It’s a bit of a shame that the abstract electronica genre isn’t thriving commercially the way it used to be. The heyday of labels like Warp Records and Planet Mu has long gone, and very few experimental electronica producers are making a living from their music.

That said, there’s a great wealth of absolutely amazing free electronica out there. I’d recommend any fan of electronic music to take a listen to the brilliant Bleepshow podcast for many fantastic examples. It’s a highly creative area, and one which needs a constant supply of fresh talent, so it’s a good time to get started!

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The ostinato pattern is a staple of modern music; across every genre you’ll find countless examples of pieces that at their core revolve around a single repeating ostinato pattern.

In this tutorial we’ll look at how to create an ostinato pattern from a simple outline, give it a unique and intriguing sound, and use this pattern as a basic building block for creating your own original compositions.

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Sometimes we spend hours, days, even months, struggling to find the perfect chord progression to suit the lyrics we’ve written. And then we find it, only to get bored sick of the same chords being repeated over, and over, and over again.

If you listen to some of the great songwriters, you’ll notice that the chorus progressions, if not all progressions in the song, are constantly being varied in both subtle and obvious ways. This tutorial will take you through a bunch of ways to vary up your chord progressions to retain not only your own interest, but your listeners’ interest as well.

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It can be hard to find a good synth plug-in, and there are plenty on the market that will have you wondering why you ever parted with your money. Fortunately, this list offers no such disappointments, because everything on it is totally free!

These are all VST synths—while some developers may offer ports for other plug-in architectures, most don’t, so if your workstation of choice doesn’t support VST you might have a hard time finding something you can use here. That said, flick through the list and to each developer’s website and see if they have something that’ll work for you.

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Livecut by Smartelectronix is a VST beatslicer effect. It rearranges the incoming audio in real-time and is a great tool for generating drum n’ bass-style drum fills from existing audio or VST drum loops.

However, the output can seem a little unpredictable. In this tutorial we’re going to look at using Livecut to generate some fills from an audio drum loop. We’ll edit the results to create something a little more subtle.

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In this tutorial we are going to use Ableton Live’s innovative follow actions to create generative music in the form of some electronic wind chimes. When writing generative music we look at composition from a different angle. Instead of composing melodies and writing arrangements, we define a number of fixed parameters and let the music write itself! Wind chimes are prehaps the most common example of generative music—a term coined by ambient pioneer Brain Eno.

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Reason is used by musicians across many genres; not just electronica artists, but rockers, folk artists and pop bands, too. I know one punk rock band that sold pretty well a few years back using completely programmed drums, and surprisingly nobody ever noticed—I’ll spare their reputation the damage and keep the band’s name to myself.

The point is that Reason is flexible and useful for all musicians. If you’ve got an itch to ditch your drummer, here’s how to program a rock beat using ReDrum, Reason’s resident drum machine.

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