Making Tracks

Learn how to create complete musical ideas over four weeks in a small class of 1–9 people. You’ll explore beat making, basslines, chords, leads and vocals, and sample selection – the essential ingredients of track creation.

Course Overview

Great tracks start with a few essential elements: tight drum programming, solid basslines, well-chosen chords, memorable leads and vocals, and creative sample use. Modern producers rely on these building blocks to craft professional-sounding productions. This course is dedicated to demonstrating methods for creating these elements and showing how they interact to form engaging musical ideas. You’ll gain practical techniques for programming and combining each element into strong track foundations, ready to develop into full productions. While examples are primarily demonstrated in Ableton Live, the principles taught apply to any DAW or sequencer.

Course Level

This course is designed for anyone looking to bring their musical ideas to life – from complete beginners to those with some production experience. You’ll gain confidence in building and shaping tracks while learning how to create rhythm, harmony, and melody — and combine them into cohesive ideas. By the end of the course, you’ll have created at least one complete track foundation combining beats, basslines, chords, and melodic elements, giving you a solid starting point for further refinement or advanced production work. Please contact the school if you have any specific needs or requirements.

Course content and features

• Rhythm theory and the basics of beat-making
• Common sampling practices and how to sample sounds
• Generating ideas and finding inspiration for basslines and melodies
• Exploring resources for basslines, chord progressions, harmonic ideas, and melodic hooks (including leads and vocals)
• Groove, swing, and quantisation
• Time signatures and BPM
• Writing and programming various beat patterns
• Editing, slicing, looping, and triggering sounds
• Combining beats, basslines, chords, and melodies into cohesive track foundations

Course objectives

by the end of this course you should be able to:

• Make tracks on any DAW, sampler or sequencer
• Understand rhythm and groove
• Load, edit, program and write your own beats
• Create and apply swing and various quantisation to your beats
• Write beats for a range of styles, including house, techno, UK garage, and drum & bass
• Explore and utilise resources to create basslines, chord progressions, and melodic hooks
• Apply effects and manipulate sounds creatively
• Combine beats, basslines, chords, and melodies into cohesive track foundations

EXCLUSIVE LEARNING TOOLS INCLUDED

Permanent access to our guides and articles in our Content Portal:
Each student gets access to detailed notes and references covering all courses and providing a valuable ongoing and updated resource to aid learning reinforcement.

Carbon Electra:
Each enrolment includes a software licence to use the award-winning Carbon Electra, one of the world’s leading synthesizers.

School of Synthesis Producer Pack:
Each enrolment includes a carefully selected VST/AU plugin pack for Windows and MAC OSX with everything you need to get producing, including some of the best EQs, Compressors, FX and Limiters available.

Analogue Sequences:
Each enrolment includes an authorised download of the Loopmasters Analogue Sequences pack designed by School of Synthesis trainers.

SOS Loopmasters Pack:
All SOS students receive 2 gigabytes of samples from the award-winning Loopmasters collection.

Educational Discounts:
As an SOS student, you will be eligible for student discounts from Ableton, Output, Fabfilter, Rob Papen, Plugin Boutique and more. Information on educational discounts will be sent to you via email upon enrolment.

Learning methods:
Each session commences with a group demonstration and discussion, followed by solo work on one of our eight Mac workstations where you will practise set themes and techniques derived from real-world applications of the technology. Upon demonstrating your command of the necessary skills you will be further encouraged to add originality to your recreations and save various versions of your work.

Additional resources and materials:
All hardware and software is supplied, though we recommend students bring a storage device (eg. a portable USB drive) to save and back up all work, and a pen and paper to take notes. We also recommend students own a PC or MAC. Students can bring their own laptops to class so the tutor can assist with setting up software like Rekordbox.

Assessment and feedback:
You will save successive work and will receive regular support, encouragement and feedback from your tutor. All students will receive a t-shirt, sticker and completion certificate upon the successful completion of the course. At the conclusion of the course, you will be invited to leave feedback and evaluate your experience, at which point we’ll email you a link to a suite of exclusive sounds and various discount offers from the School and its partners to say ‘thanks’!