Cover of track Tips: Big chord stacks by Archon
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Tips: Big chord stacks

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Follow me on soundcloud! New stuff from different DAWs coming soon.

I know I haven't been very active here on Audiotool, so I thought I'd give some tips that I've learned through tutorials and just messing around.

One of the things I see a lot of people like to do are these large dubstep chords. A lot of them are lacking a lot of elements, causing them to feel empty. Here are my ideas on how to solve that:

First of all many of you may have seen Virtual Riot's tips on this, and that's what I am basing some of this off of. However... some of those things may not seem directly compatible with Audiotool's limitations.

In VR's tutorial, he says that he likes to do a combo of detuned chords and clean saws. If you open this project, you will see that I have tried to replicate that using the Heisenberg. It's super easy yet effective, just play around with different effects/settings on 2-3 saws until they sound really nice together.

The next thing he does in his tutorial is this really distorted saw bass. This can be redone almost perfectly with the Pulv because of its noise oscillator. All you need to do is set oscillator 1 to a saw, run it through a heavy distortion, and turn on the noise oscillator to a low volume. Play a low note of this under your chords for a nice bassy aspect. You'll see in the project that i have also thrown in a sub under the chords. This bass is sub-heavy in itself, but I felt it helped.

In order to make these chords seem a little more full, we need to fill out the high end. You can use anything really, I used some preset I made in another project that was trying to be a Spag Heddy lead. You can also make a lead to play a melody to go on top of these chords (which I have done), and in my opinion is one of the most important parts in this whole thing. I'm not exactly sure what i did to it, but I'm sure it's just a saw with a few voices being detuned and compressed.

This won't all fit so I'll finish in comments

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