Blog Post

School of Synthesis tutor and Native Instruments specialist Tristan Malloch teaches us how to make Synthwave in this excellent 10 minute video 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.

Davide Carbone explains the difference between Peak, RMS and LUFS meters and how we should use them when mixing and mastering our tracks in preparation for export.

In this detailed mastering tutorial Davide demonstrates why understanding LUFS is extremely important when uploading your tunes to streaming services and digital retailers. This video is based on content from his popular Production Masterclass at the School of Synthesis.

The use of certain chord types such as triads and extended chords have become the staple of chord progressions. One way to expand this palette is to layer different chord types together and invent new chord types. This gives you greater control of the voicing and harmonic sound of your chord.

Mastering seems to have come back into fashion. With the days of extreme loudness behind us and more of a movement towards dynamics how does mastering fit in to modern day productions? Do you need to master? Can you do it yourself? Davide Carbone discusses his approach to mastering in 2020.

The “which is better” comparison between Digital Audio Workstations (DAW) is discussed at length and is often inconclusive. Here our Ableton Certified Trainers and Apple Certified Pros in Logic discuss what they think are the strengths and weaknesses of each platform

Given the importance of plugins and the fact that we are overwhelmed by the abundance of them we thought it would be useful to discuss our favourite and essential VST plugins we use in our day to day work. 

School of Synthesis Modern Music Theory tutor Shaun Keyt explains Key Modulation in a way we can all understand it!

The Mussenden EP was written by Carbon Electra (otherwise knows as our very own Davide Carbone) and Olly Davis whom Davide met whilst Olly was studying the Production Masterclass at School of Synthesis.