in on the reverb signal so here we have i started with valhalla vintage verb any reaver would do just want to make sure you're using a big bright hall type of setting because we want a nice luscious space there and i'm going to follow that reverb over with a little bit of auto panning so there's actual some movement and that's kind of what i'm doing i'm just adding this depth to the reverb so that's just a little bit of that panning eq'ing this so that we're not getting a lot of the muddiness that might come through and warming up the reverb as well and then the most important aspect is sidechaining the reverb to the actual lead itself not necessarily the kick that we normally oftentimes do in dance music where you have the kick drum playing and you would use the kick as a source of the side chain here the source is going to actually be my main lead so let's go ahead and take a listen just focusing on the reverb and then what you want to do is dial the threshold up or down you know lower the threshold raise the threshold till you feel like you have a right balance there between the reverb and the dry signal and then i'm actually just compressing it slightly with the glue compressor after that just to actually control any rising peaks that might be a little out of control with the reverb and so that's the affected reverb blending in with the drives you can see the dry signal there's nothing there and the reverb has that on there then affecting both the dry and the reverb signal is a side chaining plug-in by nicky romero called the kickstart that helps really create that nice pulse action then i'm going to be using ableton live saturated just give some more gain and then enable the soft clip so we can get a little bit more volume kind of just squeeze the dry and that reverb signal together blend them and kind of mesh them into one the eq is really just to kind of tame and balance this out in the mix of everything and then we have the filter to automate in certain parts of the arrangement such as this breakdown and the build up that we can see here [Music] so this is what it sounds like all together [Music] so the reverb makes all the difference here and you might have noticed in the arrangement we have another synth that comes in and this is basically creating the same exact rift line and i'm using silent for this and this is just a basic patch that i found here and what i'm doing is just going a couple octaves higher just so that we actually have a little bit of lift happening in the second part in the second half of this drop so we have two layers of base we have a sub base and then we have this aggressive dirty base here that you can normally often hear in future rave music so i'm going to start with the aggressive one first it's got that reese that hoover type base so let's go ahead and take some of the processing off and walk you through what we're doing there this is also serum and this is just basically starting off with a sawtooth waveform and adding some of the unison voices so where i'm at three voices here and just detuning that until i got the nice texture that i'm looking for and then heading over to the effect we're adding some distortion have it set to the tube using the compressor here just to make sure as any notes that might resonate a little bit more than the others this is just going to give a nice controlled dynamic performance and i'm just using this eq to take away some of the topic [Music] that's it then we really get a lot of the grit and dirt added when we use an amp simulator that we have here in ableton live [Music] notice that i set it's set to mono so i want to make sure i don't lose that width so i'm going to leave it and set it to dual [Music] put an eq so we can take away from the low end and leave that space for the sub bass now i have a reverb inserted directly onto the synth and we're going to repeat that same process and this is a big staple in this genre of music and that is side chaining the reverb to the lead source of the actual synth so in this case base that second base is going to be the source that ducks the reverb so when the bass stops playing you hear that nice epic reverb take place and take presents that's what we're trying to do here [Music] and for this you really have to kind of dial in the threshold a little bit to get the right blend that you're looking for and then we're using that same kickstart here to create some of that pulse then i have the kick and the sub bass layered together i'm going to tell you why here we have the sub base first which is just a basic sawtooth no unison set to mono and just brought the filter all the way down i'm also using an amp simulator here this one's set to mono and this is set to the base amplifier and just using eq to cut any high end off and this base in particular is going to get side chain to the kick drum so i have the kick drum right above that now here's a principle that you can also use in any type of genre that music that you're creating and that's understanding when and the why behind what to do when it comes to compressing your kick and your bass i particularly wanted to compress the kick and bass together so that's why i grouped them together the sub bass and the kick because it just felt a little detached they just felt a little bit detached from one another and so putting them together and then compressing the two of them with a multi-band dynamic compressor really helped to glue them together so i'm going to play this this is just the kick and the sub bass together without the multiband dynamic that low end really just kind of lifts up a little bit and the kick still keeps its presence but yet the bass now feels a little bit more undetached from it it actually feels more glued to the kick so what's going on is in this multi-band dynamic i made sure the highs are set to 600 hertz and i put the low at around 110 hertz and i'm just kind of dialing back the compression here the ratio and the threshold until i felt that detachment leave and have the sub and the kick more glued together once i heard that when i started dialing in these knobs and boosting up the makeup gain once i heard that then i was like okay that's this is this is really helpful this is what i was going for and then using a saturated to just give nice beef this is another way to actually kind of glue them together as well with having that saturated so over here i duplicated the same build up and drop so i can spotlight a different type of synth that is also normally found in this genre of music so let me just play a little bit [Music] [Music] so this is a bit more of that epicness that's going on and it's the same type of vibe here that we've got with the the lead here so we've got a serum performing the lead and that is oscillator a and b set to a sawtooth and really just cranking up the unison here and giving it that nice wide depth and putting the filter on not shaving too much of that because we do want it to be bright distorting it i'm using going back to diode one here and just creating a little bit of depth here with the dimension and that's really it because once you have this big synth here it's just all about that sawtooth just that grittiness that comes from that and then duplicating it again on top so that i have the same riff playing with the noise just as we did earlier so we've got that as well so i'm going to duplicate this part here and play these together [Music] well i hope the tips i've shared in this video have been helpful and inspiring you to use them and implement them in your projects and if you're serious about wanting to produce your own music and you're looking for professional guidance to help you take your next step with your music production then i want to encourage you to visit beatacademy.com as a matter of fact i want to take this moment to highlight some of the wins from some of my beat academy members i want to specifically highlight bt academy member riva before joining beat academy she was a bit overwhelmed with the whole self-recording and production process but after becoming a member for several years she's been able to write self-produce and release her first song which became a semi-finalist in nashville's music city songwriter competition color on the walls her project also caught the attention of producers in nashville who turned out to be the producer of her dreams and they've been working together remotely for almost 1.5 years now she went from zero fans to having a growing fan base and started to sell merch and the color on the walls has achieved over 3 000 streams on spotify since its release additionally her new song state of mind is coming up on a thousand streams in a matter of one month she's also increased confidence and musical abilities and exponential growth in both the music and the business side of things and she actually got to nail her first job doing some vocal work for a tv ad that i was able to send her away as becoming a beat academy member so super excited about everything going on inside the beat academy community and all the members that are achieving the success that they're looking for if you're interested in want more details then venture over to beatacademy.com for more information be sure to subscribe this video so you can stay up to date with upcoming videos and i'll see you soon

Channel: Beat Academy

Views: 18,186

Keywords: Beat Academy, ABleton Live, Tutorial, how to produce ableton live, Futurerave, future rave, david guetta, mortin, gueeta mortin, cymatics, busyworks beats, adam ivy, puremix.net, mixwiththemasters, learn how to produce, producelikeapro, future rave type track

Id: rxQxDIO19q8

Length: 19min 45sec (1185 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 17 2021