Oneshots: Volume 1

Since launching Symplesound, my focus has been to create intuitive instruments and presets that make it easy for producers to create their own sounds – without having to be an expert at synthesizers.

Because of that, I decided to redesign all of the instruments on this blog and collect them into one pack, making everything much easier to use. The pack also includes tutorials, integrated effects and MIDI clips for inspiration.

They're still 100% free – because I want to continue supporting synth fans everywhere – and they're now available at the Symplesound shop, along with more free downloads and goodies.

Hope you enjoy these updates! Download them here.

Production Tips From The Pros

In the past year, I've done a series of Producers' Roundtables for Keyboard Magazine - much like my Production Master Classes for Beatportal back in the day.

For Keyboard, I queried some household names like Alan Wilder (Depeche Mode) and Wolfgang Gartner, a bunch of Beatport gods like Josh Gabriel, Jaytech, Boom Jinx, Richard Dinsdale, Patch Park and former students of mine, Tritonal. Dan Kurtz from Dragonette and veteran sound designer/remixer, Josh Harris also make appearances.

Only a few of the pieces have made it online so far, but I thought I'd share them anyway. If you want to stay on top of the series, you'll simply have to subscribe to Keyboard, I guess.

Links after the jump...

Native Instruments Announces Dubstep Softsynth

It's not April 1 yet, so this must be real. Gadzooks.

Five Tips For Perfecting Your Arrangements

Making an eight-bar groove with cool riffs and funky drums is actually pretty easy once you get the hang of it. I mean, think about it... How many "brilliant ideas" do you have on your hard drive that would be huge Beatport hits if you just took the time to finish them? Yeah, like I said, it's the groove that's easy. The work is all in the arrangement of the track. Great music with a crap arrangement just isn't compelling.

It's the story, stupid.

Let's face it, crafting an arrangement is a massive, time-consuming chore. Some producers really get into it and focus, but others - like me, actually - find this part of the process a gigantic pain in the ass. I just wanna make neat sounds and wiggly grooves.

Well, short grooves are great if you want to carve out a future making loop libraries. The world needs those too. But if you want to be an "ah-tist" you'll have to buckle down and get to work. So here are a few things to think about as you create your masterpieces.

My Five Desert Island Plug-ins (February 2011)

Mike Cobb asked me to post an entry about my five must-have plug-ins, which is a very difficult task for a few reasons.

For one thing, there are literally thousands of great plug-ins out there. Synths, effects, EQs... Everyone knows this drill, so filing it down to five means leaving out some really great software.

On the other hand, I'm extremely finicky about what software ends up living on my machine. More plug-ins means more maintenance, upgrades, compatibility - and if you decide to collaborate or share tracks, then you need to render what the other party doesn't have.

In the end, I just went with the facts: These truly are the plug-ins that I use regularly and know intimately.

So here goes...

Index Of Beatportal Tutorials

From 2007-2009, I was technology editor for Beatport's EDM blog, Beatportal.

During that time, I wrote a comprehensive set of tutorials on subtractive synthesis - the underlying technology behind 99.9% of analog synths - as well as sampling, effects, tips for getting the most out of Reason's Thor, and a smattering of production master classes with techniques from some of the top EDM producers.

Since starting this blog, I've been asked to create an index of the Beatportal tutorials, so here ya go.

Housekeeeeping! (5 Tips For Smoother Workflows)

Five housekeeping tips to improve your workflow and protect your projects:

- Label and color code your tracks as you work. Nothing slows down the production process more than trying to remember if the bass is on channel 6 or channel 17. I organize my channels as follows: kick, snare, hats/shakers/top loops, percussion, whooshes/fx, bass, synths/instruments, and vocals.

- Make use of your DAW's locator markers. As you make progress on your arrangement, it's incredibly handy to be able to immediately jump to the verses, choruses, breakdowns, intro, and outro sections of your track. When you're in a state of "flow", every second counts.

- Learn key commands for as many common operations as you can. If you find yourself going to your DAW's pull-down menus all the time, something's amiss.

- Every time you make a noteworthy change to your project, resave the file with a new number. For example: MySong v1, MySong v2, MySong v3, etc. This way, if your arrangement or mix veers off course you can always go back to the last solid version.

- Every time you add new audio to your track, be sure to Collect All and Save. No exceptions. It may eat up more drive space, but keeping everything in the same folder makes archiving much easier.

- Speaking of archiving, be sure to backup to an external drive at the end of each session.

Oops. That's six.

Old-school Automation Shortcut

This trick is really old school, but in many cases it's way more efficient than screwing around endlessly with automation and fx sends.

If you want to echo or verb only certain words of a lead vocal, just duplicate the track, add the desired effects (making the echo or verb 100% wet) and chop out everything you don't want to process. This is - for me - the quickest way to process only specific words and syllables.

Here's how I'm doing it on my remix for the upcoming Winter Kills single "Hot As Hades":

Speaking of... I gotta get back to work.