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Have you seen Oscar and Alice’s magical mystery tour of Stockholm, collecting sounds then heading to the studio to build a banger?

We have collected the best of these field recordings for this Friday’s giveaway and loaded them into the creative sampler Mimic, ready to use!

This giveaway contains the Mimic patches and the audio files to use in any way you choose. 

Download the Patches

 

If you haven’t seen the video yet, you can watch their full hour long adventure here and find inspiration on how to use the samples in your own music!

Transcript

Intro: from Brussels to Stockholm

Hey everyone, this is Oscar from Underdog, and today, as you might see from all the snow and the whiteness behind me, I’m not in Brussels as usual, but instead in Sweden, in Stockholm. And what else is in Sweden? Well, yes.

The plan: record the sounds of Stockholm

So we’ve been invited today by the Reason crew to go explore the city and record some field recording samples around Stockholm, let’s say the sounds of Stockholm. We’re going to take those back to the studio later to process them and turn them into some, I don’t know, some techno stuff. We’ve got a schedule today: we’re going to check out a whole bunch of iconic locations, so why don’t you come along with us and explore?

Narrow streets and metallic sounds

All right, we are in the narrow street in Old Town Stockholm. It’s so tight you can actually hold your hands out and reach both sides. That is perfect. Do we have a metallic object? Yes. Well, that was the worst metallic sound I have ever created in my life. One of those things that cute couples do on bridges, exactly. The sound of true love.

The Stockholm Bloodbath square and the palace

Oh wow, this looks spooky. They call it the Blood Bath of Stockholm, because elderly people actually got executed here in the past. The Stockholm Bloodbath was a trial that led to a series of executions in Stockholm between the 7th and 9th of November in 1520. The event is also known as the Stockholm Massacre, and it occurred after the coronation of Christian II as the new king of Sweden. So we’re going to the palace now. The guards should be doing something, but maybe not. Very nice, very nice.

Noisemakers, shops, and the metro

There’s so much potential here. They actually make noise. No birds were harmed in the process of these sample packs. Okay, very cute.

I haven’t used the metro for a really long time, I feel bad about it. At the moment we are in Kungsträdgården, and this metro line is special because it’s supposed to be one of the biggest open-air museums in the world: every station on this blue line is another gallery. So if we could find anything along the way to hit, it’ll give us a whole different palette of sounds. Now, right behind you there’s a metal box, we have to go have a look. And if the train could do that thing again, that would be great. The train will move in two minutes, so we will have a lot of noise coming. I’ll be turning to ASMR sooner or later.

Using ambience as a noise floor

So that’s the kind of loop you put down at super low volume in the back of your track, kind of like vinyl crackle or just a noise floor, so that in between your beats you don’t have perfect silence. You put some kind of ambience like this, but really quiet, so you can’t really tell. It makes the difference between perfect silence and just a room tone. Super nice. There’s just so much to do here. We got all the humming and the hissing on that one, so that was really good, so much material. And there’s a lot of nice toms there as well. Yeah, for sure.

Planning the track: abstract or melodic?

I’m curious what we’re going to do once we get into the studio, because we’re going to have a lot of good material. Are we going full abstract, no melody at all, or are we going more for random stuff, whatever comes? Maybe we should at least have something melodic in there. I feel like we’re getting a lot of atonal sounds, which is cool, but then we can also do something with the Bassline Generator, like a very easy melodic pattern.

Recording a street performer

Okay, one question: do we have any coins? Because now we’re going to record this guy and use this song. I’ve only got euros as well. No, but if we are going to record him, I feel like he should get something. I’ve got ten. It’s worth it now. It’s karma, because we’re benefiting from this guy. Exactly. Ah, this is actually so good, I already had a couple of ideas like this.

Sometimes we have people performing here inside as well, which would be a pretty good spot for recording that sound. So let’s go give him a tip and see if we’re allowed to record it for a minute. Is it okay? I’m kind of a big deal on the internet. Super nice, okay, we’ve got a lot of good stuff so far.

One more stop

But I have one more thing: we have to say, it’s just so Swedish. So creepy. Also creepy. I wonder how these look outside. Oh my god. Now that was really something else. I don’t think I could ever feel this Swedish in my life. The depth and richness of ABBA-related history was never so clear to me. Thank you so much for that. You never knew they did that much. I think we need to get into the studio and start working on some stuff, this is too much inspiration. All right, let’s go home.

Back in the studio: the rules and the tempo

All right, we are back in the studio now. We had several hours’ worth of content from Stockholm, which is a beautiful city, especially in the winter. They’re going to tell you the summertime, but don’t believe them, the winter is also pretty nice. We got all sorts of different samples: a lot of percussive stuff, hitting stuff, a lot of atmospheric stuff, some weird sounds. Today it would be a good idea to take those sounds and make a track from scratch using only the sounds from this. So we’re not going to use a kick drum sample or a hi-hat sample or anything like that, and we are not going to use any synthesizer either. Everything in the track will be created from the samples.

You can follow along using whatever DAW you’ve got, as long as it’s got some sample players, which are going to be pretty important in this, and then some kind of suite of effects: things like saturation, delays, and reverbs. Today we’re being hosted by Reason Studios, so we’re going to be using the Reason Rack effect plugins, which you can just get as a VST. And I want to open a parenthesis there, because I’m not really a Reason user. I know a couple of Reason players, like the arpeggiator, but I never used actual Reason FX up to now, so I will play the noob. How hard can it be, right? We’ll just figure it out along the way. If I make some happy accidents, that’s good, and if it sounds really sad, it’s my fault. Given the amount of plugins and software you’ve mastered over the years for your channel, I’m fully confident that we can make it work.

Before you make a track, it’s always good to think about a BPM, a tempo. If we’re going to do techno, that could be anywhere from the slowest side, around 120, up to 140 on the highest side. So where are we going to go? 130? Yeah, 130. When it gets going we can try speeding it up or slowing it down. I don’t want to use a metronome, so let’s do something that at least gives us the BPM and the feel, so that everything gets a bit easier. It doesn’t need to be a kick, but something on the beat, just giving us the BPM. Okay, fine, this is good.

Making a kick from field recordings

If you want to make a kick out of field recordings, how would you do that? One easy solution would probably be to put a pitch envelope on your percussive sound, bring it down to really low frequencies, and then sustain it low there, and you’ll have this kind of kick. The other thing you can do is take a percussive sound and just pitch it down, because most things, especially if you are hitting drums or metal things, have sustain in them, and if you bring them down, they will always kind of sound like a kick. Then maybe you can layer it with another one, and so on.

So what I’d suggest is a new MIDI track with a sampler, in this case Ableton’s Sampler, and afterwards I have the idea of adding one of the distortion units that’s in Reason, called Pulveriser, which is really, really nice. So maybe we can do a combo: the kick sample in Ableton plus the distortion in Reason. That sounds like a plan.

This is the part where you have to figure out what you want. I want something a bit more sustained, so I can use the tail a bit more. Let’s press this one. Whoa, there’s probably a bit too much. There was also that tube in there. Yeah, right there, it’s a subway pipe drum. Okay, actually this is pretty good. What you can often do is bring in an equalizer: this area is the area you are mostly interested in on a kick, and we can always boost it. Let’s play around with the pitch envelope amount, bringing it from up to down. Maybe 24 is better, because if you go further it will just be too long and you’re cutting off all the lows. You can also bring it down again, and it can get pretty dark.

Beefing up the kick with Pulveriser

I would probably go from here with some saturation or distortion to beef it up, because we need it to be a bit beefier. We’re going to go to plugins, then Reason, and very important: right-click Reason and set it to Favorites. Okay, so we’re going to use the plugin effect. Reason has this very cute-looking one called Pulveriser. I’ll turn it off first. The first thing you’re going to notice is that it just sounds louder, right? Don’t let yourself be tricked, because louder always sounds better, but in many cases this one just sounds better too.

So I’ll reset the device, and when you go into Pulveriser, the first thing you want to do is turn this Dirt knob and see what happens. Squash is kind of like a compressor, but you don’t get a lot of control over it. Then you’ve got a filter. We might need to finesse the envelope a bit, because whenever the sound stops it feels like it jerks. To avoid it being too long we might need to shorten the notes as well, and you can also apply an envelope here.

The other thing we can do is use Ableton’s Drum Buss, which basically adds a sine wave, but they call it Boom. You can pick where you want to add that boom: let’s say we are heading for 55 Hz, you put 55 here and you get that boom, then you can increase it, maybe not that much, and you can damp the transient as well. Now we can hear that boom a bit more, but I would still say the main problem with our sample is this very high pitch. Maybe we can play with the decay a bit more.

Taming the tail and checking the stereo image

Give me a Reason compressor, I want the compressor now. We’re going to put it in the same chain, so we go to effects and the built-in devices. There’s the MClass Compressor, the Master Bus Compressor, and Channel Dynamics, a couple of different compressors that all kind of emulate some kind of analog gear. Let’s try this one, which has a gain, a threshold, a ratio, an attack, and a release, so that should be more than enough. My idea is that if I use really heavy compression and a longer attack time, it will let the initial hit pass through, but that sustained tail we can cut. Afterwards I’d even suggest we freeze this one, so we can control the tail manually on the volume as well and have a lot of control over what we are doing.

Now we are getting much closer to that “kiki” sound. How do you feel about this? I feel pretty okay. I’m still missing a little bit, because I’m so used to 909 kicks, I’m missing that punch-in-the-chest feeling. We shall try something here. That’s too much. The thing is, we’re going to freeze it and then control the tail, so it’s actually fine that it’s a bit too long, because we can cut the tail. Great point. Then you can freeze, flatten, and play around. We’re going to commit to all of this, because when you’ve got a lot of effects it can become a bit chaotic, and when you’ve got audio you can work with it in the ways you know. Also, the waveform of the audio might tell you something about what’s good or bad.

So what are we seeing on this one? We have a very dominant initial click and thump, and then this tail. The thing I’m seeing for the first time is a very stereo sub bass, and that is probably an alarm bell, so I’m going to bring in a utility just to mono it. The way you can see this is that you see these two lines one above the other, and if they’re not identical, the signal on the left channel is slightly different from the one on the right, which gives you stereo. Then I’m going to freeze one more time, because I want to see the mono signal so I can decide which part to keep. This is a very nice tail, I want to keep this part, and then we can combine it with something else and create our own little Frankenstein kick.

Let’s bring them up. I have no idea how this will sound, I’m going to be as surprised as you. Look at this, this is just perfect. Before, it was kind of fat and flabby. This is absolute perfection, this is so good. I love it.

Four on the floor

Okay, so once you’ve got it, delete everything else, it doesn’t deserve to be on our track. Move this over and consolidate it so it becomes one thing, which you can then duplicate with Command-D four times to make four on the floor. This is a very good kick. And what do we have, this thing? Let’s put it on the offbeat. Some people say that’s enough for them. You put it into the club and people are having fun already. In terms of essential techno percussion, this is the low end, then the high end needs at least a hi-hat, and that could be enough for the track. Of course we can go further, but that could be enough.

Building a hi-hat from a metro sound

Let’s do the hi-hat. I’ll just do an upbeat hi-hat, because we know with techno how functional we want to be. You put in a MIDI clip that’s one bar, play C3 on every upbeat, halfway between the two kick drums, and hold down Option to copy that across. This gives you the most standard hi-hat pattern possible. We haven’t even chosen the sound yet, but you see where this is going. Don’t you feel the kicks should always be blue and the hi-hat should always be yellow? Things are so bluey and hi-hats are so yellowy. It’s a Swedish colors thing. We’ve got coffee, we’ve got our kick drum, and really the rest is easy once you’ve got all this.

I remember there was a metro sound, the subway that starts and goes, yes. I want to take a little slice of that. You can make either a closed hi-hat, which is a short one, or an open hi-hat, which is the long one, and we can change the length using envelopes. I’m going to use the Reason sampler right here: subway leaving number two. I’m going to consolidate it, show it in the browser, and drag it in here. So last time we did it in slice mode, but this time I’m just going to find the relevant sound and play it. Oh, look at that, that’s accidentally almost perfect. Honestly, I don’t need anything better than that.

When you put a spectrum analyzer on any sound, white noise is when you hear almost all the frequencies equally, and notice there’s all this super low end in there that we probably don’t want. So let’s put an EQ Eight on there and mercilessly kill anything below, I’m going to say, quite high. We only need the high end for this track. It’s probably going to get very exhausting very quickly unless we tweak the sound, so I’m going to bring the sustain down to zero, shorten the decay, and find the sweet spot where it grooves along with the kick. There you go, that’s more like a closed hi-hat, and this is more like an open hi-hat. I quite like this.

The only thing I’d suggest is a slightly different attack, so it’s a little bit different over time. Super cool idea. We want to change the amp envelope over time, so let’s use some automation: drag this out to an eight-bar loop, hit A for automate, move the parameter we want to change, which moves this little red line up here, and then automate it by hitting the button and bringing it up. We’ll have to figure out the sweet spot, but imagine something like this: a little bit of attack, kind of color.

Tonal toms and layering

So what should we do next? Something low-end, maybe toms, I love that stuff. I remember we were hitting the boxes and there were some tonal tom sounds. Look at these ones: really manually putting them on top of each other, doing the sidechaining, and then adding some random Reason effects, layering stuff before really knowing if it would work. My idea is that we see the visual kick, we don’t want this on top of the kick, but in all the empty area here. I have no idea how it will sound, but I’m going to just test it, because with this audio you never know.

Now this is a bit too clicky, so I’m going to do a bit of high-pass and low-pass and play around, and take the high end off a bit. Then again we’ll use some delays and so on, but I’m just going to put a sidechain on it, so I have this boom-boom pumping going on. It doesn’t have to be perfect, it’s about feeling the groove. I’m going to put a look-ahead on it. Now give me some delays, some reverbs, something that makes dark noises. Love it.

Low rumble and The Echo

Whenever we’re doing a rumble, you want to smear the sound out in the lows, and The Echo is a really nice unit for that. Before we go any further, once we’re working in the ultra lows, we probably don’t want super wide stereo, so we probably want to go for that utility. You have two options: simply mono it, or bass-mono it below a certain frequency, or select left or right, which is another way of monitoring it. Which one would you use in this situation? I think we keep some of the information stereo for this one, to give it a nice stereo feel. We can go for Bass Mono, exactly like that, keep the rest as it is, and decrease the amount depending on how stereo the sound is.

So this is a delay unit, we’re going to reset it, and it starts at dry/wet 100. Yeah, this is pretty good. It’s got this color section, pretty nice. Maybe some diffusion, something like a reverb. Can we add a bit of reverb? Sure, for sure we can. There is the RV7000 reverb, where we just have to find ourselves a good spot.

Splitting the rumble into low and high layers

When I’m composing for myself, I try to separate the low rumble from whatever I have up high, because I find it easier to control something that’s really drastically low-passed. I can set it up next to my kick at the right level, and then set whatever high rumble I’ve got at a different level. So maybe this is a smart moment to duplicate this track and say that one of them is going to be the low rumble, and then drastically low-pass that. On that one we can actually get away with being less creative, because low frequencies are kind of blurry anyway. Without this, there’s silence in between our kicks; with it, there’s this sense of space in the lows. Now this pipe drum can do something else, which we can high-pass quite drastically.

Secondary percussion and swing

For that part, I want something like this, I’ll show it with my hands. How can we do that? Because you’re clapping, that’s very cool. When you know where you want the thing to sit on the beat, you probably want to just draw it in as MIDI, because then you have full control over it.

Now, when you’re putting in secondary percussion, you’ve got your main percussion really tight on the grid, which is a very techno feeling. Sometimes you want your secondary percussion to be swung, which just means pushing, let’s say, the ones that are here a little bit back. Not too far, because that’s going to sound like triplets, but just a little bit. Okay, cool.

Metal key bangs and Scream

I don’t know if it’s too cheeky for this type of track, but we can maybe take these metal key bangs and drag them in, go back into our sound, and find a place where it sounds cool. We find a transient, almost any transient will do, because we can warp it afterwards. Let’s find a darker sample. It’s a very quiet recording. It was like Morse code, like a message from outer space. That’s actually kind of cool. It’s kind of weird, but I’m not against it. Let’s bring it down a couple of octaves. Here you go, this is the truth, really.

Then we try Reason’s distortion plugin called Scream. Scream is absolutely a very promising name. So let’s put the sidechain on there. Do you set your release time to a particular thing by default? Not by default, I always feel like I don’t know what to do. I do 70, that’s good. So there we go: Reason Rack plugin, and I’m going to put it before the compressor, because we want the compressor to take the whole signal. Reset the device, and this is the amount control, so let’s set it halfway and find the timbre we like.

We hear a little bit of clicking every now and then, and when you hear clicking, look at the envelopes. The clicking happens when the sound tries to go from minus infinity decibels to some amount of decibels, so for the amplitude envelope we just set the attack to a tiny bit. You can see down here how many milliseconds that is: one is usually enough, two maybe. Now let’s keep looking. Which of these tape ones are you attracted to? I’d also suggest we low-pass it and play around a bit. I want to see how those super abusive ones sound when you low-pass them. Oh, and look at this, a super huge amount of low-end junk. Let’s drastically tidy that up.

Do you prefer it sustained or not sustained? It’s a different direction. You could also still move the sample start around, it’s going to change a lot. I’ve definitely heard this in a song somewhere. Some crazy effects, but give me something like fuzzy and chorusy. We could put a reverb before it so it’s got more stuff to crunch on, but it loses that percussive charm, and I’m not a huge fan of this, to be honest. Do you have a phaser? Oh, this is one of the old-school ones. Yeah, cool. Like a resonator kind of feeling.

Tension and release: the micro climax

So what I propose is this: when you’re working on techno, I find that when you get stuck in a loop, you get exposed to the same stuff over and over again, so sometimes it’s good to start building a little bit of tension and release. Let’s say 16 bars or something, but then a little micro climax at the end, when you take away the kick. So let’s take away the kick here at the end and set the loop here, so that whenever it gets here we kind of feel what it would sound like in the context of a drop. This is one of the steps you can take to eventually start getting out of the loop, even though we’re still kind of working.

A subtle 16th-note delay and a second hi-hat line

I feel like a subtle 16th-note delay would fill up the space a bit nicer. The Echo does that very well, but you’ve got to reset the device, set it to quite subtle, and set it to 16th notes. Let’s listen to that. This is very dry/wet, so you can hear it never stops, in a way. Yeah, there we go. We can set it relatively subtle, and if you wanted, you could automate that to happen during a climax to get that feeling that everything is rising up.

What is the next step? Which direction shall we go? I would like to create a secondary little hi-hat line, a 16th-note hi-hat line, because I feel like this hi-hat line is going to get a bit stale pretty quickly. We can duplicate it and simply play it on every 16th note, taking into account a little bit of velocity so it sounds like it’s pumping, like a sidechain type thing. Let’s call this one the closed hi-hats, and make some changes so it sounds like a closed hi-hat. Because it’s identical to the other one, we probably want to shift it a little bit so it isn’t actually identical. Maybe you can add a bit of groove as well. You don’t need to have 100 percent timing, so bring it down a bit, maybe quantize a bit, and apply it. I’m not sure we want this much, actually, so I’m going to bring it down and consolidate here, so that it’s not super repetitive. Okay, let’s see the context of the loop.

Finding a hook: Bassline Generator and Mimic

I feel like we still need a hook. The question is, do we want a melodic hook or an abstract hook? Oh, Bassline Generator! For everyone at home, if you need a hook, Bassline Generator is your secret code. It’s a player device inside of Reason, which is basically a sequencer device that automatically comes up with really nice melodic patterns. For this to work we need two things: that player device, and some kind of sampler that has something tonal in it, so that when the sequencer plays different melodies, the actual sound changes pitch and sounds like a melody.

We’ll go to Players, Bassline Generator. Boom. Now this thing is going to generate a bassline, but right now it’s just MIDI data, it’s not going into any synthesizer. We can either put a synthesizer in here, or route this MIDI to a different Ableton track with a different VST. In this case, let’s just use a sampler inside of Reason, that’s the easiest one. So we’ll put in the Mimic creative sampler, reset the device, and put in something tonal: show in browser, grab it from here, put it in there. Oh, this is going to be good. What you’re seeing here is notes being played from left to right. I kind of like it. It may work, especially if you put a bit of reverb on it, it will turn into this abstract thick thing, and people say music theory doesn’t work.

Delay chains and parallel processing

I want a delay on top of this. And I may actually get a bit creative with it, because I think a single delay won’t cut it for this type of sound. If you really want to get creative, you want to create delay chains. Oh my god, what is he doing? He’s using parallel processing: he’s using an Effect Rack to create three separate copies of the sound, and two of them are going through different delay units while one comes through dry.

Because we have this very rich sound, I may even use the filter here, so that one could be the high end of the sound and the other the low end. If I just solo this one, for example, this is the high part, and the ping-pong could be nice here, because you don’t care too much about the stereo field on a high sound. Then we can bring in the second one. Now everything is too loud, we don’t want everything coming through, so I’m going to bring it down a bit. Abstract sounds like this are going to be super satisfying when the beat drops back in, because then everything lines up and all the rhythms bounce off each other.

Do you tend to use more of the convolution or the algorithmic side of the reverb? It really depends. I’ve started really loving this hybrid reverb, with different combinations, especially to get that really nasty hall type of thing.

Upward compression, EQ cleanup, and feedback

My main idea here is sidechaining as well. You don’t hear the kick now, so I’m going to get the kick in. I’m thinking about upward compression, because I want this sound to react to the kick as well. It’s a really random, abstract idea, and I don’t know if it will work, but if you set it to expand, then whenever the kick hits, this sound also gets louder, so they groove together. Whenever that thing hits, this also goes up with compression, but we should of course use the sidechain afterwards, because the kick is the most important thing. They really blend together, and we’ve got this tonal phasing part.

Now, just out of being a little bit neurotic, I always put an EQ Eight here, because this is the kind of material that’s gone through a lot of processing, and you want to clean it up. This is okay for me. Hey, this is going somewhere. I’m going to be extremely efficient now: I’ll bring the feedback all the way up so I can create a super feedback from our hook, and our hook is this one, on the send channels. What I want after that is The Echo here again, my favorite delay plugin of all time. The main idea is that if I bring this above 100 percent, it will start to feed itself, and the sound goes really up and starts to break apart like a feedback loop. Let’s just enjoy the feedback loop, and we’re going to resample that as a layer in the climax.

Building the breakdown

If I go for an Auto Filter and put an A here, probably something like that, we don’t want that much, and I’m bringing it in. The final one is to put a reverb on it, to smear it up. Super cool. What we’re trying to do here is this: this section is more or less a perfect loop with the beat and everything in it, and then over here, where the kick drops out, we’re going to create a sense of buildup, so that when the loop resets we have a little bit of a climax feeling. This little section is almost like a micro cosmos of what a full track would be like. Over this amount of time we need something to build tension, and right now that’s what we’ll call the delay builder. Also turn off the other Echo now, so that we don’t get double feedback. Ah yes, very important.

Now it’s a bit loud. You’ve got to make sure that whatever you build up here, your kick doesn’t sound small when it comes back. It’s really cool.

Risers and splashes from the metro

Awesome. Now I’d say we need some kind of white noise splash at the start, one of those clichés to mark that something is epic. Because we’re a little under time pressure, I would use proven techniques: for example, taking the subway leaving and just using the audio from that. We don’t want a MIDI channel for this, but an audio channel. Then we put a bunch of reverb and delay on it, and that’s going to be very efficient, as we say in French, efficacité. We don’t want it to go quite that long, so we can just take this, it’s like a cymbal splash. Yeah, that’s going to be fine. I can already tell you it’s got a lot of low end, so we definitely want that out, as always. If you’re working with field recordings, you’re going to have a lot of frequencies where they don’t belong, and that adds to the beauty and texture of everything, but you’ve got to keep it under control.

I’d usually use an LFO tool on this, but I’ll just sidechain it to the kick, for a sort of gentle pulsing. That’s cool, maybe that’s enough. I’m not 100 percent happy with how loud it came in, though. Let’s use your noise one more time, and let’s reverse it. This is another cliché that people like me do. I’m going to bring this down a little bit so it’s quiet, very quiet.

Super cool. I have another idea. The cliché white noise riser tends to be white noise plus an automated band-pass filter, but instead of white noise we can use the metro leaving, the metro speeding up. There’s a subway sound where it starts to go faster and faster. If you had a long break you could use the entire thing, but we’re only going to use a small section, because we’re trying to squeeze everything into a very short amount of time. Let’s see what it sounds like just like that, it’s probably going to be too much. That’s pretty close to where it needs to be. I think we’re very close to our minimum viable product, so to speak.

What I really want to do here is put Scream distortion on this thing. I have to do it. It’s probably too much. Pretty cool. Now let’s, as always, get our frequencies a bit under control. One of the things you want to do in a breakdown is not have too much low end playing, because you want contrast between before and after the climax. I tend to put in a little bit of contrast. Yeah, that’s cool, that’s fine. There’s like an air raid siren or something. And because it stops so suddenly, maybe just a little bit of delay so that it kind of keeps going, not too loud.

A double kick

I have one more thing that I think may work: what about a double kick? These are turning into my favorite things lately. I’m overusing them, but please don’t hate this.

What to do next: three loops

All right, so we’ve got ourselves a little sound nugget here, with a couple of really cool musical ideas that would still need to be developed a bit further. We might not have time to do that today, but if you had your way with this as a starting point, what would you do next? I think you always need to think about the full track. At the moment we have a viable loop that we can extend. People who watch my arrangement videos know that I go with a bottom-up or top-down approach, but I always start with two or three loops. Okay, this is, let’s say, the first verse. How can I support this, be the brick? Then I come up with another loop next to it so that they still sound similar, which means that when I start to arrange the track I only have two loops to connect and go from. Finally I’ll probably create one more loop and call it my chorus, the highest point of the track, the climax, and make it as catchy as possible. That’s most of the time the part where I ask other people whether they think it’s catchy and good enough. If they feel it and I feel it, then the rest is just connecting the dots, because now I have everything I need to build the whole track.

Indeed, so this could be one of those three loops, which represent three different energy levels of the same track. We could either keep workshopping this and make it more dense as the highest-energy loop, or take away elements to create lower-energy versions and connect them with breaks, so there’s push and pull, tension and release. I think also when you’re working like this, you get kind of blind to certain elements that might not be working, so we might need to sleep on this. As always, today’s great track is tomorrow’s trash track. I’ve done it so many times: I think I’m a genius before I sleep, and the next day I realize how trash it was. It happens, I think people will relate to that.

Wrap-up

So I hope you enjoyed our little techno collaboration with Reason Studios. As you can see, we were using a mix of different tools. You can either use the Reason plugins as VSTs in whatever other DAW you’re using, and the concepts we applied are pretty much universal: you can use them on anything, even in hardware if that’s what you prefer. Don’t be bound by the tools, think about the concepts. It’s easy to see how beautifully it flows when you combine different tools and end up with unexpected results, and that really drives creativity further. Many times you may think, “I don’t know what to do, I don’t have an idea, I’m stuck in that loop,” and these types of approaches can help. If you’re a synthesizer-based producer, doing something like this could be very challenging and spark new ideas, so you can take some of the ideas here, apply them to your workflow, and come up with new stuff.

For the people seeing me for the first time, I mostly do Ableton tutorials, mostly in house and techno, to be honest, and there are other genres I enjoy making tutorials for as well. If you’re interested in those genres, I welcome you to my channel too. And once you’ve watched every single tutorial on Oscar’s channel, if there’s anything left to discover, come to my channel.

Oscar from Underdog: Underdog Electronic Music School is where I go into electronic music for beginners, often focused on dancefloor genres like house and techno, but quite broad in general. Slap the like button and subscribe. Have a great day, bye bye.