Making Kaeya’s musical elements in Cubase

Gavin creates throwback rave vibes with some contemporary plugins and processing techniques

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The main stab sound in Kaeya comes from Loopmasters’ Khords ROMpler plugin, specifically the ‘Pike’ preset. The filter Cutoff and Resonance parameters are automated to gradually increase the sound’s intensity over the course of the track, dropping back down again at the start of each section.

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The vocals are a sample that was originally at house tempo which are already close to the Rage Mix of Kaeya’s 127BPM tempo. “For the DnB mix and 155BPM mix I had to do a lot of timestretching,” Gavin notes. Gavin boosts the mid-range and top of the vocal with EQ, and slathers them with delay.

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For the breakdown vocal section, Gavin creates a pitched delay effect where he manually places the ‘delayed’ copies of the vocal which are pitchshifted down using Cubase’s real-time pitchshifting algorithm. “It gives the vocal an effect that rolls quite nicely,” he enthuses.

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When the beats kick in post-breakdown, a sustained sub bass from Loopmasters’ Bass Master is introduced. “This plays the same notes as the stab, just to give it that bottom end,” reveals Gavin. The bass is compressed with a sidechain input coming from the kick drum, so that the kicks still punch through.