Sonic Academy is proud to welcome a brand new tutor this week, Glasgow based driving, soulful Techno producer Harvey McKay.

In How To Make Techno 2019 Harvey shows us his creative process in making a dark, brooding, and downright sinister techno track from start to finish in Ableton.

Starting with a sub layered overdriven and saturated kick we build tension with a rumbling bassline, pitched and crunched down hi-hats and a snare before adding the sinister main synth line created in u-he's Repro. Once the elements are in place we build up the scenes in Ableton's session view before recording as if playing live to lay down the basic arrangement. It's then a case of tweaking automation and editing the playthrough to get to the final mixdown so it can be sent off for mastering.

This is a course that proves you don't need a whole ton of plugins and gimmicks to create a banging floor filler, just careful selection of the right sounds with minimal processing can get you there!

Go check it!