A lot of producers buy templates and only use them one way: open, listen, close. That's like buying a restaurant cookbook and only reading the introductions. Templates are one of the most underrated tools in a producer's toolbox, and once you start using them properly, you'll wonder how you ever worked without them.
I'm Mikas, founder of WeMakeDanceMusic. Over the last decade we've built a library of over 16,000 templates across every major DAW: Ableton Live, Logic Pro, FL Studio, and Cubase. We've watched producers use them in ways we never expected, and the best ones have become signed releases, film scores, game soundtracks, and sold-out live sets.
Here are twelve of the ways that actually move the needle. I've grouped them into three phases: learn, create, and release. Pick the phase you're in and start there.
Phase 1: Learn faster
The fastest way to get better at production is to reverse-engineer a finished track by someone who already knows what they're doing. Templates turn that process from "good luck guessing" into a guided tour.
1. Understand your DAW in one session
Opening a finished project file teaches you more in an afternoon than a week of YouTube tutorials. You see how a pro producer organises tracks, names busses, colour-codes groups, and routes sends. You see which plug-ins they reach for and which they avoid. This is the single best way to go from "knowing the buttons" to "feeling the DAW."
If you've just switched from Ableton to Logic or Logic to Cubase, one template will teach you the new environment faster than any manual.
2. Study MIDI melodies, chords, and basslines
Every pro template comes with the MIDI exposed. That means you can open the piano roll on the lead, the bass, the pads, and see exactly how the track was voiced. Which scale? Which chord inversions? Where does the bass land relative to the kick? How does the topline sit against the chord progression?
This is the kind of music theory that actually sticks, because you're learning it from a finished record, not an abstract exercise.
3. Import entire channels into your own projects
This one is underrated. You can drag an entire channel (synth, effects chain, automation, everything) from a template into your own session. Suddenly that lead sound you've been chasing for a week is in your track, complete with the reverb, the delay, the sidechain routing, and the subtle EQ moves the original producer made.
Think of it as a masterclass in sound design you can copy-paste.
4. Study the mastering chain
Most of our templates include a finished mix bus chain on the master output. EQ, multiband compression, saturation, limiting, all dialled in to release-grade loudness. Export that chain, save it as a preset, and you've got a professional mastering starting point you can reuse on every track you make from that point forward.
Phase 2: Create from them
Studying is one thing. Making new music is the whole point. Here's how to turn a template from a teaching tool into your next release.
5. Remix what you love
Pick a template whose vibe inspires you. Strip out everything you don't need. Keep the elements that grabbed you. Build the rest around them. Congratulations, you've just made your first remix, and you've done it without starting from a blank session.
This is how many of our signed artists got their first releases. They didn't write from zero. They wrote on top of a foundation they loved.
6. Keep the drums, write new melodies
Some of the best tracks I've heard from our community started by deleting every melodic element in a template and keeping only the drums and low end. Drums in a pro template are usually the best part, expensively processed, perfectly sidechained, sitting exactly right. Why rebuild them when you can inherit them?
Write your own melodies, your own chords, your own hook. The result is a song that's fully yours but rides on a rhythm section you could never have programmed from scratch.
7. Build mash-ups that actually sit right
Mash-ups are hard because the two source tracks fight each other harmonically and rhythmically. Templates solve half the problem: you control every element, so you can transpose, retime, EQ-pocket, and sidechain until the two sources feel like they were always meant to be together.
Start with an acapella you love, drop it onto a template at the right key and tempo, and the mash-up practically writes itself.
8. Export stems and start fresh in any DAW
Render every track in the template as an audio stem. Drag those stems into any other DAW, any other production setup, any other collaborator's session. Now the template is a reference track you can mix, rearrange, or layer your own parts onto, without being locked to the original project file's format.
This is how pro remixers work. The template is just the raw material.
Phase 3: Release and perform
The last four ways are about what templates can become: finished releases, live shows, syncs, and teaching material.
9. Build a unique live performance
Combine three or four templates into one live set. Launch sections on the fly in Ableton's session view, trigger cues in Logic's arrangement, automate transitions in FL Studio's playlist. Your live set becomes a curated journey through multiple productions you didn't have to write from scratch.
Many of our customers use templates for touring. One producer told us he plays a 90-minute set built entirely from templates he reworked. Nobody in the crowd knows or cares. They're too busy dancing.
10. Video game music
Game studios need a lot of music, and they need it fast. Templates let you deliver in days what would normally take weeks. Pull a template that matches the game's mood, strip out the elements that don't fit the brief, write around what remains, export in the format the studio needs (stems, loops, adaptive layers, whatever).
Every template in our catalog comes with an exclusive buyout option, which means you can guarantee the game studio that the music they licensed will never appear anywhere else. That's a contract-winner.
11. Media synchronisation
Film, TV, ads, YouTube, podcasts, apps. Every one of these needs music that clears legally and fits visually. Templates are cleared by default, customisable on demand, and priced to fit sync budgets. You can rework a template to hit a scene's emotional beats without paying a composer for a bespoke score.
Also: stems. If your edit changes (and it always does), you can re-cut the music to fit without having to re-record anything.
12. Teach music production
If you run a class or a course, templates are your secret weapon. Pick a project in the genre you want to teach, walk students through how it was built, and let them take the same project home to experiment. They learn faster because they're not starting from zero. You teach more because you're not wasting time explaining basics.
Several music schools we work with use templates as the core of their curriculum. One instructor told us it cut his lesson prep time in half and doubled the quality of student output.
Where to start
If you're new to templates, pick a genre you already love, buy one template, and spend an afternoon with it. Just open it. Click around. Mute tracks one at a time. Read the MIDI. You'll get ideas for things you never thought to try.
If you've been using templates for a while, try one of the techniques in this list that you haven't used yet. Export a mastering chain. Build a mash-up. Pitch a game studio. The templates in our library are tools, and like any tool, they get more valuable the more uses you find for them.
We've got over 16,000 templates in the library, with new ones every week. Start browsing: wemakedancemusic.com.
May the sounds be with you.
