How To Make - Progressive Trance 2019 with Protoculture / 883

@Toryn @phil_johnston

Yep, good point with Audacity as a free software to achieve this.

BTW, I did put a ticket with Ableton Support about this & they came back to me telling that this has been escalated to their development team among other similar requests but no confirmation of a future fix until now.

They also asked me to test the following : trying to convert those 32bit files to 32bit Floating Point and import them into Live again. I had a failure with “Fission” under MacOS but it did work with “iZotope RX7 Audio Editor” and I think that Audacity should be able to do the same conversion according to the Import/Export features from their site, you can also give this a try @Toryn and if that’s working then you have a chance to retain the 32bit files format inside Live.

Thanks Nate. Great course and lots for me to work on.

Great insights as always :slight_smile:

Hi there, What is the Swing Percentage (15%) that protoculture is kept putting his Audio’s at and midi too I believe. is it for rhythm? any links so i can understand this better in my DAW ( I use Logic pro x) Thank you !

Yep, swing is usually used to add variation to your beats. Basically what’s happening is that the midi or audio affected by a certain amount of “swing” will be slightly moved from their original position. That will result in a more “human” playback timing, giving your beat ( or other instruments ) a different groove.

For Midi you can just select the regions or notes you want to affect and use the “Swing” amount value paired with the Q-Strenght ( Quantization Strenght ) value, it’s set to max 100 by default.

For applying swing to Audio Tracks, check this Tech-Tip from Chris here :

Very nice and detailed course from Protoculture. Im happy with the content. Keep up the good work.

Took me a while to get through the whole course, but well worth it… learnt a lot… Thank you very much :slight_smile:

Uoool

Can’t remember exactly what I use here… but usually I’m around 25% swing.

@Protoculture

Nate, I’m just now taking this course and am ever grateful to learn your process. Have been a fan of your music since the early 2010s and I’ve enjoyed hearing your music evolve over the years!

I have a couple questions about your process that I hope you can provide insight on. I know many producers like me struggle with making progress on tracks due to too much time spent on composition and also sample diving.

When it comes to sketching out melodies, do you have a general criteria for avoiding over-complicating melodies? Is simpler melody almost always better with progressive tunes? I’m classically trained with a decent music theory background, but I feel that might actually be working against me when it comes to composing for trance. In this course you sketched out the melodic elements in 30min, whereas in my current production I’ve totally pivoted on melodic elements several times!

As for sample diving, especially for things like transition FX or drum loops, what makes one sample really better than another? With enough time and processing, can’t you get just about any drum sample to sound decent in a mix? I personally spend a lot of time potentially putting lipstick on a pig, so I’d love to hear how you approach this after all your years of experience.

Thanks again for the course and I appreciate any more helpful tips you’d have to spare!

Another brilliant course from Protoculture, learnt so much.
Thanks for recording this.

Thank you, wonderful course!

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nice work thank you !

“When it comes to sketching out melodies, do you have a general criteria for avoiding over-complicating melodies? Is simpler melody almost always better with progressive tunes?”

Honestly… I don’t really think about it all that much. More of an intuition thing really. I usually just play stuff by ear and thats about as complicated as the process gets for me.

“As for sample diving, especially for things like transition FX or drum loops, what makes one sample really better than another?”

Nothing really… again just taste and intuition. Something I try not to over analyze.

“With enough time and processing, can’t you get just about any drum sample to sound decent in a mix?”

Sure… to a point, but you’d be wasting your time when you could just find the right sample to begin with.

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Great work man :slight_smile: I have learned a lot from your videos.
:raised_hands::sunglasses:

Great tune and tutorial. Thanks so much. I’m learning the Trance genre and this is excellent to get me oriented. I’m using Ableton but able to make the conversion with no problems. Can you point me to where you got the Sylenth patch “Flower Power?” Thanks again!

Think its from the Vengeance Trance pack for Sylenth1

Very cool course! Loved to see your process and workflow

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this stuff is gold im a fan of nates alias protoculture these videos have really been very informative so just wanted to say thank you to all involved in the production of the courses.

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in mixdown part 1 (20:54) you are changing setting on mixer delay are you only delaying the signal in the left speaker and not the right is this so all your sounds dont hit at the same time and prevent frequency clashing