1. Mixing / Sound designing too much in the beginning phase of making a track This is my biggest mistake. Too often I find myself tweaking synths or samples instead of writing the music. Mixing and sound design are very time-consuming and too much of it kills my inspiration. To battle this problem I resample drums and save presets from my previous tracks or collect sounds that already sound nice. I save them all in one folder and do the same for presets. That allows me to have a folder with ready-to-use sounds. This way I don’t have to...

In this session, Francois shows how to make a stephan bodzin type bass and lead with Arturia Mini V3 and Ableton and goes through different techno production and sound design techniques. Contents: Overview Analog Bass Sound Design Lead Sound Design Bells / "Rhodes" Reverse Swells Checking the Drums (powered by Deep Premium Vol. 2 Drum Samples) Shakers + Phasing problems Lead 2 - Top Melody Playback   Resources / Files:  You can buy the Ableton Live Project file here  If you'd like to dig deeper into Harmony Theory, check out our course: Harmony & Chord Progressions   Learn more about producing...

What's inside? 75 Tracks (professionally mixed & mastered) 24 MASSIVE Presets (out of our new DRUMSCODE preset pack) 42 Premium Drum Samples  Grab it here: http://bit.ly/pml_s_tmp_moon

New Plugin from Dada Life. After the huge success they had with the "Sausage Fattener" here comes their new plugin "Endless Smile". Let Dada Life explain it to you!  

Here are a few techniques we used while making this track: Get this project file 1. Grouping groups and Bus Limiting In Ableton you can „group groups” by creating buses from audio tracks. Here’s how to do it: - create a new audio track - in the Monitoring section set it to In (Input)  - go to the groups and set their output to the bus track. In our project file we used this technique to create a Kick/Snare Bus. On this bus we placed a limiter to make sure that when our kick and snare play together, they won’t...

A compressor is an important tool when it comes to mastering. Today we’ll go through some tips to get the most out of it. First: What is a compressor? A compressor, in short, is a device which reduces the dynamic range of an audio signal. Dynamic range is the difference in loudness between the loudest and quietest parts of your mix or any kind of audio source. A compressor reduces the volume of the peaks or louder parts of a mix (for example when a kick drum hits). As a result, you get a more „flat” audio curve. The dynamic...

1. Compressor: Transfer Curve View The ”Transfer Curve” view is the second view in Ableton’s Compressor. It’s confusing to a lot of people, so I thought I’d explain it. Remember what an y=x graph looks like? The display in this mode is very similar to a graph, but instead of the x and y it displays input volume and output volume. When the Ratio is set to 1:1 no compression is happening - the compressor doesn’t affect the volume at all. That means that no matter how loud the input signal is, the output level is exactly the same. That...

  In this tutorial, Francois is writing and voicing uplifting Summer House chords in the C#-Minor scale shooting trying to achieve a optimistic and stable sounding chord progression in the style of EDX, Nora En Pure, Dinka, Armas, etc. Listen in! Feel free to take a look at our MIDI packs:   MIDI Pack   Learn more about our Harmony and Chords: Course: Harmony & Chord Progressions        Keywords: EDM, Progressive House Chords, EDX Chords, Nora En Pure Chords, Dinka Chords, style track with ableton live, drums with ableton live, remix ableton project file, edit, starting with ableton live, starting out with ableton live.

Referencing is a very useful tool when mixing or mastering any track. Here are a few tips on why and how to compare your track to a reference. It helps you making the right decisions. After hours and hours of listening to a track, your ears get used to the sound of your mix. With the complexity of today’s music, it’s necessary to spend a lot of time on drum patterns, melody writing or sound design. By the time you get to the mixing stage, your ears have already gotten used to the sound of the mix - and that’s...

When mastering a track it’s crucial to understand the difference between RMS and peak levels. Today I’m going to show you what they are and how we can use them. Back in the day when I was starting out with making music, I faced the problem of my tracks being too quiet. Even though the „peak volume indicator” showed that my track’s highest volume was around 0dB, it was still too quiet when played alongside professional tracks. Loudness ≠ Peak Volume What I was trying to get out of my track is loudness. What I was looking at instead was...