How to make PROGRESSIVE HOUSE (Like BEN BÖHMER, Lane 8 and Anjunadeep) – FREE Ableton Project! ♥

They've taken another heart and they put it in MY heart 💞 THAT'S how much heart there is ♥️ What's up, guys? It's Will from EDM Tips.

Today I'm going to show you how to make progressive house in the style of BenBöhmer and Anjunadeep.

So in the last couple of months I'm really pleased to say that these videos that I've been doing on particular genres and styles ofartists have been blowing up BIG TIME.

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So thank you so much for the support! Anyway, I've had loads of requests for doing in the style of Ben Böhmer, so that is what Idecided to do today.

I'm going to be using Ableton 10 but you can use anyDAW to follow these techniques, and you can download all the samples and theproject file for free below this video as well.

So today we will be covering thekick and bass.

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the percussion and atmosphere.

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the chord progressions.

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melodic arpeggio and some mixing andarrangement.

If you want music production tutorials like this each and every weekhit that subscribe button and the notification bell to make sure you nevermiss one.

👍 SMASH the like button if you dig this video, and without further ado, let's hop into the DAW and get it done.

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Okay so the first thing to do onceyou've checked you have your dinosaurs ready is choose the perfect kick andwe've chosen 124 bpm because it's that and unity been boma type speed or tempoand this kick I've included it for free in this sample pad below which you candownload but it's got lovely low deep Sabinas and it's also got this high endtick which is going to help it pop through the mix so what I'm going to doand you can do this in MIDI as well I'm just doing it in audio because I want toshow you as much as I can in this time we have available so simple righteveryone knows how to do that I'm going to just gonna put it to minus six sowhen other elements are added I've got some space on the head room on themaster channel which is what we need what we want now I've called thisproject progressive now's see what I did there so next it's all about the emotionwhen it comes to Ben Bowman and these and una deep tracks in generalprogressive house you know it was my first love in terms of dance music thatand the rave rave like The Prodigy so I'm just going to call this chords andwe're gonna just get a grand piano and we'll probably end up keeping that pianosound so to put piano and I'm gonna use Ableton piano so I'm just going to go tosounds and I'm gonna go to piano and I'm just gonna choose a normal grand pianothat comes with Ableton so where is it oh I've actually downloaded like thepiano pack I think which was free I believe so come on come on there you goright now this kick I know is in G it's a kick on G so I'm actually going tocreate this track in the key of G whether it's minor or major it dependshow I'm feeling but let's just vibe with somesome note I'm gonna work out some bass notes first and then work out the chordsover the top okay so I'm gonna do it in G minor like that's not complex okay so let'sjust draw those notes in whack them there and this is in the style of that inmemoriam track that I mentioned before and by having them kind of come in justbefore the beat it gives it a bit of vibe already so the third and the fourth sorry thesecond and the fourth note that kind of plane before the beads and I'll do it with this nodes as wellso we've really got some kind of movement and energy I'm gonna reduce thevelocity so it's a bit more gentle and ethereal and I just bump up the volume a bit that's quite nice so now let's work outthe the chord notes that we're going to have on this so I'll just close thatdown we don't need the velocity showing much anymore and you can use my templatetechnique which I've linked to in one of these others and one of these othervideos if you're using FL Studio you can use a scale thing or you can draw in allthe notes in the scale move them to the side in Ableton and press fold so let'sdo that really so these are all the notes in the key ofG minor natural so I'll just kind of drag these in and then we'll move themto the side and then we'll press that we'll we'll just duplicate it down andI'm not shit to the side by pressing the left cursor key but if I press fold nowthese are just the notes showing in the key of G minor natural so if we use anyof these notes is gonna sound good so let's build up our chords by buildingthem up just skipping a note each time you but we'll have to move it up an octavebukas and they sound a bit so I'm just going to draw in the basicnotes first and I will it's another in my template so I'm just skipping a note each time tomake these chords and then if I unfold I can decide whether they should be majoror minor by just moving this the middle one either up or down each time so I want the last one to be majorbecause I thought the minor one sounded a bit dodgyokay okay on to the next thing is let's add some kind of reverb to that butfirst with Ben bonus stuff there quite naturally played so he uses lots oforchestral instruments so what I'm going to do – you can either play this in ifyou're good with piano or if you're not then you can manually hold the commandkey and just drag the notes so they're not quite on exactly on the grid andthat will give it a bit of more of a human feel so they're not all playing itprecisely the same so if you heard their you know it's kindof OneNote it's before the others and we just addsome and you could even you know choose different velocities for the notes aswell which give it give it even more of a human feel but you know for brevity'ssake I'm not going to do that in this example so here we go and I'm actually gonna extend that lastcord much like in memoriam which I'll refer back to several times we're nottrying to copy it remember but we are using it as an inspiration for the vibeof our track so I'm going to consolidate that and make sure that loops turned offjust so I can drag that clip longer and I'm just going to extend these lastnotes and although I usually do mixing a bitlater I'm going to add a reverb here because I want to give it that etherealfeeling as quickly as possible and the way I'm going to do that is I'm going touse it in the channel as opposed to on the auxiliary Channel and I'm going touse this freeze function on the reverb which is a pretty cool effect so let'sjust get the reverb sounding nice first it's nice and big very Spacey and I'mgonna put a utility to bump up the volume of the whole track rather thanusing this fader because I don't want no I don't want to use all of the fader uplike this otherwise I've got nowhere to go if I need to go louder so I'll justput five decibels on there and what we're gonna do is automate thisfreeze function on and off so let me just kind of minimize that don't needthose anymore so if we chose choose to automate and what this does is itfreezes the reverb to go on infinitely but obviously you want to kind of switchit off before the next notes plays so this will give that cool effect thathe's got in that track in Moorea you'll really hear it at the end as well so youcan hear it's staying on forever whoops I got spit it up there so itgives it a really nice big field and if it's too much reverb you canalways just notch back the dry/wet control it that will do for now okay onto the next thing we have got base and sub-base so the base is really importantin all dance music so let's get straight onto the base we're gonna take the basenotes from the chords that we've written so let's put base in color it yellow andagain I'm just using the stock plugins I will be using some of the sound toysbundle as well because they are an awesome third party bundle and you canget that from below this video as well and if you buy it through that link Iget a nice little bit of Commission which kind of helps me run the channelwhich is cool okay but you don't need it you know you can do it with the stockplugins but I'm gonna show you one cool effect actually with one of thesoundToys plugins that you can't do with a tables and stuff plugin okay cool thisbase and we're just copying the base notes from the piano chords and we'rejust gonna paste them into our clip here so we're just going to use the samechords and we are going to use to do what should we use actually that becausethankfully I'm gonna turn off this reverb for the time being just becauseit's distracting every time I press stop and the freeze is on then you know it'san issue because I can still hear it so let's use wave table I'm just going touse a stock sound from wave table base let's try this first one how does thatsound okay that's cool but it's a bit high upso I'm just gonna grab it all command a to select all then hold shift and pressdown to notch it down an octave that's too low actually what I'll do is I'llsplit this base into two and have the sub base one octave but there's too many high frequencies soI'm going to notch down the frequency okay there's something going on here soI'll have to go into the matrix and have a look at what's going on velocitywe don't want it affecting the frequency at all so let's turn that back to zeroand there's some kind of envelope playing on the frequency as well sothat's better that's more how we want it nice and lowso we turn off this and let's work on this bass a bit now we want a portamento sweep betweenthose notes I'm just gonna make them overlap a bit like this you can see thisnote is overlapping this one this note is overlapping this one then we makesure it's set to mono or it already is and we've got glide on so let's have alisten so it kind of sweeps in between thenotes and at the end it gets a bit boring soI'm just gonna open up the envelope choose MIDI control pitch Bend and thenI'm gonna do a pitch Bend at the end of the bass just give it some character so it's just to give it some extracharacter and emotion okay let's split this base out I'm gonna duplicate thisand I'm going to call it sub base like so and I'm gonna use an operator forthis which is a super simple synth that comes with Ableton as well operatorwe just want a sine wave for this and you can hear we need to make surethis is monophonic as well at the moment has got six voices we just want one and it's not sliding between so we needto add some glide turn that on and you could choose the same glide amount youknow 112 BP 112 milliseconds just to make sure they slide at the same time but it's too high up for sub-base so I'mgonna go in and I'm gonna grab them and move them down an octave maybe not allof them we'll see until they're almost sub-audible see if I move this oneoctave below you'll barely hear it so I'll keep that up I might leave that onelow because you can you can just hear that okay if you've got good headphonesor monitors you'll hear that low bass note what I'm going to do is I'm goingto filter out the sub bass of our main bass sound otherwise it's going to clashwith the sub bass so let's listen to that on its own so the sub-base can now be controlledseparately see or hear rather I need to make sure they're really pitchbending the same amount as well – the pitch Bend on this I don't know where isit well anyway I think it's – I can't remember where it is at the momentprobably a MIDI buffer pitch Bend yeah pitch – so if we go into the subbase we can make sure our pitch Bend amount is – there as well there you cansee it defaults to 5 so we just make that 2 and that means they both go downat the same rate there so it kind of sounds like one place now we are goingto group them together and call that base and we're going to get that pumpingwith the kick using sidechain compression so I'll show you how to dothat really quickly and we're going to add more processing – but this is whatwe're gonna do at the moment so sidechain compression then we're goingto go into percussion and the arpeggios that make Ben bonus tracks so etherealand lovely so let's do this first because we're going to use thissidechain compressor on many of the track channels so we're going to callthat pump come pump Compton open up the sidechain options here and we're gonnacreate a little sidechain track now what I would usually use is Steve do this LFOtool but because I'm trying to do this in as much just using the Ableton 10plugins as possible I'm gonna do it like this so rather than using a kick for thetrigger I'm going to use a short sharp hi-hat because the kick lasts too longand it's going to duck everything too much so I'll go to samples then I willgo to I shall goats drum hits and closed and then I'm gonna put that into asimpler where is my simpler I don't have it there okay I'll just use a samplerand then I will convert it to simpler now I'll go back to my samples or mydrum it's your my mob drum hits boy here we goso I'm just gonna program them in on the kick as you'd expect there we gojust on every beat ba-ba-ba-ba and then I'm going to go to the routingcuz you can hear it now but we don't want to hear the tick so I'm going tochange it to send only and minimizing and that means we canjust refer to it when we need it from these other devices so sidechain audioinput from SC as you see I've called SC for sidechain and then I can just use attack andrelease to get it pumping in the rhythm that I want cool okay that's working nicely so nowwe can just copy and paste this whenever we need the sidechain compressor allright on to the next thing percussion so been bohmers percussion isvery delicate as again some lovely atmosphere in there so we're going toadd some tech note well some progressive house atmosphere as well but first let'sget the drums going so we're just going to go drums I'm going to use a drum rackfor this so I'll stick that there just call it drums and we will be working onthis bass to make it even bigger and leave here so don't worry about thatyeah so we'll put drums in first thing to getis the clap that would be the main thing so I'm going to go to my drum hits gotthose of drum hits all organized nicely and I'm going to use a let's see lots ofdifferent claps I'm going to use this which is from a classic Lin drum machineand yeah just put it on on every other beat I like sound selection is soimportant guys it's worth it's worth spending the time on getting the rightsounds if you need to you can put Ableton into hot-swap mode like thiswhen they're programmed in just press this little button here and now I canjust press up or down and load in different ones to preview them and youwant the one that sounds you know right for what you're trying to achieve that'sthe sound I want okay now I'm gonna add a little bit of reverb to that and I'mgonna do it on an aux Channel so I'm just going to create an auxiliarychannel on Apple it's command alt and T and then I'm gonna call that room forroom reverb and I'm gonna whack on a Ableton delay Ableton reverb and I'mgonna you program the drum to have that reverb on it so you can press thislittle button here in Ableton turn on the routine turn on the returns rightclick create return chain select room as your output and now we have the roomreverb and we can control it by just turn those off by turning on this s thissend thing here that so I'm gonna pump it up nice and loud too loud so I canget the K the right time and I want it quite subtle so I'm gonna take off someof the high end of the reverb how's about right so it's it's quitesubdued and I'm gonna put a an EQ after the reverb just to make sure there'snothing happening in the low end that's gonna muddy up the mix when we get tothat cool okay on to the next thing that would be the hat sounds that sounds I'mgonna go to the current project because I've already saved some of them just forthe speed of it so I'm going to use this one because it's got lots of lovelytonal qualities to it and I'm just gonna program it in super simply let's callthat hat and we're just going to loop this level pattern and we can add alittle bit of well I wanted a bit softer it's more of an atmosphere than anythingso we're gonna use classic I'm gonna choose one voice so they don't overlapand then just tweak the attack slightly to soften it so it's more like a shakeralmost and then you can add some of this reverb to which you can't really hear because thereverb has got a lot of the high end rolled off so if we listen to the reverbon its own you can kind of hear it just so just to add all these little bits addto the thickness and the richness of this style of music okay on to the nextthing we are going to add a bit of a kind of ride rhythm as well we are goingto have come in at a particular point in the track when we get to the arrangementwhich we will do so gonna go to my drums again drag in this tambourine sound justcalled a Tam and then add in a little rhythm really simple just to give itsome more some more groove and then repeat that excuse me I'll put one thereas well and then we're just gonna duplicate that I'm gonna add someinterest to this so I'm gonna add a tiny bit of delay and so it can bounce arounda bit ping pong turn reverb right down so now the tambourines kind of bouncingleft and right a bit I just make sure there's no untoward low-end in therewhich there is so it's just cleaning up the sounds as we go okay on to the nextthing first let me know if you're liking thisguys give me a hell yeah in the comments below because that lets me know I'm onthe right track I'm doing something that you like so I'm just going to write whattime that was 52 1152 cool on to the next thing these awesome awesomearpeggios which is going to start giving it some real character so if we justwrite arpeggio we're gonna do this manually and I'm going to do a sampleI'm going to use a sample for this and all I'm gonna do is I'm gonna choose asimpler you can use a synth for this but as I said I'm just going to use asampler just to show that it is possible and I've got this crappy piano soundfrom decades ago so I'm gonna use this but make sure it's tuned to the key ofthe track so if I use my chords as an example because it's a grand pianomiddle C now my sampler yeah they're they're in tune I might be chewing thisup a tiny bit and now let's draw in this arpeggio so we're going to do it in thekey of G minor natural of course because that's what the track is and this isgoing to be a really subtle effect but it's very important and this had someharmonic content so it's gonna sound really crap at firstbut we'll make it sound good I promise and you can use the template techniquehere as well so if you kind of go to the right and can I see my template maybe Ialready deleted them okay so I won't do it but you can drawin all the you know all the notes in G minor natural and use the templatetechnique if you want what those playing really quickly that's kind of coolso it's playing a 7th chord but really quickly in succession and now what I'mgonna do is I'm gonna just repeat that and then we're gonna make it sound cooland this is going to be playing underneath the piano chords maybe I will have that minor now I'llleave it major and now we can add some of that roomreverb to this can't really hear it so I'm going to add it so in reverb I'llcreate another aux Channel and I'm gonna call it all and this is going to beanother reverb Ableton reverb so I can just copy and paste that but with a muchlonger decay to add a second reverb that everything can use if we want it so weneed to turn off this high diffusion because we want to hear the high end inthis now and I'm going to add a utility becausethe Ableton reverbs are usually quite quiet so it's more atmospheric and again youmight go in and kind of take off some of the decay or the attack and you can hearit already start sounding frankly awesome and then you can start bouncingit around a bit with a bit of auto pan so let's get one of those on-the-go autopan on the arpeggio – so it bounces around a bit and we aregoing to get one of these pump pumps the sidechain compressor remember that fromearlier and put that after here we might not use all of those notes andthe cords so next we want to add some atmosphere now this is important as wellso I've actually got a recording that I took when I was DJing around the world afew years I was in Thailand I think and I recorded it and I've got loads likethis of just different field recordings from atmospheres that I've I've recordedaround the world so the one I've got was from a jungle whereas this one here wego and I just made a really short loop out of it and you know it's gotcrackling noise in there you can hear me kind of accidentally rubbing themicrophone so I'm just going to repeat that and again you can get this in thesample pack below for free I'm gonna color it green because it's an effectthey're bright green and I'm going to just listen to it with the chords andthese chords I'm going to add some extra reverb and our I put the reverb that wedid earlier now you can hear that jungle sound hasgot the cicadas doing the really high school kind of screech so I'm actuallyjust tuning the cicadas to the to the key of the track so it's in tune and youmight want to take out some low end and then use the pump compressor againand get that sitting nicely with everything else you might even take that arpeggio down now I want to beef that bass up so thisis where I'm going to use the soundToys Decapitator students of my master classactually get 50% off all the master class sorry all the soundToys stuffanyway so you can check out about my master class below this video so you can add you can hear it addingsome richness and what I'm gonna do now is I'm going to group the kick and thebass together like so and I'm gonna you can just bust them if you're not usingAbleton but Ableton's got this cool group thing so now the kick and the bassso there's the bass bus which has these two separate bases in it and then thatin turn is in the kick and bass bus so it's kind of nested and this is so wecan gel the kick and the bass together and getting get them really sounding fatso I'm going to put another Decapitator on the kick and the bass bus and then tweak it just a tiny bit though at this stage andthen I'm going to use this free plugin bark of dog just to add some lowerharmonics I'm going to boost it right up thentweak this till I hear where the sweet spot iswhere it's resonating about sixty Hertz Oh then I'll dial itright back and then just add some in so this is with none of our kicking baseprocessing just a bit weaker bit less less gutsy and actually this base the upper base sonot the sub base we can actually spread that out using this other free plugincalled the but Berber Berber what is it called it is the ozone imager andthere's I'll put a link to it below here as well but you can spread out the basenow it's already pretty wide actually there's not much need for that I'll just turn that off so forget thatall right cool on to the next thing is the strings as I said earlier beenboomers tracked are known for their beautiful orchestration so we're goingto use some real strings I'm just going to use the ones that come with Abletonas well and we're just going to add some extra notes based in that same key thatwe've been using which is G minor natural so let's just put strings here and then let's choose one of the stringpacks that come with Ableton this is Ableton where are they this is the topone I can't remember the suite Ableton suite okaystrings let's get something lovely that'll do and I strings ensemble that'sFrench for Ensemble right let's get some beautiful heart-melting chords in I'mjust going to play along with the piano chords I'll roll off some of the low-endwith the piano as well so it's not clashing with the bass and now let's play some strings yet that's what I will do for the secondpart of the the sequence let's just stop that playing so this iskind of good going to be building into the repeat of the progression again just using notes from is in thekey of G minor natural I'm just making this up as ongoing guy as I'm going soit might not be the best production in the world but it's just to give you anidea let's add some more reverb on the auxilary and next we are going to do a anotherlittle riff just kind of rolling things along in the background I feel it needsmore rhythm so I'm just gonna do another piano actually so it gels in nicely andwe're going to play with those piano chords as well so then we're going to doa vocal and a couple of effects and then some arrangement I know we're runningout of time so let's get this going okay piano I'm going to delete the reverb Idon't want that just going to confuse things I'll delete me utility and I'mjust going to repeat two notes over and over for this so that's what I'm gonna repeat over andover and I'm gonna play it so we've got some nice you know I'm actually reallyplaying it so we'll have some discrepancies and velocity okay I screwed up a bit at the end thereso I'm gonna do is split it into consolidate that then I'm gonna actuallyquantize it so it's nicely in time but we want this sat right back in the riftnow in the mix and then repeat it make sure that we don't have anyunwanted low frequencies in the strings okay so we are almost there now we'regoing to add some extra kind of excitement so what I'm going to do forthis is that actually I'm gonna sing something so sorry in advance but I justwant to give it some texture and then I'm going to convert it into a kind offemale voice by using formants and picking it up a bit so here we go blahblah blah can you hear me yeah simple as thatgosh and now let's put complex Pro on and play with the foreman see if we canget it sounding a bit more like a girl a woman I mean you know it's a bit dodgy but itdoes the job for the sake of this example I'm just gonna add a bit of EQmake sure the low ends taken out Weaver let's try the arpeggio up one octave cool that's sounding pretty good now Iwill just add a couple of bits of effect so like something to start the phrasewith and then we will get on to making this piano better and then a bit ofarrangement then we're done cool so effect what effect should I useI will go into my current project I would just use this crash and just toadd some interest and what I can do is actually use a a delay Miley's echobecause that's quite nice on a new auxiliary Channel let's stop that pianoreverb so a new auxiliary Channel gonna call this delay let's put this echo onthere and I'm going to make that that kind of cymbal crash a cup a bit solet's choose notes not dotted one two four where is itcrash here we go okay there's a high filter there we goand now it just runs on a bit longer but if I wanted to just have that play thetail rather than the initial impact I could automate that like this showautomating in new lane and then just run up that automation after the initialtransient and then we've got this effect so it's just a kind of ringing that'sdelayed as opposed to the initial transient see so this is a bit softerand nicer okay with these piano chords let's see what we can do what I'm gonnado is just do a bit of an ad-lib cuz it sounds nice ready hi nice it's like someone's got my heartthey've opened up that heart and taken another so I hope that gives you an idea abouthow to start developing this progressive house sound as I said I've done this allfrom scratch so it's not perfect but I've shown you some really useful tipsif you've enjoyed it let me know smash the hell out of that life but likebutton give me a hell yet in the comments below and download this projectand all the files I'm actually gonna I'll do some more work on this so itsounds better but in terms in fact in terms of the baseline the Benbow mybaseline what you can do is let's average us listen to the kick in thebait you can actually add a the secondoscillator you could bump that up seven semitones and then you get this cooleffect and then you could automate thefrequency as well as he does in that in memoriam track so that's pretty dope as well I know onemore thing we are now going to do a bit of arrangement very quickly because it'sall about arrangement as well so I'm just going to copy and paste some ofthis and we're just going to develop it slightly so you might just have thearpeggio and the effect in the background you know like the jungleeffects so let's try that and that might be improved even with a bit of baselinebut you could turn off the sidechain compression for that so it's less pumpyand you probably want to you know take the bass level down for this brain and then it would go into you know thevery minimal beats I probably take some of those notes outfrom the cords just to make it a bit less and with the strings you wouldn't havethose repeating so you could add some ad lib there as well and you wouldn't you wouldn't overusethat vocal as well but you can see how you you'd start off with that lovelybeautiful ethereal atmosphere at first and then you go into the beats and themain idea and then just develop those drums overtime as well and then you go into another break but if you do want to ifyou would want to arrange this into a full track that's when you could use areference track to get a better arrangement from it and I'll link to avideo there as well so there you have it guys I really hope you enjoyed thisBenbow my progressive house tutorial don't forget you can grab all the filesbelow this project completely free if you want to find out more about mymaster class then there's also a link to that below as well where you can get 50%off sound toys and loads of other plugins too thanks for watching untilnext time stay safe cheers and happy producing.