David Lindmer's 'Altered State' EP dropped on Nora En Pure's Purified Records last month, and it's dark and brooding progressive house melodies and pounding techno percussions percussions have caught the attention of heavyweights from across the industry. 

Read Magnetic's Full Review Of David Lindmer's EP Here

The 'Altered States' EP sees the Purified Signee honing in on a sound that is seen an incredible rise in popularity over the past five years. As such, competition to carve out a sound that is unique is tougher than ever.

Producing amazing progressive house and techno takes nuance, texture, and an acute attention to detail to make the track shine. 

And because these details often go unnoticed to the untrained ear, we decided it was time to have David on to have him do the next edition of How It Was Made.

My Moog Sub 37 which forms the bass line and gives the track that warm analog groove. What I like to do with the Sub37 is put it into 'init patch' mode then usually just using a single oscillator I will play around with the ADSR and the Arpeggiator section until I find a groove I like.

Also In this because the Sub37 does not have any onboard FX, I ran the synth through Ableton and into a 1/8th dotted delay with some low-cut reverb. 

Amazingly I recorded everything into audio in Ableton in one take, just one of those days where everything clicked!

Learn more about Moog's iconic synth here.

For soft synths I have the 'Push 2' which makes everything much more hands-on and tactile with regards to automation. 

For my hardware I don't often record the automation via MIDI into the DAW, it's too much hassle and never really works out that well as you are forever going back and fiddling with it. I tend to just record 4 or 5 takes to audio in Ableton and use the best one. 

My general rule when I am messing around with the hardware synths is that I am always recording, so if I do something great by accident then I can go back and use it in the track somehow.

It depends on the track - I have a big library of about 2,000 different drum samples. I also have a folder of sampled drums from various tracks that I use as a 'groove library' where I can extract the groove and apply it to my custom drum rack in Ableton. 

There are some great sample packs out there available for drum hits though, I can recommend 'Keinemusik Werkzeug by David Mayer"

You can purchase this sample pack on Keinemusik's website here.

The lead actually has 4 different layers in this track. But I will talk about the main layer of the lead. On that I used the analog wavetables from the Prophet 6 layered with some white noise. Fed those into Serum as I am pretty comfortable using the various modulation and automation options in there. 

Then I added a Decapitator from SoundToys which gives the sound that grit. Then I added an Echoboy, 1/2 dotted delay in parallel. An imager after that as the sound was getting too wide for my tastes so I made it a bit more mono. 

Then some sidechain compression to the kick, a glue compressor that I pushed pretty hard and finally some EQ cutting out the low to allow room for the bass.

Check Out More In-depth Guides On SoundToys' Powerful Plugins Here

It's a good question, it's very hard to say when a track is finished and I kind of have to force myself to move on as I am a bit of a perfectionist by nature. I have a rule that if I am on a roll with a track I will stay up all night and make sure I arrange and finish it so it's in a place where it's close to sending off as a demo. 

I also mix and master my tracks myself so I tend to get it into an acceptable format then I send it off to some trusted producer friends as well as mix engineers who usually give me feedback within a couple of days. I write all their feedback down, sit on it for a week and then have another crack at finishing it. That is usually the point where I feel comfortable that it is ready to send out.

I wanna give a little shout out to my friend Guido. He is an incredible mix engineer and a lot of what I have learned about mixing is from him. I will always send tracks to him first to check before I send anything out as he has an incredible ear and a fantastic listening space. 

You can find him by searching for @catsandbeats on Instagram.

Learn How You Can Submit Your Next Demo To Purified Here

Now that you know a few things that go into a track that's well produced enough to get signed by Nora En Pure and supported by artists on big labels like Dynamic and Afterlife, you can now start applying what you've learned to your next track.

If you're still hungry for more melodic house and techno productions, we got you! 

Learn How To Produce Music Like Nora En Pure In Our Latest Guide

Until then, you can keep Up With More Updates From David: Website – SoundCloud – Instagram 

Managing Editor at Magnetic Magazine - Former Marketing Manager at the Hyperbits Masterclass - Writer, Content Strategist, Music Producer, and Record Label Manager