Most often when artists (looking at you Skrillex and deadmau5) publish a storm of Tweets, it’s some kind of drama. Our favorite trance artist and possibly EDM’s best sound designer BT brought the storm to Twitter this morning for a different reason. “If you’re ‘getting by’ doing the minimum etc : basically cheating, this reflects ultimately the sustainability of your work.”
[I] realized about half my work is creating an array of material, instruments, design & workflow to draw from, in the hopes of birthing unicorns. Hopefully this inspires a new thought in you creative types, the foundation from which you build determines the merit of the entire work.
What was the production tip? Getting you off those “sh**ty” Vengeance risers we all know you use and instead building a riser that actually operates within the context of your song! Because it’s BT it isn’t as simple as you might think. The technique requires making a simple arpeggio of your chord progression, running it through the fantastic Valhalla Labs Shimmer plugin, cutting it into a thousand pieces (duh, it’s BT), and using the resultant pieces to create rises and falls in your arrangement.
Sound confusing? The main thing to remember is these techniques require you to bounce-in-place so you have an actual audio clip to work with. In order to produce some of the results BT describes, you’ll be using only the recorded reverb tails Shimmer outputs. In practice this will only take about 20 minutes to accomplish, but will leave you with endless combinations and possibilities for adding emphasis to moments and movements in your arrangement.
We’ll let BT take it from here:
Alright, producer tip of the day. Instead of sh**ty risers try this. It’s a couple step trick. Let’s say your chord progression is in Em
— BT (@BT) December 10, 2015
Let’s say the progression is Em Dm Gmaj Cmaj. The chord before the tonic is a Cmaj. Okay. Let’s say that chord lasts 2 bars. With me so far?
— BT (@BT) December 10, 2015
Take that chord & make a short plucky sine wave (in anything) sharp attack quick decay to zero. Now arpeggiate your Cmaj chord at 32nd notes
— BT (@BT) December 10, 2015
In fact arpeggiate your whole progression & split it into those chords. Now take 2 bar arpeggiated chords & put 8 bars of silence after each
— BT (@BT) December 10, 2015
NEXT! Grab Valhalla Shimmer. Tune it up 7 (a fifth) and crank the decay to taste (longer is better here. Okay print that and cut it up.
— BT (@BT) December 10, 2015
You now have 4x 10 bar sounds (2 bars each of a chord arpeggiated & 8 of a reverb throw) Now at this stage there’s so many things you can do
— BT (@BT) December 10, 2015
Here’s a couple favorites. Take the 8 bars of Shimmer for the Cmaj chord and fade it out. Reverse it. You just made a sick riser.
— BT (@BT) December 10, 2015
Better still cut the Emin arp reverb and put it after the Cmaj reverb reverse on the down beat. Presto tonal riser into tonic tonal crash.
— BT (@BT) December 10, 2015
You can also fade out and reverse all the chords and put them under your progression for ear candy (and something not out of a sample pack!)
— BT (@BT) December 10, 2015
There’s a bajillion things you can do with this technique. Try delays, flangers etc. You’ll flip out if you’ve never done this. Enjoy!
— BT (@BT) December 10, 2015
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