How to create easy, free electronic dance music

In this step-by-step tutorial, we show you Create EDM for free with a couple of synths and a drum machine…

Step 1

Electronic music is, of course, easy to create with our synths and drum machines. We’ll start off with u-he’s Podolski, a fine synth for all aspects of dance, but the second preset – HS Boggle Beat Dynamic – gives us a great riff to get started.

Step 2

In order to change that preset sound a little and add some movement to your track, open whatever automation features you have on your DAW (in our case, it’s pressing A in Logic) and automate the filter frequency of Podolski. We’ve opened it up gradually to raise the sound as it loops.

Step 3

Podolski is supplying an instant melody riff and we want a bass sound to underpin it. Time to load in Helm, which is a great looking synth and a big-sounding one at that. Select the CM Electro Bass preset – see what we mean?!

Step 4

Record a riff to underpin Podolski. In our case, we’re only looping around four bars just to show you how quickly a dance track can be produced for free, but already it’s sounding big, a little too big in Helm’s case… so you’ll want to nudge back its volume.

Step 5

Now we want to add that most famous of dance kicks, a 909, courtesy of the plug-in that does just 909s: Synsonic BD-909. Record a kick at the start of each beat, so you get the famous four-to-the-floor kick pattern.

Step 6

You’ll want to quantise both this kick and the Podolski arpeggiation for them to lock in time together, but now you have the basics of a dance tune with a classic combination of drum and synth sounds, all for free.