How It Was Made: David Lindmer’s ‘Altered State’

My Moog Sub 37 which forms the bass line and gives the track that warm analog groove. What I like to do with the Sub37 is put it into 'init patch' mode then usually just using a single oscillator I will play around with the ADSR and the Arpeggiator section until I find a groove I like.

Also In this because the Sub37 does not have any onboard FX, I ran the synth through Ableton and into a 1/8th dotted delay with some low-cut reverb. 

Amazingly I recorded everything into audio in Ableton in one take, just one of those days where everything clicked!

Learn more about Moog's iconic synth here.

For soft synths I have the 'Push 2' which makes everything much more hands-on and tactile with regards to automation. 

For my hardware I don't often record the automation via MIDI into the DAW, it's too much hassle and never really works out that well as you are forever going back and fiddling with it. I tend to just record 4 or 5 takes to audio in Ableton and use the best one. 

My general rule when I am messing around with the hardware synths is that I am always recording, so if I do something great by accident then I can go back and use it in the track somehow.

It depends on the track - I have a big library of about 2,000 different drum samples. I also have a folder of sampled drums from various tracks that I use as a 'groove library' where I can extract the groove and apply it to my custom drum rack in Ableton. 

There are some great sample packs out there available for drum hits though, I can recommend 'Keinemusik Werkzeug by David Mayer"

You can purchase this sample pack on Keinemusik's website here.

The lead actually has 4 different layers in this track. But I will talk about the main layer of the lead. On that I used the analog wavetables from the Prophet 6 layered with some white noise. Fed those into Serum as I am pretty comfortable using the various modulation and automation options in there. 

Then I added a Decapitator from SoundToys which gives the sound that grit. Then I added an Echoboy, 1/2 dotted delay in parallel. An imager after that as the sound was getting too wide for my tastes so I made it a bit more mono. 

Then some sidechain compression to the kick, a glue compressor that I pushed pretty hard and finally some EQ cutting out the low to allow room for the bass.

Check Out More In-depth Guides On SoundToys' Powerful Plugins Here

It's a good question, it's very hard to say when a track is finished and I kind of have to force myself to move on as I am a bit of a perfectionist by nature. I have a rule that if I am on a roll with a track I will stay up all night and make sure I arrange and finish it so it's in a place where it's close to sending off as a demo. 

I also mix and master my tracks myself so I tend to get it into an acceptable format then I send it off to some trusted producer friends as well as mix engineers who usually give me feedback within a couple of days. I write all their feedback down, sit on it for a week and then have another crack at finishing it. That is usually the point where I feel comfortable that it is ready to send out.

I wanna give a little shout out to my friend Guido. He is an incredible mix engineer and a lot of what I have learned about mixing is from him. I will always send tracks to him first to check before I send anything out as he has an incredible ear and a fantastic listening space. 

You can find him by searching for @catsandbeats on Instagram.

Learn How You Can Submit Your Next Demo To Purified Here