This week we proudly welcome back Harvey McKay for another ‘How To Make’ techno tutorial and again he’s making it Dark!
With its pounding driving kick and filthy gritty synth line created in Repro, this is one for the warehouse. A sinister late-night track for all you techno headz out there.
Harvey keeps it simple building the clips up in Ableton’s session view before arranging them out, recording them live so they can be tweaked further in the arrangement page and then mixing down and fine-tuning.
This course is all about getting great sounds at source level that really pay off when it comes to workflow and getting results fast.
For me a lot of information is missing as he mentioned several times itˋs important to get the sounds right from the beginning but how? Is it important to clip all the channels?
I would classify such tutorials as advanced level how should a beginner follow what along? Sometimes if I see such tutorials I just thinking why the guy is doing that if he didn’t want to share his techniques, only for the money.
Love your way of working with the clips in session view and seeing how you build your tracks by looping the samples, rather than simply using midi clips to trigger them. Really inspirational to watch the arrangement being created like that.
Another great tutorial and another banging tune from Harvey.
Definitely agree with the other commenters about this being a walkthrough. I was impressed how quickly he built the track out though; wish my workflow was so fast
I am a little bit disappointed with the tutorial. On one hand I liked the seeing him building the track but I think this was not a very overall good learning experience. Having the faders all the way up with the signal clipping (which in 32-bit float-point might not be a big problem, granted) so that you can put a gain in the master to reduce it - makes no sense. Why not lowering the fader and increasing the gain in the master. This avoids any possibility of having the plugins clipping internally. Then no equalization for any track for a better mix, only a eq in the master bus. And then the comparing a compressor and a limiter as a group against a simple gain reduction of 4 dB shows me that he does not understand too much what he is doing in terms of mixing concepts. Also very hard to understand what he was saying and a lot of breathing noises (this part I put fault on the editing team at Sonic Academy - it’s not good enough to just put the animations at the start and at the end). I take the tutorial for what is worth which is just seeing what elements and automation he used to build the track.
Yep, found that track on Traxsource & Beatport rleased on Label “Thunder Records” and it sounds exactly the same indeed.
Will report this to S.A head of content and they let Harvey mcKay know about it and clear out if this has to do with an alias or any other legal agreement or if it’s an infringement.
Harvey McKay shows how to quickly build a track that will work on a dance floor without getting lost in the irrelevant sauce of endless tweaking and things that don’t matter. This tutorial shows how the performance aspect matters as you create a track. All Ableton stock plugins used shows you don’t need anything special. Great tutorial.
Great to see how things get done fast without going into these never-ending little tweaks, and most important, all with native plug-ins! Very professional and motivating on that end. However, this is NOT a tutorial and NOT a beginner one that´s for sure. Also very chaotic…Rebrand it or something.
If I was a beginner, I would be going “what, what ,what he did??”, during the whole 1.5 hour of the video.
Really nice and straight to the point course. Could learn some good workflow tips in the clip view and some nice tricks with the percussion. Just think some subtitles would be really good, as a non english native speaker, this accent was a bit hard to understand sometimes.
Turning the text transcript view on the video can help, it’s only available in English but you can read the tutor’s comments and browse through the video by time/section
Sounds exactly the same