Here we are at the topic where I’m going to write you my way of making the leads. My idea of leads is that Leads should be warm, powerful, and always with a lot of movement. Psy-Trance leads are usually repeated in circles, so they shell have some kind of movement all the time. I personally always automate Cutoff or some other parameters to get this movement. Layering is also a way to get much more interesting Leads in your tracks. Mixing a few kinds of synths, different kinds of synths is something that gives mystical and atmospheric smell to the lead melody.
I will write down 5 steps for creating E-Clip style of leads.
MAKING A LEAD MELODY The first step would be to have a midi ready. Usually, I start with choosing t “transpose” notes for a lead. Lets set example that our track is in G, so for this example, I will take 4 notes for this lead, (G, C, D, D#, and F) How you will make those notes is up to you, but I usually chose 3-4 notes that are going to create a melody, and I support them with “rhythmic” notes, with are usually keynotes of the track. Rhythmic notes also can be shorter in the length, that is the way to create a bit more dynamic in the melody.
LAYERING LEADs This is a way powerful technique to make your leads sound unique and powerful. Every lead that I creat have 3 different types of synths to create one big powerful, great-sounding lead sequence. The first kind of synth that I always use is PLUCK. Pluck synth will always give a great dynamic to the lead. It will pump it and give a rhythmic richness to the melody you created. The second one is “Leady” synth. Synth that will have no much attack on it, short release, but probably some distortion or something that will give great ‘meat’ to the lead. This kind of synth I usually duplicate a few times, with different presets of the same kind, and to each layer, I would put different automatization to create beautiful chaos in developing Lead melody.
CRATING MOVEMENT TROUGH AUTOMATIZATION The third step is to create a different movement to each layer trough LFO modulation or trough writing automatization. Personally I like more Automatization that LFO as trough Automatization we can be much more precious than trough LFO modulation. Automate each layer a bit differently than others and hear the magic of layering.
GROUPING An important step in getting full control of all layers that we made is to group all of them into 1 Group Channel, where we will be able to process all those layers at once. Because of multiple layers, we will have a lot of information to control. One way is to compress them and keep them safe from peaking and resonating your track, with a bus compressor or with the multiband compressor. Most of the time I compress trough Multiband just in the low/mid section. from 100Hz to 1000Hz, with 1 band, I usually try to prevent peaks from getting on the way of good track mix.
STEREO PLACEMENT Stereo placement of the leads is important thing in getting a good mix to my tracks. After so many layers we created in the leads, we want to place them in the stereo field in the right position. My theory is that leads should go totally on the side, which means that midsection level and side section level shell be almost the same or at least on similar levels
I hope you enjoyed and learned something. Stay tuned till next week. VIDEO: