Transcripts
1. Welcome & Overview: my name's Jay and welcome to slam a Cat. This is Liam Academy. We're a diverse family of working musicians with one important common bond, a deep love for the creative process of making music. I hate every preset I've ever listened to. I just want to, like, make all my own sounds. You have to have your own son. Otherwise, you're not gonna stick out United by your passion for creating the Slam family exists to educate and support musicians of any age. Any level at an Eddie genre had been more creating electronic music once I stepped into sound design. This is electronica music. This is like what I envisioned it being like our community lives on and offline with Livestream group classes as well as in person programs in Minneapolis. Our instructors meet you where you are and work to accelerate your musical journey to where you want to be. There's like, frustrating and call it being with all the music majors. You know, you had all these classical musicians, and I'm like over here making beats and I come here and I feel like these last nine months I've learned more way more for what I need to be doing with detailed courses in deejay music, production recording, sound design and more. Slam Academy is ready to show you what it takes to be an industry professional. I was pleasantly surprised with how much I really could take away. After only 12 sessions. I finished up, and I am walking out with exactly the tools that I need to finish projects. We want you to become a part of the slam Academy family. - Four of these air gonna happen in between each clap, right? So I'm gonna clap our pulse. And when we get to hear, you're gonna hear four of these pass in between 2.1. That's happening. More comments, or we're gonna hear that as an accent. Low, low, high, low, high, low, high, low, high. So we're going to hear that as accent it. That one is coming every 3/16 notes, right. It's one e and A to E and one e en to eat. And, uh so that's awkward, right? And that's what Syncopation is all about. Farther and the numbers weirder, right? There's nothing to see here. I see. 311 229. Okay, we're gonna talk about those numbers in a minute and able to know the same thing if I scroll and even farther. Okay, So we talked about swing being, you know, moving stuff a little bit off the 16th notes, Sometimes the eighth notes Just moving the pattern around just a little bit, nudging some things here and there to give us that feeling of swing. Right. So, uh, I want to add it to my percussion here, but nothing else. Okay, so here's I'm gonna do it. Uh, and this is gonna be different, depending on what at all. There's a little bit more high stuff happening later on in the song like that, but the main group is rock solid.
2. About Me: All right, let's dive in. So what I thought we do first, Uh, just do a little bit about me. Um, So I'd like to just show you real quick Some of the things that I've done, how I work, cause that does inform a lot of this class. Um, you know, programming beats is a very stylistic thing. So if you know kind of where I'm coming from, it might help you kind of interpret what I'm showing you so that you can make drums in the style that you want. Perhaps a little easier. Uh, and if nothing else, it gives me an excuse to show you one of my tracks. So let's do it. Um, So this here we have the midi grid with drums on it. And this is where we're gonna primarily be working in this course. We'll talk more about that in the next video. When we talk about tools we're gonna need for this video. I thought I would just show you. Ah, one of my tracks. Eso I have iTunes up over here. Um, you can grab this. I have a couple albums out up here on iTunes, but I thought I display this 1st 1 because it shows a couple of different beats. Um, in this track, there's Ah, riel, four on the floor, Just kind of a thumping beat. There's also some really glitch heavy, frantic beats happening at double time. That's the kind of thing we're gonna be talking about in this class to. We're going to talk about how to make a ton of different styles and a ton of different techniques for making stuff. So this shows a few different things. Eso I want to play the whole track. It's a bit long. It's like five minutes long. Um, but, uh oh, no, it's 6.5 minutes long. Wow. It's a really long track. Holy smokes. Um, but listen to the drums. Just get an idea of what I like to do in my drums. Just that, you know, uh, you know what I like to do Here we are. Okay.
3. Tools: Okay, So before we dive into the nitty gritty, let's talk about the tools that we're going to need to be able to do this. Really? Well, As I was preparing for this class, I made some posts to current students of mine through Facebook through some of the class sites. You to me, Whatever. And what I found was that a lot of people's were asking me to make this class, and they gave me a lot of tips on what they wanted in it. Um, and I really worked hard to get all of that in here. So everything that all of you guys have been asking me for, I've packed into to these drum programming classes. However, the one thing I heard more than anything else was We don't all use able to, so don't focus it just on a Bolton. So I get it. I'm totally on board with that. So here's what we're going to do. I'm going to use a Bolton, but this is not enable to in class. You do not need to use a Bolton. You can get absolutely everything out of this crap class if you're using a different program. But you need to be using some audio program. Okay, So whether it's fl Studio logic, pro tools que base, uh, any of the other ones? Bit wig? Uh, all of those will be fun because of what we're going to be doing as we're going to be talking about building beats in two ways. And both of those two ways work the same and all kinds of different software. Right? So one is placing samples on the grid on the timeline, and all of these audio programs have a timeline, and I have a grid, and you can play samples on them. Okay, The other way is going to be using the MIDI grid, and all of these programs have immigrated. They all look pretty much the same. Okay, so if you're not using a Bolton, you'll have to a little bit. Look at what I'm doing and then find it in your program. This isn't gonna be a class about how to use those programs. Um, but it should be really easy to do, because all of these programs, when it comes to this stuff, work the same, so you can use whatever program you want to use and you'll be just fine. Cool. Um, so you need some kind of audio software like that? Pretty much any audio sequencer will do. So that being said, what I want to do next is dive into those two ways that we're gonna make beats, okay? And we're going to talk about this is gonna be the smallest, little part of this class. Um, I'm gonna show you how to put beats together on the timeline with audio samples and on the mini grid, and then we're going to get past that. And then we're gonna focus primarily throughout this class on different styles, different techniques. But I do want to include this little bit of, like how to actually put the samples together. Um, just to make sure we're all on the same page. But after that, we're gonna be talking about styles, ideas, how to make things sound really pumping. So let's go into that next. Ah, and putting stuff together on the grid
4. Making Beats In Your Audio Sequencer: Okay. Next. We need to talk about how to actually put this stuff together. Okay? Just like the mechanical stuff of it. And there's kind of one thing that I see people doing wrong with this all the time that I just want to point out. So here I am in the timeline, I'm going to zoom in. We're gonna talk about how to read this timeline in just a minute. All these numbers up here, so don't worry about that for now. Um, what I care about is really just this first number where it says 11.21 point 31.42 Okay, so that means between one and two is showing me one bar. Okay, so I'm gonna loop one bar. You don't have to do that. Don't I just want to do that toe set this up. Okay? Now, I'm gonna start us off with just three samples, Okay? So I have three samples here, and I'm going to give you these same three samples in the next lecture, so Ah, if you don't have any audio samples, that's fine. Uh, in the next lecture you can download these case will have a kick snare in a high hat. The three most basic things that we need. Okay, so I'm gonna throw my kick on this track, and these were just audio sound samples. Now I'm gonna make three separate tracks, and this is a good habit. Whoops. This is a good habit to get into keeping your sounds separate. So I need three audio tracks, and whatever your software you're working in, just make three audio tracks. The reason I'm making three years, cause I'm using three different sounds and it's just good habit to keep them separate on separate tracks. Makes it a lot easier to mix later. Okay, so here I have my kick, my snare in my high hat. So if I listen to those meet get, um, nothing amazing in these sounds there just kind of generic starter sounds that I grabbed for us to use. Okay, so when you're moving around these sounds, we can we condemn, dragged them anywhere within the beat that we want, we can duplicate them usually a quick way to duplicate his option. Click and drag. That will leave the in original one and put a new one in another spot you can also just at it copy. Put your cursor somewhere at it, paste this copy and paste. And if you know the key commands for that, that's fine, too. Okay, so I'm just gonna do this. That and let's do this to make a very generic beat. There we go. Now, the thing that I see people doing wrong all the time is when you're placing samples on the grid, you see how mine kind of jumps to each spot on the grid. It's jumping by 16th note, which we'll talk about in a second. Uh, what's important is that if yours is not jumping like that, if yours is just sliding, um, let me turn that off and get mine to just slide without any of that jumping. Okay, so now I'm not sliding at all or I am sliding. I'm not snapping at all. The thing is called snap to Grid. Before I had snapped a grade on, and now I don't case. So when I'm working in this way, where it's just sliding, this is a dangerous game, okay? Because if you're you're hits are just a hair off from the line. It can be bad so be sure that your dead on this line So I want this snare to be on this 1.4 , so I'm going to get it there, and that looks pretty good, right? But now I'm going to zoom in, and I see I'm not actually on it. So if you're not on a grid, you have to make sure that you are exactly on this line. Ah, whichever line you want your hit to be on, just get right on it, and you might have to zoom way in. Okay, So being exactly on that grid is important when you're making beats. Now, that being said later on, in the course when we're talking about kind of humanizing this and making it feel, um, more natural, we might go off the grid quite a bit, right. But for now, make sure that you're just really on these lines, just like really tight on those lines. See how these ones are exactly on it. Make sure that you are exactly on those lines. Wherever you want your beat to be, be dead on it and zoom right in there and make sure you're on it. I see people doing stuff like this all the time where they're just not exactly on that grid . And it just everything falls apart just really fast. See? I mean, just pull everything off. Just a hair. Say it. It sounds like someone's had too much to drink, and they're trying to play the drums. Right? That's not what we want. We want this to be super tight. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna turn snap to grid back on, and I'm gonna tighten this up, make sure everything is exactly on the grid right where I want it. And then everything sounds good. Okay? It's boring because I've made a very boring beat, but that's OK. Um, because it's tight. Everything is exactly where it needs to be. So, uh, that's how we work with audio on the grid. We just drop our samples right where we want him. Keep him on separate tracks. So you've got kick snare and hi hat. Um, and make sure you're right on the grid. That's the basics of it. Okay, Now, I'm going to give you these three samples in the next lecture so you can grab those if you want. Um, we'll talk more about finding samples in just a bit. But for now, these will at least get you started if you don't have anything to work with. And you're welcome to use these for whatever you want. Okay, so next lecture, download links for these samples, and then we'll talk about, uh, working on the mini grid.
5. Making Beats With The MIDI Grid: Okay, So, working with this same kind of idea on the MIDI grid, everything work exactly the same. Except we have one other step we have to do. Um, I'm gonna make a new MIDI track. Okay, So if we're gonna work on the midi grid, which we will, sometimes there's an advantage to working on the mini grid. Um, I need a MIDI track, and then I need to put a sampler on it. So whatever program you're in, find yourself a sampler for me. It's going to be in instruments, and I'll go to actually going to go to a drum sampler. Let's just use a drum rack, an empty one. Okay. So here, I'm gonna put my samples here. Some schools say, put a high hat there, a kick there and my sneer there some just dragging these right in. If you're in a Bolton, it works nice and slick that way for in another program, you just have to figure out how to get samples into your sampler. Okay, so that sampler is on this track. Okay, so I'm gonna make a new midi clip and let's make it four beats long. Okay, so now I have three different mini notes I can play. That's all that I have here because I'm just controlling that sampler. And it only knows how to play three notes at the moment because those are the only samples I put in it. So if I wanted to make the exact same thing I just made, I would put my kick that I just made with audio kick snare would go there and hi hat would go there, There. I think that's the same thing I just made. So what we have here is this is my kick And think of these ticks these little marks years, little boxes. Think of these as basically a play the sound message. Okay, so must they play the sound? Play the sound? There's a kick. Here's the sneer. Play the sound, play the sound Here's the high hat Play the sound play the sound played the sound the sound . Okay, so let me go back here and mute all this other stuff. I'm just gonna solo this midi clip and play that. Okay, so it's exactly the same time. You this one. Okay, Same way to times. Let's go back in the mid Ingrid Here's the thing. These notes can be long. Ah, and that's okay. In our case, it won't matter. This is the same right with this kick all the way out because all this note is doing is saying play that sound the length of it doesn't matter in this case, so it could be a long or short Doesn't really matter. What does matter, though, is that we are exactly on that grid. Same problem is before, right? So if I zoom way in, I can see that I am on that grid. I can get a little off of that. Great if I want to, but right now I don't. I want to be exactly on this line right here. Wherever I want those notes to be, make sure that they are exactly in that position. Um, not just a little bit off. They have to be dead on and again later. We might let things get a little off to give it a certain feel, but for now, we want to be locked right in, so that it's type of that. Okay, So there are reasons why you might want to work this way using a sampler and a mini grid, and there are reasons you might want to work. Ah, just using the audio samples. What we're gonna do in this class is we're gonna start by just using the audio samples because it's a little easier to understand. And then later, once we get into some more advanced stuff, we'll work on the mini grid. Um, in general, working in the MIDI grid is a little less cumbersome. Once you get used to it, it's easier to trigger a lot of stuff and do more complex things. Um, where is working? The audio green can get a little. It can kind of start to hurt your head a little bit. Um, with all the things that you're seeing on the screen. So if you need more help on this, check out my other able 10 classes. Check out my pro tools class, check out my logic class. Ah, I'll show you how to do, uh, all of this in those classes in more detail. But for now, I want to move on to talking about how to read these numbers up here at the top, and in particular, um, how to talk about the rhythm of beats because this is gonna be important. We need to figure out how to talk about these things or else. Uh, nothing I'm saying in this class is gonna make any sense. So let's learn how to do that next.
6. The Bar: Okay, lets start off talking about the bar. So what is the bar in our case here? Ah, these numbers at the top. We're seeing one right now. We're seeing 1.1 point 31.21 point 2.31 point three etcetera. Until we get to a whole number two. Okay, so the bar is between one and two. So what? I have looped here. Now. The bar is important, because when we make beat patterns, we make drum patterns were typically working in groups of bars. I would say, almost always You're working in a number of bars, and almost always, they will be either one bar long, Two bars, long, four bar long or eight bars. Long, sometimes 16 bars long. But that's pretty weird. Um, so 1 to 4 or eight. Okay. Um, why? Why is it that we don't typically have a beat pattern? That's three bars long, for example. The answer is, I don't know. Actually, I don't know what the answer is. It's just hardly ever done. We just like these patterns that are four bars long or eight bars long, um, or two bars long or sometimes even one bar long. Um, it's just the way things work. It's weird, but that's the way it is. So you can make a pattern. That's three bars long. Don't let me stop you, but know that it's kind of weird, that's all. Um, so we have one bar here, So if I wanted to make one that was two bars long, I would go all the way out to the number three. So this is now two bars long. Okay. If I wanted to make one, that was four bars long. I knew a little bit more space, and I would take this all the way out to the number five. No notes that we see the number five here, but that doesn't mean it's five bars long because we're pushing right up to the start of the fifth bar. So that includes all of bar one bar to bar three and bar four. You kind of see the big blocks here. Each one of these is a bar. Okay, um, so on these numbers, when we see 11 point something and then to 34 when you see just a single number, that's the bar you're on. Kept Now, if you see time appear if you see, like like, uh, minutes and seconds change that, uh, you don't want to see that There's a way in all programs to change it. Um, I can't remember where it is here. Um but but in the Mableton, we have time at the bottom down here. Right. So this is one second. Two seconds says three seconds, but we don't want work in time. We want to work in beats. Eso We want to work with 11213142 Right. Um, so there is a way to change it. If up here, you're seeing time. Okay, um, let's jump over to logic and see what it looks like. There. Okay, So in logic, I see 1234 Right up here. If I zoom in a little bit farther, I can tell that those are full bars. Right. So now I see. 33233344 Okay, so from 3 to 4 is one bar. Okay, this much. That's one bar. And that's actually my third bar. So I could go back. We started bar 11 to 2. That's a full bar. Okay, But I had to zoom in to see it, right, If I zoom back out now, I see. 159 What am I seeing here? I'm seeing groups of four bars. Okay, Each one of these is four bars long because their whole numbers. Right. So that means it's a big span of time up here. I'm at bar 125. It's a long time. I consume in farther and the numbers get weirder. Right? There's not. See? Here I see. 311 229. Okay, we're gonna talk about those numbers in a minute and able to do the same thing. If I scroll and even farther I start to get 1.3 point two, I'll get more. If I zoom in farther. I think maybe I won't. Actually, I'm zoomed in too far already. So able to work. The tiny bit different in that way is that it's not gonna give me new numbers if I go. And crazy far. But don't worry, you're never gonna go in that far. Okay, so that's the bar. Okay. Bar is very important. Uh, okay, let's move on. And let's talk about the beat like the well, I'll explain in a minute.
7. The Beat: Okay, so let's talk about the beat. Now. This word beats like B E A T has, like, a 1,000,000 different meanings and electronic music. Like when people talk about a beat, They could be talking about just the drums that could be talking about a whole segment of a track. That is the beat that you might hand over to like a rapper. Um, or they could be talking about the general pulse of this song. And that's what I'm talking about right now is the pulse. So, actually, I'm gonna not use the word beat for this. I'm gonna talk about the pulse. Okay, so let's talk about the pulse. The pulse is in musical terms. It's the quarter note. Okay, so we're looking for 1/4 note, and you don't need to know all the musical terms, but let me just tell you that there's a reason we call it the quarter note because there are four of them in one bar. Okay. Each bar, if you imagine a bar is a pizza and you cut it into four, even slices, each one of those is gonna be a beat. So you need four of these slices to make up one bar. Okay, So if we look here at our timeline one right now, the way we resumed in, we see 1.1 point three and then 1.2. Okay, so 1.2 is the start of the second beat. Okay, so one is the first beat, the whole numbers of first beat. The whole number point to is the second beat. 0.3 is the third beat. 0.4 is the fourth beat. Okay, so if we go to to 2.22 point 32.4 MSM out Just a hair, they're now all we're getting is the quarter notes 1.21 point 31.4 to 2 point to 2.32 point four. You can imagine that where when you get just a single number, you can imagine a 2.1 right? They don't put the 0.1 there, but that's what it is, right? It's 2.1. It's bar to beat One is what that saying? This is bar to beat too. 2.2. Bar to beat three bar to beat four. Ok, now the pulse. The beat is the thing that, like, if you were listening to a track and you decided tackle foot along, that's what you're tapping your foot to. Is that pulse? That quarter note? Um, 99% of the time you're gonna tap your foot to the quarter note. There are some cases in, like, a really fast song that you might not be or something like that, but, uh, So let's figure out what it is here. Okay, So oops. Let me loop. Just this bar again. Okay, So what is the pulse here? Uh, clap pulse, which is the quarter note and clap the quarter. Right. And if you look close, I clapped every time we crossed one of these point to 10.0.3 point 41.1 point 2.3 point four every quarter note. Okay, so that's what we clap if I slow this down, Okay, Now it's way slower, but I'm still gonna clap on those same spots, right? Where's the false? So even though we slowed it way down, the pulse is now still in the same spots. It's just a lot slower. So that pulse is super super important. So the quarter note the pulse or the beats, Although I'm gonna try to make myself say the pulse. Instead of saying the beat throughout this course, I will probably call it the beat a lot. Um, but that's what I'm talking about. Okay, let's again jump over the logic and just have a look at what it looks like. They're same deal. Here. We see three you could imagine. That's 3.1, if you want. 3.23 point 33.4. So Bar three. Beat one. Bar three beat, too. Bar three, Beat three. Bar three. Beat four. Let's go back to the start. Bar one beat one bar one beat to bar one, Beat three. Bar one beat four. Bar to beat, one part to beat, two etcetera. So when you just see a number point another number, that means the bar and the beat. Okay. Are the pulse if you will. Okay, great. Okay. Now let's talk about dividing this up even further and talking about these little things in between each one of these. All right, um, for that let's go to a new video
8. The 8th And 16th: okay, so we can go in even deeper. So we know so far that if we have a whole bar and we slice it into four equal pieces, we get that pulse right that quarter note, right? We can slice it even more so we can slice each one of those quarter notes in half, and that gives us an eighth note. Okay, so we have eight of them to make up a full bar. Okay, so I'll be each quarter notes sliced in half. That would be here, here and here would be his beat, too, right? So if this is beat to this is halfway between beat one and beat to this is the eighth note . Okay? Because we need eight of these to make up a full, A full bar, and we can slice it in half again, and we would get 16th notes. Right. So each eighth note, we're going to slice in half, it's gonna double them. There's gonna be 16 of them. So we need 16 of these to make up a whole bar. No, Able Tin shows us, um, in its Siris of three numbers here, like number point number point number. What it shows us is bars beats 16th notes. Okay, it doesn't show us eighth notes, so you kind of have to calculate the eighth note on your own, but it's actually really easy to do. Check it out. 113 is what we have here. So what that means is, the first number one means the bar. Okay, the second number one means the beat. Okay, so we're on bar one. Beat 1.3 means 3rd 16th Note is where we are. OK, now, the 3rd 16th note is also the 1st 8th note. Sorry. The 2nd 8th note. Really? Because there are 4/16 notes in one beat. Can't remember that. That's important for 16th notes for every beat. So 1/16 note would be Let's make this just 1/16 no long. Okay, so now this is 1/16 note. I shortened the sample so that it would be just one. So here's 1/16 note. Here's to 16th notes and that lines up to be at the start of the first this 2nd 8th note. So these together. Oops. Make up 1/8 note. Okay, so 4/16 notes per beat. Okay, Now, let's let's Ah, I know this is getting a little complicated, so let's put it in terms of music. Doing this with your kick drum is silly because you're gonna have 4/16 notes. Ah, on your kick drum, and it's gonna sound like kind of like metal. Um, not that metals, silly, actually, kind of like it because remember that as these numbers get higher, uh, eighth note, 16th note. Um, that means rhythms that we put in that are in 16th. Notes are gonna be going faster every time that number gets higher from bar quarter, 8th 16th That means a faster note. Okay, so these are gonna be cooking. These are gonna be really fast. Uh, let's hear what I just did. It started at the beginning. Uh, it's not that bad, because I slowed everything down to speed it up. OK, actually, let me slow it down one more times to show something. It's actually kind of fun. Little beat. Actually, it's not that, Um, remember where our pulse is, Right? So our pulse is here and here, So four of these are gonna happen in between each clap, right? So I'm gonna clap our pulse. And when we get to hear. You're gonna hear four of these pass in between to collapse. Okay. Is there pulse? 1234 1234 1234 Right. So the 1st 1 happens right on a clap. And then there's these three that happened in between the collapse. But that isn't typically what you would do. What we would more commonly do is do something with our high hats on that. So let's do that with our high hats. Right? So I'm just gonna put 16th notes all the way through on our high hat. Okay, That last one. So now our high hats are going Gonna be going Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. Well, our kick is going one three one three cause not happening on beat to write. 1234123 Our snare is happening on two and four. Right? So it's going 1234 to four. Right. Meanwhile, are high hat is going. 123412341234 Or the way we would count this in musical terms, which is kind of funny sounding as we count one and then we say e and uh to So it's a one E and A to E and a three and a four rienda. Right? So I'm gonna play this. I'm gonna count each one of those out loud. It'll be kind of funny way. So the kick goes one, three, 12313 and stare goes 4 to 4 to 4 to 4. And then hi. Hats go 20 and a to e. And the three and a 40 a one year and a to E. And a three and a 40 a one and a two D and three d end a 40 end up. Cool. Now you don't have to count like this, but you need to know what's happening in the beat. Um, and this is important because you can see by just adding these high hats like this Suddenly it's starting to get a little more interesting than that really kind of corny, But we had before, um, I could maybe even move this around a little bit. Let's get rid of some of these high hats. Uh, that one. Let's add a kick on the eighth note of beat four. Okay. Eso We would call this the and of four because we say four and sometimes. So we gotta add this to the end of four. Um, we could add another snare. Maybe on the end of three. Right. So the 1st 8th note after three. I'm just moving stuff around a little bit, but let's see what we did. Let's start at the beginning. E don't like that. That all right? Still really simple, But you can see how moving stuff around the beat is useful right around the pulse. I should say, um, because we still have these main pulse markers here. The quarter note. Right. Everything comes down to the quarter note removing stuff around the quarter note. Okay, let's move on. And let's talk about meter next. This is a complicated thing that I want to touch on. Um, it was spent too much time on it, but you ought to know what it is and how it works.
9. Meter: Okay, So you have been asking yourself why is it that there are only four beats in a measure? Like, could there be five? Could there be three? Uh, the answer is yes. There actually there very well could be. And there are. Sometimes we do things that way, but it's weird. Um, it's weird in electronica music. It's weird and dance music. Um, but if you want to get into some more complex kind of more like progressive stuff, then you might do it. Um, listen to the artist Venetian snares. He does kind of drum and bass stuff that's often in seven. Um, it's complicated, but it's fun. It's really fun. I love it, but be hard to dance to it because every three beats you end up on your left foot twice and fall over, but I don't think it's designed to be danced to anyway. Thistle all talking about the meter. Now for me, the meter is up here. It says 44 Now, if you're making dance music of any type, then the odds are you are 99% of the time gonna be in 44 meter what 44 means is the first number means there are four beats in a measure or four pulses in a measure. OK, we've already established. That's what we've been doing. Um, the second number says the quarter note. That's the four there. The quarter note is the pulse. Okay, that's what that means. So first number says how many pulses in a measure? And the second number says, What is the pulse? And in this case, four means quarter notes. Let's change it. Let's do. Ah, another common 168 Okay, now what we've done is we've said there are six pulses in a measure. No. Okay, six, not for six pulses in a measure. And the pulse is now the eighth note. Not the quarter note, but the eighth new. So if I do this, that means that this 12 is now our 2nd 8th note because my numbers here adjusted. Look, see how it goes up to 1.51 point six and then to So this goes up to six. Know my pattern is too long. So what's this gonna sound like? It's not gonna sound much different. It's gonna sound a little shorter because I have 6/8 notes. And then it stops, Right. I had 8/8 notes before, but now I only have 6/8 notes. So this isn't going to sound very much different other than it being shorter. But let's hear it. Anyone, right? So if I tried to count it now in 68 thing is a little bit of a head scratcher. 123456123456123456 That's the pulse. So it's a little strange right now. Like I said before, 99% of the time, you're gonna be working in 44 it is not unheard of to be working in 68 there are cool tracks that Aaron 68 But the other meters, like 78 3498 those are would be really strange. But you're welcome to experiment with them and work with them. Let me show you a track in 68 just to give you a feel for it. Okay, so this isn't exactly dancers. There's more pop music, but it's the first track that came to mind when looking for something in 68 So, um, postal service. This place is a prison. Um, so let's just do it for just second. And I'll count it to show you that it's in 68 when the drugs come in. What were the screen? All right, so if I counted four, it would be awkward. 12341234 C doesn't line up. It doesn't line up correctly for but if I kind of six one well, so I have to count the So So Here's the eighth Notes. 123456123456123412345 one So you can hear that like significant events line up on the one. That's what we expect. That's what should happen. So I have to count six and I have to count faster because I have to count the eighth note instead of the quarter. Note. Make sense. Um, cool. It's it's tricky. If this is frustrating, I get it. It's tricky to spot the difference between 44 and 68 sometimes, but don't worry about it. Let's focus on 44 since almost all of what you're doing is gonna probably is gonna be working in 44 And even if it isn't, it's best to get comfortable making drum patterns in 44 1st and then start experimenting with him later. I can show you how I've done that later on in the course, Um, because I like making some stuff that's not in 44 or 68 but, uh, I usually do it by making something in 44 and then altering it. So let's stick to 44 for now, but that's what the meter means. Cool, cool.
10. Counting Bars: Okay, One more piece of review. Um, let's go back to 44 With this pattern, it's open it back up. Case we have the full beat. Let's hear it where we've left here started beginning. Okay, I'm gonna give you a little quiz here, so try to answer this out loud. Say it out loud for me. What beat is this on this first kick? The answer is one B one. Cool. What beat is this one on Beat three, Right, Because we're on Bar one, Beat three. Great. Which one is this on? Okay, the answer here is the way I would say it is. It's on the and of four. Okay, now, that means it's on the second half of beat four. And the way we say that is the end of four. Because if I was gonna count eighth notes all the way through this, I would count. How do it? One and two and three and four and one and two and three and four. And so that's four. And is the way we say that. So the second half of beat four is for and it's the same thing as the way we count 16th notes one e and A to e. And, uh, if you think about it one e and, uh, two e and, uh, the And on 1/16 note falls right in the middle. So this is the same syllable. Really? It's just a convention we use to keep track of rhythms. So I'm gonna call this the and of four is what beat. That is on. Okay, how about the snare? What beat is that on? Be too easy. One. How about snow? Here? Be four. Easy one. Okay, now let's go to the 16th Notes. What does this one on beat? One easy. How about this one? This one is on the 2nd 16th note of be one. So we could call that the 2nd 16th of beat one. If we wanted Teoh be a little silly with our syllables, we could call that the e of one cause one e and ah, one e It's on the eve of one. Ah, I don't typically do that. Just the way that I talk. I would probably say the 2nd 16th note of B one. Let's do what? This one. This is on the 2nd 16th note of beat for okay. And this one, the 4th 16th note of beat for. So this one, I would say the 4/16 note of before Or you could say the, uh of before, but I'd rather say the 4/16 note. It just starts to sound silly if you do it the other way. But both are correct. It's fine. So the reason I'm trying to hit this home is that when we're working on a B, and I'm going to say, Oh, let's take this one. That's on the 2nd 16th No, and move into the 3rd 16th note, You know that. I mean, take this and put it there, Okay? Because we're on the 2nd 16th note of beat three and I'm gonna move it to the 3rd 16th note of beat three. It's gonna push it over there. Now, one thing I haven't pointed out yet is that we can go deeper weaken. We've gone up to 16th notes, but you can slice the 16th note in half and get to a 32nd notes. Okay, that would be Watch this half way here. So now here's a 32nd note. Okay? I just put a note in between the 16th notes. Okay, Listen to that. Okay, Let me have a few more of those. So you can really hear it. Okay, That's in between each 16th note. Can I go farther? Sure can. Ah, so I'm on 32nd notes. I could go up to 64th notes by getting in between there right now, it starts to sound a little ridiculous. Um, because it's just going so fast right in there, but that can actually be a cool trick. And once we get into some of the rial, nitty gritty stuff will probably be getting down to 16th notes in that same way. But you can go infinitely deeper if you want. You can go. 64th notes, you go 128th note. You can go. Ah, 240 six. Note. I think that's a, uh, if you want, but, ah, up there is not really very useful to us. But you can continue splitting it more and more and more. And just you just have to zoom in farther and you can get more things to do in between there. Um cool. Okay. I think we've covered this. I want to talk about one more quick thing. Ah, in terms of this stuff, and it takes us back to the middle grade a little bit, so let's go to that and then we'll move on to talking about the elements.
11. Reading Drum Patterns: Okay, so I want to talk about reading a drum pattern. This isn't something that you might come across two, or you might have already come across it. So I just thought I'd talk about it really quick. You can find these books on Amazon and bookstores and whatever of that air called, like 100 and 27,000 drum patterns. Right. If you look around online, you can find these, and they're typically drum patterns written like this. Okay, Um, so if you see these, if you come across these, let's one talk real quick about how to read these. These are basically a mini grid, right? So if we look at what I've got here, zoom out and then go back to that image, okay? Really Kind of have the same thing here, except they're showing bass drum. They want it on beat one eso. They're showing you 16th notes here, right? Cause there's 16 of them in one bar, which is what we're seeing here. So they wanted on the 1st 5th 9th and 13th 16th notes. In other words, the quarter note, okay. Or the pulse. So let me let me make that. So based from on all the quarter notes. Plus this last one. Okay, so that's gonna be here. Upsets my snare. So here's my kick. So here, here, here. And the, uh, let's go back to it. So I have one on every quarter note and the last eighth note, right? Because 13 this is an empty 16th then the second to last 16. That's the and right, So that's gonna be the one before. And that's what that's gonna show us there Que snare drum they want on five. And remember, five is going to be the second quarter note. Nine is going to be the third quarter note. 13 is gonna be the fourth quarter note, and then they want one on the very last 16th note. Okay, we can do that. So second quarter note, 3rd 4th quarter note. And in the very last 16th note should probably zoom out more so that we were actually in. There it is. There's my last 16th note right there. Sometimes it's hard to see those 16th notes if you're not all the way, zoomed in to see exactly where they are. Here we go. Okay. And then this wants O h is open. High hat. Ah, I only have a closed high hat sample here, but that's okay. Let's do it anyway. They want it on the and of one. The end of two. The end of three. In the end of four. Easy enough. Here's my high hat and of one. Oops. I put that on the snare and of one end of to and of three and a four. Okay, so now I've recreated that drum pattern. Let's hear it. I need to solo this. Speed it up a little bit. That's neat. So that's what we're hearing is we're hearing this. Ah, one last thing up went out here is in case you were curious how they're labeling stuff. BD bass drum sn snare drum. Lt. I don't know what they mean. Their large Tom probably MT Middle Tom. So, Tom drums like big, booming ones. Each t is probably Hi, Tom R s is probably rim shot. HC is hat closed. Probably no closed hats by ch h c. I'm not sure what HC is, but ch is probably closed. Hat. Oh, h Open hat. Sisi. Crash symbol. RC ride Cymbal. Not sure what HC means here. You know what that is, anyway? Um So that's how you can read those drum patterns if you like
12. The 3 Essentials: Okay, let's talk about sounds. Sounds in samples that we're gonna need. So the three most basic sounds we need is a kick snare and a high hat. This is true in just about all genres of music. And once we get into some of the other sounds, some of the rules not rules. But some of the stylistic things change. But the reason we like kick Astaire and a high hat is and and all of the sounds that we use pretty much is because we emulate a drum kit, right? Like someone playing a drum. So this big thing is the kick. This thing over here is the snare. And this is the high hat. Okay, Now the high hat has two positions. It could be open or closed. I've started us off with a closed high hat. Um, let me pull up a sound of the two of them. Okay, I have here. Ah, website full of samples called free sound. I'm gonna talk to you more about this website in a minute. But for now, I just want to show you the different kinds of high hat sounds. So this is a closed high hat. OK, It's very short. Percussive sound, Right? Open hi hats. Sounds more like this. E rings a lot longer, right? It's It's noisier. There's a lot of sustained to it. Now. You can also have a high hat that's hit open. And then you close it right? You close it with a foot pedal. Eso I think that's this hope. Yeah. So this is the sound of a high hat. You hit it open, and then you close it with your foot, right? Kind of cool sound. But it's really to sounds. And one, it's open high hat and then a closed. I have. So I have started us off here with a closed high hat, actually a synthetic closed high hat, but it's emulating a closed high hat. So these are three elements that I like to start Just about all beats off with. Whenever I'm making drums, I start with these three things and really get the foundation. And then I start layering in some other sounds. Right? We're gonna talk about those in just a minute. Eso Let's take this back to being something not so crazy here, so I'm gonna get rid of all of that on Let's put this. Let's just do I don't know that. Oops. It's cute of that. I screwed this whole thing up, so let's to there that should work. Okay, so all of these air synthetic sounds that I'm using just cause of the samples. But, um, kick is gonna be your bass sound The snare. It's gonna be kind of in the middle and the high hat's gonna be ah, high sound. Right? So we've got kind of the full frequency spectrum here low, middle and high. Um, and that serves us really well for a foundation to get started with. So most beats we make, I'm going to start with these three sounds and then start layering some other stuff on top of them. So let's go on and talk about some of those other sounds now
13. Percussion: Okay, let's talk about percussion next. So percussion is kind of a bad word to use, but it's the common word that we use for this kind of thing. Percussion just means, ah, instruments that are played by hitting them, right? Eso all drums are percussion. The snare drums, percussion. The high hat is percussion. The kick is percussion. So, like if you go to like an orchestra, the person playing all the instruments in the back, the snare drum, bass drums, any symbols, xylophones, all that stuff that person is called a percussionist. They play all of the percussion instruments. However, in kind of modern music production lingo, percussion means, uh, short sounds that are not Ah, the hi hats, the kicks in the snares. Okay, so they're extra little short sounds is what we usually call the percussion. So let's add some in here. So I have some audio samples of depression like things. Let me just play for you. This right? It's just a little brute, like a wood block or something. Um, so I might pepper this in a little bit. Right? Um, let's shorten that up. I'm going to arrange my tracks a little bit. here and move this track above my MIDI track just to keep everything organized. So let's maybe put this here, here, here, in here. It's a little bit of these two. What we've got now. Okay, that's cool. We'll add another piece of percussion. Let's see what we've got in the sample. You can add a lot of percussion, and these are kind of emulating acoustic things. Like I just showed you the drum kit, but they don't have to be taken. Be just weird. Like zap sounds vocal samples. Pretty much anything you can imagine. Let's see. I don't know what the sample is going. Try it. Okay, that's cool. So I'm just kind of randomly throwing these out of the grid and in different places. We're going to talk more about how I'm choosing those places later. Actually, the majority of the class is going to be about how I'm choosing where to put these. For now. I just want to introduce you to the sounds. So percussion is this kind of a thing? It's a very loose term. Generally means short sounds. They don't have a lot of ring to them. They don't have a lot of sustained to them. Um, but they add a nice flavor to the track
14. More Cymbals: Okay, let's talk about, uh, symbols. So going back to our drum picture here, symbols are these. And these now we already know about these, right? These are high hats. High hat is a kind of a symbol, but we kind of treat it separately. This one is called crash symbol. So we have a bunch of different kinds of symbols that are typically found in an acoustic drum kit. Like a really life drum kit. There's crash symbol. There might be a ride Cymbal off over here. This from kid doesn't have one. There might be more crash Cymbals. There might be a lot of them. Um, symbols. When you're making a an Elektronik kit, we don't use the Tana symbols, but you're welcome to do it. Um, let me throw some in here. Here's a crash symbol. Now, these air going to sustain for, like, kind of a while, Um, throwing another one. Here's another crash symbol. Let's just hear these. These are long sounds. So here's the 1st 1 Right. Okay. Here. That is piercing. Um, I don't like that so much. Typically, if you're gonna put something like this in here, you would do it right at the end of the loop, which for us would be the beginning of the loop, which sounds crazy, right? But because But basically, I don't want to hear this the first time. I want to hear it at the end. So this is where having more than one bar might be useful. So let's stretch this out to four bars all the way up to that number five. Then stop. Just short of it. Here we go. Now we have four bars. Zoom out just a little bit. Okay? So now I have a four bar loop, but I have only one bar of stuff, so I'm gonna take all this stuff. Copy and make sure I'm right exactly on this line and paste right online paste red on the line paste. Okay, now I have a four bar groove. Um, and I'm gonna have my symbol hit at the end of four bars. No, no, because we're looping it. I'm gonna put that at the beginning, but I don't want to hear it the first time, so I'm just gonna mute it out the first time. If I was making an arrangement, this would be less awkward, But for now. I want to hear that in the return of the loop. Okay, so we're gonna hear this through four bars, and then we'll hear this crash symbol. Here we go. Oops. Should probably stop selling stuff. Okay, Not bad. You know, it kind of symbols are good for a at the end of Ah, long loop. This one, because it's short. Um, I kind of dig it. Kind of gave us this. This kind of cool, like daft punk sound. Um, if I just turned it down a little bit, it might be kind of cool every two bars. It is kind of daft. Punk. I'm gonna put this up here, okay? We'll talk more about what I mean by it's kind of daft punk later. Um, but symbols are long sounds. They're the opposite of percussion in many ways, right? They're usually really bright. They're usually very high frequency wise. Ah, And there long. Ah, and we don't use a ton of them typically. Okay, so they're symbols. Uh, let's go on and talk about some just general other sounds that we have access to
15. Other Sounds: Okay, How about these things Right here? And there's 1/3 1 over there. These air Tom's right. So the toms are kind of big thumb P sounds their higher frequencies than the kick drum, but they're like a new type sound. We don't use them a lot. You'd be surprised. Um, in fact, I have a good story about this. There's this one drummer that I work with a lot, Um, who in an acoustic drummer who plays a drum kit. And he's really well known for playing along with an Elektronik kit So you'll have a beat like this one that we that we're making here and he'll play acoustic drums along with it. And I asked him one day, How are you so good at blending with the Elektronik? Sounds like what makes it so that Ah, you can get your acoustic sounds to blend with these electronic sounds. And he his answer was, I don't use Tom's like Don't use Tom's and you'll blend with the Elektronik Sound a lot better. Eso That is a long way of saying we don't use Tom's a lot in most styles. Now, if you want it to sound like are. If you want to make a beat, that's like a rock beat or a metal beat or something like that. Then you will want to use Tom's. But let's throw some in. Um, here's a couple times just you can hear what they sound like. A handful of different samples, right? So various Tom Samples, um, they kind of work the same way the percussion does, except there much less interesting. Um, if we did something like this, maybe we use it as a fill at the end of our pattern. Um, like it kind of work, it's gonna throw four of them. The very end. So we're looking at 16th notes now is what those air gonna be. Let's get rid of those. Case of this is going to go one e and are actually four e end is what we're going to hear here. Okay, to do to to. So let's let's hear it and see what happens that started beginning in the loop. Kind of funny. I don't know why that strikes me as funny. E. I don't know. Maybe I like it. Let's leave it in for now. Uh, so Tom's air, these big, booming sounds, these ones are higher than normal. Ah, but there. OK, there they sound the way Tom sound. Other sounds you might expect are just weird sounds. I mean, you can get weird, like zaps and yelling and weird stuff. Let me see if I can find something here. Yeah, OK, here's a scraper. Um, right. Let me just so low that. Okay, you know, that's Ah, Euro. We call that, but putting this in Ah, might be kind of cool. Caffey. That's interesting, But all kinds of sounds you can throw in in interesting ways. Now, one thing to note right now is how I dropped this in because I didn't put this to start right on one of my beats, right? It's starting in between two beats now. Why did I do that? Well, let's zoom in a little bit. Look at the wave form, right? I want this part of this particular sound to hit right on the beat, not the beginning and not the end, but where the action is. That's not always true, but usually it is you can see in these. I want the file to start right at the beginning of the beat because that's where the attack is here. The attack is halfway through the file because there's a ramp up to it. So I want to make sure that is right on the beat. And I could finesse it a little bit more, but I think probably right here is about right. Maybe earlier. So watch out for that. You want the attack. And that's where the rial the way form, gets the biggest. You want that to be right on the arrhythmic point that you want? Um, okay, up next. Let's talk about where to find some drum kits and some drum samples.
16. Where To Find Samples: okay when we started this section I take you to this website called Free Sound is free sound dot org's. I want you guys to know about this sound this website because it's really important. So one of the problems we have when we're working with samples is copyright problems, right? You can't just grab the kick drum out of your favorite song and put it into your song. It doesn't work that way. You can. You can physically do it. There's ways to do it. But the problem is that is breaking the copyright law, and you could get in trouble for it. But if you go to a website like this, what this is is a big community of, ah sound designers and folks who post sounds that can be downloaded and used for free. And you don't have to worry about any of that copyright stuff. So if I go here and I just say kick search for kicks and it finds 8904 kick samples for me to use, right, I can sample them right here, right? That is a big, nice, meaty kick. That's a great kick. Is it a crunchier one, right? There are tons of them. Um, And then what? Super cool is that? Like, if I like this one, click on the name of it, and often you'll see it will say this is part of a pack. Yeah, right here. It's part of a pack, which means someone's made this whole kit. Oh, they only made two samples in this pack. That's a bummer, but ah, you can log in and download it. This is a totally free website. You do have to create a log in, um, but once you create a log in, you can download as much as you want. Hey, and you can upload stuff. So if you get in the habit of downloading out of stuff right through this website, and then you get in the habit of making your own sounds, upload them, share them with other people. So whenever you're looking for sounds to use Ah, I always think about going to this website and you can search for anything you can do like whole drum kits. Drum kit. Okay, that's weird. Okay, that's good sound. Let me go here and look at pack. There we go. Now we've got this whole drum kit. And with one download, if I was logged in, I could click. Here, let me just log in quick. Okay? Now I'm logged in. Um, I could just click here and download all of these samples to use as I want. Oh, nice course there. I real dirty stuff, More high ATS, some sort of snare drum. And there's tons and tons of options. So whenever someone says, Where do I go to get good drum sounds? The answer is free sound dot org's go. Their search around you will have limitless options. Cool. Okay, uh, up next, I'm gonna give you this track that we're working on, as is so far. Eso I'm going to give it to you as unable to set. If you're not able to in user, then that's just fine. I'm just gonna give it to you for fun before we start to get really weird with it. Um, you don't need to use it if you don't want to. I just thought I'd share it, because whatever. I also share the individual samples here. How about that? Ah, so you can have these samples that we're working with. All right. And then we move on to something new
17. Building A Groove: okay up next. I want to spend the next section talking about Ah, what we look for in a drum pattern other than just putting samples in the right place, right There's more to it than that because what we're really trying to do here is build a groove, build a feel, um, and fit into the genre at the same time. So there's a lot of the genre stuff like things specific to certain styles of music, like in In Dub Step. You do this kind of thing and entrap you do this kind of thing and use these kinds of sounds and stuff like that. We'll get it all of that later, although we'll talk a little bit about that right now, um, in the next couple videos. But what I want to talk about here is kind of the the main things and how you capture the feel of a beat. Now, this is really kind of cerebral stuff, heady stuff. So bear with me a little bit. This will be really hard to explain how to really capture that, But I think I have I think I've thought this out pretty well at this point, so There's four things. There's four things that I really look for when I'm building something that would be good for you to keep your eye out for the four things are variation, genre modulation and feel. OK, so I've got a couple tracks here, and we're gonna walk through and kind of do a little bit of analysis of these tracks while we talk through each of those four things. Cool. So, uh, let's dive in and let's talk about variation.
18. Variation: Okay, first up variation. Um, when we're making ah drum pattern, we don't want to repeat the same thing forever. But, uh, you might if your genre requires it. Okay, I'm gonna show you a few different examples of that. Let me start off with this one. Actually. Know what I was planning on doing, but so Ah, this is popular song by massive attack called Teardrop. It's a very, very beautiful song. But let's just listen to the beat for a second, okay? You get the point. Let's jump later into the song. The beat is hardly changed at all. There's a little bit more high stuff happening later on in the song like that. But the main group is rock solid and did not change. So this is not a pattern. That's all about variation, right? However, um, in other genres, we look for or we want tohave something that keeps the beat alive, right? If it's just looping over and over, it creates this Stasis that in attract like this one that we just heard works. That's what the track really needs, Right? Is that riel calm. Nothing is changing feel, but in most tracks, you want a. Liven it up a little bit by changing it up every now and then. There's two ways you can do that. One is to put a fill at the end of phrase. The other is toe have change happening throughout the whole track. So let's talk about Philip the end of the phrase first. So let's listen to this 1st 1 case will remember how I said We like to work in patterns of one bar, two bars, four bars or eight bars, right? Each of those, let's call a phrase. Okay, so this song that we're about to listen to is working in a two bar phrase. So that means every two bars, the cycle repeats, Okay. And that also means we have a little bit of variation at the end of the phrase. That's usually where you put some kind of thing to just mix it up, right to fill its a drum fill the same way a drummer would at the end of a phrase. So the word phrase means the grouping of bars. That is our pattern. Okay, so here we have a two bar pattern and just listen to what happens. Every two bars k the It's subtle. It's not over the top, but listen to the drums. Focus in on the drums. This is a tune by atmosphere called the arrival here. But did you hear it? Ah, there's a little variation in the kick. And there's a little variation in the high hat. We heard it twice there. If you didn't catch the two bar phrase, let me point out to you account here. So I'm gonna count to four twice. Ah, and that's gonna be the two bars, right? Every time I count to four, that's one bar. Okay, so a count. 1234123 And then you'll hear the variation. Here we are, 34 So there's a little bit of variation there just to keep it a lot, right? Keeps it moving along now. The other thing you could dio that I mentioned a minute ago is toe have variation all the way through it have things changing kind of a lot and that we would more classify as modulation, right. If you've done much work in production, you know about modulation. Modulation is opening a filter over time, changing something over time. So that's a little bit of a different category. Um, so let's jump now to a new video and talk about modulation.
19. Modulation: Okay, So with modulation, we're talking about longer, gradual changes in the beat. So for that, I was going to use this drum loop. I'm going to stretch it way out here. So this is what we've got. Okay, Uh, subtle two bar phrase. And we know it's a two bar phrase because we hear ah, very slight change in the kick drum. Every two bars, right? 1234 Fun, New Street. 234 It's actually on beat. Three. There's a very small change in the kick drum. It doesn't really matter for what we're about to do so, but let's do some modulation to it, right? So modulation would be something like, Let's take the hi hats out and put him back in. Now, I can't really do that because I don't have each instrument separated for this particular loop the way I would if I was building it myself. This is just a loop I grabbed. Um, but I kind of can a little bit, uh, by just using an e que So if you're not using able to And don't worry, I'm just going Teoh set up a simple e que to demonstrate. Okay, and then let's go here. Okay, so I'm going to That's what I want in a slowly move the hi hats around a little bit. Okay, let's say for half this loop they're going to slowly go out and have this looped again. Slowly come back in. I'm just pulling the frequency, the high frequencies out and then pulling him back in. That's what this line is doing. So let's hear what I did. Okay. So long and slow, right? That's modulation. Now it doesn't have to be that slow. You know, you could do this quite a bit faster, but, um, this is just another way that we kind of mix up a pattern to keep keep some life into it, you know, like just change something over time. Now you don't have to do this in every beat by any means. I'm just sort of laying out some of the main options that we use to kind of keep life going into a beat. So let's move on on and talk about the next thing in my kind of list of four things that we look for and that is a genre
20. Simplicity And Genre: Okay, so the thing about genre is everybody or every genre has kind of its own rules. And if you want to fit perfectly within that genre, you follow those rules. But that doesn't mean you have to let yourself experiment with adding in elements that are not typical of that genre. That's how new genres get created. That's how innovation happens, right? Let yourself break these rules. However, that being said, one of the things about genre is blending in with the other musical elements. Okay, so here's an example. This is a New York track. Okay, so what we hear in this we here? Not a lot of variation. We here really pretty dirty sounds in the drums, right? Like they're pretty noisy. And why are they so noisy? Well, one of the reasons is that bass synth is quite a noisy, sent a kind of rough, noisy sound. So the drums want to blend in with that, right? So in this genre, having that dirty drum sound works right, cause it locks in with the base. The synth bass. Right. So one of the things we try to do to really make that groove is toe lock in with other elements and by lock in I mean having those two elements feel like one, right? So the drums and the bass really kind of feel like one thing working together. It doesn't always have to be the drums in the base. It could be other musical elements. However. I will say that for developing something that really has a tight groove, the drums in the base are one of the most important key things that you want to lock together. You can do it with other things, but Drummond base. That's why there's a whole genre called drum and bass. I guess so. Think about the genre, this track that we heard a minute ago, the massive attack, one right, No variation, really stale, clean drums that is really typical for this kind of some. Right? It fits, so you have to find the pattern that fits in with what you're doing. Um, otherwise, it's gonna feel like out of place, like you're putting ah, peanut butter in your cheeseburger, right? Like it doesn't make any sense. Although I will say putting peanut butter and cheese burgers is like a fad around where I live right now. and it's actually pretty good. But that's beside the point. Let me show you what happens when the other musical elements kind of enter here, right? So things just keep truck and right through. And there's no real baseline toe lock onto because those based notes just happen kind of sparsely every now and then. So the drum is just this guiding light, you know, that everything just keeps charging towards. It's very interesting. So don't be afraid of simplicity in, ah, your drum patterns. Okay, that kind of goes along with genre is sometimes the best thing is just really, really simple, right? It's just kick snare and hi hat. Maybe not even high hat right. It's all about finding the thing that fits into the groove that you're trying to make. Okay, let's talk about one other thing, and that is feel
21. Feel: Okay, so, with feel, what I'm really talking about here is swing. Okay, so, uh, let me put together Ah, quick example of swing. Okay, so let's say I've got three. Well, let me let me actually do this on a drum machine so that we can What? We know what's going on here. Um, so let me load up some drums, Okay? Sure. Okay, so let's go to the high hat. Hi. Hat closed. Okay, that's what I want. Okay. So I'm gonna make this nice and long. Not that it's gonna matter. Um, let me solo this. So that's all we hear and let me loop one bar. Okay, here we are. So the length of this isn't gonna matter, because it's it's a midi notes, so it's just hitting on her off, right? But it's gonna help me demonstrate this thing, so I wanted to be a little bit longer. Okay, so I'm gonna put 4/4 notes in 23412341234 You got it right. Ok, uh, let's make these eighth notes. Hey, now I'm explaining swing here. By the way, if I didn't say that, so just hold on one second. So I'm gonna double all these up. Hey, one and two and three and four and one and two and three and four End. Now, here's what swing means. Swing is important when you're making drum patterns, you don't always use it. Um, you might not use it very much at all, but, uh, it can be a really critical element to getting that feel that you want. So what I'm gonna do here? So when we swing something, actually, it's a Well, that's okay. When we swing, what we do is we blur the line a little bit on some of the notes. Okay, so I'm gonna take this eighth note. I'm gonna put it just a little early, but I'm gonna leave this one right on the beat. Put this one a little early. OK, Ok, so now we've got some things. Not just what we call straight A's notes. It's swung. Eight notes. It's a little different, right? You almost feel like this is if the 1st 1 the straight eighth notes, was somebody walking down the street. This one's like somebody walking with a limp, right? Right. Something's a little off from it. So that's how swing works. We adjust some notes a little bit to be a little early, and that gives it a little bit of a more. I don't know how to describe it. I don't want to say a little more natural feel because the way I'm doing it right here is less natural, I think kind of. But let's hear it in context of Ah, an actual tune. Let's take this thing way form came. Remember, we know how to read all this stuff now, right? So what? We're seeing all the elements of the beat in one file right now. So So this is a kick. This is a kick. This is a snare. So kick is on one and and then snare is on two. That's a high hat. Another kick on the, uh of to right one e and, ah, it's where that kick hits. Nothing. Right on beat, too. And another snare on beat four. Okay, let's try to add a little swing to this and you'll see what happens now. Some programs have the ability to take an audio file and add swing to it, uh, able to his one. I'm not sure if yours does. But let's see what happened. Do you feel that way? It off. So this is straight No swing. And here it is, with right? Totally different feel, right? This is when it's got the swing. It's got a little more upbeat, little more happy vibe to me. I guess I just think of swing is, like, a little bit happier. Um, but what we're doing is we're subtly nudging things around. Now, watch this. If I take this, I commit to it. I'm gonna press this button, and this button is going to tell my wave form to permanently adjust to the swing amounts. So you're gonna see each attack here nudge just a little bit. Okay, here we go. Quick. Everything moved around a little bit. So let's jump into Ah, this second kick drum, right. This is on the end of one zoom way in there and see this is where the real meat of it is, and it's not quite on the end of one anymore. Starts a little early. The main just of it comes a little bit later. If I go to let's go to this high hat right here. Can see, it's not right on where we expect it to be at all. Everything's just a little off. But, ah, our main timing hasn't been affected, so that's important. You can't just adjust everything or else everything will fall apart. This is adjusting all those in between. Notes are beats are still write down. 1234 Those air still right on. We're adjusting the stuff in between. Check it out. 341234 3 4/4 notes haven't changed. It's all the stuff in between. So that is how you could make a really cool feel. Okay, A swing doesn't work great on everything on every pattern. And it doesn't work great in every situation. It all depends on the genre in the field. Okay, we'll be getting into more about swing later. Ah, and applying it to some of the beats were making just to try it out and see what happens. But that is your explanation of what swing is
22. The Basic Pattern: Okay, Now that we've got all that other stuff out of the way, let's start actually making some beats. So, um, what we're going to start off with here is what I call the basic pattern. So this is the most basic drum pattern you'll ever use. And in fact, you'll probably never use this pattern. But when I'm making a drum pattern, what I like to do is ah, start off with this pattern, okay? It's really simple. It's the simplest thing in the world. And after I lay that in, then I'll start adding stuff, moving stuff around and really crafting it. It's kind of like this is gonna be weird analogy, so hang on for just second. But, uh, who did this culture of David? I used this analogy all the time. Michelangelo? Yeah, I think Michelangelo, um, made the statue of David, and someone asked him how he made the statue of David. And he said he, uh, took this big giant rock and he cut away everything that wasn't David kind of like that. What we're gonna do is we're gonna make this basic pattern, and then when we put that onto a track, we're gonna move things around and really carve it into what is a cool sounding pattern. Okay, so this basic pattern that that I'm going to show you now and in fact have sort of already showed you is not designed to be the most profound drum pattern you'll ever hear. It's designed to be a starting point. Okay, so we're gonna start with this, and then we'll, uh, move it around and make it into something that that qin sound awesome. Okay, so for the next couple videos, we're gonna talk about making it. And then after that, we're gonna talk about how to make it sound cool and throw it into a track. Awesome. Okay, here we go. The basic pattern.
23. Building The Basic Pattern: Okay, So what I have here again is a kick, a snare and a closed high hat. Those were the only three sounds we're going to need. Okay, so I grabbed different samples this time. Let's just hear what we've got. Get pretty simple, Okay? And I'll give you these samples in the next, uh, segment just so that you can have them. They're not particularly brilliant samples. We might even replace them later. Um, but these are what we're going to use as just kind of placeholders for this basic pattern. Okay, So what the basic pattern is is Ah. Well, let's get a one bar loop going here. So there is my one bar command. L and able tend to make a loop, So we're gonna put our kick on beats one and three. Okay, We're gonna put our snare on beats two and four. We're gonna put our high hat on all the beats, beats 123 and four, and that's it. Okay. The most basic pattern we template from which we will make much more interesting patterns. Okay, Let's hear it. Let's hear from the beginning. So it doesn't screw up our thinking. Okay, if that doesn't make you want to dance and rock out. I don't know what will. Um yeah. Okay. So I instantly don't like these samples. Uh, let me see if I can live it up just a little bit. We hear just that kick. That's not terrible. I don't like this snare. I'm gonna replace this with another snare. Oh, let me just dig around here for a second, okay? I found a different snare here. I'm gonna swap that one out. And the only reason I'm changing the snare here is just because we're gonna have to listen to this for a little bit while we work with it. And I just didn't feel like listening to that one. I just didn't like it. Um, this one has a little bit more power to it. A little more sympathetic sounding, which is what? I guess I'm kind of in the mood for Let's hear in context, Okay. No, I don't like the high hat, but I'm not gonna worry about that for right now. Right? This is just the basic pattern. We don't need to worry about anything. Okay, So that's the basic pattern. All you have to remember is kick, snare, kick, snare and then high hats on every beat were not on anything in between. The Beats were really just focusing in on establishing the beat. That's what we're trying to do here. So 1234 right. We really want to feel that. 123 and four, Okay. And that's what we've got here, right? It's It's just the 1234 The beat is What were the pulse, I should say, is what we're really trying to reinforce with this pattern. Okay, then we can do a little bit more with this right off the bat before we start adding in all kinds of fun stuff. Um, let's talk about some kind of slight variations weaken due to it just to liven it up, but still keep it the basic pattern. So let's talk about some off beats
24. Adding Off Beats: Okay, so I want to do something with these high hats, right? And there's a couple of things I could do that still in my mind fall into the basic pattern . The hi hats don't need to be all 1234 They could be the off beats. Right? So the offbeat would be if instead of on beat one, this was on the end of one. And instead of this being a B two, this was on the end of two. The easiest way to do it to select all of those and just shift them over to the halfway point. Okay? Now I don't have a high hat on beats. 123 and four. I have a high hat on the and O on the end of to the end of three in the end of four. Okay. Lets huh right it automatically just doing that, like, doubled the feel of our beat. Right? Let's go back to the way it was before. In fact, let's do this. Let's take this and put that there. And then let's copy this whole thing and put it here and move this to the off beats. Okay, so now I'm gonna have one bar. That is the pattern. The basic pattern and one bar with it, uh, using off beats instead of the beat. Okay, so first bar, just with the beat. Second bar with off feeds. Okay, not bad. Right? Um, so just adding a little bit of flavor with those off meets really helps make it feel essentially it feels twice as fast, right? Because here we have 1234 And then here we have one and two and three and four end. So it really takes that pulse. And even though our pulse is still on the beat, the feeling of it is that we're moving twice as fast. Essentially, um, we aren't moving twice as fast, but it gives that deal that things are happening a quicker, a quicker rate. Let's just say Okay, So, uh, you could do either of these as your starting basic beat. You could do one more. Let's copy this whole thing again. And the other one would be to do both. Okay. Now I have on beats and off beats, Okay? So let's hear it all three ways. Okay, so on the beat. Hi. Hat off beats high hat on an off beats so doubled up high hat. Okay, So what's your favorite? You can pick totally up to you. Um, for me, my favorite is the middle one with the off beats this one with the high hat just going clunk. Clunk! Clunk! Clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk! Clunk! Feels a little stale. Um, but in certain situations, that might be our best thing to do, depending on the music happening around it. And there's some things we can do to really kind of give this some life, some of which were going to do in just a minute. Okay, so all three of these, I would call the basic beat that will use as a template to start off with. You can start off with any one of them and transform it into any of the others. It totally doesn't matter. It's just a way to get started. Okay, let's move on to talk a little bit about tempo, since we kind of touched on it just for a second there. When we were talking about this kind of double time and 1/2 time thing
25. The Importance Of Tempo: Okay, So the tempo is the speed at which we're going right for me. The tempo is up here, and I'm at 120 beats per minute. And that's two beats per second is what we're thinking about their Okay, so 60 beats per minute would be one beat per second, right? So if you have a watch, you can use that to hear what 60 beats per minute is gonna be. Because it's what the second hand in your watch is doing. That 60 beats per minute 120 is gonna be twice that. Okay, um so let me focus in on just one of these. Let's dude, actually, let's do just the 1st 1 sentence the most simple. Now, in most cases, the tempo of your pattern is gonna be dictated by the music around it. Right, which is hugely important. But let's say you're starting off with the drum pattern. How do you decide what tempo to go at? Hey, there's really no strict formula for this. However, a lot of different genres of which we're gonna talk about soon, uh, have their own rules. I guess you would say about the tempo, right? Like dub step likes to be at this tempo, you know, translates to be at this tempo. That doesn't mean you can't play around with it at all. But they have ways that they like to do things, But I want to talk just for a second about I was just talking about double time. So if we're at 1 20 and it sounds like this, if we literally went double time, that would be doubling this number. Oh, to be 240 which weaken dio. But it's not the same. It doesn't. It won't sound the same as over here when I said it feels like double time. Okay, this is actually double time, okay? And that sounds quite a bit different than regular time, but with a double time feel, which is this right? Because what happened? An actual double time. Our kick and snare went twice as fast in the feel of double time. Just are high hat started going twice as fast. Okay, so we often don't want to double time something. Um, it's not something that you do very often. There are some cases where you where you might do it, but it's pretty rare what we What we do instead is give the feeling of going at double time by adding another element. You know, I could make this feel even faster than this by doing this. May be I don't know if this will really feel like four quadruple time, I guess. But let's try it. Yeah, that doesn't really, really feel like quadruple time. Um, I just added another 16th note, so that really doesn't have that big of an effect. But what I want you to understand is the difference between actual double time and a double time feel and a double time feel. We take some elements and we make him go twice as fast by putting them on off beats or 16th notes in actual double time. We speed everything up by double. Okay, big difference. Uh, and you'll want to know the difference, because that will be candy, especially the feel. OK, so we're gonna want to play with the feeling of increasing the tempo without actually doing it. Cool. Okay. So keep that in mind as you're making these patterns
26. Dynamics: Okay, Next, let's talk about some of the most basic techniques. We used to live in this up. Okay? And the 1st 1 I want to talk about is dynamics. So dynamics fancy word for volume. Now, you might think making this louder or quieter isn't going to change how cool or not cool it is. And you would be right. However, that's not we're talking about. What we're talking about is changing the volume of different elements at different times. Okay, so check this out. Let's go back to this one. Right. Okay, so this high hat is just, uh, clunky and rude. In many ways, my route is the right word, but, uh, just come, Let's just feels rude to me. But let's take our volume, okay? And I'm gonna automate this volume. Now. This is where we're if we're working in a midi Ah, setting. This would be a little bit easier, but what I'm gonna do is just put a little mark in between all of these. So this line is my volume, right? So I'm just gonna automate the volume here, so I'm just gonna take this one down. Maybe not that far. It's gonna kind of approximate. And let's take this one down to, actually, so and then let's leave the next one up so it's gonna be too quiet, and then one louder. And then let's leave this last one loud. It's a quiet, quiet, loud, quiet, Quiet, loud, quiet, loud. Okay, so I'm just turning some down and leaving some loud. Okay, Let's hear what we've got now, right? Totally made it away. Less rude. Okay, um, we could even pull this volume up a little bit so that it wasn't so quiet. Although I kind of liked it down there. If we were working with Mitty, we would just adjust the velocities of these, And it would be quite a bit easier, less cumbersome, I should say. But this does the same effect, right? Not bad. So just by adjusting the volume of some of the notes, we given a much more natural feel, right? Think about the way an actual drummer would play that kind of pattern, right? They their right hand would be hitting the high hat if they're right handed. I suppose, Um and they're gonna naturally put some accents on beats, right? So weak. Want to emulate that, and it gives it a much natural feel, much more natural feel by emulating just the way that a drummer would work. Grammars are always putting accents on stuff, and we want to do that, too. And we don't really want to put an accent on this sneer here because we only have two of them. So putting one louder than the other, uh, doesn't really make a lot of sense. But if we had more snare heads, let's do it. Let's put a snare hit right there. Now I want that to be on the, uh of four, which it's not quite so. My samples a little too long when you just shorten it to get it right there, Right on the of four K. Now it's there. Okay, Now, if I just play this, you're going to hear too loud sample cracks right next to each other, which isn't gonna be awesome, but we can fix that with velocity. So let's hear it first, right? Not awesome. But let's take that 1st 1 and drop it down to be quite a bit quieter. Maybe somewhere around there right now, it's got a much more natural feel. Um we will call this a ghost note. Okay. A ghost note would be like, Ah, snare head or really any kind of hit that eyes right before or right after a normal on the beat hit. But the ghost note will be off to be usually on 1/16 note and much quieter right? It's almost like an echo of the note when we could put it after, like, let's do one after right here. One doesn't sound is good. I like it before. Better than after. Cool. Um, not bad. So the next thing I'm hearing, uh, I'm kind of imagining hearing that I'd like to hear is another kick. I'm not gonna do any accent work on the kick. Um, but I really wish there was a kick right on the end of four. I think after this hit, having an extra kick here to reset us back into their would feel kind of good. I often like a kick on the end of floor. Just as a taste thing that I like. Let's see what we've got now, right? Not bad. So we took this really bland. And what was the word I was using for it? rude beat, and we turned it into something much more interesting. Really. Just using velocity is all we've really used here are not velocity necessarily, but volume dynamics. That's all we've really used here. I added one snare hit and turned it way down. I added one kick and and do anything to the velocity to the volume just because that's what I felt like doing. Ah, and on the teacher So I could do that. Um, but the majority of the feel here that we created is with the high hat and adjusting the volume. OK, so don't forget about that. That's a big distinguishing factor when you're making these patterns some variation on the volume. We'll talk more about this as we get into building some beats in particular styles. But for now, just remember dynamics
27. Adding Percussion: Okay, so next thing I want to do is a little bit of percussion. I remember percussion is any kind of short little sound. Um, I tend to mix them underneath everything else in the beat, their kind of background, depending on the style. There's different things you want to do, but this is the sample I grabbed. Okay? It's nice. Short and quiet. Okay? It's just kind of a little stumpy sound. Now, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna actually turn this into two samples. I'm gonna put this down here and with this one, I'm going to go into the sample and I'm going to raise its pitch by a second. Something's gonna make it a little bit higher. Okay, so now that two samples I have sound like this. Okay. So low high. So I just turned up the pitch just a little bit just to give me some variation, okay? Next thing I'm going to do and this is just a place that I like to start is I'm gonna go through and look for 16th notes that don't have anything on them yet. Okay. Just as a place to start. So noticed that the grid I'm working on right now. This is actually in 32nd notes, so I'm gonna try to zoom out a little bit. There were I'm still seeing. There we go. Now. I'm seeing 16th notes, Right, Because there was only four per beat. Okay, so now we want to put these on any 16th note. That isn't It doesn't have something on it. This has a kick on it up there. This has something there. There's not one there. Let's use my higher one for right here because there's nothing there. Go back to the lower one for right there. It's good right there on Let's go right there. And right there. Okay, so now every 16th note has something on it. Okay, let's hear what we've got. Okay? I really love those sounds. I want to be a little more a little shorter and a little more like would like so, but let's let's roll with it for now, actually, let's take both of these. No, let's take this one. And just to make it a little more would sound dish stick those up 12 steps. That's an active. I think I only did that for the 1st 1 You have to do that on all of these, and then this one, I'm gonna take up 12 steps. Plus, the two steps already did it. So that will be 14 steps. This is just to make it sound a little bit better. This is a sound thing, not a rhythm thing, but I think it'll add a little bit. Not a bad start. Now, I could keep playing around with that percussion for a long time to make it sound a little more interesting. But for now, it's not that The main thing I really want to do with this percussion is give it a feel of Syncopation. Okay, so we're gonna talk about this word Syncopation in just a second, but I don't want to give it a feel of Syncopation because I always want Syncopation in the percussion. I want to give it a few of Syncopation because I want to teach you about Syncopation so you don't always have to do this thing I'm about to do in the percussion. Doing something like this is cool. Um, you could even, uh, do a little bit more, you know? Maybe. What if we got rid of these back just doing that. But I'm gonna bring him back so that we can talk about single patient. Okay, so let's go to a new video. Let's talk about single patient.
28. Syncopation: Okay, So another trick you can do when working on this kind of a beat is this thing that I was just talking about called Syncopation can of Syncopation is kind of a complicated thing, but to simplify it a little bit, it's basically using an element like this percussion to imply a different beat pattern. Okay, so what to do it, for example, were always know we're always, in this case working in groups of four. Right, Because we have 4/16 notes to a bar we have for our sorry for 16th notes to a beat. We have four beats in a measure. We are in 44 time that tells us everything is based around four. So if we did a pattern that was based around a group of three, it would be what would be called a syncopated pattern, right? That's using Syncopation. And the percussion is a good place to do that. So watch this. Let's go. 12 three. Okay, let's get rid of those. So now I have a group of three. Okay, let's copy that. Read it. I'm not gonna let this reset on every bar. Right. I'm gonna have a leftover 16th note here. I'm gonna do that. Okay, so this last one, when it circles around, there's gonna be a group of four. Sort of, because it's gonna be these three plus this one. But that's OK. So this is going to give us a little bit of a syncopated feel. Oops. I forgot to re transpose this one since I deleted it. Okay, No way. Feel how Theo Accented one, which is the one that's a different pitch because it's different than the one that's happening more common. So we're gonna hear that as an accent because low, low, high, low, high, low, high, low, low, high. So we're going to hear that as accented That one is coming every 3/16 notes, right? It's one e and two e and ah, one e and two e. And, uh, so that's awkward, right? And that's what Syncopation is all about. Uh, and it concerned. Cool. No, uh, let's make it sound even cooler by using some velocities stuff. Right? So check it out. What if I did this for every two I'm going, Teoh, lower the velocity of some of these. I'll leave the accented one up kind of high. But let's just give this a little bit of variation by moving the volume around. Okay, so now somewhere louder, somewhere quieter. Okay, that's what we've got. Now let's hear. Just percussion. It's kind of a cool group, right? Let's add in. Just kick. Just the way Right. So Syncopation mixed with a little bit of dynamic variation, Right? That's fancy way of saying volume gets us kind of a cool groove going. So that's what Syncopation is. It's implying kind of a different group. So if you're working in four, that would be a group of three. It could be a group of five. Uh, it could be a group of six, although that is, that is, that may easily feel like a group of four, depending on how you do it. So six is a little tougher. Odd numbers work better. Ah, Group of seven. Um, Group of eight won't work because that's divisible by four. That I just feel like two groups of four. Um, but that's how we do Syncopation. Okay, now we've already learned a little bit about swing, but let's try throwing a little bit of swing into this and see how it feels
29. Swing: Okay, so we talked about swing being, you know, moving stuff a little bit off the 16th notes, Sometimes the eighth notes, Just moving the pattern around just a little bit, nudging some things here and there to give us that feeling of, uh, swing. Right. So, uh, I want to add it to my percussion here, but to nothing else. Okay, so here's I'm gonna do it. Ah, And this is gonna be different, depending on what program you're using. So in able to live, I have these groove settings in this thing called the Groove Pool. Here, um, and I can just drag one of these right onto the pattern. And this isn't actually gonna work, because what this is going to do is put a groove on the 1/16 note on Lee. And I can't say I can't swing a single note. Right, Because it's all about how notes relate to each other, so that doesn't work. So what I'm gonna need to do is convert these 21 file, okay? And depending on what software you're using, Ah, this might be called render in place. It might be called, um, re sample. It might be called consolidate for in a Bolton. It's called Consolidate, and it does that. OK, that's what we want to do here. Um, I'm gonna do it to this one. Also. Be sure you include the empty space at the beginning. Okay, so now it'll sound exactly the same. But I just have one big audio file. That's all I did. Now I can throw this swing on here, and I want to throw it on both of these, okay? And let's just hear what that did. Let's solo these two here, that's got a little bit more skip to it. Now let's see how that combines with the rest of our pattern Not bad, right? With totally different feel. Totally different group. Um, I might want to try that on my high hat as well, because my high hat is not swung. We call that straight. So the high hat is straight, but the percussion is swung, which is a feeling that I actually like, Um, I think that's a cool that makes for a cool groove. But if we wanted to swing are high hat also consolidate that into one and then high had is only in eighth notes So I'm going to switch this to be in an eighth note pattern. Put it there. So in a cenotes, in this context, we don't really feel the swing. Hardly at all. Um, but in 16th notes, we really dio and I think I undid it by changing that. Let's redo that back. Right. So now I'm starting to bob my head, right? I'm starting to feel like like, this is something you could dance to. It's starting to feel pretty good. So don't forget about swing, right? And you can You don't have to go all out with it. Um, if you on most programs, including able to in but also in all the other ones when you apply suing to something, there should be an amount, right? So I can turn down the amount of swing if I want. So I put swing on here. I could scale it back, make it a little less obvious. Crank it up. Right. So there's an amount, right? So you don't have to go all the way in with everything you do, So just put a touch of it on. There may be a little maybe a lot. It's like assault in your soup. You know, um, try out the water, see what really starts to feel like a groove to you. Okay, Now I want talk about one more element, and then we're gonna kind of look back at what we did with this basic pattern.
30. Humanising: related to swing, but different is just mucking up our pattern a little bit. Okay, so we sometimes call this humanize, humanize the pattern like if a drummer was really playing this, they wouldn't play it mechanically. Perfect the way a computer does, right? And we've done a little bit of that by adding swing. We've kind of made it sound a little bit less robotic, but maybe we want to do a little bit more. It can really help the feel. If I zoom way in, just take this kick and just know, nudge it over there just a tiny bit. Wait, we can't even see it. Very subtle things. So don't be afraid to do that. To get in there and just nudge some things around a little bit. Make it feel a little more human. We'll do this, uh, in a lot more detail once we start talking about recording in beats, using some kind of controller and just playing it like finger drums. In that case, ah, lot of these imperfections happen naturally, and we tend to want to keep them because you don't always want it to sound like super robotic, you know, like a like a computers doing it. When a computer actually is doing it, we want it to sound a little more natural. So one way is just to move things around really slightly and give it that feel. We'll talk more about that soon. Okay? What I want to do now is let's go back to our most basic beat. This is the most basic of the basics. Beats and let's hear how we turn this and what we did to it. Okay, so here's where we started. Awful. Okay. And here's where we ended, right? Not bad. Not bad for just getting started. We just did a few elements to it, right? All we really did was we did some stuff to the off beats. Ah, we added Cem variation with dynamics or volume. We added some variation with some percussion. We did a little bit of Syncopation. We add a little bit of swing to it. That's really kind of all we did, and I just I just did a little bit of that humanizing stuff on the kick, although it's not really even very, uh, obvious what I just did. So just with those few techniques, you can really turn this basic beat into something that has a really good feel to it. Okay, so I'm gonna package up this whole session and the samples again for you. So you have access to everything. Um, if you're using able to you can download this whole session. If you're not using able to. That's totally okay. You'll have the samples. And you can rebuild this however you want. Okay, so we'll put that in the next segment, and then we'll get onto our first genre where we're gonna pick apart some tracks and just rebuild the beats.
31. About Genres: Okay, so let's get into making a beat. So we're gonna start with House House music Just because the beat is relatively simple. There's there's not a ton of elements to it. Um, that being said, there's a lot of subtlety in it, and a lot of ways for you to really craft things in very subtle ways. Eso It's not that it's simple, meaning bad. Ah, it's actually simple meaning, um, that there's a lot you can do with it. So, um, now when we talk about any genre which we're going to be doing more and more as we get into the further parts of this class, Um, keep in mind that I'm treating these genres as kind of a big umbrella. There are a 1,000,000 sub genres toe everything right, Even with house, there's electro house, deep house, future house, tech house, melodic house. There's a 1,000,000 different kinds. So I'm talking in really general terms, the main style of the beat. That's what we're gonna be looking at. I don't want to get bogged down in, like the really nitty gritty elements of all these other things, although we will look at some of them. Um and a lot of the time the beat. The drum pattern is what separates the different styles, right? Um, not always, but sometimes. And I would say a lot of the time. Ah, the thing that's different in all of these sub genres is the way the the drum pattern is treated, so it can be important. Okay, that being said, let's build a cool house beat.
32. Finding Our Sounds: Okay. The first thing we need is some sounds that work. Now we're gonna talk about building our own sounds for this later. For now, I'm just gonna find some samples that will work well for this style of music. So I'm gonna go to free sound, and I'm just going to search for Ah, House kick. Now, this is a trick I'm going to do here. Um, I'm gonna look for a house kick. That was pretty good. I'll go with that one. Okay, so I have modern progressive house Now I search for kick. But what I'm really looking for is this whole sample pack here, so I so I can look down here and says, Pack bottom, Progressive House. And this will hopefully give me all the elements I need. No, it doesn't A little too progressive for what I'm looking for. So let's try again. House trance kicked. That's a little too aggressive for what I want. As is that Let's find the perfect one. Okay, so this one will work. Let's try this. Uh, no. This is what I'm really looking for. Its part of a pack, and here's a whole bunch of drums. Sounds Hopefully, this will be everything I need. So let's go ahead and download it. We're gonna download the whole pack here. Okay, that's done. Downloading. Okay, so see, we've got a kick. It's an OK kick. That's better for what we're doing. That's better yet. That's best. That's not bad. Okay, Kind of a goofy snare, Other goofy snare my soft kick kick cake clap, clap for me does. And to one kick. So bunch of kicks, a few stares and a clap So we're gonna need kicks, snares and collapse for this. So that's a good start. And then we're gonna have to find a high hat somewhere else. Hopefully, you can find a pack that has everything you need. But, I mean, the thing about free sound right now is that there's just so much stuff on here. It's kind of getting hard to find something, something really great, um, amongst all of the other stuff. But this will. This will get us started. All right, so we found some sounds. Now, let's go into making the first part of the beat
33. Basic House Beat: Okay, so let's start with our are kind of our basic beat. So I'm gonna pick a kick sound. I think I like this one the best. Let's make that our kick. And then I'm gonna need a snare. But I'm going to use a clap instead. Uh, good. Like that brighter one. So, in this style we like, we like collapse. We will use the snare in just a minute. I'm going to start with a, uh, kick clap and ah, hi, hat. And let's just see what I have in here for high hats already. Um, do you sounds That's good. Nice little soft data. Wait one more about that soon. Okay, So let's build our basic pattern here, right? Let's just do one bar case of zoom in here so I can see what's going on. So, for kicks, let's label the is a little bit better, So I'm gonna say this is my kick. This is a clap, and this is a hat K. And I don't have any use for this yet, but I will in just a minute. Okay, so we're gonna go beats one and three. We're gonna put our clap on beat two and four, and we're gonna put our high hat on beats one to three and for All right, let's hear what we've got. Okay? There's our basic pattern. Now, how do we turn this into a house pattern? Um, first thing we're gonna dio is we're gonna put a kick on every beat. Okay, So 123 and four. Okay, that gives us this. Oops. Bad. Were already much closer. Okay, next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna move our hats to the off beats, and that's pretty much our basic basic basic pattern. Um, for ah, house group. Okay, we put the kicks on 123 and four, and then our clap on two and four and are high hat on the off beats. That gets us the most basic pattern. Now there's more we can do with it. Um, what's stretch this out and turn it into a four bar pattern? I'm just gonna copy this paste paced. Send even more bar paste. Oops, paste. I shouldn't have screwed anything up. Okay, so now we have a four bar pattern. Poor full bars. Let's hear it. I did screw that up. Let's just fix that. Okay, Okay. Basic basic house beat. Now let's do let's add a couple of little things to it to spruce it up. All right, The first is let's make a reason for a four bar pattern. Okay? I'll get to that in the next video.
34. Adding More Elements: Okay. Cover a couple other elements that we can deal with here in this style. First of all, I didn't talk about tempo, and I should have. So the tempo for ah, house pattern usually 1 20 to 1 40 you could go up to. I'm at 1 20 Now. We could push this all the way up to 1 40 still more or less feel like house. Although that's pretty cooking. Uh, let's do 1 28 because it's a good house. Tempo bad. Okay, so why did I turn this into a four bar pattern when it's just one bar repeating over and over, right? Well, there's a reason because I wanted to feel like a four bar Ah, pattern. And in order to do that, I need to change something up. So the first thing I'm gonna change is I'm gonna add a snare, find a good one. That's not bad. It's gonna throw that here. Okay, so now I have a snare. Let's little able this because I'm not so about labeling. Now we want to double the snare against the clap, but not every clap. Okay, so let's put this snare on every other clap. OK, here we go. So now it's gonna This is gonna basically make it feel like a two bar pattern because the pattern repeats here. So this is kind of one bar through the pattern or one time through the pattern. Right? Cause this is bar three, and we've had to snare hits. Okay? Now, I'm gonna do a little bit to mix this snare. Okay? I don't love the snare. Sound better? That's kind of weird. Let's try that. It's a pretty bright snare, but I think it might work. I just want something a little less thumb be something that will match that kick a little bit better. Okay, let's try this. All right? Okay. That gives us something that we can play with. Now. Another thing we could do is do a little something at the end of this four bar phrase to really make it warrant it being a four bar phrase. So let's go over here right to the end. The easiest thing I could do would be with the hi hats. Let's see if I can just make a really kind of subtle little change at the end. You might call this a turnaround and jazz. We would call this to turn around basically just something right at the end just to throw it back to the beginning. I was gonna throw a couple extra high hats right at the end there and see how that goes. I still don't love this snare. So if this was a beat that I was actually working on, probably go through and mess around with it quite a bit more. Maybe I don't play with it a little bit more. Let's undo what I just did way. Okay, so we've got a nice little turn around at the end. Really short, really subtle. We've got a sneer, every other clap, and then other than that, we have our basic house beat. Go. There's one other thing Weaken Dio, and that's to play around with dynamics. So let's go to a new video and talk about that
35. Dynamics: Okay, so let's mess around with our dynamics a little bit, Remember, that's just volume. So and I'm gonna do that primarily in our high hats here, and I just kind of wanna move him around a little bit. So I'm just gonna take my volume here. I'm just gonna move my high hats around a little bit. I don't want it to regular, and I don't want it to extreme. Just a little bit of moving around here. Here we go. So this line I just drew is my volume. Okay, so we're gonna hear our high hats going up and down and just kind of toying around a little bit. It'll be subtle. Remember, everything is about subtlety in this genre. In the beginning, Just okay. Really subtle that I would actually probably make this a little more subtle. You smooth some of this out. Some of these got a little extreme, but that's pretty good. Okay, up next. I think what I want to do is analyze a track. So it's pulling another track and just kind of pick apart what they're doing in the in the beat. Cool. Off we go.
36. Analysis 1: Okay. I decided, um, to look at this tune by Sam Paganini called satellite. Uh, it starts off with just a simple pattern. Nothing amazing. What I want to do is jump in tow once the groove is really going. So I'm going to go way out here different. Okay, Let's grab that. All right. So I'm gonna grab, gonna go like this, and then throw that way back here, and then we'll see if we can modify the beat. We already have doing what it's doing. Okay. Okay. So the first thing let's do is focus our ears in on the kick. Okay? So try to ignore everything else. It just listen to the kick and decide. Is it playing 1234 or some other pattern? Okay, so I'm gonna mute everything here. We're only hearing the, uh, track. Okay. What do you think? Do we hear every quarter note or every other quarter note or something different? I think we heard every quarter note. Um, we hear it more on one and three because there's less other stuff happening around it. So because there's less things happening on one and three, the kick sticks out more But if you listen close to beats two and four, we also hear a kick there. So our kick here to turn all of these off our kick here should work your archaic. That works now. Our sounds don't match, right. Sounds a little bit different, but we'll focus on sounds a little bit. Well, actually, let's talk about the sounds that he's using. Let's listen to just those kick sound a little thicker, a little bigger than this one that we have, right? Ours is a little wimpy compared to this big fat kick that he has here. Well, that's not focusing on that just yet. Okay, let's think about the clap. OK, So where are the collapse happening? Suddenly turn off our kick just to make this easier to hear. Well, here, just the track where the collapse. Okay, I heard him on two and four, just like we have here. Okay, so let's put our collapse in and see if it work. Oops. I didn't want to solo those. I wanted to hear those together. So we're gonna hear the track and our collapse way working. Well, okay, Let's think about the high hat. Where do we hear that. Okay, so going back to just the track, Okay? I hear the high hat on every offbeat, just like we have here. You can try to let your eyes follow along this line while you hear this track and see if the high hat happens every time you see when it's right, it works everywhere except here where we added this little fill. Let's get rid of that. Okay? Okay. What else do we have? Do we have a snare? Let's hear. I don't think we do. Um, I don't think this is in it. And the rest of the material that we have in this track is more musical material. Right? So we've got some ringing. There's some, uh, symbol hit. There's like a ride. Let's find a ride Cymbal that hits right at the beginning. That'll work for now. It's like the first thing we hear, right? Just listen. It's really kind of digitized. It's that sound. So let's throw that in there since going. That must think that's going up. We also hear kind of more droning since going, want, want, want, want, want, want, want, want throughout it. So we're not gonna worry about those because we're only thinking about the drum pattern here, so, um, we've pretty much covered it. Let's hear our beat played at the same time, and we shouldn't hear anything. Stick out. Now, remember, we still don't have great sounds that match what ah, he's doing in this track, however, are rhythms are pretty much right. Um, and if they aren't, something will really stick out when we hear in both at same time. So here we go. Okay, let's get rid of, uh, track. Okay. With those synth elements gone, we really kind of miss a lot. But this is just the drum pattern, right? Simple drum pattern, Um, with some extra synthesizers and musical elements filling out the rest of the beat. Great. So, uh, in the next class, we're going to start talking about building our sounds and really making these sounds match . Um, but I think we've got a really good feel now for building a drum pattern that can match Ah , tune at least of this style. We're also gonna be working with mawr styles as we progress through the more sections of this class. So don't worry. There's plenty more to come
37. Finding Sounds: okay. Earlier, we were talking about daft punk when we were looking at that high hat hit. Ah, and I So I thought, Hey, you know, let's let's look at a deaf punk song. Doesn't flow perfectly right out of house music, but yeah, who cares? I'm just looking for another song to give you an idea of how to emulate something. So, uh, I grabbed this one. This is off their latest album, Random Access Memories. This is the first track called Give Life Back to Music. Let's just hear a tiny little taste of it. Okay, Pretty sparse. Um, so the first thing I need to do is find some samples that will work well for this. So let's think about these drum sounds, OK? What do we hear there? We hear primarily acoustic drums, right? So what they're using here is acoustic sounding drums. So let's go grab some and go over to free sound and say, um, acoustic drum kits. I guess I'm not really sure, But let's try that. Um, okay, this is a small little pack, but it looks like it's gonna give us what I need, except for the high hat. But that's OK, will hunt down a high hat in a minute. Kick kill. There's a stair. Um, let's do that one. And then a kick. Sounds like a little more power to it. Great. So, uh, let's loop these 1st 4 bars. Actually, let's look just one bar for starters. So let's grab this stuff and move it over here and zoom and so you can see what we're doing here. Okay, so I see. 1131212313 etcetera. What does that mean? Um, remember, we're looking at quarter notes. 1.2 is the quarter note. So we're looking at eighth notes now. Here. Okay, that's the eighth note. So, um, I still need a high hat. So let me just look and see what I have here. What kind of high hat do I want? Let me just hear this. It's complicated. Let's grab that. But I also need a crash for that downbeat. There was a crash that sounds good right for that downbeat. Um, and then I think there's some kind of shaker in there. Let's call it Ah, we'll see what happens. Focus. Sugar. Let's try that. Okay, so I hear this kind of shaker, we'll talk about that in a minute. But all of these are pretty much acoustic sound. So, um, let me just lay out all my elements here so you can hear him. Okay, So here are the elements. Oops. Commute track. Oops. I turned loop off. Okay, so five elements are what I hear in it. Cool. Okay, let's start putting together.
38. Building The Pattern: Okay, so let's start with our kick, I think. Is this one? Yep. Um, so I'm gonna rename this kick, and while I'm here, I'll rename this one snare and this one. Hats, hoops, nukes in type, Crash and shaker. Okay, now we know what we're doing. So let's hear. In this one bar, it's loop it. Where do our kicks it? Okay, so we're looking for the kick. Okay? I think on every beat, um, it's hard to tell because that crash Cymbals going, But pretty sure we're on every beat here. Okay, so that looks good. How about our sneer? Let's go back here. Way would expect. Right now, we didn't start with our template. Be here, right? We could have it would have not had this or this, and we would have added that later. Um, but that's OK. Uh, let's listen for high hats. Let's try moving out here by a bar just so that we don't hear that crash symbol and let's see if we can hear high hats here. Okay, let's go back here. I the reason I went out here to the next bar because the hi hats are probably doing the same thing, and they're a little easier to hear out here. Here's what I think the high heads are doing. This is a little tricky. I think the hi hats are going. Oh, I think the hi hats are every eighth note like this, but there's quite a bit of accenting in some spots. So we're gonna want to do a little bit of work with our velocity, our volume on those. Okay, so let's go to a volume and let's let's turn this down a little bit And then let's accent where we hear it, okay? I hear a little bit more on that one. Okay, now we're crash symbol. Now, this crash symbol looks good. I just want to hear that doesn't have a really harsh attack like we want, so I'm gonna kind of force it to, but chopping off the beginning. How's that sound? Ah, a little too much. That's okay. Okay. So I just wanted t crash right on the downbeat, and it looked like it was kind of ramping up. Um, so that's okay. We'll leave that one there, and then let's listen for this shaker. Okay? I think the Shakers doing the same thing So eighth notes. It's just helping the high hat. Give it a little extra rhythm. A little extra sound in it. Okay, let's hear what we've got. So let's turn off the track and cross our fingers and hope this sounds interesting. Wait track. Okay, pretty good. Let's pull this out in a whole Another bar. So let's copy it and paste it here. Now, this time you do not need that crash symbol. Okay, so let's hear this with everything. Okay? I want to hear just the track one more time, cause I think something might be happening right here. No, I was wrong. I thought maybe there was a kick hitting right here, but I don't hear it, actually. Okay, so I think we're in pretty good shape. We've got, uh, beat. Pretty much put together now. It's not very different, right? Than our, um, our basic beat pattern. We've changed a couple things. We added a shaker, but other than that, it's pretty much right on it. Let's listen to how that shakers playing. Let's turn that off, get a little bit more out of that baker. We used a sample that was a little bit more ringing. Uh, you might get more out of it way, but it's okay The way it is way might be able to get a tiny bit of feel pushed into this by doing a little tiny bit of swing. Let's hear just to be. I think that might help give it this more natural human feel than the robotic. When we have, let's go to a new video and let's experiment with that.
39. Swing Elements: okay. I can experiment with just a little bit of swing in the high hat and the shaker. Don't order to do this. I need to combined these into one file again. Remember, if you're unable to him, that's called consolidate. If you're in other programs that might be called re sample or, uh, merge, I've seen it be called. And then to add the swing, uh, you should have in most programmes, you'll have a swing amount that you can play around with. Okay, so I just put it on there. Let's let's hear what it sounds like. A bad Let's hear just the high hat and shaker. It's a little more comfortable, a little more natural. You hear how it almost feels like the drummers. Just kind of getting lazy right around here, right? But it's those imperfections that really kind of help it sound more natural. Original track. Pretty good. Okay, great. So I think we've built this beat. No. If we wanted to finish out the rest of the song, we have a couple a couple other musical elements happening here. I think we have a base. We definitely have piano. We have some electric guitar I think that's it. Based piano. Electric guitar. Not too much. Very kind of subtle track. Great. Ok, uh, let's move on to some wrap up stuff.
40. What Next: All right, everyone. We are just about to wrap up this first part of the drum programming class. Now, don't worry if you're thinking Oh, my God, we just got started. Uh, you're right. There's so much more to go. So I have outlined and plan on making three classes, undoing this, and they're all progressive. So the next one was going to start up right where this one left off. So hang on. It'll be out shortly if it's not out already. Um, in that one, we're going to focus a lot of time on working with samplers and drum machines. Okay, So in this one, we were really working on understanding how the rhythms fit together and where we put different elements of the beat. And the next one, we're going to switch over and start working with samplers and drum machines, which is how a lot of stuff works. However, everything we've learned in this one is going in. This class is applicable, and it still works. You could make beats this way that were doing it. You can do that totally fine. And that's totally okay. I work this way a lot of the time. However, Ah, lot of you might want to work with samplers. And even if you're not interested in working with ah samplers or Midi like we looked at the beginning of this class, you should know how to do it, because it can be a big time saver. So we're gonna work on that. We're also gonna look at a bunch more genres. We're gonna look at Drummond Base. We're gonna look at Dub Step. We're gonna look at a whole bunch of other styles of drum programming as we learn more tricks and tips and all this other stuff. Okay, We'll also start diving in a little bit into the sound design element of programming drums . Although I have the third class really reserved for the sound design element of it. So I really hope you decide to continue on this course. Um, there's a ton more coming. I'm really excited about making this. This is super fund for me. So, um, not saying making music theory classes is not super fun, but this is more fun than that. Let's just put it that way. Okay, So I'll see you in the next class, but don't leave. We've got a couple more things for you before you go. So, um Well, stick around the next video. I'm gonna talk about some other good stuff coming soon that you'll want to check out, so just don't go anywhere.
41. SkillshareFinalLectureV2: Hey, everyone want to learn more about what I'm up to? You can sign up for my email list here, and if you do that, I'll let you know about when new courses are released and when I make additions or changes to courses you're already enrolled in. Also check out on this site. I post a lot of stuff there and I check into it every day. So please come hang out with me and one of those two places or both, and we'll see you there.
Jason Allen, PhD, Ableton Certified Trainer
