To the bedroom producer having release-ready tracks may seem an unattainable goal but by making some small changes to your current workflow and set up, you can with time start pumping out banging tunes that can start pushing your career in the right direction. 

In this post, we will be covering 5 ways to help improve your techno productions by focusing on some key mixing techniques specifically designed for techno and dark genres.

Before we start let’s make sure our tracks are ready for mixing, check out this blog post and use it as a checklist before you start to think about mixing. Ok without further ado, let’s get started by visualizing the mix.

With the release of Dystopian Signals, we at Mind Flux thought it would beneficial to follow the release up with some informational video. This video is designed to help you use the pack to create some Dark Techno ideas. Cause as we all know that creating that initial spark can be the hardest part of producing music.

Mind Flux is proud to present the Moog Big Bass Freebie, a meticulously designed collection of bass sounds created to elevate your techno, drum & bass, dubstep, and other gritty genre productions. This pack captures the powerful, deep, and gritty essence of Moog synthesizers, offering a rich palette of sounds that inspire creativity and innovation. Perfect for producers looking to add powerful low-end basslines to their tracks, this freebie provides the tools needed to craft professional-quality music.

With Techno its all about experimentation and within Techno over, the last 3 decades producers have continually pushed the boundaries of the musical norms. One clear example of this is making bass lines from soaking your kick in reverb a practise which in all music engineering books is frowned upon. 

But let's be honest the grey-haired folk who wrote these books have probably never been to a club in their lifes and therefore have never embraced the gut rumbling power this technique can provide.

We at Mind Flux have created an audio effects rack for Ableton that has adapted this power. The rack has a selection of tools that allow you to easily create techno rumbling kick drums that will leave your studio walls shaking. Simply load a kick of your choice and let it roll. 

Click here to watch the video: http://bit.ly/2kw4cMm

One of the hardest things to mix in music for most producers and artists is kick and bass, this is mainly due to the fact that these two elements require a lot of the same space in the frequency spectrum and if you get the bass and kick wrong it can take all the energy out of the track. Which can be rather demoralising

Well, don't threat, In this how-to, we will look to help with these issues and show some key steps on how to get your kick and bass sitting perfectly together. And once this is done, it can make the rest of your mixing job way more enjoyable.

What you will learn in this techno music production tutorial is:

Tuning
EQ
Compression
Dynamic EQ
NYC Compression
Bass Programming
Sidechain Compression

If you would like to check out more of our music production tutorials go to our youtube channels here: http://bit.ly/2RXbSDz

Today what we are going to be looking at is creating a 808 style hi hat, after you have followed this tutorial you will have all the custom 808 style open and closed hi hats you desire. Lets get started.

Thou wavetable has a category section called noise with some great wavetables they don't have the traditional noise sound we need to make, thou there is a trick to turn these into a hi hat.

In this tutorial, we are going to look at how to beef up our drum loops and samples using Ableton’s stock audio effects.

For Mind Flux’s newest blog series we have decided to open it up to the floor and ask our followers and friends what they would like to learn. And one request really stood out.

This request was to show how you could go about recreating Pat Thomas & Ebo Taylor - Ene Nyame Nam 'A' Mensuro (Henrick Schwartz Blend Mix).

In our last adventures into drum synthesis we looked at using synths to make our drum sound but you can also explore samplers to do the same. All you need is the raw material to get started. So for this kick we are just going to use a sine wave and Ableton’s Sampler.

Next up in our synth series, we are going to look at creating some R2D2 style bleeps and bloops and turning them into some techno percussion loops.

So far we have looked at synthesising kicks and snares now in the latest blog post in this drum synthesis series we are going to look at creating a clap with operator.

For old analog synth users a happy accident occurred when increasing the resonance to the max. The cool and crazy result of this left a lot of synth lovers angry and confused, but the adventurous among us saw it as an opportunity to experiment and create weird and wonderful sounds!

In this ‘Drum Synthesis’ series blog post we are going to use this “mistake” to build a kick drum, without even using an oscillator or sample.

In this blog post we are going to look at how to make a snare using Ableton’s simply scrumptious FM synth operator. The main advantage of building your own snare apposed to using a sample is you have full control over how the snare sounds. For example does the snare need more body or sizzle?. Does it need to be longer?. Can the pitch bend be deeper?. And that is just a small number of elements that you can change and through out the tutorial we will see the huge array of sound design possibilities that Ableton presents us when making a snare or in fact any drum sound.

Samples are an amazing source of inspiration but the fact is everyone who buys the pack has access to the same set of sounds, so the question is how do you go about making those sounds your own. Well in the blog post we will show you a selection of ways to do that.

Without a doubt Ableton is the most user friendly DAW when it comes to work flow and being able to get your ideas down quickly but there are a multitude of ways to make Ableton truly your own. In this series of blog posts we aim to showcase a number of ways to make Ableton work for you.

At Mind Flux we always like to find ‘odd” samples and turn them into something completely different by doing this you can ensure that you have something original to work with.

In this example we will be taken Britney Spears “One More Time” vocal and turning it into a raw bass preset. To do this we will be using Native Instruments highly impressive Form.

The team of nerds at Mind Flux, have put together a gem of a instrument rack. The main sound of the rack is from the ever impressive Moog Minitaur which is a one stop shop for bass.

But using the amazing elements within Ableton it can become so much more. Simply turn the “Warp It” macro to let loose all hell.

Sometimes when trying to build an chord progression or chord melody you seem to just jump instinctively for the same chord, for me its the Minor 7th. While I would say this is my and many peoples favourite chord it does end up with your ideas sounding rather similar to everyone else. 

So to help breath new life into your stale chord progressions and chord melodies we at Mind Flux have built a chord randomiser which with the selection of over 80 chord variations will output a new chord at the rate and depth of your choice.

More often than not in your music you will want to create harmony, that can be done via layering notes in your piano roll or adding a extra synth or vocal layers using a different note. This is all great but what happens when you want something a little more outlandish.

Well we have the solution, a grain harmonizer. In the tutorial we will use Ableton’s other worldly grain delay to create a more unique way of adding harmony to your music.