5 Golden Pillars of Music Production Course

1. [INTRO] - 5 Golden Pillars of Music Production: Hey, what's up, guys? I'm gratuitous. If you guys are wanting to learn the secrets of music production. If you have been producing for at least three months, this course is for you, okay, so you guys know I teach on FL Studio. This course does apply to any DAW. Alright, so this course has also focused mainly at a beat maker. Somebody who makes the B, who arranges the B, likes to do the mixing and the mastering. And you guys can check out the course curriculum for what we cover inside of this course. But like I said, this is a five golden pillars of music production, which I wish I knew before I started up. And I break it down in-depth for you guys to learn. You're going to feel really, really inspired to get back into your music and see results. Okay, Now, one thing I want to say before you watch the course and enroll is I advise you to watch it at a faster speed. So most video players allow you to watch it like 1.25 or 1.5. There's a lot of information I'm telling you in this course. And it isn't a course where where I'm teaching you what to listen for. It's more about like how to use the tools. And again, there's a lot of speaking, a lot of information I wish I knew. So if you watch the videos fast, you will be able to digest that information really quick. You can still hear the beat, you can still hear the audio, but you'll be able to follow along really, really good. So I really think you'll get a better experience if you've watched the videos fast, you don't have to. But again, this is my five golden pillars of music production. It took me a little while to figure out what order I wanted to put them in. Because a lot of different golden pillars just in general of music production. There's a lot of things to know, but I broke it down into five golden pillars, which I think that you need to know to get up and running to see results when you're making your beats. Things that I wish I would've known. Okay. So you guys can enroll. I'll talk to you inside the course. I'm really excited for you to watch this one. 2. BEFORE WATCHING - 5 Golden Pillars of Music Production: Alright, so again, I just really want to stress to you that because this video has a lot of talking, a lot of good information, I do highly suggest that you watch it at a faster speed. So if you are watching on a video player, typically it's around here and it'll be like an x or something. And I suggest watching at 1.5 times speed or you can go like 1.25 times speed. And so what that's gonna do is I'm going to start talking faster and maybe sound like chip monkey. But I'm telling you that your brain will allow you to understand what's being said much faster. You will be able to digest the content way faster. And I promise you by the end of this course, everything will make sense, okay? So you, you don't have to do this, but again, the course would just be drawn out much longer. And this isn't a course where you are listening for how things sound or Halloch we're mixing. It's more of just kind of like I'm just sharing these valuable golden pillars that I've learned over the years. And if you watch at a faster speed, okay, so what I suggest to you is put it fast. Listen, Does it sound too fast for you to digest that? Maybe go back a little bit, but you want to put it to a point where it's a little faster. And I promise you this course in particular, you will learn very well, Okay, so again, you can watch however you want. But that's my recommendation to you to get the best experience in this particular course, okay. 3. 1-1 - A/B Comparison Fair Level Matching [OVERVIEW]: Alright, so welcome to Five Golden pillars of music production. These are a must know skills if you really, really want to advance as an FL Studio music producer, okay, this stuff applies to any DAW that you use, but you guys know that I teach on FL Studio. So tip number one is a and B comparison and fair level matching. Okay, So we're just gonna be looking at tip number one here. So loudness tricks us into thinking that something is better with an audio, okay, so when we have a and B, a and B is when we switch in between two states of the plugin. And so for example, a and B is like, Do you like one or two better? Do you like part a or part B or do you like before and after? That's what a and b is. But technically, we actually have a sea state as well, which is actually on and off. So whenever you hear someone say a and B, that's before and after, but you actually are able to turn the plugin often on for the additional c. Now, I was saying here that this tip has two parts which is fair level matching. So because if something is louder, okay, tricks us into thinking it sounds better. So when we are switching between a and B, we have to make sure that we're fair level matching. And so what that means is that we are, when we're switching to a or for switching to be or on and off. Because again, that's that C, right? We just want to make sure it's a fair volume. All right? And then one final thing I'll share in this section of videos is just be careful when mixing and solo. When you have an individual instrument that can do a lot of harm if you're queuing and processing it. Okay, So let's hop into FL Studio. I'm going to cover this section first of both a and B comparison and fair level of matching. And I'll make a little bonus video in this section just talking quickly about mixing and solo. 4. 1-2 - A/B Comparison in Practice: Alright, in this video we're gonna be talking about a and B comparison and fair level matching. Now again, this is kinda like two tips in one. Alright, so a and B comparison is one thing and fair level matching is another thing. So for example, if I open up the pro Q3, you can see that we have a and B. So for example, if I adjust the band down here and up here, and then I go to B, you can see nothing is on b. So what we can do is we can actually store the state into b. So for example, let's say we are mixing our track. Let's say we like it the way it is right here. You can copy the state over into B and maybe on B, maybe you're like, You know what? I want to maybe make it just a little bit tighter. Do you want to move it over just a little bit. Okay, Now watch, we can go between a and B, and this is how you can mix a lot better, a lot more accurate. Now the next thing is fair level matching. So in other words that when we turn this plugin off and on, we want to make sure that the volume is pretty similar. Now, don't get stuck on thinking that it has to be the perfect volume because if you do that, you're never going to move forward in your mix. You're always going to be trying to turn off and on the plugin and you're going to listen for, is it louder or is it quieter? You just want to get a nice reference so that when the plugins often on that It's pretty close and you can actually hear like, yeah, Do you know what cutting here and boosting here actually helped this instrument. Now for example, if you're going to cut frequencies, typically you're going to have to boost the master volume of the EQ to compensate for that cut. Alright, let's copy it over and let's go to a. And now let's just say we boost, okay? So if you are boosting frequencies, typically you're going to have to decrease the volume of the master EQ to compensate for that boost. Because again, what we're, what we are actually listening for is often on, is it a fair volume comparison? And is it improving in our mix? So let's just quickly look at the fruity parametric EQ to just so you know how to do that, okay? Because these plugins have very similar features. Again, just the fab filter, which you don't have to have. Again, I always recommend to my students, I'd highly recommend looking into the, into the fab filter plug-ins because fab filter plugins allow you to access all of your audio when you're processing it, alright? For example, you have the mid and the sides. So this is a mono content. Stereo content. They're expensive. But I'm telling you that it's kinda like the best of both worlds. You get FL Studio, the amazing workflow of making beats. Then you have the fair filter plug-ins for processing the audio. But now let's talk about the parametric EQ to, which is an amazing EQ to learn off of. This is what I learned off of. It's awesome. So again, let's say we cut, we cut some frequencies here. Again, always look in the top-left of FL Studio. And you can see that I can store in spirit state. So this is essentially like copy. So let's bring up this EQ to this both EQs. So you can see that if in the parametric EQ to this is like copy, alright? So you can see store in spirit state. So I click that. And if I go between both of them, you can see nothing because nothing is different between them. Let's boost one. And you can see before and after or a and B again, there is also left off, which is actually a sea state. So all plugins have an a, a, B, and a C state which is on an off. Now, if you actually are working with a plugin that doesn't have something built in, like visually. Fl Studio does have the built-in store in spare state. So for example, let's load up something like the fruity chorus, which is like a super basic plugin k. This is all that is. There is no a and b. You can just adjust your knobs. So for example, here's store in spirit state. So right now, this is stored in a and B. So for example, if I would go between flip, whisper state, nothing's changed. If I were to increase this to full and let's say we bring this back. So again, we're just going to watch the depth and the LFO to if I flipped it, you can see that this is now a. And if I go back to flip with spare state, this is now B. And every single plug-in has this built in. And then again, you have the off, so that's a, B, and C. Okay, really, really powerful. And the whole goal is when you're turning off and on the plugin, or if you're flipping between a and b, that is a fair volume comparison. Now, for something like a fruity course, which is more of like an effect. It's a little bit different, like you're just trying to find maybe just a different sound, but for something like an EQ, but that is more technical and you're trying to get clarity in your instruments. This is where the fair volume matching is pretty important, okay? So you can see that we have before like a and B. And again, what you want to do is on this side here, this is the, this is the master volume for the EQ. So for example, let's go back to this. So if we have, if, if, if we have cut frequencies, we are going to probably want to increase because it's gonna be quieter if we are boosting. And let's just reset this one. So if we've boosted frequencies, you're probably going to want to decrease the master volume because. It's gonna be louder, okay. And then again, when you are turning off and on the plugin, is it a fair volume comparison? Okay, so let's just turn off. Let's just work with the pro Q3. And I'll just solo out this piano, and I'll just give you an example of how this workflow works. Okay? So again, we want to be careful when working in solo, which is our next video. And let's just hit Play here. So this is the whole mix, right? But mixing and solo is when we do this, we can either solo it from here or we can select from down here. So this is called mixing a solo. If I were to come here and adjust it like this, we really don't know what we're doing to this piano in context of the mix, and that's gonna be our next video. Now again, because the pro Q3 is a little bit more advanced than a normal EQ. It has a built-in auto gain when in other words, if I'm going to cut, it's going to increase the volume for me automatically. Or if I, if I boost, it's going to turn it down automatically. And so I'm just going to disable this to keep it like a normal plug-in, just like the fruity parametric EQ to that way we can kinda see in a real-world setting how this works. Okay, so let's bring this over. And we can see before and after. Okay? Okay, So what I'm gonna do is let's just copy this state. And let's just say we have this piano. Okay? So again, if it's cutting or here by quite a lot, like we're cutting like 13 decibels. We're at. We're going to have to increase the volume here. And if I turn it off, it's kind of a similar volume. Again, this is the thing that different frequencies are louder than others. But the whole goal here is we were just kinda looking for a similar volume. But again, remember right now we're mixing a solo which is not good. So let's just real contexts. Let's say it was actually mixing this track. And we're listening at this electric piano. We're trying to do a before and after, and let's just go through it. So let's just say we boost up here. Now, let's turn off and on the plugin, way louder. And there's two reasons for that. First I was boosting and had them plus six. So let's just turn down the volume and then we'll try to get a fair volume comparison because I am boosting, turn it off. Turn off and on. Still quite a bit louder. I'm just going to turn out a little bit more. Share back is a little more. So really this EQ rate here is helping this piano stand out over top of the mix. And it's not a fair volume comparison. So again, this is like EQ, this is like an mixing, the mixing stage. We're trying to get all our different instruments to stand out in their own way. But before and after. So off and on. So let's say maybe we're not that happy with that. Maybe we are, maybe want to fine tune it a little bit. So this is where you can copy over the state. You go to B. Maybe you want to maybe bring it down. Maybe it's a bit aggressive. If you want to tighten up the cue. Maybe you're like, Do you know what I want to cut them just a little bit right there too. And this is just, I'm just guessing. So let's bring up the volume back. So now we can go between a and B. Okay, so let's go back to soloing out this electric piano. So again, we have often on which is essentially that sea state. So we have a, we have B. We also have off and on. Again with the FL Studio. You also have often on here, but with fat filter plug-ins, they have it built in where they have the off and on. They have special code going on so that you don't get any kind of glitches or anything when you're turning off and on the plugin. So I highly recommend that you do it from right here. You can also right-click on these and you can set it up to like a button on your midi keyboard. I actually have my setup to a slider. You can see I've set it up like this. Don't worry about like the mapping formula stuff. I just fine tune this slider to have a little bit of more finer tuned. And you can also even invert. So again, I'm not going to cover this in this video. But you can see that watch, if I'm just using my midi keyboard, allows me to do that. I can also turn up and down my master volume from a midi keyboard as well. You can see that my mouse is not, my mouse is over here. I'm using my left hand and I'm going up and down. And again, you can just right-click. You can go or override global links so that whenever you open up this plugin, you can get hands on mixing. And again, so instead of having to use your mouse and fine tune it, check this out so I'll hit Play. Let's just say we boost it like this. Which I can use my midi keyboard to help compensate for that and I can quickly turn off. You can look for the red shirt off and on the plug-in. And if you're using your mouse with your midi keyboard, so you can kind of get this hands-on mixing, which is super, super powerful. You can also do the same stuff with the parametric EQ to. The only thing is the on and off doesn't really work. But if you wanted to, you can right-click, go override global link. And you can, and I usually like to enable the smoothing. If you don't enable smoothing, it kinda looks choppy like this, kinda looks kind of gross. And if you right-click and go over a global NGO smoothing, I'm just going to use a midi keyboard, a slider, or a knob, and watch this. You can see it's much smoother. That's what that smoothing does. But for example, if we are mixing our music, so I'll turn this off if you want to increase it. So watch this. If I hit play, you can hear it's pretty loud, right? So it's turned down. So you can, you can mix with your mouse if you want, and you can adjust with your master, or I'm with your midi keyboard slider. Now, again, with the parametric EQ to, I couldn't figure out a way to do the on and off because what happens is this. If you look down here, off and on, you can see that this is actually this and it correlates with what order it's n. So for example, which I'll actually show you this. So if I right-click and go over a global links. So again, there's linked to controller, which means that if I were to adjust the slider, it's only for this project. But FL Studio has a really cool built-in feature called overall global link, which means that it doesn't matter what project you're in. Even a new project and old project do you use override global link? And whenever you open up this plug-in, this global link will follow it. But this on and off is different than the actual plug-in. So let me just break that down so you can see that the parametric EQ n2 is onslaught ten. And you can see that it turns off and on. So let me just remove the, the, the pro Q3. And you can kinda see like this. So again, I was trying to do the on and off, very similar and watch if I move my slider. So now nothing's happening. And you can see up here, my midi keyboard is moving. But watch I have to actually be focused on the mixer and then watch. You can see it's off and on, so I'm not clicking that, right. That's my midi keyboard. So watch this, so it's working, so it's on, it's off. But as soon as I hover onto the EQ, on and off does not work, which was kind of annoying. And if you change the slot, you can see watch slot ten turns on and off, if that makes sense. So when I right-clicked up here, so this is essentially nine. Now, if that makes sense, okay, so it was kinda tricky for me to figure out that this just correlates to the actual slot that the actual plug-in is on. But again, with the fab filter plug-in, you are actually able to right-click the on and off. And you can see that I can now go off and on, which was so powerful for workflow as you just saw. Okay, so again, you don't have to have the fab filter plugins. I was I was just I always try to give a fair comparison between them because they can both give you great results. But the whole goal of this video was just to teach you a and b comparison, fair level matching, as well as be aware of on and off, which is that C. And then again, if the plugin doesn't have an a and b comparison, you actually have the store and spares state where for example, let's just say we store it in spirit, stay like this. And then now we're just going to adjust some different things will go up a little bit. If I go flip with spirits day it brings us back to the way it was. Okay, so that's how you can do a and B if the plugin doesn't have a and B. But again, a good EQ, which the parametric EQ two is definitely a good EQ. You can just use the built-in a and B. Okay. It's just kinda like the, the, the off and on. I wasn't able to automate with a midi keyboard. Alright, so let's just walk through that one more time. I'm just gonna go preset default. So how you do it with the parametric EQ to is if you are cutting frequencies, you're probably going to want to increase the volume. Because when you turn the plugin off and on, you just want it to be a fair volume comparison, okay? You can store it in the spirit state, which is what I'm doing right here again, look in the top left if fl Studio that is stored in spare state. When we're flipping between before and after, nothing's happening because I stored it. Let's just say we boost it now. And when we cut over here, now, if you're boosting and cutting, all you have to do is you just have to turn the plugin off and on. And the whole goal is you're trying to find. So let's just listen. Cancel off and on. It's probably pretty loud. Let's a little bit louder. So again, you can hold down control and it fine tunes, okay, that's a really powerful thing. So if you don't hold down Control or Shift, again, every plugins different when it comes to shift or control. So you have to find what it is for your plugin. But watch if I just click it, it's pretty aggressive and it's hard to kind of fine tune. But if you hold down Control, watch this, this is, I'm moving it much faster and you can fine tune it. So let's turn it off and on. So here it just sounds being a brighter. It sounds like a little darker. It's pretty fair volume comparison. Okay. So now we're going to flip it. Turn off and on. Kids, to me, it sounds pretty bright, but let me a little bit loud to bring it back. Off and on. Let's flip it off. To me. It sounds louder, too loud. Okay, but again, we are mixing in solo. So for example, this is how we want to mix the track in context of the mix. Let's turn it off. So for example, if I'm listening this and it's kinda like Genoa, it sounds a little bit dark. Maybe it'll make a little boomy. I'm going to store it in the sphere state. We're going to go is it doesn't matter if you flip her now because now they're both in the same state, which is kinda like doing what? We're going to bring it down a little bit. And again with the parametric EQ to if you, if you like, if you like where this band is and you just want to turn it down. I wouldn't grab it from here because you can move left and right. I would grab it from here. Again, holding down Control on my keyboard, shortcut, hold down control and left-click. And you can fine tune by going up and down. You're not going to go left and right. If you want to go left and right, you can do it here. So when you're first getting into mixing, I would grab a band and you can kinda wherever you want to put it. Once you find that spot, then you can use the sliders to find tune. Okay, You can, you can even use down here to fine tune or hold down control and the scroll wheel. Or again, you can use, you can use just the scroll wheel. But again, it's more aggressive. If you hold down control, again, it's more fine tuned. Okay? So again, let's just before. This was after, and let's just listen. Maybe let's bring up the brightness a little bit. Let's turn off and on. You can make me make a little bit louder, bring it down a little bit again. So this is over six decibels of Boost, which could be aggressive freight. Again, I'm just giving you an example here. We can put. So again, that's how you do it with a fruity parametric EQ to, it's the exact same thing with the fab filter plug-in. Let's just turn this off again. So this would be like the experience that you'd get with the fab filter plug-in. I'm gonna do it with the auto gain on, and then I'll do it with the auto gain off. But what the auto gain on, you can just hear that when it's being cut or when it's being boosted. We don't have to do that on and off as much. So it allows you to fine tune quicker and keep that volume the same, and then you can fine tune from there. So let's just listen to hear how the volume stays the same. Like yes, the EQ is sounded different. Just turn up the actual piano volume a little bit louder, so we just hear overpower, it boosts, this is turned off. So that's kinda like the benefit of the auto gain as always increasing and decreasing. We're mainly just kinda hearing the effect of the boost or the cut, but it's actually compensating that loudness for us. But like I said, it's not perfect. And so sometimes I even just use it off or even now I hear that it still sounds a bit louder. So I might even cut it back a little bit by like 0.40.5. I don t know. We'd have to hear it, so let's just listen. Listen. We pull it back a little bit, turn off and on. So a little bit loud. But anyway, so what I'm saying is this, the auto gain helps. Your mixing is not perfect, but it's one of those little tools, right? Let's turn it off though. And if we're boosting by ten, we're going to have to cut this by a lot. So let's not do that. Let me just let you listen that this is aggressive. So what you're going to turn it back now because we have to do a fair volume comparison. And again, just because we're boosting by ten, doesn't mean that we have to cut by ten. Because where does boosting a certain frequency band. So we may only have to cut by six or something. Off and on. To me it still sounds quite louder. So the spirits like eight. So let's say we kind of like it, but we're not sure. So I'm gonna copy it. We're gonna go to B. Maybe we're going to pull it back a little bit. Now. It's the same thing instead of grabbing it from right here, which can skew where we're going. Again, we can also call back, which is really powerful. I would just use the gain, which is one, which goes up and down. Just like I showed you in the parametric EQ to go up and down, right? Once we kinda like something. So you can see it now, before it was at ten, I'm going to go back forward k. So this is like Ford and undo, this is an AND is for an undue, we're still on B. So let's just say we want to maybe cut a little bit. So again, now we're cutting and boosting. So what we're listening for is when we turn the plugin off and on. I think it can be a little bit louder. So I'm just gonna use the scroll wheel. We don't have to use that knob. I'm just showing you that for visual. With the pro Q3, you can just use your scroll wheel right here. Okay? But again, if you have a midi keyboard, you can do that same thing right here. And you can also use a slider. Okay? So again, I'm going to be using my mouse as you can see. And so that is kind of like the workflow when you're mixing your music. So something like that to offer, Building a little bit. But again, so now we go back to a degree like this or like this. Or did you like it when it was off? These should all be a fair volume comparison when you're doing something with EQ, again, if we're loading up something like the fruity chorus, it doesn't really matter as much because it's more of an effect. We're trying to get a cool sound going on. And again, if you want to flip between a state, you just go from here. For example, we stored this in the spirit state. Let's, let's adjust the degree. Let's bring it back. And so when I, when I flip it, you can see that the stereo, stereo and the LFO three will change right? There you guys go. So that is a and B comparison, that is fair level matching and that's a, B, and C. So it's before and after. And I'm telling you that once you learn to make your music like this, you are going to be, you're gonna make way more accurate decisions. It's not to say that you're gonna become a really good mixing engineer. But at least you know a before and after a decent fair volume comparison, you don't want to spend so much time as you saw when I was going back and forth, I spent some time but I'm also talking at the same time, right. So if I was doing this, sometimes it's things a little quicker. But that's kinda the workflow. I hope it gives you tons of insight. The next video, again, I'm just going to quickly talk about mixing and solo, which is again, for example, if we are like this versus like this. So you can tell when I was mixing the music, it was in context of the mix. I might actually benefiting from my actions. When you're mixing in solo, It's very dangerous. So I'll just make a really quick video because I covered pretty much it in this video, but okay, so that's the next video coming up. 5. 1-3 - Mixing in Solo Explained: Okay, So mixing in solo versus mixing in the mix. Okay, so when we have our actual track going on like this, this is how we want to EQ or instruments. So for example, if we have, let's just remove some of these. And I'm just going to grab this back. We're gonna go default, okay? We're back to brand new. So again, if we're going to mix our music, and right now I'm just focused on the electric piano. And so again, when I'm mixing my music, we are mixing and in context of the mix. So if I hit Play here, we can hear what's going on. So if I cut and boost, want to have a fair volume comparison like we just did off and on. Again, not to say that we like that, but I'm just showing that what you can do. The same thing with your kick drum, for example, here is the track going on with that kick. Let's go open up an EQ, for example. Again, you have an EQ with this auto gain built-in. You can kind of hear what's going on a little bit better with the kick drum. So it's trying to keep that kick drum at a fair volume comparison for us. Like, you know, it sounds pretty basic. Sounds not bad. I'll turn it back a little bit. Off. Is, is the drum skin, does it need that extra base? So again, let's turn off the auto gain, because if you don't have this plugin, now this is like your plugin. I boosted it but the volumes louder. So let's pull it back a little bit. Again. I'm mixing in context of the mix. So for example, if we want to cut a little bit or boost some highs on that kick. You here. It's cutting through Moscow, right? So the high end of a kick drum, and let's solo it out because many times when people are mixing the solo out the sound and they do damage to the sound. Much before. Right? It sounds a bit cleaner. Move, bring it back just a little bit. Again, I use my scroll wheel a lot. It helps refer workflow. It doesn't matter what plugin. The scroll wheel just helps you kind of fine tune it. Okay, So now where should you be soloing is also the question, because there is a time to solo. So let's say we're working on a track, and let's say there's a certain instrument which is causing us problems. Or maybe we want to fine-tune the kickin base a little bit more. So for example, kicking base is super important because it's like the low end of the track. And so in context of the track, again, I would try to get your mix sounding half decent. Try to get the mics working as it is. If there's any problems that you're noticing. And this is where I'd be like, Okay, I'm going to solo up the kick and just right-click. And we can now left click. And now we have the kick and the bass. So this is width, that EQ, this is without it. Am, I am proving it. Maybe also sometimes. What I've done in this track is I've done side-chain compression. So let's see here I think. Yeah, This is many times I would even go like a side chain. So it is pushing my middle scroll wheel to relabel an effect. And you go like side chain and you can hit F2 to give it a color and it'll make it a little bit cooler to see. You can see it's distended a little bit, right? If I was doing side-chain compression, which is whenever the kick drum plays is producing the volume of the base. You can see we're getting some pump going on, right? So this might be somewhere where I quickly just solo the kick drum to the base and we can kinda get some side-chain compression going on. Again, don't worry about my settings. Every kick drums different, every baseline is different. So you're always going to have to fine tune it. But you can see I didn't do tons of reduction. So for example, up here it's around us six, and then it's coming down to two. So about four decibels of reduction. Some tracks, you're doing a super heavy reduction, right? But that might be an area where I solo out the instrument, but then you have to make sure you go back. Okay. I might be just kinda quick like boom. Then I might adjust something quickly. Like for example, if I open up this plugin, I might just tweak it. And then what I do is I right-click because right-clicking once solos out an instrument, we bring it all back with right-clicking again. Okay, Here is another really cool approach to it. So let's say you are mixing the track and there's an instrument which is really clogging your mix. Maybe it's too bright and you just can't figure out what instrument it is. You can actually work opposite. So you can actually start muting an instrument rather than soloing it. Okay, So let me just show you for example. So imagine, let's just say that one of the, one of these instruments was annoying or we just couldn't figure what it was. So let's just hit play. You can mute the sound. Maybe let's sit as bagpipe. So this is actually a, quite, a, quite an aggressive sound. So watch, we're going to disable it. So everything kinda sounds balanced for the most part. So this bagpipe, maybe this is aggressive. So I click on the bagpipe. Let's say we open up an EQ and we're like, do you know what? It's a bit aggressive. Let's disable the auto gain just to make it fair. For everyone who has an EQ. Maybe around here, maybe it's aggressive. So everything kinda cut this. We can again increase that volume just a little bit off and on. Maybe it's not as harsh now and we now muted. We can bring it back. So that's a really cool trick. Okay, so again, mixing and solo, super dangerous. But there is still a time to solo certain things out. Typically, how I would like to mix is I'd like to try to get everything working as a whole, okay, so when we're mixing our music, I like to kind of, you know, as a whole, we try to get everything working together. We open up all our different plugins, whatever we're gonna do, we're fine tuning it all. If there's a problem going on, you can quickly solo out. So for example, like that kick drum and the bass, where I want to make sure that the low-end is gelling together nice. Then you want to make sure you bring it back quick. You keep listening and sometimes right-clicking and holding, working in that same area is nice because it keeps looping and looping and looping. You can fine tune it. Then again, if a problem is happening and you can't figure out what the problem is, you can mute it as well. And it can be, That's the problem, this one. And then you can quickly, maybe, you can maybe quickly solo it opened up an EQ and maybe try. So for example, let's say, let's go back to this electric piano because it's more consistent. So for example, let's say this electric piano was just really, really annoying, right? And there's this, there's a really cool trick. It's just kind of like boosting and trying to find for problem frequencies. And so for example, like I'm saying, let's say, let's say we're listening to the mix as a whole. There is a certain instrument which is bothering you. You're not sure what it is. Again, you may be muted them and you're like, oh, that's the one right here. You can quickly solo it, a solo it out. You can now boost and you can listen. So let's just listen for that. So everything is enabled. So my bad, let's just go back to this electric piano. I'm just going to hit Play. Alright, so for example, you can do this in kind of boost where it is. Right here. It's right there. That's where maybe you want to cut. And then you're gonna do, you're gonna go right back into the mix. And you're going to try to fine tune that volume again, okay, because we are cutting in and out, you'd want to boost it. One other really cool thing that the pro Q3 has is again, it has the solo band and you can, you can, you can fine tune that. If there was a certain, there was a certain sound or a certain frequency within this frequency range within this instrument, this region kind of fine tune again, you can make it smaller or wider. This allows you to really hear and you would like to know what that's, that's where the problem is and we're just gonna kinda cut it out. Now, you can also do this with the fruity parametric EQ to. But again, it just doesn't give you as good of an experience, but you can, you can enable it right here, and it can look in the top left. It says band solo on shift. Okay? So if you click a band, comes to enable it, pulling down Shift and clicking, you can kinda get that similar sound. Alright? I'm again, I don't use the parametric EQ to very much anymore, so I'm a bit rusty with it, but that is a new feature which can get you a similar sound. But again, it's not like that same fab filter experience, okay? But again, they're very comparable. I'm always trying to keep things as fair as possible, but I'm telling you that FL Studio with the fab filter, I'm telling you is the experience that you want to have to be a really well-rounded producer because FL Studio is amazing for making the beat. And then when it comes to processing the audio, again, that's where the fab filter tools come in. I just want to say that because a lot of times, many of you say, Oh, I watched the course and third-party plug-ins were used. So I tried to keep things fair. And I hope that is clear when it comes to mixing and solo, and different tricks that you have available. You have solo, right? We have muting. And essentially the whole goal is trying to mix as a whole. If you have problems, that's where you can solo. And you just wanna do things quick. Get right back into the mix. 6. 2-1 - Be Organized from the Start [OVERVIEW]: Okay, tip number two, when we're talking about the five golden pillars of music production. So tip number two is being organized from the start. Many, many students have reached out to me. And the number one reason for burnout when we're being a music producer is an organization like you don't know, for example, where to put your projects, where to put your sounds, and if you work with clients, whatever. Being organized, I'm telling you is the secret to really, really seeing results as a music producer and still always having fun. And let me just walk you through so there's two ways that you can be organized, okay? So you can create your own custom music folder, which I highly recommend and I'll talk about that in a second. Or you can use the built-in file management of the dog. So FL Studio has their own way that you can store files as well as you can just do your own custom music folder. And what's happened for me is I went to custom music folder approach. What's really awesome about it is it doesn't matter what's happening to the door. Okay, so one thing to say is FL Studio and change their folder structure in recent years. And it kind of changed how you could store your files and the location of the files. And so if you had all your files in FL Studio is kind of ecosystem file management, you were having to reorganize your stuff. With my approach here, custom music folder, it doesn't matter what happens to your DAW. You just create your music folder. You organize your projects, you organize your sounds or VSTS, and it's super easy and super easy to backup. And so that's what I suggest to you. Now you can use the built-in file management of your DAW is really helpful. Sometimes it can be even faster in some ways, like if you want to access files or whatever. But again, it can change over time, which we have seen with fl Studio. Now nowadays, FL Studio is built-in management system, seems like it's well-thought out now. So I wouldn't say that you're gonna go wrong that way, but it's just all I'm saying is my experience at a custom music folder. I have just significantly enjoyed my workflow. Now let's just talk quickly about why accustomed music folder. Okay? So you know exactly where your music files are, when it comes to your projects, your sounds, and if you work with clients, it saves you so much time, right? You work faster. You're clear headed. Honestly, it is such a relief. Now in our upcoming video, I'm going to break down how to create a custom music folder. If you'd like to follow my folder structure, I'm going to show you how I organize my projects, how I organize my sounds. This includes the one-shot drum samples and VSTS. With the VSTS, I like to also keep a backup of an executable file. And so the next part of accustom music folder is actually backing it up, like, you know. So that was a very, very tricky thing for me personally. And so, for example, do you have a solid backup plan? Because it's very, very important, like are you even backing up your music? If your computer failed today, how long would it take you to get back up and running? And it doesn't have to be hard. So you can just put your projects in the Cloud and have a hard drive backup in addition to your computer, which I will. We're gonna do a really cool video. I'll write on a paper and pencil, and I'll just show you because writing on paper and pencil I'm telling you is so awesome for figuring out your game plan and kinda connecting the dots. And finally, when I talked about organization is burnout. When you have too many plug-ins, okay? So organizations are too many plugins, so be careful of too many plug-ins, especially free plugins, okay, this is what I call gear lost. If you have too many plugins is the potential for bugs. Even right before this video, I want to load up a project with you guys. It was an older project. I loaded it up and it was giving me an error. So I had to open up the installer, re-install it and everything finally worked. But it was the fact that men time is money. Time is so valuable. So I was experiencing bugs. Another thing, if you have too many plugins, you have to learn the plugins and some of these plugins aren't easy to learn. And so the trick is if you can learn your plugins really well, you can become a really good producer because you know how the plug-ins work. Like if you want a certain sound, if you need to do something, you know what you're doing, and I'm telling you there's not enough time to learn them all. When you're watching tutorials or videos and all these companies are advertising to you. They're taking your time and money. Another thing to have too many plugins, extra space on your computer, and if you paid for them, more money spent. So my highest recommendation for you guys is to learn premium plugins well and truly understand what you're doing and it's going to send you so much further now you don't have to have that filter plug-in so you guys can do whatever you want. But I do suggest looking at a premium suite. Of plugins. And so what that means is many times these Dawes, They usually lack in a certain area when it comes to audio such as mid and side mode or multi-band compression, or even a gate. And when you can get premium plugins that just work super good, I highly recommend just keep using those plug-ins, learn them really well. And many times these plug-ins, they even have different modes. Like for example, like if we load up like a fat filter proceed, you can see we even have different modes of compression. So I don't have to use different compressors. I can just use this one compressor. I know it really, really well. It has all these different modes which, which essentially is just like different timings and different character of sound. So for example, if we select clean and we have a really fast attack, it might sound quite a lot different if we choose the classic and you can even see that the actual curve change. So it's just when you have powerful plug-ins. It just allows you as the music producer to be super, super creative, super powerful. And it allows you to know what you're doing fast efficiently. And I'm telling you, my workflow has been amazing. I use FL Studio to make beats. I use the fab filter plug-ins for the mixing and mastering. And then yes, when it comes to third party VSTS for our instruments. And these are as you can see, these are the, at the moment, these are the ESTs are used for generating instruments sounds. You can see there's quite a few stock plug-ins, right? Three times oscillators of stock FL keys is stock flexes stock, I believe harbors and upgrade for FL Studio, but I do use it sometimes. Nexus is paid, pigments is paid, plucked is stock. We have serum which is paid. Silence, one paid citrus stock. Not very many instruments, right? And honestly, when it comes to citrus, I don't really know how to use it very well, but I keep it around because it's powerful. Silence one super here. I'll just pull these up just so we can kinda see him quickly because I think it'll be useful if you are pretty new. Okay, let's just look at these super, super quick. So three times oscillator is like super classic. You can see that it came, it came out in 2 thousand, right? So there's three oscillators is what they're calling them. Alright? So a generator which is generating sound and you can add these together, right? So like additive synthesis, if you click here, you can also come up to here. And you also have your filters section all in here, right? So if you want to be really creative with it, There you go. Three times. Oscillator, very powerful, F0 keys, very, very simple for powerful piano. You also have different styles of piano. Even like other roads is super powerful and a lot of people don't look at Ethel keys. It's one of my favorite piano plugins and it's come stock. Okay, flex, new. It's a Rambler. I highly suggest when you're first starting out, you use a ROM player. All you do is you just simply select a sound. So that's what's called a Rambler. Okay? You can also select your sounds down here. Here is harmonic. This is a little bit of an older plugin now it's busy. It was newer for its time, but it has been around for a while now, super, super powerful. You can select different presets up here, or you can design them yourself. Here's Nexus. This is another romp blur just like flex. So again, this is flex and this is nexus. So essentially when you're making beats, I highly suggest using a Rambler. One. You don't have to worry about sound design to just the versatility. And so this is why I like a Rambler, because I can just quickly grabbed real sounds. Alright, so three times oscillator, FL keys, flex, harm or Nexus. Here's pigments. This is a really, really unique synthesisers. What makes pigments really, really powerful is that there's different types of synthesis built-in rate into pigments, which is really, really powerful, really, really good bang for buck. Here's serum, which you call it Like, I guess like a wave table synthesized IR. But really it's much more than that because you have two generators, even have a filter and you can select a, just like a wave table. You can kinda go through that just like this, right? Okay, and then we have science one, which is one of the industry classics. You can see you have oscillator one. So this generates one waveform oscillator to generates another waveform. You can detune them. You can make them wide or less wide. And then what's really powerful is you can just hop over to Part B, which is now this isn't a and B, for example, a and B comparison, this is not a and B. You can blend a and B. So for example, you actually have four waveforms that you can blend together, which is super powerful than again, you have your filters. And again, I'm not covering this stuff in this course, but I just wanted to show you guys when it comes to plug-ins, like so for me, I've never really mastered citrus. This is a stock plugin that comes with fl Studio. Extremely powerful. But I just want to share that when I right-click and I go instruments, you can see these are my instruments. Let's just quickly look at my effects. So for example, if we click here, you can see when it comes to. My delays. If you're looking at this, what are you seeing? For me? I see stock plug-ins. I see a chorus by FL Studio. I see a flanger by FL Studio. I see 23 delays by FL Studio. This is a third-party one. I picked it up. It was like super affordable. Again, I'm not telling you guys to go out and buy this. But hey, it works pretty cool. I don't use it too much. I usually try to stick to the stock plug-ins. Okay. So let's continue. So when it comes to distortion, so this is a third party. I don't use it too often. Don't use it too often. Camel crushers, pretty powerful. But again, a lot of FL Studio destructor is in FL Studio stock plug-ins. So 12344 fl Studio plug-ins for distortion dynamics. I use a lot of fab filter when it comes to this kind of stuff. Okay, so again, I'm not going to continue, but I'll just show you like even like reverb, fruity solver, That's a stock plugin for a reverb stock plug in. Oracle was just like that. That nebula. So let's, let's go back to that delay quickly. So here's that nebula. This was the same brand I got. I think I got them in a bundle. I got them really, really affordable. I think they're cool, they're powerful. But again, it is a third party plugin. Is the company going to support this plugin forever? Maybe, maybe not. But when you use a stock plug-in, you know that the company is typically typically going to at least allow it to work for much longer with their program. Okay, so let's load this backup. So again, an organization, too many plugins. I just showed you a lot of plugins and most of them were FL Studio stock ones. And the question is, do you even know how to use the stock plug-ins? So be careful with too many plug-ins, especially free plugins, because those, those plugin developers, if they're not making money from their free plugins, there's no promise that they're going to continue with it and the same as even if they're paid. But if they're paid, typically, you're going to typically get better support. That one isn't fully true, but you know what I'm saying? If it's free, there's a lot of good free plugins out there. I'm not saying not to use them, but what I'm saying is just be careful if you're bringing them into your serious projects that you want to reopen later on. This is what's called gear list. With too many plugins, there's potential for bugs. You have to learn them. They take up extra space on your computer for me when I install FL Studio, will all those plug-ins come with the program, right? And if you paid for all these plugins while you're just spending more money. So again, my highest suggestion you guys is to learn premium plugins well and truly understand what you are doing with those plugins. And you will go so much further as a music producer. Okay, so let's talk about a custom music folder. I'm just going to go quickly. We are going to create a custom music folder together. I'm going to show you how I organize my projects, my sounds, and then after that, we will just quickly talk about a solid backup plan. This is gonna be a cool video. I am actually going to write on paper and pencil with you guys. And I'll just walk you through and essentially just connect the dots. So stay tuned. I promise you. This is definitely a golden pillar because what happens is you get to making beats. And if you get unorganized, one day, you are going to want to sit down and reorganize everything. And at that time you can have a lot of missing files, which means that you're gonna get more unorganized. And so if you're organized, you can create music, you're super organized, and you can flow so fast. Okay, so let's get into creating a custom music production folder for you guys to be organized and see results and your music. 7. 2-2 - Creating a Custom Music Folder WALKTHROUGH: Alright, so in this video, I'm going to talk to you about a custom music production folder. Now, if you guys do want to use the FL Studio built-in one, I just wanted to share this with you and I'm sure a lot of other dogs are very similar. So FL Studio has it in their documents, are in our documents. And you go to Image line and you're gonna go to FL Studio. I usually just hit F until I find it. So there's FL Studio. And essentially this is your area for being a, you know, for your projects. If you want to put your projects and stuff like that, you can do this. It makes it really easy because if you ever want to transfer your computers, you can just essentially bring over this FL Studio folder is essentially like yours. But like I said, FL Studio has changed this in recent years and I do think that it's improved from what it originally was. So you can take this approach, but I wanted to share my own custom music folder approach. And let's just get started. Okay, so I'm just going to right-click. We're going to go new article folder. Now let's just call it music folder. Alright, this is your custom music folder now. So inside this music folder is where everything pertaining to your music lives. So for example, sounds projects. If you work with clients and even if you have other things, such as like templates or kinda unique things to your music. I would go something like assets, okay? Now, you do not want too many folders in here. You don't want it getting unorganized. You want to keep it really, really simple. So the first place I'm going to start as projects, okay, so when it comes to a project, each project should have its own folder. Now for me personally, I like to work and beat tapes. Okay, so I'm just going to show you this quickly. So let's go beat tapes evolved one, let say, okay, now you can right-click and go new and folder, but you can see how long that takes. I'd go Control Shift and N, again, you can see on my keyboard shortcuts right there. And so too foreign to do another 13. So what happens is let's say we go into beat taste, evolve one. So I would go beat tape vault one, artwork, right? I would go mixed and then I would go mastered. And there you go. Okay, so now in the mixed, this is where song name one goes. Song name two goes, song named three goes. And so inside of here, I'm just going to bring I just have FL Studio project. So let's just scroll song name one. Okay, so let's just make this a little bigger so we can see this. Okay, So we are in this head back. Okay, so we're in the music folder or in projects were in beat tape one, we have artwork that's pertaining to that beat tape. If you're going to release it publicly, we have the mixed, we have all the songs. And then here you also want to go, song name sounds. Oops. You want to make sure that you have backed up the individual sounds for this project in case you ever delete any of your other sounds, you know that this project is good to go. Okay, so watch this if I have, let's just go new. And what I'm gonna do is just add in a kick. Let's just add in a clap, get. So we have kick, clap, clap. And so we're going to go File, we're going to go Export, and we're gonna go project data files. Okay, and so this window opens up in FL Studio. And so since we are, let's say in song number one, are gonna go projects. We're gonna go to mixed song name one. Here's the sounds. And so this is where we're going to select the folder, and I'll just have this folder open right here. We're also going to be into sounds. Okay? So you're gonna see in here it's gonna be populated with those two sounds. So select folder, let's send it. And here we go. So we have the clap, we have the kick. And so we have a song name. We also have the sounds and this is, this is how I've done it. I have the song name outside of it. We have this sounds. If you ever move computers, you open this up, you have a problem. You can easily just drop this in here and you're good to go. Okay, you can open this up, it will quickly load all your sounds in. I just like it outside of this, just looks a little bit cleaner. And so that is how I organize the project. So every single project gets its own folder. Now, if you don't release beat tapes, you can just release, for example, you can go like unreleased and you can have released or something like that. And everything inside of released, you know that these are out there, such as on SoundCloud or Spotify or wherever you've listed it. Unreleased. This is where you can be really unorganized, but you still want to have a song name, right? He always just want to list a song name and you always store the file in there. And I'm telling you you'll be so organized because you know that well, these are all the unreleased tracks. There's not a big deal right there all in here that all unreleased. They're released. Well, these should be a little bit more official. Like like I said, if you have artwork. If you've mixed it, if you've mastered it. Okay. This is very, very pro tip. I'm telling you if you want to get really organized, now, I want to quickly talk about your sound. So we have drum kits, we also have the ESTs. Our v is t i's, but essentially I just put my virtual instruments and my effects in here just for convenience. So let's say we had a drum kits. Now, purchasing drum kits has changed over the years. I don't wanna go too much into it, but essentially there is no standard when it comes to purchasing drum kits. Like there's no real governing body which is saying Yes, this is quality, this is not quality. Okay? And so I just want to tell you guys from doing this from a long time, there are premium, premium drum kits, which as soon as you experience a premium drum kit, you're like, wow, like it just allows your drums that like your drum loops, just a sound awesome. But this is how I would do it. So let's just say we have company one. Whatever this company is, let's say you've purchased from two different companies. And for me personally, I like to purchase a drum kit where you are getting a 100 sounds and you can go through them individually. I understand there's no conflict. There's new innovation of how you buy sounds for me personally, I've always liked just to get, for example, the float up FL Studio. As you can see, I've always liked the drum kit like this. When you're purchasing from a, from a reputable sound kit vendor. All of these sounds, not, not every single one is good, Okay, But, but generally, they are pretty half decent and they allow you as the beat maker to be very, very versatile. You are able to just select different sounds, nice and quick. And as you can see, look how many kick drums there are. And they are quite high-quality. Okay. Again, this isn't like a review or anything. I'm just showing you that. See when I make my beats, look, I have if I want eight awaits, there's my Ada weights. If I went short-tailed kicks, There's my short-tailed kicks. So it's all about variety and quality. That's what they always tell you guys. And when you have your sounds laid out like this, it allows you to make beats so fast, such high-quality, you have to remember the audio industry has not changed much in like 40 to 50 years when it comes to the actual quality of the audio that we're hearing. Okay. So you have to know that when these other companies have come in and they're trying to sell you all. This is the new way to do it. Well, audio hasn't really changed much, so they're just trying to sell you on a certain way to do it. But I'm telling you that this is like the old school way to do it. This is like the awesome way. You're so fast or so organized. You're good to go. Okay, so let's come back to here. So we have company one company to. Now, let's say you purchased three drum kits from company one. So it'd be drum kit one and then it'd be drunk get to it would be drum kit three. Now, what happens is the company, if you are purchasing from a good company, if you go to drum kit one, they should have it all organized for kicks, claps, snares, high hats. They should already have that organized for you. If they don't, you're not purchasing from a good reputable sound kit vendor. Okay. And so like I'm saying right here, you can see that organic drum kit. This is what it would be like. So if we come to company one, would be organic drum kit. You come into organic drum kit and it would have kicks, snares, hi-hats, claps, and you're good to go, right? You can see here on the side survival drum kit, urban heat. So for example, let's just say we just kinda follow that because it'd be nice and easy. So urban heat drum kit. So remember, we are in company one. Company one has this urban heat. Company one also has organic drum kit. Let's just say you've purchased two from them. You're really organized. You're good to go. They have already organized it for you. As you can see right here. They've organized it, right. There's no need for you to go and reorganize what they've done. It's going to take way too much of your time. Now, let's say you purchased from another company, let's say you find another company and other reputable vendor. There are no company to, they're gonna do the same thing. Drum kit one, right? And then inside of here, it should be kicks, it should be claps, it should be snares, okay. If you're not purchasing from reputable drum kit vendors than this, this is the standard. And I'm telling you that the industry has they are trying to change it, but I'm telling you that this has been the amazing workflow. If you guys check out my beets, I'm telling you that my beats are very versatile. Each B is very unique, very different. And if you want to know why, It's because I can just quickly select sounds. It allows me if I want big drums, short drums, different snares, different claps, different hi-hats. Just it allows me as the beat maker to be super versatile. Okay? Okay, that's our drum kits, VSTS. Now this is how I do my BSTs. Okay. So again, let's say you have purchased some VSTS from companies and not even purchase, let's say even if you've been acquired free. So I'd go fab filter. So this video is not sponsored by any of these third-party companies I'm talking about I'm just talking that we've already talked about fab filter and I'm just going to include it there to give you an example. But another company I showed you was silent one. So silent one is actually by Lehner digital. What I would do is inside a lender digital, I would go silent one in case one day Lehner digital creates a new product. Let's say we go X4 Records the makers of serum. So they do sell other VSTS than just serum. But inside of here I would go serum. Okay? So for example, if we're in fab filter, I would just do this. This is the executable file, which means that let's say we want to transfer our computer to a new computer in five or six years. If they have never updated it, you can easily install this and get back up and running. Alright, so it's nice to always keep the most recent executable file. For example, if you have updated your plugins, keep the executable file and keep this updated. The next thing is, I just put a pretend license in here, okay? But so for example, you can put like a code like this many times. That's what they look like. Or provide a link to the website. Nice and fast rate here like, you know, sometimes they have a special place. If you want to activate your license or something, this is where you're going to put it. Okay, I'm telling you this is a workflow thing. Alright, so for example, let's say we're talking about serum. So in expert records, watch if you click in here, I've loaded in the files here. So inside a serum, this is what it would look like for you. So you have the executable file. There's also, this is just how serum does it, but I guess there's two, but usually they'll just be one. Okay. So depending on how your VST installs, okay, you're just going to want to have your executable. But I guess if you already had serum installed, there was also like an update. So I made sure to keep that as well. This is the VST to format. But it's many times if you install some times there is a v as T3, and v is T3 has to be stored in what's called the commons files folder. So it can't stay here. But I do keep two right here, which is makes it nice and easy. And then again, I have my pretend license right there. If I ever have to re-install serum, I could just put in this pretend license. And I'm good to go then these presets, we're just presets which I've created over the years. And I just kinda keep them there just for a nice backup. Okay, so let's go back to this music folder. So there is the sounds I talked to you about. The drum kits should be laid out like this. You don't need to go in there and organize it any more than what they've done. I'm telling you it is such a good workflow. And when you go buy company and then just throw the drum kits in there, you're organized, you're good to go. You know where the sounds are over time, you start to learn where your, where your sounds are for your drum kits. For v is T's. I just do it this way, right? We keep the executable file. You also, I like to keep a license and there you don't have to, but it does allow you just to speed you up tremendously. Otherwise, what you have to do is you have to log into each website and get the license if you transferred to a new computer, I'm telling you takes a long time. So that's the V is T's. We talked about the projects. Again. Sorry my bad. So it'd be like this. So albums and then the tapes and then beat tapes would all be within here as my bed and then album it would be like one, right? Two and then again the same thing. So inside of album, you'd go album one mixed, then album one mastered. So in other words, this mixed is where you would go song name one. And if you had an FL Studio project, this is where you're putting it and then you also go song name one sounds and you back it up. Okay. I'm telling you it is so worth your time to do it this way. Because if anything ever happens to your drum kits, like for example, let's say for down the road you're like, Do you know what I don't want I don't want this drum kit anymore and you just delete it. It doesn't matter to your other projects if you've backed up those sounds, alright? And so essentially that is my workflow. Alright, That's my music production folder. This has allowed me to be so organized. It doesn't matter what the music program does, right? Like, for example, with fl Studio, if they ever change their folder structure, how they do things, it doesn't pertain to me because I've organized my thing just like this. So we have albums, we have beat tapes. So let's go to Volume One. So you can see there's mixed. We have song name one, we have the project. We also have the sounds which I showed you right there. And that's it. Alright, so it's not too complicated once you understand this process. And I'm telling you that when you sit down to make music, and let's say you save a project and let's say it was, it was because the thing is when you make a beat, not every single beat is good. Okay? So what I'm trying to say there is, let's say you make a beat and it's half decent. You're like, Maybe I'll use it. Probably go in the unreleased. And even in here, you can even have like do not like. And here you can have all your projects ensure that all unorganized, whatever. But at least you have one folder where all you're an organization is. Whereas here maybe you can be like maybe, and this is like all the projects which is like half decent, which you still have to work on. Then here you can view working on if you want. Again, it can get quite intense. If you do this, you don't have to do this. But I usually find that the Do Not likes. These are the projects were like every time I open them up, I'm always just kinda like, oh, like I don't like it. So I just throw them in there. The maybes are the ones where I listen. And it's like it has potential, but it feels like there's gonna be a lot of work to get it to like to sounding good. And the ones that are like are working on. Or even you can go like good or whatever. These are the ones that you open up and you're like, yeah, like I can work off that nice and quick. I feel that I can make a beat really fast and finished the B k because that's what I'm thinking of when I listen to this, they do not like It's like I don't like it. I don't want I don't want my name or my brand behind that. Behind that would be the maybe this is like I said, I see potential. There's a lot of work. Alright, the good. Yeah, let's work with it when I have time. Okay. That saves me so much time. The released is if you're if you're releasing singles, maybe I don't do that. I just released the beat tapes and the albums, and this is the easiest way to work. Okay? Alright, I hope that video helped you guys. Oh, I'm telling you when it comes to all this stuff, when it comes to burnout, right? I'm telling you that a custom music folder, and I just showed you the custom music folder of the projects, the sounds. If you work with clients, you guys can figure it out like your own way. But in my opinion, I would suggest creating a folder for each client you work with array. And then if you want to make notes or whatever, you can do all that stuff in there. Okay. So our next video, we're going to talk about a solid backup plan. We're going to I'm going to write on a piece of paper. And we'll just talk our way through that. Okay? Because again, this music folder is super powerful, but if it's not backed up, you can lose it all. And if you back it up in an easy way, then you're good to go. It doesn't matter what happens, right? You can load it up easily on a new computer. 8. 2-3 - Creating a Backup Plan: Alright, so I'm going to talk to you about a backup plan in this video. Now what you see me do here, I highly encourage you to do the exact same thing. You get a pencil and a piece of paper and you figure out, how do you want to backup your computer. I understand it is the most boring thing to do. But if you've already organized your music folder, backing it up, isn't that hard? It doesn't have to be that hard. Okay. So we're going to first talk about your computer. Okay? So I want to say computer. And again, I highly encourage you guys to do the exact same thing that I'm doing. Because essentially all you have to do is kinda connect the dots. Okay? So this computer has your music files on it, your sounds, and you know, if you guys do anything else on a computer, everything is on this computer. Okay. Now, when it comes to backing up your computer, you can have hard drives inside your computer. So typically our computer has an SSD. So an SSD is a solid state hard drive and it's super fast, but typically it can only be like 11 terabyte, sometimes two terabytes hopefully in the future, these things can get bigger as well as more affordable. So SSDs are expensive, but they're fast. And so the reason we want them, we want them for that C Drive. Okay? Why don't for that C drive. So in other words, we are putting our operating system like Windows on there. We are putting FL Studio so it loads fast. Okay. But many times most of us also have an HDD, a hard drive, so a mechanical hard drive. And these things, they can get up to like eight terabytes for example. And for example, eight terabytes might be like $300. This, there's one or two terabyte, could be like $300, but you get the speed. And the thing is they're also silent. These, you can buy them in all different configurations, different styles like for example, are you buying one for backing up? Are you buying one for performance? You want it to be fast. Are you buying one for us? A surveillance system like do you have cameras on your home? There's different hard drives for different purposes and so you wanna do your research to buy one that isn't too loud, but also at the same time that you can get a good amount of storage for a fair price. But now I want to talk about Let's, let's go back up. Okay. So backup, so we can have an internal backup hard drive. We can also have an external. Now, an external hard drive is like one of those USB drives. You just plug them in and you're good to go. Alright, so you have your computer inside your computer, typically, you're going to have your solid state hard drive and then you're going to have a hard drive which is being used for files. Now when it comes to backing up, you can also get another hard drive for internal again, the hard drive is more affordable. You can get more storage space. My recommendation to you is to get at least double that your computer is. So the reason I suggest a hard drive that is a boat at least double from what your computer is. So for example, if this was instead of four, let's say it was like two terabytes casey of one terabyte for SSD, then a two terabyte hard drive, Let's just say for example, okay, so let's three terabytes. So you could get away with like a six terabytes a backup drive. But the reason I suggest having at least double is because as your hard drive on your hard drives on your computers start getting fuller. Your backup software. Many times it'll throw up an error message and say, Hey, your hard drive is full, we can backup to it. And do you know how annoying it is when you log into your computer and you realize that your backup hasn't been working for the past week. And now you have to figure out, well, now you got to go fix it. And like I'm telling you, you want to be able to sit, make music, and enjoy what you're doing and by you getting a backup drive, that's a boat at least double. Okay. Now, it kind of sucks once everything starts going up bigger because it gets more expensive. But that's why I tell you all the time when it comes to your plugins, when it comes to your sounds, you don't need millions of sounds. You don't need tons of plugins. You just need good sounds. You just need good plugins. And if you do that, then your computer space isn't really going to get big. Because if we're talking about like an FLP, right? So this is FL Studio, but whatever DAW you use, so at FL Studio project, these things are usually less than a megabyte. So you can have like 10 thousand projects and you're still not going to really see a huge hit towards your main computer. Where you see the main hit is like if you are acquiring big VSTS that are like 20 gigabytes, 30 gigabytes to operate, stuff like that. That's, you know, I always warn you guys like just know the sounds no, the plugins that you're bringing in to reduce the weight on your computer. I'm telling you it just makes your life so much easier. More affordable. It's really easy to think that you need a lot of stuff. Okay? So now when it comes to your computer, for example, like how many USB drives D1. Like for me personally, I would suggest. Because again, you also want to think like if you use an internal hard drive as a backup drive in your computer, then you don't need to have a USB drive because there's pros and cons to a USB drive. So I'm just gonna go USB. First of all, the really easy you just plug him in USB. But it's also a con, because as a beat maker, someone who uses a computer for music production, we're plugging a lot of things in USB to our computer, our audio interface, our midi keyboard. If you have different midi controllers. For me personally, I plug a lot of things in USB. So for me it's more important to have the USB ports opened up. Another thing too, is when they are plugged into your USB port, they take a lot of bandwidth when they're actually backing up. So that's another thing too. When it is all internal, a lot of those things go away and you plug it in just like them into your motherboard. So the internal approach is a little bit more involved, but it's not too bad. You just plug it in. You make sure to use those little rubber feet, right? That this reduces the vibration. It those typically come with other your computer when you purchase it. And then you with a hard drive, you provide it with power as well as it needs a SATA cable to plug n. Okay? So USB is really nice and convenient because you just plug it into USB. It's self-powered. But again, it does take a lot of your USB ports. So for me personally, at the moment, I just have one USB port and I've gone with an internal drive. And it's been really nice. It allows my computer to be pretty lightweight and I can use all of my USB ports. Now I understand if you need more USB ports, you can buy a USB card. But even for myself, I was starting to max out like all that stuff. Okay. So what we're actually backing up our computer, there's a couple of different things that I want to quickly talk about to finish up this video. Okay? So the cloud, the cloud, what I want to say here is it's dangerous the Cloud, right? Like at the same time, what if someone hacked your your your password or whatever and got in and found all all all your stuff. So when it comes to the Cloud, what I suggest is only put what you want in the Cloud. And when it comes to your music, you know what I mean? Like, I think the convenience of having your music and your projects in the Cloud and just make sure that you have a secure password and all that stuff. Because really that's all you can do when it comes to the Cloud. But the thing that is really awesome is that there's apps. Okay? So for example, if you want to access that project or those sounds, or if you've exported that beat. Okay, so if you've exported the beat, well, for example, now it's into an MP3. Now, you could access this from your phone. Go phone. Right? Look how easy that is. You made the beat on your computer, you export it, it. So in other words, that custom music folder is in the Cloud. You put it to an mp3 like the beat. Now you can listen to on your phone if you just went out, That's how convenient the Cloud is. Okay. And also if your computer ever broke, you have it in the Cloud. And so or if you have a laptop. So if you have a computer and a laptop, then you can do it in the Cloud. Now, you want to have what's called a local backup. Now, again, a local backup is it could be internal or an external. And I'm just going to say a hard disk drive for this video because at the moment, even with current standards of audio or of computer technology, the hard drive is like the best solution when it comes to backing up its most affordable, you can get the largest amount of space. So I'm just gonna go HDD, okay, so hard, hard disk drive, I think is what it stands for. So a local backup, you can either have an internal, external or you can have both. Okay? Then another thing to also think about is it's nice to have like a USB drive, USB backup. Now, this can be one of those little sticks. And like, you know, for example, you might just want to backup like your, your actual albums are certain songs. And I suggest putting this into what's called a fire box. A fire box is something that you guys can look into and I would look into one that is waterproof and fire proof. Then you can just put your stuff in there. The Cloud again has been so useful, right? You're able to access it from your phone. Really, really liked the workflow as well as it's another form of a backup, right? You also want to have a local backup just on your computer, right? Always ongoing of a current, recent backup. And then this USB backup, what you want to do is you just want to plug it into your into your computer every once in awhile, you can backup everything that hasn't been backed up yet and you just kinda keep it in a safe place. Okay, So again, a backup strategy is boring. It's going to cost you some money. But if you're serious. It's very, very important and it should last you for quite awhile. Now one final thing I will say before closing out is I've always used a Kronos backup software, but in recent years, it seems that they have changed their direction and becoming more of like a firewall software instead of a backup software. So I personally have not tried it, so I cannot fully recommend it. But it's called macro reflect. Okay. With Windows 11 coming out, this is something that I will be looking at to personally, because I'm just wanting a super-simple backup solution that allows me to do what's called differential backups. And so what this does is it takes a main backup. So this is a main backup of your computer. And then if any file changes happen, it just backs up like just like little backups. In then maybe once a week, it will then do another full backup. And so in other words, it's not so hard on your computer. And you guys can do more information on a differential backup. So that's kind of a little overview of backing up a pencil and get some paper, figure it out. I'm telling you it might take you an hour, it might take you two hours, it might take you a week for me to figure out my backup strategy. It took me quite awhile. Alright. It doesn't have to be intense. Keep it simple. And also when you are backing up sometimes. So for example, let's say, let's say you had your C drive, right, which is your SSD. And then let's say you put your next one is F. So this is like your hard drive. So if this is 11 terabyte, and then let's say, let's just say this is two terabytes. Many times these backup softwares allow you to back it up like as a whole. But what I have found personally is just back them up individually. Okay. Because what happens is this C Drive, it has some special files on it to help your boot. So when you actually boot your computer. So what I'm saying is if, let's say you get Mac for you and reflect again, this is the software I am looking at when I do upgrade to a new computer and get Windows 11 and stuff like that. I would just do like this. So you'd backup your C drive separately and you'd backup your F dr separately. And then again, this would be going to your either internal or external hard drives. So again, it could be external USB drive or it can be your internal hard drive. So without getting too intense, but that's kinda how it works. So you're going to have your C drive for your main computer. You're going to have your f. As for your files and all that kinda stuff. You're gonna get a piece of software now, Windows and Mac, when it comes to backup, you're going to have to find your own software that you like. But I would highly suggest looking at this differential and then you can do it on like a weekly backup where it does a full backup of your computer and then during the week, it just backs up like any files that you've altered or added. And it just makes the backup really, really fast and really light on your computer. And then maybe every Sunday or something like that, you can just run a full backup, but it does it all automatically. It can even wake up your computer and do it for you. And again, if you have at least double the size of your hard drives, you will not get that error message of, hey, we can't backup because if we're going to back up, then your hard drive is gonna be too full. And I'm telling you I've experienced that so many times. And it's all about workflow. So that's some super, super wise advice for you guys. If you want a solution that just works, then I would suggest looking into at least double what you've got going on here. Okay, so forget. So for sulfur again, your SSD is like your C drive, that's like your main boot, then your hard drive would be for your files. But depending on what this is, base your backup off of this thinking to the future. Again, when it comes to VSTS, when it comes to sounds, you don't need millions of sounds. You don't need tons of ESTs because it's called the gear ****. That's one of the biggest burnouts that has happened for students that I've been teaching over the years. They email me and be like, Hey man, I've been checking out your videos and I fell into gear lost and then they spend like a week or two or maybe even longer correcting all the an organization and take take a pencil, take some paper. I'm telling you it's worth your time because if you are serious about learning to make beats, then you will see way better results and you'll be able to focus on your music whenever you want and there'll be backed up. Get talked to you in the next one. 9. 3-1 - Using Your Whole Frequency Spectrum Part 1: Alright, so tip number three for the five golden pillar that music production is using your whole frequency spectrum as a beat maker. Even when you're mixing music, you can think about this too, especially when you're mixing your music. It could be applying certain effects on, or you can be EQ in a certain way. So using the whole frequency spectrum is definitely a golden pillar and allows your music to be four. You must understand how basic sounds work. And I'm going to show you that it'll be really eye-opening to your care when selecting instruments, always think about getting them to fit in. So for example, you gotta be creative. So when you're a beat maker and you're playing your instruments, you can play up and down in octaves. For example, a baseline can actually be a lead up high. That's a really cool pro tip. I want to pass on to you. Okay? So I'm talking about using your full frequency spectrum. And again, we're just going to load up the pro Q three and we're just going to use it as a visual analyzer, analyzer, which means that we can see our lows and highs. And so let's just look at a kick drum here, okay. And so I'm talking to you about, I'm talking to you about that you must understand how basic sounds work, okay? So when we talk about a kick drum, what do you think about a kick drum? You think that it's mainly in the low end, right? And I just want to select maybe just a little bit of a different kick drum, maybe something like this. Okay, So in our track, if we had a drum loop going on with instruments, many times we're not hearing this high-end, but you can see that high-end actually does exist with this kick drum. And so watch this. If we take a high cut filter and we cut it off, I'm going to turn off the auto gain because if I don't, otherwise, it's just gonna make it louder and louder, right? And I'm just going to do this. Okay? So in our song, we would typically hear the kick drum like this. What's your up just a little bit. Without it. But with a cut. Now, I'm just going to copy this over. And we're going to use a low cut. We're going to bring it up like this. So this is the high end of the kick drum. This is helping that kick drum actually stand out in the song. Right? Like all these frequencies are what help the drum cut through. But really inner track, we're really hearing this. Alright? So what I'm trying to say is when we are looking at a kick drum, it's really important to understand how our basic sounds work. Because even though that we see this full frequency spectrum in this sound, like it looks pretty full, right? Really, we are only hearing this in our song, okay, so there's a little bit deceiving, but I'm mainly talking about when we have a full song going on, such as our kick, our clap. And let's just put this just kind of make it a little kick drum loop here. So I'm just going to lower it down just a little bit. Make one on the spot. And we'll just layer these up and this club here, since it's a little bit looser sounding, sometimes I will use the out and I can trim it up just a little bit. Turn it up. Okay, so we've got this kick drum and then it'll cut itself so that these drums right here, so I'm cleaner. Okay, so again, let's just look at the claps here quickly. Because again, we're going to see the claps. They have low-end frequencies, but really the clap everywhere from around here and over. Alright, so let's just go to a high, high shelf, right? So really, for a clap, it's kind of like all in here, which is where the co-op is really cutting through. The clap does have low end, especially if we have a snare. Feels like a real snare. Maybe something like that. Again, I'm just going to trim this up a little bit because a lot of these sounds have really powerful layers. They cut through in a mixed good bread. Just want to show you, just see, so a snare. Again, you've got to learn how these sounds work. A snare, this is, this is what cuts through and this is a really cool mixing trick. So if we listened to, I'm going to turn off the auto gain weight, but I just want to exaggerate this. So let's turn it off. Okay, so, so let's do much. But watch off. On. Alright, so it sounds a little bit muffled. So you can tighten it up a little bit. Or you can even use cut a little bit rate after. And it can be like before and after. Right? So this is more of a snare that we know and that we, that we listened to with a lot of rapper hip hop, right? They, they kinda boost that fundamental and the snare. Okay, so again, I'm just kinda talking about your frequency spectrum, knowing how to use your sounds. Now, I'm just going to build a little drum loop. I'll put some melodies in. And then I just want to talk a little bit about thinking about where you should be placing your instruments within the frequency spectrum. Because if you follow the standards, because there's typically like those musical charts where instruments should be fitting in your mix. But the thing is that is for like, let's say classical music, where they do want things to be like very perfect and, and stand out and fit. But as a beat maker, like when we're selecting our instruments, like we're selecting super random sounds, right? And we don't follow that stuff. For example, if we use a piano, let's say this one is gonna probably sound like country or like a kinda like in a saloon. So sometimes it might be like you get this sound. But let's, let's, let's write it to the mixer. Watch. We're going to go to the mixer. Instead of putting the heavy effects directly on, I get, I usually send it to ascend. Now, let's just go Westworld and unclick distortion. Okay, So let's just confirm what we've done. So I have this flex instance open. It's going to insert nine. I've also read it to another sense. So right now, all that did was it duplicated it's audio, it made it louder. So what we could do is we turn it down a little bit. Let's just load up a distortion. I really liked the fruity blood overdrive, really, really powerful. And I've shared this before, but you can actually right-click on a lot of these plugins for FL Studio, you can change the theme. And again, if you right-click these windows, stay open, right? So watch if I left-click, it goes away. But if you would, if you right-click, you can decide what you like. There you go. So we'll use the red one. Okay, so let's just really, really, really distort this 100. Turn this down. But again, depending on the sound that you're wanting as a beat maker or something like that may not be uncommon. And again, that might be a bit aggressive swatch. We can open up an EQ. Turn off the auto gain again. Much maybe because some of the highest. So let me go more into a different beat, a load up an example. We'll talk a little bit more about where these instruments are fitting and then also how to be creative. 10. 3-2 - Using Your Whole Frequency Spectrum Part 2: Alright, so I brought us back to this no burden song. I'll just play it quickly just so you can remember it. Okay? So again, if we're listening to this song, so this is the chorus and this is, I guess the complete song, right? We have all these different melodies and let's just look at a frequency spectrum analyzer. Okay, so let's just look at the full frequency spectrum of the song again, these are all the instruments going on. We will solve them out. We'll look a little bit further at them, and then we will just have Nexus here. And I just want to go through a couple of different sounds. And I'll show you how I would approach, maybe adding a new melody in or how we can approach it. Because what you want to think about is where do you can fit them into your track? Which is what I see right here. When selecting instruments, you've got to think about filling them in. And so if you think that way, it really helps your mixing and it makes your tracks on four by itself. And then when you go to mix the music, it really makes it a lot easier. Okay, so again, here is the frequency spectrum of the full track, and then we'll solo out some, some sounds. So again, here's the piano. So even though it has some high frequencies, to me, this is more of like a mid kind of sound. And this sound itself, I have a lot of reverb on purpose because i'm, I'm doing what's called side-chain compression, which is pumping it. Okay, So if we go here, you can see this is side-chain compression and we have the kick drum. And I've right-clicked and one side chain to this track on the electric piano. It allows us to see it as a side chain trigger. Whenever the kick drum plays, it's reducing the volume of this electric piano, right? If you don't know how side-chain compression works, I highly encourage you to go look it up. So this is just getting some pumping going on. Okay? Consider this piano kind of more of like a, more like a mid instrument is not very bright even though it has the high frequencies. And again, that's where it can be deceiving. Like there are some high frequencies and it's kind of like the kind of plucks of the sound. Okay, so now let's move to the kick drum. So again, same thing, it has the low end. And if we listen to the kick drum by itself, listen, it kinda has the right. You hear that. And let's go to the kick drum here. Let's just go a and B. And I will just cut this out. And you will hear the song. This is really what we're hearing in that kick drum, right? So watch while back. This is a song. Here's the kick drum, right? Like we are hearing that kick drum as the low-end because that's what we know the kick drum for. But even though it has some high end, it is deceiving, but that high-end is what helps the drum stand out as well. Okay, so let's look at a clap. So this is, this looks like what a clock would be. Alright. Again, this EQ, don't worry about how my cuts are. This is on the master. So this is this one right here. Okay? Again, since I'm on range three, these are very, very subtle moves, okay, I guess I cut some low-end lately, the low, low, lows. So here's the high hats, right? Like we know hi-hats for being up and up and high-frequency. But one thing to talk about hi-hats is they can live way up here. Hi-hats can also live a little bit lower as well. And here let's just go through a couple of high hats and I'll show you so many high hats are very different. Okay? This is a very, very high frequency. At much lower, even though it's still playing like that same frequency that you can hear. This one is like very bright. This one is very dark. Okay? So all I'm saying is you can't be looking at the frequency spectrum and know how it's going to sound in your mix. Okay, so let's go to the bagpipe. You can hear that this one is a little bit higher up in the frequency spectrum. So I'll play it with what we got going on right now. Turn this one off. So you can kinda see those little peaks. That's this instrument. It's a little bit higher frequencies. So what I'm saying is we still have room up here. If we wanted an instrument, it'd be very, very high in bright, but you can do it. You just might have to mix it up more aggressively with heavy compression, but you can have a sound up here. You can also maybe have another sound in here, even with this, because this is more of like a mid instrument. You can fit something in there as well. You could fit something in here. And I'm just I'm just going just by hearing, not by looking. Okay. So that's something you gotta kinda train for when you're, when you're making your beats. So for example, we know that the kick drum, it plays low, right? Like that's just the kick drum. We know it plays low. Here comes the base. The base also plays in a very similar place of your kick drum. So we have our base, which just listen to the base by itself. You can hear distortion going on with that base if I click on it. Because for our base to cut through on a cell phone speaker or something, we want that, we want some distortion on there. Right now Let's put the kick drum together. But in context of the whole mix, and here's the piano. We didn't listen to you. Okay, Let's load everything back up again. One thing I want you to listen to when it goes through is what I call the audio painting. This will be our next section, which is preparing the listener. So we have a reverse symbol and a clap and you can hear that it comes right back around. Okay, so I have loaded up nexus. And what I wanna do is I just want to look at these chords. So what I'm looking for is C, G-sharp, D-sharp, A-sharp. And you can see that this right here. This is the chord progression, okay? And I don't believe it, maybe it changes at the end, but what I'll focus on is just like at the beginning, okay? So here I will hit play. And what we wanna do is just listened for this, what I call audio painting. Again, these are those transitions. And then what I'm going to try to do is I'm going to try to fit another instrument in. And what I shared with you was your baseline. Your baseline could be a lead. Okay. So let's, I hopefully this one sounds okay. So it's not bad. Sometimes these have quite a bit of effects going on. Okay? So let's say we have this baseline now. So there's two low, way too low. Let's get something sometimes, sometimes the base is really hard to find. I know there's a square I'm just going to do because I know this one's pretty, pretty powerful. The schools bear square. You can hear how that low-end sounds good, right? We can get maybe just a little bit of a delay going on. Okay, so check this. So if I play up high, so I'm gonna go up an octave. That was a baseline, right? And so much if we tried to play something over top of this song, I get it. I can't promise it's going to sound good. Brightest. Want you to be aware that we are playing are sounds, inner beat. It's all about trying to play throughout the octaves, tried to find a sound that fits and also be listening for where you could be placing in fitting in your sounds because it's going to make your mixing a lot easier. So for example, if we had a piano like this, if you're always playing all your sounds here, you might want to start playing some sounds up here. So let's just hit play. It cuts through. But I think that this would kinda fight. I think this would kinda play with the draft up higher. Here we go. Try again. So that's pretty hot. So turned out as loud. Too aggressive still. It is cutting through though. Here it's cutting through and it's not very loud. It's because it's in its own frequency space and that would make its mixing so much easier now it's a bit of an aggressive sounds. So again, watch for this, try a different sound because again, I told you that base, a base, we go up higher. So again, it's a bit loud. So this was kinda sounds a little similar to what we had, so that's a little cooler. Okay. So watch will turn it down and listen. Go up higher. Now if you wanted to spice it up, this is where effects would come in. And with Nexus, you also have your effects area. And if you want to add in like a chorus or whatever you want to add, many times I do add sounds in here and you can even limit, or they kinda compress right away. So something like that. Now the instrument itself might be long, like so for example, when we're playing it here, hold it. I'm going to trim this down so it doesn't hurt your ears. But if I hold it down, you can hear that the sustain is forever. And so you might be like, Okay, well, this is what I might think. I'd be like, Hey, let's just bring that sustained down because I'm not holding down the note. So it's still loud. And now we're going to turn down the decay with that. There you go. So this is why it's really important to understand how all your basic things work. So this is just ADSR, attack, decay, sustain release. Now, when you are using a sampler like Nexus or flex, sometimes you really don't learn this stuff like the attack. As you can see, this one has a hole. So this is really powerful. And again, I'm going to load up serum because all of these different scents are really easy to learn and to teach off of. Okay. So when we talk about ADSR, you can see Attack, hold, decay, sustain, and social is really important for you to learn. And let's just load up a different one. So it sounds maybe just a little bit different. Okay. So again, we have and this will be super, super quick. Okay? So how it works, and I usually hit the lock here, it's kinda nice. So we have a fast attack, which means it's going to turn on immediately, has really high. So let's just do this get. So if we have a slower along attack, slow attack, the pad will be a fast attack. It's like very quick. Okay, so now let's put this sustain all the way to 0 because this is the easiest way to see it. So the decay is how long it takes to get to 0. We increase that. You can hear as longer, but you can hear that what's going to happen is eventually it goes to 0. So if we bring up the sustain, this is where when you hold down the note, now it's going to stay at this volume. And as I'm holding it down, you can see I can increase and decrease the volume. Okay? So this is what makes us sound somewhere real is if the attack is very, very fast, no, maybe you want a fast sound or slow sound. This is always differs. You can even change the tension on this, so every synth is different. But okay, so we have our TAC, we have our decay. So how long it takes to get to the sustain, or if it was 0, how long it takes to get to 0. Once we let go of the note, that's where the release comes in, which we'll make it longer. That's the release, right? Okay. So I don't want to spend too much time here, but okay. And then the whole, what it does is once it gets to the actual attack, it stays at that max volume for however long you want. So you can see right there. So it holds and then it goes to the decay. And so that's why it's nice to have a visual and I just showed you that nice and quick just so that we can see that when I'm talking about attack decay, so I just turned the decay sustain, which means that I want to go quick. Okay, in something like this, can be used more powerfully because we're not using a sustained instrument. So watch if we can't, if we click on this. And we're going to hold on so many of these knobs and many of these VSTS, if you hold down Control and click or double-click them, they will reset. So you can hear this might be a super aggressive in our song. Even have higher some holding it down. So it was a beat maker. To me. It's like our track already is full. So in order to fit things in, there's a couple of things we're thinking about. We're thinking about the frequency spectrum, which is up high. So again, you have different sections in the highs, you have different sections in the mids, you have different sections in the low end. And so as a beat maker, you could be fitting them in and all of these different little areas depending on how full you want the track to be. But another thing you have to think about is how long the sound is. So if the sound is super long, it's going to really, really overtake a lot of other instruments. And this track by itself, Let's, let's listen to it. Like it's a hit as it is. I really, really like it as it is. This one right here because it's sustained. Loud, right? It was turned down. Volumes of big thing. Not loud enough, but it's not really cutting through. I don't like to sustain. So let's go and check it out with the, these parameters. So watch. It's a lot quicker, which means maybe we can mix it louder. It's not gonna be as aggressive. And let's just see how it goes. Okay, Again, I'm not promising I can make this is all improvise, so I'm not promising I can make something catchy, but you will be able to hear, hey, yeah, it is cutting through a lot better because it's quicker. The ground is lower, lower, lower as you might have to go a little bit louder. See, but it's cutting through in its own space. I don't feel that it would be fighting with the track. But again, since this track is complete as it is, it's a little bit hard to get something to fit. That's really going to complement with what's already going on, if that makes sense. But many times if you want to add and stack on your different instruments, that's what I'm thinking about when it comes to frequency spectrum. So this video is pretty random, but the whole concept of understanding your frequency spectrum is really going to allow you to make better beats. So what I want to recap on is when it comes to a certain instruments. Again, not just put this here so we can look at them. So we have our kick drum. Like yeah, we know that the kick drum plays in the low end and the kick drum, what does it fight with? It fights it faced with the baseline, right? I'll go down lower, even lower. I think I played like right here. Right. So watch if we play the kick drum, the base, right? So like, yes, they fight in the same area. That's always going to happen. It's always going to fight, but even in the low-end, right? So for example, you have to remember from 20 hertz to 50 hertz, That's more than double. So watch in the fab filter, you can open up the piano keys here. You can do that or you can look at the frequency. So you can see from 20 to 40, well that's double right here. I'm cutting almost at 50. And then even up to 50 to 100, again, that's double. So in the low range, your frequencies are moving much slower, which means that you can actually fit a lot more in that low end. And it's really important that you're listening closely in that low end everywhere from like 200 hertz and down. That's kinda like where you can get the nice sweet base up here in the high-end. Let's just there. So again, so from 200 to 1 thousand, so that's 45 times as much, right? 200 to 1 thousand. So there's a lot of things that you can fit in there. And many times when we take a band. So like if we take a band and we're just kinda like, Oh, I'm just going to do this. You can see because it's so wide many times you think that it's just in this area, but really you have a lot of space within this area. So from 200 to 1 thousand, all in this area, right? And then when you go up higher, so 5,010. So all I'm trying to say is there's a lot of space in your frequency spectrum. Don't be, don't be just looking at a frequency analyzer and mics off of it. It's a good reference, right? So if we listen to the full track here, you can see it's a pretty good reference. It looks half decently balanced. When it comes to our individual sounds, a kick drum. And you might be like, I'm going to cut all that out. And you can write, you can do that if you want. But the thing is your kick drum may struggle to stand through or to cut through because many times it needs that click, which is what they call the beater on a kick drum. This isn't like a typical kick drum, like a process. A little bit different because Is beat makers, we are using many different styles of drums. If we listen to a couple, that was probably the one I use. So kick on there. So it's much higher. This would be like a type of kick drum that we are using as maybe like, maybe like a layer or maybe like a secondary kick. This could be like the main kick. And this is like a secondary. Again, this is much of a different style of kick, right? So like this one here is very, very aggressive in the high-end. Let's look at it a little closer. I will write it to an FL Studio. You just hold Control L. You can see that now it's going air and watch if you open up an EQ on there. So this is just the kick drum. Okay? So in this track, maybe this kick drum would be a bit aggressive. So what you could do is you could maybe cut some highs. Maybe you cut out some mids. Again, I'm not sure where, because you have to listen for where in the song, if that makes sense. But I'm just listening to it. And I just hear that maybe it can be hitting harder, right? So let's just boost up some of those low-end. So let's just make our own little, little kick drum. You're quickly. So it's at 140. And so what I'll do for that as well, what a SQL-like halftime. So this would be like 70 beats per minute. And let's do something like this. So let's just mute that. Okay, so let's listen to it without they get drunk or like without the EQ. Now, maybe it sounds fine in the mix again, I don't know, but right now, it's like to me, this sounds more like a drum like that I'd be looking for, right? So without the EQ. But what I'm trying to say is if you made the track, you can't just be looking at this frequency spectrum and be like, Okay, yeah, yeah, that's the kind of sound I'm wanting. It's all about listening for your ears. Everything for me when I'm making a track is all for all by my ears that I selected this sound. I just got to unmute that. It's kinda like in the myths. We ever kick drum. Kick drum sounds a bit quiet compared to this piano, but in context of the whole mix, I think it sounds stands up, right? So it sounds pretty balanced. We have this bagpipe, which is like the main part of the song. It's kinda like in the same area as this electric piano, but it is up alerts just like a little bit higher and it stands out on its own. Alright, so what I'm trying to get across to you guys is when it comes to selecting our sounds, there's some sounds which we know live in certain areas of the frequency spectrum, regardless of how they look, right? If we have this kick drum, yeah, it has some high-end, but at the end of the day when the track is really going on, we are mainly just hearing the low end of that sound. Yes, we can adjust the high end to maybe help compensate to make it cut through more or less because your kick drum, I'm telling you that without high-end, sometimes it's hard to get it to stand, to cut through. So you can apply distortion on or all these different types of types of plugins such as like you can distortion, compression, transient shaper to help it pop through a little bit more. But your kick drum, we mainly know it for the low-end, Gay. These are the basics. The snare, I showed you that little trick, right? You can kinda boost the fundamental right here. So let's just play that again. Without it. But with it. Like this is more of the scenario that we know. Now that's a little bit aggressive, but I'm telling you that they might boost it that 56 decibels. So it's just all about learning your sounds, learning how they work. 11. 3-3 - Using Your Whole Frequency Spectrum Part 3: Let's just load up like a, just a bare project here quickly. We will open up an EQ again and just look at that. So here's one hat. That one cuts through aggressively. But this was pretty dark. So like, you know, if we are making a drum loop, you can hear that, you know, we listen. It's just about knowing your sounds. This one is cutting through the high highs. This one's kinda more like a filler high hat because I could kick drum. So I'm just looking for a kick with a lot of low end. That's kinda cool drum. This is C, this one has a long tail. So if I was going to work with this for me personally, I might trim up that tail because this tail might fight with the baseline. And so as I'm making the beat, this is what I'm thinking about. Let's kinda bring that back a little bit. Okay, So watch. And I will get, just get a snare here now. That's a pretty classic kind of sounding snare. So I usually like my snares up here. And then, SO kicks, snares, hi-hats. Okay, so we've got a couple of different drums going on. Okay. So again, this one could fight with the baseline because it has that tail. Yes, I've trimmed it up. But maybe we need to go a little bit more. Maybe something like that. Okay, so we've got our snares. Let's just clear up those snares. This drunk. If you played it once and awhile. Okay, I'm going to cut it so that it sounds fresh each time at laps over a bit faster tempo. And then we have something like this. So for me right here, because I'm hearing that this sounds pretty powerful. I kinda here's a little bit boxy sounding. So maybe I would open up like an EQ or something. And again, we are just wanting this ROM to sat down to cut through Nice watch. I'm just going to be cut around here and we're just going to boost up as well. We get more of that kind of sound. And then for me I have this little template so I can just quickly read it to some distortion. So all I have on here is fruity blood overdrive. And then I also just did some light EQ. I guess. This isn't totally necessary. But again, I don't like to put the effects typically directly on when it comes to like a distortion and stuff like that. I usually like to run it in parallel and this just goes more control if you listen to it before. So bone. So without the EQ though. But like it's like we need we need more. To me. It's like we need more bass in there. So I just kind of bumped it up a little bit. And again, this is the auto gain, so turn it up a little bit. Maybe we will compress it really, really hard. Get that ROM hitting hard. Can we have, we do have auto gain on again here. So before. But now we can hear it that low end because we're compressing it is so hard. So watch, we can take an EQ and we can kinda cut the lowest lows on that just because it's kinda, I hear in my ear buds here, I hear it here, some like some rumble. I'm going to turn off the auto gain. Okay? So watch Will you go back? So without these effects. So it is much louder. So let's just turn it off from here. Without it. It's like a hidden way harder. Right now, if we went into the mastering stage. Now we can kind of glue it altogether if we add instruments and stuff. So again, gone off track here, it's a bit of a long video, but I just hope that this kinda gives you some insight to when I'm building a drum loop around or if I'm building the melodies, I'm just thinking that okay, we need to spread our stuff around, right? We have the all one high hat. This one cuts through in the high-end harsh, right? This one's kinda like a filler. When it came to our snares, I just used them as a layer. So layering is very, very powerful. This drum. 12. 4-1 - Understanding the BEATMAKING Process [OVERVIEW]: Alright, so in this section of videos, I want to talk to you about understanding the beat making process. Okay, so first I want to talk about the whole process of music production. But I want to focus on the beat making in this video. Because as a beat maker, very, very important to understand how all this works. Okay? So the whole process of music production is there's beat making, There's arrangement, there's mixing, There's mastering, and there's sound design. Now you've may have heard me talk about this quite a bit, but it's very important you understand it because these are the different stages of music production. If you are the beat maker, you understand now that you have to learn mixing it's separate. You also understand you have to learn Mastering which is separate. And typically as a beat maker, we are arranging the song together, but the arrangement is actually the secret of taking your beat and making it sound really professional. The arrangement is really what does it. You can have a beat. For example, you just create some loops. But your loops are not a song. The arrangement is what turns it into a song. This is a skill. It's tiring and it's a different set of skills than making the beat. Not everybody can make the beat. And again, I always tell you this is what you want to learn. And we learn that by understanding how to pick a key in scale, we understand about our sound selection. So I'm not going to be covering these in this course. I'm just going to be covering the beat making. Okay? One thing I do want to say is sound design is actually a separate industry, which is why I was telling you if you're making your beets, I highly suggest something like a Rambler. And the reason is because you're not just using synth. Sounds like for me, I really like using piano's different orchestra sounds. And typically these romp blurs, They all have that kind of stuff. Okay, so that's the music production process. Here. We're just going to focus on the beat making. Okay? So here's what you need to learn when it comes to beat making is not too intense. I just kinda broke these into very, very fundamental things which are highly recommend that you learn. So knowing a key and a scale, we will talk about that in FL Studio. So FL Studio has a built-in scale helper to teach you this. Now, if you don't understand how a piano works, there is 12 notes in an octave. So when you go up an octave, for example, it can be A4. You go up an octave as A5, up an octave, A6, same thing if you go down. So if it's A4, then you go down, it's a three A2. Now when you pick a key and a scale, look here. So even though there's 12 notes in an octave, you can actually only use seven notes within a key. And a scale is a very important for you to understand once you understand that you're on your way. So when you're making your melodies, which is typically just kinda single notes, or if you're programming cords, they must have those same seven notes. Okay? So when you pick a keen to scale, it gives you seven notes that you're allowed to play. Go up and down the octaves. Those seven notes just keep repeating because there's 12 notes in an octave. If you go from A4, A5, the seven notes, or keep going up and down. Those seven notes have to be in your melodies and they have to be in your chords, and that's it. So you can look online at a piano scale helper and it will show you, typically we're selecting major or minor. In FL Studio has a built-in one which I'll show you. You also want to understand the order of your plug-ins. They do matter. They don't always make a huge difference. But it is important to know quality drum samples. I'm telling you make all the difference. They allow your drums to hit hard. They allow things to sound clean, professional. If you're using low-quality drum samples, I'm telling you when to find some high-quality sounds. It makes all the difference. I'm not going to cover this one in this course, but I just wanted to say it that getting the right equipment for your program. Now with fl Studio, they introduced a midi scripting when it comes to a midi keyboard. But just in terms of your speakers, your midi keyboard, your audio interface, make sure that everything is working good. It doesn't have to be the most expensive. It just has to work. If you can get that going on. I'm telling you you're going to have an amazing experience as a beat maker because you're just going to be able to learn what you've got. Creating a template. I highly advise you to create it. Now I warn you a template can actually hinder you. So you want to make it super light. But in other words, a template is supposed to save you time, save you clicks. And then again, I just wrote here using your whole frequency spectrum. We just talked about that, but I'm telling you this is the secrets of being a good beat maker. Okay, So let's break each of these down into separate videos. We're going to talk about keys and scales. 13. 4-2 - Picking Keys and Scales: Okay, This video is just going to break down what is a keen scale? Because if you don't understand that, all your notes will not be in pitch. And that's just how music works. You need to pick a key and scale. Now, yeah, you can actually change a key and scale throughout a track, but that's quite advanced. But typically, you need to pick a key and scale. It gives you seven notes. So how it works is you just go to the piano roll. And you can see here all the light ones are the notes that I'm allowed to play. So let me just show you for an example. So we have C, we have d, we have D-sharp, we have f of g, we have the G-sharp and the a sharp. And then you can see it goes to see six from C5. So this is what's called an octave. So we have 12 notes. Let's see if I can hit them all down at the same time. K, These are the notes that we have, and then it goes up an octave. That's just how music works. We have 12 notes in an octave, but you actually only have 1234567 notes and watch if I clone them, you can see it just does the same thing. And what do you notice? These are light, right? These are the light ones. So how it works is you come up here, you're gonna go to View and you are going to go to scale highlighting. Okay? Now I personally selected on minor, natural because I'd like to play in C minor. But you guys can select whatever you want. So for example, if you like C major, you can see that C major is all white notes. So watch C, D, E, F, G, a, and the b. And then it goes back to C. So that is a scale. So which means that whenever you're programming your notes, you can see that the dark ones, these ones are not in your scale. The light ones are. If you've ever programmed in your notes, if you don't want to look over here, you could, you could just do stuff like this, right? But let's just select a different one, okay? So I usually like to always select a key and scale with both white and black notes. And that is why I like this C minor, natural. I like this one. But again, you can just select like a G minor or G major. Maybe we'll select that one. So you can see that when it comes to G, a G major, right? And let's just look at that again. So we have scale hyaline, we have G major, so it doesn't matter what key in scale you select. So typically, in when we make beats, we're working in major and minor scales. You can be creative, you can try the other scales, whatever. But I'm telling you major and minor, okay? That's just what we use in our Western culture here. Okay? So here is g, get here is a, b, c here is D, E here is F sharp, and then back to G. And if you look so 1234567 and then trickles, goes right back to the G5. Okay? So now if you want to play chords, the chords have to have these notes. So for example, if you want to play a G chord, get to this in many times. If I'm clicking and notes, so use my midi keyboard a lot. It allows me to see it quickly. Okay, so you're gonna have to learn how chords work. They're not too complicated. Typically there are three or more notes and they're spaced apart. And they just allow you to allow your music to be way more pleasing than just single notes. Now, one other thing to say is when it comes to a major and minor, the only difference is just the spacing between the notes on us, certain notes. Okay. So let's just walk that through just quickly, okay, because these are what's called half steps and whole steps. Now again, this is getting into music theory. And what I'm showing you here, you don't need music theory. You could literally just follow this, clicking your melodies and you know that all the notes will sound good. Because how music works is it's just math. K. When we, when we look at a frequency spectrum again, you can see that it's just math, right? What do you see down here? You see a number. What does this number? Look at? This, it's actually notes. So watch this. If we go to A4, which is right here, when seconds come in there. Okay, So there's a four, what do you see? 440 hertz. Okay. So check this out. Let's go to a three. And what is a three? It's 220 hertz. What's 220? 220 or times two hundred and twenty two hundred and twenty times two or 40. So here's two twenty four forty. Well, what is double for 40? Okay. Because where do you think that's going to take us? It's going to take us to a five. So watch, we'll just double-click here. At. So watch for 40 times two, because that's how AAC does work. They are just multiples of each other. So as you go down, it's half, and if you go up, it's double. And this is what makes music pleasing k. So without getting super intense into theory and math, because if you Are always thinking that way. You're not going to enjoy your beat ME king or gay, because you're going to spend a lot of time trying to learn music theory. And so right here, this is the secret. Picking a key and a scale. These are the seven notes that you're allowed to play depending on the key and scale that you select. So for example, if we go back to scale highlighting, I'm gonna go to C and minor. The biggest thing I suggest to you that if you're wanting to learn to improvise on a piano, is picking a key with both white and black notes because it allows your hands to know like where you are on the piano, even without looking at a piano, if you select only white notes, which is what C major was, then it's gonna be really, really hard to know where your hands are on a piano because you don't know. You can't really feel, because it's all white notes, if that makes sense. So picking a key and scale with white and black notes allows you to be able to improvise on a piano as you start to improve. And then what I suggest to you guys is learning about chords. Now, for me personally, I just use basic, basic chords, okay? So stuff like this. And you can even use what's called a cis two and a sus4. So for example, instead of playing like a triad, you can be here or it can be like here. So this is called a sus4 and this is a sub-2. And so let's just click in all the notes again. And so again, when it comes to this music theory stuff, the difference between a major scale and a minor scale is just the amount of steps, okay, so half-steps and whole-steps. So as you can see, a full step is from C to D. And let's just make this bigger. Make it a little bit easier to see on the keys. So you can see that a black note is in the way right here. So we go from C to D, and that is a false step. So essentially we have a half-step and then another half step, which is what they call a full step. And then you can see that the next note is a half-step. Okay? Now, now we don't use the e, which means that from the D-sharp, F is a full step. And so when it comes to a major and a minor scale, it's just the difference of some of these full and half steps. So for example, if this is the C minor, you can see that we can go to scale highlighting. And if we go major, you can see right here that This D sharp is not in the scale. So you can see that that is a difference. So you can see that it goes C, D, E. And then here is where the half-step is, okay, whereas in the minor, this was a false step. Okay. So again, if you're looking at this and you're like, Oh, this sounds confusing what it is, but it isn't because once you learn the basics of major and minor, then you can figure out any key in scale. But what I'm trying to share with you is we have computers and you want to learn just to make beats and to make it as simple as possible, just select a key and a scale that both white and black notes, okay? Because when you go to play the keys, I'm telling you you want to learn how to play the keys. You will actually be able to feel where your hands are and this is how simple it is. So you can see that now I selected a minor scale and you can see that the E is not in there, so it's there. Okay. So all of the light ones are where you can put your notes. Now if you're gonna play chords, they also have to have these seven notes. Now throughout the song, yes, you can change the keen scale if you want, but you are getting its super-advanced. I highly suggest keep things super, super simple and you will learn to make some really awesome melodies. So again, here we go Watch, right? Do you see that? Because I learned to play the keys over the years. And you can see that I am playing in the key of C minor and has the secret. So as to high. So you can't see that. A little bit smaller. There you go. So that is the secret. Okay, so picking a key and a scale FL Studio makes it easy on you that you are able to select a key in scale and you can see the notes you're allowed to place. So when you're going to go click in your notes, well, no, you can't click it here. You can't click it here. You can click it here. And the end, you might ask why? The answer is, it's math. All of these are harmonically pleasing to each other. So someone who's super, super smart, figured out how major and minor scales work. We just follow it. We have seven notes were allowed to play. You want to learn to play the piano. Pick one key and scale with both white and black notes. Learn improvisation and I'm telling you, you will go very far with your music. 14. 4-3 - Understanding Plugin Order Matters: Alright, so this is a really, really simple video, and it's just about the order that your plugins are in, how they matter. Okay, So what I'm gonna do is we're going to say I'm selected on FL keys. You can right-click. You can go channel routing and you can go route selected channels to this track. But again, I always like to show you guys the keyboard shortcuts, which has control and L if you've had multiple. So let's go f, L keys, and let's just give us a different color just so we can see it highlighted on both of those were selected here. You can see that the keyboard shortcut could be controlling L. But what will happen is both of these instruments will go to one insert, but it could shift control and L is what we're wanting. Okay, so what's going to happen is F L keys will go to nine, FL keys number two will go to ten. And make sure I'm selected on the mixer. So Control Shift and L, boom, there you go, right? This is just the keyboard shortcuts. It really helps you. So what I want to talk about in this video is just the order that your plugins are in how they matter. So if we have a distortion plugin and this is probably the best way to see it. And I'm just gonna go fruity, but overdrive again, we can select a different theme, select maybe that one. Okay, so what we're gonna do is we're going to open up parametric EQ and we will see what's happening. Okay? So if we increase our distortion, turned down a little bit. Look at this high-end, Okay? And I'll just turn it off and on right here. We have a distortion on this key. So FL keys is going to nine on nine. Now we have all our inserts. And this is what's called an series. So as our audio goes through, each insert, your audio gets processed more and more and more. So many times you're not gonna notice a huge difference, okay? But sometimes you do, and I just want to share an example here with you. So right now if we play this, you can see that the distortion is before the EQ, which means that we are seeing the frequency analyzer. We're seeing the high-end be boosted with distortion. Watch if I put it before, you're not seeing it even though it sounds the same, right? Because we haven't done anything on the EQ, we're just using it as a visualizer. So both the low end and the high-end have increased. Okay, so now let's talk about using a high cut filter because when it comes to distortion is it increases the highs. So watch this. So let's cut out more. So let's open up another EQ because we can use this as an analyzer. And what I'll do is I'm just going to push in my middle scroll wheel. And I'm just gonna go before you can F2 to give it a color. And we're gonna go after a, go after EQ. I will go before EQ on this one. Okay? So we have after EQ, we have before EQ, and then we're going to have our distortion plugin. Okay, so I just mixed around the plugins. So I got before EQ, we have after EQ, and then we have some distortion going on. Okay, So here is this sound, and let's just play some catchy chords. I'll just play something quickly. So I turned off all the effects are here. And we can also do that right there. And if I hit play, I just rounded it to some reverb and some wideness just to make it sound a little bit better. So it sounds like this. Okay, so let's add the effects back on. And I'm just going to turn off that distortion. And therefore EQ, I'm cutting the highs on it. It sounds like some distortion is going on there, but okay, so what we're doing is we're cutting off the high frequencies. Okay, so let's just go post pre. Pre is before the EQ posters, after the EQ. So I want to see it before. So you can see that I have cut it, but this is what it would look like. You can see that this is, this is it after we have before EQ, after EQ. So if we put the distortion here, what's happening is the distortion is seeing this audio, okay? It's actually seeing it cut off just like this. This is what the distortions is seeing audience being cut off. If we add on our distortion, you're going to see that frequencies come back quite aggressive, right? So it's pulled back and can go maybe a 100, trying to make it kinda musical. So you can see right here that we have some fuller frequency is going on. And if I go really, really aggressive, I just want to show you that, look, we get our high-end back. So we have our EQ, but our distortion, we were really, really aggressive on it. Again, trying to make it musical as much as I can, pretty aggressively. Alright. But again, I just wanted to show you that the order that your plugins are in matters. Okay. If we put the distortion before, now, what's happening is the distortion is seeing the full frequency spectrum and then we're filtering it and then we're seeing another EQ. So let's turn up the volume on that swatch. If we go pray. You can see that this is what this EQ, so before EQ is seeing the turn it off. Okay, this is what the piano roll looks like. We add in our distortion. The first EQ is cutting this off. That's why our second EQ is like this. Okay, so again, all I'm saying is when you are adding on your effects, such as, let's say we add in a chorus or we add in some type of compressor limiter, whatever you're doing, the order that your plugins are in, it does matter. And that's all I wanted to share with you in this video, is as a beat maker, it's really important to know that. Now sometimes it doesn't matter, but sometimes it really does. You know, especially when you're using heavy things like heavy distortion and stuff. But for me personally, I really do like to use sends and for example, to create a sandal, just show you quickly. Let's say we wanted to create a reverb. So what you would do is you would just left-click, boom. So now FL keys is still going to the master. And if you look on the master, that's the out, that's the 12, That's your left speaker and right speaker. Everything gets routed to the master. That's how we are hearing our audio. This is where it gets what's called summed. We're sending it to what's called a parallel track or ascend. Let's say we open up some reverb. So I'll go to the free reverb to probably one of my favorite reverbs. And you can see that you have a dry in a wet. So if you put the reverb directly on, now let's just do that. For example. If you do decide to put it directly on you can, there's nothing wrong with that. It's all just a choice thing. But you also have a dry, which is the original signal, and then you have a wet so you can blend in. You may only just want a little bit of wetness there. Okay, let's turn off that reverb. And now we're back to this reverb right here. Okay? So if it's being ascend, you don't want the dry, you would just put all the way to wet. And so what you can do is you can see that f L keys is going to the reverb. Let's turn off all those effects. So FL keys, let's say it's just going to this reverb. So without it. Now, with it. If we're cutting a little bit too much on the lows. Sometimes, again, it depends on how many instruments you have in your song. Sometimes the lowest is nice. Just a little bit. So we have the NFL keys. It's going to the reverb. This is what's called a send, a parallel track. And we have disabled the dry, we put the wet up and now we can turn down off if it's too much. We can also turn down how much we want to send. And there is a difference between this knob to this novel K. I encourage you to try it out. And in short, this is just sending less audio into the effect, which means that you're getting less of the effect, okay? If the, if you're sending it in full, which means that you're getting the full effect. This is just churning it down after the effect if that makes sense. Okay, So this is turning it down before the plugin, which means you're getting less effect. This slider here is churning it down after the plug-in. So in other words, you're getting the full effect, you're just dialing it back. Okay, so there you go. That's the order of your plugins. So for example, even if we add the reverb and you opened up an EQ. So many times. You can also select your different styles up here. So for example, let's say we had our reverb and it was before. So we are cutting off the low frequencies before it hits the reverb, right? So in other words, we have F, F, L keys. It's being sent into the reverb. It is seeing the NFL keys. It's cutting off the high frequencies, then it's hitting the reverb. If we want the reverb to hit the low frequencies, now the reverb sees the low frequencies, but then after it goes to that reverb, them are cutting off the lows. And again, depending on what you're doing, you can get a different sound. And that's all I'm wanting to get across in this video. 15. 4-4 - Quality Drum Samples Makes ALL the Difference: Alright, in this video, I just want to talk about quality drum samples and make all the difference. Now, I'm not trying to sell you on these drum kits at all. You guys find your own drum kits, k, If you do want to get these, these are by exclusive audio so you can check them out. Okay. Now, what I'm trying to present to you is just the variety and the quality. That's what you need as a beat maker. Okay, this is a golden pillar that I can pass on to you. I can't tell you enough. You need variety and quality. So when it comes to your drum samples, because as a beat maker, we only have two different types of sounds, right? We have drum samples. When I say drum samples, I mean like one shot drum samples like for example, if we look at organic, we can see we have symbols, we have precaution, we have high hats, right? So this closed hats, open hats. I classify one-shot drum samples as all that stuff. So we have kick drums, yes, we have snares. These are all our one-shot drum samples. That's one type of sound. The other type of sound is our virtual instruments. Okay, so there's really only two types of sounds as a beat maker, virtual instruments and one-shot drum samples. Okay, and here I always try to teach you guys to create everything yourself with your own melodies, your own one-shot drum samples. It's the most rewarding feeling, okay if you're using loops, I always think that you are cheating yourself. Okay? So with that out of the way, again, I just want to present to you what a good drum kit should look like. So if you are purchasing sounds out there, again, this is what I have experienced over my years and not every single sound kit is amazing. So even within these sound kids, not every single sound is good. Sometimes you go through them and you're like, I'm not going to use that sound and then you go and try and find another sound. But that doesn't mean that I'm not going to use it. Maybe for another beat. Maybe it's the perfect sound, maybe it just works. And again, like I was trying to explain, like, if we have this sound here, when we have a frequency spectrum, don't feel that you always have to play your kick drum like that. You can play it up high. Like these are very cool sounds, right? So depending on the track. So let's, let's just get, so what I'll do is I'll just build a little beat here with you. Just really quick. Okay, so I'm just gonna go to song mode. And we are going to go to a new pattern. And so let's just get a cool kick drum going on. So something like that. It's kinda cool, It's kinda clean. That's what I'm looking forward to. The nice, clean drum. Sometimes they find a lot of these are really big, really full, which are powerful, but sometimes you just want a nice clean drum that has some distortion on it. What I'm thinking is maybe I can EQ it, right. You can hear that there's a kinda like mid distortion going on. So I just think, I think, I think I can clean that up. A clean drum too, but again, it has a bit of a layer. So I'm going to use the Alt. So this is what I'm thinking now as a producer, I'm thinking what's my main drum? And I'm thinking this, what is it I'm using ultimately Up arrow to do that. Usually my main drum at the top. And then I'm going to layer drums are mixed them up, kind of put those around. So the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to clean up this kick drum a little bit and I use Control and L, we're going to open up an EQ. So I can just hear like, I don't know where somewhere in here. Again, I'm just cleaning it up just gently. So before after it sounds a little bit cleaner, maybe will boost up some of that low end and just get it a little bigger too. So without it. And again, it's just a reference point. We haven't even started making the beat yet. So what I wanted to do, this sound, I'm going to show you that we're going to play something cool up high with them. Because it's all about being creative with your sound, with your music. Okay? So again, I'm just talking to you high-quality drum samples. So even here they're nice and organized. Faculty short kicks, they hit so hard. Like they're just, they're just short. And that's, you know, that's what you want. You want a nice clean, there's even a two weights, right? So if you're in speakers, you can hear that, but these are big, these various sounds. Something like that's cool too. But again, it's just all about variety and quality allow you as the producer. For example, like you know, do you have tambourine? Do you have like as you can see in here, I think metallic rate, we have different tambourine, right? And if we take this sound, if you play it down low, like That's pretty cool sounding. So let's just open that up. I'm just going to layer that just for a sec. So we're at 91 beats per minute. Let's play the beat. Sometimes I like to put the metronome on and we will just do this. So does a bit loud. Let's get a clap. I already have lots and lots of kicks. So looking for kind of like a quick quick clap. That was a bit loose. So what we'll do, we'll play that on the two and the four. And then this one, what we'll do is we can nudge it back a little bit because it might be a little bit late. So again, this needs to be loud. And again, the keys could be a bit loud to making it a bit harder. And some of the claps. So I want this kicked in to hit hard. But again, the kick itself doesn't have much body. So it could be one of those things where we got to bring it to the mixer boosted up. Maybe, maybe we'll use this one instead. So let's just boost it up. And you can hear on that layer how it hits harder, right? Okay, Now this drum, boom, boom. Now this drop can be a little bit too overpowering. So this is where we can use some velocity. We can kinda maybe nudge those down a little bit, kind of blend them in a bit. Let's make it hard when it layers, but when it doesn't layer, maybe we just kind of blend it. We can add some swing in there. It gives a little bit more grooved or music. Okay, so I wanted to take this kick drum, this one right here. And let's play a little melody with it. Let's see if we can get something kinda cool going on. So okay, so what? We're going to go to a new pattern, and we're going to play a melody with that sound. And we're going to mix up the melody as it goes so that it's not so repetitive because right now the kick drum that is repetitive, That's one thing I always tell you guys as well, is you gotta make sure that you're mixing up your drum loops. So for example, if it's pattern to pad, this is the same thing. So a cool little trick and efforts to do is you can just go right-click or make unique. And if you wanted to maybe like, like change up like what are the drums? So for example, let's listen to that. Alright, so pattern is like this. Pattern three, let's say is just like that. Okay, so again, we're going to get a new pattern now and we're gonna go to this sound. I think it's this one. So let's just try a little recording over that. So let's open that up and I'm just gonna press Control and cute quantize. That is the easiest way to make your beets versus late, right? I heard that. I would bring that back and we will go to a step, make it a little bit easier. And when we get our press Control Q and now we'll just quantize it to the grid. So you can hear right here, it was too quiet. So I'm just going to hold Alt and the scroll wheel or you could just click. Instead of listening to all the way back. You can see I just clicked here. And if you see up here, you can see that it actually follows where you're clicking. So in other words, I liked where we're at. I just fix this one little note here and it's like, okay, well let's continue. So let's take this and let's do something kinda cool with it. I don't know what, but we're going to do something. So the first thing we're gonna do is I'm going to compress. Usually compression really just helps things stand out and I don't know, I'm just gonna be aggressive on it. Again when I press Q isn't the original sound. So I have to listen to in context of the beat. Let's copy it over. And this is where you can, you can kinda mess around, you know, you can adjust different things, different styles. I'll leave it there. So let's take advantages of some of these sands. So we'll add some reverb all there. Let's maybe add a reverb directly on to this because it's a special sound. And again, so I told you there's a dry and the wet, so we're just going to bring the wet down a little bit. We'll use some pre-delay and that's going to allow the reverb to stand out a little bit more clear. So let's play up higher. So without the reverb can bring back the decay, which is how long it is. Okay, we're gonna just like the sound of it. Sometimes using the mod is pretty cool. Castle was also a little bit too much Frito-Lay. Now, when I talk to you about the order that your plugins are in, check this out. If we put the river before the compression, we're going to hear the reverb way more. Okay. So again, I'm just trying to break down and letting you see how it all works, right? Like you have to understand the high-quality drum samples is what makes beat making so easy. And I just walked you through how we just made us the little drum loop, right? I usually like to use a couple of different drums. We didn't use this one. I'm going to press Alt and delete to remove that one. But we use this kind of like cool little tambourine. I played it down, lower down here. So watch like maybe. So because powder into and pattern of three have that same note. So watch, I'm just going to come to pattern three. We will remove it, will kind of pattern two and we will remove that as well. Okay, So now no longer has that. So we will just put it into our own. And what I'll do is maybe we will, We were down quite low on that. Okay, So here we're playing here. So maybe, maybe all like play it like this. So was the sea. Maybe Blake, I don't know. We'll try it. Again. Always look at my keyboard shortcuts. So what I did there was I clicked it in, I highlighted it all. Press Control a and B. What does trim? Something like this, so it'll sound like this. And maybe that sound annoying. Maybe I want to spice it up at the end. And maybe you'd maybe our sound cooler. I don't know. Well, we'll try it out. Try it out. Again. Same thing now this is remixing comes in. I feel that we have something kinda cool happening. But maybe it needs some effects on some reverb, maybe needs to be louder. So again, this is where I'd use like compression. Compression. Compression is such a powerful tool. So many times you see in tutorials people are like, Oh, only use two to one or like for me, I'm aggressive. So that doesn't mean that it's right or wrong, but it just means that you're training your ear for what sounds good and what doesn't sound good. What's over process, what's not. And then also when it comes to the mastering, this is where we're a lot more gentle right now. Like we're a beat maker or not a mixed. We're not mixing the music right now where a beat maker and we're trying to find a sound that's cool, and that's what I'm trying to do. So so let's it was like this, maybe. So again, this is repetitive. So watch, this is what I will do. We will come here. Right-click could make unique. So now we have two different styles. So here is the one. And so this is what I want to do. Maybe we'll just take this. So it's like this. And maybe we will just say like what we had there before. Now, check this out. So I still have, I still have that ds, ds around there. So we'll have a compressor. And what I'll also do. Okay, So it's still, it's still showing the DS or a. Okay, I think usually it used to always say replace it, so let's just delete that. Okay, That's what threw me off because I opened up a ds, which is renal failure, Ss on your voice. And then here's a compressor. And then watch, what we'll do is let's try like a gate. Gate is really powerful because it will clean up the tail of that sound. And so right now we don't hear it without it. Then again, this is where you can maybe get like a reverb to bring back that tail, but it's more like controlled. So let's do that. So and watch we can put the compressor after, so we're controlling the tail in our own way. Let's compress that really, really hard CDO compression is happening. So let's be really, really aggressive, but good Auto games on. So watch others can copy this over. Let's try a really aggressive on a really, really aggressive on that. And I give you how to compensate for that because we're not really hearing it. So with Allee effects. So the next thing is just the variety. So as you can see in percussion, you can see in hand drums like looking at the different styles or hand drums you get. And it's like as a beat maker, that's what we need. We need these different styles of drums, different styles of pianos, different styles of snares and claps and high hats. And what I always tell you is you don't need millions and millions of sounds. You just need a decent selection of sounds, which is high-quality, which gives you the variety. So for example, we have eight awaits, their short-tailed kicks, There's various kicks now, whatever drum kits that you decide to purchase, what I'm trying to tell you is that you need to acquire those sounds for yourself. Like do you have bone goes? Do you have tambourine? Is do you have shakers? For example, if it goes too high hats, do you have closed? To open hats? Open hats are so powerful and you want to learn to use them, okay, you can use them random times. It kinda, kinda satisfies the drum loops. So for example, let's say we can throw it in here. Because we have pattern to and pattern three. That's kinda mixing it up. I'm just gonna go to a new pattern. I just use my number pad, as you can see down here, it's hitting the plus and my number pad. Let's try this. Okay, so I'm just going to throw this in every once in awhile and watch. We'll just mix it up with a different one. So this one sounds lower. Something like that. That might sound cool. So I'm just gonna new pattern. And maybe we'll play it like this. Maybe it'll be like this. So again, it's just all about trying to find what sounds you like. Sound placement is huge. And other thing too is sometimes certain sounds. You can see this one's trimmed really good. This one might have a little bit of space there, but you can use the trim and it'll trim that for you. So when you place your sound, it actually is on time. Let's just see, as you can see this this top right here because it's late, right? So even the trim won't fix that. You would have to use the sample start and you can see that that is going to trim it. You can use the n as well, but it kind of messes with this sound quite a bit. You have to use normalized to bring it back. So you can use a sample star. It's going to get rid of this kind of stuff if you want that clap to hit a little sooner. But I'm just gonna leave it because I know Najd, if you remember in the beginning, we took our clap and you can see that I know nudged a little bit back and I did that by holding down Shift and the scroll wheel. Or you can highlight them both. And then again use shift and the scroll wheel and you can see they can move. And we'll just put that back to where I had it. I think it was there. Yeah, there you go. Okay. So there you guys go. So quality drum samples, That's just an example of the difference. Okay, Now I understand there's lots of different ways you can be buying drum samples nowadays. But purchasing a full drum kit, I'm telling you is like the most enjoyable because you just quickly, look, look, you have them all right here you don't need to be connected to the Internet. These are on my computer which I've purchased, which I own, and tons of selection. It's the workflow. I understand that marketing can really make people feel as if a certain ways better or whatever. But I'm telling you this is the old school way to do it. It's by far the tried and true way. As you can see, you know, I was just messing around. We have 11 instrument. We're clicking in and we came up with this pretty fast, right? So there you go. So that's quality drum samples. I hope that inspires you to beat make this approach, I'm telling you it allows you to be super versatile, find your own sound and do your own thing. 16. 4-5 - A Template That Saves TIME: Alright, so in this video, I just want to quickly talk about a template and what you should be looking for when you're making your own template. Okay? So I have been making beats for many, many years, alright? And what I discovered in my early years, I was like, Oh, you can make templates. Wow. And I thought, I'm going to make this super big template. You have all these plugins open. You have all, for example, it was at a time where I was creating a lot of albums. So I was creating for verse, verse one vocals, verse two vocals. And it will pick up big, like I think I had up to like 40 or 50 inserts, all color-coded, all tons of effects. But do you know what? If you use that template and you're not taking advantage of all that stuff, FL Studio, when it opens up the project, it has to open up all those plugins. So do you know what if you had a simple beat like this? You still have to wait that extra 51015 seconds for the project to open. Because it's open, it's opening up all of those inserts and all of those plug-ins that you've color-coded and add it on all your plugins. So what I want to get across to you is you have to understand what is your workflow. And you can see this is my own personal template right here that I use this as my own workflow. So you can see that insert nine, we did this right? We added the keys in, we created our own sand. And this is specific just to this track. I wanted it its own reverb just for the FL keys. Yeah. We even routed it to some reverb heaters and wideness, I guess. But I wanted its own reverb for its own sound and that's fine. That pertains to this song for this particular f L keys, right? So if we have f L keys right here, just do F L keys hit F3 because it has that same blue color. And there you go. So again, I'll just show you that should that shortcut. So again, if you open up a sound and you hit Enter, this color gets stored into your, you know, it gets stored. And so if you hit, if we go to new pattern and if we hit F2, you can see if you hit F3, boom, check that out. It actually brings up the color. And even if you don't hit F3, it's usually the first color, okay? So for example, if we hit Enter and hit F2, if you select here, it's the first color. Okay, that's a little pro tip with fl Studio. So FL keys and insert nine. I wanted this reverb just for this project. But typically how I work is I like to have one reverb. I'd like to have a second reverb, which sounds just a little bit different. And I'm telling you that if you send them just to both of them, you can get really, really cool sounds. You have two different reverbs. If I want to send anything else to it, check it out. But this is how fast you can add reverb on two sounds. Now again, if I want a special reverb, I will create a special reverb for that song. But if I just want some gentle reverb, boom, that's how quick it is. Same with delay, same with wideness, right? We have a stereo enhancer. Same with some distortion. Okay? So these are all common techniques within the audio world. And this is my little template. And also when it comes to the mastering chain, when it comes to the limiter. On your limiter. Current standards are that minus one k. And it's kinda like Everything's opened for me. I'm ready to start mastering. I'm ready to start making the beat. And it's just a part of the workflow. And as you start going as a music producer, it's all about creating a template that works for you. Okay, so I'm just going to explain how you can save your own template. So I'm just gonna go knew I just saved this project. So let's just say you want to set up your template however you want to set it up. Okay, So again, I set mine up just the way you're looking at right here. But let's say on your master. If you just use FL Studio stock plug-ins, then you can use the fruity limiter. You can put it like that minus one. You can see here on the ceiling, right here this you want to make your very last plugin the limiter. So that's how it would work. So it'd be like this. So your limit or do you want to be very lost? And nowadays the loudness standards. So now you need like a loudness meter so you can monitoring so you lean loudest meters. This is a free plugin. He also has a paid version as well. So if you want to support you lean. So you can see that this is how I would set it up. The loudness meter is the very, very last plugin. And then you have your limiter. Now when it goes to actually saving this, Here's a cool little trick to find your templates faster. So you can come here to the all you can scroll down. You can actually see templates right here. If you right-click it, sorry, the little things up. So you can actually go open where you can go Window shell menu, but I'm just going to go open. And it's going to take you right to here. Okay, and let me just select this. Let's go view the navigation and we're going to disable the navigation so we can see like this. So you can see I use two templates. I have one that is FL Studio stock plug-ins, and then I have my third-party one. This one here is my third-party template, which gives me, because I like to use fab filter plugins and that's just a part of my workflow. So you can open this up right here, okay, And what I'm gonna do is I'm just going to bring this back up. And so I'm just going to click this and I'm just going to press Control and C and I'm going to highlight this address bar. You're going to go file. You're gonna go Save As you're going to come here, you're going to paste it in and then you can save it. So let's just say new template for course. So whatever you have done here, this is now your new template. So you can see how the limiter and the loudest meter. Now in FL Studio, if you hit F ten and if you go general, you can see right down here, default template. This is what you would want to select right here. So right now we don't see it. So we actually have to close FL Studio. We have to reopen it. And we're going to see that new template for course. Okay? So if we select File and New from template, you can see that this is new template for course, you can select it from here. Again, FL Studio always updates in certain areas so you can even change the default template which takes you to where I just took you. So again, you can go options, you can go Midi settings or general settings. But I always like the keyboard shortcut, which is F ten. Good general. And you can see right down here. So for example, if we click here, you can see if you wanted a new template for course. Now when I would open up FL Studio every time, That's your template and that's how it works. Okay. So I'm just going to give you a mine. And so again, I just want to advise you that when you are creating a template, my suggestion is to keep it super lightweight. Because again, you have to remember when you're opening up your projects and you've made a super heavy template, it can actually work against you. And so, as you can see, when I go to make my beat, if I added in my drum, if I add in snares, right, then what's going to happen is I'm going to add these to the mixer, okay, now, I get to decide, do I want to open up an EQ? Do I want to open up a compressor? And yes, it's nice if you could save yourself a step and have some EQs and compressors already set up. Maybe if you want to set up your first like ten or something like that with EQs compressors, you can do that. But I'm just saying that over my years of making beats, what I discovered was I just found a lightweight template was way more enjoyable than a super heavy one. And so if I want to EQ this or compress it, it doesn't take too long. And because I have organized my plug-in database, as you can see right here, everything's really, really easy to access, right? So again, I use fab filter a lot, but I also have this one open, for example, in these courses a lot. I want to always reference between them. But so it's just the workflow. And then I get to decide. So for example, let's say we had two drums going on. So let's just bring this one up here. So what I'm gonna do is if you right-click, you can highlight multiple, and you can also come here and go colors selected. But you can see the keyboard shortcut is Shift Alt and see, okay, so I'll just click it though. But again, I always like to use the keyboard shortcuts. So this is the new editor for your colors. Let's just say we put orange for both. Okay, So again, I just selected one which does the first and I just hit this and it goes to last. So now those are this color. So let's just say we're going to just remove this, and we will remove this. And I'm going to click here and go Control Shift and l, that's the keyboard shortcut, right? So let's Control Shift and l. Now what I would do is let's say I want this drum to have a sub, alright, so I'm going to F2 and I'm just going to put kick sub. I usually like to write in capitals. We can F3 for that same yellow color. Or again, you can select it. It will be right around here. Okay? So let's hit Enter. Now, let's say this kick sub one. So what a kick sub is, is one insert controls to faders. So that's how that can work, is we would use the kick sub for that. And so we're highly highlight both of these right-click and go wrote to this track only. And so what happens is you can see that number ten is going to nine and kick, this kick is 11, and it's also going to nine. So we ordered ten. So in other words, we just created a kick sub. So what I'm saying is if I'm making my Beats many times I will create a kick sub. It allows me to process them individually. But then maybe I want to put maybe some light compression on the kicks up or whatever I wanna do. So as a beat maker, you can see that I have ultimate flexibility on how I want to use my mixer still, but I still have my Sends, which is really powerful. I also have my mastering chain, which saves me a lot of clicks. I don't have to always open up this. Alright, and I just, I just have a little bit of light compression going on when I'm making the beat and makes the mixing a little bit easier. And so that's the walk through. So when you save it, again, you guys can come to the templates, go right-click, go Open, and it's going to put you into your documents. It's gonna put you into Image line. There, go to FL Studio. You are going to go to projects. I believe it's in templates, and there you go. So I will delete this one. That's the one I did with you. And this is just my own templates. So again, when it comes to a template, my highest suggestion is don't make it heavy. I'm telling you it's going to work against you over time because I've experienced that. It's all about understanding a good template that works fast and it suits you. And this one, over my ten plus years of making beats, I've just discovered that this works for me. And so before wrapping up this video, I just wanted to show you how you can create a totally blank slate and then create your own template. Okay? So if you go File and New from template, you just go empty. And now there's absolutely nothing in your project. Okay, So this allows you now to create your own template. My personal suggestion to you is again, keep it really lightweight if you want to have a virtual instrument open all the time, such as whatever you use, you can do that. And whenever you open up this template, it will be there. But I have just found personally, usually just setting up like the master the way how I showed you, it's like a limiter and loudness meter. If you do use just like the pro L2, this has a limiter and loudness meter built-in. So not to go off topic, but again, it's just sometimes you can just use one plug-in for both purposes. And again, it's high-quality, right? But you can use other fruity limiter and the Boolean loudness meter. But what I'm just trying to get across is this is a blank slate. You can set it up however you want, right? I had my own sense. I went, you don't send one, for example, you just say F2. And then whatever you do on here, like if you want like that reverb, we're going to go to revert pretty reverb. Remember I told you if you want it as a sand, you put the dry to 0, you put the wet to 100% and then you can fine tune this however you want. Just remember that if you save this into your template, this and my recommendation to you is try to make it pretty general so that this reverb will work no matter what, you can always find, tune it for that particular project. You remember when you open up a template, it always opens up as is. And then when you save it to a project, then you can fine tune it and it won't affect the template. But that's it. Okay, so now if you were to save this template, you would be able to access it from right down here once you close and reopen FL Studio. So I just wanted to quickly show. If you wanted to a blank slate, you just go empty and you can have at it. But again, I'll just show you this is my own personal template. And it does move wonders. I really, really like it. Okay, so stay tuned. Let's go onto the next video. 17. 5-1 - Preparing Your Listener [OVERVIEW]: All right, we are on our last tip for our five golden pillars of music production, and this is preparing our listener. Okay, So the biggest giveaway of an amateur song is when someone did not prepare their listener. And we're going to break down a couple of my tracks. I'll show you exactly what I'm talking about for preparing the listener. Okay? So we prepare a listener before a change happens, okay? And we do this with transitions. These can be things like a reverse cymbal, snare roll or Tom role. Silence is even a really powerful example. And we'll check out one of my songs called looking for my love. And I'm saying here, transition, it can be anything. Alright, you've got to be really, really creative. Because the transition, essentially it's just some type of noise, some type of sound before the chorus or before, essentially before you change something in the song. Okay, So I'll just quickly break down when to use a transition, and then this is it for the notes. Okay, So we use a transition typically before a song structure change. So for example, if we go from verse one to the course, or if we break out of the coerced into averse. This is a perfect example, okay, So before a course or out of a course into reverse. Now what I want you to do is go and listen to some of your favorite songs and listen how they prepare you as the listener before a song changes, okay, Many times they use like a riser. And this whole process of preparing a listener, I actually call it audio painting. I wrote a book on it. It's on Amazon. You can look under the author named Riley Weller or gratuitous. Alright, so that is it for this tip, we are going to now look at transitions in further detail. And again, so tip number five is about preparing your listener. I essentially just call this audio painting. It's preparing the listener before a change happens. And I'm telling you if you think this way, your music will definitely not sound so amateur and your music will really start taking off because it's all about preparing someone before you add in a new instrument or before that chorus comes, Alright, and I'll show you that in our next video. 18. 5-2 - Audio Painting in Action [Part 1]: Okay, So I want to reveal to you what audio painting is if you've never heard of that term before. Again, it's my own term and I really think it's a good example of how it all works. And so essentially what I think about the playlist is like a Canvas, alright? As an artist who paints, you're painting the picture for your listener. But visually, when the listener puts on the headphones, you are essentially taking them through this song, right? And so for example, you can see that this is, the chorus goes into averse now, right here, okay? But you can see what's going on is I have some transitions. And then here, here's kinda like a transition. Here's another transition. Now into track. It's usually pretty good to have 12 or three different types of transitions you can bounce around. And something I will show you right here is notice what's going on right here. You can see that the drum loop is chopped up. And so essentially I'm using this as a form of audio painting in another word on preparing the listener to let them know something's changing in the song. So for example, I'm not playing the drum loop fully and it lists the listener know that okay, something's happening. And then the chorus comes in. Okay? Again, this track is called looking for my love. It's off of one of my beat tastes by gratuitous. You can just look that into Google, looking for my love beat tastes by gratuitous and it will come up for your care. So we're not going to listen to the whole track, but I will listen to a bit from the beginning just for you to see. Now you'll notice here that the only type of really quote, unquote, audio painting is this sound effect. Okay, and I'll play the sound effect by itself. So right now I just have a sound and I use those pitch bend notes. So the sound would just be like this and it's not going to sound good because I don't have an automation clips going on. But let's just listen to it by itself, just for you to see bends. But now watch when we have the types of transition or automation clips going on. So watch all hit F6 to bring up the channel rack. The S affects the sound effect is right there. So as you can see when I'm organized, everything's really easy. I can get there really fast. Same width. If I hit, if I hit F9, I know 28 is my sound effect. Okay, So it's just all about workflow as a music producer. So what I did here, let's just quickly look. Alright, so prism is right here, which is the green one. Pitch is this main pitch. And then you can see I also have a channel pitch, so it also affected this pitch right here. So I did three automation clips on this. You see how that one went up as well. So I affected pitch prism and that one and again in FL Studio to create an automation clip, what I like to do is I'd like to right-click and hold. And then I'll create the automation clip in there just by right-clicking and going create automation clip. Now, if you are using a third party plugin, you can go tools. You can go last tweaked knob. So for example, if we moved the harmonizer knob like that, you can come here. You can go last tweaked and you can go create animation clip. And it would create it right in that area. And so what I'm gonna do is I'm just going to come here. We're going to occur and project history and go all the way back because I adjusted that and I want it to be how I, how I originally had the track. Alright, so I'm just showing you that's what I did from my, from my transition. I just took a sound. I pitched it up with slide notes, which is really powerful by itself. And then I just use some automation just to get my own sounds. So this is what the track sounds like. You can see that no, no audio paintings really going on. I didn't really transition. But sometimes you can get away with it depending on your instruments. You can see that the notes are played faster it here, and it really helps transition into the course. And when I hit play, I'll let you listen to that. And then the same thing when it comes out of the course because I guess the notes are kind of fast, just kinda worked. Sometimes it works. Typically it doesn't. So typically you do need some type of transition. And as you can see here, that this track is pretty basic. I only have one piano. And in order to spice up this verse, because this is verse one. In order to spice this up, what I did was you can see that I chopped up the drum loop. And if I play the drum loop by itself, it's really heavy with symbols. So listen, it's a really powerful drum loop. So we're going to hear it stops. So the symbol continues right here, it goes. And then the symbol comes back in and then it continues. And then you can say also chopped up the drum. And what I've done here, and what I'm trying to share with you is that what I've tried to do to spice up the song when it could have just been so basic like this, like it would have been so continual at sorry, everywhere here I've kinda chopped up. So one sec, Let's just do this. Because otherwise the track to Twitter bit like this over and over and over. So we'll come back here. It would have just kept looping and looping. So it just would have kept looping like, yeah, it's kinda catchy, but at the same time it's like as a music producer, we need to add life into the track. And we do that by with audio painting, Preparing the listener and kind of listening from the listener's point of view. So what I'm trying to say is, you can see right there I put some silence in, right? We took out the drum loop. We allowed that symbol to play through as like, kind of like, ooh, that's kind of a cool part. Because way back in. And then you can see right here, I've chopped up the drum that because spiced up this verse because we only have one thing going on. And then the same thing, I just also put another snare hit right here. So what your goal? Right, just just the drunk. And how I'm doing that is I would just go like step or something. So this is what I do when I'm editing. So I usually like to be in B or bar when I'm actually working from far. So for example, if we're beat and again you can right-click and it keeps us window open or from lumbar. Okay, so if you can't see the difference, just look at the lines. So step you can see all the little lines in-between. This makes it good if you want to do fine, edit select. I'm going to show you if we're going to chop up the drum loop. But if we are working from far, then this is a lot better in beat. You can notice that there's not as many lines, okay? So B or bar I'm telling you is so easy. So from far back because you know that wherever you're clicking, it's like you are locked in. But if we want to do some edits, then so for example, let's just replicate this snare hit. I did. So I'm just going to put it to step. And what I'll do is I'll just take a regular drum loop like this. And what I would usually do, so this isn't, Let's listen for a drum here. Alright, so I know that this snare is right here. We'll listen one more time. Alright, that's, that's the snare. So I'm just going to enable this track, but hold on, Shift and click. And so what I will do is we will bring it back a little bit just like this, or bring it over. And we know that this is the snare, right? So what I did is I probably just did this broader rate up and watch. This is what it did, probably. There you go. So, yeah, so this is drum loops pretty powerful. I have a lot of symbols going on, as you heard, even how to reverse symbol. So it was just symbols all over the place going on. Okay, so let's listen to the track, alright Wilson, to kind of like the beginning of it. I'll let, I'll let it go into the boat here. Okay, So there's gonna be a little bit of listening from you right now. And then I'll just quickly talk about right here in this section of the song. You can see that again, I've just used that same single piano, right? But the only thing is you can see that the color of the drum loop has changed. And so what that is doing is I have just mixed up, as you can see, there's no big drum. And then in here then there's no symbols. So it's just kinda spicing up the drum loop. Even though it was just a pretty basic track with just a single instrument. We did add in our, I did add in a second instrument there, but here we go. Here's the track. Okay, so we've got audio painting and no transition really. But then we start getting into it further on. Okay, we're gonna get into the audio painting now. First one, we have that snare hit coming up, the double snare hit. And then this is audio painting. So let's look at that quickly. So again, this is, I'll just show you it. So I just had some just some sounds. These are some toms, so I'm gonna go to the mixer. So on Insert 29, you can see I have some compression. I have lots of compression and some distortion and some EQ. This one I reversed and to reverse a sound, you just hit reverse, right? That's all you do. And I must have just fine tuned it just for it to flow. And that's it. Okay, so that is my, my, my, my transition. And listen. Now again also the drum loop I chopped out. So I didn't continue it on. And it just looked the listener know that, okay, here comes the course. Okay, Well, listen from here. We'll play this a little bit of the course. But you can see I also chopped up the drum loop again. And this prepared the listener that now we're going into the verse and n in this track because it was using that same instrument. This is why I changed up the drum loop. So this drum loop here is the biggest drum loop of all the tracks. So it has the big drum, has the symbols. It's really big and heavy. Okay, we'll listen to it in just a second. This one here has no symbols and it has no big drum. And then if we go a little bit further on, you can see this one has no symbols, but it has the big drum. Okay, so let me just play. Just like so as you can see, see how I'm not perfectly unlike at the beginning. And this is why I like to work in beater bar because it's just so easy when you're far further out. It just locks in for you. Okay? And I'm telling you all about workflow. So this one is the very, very folded drum loop with the big drum, the symbols. And you've already heard it here. It is really, really powerful, really full. This one here is no symbols and no big drum. So this is just by itself. It's very, very light, but this short-tailed drum does cut through. Okay, now again, I'll just let you listen quickly to this one right here. And this one again is, it has the big drum. So listen at the very beginning of the drum loop, it's like, okay, so we will extend this over to the node big drum case. So let me just recap. So this one has the big drum. So no symbols, has the big drum, but no symbols. This one has no symbols and no big drama. So all I did was within the track. This is what I did to spice it up. Okay. So we were right here so far. Again, you're going to listen to the audio painting. I guess we will just finish throughout the course because it'll let you listen to how when I remove that drum loop, it prepares the listener for a change up. And then it comes into here with a drum loop, which is much lighter than the heavy drum loop. Okay, because no big drama, no symbols. We play it through. Again silence. You can see I even brought in the big drum loop right there. And again, I would just kinda bring a sound over. And I do that by holding down Shift and clicking. And you can bring it over and you can chop up different drum loops and mix and match. And that's what I did in this track. So here it lists this, listen to it through. I'll go back just one more bar. And we will listen to this audio painting with the drum loop cut. It prepares the listener. The course goes through. We're preparing the listener again right here. And then we will get into a different section of the song, which is V2. See I did that. I added that symbol and we chop it up. We got the audio painting. Okay. So do you notice there that this right here was a type of audio painting. It chopped it up. It was kind of like a transition. I also used a real transition, the toms, which you already heard, they're pretty aggressive and kinda cool sounding. But I did that because what do you know this is coming in? New instrument, right? So I did that to prepare the listener a new instruments coming in. Then as this continues on again, I kinda spice it up with the big drum and then no big drum. And then right here, I actually add in the big drum loops. So I must have just done this. Grabbed it, hit Shift and click, and I must have done something like that with this transition, you can see I brought in the toms and I brought in the riser, and it brings us into the chorus. Now one thing I want to share, because again, it's about audio painting and preparing the listener. So you can see at the very, very first chorus, what do you notice different with the first course to the second chorus? So you see the dirty whistle. And it sounds like this, like a pretty aggressive but within the track and I kinda liked how it sounded. But what I'm saying is you can see in the very beginning of the song, That's probably why I didn't do some type of transition because it was just a light chorus. It was the chorus without the main lead. And then what happens is we essentially tease the listener with only an eight-bar chorus. So as you can see, we have 12, 12345678. We have eight bars right here. And the big courses are usually 16 bars, which you can see right here. And to spice up this course, even just a little bit further, what I did was you can see I have two dirty types of whistles, so it's the same sound. I just changed up the melodies just a little bit from the first eight bars to the last eight bars. Okay, so it's a 16 bar course. And typically in a song, this is how it works, not all the time, but usually the listener. What they're wanting to hear is that chorus. They're wanting to hear that big full chorus and they want to play again. Because right here, I'm teasing the listener, right? We've just brought it an eight-bar chorus. It's powerful, but then it goes back into the verse. And then now it's built up into the big course, which is what everyone's waiting for, which is why I have put the big drum with the chops right here, right? You can see that. And I will let you listen to the chorus with both versions there. And then again, I use the toms, and then I use the sound effect with the automation clips. And this prepares the listener for the change. And again, as you can see right here, this is why I was able to bring in this instrument because I transitioned in. And that's pretty much it for the track. But again, I will let you listen to this course. Then I'll hop to one more song for you and we'll just do a slight break down. Very similar. Because again, if you've never heard about audio painting, you can just see that. Okay. I get it. You can even see right here. So listen to this. There's no drum loop going on from the Chorus to this is like the first three, but it's kinda like an outro. But listen, no drum loop going on. I use this transition. It comes back in and then it slows down. So in other words, the big drum loop is not playing. I just kinda layered up and then it fades out. So check this out. There's no drum loop going on. Listen for the transition. Alright, like it's kinda back. So did you hear that reverse symbol? So that reverse symbol was actually built into the drum loop and I just took advantage of it. So there's also one more thing I'll note here before going, before playing that again, you can see that piano one is playing, usually the verse was piano too. So you can tell that this is now an outro because PROC piano to watch verse one piano too is verse 02:00 PM on to with verse three. This is the outro because piano one was actually a part of the chorus. Listen to that reverse drum loop and then it goes into a lighter drum loop to kinda slow down the song before we add in or before I add in this piano layer. So listen to that reverse symbol. This piano layer is going to come in. I stopped the piano. Then I just have a master of volume fade out just for best practice kinda thing there. Okay. So again, let's just play it from here because you will hear the transition, preparing the listener for the new instrument to come in. Then it builds up for the biggest part of the song. This is the 16 bar chorus. And then after that, I will stop this video and then we will go into another track. Okay, So there you guys go. That's, that's your first look at audio painting if you've never heard of it before. And here we go. This one has the big drum. Audio paintings. I chopped it up again, breaks down. And again, I took advantage of that reverse symbol, just dislike you saw right there that reverse symbols listen to it. The reverse symbol breaks down the song. You can't see it, but that's what's happening with this drum loop. Just listened to the reverse symbol. It goes, kinda sounds like, and then it goes into the chorus piano. Because remember, piano too was the Vs. And this is just kinda breaking down the songs. So the reverse symbol there. Let's hop to the next song. 19. 5-3 - Audio Painting in Action [Part 2]: Alright, so I wanted to play this one because you guys have already heard this track and I'll break it down just a little bit further for you to understand more about the audio painting. Now this track is not a 100% complete, and it's actually not publicly released yet. So you can be on the lookout. Again, I released those beat tapes so you guys can just keep checking beat taste by gratuitous and see if I've released know burdens. This one probably will be on my volume ten. And so this is how this trick works. Okay? So again, it's pretty much complete and I wanted you to just hear it because you've already heard this track. Let's play it. So you can see that the drum loop is all chopped up. We have a reverse clap and afford clap symbol, forward symbol. You can see I've removed the kick drum here for a type of transition to spice up the chorus. Now you can see right here, I also use that same reverse cymbal, reverse clap. And what I would do is just highlight, hold on, Shift, click and bring it over. Okay, so let's listen to that transitional care. And then here I have another clap for a transition. So I just took the same clap, but I just made it fast. We have a reverse symbol. That was the transition to bring in the piano and the cloud gas. So you can see that the clap wasn't playing before. Okay? So again, these are just the, just the little things that you can be doing to prepare your listener. That's what it's all about. So in order to add in this piano, I use the reverse symbol and a forward symbol. That's a very classic sound. Okay, so in the very first video of this section, I told you that you could be using like a reverse symbol, a snare roll or Tom role. Silence is super powerful. But you can see right here that this is a reverse and forward symbol, and I'll show you how to do that. So if you want to have a symbol in your sounds, Let's just go to symbols. So for example, this is tape. Let's just say we take this one right here. So you just take it, you drag it in. Okay. There are multiple clips that are Use the drought file. Okay, so maybe I already used that sound. That's, that's amazing if I were to use that, Let's see. I already used that sound. Okay. I'm just going to use another sound. I've never actually had that pop-up up here. Okay, So here is the forward symbol, and let's just color it different. So double-click and listening F2. So we'll give it a green color. Okay? So usually when it comes to assemble, you gotta be careful. A symbol is very, very loud. Okay, So to start off, let's just, let's just normalize it so it's nice and easy to see, but let's just listen to it because I'll turn it on first. Okay, So this is symbol isn't too aggressive. It's more of a, more of a lower frequency, lower high frequencies. Ok? So what you wanna do is you hold on Shift and click, and that will duplicate. So this is the same sound. But what you can do is you can right-click and go make unique. And so now you can see has number two. And if I just hit Enter and that's going to make my playlist small. Again, this is the workflow. I always try to tell you guys, I like this workflow because it is so fast. And so you can see that we have a symbol 18 here. And then we also have symbol 18, number two. And again look in the top left. So simple, 18 and symbol 18, number two. So this one right here, you can either double-click on it or you can just click it and you just called reverse, and that's it. So now when you want to line it up, you can come up here and you can go to non. But for me personally, I just hold on Alt locum, look down here and my shortcuts hold down Alt and you can just kind of break free from the snap if you don't hold on Alt because I am in beat, you can see how hard it is, right? You're not gonna get it lined up. So I'm just going to hold down control and right-click to zoom in there, just like this. And let's just make it big now. Because I'm not going to fine tune it. For example, you can fine-tune your reverse symbol if you wanted to like, for example, if you don't want to as long, you can just increase the trim. And for example, if you increase the n, you can see that it shortens it up a little bit if you don't want to as long so you can do that stuff. But I'm just going to leave everything as is. Okay. So let's make, and again, that was just to reverse it. So we cloned it, right? We went right-click. And you have to have a paid version of FL Studio to be able to use make, make unique. And let's make it big now. I just hold on Alt and a fine tune it just like this. And sometimes if the symbol is a little bit weird like that, sometimes I will bring it like this. For example, sometimes I make sure to count even because sometimes it lines it up better. Get 123. Let's go for, okay. So same thing here, 1234, okay, I'll bring that over. And now let's just listen to that symbol because this is a really powerful trick. Okay? Now when it comes to this reverse and forward symbol, sometimes, sometimes you might want to churn Like other reverse cymbal odd down in volume a little bit. So let's just go like a reverse. We will go forward just to make it really good for education purposes, okay? So sometimes the reverse, you can turn it down just a little bit if you would want. Typically the forward symbol is like this is the original crashes that the right so many times you want that to be a little bit louder. But this type of symbol isn't very energetic. It's more of like a different kind of symbol, whereas something like something like this. You can hear it's a little bit brighter. So just a little bit brighter, a little bit more energetic, whereas something like these ones. But let's just listen to it just because we already put in the work. So you can hear that it sounded a little bit weird when it hit. So anyways, you'd have to fine tune how you want your cut to happen. But once you get it right, and again, that's all I did here. Alright? And again, if you select the right symbol, it just sounds a lot better. So listen to my before and are like my reverse and forward. This was the original symbol from this track. Okay, and again, we'll listen to the whole track right here. The symbols are actually a little bit quiet. A committee turn them up a little bit, but again, this track isn't completed. The next one I want to show you is again, this is the clap. So typically when I'm working with the clap, I will go like to take a step. And the reason is because we can fine tune to make that clap more in time. Now, you might be looking here and you'd be like, oh, well this clap isn't on beat, right? But the reason is because of the actual clap itself. So I'll hit F6 plus hills into it. I guess that the clap actually began here and there was some noise before it. I just, I just did that. So for example, let's get a clap here. So that's actually a good example. So I'll drag it in here. Again. Same thing. If I wanted to, I could bring it back a little bit. But let's just leave it where it is and we'll do this. And so again, same thing. Actually, it looks like these are two. Actually, it might be the same clap. I'll let you know. So I hit F6, we're going to click on this clap. So F6, this is a clap 18. This one here is clap 18 as well. Okay. So yeah, usually what I do personally is I usually like to have the same reverse cymbal forward symbol or the same reverse clap, forward clap, if that makes sense. Then again, same thing, just like we did for the symbol. You hold down shift and click. You can duplicate it. You're going to come here, you're gonna go make unique. I'm going to double-click that. We are going to go reverse. We can bring it over. So it's right now. It's just, I guess it'll really long clap and that's where you can use the trim. And let's just find it. There it is. And I'll just double-click here and I'll go trim as well just to make them the same. So here we have two claps. And so what you wanna do when it comes to the clap, because they're a little more aggressive than the symbol. Let's just listen to that. So okay, so what I did usually is this, let's just listen to what I did. Lots of reverb, right? So let me just show you how to do that. So I'm going to enter that puts the playlist backup here. Is my middle scroll wheel to get the hand if you want to fine tune just like you see there. And so I'm on inter 25, but let's just put it to our own. Okay. So you can see that on 25 I had some reverb, EQ and compression. And so EQ might have just been defined tune the clap reverb is for the length of sound and then compression is just to help the clap and the reverb maybe be a little bit more audible together. And so I'll just take both of these. We're going to come here. We'll Control L, that's the keyboard shortcut. And we're just going to add a reverb directly on so-called reverb. There's a reverb, which is a super powerful reverb. Now, both the forward and reverse clap have reverb, which we can increase it. And so that is how you do the reverse and forward clap. Okay, And you can, you can fine tune your pre-delay and however you want to fine tune it, right? You have your EQ compression. So when I use compression, again, it was just maybe to fine tune that delicious look at how it works. So we add compression going on. A lot of compression, right? So watch if I turn it off. So this club is quite aggressive, whereas I really, really sucked back the original cloth and it just allows the reverb to happen. So listen to one more time. So this club is a lot louder. You can hear that Here's some reverb now. So I took them, put them to a mixer insert, added some reverb on. And you can fine tune how you want that, right? So let's listen to my new claps with the song and we will mute the symbols. And let's just hear how it sounds. Now this is where you'd have to fine tune it. Okay, So again, the whole song is going to play. But the claps that we have added in are gonna, we're gonna play. Let's just here. So again, that does sound off, right? So that's probably why I brought it over like that. And it just loud. And that's probably the reason why I compressed it so hard, is because the actual clap was really aggressive to the symbol. So however long you make that reverb, you just got to remember that the tail is going into the chorus. Sometimes it can be really powerful to have a tail that overlaps. So again, I was just showing you how to do those things like you see here. So I did a reverse symbol, I did a reverse clap. Now you know how to do those, right? They're not hard. You just got to fine tune and line them up. Here, is this is all I did for this clap. Like I said, when it comes to your transition, you can do anything. You heard any other song. I had those toms and I go reverse Tom or whatever. You just want to have some type of transition because it lets the listener know that okay, things are happening, things are changing. So you can see that this part of the song, the clap, was not playing, the piano was not playing. Okay, so I used the reverse symbol and this buildup clap to bring in the normal clap and to bring in the piano. And then again, I used another reverse and forward symbol with a kick drum. So let's make this big because it's a little easier to see. So you can see that I used the kick drum and I just chopped it up. So what's happening is I'm looped somewhere. So I'm just going to double-click and we're back. Okay? Now when it came to lining up these kick drums, so for example, you can see that actually this one probably worked. So sometimes if you are on beat, you won't be able to do that because you don't have the lines. So if you're going to want to fine tune and chop up, that's where you're going to have to change your your playlist. You don't snap your steps, right? But like I said, usually like to be in beat your bar, but yeah, I just chopped it up in that allowed the transition. And then I'm just working on this symbol part. It kinda works. I just want to fine tune it a little bit. But you can see that this bagpipe, which is the main lead, this is not coming in yet. Okay, So let me just break down kind of how the song works. So we have the electric piano, sounds like this. There's tons and tons of reverb, so I did side chain compression and it pumps with it. We also have a clap. We have some hi-hats. Now, the bagpipe, this is the main lead of the song. Okay, We have a piano, it's a nice filler. Then we have the baseline. And it also has lot, a little bit of distortion going on. And as you can see on the base, you can see distortion. When it comes to base distortions quite important because it allows this bass instrument to stand out a little bit better on smaller speakers. And that's something that you'll learn as you go. And then here are these kind of weird symbols. I tried to make a melody, as you can see, Aided Symbol melody. And I tried to just spice it up right then with the kick. Alright, so here we go. I'll just play a little bit more of this track. But one last thing I want to look at before we wrap up this video about audio painting is some filters. So you can also be using filters to break down the song. But let's just listen to how the kick drum kind of builds up and it prepares the listener. And then we come into the chorus with the full symbols and everything that's going on. Okay, so here we are from around here. As you can see, I must have just add that, add one little symbol in for some type of audio painting. So you don't always, always have to use audio painting, but it's just, you always want to think that way. Okay, so let's just play it from here. So I remove the kick drum and then it prepares into a breakdown of the song, but then it builds up until the big course. Alright, so that is this track, again, removing the kick drum. So let's quickly look at this filter section and then we will wrap up this video cam. So check this out. So let's just quickly look at that to see how I did that. So we have the electric piano and we come here and it is filter. So I actually labeled it that because it makes it easy. And if we click that, you can see that this is what I did, so I just moved it around like this. And here's a cool little trick. So when you ever, you are creating an automation clip is called, it is called an internal controller. And it's really important that you understand what an internal controller is inside of FL Studio because you can use it to automate multiple things, multiple knobs. And so here, let's just go like a filter, filter course, just so we can really visually see it. Okay? So you can see that this automation clip is already available to us as an internal controller because we've created it so we can see it visually, but it's also an internal controller. Okay, So check this out what I did here. And I'll just mute this and I'll bring this one back up. So let's just listen to it again because you will be able to see in the regular filter. So this is it from the song. Okay, you can see that how am I doing a low cut and high cut filter at the same time? You can see it's kind of cutting it out, right? But why should we turn it off? This is what it sounds like with it. Gay and it's kinda like that little telephone effect care. Now, if we click on one of these, you can see that I am just adjusting the filter. So I have a high cut filter and I just right-click and then I went link to control it. Okay, because I already created the automation clip and as you can see right here, we have an internal controller. Okay? So I'll break it down because it might be a little confusing. So an internal controller is an automation clip. For example. If you create an automation clip, you can create another band like this. Like let's say we want this one to follow this automation clip. Watch. I'm gonna go link to controller. We're going to click here. I'm going to go Filter band one frequency, which is, which is this one right here. You can see it's filter, electric piano band one frequency. And you have to remove, remove conflicts. You want it disabled so that you can use multiple things with this Controller. And let's just hear, hear how it sounds again. Okay, so it's still following that same, that same thing with what's going on. Okay. So let's just disable that. So for example, let's come here to our own. And what you do is you just, again, I like to create the automation clip within that area. So I'm going to do something like, let's just do it nice and short. So this is the highlighted area. And if I come to the automation clip, or sorry, my EQ and we want to create an automation clip. I'm going to right-click and go create automation clip. And now this much if we right-click and go link to controller, you can see that this is filter course, electric piano band one frequency. If that makes sense. So we're on Filter course EQ. It's on the electric piano and as well as the band one frequency. Now, we can adjust anything in here, and let's just double-click this and this is like the new window and FL Studio. If you want to adjust your automation clip is quite powerful. I'm just gonna do it the old school way. And I'm just gonna double-click though and change that color just so we can see a little bit different. Let's maybe give it like a purple just so we can see it nice and visual. And so now what's happening? It, Let's bring up, let me make the playlist smaller. Because now we can kinda see two windows. Okay? And so what I wanna do is let's say we're going to do this. Okay, So when we play the song, the electric piano, let's make it like this. The electric piano is gonna go up. And then down. Here. What I did was I created a high cut filter as well. So we have a low cut and we have a high cutoff filter. And so what I did is instead of creating another automation clipped for that one. And then now you have to automation clips where you're trying to adjust them to go back and forth like you saw with this one, right? So we go back to this one. And let's remove this band. And so you can see it's going up and down together. And so what I did to do that is we linked both of them for the same automation clip and you just right-click linked to controller because it's an internal controller and automation clip is an internal controller. Now, I'm going to select that filter course, which is the one that we've created together. And we're select that. We also want to make sure remove conflict is not enabled so that we can do this. In other words, two things can use that same controller. And we're just gonna go except, and let's hit Play and see what it does. So it goes up and it goes back down care. So that's because we have it set up like this. So anything we do here, we are going to adjust that. Now. The reason we're not seeing audio is because where it's not on. We also have the auto gain. So that's a really powerful feature of pro Q3 that whenever you cut or boost frequencies that compensates and volume. So let's just turn that off to make it like a real EQ and, or just a normal EQ. Okay? And so if you want to go to the other band, I guess you can click right here. And let's say we wanna make it like a gentler slope. Make it not as aggressive. You can do that. And again, if you want to do this for any EQ, it typically it's the exact same process. And if you are using a third party plugin and you can't access the knob. You can click here, you can move the knob. You can see that now it saw it. So you can right-click up here and you can do the link to controller or the last knob that you tweaked. If, if you, if you move a knob, again, you can come up here and you go last tweaked. And that's how you can access your create automation clip and link to controller as well if you're using third-party plug-ins. But typically if you're using the curve of the Test3 plug-in, sometimes you can click it and it's like, it's like a native plugin if that makes sense. So for example, if you had a 3D parametric, fruity parametric EQ n2. So this is a native plugin, so you can always right-click and access things, right? And watch even if we wanted to do the same thing here. So if we come to here, so I'm going to right-click down here, okay, so if you want to do the same thing on this EQ, you gotta do it down here and I'm going to right-click the link to controller. And again, let's say we want that filter course. This is how easy it is. Once you understand how things work. There you go and watch even if you want to put the one. So I'm making them opposite. So if we come here, we go type and they call it a low-pass, I believe. So we got to bring that back. So watch now we can come here, go link to controller. We will go Filter course. And now we'll get the same effect. You can adjust. If you want a more steep on any of them or whatever. You can also adjust how steep they are by doing it right here. Or you can right-click on it and you can adjust the steepness. And again, you can right-click if you want to play around with the steepness without the window closing, right? So if you want a more gentle or whatever. So I just wanted to show you how to do different things. When it comes to automation clips. Very, very powerful to use automation clips. Clips because they are a type of audio painting, right? It's a type of transition. But they're kinda like a slower transition. They can break down the song if we come back to the way how I originally had it with this one is kind of just gently, just kind of messes with this piano, makes it more telephony. And then it's going to come into the kick drums. And then we're back into it. So again, as, so as you can see here, even though this piano is playing and select, for example, you might think, you might think that the sound is being dequeued. But it's actually not because you can see that the mix knob right here. So you can see I automated the mix knob too full when it's going on and then I turned off the mix knob. So in other words that even though that the audio is playing through this EQ, we are not hearing it. And the reason is because the mix knob is off and that's a really powerful way to turn on and off effects in FL Studio. So anyways, there you guys go. That is just a breakdown of audio painting. We use two different tracks of mine. And so there's reverse symbols, forward symbols same as reverse clap. For clap, you can use fast kick drums. You can use snare roles, Tom roles. You can use filters, you can use silence, you can use whatever. But typically you always want to be thinking this way to prepare the listener before a change happens. And I promise you, you will be making way better music. And again, if you guys would like to check out the beats that you listened to, just search them into Google, beat taste by gratuitous, and then search for the song name and it should come up for you. Okay, so I'll talk to you in the next one. 20. [BONUS] / OUTRO - Read to See Results: All right guys, thank you so much for taking the course. So again, my name is Riley, whether my artists and producing them as gratuitous. And I got one last bonus tip for you guys. I wanted to put this as actually number one, but I know that people don't really want to hear it and it's that you need to read. Okay? So just like backing up is kinda one of those things that's boring, that you really don't want to do it, but it's really going to help you, right? It's the same thing with reading. Okay, so if you don't read as a music producer, you're not gonna get very far. Watching videos is helpful, like you saw in the course here, right? I showed you a lot of in-depth things. But the thing is, if you don't go and practice them yourself, and when you get stuck, if you don't go and read, you're not really going to advance as fast as what you want. Videos take a long time to digest and to watch. Sometimes reading, you can find your answer very, very fast. What I want to talk about is the first thing that you want to look for is you want to read the manual. So if you use FL Studio there helped manual is phenomenal. It is so good. And recently I picked up some equipment and do you know what I did? I was reading the manual. Okay. But these are called mixed cubes. So I've read through this manual to learn how to use the, my product. Here is another thing I picked up for my voice because these courses, this is, this is called a single-channel preamp and it's not too thick, but there's a lot of information in here when it comes to using half decent voice sound. Okay? Another thing is you saw me using some fab filter plugins. And so what I did was because I didn't want to always be on a computer. I actually printed it off. I printed off the fab filter help manual. And you can see that I read through it, right? So there's a lot of good information in here. It's pretty thick, but what I'm trying to say is you want to read the help manual if you want to see results as a music producer. So for me when I was in school, middle school, high school, all that stuff, I found reading so boring. But then once I discovered music production, I discovered it was essentially like you're finding your answer, right? It's like so awesome because it's not like you're reading a fiction book which is like, Oh, it's just a story or whatever. It's like you're actually reading your answer to help you improve. If you're really determined to learn music production, reading the manual is the best, okay? You can also find books to read on certain topics. Now sometimes books are good, sometimes I found them okay. But a lot of times you are going to find a lot of good information in books. And my recommendation, my recommendation to you is only go to tutorials when you need either like the absolute basics of something just to maybe get started with how to use a synthesizer just to kinda understand how the knobs work and they okay, then you can get on your way. Or if you kinda need some visual, for example, if you are reading in a book or if you read in the help manual and you still don't understand the explanation, that's where you can, again, look at a video for some visual. Or if you did read and you're still confused, or you just want a different opinion. That's when you can look to videos as well. So again, I hope you enjoyed this course called The Five Golden pillars of music production. I was always kinda juggling around where to kind of, you know, what order to put them in. And I finally ended up on the ones that ended up in this course. So the thing I want to ask you is if you ever have questions, please just send me an e-mail and I'm always here to help. And if you can leave a review that helps tons to help my courses continued to grow and help people. Thank you so much. Again, my name is Riley, whether I understand producing him his gratuitous. I hope you enjoyed the course. Leave a review and I'll talk to you in the next course.