Another week and another big course from Sonic Academy. This time we welcome back Armada’s South African psy-trance heavyweight Protoculture for a massive How To Make course in Progressive Trance.
This detailed course will take you from the all important kick, right the way through to creating a radio edit and mastering the track yourself, giving you an insight into the tips and tricks Nate Raubenheimer has amassed over the years producing huge tunes that have gained him global success and admiration of his peers.
The end result is a massive, pumping Progressive Trance track that will put a big grin on any fan of this genre!
We have also teamed up with Armind to offer an amazing remix competition of this track officially called 'Asphalt’ and to be released in the new year in the very label founded by Mr Trance himself Armin Van Buuren .
So it’s over to you guys as we are offering a chance for one of our subscribers to get their production released, with the best remix coming out on Armind founded by Armin Van Buuren, gaining some global exposure, and of course, some great prizes from Sonic Academy.
We think we have one of the best music-making communities anywhere, so show us what you’ve got! Click the ‘Enter Remix Comp’ button below to find out more. Good luck and we can’t wait to hear your entries!
I’m a huge fan of protoculture and have been following him for a few years now, awesome tutorial, thanks for sharing. One thing i was’t quite sure of was… When you were hard clipping the channels, this seems to me to just been limiting. Is there a difference between using a clipper and a limiter?
Its a very similar effect but there are a few subtle differences… hard limiting with a fast attack periodically attenuates the volume of peaks to avoid clipping whereas clipping essentially cuts off any wave above the threshold which actually results in distortion but if used carefully its pretty negligible. Some people don’t like it, I quite like adding small amounts of clip distortion to electronic music specifically. Also the graphical interface on Clipshifter (The plugin I’m using) is pretty handy since you’re working with a graphical representation of the peaks rather than just a VU meter. Brickwall limiters would be a good alternative as well, this is just my preference. Here’s a good article that explains it in more detail.
A lot of the plugins I’m using are interchangeable… Cubase’s bundled plugins would probably cover most of the effects I use from Vengeance, Fabfilter (Cubase 9’s Frequency Plugin does everything Pro-Q does now) etc. Stuff like VPS Stereo matrix you can do with a stereo delay albeit not quite as convenient, same goes for Multiband Sidechain. The instruments are sometimes a little more difficult to replicate with other plugins, but if you’re looking to expand your collection I’d recommend looking at Native Instruments Komplete bundle cause its awesome value for money, and secondly Serum just because its a powerhouse of a synth thats super flexible and it handles wavteable and regular virtual analogue style synthesis equally well.
Yeah that totally makes sense. First-please know that I’m not knocking the tutorial in any way…I think it’s great! I’ve learned a ton, and I really appreciate your style of teaching. I actually ended up getting the Vengeance Multiband Sidechain, Kick 2, and I finally just paid for the old Fabfilter demos that I’ve had forever…and Serum and Sylenth. That Multiband sidechain is freaking awesome, and Kick 2 is blowing my mind and how qucik and easy it is. Luckily I already have Komplete. I’ve been enjoying Cubase 9s new Sampler track instead of the Vengeance sampler.
The only effect I haven’t really been able to recreate very well is that nasty v-verb delay effect on the tom. I set up an 1/8th note delay on a fx channel and dirtied it up with izotope vinyl and then did a gate to tighten up the sound. It’s not the same but gets the same effect.
I’m taking it real slow through this tutorial, so I’m only now through the percussion video. For some reason, my downloads of the resources didn’t contain the Tom-actually the .wav file is there, but it is 0 kbs. I ended up using another Kick 2 pitched higher for the tom.
I’m using a lot of my own samples, but I’d really appreciate knowing exactly which sample packs you are using. In the video, you kind of scanned through your sample packs and you said you thought they might be in one of a few different places, but you didn’t specify. Also, on the crashes and a few other elements, the samples were already loaded on to your project. Can you tell us which sample packs they came from (especially if there can be found here at Sonic Academy).
One thing I’m curious about since you are just using samples that you had already pre-selected: Did you make a conscious decision around tuning the samples to the track? Like with the cymbals and hats, etc?
Thanks again for this tutorial. I’m loving it! Greetings to SA. I specialize in traditional Zimbabwean music and lived there for many years. I have many friends from Zim who are now in Cape Town.
Cool, for the reverb, most reverbs will have a pre delay that’ll get you a similar effect… often they don’t sync to tempo though so you just have to wing it. I love the vengeance stuff for that reason exactly, they’re not particularly stand out plugins but they’re just so well suited to streamlined dance music production.
The tom should have been bounced as a whole channel… easily replaceable though. The majority of the samples are from libraries Sonic Academy kindly provided me with, minus a few bits and bobs from my own samples and stuff I made in other tracks etc. Didn’t include importing them in the videos as its a huge waste of time with me basically just auditioning hundreds of drum hits for hours
I tune kicks normally to the root note… as for other samples, its easy to pitch up and down with the sampler but I generally don’t bother too often.
Right on. One thing I have been doing since I don’t have the Sonic Academy packs fro your tutorial is I’ll just take an instance of Battery 4 and then randomly select a whole bunch of closed hats and save that as a kit, and then listen to your closed hat and then just quickly pick one that sounds pretty close and tune it up and play it in with midi, render in place and then disable the Battery track. Rinse and repeat with the other percussion sounds. I have found that to be a really great and quick method to get the percussion sounds together, and now I have all those kits ready to go for next time and I can tweak the kits over time.
Would you share your Dune 2 preset? Checking out the Demo now…
EDIT:
OK-I think I figured out how to do that…it looks like the Dune2 presets will load when you load his main Cubase file. Then you can save the individual presets and then open them in the track that you are creating…Looks like I need to track down a wavetable for one of the sylenth presets as I get a wavetable error…Will give more info later today when I work through a few more of these. Cheers.
Also-I’m surprised to see that I can only post three times on this forum topic since I’m a new user. That’s strange.
hi…it’s me again…lol. Just finished Tutorial 6. Between the Video 5 and Video 6, you put in many effects, and Kontakt stuff. You didn’t tell us what they are or how you created (and more importantly why you created them). Can you please shed some light on this? The reason is because for those of us following along, without guidance like that, now it just kind of feels like coloring in a coloring book because we (meaning I lol) are just left with dragging and dropping samples. I know you have said several times that you don’t want to bore us with hours video of of browsing samples, but really it seems like that is a big part of the meat of the creative process…not so much the browsing, but telling us what you are looking for while you are doing the browsing. Thank you for considering this for the future!
