MusicRadar

Felix Da Housecat's music has a strong electro influence.

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Blending electronic instrumentation and old-school funk, electro was born in the USA in the early 1980s. Now you can become a master of the genre with MusicRadar's essential selection of tips…

1. Whether you're making electro-influenced pop, rock, or dance music (á la Felix Da Housecat), full, expressive synthesized sounds are of the utmost importance. When creating your lead sounds, pitch or pulse width modulation can add a human (or at least humanoid) touch. By tying these functions to your MIDI controller's mod wheel, you can add appropriate emphasis when needed in good old 80s fashion.

2. Synth leads can be thickened up by adding more voices or by using unison functions. If your synthesizer has a built-in chorus effect, you may find using this is more efficient than applying a separate chorus plug-in, and could well yield better results. If your lead sound still requires additional beefiness, consider adding another voice tuned to an octave down.

3. Using envelopes can add a lot of character to your tracks. Try employing a filter envelope to create punchy bass sounds, or use a frequency modulation envelope to get harsher, more abstract effects that are perfect for punchy leads.

4. Many purportedly electronic acts expose their Luddite roots by using the distinctly un-robotic sounds of the guitar. Even if you're no axe hero, you can emulate this behaviour by running your synth through an overdrive plug-in. Saw or pulse waves tend to work best – just apply a bit of chorus, overdrive and delay or reverb and you're good to go.

5. Add that 'stretchy' quality to your saw wave-based basses and leads using a band-reject filter at about 100Hz. Turn up the resonance until it sounds suitably robotic.

6. For tearing synthesized sounds without an all-out rock flavour, use a synth with its own EQ, and turn up some of the bands so that they overload in a pleasant manner. You may find you have to do a bit of experimenting, as different patches require different EQ boosts for optimal effect. In addition, cutting certain bands helps bring out the sound too.

7. For those synthy atmospherics, you can't beat a bit of band-pass filtering. Try taking a regular low-pass filtered bass patch, changing the filter type to band-pass, and adding some delay or reverb. You can also turn up the filter's resonance or alter the decay time of the filter envelope for different effects.

8. Even if your synth doesn't have an arpeggiator, you can still create basic gated riffs using a pulse or square wave to modulate volume or cutoff frequency. This also means that you can use envelope or key-synced LFOs to sweep an effect over a whole passage without it restarting on each note.