Hi there!

This week is progressive house time. On last weeks submission Cake said „expand this into a full progressive banger“ so i tried working around the melody from Procyon a bit but quickly drifted into a different direction which ended up quite fun.

There isnt a lot to say this week other than i spent 80% of the projects time designing the arp sound to feel just crunchy enough to not disturb the general mix.

Its 2 serum patches stacked on top of each other, one a crunchy short decay „pluck“ ish sound that has tons of tube distortion on top of it which makes it scream even with a closed filter and then a more synth trumpet like synthwave synth to add more body to it which i both added macros to that when opening the filter, add compression to the top end so it doesent add too much volume.

This method really opened my eyes after trying to limit the volume output after everything including reverb and delay got excited too much from the upper harmonics of the open filter. this seems to really squish it down nicely.

In addition to that i tried heavily compressing and limiting the upper range of the volume area after hard clipping the kick while trying to keep the dynamics as much to the original as possibe which i usually never do. usually i just soft clip the master and then push the volume into -0.3db but this time im closer to -0.01 while lifting the quiet, and dapening the louder areas. Its a bit of a „trying it out“ instead of a „buy my mastering course on skillshare“ kind of experiment but i think it sounds pretty good. Looking back i might have used it a little too aggressively but now its exported and once i export it its done for weeklybeats.

Thats one thing i kept going now since the first week. A rule i set to myself is that once i export it and its not a obvious mistake on my end like forgetting to enable the master chain or noticing a wrong note that slipped during production, im not gonna work on it anymore. There is no export-finalFinal3-final11.mp3 but just the plain export.

While this is really painful for my perfectionism, it really helps by just accepting non perfect outputs and while im not trying to put out low effort slop, it really helps loosen the expectations for „making a perfect banger“ and supports experimentation.

Anyways… Its been super fun to work in ableton again after not touching it for quite a while in favour of all the shenanigans ive been doing in pretty much everything else.

Make sure to use headphones and push that volume knob to max, the crunch is really tasty in this one.

Tags: ableton, house, progressive, progressive house, week 11 2026, View by:Apticx