NOTES

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SYNTHS AND LEADS

Trance gate

Create two tracks, put a synth on the first one with a melody (long notes and pad like sounds work well). Then put a synth on the other track with a short snappy enveloppe and create a rythmic pattern of notes with it, then turn off this track. go back to your first synth track and set the sidechain on the gate to take the second synth track as input, then adjust the gate settings until you hear the first synth playing the rythm of the second track. Adding some delay and reverb after the gate sound pretty too.

Bass

the lowest frequencies that subwoofer can reproduce well are around F and G

Bass Line Algorithms

This is definitely not a complete list of every way you could write a bass line but it includes a lot of common approaches and is a great starting point for ideas.

1. Root note pads: Bass holds the root of each chord.
2. Line up with the drums: Bass plays root notes on each of the main drum hits.
3. All offbeats: Bass plays the root note of each chord on all the “and” beats of the bar (“1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and”).
4. Disco octaves: Bass plays the root note of each chord, alternating between two different octaves of that note (usually the higher one is on the offbeats).
5. Root note downbeat + fills: Bass plays the root note on each downbeat, followed by melodic fills leading to the root note on the next downbeat.

Also think about “passing notes” or “passing tones” - notes that may be outside of a chord or even outside of your key, but that can serve as a bridge in between the more important, anchoring bass notes you’re using.

Guitar

guitar effects chain, in that order:

1. pedal (for more distortion, increase output / gain of pedal - esp. combned with boost amp)
2. amp
3. then cabinet (cabinets can be combined with parallel chains and mixed together)
4. then guitar lead solo glue compressor
5. play around with grain delay, pitch up or down and then play with spray and frequency, try around 50% wet
6. good amount of short reverb
7. add widener

Drums

FX

Sidechaining

Use eq in compressor sidechain to get just the transient of the kick, click the headphones to hear the filtered sound

Using reverb with transient heavy sounds

Short Reverbs
When adding reverb to drum sounds or plucks, use a return track or a parallel channel and reduce the transient of the signal before it gets to the reverb in order to keep the original sound punchy. It's also a good idea to apply some pre-delay to the reverb to give even more room for the initial transient to come in before the reverb kicks in. EQing out the highs and lows can also help reduce the flutter sound than can be created by the reverb.

Gated reverb

put a gate on a reverb return track and lower the treshold to leave just a bit of the reverb come through. Quite useful to thicken up drums.

OTT tips

OTT can be used to bring out textures out of certain sounds by compressing certain ranges of frequencies. Bringing the outpout up by 5db helps keep the volume consistent at different amounts.
YOu can adjust the crossover frequencies on the left of the plugn to change the sound of the effect, it helps to control how much of the low-mids and high-mids get compressed. For non bass sounds it helps to bring up the low band up to 120hz-150hz
Some bands can be turned off if only part of the frequency range needs compression, for example just the highs to add some texture and fizzle.
By changing the value of the time knob you can make the sound more smooth or transient heavy.
Adding a saturator to clip some of the hard transients can help with the mix.

RESOURCES

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