Defected intern Keelan Doyle continues his report on Point Blank's 4-week Deep and Soulful House Online production course.
Week two focused on percussion, instruments and synths. First we concentrated on adding percussion to a beat, and it was great to learn the basic structure of programming percussion as well as how to create real percussion itself.
We also looked at the instruments commonly used in this particular genre, which taught me the key foundations and building blocks used when making a deep or soulful track. The great thing about the way in which they teach different aspects is that the tutor always refers back to examples of tracks that everyone is familiar with, so it’s really easy to pick up exactly what’s meant, rather than getting bogged down in lots of terminology.
I found the video tutorials superb in terms of understanding what was being shown to me, and was creating wicked sounds using the ES2, EX24 and EX1 in no time. At first the all the different LFO, envelopes and oscillators were pretty daunting to look at, but the way in which everything was broken down and explained was really accessible and massively improved my understanding of Logic.
I was keen to learn more on synthesis, so was happy to see the tutorials on creating synth sounds as well as some hints, tip tricks on things I never knew you could do with the program. I actually managed to incorporate a lot of the various new techniques into the track I have been working on (which you’ll get to hear in a couple of weeks!)
Overall, very happy with this weeks progression, and as always the course tutor Alex was on hand 24-7 to get back to me with any questions I had regarding this weeks syllabus. I look forward to chords, baselines and riffs next week.
Keelan is studying Point Blank’s Deep & Soulful House 4-week course.
