anticipation and excitement build as your music takes your listeners through an increase of energy and tension provide enough change in your drop sounds exciting as a producer you need to understand the vital role that a buildup plays in your music for example let's say we go from 60 miles per hour to 80 miles per hour this change in speed is less exciting than going from zero miles per hour to 100 miles per hour if you build up with 80 of the element and drop at a hundred percent there is a 20 chain is this change enough to make your drop feel more significant and Powerful that is up to you to decide based on the genre of music you're making however in today's video we're going to be focusing more on house and techno buildups every single tip you learn in this video will help you provide a stronger setup to create better builds a good buildup should use changes and Dynamics to help create a bit of tension and anticipation this can involve gradually increasing the volume or intensity of your music one of the vital elements that we as techno and house regions have that not a lot of other genres do is low end low end will usually take up a lot of space in the make also provide the most amount of energy imagine being at a huge festival and not hearing bass and all of a sudden being blasted with it thank you okay so here we have a track that I released called lid on me which you guys can check out on Spotify if you like what you hear then the breakdown we have a very strong vocal with this seventh style Bass [Music] now in this section of the breakdown we do want to have the low end there but the moment we get to the build up which is here we want to start slowly as you can see removing the low end now let me play the breakdown without the removal of the low end so you can see how much of an impact it has on the song Here the bass comes in fully there [Music] and there's no change in power in the low end the low end stays the same but you can hear the low end stays the same on that build up it drops with the same amount of power and it sounds kind of rather dull but one easy thing you can do is again put an eq8 on the master and slowly remove stuff as you approach the build and slowly start to take away so here the low end is removed it's going up it's going up and now we're gonna allow it in yeah and we profit Rhythm is a vital tool to create tension in our buildups tension is good because it makes our listeners anticipate a big Drop Like The Art of War States every battle is won before it's fought if you can make your listener expect a huge drop you did an excellent job in the build up through the Law of Attraction they're gonna get what they're anticipating a way to create tension with rhythm is 116 snare rolls the more popular thing to do with them is set up a 116 scenaro and increase the volume slowly as you approach your build up you can also go the traditional way of big room where you would start with [Music] but this one is last seen in house and techno where we have more of a mature Vibe not to be confused with hills houses I'd like to can spice things up by playing with the velocity so that it dictates a different rhythm another way Rhythm can be used to execute better buildups is the removal of the groove so a lot of tech heavy tracks out there where the main ideas are the drums so if you were to remove those drums that the listener has somewhat already just pushed to the back of their mind as they hear your song then you can utilize the concept that you don't miss something until it's gone to gain the listener's attention back once you have their attention they're going to anticipate that the drums will come back and from there it's all about you utilizing all the tips in this video to execute the perfect again I want to show you guys the last build up where we have a Groove going which can be found here found this build up you obviously have a lot of drums going but now watch what happens if I decide to delete the drums now one of my biggest regrets is that I didn't do this in the original song that I released because you can see how we go from this sort of like Reese and groovy drums and then [Music] there's just so much tension like you want to get to the drop it feels so epic but now if we go back to what I actually ended up releasing this sounds kind of rather dull and boring so in my most interest I should have taken the risk and gotten rid of the groove there because it makes people go whoa something's about to happen here it sort of feels like we're just dragging on so again a huge risk to do but if you can pull it off in your song it's one of the strongest things you can do to improve your build ups and get them sounding a lot better pitch pitch can also create tension through the utilization of higher low frequencies in tip one we talked about how removing the low end is one of the best tools you have in order to go from nothing to Max and bass provides the highest energy but high frequency Riser strings uplifters that are increasing in Pitch can also create a lot of excitement and a lot of tension [Music] and as most listeners are going to anticipate that that they're expecting to drop now utilization of risers in build-ups is like bread to butter to peanut butter and jelly however you can always get carried away with too much peanut butter on the bread so same thing here the other cool thing is that we can also omit the high frequencies when needed so we talked about the removal of the low end but you can also remove the high end now this is not as popular and it will work for certain tracks per se if you have a very catchy vocal coming up and you want to give it the spotlight if there's a track where it's more chill then you can omit some of the high frequencies and that works well as well now there's a theme here if you're catching my drift with build ups it's all about the removal of stuff so that people miss it and when they miss it they want it back more okay now Reverb and delays are great tools to have for the utilization of buildups but they're also great tools to have if you're trying to sound newbie amateurish because it's very easy to get carried away with Reverb And Delay take it from me I tend to make my tracks too wet and that's the criticism I get from a lot of my peers and just has a way of making everything get wet that however the cool thing about Reverb and delay is that it has this effect on the perception of depth the more Reverb something has the more your brain thinks that that sound or that thing is more further in the cave further in the church I can see [Music] the altar boy is saying 20 Hail Mary so you can utilize Reverb to push main elements of your track to the back of the mix but again too much of it makes you sound amateurish the same thing with delay the delay will create a death effect as well and the more you put it the more it gives it to you but this one's more Rhythm based and it's super cool to utilize however I will say this that the Reverb and delay and buildups is more popular in tool room based tracks very heavy ones that create huge buildups they ain't shy about the Reverb and delay and then they drop heavy with obnoxious downlifters [Applause] [Music] automation is key now all the tips that we've talked about would be nothing without automation now automation is going to be the idea that we can grab a knob and we can tell Ableton like hey I want this knob to move up like so through this time span so we use our Arrangement window to program that now there's multiple things to automate and this is where every producer can become their own unique self they have their own unique sound in the way that they do buildups for instance the more popular things to automate are going to be the removal of the base removal of certain things the low passing of stuff the automation of Reverend delay the automation of a plug-in like endless smile to create the crescendo the progressive house guys will automate Dynamics on the synth for example we can grab the Decay and sustain and put that up the release up and we create this really cool effect hear a lot from the chill always high dudes over there in the Prague World in 124 BPM and 126. without automations though buildups probably wouldn't exist so there's some of the best tools that you can have and I recommend you learn the shortcuts in your Daw when it comes to automations to again execute the perfect build up bonus tip the pre-drop lately there's been a fad with heavily popular music utilizing the pre-drop so usually in a track you'll have the build up put your hands up but now we'll do something like put your hands up dude [Music] so that's the pre-drop it's sort of killing the predictability in a song but the question is at this point with everyone doing it is it has it become predictable to do that so now if you just drop normally is that unpredictable now should you be doing this well I'm gonna give you guys the pros and cons on it and from there you guys can decide if you want to execute it here's a couple of examples of pre-drops oh pros of the pre-drop surprises your listener as they don't expect they expect the drop so it's like you trick them and you both look at each other and you're like ah you he got me the pre-drops are made in my opinion for the live crowd like literally it makes tracks just go ham live and you'll see most DJs will set that up and then they'll get ready to throw their hand in the air and go like and pewdrops can be the highlights of songs especially with techno and Tech house where they're very Tech heavy I mean the tech House tech no a lot of times memorability isn't there like a vocal or a motif so this is a perfect time to execute a little Motif so that the listener can be you know it was just one time I heard last night and all I remember is it had a build up and it went very easy to sound cheesy everyone's trying to do them and honestly it takes a bit of skill to get them to sound right are people even surprised by them anymore I mean it's become the norm at this point if you don't have it people will find that unpredictable the DJ has to commit to your song in order to play it in my opinion if I was a DJ which I'm not I would expect myself wanting not to play too many songs with pre-drops because eventually it's like oh every [ __ ] song has a pre-drop however I know a lot of you guys are DJs and probably DJs more than me so maybe I guys can educate me on that matter do you care what you played five songs in a row with pre-drops and or in it or it doesn't matter and finally it's one of the hardest things to get right I mean even to this day I'll work on some songs and my pre-drops are not the best so who am I to talk about them I know I need to do them but when it comes down to it again creativity is best finally the last one I want to talk about guys is foreshadowing some of the greatest producers out like suicide Mafia Avicii um would always foreshadow The Melodies In Their build ups [Music] started [Music] now if you're making more Tech Heavy Music techno you can foreshadow what's going to happen in the drop in a certain sense you can have one the melody in the build up filtered and then slowly filtering it in that would look something like this where we have the eq8 and we're gonna go from left to right maybe not giving away the full Melody utilizing a bit of the Dynamics that the progressive house guys use now in this track I have here which I'm probably gonna end up trashing but I I love the initial idea of it the way that I personally create foreshadowing is by using the drop lead as a brake lead and then turning it into an uplift in the track to the utilization of automation as well as utilization of Reverb in delay to wash the lead out so it's not as strong so that way again we're removing the the strong part of the lead to allow it to shine in the drop and then from there just using it as an uplifter via pitch increasing so again a high pitch to create the tension needed to execute the proper build up so that's going to sound like this yes and I'll try and show you guys what's going on as we go punches okay [Music] [Applause] [Music] removing the eyes we're filtering it up at the same time endless smile growing up and then the sink we know about this one [Music] so again in the break you have the lead turning into the uplifter which is foreshadowing the drop there are various ways that you guys can do this you can utilize your drums and filter them in slowly or filter in a percussion that's going to happen in your drop again foreshadowing is another thing that I see with some of the best buildups I've heard in dance music to this day we went on a little tangent there but with these tips you should be able to create better buildups hopefully these tips shine some light on stuff you didn't know about build up some tips that you can utilize and for those of you guys that are adapt a good little review because you can never have enough of that as always guys if you want to support the channel make sure to head over to evilsounds.com you can find all of my sound design work I'm a full-time sound designer with clients like Hardwell Mao P umic West End a-lock very diverse selection of course guys but figure out why they're using the sounds go check them out and you will never see sound Banks the same again I put my heart and soul into them now if you want to continue in your journey of knowledge consider watching this video on the best mixing advice I ever received you know back then I used to think the best mixing advice I would ever receive is putting a sausage fattener on my base or saturating the crap out of my drums but in reality it's a very simple tip that you can do right from the beginning of your production career that will help you it will create first off better balances in your mixes it will create more longevity because you know you're not busting your eardrums so make sure to check it out and as always guys happy producing take care