Ableton Forum

j2j wrote:
I think it is different for everybody. The only true answer is, "experiment and find your sound, style and vibe."

Perhaps start with drums. A synth melody.


Filters, morphing, resonance, pitch, detune??? A little meaningless without a solid foundation.

I've been experimenting with sound design about three years..

I mostly start all my tracks by making a kick drum, and sound designing a bass to go with.....

I'll try this right away. When I start with drums I usually want to make a complete beat from the start. So only kick drum and bass designed for each other; sounds good for starters.

I started 4 years ago with production with a Pod XT and an Mbox with the included software Pro Tools LE and Reason 2.5 adapted. I already took me a few years to find a production environment that really suits me, namely Live and Kore including Guitar Rig and Massive.

I have one slightly electronic song that I finished with a classic structure. I'll try to post it a bit later so you guys can give me some feedback. Thx for your input Kent!

My God what a pain in the ass to put up a music player in Myspace at the moment

So here's that song I was talking about: www.myspace.com/understuff

The vocals were recorded in 2 takes as we didn't have much time and it was recorded in my room that's absolutely not suited for that. There's also no bass, because I simply don't know what to play

Anyway comments are appreciated!

Haha, is it really that cheesy

A friend of mine already told me that.

it has that soft metal song guitar sound to it. you have guitar rig right? there is tons of ways to tweak your guitar to make it more mysterious and less ....i guess metal.

or like someone else posted, lose the guitar......use some synths.

drop the vocals as well....and the guitar and i suggest changing the drums from real sounds to more synthetic sounds....hmmm im a bit confused as to why you posted this as well.

from time to time i still find myself wandering from the original idea of a song. at that point you have 2 choices. if there is a certain thing in the song that you really like then keep that and delete everything else and stat over moving back to your 1st idea. the better thing to do though is even if it winds up in a different direction or you dont like it finish it and sell it or keep it in your catalog. you learn more from finishing tracks. another good thing to do is before you start recording listen to some good reference material and take note of the sounds they use and the arrangement. TRAIN YOUR EARS! replay songs you like so you can get the feel of what you need to be doing. i dont listen to to much tehcno so i may be wrong but i would think that outside of hip hop an r&b you shoundnt be using a guitar other than a heavilly distorted and filtered one in electronic music anyway. its mostly synths and electronic drums.

I'll take all that advice you guys gave me to move on.
Many thanks!

I posted this because I recorded it with Live and it's my first song where I used Vst-synths and sampled drums. But it's true that it hasn't much to do with an E-song.