Guide to Electro House and Dubstep Production // Introduction

First of all, a little bit about myself. My name is Alejo Gonzales and I've been producing music for around 6-7 years. A little less than a year ago, I started a project that goes by the name Invader! where I go about ripping everyones face off with my seek beets. For a full bio and list of all my releases please visit http://itsinvader.com/more-info.

In this guide I will give you my suggestions on how to go about starting or bettering yourself in regards of Electro House and Dubstep production. I will also include some information on how I go about producing myself.

Getting Started

1. Choosing a DAW

One of the first things you need to do is find yourself a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation). Do your research and choose wisely. You can choose something cheap to get started, like Reason or Reaper with some free plug-ins for example, and then switch to something more complete when you feel more comfortable with producing and can make a better decision based on where you want to go with your music.

In my case for example, I started out with this program called Orion, the moved to Reason, then Logic and finally arrived at Live which I find the most comfortable to work with. If I could go back and give myself advice I'd tell myself to star up with Live, but that does not mean I'd do the same with anyone else as I believe your DAW should be a personal choice.

Once you choose a DAW, simply RTFM to learn how to use it and look up tutorials on YouTube when in doubt. YouTube is your friend, I wish I would have had this as a learning tool when I started producing.

2. Monitoring

I believe the best way to start learning how to produce is with headphones. Monitors are awesome but you need to spend some serious cash for them to be any good. On top of that you'll need to acoustically treat your room for them to sound accurate. So don't worry about any of that for now.

As starter headphones, I'd recommend the Audio-Technica ATH-M50 headphones. I don't own them myself but a friend of mine did his research and found out that they are the best bang for the buck. I've checked my mixes on them and, to be honest, I would not mind working with them. They are detailed and have a very flat response which is vital for accurate mixing.

I personally prefer mixing with open headphone which is why I mix with AKG K702 headphones. I would recommended them to anyone serious about mixing. I run mine through an Apogee Duet 2 which I also use for recording. I also have a set of Dynaudio BM5a MKII monitor speakers which sound absolutely bad ass but rarely use now a days since my room is currently untreated. They're pretty awesome to blast music with though and are a great way to check my mixes.

3. Learning How to Mix

To learn how to mix House music I recommend getting this book called "The Secrets of House Production" by Sample Magic. Not only will you learn everything there is to know about mixing and producing almost any type of House music from this book, but it will also help you with Dubstep and DnB production.

Another great way to learn is just to go around the internets trying to find as much information on mixing as possible. This is pretty much how I learned, plus simple trial and error.

Word of advice, learn how to use what you DAW comes with first before worry about all those fancy mixing plug-ins. There's no reasons why you couldn't get a good mix with your DAW's built-in plug-ins unless you're using Garage Band or something like that!

One of the most important things to keep in mind while mixing is the frequency spectrum. You have to make sure everything fits together like puzzle pieces. To carve out the puzzle pieces, one must EQ out the frequencies that clash together. Clashing frequencies will cause your mixes to sound muffled, muddy, or just plain wrong. To give an example, lets say you're mixing a piano track with a vocal track. Both occupy most of the same frequencies, so you must EQ the piano in a way that lets the vocals come through since in most cases it's the most important. The piano might not sound it's best alone, but it will make sense with the vocals. This is why you should never mix tracks by themselves. You can start off with a couple and keep adding the rest on top while still mixing all of them together, but you should try to avoid singling any of them out and mixing them that way.

Another way to make clashing frequencies fit together is panning. For example, if you go back to the piano and vocals example, if the vocals are centered and the piano is stereo (eq. recorded with two microphones and panned left/right) then you won't have to take a much of those clashing frequencies out as the panning separation will give the frequencies more space.

Don't be afraid to move things around and use different tracks with different processing for different parts. Like in the piano and vocals example, if you have a part where the piano is playing alone, then you might want to EQ that bit differently than the parts that have the vocals on top.

There are a ton of online tutorials on how to properly use EQs while mixing. My advice is to check those out and also look up EQ guides to help you figure out important frequencies for specific occasions. Ultimately, you should use your ears. Frequency analyzers are very useful as well.

Compression is another thing you need to keep in mind while mixing. Since electronic music is usually programmed, as opposed to played live like rock music, you won't have to do as much compressing as you would usually if

mixing a conventional rock song. I recommend using compression for things like synth leads or basses that switch octaves often. This is because the higher the notes, the louder it will get. You might not hear this when playing a regular riff, but if you have a lead that is being pitch bent up 24 octaves up for a build up, it will get very loud and will require compression to keep it leveled. Same thing applies to synth patches with a low pass filter that is being gradually opened, like on Progressive House chords, because as the filter opens, the louder it will get. You could also use compression as a creative tool, like for example, by overly sidechain compressing things to make them duck out of the way when desired.

4. Mastering

Forget all those fancy mastering plug-ins that you've heard about like Ozone and T-racks, man, forget them. All I do for mastering is put a 24db high pass filter at 10hz and a limiter boosting almost 20db on my master channel and mix through that. This gives you a shitload of headroom (aka the space between where you mix peaks and 0db) for whoever masters your tracks later to work with and if no one ever masters your track you'll still end up with a good mix that is loud enough to compete with professionally mastered tracks.

Whatever you do, NEVER EVER EVER EVER rely on mastering to get your track to sounds great. Make your track sound great while producing and mixing.

Getting Serious

Now that we're past all the baby bullshit, it's time to get serious.

1. Sidechain Compression

Sidechain compression is used to duck things out of the way using an audio input. The most common way this is used is by having the kick drum trigger the compressor to duck all the synths/instruments/vocals/etc out of the way. The Getting this right can be the difference between your track bumping loud

and proud and you track sounding like an uncyncopated train wreck. That might sound a bit extreme, but getting the release time wrong on your sidechain compression can seriously mess up a track. Also, too much sidechain can sound stupid. I recommend you use this as a mixing tool and not so much as an effect and it is pretty overdone.

An alternative use for sidechain compression is to quickly duck a sound out of the way to let a different one through. This is useful when you have a lot of things going on and would like to add some glitchiness on top without having to edit the MIDI or cut up a piece of audio. Just route whatever you want to let through to a compressor on the track that you want to duck out of the way.

2. Getting the Drums Right

I believe drums are vital to your sound. I tend to use virtually the same drum sounds with small changed on all of my tracks. This is because I worked long and hard getting my drums to sound how I wanted them to and believe they are a part of my "signature sound".

To find your drum sounds, first get the samples closest to what you're trying to achieve and then process and layer them accordingly.

My kicks usually consists of a high passed kick sample for the snap and a low passed kick for the low end. I use the same snap sample in all my kicks because it helps me keep some sort of consistency between my tracks. I also layer my kicks with acoustic kick drum samples from the Steven Slate Drums EX library.

My snares usually consist of a base snare which has a ton of EQ mainly boosting the 150hz area to give it that low end thump and couple other off set snares/claps to give it a bit of a splat sound when necessary. Steven Slate samples also apply here, I just love the live snare drum room samples. I also sometimes like to incorporate a high passed 808 hat sample with a ton of reverb to give my snare that extra shine.

Something to keep is mind is that every sample I use is triggered off a sampler where I adjust the amp envelope (ADSR - attack decay sustain release) to shape them (you can also do this with a transient designer or any amp envelope plug-in if not using a sampler) and sometimes the pitch to make those boomy kicks fit the key of a track.

Once you have all your drums sounding right, don't forget you can group them all together (or buss them, depending on the DAW you're using) and apply some compression to them. This can help bring all your drum sounds together as a whole and can also be used to give your kick and snare a bit more snap if necessary.

4. Synths

This is where you get to go wild. Explore all the synthesizers you can. There's demos for all the software ones.

If you're looking for those Dubstep sounds, Massive is an obvious choice. This plus Ohmicide to gently distort or just down right massacre your patches and you got half of those Dubstep sounds down, if you take the time to learn how to use them ofcourse. YouTube is your friend in this case. So are LFOs and automation.

For Electro House, anything goes, but you usually wants to have a nice virtual analog subtractive synthesizer (if you don't know what this means then go on Wikipedia or just google and look up synthesis types) for those bread and butter sounds like we all know and love, like those Progressive House chords and the simple saw basses/leads.

I personally am a big fan of Massive (and the rest of the Komplete 8 family), uhe ACE (amazing semi-modular synth, I go nuts with this guy), DCAM Synth Squad (Strobe and Cypher are amazing), Sylenth 1 (great for all those detuned unison leads) and Nexus (has some interesting sounds along with some of those bread and butter sounds that you can throw under a track without having to beat up your ram with Kontakt or if you just don't have Kontakt).

5. Kick and Bass Balance

Getting your kick drum and bass in balance is vital for these types of music. First of all, you need to decide which one should shine where. With a lot of Electro House, you might want the kick drum to be the center of attention. In that case, you're going to want to high pass your bass (or basses depending how crazy you're getting with the track) to the point where they sound right. If you have a big boomy kick, don't forget to make sure it's somewhat in tune with the key of your track or else it will sound all wrong.

When you're using a sub bass track (should be a simple mono sine wise), like in Dubstep, DnB and some Electro House tracks, you should high pass your kick instead of the sub. You should also sidechain compress the sub separately to the main bass so you can knock it more out of the way. That way, you won't have to high pass your kick so much. when you're done with that, you can put all your bass tracks in a single group, high pass them (to let the subs through without getting muddy) and sidechain compress them all together but not as radically as the subs.

6. Getting better mixing plug-ins

As you get more serious, you'll probably want to explore better mixing plug-ins and software synthesizers.

Go ahead and get some quality compressors. I personally love the PSP OldTimer ME compressor. I use it for most of my mixing tasks and I find it extremely versatile, going from clean to dirty at command. There are also some other great ones that don't break the bank like Stillwell's The Rocket Compressor and Cytomic's The Glue. Ultimately, I think the best compressor I've tried so far is the Softube Tube-Tech CB L1, but that would definitely break my bank which is why I don't own it.

Also check out some serious graphic EQs (like Fabfilter's Pro Q for example), some nice parametric EQs (like PSP's Squad for example) a good limiter (I use

PSP's Xenon) coloring plug-ins, filters (Fabfilter has great ones) and some distortion plug-ins (my favorite is Ohmicide, I abuse this on almost everything).

I highly recommend using an impulse response reverb plug-in and getting the Acousticas Bricasti M7 impulses. Look them up, they're free! I also recommend getting the SoundToys Bundle as it is very complete and every single one of their plug-ins is fucking amazing (pardon my french).

Analog vs. Digital, Hardware vs. Software

Please disregard this as it is completely irrelevant and punch whoever brings this up in the face. A synth is a synth, doesn't matter if it's analog or digital, hardware or software. They all have their place and you can make amazing music with any of them.

I've owned a few analog synths myself (including a Moog Little Phatty, Prophet '08 and Future Retro XS) and I pretty much learned that they weren't for me. I love them and think they sound amazing but the price tags didn't justify what I was getting out of them so they had to go.

Every now and then I get the urge to get myself a Virus TI because of how awesome it is, but then again I really like having all I need inside my laptop.

Getting your music out there

I'm still working this one out as I am not that well known as of now. A great way to promote you music is to submit to well known YouTube channels (YouTube is your friend, like I already stated about 3 times) and music blogs. Just don't send them crap music because they will disregard you and most likely you look past you on future submissions. Another good way to get well know is to make a sick remix of a hot top 40 track that is right at the booming point. If you're lucky, people will find it on YouTube or around the internets and get interested in your music. I have yet to try that myself but I've seen it work for numerous artists.

Whatever you do, do not pay for your Facebook likes, SoundCloud plays/comments/followers etc on sites like http://www.cloud-promotion.com/ because I will hate you and call you names like "stupid" and "lame" because it's stupid and lame and it will get you nothing other than make you look popular when in reality nobody knows who the hell you are.

This concludes version one of my guide to Electro House and Dubstep production. I will probably continue to add to this as time goes on and feedback come in.

Thanks you for reading my nonsense rambling, don't forget to check out my music over at http://itsinvader.com/ (Facebook, SoundCloud, Twitter, etc links are in there and also at the bottom of this page).

Love it? Hate it? Think there's something I should add or would just like to give me some feedback? Write it on a little piece of paper and shove it up your ass. Just kidding! please send all feedback to alejo@itsinvader.com.

If you found this useful wish you could do something to get back at me for being so damn awesome, please consider making a small donation through PayPal!