PML

Production Music Live

HOW TO MAKE A DROP IN ABLETON

LIVE 9 + SERUM

First time in Ableton - guide

productionmusiclive.com

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 Table of Contents

1. Bassline (and quick program overview) ……..……………………….. 3

2. Kick……………………………………………………………………… 14
3. Main Synth ………………………..…………………………………….19
4. Hihat…………………………………………………………………….. 26
5. Pluck ……………………………………………………………………. 33
6. Toms ………………………..……………………………………………34
7. Mixing ……………………………………………………………….….. 38
8. Mastering ………………………………………..…………………….. 44

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HOW TO MAKE A DROP IN ABLETON LIVE 9 + SERUM [FIRST TIME IN ABLETON,
BEGINNERS]
Hi! This is an article for you if you’re for the first time in Ableton and would like to make some
music. Follow this tutorial at your own pace - if anything is unclear feel free to ask questions at
support@productionmusiclive.com.

You will need:

- Any computer
- A pair of OK headphones (basic iPhone EarPods will do the job for your first project)
- Ableton Live 9.5 or higher (lower versions can slightly vary in layout)
- SERUM VST Plugin - (A simple to use, yet very powerful synthesizer, one of the best right now)
Any version of this plugin will do the job here.
- A free pack with sounds that we’re going to be using [Download]

I recommend you to open up your Ableton and follow my steps while reading.

We’re going to make this sweet little future bass drop.

https://soundcloud.com/pmlblog/preview-full

Excited? Alright, so let’s jump right into it.

1. Bassline (and quick program overview)

Boom. You’ve got Ableton open and SERUM installed. This is what it should look like right after
you open Live. The first thing I want you to do, is to press the TAB key on your keyboard.

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That will take you to the second view called ‘Arrangement View’, which we’re going to be working
in. The first ‘Session View’ is for collecting ideas and performing live, the actual production side of
things always happens in the horizontal view.

Now if you look on the right side you should have two tracks - one ‘MIDI’ and one ‘Audio’. That’s
because EVERY single sound in Ableton is either coming from one type of those tracks. We’ll
cover the ‘Audio’ type of tracks later, so you can delete it by selecting it (clicking its name - ‘Audio’)
and pressing delete (mac) / backspace (win). Another way to do this is to right click there and
simply choose ‘Delete’

Now you’ve only got one track - MIDI. You can use the MIDI track to play any instrument you like -
for example the piano, a synthesizer (like SERUM), or even drums. But before we can hear any
sound, we have to load up an instrument. Let’s take our SERUM synthesizer.

To load it up onto the track, we need to find it. To do that, type in ‘serum’ into the search bar on the
left and select ‘Plugins’. If you have installed the plugin correctly, it should be visible under VST >
User > Serum.

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Now, to open it up, you can just double click its name and the plugin should open automatically.

Now we have the instrument open. To hear its sound, you can click the keys at Serum’s bottom
part. (Don’t worry, you don’t have to know how to play the piano) Actually there’s an easier way of
playing it than clicking around with the mouse. You can use your computer’s keyboard (or if you
have a MIDI keyboard, but that’s entirely optional). Make sure this button with a dot inside (called
‘Arm’ button) is red. We use this button to switch between playing different instruments (when we
have more tracks).

Now you should be able to play the synth by clicking keys on your keyboard from A to L. You can
move left/right on the keyboard by pressing Z/X. Play around and get used to it.

Now let’s switch the sound of the synth for something more pleasant than the initial sound. If you
click the right arrow next to ‘Default’, it will change the waveform for something else. Click it 3
times and you’ll get a sinewave - they’re very smooth sounding, great for bass. Remember to put
on headphones, with a sinewave you won’t hear lower notes on laptop speakers!

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 ***

Tip: Sound in Serum can come from 4 sources. You can add two waveforms, just like our current
sinewave, into things called oscillators. We’ve got two of them, called OSC A (the one we’re using
at the moment) and OSC B. There are also Noise and Sub sections on the left, which can generate
some sound as well, but the oscillators A and B are the most important. All sections can be turned
on and off by clicking these blue boxes:

Everything else in the synth just edits the sound coming out of these 4 sources, so don’t worry
about it for now.

***

Now we could find a simple bassline and record it into the program. That’s easy to do: you need to
press two buttons which are at the top of the program. One of them is Record (circle) and the other
one is Play (triangle). You can play around to find something cool. To play in time, you can turn on
this button:

You’ll hear a clicking sound which will help you play in time. But don’t worry, you don’t have to find
your own bassline - I’ve made one for you!

Delete the bassline if you recorded something by clicking on it and pressing Delete (mac) /
Backspace (win)…

… or you can also press cmd/ctrl + Z to go backwards in time - useful if you do something and get
stuck not knowing how to get back :)

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If you now open the folder from our free download, you’ll find a file called bass.mid

Now you can simply drag and drop it onto your track here:

You’ll probably get a popup asking if you’d like to ‘import tempo’ - make sure that you click ‘Don’t
show again’ and ‘No’ - the default tempo is ok (120 BPM).

Now if you select this clip and press space (equivalent of start/stop buttons), you’ll hear my
bassline.

This is what it should sound like:

https://soundcloud.com/pmlblog/start1

If you click on the bassline and press this button (or cmd/ctrl + L), the clip will loop.

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Let’s take a closer look at the bassline now. To zoom in at it, place your mouse on the dark grey
area above the clip - the mouse should turn into a magnifying glass. If you click and drag it up and
down, you’ll zoom in and out. If you click + drag it right and left, you’ll move around the timeline.

Let’s zoom in at our clip.

We still can’t see which exact notes are those. To see that, we have to select the clip (click at the
bar called ‘BASS’). Now that the clip is blue after selecting it, you need to look at the bottom of the
program.

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The bottom of the program can display two things:

- the devices on a track - that’s what we’re seeing right now, Serum is our device on the left

or,

- it can display a selected clip in depth - to see or edit which notes we’re playing. That’s what we
want.

Switching between those two views is done by clicking those two tabs at the bottom right corner:

The same thing can be done by pressing Shift + Tab.

***

Tip: Don’t confuse this shortcut with Tab, which switches between Arrangement and Session views
(between our current view and the starting view with columns). These two are probably the most
useful shortcuts in Ableton. When I was starting out the variety of views seemed a little bit
confusing - there’s the Session and Arrangement view, and in each one you can change the
bottom of the program to display the track devices or the selected clip.

***

Okay, so make sure you’re in the Arrangement view and that you’ve got the clip selected. After
pressing Shift+Tab you’ll see the piano keys and the notes we’re playing.

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Now if you hover your mouse over the red blocks, you’ll see the note names on the left (near the
piano keys) - it’s a good way to learn the key names.

Tip: Make sure the Fold button is off (that it’s grey). The Fold button will make the piano on the left
disappear and it will only display the notes that we’re playing already.

Now if you click the grey bar at the left and drag left/right, you’ll zoom out/in at the notes, and
dragging up/down will make you move up and down the keyboard. The grey bar on top acts just
like the bar at the top of the program: dragging up/down is zooming in/out, left/right is moving
through the timeline.

The zooming is a little bit weird at first, so mess around with it until you’re comfortable.

Let’s say we recorded this clip. You’ll probably want to fix some things, to make sure you’re playing
perfectly in time.

You can for example resize the red blocks by dragging their left and right sides. You can also add
more notes by double clicking anywhere - it will add a note between the „lines“ which are called the
Grid. When you zoom in, the grid will turn smaller so that you can make more precise adjustments.
Try adding a new note (block) and resizing it.

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Remember to delete it afterwards by selecting it (clicking) and pressing delete/backspace.

***

Tip: Following this logic you’re maybe wondering if it’s possible not to have to record a clip first, but
to just draw in the notes. To do this, you’d have to make a blank MIDI clip.

Select an area on the TRACK (at the top, not the CLIP). I selected the blue area:

Next all you have to do is right click in the upper area of the selection (at the level of the ‘bar’ on
top of our first clip) - the dropdown menu will show an option ‘Insert MIDI Clip’ - that’s what you
need to click.

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Watch out: If you right click below that area, the dropdown menu won’t display this option.

Now that you’ve got a clip, you could draw in your notes in the Clip View.

***

Now you probably noticed that every of the bass notes begins with a short „pop“ sound. Let’s
quickly fix that.

Open Serum again and look at its bottom.

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What you see in the lower left corner of Serum is envelopes (ENV). Essentially what envelopes do
is they manipulate something (for example move a knob) for you every time you play a note.

Now the most important bit: The first envelope (ENV1) always controls the VOLUME of each
note.

Take the first knob and turn it up a little bit, just so that the pop disappears. That knob (Attack)
controls how long it takes for every note to reach the maximum volume.

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Now to finish off our bassline, just right click on our track and „Rename“ it to „Bass“ or whatever
you like.

_________________

2. Kick
Now we can add in some drums to finally make things sound cool. Let’s make a kick and snare
pattern.

First, make a new track - this time an Audio track. Right click on the grey area below the first track
and select „Insert Audio Track“.

We use Audio tracks to play audio clips - you can put any recorded sound onto an Audio track and
it will play. It’s especially useful for drums, which are audio samples.

Let’s find a kick sample inside the downloaded folder.

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Now simply drag and drop it onto the beginning of the second track.

If you now play the track, you’ll hear a standard kick sound.

Now look at the bottom right corner of the program - there’s a track called „Master“. If you click and
drag up the grey line above it, it will expand. Now play the bass sound with the kick.

Chances are that it’s going to turn red. That’s because the volume of the bass + kick is too much -
that’s called clipping. Clipping is to be avoided, so we’re going to have to turn down the volumes of
our tracks.

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You can change the volume of every track by dragging these orange „volume boxes” up and down.
They should display „0“ by now. Let’s drag both of those volumes to about -15 dB. You can also
click those boxes and type in „-15“ if you want to be precise.

Now you can turn up the volume of your computer - the instruments will be a lot quieter.

Okay, now back to our kick - let’s zoom in at the first bar and paste the kick into position 1.2.4 - you
can see it above the tracks:

We want this pattern to repeat 4 times - so let’s zoom out and select the first bar by dragging our
mouse over that area. Now press CMD/CTRL + D to duplicate the pattern over the whole bassline.
That’s all for the kick!

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3. Snare
For the snare I’ll show you a little bit different technique of placing drums. We could also make a
new Audio track and drag a sample in there. But the same thing can be achieved with a MIDI track
- and it’s very useful for snares.

Let’s insert a new MIDI track the same way you inserted the last one (but choose MIDI).

Now find the „Snare“ sample in the downloaded folder and drag it onto THE BOTTOM OF THE
TRACK (where it says „drop the instrument or sample here“) - the same place where Serum was
on our first track.

If you drag any sound onto a MIDI track like this, Ableton will put it in a device called Simpler, and
it’s going to look like this: (if you’re on Ableton pre-9.5 then it may look a little bit different)

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Now I want you to arm this track - make this button with a dot inside red.

If you now press your keyboard keys from A to L, you’ll notice that you’re playing a snare drum
sample like an instrument - it goes down in pitch when you’re playing lower notes and goes up
when you’re playing higher notes. Make sure you’re playing C3-C4 notes with your keys - when
you switch between octaves (Z-X) there’s an indicator of your current octave in the lower left
corner of the program.

Important: When you play the C3 key (the A key on your keyboard in the c3-c4 octave), Simpler
always plays the default pitch of the sample - the exact sound that you would hear if you put the
audio file into an audio player like iTunes or Windows Media Player.

Now we could „record in and edit“ our snare drum pattern - but in this case let’s go with „making a
blank MIDI clip and drawing in the notes“.

Let’s select all 4 bars, right click in the upper area and select Insert MIDI Clip. Then just click it and
press Shift+Tab, just like with the bassline, to go into the Clip View.

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Now the keyboard notes will be tiny - zoom in at the C3 key on the left (that’s the only key we’re
interested in here)

Now just double click on every 3rd of a beat to create the MIDI notes - so 1.3, 2.3, 3.3 and 4.3.

Here’s our bass, kick and snare by now:

4. Main Synth
Now let’s proceed to the most fun part of the whole track - making of the main synth.

Let’s make a new MIDI track first, just like with the snare, and drag a Serum device on it.

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Now go back into our folder and find a MIDI file called CHORDS.mid

Now place it on the new MIDI track just like the bassline.

Now I recommend you to solo this track - make the „S“ button blue (it’s next to the Arm button).
Now we’ll hear just this track. If you play it now, it should make this sound: (it’s very aggressive
sounding, so we’ll fix it in a second)

https://soundcloud.com/pmlblog/preview2-3

Let’s now make this synth awesome. First of all,

open up Serum (just like we did it with the
bassline).

Now look at the first oscillator - it’s the only one

playing. The zig-zag looking „Default“ waveform
which is playing there is called a „saw wave“.

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We’re going to add more of these saw waves. To do that, we COULD turn on the second oscillator
(OSC2). However, doing that we’re limited to having two waveforms. Luckily there’s an option to
„clone“ a waveform without having to use another oscillator. That’s called UNISON.

New terminology you need to wrap your head around: (very simply put)
Oscillator - the part of a synth which generates sound.
Waveform - the type of sound coming from an oscillator.
UNISON - allows you to duplicate the waveform inside a single oscillator = increase the oscillator’s
„voices“

Okay, so let’s crank the Unison of the first oscillator to 5 and hear what happens.

You’ll see 4 more „lines“ appear - these are the 4 additional voices. The synth will sound bigger
and wider. What you need to do now is to turn down the „Detune“ knob of the voices to around 10
o’clock. We want the voices to be closer together, more in tune.

https://soundcloud.com/pmlblog/preview3-3

Okay, now let’s finally make the synth less aggressive. In order to do that you’ll need to turn on the
„Filter“ section of the synth.

The synth will immediately sound much quieter and more

subtle. That’s because we’re cutting off the high frequencies of
the sound. To understand what a filter does to a sound, it’s
best to let the synth play and to play around with the „cutoff“
knob - which controls how much of the high frequencies the
filter is cutting off.

***
Tip: Such filter has a name - it’s called „lowpass“ - because the
low frequencies are passing through and we’re cutting off the
high frequencies of the sound. It’s probably the most
commonly used type of filter (accordingly, there’s also a
„highpass“ type of filter which is the exact opposite)

***
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The whole difference between this:

https://soundcloud.com/pmlblog/synth1

and this:

https://soundcloud.com/pmlblog/synth2

is that the cutoff knob is moving in time. That adds movement to the sound.

One way of making this could be to record the clip while moving the knob with your mouse - that
would save the movement. However a much easier way to do this is to use Envelopes and LFOs
to move the knob for you every time you play a note - that’s what we’re going to do.

Let’s then turn the filter’s „cutoff“ knob all the way down for now. That’s going to be our starting
position, from which an envelope is going to move our knob up.

Now select ENV 2 and set its „Attack“ knob to around 685 milliseconds. That’s the time it’s going to
take the envelope to bring the „cutoff“ knob all the way up.

Now drag the „four arrows“ sign next to „ENV 2“ onto the „Cutoff“ knob
- just drag and drop it there.

Now when you’ll play the clip, you’ll notice that the „cutoff“ knob will move in time.

This is what it should sound like:

https://soundcloud.com/pmlblog/synth3

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Let’s take a closer look at the cutoff knob now.

The moving tiny blue dot (1) matches the „current

position“ of the knob. The blue line around the knob
(2) indicates how far do we want the knob to move.
For example now our knob moves from 0% to 100%.

This is what the knob would look like if we only

wanted it to move to around 30%:

s56

The tiny „round blue line icon“ (3) is what we can use
to change how far we want the knob to move. Click on
it and drag it down to 30%, just like on the image
above. Now the synth should sound like this:

https://soundcloud.com/pmlblog/synth4

That’s all we’re going to do with this envelope. Now we’re going to add an LFO.

An LFO also manipulates a knob for you, but instead of a single movement per note it performs a
movement in a loop - as long as you’re holding the note. The movement type by default is set to go
up and down like this: /\/\/\/\ …

Click the „LFO 1“ panel and drag it onto the „cutoff“ knob.

If you play the clip you should hear the cutoff knob go up and down like this:
https://soundcloud.com/pmlblog/synth5
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Now change the „Rate“ of the LFO to 1/16 - the knob is under the curve, at the level of the „Attack“
knob for envelopes.

https://soundcloud.com/pmlblog/synth6

Now that we have the right speed of the LFO, change its amount to around half.

https://soundcloud.com/pmlblog/synth7

A cool thing we can do now is to add a slight reverb effect to the synth. First switch to the „FX“ tab
on top (shortcut for „effects“).

Now on the effects list find Reverb and click the box on the left so that it
lights up.

A Reverb effect will show up and when you play the synth, you’ll hear it.

Now just turn down the „MIX“ knob on the right to about
1/10 (so that the reverb is barely audible)

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That’s all for the synth! Let’s now click the Solo button again to play all tracks together. Also turn
down the overall volume of the synth to around -6dB (it will be too loud if you don’t)

I’ve now adjusted all the volumes (mostly turned down the bass) - make sure yours are around the
same values.

You can also switch back to Session view by pressing Tab and you’ll see bigger volume faders:

(From left: Bass, Kick, Snare, Synth)

Result by far:

https://soundcloud.com/pmlblog/bass-kick-snare-synth

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5. Hihat
Now we’re going to add a cool rhythmic element to our beat - a hihat. Make a new MIDI track find
the „hihat.aif“ sample and drag it onto the track.

Now when you arm the track and play C3, you’ll hear the sample.

In this genre (future bass/trap) a common thing is very fast hihats. We could of course make them
just like the snare, but we would have to insert a lot of notes (for example 16 hihats per bar). That
would be a lot of clicking.

Luckily, there’s an option which allows you to play many notes in a desired tempo while you’re
holding one key on your keyboard. It’s called Arpeggiator.

To find Arpeggiator, you’ll have to go to „MIDI effects“ in the browser.

Now you need to drag it BEFORE our sample (on its left) - just like this:

Now when you press and hold any key on your keyboard instead of a single „tick“ you’ll hear
regular ticking. You can change its tempo by dragging down the „Rate“ knob. Drag it down until you
see 1/16 below.

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 ***

Tip: When you press a key, our arpeggiator now changes the signal from „play a C3 key“ into „play
16th notes“. Then this information gets into Simpler, which plays our sample in this tempo. That’s
why we place MIDI effects BEFORE the „device“ (which in this case is Simpler holding our hihat
sample - we could do this with Serum or any other instrument). MIDI effects affect the information
coming from your keyboard (the „MIDI information“) BEFORE it gets into the device which
generates the sound.
***

Zoom in at our clips and select this area on the 5th track (from 1.4.3 to 3.3 - just before the second
bar (7/8 of it) and until the half of the third bar). That’s going to be our first area where we’re going
to play hihats.

Next, right click in the upper area of this section and insert a new MIDI clip.

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Now as usual press Shift + Tab and zoom in at the C3 key in the Clip View.

Double click at the beginning of the clip to create a single note…

… and EXTEND this note all over the clip (drag its right end until the end of the clip).

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Now you should hear ticking hihats like this:

https://soundcloud.com/pmlblog/with-ticking-hihats

A cool thing we can do now to make it more interesting, is to make the tempo of the hihats change
from time to time. Let’s make the part of the hihats before the beginning of the 2nd bar faster.

To do that, click the Rate knob once again.

Now it should say on the right „Arpeggiator“, and „Synced Rate“ below - it means we can now
adjust the tempo.

Drag down the track’s bottom end to make the track larger. It will give us more space.

29
Select the area before the 2nd bar just like text in a text editor.

Now hover your mouse over the red line and drag it down by 2 steps just like in the picture below:

The hihats should now be faster at the beginning.

https://soundcloud.com/pmlblog/with-ticking-hihats-2

Now we can do the same thing with the hihats’ volume - that will make them sound less robotic.

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A cool effect for adjusting volumes is called Utility. You need to find it in Audio Effects and drag it
AFTER the device - on the right of the hihat sample.

The Gain knob in Utility can turn your track’s volume up and down. Click it and a red
„automation line“ should appear over the track - indicating „Utility, Gain“ on the right.

Now when you click on the line, a dot will appear. When you click another point, another dot will
appear. If you drag one of them down, the line will bend - and the Gain knob will always follow this
line. Make sure your automation line looks like this:

If you now play the clip and look at the Gain knob, it will move by itself according to the red line.
That’s called „Automation“. If a knob is automated, it will be indicated by a red dot.

31
Now I drew this kind of an automation line - it goes from -14 dB to 0dB, then down to -5.5dB and
back to 0dB. You can see the exact dB values of the dots by hovering your mouse over them.

Utility has another cool option, which is called „Panorama“. It allows you to shift the volume from
the center (both left and right speakers) to the left (left speaker) or right (right speaker) in time.

You can click on the Panorama box…

… and draw in an automation line this:

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[goes from 12R (right) to C (centre) to 7L (left) and to 7R]

That’s all for this hihat pattern. Now let’s just copy this pattern to the end of the clip. Instead of
copying and pasting (ctrl/cmd+C/V) we can just hold alt (win) / option (mac) and drag and drop this
clip. That will do the same job.

Make sure hihats are coming back at 3.4.3.

Now select the area after 4.4 and erase it by clicking Delete.

Voila! The hihats pattern is finally done.

Result by far:

https://soundcloud.com/pmlblog/with-ticking-hihats-done

6. Pluck
Now let’s make a simple synth which is going to play a melody.

Throw a Serum onto a new MIDI track and go into its settings. Change the first oscillator to a sine
wave, just like with the bassline.

33
Now drag the Sustain of the first envelope to 0%. The volume of every note you play will go down
like this shape:

Check out this effect - arm the track and play around on your keyboard.

Now you need to do 3 things:

- turn on the Filter,
- map the first envelope to its cutoff (drag and drop the „four arrows“ sign from ENV1)
- and bring down the amount of the envelope to about 3/4 (decrease the blue line surrounding the
cutoff knob)

That will make this instrument sound like a „pluck“. Not only is our first envelope affecting the
volume of the synth, but now it’s also affecting also the Filter Cutoff, which adds cool movement.

Now turn on Distortion in the FX tab. Make sure its Drive and Mix knobs are both set to around
25%.
34
 ***

Tip: Distortion can be used for different purposes. A lot of distortion (high Drive and Mix) will make
anything sound gritty and dirty (try it!). However, if you bring the knobs to a half like we have done
it, you’ll achieve a lighter effect - it will make your sounds more present on different speakers. That
technique is often used for bass to make sure you can hear it for example on tiny laptop speakers
or small radios.

***

If you now drag and drop the „pluck.mid“ MIDI file onto the track and play it, you should hear this
melody:

https://soundcloud.com/pmlblog/with-pluck

I also turned down the volume of the pluck to -8dB - make sure you’re not clipping on the Master
track, otherwise everything will sound terrible :)

Now we’re going to add the final element which will just spice up our beat:

7. Toms

35
I added two toms at the end to make the beat more interesting. Let’s make a new Audio track and
drag a tom.wav sample from our folder to 4.3.4 like this:

And copy this sample over to 4.4.3:

Now I wanted the second tom to play a lower note. If we put the tom on a MIDI track, we would
simply play a lower note. But we can also do that on an audio track - that’s called „Transposing“.

36
If you now select the second sample and press Shift+Tab to go to the Clip View, you’ll see the
sample in depth (just like we see MIDI Clips in depth).

Now in the lower part locate the „Transpose“ knob:

You can drag it down for example by 3 steps and it

will play a note lower by 3 keys - simple as that.

The toms are quite loud samples, so I turned them their overall volume to -12 dB.

37
Result by now - all elements:

https://soundcloud.com/pmlblog/final-result

8. Mixing
Now that we have all of our elements, we can make them sound good together = achieve a right
balance in the overall mix.

1. Click on the first track (Bass) and let’s make it sound better with the kick.

A common problem with mixing kick and bass is that both of these sounds are playing very low
frequencies. We should be careful with playing the same frequencies with many instruments, as
that can cause the track to sound very muddy. However there’s a trick we can use to avoid that,
which is called Sidechain Compression.

Sidechaining basically decreases the volume of one track while another one’s volume goes up. In
this case we’re going to be turning down the volume of the bass when the kick is playing.

Here’s what you need to do to turn on this effect:

First, find a Compressor effect in Audio Effects and drag it onto your „Bass“ track.

Click the little arrow next to the ON/OFF switch, and set it to
Sidechain mode by clicking the box below.

38
Select what you’d like to sidechain your track to from the „Audio From“ dropdown menu (in this
case we’re sidechaining to the kick, so select your Kick track)

Now drag the threshold down (first fader in the black center area - „Thresh”) and hear the result.
Notice how the bass’s volume is reduced when the kick hits.

Now you can just copy my settings from this effect - I chose a maximum ratio, 12.5 ms Attack, 25
ms Release and a Threshold at -40 dB. All these settings just modify the way in which the bass’s
volume is reduced (the shape of that curve)

***

Tip: The Attack knob controls if the

sound disappears suddenly or gradually.
The Release knob is the opposite - it
controls how long it takes for the sound
to come back („be released“). The Ratio
and Threshold control by how much is
the sound reduced.

***

Let’s now proceed to the kick and make it more snappy. Select the kick track and drag an Audio
Effect called „EQ Eight“ onto it.

You can use this effect to shape the sound just like the Filter in Serum. It can add or remove
frequencies just like the lowpass filter we used there.

To use this effect in short just move around the yellow dots with numbers (1,2,3,4) and edit the
type of their curve (each number has a corresponding dropdown menu below)

In this case we’re going to use a high shelf type of filter. By default the fourth yellow dot is a shelf
filter, so let’s use it. All we’re going to have to do is to drag that dot into this position:

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Looks like a shelf? That’s why it’s called so.

Now let’s solo the kick and play it back. You can simply turn on and off every effect by clicking the
„I“ button in the upper left corner.

Here’s a preview (first the kick and bass with the effect, then without)

https://soundcloud.com/pmlblog/audio01

Now the kick should be much more present especially on weak laptop speakers.

Now we can proceed to the snare. Let’s also drag an EQ8 onto it. We’re going to add two curves
here. First, let’s put a slight high shelf on the very high end of the spectrum like this:

I just added this curve because I felt

that the snare needed more of the
high end.

Change the type of the first filter to the selected (it’s going to be a 48db (x4) highpass filter) …

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… and place it here:

I added this highpass filter because this snare didn’t need to play those low frequencies. To check
what we’re cutting out, you can press this headphones button on the right:

Now click and hold the first curve (1) and the background shapes will turn blue - you’ll hear the
mud of the sound which we’re cutting off.

For the main Serum synth,

you can simply copy the EQ8 from the snare and paste it. Select the EQ8 on the Snare track, copy
it (cmd+c), select the Serum track, click on the right side of Serum and click cmd+v to paste. Voila:

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Here’s what the Main Synth sounds like with the pluck: (to put both instruments in Solo mode
simply cmd/ctrl + click on both Solo buttons)

https://soundcloud.com/pmlblog/audio02

Now I figured that the pluck isn’t very audible because it’s playing simultaneously with the main
synth. To avoid this problem we can simply sidechain the main synth to the pluck, so that every
time the pluck hits, the main synth’s volume is reduced.

That’s what I did. Here are my settings, you can copy them. I copied the side chain compressor
from the kick, changed the Audio From to „pluck” and decreased the Threshold a tiny bit.

Preview:

https://soundcloud.com/pmlblog/audio03

To me it sounds much clearer and it gives the pluck the necessary space.

We’re not going to add any EQ or Sidechain Compression to the hihats track - I often sidechain
them to the kick to create some additional volume changes, but this time I simply chose not to.

Now for the pluck:

That instrument was a pure sinewave with an automated filter. Even though in Serum we’re using
Distortion (which is the same as Overdrive), I chose to make the higher frequencies even more
present by placing this effect. You can copy my exact settings of the effect.

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(I also put a Utility after the effect to bring up the signal by 14 dB.)

Then I put an EQ8 on this track to cut out the lower frequencies. I did this with a low shelf curve
just like on the image above (dragged down the Q a little bit to make the curve more smooth)

Also, I’m bringing up the volume using the Gain function in the bottom right corner of EQ8.

https://soundcloud.com/pmlblog/audio03

And the last instrument we have left is toms - let’s just put a highpass filter on it to cut out some
muddy low end. This time I’m using the 12dB highpass curve (without the „x4“ sign)

- Adjusting the volumes -

If you switch to the Session view with Tab, you’ll see bigger
volume bars - they’re very useful for getting the right volumes
of all elements. Make them even bigger by dragging up the
dark grey line above them:
Let’s look at one of those bars for a second:

The actual VOLUME of the track is

displayed by the green area in the volume
bar (of course)

The PEAK VOLUME level (2) is „the highest area the green area has got to“. To
see it, you need to play the clip first. If a track has a peak over 0dB, that means
it’s clipping (the sound will come out distorted - not nice). That’s why we’re
working with lower peaks - we can always bring up the volumes a the end, and
we’re sure we’re not clipping.

Every track has also a triangle „fader / slider“ (1) on the right of the volume bar.
You can also check its exact position in numbers (for example we have -26.2
dB) in the box in the upper left corner. Try to move the triangle and see how the
numbers in the box are changing. Conclusion - it acts like a Utility at the end of
every track (can bring the volumes up and down).

However, when trying to figure out the track’s actual volume, you shouldn’t look

43
at track’s fader. If you threw a Utility onto a track and brought up its volume, then even though the
„track’s fader“ is still the same, the actual volume would be much louder. That’s why measuring
PEAK VOLUMES is essential - it displays very accurate values.

I recommend you to play back your clip and to adjust your PEAK VOLUME levels to mine - that
way you’ll be sure you’ve got exactly the same track volumes as I do.

To do that, you’ll need to play back a clip, check a track’s peak level (2), then check how much you
need to bring up the track’s fader (1). Then just repeat this process with every other track.

Here are my final volumes and peaks:

That’s the end of our mixing process. If you’d like to learn more about it, make sure to check out
our mixing course.

And now we can proceed to the final process, which is:

9. Mastering
Mastering is adding effects on the final „Master“ track - to make the final track sound as good as
possible.

The „Master“ track is where all the tracks we’ve created go to. You can find it at the bottom of
„Arrangement view“ or at the right of „Session view“:

To view it, simply click on it.

Now let’s add two audio effects onto it: EQ8 and a Limiter.

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First I expanded the EQ8 view by pressing this arrow:

Now I noticed that the track needs more of the high end, so I added a high shelf filter…

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… and now I saw that the hihats started to sound too aggressive - so I added a
bell filter and took those frequencies down a little.

Now the last element of our track is the final Limiter effect, which is going to
bring up the signal in our track. Let’s take a look at the Master track level in
Session view.

Make sure the fader is precisely at 0dB (to set it to 0dB simply click on the
„track level“ (1) box and press 0, Enter). Then, the peak level should be
somewhere at -10dB.

If we left the track as it is now, it would be much quieter in comparison to other tracks (if you were
for example to upload it to Soundcloud). To fix this, we need to boost the level at the end, but we
cannot clip - the track level cannot exceed 0dB and „turn red“.

That’s what a Limiter is useful for. It has a Gain knob, just like the Utility, which will boost our
signal. However if the signal exceeds the Ceiling parameter, the limiter will decrease the volume of
our track so that we are not clipping.

So if our peak on the Master is -10.02dB, then if we put +10.1dB on the Limiter, then we should
end up perfectly at 0dB on the Master with the limiter turning down the volume by 0.08 dB in the
highest volume moments.

The thing is that if we’re going to put the track up on the internet, the streaming services are going
to secretly convert the track to mp3. If you convert a track with a peak level of 0dB to mp3, it will
clip. A possible solution then is to always turn the level of the Master track down by 1dB.

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Now all you need to do to save the track is to go to the Arrangement View and select the area we

want to export (the first four bars of any track - you can just click the „bass“ clip). Also, always
make sure you none of your tracks are in Solo mode.

To export the track on Mac go to File > Export Audio/Video or click Shift+Command+R (it should
look similar on Windows)

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Now in the popup window you can just copy my settings - you’re choosing the quality and format of
the export.

Finally, after clicking Export, just name the file and save it.

https://soundcloud.com/pmlblog/preview-full

That’s all! Now upload it to Soundcloud with a tag #PMLstart so that we can check it out :)

Remember that you can always ask questions at support@productionmusiclive.com if anything is

unclear.

More by PML:
https://productionmusiclive.com/

Check out the track I made from this idea:

https://soundcloud.com/k-pizza/smokeretribution/

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