BLUEPRINT TO BEATMAKING: A Step-By-Step System to Hip Hop Music Production

1. Course Intro: You want to make beats. Let me talk to you for a second. Orion. Give you just what you asked for. What you see on the dashboard? 101 because we speeding up. Why call it my crash course. Trust me, I'll get you from A to B. Don't take my word for it wait and see. Showing you just how did it. End of the class you'll be making beats. In it for over a decade I hustled on everything reason to Logic Pro and if you get stick with it options are infinite you'll get a trust me, I promise you. Easy to follow showing the steps. How to record on a track? Lay the effects on a rack. Yeah. Nothing now holding you back. Look, I'm not going to sugarcoat it. Making music ain't easy. But if I can do it? Trust me, you can do it. Everybody got to start somewhere. Welcome to class. I created a system to get you up and running as fast as possible without the bullshit. You don't have to waste years your life trying to figure this out on your own like I did. I'll be right there with you, showing you my process every step of the way. You ready? Let's go. 2. Welcome To Class!: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the course.I am so stoked that you are here.My name is Kia Orion and today I'm going to be taking you through my blueprint for Beatmaking. So this is going to be the overview of the course, very simply as broken into three modules.And this my step by step process, for you to learn in as fast as possible. The first step is INITIATE this is actually the most important step. Because it's all about your mindset, setting goals, expectations, requirements.This is the foundation to set you up for success for the rest of your production journey. Number two REPLICATE, this is when you really get to get hands-on with the project. Last but not least is. Number three this is EXECUTE. This is when you actually do the work then you start to see results.So are you ready? Let's get into it. 3. Course Requirements: First things first, before we can jump into the course, I want to talk to you a little bit about requirements. This is a course meant for people that have a bit of experience with a digital audio work station also known as a D-A-W. If you're coming in as complete beginner, I have other courses on Ableton and there are a million resources online to help you get familiar with your D-A-W. With that being said, you're going to need a D-A-W of some sort. I'm going to be using Ableton Live. I've found has been the most helpful for me. But this will work in any D-A-W. It doesn't matter what D-A-W you use, just get to know your tool. Pause, also and no unplugging. You don't need fancy plug-ins to make dope beats. All the beat tutorials that I walked you through, most of the plug-ins I'll be using our stock plugins. Especially if you're a beginner, seep plug-ins for later down the road, maybe those can help elevate your game, but like any skill you need a solid foundation first before you can really take it to that next level. A lot of times people think that to start making music, making beats, you need a ton of different fancy studio equipment, honestly, some of the most gangster beats that I've heard dudes make have been on a shitty little speaker or an Apple headphones. You can throw all that out the window. The most important things are if you have a computer, a set of headphones and a bit of inspiration or motivation to make this work. That's all you need. 4. Course Expectations: I want to talk to you about what you can expect from the course going into it and what you can get out of it. Now, I like to compare production in music to working out. Just because I think there are a lot of parallels there. Meaning I can give you the best diet, I can give you the most pop-in workout plan but I can't do the work for you. When it actually comes to it you're the one who has to do the push-ups. You're the one who has to put in the work, you have to really want it. It doesn't necessarily have to take you a year, two years, five years, 10 years like it did me, to get to where you want to go. If your goal is just to get shredded, that's when you take a different set of goals, that's going to take a different routine of practice than if you're trying to be The Rock. So the first one, I can make it happen The Rock that is a totally different approach to be making. Do you want to work with artists? Are you trying to get in the studio with Drake, with Trippie Redd? Are you trying to go linked up with artists and make poping records and enable them to do what they wanted to, or are you trying to headline ultra? You can do whatever you want to do production, but it's going to take a different amount of time, a different amount of energy to make that happen. So I want to make that very clear going into this is the first module is the most important. I'm going to have you do some exercises, but it's really important to nail down and be honest with yourself, what do you want out of this? 5. First Things First: Let's start off with the top five tips that I give to every beginning producer when they're first getting started. Number one, like I've said, make sure that you know this is an effort thing, it's not a talent thing, you don't need to know music theory, you don't need to know anything about music. All you have to do is have the passion and the discipline to practice, to be able to get to where you want to go with your goals. Then rule number two is curiosity. Music will forever be changing. You have to stay curious or want to learn. I've been doing this for years. I still take classes on this. I'm still constantly watching tutorials, practicing, really breaking down. Where are my weaknesses? What are my strengths? What can I work on? You never stop learning. That's when you get washed up. Different producers like Timbaland, Pharrell, if you go back and listen to their old stuff, it's very different than what they're doing now because they've learned to adapt and change with the environment. You have to be curious. You have to want to learn to make this work. If you are, you will embrace the process. Everything will feel a lot easier. Rule number three, and this is a really important one, break shit. I'm being honest. In music production, the number one rule, there are no rules, that's the beauty of not needing music theory to be able to be good at production. Some of my hommies that I know, that know music theory amazing and can play incredible keys, make terrible beats. Some of the guys that I know that are dudes that make hood bangers know zero about music theory and their beats are some of the most popping that you'll ever hear, just because they understand the feeling when your drums are always set on the grid to be totally quantized. It's when it feels human. When it feels messy, that's when the magic really happens, so know that. I'll teach you tactics and concepts, but there is no wrong or right way to this. Get in there, tweak stuff, really push things to the limit, break shit. Step number four is a pretty simple one. Be a good person. Period. If you're going to want to work with artists or with promoters, if it's your own show or you're going to want to work with companies because you want to produce music, you've got to be a good person. You can have much less talent and be a nicer person better to work with and you're going to get those gigs anytime over that person who might be a little bit more talented, might have a little bit more recognition, but it's just a dick. The music industry is about this big and it's all relationship-based, so the faster you start burning those bridges, the faster your career's going to plumb in. Last but not least, my production tip is, treat this like it's a skill. Know that it takes time and put that effort in. I'll stop talking. Let's get into the good stuff. 6. Case Study Setup: Now that you get your mind right, you know what your goals are, you know what you're shooting for, now it's time to learn to listen. So when I talk to producers that are first coming up, I know that they have listened to music, obviously you love music, but to really learn to listen to beats is a completely different animal. So before we get into pillar number two, I want you to do this exercise where you go in and you start to analyze different production that you enjoy what inspires you because once you can break that down, once you know what to listen for and can break down what it is that inspires you, you start to see what kind of music you might want to make. Three things that I recommend you listen for when you're going through tracks that inspire you. The first one is sound choices. These are going to be instruments that someone is using, are these more kind of wavy, ethereal textures like a drake or are these going to be more intense kind of biting, high intensity melodies that you get from something like an EDM track or in a Vici record and number two is going to be the arrangement. This one is huge because when you come into a beat, especially once you start to peep behind the scenes of producers that you enjoy that are making number ones, you start to realize it's not super-complicated. Making good music, music production especially in hip hop is not rocket science. It's about having a couple good instruments, bringing them in and out at certain times to keep the listener engaged but not distracted and number three, which I think is also one of the most important things that you have to learn to listen to and it takes practice is mixing. This can be anything from panning to the different volumes, to how hard the kick is, to how much the snare snap. These are different things that once you learn to listen for them, you can pick up on different producers styles and start to have your own. I've created these worksheets for you to go through and start to analyze. Listen to each beat two or three times, listen to the arrangements, listen to their sound choices and listen to the decisions that these producers are making on their mix so that you can start to incorporate some of those ideas in your own production. 7. Learning To Listen: So for this first beat, I want to walk through with you. We're going to listen to Congratulations by Post produced by Metro Boom, and just so that you can sort of see what I'm talking about when it comes down to how he arranges the beat and how simple the beat is, but at the same time he keeps it interesting by just taking instruments in and out. So let's check it out. [MUSIC] What I want you to listen for is when he brings the drums in, when he takes them out, when he brings the base in when he takes it out. And I'll be going through it with you, but you can see how it's the instruments. He's not using a bunch of different instruments, he's pretty much using the same things over and over, but just then bringing them in and out and layering them in different ways that keeps it the variety, you know, sort of so that it doesn't get boring or stale. [MUSIC] He drops the drums but listen how long they're in here. [MUSIC] He took them out. He just brings them in for a little bit, takes him out. [MUSIC]. Brings them back in. [MUSIC] Takes them out again. Obviously, I don't have to keep starting and stopping for you to see this, but as you can pay attention, he brings them in for four bars, takes him out, brings him in and takes them out. It's just an interesting way to arrange the beat so that it doesn't ever go stale. [MUSIC]. He has that base now he brought in that base that's just doing the same note. Don, don, don, don, don [MUSIC] If you notice right there, he brings in that [inaudible] again that's pinned to the left.[MUSIC] For those transitions, it's certain times he has those snare drums that are pitched down and sometimes he'll just drop the beat out completely. [MUSIC]. We've got an open hi-hat pinned to the right ear. He's got a lot of his snares and his other percussion pinned to the left ear. [MUSIC] Pay attention and at [inaudible] that's in the left ear and see when he takes it out. [MUSIC]. I bet he's going to bring it right back in here. [MUSIC]. This is where he drops the beat out right here. [MUSIC]. Pretty straightforward, but at the same time, brilliant, simple, but really dope beat. 8. Building Out Beats (Walkthrough #1): Now we're going to start getting hands on. This isn't work sheets anymore. This isn't activities. This is when you're starting to get nitty and gritty. This is where we're starting to put things to practice. I'll walk you through the six different steps and elements that go into building a beat step-by-step when I'm putting together a project. 9. BOB 1: Melody: Number one, the part that I always start my tracks like these are the main melody of some sort, doesn't mean this has to be the melody that you keep for the rest of the track. At the end is might not even make it into the final track, but I like having a jumping off point. You can create this yourself if you'd like playing keys you like playing, [inaudible] you want to make a texture, you're more than welcome to do that. I actually highly recommend that if you do know music theory, you'd like to create for me personally, my very sample-based producer. I like to find some sort of an idea and then take it, tweak it and make it my own. These aren't necessarily like old our green source samples. But it might be a piano melody. It might be some sort of strings.This might be even just a vocal sample. Someone saying something, I like having a main melody in building my tracks are roundness. Please give me a jumping off point give me a key, gives me a BPM, gives me an idea of at least a feel that I can build the rest of the track around. Let's tackle them a melody. I'll show you how to make one, and then you can try. 10. Melody Walkthrough: We come into the project looking like this. This is a sample I found on Splice. I highly recommend using Splice in other sample packs. Today for this demo, I'll be using a bit of splice and a bit of my own sample pack. It makes the process a whole lot easier there and amazing ideas out there. It's kind of like the entire process is a collaboration. So this is a sample that I found on Splice that I dig and shall play for you real quick. This is what we're starting with. So I think that's pretty pop and just from the jump. But if you do take a sample, what would I do recommend is even if you aren't chopping it up per say or doing anything Incredibly drastic, I recommend just changing it a little bit. There are usually some kind of fun things that you can do to mess around with it. So what I'm going to be doing now is just toying around with it and seeing what works, what feels good, but a lot of this is about finding, experimenting and finding what you think works. So I'm just going to play the sample and kind of mess around with it. So this is on complex pro. If you're on [inaudible] , you can either have this, these are different kind of work modes. If you have it set to beats, it kind of keeps and the original amount, but at the same time, it can be prone to artifacts which are little clicks and pops. So right now if we play it with beats, I actually kind of almost like a more beats, keeps some of the original sample. These I have loaded up, and these are my two of my favorite things to use just because they, I just, I'm a distortion guy. I like to kind of fuck around with sounds and I like the idea of manipulating sounds and kind of the grittiness that comes along with that. So this is one my favorites, it's called OTT. It's a multi-band dynamic different setting in here that I load up. So this is with OTT. It brings out a bunch of different elements and normally you've got to boost this baby down because it's kind of intense, but that's part of being a producer is like I said, is breaking shit. So let's see what we can do with this. Just boosting the highs here. This is also a distortion with Ableton is called saturator. I use the preset a bit warmer and then mess around with that. It's a finally a good starting point. So right there you can already hear the distortion is a little bit too much. Distortion goes a long way, but I also want to still keep summons of the sample. So I'm going to turn the distortion back a little bit. Let's start to have a bit of a vibe to it. So the next part of this [inaudible] , is I also, I recommend this every single lesson that I talked about is save it often. So I'm just doing Command S. I save every time. It's sort of a habit just so that way you never lose work because that is a pain in the ass and it's really frustrating. So save often. So now that I have this sample, how I normally build out my tracks and this is the, this is what I recommend, [inaudible] their own. But I'm a melody driven guy, so I like getting some sort of the music element of it going because it gives me starting off point. So also because Splice rocks, they tell you that this is in G major and a 105 BPM. So I've tuned this down now, to semitones. So it's not going to exactly be in G major necessarily anymore. But the good news is that we already know the BPM. We have a ballpark idea of this and this is now I can build out the rest of my track. So I like to have sort of my lead melody set and then I'll normally build it out with the drums. Something simple, some snare and kicked just to kind of get a feel a little bot that I might have in my head. So that's what we're going to do now. 11. BOB 2: Drums: After main melody is taking care of the next part that I like to tackle, is the drum. This doesn't mean that this is all of the drums, but I like to get a simple drum pattern down. This may be a hi-hat, snare and kick. Maybe just a snare and kick. Again, these can change out the tragic if you want to.Really just get something down that matches the melody.That's why I find it much easier, to match my drums to a melody than the other way round. I'd have a melody, and then from there that's sort of texture or sound, will then speak to me and tell me what kind of drums to go around with. In this part, I want you to develop a simple drum loop. Doesn't have to be anything crazy, maybe just to kick and snare and a hi-hat. Put something down, could go along with the main melody. Don't obsess over the sounds, don't obsess over the crazy patterns from the jump, to get something down that works and move on to the next step. Try this out. [inaudible] 12. Drums Walkthrough: I'm going to use some snares from my sample pack. Let's go. This is my drums folder, cool, and a key with this is you don't have to find the perfect sound right away, but just use something as a place folder for now so that way you can keep rocking and keep running with the inspiration. All right, so this is what I'm just going to run with for now, not exactly what I'm looking for, but it works. And another thing I'm going to do is, this is a nice little shortcut, you highlight whatever you want in Ableton, you do Command L and it will automatically loop to the selection that you have. So what I'm doing right now with these snares is, kind of having a feeling of how I want it to bob. But I'm just going to be experimenting with them a little bit, see if I can get it to have a bit more of the feel that I have in my head. I think they need a little bit of something. So I'm going to add some reverb to them. Cool, so again, not perfect. I'm just laying it down so I kind of have a skeleton with what I'm working with. All right. Next I'm going to move on to the kick. So what I'm doing here with the kick is just experimenting, trying out different patterns. I'm also an audio, I like to work with audio snippets over midi, just because that's the way that I learned when I was messing around with it. So to each their own, if you prefer midi, you can always drag these into a little drum rack and tap them out yourself. But I'm a gamer, that's the way that I grew up. So I just like the way that I can manipulate the audio in these kind of intricate ways when I'm messing around with a little audio files like this. So pretty much, what I'm doing is I'm figuring out a little drum pattern. And what I'm going to do with these kicks is get something going, something simple, a little bob. And this, I'm going to turn down the slightest bit just to give it a little bit more of a human feel. And right now playing it back, I actually want my sample to be a little bit louder, a little bit less reverby, more in your face now that I'm starting to build things out. So again, this is just a placeholder. Maybe this is the final kick rhythm, maybe not, but just something to get it going. I really like to, depending on the track, sometimes I can get a locator way with the kicks. And what I really love to do, and what I think makes good tracks is good percussion and good high hats, little different rhythms and things going on. So I'm going to put some high hats, play it under percussion. And then from there maybe go back and redo the kick, but the key is don't stress out about this stuff too much from the jump. Just lay it down, get something going, run with the idea and as you build out, listen, you can always come back to it. So now I'm going to pull up a high hat, see what kind of a high hat I want. I also like to play the track and it's called auditioning. Meaning while I'm playing the track, I'm going to play these high hats back just to get a feel, see how it fits with the track. All right,run it back. Actually, take it back, I don't like that one. I'm looking for something real short, just almost like a little click. And again, the reason why I turned it down every second hat was to give it a little bit more of a human feel. And the high hats, I like to make the high hats feel really sloppy just because I'm old. That's the way I was brought up on Jay Della, like DJ Premier. Everything's a little bit sloppy, played out. And so that's my kind of vibe for high hats no matter what I'm doing. So I'll show you some advanced high hat tips here in a hot second. But right now what I'm going to do is I put them on the grid at first just to get them down. And then I come in and start to mess around with them, get a vibe for it. Now what I'm going to do is come in, select them all, select all my hi-hats and then other than that first one, I like to drag them all a little bit off the grid. I'll show you this in another tutorial when we really get into it, but right now what I'm going to do is drag these just a little bit late and start to see if I can get a little bit more of a bop to it. What I'm feeling now is, I want this snare to really bump. I'm feeling like I need, shout out to Eminem, where is my snare? I want more snare, I feel like this rhythm is lacking some energy, so I'm going to come in here and I'm going to do what's called layering, where I snag another sound and I'll just bring it down a bit, but just to beef up that first sound. So let's see what we're working with. Let's rock with this, see where this gets us. We got this little bob going, we've added this second snare, just have something a little bit more snappy. So this is what we got so far. I think now the highs are starting to bother me a little bit, so I'm in this, again, this OTT multi-band compressor. I'm going to bring this down just a little bit. Panning is huge. I'll talk about this a thousand times, but I like to pan things just slightly. It gives it a little bit of character and it also frees up room, I'll talk about this more in the mixing section, it frees up room. If you have everything coming straight down the center, then it can get a little bit crowded. So if you pan things just slightly, it opens up more space and I'll talk about that more in mixing, but that's what I'm doing now. I'm going to give you guys a little pro tip right here. This is the secret sauce. Man, you're only paying me enough for this, right here. These are the gems. Talking about the [inaudible] stuff may come in here and drag these joints off the grid. Again, it's producer's choice, I'll say this a million times. I like my snares a little bit early, and I like my kicks a little bit late. I feel like it just gives it more of a bop, so that's what I'm doing now, is I'm looking for that bounce. It doesn't have to be much, but just a little something to give you a little bounce to it. Now that I've got this first part, I'm just going to pretty much loop everything and start building out more of a drum, the full five bar loop. This one you do not even really almost hear it as a kick. I just want it to be just the feeling of there's just something slightly there. Let's check it out. Now I'm thinking I want something interesting maybe going on in the hi-hats here, so I'm just going to start messing around with it. Simple little stuff like that, man, it's not even like it's super crazy hi-hat pattern, but what I'll probably do later and what I like to do is in the second parts of the verse or other sections, add another hi-hat to it. I keep this one pretty simple, just little things here and there, give you a bit of a bop or a bit of something different than just your regular 18 note hi-hats. What I also like to use, what I love actually I take it back, are open hi-hats. Let's come in here, let's bust out some of these open hi-hats. There's something about open hi-hats man that just they give you this slide, this swag that I feel like you can't get from a bunch of other things. Sometimes it drags a little bit, so you'll see what I'm saying. I like both of those, let's see how it feels. Again, you don't want this to be blasting your head off, I'm panning it a little bit, so it has its own little space on the left, and then I'm just going to toy around with it, but I'm just looking to get a little feel for how much it makes it drag or not. I'm telling you, man, I go overboard with open hi-hats because I just love these shits. What I'm going to do now is make this one, I'm going to make it a little bit longer just so that it can extend for that little rest of the measure. We're going to turn it up a little bit. I think it also needs maybe another snare or something with this little transition part after every little measure, like a little extra snare snap or something. Again, a lot of this just comes down to experimenting. That's the fun part about producing. If you trust the fout, see what works, see what doesn't. Take it in, take it out. Pause. I bring those down. Now we've got the groove, we got those two little snares. 13. BOB 3: Bass: After we have the simple drum pattern down and we have our melody kind of rock in. The next part that I'm going to teach you to build out is your bass. Synth bass;this can be an actual bass guitar,this can be an 808 and hip hop. Since I'm mostly a hip hop producer, I use a lot of 808's and a lot of synth bass. But to each their own, it's up to you. When it comes to something like bass, I highly recommend really using good sounds. Because a good bass sound can make or break a track. And I also recommend really experimenting. If you're using 808's and you are a hip hop producer, experiment with your 808's. Turn up the distortion. You can really start to add character and a signature sound to your tracks in your 808's. Let's build out some bass in this track. I'll show you how to do it. And this is really what kind of starts to beef up that [inaudible] 14. Bass Walkthrough: So once you've handed the skeleton you're to drums your sample things or current feeling good, feeling groovy. I like to start then looking at the bass, you can either have an 808, a bass or both. In this one, I'm going to have it just be a bass and for the bass and when you use a plug-in, some of you may not have it again through spliced.com, you can get this thing where it's like $7 a month. It's called serum. I highly recommend it. It's a really a good synthesizer. You can make all types of cool stuff on it. Tons of tutorials online about how to use this. So I'm not going to jump too crazy into sound design. I've made a bass sound that I'd like to use as something to help me figure out ideas. So this is a buzzy bass sound that I made. Something I want to talk about here is, I grew up playing saxophone, shout out to Mr. Miller, my jazz band teacher. But, I know very little about a music theory. So if you don't know about music theory is I mentioned the course, don't sweat it. You can figure it out often what I do because, I can't just tell exactly what note I'm supposed to be playing. I'll throw in some sort of a center piano.Then I'll just play along with the track until I figure out the key that it's in, what notes work in what I think sounds good. So that's what I'm going to be doing now playing the track. In messing around with this scene, trying to find what notes sound vibrate the track. [music playing] Cool, so I've found this little key. [piano playing]. I'm going to pitch this down to be closer to the actual, since it's a bass. I just figured out when this up an octave like this. [piano plays] But then, I pitch it down to be more the actual octave it's supposed to be in. [piano playing]. Probably somewhere in there. Let's see how it goes. [music playing] So baselines soon as they can be fun in other tutorials, you will see me, I'll get really fun funky with the base, with this sample. There's a lot going on, so I'm going to keep it pretty simple. My baseline is going to be pretty much. [piano playing]. So let's put that in. [music playing],. Cool. [music playing]. All right, so let's see what we got going on here. [music playing]. What I'm doing right now, it's called quantizing. If you don't know about it, figure it out on your door and pretty much just make sure that the notes are. Because I played them a little bit off a little late, which is cool sometimes, but here I want them to be more lined up. So learn about quantizing. It's important, but I'm not going to dive into it too much right now. [music playing]. Cool. 15. BOB 4: Percussion: Now that we have those elements down, let's talk about percussion. This is going to seem silly, but I think dope percussion is a really what separates a good track from a bad one. This is where you get to add some personality because if you listened to old DJ Premier tracks, it will have weird shit come in like birds. If you listen to Nozzle's like I loved that beat, it will have some weird birds in the background. Or if you're into more modern hip hop producers like Monte Booker, who produces for Smino, his percussion is all over the place. It's used in such a unique way that percussion can really give you a unique bop. Most hip hop tracks are going to have a pretty similar kick, pretty similar snare, pretty similar hi-hat patterns. If you listen to him, about 80% of trap tracks are built on all of those same elements and pretty similar patterns that people kind of reuse and recycle. But I think the real key is getting nice with your percussion sounds. Getting interesting sounds, you can get off my resource list that I'll provide you. It can make a big difference just to have strange shit. I've listened to some J Cole songs where I have a dog barking in the background or goat bleating somewhere and not a goat bleating, but you know what I'm saying. So if you're producing for artists, this is a huge window to jump into because you can really create unique pockets for an artist, which they'll thank you for later. So in this track with the percussion, we're gonna keep it pretty simple and I'll show you how to do it and then give it a shot, but belted out one element at a time. I'll see you there. 16. Percussion Walkthrough: What do we do next? We move on to some percussion. This is where ladies and gentlemen the magic happens. Not really but kind of. This is where you can make a lot of interesting things happen. This is also where it's really easy to go overboard. That's just a fair warning. Trying things out with the percussion.Let's see what happens. Of course this is a shaker, and I think that might be what I'm looking for. What you can do with percussion is just get interesting sounds, miscellaneous, strange. Hearing things that might not even be an actual percussion sound. You can even record things yourself, like a bottle opening. Or just strange, weird shit can really make a track fun. Give it a little bit of character here and there. Let's see it. What I'm doing right now is I have this percussion pattern in my head that I'm hearing. So I'm going to separate this one and this one so I can turn this one up and this one down, give me a little bit of volume control. I'm not going to go overboard, like I said, with the percussion just yet, just to see what happens when we board out the rest of the track. So let's see what happens. We can add some more to this. 17. BOB 5: Tracking Out The Beat: It's simple loop, but this is what we have so far. [Music] Cool. That works. Now what you can do, is now that you have this loop, this is what you build out the rest of the song around. The key with production especially if you're producing for artists, is to keep it relatively simple. A lot of the beats that I make are for artists. You don't want to have some crazy leads sent running around, jumping throughout the entire track. The sample that we're using already has a lot going on. If the vocalist is going to add their vocal, for lack of a better word, to the track, you don't want to have too much going on. Already what I'm thinking in my mind is, I think I might actually filter this out for the verse part or at least bring it down a little bit. If you don't want to auto-filter raise or a filter in general, your door has one. It'll be in your audio effects. The filter pretty much just cuts out. This is the sample without the audio filter. [Music] This is with it. [ Music ]. This is what Drake 40, Drake's producer, is notorious for doing, is cutting out these highs to allow room for the artist vocals. I think that's what I'm going to do. Let's start to arrange this track a little bit and we'll take it from there. Now I have this loop. What I'm going to do is, I'm going to take this loop, and just so to make sure that we have it, I'm going to duplicate it and I'm going to bring it way out here just in case something goes wrong. This isn't something you do, this is something I have just because you never know when beats mess up because I'm going to start experimenting with stuff. I always just keep a backup version. I keep out farther in the track just to pull from it if I need it. Now we're going to duplicate this, and move this. Now what am I to do? What I'm doing now is I'm just setting up a little intro. [Music] Cool. Then it'll drop into, let's say for now that this is the hook. [Music] If that's the hook, this is just going to be a stand-in hook, we'll come back and add stuff to it. So let's say that's our hook, then this will be our verse. What I'm doing is I'm copying, pasting all of these little sections. Actually let me do this then move this up. There, shaker, give it a vocal chap. Nothing you can do to make this a lot easier if you're an able to and you're working with audio, because I like to work with audio, is you can bring everything together like this, and then it's called a consolidate. It's command J. That way once you start building things out, it makes it easier to grab. Those are the actual I hats. We have intro, we have a hook part. [ Music] I actually take that back. I lied. I didn't mean it. I'm going to just make this the verse. I'm going to have this first part of the verse, and then there's the second part of the verse. I'm going to add some stuff in here. I just like the way that it dropped into that. I feel like this would work better as verse and then I'll add some stuff in later to make it hook. But I think it's cool I started off this way. Sometimes you got to call an audible. This is going to be our verse part. You drop into this. Since this is the first part of our verse, what I'll probably do is, every four bars or so, I like to just have things that switch it up. It doesn't have to be a lot, but just a little something. Let's see how it sounds without the shaker for this part of the verse. [ Music] Cool, so I like that. This is what I mean: it's building out. This is going to be the verse part, quick 16 bars. But to make it a little bit more exciting, we'll add this percussion shaker in and we'll come up with some sort of other high hats just to give it some spice. What I'm saying. My Pops is Cuban. I'm about that spice life, South American women, you feel me? I'm all about it. Let's find one more high hat just to add a little bit of, little bit of swag it out, a little bit of flavor. Again, this isn't crazy. It's just something to be little different. We're looking for something really short, simple. Cool. Let's see how this guy goes. I'm also going to consolidate these open hats just to make it easier. Cool. [ MUSIC ] Loop in there and let's see what we can get into with these. I might also pan these to the left just because we want to have a little something. [ MUSIC ] Again I'm going to turn down every other one, just so that it gives it a little bit of feel. I'll talk about this in my J Dilla drums tutorial when I get all ended drums. But for now you just got to take my word for it. [ MUSIC ] What I'm looking for now is just to bring it up so it's subtle enough, you hear it but not so in your face that is distracting. It's an interesting balance to find. I'm not always perfect at it, but it just takes time. Something that you got to find. It's the taste. That's the beautiful part about being a producer. [ MUSIC ] Cool. I built out the first part of that verse. The first few bars of the verse, and I'll [inaudible] out the second few bars of the verse, and then we'll consolidate it, loop it and get moving. [MUSIC] You can use the second hi hats to do as well. Now I'll just accept the other a high hats you have going on. That's what I'm doing here. It's not any crazy, rhythm. You can see me just layering them here slightly, just so it has a little bit of an accent on those hits. [ MUSIC ] Cool. Let's see how that sounds with the verse. We got the first part of the verse done, boom. Second part, just to add a little bit of spice, we've got the percussion, everything. Another thing that I do is to add some differentiation between the verses and the hooks. Again, this comes down to personal preference and the track and what it calls for. But this one, I'm not going to have the base and the verse. Maybe a little bit in the second part of the verse. Let's see how it sounds. [ MUSIC ] Sweet. I like the base actually in this part of the verse. What I'm going to do now is, before we go into a hook because we've got a lot going on here, it depends on the arrangement, but for this one, I want to give the listeners a little bit of a break before we drop into all the drums and the hook again. We're going to make a slight bridge; just something to break up the constant drums in the sample. 18. BOB 6: Automation: When it comes to these little bridges and things of that nature, automation becomes a huge key to it and so automation pretty much allows you to take something in the track like an affect which I'll show you here in a second, which we're going to take an auto filter and we're going to automate it. So what automation allows is you to manipulate pretty much anything, any effect on a track. Volume, panning, effects to move in and it gives life to the track and it gives it some movement so it's not so static. So what I'm going to do now is I know that for my hook, I'm going to want something along these lines as well. So I'm going to actually take the hook, excuse me, I'm going to take this sample and I'm going to duplicate it. When we come into it over here, I want to drop into this slower section and then pop back into the hook again. So what it'll sound like is. I already know I'm going to build in transitions a little later so that won't be quite such a drastic change but then what we're going to do is we're going to come in here and we're going to bring this way down. Cool. I'm starting to feel it so automation and ableton is how you enable automation, this little guide it will normally be these two connected dots. Depending on your door, you're going to have to figure out what that is exactly but it normally gives you some red line before when in logic, I think it's a pretty similar looking function it's a little drop-down with yellow dots. But what I'm using right now is whether this auto filter in ableton is telling me whether this auto filter, this thing, the device is on or off. So for most of the tracks since I want it off, as you can see this flipped down when I clicked it off. So I'm going to come to this pencil. In this, it allows you to draw in automation which is cool because I'm pretty much telling the program, I only want auto filter on for this part of the bar. You can also come in here and choose what type of thing you want to automate and since if we look at this with this knob is, it's going to be frequency, resonance, a couple of different things. Let's come in here and we're going to go with frequency. So I'd like to do out here to start. Cool. So what I want to do, what I want to automate is the frequency so this is a cool starting place and then I'm going to come in here and do is automate it a bit. You can draw these in, you pretty much double-click to get them. There are these points that you can then manipulate in the track so I wanted to stay the same and then I want to bring it down and then come back out. So this is a bit of a transition and I put a little dip in here, if you hold option you can manipulate this in ableton. I'm not sure there's other doors but it's not super important, but just a little flavor just to give you some bit of a bridge. So we'll come back to automation in a bit but that's just get us a bridge while we're working. So then I want it to drop into the most busy part of the beat right here, so we're going take that, we're going to duplicate this over to this section and then we're probably going to drop some more fun stuff into this as the hook. So it would feel like this for now. Actually, no, I like to spice things up a bit so just to have a bit of a transition I'm going to chop this up a bit. Cool, so I like that, it's something simple and subtle but you can hear there's a little bit of a glitch in here. Cool. Again, simple, nothing crazy, just to spice it up a bit. For the transitions too, there are things called risers and impacts that I love because it signals to the listener whether you know it or not the a transition is coming so that's somewhere to jump into now. 19. BOB 7: Mixing The Beat: Now, we get into the gritty parts. This is what you're really paying for right here, is the gems that come from mixing. This is one of those things that I can't stress enough. It comes from doing it over and over and over and over and just making a shit load of beats. This is something you can watch tutorials on, I'll show you, so I'll save you a ton of time because this is tons of stuff that took me forever to learn on my own and then I've been taking courses as well. Maybe five years ago, I bought my first one, on mixing in particular, because to be a good producer, you got to stay curious, you've got to stay learning. Even though now I'm teaching courses and coaching other people, I'm going to forever be trying to step my game up because I always want to get better. From watching a lot of mixing tutorials and taking classes and sitting with engineers, that's what I'm going to teach you, step by step with each of these different beats. You'll see how things are done differently or done in a similar way. In Ableton, I switch to session view with this point, where everything is laid out like this, but wherever you are, just get to your mixer; in Logic, in Pro Tools, Cubase, whatever you're in, get to your mixer and this is where we're going to dive into it. But first, I want to make sure I don't have any extra track, so I'm not worried about anything popping out. I didn't use the 808 in this track, we didn't use a second sample and I'm going to keep the instrument around just in case we decide to go that [inaudible]. Different parts of your track are going to be different volumes because you have different elements. I go to the loudest part of the track where I got the most elements first and I might actually have everything in here, which is lucky. Since I have everything in here in the hook, I don't have to worry about it too much because everything will be mixed together but make sure you don't miss other parts of the track when you're doing your mixing. Jumping into mixing, first thing that I do is, I bring everything down to zero. Even though I do a loose mix while I'm making the track, I always go back and mix everything individually again so when I play it back, you can still hear there's a couple of things sneaking through the drums, the hi-hats. What I'm shooting for, and again, mixing comes down to personal preference, what you like, you'll learn what you like, what you don't. But the way I'm going to teach you is the way that I learned and what's really important to me is the driving elements of the track is the kick. You can also have really snap and snares, growing up in the 90s, snares just about blew your head off in a lot of those hip hop songs but for this, I'm going to show you how to make the kick really rock and everything else come through in your mix. I start with my kick, zero out your levels and let's see where we go in with a kick. Another thing that I do is I've realized I haven't done it yet, is EQ. If you get nice with EQ, you actually don't have to have crazy effects. I think when you're first starting out, get down your basics, really learn how to EQ things well and it will save you tons of time. I know some amazing producers that barely use any effects on their drums and you would never know it because they've just EQ'd it so well that it knocks. With EQ, kind of a general rule with them, is frequencies, where something lives, you don't want to have a bunch of things living in the same frequency, especially with your low end. If you have a kick and a base and an 808 and something in the sample, they're all competing for the same space. That's why sometimes having a more minimal B and just having really good sounds come through can be key. For the kick, what I always do is, I kill anything under 40 hertz honestly on a kick because this is just muddy stuff that you don't actually hear and so it's just taking up space. I like to probably cut it off depending on the kick, maybe around, 32 somewhere in there and EQ the kick a little bit. From there, I'll bring this up, this is another knob, just to alter EQ really high. I'm just kind of giving this a couple of frequencies and maybe just bump this up a little bit but not too much. I also like to sometimes throw a little bit of saturation on my kick. And what's really fun with the kicks is soft clipping. This is when you can really get that shit to bump, because soft clipping allows you to really compress it but without necessarily it boosting up a ton of the volume, so you'll see what I mean. What I'm shooting for is this blue line to be knocking around the five. I have the attack set pretty high, but on this one, I'm not trying to blast it all the way to 20, so I'll bring the threshold down until it hits the five and then I turn my make-up gain on and this is kind of give me back the volume that I lost. That's kind of cool for now. You don't have to get this exactly perfect right now because you want to hear it sounds with the rest of the track. What I'm looking for right now is just kind of get in some levels going and when you have the whole thing done, when you have your entire track mixed, before you master it, meaning before you really bump up all the levels, you want it to come in somewhere around negative four to give you headroom. I'll have an entire tutorial just on mixing things of that nature but you don't want it to be blasting out of the charts from the jump, because you can always make it louder but once your track starts to peak, it's really hard to bring it back down. So keep that in mind. I'm not sure how much the rest of the other elements are going to take, so I still leave some room with the kick. That's why I bring it in, maybe around eight, seven somewhere in there, put the bass lets see how it sounds. Its bass is pretty boring on its own so we're going to use some stuff to spice it up, we're also going to EQ this bass. Again, take out the low muddy stuff, this has to compete with the kick, so let's see where we got it. I just like ready basses, so I like to throw in some distortion. This is one of my favorite plug-ins, it's called CamelCrusher. It's free and then honestly, I just blast the shit out of some distortion just because that's the way I roll. I also might throw in some saturation. Again, I know I got a little OD with the saturation and the distortion but, that's what I dig. With bases especially like this one though, this low, something that you can do just to bring it out a little bit if you want to in the mix, is to boost the high-end. As you can see, it kind of drops off around in here but if you can boost the high end a little bit, you can get it to stick out without it making your kick in the rest of your low end muddy. Scanning frequencies is really fun. You want to get to the best and mix, I feel you, I'll stop fucking around but this, you kind of tune the taste. That's our base. Let's get into our snare, again two most important parts your mix, are your kick and your snare most of the time, but depends on what the track calls for, let's get into it. [inaudible] Okay. I deleted this by accident. I don't actually throw Glue Compressor on my snares that much, because I don't like super loud snares. But this one, I feel like it needs a little bit of beef. Let's see how it comes in with the second snare, then if it needs, it will throw on this Glue Compressor. The key is when you're mixing in another instrument, another layered instrument, you want to bring it in slowly just to the point where you can start to hear it. So it's not totally sticking out, but instead you can feel it but you can't necessarily hear it. I know that sounds crazy, but just see what I'm saying. You see what I'm saying? This is it. This is with it. Just gives it a little bit of [inaudible]. I'm checking over here. We have about two decimals left, so we better be careful because if we still want the whole sample and the rest of the music to come in, we're not given ourselves a ton headroom, but I love some banging drums, so lets see how it goes. That open half feels a little bit louder right now, but maybe with the rest of the track, it won't stick out quite as much. Again, a lot of mixing comes down to having things the right level, sit in the mix the right way. It's not so much about throwing a shit load or effects on. If you can get your levels right, [inaudible] that's the key to the whole thing. What I'm doing now is again, I'm just taking out some of these frequencies that we just don't need. Now we're starting to come in around where we want it for, but at the same time as soon as he brought this sample in, I can hear that we're losing the energy of the snares. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to bring this down a little bit, bring the sample down to free up some more room for our snares because we're already coming in hot. So let's come back to our snares. We have a little bit of room left, which is good because when we bring in the impact and the risers, those are going to add probably the extra flair that we need. To me, I think this snares is now a little bit too loud, so I'm going to bring it down a bit. Now I'm just hearing how the rest of the track sound outside of the hook when it's mixed as a rough mix. I'm going to see about this automation. What's good with our Auto Filter? So the base, I am feeling right now, it's still taking a little bit from the kick and so I wanted to bring up the high end again. So I'm going to add the distortion little bit, when you are mixing them separately it's great. Because you can hear everything, but when you bring it all back together, you got to add some final touches to it. Because now there is all playing together, things you're going to fit into mixed differently. That stares stuff a little loud? I feel like it might be cool to have one of these open eye hats to lead us into this part of the verse. So that's a rough mix. Now that we have the mix done and it's starting to feel good. I like to come into the master and I probably will not do too much in this track in terms of e-queuing the whole track total, but I might throw in a low cut to somewhere around like 12-13, just because they are probably frequencies in there that we don't need just to clear it up. But nothing too crazy on this one is starting to sound good, but this is where I'm going to come back in, come back to the loudest part of my track and start to master it. So mastering for me is pretty simple. I have this Mastering plug-in that I love and I keep it automatically loaded in my mastering track. If you don't have it, I highly recommend getting the FabFilter Q2, which is what I have for e-queuing and the FabFilter pro L2. So I did most of the things in here with stock plug-ins just because I have a feeling, some will be doing some Ableton follow along. But no matter what doll you're in if you want some third party plug-ins, man, this Q2, the L2 saved me a lot of work. So what I do now is; I know what I'm shooting for in terms of volume. So what's nice about pro 2 it tells you when to stream, it gives you these numbers to shoot for. So this is where I'm shooting for, for streaming. Like if on Apple Music, Tidal, anything like that. This is where the setting comes in, where you don't want it to be bopping too much louder than that, maybe a little bit, but not too much. So again, I'll go back to the loudest part of the track. I'll turn the volume down a little bit because now we're going to start bumping. So I can see them coming in around 18 when it was playing. So what I'd like to do I'd to put on my headphones boom. The little headphone icon on. And this will pretty much only tell you when that headphone icon is on. It will only tell you what is bleeding through, what is peaking. So then I'll crank this bitch all the way up. So that's not bad, right? We're coming in on the little things are peaking here and there. I also realized when the loudest part of the track and were coming in a little bit over 14. But this is also the loudest as part of the track. So it's probably safe to say we are around 14 somewhere in there. So now I'll turn my headphones off and then watch out because the tracks going to be a little bit louder now that we've mastered. We filmed some mastering on. And then the last thing we have to do is have this little intro again, same things before throw on this auto filter. And for our little something. Comeback in automation. We've got the filter device on just for this part of the track. So what I going to do is I'll come back in and see if we can copy and paste this automation. Again, this is going to be different matter depending on what doll you are on. [MUSIC] Cool, we'll get the transitions and I'll call it a day people. We almost there.[NOISE] Cool. Looking good, sounded good. And then you might throw in some rough tweak little things here and there. You can go in and nitpick, but for the sake of the tutorial, that's where we'll end this beat for now. Hopefully you got something from it. Thank you for sticking with me. Hit me with any questions you already know what it is. Appreciate you. Onto the next one. 20. WALKTHROUGH SETUP 2: This is another track that I'll take you through, another walk-through from the drums to the melody, making a track your own. But the real gems in these walk-throughs are also not just in the process, in the mixing. Because mixing is something that just takes practice. Beat making in general, it just takes a lot of practice doing this over and over, getting repetitions in this is your [inaudible] montage this is when you're in the freezer. I mean, you're in there, boom, you're getting your reps in, has been doing your push-ups, busting your nose out. Even you're really starting to put into practice, put together the strategies and is doing the repetition. Let's jump into it. Number two, walk-through. 21. Melody Walkthrough #2 (Chopping The Sample): All right, so you're going to land in your project like this. The first things first is, since we're in Ableton, honestly you can do this in any DAW, but I'm going to be teaching you in Ableton. You can come in here and this is a sample I got from Splice, which means it's royalty-free, which is pretty sweet. It's going to be 90 BPM, so you set your BPM to 90 as well. Now when you first drag it in, it might be out of time, so you're going to want to click this Warp button, that says warp, you can warp the audio if you're in another DAW, just make sure that it lines up so that when you play it back, it's on timing. We're going to turn on our metronome just to make sure it's on time. Sweet, and you're going to want to make sure that you have gain staging done, meaning that when you bring your track in It's going to be negative 10 somewhere in there, if you want my template, my Ableton template like this, have everything already set up for you, you can download that in the resources section and that way you can pop in like this, I've already set the levels, everything at negative 10 for you. When you first jump into a boom bap track, I like to start with a melody. Some people start with drums to each their own you'll figure it works for you but for this course, this walk through, we're going to talk about doing it with your melody first, because I find that that is the mood for the track. At least for me, for all of my drums I build them around my melody. In this tutorial, I want to walk you through how I chop up samples for a boom bap track. We'll loop for a boom bap track, so I'm going to play first. We got a lot of good stuff in here going on and the way that you chop up samples in Ableton is when you have something warped like this. It's warped. You're going to come in and you see these little gray things above each of these, they're called transients. Ableton has already told us where it thinks that we should chop up the samples because it's told us that there is a sound being triggered here and each of these gray arrows. The way that you chop up a sample in Ableton is you can come in, you can stretch audio, that's why I love Ableton, you can stretch audio, you can drag it back, whatever and in each one of these spots that you put in it's called a warp marker, you double-click it. That's where you can chop your sample. So that's where you're going to tell Ableton, that I want a chop. I'm going to play the sample back and start looking for the different chops where I think they might be fun to play them back as if I was going to play, if it's a boom bap track, I like to think of it playing it on an MPC. In other types of beats that I make, I don't often use midi and chop them up, but since it's boom bap, we're going to stick with the boom bap style. Let's see where we can find some chops. Right now, there's no exact science to this; this will also come down to your personal preference, where do you think there are certain aspects to things that you might want to chop later in the track. Also, this doesn't have to be set in stone you can always experiment with this as you go, but this is just a rough idea of where these are different elements I think I might want to put into MPC style chops. Once you've got a rough idea, some rough chops in there, you can chop up however much you want. If you are using a different sample, you want to make sure that loops correctly, so these are on time. Then you're going to come in here on Ableton you right-click on one of the yellow Warp markers and you're going to say, slice to new midi Track. You have a bunch of these slicing presets but there's one that I've built for you called MPC Style Slices; this will also be in the resources section. Doing this, you can makes it easy, something I've already built for you so that it plays out almost like an MPC. You're going to hit "Okay". If you play it back, you'll see that each of these little drum pads almost as if we're in MPC is going to be triggered where we told it to. Which is pretty cool. But since this is a midi track, we want to create our own, we're going to delete this. Now that this track is triggered, it's armed means it's read. This means that we can then trigger these different slices with our keyboard, either on our computer or our keyboard if you have an external keyboard like a midi controller. That's pretty cool. In this MP Style Slice thing that I've built for you, you can turn up the velocity, meaning that I don't have to hold, if this is down, this means that I have to hold down the key and whenever I let go of the key, it lets it go or if I turn it all the way up, it'll play the whole sample just with me clicking it once, so this is me just tapping the button. Does that make sense? I hope it does. Then here, if you want to really get fun with it, you can transpose, meaning you can pitch it up, this is like the Kanye West type. You pitch it up if you want to get those squirrel voices like chipmunk voices, Kanye pitches a lot of his samples. That could be really fun to a lot of this comes under experimentation. But what I want to do is keep it regular just in the zero for now. If this part is not showing up, you come over to this part of your drum rack and you click this Show hide devices. Now that we're in these show hide devices, we'll see each of our different slices then you click this sample part we'll see our different slices in here, which is pretty sweet. Now we can adjust these if we want to, to get, we can fine tune them. Which is why I was talking before even if you mess things up, you don't have to worry too much because you can come in here, and fine tune it. Now what I'm going to be doing is just toying around at the sample and seeing how it sounds. Another thing that I might do is I can tell, so I'm also going to rename this chopped sample. Because I can tell that there are different sounds in here, like a base and things of that nature. I might do a little EQing and add some effects to these chops, so that way, as I play them out, I have a better idea of how it will actually sound once things are in the more final versions. Now that you have our rough chops down, I'm going to show you the effects that I add and then we'll jump into really making the chops more precise. 22. Melody Walkthrough #2 (Playing The Sample): We've got the effects on the rack. We're going to come in here and start chopping up these samples and get something going. Right now this is what we have, you just play it forward. I think what I'm going to be doing now is toying around with this sample to try to get some sort of a cohesive loop that just makes sense to me. I personally like it if it goes. I think that we have something there. This is a sample that I've chopped up a long time ago. I remember that there is a certain flow to it. So what I want to do is come in here. I like that and if you play it back with the metronome, see how it sounds. Cool. We have something at starting point there. I do think it's a little delayed here. Maybe I'll bump this sample up a little bit. And that could work, except I don't really like that, as much as I like these next ones. And you see how in the sample, it starts with a bit of a snare sound in here. I'm going to start exactly on the downbeat. There we go. That sounds better. This one also starts a little bit late, I think, so I'm going to just boost up this. I kinda like that ending. I feel like it needs something else in there. Something. All right, what I'll do is I'm going to play this in, and then we're going to figure out, we're going to toy around with that last sample, that last bit, to see what we can make with this four-bar loop. All right, let's see how we did in here. So obviously you have to play it out exactly perfect. We're going to come in here, see how we did. Since my notes are a little bit off, I'm going to control all and hit, "Quantize". Make sure our samples are on point. Because I know this is where I want to end, so this is the part that I've got to figure out. It's a bit of a puzzle. But now that these are starting to line up, what I'm going to do is I feel like it's a little bit off time. I'm going to come in here and just chop my samples a little bit more precise or not chop them but mess around with their transits to shorten ends to really get down a beginning and an end that sounds more natural. Because this sample is ending a little bit late, I think. There we go. There we go. So this was just experimenting with the samples and seeing which one kind of fits. Still play it back, see how it sounds. Again, these have to be super perfect right now. I can always come back and toy with these, but we're going to keep it moving and move onto the next part of the beat. 23. Drums Walkthrough #2 : Now we're going to pop in here. We're going to mess around with our drums. Now we've got this little loop going. We're not going to worry about that too much. We can always come back again and change these later. Now that we have our little loop, we're going to come in here and start adding some drums. I've given you in this sample pack a bunch of different snares and things to choose from. There are four different ones, you can choose which ever one you like. I'm going to lay in some snares first. I'm not sure I like that one. I like this one. Feels like there's something's maybe rushing a little bit in here, so I'm going to come on in and mess with these. There we go, now feels a little more in time. Cool, let's get these going, we're going to duplicate the snares. Duplicate, see it? In these, I like to switch up a little bit of a different kick pattern in the second couple bars, but we'll see how it goes. So they tick before the kick, I'd like to turn down just a little bit, just to give it a little variation. We got our snares, we got our kicks, let's add a hi-hat in here, something simple. It's boom bap so we're not going to do anything too crazy. You can either load in a loop, like a hi-hat loop, a live hat, and chop that up. But since we're keeping things moving, I'm just going to keep it simple and going to give you a couple of different hats to choose from. I like this, this is like that straight-up old-school hat. It's got that grit to it. Again, to keep it dynamic, I like to tune to these. If you want to get real J Dilla with your drums, I'm going to have some elements on that later. You can really mess with these, come in and slide them off the grid, but just for some pretty simple hi-hat patterns for now, we're just going to tune this one or turn this one down just a little bit. Cool, that's our regular hi-hat. Then let's add an open hi-hat, I love open hi-hats and I give you a couple to choose from as well. I like this one. That could be fun, that wasn't even intentional. I like that. I like that open hi-hat on the kick, except it's a little bit off time, so I'm going to warp it so it fits better. I like that. You know what, I'm going to add another open hi-hat, open hat 2. Bring this one down. Again, this is just a rough mix for now, with my pan needle it to the left. I might pan these a little bit to the right just for now. We'll come back and mix this later, but just to get a rough mix as we're going. Then when we can come in here, grab another open hi-hat. I really like open hi-hats at the end of bars or the end of measures, let's see how this goes. That doesn't sound too hot for now. What I'm going to do is, I want to duplicate this out. I'm going to keep this, I'd like to keep this on my project just because you never know when you might need it. But I'm going to drag it way out here where, I know I'm not going to bump into it for a bit. That way I can have room to play, when we scan over there just doing this thing, so you can mess around in here. Let's duplicate this part out, because we have more of a loop to play with. There we go. I duplicated the whole loop by accident. What you want to do is just duplicate your drums. I'm going to have this coming at the end of the measure. Let's see once we drag it out. I'm pitching it down. Right now this is just the experimentation phase. This isn't science, this is just messing around. Now that we've got these drums down a little bit, what I like to do, this will be more apparent in a Lo-Fi song, but I like to drag things off the grid a little bit. I'm going to come in here to my hi-hats and I might drag these off just the slightest bit off the grid. With the track, I'll play the track. This is not a science again, this just comes down to a feel, just to give it a little bit more, something sloppy. I like those J Dilla sloppy drums. You could probably even drag those off a little bit more. Then with the snares, I might drag these off a little bit late or a little bit early depending on how I'm feeling. I don't have this pinned but it still is only playing. I feel like this is a very hard left pinned open hat. This is a bit more down the center for me that has to be pinned over here. Those are our drums. For the most part, super-simple for boom bap, you won't do anything too crazy. We'll get to the spicy stuff in a second. 24. Bass Walkthrough #2 : Now that we've got the drums ready and rocking, we're going to start with the bass. There are four elements to any boom, bad track, you're going to have the melody, you're going to have the drums and bass and either some FX or more melody, sort of the extra sauce on the top, but the bass in the kick, basing the drums is going to be an important part of every track. Now, this is a part where I will be using this mini B3 bass. Because there's a bass that it's a pretty solid to standard sounding bass. Nothing super crazy special if you are in [inaudible] another one, if you just had their stock instruments, you know that they're instrument rack and go to bass. They have a pretty chill standard hip hop sub bass. That will work just as well as a stand-in or whatever bass you want. If you happen to have those plug-ins, you're welcome to have at it. For boom, bam. I like to keep my bass pretty vanilla. I don't do too much crazy stuff to them. Something simple. What I'll do now is play around with the keys and try to find what key it's in and also try to find different notes that work. This is just going to be experimenting, finding what notes that I find that I think some good. I'm going to turn my bass up and just have fun with it. See if I can find a different pattern and see some, find some notes that sound good. The reason I'm solving them is to make it a little bit easier to hear. I'm also going to come over here. This is a free plugin, will also be in the resources [inaudible] pressure. It turned this on and this is some intense distortion. Just to make the bass easier to here while I figure out the notes. I think I've got them. But I might have some distortion on this just to bring out the highest little bit. I love some distortion of the basses will be tutorial in another time. But just again here it will be more. Then what I might do with this bass as well is a leave design for now, just right in here while I'm playing as my sample data a little bit. Now, I kind of have my four notes that I want. Then I'll pitch it down and try to find some sort of a little melody that works with this. Nothing. It's just four notes. I'm going to do anything too crazy when the keep it simple. Another thing that you can do, that little technique is to play your bass, sometimes on your kicks. I'm just going to toy around with it and see if I can find a pattern that works quantizing in there. I think these are just a little bit too long. Your bass doesn't have to be K2, NO2 at the bass there. Especially with these boom back tracks, the bass go back to listen to some dill attracts man like they aren't super crazy, complicated, could always come back, get more funky later on, but I'm going to keep it pretty simple and standard with the bass for that for now. Keep it moving. 25. Percussion & Textures Walkthrough #2 : All right. Once we back in action, we've got this little loop going are feeling good. We're going to now start adding in the fun stuff. This is the basic, this is the meat and potatoes. What we got, by now we're going to start to layer stuff. We're going to start to make it really fun, we're also going to delete stuff that we don't need. So I'm not going to be adding any extra instruments to this track, and I'm not going to have any 808's. So we can start to look at how things might line up. All right. The first thing we're going to do is add, I realized that we have a loop going. But I might add a little some to it to give us a more character. This is a stab. I like stabs, they drop at different parts. This is one that I gave you, and I've already added effects to it, so you have to worry about it too much. But more I love adding vocals to my tracks. That's one of the biggest textures that I'll always add to my track is if it's a some sort of an FX or a texture, it's going to be a vocal of some sort that I'll find. Now add effects to it. This is one that I've already found and edited for you so you don't have to worry about it too much. So I've already added reverb to it and some delay, but we can also reverb it out a little bit more as well. Just something that gives them some character in texture, and then what I'm going to do is play the track and add this stab in a couple of times. All right, that sounded good to me. You don't want it to be anything that's like super dominant or apparent, but add some texture to it. Then the next thing we're going to add is some more percussion, a little things here and there on top of the high hats, and maybe some shakers and things of that nature, just to give it a little bit more swag with the drums. You can get carried away in this part, so I'm hesitant to recommend this too strongly, but just something to break up the measures which I'll show you when we're actually tracking out the beat. So I'm going to add just a little things here and there to add some character. So I gave you a couple of choices for percussion. This shaker, and this shaker. I like this one. But I think I might add is instead, so this is going to be shaker. I might add in another high hat is to give it. I like to shaker but I don't love it. Now, I'm just experimenting with some more high hats, again to give it some character and possibly, just filled a beat out a little more. I insist that these high hats are too dragged off a little bit. I'm going to take these and drag these off a little bit as well, so they line up with the other high hats. Again, all this is just experimenting. Right now, I've got back in my head, and I'm rolling with it and throwing stuff in, checking it out, and then taking out if it doesn't work. Cool. So at this point, I'm feeling pretty good about it. We've got our basic stuff, we can throw in some extra bells and whistles, but I'll show you when these actually come into play here in one second, after we mix the track down. 26. Mixing Walkthrough #2 : So now this is when we're going to throw on a quick mix of the track. We've got a little loop that we can build up from here. We've got all of our different elements. We're going to make sure that everything is labeled. This is the original sample. We aren't really messing with it that, we don't worry about it. This chopped up sample are stab transitions that we'll talk about in a second. Open hat 2, one Shaker. This is going to be hi hat 2, hi hat 1. You know what? I might even throw in some extra snares to give it some extra snap here once we track the beat out a bit more, bass and kick. Cool. The way that I mix things down is in Ableton, I then switch from the arrangement view into this session view, and I'm turning all my levels down because I like to mix in one element at a time. We're going to come in here. I'm going to mix this kick out. Overall when we're mixing, we want to shoot for around maybe negative four so we have some headroom to actually do some mastering, and you'll see me in all of my tutorials, all of my courses, every beat I make, I shoot for negative four and my mixing is very simple and standard. I think that when it comes to mixing, less is more. It's not about having these crazy effects chains. It's about EQ, getting your levels right. So that's what I'm looking for right now. I've got this EQ to about negative, you can't hear much below 25, 24, so I'm just cutting out everything beneath those frequencies. We're coming in at around eight, I like that and I've thrown on a little bit of compression. The reason that this is in my Ableton template, so this is already ready to go. But if you don't have that, throw on a glue compressor and this just makes your kick a little bit more punchy. I don't worry about this too much, I'll come back and mix this in a little bit later once I have all my other elements, but I want to make sure we have enough room for this bass. I threw in this Saturator just to give it a little bit of volume but I'm turning it off for now, I'm going to mix it in and see if we even need it. Big part of the bass and the kick when it comes to mixing is not having them clash, so turning on some sidechain compression on that bass to let the kick come through. If you've seen any of my stuff, you know that I love bass. I like that bass in your face, so we're going to see how this is going. I still feel like we have a little bit more headroom so I'm going to start pushing my kick up a little bit. This is something where I might come back to it again a little bit later, but that bass, I think for now, the reason I throw on some distortions just to bring out the high-end. The high-end allows you to hear some more bass because it's pretty low. Again, rolling off anything below a 22 around in there. Let's bring the snare and get it popping. Snare comes down to taste. Some people like the snare to make their ears bleed. I'm not a huge, super loud snare guy, so I rock with this and I build this in as we mix out the rest of the track. Throwing a little sidechain compression under the hats just to give it a little bop and I pin those a little bit to the right so they can stand out a little bit. The reason I like to play in like this is because it allows you to here elements a little bit better, a little bit differently. If not, everything is coming right down the center [inaudible]. This is a loose spot where the drums are bumping, I'm feeling good about that. Let's move on and start to bring in some of these instruments. With this EQ, I've rolled off a little bit to the high-end because there's a lot of things going on in this sample, and you can hear that bass in there too. So I'm taking out the lows, I'm taking out the highs to allow room for our drums to cut through. We just want the mood from this track. In boom bap, you don't necessarily have to throw some compression, sidechain compression on your main sample. But just because that's the way that I like to roll again, I like my kicks to really cut through the to mix. Also, I'm very influenced by Dylan Fly Low, that I like the kicks to bump through. So I'm throwing a little sidechain compression to get some vibes going. Coming in at five, that's giving me a little bit of room to work better by the decibel left. I'm going to in bring in the stab and I can tell when I brought the sample in because it's sharing some of the same frequencies as my snare. We're losing some of the snare so I'm going to go back to that. I'm going to mix in the stab and then go back to the snare. Speaking of panning, I love these tool, it's Auto Pan. So when this drops, I want it to go slowly from the left ear to the right ear; just add a little bit of motion, [inaudible] some little things. Throw in a little bit of saturation to bring out a little bit, not the tone, but just some. This will come down to taste, I like my bass in your face. Cool. That's a rough mix. Now, what I'm going to do is, I'm going to throw in some mastering to the track. See how it all sounds together and mashes once all the volumes are brought up, and then, I might come back and tweak things in the mix. We're negative 4.83 so we've got some headroom to master with. Things are feeling good, things are sounding good. Let's see how it feels when we throw some mastering on. 27. Mastering Walkthrough #2 : So these are the two plug-ins that I use. So I put them automatically in the master chain, it's a Pro-Q 2 and the Pro-L 2. But since I'm keeping this all stocked for you all, we're just going to rock with the regular EQ and the regular limiter. So throw an EQ Eight and what want to do is you're going to want to come in here and scan around for different frequencies that stick out. So I'll show you what I mean. You're going to push the Q all the way up and you're going to push the gain all the way up. You turn these headphones and you're going to scan for frequencies that might be sticking out that are unpleasant to the ear. The hor-resonant frequencies and you'll know when you hear them. There it is, right there. There is one, so you're going to bring the gain all the way down. You don't want to open this bad boy all the way up. You're going to keep it still pretty slender, right there. We want to to keep, you don't want the waves, you don't want to cut too much out. So you just go looking for those that really jump out at you and they resonate and if you leave them in there, you can leave them in there, but it helps you clean up your mixing, your mastering if you just take out a few of them. There's another one I'll take him out, boom. You can do this all day if you want finding different things. I'm not going to spend too much time on that, because this isn't about just mixing and mastering is about making banging Hip hop beats. Then the next thing I'm going to do is throw on the limiter because we want to turn this joint all the way up. So we're going to leave this auto and I like to push the gain up. Turn the volume down a little bit because you are going to separate that gain up. The built-in able limiter isn't the best, it'll do a decent job, but if you push this thing too hard, it starts to sound pretty crappy. So anytime it's coming in, pretty much what your limiter is going to do is bring all your levels up and it's a big compressor. So I throw it on the master chain, but at the same time, I don't ever let it go past that negative five anywhere in there. Then once I have things mastered i might come back and turn things up or down a little bit. Like this snare I think its maybe a little bit too snappy, a little too crunchy i might just blend this in a little bit more. There are certain things that I think are better felt and not heard. In this instance that would be these high hats. You can't really hear them, but they just add to the track. So that's the quick mastering that were thrown on here and now once we have that down we are going to track the beat out. 28. Tracking Out The Beat Walkthrough #2 : So once you've got things pretty well mixed and mastered then you're going to want to come in and tracking the beat out is when you really get to build out the different sections of it so you might do this beforehand everybody's a little bit different. I personally like to build things out after I have this kind of eight bar loop,so this is how I'm going to just run with it. You're going to see me check it out. I'm going to not talk about it but I'll duplicate this part. And this is where I got the most action going on right? So now for the intro I'll probably have the samples in here and then some sort of an intro. Maybe first couple bars where the key when it comes to building out beats from an eight bar loop isn't necessarily adding a bunch of new stuff but it's more about just bringing in, adding and subtracting different elements at different times. You can build your entire beat out of these eight bar loops. I'll show you what I mean. [MUSIC]. So right now. [MUSIC] and so I'm going to duplicate this because I want at least this many bars before I drop into this hook part with everything so then I'm going to duplicate this little section that we have and maybe bring in a bit of, maybe let's bring in some of the shakers and the second hi-hats. So every four bars or so I add something in or take something out. The listener might recognize it, they might not but it's just to kind of keep it interesting. Just some of your ears to do. [MUSIC]. I don't like their high let's try with the shakers. All right, so what actually what I think I'm going to do is here. I'm going to drop the kick out and I'm going to do a little bit of automation as well Just to add some spice and then drop it into the hook here. So what I'm going to do with automation if you don't know much about automation, I'll have other tutorials on that and I'm going to talk about a ton but there's automation you pretty much get to move different things and create motion throughout your track. It allows you to have more control over the elements as they move throughout your tracks you got to bring things to live so I going to remove this automation. All right, so I'm only just going to have this auto-filter on for these four bars in or I'm going to do is have the frequency. I'm going to make the frequency. And actually I don't really like that bass there. So I might have the bass. I might not even bring the basin here until the hook and I'm going to automate this. And then I'm going to come in here and add just a little bit of a character to this last bar, this last bit of the bar when it come into this midi note this mini job and it was going to duplicate it a bunch so that it feels like it's kind of glitching. So that's kind of cool but I wanted to be even more glitchy onto the legs. Feel like it's like really the press enough. Like that so what I might do is something different. Another snare too. And then I'll also bringing in that open hat at the end of the bar just for something to do. I actually think I might do a little bit of a double snare. Come in here, grab it, duplicate it, and I might turn them down a little bit.There it is boom. And then another thing I'll do is add in some transitions to this and drop the beat out periodically. So now we have a little bit of a hook.You got our verses and I'll come in here in a second and just do some things to spice it up. But first before we add the spice I'm just going to take this and I'm going to duplicate it. So now we have our different parts of diverse where we have kind of this bridge section now. So come after the hook. Now that we have kind of a general overview of how the track looks. I'm going to come in here after this and add some spice just to make things a little bit more fun. 29. Automation & Transitions Walkthrough #2 : >> So when it comes to transitions in splice, a lot of it comes down to automation and little things like these risers and impacts. So that's what I'm going to open up my transitions again, coming here in the sample pack you'll have a transition both the impact and a riser. So let's do an impact and a riser. You hear these a lot in like EDM songs and things of that nature, in these hip-hop joints in Boom bap, these are essential, these aren't super huge, but I like to have them just because they add a little bit of umph to the track. So these aren't going to be like your huge EDM things, are things that I might put in a trap record these might be much more pronounced, but for now I just keep a little something. All right so here, just because I like the feel of how it's going, I'm just going to come here and just take some stuff out just to add some drops. In hip hop tracks, especially Boom bap, you've got to add some drops and different things to keep it interesting, because there aren't that many elements, so you just got to spice it up a little ways. So I think what I'm going to do here is cut these drones out. I might just cut this out. So another hack when it comes to the samples, is when you want, this is a little key a trick, this is what you're paying the money for right here is to have a slice that cuts everything off like it is a real NPC. So I'm just going to take a slice that we don't actually use in the track. Which is- We're using all, so instead what I'm going to do is switch up my key a trick. I'm going to come back to my samples and make a particular chop, so I'm going to duplicate this slice, that on a Mac is option, you click a slice, you hold option and you drop it, and this is going to be my phantom slice, where I take the volume and turn it all the way down, and so this will be my slice, which will be slice number 17, there you go. Sweet. In here, I might also add another snare. Add the snare to open just in case I wanted to throw another snare in there but I'm not sure it's going to end up working out. But I like this snap, snap snare joint. This would be another good time to drop in your impact. Impact's here. Let's see how it sounds with the riser, not sure if it's good or bad but we'll see. Then I'm going to add a little bit more spice right in here, I just feel like it'd be cool to drop it.Then I'm going to come back in, add my little phantom sample chart so that it cuts it all. So this is how the hook will sound.Then going into this part of the verse would be another good time to bring in the riser so that people know that you're coming into a first section. We're going to work this and stretch a little bit so it fits the measure. Then I'm going to repeat. Now, I might throw away just another- Wait, I think that's the wrong way.[ Music} There we go, what I actually want is- Nice, I like that. I might actually throw in this open hat there too. Spice man, it's just the little things, little spice, little details, but you-all, that is all that she wrote for the boom bap. Getting your boom bap hip hop banging tracks on, mastered, things for Gucci and now, showing you how t bounce the stems, and we'll get you out here. 30. Bouncing The Stems Walkthrough #2: Once you've got your main song tracked out, it's mixed, it's going to lose mass to run it. You're going to want to play this in different speaker. Play this in your car, play this on your headphones, all sorts of stuff. Then you are going to want to bounce your tracks, but before you do that, I'd like to add a little bit of an outtro. I like to have some bars at the end, is hip hop chat you want that person able to talk that talk. I'm going to take my last hook, these four-bar Hooke. I'm going to double it, which I did here, and then have just some final bars for people to talk, talk that talk. I'm not allowed to swear, so we're just going to rock with it like this [MUSIC] and then I probably at this final piece [MUSIC]. Take that out. A little bit of a outtro. You can throw on whatever outtro you would like, but then to bounce the tracks before you bounce, you want to make sure that everything is labeled correctly. You've got your low-end kick base, you've got your drums, snare one and I'm going to use snare two, so we will delete that high hat 1-2 Shaker opener that one, open that two get your risers. This original sample, we don't need that anymore either, so you can delete that. Then the chop sample in estab, so then you'll go to File, Export Audio, Video, and then all individual tracks. Export, bounce them joints and you're good to go. That is your bang in hip hop beat. I hope that you enjoyed. If it didn't turn out exactly like this, do not sweat it. If it turned out better, please send them away, I would love to hear it. I'm sure that many of you will be rocks-tar producers in no time anyways. That's it for now, and check you soon.[MUSIC]. Let's get some bars up [MUSIC] 31. Wrapping Up: There are a couple last gems that I want to drop on you before you go on your production adventure. The first one is perfection doesn't exist. If you're waiting for a beat to be perfect, you're going to wait forever because it never will be. You'll come back to it in the year and start to see all the different things you can change. That's the beautiful part. There is no perfect beat because music is subjective. That being said, there can be better qualities and not if you're shooting mix or different things here and there. But there really is no reason to obsess over the little things. When it comes to production, It's quantity over quality. Who do you think is going to get better? Producer A who spends one month trying to make the perfect beat at the beginning or producer two, who makes two beats a week and is focusing on different elements every single week. I was the producer B, because he's made so many more beats. It's really just a practicing [inaudible] thing. When you're first starting out, beats are going to seem slow. At first you're going to want to take all of these concepts and boil it down and try to make everything perfect. My advice is, build out these beats and remake as many beats as you can with whatever time you have. What goes hand in hand with this is like any creative endeavor. Don't edit while you're making the beat. You're going to start making a beat and that voice inside your head it can tell you, nobody's going to want to listen to this, this is trash, why are you trying this and the list goes on. One of my favorite books is called The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. It's about resistance and it's that voice every artist and creative has in their head that's telling you that you can't do shit. So if you do the best that you can, especially when you're beginning and your beats aren't going to sound super fire, just to push that as far away from your brain as possible while you're creating or remaking a beat. This didn't sound like [inaudible] beat. Push that out of your head to saying, what did Kanye do? Boom, here's the sample. Learn how to flip that same sample. Flip it. Does it sound the same? Fuck'em. Different high end pattern maybe yours is a little bit off. You can't quit nail it. Fuck'em. It's about putting one foot in front of the other and not editing while you're in it. Once you have the beat done and you want to mix, you want to come back to the mix, fine. More power to you. Come back to it later after it's done, finish something. Use this system and break it down each element. Make a beat, have an idea, run with it completed. Focus on one thing at a time, finish your beats. Don't add it while you're making them. Just run with it and complete the beat. One of my last pieces of advice, and the biggest pieces of advice is to keep it simple. When I first started, I tried to cram everything in these tracks. Just use better sounds and keep it simple and start to practice. Put these into place. Watch these tutorials, watch these walk-throughs as many times as you need to take those little tips and tricks and tactics, get after it. I'll see you on the other side. You've got this shit. Peace. 32. Melody Walkthrough #3 Reversing Samples: Alright, so we're starting a new project I found this little loop and what I'm going to do is start messing around with it. I feel like there is lot of potential. What you're going to see me do is just write now come in, reverse it, chop it up add some effects and see if I can get something out here that might be a little bit different than what we're starting with. I feel like this reverse could be really cool. That's me, that's the loop right there, that's the joint. We can do to borrow from this one.Borrow from that one and go like this, then it might repeat. Let's peak. Yeah I started young. We got this little melody going in. We're going to jump into some vocals, maybe add a little texture or something to this next. 33. Vocal Textures #3 Pitching Samples: I found these two vocals that were also in the same key, It's D sharp. I'm going to start just messing around doing a little bit of that key vocal technique, the vocal texture, this is my secret source. Just going to vibe them out and see if I can get some sort of a cool melody out of these vocals and out of these textures, let's do it. Start that here, are little faded it will fade out so don't get clicky and don't get mad at me. As you can see, a lot of it's just experimenting, seeing what works and just twine with things pitching up pitching down and see what works, I did that. We are on to something with this, we are on to something. That sounded good, you definitely got something with this on your own. That's cool vocals damn it could be the hook, we'll take it from there. 34. Drums Walkthrough #3: What I like to do is, I like to get some drum loop that I find inspiring, and then I'll hop in here and make them my own. That's what I'm going to do now. I'm going to bring in this drum loop that I found and then start tweaking it, mess around with it, making it a little bit more what I'm looking for, but I liked this bounce. I'll try to find a bounce that I like and then take it from there. [inaudible] First of all, what I do is put it in here with some kicks. You start doing it. I'm going to do my kick thing. [inaudible] I really like this Nik Dean kicks, shout out Nik Dean at all times. That's just a cool groove right there, I like this. Our note, this sound is, but it's kind of cool. I'm going to see if maybe I can steal that, stole the wrong piece. Didn't mean it. Let's see what this is. All right, so what I'm going to do is because it has that hi hat in it and I don't want the hi hat in there for my kicks, so I'm just going to rock with it for now, but then come up with something in here and say, this might be note to self come back to this That should be something cool. I'm just going to pitch it with. [inaudible] That's another one of those. It's like a timer something. I'm just going to steal these hi hats because why not? They are cool hi hats. It just goes back but we'll just continued throughout [inaudible] because your entire hi hats are a little bit early so I might come back and slide these a little bit later. For now, we're just going to rock, with it as it is because I like those and then they're snare at them because near to. That's like almost want to say that's some sort of like a 909 or like an 808 type real like a machine drum type snare [inaudible] That's a pretty cool snare. Let's see if we have anything like that. Nik Dean you really coming through big guy. That's also a pretty cool [inaudible]. Let's work with some Nik Dean,he is just holding the down for me today. I'll just try three of these and just see if it fits. Right now again it's just experimenting. [MUSIC] I like the idea of these being kind of more splashy, like, crisp in the knees might have to kind of delayed snare that do it. [MUSIC]. I was looking for kind of like some weird. I just wanted to, almost like a chorus. Lets see if we could gag along this joint. [MUSIC] That's more like it. [MUSIC]. You know what I want in here? Is the phase - almost a flanger. I'm feeling like. [MUSIC]. 35. Drums Walkthrough #3 Cont.: Now we are going to jump into some more drums. But I consider this kind of like more percussion, things that are like spiced up a little bit. We need little bit more, something to add some bop, something just to make it interesting. So that's what I'll be doing now, experimenting with some percussion, other drum sounds, things of that nature. [MUSIC] That's where the kick comes in, probably we shouldn't have something there. I really liked that snare, but I think I might just come back to it later. Because I don't necessarily think I need it right now, but I liked that a lot. Cool Kids Snare. Boom. [MUSIC] I thought that I was going to maybe keep that drum loop but I realized I actually don't need any more because I got my on thing going on. So peace. [MUSIC] So a lot of these are, these hi-hats they're just kind of accenting those kicks. I'd like to just have in a couple of different things going on percussion, just to make things kind of interesting. What I'm looking for right now is, maybe some sort of, I don't want to spend too much time on these drums because I know we kind of are, but just kind of that's the main bop. I would love some sort of another like this 909, kind of open snare to kind of maybe start to measure with or to maybe land on a snare, something like that. So that's what am looking for. [MUSIC] Subtle, you feel me? Impact or something. [MUSIC] So I'm going to duplicate these now. Then come back in here, take these out. Add D-spec in here so we have a little bit more of a full loop. [MUSIC] So now that I have the drums, these vocals are starting to sound a little bit off. So I might come back and change those too. [MUSIC] Actually what I should've done, let me take that back. I'm going to edit these drums a little bit more, give them a little bit of swing. [MUSIC] Yeah. I'm going to probably automate this delay, just under that last snare. So I'm going to leave that off for now. Let's get it. That sounds good, that sounds good to me. Those are pretty much my drums drag these up just a little bit, to get a little bit of some bop to it. Might mess around with this snares a little bit. But don't have time for that right now. We got to keep moving, keep pushing, let's get it. 36. Walkthrough #3 808s: So now I'm jumping into my, I'm going to, I am going to duplicate this now. I'm going to, by the way, if you hear strange, if you hear strange sounds in the background, that's just my dog. Don't mind are she's having a dream of some sort and snoring and pretty loud. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to come in here and add one of my favorite Ada[phonetic] weights because I think it would match well with this song. So I'm going to add N sampler that's automatic. Where are you at sampler? Then let's come in here to it'll weights. I think it's this one. Yeah. This one's dope. All right, let's get it might come back try a bass later. Did I add this things tripping, things tripping alright, I might come back and add a base later, but for now, let's try some ada weights. Let's make sure that's not green and let's get cracking. So what I'm going to do actually for now is coming here, grab these roads and we can invert these to a melody track to see if I can find out what the notes are to go along with these. Cool works for me. It says that this starts in D, so make sure that you sit that root, root note to D and what i like to do with my eight awaits is I like to have them follow my kick pattern's pretty similarly. So I'm going to actually push this up to make it easier to hear. Listen when it come down, make sure that I've queued this. Yeah, I have to [MUSIC] Well, if the key is A2 would tell you right now, if you get this, if you make room for your kicking 808 and then here's the little key tactic, I'll come and queue this more later. My favorite plug-ins came a crusher free plug-in man. [MUSIC]. You got to make sure fat mode is on, of course rookie mistake leaving that off [MUSIC]. Then I'm going to come in here, I get a little glider on and I'm going to come in and get my glide on. So the way to do that is you, when you're with your 808, you hit this automation thing. You choose your 808, and then you choose your transpose. Then we're going to come in here, glide some joints [MUSIC]. I managed to take this 808 out. So I'm going to say no automation for this just to see how it sounds if I take this out [MUSIC]. I actually might push this up just to see what it sounds, that's almost like to pitch those up an octave, just to try some things out, just like grade eight away, can you blame me?[MUSIC] What I'm going to do is I'm gonna duplicate this and then I'm just going to add a couple of small changes in here at the end, just to make things a little bit different[MUSIC] I might actually add more in here. Hey, that's how you rock out some 808. Let's get it cracking. 37. Walkthrough #3 Writing Melodies: All right. Now, I'm going to come back to that vocal melody because I feel like it doesn't quite feel the same as it used to. I'm going to come back, maybe reverse it a little bit, see what we can do. Turn back that and reverse it, and see what we can do with a little reverse vocal melody and if not, then get another kind of vocal melody going. I also might only put in this reverb snare at the end of every four bars. That's the piece I wanted right there. I think we've got something for real. What I'm going to do is I'm going to duplicate this guy because I actually want to make up eight bar loop, and I'll show you what that was, but we're going to just work with it. We're going to duplicate this. We're going to come in here. I like that pitch down, those pitch down vocals a lot. I think those would be maybe cool with it for an intro or a bridge or something like that but right now I'm just building out. This would be like the loudest part of the song. I want some sort of a pluck or some other instrument to maybe come down and add some downbeats on this joint. I also feel like these vocals might be a little off timing, so I might come back to those but we're not sweat in there. Right now I don't sweat the technique. I like that. Let's get it. There it is. That's what I wanted. I'm going to add this over here, CS M. I'm not crazy about that one, but we're going to roll with it. I also love choirs, so I'm going to add a little bit of choir action to this, see what we can get cracking with that. You know more about that choir life, what do you know about it? What I'm doing right now. So I'm going to see if there are any weird frequencies in here. A frequency is kind of like that. I'm going to take those out. You want to do a thin cut, so there's another one there. Still don't love this choir, but we might be wrong with it. Let me just see what else I got going on here. Yeah, that will be good for the pluck. That will be it, I need to go with some bells, or some mallets, or something. Cool, I think that's what works. I'm just going to come in here and look at these vocals real quick make sure they're on time. Now this one feels like its rushing. There it is. That's how we do it. This is how we get it down. 38. Walkthrough #3: Mixing: Now this is when we get into the mix. This is the fun part. We start to put it all together, seeing how it's all going to sound, mix down. For a mix, what I like to do is, zero everything, but first, I come and make sure everything's labeled: Snare one, Splashy snare, Delayed snare, Reverb snare, Extra snare, Hi hat, Hi hat two, Open hat one, Cowbell. Let's make this Impact hat. Cool, Transitions we don't have yet. Sample, Rev keys. We're going to have Main vocal. I don't think that we need this Vocal anymore. I think this is the back drum, right? You know what? I'll keep it anyways. Back up vocal. Don't need that. Color these instruments. We'll say, NA plug, just to keep it, just in case. Now the Mallet. Sweet, so now I go to, this view. So "Session view", "Arrangement View"? I can never keep them straight. I'm doing "Control all", bringing everything down to zero. I'm going to mix it all in, one at a time. Cool. Cowbell sneaking in. Cool. No. This Glue compressor helps a little bit of punch out of it. I don't like that it has that little blip thing at the end. I want to make sure that I don't get no little clicks and blips as much as I can. Coming in around eight. That's cool. I might, bring it up a little bit. I know what you're saying. That's a lot of bass, but I'm rocking with a lot of base for now. I love that gritty base. I might even turn that distortion up just to mess with you. One thing is if you aren't knocking by the time it's just your drums, something's wrong. You want to be able to rap, on just your drums and bass. I'm already feeling these. I feel like this is already inspiring me to write. So I know that's a good sign. Moving on to the keys and the vocals. Also, keeping an eye on this, I don't like it to go too much, passed, negative four because when I master it, I want to have some headroom so that I can still have some room to, push up the volume a little bit later down the line. So anyway, I wanted to maybe have a little bit less. Also make keys and get some of these resonant frequencies. That's a bad one. That's a bad one. We're not going to get all of them right now because we're doing this on tutorial, but you can go and exercise much as you want. Now that I'm hearing this back, I actually wanted [inaudible] to play another note. I want it to go down, down. You feel me? You know, I'm a great singer step lying to yourself. It's competing too much. Now we're going to throw in the Master channel. I feel like I might roll off a lot of the low end on the entire track then come in here, pick up some of the resonant frequencies. But for the sake of the tutorial, we're not going to do that, also going to limit this. So watch your ears. Cool, I think we're sounding good. Let's check this out. 39. Walkthrough #3 Tracking Out The Beat: I have ideas of where I might want to take it for verses and things of that nature. For now I would like to join all these clips from this part of the beat that we made. I also want to make sure that I do not join it all without having a backup in case I want to come back to the samples I messed up later. I would like to duplicate out a clip. I can zoom out and see my whole board as one. I will come in here and join these clips. I'm going to move these old vocals. These are now backup vocals. I will delete that and duplicate this out so that we have a little bit of an intro joint and see what this key sounds like. I thought this intro sounded cool pitched down. To achieve that, come back to the history. I needed to take this. I pitched those down already. I'm clicking this to make sure it comes from over here and see where it is clicking from. There you go. You take that and bring that over here. I might want to mess with this vocals, then delete those. I'm going to bring this back to this part of the track and bring these in. The reason I do that is because it brings me energy. I am going to duplicate these. I'm going to play it one more time. That is it and we drop it on. What do you think? I didn't like that, in the hook, the double snare there.[MUSIC] That's a little joint, right there, that's a little joint. [MUSIC] Now I do throwing into automation just to spice things up a bit. This is my full drums master track, I'm going to add this device on. [MUSIC] There are some risers and impacts in there. That's what I wanted. One along one. Pause. Might have a couple impacts on this joint. Then, I really like breaths as impacts. I also like claps, this one clap impact, this one I really like. [MUSIC] I know what I should do. [MUSIC] I got an idea. This might be a little bit going into weeds on you all, but I think this could be cool. One of my favorite, where did you go, is this little alter boy. Here we're going to do, we're going to duplicate this track just in case this doesn't work, but I just want to try it. Intro vocals. Let's try this. Let's try this guy. [MUSIC] Oops, I didn't mean pitch. Yeah guys, I don't think this is going to work. Sorry, I didn't mean it. Not quite coming out how I wanted. [MUSIC], also just to make this fun, I might pan this back and forth with a little Auto Pan. The beautiful part about arrangement, is that you just add and subtract different instruments at certain times and it totally makes your beat. The New Testament. That dinner relates is the zone mood. Woman known made up. New woman known late it, learn murder and movement. I'm a zone a zone and waste sit had been known and delete and known or weight, mole I ain't coming and owner wake says and the known him make it told you has come back from this delared. This delayed snare you guys didn't remind me what's up with that. Known and unknown move sediment, been known waves says manana, change Doe men and no way, minimum way. No, wait, no. Then no mood. Not today though. It ain't up to you up I've been looking and known to chase it. But I don't approve Roman-um man. No to move I've been. No mo, bone, manana, move. Now in this, we have been known are made out of device is on. But none of my unknown I've been looking everyone knows who made it a mole. It's as if the you up and that began a toe. Neural Wave says unknown or not, then get good. May be none. No [inaudible] If I'm a low [inaudible] and have it up and none. Kuhn and knit Minoan make it of it up and none low and dead band. Says me and made me me, me, me, me, me, me, me. But know that never had luck is, a three by three. The point of a book. I can feeI joy in my heart. I can feel joy in my heart. I can feel joy in my heart, joy in my heart. I can feel joy in my heart Should be from here to here. But really she moved to here to here. What do you guys think about pitching these differently. We now mu here and not a mood always saying the same thing, what am i supposed to do while I was in a mode yeah. Let me make it don't, don't vote. Moldova to debate, still I love him. It's nothing to me enough and pay. Am loving the rain. Am loving it. Nothing really.I can feel. That's all folks. 40. Conclusion & Next Steps To Level Up: I hope that you enjoyed the course. If you did please leave a review. If you didn't, please leave a review as well. I'm a grown man. I understand I am not for everybody, but the only way to improve is to get your honest feedback. If you did enjoy the course and you want more materials like this, you will find all the resources either below or at kiaorion.com slash resources. Anything that you saw in this course, I have available for free download. I have Ableton templates. I've free Ableton crash course. I've got sample packs about free guides, everything that you need to level up. I guarantee that I can help you do it. So that being said, thank you again for taking the course. It means a lot for tuning in, and I appreciate you for watching I'll check you on the next one till we meet again, keep making beats and I'll see you at the top. Check you in a minute. Peace.