Making Tech House sound like Michael Bibi – Ableton 10 Free Template
It’s a video from another small channel with just 348 subscribers and 21 videos, but this particular tutorial has had 3,223 views since it was published on the 21st May 2020. Fair play to Sai Lika here as he’s given away his template for free rather than sticking behind a patreon link.
Although this is described as a template, it’s not a full track – essentially it’s just an intro and a drop, 16 bars of each. He’s used a couple of VSTs that I don’t have, Sylenth1 for the laser FX and 808 WRLD for the bass. There is no talking during the video, so I’ve not got any thought process to go on, but here are my observations;
Kick – Very, very distorted. He’s combined VEC1 BD Distortion 56 & VEC1 BD Clubby 04 from Vengeance Essential Club Vol1. It’s a bit too much in my opinion – I imagine the distorted kick from Hanging Tree was the inspiration for this.
Bass – Repeating 2 bar patterm with variation in the 2nd bar.
Drums & Percs – Layered claps, 909 open hat, shaker, crashes, top loop – all pretty standard, but also a cow bell, which is good to see as I think elements like that are more prevalent in later Michael Bibi productions.
Sample – Taken from LL Cool J – Jack The Ripper (“Party people let me see if you can dance“) pitched up 3 semi-tones
Textures & FX – Laser shots, crowd noise and background ambience to fill out the track
Here is my take on what Sai Lika was suggesting. I toned down the kick drum considerably, and switched out the vocal sample, but apart, from that I used exactly the same cow bells, top loop and clap samples plus used my own crowd noise, lasers and additional percussions.
It’s not exactly breaking any new ground, but it’s solid enough. I really hooked on to the use of cow bells and went for a more latin feel with a repeating conga groove and lots of different percussion hits sitting in the background. Initially I wrote a custom trumpet motif with the Kotg M1 but decided not use it as it didn’t sound natural enough. I instead used a random sample from the Jungle Jungle – 1989 to 1999 Samplepack and layered it with a SoftString pad from the M1. The “C’mon” sample I lifted from Lil’ Louis & The World – Club Lonely (Latin Groove Mix) and the rest, as usual, come from the Zero-G – Datafiles.
Next up will be Dennis 97 – Tech House tutorial Ableton Live | Estilo Michael Bibi 😎 | Libreria +Template | 2021