Quick Tip: Drum Variations with Clips in FL Studio
“Playlist clips in FL Studio can be sliced up and rearranged, which is an easy way to add fills and syncopated variations to drums. Once we have some variations, we can merge the clip slices and then clean it up a bit in the piano roll.”
Quick Tip: Realistic Solo Orchestra Instruments with Keyswitch Articulations
“Performers who play orchestral instruments often use multiple playing styles throughout a piece of music. Therefore, knowing when to switch articulations is important for computer composers who want to achieve a realistic sound. Fortunately, many orchestral VSTi have a feature that helps us do this, called keyswitching.”
Quick Tip: How to Create Orchestra Hits
“When you listen to 80% of the dynamic and action-oriented orchestral music, you’ll notice that when used appropriately, orchestral hits can bring tense feeling to your tracks. In this short tutorial, I’ll give you some advice about how to combine different patches.”
Quick Tip: How to Recreate Tails of Drum Samples
“Chopping drum hits out of loops is a great way to gather one-shot drum samples, but since they’re in a loop, the tail or decay of the drum is often interrupted by another hit. To make our abbreviated samples sound more natural, we’ll try to recreate the lost tail of the drum in Edison, but any audio editor will do.”
Quick Tip: Single Low/High Pass Filter for Ableton Live
“In this quick tip, I’m going to show you a neat way of implementing a low/high pass filter using the Auto Filter device in Ableton Live. By that, I mean that we are going to be able to construct a filter that goes from a full low pass to a full high pass with the turn of one knob, leaving the unprocessed signal to pass in the middle position.”
Quick Tip: How to Create a Dubstep Wobble Bass with Subtractor
“When creating Dubstep music, one of the most important instruments is the bass. A lot of Dubstep songs have a wobble bass. This is basically a bass with a filter being modulated in a rhythmic sync with the tempo. Most often you will hear triplets and 8th notes being modulated by an LFO on the filter. In this tutorial, we will cover how to create a bass sound and add the ‘Wobble’ effect in the Subtractor device within Reason.”
Quick Tip: Getting Realism in Orchestral Music
“Getting the best of an orchestral library is sometimes the worst nightmare for a composer or orchestrator. The main goal is to make a mock-up that sounds as real as if the melody was played by a huge group of professional musicians.
“There are lots of ways to achieve that, and in this quick tip I’ll explain a way to get that tense and dynamic staccatto feeling in your music. By the end of the tutorial, we’ll try avoiding the so-called “machine gun” effect of very synthesized orchestral sounds.”
Quick Tip: How to Emulate a Theremin Sound in Ableton Live
“In this Quick Tip we’re going to emulate a theremin sound using Ableton Live’s Operator (although the same principles apply to other synths as well).
“The theremin (named after its Russian inventor, Professor Leon Theremin, who patented the device in 1928), often viewed to be the first electronic instrument, has two metal antennas which sense the position of the player’s hands (it is played without contact from the player), who can control oscillators for pitch (frequency) with one hand and volume (amplitude) with the other. A similar device is the Ondes Martenot, with the main addition of timbral controls, switchable loudspeakers, and a keyboard.
“Many people just call it “that ghost thing sound you hear in old horror movies”. Although that is quite true, it has also been featured in classical music, modern film music, rock, etc.
“The idea is pretty simple: sine oscillator, slow attack, one voice (monophonic), glide between notes, and vibrato.”
Quick Tip: Using the External Instrument Plugin in Logic Pro
“In this quick tip I’ll show you how to set up the External Instrument plugin. This handy little plugin allows you to integrate hardware synths into Logic and treat them just like a software instrument.”
