Maxim Lany

The Belgian producer shows us how he builds a groove from scratch

Belgian beat boffin Maxim Lany has made waves in the dance music world with his groove-driven takes on progressive, tech, and deep house, and scored releases with Bedrock Records, King Street Sounds, and Armada Electronics Experiments. In this special edition of The Track, Maxim invites us into his studio to give us a masterclass on creating an infectious tech house groove using Ableton Live and a combination of hardware and software instruments.

In the video you use Live’s Arpeggiator MIDI effect on a synth track to make its playback less predictable. Do you have other techniques for generating happy accidents?

“This is something that might seem like an obvious thing to do in retrospect, but it took me years to discover! Sometimes when you’re looping a project in Live you might have the loop markers set up at arbitrary points, and you might hear the track drop at a different section and think ‘woah, this isn’t bad at all. I should drop like this because otherwise, I would drop with the whole thing, the crash and the hi-hat and everything...’

“When that happens now I make sure not to delete those accidents. I copy-paste that whole scene and refer to it when I’m arranging the project. From that sort of thing I learned that I should look into more unorthodox ways to create music.

“For instance, everybody says it’s really important to have an EQ before compression. I tend to just play with those things and some of the effects that might not be ‘correct’. This is how you get a broader idea of what might be possible.”