Learn — Modern Tastemaker

Tips, Tricks & Tutorials

The exact techniques our packs are built on — free, with the numbers. No signup: every lesson is complete on its page.

Tips & Tricks Tutorials How-Tos

Tips & Tricks

Thirteen quick moves, every one measured.

Each tip is complete on its card — the move, why it works, and the exact action to take.

0101 Low End

Anchor the root — 16 of 18 notes

Read ≈1 minLevel Core

In the rolling pattern from our CONCRETE pack (A minor, 132 BPM), 16 of the 18 notes are the plain root. The only travellers are two octave pops and two passing fifths — one of each per bar — everything else is A, holding the floor down. A bassline’s job is harmonic foundation, not melody: when 70% or more of your hits are the root, the groove gets heavier, not emptier.

Try it: count your last bassline’s notes. If the root is under 70%, delete the travellers first and see what survives.

0202 Low End

The downbeat is empty on purpose

Read ≈1 minLevel Core

That same 18-note pattern lands zero hits on a kick step. Kick steps are 0, 4, 8 and 12 of the bar — the pattern plays around every one of them, so the kick and the bass take turns instead of fighting. Then duck what’s left with a sidechain or a volume shaper so the kick punches through the gaps.

Try it: mute every bass note that starts on a kick step. If the groove gets better — and it usually does — leave them out.

0303 Low End

Two velocities are the whole groove

Read ≈1 minLevel Intermediate

The CONCRETE pattern uses exactly two velocities: 80 and 100. Nothing in between. Every 100 lands between kicks, so the accents themselves become the rhythm your ear follows. Random humanize smears that; a strict two-level accent scheme makes a one-note pattern feel like it’s moving.

Try it: flatten your bassline to two velocities — ghost notes at 80, accents at 100, accents only on offbeats.

0404 Low End

Your punch is a coin flip until you retrig the phase

Read ≈1 minLevel Intermediate

We rendered the same rolling pattern two ways and measured every hit. With the oscillator starting at a random phase (Serum’s RAND at 100), identical notes swung 7.62 dB from hit to hit. With phase retriggered (RAND at 0), the spread across 40 hits was 0.00 dB — same punch, every time. Random phase doesn’t sound “analog.” It sounds inconsistent.

Try it: set RAND to 0 on your bass patch and A/B the first four bars. Listen to the attacks, not the tone.

0505 Low End

Never distort the sub — and keep it mono

Read ≈1 minLevel Core

Split every bass patch in two, mentally: the sub is a pure sine (in our rolling recipe it sits at ~70% level, one octave down) and it never distorts, never widens, never moves. Saturation lives on the top layer only — drive ~22, wet ~55% — because that’s glue, not weight. Below ~120 Hz everything stays dead-center mono; width is a top-layer toy, and a stereo sub is the first thing a club system eats.

Try it: put a mono-maker at ~120 Hz on your bass bus and check the mix in mono. If the bass disappears, the phase — not the volume — is broken.

0606 Low End

A static filter is a dead bassline

Read ≈1 minLevel Intermediate

The roll doesn’t come from the notes — it comes from the filter opening on every hit. Our rolling recipe: lowpass at ~350 Hz, resonance ~18%, and Env2 routed to the cutoff at +0.45 with a fast decay (the formula’s working range is +0.4 to +0.65). Park the cutoff and the same pattern goes flat in one bar, no matter how good the rhythm is.

Try it: take any static bass loop, route a fast envelope to the cutoff at +0.45, and shorten the decay until it plucks. That’s the whole trick.

0707 Drums

A kick is a pitch drop, not a sample hunt

Read ≈1 minLevel Intermediate

Synthesize it and you control it: a sine whose pitch falls from 160 Hz to 48 Hz over ~28 ms — that drop is the punch — with a ~90 ms body decay under it. Add a 4 ms noise click at 0.35 level for the attack tick, then a touch of tanh saturation to glue the two together. If your kick feels soft, the fix is almost always a faster, deeper pitch drop, not a different sample.

Try it: build this from init once. Then tune the 48 Hz landing to your track’s root and hear the low end lock.

0808 Drums

A snare with no body sounds like paper

Read ≈1 minLevel Core

Two layers, always: a 190 Hz sine body with a 60 ms decay for weight, plus highpassed noise with a 45 ms decay for the crack. The noise alone reads as a clap through tissue; the body alone is a tom. Producers audition snares solo and pick the bright one — then wonder where the weight went in the mix.

Try it: mute your snare’s body layer. If it still sounds fine solo but vanishes against the kick, you just found the layer that mattered.

0909 Drums

Cap your hats at 0.7 — they punish harshness

Read ≈1 minLevel Core

Our hat recipe is brutally short: white noise, highpassed hard, 18 ms decay. And it never peaks above 0.7. Our first pilot hat rendered at 0 dBFS and failed the ear check instantly — hats live where ears are most sensitive, so a hot hat doesn’t read as loud, it reads as harsh, and it makes everything around it feel cheap.

Try it: pull your hat bus down until the peak sits at 0.7 and re-check the groove. Most hats are louder than the track wants.

1010 Drums

Tune the kick to the track — then evict everything else

Read ≈1 minLevel Core

Before any EQ: make sure your kick’s fundamental isn’t fighting the bass root. Tune the kick to the root (or a consonant interval) and the low end stops wobbling between two competing pitches. Then highpass everything that isn’t kick or bass out of the sub range — if it isn’t one of those two, it doesn’t live below 100 Hz. Pads, hats, vocals, reverb tails: all of it goes.

Try it: solo kick + bass, then unmute one element at a time with a highpass at 100 Hz on it. Keep whichever version sounds bigger.

1111 Drums

Judge an 808’s tuning on the settled sustain, never the loudest block

Read ≈1 minLevel Advanced

808s have a designed pitch-drop head: our long 808s start around +354 cents sharp and settle by 0.35–0.40 s (shorts settle by ~0.1 s). Measure tuning on the loudest block — which straddles that glide — and you’ll read about +27 cents on a file that is actually in tune. Read the settled sustain instead: across 50 808s measured that way, the worst settled deviation was under 4 cents against a ±10-cent bar.

Try it: before you re-tune or trash an 808, check it a half-second in. Most “out of tune” 808s are just being measured on their attack.

1212 Drums

Clicks live at the joints — fade every boundary

Read ≈1 minLevel Intermediate

Two cheap habits kill most one-shot clicks. First: a 3 ms raised-cosine fade at every note boundary — butt-jointed renders tick, faded ones don’t. Second: for tails that won’t settle, fade the last 40% of the file with a raised cosine; measured right, the last 5 ms sits at −88 dBFS or lower with the final sample at exactly zero. And render the whole kit hot but honest: peaks at −1 dBFS, never 0.

Try it: zoom into any loop boundary in your last render at sample level. If you see a vertical edge, that’s the click you’ve been hearing.

13 Sound Design

The Deep Pluck, Dialed

Read ≈1 minLevel Intermediate

The pluck isn’t a sample choice — it’s a decay. A square-ish oscillator, unison 4, detune 0.14, sub OFF — a pluck that needs a sub oscillator isn’t deep, it’s muddy. Lowpass at ~1 kHz, resonance ~22%, Env2 routed to the cutoff at +0.65 with a 0.18 decay and sustain at 0: the envelope slams shut, and that fast close is the pluck. Amp envelope to match — attack 0.015, decay 0.24, sustain 0.08, release 0.18 — and a dotted-1/8 delay for space without mud, because the echoes land in the gaps the decay leaves.

Try it: take any sustained pad-ish patch, set the filter envelope to +0.65 with decay 0.18 and sustain 0, and shorten nothing else. If it starts plucking, you’ve found the whole mechanism — everything else is voicing.

Tutorials

Full lessons, settings included.

Real patterns from our own packs, opened up step by step.

Build a Rolling Bassline, Note for Note

Time 15 minTools Serum / VitalLevel Intermediate

One real, shipped pattern dissected — steal the method, not just the sound.

The 18-note pattern, position by position — 16 notes are the root
Why zero notes land on a kick step, and where the accents live
The two-layer sound and the filter settings that make it roll

Start the tutorial

How-Tos

Diagnostics and builds, step by step.

Reference lessons you run against your own tracks.

HOW-TO 01

5 Mistakes Killing Your Low End (and the Fix for Each)

Any DAW · five checks · symptom → cause → fix

Distorting the sub, bass sitting on the kick, random phase, stereo sub, static filter — the five construction errors that collapse a low end, each with its rule.

Read the how-to

HOW-TO 02

The Rolling Bass, Built in Serum

Serum · two layers · every parameter written out

The complete rolling-bass patch: sine sub at ~70, saw top with unison 3, lowpass ~350 Hz, envelope-to-cutoff +0.45, phase retrigged, glue on the top layer only.

Read the how-to

HOW-TO 03

Synthesize a Kick That Punches

Any synth · ~10 min · click, body and tail from one sine

A club kick from a single sine wave — the 160→48 Hz pitch drop, the 4 ms click, the decay window — then tuned to your track.

Read the how-to

TRICK 01

The Reverse Reverb Throw

Any DAW · ~10 min · a transition built from your own lead

Reverse the lead’s last note, print its reverb, reverse it back — and place the print so the swell blooms exactly into the drop. Decay set in bars at your tempo, placement by the end of the clip, not the start.

Read the trick

TRICK 02

Build an Endless Riser Once, Use It Forever

Serum · ~15 min once · a riser loop you own

The Shepard build: a saw an octave down, a quieter sub below it, a +6 semitone bend, and a filter that closes as the pitch rises — so the tension never peaks and never resolves before the drop.

Read the trick

TRICK 03

The Three-Octave Bass Stack

Serum · ~10 min · one line, three octave layers

Triangle sub at the root, a saw at +7 semitones, a third layer an octave up — with the crossover discipline and mono rules that keep a melodic stack club-safe.

Read the trick

The full system

These pages teach real, complete slices. The Handbook is the whole kitchen: 69 pages, 11 chapters + FAQ + glossary — genre, structure, sound design, drums, vocals, harmony, mixing, and a build-a-track-in-one-sitting walkthrough.

The Tech House Production Handbook — Visual Edition

The complete visual guide to tech house production — 69 pages, built to be looked at, not just read. Chapter 05 is free if you want to see the standard first.

FormatPDF — Visual Edition
Contents69 pages · 11 chapters + FAQ + glossary
ScopeThe complete tech house production guide
HearChapter 05 is free — read it first
Best forProducers who learn visually

$42.99

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