I’m giv­ing away a few great tips (marked Pro-tip) and it would be fun to see if any of you have some­thing that you feel gives you the pro­fes­sional edge.

Before I start, I want you to be crit­i­cal to my work­flow and real­ize that this may not work for you specif­i­cally. If you feel like any of the Pro-tips are incorrect/bad advice, don’t hes­i­tate to cor­rect me! :)
I’m going to write this work­flow start­ing from the point where you have an acapella and want to cre­ate a track around it. You can apply any of these tech­niques in your own orig­i­nal tracks and in acapel­las that you got off your mates/colleagues.

Start­ing out pro­duc­tion, I always felt like I needed to wait for inspi­ra­tion to be able to cre­ate a track and could never cre­ate one on demand, but the more I saw how the pros could just pro­duce track after track, the more I real­ized that they used some sort of for­mu­las and that in order for me to be able to do the same, I need to be able to under­stand all the intri­ca­cies of their for­mu­las.
I set out on a quest to find out exactly what the com­mon threads in all tracks are and started to ana­lyze a few artists, but only one at a time so as to avoid con­fu­sion. I recre­ated their tracks, melodies, mixes, mas­ter­ing (Pro-tip) and I learned a lot that way. For exam­ple: instead of doing what the pros were telling me to do, I did what the pros were actu­ally doing. A lot of the time you’ll find that you’re given bad advice and false advice, so always be wary when a pro­ducer reveals one of his secrets (Pro-tip). He may just be bla­tantly lying to you or avoid­ing to reveal what the real secret is.

With that in mind, let’s get started:

  1. Import an acapella into one of your last tracks (Pro-tip).
    I think this is a really good idea, because it gives you a tem­plate that you already know works and you get the choice of what you want to keep from the old track and what you want to scratch. Also I want to use the same BPM in all of my tracks (170BPM) since it makes it eas­ier for me and every­one else to mix and I don’t see any rea­son to vary the speeds of my tracks. Also vary­ing the speeds in tracks means that the DJ play­ing your track will have to timestretch or pitch your track, which will either make the kicks sound less pow­er­ful or the track sound out of key.
  2. Beat­match the BPM to the acapella (not the other way around, as most peo­ple would do) (Pro-tip).
    When­ever I start with an acapella that’s not 170BPM, I slow down the speed of my project. I haven’t seen any­one else do it, but I know that if the tim­ing is right at a slow BPM, it will only be more spot on at a higher BPM. Don’t be afraid of cut­ting the acapella and requan­tiz­ing if it goes out of sync, because not all acapel­las will line up perfectly.
  3. Cre­ate a bass-progression that works with the acapella.
    If the bass and acapella aren’t in the same key, it’s gonna make every­thing sound awful, since I base all my other synths on the bass.
  4. Cre­ate a pad based on the bass (and thus works with the acapella).
  5. Cre­ate a melody based on the pads (and thus works with the bass and the acapella).
  6. Change var­i­ous melodies, timbres/sounds and samples.
  7. Delete char­ac­ter­is­tic sounds from the old track and cre­ate new char­ac­ter­is­tic sounds.
    This can be any­thing from an arp to a drum-sample or effect.
  8. Arrange the track.
    A rough out­line will do at this stage. Prefer­ably use arrange­ments from other tracks you like. (Pro-tip)
  9. Add details here and there (espe­cially in tran­si­tions) to give it the pro-edge and make peo­ple go “how did he do that?” (Pro-tip).

Keep in mind that less is more (i.e. a select few good sounds will work bet­ter than lots of bad sounds) and to keep it sim­ple. The dance­floor is the judge of how good your track is. Remem­ber though that not all details will be heard when you play out and some­times too much detail can steal the focus of your main ele­ments, such as the kick/bass, lead synth and vocals.

I hope this gives you a lit­tle more insight into how I view a track as of right now and most impor­tantly that this gives you a way to cre­ate your own work­flow and lets you be more pro­duc­tive. The way I work is con­stantly shift­ing, so I may redesign my entire work­flow by next year, but this is what I do as of right now.

If you found this arti­cle use­ful, please let me know and also share it with your friends! :)

Feel free to share your own tips!

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