Jonas Rathsman and Francis Novotny, who make up the duo Modern Tales, are back on Rose Avenue Records with their latest two-track release, ‘All The Stars/Judgement Day.’ After making waves with their 2023 debut album ‘Stars Align,’ they’ve returned to the studio to dig deeper into the sounds that define their collaborative project. This EP captures the the whole vibe of what Modern Tales is all about, blending late-night club vibes with their roots in songwriting and musicianship.

These guys are picking up some serious momentum in the underground dance music scene and I figured there was no better time to bring them on and learn what their favorite studio tools are and how they use them to get signed to some of the best labels in the game. So listen to the track below a few times to acclimate your ears to the sauce they’re about to be sharing and then dive into the latest iteration of How It Was Made: Modern Tales – All The Stars.

Astra by Splice

The song has many layers of different sustained synth pads – and one of them is a sound by Astra. It’s Splice’s own synth and it’s great. It’s basically got everything (granular,FM, oscillators and even sampling). If you’re a splice user – this synth can come in handy since you get all the presets you buy, straight into the synth as you open it up in your DAW.

We wanted to get a nice mix between electronic and organic sounds, and funnily enough this synth sounded really harsh and irritating on its own. But as we blended it with a bunch of other more warm, analog sounding synths – we got this almost live organ feel to it. Stacking synths is the way to go.

This is a nice go to synth if you want to get inspired, because it can create some really unusual sounding sounds. You can play around with the granular effects, the different filters and eventually end up tweaking a synth into a drum. There are some amazing presets being made for this relatively new synth, so a tip is to check splice for new sounds – it can be super inspiring.

Subsynth by brainworx/UAD

Subsynth by brainworx/UAD is such a great plug in. This is a channel strip plug in, so don’t be deceived by the name. This is a plugin we used on the bass in the song, to enhance the bass and make it thick!

One of the trickiest things in making dance music is getting the relationship between the kick and bass to feel natural, punchy, full and warm. Sometimes, even when you have a lot of bass in your song – it can still feel empty and dull. Very often, the solution is to fatten up your bass, and what you can do is to create subharmonics, or bass harmonics. This can be achieved by saturating the bass, and by doing so, you artificially create tones in the bass. This can give the bass more body, life and a sense that it’s way more present.

Since bass frequencies thrive in mono, a good thing to do is to use the mono maker knob to control the mono/stereo information. Play around with the subharmonics knob, to add some tones to the bass, and a power move is also to add bass to different areas of the bass with the knobs in the Synthesized Frequency area.

Trackspacer 2.5 by Wavesfactory

If you’d randomly pick a project of ours and opened it – you’d most likely find the Trackspacer by Wavesfactory. This is a great tool for isolating and sidechaining specific frequencies, rather than sidechaining the whole sound with a compressor or any other ducking tool. It’s also fantastic if you want to create space for a sound, but not necessarily an intense pumping effect.

In ‘All The Stars’, we used it on plenty of different things, but let’s look at the bass. As you can see on the picture – we used the High Cut knob to focus the area of sidechaining to the bottom frequencies. Then we fed in the kick signal, so the lower frequencies of the bass could start ducking, giving the kick the space it wanted. Suddenly, the kick punched through, and the upper frequencies of the bass were unaffected, in your face and steady.

Our approach is: ‘Don’t be scared of using Trackspacer on whatever you want’. If your hi hat is interfering with your vocal – sidechain the annoying frequencies of the hi hat to your vocal.
Just play with the amount knob to adjust the intensity of the sidechaining effect – so you don’t remove too much of what you want.

Texture by Devious Machines

While working on this song, we reached a point where we felt that the kick wasn’t punching through in the mix properly. A life saver in situations like that is ‘Texture’ by Devious Machines. It’s a layer generator, where you can browse through different samples that you want to layer on to a sound. You have full control over the sample, with an envelope section and even a limiter. In our case, the kick was missing some hi frequencies. So we added texture to the kick channel, and added a layer of a very short hi hat. This brought the kick drum to life, and it felt way more present.

We like to import our own samples, but you’ll go far by using its own standard samples.

Work with the gain knob until you reach a desired balance between the original kick and the now layered top sound.

RC-20 Retro Color

RC-20 Retro Color is an ‘all inclusive’ plug in that is perfect if you want to spice things up. It has everything you need.

As we mentioned, we wanted a gritty, old organic feel to many of the synth sounds. If we felt that a synth was too boring or digital sounding, we threw on the Retro Color to add some flutter effect, tube saturation and a little bit of space/reverb. Sometimes we throw on the noise button, to get a subtle static vinyl noise in the background to fill out some space and get a nice thick feeling to the song.

Another cool function that we use is the width knob, as It sometimes is nice to widen a sound. It’s not a Haas effect, but rather a chorus like/diffusion feeling.

The post How It Was Made: Modern Tales – All The Stars [Rose Avenue Records] appeared first on Magnetic Magazine.