House producers fret not! PhilZen is here to deliver five quick and simple tips to bring your production up to the next level. Whether you need help with percussions, advice on reverbs, or even just want some tricks on automation, PhilZen has insight for artists of all levels.
Find your “motif” and expand upon it:
To me, the presence of numerous and simple musical motifs, such as chord stabs, different FX, vocal chops and/or basslines are the heart and soul of tech house. The key is to find those different fragments of sounds that gel together and drive home the theme for your track. Throw those files into a sampler, experiment with making different rhythms. I like to hit record on my DAW and just jam on the keyboard while a Sampler is loaded. You never know what magic you can come up with!
Percussion and Drums:
With drums and percussion, I will spend a good amount of time sorting through my own samples and see which are most fitting to the track. Certain samples such as lo-fi claps or sharp and groovy hi hats, will usually find its way into the track, but the main thing with nailing tech house drums is to make them sound as human as possible. You have various tools to achieve this, via automating your drum velocities, volume, sample layering, and adding track delay. This will differ according to individual taste. It’s important to listen to your favorite tech house tracks and really pay attention to how different artists program their drums and what makes them interesting. A lot of this will boil down to automation…
Automation:
Automation has been a game changer for me and I know it will be for you too. In your DAW of choice, adding automation to your projects will help bring out the life and soul of your tracks. I remember when I first started to produce that there were so many knobs and I didn’t know WTF any of them were doing. I still have those days sometimes haha, but the magic happens when you figure out what those knobs do and how they influence the sound you are creating. Whether you have a filter slowly opening up or closing on a drum track or if you are automating the cutoff envelope on your synths during the chorus, try to experiment with your tools. Seriously turn all of those knobs while your track is playing and see what is really going on! A little bit of automation goes a long way!
Groove:
One of my teachers in school had a great term for the concept of groove, which he named “camel necking”. Haha. It’s a funny term but nonetheless very true for determining whether your track has that magical “groove” to it. I personally define it as that factor in your music which makes you nod your head up and down in a nice rhythmic way. The groove can be dictated by the bassline, the drums or even the vocals of your track! A tech house track isn’t complete until its groove is locked in. One of the ways I like to maintain a nice groove with my tracks is judicious use of Xfer’s LFOTool under the side chain presets (which is a great start).. Or if you don’t have that, you can use your DAW’s native compressor and really take advantage of the side chain feature. Be sure to experiment with your threshold, attack and release times (this is a big one to really experiment with). Experiment with side chaining other things besides the bass line to your kick. Try side chaining a clap to your drum group and see what happens. You can get very interesting results!
Using Reverb for Texture and Glue:
Reverb is an interesting tool in every producer’s arsenal that producers should get comfortable with. Done properly you can add so much depth to your tech house track or on any track for that matter. For the most recent tracks I have worked on, I knew from the beginning that I wanted to make a track with a “dark vibe”. My two favorite reverbs right now are Ableton’s stock reverb and Valhalla’s Vintage Verb. Both are solid options. Using your DAW’s sends, you can set up a “long” and “short” reverb chain. I then add a low pass EQ on my sends cutting at about 1000 hz which helps take the brightness off of your selected reverb. After that I experiment with automating the reverb’s dry and wet on various channels. Give this a shot! As a producer you really want to take advantage of adding that ambience which glues your track together.
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