What’s useful about Templates?

DAW template projects for software like Ableton Live are becoming more and more popular with producers, and its easy to see why. Buying a template gives you access to a fully mixed and mastered project, complete with drum racks, samples, synth presets, MIDI information, automation, effects and more. So how exactly can DAW templates be used to help you out with your own productions?

As soon as you open up a template in your DAW, a fully completed track is at your disposal. By swapping out drum sounds, synth sounds and loops you can start adding your own flavour to the track right away, and begin shaping the sounds to your taste. As the processing is already on the track, its extremely easy and quick to get good sounding results right away.

Reverse Engineering

Templates also offer a great learning opportunity. What better way to get an insight into how a track is produced than to have a project file right at your fingertips! 

With templates, you can easily deconstruct a track to learn how the different elements interact with each other, how the effects are used to get a great sounding mix, and how a track is structured to create effective builds, breakdowns and drops. This is a great way to learn new techniques that you can apply to your own productions.

Taking Parts Elsewhere

One of the great things about templates is that you can use as much, or indeed as little of them as you want for your own tunes. Need a decent mastering chain? Simply copy an existing one from a template. Stuck for a catchy melody? Copy over the MIDI info from a template you like and tweak accordingly. It's this flexibility that’s making templates a huge hit with producers.

Where can I find Templates?

Virtually all Producertech courses come with software projects, which are sometimes blank templates for creating content, such as drums, grooves, entire arrangements and so on, and sometimes completed projects, which can be used in the same context, e.g. deleting content where required and then 'saving as...' to create your own template with all the time-saving features you need to get going with a session. You can also purchase templates on website like Loopmasters. The advantage with templates on the Producertech website, however, are that you have a tutor explaining all the material in the project, so you not only get hold of the project, but acquire a good understanding of how to use it as well.

For an example of a template in action, check the video below, where senior tutor Rob Jones shares some of his tips and tricks using Defazed’s Future House and EDM Template in Live: 

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