Layering Synths For Bigger Sounds

Are your synth lines not really cutting the mustard? Does the top end lack a little fizz, or do you find the lows to be a touch inconsistent? Then perhaps you should indulge in a spot of layering....

When people discuss 'layering' up synth lines, they're usually talking about getting the same MIDI part playing on two or more synths at the same time. There are plenty of reasons why you might want to do this, and a few why you wouldn't, and that's what we'll be examining here.

The first, and arguably most common, reason for layering up your synths is that you want a bigger sound. If your lead line isn't quite cutting through the mix, then try doubling it with a fizzy sound, high-pass filtered such that it doesn't clash too much with the main line (at least above 1 - 2kHz). In general you should be looking for a fairly subtle effect; take a simple synth patch, blend it in very quietly, and make sure it's doing only what's required. The majority of the character of the sound should be coming from the main synth patch; if you start trying to get several big and crazy synth lines playing at the same time you'll only end up in mixdown hell as you try to compress, sort out phases and automation and volume on several synths simultaneously. To this end, don't be afraid of using presets or simple sounds for any synth layers that will secondary to the main sound, although many producers like to stay away from presets for reasons of originality, here you're just using it as a tool, to bulk up another sound. It's the main patch people will be listening to, so just grab something that works and move on!

Similarly at the low end, many big synth patches make great bass sounds, but don't quite cut it for sub-bass. In this case, try high-passing your synth at something like 150Hz (or perhaps even up to 200Hz if it's getting muddy in your mixdown) and layering in a straight sine wave for the sub bass. Again, simpler is better, and a sine wave is perfect for sub bass. Be sure to make the volume envelope match that of the main synth (or at least make sure it will sound good on a system, by giving it a touch of decay and release), add a touch of compression and you're good to go. It really doesn't need to be any more complicated than that.

When layering a new synth line to complement an existing patch, you need to make sure it matches your main patch in a number of ways; chiefly volume, space and filtering. If your main patch filters up and down, make sure your layers do likewise to avoid leaving them high and dry (try sending them all to a buss and filtering that for simplicity). Send your layers to the same reverbs for consistency, and if your main patch moves around the stereo field, then ensure your layers do too. If the volume of the main patch changes, then reflect this in the layers. Paying close attention to all these points will help the layers blend in with the main patch much more than anything else. So many forum heads will insist that you jump straight in with frequency analysers and multiband compressors, this is a tricky and complicated way of solving a problem that can often be avoided!

On the subject of filtering, one common reason for requiring layering is that when you change filter levels, the weight of the sound can change with it. For instance if you've got a chunky bass sound with a resonant low-pass filter on it, then when the filter cutoff is at a low frequency, the resonance will give you a boost at those low frequencies. But then when you turn up the cutoff, the resonant boost moves, great for giving that acid adrenaline feel, but it doesn't help when you wanted to keep the low-end weight. So in this case, it's often helpful to double the synth patch with itself, and have one patch with the filter down, low passed and unchanging. Then high-pass the other, and you can alter the filter as much as you like, without affecting the weight of the patch.

Another area where layering synths can come in extremely handy is with samples, especially melodic samples taken off an old vinyl. Typically, these may be badly recorded, lacking in high or low end (or both) but will usually have loads of character. So in cases like these, you can use the same techniques, get an unobtrusive synth patch, programme it to match the sample, and fold it into the mix as subtly as you can to fill out the sound. With a little tweaking, you'll end up with a full-spectrum sample that sounds crisp and finely EQ'd but that still keeps all the character of the original.

The possibilities of layering up your synth sounds go well beyond the scope of this article, but this should give you a few ideas on how to proceed! The golden rules are to keep it simple, make sure you program the layers in detail to keep them true to the main patch, and watch out for clashing or overlapping frequencies. Once you've taken heed of these, feel free to layer away....

Get The Web To Work For You!

Last week, we brought you the first part of this look at how artists and musicians can manage their web presence to be as effective as possible. There are a whole wealth of services out there to use - many of them for free. But once you're signed up, up how can you ensure that they serve your needs as well as possible, without eating into that precious music-making time? There's no point having a strategy for promoting your music if it means you don't get a chance to write any! So read on, as we suggest a few hints for getting maximum results from your web exposure...

The first thing is to make sure that prospective fans can find what they want. If you imagine that you're checking out a new band's website, you don't want to read their biography first - you want to hear some tracks. That's the important thing. So to that end, make sure you have obvious links to where people can hear your tunes, and then where they can buy them. Make sure also that they're your best recent tunes - this sounds obvious but so many artists have just a few tracks on their Soundcloud, all from over a year ago. This just makes you look like you've quit!

This point is key - however many sites and accounts you have, you must make sure they're all up to date. If that means cutting back to just a couple, then do so, otherwise it could just be counterproductive. If someone's looking to buy your latest release, and one of your sites says you haven't released anything in 8 months, then you've just lost a sale. If you don't have time to keep everything up to date, then just cut things down a bit - only keep as many sites as you have time for.

Similarly, although it's possible to upload your tracks to any one of a number of sites - Last FM, Pandora, etc, it's arguably not the best use of your time. You could spend weeks making sure you're on every site possible, but so long as you have a good selection of work available in a few key locations, your time will likely be better spent honing your tracks instead. People will find them if they're good enough!

The whole point of all these sites is to make life easier for you. It is not, as a rule, to generate fans. There is only one thing that will guarantee fans come to your page, and that's good music. It's a cliche, but it's also a liberating one – so long as the basics are there (people can hear your music, get in contact with you, find out how to buy your tracks) then you can spend the rest of your time actually writing and recording tracks!

That said, play to your strengths. If you find social networking difficult and tedious, then just do the essentials - news updates, new tracks etc. If you are a natural chatterbox, then indulge it - the more retweets you can get on Twitter, the more comments on your Facebook posts, the more people will see you on their timelines and the more exposure you'll get.

To this end, smartphones are a revelation. With phone apps for Twitter, Facebook, Soundcloud and more, you can update your networks while you're on the bus to work or away for lunch. Apps like Seesmic Ping can synchronise all your social networks, so one status update can be pushed through all your sites, pages and blogs at once. This means you can get more time to spend on your tracks - the important stuff.

There's a lot of talk about things 'going viral' - and once again, this something that can only be achieved if you have cracking content. Videos, jingles, mashups - whatever it is, the most important factor is that you work hard at it and ensure that it's as good as possible. That sounds obvious, but in all the commotion about how to maximise your crowd engagement, it can often be overlooked! Just as you'll never have a number one hit simply by connecting with your fans on Facebook, so your music and videos will only go viral if they're good enough and if people want to share them. One band who have made their videos viral is American rock band Ok Go!

This doesn't negate the whole process of finding fans online, however. The concept of 'web presence' can also include being an active and useful participant on a forum - the respect you can build up will translate into people taking you more seriously when you have something to promote - for instance the chief engineer at one mastering company is a keen contributor on a certain music forum, constantly offering technical advice to other users. It's won him a lot of friends and a lot of business.

Overall then, getting your web presence right is crucial - it's your method of converting curious visitors into fans, and of keeping existing fans up to date with what you're doing. But it's also something that should facilitate your musical efforts. No-one gets into a band or artist because of their fun and slick internet profile, and as such you shouldn't devote too much effort to acquiring fans through the internet. But you certainly do need to make sure that if someone lands on one of your profiles, the route from there to listening to your tracks, buying them, or booking you for a set is as simple as possible. So make sure your web presence is complete, simple, and manageable, and then get on and make it work for you!

Get Your Music Stuck in The Web!

For some of us, it doesn't seem long since the cutting edge of musician's web promotion consisted largely of starting up a Myspace page, chucking a couple of tracks on there, and then furiously adding friends. It's moved on a lot since those heady days; the options available to the average producer or musician now are dizzying. But what's the best way of keeping on top of things? Which tools are really useful, and how can you use them to your advantage without losing hours each week to the social network sites? Let's take a look in a little more depth...

Facebook has been the undisputed champion of social networking over the last few years. It has the most users, the highest view counts, and carries unarguable weight in marketing your stuff online. Since the relatively recent launch of 'Facebook Pages', it has been even more useful, as you can set up a one-stop shop where fans can find biography, booking information and all the rest of it.

So there's step one - set up your Facebook page. Make sure it's clear, has all the information people want, and has links to places where people can hear, and buy, your music. You can add apps like Bandpage, which is a great tool to enhance your page. On this you can embed tracks from your Soundcloud page, pull in your gig details from a number of sites, and generally collate everything a fan could want. The downside is that as Facebook changes constantly, it can stop apps working so well, and the recent switch to Timeline pages has left many apps consigned to a small icon at the edge of the page.

So think back to the days of Myspace - it was once the biggest music networking site, and now it's nowhere. The same will eventually happen with Facebook too. Already, musicians and marketing people are concerned over the use of 'Edgerank' and 'promoted posts'. It's too deep to go into here, but the upshot is that as Facebook is now so popular for marketing, sometimes your status updates will be crowded out of your fans' busy newsfeeds by other people's updates. In turn, you can pay money to get your status updates onto more newsfeeds - but only people who have already 'liked' your page. It's a tricky problem, but the concept of paying to reach people who are already fans has many industry commentators up in arms. It will be interesting to see how it pans out over the next few months, but in the meantime, just remember that you may need to shift your web-focus elsewhere at some point.

A suitable place would be to your own website. Start one now - it doesn't have to be an all-singing, all-dancing affair - just a simple blog site with a customised template will do. Make sure it has links to your main pages on the web, and is updated with your discography and significant news. Otherwise, it can be a very basic site; for smaller artists most people engage through social networks anyway. All it needs to do is provide a central hub for your other web engagements. Tumblr is handy and easy to use, while Posterous has an ingenious interface where you can add blog posts simply by sending an email. For the non-technical, it's a revelation. Both feature 'auto-post' functions, which will spin your content out through your Facebook and Twitter accounts too.

Soundcloud is still one of the best sites for getting your tracks heard; it has a large community and is easy to use. Make sure your tracks are embeddable; this way, people can put them on their blog sites but you'll still get the play counts.

Bandcamp is increasingly popular as an alternative to Soundcloud, especially among independent and self-releasing artists. It offers embeddable players, tracks to stream and download, or you can sell tracks, albums and physical merchandising direct from the site, taking money into your paypal account. It lacks the graphical waveforms of Soundcloud that so many producers love, and also the strong community so crucial for fans to share and discover new music, but the site is improving constantly and is well worth a look, especially for self-releasing artists. Don't forget to check out Official.fm too though. Recently revamped and re-launched, it's now setting itself up as a serious competitor to Soundcloud. If you're a DJ, Mixcloud is the simplest and best site for hosting mixes.

Songkick has also been making waves recently, and it too is getting more useful all the time. Primarily, it's a site where you can create and manage your events - gig and tour details. So artists can keep fans up to date, and fans can buy tickets to events. What makes it more useful though, is the integration with other platforms. If you have an account with Soundcloud, Bandpage, Spotify or many others, they can automatically pull your tour details from the Songkick page - so you only have to put the shows in once.

We still haven't mentioned Twitter - everyone knows what this is, but it can be a highly useful tool for communicating with your fans, getting information out into the world and even networking with other acts - if you need to get tracks to someone you can often just tweet at them to get an email address. It's surprisingly effective for this!

So, with all these sites, you'll essentially have something that is less of a website, and more of a web eco-system. But what should you do with it? We'll run down the strategies of how to create an efficient, useful, and stress-free online existence next week! So make sure you've got the basics sorted for now, and then join us again for some tips on how to use them.....

How To: Finish Your Tracks!

A skill that is often overlooked by many aspiring producers, and it's a skill that is seriously under-rated by too many, is simply getting tracks finished. So many people end up with a hard drive full of loops, half-tunes, ideas and sketches, but all too few full, finished tracks. Sound familiar? Don't worry if so - it's a stage most people have had to work through at some point in their production lives. So let's go in a bit deeper on this issue, and look at some ways to make sure you get more finished tracks under your belt!

Many producers who start to write beats have a certain idea in mind - that once you get to a certain level of technical proficiency, the rest is easy. Your tunes pretty much write themselves; you get your 8 or 16 bar loop sorted, a couple of sick synth noises going on, and somehow after that, everything basically falls into place.

It's a nice dream, but unfortunately, a dream is all it is. The uncomfortable truth is that, just as with every other aspect of production, finishing a tune takes work and plenty of practise. It's a skill, and needs to be learned just as much as compressing your drum buss or writing a harmony. There's no shortcut!

So how do we go about getting over this hurdle and convert those ideas and sketches into fully formed works of electronic art? Well, first of all you have to change your mindset somewhat - and set as your goal the completion of a full track. It sounds obvious, but many forget that although firing up the 16-bar loop and muting/adding parts is loads of fun to jam with, all you're really doing is admiring the potential that your embryonic tune has. You're not actually writing, and you won't end up with a full track any time soon. At this stage, you're really only a third of the way through the production process. It's time to get on with the hard graft - but don't worry, you'll soon learn to enjoy it!

So you start tracking out the arrangement, and this is where so many people come a cropper. Remember the new mindset - forget the art, what does it need to do? It needs an intro; perhaps a breakdown, a main drop, and so on. Listen to tunes in your genre and count out their structure – how long is a typical intro, how does a drop develop? Don't worry about copying parts of a structure for now; the important part is that you work through the process to completion: anyway, if you listen to enough tracks in your chosen style you'll quickly see that most structures are pretty generic. Just the fact that you're writing your own beats and melodies, and producing in your own style will give it a distinctive signature. If you really want to get arty then later you can start experimenting with crazy intros, tempo changes and whatnot - but get the basics down and get into the habit of finishing tracks first!

Important things to consider are factors such as, when do elements come in or drop out? Fills? FX? Switch-ups? A good track will use plenty of techniques to keep the ear engaged, and let the music progress without becoming boring. It's a good idea to have some production 'tools' to hand here. For instance, a sample pack of risers and whoosh noises to drop into a progressive house track to keep the momentum up. Or a couple of glitch/slicer plugins if you're writing psytrance; maybe a sampler instrument full of bass drops that you can throw into your D&B tune for half a bar here or there. Often these details can make a big difference, and take a simple track from being boring to being just 'stripped back'! As you keep finishing tracks, you'll also start to build up a repertoire of tricks and techniques that can help at this stage - practise is key.

The other crucial part is to distance yourself from what you're writing (it's that mindset thing again). It's only natural that you'll like whatever you happen to come out with; but is it actually good? Be brutal with yourself here. It's often a good idea to get a friend round to check out the tune at this point; it makes you listen to the track from a very different perspective. If you find yourself justifying it, saying things like 'this part really gets going in a second' then you perhaps need to add some extra interest at that point.

The important thing though, is just to get through the process, sign the track off as 'done' and move onto the next thing. Don't spend weeks tweaking and tweaking to get everything perfect - there isn't a producer in the world who doesn't look back at old tracks and see things that couldn't be improved. The more tracks you finish, the easier it becomes to see what a track really needs to do, and the easier the process becomes. So load up that unfinished jam, settle in for the long haul and get finishing!

Score A Hit On A Budget!

Music production has always been a great hobby for those who like their toys and gadgets. So much hardware, so many classic pieces of kit to get your hands on! Every month, the magazines are full of reviews of beautiful new gear and plugins that offer the finest in audio processing - with price tags that offer the finest in wallet-bothering panic. It's easy to get sucked into the idea that if you can just get one of these babies, your production problems will be solved - but that's rarely true, and in these times of recession, finding the cash is harder than ever! So until you win the lottery, here are some tips on how to improve your tunes, get more inspiration and beef up your production on a budget more suited to these straightened times...

Cheap Hardware

The opposite of what you see in the magazines! Get down to the local second-hand music shop and see what they've got. The weirder the better - a random old bass guitar amplifier is great for running your drum track through to get a crunchy lo-fi edge. Guitar pedals offer a wealth of options - distortion and overdrive for those filthy basses, delays for pads and drones, envelope filters for inspiring new sounds. If you find something really strange looking, pounce - it could be the thing that gives your tracks that distinctive sound you've always been looking for! If not, you can always put it on Ebay and make your money back...

Get A Microphone

Great microphones don't come cheap, but decent ones can. Companies like Red5 Audio can supply surprisingly good condenser and dynamic microphones for less than £50, leaving you with enough cash left over to buy a couple of cheap shakers and tambourines. Then you can get busy making your own unique percussion loops, start recording some crazy found sounds, or even get a local singer or MC in to start getting some decent vocals into your tracks. It doesn't need to be a full vocal - just start making some loops and chops!

Digging In The Crates

Go and buy some music. That's what this one is all about - as a music fan you probably do that anyway but by broadening your horizons you can really get some fresh ideas going. If you're a vinyl junkie then get down to the local second hand shop and start digging, especially in genres you generally don't listen to. If you don't do wax then just get on Amazon and buy yourself a couple of those 3-disc compilations - Greatest Motown Hits, Latin Jazz For Beginners, Blaxploitation Soundtrack Classics - anything like that. This way, not only are you exposing yourself to a new genre which may give you some new ideas, but also giving yourself the chance to learn more about how great music works. What makes those Motown records so catchy? How did those soundtrack guys get such an exciting sound out of just a few violins? By learning from the best, you can discover new musical techniques to take into your own productions. And even better, you also get a stack of classic tunes to sample!

Knowledge Is The Key

Speaking of learning, one of the best things you can do to improve your music-making skills is to take some music instrument lessons. Whether it's guitar, piano, or anything else doesn't matter so much (although of course brushing up on your keyboard skills will help no end when jamming out riffs on the MIDI controller keyboard) – just learning more about the nuts and bolts of music will give you an insight into the basics of melody, harmony and how things fit together. Fifty quid won't get you to Carnegie Hall, but it should be enough for a few weeks of 30 minute lessons. Combine that with some daily practise and you'll be surprised how much difference it can make...

Free Plugins

Apparently, there are even some free software plugins for your DAW out there! OK, so this isn't going to be news to many, but there really are some gems to be had out there. From old favourites like the Kjaerhus processing suite and Yohng's W1 Limiter to newer pretenders like Scythe, which is a DAW port of the popular iPad synth Grainbender, you'll always be able to find something that fits neatly with your requirements. Check out our new Plugins site where you can get top plugin Oscillator for FREE! Grab it here.

Hopefully these tips will help even the most cash-strapped producers out there, and remind us that you don't need the best, most expensive kit to write great music!