8 Bar EDM Buildup

There is no drop without anticipation. A drop without a buildup is like a good ending to a bad movie. There are many different styles and lengths of advertisements, but the most popular are 8/16-bar EDM buildups. In this tutorial, I will walk through the process of creating an 8-bar EDM-style buildup in Lumit using a variety of plugins and our FX. It is most suitable for very synthetic and animated dance tracks. With all the subgenres of EDM out there, this process will work better for certain producers than others. Click the links to download the patches. It sounds like this... 

 

Plugins Used:

• NI Massive
• NI FM8
• NI Battery 4
• Xfer Serum
• Xfer Dimension Expander
• Valhalla Room
• Cableguys Kickstart
• Dmitry Sches Tantra
• Lumit Delay Unit
• Lumit Filter Unit  

General Tips

Gradual automation is crucial but is not always a straight line. Try using logarithmic shapes. They are more natural sounding and provide a sense of acceleration. Suitable parameters for this type of automation include filter cutoff, reverb, delay wetness, and sidechain amount. 

Experiment with master FX automation for the fills. Try parallel processing the entire mix with something dramatic and creative like Tantra. You can capture that audio using our Freeze Tool for future use as a pre-produced sound effect.

Experiment with master volume automation. You'll find a lot of times, the buildup is TOO dynamic. With most of the anticipation already coming from changes in density and instrumentation, the levels can be about the same and still sound like it is building.

Not too short, not too long. The decision on whether to make an 8-bar or a 16-bar buildup is crucial. Perhaps my advertisement is too quick. It might be a good idea to pick out the type of drop you want first, then research how long their buildups typically are.

Try only to have one or two elements in focus, keeping the rest of the elements as support layers and FX. These delicate sounds require more attention to have the right effect. Be careful not to mask them.  

Important Elements

Riser  - The synth riser is a basic Massive waveform with a precise pitch modulation setup. What is different about this riser is that the modulation source is a prolonged triangle wave rather than an envelope. I did this because the range for the envelope attack did not allow a long enough rise. The rate of the LFO is synced to 14 bars. You're probably thinking… why not 16 bars? Isn't this an 8-bar buildup? Indeed it is. But I wanted to have a fill-in-the-last bar. In that fill, I liked the pitch to change direction and fall for a bar suddenly. The synced triangle wave LFO allowed me to program this without any automation. 

Noise - The noise component to this buildup is also from Massive. The patch is your essential bandpass-filtered noise with a bit of filter resonance, and the center frequency is swept up over 7 bars using automation. I also decreased the resonance a little at the peak of the sweep using automation because the higher bands tend to sound too hard with resonance. 

Blips - The lead blip sound comes from, you guessed it, Massive. It is another straightforward patch, this time with the pitch of the pulse wave oscillator automated. The only angles that need to agree with your song are the start and ending pitches of the rise. I chose those pitches by ear. Other than using a synced envelope or LFO, this is the only way to ensure harmony. I also automated the release and the wavetable position as the pitch rises.

Sub Drop - The sub drop at the beginning of my audio example is an FM patch with three operators. Two operators are carrying a sine wave and are detuned a little before being lowpass filtered. One of those is modulated by the third operator very subtly. That modulator envelope decays, unlike the carrier envelopes, which are more like gates. I turned up the range of the pitch bend control in the modulation section. Then, I recorded a long note and drew a linear downward pitch bend in the sequencer. 

Processing - The riser, noise, blips, and subgroup are all converged into a group output, which has a delay, a reverb, and a Kickstart on it synced to create a pumping effect. Some parameters of the delay are automated as the anticipation builds. I also automated the Kickstart "amount" so that the pumping gets more noticeable. I dropped a Lumit limiter on the Master to soften peaks and prevent clipping.