Synths and leads
Trance gate
Create two tracks, put a synth on the first one with a melody (long notes and pad like sounds work well). Then put a synth on the other track with a short snappy enveloppe and create a rythmic pattern of notes with it, then turn off this track. go back to your first synth track and set the sidechain on the gate to take the second synth track as input, then adjust the gate settings until you hear the first synth playing the rythm of the second track. Adding some delay and reverb after the gate sound pretty too.
Drones
Sample-based pads
Layering
Layer multiple instruments / samples to make sounds richer while playing the exact same thing, play around with the volume and parameter of each one.
Bass
the lowest frequencies that subwoofer can reproduce well are around F and G
Bass Line Algorithms
This is definitely not a complete list of every way you could write a bass line but it includes a lot of common approaches and is a great starting point for ideas.
- Root note pads: Bass holds the root of each chord.
- Line up with the drums: Bass plays root notes on each of the main drum hits.
- All offbeats: Bass plays the root note of each chord on all the “and” beats of the bar (“1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and”).
- Disco octaves: Bass plays the root note of each chord, alternating between two different octaves of that note (usually the higher one is on the offbeats).
- Root note downbeat + fills: Bass plays the root note on each downbeat, followed by melodic fills leading to the root note on the next downbeat. Also think about “passing notes” or “passing tones” - notes that may be outside of a chord or even outside of your key, but that can serve as a bridge in between the more important, anchoring bass notes you’re using.
Drums
Gluing drums together
Add distortion on the drum group to add similar harmonics to the different drum sounds and bring them closer timbre wise. Add the same reverb in a return channel to different drum sounds at different levels to simulate their different place in the room, more sparse sounds can have more reverb than quickly repeated ones
Think about how the different elements fills the space
Add fills / drum fills towards the end of sections to bridge to next one
Impacts (cymbal or sounds with a lot of reverb), usually at the start of sections
Layering
Works pretty well with drums too, for example layering two snare samples with different tones and characteristics to make the sound more unique.
Sidechaining
Use eq in compressor sidechain to get just the transient of the kick, click the headphones to hear the filtered sound
Gated reverb
put a gate on a reverb return track and lower the treshold to leave just a bit of the reverb come through. Quite useful to thicken up drums.