ARTFX Releases Video Tutorial and Ableton Live Project for Creating Neurofunk Drum & Bass

 Kaj van den Oord is an accomplished producer and video tutorial creator based in the Netherlands. He has been producing music for the past 12 years and his YouTube Channel has over 30,000 loyal subscribers. Each Tuesday, he releases a brand new video tutorial along with an Ableton Live session you can download from Splice. Sign up for a free Splice account, download the project and watch the video below to get started. Also read on to learn more about Kaj, some of his favorite production tools and workflow techniques.


Splice – How long have you been producing music?

ARTFX – I started producing electronic music in 2000 on an old computer with MAGIX and FruityLoops 1.5, nothing serious just having fun. Then from 2003 I became hooked and started becoming a lot more serious with my music, so let’s say I’m now making music for about 12 years. During those 12 years I’ve had moments where I didn’t produce any music at all, but I always came back to producing in the end. I just need to make music. 🙂

Splice – What inspires you to share your music and educate newer producers?

ARTFX – When I started out making music there was no YouTube yet and so there were no video tutorials about music production at that time, I learned everything myself by reading on music production blogs and forums and by simply spending a lot of time practicing my production skills. Times have changed now, there are thousands of tutorials out there that can help you to get better but to me there was one problem: the majority of all the tutorials on YouTube aim at the basics of music production and not at the more advanced stuff that most of us actually want to learn. That’s why I started doing tutorials, I want to share the knowledge that I have about advanced music production techniques to other musicians who are just starting out.

Splice – How has Splice changed your workflow?

ARTFX – I run a show on YouTube called “Tutorial Tuesday” in which I make a track from start to end in a particular genre. In the first two seasons I never gave away the project file of the Ableton project, even though a lot of viewers asked for that. Starting with season 3 I’m now using Splice to share the project file to my viewers so they can learn from it.

Splice – What are some of your favorite plugins or virtual instruments?

ARTFX – This could become a long list but I’ll try to keep it short, I use a lot of different plugins. First of all I’m an Ableton guy, so anything that comes with Ableton Suite 9 will be used by me, but regarding third party plugins I can name a few. The most used synths in my projects are Native Instruments Massive, U-he Zebra, Xfer Records Serum, Rob Papen Predator and Sylenth1. Those are just a few because my full collection of synths is much bigger than that, naming them all would take ages. Effects-wise I would say anything by Sound Toys is great, their delay and saturation plugins are amazing. I’ve also fell in love with the new Looperator by Sugar Bytes which I got like last week or so, damn that plugin is amazing!

Splice – Any advice you want to share for up and coming producers?

ARTFX – Knowledge is key to becoming better as a music producer, but knowledge alone will get you nowhere… So many times I get questions or emails from viewers who have watched a video of mine but then they realize their end-result doesn’t sound as good as my version did, they ask me about it and I’ll always ask you the same question: “How much time have you spend practicing the technique?” Usually they’ve just followed along with the video and that’s it. The thing is that when you want to become good at something you need more than just knowledge, you need skill and experience to actually put that knowledge to use. It’s the same as when going to school and your teacher explains some subject during class, but then you need to do homework in which you put that knowledge to use. Just watching a tutorial is only half of the learning process, practice is what makes you perfect a technique or skill.

January 9, 2015