After many tutorials about Sound Design and making kick and bass sound tight and fat, it’s time to bring the soul into the track. In this tutorial, I’ll focus on melodic content and how to bring life into the record. Before we start with this process, we should already know which way the track will go as there are several different ways to structure our record. In this tutorial, I will focus on progressive psytrance music, but it can be used for faster music as well, just with a taste of psy-prog. This lesson will be about my original sound genre of progressive psytrance, as this genre, I can explain the most. Let’s jump on it!
After we finish building the kick and bass and rest of our drums, the next step is to bring some of the single shots and atmosphere sounds inside the record. In my music, I always want to bring the contrast of dark and light, deep and high sounds that create the balance that I like the most. That means that single shot atmospheres I will build from single bass sounds, chords, pads, small percussions, stubs, a lot of delay and reverb with different settings. One of the essential parts is that we separate all processes of making a track. First will be the sound design part where we make our drum stems sound tight and build the groove. Separating this process from other processes will have a fantastic effect on creating new music.
If you already have a track with the right sounding kick and bass, snare, hi-hats, my advice is that you export those stems in a few different bpm, and have them ready and mixed in separated folders. When inspiration comes in, if you have everything preprepared, you will have the possibility to get into the creative process in 1 minute. By dropping those stems inside the project, you can save a significant amount of time for being creative.