Monthly Update March 2024
As we emerge from the cold, dull winter and enter the renewal that spring brings, we reflect on what has and hasn’t been working at Sonic. One thing we haven’t been doing enough of is interacting with you guys, so this is our first stab at keeping you more in the loop.
We aim to do a monthly update, but since this is our first one, there’s a lot to cover.
In this article
Our Mission.
Last year, our biggest success was the introduction of our “Takeover Events.” These were hugely popular with the community and produced some top-class music. Interacting with the community, sharing songs and ideas, and laughing at the live shows really gives us a warm glow.
So this year, we are doubling down on these events, hoping to bring them more often and with a more focused approach. We have a schedule in place and are working on bringing all the elements together. The first one this year will be in March.
Another thing that we’ve been thinking a lot about is what we are actually trying to do at Sonic… what is our real mission? Previously, it was a vague idea about teaching people how to make electronic music, which, while not incorrect, didn’t really encompass everything we wanted to do for our community.
With that in mind, we have refined this and come up with… “Give our community the best tools and knowledge to create and release current and professional dance music tracks.”
We are shifting the emphasis from just teaching music production to focusing on how we can help you get to the point of releasing successful tracks. Our recent music business course was a first step on that path. Showing you the process behind the monetisation of music.
We will continue with this series and help you get from just making cool music to actually releasing it and making some beer money.
Music Discovery
A piece of the puzzle that has been missing in the process is how our community can discover good music in each of the genres we cover. Having music to aspire to and reference is a key part of how we produce our own tracks, and we believe it is key in learning progression. We have started curating our own Spotify playlists in a few key genres using a combination of sources, tracklist sites, radio shows, charts, and other playlists.
We aim to have a comprehensive playlist for each genre that reflects the hottest and best-produced tracks. We will start sharing these with you soon when the web stuff is in place.
This will also feed into our content creation. Helping us to be more cutting edge and relevant with courses, sample packs and presets.
Follow Sonic Academy on Spoitify
Web Site.
Website updates
We have been updating various parts of the website to provide more relevant content to the user. Many of our genre pages, etc., didn’t really have any direction or sections, so we’ve added these here so that the content on those pages is useful. We’ll continue to add features to various pages on the site as we get around to them.
Video Player
Our website has been doing a decent job of getting you to the content you want, but the video-watching experience needed a bit of a refresh. We have started refining the process by creating a new player experience that gives you better access to all the videos and content from a course in an easier-to-use way. This has already gone live, and we will refine things further with insights from you guys after it’s been up for a bit.
Beginners Flow
Work is also underway to provide new users with a “Guided Journey” as they learn with us. The aim here is to give everyone a starting point and guide them through all of the courses that we feel are necessary for someone new to music production. This way, they won’t get overwhelmed with content that may be too advanced for them, and it gives everyone a progressive journey to follow, from A to Z.
When they’ve completed the journey, they will have all of the knowledge they need to continue into advanced courses and to release their own music. You will have noticed various courses like our Music Industry and Getting your music on Spotify that will all flow into this area.
Our aim is to have this ready for use in the next month or so
Plugins
ANA 2
[Phil Johnston: Product Designer] Oh ANA, how you stole my heart. It has always been my own personal obsession to build a synth that did everything I needed in a track. Multisampling was the last piece of the puzzle. I hated having to use 3rd party samplers to get nice strings / pianos / choirs, etc. Having a classic dance piano or some high-quality strings really sets it apart from most other synths at this price point. I’m being 100% serious when I say ANA is the only synth I use now for all my tracks. (even my ASOT tune of the week… yeoooo) Mission Complete (sort of!!)
A feature that I’ve been wanting to add for a while is a better chorus effect. The current one does a decent job but lacked the vibe of my all time favourite chorus from the Juno 60. So we have created a very close replication of the classic sound which will soon be added to the effects section in ANA 2 and will also be coming as free standalone version for our Subscribers. (Non subscribers will still be able to purchase for a small fee.)
Another area we would like to improve is the accessibility of skin creation. We are currently investigating how this can be improved and will keep you updated.
So, while ANA is almost perfect, we will keep pushing the boundaries and refining it until we either die or give up music. (Hopefully, neither will happen any time soon!)
Kick 2
Kick 2 was released about 7 years ago and continues to be the go-to kick generation plugin for almost all producers. While it still performs its job impeccably, it’s starting to look a bit old.
While we aren’t ready to release too many specifics, we can say that we are very far along in the process of developing Kick 3. It will come with some mind-blowing new features that will help you get the exact kick you want as quickly as possible.
It will also have full backward compatibility with Kick 2 presets, so you can continue buying those packs ;)
When we are ready, we will be running a closed beta for current Kick 2 users so you can try out and get feedback on all the cool new stuff in Kick 3.
That about wraps up this month. There is quite a lot to take in, but it will be shorter in the subsequent months. Drop a comment in our forums if you would like to chat about any of the topics discussed this month!
Thanks for tuning in.
