How It Was Made: Aldous – Silhouette (All Day I Dream + Melodic House)

Aldous joins the All Day I Dream – Summer’s End Sampler with Silhouette, a smooth, hypnotic entry that captures the label’s balance between warmth and restraint. Built on a precise groove and anchored by subtle motion, Silhouette shows how effective melodic house can be when simplicity drives the arrangement.

In this breakdown, Aldous opens up his production session and explains the tools behind the record, from the plucked lead that defined the track’s direction to the plugins that brought polish and movement to the mix. The focus stays on clarity, groove, and emotion, achieved through deliberate restraint rather than complexity.

Below, Aldous shares the core synth, mixing tools, and workflow habits that shaped Silhouette.

Serum

Serum is a super versatile wavetable synthesizer that appears in every one of my tracks in some form or another.

I started with a gorgeous pluck preset from a PML pack and then did some sound design, adjusting the decay, sustain, drive, sub levels, and so on. The thing I like most about Serum is the LFO interface. As with various other layers in the track, I created 1–2 bar LFO loops and applied that to cutoff, drive, and other macros to add cyclical color and a singing groove. It’s a lot of fun to experiment with.

Some suggestions for melodic house: to begin with, KISS. If the track isn’t shaking your booty with just a kick, bass, and your main lead then forget about adding layers and FX. Make it sit in a fat, funky pocket first. Personally I like to swing the sixteenth notes when possible; I find 33 percent swung is a sweet spot.

Ozone Elements

Ozone Elements always appears pretty close to the end of my master bus. I use the factory “tight dance” preset most of the time, with EQ, stereo imager, and a maximizer to manage my levels. A great plug-in that adds quality in a single click.

I like to experiment with the parameters of the maximizer to give the track the perfect final dynamic character.

I’d highly recommend creating a standard plug-in stack in your master bus. But keep it switched off until the track is getting close. Your mix should sound decent before you start playing with mastering parameters, in my view anyway. You can’t fix a bad mix with a mastering plug-in.

Waves C6 Multiband Compressor

C6 Multiband Compressor by Waves is probably the single plug-in that improved my sound most when I first started to use it. Prior to that, I was using standard (single-band) compressors on everything and trying to tune by hand. Yikes!

The built-in presets are pretty great. Probably not enough dance bass / master presets, but I usually load up a standard one and then tune it. I don’t automate this plug-in.

If you aren’t well stocked with a good multiband compressor, do yourself a favor. It’s really a game changer.

Quick Fire Tips for Melodic House

#1

• Keep it simple. Make sure it’s fat and funky with 3–4 parts.

#2
• Melody is everything. But throw in some random variations and incidentals. A subtle amount of surprise brings joy to tired ears.

#3
• Tune all your drums – kick, snare, toms, hats – either to the fundamental tone or an appropriate interval like a fifth.