Leads and special FX
In these pages we’ve grouped together a couple of key aspects of music production — leads and special effects. Both require bespoke sounds and both tend to play quite a prominent role when they happen.
Lead parts in a music track can be vocal or instrumental. Producing vocals from scratch is a big topic that goes beyond this tutorial. It starts with melody/lyric writing, involves recording and editing and will at some point make use of the EQ, dynamics, reverb and effects sections we explain elsewhere. Hopefully we’ve contributed some relevant advice, showing you how to make use of the Plugin Suite for some parts of your vocal production process.
In contrast, creating instrumental lead and melody lines is a more immediate and tangible process that the Suite is better equipped to help you with from the outset. With that in mind we’ll look at how to create a distinctive lead synth sound from scratch, exploring both the oscillator capabilities of our synth and also how to finesse the sound using parameter modulation, envelopes and its own onboard macro parameter controls. We’ll then move onto what musical aspects make a melody or riff and how we can create one in the context of a track. We won’t delve too deeply into music theory, but hopefully we can provide some pointers
