This is a 8 bar loop that's a starting point for a full song, which I'll hopefully be working on in the follow-up class. I've already done some music production before but I learned a lot from the class.

One takeaway is that it's cool to use a lot of different melodic elements. Beats I've made in the past have been pretty sparse, but I saw K Theory were using multiple melody lines to fill out their loop so I tried to do the same.

Another takeaway is the importance of organization and workflow. Usually my projects have a bunch of unnamed or unused tracks which makes them difficult to mix and arrange. Here I kept things tidy as I went along and it made the production process a lot smoother. I'm planning on using this project as a template like K Theory's.

I also picked up some small tricks like avoiding hi-hats on snare hits, layering synth basses on top of 808 samples for extra harmonics, and ending the section with a snare fill.

I don't have Reason so I used Ableton, with a couple of plugins:

- Air XPand2 VST for the piano and synths
- Output Exhale VST for the vocal samples
- A couple of free sample packs from Reddit /r/drumkits for drums, 808, and risers
- Reverb, delay, and EQ are just the stock Ableton ones

Kai Rikhye

data engineer @ skillshare

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