Monthly Archives: January 2024

Jason Herd Making Minimal Tech & Garage TUTORIAL

Join world renowned producer and DJ Jason Herd as he creates a polished minimal tech/garage track and shares his music production secrets.

Supercharge your music production knowledge and join globally renowned producer and DJ Jason Herd (Juan Kidd, Herd & Fitz, Cabarza and Pirate Copy) for a complete education in building a fully fledged track from scratch. Using electronic musicians’ favourite DAW Ableton Live, Jason constructs a minimal house/garage track from thin air, revealing modulation and synthesis secrets that you can use in your own projects to totally transform samples and make them your own.

This course is a unique opportunity to dive right into a studio session with a dance music producer with over 25 years in the game, who has put out releases with some of the world’s biggest record labels including Defected, One Love, Sondos, Subliminal, Size, Toolroom, CR2, Azuli, Moody and many others. Jason is also an experienced music production instructor with multiple courses on FaderPro, and the scope of this particular course covers the full range of his talents, including sequencing, tracking, arranging, mixing and mastering and much more.

Over the course of hours, watch Jason build a beat and share drum programming techniques, design and modulate bass lines, create rhythmic vocal chops, craft arrangements and prepare his track for mastering. He’ll also share with you his Ableton Live template, giving you a firm understanding of a professional workflow and a surefire way of kick starting any project.

You don’t always need a great studio to make great music, but it certainly helps, and Herd is more than happy to welcome you into his gear-packed studio to explore his range of plugins and hardware. Each piece of equipment and software has been road tested over a 25 year career making music that’s graced the biggest clubs and festivals around, making Jason supremely qualified to show you how to put them to work in a track. Whether it’s the Moog Sub 37 or Fab Filter Pro Q3, you’ll get tons of insight into the way top producers use the resources at their disposal to shape and hone their music.

DAW: Ableton Live
Total runtime: 7hrs 32mins

Includes the Session Project for the song DJ Jason Herd uses in the course.

Making Minimal Tech & Garage

• Chapter 1: Introduction to the course
  From his gear packed studio Jason Herd will be walking us through the creation of a minimal tech/garage track.
• Chapter 2: Templates and Tools
  Jason introduces his Ableton template, explaining what hardware and software he uses and why.
• Chapter 3: Building a Beat
  Jason builds a beat and shares his drum programming techniques including hot swapping, segmenting drum racks, groove and more.
  FREE CHAPTERFREE CHAPTER
• Chapter 4: Adding Glitches for Interest
  Next, Jason adds extra glitchy sounds to his beat for interest and texture.
• Chapter 5: Moog Sub 37
  The Moog Sub37 has become one of the defining synths of recent times – in this chapter Jason gives a guided tour of the synth.
• Chapter 6: Using Modulation
  Jason leads an Ableton modulation crash course. He designs a bass line and modulates it with Envelope Follower, LFO and Shaper.
• Chapter 7: Bassline Theory
  In garage music bass is key. Jason talks through the theory of writing a bassline before diving into the process in the next chapter.
• Chapter 8: Building a Bassline
  Starting with two square waves, Jason builds a garage bass patch on the Moog Sub 37 and records it into Ableton where he tweaks it further.
• Chapter 9: Bassline Alternative
  Not quite satisfied with the Sub 37, Jason recreates the bassline on ML-VST’s free PG-8X softsynth.
• Chapter 10: Bass Treatment
  Using Ableton’s LFO and a few third party effects, Jason adds extra movement to his bass patch.
• Chapter 11: Moving Forward
  Jason selects his favorite bassline and begins to structure his track. Energy changes and atmospheres help move the track forward.
• Chapter 12: Follow Actions in Ableton
  Follow Actions define how clips behave in Ableton. Here Jason uses them to move between sections to get a feel for the track as a whole.
• Chapter 13: Writing an Intro (part 1)
  Jason builds an intro to the track using atmospheres and the ML-VST PG-8X. Automating the PG-8X’s LFO and filter adds extra interest.
• Chapter 14: Writing an Intro (part 2)
  Jason continues to develop the intro. He then listens to his track so far in full to make sure everything works together.
• Chapter 15: Adding Vocal Chops
  By looping sections of acapellas, Jason creates rhythmic vocal chops. He makes sure they sound smooth by de-clicking and de-harshing.
• Chapter 16: More Percussion
  Jason programs in more percussive elements and experiments with breakbeats to give the track more groove and energy.
• Chapter 17: Arranging the Track
  Now the various track sections are written in sessions view, Jason lays them down in arrangement view.
• Chapter 18: Fills and Arrangement Changes
  With the general structure in place, Jason develops the track’s intro with drum fills, EQ automation and minor arrangement edits.
• Chapter 19: Bass Layers and Time-stretched Vocals
  Jason adds a new bassline to the break and layers basses for grit and time stretches a vocal sample with Ableton’s Warp Modes.
• Chapter 20: Finalizing the Arrangement (part 1)
  Jason works through the entire arrangement, adding fills, automation and transitions to make a flowing track.
• Chapter 21: Finalizing the Arrangement (part 2)
  Using EQ, saturation, bitcrushing and compression Jason cleans up the mix, references it, and prepares it for mastering.
• Chapter 22: Ready for Mastering and Feedback
  Jason makes a few final, minor tweaks so that the track is ready for mastering, playing out in sets and sending for feedback from other DJs.
• Chapter 23: LoFi vs HiFi
  Using bitcrushing distortion and a sampler emulation, Jason makes elements more LoFi to match the feel of old-school dance music.
• Chapter 24: Final Mix
  Using a variety of vintage-inspired plugins, Jason adds some final grit and saturation and shows how to master to a reference track.

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