Get powerful pop sounds without shelling out

You think you’ve got what it takes to climb the charts? It’s surprising how little you need to build a playlistfriendly banger…

While garnering the respect of other artists, and your own simple artistic satisfaction are reasons enough to make music, you’d be lying to yourself if you didn’t admit that achieving commercial success was always lurking somewhere in the back of your mind. While ‘pop’ as a genre is less consistent than the other styles we’ve honed in on, there are some general aspects that you’re going to need to think about when aiming at the charts. (Remember the charts? Whatever happened to them…)

Firstly you’re going to need to study the musicological structure of the best pop songs. Writing an effective pop song is all about the development and dynamics, centring on emphasising your big hook(s), how you use tension and release to build anticipation, as well as crafting an effective core theme on which to base your song. You’re going to want an impactful lead vocal at the centre of your mix, and it’s increasingly popular these days to pitchshift, warp or robotise it. You’ll want bright instrumentation, strong beats and compression that lets your track stand out among the many thousands of other hopeful hitmakers.

For our powerful pop studio, we’ve put together some of the tools that we think will stand you in the best stead. Firstly, Presonus’ Studio One 5 Artist is a feature-packed DAW aimed at writing, with unlimited tracks and a whopping suite of virtual instruments.

We’ve also included some robust, yet affordable mini-monitors, a vocal processing suite par excellence and a means of generating some seriously thumping beats. As before, we’ve also considered which item from our buffet of free plugins would be most beneficial for the pop producer. Then again, with the assortment of characterful synths, EQ and mixing tools and more within said suite, you’d be wise to nab it all.

Here then, is our power pop studio, with everything you really need to get started on a smash hit.