In the world of drum and bass, it's very easy to get caught up in the technical side of things, get obsessed over drum sounds and how people make basses and sidechain synths and weather or not your tune is up to scratch. While it's...
This works especially well with multiple sine waves to get big, old-school style basses. Loading up a sine wave and detuning it against itself with multiple voices or against another sine wave from another oscillator will create varying levels of beating and modulating. Generally works best on...
One of the biggest challenges facing all producers (especially new ones) is surmounting the problem of getting music made entirely in software to sound pleasing to the ear; even though we make electronic music, our ears like things a little imperfect. Drums: distort things up, saturate...
I don't know how other people go about producing music from square 0 to square 100 but the way I do it is like this...
The last 6 months or so I've been focusing on making my tracks as clean as possible. It's really just a matter of listening to every track individually and assessing weather it's fitting in and is serving a purpose frequency-wise. Going over your track with a...
Works especially well for making fast, 16th note percussive bits for drum and bass. You can turn a boring, repetitive and robotic 16th note loop into something dynamic, layered and morphing by adding extreme flangers and phasers to it to give width and create movement in...
When you're layering drum hits and constructing your beats, make sure to pay attention to the transients of your hits. Sometimes, hi hats or other percussion that lands on the kick and snare can obscure or screw up the transients so make sure to prioritise the...
Normally, placing distortions after reverbs is a bad idea but with enough fiddling and extreme enough settings you can stumble across artifacts and sounds which are actually very useful and unique. As a side note to this, if you're working on percussive material with lots of...
I think it's useful to think about producing a song in terms of a pyramid. You put in a lot of time and effort at the start laying out a very solid foundation before incrementally increasing in height in smaller and finer amounts. If you don't get...
Usually, I split my bass audio into two frequencies: one above 150hz and one below 150hz and I process them that way but lately, I've been using bassier, subbier kicks in my tunes. I'm a big fan of producers who use bigger kicks in drum and...