Sonic Academy is proud to welcome a brand new tutor this week, Glasgow based driving, soulful Techno producer Harvey McKay.
In How To Make Techno 2019 Harvey shows us his creative process in making a dark, brooding, and downright sinister techno track from start to finish in Ableton.
Starting with a sub layered overdriven and saturated kick we build tension with a rumbling bassline, pitched and crunched down hi-hats and a snare before adding the sinister main synth line created in u-he’s Repro. Once the elements are in place we build up the scenes in Ableton’s session view before recording as if playing live to lay down the basic arrangement. It’s then a case of tweaking automation and editing the playthrough to get to the final mixdown so it can be sent off for mastering.
This is a course that proves you don’t need a whole ton of plugins and gimmicks to create a banging floor filler, just careful selection of the right sounds with minimal processing can get you there!
In fact no, the contest is not linked to this tutorial, if you scroll down through the email you will see that it’s a separate announcement and you will find all the details about the contest and the link to enter in the second part of the email.
Be sure to use the link “View This email in Your Browser” on the right top corner of the mail if you have any issue to visualize the all mail.
So again, no Remix Competition with this tutorial, the contest to win a seat for a major event is a separate thing.
it’s okay but it’s not long enough. I don’t really know who it is aimed at either. There are not a great deal of explanations in the course but there are some excellent tips. Some of the longer sections have hardly any talking in them. So you probably need to know sound design already and you probably need to know some music theory on playing the main melodies and riffs. There are parts like that which just happen without much explanation.
The instructor is great and there are excellent tips in there but maybe he has been set back by the videos being so short. I liked the course but I feel that it should have been 2hrs 30 mins or it should have been half the price.
From the parts that I learnt something from, it could have been a shrunk into a 10 minute tips video. I guess the theme here is there are courses out there by top producers like this that are about the same price and range from 2hrs 30 mins to over 6 hours. This one doesn’t give value for money. But if value for money is not an issue for you and you already know how to make a techno tune then jump in and get those tips!! The more information you can get the better.
Having said all that the guy makes some super cool tunes so I really hope he does another longer more in depth course.
Yeh, sort of agree with Richard below. I mean dont get me wrong, I’m a huge, huge fan of Harvey and when I saw this pop up I couldnt wait to check it out but I wish it was abit longer and had abit more discussion around different ways to do things, for example different ways he comes up with basslines (unless of course thats how he mainly does it!) and how he creates those amazing drum grooves he’s known for.
Saying all that, I loved his keep it simple way of working and after watching it I banged out a track in a couple of hours. It’s obviously nothing of the quality of Harveys track as sample selection is key I think but watching him work quickly made me stop faffing!
I would say if you’re a techno fan and like Harveys music you should give this a watch. If you’re mid-level to experienced producer you probably won’t learn a great deal with this but its worth a watch anyway. I really hope you plan on doing more videos with Harvey, he’s a quality producer. Cheers
Thanks for this constructive feedback guys, it’s those kind of comments that helps S.A & the tutors to level up the content and that’s the reason for the forums to be, so very cool to see people getting involved
I’ve watched it about 5 times now so thats a good sign