Here is a little post on the making of my latest song Neon Aeon. Here's the finished product.
Now for the process and some plugins.
For my electronic music I prefer to use Mpc as the daw as it handles midi quite well and it works perfectly with my mpk mini midi control. Above is the screenshot of the first sequence. I usually load a variety of samples and plugins and play with sounds until an idea starts taking form.
Mpc is a bit of a strange daw where you have to make portions of the song separately in sequences rather than map out the song in its entirety. It takes a bit of getting used to but it makes sense after a while. Here is an example of a drum fill sequence between larger sequences.
The main bass of the song is via the Tubesynth plugin by Air. This plugin creates quite a variety of sounds, it is easy to create entire songs with just this one plugin.
For the strings sound I used the hybrid plugin. This plugin is great for pad style sounds that can sit in the background.
Hype is the plugin that has the step sequencer rhythm sound. This plugin is perfect for trance and the step sequencer really helos build the rhythm of the song. Often I will build a drum beat just around one note being held down in hype.
Once I have finished laying out various parts of the song in MPC I export the tracks as wav files to be mixed in Cakewalk. Cakewalk has way better mixing tools and I like to make loops and finish composing here. I also ended up adding my leads in Cakewalk as it lets you see the entire song rather than in a sequence.
Here is a new plugin I got for free from Air because they sold me a depricated plugin called timewarp. I complained to tech support and they gave me an expensive plugin in place of a cheap not working one lol. As it turns out Opx-4 is great for leads. This is quite a heavy duty instrument that I still need to get familiarized with. So far it is great for soundscape design. The first lead and last leads are made via this plugin.
Here are all the plugins I ended up adding to the song in Cakewalk.
Loom is another new plugin I got for free. It has quite a few good leads in it with the ability to create motion by timing the filter on the left.
I also discovered I had quite a few free plugins from Native Instruments because I bought guitar rig a few years ago. I ended up finding about 10 new vst instruments for free in my account. This is one of them that creates interesting pad sounds. I'll be digging into all these new instruments for new songs soon...
That's all for now, thanks for looking :-)
