Layering Masterclass 3: Lead Layers

The first thing I focus on is the octave of the lead and the melody. The main lead is going to play around in one octave range. If you made your melody in D and you're not comfortable with that position, feel free to transpose it, to A for example. Then transpose the whole song to A.

The power of your melody really depends on the range you're in. If your melody is too high, it doesn't matter what you add. It's still going to sound a little bit crackly.

The first lead I always include, no matter what I'm making, is a very detuned lead with a lot of voices. It doesn't need to have any character. It's just there to fill up the sound. I open up 16 voices, detune B a little bit more and put it one octave up, so we also hit that higher octave.

After that, don't make it a surgical process. A lot of people focus on what they have in the lows and the highs. Just cram it together and see how it sounds. As long as the processing is right, it's going to sound pretty good.

It really helps in these kinds of layers to have a lead that isn't detuned. Mine is a very straightforward saw with just a little bit of movement, slightly distorted.

You want to add this because it adds a lot of clarity and punch through in the whole layer. It doesn't have detune on the left and the right, because that adds phasing.

For the raw lead I add a lot of distortion. But if you try to go into a pluck now, nothing really happens. It has so much distortion that it distorts the pluck back into a lead.

So you want a pluck filter after the distortion. I take MG Low 12, replicate the settings with envelope 2 and the cutoff knob, and remove them from the first filter. Now it doesn't matter how much I distort it. The first filter becomes a pre-filter, a band pass on Band 24 with LFO 1 on the cutoff so it moves around a bit.

Always the parametric EQ first, on high pass, order eight, to completely cut the sub. Make sure you don't cut too much though, because then you're thinning out your leads. You do want quite some low mids. They have a lot of body and character.

Then compression. Fruity Compressor is totally fine, with the threshold around minus 12, ratio around 4, attack 15 and release 200. It takes 15 milliseconds for the compression to hit, and that generates the spike and the tightness of the sound. Then a dynamic EQ to make it crisp and an inflator for a little bit more power. That's literally it.