How to make Melodic Prog House Like Colorize - Monster Tunes | Live Electronic Music Tutorial 343

How to Make Melodic Progressive House Like Colorize & Monster Tunes

In this live tutorial, producer Cass builds a moody, slightly dark melodic progressive house track in Logic Pro — channelling the old-school progressive vibe with sharp keys and intricate melodies, dressed up with modern processing. From a simple drum beat to a chunky bassline, lush pads, an organ groove, layered percussion and a smooth lead, this session walks you through the entire first phase of writing a Colorize-style banger from scratch.

What you’ll learn

• Laying down a simple four-on-the-floor progressive house drum foundation
• Designing a chunky, sustained bassline in Alchemy and shaping it with the filter
• Building a chord pad and sidechaining a big reverb bus to the kick
• Adding forward motion with a velocity-driven organ groove
• Creating an evolving ambient pad and layering low/high percussion thumps and shakers
• Writing a smooth, dark lead melody and prepping the project as a finished template

1. Start with a simple progressive house beat

Cass begins with a basic four-on-the-floor drum beat using Logic’s Synthetic Basshouse kit, dropping it onto a track and color-coding the parts. He extends the loop length (Control-Command-R) so there’s enough space to play the bass and the rest of the arrangement over the top. Keep it deliberately simple here — the goal is just a foundation to write against.

2. Design a chunky bass in Alchemy

For the bass he reaches for his all-time favorite synth, Alchemy. He auditions presets looking for a chunky, “chuggy” feel, rejecting one for having too much distortion before settling on a cleaner version. He wants more decay and sustain, so he digs into the filter to dial it in. A key trick: overlapping notes so the attack isn’t re-triggered on the next note, which gives the bassline a smoother, legato flow. For non-Logic users, he resamples these sounds so you can play the same notes in your own DAW’s sampler with the processing baked in.

3. Drop in a chord pad

Next he creates a new channel and starts with a simple chord pad, browsing Logic’s pad category and randomly auditioning sounds to spark ideas. His advice for producers who only dabble: when an idea comes, don’t try to make it perfect — follow the flow and keep going. Start simple, then expand the chords later.

4. Sidechain a reverb bus to the kick

To add depth he sends the pad to a reverb bus using Silver Verb on a grandiose, full-wet, big-room setting. On that bus he inserts a compressor and sets up a sidechain triggered by the kick drum, so the reverb ducks every time the kick hits. He also high-passes the bus, cutting everything under roughly 500 Hz so the wet signal adds vibe without muddying the low end.

5. Add groove with an organ

To push the track forward he layers in an organ rather than a B3 or club sound, looking for something richer and different. He plays a low part, adds juice and removes the cheesy decay. Crucially, he varies the velocity across the notes so the part flows in and out, and because the patch is velocity-sensitive this subtly changes the feel. The organ gets its own kick-triggered sidechain compressor (stereo, around a 4:1 ratio) to sit it a bit further back in the mix.

6. Build an evolving ambient pad

Using the same keys already in the track, Cass adds a long, drony background ambience in Alchemy — which he praises for its mad soundscapes and effects. He picks an evolving sound, lengthens it so it revolves through the track, and brings in more air. Again he cuts the lows to keep the mid-lows clear, tucks it in at a low level, and sends it to the reverb bus for extra space.

7. Layer percussion and shakers

With the kick boosted for a punchy low-end thump, he adds percussion to build the groove’s foundation: low thumps (usually on the last beat), high thumps and congas, dialing back their intensity and using overlays for variation. A delay on the congas makes them richer and swirlier, with the lows cut so the delay doesn’t bleed into the mix. A light shaker layer on top, also with a touch of delay, drives the track forward.

8. Write the lead melody and finish the template

The hardest part, by his own admission, is the lead. He chooses a smooth, dark key/lead patch to sit on top of the production, auditioning several sounds — including a twangy and a fluty option — and tweaking the reverb until the groove feels complete. From here he turns the project into a four-to-five-minute template, with versions for Ableton Live and Logic Pro, before moving on to phase two (arrangement, added elements and mixing) and phase three (drum FX, mood, mixing and a mastering chain).

Get the project file: Want the full Logic, Ableton and FL Studio templates plus the sampled sounds to recreate this exact track? Download the template →