Sonic Academy proudly welcomes new tutor Brothertiger for an in-depth look at how he made his chilled synth-laden track Livin’.
Composing and laying down the track in Ableton before moving over to Pro Tools for the mixdown this course has the added interest of how to utilise two different DAWS to their full potential to get the desired result.
Starting with workflow tips and how John gets his ideas flowing, we move on to look at the different elements of the track and processing in Ableton. We then join John Markson in Pro Tools with the exported stems where we add live drums and vocals followed by a mixdown of the track ready for mastering.
Using some classic 80’s synths and seamlessly combining electronic and live elements, this is a masterclass in the synthwave genre.
Thank you for sharing your feedback, it really helps both tutors and other members with course content & expectation.
Haven’t watched this tutorial yet myself, but checking out the description details and duration, it looks more like a “How to make” course than a track walk-through to me. I also can see that this course is categorized into “Intermediate & Advanced”, therefore some specific areas like going into details with sound design from scratch and further processing on each part of the Mix might not always be explained in details. There’s also a rather specific workflow in this one since the tutor is using 2 different DAWs to get to the final Mixdown, so that also might be a point of focus here, but again, can’t tell much since I haven’t been watching this one yet.
Feel free to share more of your thoughts & overall impression about this course
What do you find is missing or uncovered in the course ?
What areas & topics do you think the tutor should have explained better and get more into details with ?
Great tutorial. I have been going from Logic Pro X to Studio One Pro for a while. I was glad to see someone else had a similar workflow. I would love to know if there is anyway to get a copy of of that Juno 106 Pad that I could use with the Roland plug-in. My Juno-106 was my very first synth years ago when it first came out. It was a very sad day when it quit working.
@Rtindel if you have the Juno 106 plugin via Roland Cloud, you should be able to download my custom presets via the Cloud manager. I made a rough copy of that preset from my hardware 106 for that pack. Can’t remember the name but it should be shown in the tutorial somewhere!
Would it be this 2nd patch A-2: BT O-Pad , it sounds close to the pad used in your track to me, hesitating with patch N°5 A-5: BT Swell Pad which is quite similar as well but seems to have less modulation.
@Tekalight yes it’s Swell Pad. I literally dumped the preset info from the 106 into my computer via sysex on a Max4Live device and just copied the settings into the Roland plugin. Only things you’d have to change to match my sound on the track would be attack to 0 on both envelopes, as well as messing with the VCF a bit!
@brothertiger Thank you for the details on this one, very great presets in this Roland Cloud patch you made BTW Your course is in my “must watch” list too this track is beautiful and very inspiring.
Cheers !
So here you go @rtindel, you should be able to recreate the same 106 pad using the same preset from Roland Cloud.
This is pretty cool so far, but it would be more useful if he wasn’t using multiple thousands of dollars of software and plugins. The amount you’d need to spend to recreate this is huge.
@brothertiger Lovely tutorial, do you have the DX presets for those of us not using ableton. I’m not finding these presets anywhere in the files. Not sure if they get stored in the project file for ableton.
The DX Presets are recalled on the DX instruments tracks in the Ableton Live project, but they are not included outside the Live project in the course resource. An alternative would be to use Live’s trial from Ableton ( you can use their trial version for 90 days I think ) if you’d like to have the already made presets the easy way.
Now that said, trying to recreate the presets following the course if you have the DX plugin might be much more interesting and a very good way to learn a bit more how the soft-synth was programmed to get the sounds.
In many cases, you’ll be missing “this” or “that” when following any tutorial, skipping the easy way and trying to find an alternative or recreating something with what you have is a very effective way to learn IMHO
Id kill for the midi. this song single handedly is inspiring me to add my own vocals to my music. Man! this song emotes so much emotion in me. I don’t understand why this isn’t on the radio! Great job with this one !!!
this track is beautiful and very inspiring.