Luuk van Dijk shares his top 5 studio tips

6 May 2019

Young Dutch talent Luuk van Dijk steps up to deliver his studio tips. He’s recently unveiled his remix for Rossi, available now on No Art here. Luuk goes into great detail here and discusses sampling, swing, making time to collaborate with other artists and more. One of his standout shows of the Summer for Luuk will be his b2b performance alongside ANOTR at the 16th edition of Free Your Mind Festival on 1st June in Arnhem.

1. Make templates!

For me it’s very important that when I want to make music, I can start right away! So whatever is in my head I can draw it down real quick. Maybe that sounds lazy, haha! But I notice when things in my production process go slow or don’t go my way I get easily annoyed, and you don’t want bad vibes in your studio! 😉 I work in Logic Pro 9. but in other DAW’s you can also make template projects, so when you open your DAW everything is in the right place and the settings you like.

When I open Logic you’ll see:

  • –  Samplers, 1x KICKS, 1x HATS, 1x, CLAPS, 1x SNARES
  • –  Bass plugin: Rob Papen’s Subboombass, my fave bass plugin around. This channel goes through a send with already a sidechain plugin on it (LFOTool)
  • –  All the channels -10db, because you don’t want your channels to clip.
  • –  126BPM tempo to start with, depends on the type of track I’m making of course.These settings work perfect for me, as you still have enough freedom to make anything you want and your production process is way faster.

 

2. Sampling
I sample a lot of drums from older house, techno & hip-hop tracks. The trick is to make it unrecognizable and to make it sound unique for your track. Also a lot of producers are hating on loops but I think it’s almost the same as sampling. The only difference is if you sample something well known and don’t make it sound your way, there’s a chance you get sued haha, so be careful with that! 😉

If you’re going to use loops or you sampled some drums from another track, there are some tricks to make it sound different or cooler.

You can try to cut the loops, put all the one shots in a sampler and make another groove of it. 
 And if u have a little bit less inspiration, you can use plugins that will make it sound different. Plugins I use are:

– Fabfilter Timeless, epic plugin for creating weird delays.
– D16 Sigmund, also a really cool plugin for creating delays, with super epic presets. – Fabfilter Volcano, unique and basic filters.

Also a little trick I use a lot is to sample old Hip-Hop breaks and put an envelope or gate on it to make it more stripped down/minimalistic.

 

3. Swings
The groove/swing of your track is very important, if some elements are too “tight” (so with no swing at all), while others have a lot of swing, it will sound weird. Not everyone will hear it, but it will most likely give problems in the groove of your track and if there’s something important about house, techno or tech-house it’s the groove. It’s all about the timing!

In the piano roll you can easily quantize your notes in the swing you want. I mostly use 16B or 16D if I’m making house and just 16A if I’m making more techy stuff.

You see what it does with the timing of the notes or the drumloop when I change the quantize timing from 16A to 16D?

 

4. There’s no right or wrong.
The beauty of making music is that there is no right or wrong. The more creative the better. Even what I said earlier about swings and grooves, if you make something that has the weirdest groove, containing elements with swing and without, it doesn’t matter. If it sounds dope, why not?!

I also get a lot of questions about my mixing and mastering process, but the truth is, most of the time I don’t know what I’m doing. I only have a limiter on the master to make it a little louder but every track from I make sounds different depending on the mix process during the making of the track. A big part of my process in making music is just doing weird stuff and sometimes even tweaking random knobs to find a sound that I like. Get out of your comfort zone sometimes and make stuff you like, you are the musician, not anyone else!

5. Studiotime with other artists.
I learned a lot of stuff from other producers, just making music with other people in different environments or other DAW’s will teach you a lot more. Everyone has their own tricks and ways of producing and there might be something that you were just looking for to apply to your music. If things in the studio aren’t working out the way you want them to, ask other artists to help and don’t take it too hard on yourself. We’re all just musicians, not doctors 😉