Thanks to artists like Flume, supersaws have become a very popular sound in EDM. Making a great supersaw isn’t as easy as choosing a saw wavetable and cranking the Unison. There’s a lot of tricks you can use to make that sound more exciting. In this article I’ll show you what you can do inside Xfer Serum to make your supersaw stand out. 1. Use both oscillators for different octaves Serum has two wavetable oscillators, so I like to use one for lower frequencies and transpose the second oscillator one octave up. I use the B oscillator for rich, harmonic...

We all know that people are lazy and many good things can come from it. Bill Gates always says: “Give the hardest tasks to the laziest people and they will come up with an easy solution”. But using templates does not really fall in the category of being lazy. Probably even the contrary, because it means, you really want to understand every aspect of the production process - and taking a look at someone else’s work can definitely help here! If you want to get better, using templates or preset is one of the best shortcuts you can take. But...

In this article I’m going to list 5 great sources of free Kontakt instruments. These libraries will not only work in orchestral scoring - you can easily use them in electronic music or any other genre. I hope you’ll find something you like! 1. The Alpine Project This website is entirely dedicated to free orchestral libraries. I think it’s the best orchestral library out there right now. Bear in mind that the patches are not velocity sensitive - for dynamics, you’re going to have to work the modwheel. „Alpine Project” libraries are split into 3 categories - brass, strings and...

At Production Music Live, we offer in-depth online courses through our website. Additionally, we have more than 350 free tutorials on our YouTube Channel - so feel free to subscribe. We are looking to publish new tutorials every week, covering subjects like Sound Design, Drum Production, Production from Start To Finish as well as Chord and Melody writing sessions. If you're looking for even more structured in-depth knowledge, feel free to check out our courses.   List of Melody and Chord Progressions Tutorials List of Melodic Deep / House / Techno Tutorials for Ableton Live List of Sound Design Tutorials for MASSIVE Ultimate List of Ableton Drum Programming Tutorials by PML List of Future...

How to make Massive sound more analog People tend to say, that Massive does not sound “real” enough to use it for Melodic Techno or other analog influenced genres. While it will never reach an original Moog for example, there are ways to make it sound closer to the synths it was derived from. Here is a Pro-Tip from producer and synth enthusiast James Wiltshire: Step 1: In Massive´s LFO5, we blend a sine wave with a hint of noise and use that to modulate Osc 1 pitch very slightly. Step 2: LFO 6 is used to gently waver Osc...

A More "Basic" Version In this session above, Francois shows how to recreate a Stephan Bodzin Bass / Lead sound with Sylenth1 and Ableton and goes through different production and sound design techniques. Resources / Files:  Check out: Analog Deep Techno Bundle Full Course: Analog Melodic Techno Track from Start to Finish Advanced Version  We had a very helpful addition to creating typical Stephan Bodzin sounds by user "M4l731". Here's how he achieved the sounds - there's a soundcloud example in the end of the text - the text is quoted from a youtube comment and slightly edited: "Let me put some more tips on...

10: Native Instruments FM8 This great sounding FM synth was used by Skrillex. FM8 is probably not a synth for beginners, as it takes a while to get your head around FM synthesis. Nevertheless it's still a great synth used by plenty of pros. Pro's + great presets+ ability to morph patches+ great arpeggiator Cons – no "sample import" option– FM synthesis isn't easy (probably not a synth for beginners)    Follow us on YouTube - Learn to produce like a pro!   9: Spire Spire is an awesome additive hybrid synth. It sounds very modern and punchy and has a...

Quicktip: Panning Drums for a cleaner Mix Although we might have the feeling these days, that drum machines, kick generator VSTs and percussion samples & loops of all kinds have been around forever, they have all been modeled after a real drum kit one day. Most producers know, how a fat kick has to sound or how to EQ a snare to make it pop, but without the understanding of how a drum kit is played, miced up and mixed, fundamental basics of drum sounds are simply lost. In many modern genres that does not really matter, because music is...

Tutorial: 3 Trap Beats in under 30 minutes In this video, Borys is going to show you how to make beats like Migos "Walk It Talk It" in Ableton Live 10. We’re going to go through all the sounds necessary to make this beat. Then we’ll talk about making melodies with a free synth sound. After that, we will show you the rhythm patterns to use when drum programming. We’ll talk about making hi-hats and kick-snare patterns. We're going to make another trap beat using a synth preset in Ableton Live. Tutorial Table of Contents: 00:16 Starting with the first...

New Tutorial: How to create a warm "Analog" Melodic Techno Bass In the tutorial above, Francois is sound designing a typical warm Melodic Techno Bass with an analog feel in the Arturia Mini VST. You will learn how to create the sound and which effects are crucial for this genre. Artists like Victor Ruiz, Stephan Bodzin or the whole Afterlife crew use them regularly and it is easy to do. If you want to have this or similar sounds for your own productions, check our powerful Presets - now 3 Days Weekend Sale! Struggling with the basics? If you'd like...