This course is about bending electronic instruments to your will: designing your own sounds and building groundbreaking, danceable music in any DAW. It uses Arturia's instruments - Pigments and the V Collection's classic emulations - alongside Xfer Records' Serum, the wavetable synth behind a large share of modern electronic music.
You should already be comfortable in your DAW. Basic mixing, a first understanding of synthesis, MIDI and audio editing, and signal flow will all help.
How the course works
Each class pairs a production topic with a synthesis or effects topic:
- Production - drums and grooves, shaping and layering, chords and melodies, sidechaining and distortion, tempo manipulation, resampling, hardware.
- Sound design - subtractive and granular synthesis in Pigments, FM in DX7 V, additive synthesis in CMI V, wavetables in Serum, the classic polysynths, and audio effects.
The course ends by building four complete beats, each in a different style.
Typical tools
- A DAW - any of them. Everything here works in Ableton Live, Logic Pro, FL Studio, Bitwig, Cubase or Pro Tools.
- Arturia Pigments - a multi-engine synth: virtual analogue, wavetable, sample-based (with a granular mode) and harmonic (additive) engines, with deep modulation.
- Arturia V Collection - software recreations of classic instruments, including DX7 V, CMI V, Prophet-5 V, OB-Xa V and Jup-8 V, plus Arturia's effects.
- Xfer Serum - a wavetable synth with a visual, drag-and-drop workflow.
- A MIDI keyboard or pad controller - for playing parts in and mapping controls.
- Good headphones and monitors - see the mastering module on monitoring.
Favourite plug-in habits
Producers tend to return to a small set of trusted tools. Build yours deliberately:
- One synth you know deeply beats ten you know a little.
- A go-to EQ, compressor, saturator, reverb and delay for most jobs.
- A sampler for drums and chops.
- A spectrum analyser and a loudness meter to check your ears.
Arturia publishes resources for the V Collection - manuals, tutorials and sound packs - on its website. Read the manual of each instrument you use; every one has features you will not discover by clicking.
Set up a sound design template
- A MIDI track with your main synth, an audio track for resampling, a drum rack or sampler, and return tracks for reverb and delay.
- A reference track for your target genre.
- A folder for your own presets, named consistently.
Do this now
- Install and authorise Pigments, the V Collection instruments you have, and Serum, and open each one in your DAW.
- Build your sound design template.
- Write down your current go-to plug-in for EQ, compression, saturation, reverb and delay - and one you want to learn.