Blog Post

This weekend SOS hosted its most recent Making Beats with Maschine class and it rocked. Leroy helped all students create their own beats whilst learning programming, grid, swing and quantise techniques.

SOS tutor Davide Carbone demonstrates how easy it is to make a lush synth patch on any analog or digital synth.

SOS Tutor Leroy Amphlett makes a brilliant little house groove in Native Instruments Maschine.

School of Synthesis Logic Pro X tutor James Hewson demonstrates how to incorporate various elements of swing, humanization and quantization to give your tracks a professional feel.

SOS tutor Jehan recreates the famous Roland Space Echo RE-301 in Ableton Live.

School of Synthesis Logic Pro X tutor James Hewson demonstrates his specific technique of how to make tight driving trance basslines in the style of Jordan Suckley and Chris Wiser.

School of Synthesis hosted a free open session where each attendee played a tune that everyone offered feedback on. The host, SOS tutor Davide Carbone, has just had his own tunes on worldwide release and has received over half a million streams in the past twelve months so was well placed to offer advice on how to sign to or start your own record label. From there he discussed promoting your music and how to get it premiered and played on all platforms including mainstream radio, websites, socials and curated playlists.

School of Synthesis tutor and Native Instruments specialist Tristan Malloch teaches us how to make Synthwave in this excellent 2 part video tutorial made with Ableton Live and Carbon Electra.

Here he makes beats, bass, pads / leads and uses techniques like sidechaining to create an authentic made in the 80's synthwave track. He pays particular attention to designing the sounds from scratch using basic and easy to understand synthesis. This process can be applied to any DAW or synth.

Join Davide Carbone on an analog mastering session where he passes a track through analog EQ, analog saturation and analog compression. Here he talks about his experience mastering tracks for Carl Cox through to why and how he implements his techniques.

He also explains how Pultec EQ's work and gives visual demonstrations on cutting and boosting at the same frequency.

The analog mastering chain is recorded live so you can hear the difference of each parameter tweak and the bypassing of the units.

Davide is running the track through the following chain:

Watch Davide Carbone create all the harmonic and melodic content over an entire track using Scaler 2 to generate chords, variations, baselines, melody and lead line.

Here Davide uses several instances of Scaler 2, both as an instrument, and as a midi effect to trigger various third part audio instruments. He also creates a melody using the new keys lock feature. This video demonstrates a typical workflow of how Scaler is used across an entire track.