Home Beat Making Tutorials How To Make A 303 Sound For Dance Music
How To Make A 303 Sound For Dance Music

How To Make A 303 Sound For Dance Music

Considering the fact that dance music will never vanish from worldwide charts while holding top positions on a constant basis today we decided to take on that ground and break down the signature 303 sound, a good fit for all the Dance sub-genders and not only. Good think to know how to craft when making the beat.

This type of sound lays on a saw wave and 3 oscillators but the trick here is to get all the semitones right before processing your file while finishing making beats. Let’s see how this goes in our tutorial below.

When loading your plugin set to craft the 303 sound or begin your making the beat process, make sure you set the present of your choice at -24 semitones to reach the right intensity. That is after you laid everything on a saw wave and selected 3 oscillators to work upon. Up next you should consider adding a bit of distortion  but drop the volume level up a bit to have a better grip on the settings. Find and load a Parametric EQ and boost the range at 2.8 kHz with a range of 10+dB and a bandwidth of 64%. By now you the backbone of your 303 sound so let’s see what should we do next while making beats.

Open up the Piano Roll of your DAW used when making beats and place a few slide-notes so you can work around your settings. Be careful here because slide notes are not the same as normal notes and basically they’re holding 1/3 of the lenght so do that instead of a full length note. Go ahead, create a sequence and play around with it for as much as you want. Don’t forget to add a few ghost notes (key process to making the beat) and diversify everything as much as you can. We don’t want to go dull on this one because Dance music has a lot of energy in it so don’t disappoint your public.

Get back to the EQ and enable the Filter envelope for some filter action. Guessing you know where this will go but feel free to customize this as much as you want but don’t overdo the whole process. This is about it and you can place this as a leading melody in pretty much any Dance sub-gender so if you’re creative enough you should have quite a innovative boost with the 303 sound but either way this is a big when no matter what gender or sub-gender you’re targeting while making the beat.

Feel free to post your examples below after everything is done because we’re more than willing to check some final results and see how your custom 303 sounds turned out after all. Get to work and good luck on crafting your music! Get to making beats!

Video tutorial below:

Alex Moruz Alex is a keen music aficionado who has written and published acclaimed opinion pieces on modern music genres such as techno, hip hop, rap and new age. He is a musician by training and has co-produced several records.