@Vosto, it’s called messing with the instruments and effects. You don’t want to make a carbon copy of what he’s doing. If you have a modicum of talent and sense you can puzzle out what’s being done here, and apply it to your own sound. Great tutorial!
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The plugins for this track, are they all stock ones?
Hi @Inblut
Checking the main tutorial page and the plugins list on the right side and the answer is NO : many 3thrd party plugins are listed in there. But anyway, when I like a music style or a tutorial I watch it, even if it"s not in my DAW of choice or using plugins I don’t own because there’s always something to learn and DAW & Plugins can always be replaced by your own.
Excellent tutorial!
This tutorial is actual garbage.
The entire thing consists of Tim looking for presets or telling us that he’s forgotten which preset he used and putting EQ and other dynamic effects on things WITHOUT LISTENING TO THEM. Seriously. This is not an exaggeration.
Before the guy even plays the sounds he is consistently just adding or removing EQ, compression, width on individual tracks. It’s all well and good to know what your own song already sounds like and where to apply EQ, compression and width, but this is a bloody tutorial, is it not?
How can it even be called a tutorial when the guy barely does a pre/post showing of anything?
Absolute garbage.
Some artists have the teacher gene some just double up on the artist gene… I’m no genealogist but I’m guessing the midnight is more in the artist artist category.
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Haha, welcome to Sonic Academy. I’ve been there dude, and after watching this tutorial, I totally agree. Unfortunately, this is a common problem with A LOT of tutorials on this site. And I would know, I have done literally 80% of all the tutorials on Sonic Academy. I absolutely love this site, and support everything Phil, Chris, and Brian do. I own both iterations of Kick and ANA, and this website has taught me so much, but definitely if I had one major complaint is that many tutorials are more like track walkthroughs than actual tutorials.
There are a few tutors who stand out, and their tutorials are the best on the site. Christian Vance, Soundprank, Dancing Divaz, 7 Skies, Owsey and Echo Sound Works. Some of the older tutorials from the SA team, like Bry’s Deep House, Future Disco with Chris and the tutorials on sound design, reverb, mastering with Conner Dalton also stick out too.
It’s just the name of the game I guess shrugs
Yeah, well… I guess like Phil already mentioned, it’s not given to everybody to have excellent teaching skills next to the musical creativity or techniques. It’s difficult to say who’s standing out from others though, and I also think that as learners we have some habits making us finding some courses more great than others. To me that’s also the beauty of this website & learning platform, bringing the real thing about music production to us instead of well prepared & cosmetic prompted courses that can be find on other learning platforms. So yes : "Welcome to Sonic Academy ! " 
awesome
Rad course… adding some of these plugins to my mixes
What a lovely series! <3 Thanks Tim. I love The Midnight tracks.
This is amazing!
Great!
This course specifically was the reason for getting on Sonic Academy. For some background info, I’ve just gotten into production, but created music for nearly 20 years now. I produce ‘watch me edit’ videos for landscape photography, in which I show and explain how to achieve a certain look in post. I kind of was hoping the same here. How to get synthwave in the style of ‘The Midnight’, for the purposes of expanding knowledge and creativity for future productions. However, I did not find that during this course. Recreation of a track (or a landscape image for that matter) is a daring pursuit, because you will always end up with a different result than the original. No matter how successful a track will be, there is always more to be learnt from somebody who is tied up in the creative process, than from the same person having already done that. I don’t find it particularly strange that Tim is looking for presets or ‘how he did it on the track’, nor do I find it very useful. Like few people have said as well, we want to learn how you got there. Explanation of the reasoning behind the creation of such a brilliant track is worth gold. Don’t get me wrong, The Midnight IS one of my favorite synthwave artists and continue to be after watching this, but I doubt that I will be watching another ‘click it together’ video from them, especially with a 1000 euro worth of plugins, vsts and effects.
Hey @nasha
Sorry that the course didn’t matched your expectation, and yes, there were several discussions already ( if you browse through this topic ) matching your comments on this course.
I really think it all falls down to one simple thing which is the difference between “making it” and “explaining how you made it” in the end, I guess not every one has excellent teaching method & skills, especially true for all kind of artistic things IMO.
Thanks for your feedback & sharing your thoughts on this tutorial.
@nasha I completely agree. I bought the subscription to learn some tips and tricks on how to create synthwave but we weren’t even shown how the synths were created (kind of the key point of the genre!). It’s insane how much the plugins cost as well and most of the time they really just sound subtle/don’t need to be used at all. I’m mostly disappointed that all of the drums were just his own samples and we didn’t get to see how they were created.
Interesting to listen to the difference in sound when he A/Bs the original signal vs the affected signal, but holy man I wasted my time.
He just throws effects on instruments and chooses presets without giving any reasoning behind it. It sounds great, but this feels more like a livestream than a tutorial I should pay for.
I really wanted to enjoy it, but there are much better free tutorials on YouTube. Check out Ste Ingham. That guy knows what’s up.
Awesome! The Midnight has great songs!
Love The Midnight. Would like to see Tim do more of these, and elaborate more on his chord structures and how he comes up with melodies. I also love the synth solos in these songs. I saw them live in Atl. recently and Tim took a few solos. He plays with great feel.
Nice vidio!