34 Ableton and Studio Tips Learned in San Holo’s “One Thing” Tutorial

I am so grateful when great producers, show you themselves, how they make their songs in Ableton. In the video below, San Holo shows us how he made the trap future bass track “One Thing”. This video has expanded my Ableton production techniques by a bazillion. It left me so excited and inspired to make more music, I thought I would share it with you. Also, I listed a lot of the tips and the gear he talks about using below the video for a helpful reference.

↓↓↓ 34 Tips List Below ↓↓↓

Please check out more of San Holo’s music and videos here, he is an incredible artist:

San Holo’s Website

San Holo’s Instagram

San Holo’s Youtube Channel

San Holo’s Spotify Channel

If you like this video, he also worked with Cymatics to make a turorial on one of his most famous songs “Light” in Ableton. Check it out here: San Holo’s Ableton Tutorial on how he made “Light”

You can check out Cymatics awesome samples and presets here: Cymatics

34 Tips Learned in San Holo’s “One Thing”

1. Play with pitching up the acoustic guitar
2. Layer acoustic sounds with synth sounds
3. He used Kontakt for sitar sounds
4. 4:48 how to make dull sharp attack synth in Massive
5. Pan the same sounds hard left and right but changed slightly to make sound huge and wide
6. Use a Yamaha VSS30 to sample voice and play lo-fi sound
7. Edit all the click and pops out of vocals, he really cleans them up
8. Double vocals
9. Cut parts of vocals from other vocal takes and swap them around
10. Use a Soundtoys Echoboy to add delay to vocals
11. He likes vocals loud with highs eq boosted
12. He likes to use the Ableton Sampler to sample his own sounds, uses the glide.
13. Add the Ableton Multiband Dynamics compressor “OTT” to a lot of sounds.
14. Uses Cableguys Volume Shaper for the side-chain sound, he adds it to his lead melody
15. He likes the kicks very short and dry
16. He uses one punchy kick
17. Layers multiple snares, around 5
18. He doesn’t line up snare layers perfectly, so they sound fuller
19. He Uses a Saw Synth in the drop with a pitch envelope to glide into the notes
20. He uses Retro Color RC-20 on guitars to get the lo-fi tape wobble sound
21. He uses “OTT” on vocal chopped up samples
22. Play with changing the formants when you pitch up samples to change the tonality of them
23. 22:07 makes a lead sound in NI Massive
24. When making sounds in massive, add real high pitch out of tune saws on top of the sound. It gives the metallic sound
25. In Massive, under the voicing tab add more “unison” voices to make it sound larger
26. In Massive add an LFO to the pitch to create warble. Set to around .50.
27. When Mastering, he sends all tracks without a kick and snare to a bus, the kick to a buss and a snare to a buss, then those three to a mix buss.
28. He uses IK Multimedai T Racks Classic Clipper on master
29. He uses a Waves linear multiband compressor, Izotope Maxamizer, which is in Ozone, on setting IRC3 on master
30. He takes out the lows on the sides around 100 hertz using Ozones mid side eq
31. He uses Izotopes Ozones harmonic exciter
32. Makes the lows mono in the Ozone stereo Imager
33. He uses a Waves L2 Limiter after all of the ozone
34. Used The Giant Kontact piano sound library

Again, please check out more of San Holo’s music and videos here:

San Holo’s Website

San Holo’s Instagram

San Holo’s Youtube Channel

San Holo’s Spotify Channel