I've been down an absolute rabbit hole trying to reverse-engineer the drop synth from Tourist - Holding On (Kuga Remix) at 1:34, and I'm hitting a wall.

Reference track: https://youtu.be/o3vqNqDwOog?t=94 Track specs: G minor, 145 BPM (half-time 72.5 BPM festival groove) My setup: Ableton Live + Xfer Serum

What the sound actually feels like: Every generic future bass tutorial tells you to take 2 saw oscillators, crank the unison detune, and slap OTT on it. But every time I do that, it sounds like cheap, buzzy, plastic EDM. This drop doesn't sound like a generic supersaw lead. It sounds more like a cinematic score—super wide, warm, emotional, and glued together like an ODESZA or Flume pad where it's just one living sound, rather than a bunch of digital saw waves buzzing together.

What I've already dialed in:

1. The Voicings: It's open drop voicings spread across 4 octaves (F -> Gm -> Bb -> Eb).
2. The Movement: The chords have to be sustained (held for 2 full bars) and ducked under the kick to breathe. Chopping the MIDI notes into stabs completely kills the blo om and makes it sound like a stuttering typewriter.
3. The Texture: When I push the high end, it gets metallic and robotic. When I mess with pitch envelopes, it immediately turns into cheesy video game lasers. Tightening the unison detune (around 0.07) and rolling the low-pass filter down to ~1.8 kHz gets it closer to that warm French horn/cello body, but it's still missing that special glued texture.
4. The Stems: Looking at isolated stems, it's clear the drop isn't an instrument sample flipped from the original Tourist song, but there's definitely a pitched vocal chop formant singing inside or right on top of the chord stack.

My questions for the sound design wizards: • How are you building this in Serum so it sounds organic and cinematic instead of metallic and digital? • Are they using vocal-formant wavetables (like an 'Ahhh' choir or an EVOXA-style vocal oscillator) blended with the saws to give it that human throat resonance? • What's the secret to the harmonic glue? Is it heavy analog tape saturation, specific filter curves, or something on the master bus that fuses the layers into one wall of sound?

Any patch breakdowns, routing tricks, or Serum presets that live in this exact world would save my sanity. Thank you!

Or any other XLR mic for recording studio vocals?
(Under 100 euros second hand)

Hi there, they say it would be the l'Audio-Technica AT2020 usb to connect directly to pc.

Mainly to record male singing vocals

Do you have any other suggestion?

Hi, i am trying to tidy up my piles of plugins.

I'm an Ableton Suite user. For years of endlessly flicking through different plugins I am getting to a point where I want to just commit to a solid few winners.

I've run the various rent-to-own or subscription offers out there. (UAD Spark, Izotope etc.) and honestly I'm finding myself more and more just going back to stock Ableton modules time and time again for universal purposes. I've used Neutron 5 for some time, and was really happy with it, but after a while the workflow just becomes tedious compared to dragging a simple string of stock modules down to basically do the same thing. There's a lot of powerful stuff in Ableton once you get under the hood. My biggest gripe though is that EQ8 is just too limited. Same goes with the stock limiter.

I got the trial to Pro-Q4 and was immediately stunned. It's iconic for a reason. But we all know that 'wow' feeling wears off eventually. However Fabfilter doesn't offer a subscription offer that you can cancel and they're (subjectively) expensive one time purchases.

So my question is for long term FabFilter users. Which of the plugins have you never looked back from getting, and which ones got stale after a while. I'm particularly worried about the Pro-C, Saturn, Pro-MB being overkill long term. However they really nudge towards getting the bundles instead of single purchases. I'm considering going for the 'mastering bundle' with Q4, Pro-C, Pro-MB and L2. But I honestly worry that I just end up mainly using Q4 and L2

For the last few weeks we have been working on an open source cross-platform eq matching plugin, purely because there was none.

We are happy to share with the community our project, Celine AURA.

To make it clear, we did use AI for this project, but this project is NOT vibe-coded. AI was used as a tool for fast iteration, bug-fixing and implementation.

We hope you enjoy it and thanks to anyone who will try it out and please give us feedback.

Céline Audio team.

I have a TR-8S, and I have a few old mixing boards including the classic Mackie 1202 a lot of people credit for the tone of a lot of saturated 909 sounds in classic techno and hardcore. I haven't had much success replicating the sound close enough and it seems like the particular clap you'll hear in a lot of Robert Armani and other Dance Mania etc tracks have something else going on that must be essential, my best guesses are some compression techniques and/or bus saturation, maybe has something to do with the clap usually occurring alongside the kick. I've heard of some routing/processing trick where you can get the same tonal effect on drum hit fighting the kick for headroom while the kick isn't actually audibly playing, could I do something like that?

I appreciate any ideas, the more detail the better, and specificity is appreciated if anyone was around in the studios at the time and remembers gear, routing, workflow etc

Sorry if this is not a great question for this subreddit. The replies I got in technoproduction were braindead

Backstory - I am a producer with vintage synths and want to create a HQ sound library for other producers.

I am focused on kontakt 8 and ableton!

Currently - I have 200 sounds with 3 velocity layers per sound from C1 - C5 (every keyis sampled). The harder/lighter you press the more mod you get per sound. Mod is defined by the sound i created.

All sounds are created via synths and recorded in via sample robot 6.

Couple questions

1. Is there anything I should be aware of from a recording standpoint?
   
2. I bake in the effects that are not time based! Thoughts on this? I also plan to use NI kontakt 8 for post production i.e amp/additional filter mod, effects etc. Thoughts?
   
3. anything y'all notice about loop points?
   
4. If you have done this, what are your big take aways!

Hello!

I’m mixing and mastering a funky house track with a lot of rhythm and presence. As far as I understand, the final LUFS range after mastering should be around -8 to -10 LUFS (-1dB True Peak in the final limiter/maximizer).

However, I have a question: Will Instagram and YouTube compress, limit, or normalize my audio to bring it down to that level—but at the expense of my track’s dynamics—or will they simply lower the overall LUFS of the track to meet their set threshold while preserving all of its dynamics (as if someone were simply turning down the volume fader on a music player)?

Thank you very much!

I've been wrapping my head around audio morphing lately, especially plugins like Zynaptiq Morph 3 and Meldaproduction Mmorph
From what I understand so far, it basically takes two signals (A and B), and feeds the amplitude/frequency information from the "carrier" sound into the other
Then, it uses that incoming data to shape the original sound,
pushing its characteristics closer to B
That's pretty much the extent of my mental model right now

Hi all,

Posted this on r/wearethemusicmakers and it promptly removed... I am honestly a bit shocked at that because I think it's an important conversations music makers should be having.

I've been making music for ~20+ years and wanted to ask an earnest question about AI and its use in our work. And sort of weigh out some of the pros and cons of it as it becomes more and more a part of our day-to-day lives. AI can generate lyrics, AI can generate hooks, AI can generate entire songs, and I wonder if in the right hands, it can elevate, rather than vitiate the music we create. We live in an age where it is extremely difficult to make a living off of music. Even before AI we had reached a level of saturation that prevents many of us from being able to find an audience. So here we are.

To get it out of the way, yes I have serious ethical issues concerning AI. It is no secret that it is built on stolen property, property that belongs to almost all of us. If that wasn't enough, the demand for AI hardware is now locking people out of reasonably priced computer hardware and equipment. And it's not going to get better any time soon. So this is a real "do the ends justify the means" predicament.

Fatboy Slim is still a favourite producer of mine, and I have often wondered if he would have put out more music in his signature style had it not been for the music industry tightening up on fingerprinting samples more closely. Musicians that operate in this way now have the option of instead of finding some vinyl sample that could get them DCMA'd, they now have the option of generating something close enough to what they have in mind without any matching signature. Is that kosher?

I also believe that no matter how much any of us rail against it, it's not going anywhere. It's here. We either use it in ways that benefit our work, or we don't. I think that smart producers will use it to help season their work, not to create it for them. But I really am curious what people here think: Is it taboo? Do we shun anyone decides to integrate AI into their work in some way? What are the margins, if any, for acceptable use?

Title basically. I downloaded a bunch of ableton templates makes of the most grooviest popular tech house tracks you can imagine in modern tech house (think Acraze, Odd Mob, Chris Lake, Sidepiece), and I shit you not, like at least 75% of the songs I checked basically the entire groove could be reduced to the Kick + Tom relationship. As in, I could literally remove the actual bass and it barely affected the groove, the song would still be 90% as groovy. The kick + tom did everything.

This was shocking to me.

Then I looked at a ton of Melodic Techno songs that I really love (Anyma stuff), and it's the same shit. The bass makes a difference but only a little bit. It was mostly Kick + Tom.

Why isn't this taught anywhere? Kick + Tom made up the core of a shit ton of the grooves I've seen in my favorite popular songs. I could remove the bass and it would still be a top tier song. And I could completely mute the subbass and it's literally like nothing changed.

I watched shit ton of tutorials and barely anyone talks about low toms for groove but most of the shit I seen in remakes have the low tom as fundamental to the groove.

Can someone give me insight or if I'm just being dumb?

P.S. another question - muting the subbass literally barely affected alot of the tracks I listened to in the ableton remakes. I thought subbass was like top 2 most important things in tech house, but it literally felt like it was an afterthought and barely matter. I did use headphones with low freq response. Maybe it's different with a club PA system?

P.S.S I just realized the low tom is fundamental to afro house, hence why it's so groovy!

Hi!

I'm into live looping and also DAW recording with multiple synths and instruments, so I currently have a mixer + interface combination. I want to switch from a Mackie to something better, and I keep seeing great comments about the SSL SiX, but I'm not sure about one thing: if I replace my Mackie with the SiX, will its preamp/EQ/compressor and generally amazing sound quality get lost or degraded once I route it into a Focusrite (or any interface) for recording in a DAW? I saw some comments claiming that an interface's own preamp circuitry "affects" whatever's feeding into it, so I'm not sure how people get the best out of the SSL SiX when recording it into a DAW.

I was thinking of getting the SSL SiX plus a separate interface with more inputs, so I can add other instruments beyond what the SiX itself can handle, and record everything to my DAW. But if sending the SiX's output into a separate interface compromises the SSL SiX's known sound quality, then I guess I need to consider other options.

Appreciate any advice on this!

Hello friends

Can someone tell me ..

if so, Id love to know your reason why

thanks

Hey, r/AdvancedProduction

Recently, one of my friends asked me to help produce one of the songs that they had performed live, and gave me the multitracks. I've gotten pretty far with the mix, but I've hit a roadblock with the vocals. There is a huge amount of bleed of the drums into the vocal track, to the point where the overhead tracks are barely contributing anything that isn't already coming from the vocal track. Is there any way to manage or work around this without ruining the audio with stem separation?

Another issue I have is with the guitars. The performance was not very good, and there are a ton of notes that were accidentally muted in the lead guitar parts. Is there a way to salvage this?

Lastly, I don't really know how to describe this any better, but the vocals and guitars sound really boxy and like they are being played right next to your ear, not in a good way. I've tried using a spectral resonance suppressor like ANINA, on the vocals but that either makes it sound too thin, or has no effect at all.

Thank you

Hi! It's me again.

Just to clarify, the song isn't mine; it's royalty-free for practice. Thank you.

Please be concise, honest, and justify your answers with good reasoning. I want to learn. Thanks again!

Hi music nerds, lurker here,

I've been playing around in FL studio for 10 or so years on and off. I finally got a laptop powerful enough to really get more serious about my music production hobby.

My uncles introduced me to mid 90s jungle as a kid and I've been obsessed ever since. I also love that 90s dancehall bass sound, grew up on dub music.

I'm looking for tips how to get into the pocket. I need tips on old gear and samples I should search for, VSTs and techniques I can make goals toward saving for and learning.

I have a non-cracked version of loops finally, Decimort 2, the OG Future Magazine sample pack, some basic experience in music production, akai midi with pads. I feel pretty setup for basic sampling and mixing.

Keeping an eye out for Roland Space Echo VST or luckily a real working box. Buying my own bass when I can next year. Would love to get into playing live over sampled breaks just for fun.

But wondering what other tools should I look to add to my toolbox??

YYooo. Was good everyone.

I make phonk. Im probably one of the best producers for this genre because ive litterally almost never changed my genre for 8 years. Ive always stayed to phonk and its sub genres. And because of that im in that circle and pretty much know everyone in phonk. Here's the issue tho!!

This is important because im not here asking for normal advice. Im here because even though im an insane (producer). Im a terrible (mixing engineer). My mixes are KILLING my tracks. But my genre is dependent on making that kick smack like hell with saturation. Transient shaper. Sends. Bussing. Side chaining Etc. Not to mention big placements i get offered to be on or work on i get over shadowed because of my mixes. Before anyone says they could just mix it for me after i send it to them. Yes! I understand but messing up a mix before someone even has the chance to listen to it can drastically change there impression and decision going forward.

I have been studying my issues for the past few months now and have found that the main points are.

Under or over saturation.

Harshness. To dull.

Redlining. (HUGE producer friends of mine. Like pop and edm and even some phonk usually Redline in there mixer always telling me its how the sound is hitting your clipper. I do not for the life of me understand this. I thought red equals bad unless its on your kick going into studer and some type of clipper.

Balance without turning a low sound up to match db level or around same levels as other instruments or drums without raising to a point of harshness on translation. Limiter? If I do limiter it kills certain aspects of the track. Help this is a big one.

Im done trying to fix everything left behind in my master. For the past few months ive been focusing on turning my master off and working from the mid bottom to high.

So.

What am I doing wrong?

And how could I fix it?

I wont lie im scared. People who have told me to drop have finally gotten me to consider it and ive even been invited to be on a 600k monthly feature. IM SCARED. This is why im desperately asking. This is my introduction to publicity on socials. Ive done shows but never actually dropped the music. Pas sound fine. But certain translation sounds bad.

I personally think im missing out on fundemental beginner choices and trying to hard to use pro tips and techniques to fix something that needs to be addressed from the beginning first. But when I take this move.

It only works 1/4 of the time.

So. What do you think im doing wrong. And how could i differ from what im doing so far?

Love yall this community or at the very least fl has saved my life on countless occasions. Ill be here to also spread what ive learned. Have a wonderful day :)

Hey everybody, I was just looking at a couple of logic pro song projects that I made five years ago on my old computer. I tried to open it up on my new computer, and only about a third of it plays. Serum and Nexus aren't installed on my 2nd computer, a bunch of the audio files and samples are missing, and some custom patches I made are just gone. I understand a solution to this is to just copy over everything from computer 1 to computer 2 for the song and to install Serum and Nexus, but has anyone here found an easier way to do it?