Transcripts
1. Intro Video: Hello and a warm welcome
to my Skillshare class. This is tone. If f from Berlin, Germany and I will be your
mentor over the next hour. In this course, you
will learn how to make a great sounding electronic music production from scratch. My name is Julian and
I've been working as a professional in the music
industry for the past 18 years. Music has been my passion ever
since and I'm delighted to share my experiences to help you become a
better producer. I've been the person
who called for many students in the past, and I've been
teaching Ableton Live at the electronic music
school in Berlin. As a music producer, I look back on
numerous releases for other artists and myself
under various artists names. Here are some
examples of my work. Engineering. This course will teach you all the essential elements of an electronic
music production. We then create a track
together from start to finish. Once you have
completed this course, your track will be
done to this way. All the important steps
we recovered and give you a great guideline on how to approach your own
productions in the future. What are the subjects
that we will learn about? Setting up able to live, creating powerful
drums with layering, composing an intense
chord progression, crafting your own baseline, adding a flying lead
sound structure and arrangement of a track. Use automation to
make energy flow, great transitions which
glue the parts together. Crafting and exciting drop the use of media
and audio effects, mix and master your truck. So what do you need in
order to get started? And what should my
fields be like? This is a beginner
friendly cost. If you're just starting out
creating your own music, this lessons were super
charged to production process. However, you should know how
to operate a bit in life, this course does not explain the fundamentals of how to operate this piece of software. You will need Ableton
Live for this course. All versions, suites, standards
in intro are welcome. I will also provide basic sample pack with drums and loops to
get you started. This being said, I'm very
much looking forward to assisting you to raise your music production
skills to the next level. Thanks a lot for your interests in theory. In the
first question.
2. Project Video: Let's talk about the
project for today's class. We will create a track
from scratch together. This way, all the elements of an electronic music
production will be covered. Each lesson will guide you
through a specific topic of the creation of a track of the years of
teaching other people, I found out this is the
most effective way. You will need to
have Ableton Live installed on your computer. All versions are welcome, as we will use a third party
plugin as a synthesizer. I will also provide
a sample pack with all the important sounds
to get you started. Make sure to download
everything before you start because you will find the
links in the description. After completing the course, you may want to upload
the check to the gallery. This way you can chat to
other participants and myself about what you've been
creating once you're ready, open, able to live,
and start producing. See you in the next lesson.
3. Setting up Ableton Live: Hello and welcome to
the first lesson. Today's lesson is
pretty straightforward. It's all about the
setup of Ableton Live, including the install of the vital signs as well
as the sample BEC. First up is the vital signs. You will find the link in the
description to the website. You basically just
click on get vital to the basic option here, it is free, however, you will need to
make an account. Once it's properly installed, you will find the sinned under plugins are the
units for Mac users. V is T for Windows
users and Mac users. So I choose Audio Units, vital audio like ascent. Let's check me. It works. Yes, it does. Alright, good. So the second step is also
pretty straightforward. We want to install the sample
pack to a better life. On the left side in the browser, you simply click on Add Folder. You choose the destination. In my case, it's on
the desktop, say Open. And now it will read these
samples to your library. It's a pretty straightforward
sample pack with all the things that you
will need for this class. We have some drums,
including kick drums, clubs, snares, etc. Then we have some effects
including buildups, some fields, etc. I will also provide
a couple of loops. And last but not least, there are some one-shot
samples like basis steps, etc. So with these samples
and the vital soon, you are basically ready to go and create your first track. That's it for the
setup of able to life. See you in the next lesson.
4. Creating Powerfull Drums: Welcome to the next lesson. This lesson is all about drums. Drums are very important as they are the foundation
of your track. There are two specific
things which I want to address
in today's class, which is the layering
of drums and effects. Those are two
techniques which go beyond the usual
creation of a pattern. Once we are enabled to life, we simply choose a drum rack, put it onto a midi channel, go to the samples and
select the kick drum. We go for this one
onto the drum rack and create a pattern. Simple fall to the floor. Now we want to create another
midi channel and choose a clap. You go for this one. Drum rack onto the channel. Clip inside the drum rack
and create the pattern. Now the interesting part, we want to layer three
clips in order to make it wider and punchier
in the drum rack, you see there is your main clip. Simply click on the
title column, say group. Now we can open it up to
have access to the channel. We select two more clips and
put them into the channel, which we want to pan to
the left and to the right. Adjusted some volumes
at the painting and then you have a
really nice wide clap. Okay, there is one
more thing we can do to make the clip even better. We select the false club, which we put on
another drum pads. And in the pattern be copied this one and shifted
a bit forward. This way you have this
nice sucking in effect, Let's name things properly. Always encourage people to
name things properly in order to keep track when
your project is growing. First one, kick clip. Next one is the hi-hat. Now for the effects, we want to put a little
delay on the high end, which makes it a bit
grew via audio effects, delay and delay on
top of the hi-hat, the settings, we will dial the dry wet to
around 25 per cent. The feedback will go
all the way down. The left and right
count will be at one. You can also apply
bit of the filter. Alright, let's use
another Hyatt. Let's adjust the
volume is a bit. This one we're going to be down and the other one a bit up. This way you have the
best of both worlds. You have the effect hired, which is for the groove
and the other high-end, which is for the directness
for the heart sound, which is in your face
and makes it sound a bit more fat and a
bit more direct. Next one would be
some percussion. Create a midi channel again. Put drum rack on top
and select percussions. We go for the first
one. We create. This time we create
a two-bar pattern. And onto the percussion, we will also add the delay. At around 25 per cent. Feedback goes to
like 15 per cent and the filter is
applied to bit. Alright, and another package
and this one will do. And on that one we
put a little reverb. Dry wet again
around 25 per cent. And the decay around 2 s. Next would be to put all of the four
tracks into group to apply some effects
and compression. Click on the kick, hold down shift and click
on percussion, right-click and
say Group Tracks. Name it to drum group. First we want to
apply an equalizer. We add a bit of a low cut
because everything under 30 hz, you won't hear anyways, and you will still
remain the kick, the base of the cake. Now you can also
dial up the EQ at around 1,000 to 2,000 hz to get a bit of this crisp
and crunching us out. Alright, it's starting
to sound good. Now for the compression, go to dynamics Glue Compressor. And now we will dial
in the threshold while it's playing till it
starts to pump a bit. Alright, now we will make up the gain
with the other dial. So we have created
the drum groove, which you will use for the
further creation of the trek. This drum groove sounds a bit
more interesting and a bit fatter due to the
layering and the effects. So see you in the next lesson.
5. Chord Progression: Welcome to the next lesson. This lesson is all about the creation of a
chord progression. Think of the chord progression
as being the body, the heart, and the
warmth of your trek. It's the harmony of your track. Once we are unable to
life, select vital sinned, and drag and drop it to
create a new midi track, we will create a
pet from scratch. However, this is not a course about how to operate
as soon as either, but it's simple enough to make it working patch for our track. First off, we want to
activate the filter. This way it sounds much softer. And the next would be, we want to apply an LFO to add some movement to the
trek, to the patch. Here. On the right side
you see the LFO. It's first, we change on
this little note here. We changed it to tempo dotted, and then we go for one-eighth. And to apply the LFO is simply drag and drop
it onto the filter. And with this little
green dye you can dial in how much to defect. Alright? Now we can also
change the shape of the LFO to make it a
bit more interesting, I will die a little
bit to the left and turn this a bit down. Okay, That sounds good. That's it for vital
sign for now. Now, let's create the
actual chord progression. I will create a four-bar
pattern that is not the one and the best way to create a chord progression. It's basically really
personal tastes, how you achieve this
in the pattern? I will first select
the ground node. Let's solo it first. And now I basically, I shift different nodes on top. It makes sure they sound
good together. Okay? Now, for the second batch, okay, The third one, okay, this one box is a really simple
pattern, but it works. Let's copy this pattern. Paste it here, and
then make a variation. We can now select both
of them by holding Shift and say consolidate. This way, both of the fall by loops are being connected
to an eight bar loop. But make sure in the pattern
to activate the loop again. We want to make it a bit
lower so you can select everything and go down
semitone by semitone. Invited us and let's
activate another oscillator. Use, use classic blend and
drag and drop the foot, the LFO to the oscillator. And turned down a bit. We want to add some effects
on top and some reverb. Alright, so there we have a really central
cooperation which were used in the creation of a check. See you in the next lesson.
6. Crafting a Basslines: Welcome to the next lesson, which is all about baselines. Baselines are very
important because they add the sub
frequencies of your track. And those frequencies
are the frequencies which move your body. So in the meantime, I've changed a bit on my
chord progression, which now sounds like so. We will now load weiter
sind onto a new midi track. Click on the browser. And in the left column
we selected base. And just go for a base, which is to your liking. I would go for that one. We already have our
chord progression. So in this case, it's very easy to
find the baseline because when you have a chord
consisting of three nodes, one of the three nodes
is the idea bass note. So we simply copy the
pattern from the courts onto the new midi track with
the vital sign for the base. And then we can
solo both of them. And then we tried to
find the best node. So basically try the first one. Doesn't work that well. Second one, they're
also not the best node. And the third one. This one works. I
delete all the others. Now. I did a mistake here. So let's find a new note. Alright, that sounds good. Okay, now for the
actual pattern, there is many standard
patterns which you can apply like an offbeat bays
are more funky bass. First off would be
the offbeat base, which basically is always the kick would be on
the one and the two. And 3.2 for the base
basically comes on the end. We just shortened the nodes
and shift them to the right. Alright, so let's check it out. Okay, let's lower the velocity
a bit because the velocity applies to the filter in
this particular bass sound. Alright, it works, but
it's not really exciting. Okay, Let's try something else. We keep the same notes but at different
rhythm to the base. Alright? Okay, now we apply the same rhythm to
the other nodes. So let's listen to
it with the drums. Okay, maybe we add
a bit more variety. E.g. here. We don't use the upper node and make it a bit shorter. There's one more
thing which I want to do which is side-chain
compression. What is side-chain compression? Side-chain compression
is a method to free up some space on one signal
controlled by another signal. So the kick and the bass, they are both in the
same frequency range. Therefore, there's
not enough space in the mix to hear
both of them properly. What we can do is put a
compressor on to the baseline, which is controlled by the kick. So whenever the kid
comes, the compressor, ducks the base, Let's solo
the kick and the bass. And then in audio effects, we select the compressor. Then we open it up
on the left side. Side-chain audio from kick. Dial up the gain a bit. Now while the track is playing, we can lower the threshold. It starts to pump. And the whole thing sounds
much more groovy and punchy. That's it for the bass sounds. See you in the next lesson.
7. Adding a flying Lead Sound: Welcome to the next lesson. This lesson is
about a lead sound. Think of the lead
sound as the melody, the head portion of your check. Again, we will load an instance of y tilde audio into our track. And we'll go into the browser. On the left side, select
lead for the category, and let's check out
what sounds do we have? A rather soft sound. This one is interesting, like a horn sound, but it's more of
an effect sound. This one is a bit
harsh for the ears. Let's cut sweet. This
one is a bit harsh, but the same time it's cutting
through the mix a lot. And it's quite a memorable sound for the pattern where
the lead sound, It's a lot of trying
to find something. So I suggest you let play the track in a loop and the
same time on the keyboard, just try things around
whichever do now. Okay, So I think there are some interesting parts in here. So I will record everything.
That's one thing you can do. If you go to edit
record quantisation, I would go for a 16th note quantisation this way
everything is in time. I'm not happy with
this, so I will simply redo everything. I will reduce the length
to 16 bar, right? Right-click, I would
say consolidate and turn on the loop. Okay? And when I'm
not happy with it, I can also go into the pattern
and manually add nodes. Okay, I'm happy with this one. The next thing which you
can do is let it play in the background and edit a
bit around in the suicide. E.g. I want to make
it a bit less harsh. So I would dial in
some of the filter and maybe change the
waveform around. We will come back to
the lead sound in the next lesson when we were
talking about arrangement. See you in the next lesson.
8. Arrangement of your Track: Welcome to the next lesson, which is about the
arrangement of the track. There will be two more lessons which are connected
to the arrangement, which is the automation lesson, and also the crafting
of droplets. And this lesson is purely about the basic
structure of our trek. Alright, so once
we aren't able to, and we have our
ingredients which are kick clip hired percussion. We have our courts, we have our base, and
we have our lead sound. That's basically
everything that we need in order to
make a great track. That's why we start with creating all the
parts that we need. Now we can arrange
them in the timeline. We are aiming at a length
of around three to 4 min. That's quite usual
length these days. So what I do is I select all of the midi clips and
make them longer to we hit our target of
three to 4 min hour, go for a roughly like
a three-minute track. There is no right
or wrong when doing the arrangement is basically
a measure of personal taste. It always makes sense to start with some parts and then add, add up the other parts later on. So I will start with
the bass and the kick. So all of the other
tracks clip, Hi ahead. Percussion, chords
and lead sound. I will just draw
to the right side. Then it's a bit
of improvisation. When the next part starts,
it's a bit of feeling. Let's add the clip now. And then the cosmos. And the next would be our columns. Okay, and around, around here, we will add a mini drops. So I will get rid of the
kick from bar 25 to B23. And after the mini drop is done, I will add in a hi-hat, then deletes all next time. Okay? And now we're basically
sketching out the drops. So at bar 95, I will get rid of
the kick for 32 bar. And one after another, delete the elements at
when the job is done, everything will be back in
again at the same time. So let's first the kick is out. Then we say the hi-hat, the clip and the percussion, and maybe for the
rest, even cards. Tickets, rid of the
lead sound here. So this would be the
sketch for our drop. Okay, I'm not really
happy with this. I will let the courts play and make the length of the
drop even a bit longer. Like so. But we will leave
it for now like it is, because we're coming
back to it in the, in the drop lesson. From here on, we will
let everything play everything is that the
peak energy of the check. And now one after
another element you will get rid of in
order to end the track. So our first off, I will
end the lead sound. Then the hi-hat. Maybe a bit short, but
earlier, the clap. And for the rest,
basically the chords. So this will be our ending. Hello. So for the purpose of
shooting this video, it's rather short arrangement. In the next lesson, we will
take care of the automation, which is part of the
arrangement as well. So see you in the next lesson.
9. Automation to add movement: Welcome to the next lesson. This lesson is all
about automation. It's the second part to our arrangement lesson as
automation and the energy flow, which automation is about is a really important part
in electronic music. We're going to automate two
things. In this lesson. We want to automate the
filter cutoff on the courts. And we want to
automate a filter on the drum group or
especially on the kick. So first off, the courts reopen the little menu with the little triangle on the
left and say configure. This way we can say which
parameter we want to automate. Just move the cutoff
fader a little tiny bit. And this way we have now
control over it here. To enter automation mode, you either press
a or you press on the little sign on the upper right corner
of a butter knife. Let's make it a bit bigger, going to automation
mode to filter cutoff. And now we see our automation. So the way I do it
normally is I let the song play and
during the song plays, I adjust the parameters. My likings started with lower and then try to make an energy flow which
makes the song interesting. Next off, we want to do a little filter
automation on the drums. Let's say on the kick mainly
because we want to cut off the low end in order to make transitions
to the next part. I will select a filter, put it onto the kick track, and change it to a
low-pass filter, to a high pass filter. And automation mode. I want to have less of
the base frequency coming through on the bass drum
before the next bar hits. So in order to achieve this
dial in some of the filter, and that will automate
the on-off parameter, not the filter itself. This way we always have the same amount of
filtering applied. We may come back to automation
in the next chapter, which is about the drop. We will use quite a bit
of automation in there. So see you in the next lesson.
10. The Drop: Alright, welcome to
the next lesson, which is about the drop. The drop in electronic
music is the peak part of energy which mostly
comes without the kick. And then we're heading to
a part where the kid comes back in and you have the
maximum peak of energy. So it's a really important
part in making the trek shine. There's two things which you
want to do in this lesson. First off, we're going
back to automation. And the second one
is you will use one of the samples or
maybe some more of the samples from the samples
that I've provided to make it even bigger
or even catch you. First off, the automation. Let's go back to automation, filter cut off. The last lesson. We already did a bit of it, but we want to make
it more extreme. Let's listen with
everything together. So here it doesn't
sound really good, but everything comes back
in because the courts, they are losing the rhythm and the groove when they are at
the maximum filter cutoff. This why we want to go back to the original state really a tiny little bit before
the actual heat comes. So we shift the point a bit to the left and lower
it a bit down. This way it's more interesting. Let's mute delete for now. Okay, that sounds about right. Second thing, we want
to check our samples. We have some interesting
effects here, buildups. Let's check the build-ups. Go for this one. We just put
it on in your audio track. It's fits just
right into the gap. And you can hear the, it also stops a tiny little bit before the actual account, one on the next bar. So when the buildup has got, the buildup sample is done. We also get rid of the base. Alright, That
sounds about right. So, but there are more
effects we have down lift. I like that one. So as you can hear, it's a bit of an uplift and
then we have the crash. So we need to place
it accordingly. Like really makes sure that
the transient is exactly on the next bar. Like so. Okay, It sounds good. Maybe there's more of an impact. We can use this one, maybe to get into the part
where the kick is missing, where basically all the
drum elements disappear. Yeah, that sounds about right. Okay, so let's listen
to the whole thing. Maybe also the lead sound. We also want to get rid
of the high frequencies. So I put a filter on there and I would automate
the filter a bit. Alright, that sounds
like a good job to me. Well, you can get much more
extreme as everything. But the purpose of
this lesson is to keep it short and
straightforward. So that's it for
the job for now. Next we'll be mixing
and mastering. See you in the next lesson.
11. Mix and Mastering: Welcome to this next lesson, which is also the last
lesson of this course. It's about mixing and mastering. I don't want to go into much detail here because
mixing mastering is basically huge
topic which in can make a whole course
about a rather want to show you some little tips and tricks to make yourself a gym, to make your track
sound grade right away before you want to
export the first time. So first off, mixing. Mixing is basically about
finding the right space and frequencies for your
elements in the track. That they all have space and that they all are placed
in an interesting way. We have the stereo field, the panorama, which
is left and right. You have the frequencies
20-20 thousand hz, and you have the depths, which is like the room. And in this
three-dimensional room, you can place your
elements of the track. What we want to
do, we want to put an equalizer on all of
the different tracks. So let's choose the EQ Eight. And on the kick drum,
let's solo it and check how it sounds
and also looks like. Or is they can listen to
frequencies from 20, 20,000 hz. So everything which
is below that, which you can see there's a
lot of you won't even here, so we can get rid of it. To do this, we select
and use the low cut. Can hear the sound
does not change, but there's a lot
less energy wasted. Now. If you want to get
a bit of this click, you can dive in a bit
like around 1,000 K. This way it gets a bit
crisper right off of the clip. We also want to get rid of the low end here,
but a bit more. And maybe dial in some high frequencies To make
it even crisp. Same goes for the hi-hat. Hired isn't high frequency every way so we can
grid it all of this. Okay, That sounds about right
in the high frequencies. Otherwise, it would
get too harsh for the ears and the
percussion. We do the same. Get rid of the low
frequencies. And dial in. Big Crunch in is around 2000
K. Let's check it together. I think the clubs be too loud. Alright, next we want to
do some of the Penning. Maybe put the percussions bit to the left and the higher
bit to the right. Too much. Okay, so let's check the base, which has tons of low end. So the same like
with the kid cake. We make a low cut. Still have the base frequencies, but it's less than
energy that gets wasted. In the course. And
for the courts, we do the same, get rid
of some of the low end. And maybe a bit crisper
and the highest. Hey, that sounds Alright. Okay, now for the
mastering part, first alphabet equalizer. And there it would make
sense to dial in a bit on the 1,000 hz to make it
a bit Saudi bit crisper. And get rid of the, put in the low cut to get
rid off the low frequencies. Okay. Next would
be a compressor. I would suggest just dial it in a tiny little bit till it starts to pump up. Just
a tiny little bit. As I said, that Sinatra
professor mastering, it's just something to make
it sound trick to make your track sound a bit better in order for your first export. So it's quite a lot actually. So let's use one of the
utilities and reduce the gain so much that we are like around minus
six decibel here. Okay? And last but not least, let's put a little
limiter on top and make it as loud
as you can before. It basically sounds trashy. You can see it starts
to the yellow, the little yellow bit
starts to pulsate a bit. That's basically what
you want to have. So it should
basically drive into the limiter without
sounding distorted. As you can see, we don't
have any clipping anymore. In order to export, we simply use this clamp from
the beginning to the end. We say File Export. And then you may also want to do an MP3 export and you
track layout is done. Alright, that's it for the super quick and dirty
mixing mastering. See in the next lesson, which is also the outro. Thanks a lot.
12. Outro: That's the end of our
little cause of how to produce EDM was able to life. Thank you so much
for participating. I hope you've learned
something and found it interesting
and entertaining. We have talked about
all the basics that you need to
produce your own track. However, we only scratched the surface with
those short lessons. I will do future
classes which go into more detail to enhance your music production
skills even more. Feel free to publish
your check to the Skillshare Gallery in order to discuss your music with me and other students
of this class. Again, thanks a lot and see
you in a future lesson.
Toneaffair, Composer, Music Producer
