Building the Session

Short samples with a gate across the reverb, driven hard

The gate is the sound. A big reverb on the snare, cut off before it decays, so the hit is enormous and then gone by the next eighth. Keep it on the track rather than on a send, because a shared return can’t be slammed shut for one drum.

Don’t add swing or timing humanisation. The part sits dead on the grid and that’s the genre. A few hits land on the sixteenth-note triplet, which is placement rather than drift, so quantising to sixteenths flattens the one thing here that isn’t square.

Velocity here is a programmed accent. The kick and the closed hat hit harder on the beat than off it, and every other voice keeps one level. A fill varies its strokes and a snare roll climbs, and that's all that moves. A fuller section plays a busier groove, never a louder one.

A close-mic’d kit playing the same groove a hand would play it

It arrives muted, because the machine is the kit this genre runs on. Unmute it and it sits under the programmed hits, or mute track 1 and let this kit carry the groove alone. In a bit over half the songs it moves to the ride for the biggest chorus.

Re-read the note map before you swap kits. The part is written to a map close to General MIDI without being it. The rimshot sits on 40, and the open hat runs 12 to 17 as a continuum rather than one note, so a kit mapped straight to GM loses both.

This track and DRM Machine play the same groove. This one drifts a few ticks around the machine, so with both up the kicks flam a little, and tightening this one to the grid runs them together. Where both play, the cymbal is the machine’s here, so this kit keeps its crash only for the bars the machine sits out.

Claps or a tambourine, played as short hits

Each song picks one piece and keeps it. There's no shaker in synth pop, and a song whose kit moves to the ride never takes the tambourine.

Claps land on two and four. They play only in the choruses and the outro. The tambourine is the one that keeps time where the kit drops out.

Don’t quantise it. Each section takes its own figure, one that gets busier as the section builds. The hits sit a few ticks off the grid and a take stays at one weight, the way one percussionist plays it.

Sequenced on the synth side, played on the other, and the pattern decides

Three songs in four want the synth half of the rack, a Juno or a Minimoog-style mono, because the part is a pulse on the root rather than a figure somebody walks. The rest move enough to read as a hand, and those want the sampled bass under them.

The synth bass arrives sequenced. Its notes sit on the grid at one velocity, the way a sequencer plays them, so it locks to the kick with nothing to tidy. The electric bass is the one with give in it.

Sampled basses disagree about octaves. These notes are written so C3 is 60 and a four-string’s open low E is 40, and nothing goes below it. An instrument that calls that low E 28 plays the whole part an octave high, so transpose the track down one. Nothing’s wrong with the MIDI. The two conventions just disagree.

The Live set adds mutes and ghosts. The MIDI file doesn’t. About one song in four with an electric bass carries a few notes far below the playable range, at D#-1 and E-1. Those are keyswitches, riding a struck note to mute it or restriking the last one softly. On any other bass, mute or delete them.

Clean single-coil picking chord shapes, never strumming

It picks chord tones on four strings, up, down or across the shape, two strings struck together, or one chord rolled and left to ring. Beside the lead it stays off the top string and keeps underneath.

When the synths carry the rhythm, it plays short. Wherever the arp or the poly keys are driving and a pad or the keys are sounding, it picks its own figure across a three-note chord on the lower three of its four strings. Every note’s cut short, so it’s a percussive part sitting on the synth bed while the bass and the pads carry the changes. It’s still picked on the kit’s eighths or sixteenths, and never strummed.

It turns up in fewer songs than the synths, and when it does, keep it thin. A fat guitar tone next to a poly comp turns this into a different record.

Clean, just short of breakup. That’s what keeps it a texture beside the synths instead of the loudest thing in the track. Chorus on it if you want the decade, and switch the amp’s own reverb off, because the room comes off send B and the repeats off send D.

A real second take, not a copy

The notes are identical to the Guitar track. The timing and velocity of every note are not, and that difference is the whole effect. Two identical takes sum back to the centre however you pan them, so a copy only makes the part louder. Each note here sits 10 to 25ms off its twin, which is the window where it widens.

Pan hard. Guitar 100% left, Guitar 2 100% right, equal level. Any closer and each speaker gets both takes, which combs.

Give the two sides different tone. Two live takes differ in pick position and amp state. Two MIDI tracks through one instrument don’t, so tone is the one thing the MIDI can’t supply. A different cabinet, a moved mic, a few dB of EQ tilt in opposite directions.

A polyphonic synth stating the chords

A Juno, a Prophet, a Jupiter. Bright, with enough attack that every chord change is audible, because this is the part telling a listener the harmony moved.

The voicings are close and rootless, since the bass has the root, so a patch with a fat low end only muddies what’s already down there.

It comps beside the arp. It plays its own figure, the kind this genre’s keyboardists play, on the same eighths or sixteenths as the kit. Now and then it holds each chord instead and strikes it again every bar.

The chorus and the auto pan keep it from going static. A comp that states the same chord for a bar at a time needs something moving in it. Set the pan slow, a bar or more a cycle, so it breathes rather than ping-pongs.

A held poly under everything, low-passed

The Juno-106’s own chorus is most of this sound by itself. A Prophet-style poly is the warmer way to take it.

Slow attack, long release. The part strikes each chord and holds it until the next one, letting go just before that next attack, so a fast envelope leaves a gap where the bleed should be.

Keep it quiet. Here the pad is glue rather than the whole atmosphere, and it wants to be felt under the comp and the arp instead of heard on its own. Turn it up until you notice it, then back it off.

A warm pad with a very slow attack, on handover bars only

The envelope is the gesture. What arrives is one chord held about three bars, a touch shorter at a slow tempo and out to four at a fast one. The swell is the patch’s slow attack opening across the first bar and its long release falling away over the rest. On a patch that speaks instantly it plays as a flat block chord, so lengthen the attack and release rather than looking for missing notes. A matching curve is written to CC7 and CC11 for hosts that read them.

It’s meant to be sparse. One chord on each handover into a thicker section, and silence in between. If it feels absent, turn it up rather than asking for more of them.

Send C is where this part lives. Let the tail run straight across the section line, because gluing a section change together is the whole job.

A lead voice, not background motion

Give it a patch you’d give a lead. Short decay, bright enough that every step speaks, because the line usually spans two or three octaves and the top of it is a melody somebody follows.

It sits dead on the grid. A sequencer doesn’t push or drag, so leave the timing alone. What makes it move is a synced delay filling in between the steps. Each song also hands the filter sweep on CC74 to one of its Pad, Arp or Keys, so some songs give it to the arp.

Plenty of songs have no pad under it. There the arp is the whole harmony, and it has to hold up alone. Widen it, give it the shimmer return, and don’t thin the patch out looking for room that nothing else is using.

A Juno-style mono line, and the hook in most songs

This is the part somebody sings walking away from the track. One voice, and enough body to stand beside the singer rather than underneath.

It answers the voice instead of talking over it. The vocal is the top line, so the lead plays into the gaps where the singer breathes. Where there’s no breath it loops a short figure with its own rhythm, because a lead that stopped every time the vocal started would be taking turns rather than playing along. In the last chorus, where the sung hook sits in its range, it plays that hook with the singer, an octave above.

Set it to mono with legato glide. There’s no pitch bend anywhere in the part. Notes a step or two apart overlap a touch, so the synth glides from one into the next, and the patch’s own LFOs and filter envelope give it the rest of its movement.

From the second chorus it plays a counter-melody. A second tune underneath, between the bass and the vocal line. It moves where that line holds a note or rests, holds through the busy passages, and never lands on the same note. That needs room under the singer, so with a low voice those choruses keep the lead answering. On the Premium plan you can switch off Lead under the singer on the write page. Then the lead answers the singer all the way through, and it still plays that last hook.

Set the delay to a dotted eighth. Send D then hands the line back between the sung phrases, which is most of what makes a synth hook feel bigger than one note at a time. It goes to the master on its own, so the level stays yours.

The tune, played rather than sung, so keep it deliberately plain

A plain oscillator is the strict version. One sine or triangle, around 20ms attack and 200ms release, a little vibrato, portamento off. The pitch is unambiguous and it won’t flatter a line that doesn’t work.

Resist choir and vox patches. They smear pitch and blend into the Pad, which hides the exact problem you’re listening for.

The voice sits in front of this band rather than inside it, so give the guide the space the real one will get. Plate on send A, a little hall on B, delay on D.

The line is written against the chords, so it transposes with the song. Where the range doesn’t suit your singer, move the whole track rather than editing notes.

The stacked chorus, and only some songs have one

It loads whatever the vocal above it loads. The pan and the level are what make it read as a second voice, not a different sound. It gets its own track so you can balance the two.

It sings only where the singer states the hook in a chorus, a third or a sixth off the tune and moving with it step for step. It picks one of the two for each phrase, and about three songs in five put it above the lead vocal.

It breaks from that interval only where the line would clash with the band. A note on one or three, or a held one, then moves to a chord tone still a third or sixth off the tune, and the last note of the phrase ends on a chord tone.

Pan it a little off the lead vocal and sit it under rather than beside, which is why it arrives a couple of decibels quieter.

An ooh under the singer, or the sung hook echoed

It loads whatever the two vocal tracks above it load. Two songs in three have one. It sings every chorus from the one after the harmony first sings, or from the second where there's no harmony. It sits a little off the lead, away from the harmony, and softer than the lead vocal.

Most often it’s a wordless ooh. It holds one chord tone a chord, about a fifth below where the tune mostly sits. It breathes and sings again at every chord change and every two-bar line, moving as little as it can. Where the singer holds a note it steps off anything a second away, so the two never rub. It's the oohs and ahs the two women sing on the Human League's Mirror Man, with no words at all.

The other kind sings the hook back. It answers in unison once the singer's sung it, starting on the first beat after its last note ends. Where the whole line fits before the vocal comes back in, it's all there, and where it doesn't you get its last words, so "I keep searching down every street" comes back as "every street". The lead and the counter-melody hear it as a singer and play round it. Where the lead vocal leaves it no gap in any chorus, it sings the ooh instead.