make music now Electro-house production

Make an electro-house track

W
elcome to the second half of our electro house tutorial. We always maintain that making a track can be a two-day job. The first is generally about getting an idea together, and in electro that essentially means a bassline lead and a beat, so last month we got a vibe down in Abletons Live 5 which consisted largely of a bassline lead and well, a beat! But there was more. We layered up our bassline with a riff that we spread across three different synths. The general feel was pretty cool, but its time to turn things into a complete track, so were going to switch from Live 5 to Logic Pro 7. Thats not to

On the DVD
TUTORIAL FILES Crack open the Tutorial Files folder on the coverdisc for our finished electro-house track

Last month we part-baked our electro-house cake, putting in the key ingredients. Here, we smooth on the icing and cook it to perfection
say you cant use Live to make a complete track, of course, but it does use a lot of CPU thanks to its warping features, and since electro requires lots of intricate effects routing and edits, we want a more conventional sequencer to speed things up. Not only that, but we feel like our idea is stagnating after listening to it so much, and a great way to re-inspire yourself and get excited about your project again is to load it up in a different DAW application. So, copy the new folder from the cover DVD to your hard drive and fire up your favourite sequencer cm

STEP BY STEP Importing and converting

First we import all the MIDI files from our Live project into Logic. Do we want to keep any of the Live instruments from last month? As much as we like the ideas, we think its time for some fresh blood. The only one > we keep is the main bass (from Tera 3), as its filthy! >

The first replacement instrument we go for is Logics Hammond clone, EVB3, which replaces the organ we had last month. Replacing the Clavi sound is another Logic-bundled clone, the EVD6. Finally, in place of the lead > sound, we have the Beast synth on its initial preset >

Time to import the audio. Taken from the original we have the kick, fast hat pattern and our drum loop. We chop these up in Logic, manually sequencing the kick on every beat, slicing the first bar of the hats up into > individual segments and tightening them up a little. >

Time to chop up the drum loop. With this done we can separate the snares and hats and place them on their own channels. We alter the levels of each individually, and add a little skippy double-up to the hat at the end of > every two bars, and a variation every four. >

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We load up our familiar Tera 3 patch and play the main bassline MIDI clip through it, then add some processing. We phatten up our kick using a low-pass filter with a high cutoff setting. We also add a compressor, low boost from > Sonic Maximizer and a low cut at 32Hz. >

To each of our remaining riffs we apply low cut, some Sonic Maximization, Vintage Warmer, additional compression, stereo spread and whatever other effects take our fancy (in this case, tremolo, some cool resonant high-pass filtering, flanging and some distortion).

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Electro-house production make music now

STEP BY STEP Revising the idea

Having taken a (one month!) break since making our groove, and having now loaded our idea into Logic, we hear some problems. First, our riffs are too busy, so we trim them down a bit. The easiest way to do this is to play them back and mute individual notes as you go that way > you can always put one back in if muting ruins the groove. >

We continue the theme from the original by letting the different instruments alternate so that they never play simultaneously. By the time weve finished doing this were listening to a really nice sparse grove, with the organ doing most of the work for two bars, the Beast with a solitary > note in bar three and the Clavi for the last bar. >

We add a little spice to the proceedings by applying some wah filtering to the Clavichord riff, an instance of Logics Bass Amp, some flanging and a low tape-delay setting. Finally, we use EQ to remove the last of the ear> splitting upper-mid frequencies. >

STEP BY STEP More elements

The next thing we notice is that all the high and resonant harmonics of our lead bass are in conflict with the other musical elements. Its a tough call, as we dont want to ignore our own long-standing advice (ie, dont try to force an idea thats not working, and dont ruin a > good idea by refusing to delete or modify a bad element). >

Nevertheless, were convinced theres a solution, and since this is choppy electro were making, were going to save our filthy bass for special occasions (various drops and breaks) and find another, less resonant bass to play along with our other musical elements. In our case, its a big Moog > Modular V electro patch. >

We start by copying the original bassline riff to our new Moog patch channel, tweaking it slightly to suit the new patch and letting it play for a while to get a feel. We then add broad low-shelving EQ boost, Sonic Maximization (high and low), 32Hz low-cut, Vintage Warming and an exciter > for the mid frequencies. >

To phatten the bass end, we load up a basic sine wave patch, copy our bassline parts to it, transpose the whole thing down a few octaves and then double up the notes so that theyre playing the same thing at the intended octave and the one below it. Then we add the same > plugs and settings as for our lead basslines. >

We want to use some strings to add a little urgency to proceedings, so we opt for a nice old-school Solina Strings-style synthesized sampler patch playing our root note very high (G5). We add low cut, compression, Sonic > Maximization on the top-end, and a stereo spread effect. >

We consolidate our synth parts and reset all of our levels to get a clear idea of whats going on. We add a little Tape Delay to our Beast and Clavi parts, as they need filling out. Finally, some tremolo adds stereo excitement to the Clavi, and a resonant low-pass filter and EQ take the last of the edge off it.

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STEP BY STEP More drums, please!

With all our synths in, the percussion seems thin, so we load a sampled drum hit from a loop and play a skippy pattern with it. A few humanising tweaks to the pattern later and were adding our usual assortment of effects plus some EQ boost to bring out the mid range, some low cut and > a low-pass filter to remove the rattle and hiss. >

We load up a synthetic sounding Rimshot and play a driving one-bar pattern with a variation every four. We go all out with the effects, using strong flanging to let it evolve over each eight bars, some phasing to smooth the edges, a little delay to fill it out, a gate to keep it nice and > tight, and all the usual effects. >

Our loop from step 1 sounds a little unfinished, but the vibes good. Rather than forcing that sound, we tap out a similar but slightly different pattern using a bog standard shaker sample (with compression, Vintage Warming and Sonic Maximization). On their own, these two parts sound > rubbish, but together they sound great. >

We want a little flourish to add excitement at the end of each eight bars or so. Electro relies on some cool edits, so you need some equally cool touches to throw in the drops. We opt for some drums sounds from a classic sampled drum roll and re-sequence them for our own > eighth-bar flourish. >

It never hurts to have a seventh (and eighth) bar roll to fill things out. But rather than the conventional snare roll, we opt for a fast ride cymbal roll. Remembering to set the sample to re-trigger mode (so it doesnt play right > through each time), we add brightening and low-cut. >

The last percussive element we add is a rolling 909-style electronic tom pattern. This will provide weight and depth to the intros and outros, before the basslines play, as without the bass, our percussion sounds a little light and twinkly. We roll off some low end to tidy the toms up and add a stereo spread.

STEP BY STEP Vocal city

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Element-wise, were approaching saturation point but we still need a killer hook, and in our case that means a vocal. Electro has plenty of chopped up vocal samples, and while theyre normally nicked from somewhere, we want to avoid the wrath of the record labels, so we grab a > mic and chat some rhythmic cobblers for a few bars! >

One such daft phrase is the original and poetic, I want to rock your party. To disguise the silly voice we pitch it down a little, add plenty of phase distortion, a gate to eliminate any breathing, some resonant low-pass filtering to take the edge off the treble but accentuate the high mid, and > any other effects that take our fancy >

Finally, we put the electro in our, er, electro track by loading a vocoder, creating a new vocal channel, copying the groundbreaking line, Drop the bass to it, muting the output and routing it to our vocoder. We then add plenty of upper boost and gating to the vocoder source, hold down some notes for the vocoder and place it on bar eight.

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Electro-house production make music now Q&A focus

Pump it up

hatever the nay-sayers might tell you, electro-house is some of the best-produced dance music around. It draws on two decades of dance music making experience to ensure that its some of the clearest, punchiest, bounciest and phattest material thats ever likely to pass through your speakers. Naturally, this is all down to the production processes you employ, and weve talked about a number of these as weve gone along, but some of them can only be brought into play once you have all your elements in place, particularly the ones involving sidechaining. Sidechaining is the process of using one signal to

modulate the effect youre applying to another signal, and that effect is usually compression. This can give varying results, but the one were most concerned about today is pumping, which, when applied correctly, has the effect of making certain elements of your track throb and bounce. We also need to add a lot more size to our track, and since our plug-in count has now exceeded 100 (lots of subtle tweaks, you understand!), were running pretty low on juice, so were going to draw on some bus-based reverb action. That in itself will open up some creative possibilities for sidechaining, but more on that when we come to it

1Everybody bounce! Sidechaining can add plenty of movement to your tracks

STEP BY STEP Jumping and pumping

We insert a sidechain enabled compressor (last in the insert chain) to each of the following Moog bass, sub bass, strings, and shaker. We then set the sidechain of each of these compressors to receive the signal from our kick > drum channel, ready for some pumping action. >

If your compressor plug-ins are anything like Logics, you may find that the sidechain trigger is now producing some extremely strong pumping on the volume. To tame it, push the Threshold up until the fluctuation between loud > and quiet is lessened, and then pull the volume down. >

If your channels arent pumping enough, pull the Threshold down. You can now tweak the timing of the pumping using the Attack (fast settings, but increase it to about 7ms), and the tempo and groove of the pumping using the Release (92ms is cool for our track at 127bpm).

STEP BY STEP Space in the place

This is a pretty sparse track so far, despite the number of elements we have, so we create a couple of reverb busses with two different types of reverb. We opt for Logics Space Designer convolving reverb, and WizooVerb, but, > as ever, any two plug-ins/patches will do. >

We add low cut, stereo spread, Sonic Maximizer, and a compressor to pull up the level, and use our sidechain trick on one of the reverb channels. We then send a > little of selected parts to one or other of the reverb busses. >

Everythings sounding nice and large, but we want an even bigger reverb for our vocal, so we insert one. We add some low cut to tame it a little, though, along with another compressor to pull up the reverberation. And now were ready to arrange

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The arrangement

e could bore you for a few more pages explaining exactly how we achieved our finished track from this point, but we reckon youre itching to try out your own arrangement, and who are we to tell you what to do? Instead, heres a look at our final track layout. To start

yours, simply mute all the parts of your eight-bar loop and make enough copies to cover six minutes or so. Now check out our tips below and let the arrangement write itself and dont forget to check out our finished mix to see what we did with it all. See you in clubland!

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This is club music, so give yourself a generous instrumental intro. Aim for your bassline to kick in around bar 33 (and leave at least twice that at the end for DJs to play with). Electro is all about phat, minimal breaks and drops. Try silencing everything else but put your kick in when your bassline drops.

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We have a little breakdown in our track, but electro breakdowns are usually quite short its not wave your hands in the air music, rather, grit your teeth and punch the air music.

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Dont be afraid to have some jerky stop-start sections where all the percussion drops in and out as if some virtual DJ was bringing in another tune manually. Filter sweeps can be great for adding variation to the proceedings and we even apply a very resonant high-pass filter to our intro bassline in places for some acidic action

Get choppy
One of the key elements of electro is chopped up vocals, and nothing makes it easier to play with vocals than a sampler. Unfortunately our vocal is currently saved as an audio file. To chop it up we bounce the I want to rock your party line as a distinct audio file (keeping all the FX we added to the original) and then open it up into the individual words (well, syllables, in fact) using ReCycle!. Next, we use a soft sampler to assign each word to its own key on our MIDI keyboard. We can then come up with any skippy pattern we like. The type of things youre after are stuttering effects (re-triggering the samples every 16th- or 32nd-note) and repeated words. The basic groove you get from tapping and the stuttering can be drawn in the gaps. You should also play around with the velocity of the individual hits in a stuttering section. After that, you can try adding a little reverb, some short tempo-delays and a low cut and youre ready to rock!

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Chopped up vocals sound wicked over a massive bassline, and even better when everything kicks back in and the vocals still going.

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After the short breakdown with a teasing build-up, we drop our ultimate filthy bassline from the original Live project, using the vocals to maintain the consistency.

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You cant have your track remain at a constant peak for six or seven minutes, so alternate your other elements to create little grooving bits.

Its all about the little edits and drops. Weve used our drum roll liberally throughout the track, dropping all the other elements out when it plays.

Finally, we add loads of heavily delayed, reverbed and phased sound effects and cymbal crashes. You can use automation to control these for more effects in minimal sections

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