Ambient Chillstep Music Production - Start To Finish | Jon Merritt | Skillshare
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Ambient Chillstep Music Production - Start To Finish

teacher avatar Jon Merritt, Born To Produce

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Ambient Chill - Start To Finish - Course Overview

      6:22

    • 2.

      Lesson 01 Getting Started

      5:41

    • 3.

      Lesson 02 Sound Design Pad

      19:05

    • 4.

      Lesson 03 Music Theory Basics

      8:41

    • 5.

      Lesson 04 Music Theory Starting The Chord Progression

      20:16

    • 6.

      Lesson 05 Music Theory Adding Complexity To The Chord Progression

      7:10

    • 7.

      Lesson 06 Adajio String Layer

      8:16

    • 8.

      Lesson 07 Piano

      6:24

    • 9.

      Lesson 08 Adding Space

      8:44

    • 10.

      Lesson 09 Chill Step Drum Beat

      19:53

    • 11.

      Lesson 10 Adding SFX To The Drum Beat

      14:06

    • 12.

      Lesson 11 Bassline

      8:37

    • 13.

      Lesson 12 Sidechaining

      8:38

    • 14.

      Lesson 13 A Deeper Look At Vital

      28:26

    • 15.

      Lesson 14 Modulated Bass Overlauy

      9:51

    • 16.

      Lesson 15 Adagio String FX

      8:19

    • 17.

      Lesson 16 Vocal String Layer

      5:15

    • 18.

      Lesson 17 Song Structure

      9:42

    • 19.

      Lesson 18 SFX Flanged Riser

      6:56

    • 20.

      Lesson 19 SFX Arrangement

      15:53

    • 21.

      Lesson 20 Automation

      14:00

    • 22.

      Lesson 21 Fills

      20:05

    • 23.

      Lesson 22 Getting Effortless

      6:41

    • 24.

      Lesson 23 Panning

      8:05

    • 25.

      Lesson 24 Mixdown

      15:22

    • 26.

      Lesson 25 Piano Mixdown

      25:48

    • 27.

      Lesson 26 Mastering

      10:30

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About This Class

Follow along step by step, and make a complete ambient/chillstep track from start to finish. Along the way you will learn all the techniques and skills you need to be able to make your own Ambient/Chillstep tracks.

Watch the course overview for more details, and to listen to the track you will make.

This is an in depth course that will take you step by step through the process of making this track. As you progress through the course you will learn everything from how to come up with initial ideas, how to develop those ideas, how to make your music emotive (you don't need to play an instrument or have any prior music theory knowledge), all the way through to arranging, mixing and mastering.

Note: This course is made so it can be followed along in any DAW, but that will require you already know your way around your DAW of choice, so when I mention using EQ for example, you will know where to go in your DAW to be able to replicate the same settings. This is not a course for complete beginners, but even beginners with some knowledge should be able to follow along. All audio, MIDI, presets are provided, and only free/common instruments/plugins are used so you don't need any special software to complete the course. All you need is a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation)

Here is a more in depth description of what you'll get out of the course.

Module 1 - Getting Started

Ambient music is all about minimal beauty. In this first module you will learn how to craft sounds and textures for your tracks using a variety of methods like synthesis and samples.

We use an incredible (and completely FREE) synthesizer called 'Vital'. The only other instrument used is a piano instrument (also free), so this course is accessible to everyone, in any DAW.

You will learn the basics of synthesis in Vital, creating a luscious pad and bass lines, plus using organic samples to help augment the synthesized sounds to create a beautiful and diverse soundscape and help generate an emotional connection to the listener.

 

Module 2 - Music Theory

In this module you will learn how to create a full 32 bar chord progression. In order to achieve this you will learn from the very basics, how to select a scale, how to make triad chords, and then how to resolve a chord progression to give a sense of completion. We will go much further than this and enhance the emotional deepness of the chord progression by using different chord voicings, 7th chords, sus chords, and even borrowed chords.

We then use a technique called 'complexity out of simplicity' to take a standard 4 bar chord progression and turn it first into an 8 bar progression, then 16 bar, then 32 bar. This gives the track a real sense of evolution as it progresses and helps keep the listener engaged.

 

Module 3 - Soundstage & Effects

As important as the sounds used, is where and how these sounds are used in the mix, i.e. Creating a 'soundstage'. In this module you will learn how to place the sounds for maximum impact, keeping a minimalistic approach in mind.

Using SFX sounds to enhance the emotion of the track is a vital and also satisfying process as it really ties the track together. You will use a variety of different SFX sounds, all taken from our Chill Step sample pack (all samples used in the tutorial are provided in the workfiles). Used in conjunction with modulation effects to tailor sounds to your track.

We'll also be using reverb a great deal to generate a sense of depth and spaciousness to our mix.

Module 4 - Chill Step Beat

In this module we make a beat for the second half of the track (after the 'Ambient' section). You will learn how to create a Chillstep beat that has a big impact, and works in conjunction with the side chained bassline to provide a chunky rhythm. We'll use a variety of sounds, drums and SFX sounds to create a beat that has the right energy and also compliments the track

As we discuss in the course, you can of course go in any direction you want when it comes to the type of beat you use for this track. You could choose to use very minimal drums or even no drums at all. The choice is always yours.

 

Module 5 - Song Structure

One of the most misunderstood skills is 'song structure'. Here you will learn how to analyse the track on the micro and macro scale. Looking at how we generate a sense of push and pull (tension and release) at the micro level of the melody, and the macro level of the whole arrangement. This level of understanding can help you make tracks that always keep the listener engaged and coming back for more.

As well as analysing the track on an energetic level, you will also be enhancing the movement and flow of the track using SFX sounds and automation to help deepen the emotion of the track.

 

Module 6 - Mixing & Mastering

In the last module we will delve into the important processes of mixing and mastering. You will learn the key to making sure your mixes are effortless, and therefore easy to do.

Picking the right elements is paramount, but you also need to be able to balance these with each other, and you need to be able to tweak them to fit in the mix. Here we will look at EQ, compression, saturation, dynamic EQ (using a FREE plugin) and much more.

In the last lesson we will then apply the last minor tweaks to the track to make sure it is properly balanced and then render it out.

Meet Your Teacher

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Jon Merritt

Born To Produce

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Level: All Levels

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Transcripts

1. Ambient Chill - Start To Finish - Course Overview: Hey everybody, I am John Merrick from bones of Jesus. Welcome to our ambient stroke. Chills that tutorial which you can follow along with any digital audio workstation. So as mentioned, you can follow along in any DAW, Cubase Logic, Ableton, f, l, et cetera. But that does require that you have at least a basic understanding of that DAW. So this course will be best for advanced beginners or above. Now I've specifically only used instruments that are completely free. So this course is accessible to anyone using a different DAW. And when it comes to plug-in effects, I've tried only t's basic stock plug-ins that are available in all DAW's. So we're using more advanced processes like dynamic EQ. I've used free plugins, which also available to everybody. So we'll kick off the course by guessing into some basic sound design and synthesis using the awesome new and totally free synthesiser vital, creating a luscious, deep pad that we will use for the main element. You will add many more textures to the track as we progress. Using vital, a free piano instrument and samples, which are of course all included in the tutorial download. Now, one part of ambient music that is essential to get right is of course the melody. So we'll go in depth and look at the music theory and approach on how to create an epic 32 bar chord progression and use that as the basis to add more melodic elements to our track. You don't need an advanced understanding of music theory to do this. We'll literally build this by step, and you can then use those steps in your own tracks to make your own ambient progressions every single time. Now, great song structure is imperative in any tracks. So we will analyze this track both on the micro energetic level and the macro energetic level. Now what this means is you will learn how to create that subtle ebb and flow of tension and release throughout your track from the melody to the overall arrangement that will keep listeners engaged and wanted to come back for more. Mixing is often thought of as the most technical stage of the process, which is only partially true. And although we will cover all the technical aspects of mixing, like EQ, compression saturation, so changing dynamic EQ and so on. We'll also look at how you can achieve effortless mixes every time in your tracks. If you want to learn how to make ambient music, this is the course for you. Now. This really is only a small cross-section of everything covered in this tutorial. But the best thing about these thoughts to finish courses is that you get a real insight into how to go about making your own tracks and where and when you should use the skills that you're learning. So that's it for me. I'm going to let the track play that you can make if you get the course. This is the final version that we render out in less than 27. The last lesson of the course. No touch ups, no post-processing. Thanks very much for watching. Hope to see you in the course. 2. Lesson 01 Getting Started: Welcome to this. Any doors start to finish. Ambient stroke, chill step each tutorial, the first thing I wanna do is actually play the track that we're going to meet together called cascade. I'm going to play the whole thing so you can get a real sense of what this track is all about. But of course, if you don't want to listen to the whole thing, that's fine. I'll leave a timestamp on the screen so you can skip ahead if you like. So this is gonna be a lot of fun to make and Jati informative. Now this first lesson is just an intro to the course, and we'll cover some of the basic things about how the tutorial will work if you're using a different door to me. So if you want to get cracking and you want to skip on to the next lesson where we actually start making the track, that's fine. As mentioned, this can be followed in any door, but that does require that you have enough knowledge of your door that you can e.g. find a similar effect or know how to use automation? I have tried to use standard effects and techniques that will be available in all doors. Or I've tried to use free plugins that anybody can download and use, but please don't worry, if you can't exactly match what I do, it's much, much more important that you understand the technique and why and when to use a specific technique rather than be able to match precisely every single little thing that I do. If you have bought the course, you'll also have all of these stems, audio samples, midi files, and instrument patches. So if you get stuck, you can simply load them into your door. But just know that we do make everything in this track from scratch throughout the tutorial. So two more quick things before we go on to lesson two. Of course, you are learning how to make just one ambient stroke, chill step you can attract, but try to see this as an on-ramp into these genres. So we're going to cover many of the main skills that you need to like music theory, sound design, arrangement, mixing, creating space, and loads more. So by the time you're done, you'll have a decent understanding of how to go about making your own ambient chilled step tracks. Alright, so last thing, I work at 96 khz sample rate and 24 bits and all the audio samples and stems are recorded at the same settings. I do recommend that you use 96 K24 bit, but you can work at a lower sample rate if you want. It's just a recommendation. Okay, that's it for the intro. Thanks for watching guys and girls. I'll see you in the next one. 3. Lesson 02 Sound Design Pad: Hey everybody, welcome back. Alright, so in this lesson we're gonna be making the pad sound in a free Cynthia called Vital. You can get vital just by Googling vital VST. And it'll be the first link that you see. And if you scroll down, eventually you'll get to the different versions that you can get. Now you can get the full version which is completely free. So just select the version you want and you can download the version for your particular operating system. Once it's downloaded, just install it and I'm not gonna go into where to install it as it can be different for every door, but that is info that's easy to find with a quick Google. So in your door, I would start with a blank projects or your preferred blank template of choice. And right away, we're going to load up vital. Say for me it's easy. I'll just load it an instrument track load at vital. And the first thing I'm going to do is just make this a little bit smaller so it fits on the screen properly. So you can change the size of it by clicking the little v at the top there. I'm just going to go to 70% because 100% is just a little bit too big. That's absolutely fine. Now in my door, the first thing I'm gonna do is just turn this down. This is like the quick cheat way of gain staging your projects so that when you start adding loads of other elements to your track, it does not get too loud. Say turn it down to somewhere around about -11 as absolutely fine. So the next thing I want to do is bring in a medieval from the workforce. So if you brought the tutorial, you can load it from the work files, folder, Gates and midi files, and then load in the full pad middy, just drag that onto the vital instrument. It should just load up in there. Just make sure that your Midea is starting from bar five. So if you do it on bar five like I am, then everything will line up in your project. So you'll know when I talk about being on bar 11 or 12 or whatever, you'll know that we're in the same place. So I'm just going to loop the first 4 bar of this progression. Now Just say no, if I go into it, I'll just show you roughly what this chord progression looks like. So it is actually quite complex. It's like a 32 bar chord progression, although of course, the main part of it repeats. But that's fine. So just so you know, in the coming lessons, we'll actually go over the step-by-step, how to make this progression. And we'll cover all of the knowledge required to be able to make your own epic chord progressions. Not just this progression, but really any progression that you want to be able to make. But for now, I just wanted to bring this midiin. So you've actually got enough that we can start sculpting our pad in vital, because obviously at the moment it sounds very unpack. Let's go into vital and get started. If you're new to this, it can look a little daunting, but no worries. We're gonna be doing entry-level sound design in this tutorial. And first, let me briefly, and I do mean briefly explain the basics of how the synth works. Also just say nay, all these patches are available in the work file. So if you do get really stuck, you can just load them up. And there are instructions on how to do that in the same folder as the presets. So the most fundamental thing to understand in any synthesizer is really the signal path of the sound. So where it starts from and where it is going before it comes out of the synth into your door. In any sense, really, it all starts with the oscillator section. This is where the sound is produced and where you create the initial Tom row of the sound, Tambora, meaning the texture of the sound. You can change the time broke by using various different waveforms which you can cycle through. You can add more oscillators. Two, there's three main oscillators in vital plus you've got a sample oscillator as well. And after you've created the initial sort of texture of the sound signal then goes through to what we refer to as the subtractive parts of the synthesiser. So here we can shape the dynamics of it by changing the envelope. Say, this is the envelope over here. This controls the dynamics of the amplitude. Say if I add, say, an attack to it, you'll hear that we get a slow lead into the sound, e.g. and then we can send it off through a filter as well. So if I activate the filter and I'll just turn off oscillator 2.3 for now. So that's sort of like sculpting the sound. And there are also endless ways to modify and modulate the sound that you've made. And we'll look at the basics of that throughout the tutorial. Then you have the effects page where you can add anything ready chorus compressor, delay, distortion, all sorts of stuff to the sound, extra to further sculpt the sound, to how you want it to be. But that's enough of an overview short though it was, it's really enough right now just to understand where the sound starts and how it progresses through the synth is not much good. Talking about what each of the functions do when you don't really have a framework for how that works. So to help with that, let's actually start making the sound just so you know, if you sort of made data tweaks and you want to go back to the initial preset, which is how vital loads when it first loads up. On three lines here and go to initialized preset. And this just resets everything in Basel. So again, let's start with the oscillator section. Now it's actually already on the right wave form. This is like a saw wave. That's a good starting point. But what I want to show you is this control over here unison. So for now I'm just going to turn this down. So this is the unison de-tune. We'll bring this back up in a sec, but it's better to start with that downside. What I'm going to do is start adding more voices for it. So you just click and drag up on this to add more voices. You can hear it sort of changing the sound of it. But what does that really mean? So adding more voices basically means you're adding more oscillators playing the same song. So instead of just one oscillator, which would it be if I have it on one voice? I've got like 16 voices all playing the same song wave. Now that doesn't sound that impressive when I play it. Until you start actually messing with the detuned dial, say I'm just going to play it and I'll mess with this and you hear what I mean. You can hear straightaway. It really sort of thickens it up into this nice, almost like transceiver lead, but it really just flattens it up, makes it much more interesting. Okay, so that's fine. Now let's add another oscillator to it. So we're going to activate oscillates too. Now this one, it's not really doing much if I just play it, it's just adding one more voice really to the initial oscillator one. So what I'm going to do is actually pitch this down. So I'm just going to click where it says pitch and drag this down. It's a -12 will be down one Octavio just going to play that. Okay, nice. Just really thickens it up. Having an oscillator playing one, OK, save down, That's great. So next thing, let's move on to actually sculpting the sound a bit. First of all as well, I won't say change. The second oscillator says also going through filter one rather than Filter2. You can see here that oscillated ones already being routed through filter one as well. So with the texture of the sound, sort of how I once it, or at least roughly in the right place, I'm going to come over and starts to sculpting the sound using the envelope. So emulate one is for the amplitude dynamics. So that means basically volume wise, it will shape it as I showed before. So if we add more of an attack, little bit more polite, but we don't need to be that extreme. We're gonna do something else. I just want a little bit of attack on that. So it's just got that slight sucky feeding going into the very first half, a second of the sound. That's fine for now. Let's turn up the release of it as well because we want it to have a bit of a tail. So it all sort of all the codes blend into each other. So you can hear when I stop it, you can hear it's hail off. That's the release of the sound. Okay, great, That's starting to sound a little bit nicer. No problem, but now we want to add a filter, so I'm going to activate filter one. Let me just play that can change the cutoff of the filter by using this slider. You can hear it's got that kind of resonant feeling to it. That's because the resonance at the moment is like halfway up. This is how you change the resonance of the filter. So obviously you can turn that resonance right off. Lipstick to having it about halfway up. Quite nice. It makes it a bit more interesting the sound. But rather than just filter it, what I want to do is actually modulate this filter so it sucks into the sound. So to do that, we need to add an attack, just like with the attack on the amplitude. Obviously, if we turn that up, it sort of gives it that slow, gentle leading to the sound. So we want to do this, but with the filters, It's really easy to do. We're going to use Envelope two for this. Let's just click envelope too. And also where you see these like little grayed out four arrows with a.in the middle, we're actually going to click that and drag it over. So when we get that little circle there, we know that this is going to affect the filter cutoff. So if I drop that and now not much is going to happen if I play it. Because we haven't actually done any affecting to the envelope safe. Now, raise up the attack. You can actually start to see the filter itself being modulated by this envelope here. So we can turn this down. So we're starting to get there. It's not quite right. It doesn't really sound how I want it to at the moment. So we're just going to get these settings bit more accurate. I'm just changing the hold so that every time the pad plays we get a full cycle. So it's not too bad, but we need to make a few changes to this yet. So we're going to grab this little control point in the middle and just move it up. So we get more of a kind of quick raise in the cutoff and then it gets more gentle towards the end and you can see it playing out. Oh, say we need to move the attack up as well. Raise that up. So it's more in line with envelope one, which is doing the amplitude. Don't worry too much if this isn't super sinking in right now, the more we do it, the more you'll start to understand the process. This is just the first time we've done it. So don't worry too much, if not all sorts of making perfect sense yet. So we got to just make another modification. So when I play it, It's a little bit too extreme. So what we want to do is turn down the effectiveness of the filters, like changing the mix of it radio of how much this envelope affects the filter. And we do that by actually clicking on this tiny little dots here and click and drag up and down. You can actually see how much we're going to be affecting the filter by say, if we have that circle completely filled, It's like maximum effectiveness or full mix. And if we turn that right down, then I'll won't affect it as much. So it's much more gentle. Say we want a little bit higher than that, but not too much something somewhere around here. And of course, as it's playing, we can, and we will all say, automate this, the filter cutoff. And for the standard settings we are basically there. I didn't say it was gonna be a very simple patch. And it's really easy to get something that sounds nice and luscious. Now, obviously, when we start getting into how the code structure was made, then it's really going to start taking shape as we add all the bass notes in and everything. But for now that's absolutely fine. Others, one thing more that I want to do and that is just this velocity track dial down here. So this is really quite important. Let me just close vital for a second and I'll go into the midi. Now as you can see here, we've got these different colored notes. So I'm not sure about your door, but in Cubase, basically the brighter red color it is, the higher the velocity and the darker the color, more purple, the lower the velocity. And having a variation in velocity throughout the performance is really important in guessing an emotional fields, your melody. Just say no, the velocity is like how hard or how soft a real instrument like a keyboard is struck. Say if I hit a key really hard on a keyboard that's like high velocity. If I press it very gently, has got very low velocity. But since like vital, the stock setting is basically to ignore the velocity information so it's set on zero at the moment. So what we need to do is actually turn this up to 100% in order for vital to actually take into account the velocity information that is sent through to it from the midi track. So when I'm in the middle, you can hear that these notes that are like slightly quieter or have a lower velocity when I press it. And then the higher ones. So you can hear there's a difference in volume between them. We use this to sort of add emotion throughout the track. But we're gonna get to that in much more detail when we start looking at the actual melody itself. Alright, so last thing in vital is I just want to add a few effects to this patch just to really finish it off. So the first thing I want to add is a compressor. So we just come over activate that. The compressor comes with a few different settings. You've got multiband, single band, high band, and lower bound. We actually want to keep it on multiband. Multiband is one of the best settings. I'm just going to play that. You can hear that already. It's actually nicely changing. The pad is bringing out that sort of like a high-frequency sort of grit to it. Don't wanna go into all of the multiband settings, sort of this early on in the tutorial. Say I'm just going to go through and just sort of tweak it. Sets right? For this instrument. Say that's what the bypassed. And you can add, just kinda adds almost like a bit of excitation to the high-end. So that's fine that it needs to go into any more details of it there. Now want to add a bit of distortion. So for this, we will keep it on its stock setting of soft clip, which is kind of more like, or at least if you use it in a not too strong way, is more like saturation than distortion. But there's kinda like a fine line between either, say, that's fine, Let's just have a little listen. Again. It's really just adding just a little bit of sparkle, more grit if you'd like to the high-end of the sound. And then EQ we're going to add. So there's a few different settings that you can use in here. If you click on the logo, e.g. you can cycle through between either a low cut or a low shelf. We can have a militia of kinda grew a little bit of a boost, I think. And also with the high-end, you can have it as a hike cuts or a high shelf. That's it would just he's a high shelf. And again, we're just going to boost the high end of it. Just adjust the driver bits on the distortion just to lessen that bit. Okay, so that's on a pretty decent I'm happy with that. Now we can close vital. So that's it for this lesson. In the next lesson, we're going to start looking at the lead and sort of how we programmed in that entire chord progression. But in the next lesson, we will be looking at the most basic part of music theory. So if you want to, if you're already well-versed in music theory, you understand it or you can actually skip less than three and go straight on to lesson four, where we actually start building the melody itself. And less than three, the next lesson we're just going to look at music theory basics for those of you who don't know much about it. Alright, thanks very much for watching guys and girls see you in the next one. 4. Lesson 03 Music Theory Basics: Hey everybody, welcome back. Alright, so now we have our pad sound. Let's look at how we came up with a melody from scratch. Now, it may help some of you know that I actually don't play any instruments and I am self-taught when it comes to music theory. And it's important that you understand that even if you have very little music theory knowledge, you can still create seemingly complex and beautiful chord progressions and melodies. The way to do this is to create complexity out of simplicity. This is a concept that can be applied to many things in music production. But obviously, we'll talk in terms of the chord progression here. And all it means is we start off simply with triad chords, which are the basic three note chords. And then we start experimenting with different voicings and try different core types, et cetera. Doing this with just a basic bits of understanding, you can come up with some pretty awesome chord progressions. Now, I don't want to preach to the choir hair. So any of you that already understand the basics of scales and know how to make triads can skip on to the next lesson where we actually start building the melody from the ground up. For people who are new to music theory. A quick refresh. I'm going to cover the absolute basics so you can understand what is going on in the next lesson and also, you can do this in your own tracks. So the best way to approach this is to break it down into steps. So step one is to pick the scale that you want to use for this track. We use the C minor scale in your tracks. Obviously, you can use any scale you liked. The same rules apply to making triads and chord progressions. It's just the scale gives you the basic musical framework that you need to get started. So step two is to find out what notes in that scale. Now, your door might actually have tools built into this like Cubase does. But the easy thing to do is just Google notes in the C minor scale, hit Enter, and then go to images. What you want to look for is these images from basic music theory.com. They're the easiest to understand, but you might prefer others, depends what your musical background is. Straightaway. I can see that in the C minor scale we have C, D, E-flat, F, G, A-flat, B-flat, and then obviously back to C, and that just repeats. Now what I recommend that you do is then transfer these notes to your door so you can easily reference them. Say, I'm just going to move my pad out the way and I'll just draw in a blank midi segment, go into it. And what I mean to reference them is we'll just literally draw in the notes, just make this a bit more zoomed in. So we've got C, which is obviously the tonic of our scale. D, E flat, F, G, a flat, B flat. And then it repeats going back to C and it starts all over again. But that's enough. We just got all the notes in there as reference. So these are the notes that we can use to make our chord progression and, or melody. Just say no, a quick one because obviously I said we got E-flat, we've got a flat and B flat. Now, it's a little bit confusing in most doors because what is actually E-flat in some scales is also known as D-sharp in others. And most doors, maybe your door is slightly different, but in Cubase is always labeled as D-sharp, even though it's actually E-flat. Little bit confusing, but really it's not that important in the grand scheme of things. You don't need to actually understand that to be able to use the tricks that I'm going to show you to be able to make calls and stuff. Alright, out of the way, let's actually look at making triad. So making triads is like the easiest thing in the world. Trust me, anybody can do this? So you start with the root note. So in this case, I'm just going to draw a chord in on C because that's our scale. So we'll start with that, but we'll progress onto different chords. Let's just give myself a little more room here. So once you've got your root node n, which is c, In this case, you then skip a note in the scale, which is D, and then draw note in, on the next note in the scale, which is E-flat, then you do the same thing. You skip another note in the scale, and then you draw in on the next note in the scale. And that's literally it. And it applies on any note in the scale. Say e.g. if I want an E-flat chord, say I'll draw it in the root note. So go and E-flat. Then I miss a note in the scale and then draw in and out. Then I do the same. I'm missing out and scale and I draw in another night. Like I said, this works on any note in scale. It's as simple as that. And then you start to see how important it is to pick the scale. It doesn't matter what scale you're in. It'll still, the same rules apply. And once you know that you can literally make any code you want. So let's e.g. just the one more. And that is say I want a B flat chord. So I can draw my root note now, and I haven't got the notes drawn in there, but obviously it just continues up. So these literally just repeat. So it'd be like C, D, E-flat, etc. So I can just use the notes I've already got. So I've got my B-flat. I miss a note in the scale. So the next note will be d. And then I miss a note in the scale, and the next note will be F. Alright, so it's just like that. And there we go. We've got little, little chord progression. That's just an example. Of course, we're not actually going to use this one. We're going to use a different one in the next lesson, but we'll get to that. Now the last thing I want to talk about here is the numbering of the cords because it just makes it a bit easier. And it's very, very simple. So it's literally like you have numbers next to each of these and you just count up. So the tonic of the scale c in this case is always the one chord. And then the two chord, a three chord, four chord, five chord, six chord, seven chord is literally that simple. So if I say, I want a two chord, then you know that you go 12 and then that'll be the root note of the two chord. And then obviously you just follow the same steps. So we skip a note in the scale, then add a note, and then skipping out and add a note which is a flat. This is a two chord because this chord here is a three chord because it's 123. And then the root note of it starts in three, this one up here. So obviously we count up 1234567. So that's the seven chord. If I say you want a six chord, pretty easy, counts up 123456. And that's gonna be the root node of the next tried that you make. The last thing I will mention is that when it comes to choosing the chords that used to make up your progression, I'm 95% of the time. You will start with the one chord as the first chord. Just like this. It's quite rare that you actually start with a different chord. It can be done, but to be honest, when you're a beginner, just start with the one chord. It's going to make your life a lot easier. Then the last chord in the progression is 95% of the time. Again, always a four or a five chord. Okay? So that'll be a chord starting with, in this particular scale anyway, it'd be a chord starting with either F or G. So e.g. I'll just quickly do that. Say I've got my f night, I skip and I add a note, Skipping at an eight, which is C. The reason for this is that the transition from either the four or five chord at the end of the progression, going back to the one chord gives a sense of resolution. So we start with the one chord, then end on the four chord. Not sort of transition always has a sense of resolution if you use the four or five chord. So basically, it's pretty simple to make a full bar chord progression because it always going to start with the one chord. And you're always gonna have a four or five chord at the end. Then you've just got to pick the two chords that go in-between it that sound really nice. How you want them to sound. Alright, so I'm gonna delete that because we're not going to be using it. In the next lesson, we will get on with actually making the chord progression and showing you how I came up with it from scratch. So that is the foundational knowledge that you really need to understand in order to get started. Once you understand this, then you can add to that knowledge and start experimenting with things like seven called sus chords, borrow chords, which we're going to get to in the next lesson. Alright, thank you very much for watching guys and girls. I'll see you in the next one. 5. Lesson 04 Music Theory Starting The Chord Progression: Hey everybody, welcome back. Alright, so the focus of this lesson and the next lesson is to show how complexity in chord progressions comes out of simplicity. Before we get into it, I just want to go into this chord progression. So obviously this is the full chord progression that you'll have in the workforce if you bought the course, we're actually going to get into how to build this literally from scratch. I just want to show you basically what it looks like at the end. So we will get a good idea of sort of where we're going with this. So as you can see, there's a lot going on here. It looks pretty complicated. And obviously it's based on your opinion whether you think it sounds good or not. But I like it. I'm just going to play it quickly or at least some of it. Let's say from here, it's like you get the idea, evolves all over that. This is like a 32 bar chord progression and it evolves along. But we're going to talk about how we get to that point just from starting with simple triads. Alright? So you can then repeat that yourself, that with any melody you like from scratch. Alright, so let's just get this out the way. And I'm just going to start with a simple four bar chord progression. And this is pretty much how I start all of my chord progressions, not every single one. Some startup bit differently. I might start with like single notes and then add codes that but either way, this is usually how I start. So let's go in and see our midi editor. And of course, offers cord is in C, So C minor. I've already shown in the last lesson how we go about actually making triads. And just for those who are near would actually just stick in the ghost notes, they're not going to play anything. It's just that people can see which notes are in the G minor scale. And as I showed in the last lesson as well. So we got our first core. We know the chord progression is going to start with a one chord and then our four-bar chord progression in this instance, I'm just going to pick the chord that it's going to end with, because it's either a four or five chord. And in this case, I'm going to use a five chord. So that's 12345, says G, B flat, and then D. And then the two chords in-between. And then we will start with a six chord, which is a flatter than a three chord, say a, B, E flat. But we're going to go with it. So this is sort of starting full bar chord progression. Except we will have that last chord an octave lower. So I'm just highlighting. In Cubase, you just hold the Shift and down arrow keys to drop it in. Ok, save basic, nice little chord progression, fine. But if I just said look, here's my chord progression, you'd be forgiven for thinking that it's overly simplistic. But as you'll start to see, we're going to add using simple steps, layers of complexity to this. Just note, by the way, there's absolutely nothing wrong with using symbol triads if that suits your song and what you want to achieve, we want to get something for this track that's perhaps could be described as a bit more emotionally complex. So we need to sort of build on just a simple triads. But for some songs, certainly pop songs and stuff like that, it can really work just using simple tribes can be enough. Alright, so the next step is to duplicate this over. So I'm going to make this into an eight bar chord progression. So we'll certainly start the second repetition, if you like, or the second half of this eight bar chord progression with the C minor chord. Both probably have a couple of different notes in-between. And let's just mix this up a bit. And we'll have a four chord for our last course. Say I'm just going to drag that down. Then of course I know what codes I want in-between. I want this second chord in the second half to be a five chord, so I can just Nick. We wonder we put in there, and then I want a three chord, which I can just steal there as well. So of course, when I made it for the first time, it wasn't like this just suddenly happened and I just went, oh yeah, I want a one-quarter, three-quarter five chord wherever I obviously just played around with it, I did pick the one chord. I did pick the five core to start off with as the last note in the first half of the progression. And then I messed around using different codes and found these two, which works really nicely. And then I did the same for the next one as well. So once I obviously have the one chord, the four chord, I then played around with these two and try different chords out. And just found these works quite well. Okay, So this is what we got so far and it is super basic. So as it is so simplistic, let's have a look at how we can make this emotionally deeper. Say the first and simplest way is to use different voicings for the codes. Say, easing different voicings simply means you're changing the octave that the notes are in. You're actually using the same note. So e.g. if I take, say, the E-flat of the first chord and then move that down an octave. Kinda get a different, fill up an update. E.g. you get a much more sort of epic sound if you'd like one way of describing it anyway, you don't just have to move the notes to a different position. You can actually duplicate the night, say the most common sort of thing that you could do is add a base note, say let's copy the C down and just really thickens up and gives it a much deeper sound. Say that's fine for the first chord. The second chord will duplicate the top note, but we'll have this an octave down. Save this effectively becomes the base note of the chord that will do the opposite for the third chord. So, whoops, sorry, I'm on a day that's just duplicating up the E-flat there. Already. It's starting to sound a bit nicer, a bit more emotional, perhaps, that all sort of come together as we go. But let's just play around with this last chord now. And I want to do something a bit different on this one. Up to now, these three chords have just had sort of simple voicing changes or additions. Say for this chord, Let's work on that. So what I'm gonna do is actually use what's called a seventh chord. Now, just be aware that those who are new to music theory, a seventh chord with a th after and A7 chord without the THR, actually different things. The seven chord relates to the position of the triads. So again, we go back to our numbers is like 1234567. So seven chord would just be a chord starting with B flat and then making a simple triad. But a seventh chord is any triad that you add a fourth note to, which is a seventh interval above the root note. Now, that sounds really complicated, but it's actually dead simple. Say, I want to make a seventh chord out this code. All I do is literally follow along, say, where we made the code in the first place, we need the root notes. Then we skipped a note in the scale, added a note, gets another note in the scale and added another node. And now we're gonna do the same thing. We're going to skip a note in the scale and add another node. And that is now a seventh chord. You can sort of hear the emotional impact that has it's much greater than just having the standard called. They're not that it's bad or anything, but it just changes the feel of it. One last thing I want to do this is that you're going to see that D, and I'm going to move that down an octave just to sort of open up the code a bit. Say starts to sound very nice and certainly very different from just the original triads. So let's carry on with the second half of this eight bar chord progression. So again, I'm going to duplicate the sea from the first chord. And this one, I'm actually going to change the voicing of this. I'm gonna move that up an octave. I'm going to duplicate up the B-flat, and I'm going to duplicate the D down one octave. Let's just quickly play that so you can hear what we've got so far. Sorry, Actually, before we go any further, just want to explain. This doesn't happen through simple knowledge of music theory. What I'm doing here is, well, when I made this the first time is literally just experimenting with the different voicings, just trying different notes in different positions. Trying to seventh chord, maybe trying to SAS code, which we'll talk about in a bit. Try borrowed chord, which we'll also talk about in a bit. But we literally is just about experimentation. It's not like you get to the point where at least for me anyways, certainly didn't get to the point where I'm like, I got a coordinate. I'm like, Oh, the perfect code after that will be this. And then the perfect code after that will be this. Blah, blah, blah. It doesn't really happen. This happens through experimentation and just trying things out. And that's how you really get to getting something that's original and emotional all at the same time, right? So with that being said, let's just quickly play what we've got so far. This one's quite simple on a duplicate both of these notes up. One thing about this chord progression that I found when I was listening to, and I have this so far and I hadn't worked on the last code yet. And I just needed to change the feel of this last chord. So let me just quickly play it so you can sort of grasp and understanding of where we are. And then I'll show you what I did to overcome this last chord not sounding quite right. It's not terrible. It would kind of work perhaps, but just for me, it doesn't quite say it ends on a bit of a downer ready? And it's a minor chord. And just by the way, so you tell if a chord is a major or minor chord is very simple to do in your dough. Just zoom in a little bit. So when you look at the code, if you've got a gap of two notes between the bottom and middle notes. And if you've got a gap of 123 before the middle and top notes, then you've got a minor chord. If it's the other way around and you've got a gap of three between the bottom and middle, and a gap of two between the middle and top, then it's a major chord. It's as simple as that. Now, all of the chords in a progression will be either major or minor. Just because you're using a minor scale doesn't mean that they'll all be minor triads. Some of them will be majors. It's just the way it works. So I'll just put that back to where it was for a second. There is also one other type of chord called a diminished chord, which has a gap of two between both the bottom and middle, and the middle and top, say e.g. it would look like that. There's always one diminished chord in, well, almost all scales, major and minor scales. In the minor scale, the diminished chord is always the two chord annual noticed or you might have noticed a father. We're not actually using a two chord in this particular chord progression. The diminished chord is kind of harder to get to fit in with your track. Doesn't mean it can't be used, it does get used, but in this track we're not using it. So I'm not gonna go into any more detail about it. But the reason I'm explaining all of this is because what we're gonna do is we're going to change this last chord from what is it's naturally supposed to be a minor chord. Am I going to do what's called borrowing a chord? And that is simply changing the chord from a minor chord to a major chord. Now I'm just going to play that so you can get a feel for it. It sounds like it has ending to the chord progression. And the reason it's called a borrowed chord is because as you might notice, the, a note that isn't actually in this scale, we using a note that's outside of the scale, that would be in the C major scale, whereas we're using the C minor scale. Now, it doesn't really matter. Didn't really need to understand the mechanics or the music theory behind it, just that you can use what's called a borrowed chord. So you just change the old code here or there. Anyway. Let's get on. We've got a couple more things to do to this last chord. So I'm going to duplicate this. And I'm actually going to take that a, which is sort of the borrowed part of the chord. And we're going to move that up a whole lot, Save as well. There's one last thing that I want to do to this, which I need to explain what she's using a sus chord. But first of all, let me just play this so you get an idea of where we are before we add the source code. So at the moment, I feel like it just doesn't quite resolved properly. I just want to add one last thing to this now. Very quickly before we go any further, I'm actually just going to undo the changes in position here. Just so we go back to our original sort of triad, even though it's got the borrowed coordinate, still got the AC. This is a major chord rather than a minor chord. And for the first half of it, what I'm gonna do, I'm just going to shorten that one. And then I'm going to add in a B-flat, which will be known as a sus four chord. So we're basically changing the middle note. So we've got no middle note in here, which is normally a natural third, and we're basically moving that up. If we moved it down, that would be a sauce to chord. Sus4 chord. If I move them above what we sort of discussed, that'd be a seven chord. Gets a little bit confusing, but it doesn't really matter. That's fine. This is a SubTwo code and that's what we're gonna do. So now I've got these in there. I'm going to move them into their correct position, which is an octave up. And I'm going to duplicate that f again. So I just want to show you how this is built so you can hopefully understand what's going on there. Now, let me play this. A couple of things I want to do though, is I want to change the velocity of a couple of these nights because they have a bit too much emphasis, I would lower the velocity of these so they're a little bit softer. And then actually make these almost full work. Okay, so you might be able to tell that there is a bit of a pattern emerging here. Let's just give ourselves a bit more space so we can see the entire eight bar chord progression as it stands. So what we've done is we got simple voicing changes for the first three chords in each half of this eight bar chord progression. And then the fourth cords, or the fourth and the eighth chord, we've done something a bit different. So the first one, we used a seventh chord, and in the second one we used while two things actually a two chord and a borrowed chord. And possibly just my opinion, but I would say that using a seventh chord and a subsidy cord, borrow cord, they're sort of more impactful. Changes in the chord progression. Sort of emphasizes the repeating parts. Before we go back to the one chord, we sort of emphasizing this note. Then we go back to the one chord emphasizing this. And then we're repeating the chord progression. That is not to say of course, that you should not use a seventh chord halfway through the progression or use a borrowed chord for the first chord in your progression. That's absolutely fine. You can do whatever you want. But my point here is, and we'll be talking about this later on in the tutorial, is that this sort of structuring in the way that the chord progression happens. So the first three chords, just simple voicing, then a bigger change than another three calls, just simple voicing and a bigger change changes the sort of energetic feel of the melody. And all of this adds to the tension and release of the track. And if you can master, but push and pull of tension and release in your songs at all levels, not just the melody level, but also the macro scale, the song structure. Then you will be able to make compelling music that people just want to keep listening to you. And again, we're gonna go into this in much more detail later in the tutorial and really fully analyze this. Okay, that's it for the lesson. We're halfway through with the melody and I hope you can start to see the process of creating complexity out of simplicity, starting with the basic triad progression and building up bit by bit. Thanks for watching guys and girls. I'll see you in the next one. 6. Lesson 05 Music Theory Adding Complexity To The Chord Progression: Hey everybody, welcome back. Alright, so in this lesson we're going to take a look at how we make the eight bar chord progression into a 32 bar chord progression. For this, we're going to jump into the full pad middy that we've got there. So I'm just going to delete that bit that we got at the beginning there that we used as an example. And I'm just going to go into the midi. So let's have a little look. Alright, so just for now, I'm going to meet these top notes so I can bring them in one at a time. The important bit to realize here is that we've got the same eight bar chord progression here, and it's just looped over and over eight times to be precise. So it's literally just that same eight bar chord progression all the way through. The only changes you might notice is this note up here where we've used instead of a sus chord law, you've got here with the a sharp. We've got a C, which is just repeating the lowest note of the chord. And then apart from that, the only difference is we've got all of these extra notes. So let me just zoom in to the sort of main or first repetition of this. Just so you know, as I zoom out, we got to sort of repetitions of the full 32 bar chord progression. So this is the first one. And then there's another repetition of it here. This is the second half of the tracks, so we just repeat it. But we're gonna get into that in more detail later on. So really want to work on just this first half, which is the sort of main 32 bar chord progression that I came up with originally. So the first thing that we've done to this is actually add in base notes. So got bass notes here. Sorry, let me just zoom in a bit so that more accurately say, I'll just play this quickly as the base notes come in. Having the base, and it's coming in halfway through. This chord progression has a really nice impacts and adds a bit of variation to it. Especially when you've got all the sounds and the piano coming in and everything like that, which will come in later. So that's the first big change, if you like, to the chord progression. Now the second thing is obviously all of these extra notes that we've got going on up here, which are kind of like playing a top line almost to the chord progression. And although it looks pretty complicated, we really go ahead and build this one note at a time. So one thing to consider before I take you through that process is in this tutorial, it all kinda looks like it will happen quite quickly, which is not really the case by the time I got to this point when I was making this track for the first time, I'd listen to this chord progression quite a bit. So I was already very familiar with it. Now while I'm explaining this, because that being familiar with the melody you're working on makes it much easier to pick the right notes when doing what I'm about to show you. So all we do is start adding notes. Say the first native ad was this night, literally in the second chord progression. Then from there I just listened to it and feel where I want it to go or imagine where I want it to go. And I can imagine it going the, the, the upper notes. And that'll be that see back down. Literally the processes that just one note at a time. And as I go through and add a note, I just kind of listen or in use my imagination for where I think the next note should be. And most of the time is quite obvious. The tune will always tell you where it wants to go. When you listen back to it. Say you can hear it just growing in energy as the notes go up. And this is one of the concepts that I had in mind as I did this was that I wanted to keep the sort of energy rising. Didn't want too much up and down. Obviously that is a bit of up and down. You need a bit of that in the track just to keep things interesting. But overall, the actual energy is basically just rising up, an upsurge on meeting these and growing in energy or raising in energy as it progresses throughout the progression. And literally that is it note by note, it just goes through until we have the full progression. Now the very last thing to consider, which I've touched on briefly, is the velocity of the notes. Say as you can see, the velocity of the Knights varies quite a bit. Just pull up the velocity information. You can see there's quite a bit of variation going on there between the different notes. And the reason for changing them is two-fold. One, I want this to sound more human, like it's really being played by an actual person. And also as well. Some of the notes as they go up in pitch actually kinda get louder. So some of the velocity changes as well that she just to balance those notes so they didn't just suddenly jump out at you. And really that's it. So let's have a quick recap of what's happened here. So we literally, we started with just a simple 4-bar chord progression using simple triads. We then added, so that chord progression made it into an eight bar, but simple triad progression. Then we started changing the voicings of some of the notes. We added seventh chords, borrowed chords, a SAS code to get what is the basis for the main melody. And then we literally repeated that four times. And then we've gone through and added all of these top notes on top of it. Not really using any particular music theory, really the only rule that I follow here is just using notes in the scale, at least apart from the last chord in the eight bar chord progression because we got a borrowed chord there. So you can use an a in that case. But apart from that, all the nights are in the scale. And I haven't really looked at whether they're sus chords or seventh chords or ninth chords or whatever. It's just literally going by air and seeing where I think it should go, experimenting a bit, trying things out and if it doesn't work, try a different note, et cetera, until we got something that we're really happy with. Alright, so that's it for this lesson. In the next lesson, we're going to look at adding an adagio string upper layer. Thanks very much for watching guys and girls see you in the next one. 7. Lesson 06 Adajio String Layer: Hey everybody, welcome back. Alright, so to complement our pad, I want to add a nice organic string sound playing basically the top notes that we've just added in. What I want to do is have this string sound coming in after the first 8 bar, where we start this top line of ours with these extra notes. And the reason for it coming in, 8 bar in is to basically keep the track evolving and keep things interesting. Obviously, the first 8 bar is pretty much just going to be purely the pad sound. So the listener, e.g. would just be getting used to a nice soft, gentle chord progression that's coming. And then we're going to add a top line to that easiness adagio string sample. And you'll see how it melds together, but it doesn't add this really nice organic flavor. Like it was actually being played in, say, e.g. like an orchestra with someone on strings just coming in gently after the first 8 bar. Say, when I did this originally, or just literally copied from after the first 8 bar of the top notes. So just like literally copied the whole lot. And just copied that Midea on to a new midi track for the Adagio string. But of course I've modified it slightly and change the velocities to suit just the string samples. So will actually load in. The midi file is just got exactly the same notes. That velocity is just slightly changed. So we'll load in that file. But first of all, of course, gotta load up the sample we're going to use. Now you don't have to use a string sample, but I find that adding these organic sounds just really add to the emotion of a track and help keep it grounded in reality. The sample we're going to use is in the workforce that you download it and it's the Adagio strings in C. In Cubase, we have a sampler, so I can just load this straight into the sampler track. Now, pretty much all doors these days have built-in samplers, so there should not be a problem for you. If your dog does not have one, then there are free sample instruments you can download and use. One of the best free ones you can get is this one, the t x1 six wx software Sant per se. If you just searched on Google, you'll find it. You can download it from this site here, completely free for both PC and Mac. So if you don't have a sampler, then just you can download and install that one. You might need to watch a video on how to use it if you're not familiar with it. But hopefully most stores do have their own sampler, so you should be fine, right? So we've got that in, and let's just bring in the midi file saved as gates to middy. Or you can just do this from Explorer as well. For most doors, you can just drag it in from the file explorer. It's actually pops it right in the correct position, which is 8 bar into it. So let's just turn this down. First of all, the whole idea of this is that it just comes in very gently to start off with over the top of the path. So let's just play that. One of the thing which is super, super important is we're playing this a bit fast at the moment. This is set at 120 bpm. Track is easy for this just changed the BPM now before we start adding OJ samples and everything. So 84 is the correct tempo, much, much slower and ambient. I'll just play it from halfway through the chord progression. So you can hear the string coming in. It just adds a nice sort of top layer to it. Just so you know, as I mentioned before, the velocities have been modified specifically for this. And you can see the gradual of the flow that they have to them over the course of whether played. So just a slightly different velocity pattern to the pad. But this one seemed to work really well for the strings, just emphasizes it in the right place. And all of this energy manipulation that we have with velocities and with notes and everything at all goes towards creating that sense of push and pull, tension and release, which really keeps the listener sucked into your track. But one thing we have with this, as it's a sample. Now, obviously if you've got an instrument which plays strings, then you can use that. No problem. And that's really the best solution to it. But you'll find that when you use a sample, the higher in pitch it gets, obviously the quicker the sample plays. So when you get to these higher notes, e.g. like here, the natural attack that the string has, if I just play the first note. You can see there that it has a sort of natural attack. It takes time for it to get to full volume. When we play the higher notes, it goes almost a full volume straightaway. It's almost like it's starting very quickly. We don't want this because it sounds more unnatural the higher up in pitch it goes. So what we're gonna do is actually add an envelope using the sampler. Say for that, I'm just going to go to the model. This is in Cubase obscene most sump has a pretty straightforward when you want to use the envelope shaper. And all we're gonna do is add a tag to this. A bit more than that. Just zooming out of it. Basically the attack wants to match the natural attack of the sample. It's like perhaps just a tiny bit shorter than that. And then as we get to the higher notes, you still have that gentle lead into the sound. Okay, so just using the salt block, the attack on it makes it sound a bit more natural. So that's fine. We don't need to worry about any of the other settings. The last thing that we're ready to finish this off is just the reverb. So you give it a bit of depth. That sounds a bit weird being just a dry sample on his own. But that's fine. We're going to get some reverb later on. Now just so you know, in the sampler you do have this thing called audio warp, which most instruments have Sophie turn that on. What it'll do is it will basically keep the exact length and position of the sample, but it will artificially change the pitch. Now that's fine for some samples, but when you're dealing with big octave changes like we've got here. So literally spanning from second OK, save all the way up to the fifth, OK, save that. That's quite a large variation. So what you'll find is when you've got audio warp on and you go that high is it all starts to sound very sort of unnatural in here. That just goes all weird and funny. So on the low notes this would be fine. But as we go up, just sounds horrible. So we don't use audio walk for that reason. But if say you are using something and it didn't span so many octaves and it probably be okay. See, I mean, even though maybe it doesn't sound quite as natural as an actual string being played at that pitch is still sounds way, way better. Alright, so that's the string in, no problem. The next thing we're going to add is a piano, which will come in halfway through just the same timing that the bass notes do. And we just sort of gradually building up the energy of this track as we go through, or at least the first 32 bar chord progression. Alright, so that's it for this lesson. Thank you very much for watching guys and girls see you in the next one. 8. Lesson 07 Piano: Hey everybody, welcome back. In this lesson, I want to add a piano. Now what sort of happened or how it came about was as I was listening to this over and over and over and over as I made it, I kept hearing this. And when I say hearing as in imagination, a melody over the top which is really similar to attract called lizard by Mauro Picasa. It's like an old track, their transcript from the nineties, the metal E4, it kinda goes there. Did a did it. If anybody remembers that. And that's roughly the same pattern that I heard over the top of this. Did it? But obviously in key. Alright, so basically that's what I managed to do. So I'm just going to actually bring that in in just a second. But first of all, I want to load up the piano instruments. So there are a few actually pretty decent free piano instruments out there. And you can have a search for different ones if you like. But the one I'm going to use is called room piano V3. So just Google room piano V3, and it'd be the first link there. So obviously you can choose to donate if you want, but you can download it for completely free. Obviously, if you have your own piano instrument, like if you've got native instruments, they do a really good one called grand jury, which is 10 generally, normally use, but in this case I wanted to keep the tutorial as accessible as possible. So I'm going to actually use the free sense, so I'm just going to add that to my projects. So room piano V3 and track. There it is. I'm just going to close it for a sec and I'm going to bring in the middy save, I'm just going to bring it in from the workforce, the piano Midea and drop that. It's brought it in. And it brings it in as two separate chunks of midi, which is financially got to line them up properly. So we want them starting halfway through, but just make sure you're both selected. And then find the halfway point, which is their bar 21 in this case. And I'm just going to have that say the piano he starts, they're just going to turn it down a bit. Say that it's pretty quiet actually, so I'm just turning it back up again. And I'll just play that from the beginning so you can get a better idea of what's happening there. At the moment. Obviously, it sounds quite enough because it hasn't got any effects on it also needs a bit of EQ as well. But you get the idea that is the pattern. So it's roughly the same rhythm as the lizard track that I was talking about, but obviously made to fit in with the melody of this track. So it's literally just the same pattern each time it's just been modified for each 4 bar. So each full bars and notes are different, but pretty much the patterns are same until we get to the end here. Where do something just a little bit different. And again, this just comes about just through experimenting, obviously using the same notes as what we use in our melody, but literally just experimentation. And like I said, once I got that first rhythm, that is the same. Here, here are the same pattern and here, and then the other bits, just, especially this end part here, is just really experimenting a bit and just imagining how it could go and trying different things out. And again, like I say, it didn't just suddenly happen. This was a lot of experimentation to get to this point. Now perhaps if I actually played an instrument, I'll make it really easy for myself. But unfortunately, I don't say I need to take the time to actually learn to play the keyboard just in case you haven't got this last one lined up as well, just make sure that the second bits of Midea is also lined up with the halfway point through the second repetition of author A2 bar progression from there to there and wants to start halfway through and it should overlap. But the end there's just like the ending for the track, but we'll get to that a bit later on. Now, one last thing I want to do before we actually end this lesson, and that's just tweak the EQ, this piano bit. I'm just going to bring up my channel settings. This is in Cubase, but obviously add an EQ or whatever it is. However, you do that on your door. And I just want to do a couple of things. So one is that the piano sounds a little bit sort of mid heavy. St. just using a sort of wide parametric see, sort of carve out a bit of those mid-range frequencies. Don't get too mad. Just enough to sort of tame them a bit there, a little bit, not boxy sounding, but it's getting that way. And I just want to brighten this up a bit as well. So I'm just going to add a high shelf. Just gone a bit too extreme with a high shelf there. So just taming at birth, absolutely fine. And to be fair, it's too early to really make final decisions about the queuing and stuff, just getting it in the ballpark. So it's ready for us to mix later on. Alright, so that's it for this lesson is about high time though that we got some reverb on these elements to really start gluing all this together and actually making it sound nice because at the moment everything sounds really sort of out of place. So that's what we'll be doing in the next lesson. Thank you very much for watching guys and girls See you then. 9. Lesson 08 Adding Space: Hey everybody, welcome back. Alright, so in this lesson we're going to start adding reverb to this track and creating a sense of space for all of the elements. So before we get going, one thing to consider is which instruments you use that you've got a new mix to get the reverb sound in Craig's. Now, I advise that you don't try and do that on a pad because of the nature of the pad is very slow and has a big release and tail on it already, that sort of thing. So it's not really the best instrument to gauge what the reverb in your truck is doing. It's much better to use something like piano. Let me just delete that. And the piano, basically, it has a sharp attack and it sort of ends quickly. So you'll be able to really hear the reverb that's on there now it's actually already got some sort of reverb on this. So let's just go in to the instruments and sounds like it's got reverb on there, but maybe it hasn't. Maybe it's just the sustain. Say that's just the radius. Alright, so that's fine. I think we can leave the sustainer just quickly check. Okay, so that sounds pretty natural and very dry. Just with the release set to that. So that's fine, that's good enough. Now, let's add a reverb to our projects. So pretty much every single door should have a half decent reverb plugin built in. Or you might well have a third party one that you'd like to use. I'm going to use one called Neo verb, which is actually by isotope. But really it's just because it's nice and I like it and it's easy to use, but any reverb plugin will be acceptable, Don't worry. So I'm just going to right-click. I'm going to add an effect to track this is how we do it in Cubase because I'm going to set this up as a send effects. I should imagine that you already know what a send effect is. I'm just going to add a new verb. I want to make sure this is stereo. I'm just going to call it main reverb, just so I know what it is. And honestly this, I know it looks fancy and stuff like that, but really is not that much different from any other reverb plugin. I'm mostly just using a plate response which you can select in almost any other plug-in will have a plate preset and then we're changing the reverb time. In this case, we'll try about 4.2. I'm going to make this whole reverb. So it's like a mixture of plates and who reverb and your hill. That sounds like in just a second now I will actually load up a different reverb plug-in, one that looks more standard and I'll go through the settings on that as well just so you can sort of match the same settings. But for now I'm just gonna this sounding a K on our piano effects channel setup there. Let's just say to that as well. And I'm going to just send my piano through to the main reverb group, activate this end. And let's stop playing around with this. Santa. Pretty nice. Or I can somewhere around there. It's hard to gauge with that all of the other elements in there, but that sounds pretty decent. Now what I'm gonna do, like I said, is I'm actually going to go to the effects channel where the sender's, I'm going to just mute or bypass that for a second. And I'm going to add a standard reverb, say, I'm sorry, this is just off-screen but doesn't really matter. It's just the Cubase standard reverb, which comes, I believe in all versions of Cubase. But honestly, if you've got a reverb plug-in in your door, it's gonna be very, very similar to this. And literally the only thing you need to do if it's a send effects, you need to turn the mix-up, which I totally forgot to do on the other plugin. So I'm just gonna do that now very quickly. Mix up to 100%. It's like the most important thing to do as a send effects. And of course I forgot it on that one. No worries. But that's fine. Say it mixed up. Now we're going to just change the diffusion down a bit because of fun, the diffusion always adds a bit of shininess to the reverb. And literally we're just going to crank up the reverb time. And apart from that, we're not going to need to do much. I don't think piano. And that already sounds absolutely fine. Just literally stock settings like that is no problem at all. Just going to bypass that. So you can hear the difference actually between that and the Neo verb. Say, there's really not a whole lot of difference between them. That's what I mean, Even though that new verb, it looks all shiny and nice and funky. Most reverbs sound pretty decent these days, so don't worry if you haven't gotten near verb, really just easiest standard door reverb and you'll be absolutely fine. Alright, so that's enough. That's the reverb sets up on the piano, at least now let's just add it to the strings next. So sorry, I keep soldiering on soloing stuff. Don't worry about that. I'm just going to send this through the string and see the main reverb. Now I'm going to say too, it makes a massive difference already. So we'll just leave it like that really nice, heavy amounts of reverb on there. Say let's go to the pad, say that and send that through to the main reverb as well. Yeah. And I just want to hear this on its own so I'll un-solo the dodgy string sample without just gives it that really nice sense of space. Alright, so that's fine. Now let's have a listen to the whole thing. E.g. when the piano comes in, say the strings and had just a bit too loud at the moment. So I'm just going to turn them both down. I'm just selecting them both. And in Cubase, you can hold Alt or Option and Shift and then turn them down and you'll be turned in both of these down. I'm not sure what that control will be in a different door, but if you don't have one, that's fine. Just select them individually and turn them down. But they just overpowering a little bit. I think my choice of not having as much reverb on there was a bit off. I think it needed more reverb. Otherwise, it just sounds a little bit out of place because everything else has said drenched in reverb, but it is sounding nice. Say Happy Days, will just add that reverb as we need to. All these new elements that we add. The next thing will be our drumbeat. So we'll probably add just the same reverb. We may want to add a reverb just for the drums, but we'll see when we get to that. Alright, thanks very much for watching guys and girls see you in the next one. 10. Lesson 09 Chill Step Drum Beat: Hey everybody, welcome back. Alright, so in this lesson we're going to actually start adding some drums to this track. Now the first thing I want to do is actually just play what we've got so far, at least for the first half of this repetition. And then I'll discuss why we're going to put the drums where we're going to put them. Now obviously, we're going to talk more about the energy flow of the track later on when we have more of the elements of the trach in place, I won't go too much into it here. But it's still important that we touch on that as we're talking about placing the elements. Alright, so I'm just going to let the track actually play through at least up to the first part. Obviously feel free, skip ahead if you want to, but it's good to get a sense of how the track is evolving as it plays through. Alright, here we go. So what we've got is we start off gently in the track, obviously with just the sort of basic triads, almost than eight balls him. We've got the Adagio for Strings coming in, just gradually building energy. Then there's a bigger change when we get to 16 bar n as the standard for normal song structure. So you always have a change every 8 bar and definitely every 16 bar and have a bigger change. Based snakes coming in and the piano, which really adds to the atmosphere. And then it sort of just gradually builds in energy with the notation sort of going up. And there'll be a couple of other sounds in there as well as we go. And it's kind of like crescendos or is going to crescendo. After all, this energy is built up at this point here, where are we going to have a bit of a break? And then we go into the second repetition of this chord progression. So the only difference really between the first repetition, second repetition is that we don't have the bass notes in this second repetition on the pad. And what we'll have instead of these bass notes on the pad, is we'll actually have a dedicated baseline, which will be playing these notes for this second repetition. And what I want to happen on the second repetition. So this first part is just gonna be very plain, just a couple of drums as special effects. And then we're going to actually have drums coming in in the second half, which is going to add to the energy and the baseline as well. So let's actually add the drums that we want in the second half is where we want to add them in problems. So bar Thursday nine. Actually, before we do add the drums, I just want to mention that really we're getting into the sort of personal choice arena here. And by that I mean, some people will like the drums I use, which are a bit more chill step or have a chills that vibe to them. Although I wouldn't say this track is really proper chill step. It just takes elements from that genre. But of course, you could use very different drums. Perhaps you want this track to remain fully ambient and just have very minimal drums or even no drums. And so you can go in so many different directions. It's totally up to you. But obviously, what I've chosen for this is a sort of chill, steady kind of vibe to the second half. So that's what we're gonna do. But obviously, you can go in many different directions. So when it comes to the timing of the beat, this is quite important. I didn't really want a beat that was locked to the grid lines. I wanted something that had more of a natural feel to the timing of it. Unless you're a drama, it can be quite hard to program in a natural sounding beat like that. So what I did for this tutorial was use a technique called beat tracing, which is analogous to using tracing paper to copy a drawing that's underneath it. So basically you find a drum loop that has the right time. Insert their sounds used in the loop or irrelevant, we're literally only after the timing information. And when you find one where the timing suits your track and what you're after, then you simply copy the timing of the drum hits in the loop with your own drum samples. Let's see what that looks like in practice. I'm just going to go to my work files and find germinate Pip go say, I'm just going to drag this into my projects. That up there. Now this drumbeat, if I just say that, I like that pattern, That's the pattern I want in my track. Obviously it's way too fast. They are going to fit it to the tempo of my track. Now in Cubase, that's really easy. I just click musical mode and then it's stretched to fit in with my track. If you get stuck in your door, a quick Google search will tell you how to fit a loop to the tempo of your particular door. It's a pretty standard thing, so just go check that out if you need to, and I'll just quickly play that. Let's un-solo it as well. And let's turn it down a bit. You can see the sort of tempo of it there. It's a bit lazy. If I zoom right in, you'll start to see that a lot of these hits aren't sort of on traditional tempo lines and on offbeats, they have got a bit of swing to them, as we can see. So that's the placement of the beats that we're actually going to copy, right? So first of all, let's gets in our kick. Say I'm just going to load this into a sampler track so I can trigger the kick as midi. So I'm just going to draw in a blank midi segment on that, the same length as the drum loop. And all we're gonna do is actually go through and copy all of the kick positions. Suppose it is one there at the start and facts, let's just load this into the lower zone. Makes things a little bit easier. And of course, let's turn this down a bit as well. So all I'm gonna do is literally find the stock places of the kick. So obviously there's one right at the beginning there. There's another one here. So I'm going to zoom in, turn off my snap so I can get this really nice and precise. And that's where my next kick wants to go. Again, snap off. Then I'm just going to match the positions. Says find the next kick which is here. Draw that in. And then another one right there, which is pretty much on the bar line. Find the next one. And that's it for the kick. Say the next one is the snares. Although the snares, they're all completely pretty much all exactly on the beat. So I don't need to worry about any funky timing for them. They're all just placed as a, the normal snare would be, say that's fine. Now obviously when you're copying the position in your door is going to probably look a little bit different from that, although you've got the same thing, he got the audio, you've got the middy. If you want to know where you need to add a kick or whatever dramatist you're copying the position, obviously just set your playhead so it's in the right place, e.g. right there. And then go into your midi and then you can see where you've lined up and that's where obviously you want to add your drum. Alright, so let's crack on and do the snare. The snare, like I said, is nice and easy, so let's find that. So that's the snare. We're going to use this right-click in Cubase anyway and add this to a sampler track again and turn my snap back on. Now the snare in dance music always goes on the second and fourth beat of the bar. However, in this particular track where even though running at a low tempo AT for BPM, we're actually going to have the snare halfway through the bar. So any one snare per bar. So you can hear the sort of laziness to the beats or the kick of Z has got those old timings which helps give that sort of feel, which is exactly what I want for this. Didn't want something that sounded too tight and regimented and wanted something that sounded a bit different 3D. And then we've got a hat sound, I believe, as a hat sound there at the end of that loop. So we're just going to put that in on this one there as well. So let's have a listen to the original quickly. Say let's add in our sample. So in the workforce we're looking for closed hat 18. Again, I'm just going to add this as a sampler track. Drawing a blank but Amity, and then I'm gonna go in and line up. So I need to turn off my snap, find the very beginning of that hat sound going into my head. Blank midi. And let's add a note in here. Snap turned on. So let's turn that off. Line it up with my playhead and we're good to go. Okay, So last one for the hat right at the end here. Zoom in a bit so we can make sure we're nice and accurate. There we go. We've copied their position. So let's just have a little listen after we've turned down r hat. There we go. That's basically beat tracing. So obviously you're free to pick whatever drums you want. So like I say, if you wanted a more minimal ambient track with sort of more traditional ambient drums, and of course, you could just replace these with softer sounding or whatever drums of your choice. So let's just copy that over. I'm just going to turn my snap back on. And I'm just going to duplicate that across. And also I didn't need my original loop. Say I'm just going to remove that as well. So one thing of note is that the timings that I've used for this drumbeat, obviously, the kicks being sort of slightly lazy sounding or whatever or swung. That timing is also reflected in things like the piano. The piano obviously wants to fall at the same timings as the kick. If it does fall at the same time as a cake, then it wants to have that swung sort of beat to it. Otherwise, it's going to sound a bit weird, like the piano player wasn't playing in time with the track itself. So this piano all reflects those changes. So obviously when I made this beat for the first time, I then adjusted the pianos timings to suit. And again, we just went through the same process basically. So we'd line up where the, find out where the piano beat was, e.g. like so. And then line it up with a kick, go into the piano and just move that note. It reflected the position of the kick as well, rather than being on the bar line, which is their sort of thing. So the piano is also playing with that same swung field. And I went through the whole piano and did that, just lining up with the kicks in the drumbeat. Just say name. What that does is just really sort of glue the whole thing together. It makes it feel like it's all being played at the correct time. Okay, So just when I go through and add a bit of reverb to these drums, obviously it all sounds very dry at the moment. I'll say definitely want to have these drums having quite a bit of impact. So just turning them up a little bit there. Let's just go through the kick now. Say, I want to add a bit of reverb to this, but I definitely don't want to add too much because the kick doesn't want to be drowned in reverb, that will cause it to sound a little bit messy. Say something like that. Absolutely fine. Don't think we're going to want anymore or they obviously we need to check this in the mix as well. But let's add some reverb to the sniff us as well. So just adding my sentence here, obviously we covered this in the reverb lesson. And once we've got our effects channel setup, if I was just drag that to the bottom of the track. Once we've got this setup, then of course, we just literally send the signal through from the element that you want to add reverb to, to the actual reverb, reverb effects channel. And that's how we add reverb set. I'm just literally going and doing that to the drums as well. Say snare on, Let's have a little listen. Say something that sounds quite nice. It sounds like it fits in them. Or let's sort out this hat because it sounds a little bit out of place at the moment. So let's see if reverb is enough to solve that. Say the sound aka just needs to turn it down a little bit. I think that signing okay. No problem. Obviously, we're still quite early on in the total mix. So we're going to be tweaking this as we go. And certainly when we get to the mixing lessons, laser will be just going through and just rebalancing anything that needs it. Now one last thing actually that I wanted to do, which I almost forgotten about, is I've got this other snare here also from the chill step bank, which is this sort of more glitched version of snow too. So you got scenario two, which is one we're using and then we got this. So I want to use that as sort of every like fourth snare. So let's just go in, I'm just going to select every other instance of the snare. So in this case, I'm just holding controls to do that. It should be the same or shift in your door of choice. That's a pretty common control, and I'm just going to shorten that. So basically removes the fourth snare from the beat. And then we're going to have that sort of glitched snare. So obviously that's where we want it in the position of the other one. And I'm just going to drag that into my projects and then just copy the position so it falls in the correct place. Let's just copy those Eva. Let's just have a quick listen. Reverb to say can hear it there. It's just a little bit too loud, obviously. Just balance that out so we want it to be the same as that of relative volume as the other snares. Maybe a little bit more reverb. That sounds pretty decent. I like it. Happy Days. Just adds a bit of variety to what is otherwise a very repetitive drumbeat. But actually one thing though, that snare does sound. Let's see what this sounds like being pitched up. Say let's go into it. I'm just going to select all. This is one of the reasons that we tend to use sampler tracks for our drums rather than just dragging them in as audio. Because when we want to change the pitch or something, it's really nice and easy and we can also just cycle through as it plays. Say, that sounds already much better pitch-wise, it just gels with attract better. Just going to try it a bit higher as well. I think plus two semitones up. Having the snare play in D sounds the best there. Let's just play a bit. Alright, so that's it for this lesson. In the next lesson, we're going to add a few more bits to this drumbeat to make it a little bit more exciting. Thanks very much for watching guys and girls see in the next one. 11. Lesson 10 Adding SFX To The Drum Beat: Hey everybody, welcome back. Alright, so in this lesson we're going to add some kind of SFS sounds to the drumbeat. Just one small hits of ethics sounds just to make the beat a little more interesting. So the first one that I want to add is in the workforce. So let's go find that. And that is fx hit 21. I'm just going to add that to a sampler track. Now one thing to bear in mind is that obviously I didn't just suddenly pick the correct samples, use experimented quite a bit with different effects sounds in different parts of the beats, you get something that I've thought worked. So obviously, just bear that in mind. It didn't just happen. That being said, let's go in and do this. I'd want the hit. It is a sort of thing. So on the third beat is where I want this to hit. Now bear in mind that this is a bit of an odd sound. It took me a little while to get the pitch absolutely correct. As it stands at the moment is still not right. I'm just going to play it for you. Sounds pretty out at the moment, but I'm gonna go to my sampler and just say no, if you our loading this into a sampler track either in your door or a third party sample I showed. All of them will have pitch controls which allow you to change the course pitch, which is one semitone at a time. Or a fine pitch control, which basically is in-between a semitone which changes it by CENSE. Say in this case, we want to change this by plus $0.50. Kinda almost sounds a bit old still, but that's just a bit too loud. And we just wanna do a little bit of work on this. So I'm just gonna go in and filter out the absolute low end here. Jay, just cutting that off and also wants to add it quite a bit of reverb to this as well. So let's add ascend. Fields are a little more of that. So we just got that nice, ringy high-end. Takes away that low-end. Not even sure what to call it, but it's a bit of dissonance. Let's get back to where you were in the mix. It sounds absolutely fine. That's perfect. That's exactly what I want to say. Little effects sounds like this can really just make the feet a bit more interesting. So that's fine. That's the first one. We will want to copy that across, I think, pretty much all the way. So the next hit that I'm going to add is, I think let's try this one. A bit of an odd one. This is actually from our clubs one sample pack, but it just seemed to fit. And I kinda like the vibe that it gave it a, gave this track a bit of a different sort of feel. This wants to come in just after snare hit that, say right there at the end. So let's just add this as a sampler track. Which drawer in a blank bits of middy. Although we only need to add a note at the very end here. So let's just go in. And let's turn that down as well. Say something like that. Obviously we need to add a bit of reverb tip, but we're getting there. Let's just go into the channel settings and send this to the reverb group. So I now get quick, wanna do this, but literally is just like standard, super standard stuff. Just saying up a Send of sending something to the effects group. So no prompts. Okay, so that sounds pretty good, although the hit kinda goes on a little bit too long there. I want it to sort of stop dead at the end of the bar. Kinda guys did, did, did, and I don't want that at the end. So let's just go in and shorten this a little bit. So I'm just going to turn off my snap. There we go. That's perfect. And it finishes exactly where I want it. C, Okay, so let's copy across our hit. Now I don't want it to repeat every 4 bar because what we're going to have at the end. 8 bar is a different fill other than this sound. So I just want this CB placed on the third bar of each eight bar repetition. So that's 8 bar, again, just 123. That's where we want it. Let's just copy those across so they're in the correct position as well. Let's just lengthen these drums out. Sorry, I left it like just a little bit short before, so I'm just going to copy those over as well. Then we've got our full loaded drums throughout the second half. We're going to be adding little fills and stuff like that to the second half. So we might want to manipulate the drums as we go. But for now, that's absolutely fine. So I'm just gonna have a little listen through to see if want to make any changes to this. So just on this second hat hit, let's just mix it up a little bit. So I'm gonna go into that, this one and let's add easing triplets. So I'm just changing my grid to one-sixteenth triplets. Just ten snap back on as well. Let's just try something like that just to mix it up a bit. And let's just try that pitch down a bit as well. Yeah, it's kinda vacate. We'll leave it in there for now. We may want to change that later, but as we listen to the track over and over all these little things that we've done. We might listen to it in the context of the whole track, we might decide that it doesn't work. This works in the original version of the track, but things are always different the second time around that you do it. So we'll see if that really wants to stay in the moment. In the second half of the song, we've got drums playing all the way through this, just the same drums. Now, what I wanna do is add a bit of a difference and also a bit of extra energy to the second half of this repetition. So from where the piano starts, say that I want to add a bit more drums in basically. So we're going to use a loop to do this. Let's just find loop. So this is a BTP CS top loop 12. So what we're gonna do is use a bit of this or chops of this to really get a nice feel in the track. So let's just drag this into our projects, which is going to have it in as audio. Just make sure that it does fit to the tempo of your tracked. It should automatically fit as it was made 84 BPM, which is the tempo of this track. But just make sure that it definitely is before we start chopping it up. And what I wanna do is just use of this. So first of all, let's turn it down. And before we go any further, I should add a bit of reverb to it as well, so it doesn't sound super out of place. Just a bit at the moment, we can tweak that in a sec. Little bit too loud. Still. Say again, what I wanna do is just chop this up a bit. So I'm just going to grab my splits all. Because definitely liked this first bit. That sounds really nice and cool. But this second bit here, that's just a bit too much ready. So let's just get rid of that. That's also a bit too much. So we're just gonna get rid of that. We just want the odd sort of flick of this loop coming in and out. Again. Here. We're just going to cut some of this out. Sorry, I missed a little bit bigger, so it's a bit easier to see. And we will have pretty much a repetition of the first bit here, so we've already got that. So yeah, I'm going to skim that all the way back, I think. So. Let's just have a little listen from a bit further back, just make sure this is definitely working. I like how that sounding. So let's just copy that over. So we've got that repeating through the second half of the section where our drums are. One thing I've just noticed though, is that, that FX hit 21 is not quite at the right time. And if I zoom right in, we can see that R hat is playing with a bit of swing on there. So I'm just going to turn off my snap and I'm just going to line that up exactly with the starts of r hat note you can just see that little line. Make it a little bit bigger and our effects hit. Obviously you're starting quite a bit before that, so we're getting just a little bit of weirdness in the beat. So let's just go into that. And moving pieces, sorry, it's enough or snap and then move it so it's lined up exactly with r hat. Say that's fine. Let's just check. I think it's probably gonna be the same with all of the other ones as well. So what we're going to do now we've corrected this first one, we'll just delete the others and we'll duplicate that over again. No problem. It sounds a little bit lack luster at the moment. And that's because we haven't got the baseline plane, which we're gonna get to in the next lesson. So let's just have a little listen from here, halfway through. One thing that becomes apparent when we listen to this, because we've got that sort of dinghy sound effects 21. That actually sounds a little bit odd when it's played at the same time as the piano. So I think what we're gonna do when the piano comes in, we're going to remove. So even though we just copied it, we're actually going to remove the second half of those. Are fx hit 21 sounds. That one, just because it's so conflicts a little bit with the piano. So I think it's better, we just drop it out when it gets to this section. Say, it just keeps the focus on the piano, which is just coming in. No problem. I think that's better. That's pretty much it for this lesson. So, thank you very much for watching guys and girls in the next lesson, we're gonna be making the baseline. See you in the next one. 12. Lesson 11 Bassline: Hey everybody, welcome back. Alright, so in this lesson we are going to make the baseline for this section of the track. So again, the baseline isn't coming in until the drums come in. So let's do that now. Now what we're gonna do is go to the work files and go to the mini folder. And we're going to find the baseline midi. So first of all, actually let's just create a vital instruments. So I'm just going to add an instruments vital track. Now. That's fine for now we're going to work on the sound in just a sec, but now we've got our vital instrument in there. Let's drag the baseline middy onto that. Also. I'm very quickly going to name some of these just so it's slightly better organized. And also I'm just going to color the tracks a bit as well. I'm sure in your door you'll be able to color tracks is a really handy thing to be able to do. So any of these sort of like lead sounds will have is that kind of pinky red color. Then drums can stay yellow. And then any effects sounds will be green colored. In fact, let's make them that light green color because these are like fx drum sounds. And then we've got our loop, which can be yellow. And I'm just going to organize these a bit better so that all in relatively the right place. So we've got leads and everything at the top. The baseline can be a movie kinda color. Just say no, the Midea for the baseline. Really simple to come up with that. Now, my thoughts in this track are that the baseline obviously wants to follow the melody, but it also wants to be just like a constant drone in the background of the track. And it's going to add some nice warmth. So usually in this case, what we do is we take whatever chord progression we've got safe, go into this. What we'd normally do is literally just take the root notes of all the chords. Or we could come over here and take the bass notes that you've already got. So this is more like what we got in the actual baseline. So these notes here and just playing a different instruments, so he literally just basically copy them out. Now the only difference between those nights and the baseline, I'll just go into that quickly is these G sharps here, which are normally in the pad progression, the bass notes, or just D, plays C, E flat, E flat, D, whereas in this case we've dropped that wasn't E-flat down to G sharp or a flat. Okay. So that's fine. Just so you know, that's the only difference, but apart from that, they're playing exactly the same nights. So with that being said, let's go in and actually start working on this bass sound. Now, it is worth noting that we are going to be so chaining this baseline to the kits. So that has two effects. One is mixing wise. It creates, keeps the space for the kick or the base of the kick won't interfere with the base of the baseline. And also it adds an extra bit of rhythm to it. So we're going to have quite a sharp side chain. So that dipping of the baseline whenever they kick hits will add a certain kind of rhythm to the track as well. But we're gonna get to that in the next lesson. Let's just focus on actually making the correct sound. So I've got my loop regions setup. Let's just turn that down a bit. Let's solo the baseline for now. Obviously we're on like a saw wave. So I'm just going to cycle through and I think we're going to want some include basic shapes. It should be under factory and there we go. It's the first one, basic shapes. So everybody should have this even in the free version of VSO. And then we're just going to change this a little bit. The second wave form. So this slider down the side here enables you to scroll through the wave table. Now, this is a sort of strange wave table, this basic shape one by changes to a different preset. You'll see that it's a bit more consistent as you cycle through it. And these are all of the different wave shapes that you can use on this particular sound. So let's go back to basic shapes. It's just that basic shapes has like a few different waveforms. You can even go to the 3D visual, which helps me see which ones. You're going to look. Triangle wave and a saw wave, a square wave. And at the beginning is just a sine wave. So we're sort of somewhere in-between a sine wave and a square wave ish. Anyway, that's fine. Don't worry. We're going to look a little bit more into that in the next sound that we make, which is a base overlay, it looks sort of more modulated base overlay sound. Now, obviously that's way too high in pitch, so let's just drop that. Two -24. You'll notice there's a little click whenever the notes are triggered. To get rid of that, we come to emulate one, remember this is the envelope that modulates the dynamics of the sound. So we're just going to add a little more attached to this. And you can straight away that click has gone. If I turn the attack, write down the click. Say just a bit of attack just enough to get rid of that little click. That's fine. Alright, so happy with this one. And let's just go and add some effects. Just want to make this a little bit grittier. So let's add some distortion. Solo that again. So soft clips fine. I think just a bit of distortion there. Just really grinding it a bit, given it a bit of grit, then it's just EQ up because I don't think we want all of that sort of high-end frequency. Let's just play it with the rest of the track first. So what we'll do, instead of using a high shelf, if you just click, it'll toggle between a high shelf and a high cut. So let's just have it on high cut and we'll just take out some of the top range there. Say somewhere around there. Absolutely fine. Okay, Great. We'll add reverb, not in vital itself, but we will add it using our senses gum, just go into the channel settings in the case of Cubase. So you add the send. Don't want too much here, but just enough to give it a sense of space which is definitely want to make this muddy. So without its like this, with just a bit of depth to the baseline there, that's fine. Let's just see what it's like level-wise. Okay, so that's sounding pretty alright. So happy with that. It is a super simple one. We just chose one oscillator, got it to the correct pitch, couple of little effects to give it a bit more grit. And some sort of corrective EQ to roll off the high-end. And really that's it. Dead simple, but also really nice and warm. Okay, say in the next lesson we'll be looking at side-chain in this and just really fitting it to the track. Thanks very much for watching guys and girls see in the next one. 13. Lesson 12 Sidechaining: Hey everybody, welcome back. Alright, so in this lesson we are going to side chain the baseline to the kick. Say side-chain is one of the most important mixing tools that you have, especially when it comes to mixing the low-end of your tracks. You can also use it as an effect to add an extra kind of rhythm to your track. And we're gonna do both of those things here. So what we're gonna do in this track is root a few things through to the side chain. So what we're gonna wanna do is actually set up a group channel, also known as a bus. In other doors, what we'll do is add a compressor or a side chain compressor to that group than anything that we want to be affected by. The side chain will just route to that group. So I'm just going to add a track at a group channel. Cooler side chain one, just because we might have a side chain to, it would be cool obviously. And that would be used if say e.g. on side chain, one that we send the baseline through, we might want slightly more extreme side chaining than on the other group. Say, say, let's say we send the path for it as well. It might be a bit too much if we have it dipped to the same level as a baseline. So you might want to send that through a separate side chain, but that's fine. Whatever will decide that in a bit. Now we've got a group, so our group channels down the bottom. I'm just going to go into the channel settings. So these are the Insert slots and I'm going to add a compressor, say under dynamics compressor. Now, pretty much any door these days we'll have some way of side chain as it's such an important thing. And that will be built into the whatever stock compressor of your door. In this case Cubase is stock compressor. Now, there is a version of Cubase, Cubase elements which is like the cheapest version and the sort of free versions where the compressor doesn't have built inside chain inputs. So if you have that version or if you're in a door which for some reason doesn't have side-chain compression. Then there is another plugin you can use. I'll just show it to you very quickly. It's not really side-chain compression, but it has exactly the same effect. Sorry, you can't see that. Let me just bring this up so you can see what's going on. So it's called the Tao filter. This is what it looks like. What we do with this is literally just dip the volume depending on how we have this set up. I'm not gonna go into it here, or there is actually a video on YouTube. We made a video on how to use this. If you just Google born to produce side chain, you will see the fourth video, this one here, how to side chain in Cubase elements a, e or LE. Now, it doesn't matter if you're using another door. You can still watch that video. It shows you how to get the towel filter to download it, how to install it, although it was a huge install, might be very slightly different, but I'm sure you know how to do that by now. Then also shows you how to use it. And for irregular beats, like what we've got in our track at the moment is what I would refer to you as an irregular beat, as in house music, could be called irregular beats. So it's just don't, don't, don't, don't. Dead simple to set up a side chain or side-chain effects like TTL fields are for that, it's a bit more difficult when you've got a slightly irregular beat, like kicks falling on the offbeat and all that sort of stuff, especially when they're timed, like Azar. Anyway, that video will explain basically how to use tau filter if you need to. But otherwise you side-chain compression is gonna be much easier. Now for this, I just need to activate the side chain. And in Cubase, you can just select the track that you want to use as your side chain input. Sometimes in your door, you have to actually send a signal like we've been doing with the reverb, but you'll send it to the side chain of the compressor. So that's possibly one way they might have to do it. But again, a quick Google search will tell you how to do this. The most basic thing to do and adore. So I'm going to select from my side chain input the BTP kick. That's fine. That's all set up now and then I've just got to get the settings right. So generally speaking, for so chaining is really simple. I always throw on the same or almost the same settings. So no attack, no hold ratio, roughly around about three to four. So the release and the threshold of the only things that we need to play around with to get the settings correct? Right now I'm just going to mute the pads so you can focus on the baseline. But one thing before we go any further and actually start listening to is a need to actually route the baseline through our side chain group sets actually going to be affected by this compressor. Say I'm just gonna go in and change it from Stereo Out, which is the master out, and it's going to go through the groups. So chain one. Now when I play, it should be out of here quite clearly that that is being dipped. Quite substantially. Now I don't want it to take so long to reach full volume again, say if you listened to it, it's got quite a gentle release. So as we got 500 milliseconds and you can see the gain reduction meter. You can see as it gets dipped by the kick and then it slowly goes back up. So just play that. And then as we speed up the release, so I'll just change it as it's playing. And you can see very quickly how the gain reduction meter shows that the volume is being reduced very quickly and then always going back to normal. So let me just play that. That's fine. I want a super quick release. And as I mentioned before, it kind of adds this slight rhythm to the baseline. So as the kit comes in, the baseline, gets really turned down. And then after the kicks finished, it then goes back up and it adds a rhythm to it. Then the only thing you got left after the release is the threshold. And this just dials in sort of how much of the side chain effect or how much the thing you're going to have. So if we have it right down, it's going to be extreme. Which we don't want. Say somewhere like that is perfect, Nice, and sort of Pompeii, the baseline is a bit overly loud. They compared to the kick. Let's bring back in our pad as well. What we're gonna do is go into the pad settings and I'm going to route this three is the side chain. I just want to try this to start off with, I'm not saying this is 100% how it's going to be. But I do like that. I liked the fact that the pad is being dipped. Again, it kind of adds to the rhythm of the drumbeat. And it also helps that kick really cut through the mixer. I do like that as it stands, I don't think well, I'd side chain to the DJ strings that can be left unsized, changed. And definitely not to the piano that wants to stay unsized, changed as well. That might sound a bit strange. So I changed. Okay, that's fine. That's sounding pretty decent. Owed say. Alright, so that's it for this lesson. Just remember when you're doing your own tracks site chaining, super, super important, especially when you have a kick and a baseline. And the baseline is playing like constant notes like this already is playing notes that are falling at the same time as the kick. You must cite chain. You'll kick and bass together. Alright, thanks very much for watching guys girls see you in the next one. 14. Lesson 13 A Deeper Look At Vital: Hey everybody, welcome back. Alright, so in this lesson we're going to have a bit of a pause from the tutorial itself. And we are going to just look at vital and go into a bit more depth on all of the functions are some of the functions at least. So far, we've obviously made just two sounds with this, the pad and the base. Now, both of those obviously are fairly basic sounds really. And doing those we've only just scratched the surface of what vital is capable of. So if you're already familiar with how vital works or you just don't care, that's fine. No problem. You can skip on to the next lesson. You won't miss anything that's important to the tutorial. In the next lesson, we're going to make just like a base overlay sound for the baseline. But for those of you who want a little bit more info about the interface of vital, then stick around. Alright, so again, we're going to start with the oscillator section. And as mentioned, there are three main oscillators and a sample of slicer as well, which we'll get to in a bit. You can cycle through the different wave types up here. Now, if you've got just the free version of vital, then you'll only have the factory bank, which is absolutely fine. It's got plenty of nice wave tables in here. So one thing that I didn't mention was that you've also got this, which is the frame of the wave table. So wave table is kinda like a load of different wave forms all in one file and each parts of the wave table is called a frame. Probably not the best sound. Say here we go. We've got a saw wave which will just change shape depending on where you have the wave table position. And of course there are just absolutely tons of different wave tables. You can also download wave tables and make your own. If you do want to make your own, you can use the edit wave table button so you can actually come in and actually manipulates the waveform itself and actually change it, makes it up. So I'll do want to keep to the basics here. So I'm not gonna go into too much depth about the wave table editor. We will cover this in a free tutorial lessons. So look out for that. But for now that's absolutely fine. And I'm just going to reset that what it was called Zoar just for the examples that we're going to use. As mentioned, you've also got this 3D view, so that is the wave table. So frame one is this frame right at the beginning. And then as you cycle through, you can see how it changes. So it gives you a 3D representation of all the different waveforms within this wave table. So other controls here, we've got pitch. So obviously we've got course pitch, which we've already looked at. By the way, if you want to reset any control in vital back to its default setting, just double-click it in some sense are a lot of other senses either hold Control or Alt and click them, then it resets and vital it's a double-click, same with the fine tune over here, which we've touched on already. We can choose to route this either to filter one, filter, to filter 1.2. Now just so you know, and we will look at this in a sec. But when you reach to filter 1.2, it actually sends a separate signal to filter 1.2, say It's not like these, they are in series, so the signal path doesn't travel first through filter one and then through filter two, it actually comes to filter, to filter one independently. So I could have, say, a high-pass e.g. on filter to a low-pass filter, one. Modulation and stuff you can come up some pretty funky things are not always useful though. And if you'll just plain sounds and probably just sticking to the one filter is going to be the easiest and certainly the most common use. The phase changes the start position of the waveform. So if we go back to 2D view, that's more helpful. So e.g. 180, which is the standard, it will start at the zero crossing points if I change the phase of this, although it doesn't show it here, it's basically changing the start position to anywhere within this region here, depending on what we have it set on. Main use for this is really when you've got two different oscillators. And you can change the phase between them to generate different textures between the sounds. So down here, we've got different warping modes. So we can change this to sort of like performance scale, e.g. I'll just play it. Basically, they're just different ways of mangling the waveform. All sorts of different effects. You can make all different textures, I should say, from using these plenty of different ones to choose from. Then we've got sort of more traditional kind of settings like sync here, which you can control. More sort of wave mangling functions. So lots of funds would be happy with that, especially if you want to start modulating these functions as well. So let's talk about the pitch key control here. So I'll transpose snap, sorry. So what I can do is if I select what notes, if you notice these dots represent the keyboard layouts or C, C sharp, D, D sharp, E, et cetera. So you can actually set vital to only to lock to certain pitches, which is kind of handy if you're making like arpeggiator sounds and stuff. Although the way you make ups in vital isn't really a perfect way of making apps, but hopefully they will add a module in the future update as an easy arpeggiator mode. But for now, let's carry on talking about transpose snap. So we can just select the notes that we want this to snap to. Now you've got global snap and non global snap. So you'll notice if I sorry, I have to keep clicking off that to actually get the tractor place. Uh, sorry, it looks a bit strange. But if you turn on global snap, what it's gonna do is any note that comes into vital, it's gonna be snapped or the pitch of it is going to be snapped to any of these notes or whatever notes you choose. So as you can hear, when I play it, obviously it's actually playing lots of different chords there. But you can't tell because it's snapping all of the notes to these three notes. That's fine. Let's go back to normal. Like I said, this is mainly useful when you've got a LFO playing with the pitch, which we will look at in just a moment. Next up, of course, is the envelope section. Now we've already looked at this briefly, but I will just go over it again. For those of you who want a reminder, ambulate one is always to do with the amplitude dynamics. You can think of amplitude and volume as almost the same thing. It's, it's really called amplitude until it actually comes out of your speakers, then it's referred to as volume. Say internally, we're changing the amplitude of the signal with envelope one. Obviously we've got the attack, we got the decay, which won't have any effects unless you've got the sustain down from 100%. Then you can make things plucky or whatever. Then of course, the release, which is how long the note will last for after the midi note has ended. So as you can see, we've got three envelopes visible here, but you actually have more than that. There are actually six envelopes in total, and you don't see the other three until you use envelope three for something. So if I just go to emulate three, Let's just say we're going to use this to modulate the wave table position. So I'm just going to drag over and drop it on the wave table position. And you can see when I've done that envelope for has now appeared, they just appear whenever you've used up more envelopes. If I use envelope for then you'll see envelope five, etcetera. Same with LFOs. Lfos in total. Again, the dial here controls basically the mix of the control or how much the envelope is going to actually affect the dynamics. Say if I have it basically sets a zero or as near as I can get it, then it's not going to have any effect at all. And if I have it right up, then it will have maximum depth to the effect. Now the nice thing about these LFOs is that we have this control here, which obviously changes the linearity of the attack or decay or whatever it is you're using it on. This is particularly great when you're trying to make really dirty bass sounds and stuff. You'd want to modulate probably what I'm doing here. So the wave table position and perhaps the sort of like spectral morphing sort of thing. So you can use the envelope to modulate one of these. And if you have it on this sort of like fast attack like this, it really works well for daddy bass sounds or screeching leads, that kind of thing. Or of course, you can choose to have the opposite and make all sorts of crazy modulated sound. Alright, so let's move on to the LFO's and it's incredibly similar, really obviously we can just drag this up to modulate a particular parameter. Say, well modulates us, turn this on to sink. And I'll tell you what, let's actually just change what we're listening to. So I'm just gonna make all these chords full length so you can really hear the LFO modulation. Little bit too intense. So again, we just changed the mix. And let's just change it down a bit as well as it sounds a bit weird. With the LFO. We've got the timings here, say we can change. This is just for the grid, but I'll show you when we got the grid up. Obviously we normally working in 4816, etc. But obviously you can work out whatever timings you want. And of course if you want, so you can set this down to like three and have this sort of running and triplets. There's different things that you can do here. So obviously at the moment we've got this set on just like a triangle wave. Now you can grab these points and change them. So you could change this into more of a sinewave. Or you can change the pattern that you want to draw in by clicking here and you can choose step e.g. and then you need to click the little paintbrush and then you can actually just draw it in steps. Or you can choose something else like down, which is just a ramp up. And obviously you can mix these up sort of thing. So you can choose some of them to be steps, some of them to be half-steps. They can create all sorts of different modulations. There is also this little button here, this little function which basically changes these all into editable. Oh sorry, needs to turn off my drawing tools. We had to actually change any of these points. Now with this activated, I can then freely move these around and change the exact shape. I can add points as well. So it just becomes much more editable with this button selected by just saying, if you do click here, there are absolutely loads of pre-made LFO shapes. Say, all sorts of stuff to be used there to get some funky modulation going down the bottom of the oscillators. We've got this as the trigger so you can have it to be sinks to the beat. You can have it triggered by the envelope, sustain, envelope, loop point and loop hold. Then we've got the timings that you want to set it to. Just change these up or down, just click and drag to change it. The smoothness is going to basically round off any of these sort of sharp edges if you'd like. St. gets really cool sounds, especially if you're using a sort of Voc who did kind of vocal sound, then of course we've got delay which just delays the oscillator from sort of taking effect. And stereo, which basically splits the LFO between left and right. Sort of adds a delay. So you got the same LFO, but it's being triggered on the left and right channels just at different timings depending on how you have this dial set. So that can be really useful for creating some nice modulated panned pads and stuff. Alright, so let's move on. I got some random LFOs here as well, which I'm not gonna go into too much detail here. It's pretty obvious what they are. Random oscillators say, instead of having a very prescribed pattern, like we've got here, it's going to be quite random. Then we've got these modulators here. So if I choose notes, what that does is it will modulate something depending on how high in pitch or low pitch that it is. Let's just activate the filter. And I use note. So you actually modulate this. You'll see that as we have different chords play, the filter moves. Now there's any meeting by a very small amount. Now let's just turn this up. As you can see, it's basically being modulated depending on where the notes are. So if I play some really low notes, the filter cutoff would show very much lower. And if I play high notes, the filter cutoff will go higher. By the way, if you want to remove any automation that you've added, you can just right-click and go remove or modulation. So in automation, velocity is basically the same thing, but for velocity. So this can be handy when you're trying to make a sort of natural sounding instruments. So e.g. if I put the velocity on the filter cutoff, again, what that means is the softer you hit the note, the lower the cutoff will be. On a piano, e.g. if you hit a key really hard, I has a very high velocity, then the filter sounds very bright. And in this instance, the filter would be very high if you have a high velocity and if you hit it very gently. Obviously the piano in real life would sound much more gentle and dimmer, and that's what this would mimic. So as you press very low keys, the filter cutoff would be lowered all based on the velocity of the notes coming into the instrument. Say as of the time of this tutorial, I actually have no idea what lift does, but I'm going to figure that out. I promise before I do the full tutorial on this Octavian notes. So that's basically the same as note, but it will trigger a different setting when you use a crossover into a different octave. So you can be in say, Octavia three and nothing will change. But if you go into Octave for, then this will modulate whatever you've got it attached to. Pressure and slide, I believe, are to do with the sort of more advanced keyboards like the Roland. Is it the one with the rubber keys on which you can go from side-to-side and also change the pressure as it's played. So it's not like the initial velocity is actually the pressure. After it's been hit sort of thing. You can oscillate up and down with your fingers. So that's to do with that and so is the slide, I believe. So stereo basically enables anything that you want to modulate will then get split between the left and right, say e.g. if I drop this on the filter cutoff, and let's just set this to zero for the moment. So you can see now when I play it just perfectly normally, but if I add something to this, which is basically separates whatever oscillation is happening within the stereo field. So I've got one filter cutoff which is basically higher in frequency and one that's lower in frequency. And all we're doing with this diet was just changing the sort of difference between them. Okay, So that's fine. And then random thing, this should be pretty obvious. But every time a note is hit, it just sends out basically a random sort of position or a random bit of information for whatever he'd been attached to, to sort of play by. Okay, so that's pretty cool. Underneath here, we've got the standard settings for most synthesizers, so we've got the number of voices. So at the moment we've got up to eight voices, which means you can have up to eight keys being pressed at any one time on the keyboard. You can move this up. Obviously it's going to use more processing power if you do that. Bend is simply the bend amount for the pitch wheel. So obviously if I turn that up to full, is gonna be two semitones up or two semitones down. But of course, I can change that. How can we go? Wow, that's pretty high. 48, say that's pretty mad. Sorry, Let's turn up the filter cutoff a bits. We'll talk about the filter in just a sec. That's pretty nice actually, it'd be good for some effects. Having a bend with 48 semitone range, that's pretty neat. The velocity track we've already mentioned, but that just basically means that if you have velocity information of varying velocity information in your musical parts, then having this turn, take note of that. So if you've got something played softly and you've got other things being played hard, then you need to have the velocity track turned up. Otherwise, that velocity information will be ignored. Spread is simply means the stereo spread. So if you have this turned down, whatever comes out of this instrument is going to be in mono. Or if you have it fully up, then it will be in proper stereo. And obviously you can balance that. Say if you didn't want it to be mono, but you don't want it to be full stereo either, then you can use this to curb that glide is just gliding from one note to another. Obviously sounds a bit weird when it's being played with codes like this. But normally for tennis to one voice then will only hear one notes being played at a time. And of course as well, if you do overlap the midi notes, then of course it will glide from one note to another as well. You can also change these slip of the glide, which is pretty neat. Most doors don't enable you to do is you can change it so it's a much quicker. Slower. If you do want to bend between notes that overlapped by though you do need to have legato mode activated. We haven't gotten any at the moment, but as fine if you're going to do that sort of thing, no prompts. Okay, so briefly let's have a look more at the filters. So not a whole lot to see here, but you can change the filters here between high-pass and low-pass just by moving this slider here. Or of course, a blend of the two. So you can have more of a band-pass filter got the resonance, which will change the steepness of bits, but also add resonance to a filter which is a nice touch. It makes it nice and easy. Let's get back to whatever we had a standard turn glide off resonance. We should all know what that does by now. I'm kinda used it when we were making the pad as well. Again, we've got key track here. So you can have the filter reacts to where you press a key on the keyboard. So obviously, if you're pressing the keys higher up than the filter will be fully open. If you hit the keys lower down, the filter will be more closed. For those notes. Mix fairly self-explanatory. That's how much of the effects you want, how much of the filter you want to affect the signal. And then of course, drive. Here we can choose which oscillators are going to come through to the filter. So obviously we got two filters. So we can have oscillator 1.2 go into both filters if we want, say it's just another way of routing the oscillators through to the different filters. That's all. It is. Probably easier just to select which fields E1 on the oscillator. But whatever it's just a different way of doing it, Just say no as well. When it does come to the routing of the oscillators, obviously you can choose for it to go through the filters. B can choose it to bypass the filters and tidy and go straight to the Effects page, which we'll look at in just a second. Or you can have it bypass even the effects page and go straight to the master out of the synthesizer. Say before we move on and look at a different page, Let's just look at a couple more things. So the sampler I'll just very briefly talk about. So let's just turn off my other oscillator. The moment we've got white noise. So you can also lock these two the pitch as well. And obviously you got the normal pitch controls just like we have with the oscillator. You can route it through to filter one to whatever, just the same as all the rest, same level control, pan control. Now these controls over here say if I hit this, this means that it will be tied to the keyboard. Depending on the notes. It will play higher or lower in pitch. If I have it on this, that's just a loop. So it will just keep looping around as you can see by the playhead. So if I want it to, I can have it on start to finish. I'm not sure what the technical name for this controllers, but basically if I hit it, it will play one way and then play in reverse. Very difficult to sort of here with white noise. So I'm just going to drag in a sample from sample library just as an example, That's all this is. So it's just close out, just going to drag in a sample. This is, this is how easy it is to drag something in from your door. Just literally drag and drop it. And then if I play it sorry, it's a bit quiet. Let's turn that up a bit. You can see that just pays it forwards and backwards. So that's what that function does. And then we've got random. So this will just play it from a random start position. That can be good for some things, not for this as like a plucky sound, which means there are some areas of this which don't have any amplitude at all. But if we use something like that, whatever Bart's sound or you can see that it just starts from a random position. Okay, so that's that last couple of things is he got macro controls. So you can choose to control few different things under one control. Say if you wanted to control, say LFO 123.4, like the different parameters of it. Or you wanted to have a manual control for say, the wave table position and the unison and the sink. You can basically drop this on any of those controls and you can do as many as you want. Then there's one control will change all of them at the same time. It's just handy rather than having to sort of like awesome 83 or four or whatever different controls at one time you just route the macro to those controls and then you can just modulates or automate that one controller. Alright, so let's just go and have a look at the effects page. I don't wanna spend too long on this because they're all fairly standard effects of seizures. Activate them by toggling the little dots. The fairly self-explanatory. Again, I'm not gonna go into all the details of how Chorus works and what sort of thing. We will go into this in more depth in another tutorial, but it's really not necessary to do here. And we already have touched on some of these effects anyway, so I don't want to spend too long on that. So let's just have a look at the matrix. So just disable that for now, Let's go to the matrix. So the matrix basically shows us any routing that we've got set up in our sense, say e.g. when we assigned the macro t-shirt controls that will then appear in here are obviously used envelope three and LFA-1 to do some modulation as well. So soon as you set that up, those will then appear in the modulation matrix and you can change the amount. So this is just, if you look at control here is just the same as literally grabbing that and changing it. Just another way to do it. You can also select a different destination or a different modulation source. To do that, you can also select bipolar, which basically just switches the direction of the modulation. And then the stereo that basically does what we were talking about here, where we added stereo. So it just adds stereotype, that modulation. So it will just offset the modulation from left to right. And then the Morph which just controls the, basically the speed or the velocity of which the effect takes place. Then we have the Advanced tab, which to be completely honest, I'm not gonna go into here. One reason being that that's probably a bit too far for supposed to be a very basic overview. And also, I haven't actually really had a chance to fully dive into this page yet. So this will come. We will have a tutorial about this again, which will be on YouTube for completely free, much more in depth. So definitely look out for that when it lands. And that is the most basic overview of vital luck as eight. In the next lesson, we are going to make a base overlay sound with a bit of LFO modulation. So we'll do that then. Thank you very much for watching guys and girls see in the next one. 15. Lesson 14 Modulated Bass Overlauy: Hey everybody, welcome back. Alright, so in this lesson, what I want to do is give you an alternative baseline. If that's something you'd like now in this track, I actually think that the current baseline we've got to play that really suits the track because it's nice and minimal. It doesn't really take anything away from the other parts of the track. It just adds that nice, warm sort of sub base to it. But like I've mentioned before, you can get many, many different directions at many different points during the production process. So e.g. if you wanted a baseline with a bit more movement in there or a bit more gritty. That's what we're going to have a look at now. And perhaps in the later sections are halfway through the track and this section E might want to actually ditch the pad and just go into a more sort of drum orientated, baseline, heavy sort of track, which is absolutely fine. I mean, you could even go into drum and bass. I'm in a tempo is pretty much perfect for it. So there's so many different ways you can go, but all I want to do here is just give you a sort of another option for the baseline. So it's gotta be fairly simple. We're not gonna go too crazy. I'm just going to duplicate my current baseline because I want to keep an original copy of that. And then we'll use this duplicate and start messing around. I'm just going to mute the pad as well. So I've just got the beat and the baseline playing. Okay, So we use the same sort of patch that we've got already. So we'll start off with our basic shapes because it's got a nice sub bass part to it. Say Happy Days. Now, one very simple way to add a bit of rhythm to this is to actually modulate the level, the volume, or technically the amplitude by using an LFO. So that's what we do with these LFA-1. And I'm just going to drag that onto the level. Now when I play it, it's not really doing a whole lot at the moment. So two reasons for that. One, I need to see sort of turn up the effectiveness of this oscillator all the way up. And then I also need to turn the level down. So when it plays, you can hear the oscillator actually having some sort of effects on the amplitude. So I'm just going to play it and we'll look at a couple of the factory LFO. So presets. You could actually make that work if it is that sort of choppy kinda baseline could actually work quite well. I don't think is really going to see this track particularly, but just saying can be used. So that sort of thing. Nervous groove, that's a good starting point, I would say. And we just want to change this up. So we can change this. We just got to make sure that this is selected. So we've got more control points and then we can start actually adding feet by double-click more points. I'm just going to make it a little less sort of wobbly. That perhaps let's change the speed of this as well. So let's save 1 bar. Of course, you can go in any direction. You want to choose any kind of rhythm. Totally up to you. We're going to stick with this for now. That's fine. Just gives it a bit of rhythm and that's a nice, easy way to get some sort of rhythm into your track if that's what you want. Let's add another oscillator is this. So let's just activate oscillated to. Now at the moment, obviously, we haven't set up the routing. So we also want oscillator 2's level to be affected by LFA-1. So we click and drag that over to level on oscillator to also set the pitch to 24. So it's matching oscillator what I'm just going to cycle through, let's try and find some is bit different. Remember we got to turn down the level as well. And the effectiveness up. For oscillated to say this gates see the effects page because we've duplicated the preset. We've got a high cut on there which you didn't really want. So let's just turn that into a high shelf and just normalize it. So Kosovo bytes, this is a wave table that's not included in the factory presets. So it does sound nice, I must admit, so I might go back to it, but let's just go to the factory presets for now. Try and find something that perhaps suits the track. Basic shapes. Just a square wave and I want to modulate this a bit more. So let's choose something else. Let's stick with that just for now. That sounds a cake. So what I want to do with the second oscillator is actually modulate the wave table position, but at a different rate to what's happening with the level sort of thing. So it's going to change at a different rate over time. So what we'll do for that as we'll grab the LFO to, and we'll drop that on the wave table position. Let's just play that. So it sounds absolutely awful. Say let's just change that to something else. That actually sounds not too bad. The whole point is just to sort of give you a different way of modulating a baseline so you can make something a bit different. Now, all these factory preset wave tables, they're okay, but they're not exactly amazing. So you get some way better ones when you actually pay for vital. But don't forget that you can actually load any wave table in survival. You can literally just drag and drop them in. So if you download a wavetable pack, you can literally just drop them in survival. Then if you want see, you can of course save the wave table as well so you can use it again. You didn't have to keep dragging it in each time that you want to use it, say in a different projects. But obviously, I just want to use the factory stuff because that comes with the free voice or instrument. A board we got is somewhere along the lines of what I was thinking about. So it's just a bit different, is a bit more gritty. Probably wants. So you actually have some of that high shelf back in. Say something like that we could use, and of course we could also use a different LFO pass and rather than just a straight triangle up and down. So you get the idea, you can go in many different directions here. Okay, so I just played around a little bit, just change the modulation settings of the LFO. So you'd use a different pattern, which is also in the factory bank post series. And I've changed the timing of it as well. So it's 2 bar in length. So it's a bit slower, a bit more methodical. And probably we can change as well the effectiveness of this as well. So you get the idea, we can do all sorts of stuff like that. We could also add a bit of unison to this. So you get a different sound, like, there we go. The whole point here is, again, just to show you that you can do something different if you want. So you didn't have to use a 3D plane baseline. And this is one easy way using LFOs to get a bit of rhythm into your baseline. Or it could be lead sound or pad or whatever and add a, It's more movement to your track. But I'm not gonna actually use that in the main track. As I mentioned, I definitely prefer this particular track with just the standard baseline. It doesn't take anything away from the rest of the track. It just adds that warms submenus. So it's kind of perfect as it is. But if you want to use a more modulated choppy at baseline, you just go for it. Alright, thanks very much for watching guys and girls see in the next one. 16. Lesson 15 Adagio String FX: Hey everybody, welcome back. Alright, so in this lesson and the next one, we're going to add just a little bit more content to the tracks. Just a couple of things I want to do. First, one of them is going to swap over this bit of middy with this one, just because I've got that triplet fill from the hat and the wrong place for it where actually wants, it, wants to be actually basically leading in SBAR 45. But we'll also add a kick or so on a triplet patterns. So we're on 16th triplets at the moment, so that's fine. Just there to accentuate, the Hatfield. Just adds a nice sort of bounce in there. So that's nice. And let's add in the next bit. So again, we're getting into song structure in just a couple of lessons time in much more detail. But obviously we want to keep things interesting and engaging throughout each section really. Now he starts off very gently in the first half of the track. And then obviously we go into drums and bass. And just in this second part here, I want to make this just a bit more interesting than just having the Adagio strings come in. Before, I actually add in the part that we're gonna do. I just want to talk very briefly about how this sort of came about. So obviously as we're listening to track over and over and over again, I mean, we don't do that in the tutorial up seeks, it gets quite boring. But when you're working on it yourself, you're listening to it over and over. And you start see here places where you might want a fill or whatever. And one of those moments was here. I could just imagine something coming in as a fill just to sort of one-off sound is what I was thinking at the time. Say something here. Something like that. Let's go back to non triplet timing. So yeah, what it did was just basically puts in a bit of midi and just started experimenting with different sounds. We go to the work files and want the Adagio string effects in C. That little nice one. I'm just going to add this to a sampler. And let's just draw in a blank bit of midi, go into it. And this is having listened. We want it su, literally be starting here where we had the playhead sets. Let's just have a listen to what note we want to see. So actually, sorry, just turn that down a bit first because it's a bit loud. And then we're just going to draw in note. So let's just have a listen. Now, way too quiet as tenant back up a bit. So that was sort of the kind of idea that I had originally, that I wanted to have that sound as a fill. But then as I was listening to, I could kinda like imagine this actually playing other notes further on down. So a couple of things that we need to do first is one is, is just playing a very short part of the sample. And this is actually a very long sample. If we go to the sampler track and play it, I want a bit more of that coming out. So obviously we can actually just make the notes longer. But also we can do it in the sampler if you want to say if we go to the amp mode and just turn the release write up a bit longer than that. So let's just make that longer. Say you would just lengthen this until it's right here like another hit their gun. So let's find that. Sorry, B flats. Say, let me just play this from a bit further back. Excuse my horrible outer key humming there. Yep, that's what I was coming, a G. So we can have this playing again on the note, but I do want to make this a little bit different timing wise, so it's just not always really regimented. So I'm just going to have this triggering a bit later than what it sort of what you think it should be or beat later than what it was on the last one, I remember as well. The first hit is a beat early, that one's on the beat and this one's gonna be a bit late. So it's just adds a bit of variation. You don't have to do this. You could choose any timing you like reading. I like how this sounds. To me to add that site. Yeah, what last hit right about here. That's I think that's gonna go right back down to see actually say let's just draw in that. Yeah, that sounds right. So let's have a listen to the whole thing again now. It's a bit loud. It's like they sounded pretty decent Oregon. And I'm just going to add a bit of reverb to that as well. So I just want this nice and deep sounding and this will definitely help it sort of gel him with the rest of the track. Lovely. Yes, That sounded perfect or I can absolutely fine. Going back to the sampler track, we're changing the pitch here quite a bit. So the length of the sample would be changing if we were using, say, extended notes like that. But because we're not, and we're just using the release of the sampler to define the length of the notes were basically avoiding the problem of as these notes descend, as obviously in the sampler, they are naturally pitched down means they also get longer as well, the movie their pitch down. So we're avoiding that problem of the next getting longer. Again, you could use audio warp, you could turn that on. And then it will just automatically keep the notes exactly the same length, but just using the release instead of using long notes for this is a better way to do it. Alright, so a nice, easy one there. That's it for this lesson. In the next lesson we will add a sort of vocals string layer. Thanks very much for watching guys and girls see you in the next one. 17. Lesson 16 Vocal String Layer: Hey everybody, welcome back. Alright, so in this lesson, this is going to be a very quick one. We're going to just add a sort of vocal string layer, cooling it a vocal string layer, even though it's not really a string, just because it's gonna be a constant note rather than actual vocal ready? So it's just a sort of sound sung by acquire or whatever. And we're just going to have it as a constant note back to a bit of song structure. And that is we really want to keep things interesting and evolving as we go through. Let's just concentrate on the first half of the track for now. In the second half of the first half, we've got the piano, but we haven't really gotten any change midway through. So we really need something on the 8 bar. So that's 8 bar from there to there. We need to have something added here. And to do that, we're just going to add a vocal string and say, let me put that in and then you can hear what that's like and we'll discuss it a little bit more. Let's find where we are. So here we go. Female vocal in C. Okay, so let's just add that to a sampler track. And let's just draw the n. So we'll go right to the end of the first half. So yet right. So where the pads and just turn it down a little bit to start off with. And let's draw in our midi note. So we want it to be in C because the tropics can see. Let's just play it from a little bit further back. Let's try an octave up. So just raising that up and not save normally most doors, It's Shift and press the up or down arrows to move it up. An octave might be different than yours, but I think that's quite common. Let's try it like that. I do like the high pitches a bit loud obviously, and we need to add some reverb to this. I think let's give quite a lot of reverb. And let's turn it down a little bit. To get the volume right of this. We want to play it from a bit further back so we can sort of gauge more accurately the level when it comes in. So what it wants to do here is just give it a bit of a lead in. So we could use the amp envelope to do that. I can do it very simply in the QA sampler just by grabbing this, which is like another envelope. Let's just say no, you might not have that. So we will just, in this case go and use the amp envelope. Just so you guys who don't have that same feature can do the same thing. So it's basically doing the same thing anyway. You need that to be a bit longer. That's perfect already. Just want a gentle lead in. Not like a sudden start to the female vocal is maybe a little bit more sudden than that's a little bit too slow. I would say that's spot on. The level is not bad. We might want to tweak that money just a fraction to wow, we didn't really want it to take away from any of the other elements. We just want it to compliment them sit underneath, but it does also wants to be noticeable at the same time. Okay, So that's sounding or rights. Now, let's just copy that over. So it's the end of the second half of the track as well. So I'm just going to copy that. Okay, Sorry, just drag that onto the wrong track. Let's put on female vocal lose track. So as you can see, it's playing one constant tone. That's a technique that's used quite a lot in many different genres. Not just ambient, but it is used, I think quite a lot in ambient. Suddenly I hear a lot in the tracks I listened to. And it's just one way of adding something a little bit different to your mix, a bit of variation. And it kinda adds when you have a higher pitched female vocal, Ooh, like this, it tends to add a lift in energy to it as well. Alright, so that's it. Nothing more needed to do that. Obviously, we may give that a final balance when we get to the mixing stage, but it's pretty much in the ballpark. I would say. That's it for this lesson. Thanks very much for watching guys and girls see in the next one. 18. Lesson 17 Song Structure: Hey everybody, welcome back. Alright, So as mentioned earlier in the tutorial, we are going to dissect the micro and macro energetic levels of this track so we can better understand how to reproduce that in other tracks that we might make. To use a metaphor, a good song should be like a good policy. It kinda starts gently, people talking, drinking, loosening up. Gradually the music gets louder, people get more drunk, people start dancing. Maybe you have a break for food, more drink, and then you're back to dancing and you're having a time your life, and then it ends. And a good policy always ends with the thinking, I want more. And it doesn't end too soon because it was only like a party that lasted 5 min in length. It ended too soon because you have such good fun and you just didn't want it to end. You want your track to finish with people wanting more, like they just couldn't get enough of it. Now obviously, that's going to be on some level, very subjective between-person. Some people love some tracks and other people hate those tracks, so you can't please everybody. But putting that aside, really, everything comes down to tension and release on the micro level and on the macro level. So in the earlier lessons, I talked about how you resolve a chord progression ending with the four or five chord and then going back to the one chord. And that gives it the chord progression, a sense of resolution or completion. That is already an application of tension and release on the micro-level, it kinda works like this. The longer you're away from the one chord, the greater that tension becomes, and the longer that that tension last, the greater that release felt when it resolves back to the one chord. However, if you stay away from the one chord too long, then that tension kind of collapses. And that tension, rather than being released, turns into other emotions. And that's normally like an emotion like anxiety or unease or plane uncomfortableness, which is a trick used in horror films, e.g. to promote a sense of dis-ease and anxiety. It's all done through the music are a lot of it's done through the music with like really dissonant chords that never resolved. So there's always a sense of tension, but it never gets released. In music is super important that you have to balance the tension with the release always. Now for me, this is just my personal opinion. Ready? But the longest chord progression that should be used is really like an eight bar chord progression. So one that's this long. Now, in this one this is slightly different. This is more like a four bar chord progression because it resolves back to the one chord after 4 bar. So we could e.g. have a different chord here instead of the one chord. And it's still be okay because it's still going to resolve from the four chord back to the one chord after 8 bar. That will work, but I wouldn't personally go any longer than that, like a 16 bar chord progression where it doesn't actually resolve back to the one chord, in my opinion, gonna be too much. It's just too much tension and not enough released, so the balance is off. But obviously this is something that only experimenting. You're so full kind of shine a light on. So that's kind of how we generate tension and release on the micro scale with the melody. And by the way, this is still the case if you don't use chords, but you have like say, a baseline that repeats every two or 4 bar e.g. so there are different ways to create that tension and release and tracks. It does not have to be a chord progression or a chord progression is a great way of doing it. Also, things like harder dance styles. The tension and release is much more focused on the macro scale, the larger scale. So building the tension up over time and the breakdowns and buildup sections, and then full-on energy in the drop or core sections. There's still tension and release on a smaller scale in those tracks, but balanced sort of shifts to being much more about the macro scale rather than the micro scale. It just comes about in a slightly different way to more melodic tracks. I'm going off on a bit of a tangent here. But if you really want to know more than definitely go check out the song structure masterclass, right, so to summarize tension and release on the microscope, sometimes every 4 bar and especially every 8 bar and 16 bar, we have a cycle of tension and then release from that tension. And what does that achieve? It means there is always this constant undertone of push and pull in your tracks that keeps the listener engaged, whether they realize it or not, on a conscious level and on some level it's quite a hypnotic thing. And that's why it's really important to work on that chord progression and use things like seventh chords or borrowed chords and sus chords and stuff like that to sort of emphasize the push and pull of the chord progression. Then on the bigger scale, the macroscale, the same thing applies, but obviously on a bigger scale. So if we let say just concentrate on the first half of this track. So just up to where our of 32 bar chord progression ends, we can see that at the end of each eight bar chord progression, as it resolves, a new heart is added. So obviously first it's the Adagio strings in C, then it's the piano than the female vocal ooze. Say, each time it's resolving to go backtrack a bit, it starts off very gently, but eight bar chord progression sort of builds in energy a bit, and then it releases back into a repeat of the chord progression, but as also an addition. So you can see this as each eight-bar section here is like a build-up into the next section. So the energy is just gradually building over time. And so we have a crescendo. I'm pretty much of that energy and then it will goes to pretty much nothing. And now this will become a little bit more apparent as we add more special effects and stuff like that to the track. That's basically what's happening here. All the energy is building up and then it goes to almost nothing. And then obviously we start again, but with a different energy. Now, I'm just going to draw in what this looks like. So it's a good way of visualizing the energy flow of attract. So we start off obviously very low energy. Down here. It builds up a bit in that first eight bar progression. Then as kind of a smooth added bit of energy with the Adagio for Strings. And again, that sort of builds up very gradually because it's the same progression. And again, we add the piano, I say, this whole section builds very slightly in energy. And again hit, it builds again in energy. And then we have a complete drop of energy almost to nothing. And then we go back in, but we go back in with the drums and the bass, so the energy is somewhat higher. And then again, the same sort of thing happens. So we gradually build and energy. And so we complete the track and then we'll see is a complete drop back to nothing. That is the basic energy structure of the track. And this is a good way to visualize things. So just let me get rid of that and I'll draw in what sort of more typically sort of pop arrangements, sort of energy would be something like builds up in the verse, then it goes into the chorus and you kinda nice bit of energy. There are a bit more like that. Drops down. You get back into the verse that builds an energy, then you go bang into the chorus. So it's that sort of thing. It's like this ebb and flow which you can see here that goes on until the track finishes. Soares, a terrible drawing. But you get the idea. It goes up, it goes down, it goes up, it goes down. It's all this push and pull which keeps the listener engaged with your track. Obviously this ambient track is a little bit different, but it still has that effect. It just builds in energy all the way up through the first half. Then it drops and then it goes into more energy and then it builds up again. So there is an ebb and flow is just slightly different. And when you do zoom out, you can always see like the first half of the track is actually almost like a buildup section for the second half of the track where the drums and the bass line coming. Now one other thing I'll just mention briefly, that's super, super important when we're talking about tension and release. That is the amount of tension that you create in your track with whatever it is, whether it's with the melody on a micro scale, or whether it's with the actual arrangement. Say the build-up into a drop section, e.g. tension and the release always must be balanced out. So if you have loads of tension, you got to balance that out with lots of energy when it releases. So one sort of failure of this would be saying like a dance track, we have loads of energy like a really long, super energetic buildup. And then when it drops into the main kick and baseline or whatever, if that's like really underwhelming, like there's just hardly any energy in that, then it's going to be like super disappointing to listen to. It's quite a bizarre things here, but believe me it does happen people make that mistake. So if you have mega energetic buildup, then you need omega energetic drop is pretty much as simple as that. Same again with the melody. So with that, like I say, you can't stay away from the one chord for too long because the tension just becomes too great. So you have to balance that out by not making it too long. It's a similar sort of principle, just on a different level. Alright, so that's it for this lesson. In the next few lessons, we are going to be now adding some of the effects into this track and will be automating it all to help enhance what we've been talking about, this sort of ebb and flow of energy throughout the track. Alright, so that's it. Thank you very much for watching guys and girls see you in the next one. 19. Lesson 18 SFX Flanged Riser: Hey everybody, welcome back. Alright, so in this lesson we're going to start adding some effects sounds. And this particular switch is going to look at one which is going to be like a flanged riser, impacts, sort of sounds crazy, but it's pretty simple in the end. So what I've got in the work files is this one called gentle symbol March. So obviously just a very high-frequency riser, not really an impact, but just a mover, I guess you'd call it what it wants to do to this is just to make it a bit more interesting, is add a flange effects, but we'll get to that in just a second. One thing I want to just very quickly mentioned just so you don't get confused, is that I have moved the Adagio string and the female vocal ooze. They were yellow and they were at the bottom of the projects. So I've moved them up in case you're wondering where these things came from. And what I'm gonna do is just select roughly where I want this. I'm going to have this coming in halfway through the second half. So let's just drag that into our projects. Just an audio track is fine. And it was created at this tempo, so you shouldn't have any problem fitting it in as long as you use the same tempo, 84 bpm. Let's just turn that down and have a quick listen. It sounds nice, but it's just a little bit on the plain sight perhaps. So let's just add a flange effect to this. So I'm just gonna go to my inserts and pretty much any door should have a flange effects. Be very surprised if yours didn't come with one. I'm sure there are plenty of free ones that you can download, but here we go. So flanges or a time-based effects, which is why we have delay feedback. This will just sort of accentuate the amount of flange effect that we get. So I'm just going to solo this plate. Now I'm actually totally happy with the amount of flange there or the depth of the effects and everything. So I'm actually going to use just the stock settings. The only thing that I want to change is the timing. So I don't want it to be so noticeably going up and down, up so you can hear that it really just comes in once every barbs it's on 11. So you want to change this. So I'm going to turn off sync and I'm just going to turn this down to 0.1, so it's really slow. Now, the one problem with this is that it being not sink to the beat, it will actually play at different times. So if I say play it from bar 47, the flanger flux will be triggered. And if I play it at 48, there'll be triggered. Each time it gets to this symbol, it's going to be in position. So if you can imagine the flange effect obviously oscillates as we can see here. It's on a sine wave, so it goes up and down, up and down. What I want is for it to reach its peak as the symbol reaches its crescendo on it to reach its peak there, I want it to go Zhe sort of thing. And then the flange effect sort of tails down from the sine wave. It goes down as it's passed this middle point. Alright, so basically what I'm saying is whenever you play the track, the flange effects will be different each time on this effect. So what we're gonna do is copy it like this, like say eight times e.g. and then we'll render this out with the flange effect on. And then we'll pick the one where it has the right attributes to it. Okay, so let's just do this and you'll probably get a better idea of what I'm jabbering on about, which is quickly change. My workspace has taken up the full screen. Alright, so let's go. I'm just going to export this. Obviously I don't know how you'll be able to do in your track, but it'll be exports or render or bounce or whatever different terms for the same thing. But I'm just going to export an audio mix down. Now for this, I'll just name it Flanders symbol. I want to have it come into the truck when we're done. Say create an audio track that's perfect. And obviously make sure the sample rate and bit depth and everything are accurate and then just export. Okay, so there we are. We've got our rendered or exported symbol. I can subtract, just turning it up a little bit there. He's in the middle control point. So I'm just going to mute the one that we use for getting the symbols there. And let's just have a listen to these rendered symbols with the flanges effects on. That was pretty close, but the effects peaks slightly after the crescendo of the symbol. So let's try the next one. It's almost perfect. You can hear the effects going down or the flange sort of going down if you'd like, it's almost like Doppler effects. So when you got a car zooms past you from left to right or whatever, as it's going towards, it sounds almost like higher pitch. And then as it goes past you, the sound goes lower pitched. Pretty much very similar effects. So this one is at the moment the best one. We're just going to shorten that off, so we've got that and we'll just check the others. That's pretty much perfect as well. Peaks too late, so we'll just take the first one. That's fine. This is definitely close enough. I don't wanna be too crazy about this. So we're going to take that one. We're going to drop it in halfway through there, I believe. Let's just check that. It kind of it as well. Alright, so the sign-in pretty decent. I just add something a little different to the track. Alright, so that's it for this lesson. Just a quick one there. And in the next lesson we will look at putting more effects sounds in there, or SFS sounds, and really sort of flushing the tension and release out of this track. Thanks very much for watching guys and girls see in the next one. 20. Lesson 19 SFX Arrangement: Hey everybody, welcome back. Alright, so in this lesson we're going to carry on just adding in some SFS sounds really adds to the tension and release of this track. A couple of quick things. First, I'm just going to remove the symbol that we use to generate the flanged symbol. So it's just gonna get rid of that. I'm just going to move my flowers symbol, alphabet that can stay that color is fine as green for effects, just set my loop region over the track. Not less necessary, but that's fine. Okay, So first thing I want to add is a sort of dirty or Castro hit, which hits just at the end of the first half of the tracks there where it sort of crescendos basically what I want. So I'm just going to set my play head and bath 37. Let's go to our work files. We've got dirty or kestrel hit. There you go. It's just drag that into the projects. Just going to turn it out. Somebody turned down, That's great. So let's just have a little listen. So we need to automate this to take some of the volume out of it when the drums and everything comes in. We're gonna get to that in the next lesson when we do automation. But just so you know, that's sort of how this first section of the trends obviously needs to have a bit more of an impact which we'll look at in just a sec. Effects that eat very quickly. Let's just do that. So once you have the kick, so I'm just going to copy over the kick Midea and just delete everything apart from the first kick there. Just say this has a bit more of an impact. So probably have another effect in there. In a sec, what you're going to add. But for now that's fine. So let's just move on to the start of the tracks. I don't really want anything until the piano comes in. Let's just have a little listen through and get a feel for this. Bear in mind as well when we get to automation in the next lesson, this will be coming in much more gently and more filtered. So it'd be much softer building and energy. So yeah, right there, I want to have a bit of a riser impacts and this is the one that I sort of came to rest on in the end. This is also from our two-step sample pack. Very nice. So let's just drag that into our projects. Make sure we get it set up in the right place there and turn it down a little bit. Perhaps a little bit too loud. We definitely do want this to have a nice big impact. Sorry, just trying to balance this out because honestly we've got a couple of things coming in here. We've got the bass notes of the Paddy, you've got the piano, and you've got this impact. So we still need to have the piano and the bass notes is like the most prominent things that appear here. And it's perhaps just a fraction too loud at the moment, just because the impacts there takes a little bit away from the piano. Again, we've only just put it in, so we need to have a little bit of a listen throughout the entire track. So when we get to the mixing lesson, we'll probably be tweaking these sort of things just to get them absolutely spot on. But for now, that's fine. We can leave it in that ballpark. No props. I think what we'll do as well as what actually just copy. Let's find out where we want it. So at the end here, where we've got that dirty orchestral sound, let's have this leading into that as well. Now I think we might want to have a bit of a longer sort of riser effect into there. So what I'm actually going to do is reverse this. So in Cubase, that's easy. I can just right-click or Alt and right-click. And then go to reverse. And I want to make a new version. Obviously you can have to do that in your own door, but usually that sort of operation is pretty straightforward. And certainly if you don't know how to do it, it will be a quick Google search away. And then we're going to use this as a lead in to the dirty orchestral sounds. So let's just have a little listen, see what that sounds like. It sounds like K, but I do want a bit of the, let's call it epic of the impact of this bit there as well. So I'm just going to chop these up and use them together. So if I just chocolate, chocolate there, get rid of that and copy that across. And let's just see if we can make this work. Now, normally when we do is we probably want to turn this first one down a bit. Let's listen soloed. Sounds like that with the rest of the track. So sorry, I guess that's actually the wrong way round. We do want that to have more impact than this because there's a kick, there's dirty or Castro hit as well. We want this to be a bit lower and just provide that sort of warm low-end rumble to this. So we're just balancing out the volume between the two hits. Not too bad. Now the reason I'm using the event volume controls rather than actually changing the volume of the whole track here is because obviously we've got other hits here. Let's say we're happy with the level that they're at. So I just want to change the individual event volume level rather than change the whole track level because that will obviously affect all of the riser impacts that are on this channel. Someone like that, it's quite perfect at the moment. Now we will have a little fill, we're going to see fills in a separate lesson, but we will have a little Phil going up there leading into the drums, just saying that it's not just going to start out of nowhere. But again, we'll get to that in a bit. Now let's go a little bit further on in the track and add some extra bits. So psy, halfway through the last section, we definitely want to have a bit of an impact here, which actually, sorry, I've got the flange symbol in the wrong place. I apologize for that. That's supposed to be there leading into the second half. And that is just a bit on the loud side. Let's turn that down, so it's not so overpowering. Let's also make this a bit more impactful. So what I'm gonna do is actually copy across the first little snip of our rise impacts, which is just like the high-end part of it. White symbol reversed. So that also you want to add a bit of reverb. So let's just add that. This will definitely help it sound a bit more epic. And I'll say more epic on the drops here. So let's just play that actually. Absolutely ton of reverb on it. Now I'm wanting that to be louder, of course. Okay. Let's get on with the bit that we're working on here. So we've got our sort of first half of the riser impact here. And let's add a crush in as well to sort of just emphasize the impacts of this second section. At crushed 15. Again, it's wacky bit of reverb on their ten up a bit. Okay, so that's sounding pretty decent radio and he wants one last bits which I think we'll just repeat the rise of impacts right at the very end of the track. So finishing off here. And also while we're at it, let's have the dirty orchestral hit coming in halfway through as well. We're going to have to work on this a bit, so it's not going to sound right straight away. It might sound a bit too much. And I'll tell you what, rather than have it starting here. Let's have this one beat late. Maybe that's even a bit too late. That's how that starting half a beat too late. And again, we're going to need to automate this. We really want to just hear the very start of this hit and then it go right down in volume. So it's not overpowering the rest of the track. But we'll get to that again in the next lesson. And then we'll have a last orchestral hit right at the end. So I'm just going to shorten that. It's not too long and copy that over. And again, we will be probably automating this as well. Just going to drag in the right-hand envelope just to give this a volume fade out. Now of course, it's really up to you what sorts of sound you want to use. You don't have to use a dirty orchestral hits just the same way that you don't have to use that kind of the vocal sound that we've got in here, totally up to you. You can use different sounds if you want. Say, I just really like that. Effect. It almost jolts you a bit. It's something a bit more interesting. It's a bit at the left field. So for me it really works. But obviously for you, you can choose any sound you'd like. Alright, so I think we're pretty much there with the special effects sounds. Let's now have a listen to the whole track. I'm just going to let it play through and we can get a real feel for where began before we start adding automation in the next lesson. So I won't do anymore in this lesson. If you do want to skip on, you can, but otherwise stick around and we'll get a good feel for where this track is in its current state. Alright, thanks very much for watching guys girls see you in the next one. 21. Lesson 20 Automation: Hey everybody, welcome back. Alright, so in this lesson we're going to look at automation. So the main goal here, pot from a couple of corrective things like what we gotta do with the dirty orchestral hit, where we've got to drop the volume out so it makes room for everything else in the mix. But apart from that, we're really using it to sort of emphasize the ebb and flow of this track. Now that's not complicated in really any way. And we only need to add automation, I think just to the pad for the emotional side of things, because it just all sort of plays like the same sort of filter level. So we need to make this comment a bit more gently over time and gradually build up. Whereas the Adagio strings, they're all controlled, the velocity of these notes is really what helps them kind of ebb and flow. And you can see that pattern there as we've discussed for these don't need automation, but the pad does. Alright, so let's just figure out exactly what we're going to do. So I'm just going to bring a vital and we're going to sort of play around with the filter actually. So I've set it to the beginning of the track, that's fine. So let's just play. It. Starts off with a filter sort of down here or something like that. And then it'll be gradually rising over time. So we just want to really figure out the perfect starting position for the cutoff filter. Let's try it right down just to see it as like a little bit too low. Don't want it to start off that Germany's have a little bit more energy than that. So now what we need to do is automate it. So what I'm gonna do in Cubase is I'm going to set the playhead at the start of the projects. I'm going to hit rights all summation. This just means that now when I hit play and I play with any of the controls in vital, it's going to record automation into the projects. Obviously, if you're using a different door, that's going to be different as FL Studio has a slightly different way of using automation, sodas, Ableton, so does logic. And of course, if you followed along in any of our beginner courses that cover those doors, then you already know how to do that. I'm just going to hit play and I'm just going to modify the filter cutoff. To be fair. That's probably enough already. I just wanted to get an automation lane in there. As you can see that's now appeared. Just say no, if you are using Cubase and that hasn't a beard, you just got to click the little button here, show or hide automation. Again, you go to depend on your particular door and know what you're doing. That's why we discussed needing to know how to use automation at the beginning of the course. Now I've got that in there. I'm just going to literally draw this in. So on it seems sort of gradually increase over time. So what I'm gonna do here, we got our beginning point. Sounds about right now gonna pick the end state for the automation as well. So we could try it right up. That's way, way, way, way too much. So maybe somewhere around there. Let's just play it with everything else in there as well. That sounds right now. We'll get on to the second half in a bit, but let's just sort of tweak the automation in the first half. So I still want this to kind of ebb and flow. And I also want it when we get to the piano part here to sort of come down a bit in energy. So let's just have a bit of a change in energy. Cubase again, I can add like gradual phase rather than just being purely linear, not the end of the world if he can't. And of course you can just sort of add multiple points to make what seems like a sort of curvature to the automation. Will need to listen to this in its entirety to really gauge where these sort of levels should be. Somewhere around there for now is fine, that's okay. But we will probably want to tweak that a little bit when we listen through in a minute. But for now let's just get the rest of this sorted. So the second half, I want this to drop down in energy again, not quite to where it was at the very start, but somewhere around there. And then we're going to have this buildup in energy. Yet, again, probably around the same level, but maybe just slightly higher. So it's just a little bit more intense by the time it reaches the end. Let's just have a little listen. Probably starts off a little bit too low there. I need a bit more energy when it comes in. All say, let's just get this dirty orchestral hits, source it out because it's really interfering with the track, with the baseline and everything when it comes in. So let's just sort this one out. Now. I'm just going to expand the automation lane here. And the first one that always pops up, if you haven't used any automation lanes yet is always the volume, which is what I want to use right here. So let's just make that a bit bigger. We want it to suddenly drop when the kick and the baseline come in. So right here, it's just going to draw in a point. I'll also draw in a later point. So just after the orchestral hits finished because we don't want to affect the volume of the next orchestral hits at the moment. So let's just get this sorted. And let's add a point there. And I'm just going to, you can obviously do this with points, but I'm just gonna do this by using the central control points. So you give a non-linear fade out to the volume. So let's just check that this works. They're not bad. I just want that to be a little bit steeper. And we can, if we want, have a slightly longer Taylor, I'll just play that soloed. Basically cuts it right out. That's absolutely fine. We want to make room for that kick and base. Just going to try and tweak this a little bit. So it's not quite as sudden, but we do want it to be fairly sudden. That's perfect. Okay. Great. That's not bad at all. We will, again, like I mentioned, have a little fill that leads into that, but we're gonna get to that in the next lesson. Now let's work on the next orchestral hit, because right here it's very messy after its initial start. That sounded loud. Sorry that crush 15 is way too loud. So we've really only want the first part of this. And as we zoom in, you can really see where we're going to want to cut the volume. So I'm just going to add an automation point, do very similar things. So let's go right to the end at a point. And then we'll do pretty much the same thing right there. So we just really want to hear that initial hit. So at the moment is definitely not balanced. This particular section, these are a little bit too loud. This isn't prominent enough, really wants to stand out as a feature. So it's a bit of work to do here, but again, we're gonna get to that in the mixing lesson more so than we are now. So that's fine. Let's move on. This one is already taken care of with the volume fade at the end. That's should be enough. And that's basically where we'll end the track. In fact, I'll tell you what let's say. We've got the main Stereo Out channel here. So I want it really to end emboss $0.76, drop a point in there, and we'll just drop a point in 2 bar before that. I'm just going to bring that down. So this is where the track will end, okay, right up to borrow 76. Could even have it a little bit before perhaps, but whatever, that's fine. We'll go with that for now. That's almost it for the automation. There will be a little bit more when we do the drum fills, but a couple of more things I want to add in hair actually, because I just feel like this section could do with a little bit more in the way of S FX. And so let's just quickly do that. So right around here, which is just before there's a dye JUCE string, sort of sample comes in like a bit more energy here. Like a little wiser type of effects. So let's see what we got in our work files. And we should have Fx hit 26. We're going to use that, but we're going to reverse it. So let's just drag that into our projects. Okay, then I'm going to right-click and I'm going to reverse this. Just get it lined up with 47. You turn off my snap if that helps. So kinda sounds nice, but we definitely need a whole lot of reverb on Next. It sounds really out of place at the moment. So let's add ascend reverb. Leave on the full amount for now. Type. Yet that sounds not too bad. Perhaps a little bit too loud. So let's add, I want to crush in there, but I don't really want to repeat. Crush 15 is gonna get used in a bit. So I want to have a bit of variation. So let's actually use just a ride cymbal and nice, gentle sort of hit. So let's just play that suit. It sounds like it sounds quite nice. Yeah. Okay. Like I said, you've got to balance some of this stuff out. I think that ethics hit 26 is just a fraction on the Cloud side still, but we are definitely getting there. One last sound as well, which we will have coming in. Let's see, around bar 49. So you'd make this section a little bit more interesting as well. And that is the BTP CS, short melodic riser. So let's just drag that into our projects. Let's have it leading into bar 51 because that's sort of more like the midway point. Right there. We wouldn't see a peak just before it gets to borrow 51, something like that. Let's just sort of play around with it a bit, turn it down. And we might as well add a reverb because we know we're going to say, let's just crank that up a bit. Happy days. Sorry, I know I'm going quick here, but it's literally just very basic stuff, just adding sends. This is not complicated. Perhaps it's a little bit too early and a little bit on the outside. Let's have a listen. So I kind of like that sound is almost a bit discordant, but for me it really works. So obviously you can choose to have it in or out, but I particularly like it. And it just adds something else in that section that isn't in the rest of the track. I, keeping things interesting. Alright, so that's it for that lesson. In the next lesson, we'll be looking at a couple of drum fills just to keep the energy moving along and also to introduce the second half of the Charles. Thanks very much for watching guys and girls see in the next one. 22. Lesson 21 Fills: Hey everybody, welcome back. Alright, so in this lesson we're going to look at just a couple of Phil's to sort of help the track chug along and also to introduce this sort of second section here. So let's just do that one first is a very small fill that we're going to add to lead into this. So let's just find that. So B2B CS fill O2. That's all it is. So let's just drop that into our projects and line it up. So it should be exactly two beats long at 84 BPM. So that's fine. Just make sure it's not ending with a click or a pop where the waveform, isn't it? The zero-point crossing, but that's absolutely fine. No worries. Let's just zoom out and have a little listen. It, turn it down a bit first as well. So that's what's going to lead into the second section. Obviously, we want to add a bit of reverb to this as per usual. Not sure how much. Let's just have a little play. I think that's gonna be a bit too much. Don't want it to be quite that heavy. Although we might do some funky thing with the send automation in a sec, We'll see. And you can hear it's got a bit of sort of panning information in it. You can see some of the hits here, obviously louder on one channel than the other. And then it kind of switches around, but not a lot. So it's definitely allowed on the left-hand channel to start off with, and then it gets louder on the right-hand channel. So what we're gonna do is just accentuate that a little. Let's add an automation lane I'm going to select. Instead of volume in Cubase, it's the standard pan out left and right. You have to use the one that's correct for your door. And then we're going to just add a point there and a point there so that we can freely do automation in-between that. And then we're just going to copy the positioning of what's happening in this audio. So here at the start it goes more towards the left. So we're going to accentuate that. And then we're going to go more towards the right, towards the end of it to sort of have it overly pronounced. Perhaps even that's just a little bit too much. I don't want to be crazy. Panning here just enough to highlight the fact that it is being panned. That works quite nicely. So that's absolutely fine. We could, if we wanted to add a bit more of a fade to that, sort of starts a bit more out of nowhere. As opposed to this. Actually prefer it with the fade. So just kinda starts from a bit more at zero and kind of gently swings into the film. That's literally it would just have to balance the volume with the rest of the track and everything. But again, we're only getting it in the ballpark at the moment will be a tackling this all in the mixing lessons which are coming up. But somewhere around there is fine for now. Now let's look at the second fill. This. I want to go not every 8 bar in the second half, but almost certainly from the beginning. So you're gonna count 8 bar. The first Phil wants to go in here and I see other fields. Csf fill 01 says drag that in. And we should just be at a place that right in the correct position. So it's made at the same 84 BPMN. Let's just play that. Not exactly swung, but a kind of lazy kinda feel to that film which I quite like just a bit too loud. And of course, let's add a bit of reverb. So the next place that we might want to put one is here, which is halfway through the second half where the piano comes in. But I think there's enough going on there already. I don't think we really want to add another element to the mixer will try anyway, but I'm not sure if it's going to work. Does work. They again, we do need to re-balance everything that's happening that because it is just a little bit messy. So that's just copy these over as well. So they're in the same position for the last parts of the second half. And I think we want a bit more reverb on them that I really want this to be prominent. So yeah, That sounded pretty good. So nothing much on that. I'm just going to highlight all of those though, and going because you've got this little sound at the beginning. So I'm just going to shorten them off, add a fade at either end. Not the most important thing in the world, but just keeping everything super neat and tidy. I think we're pretty much there. So now is definitely the time to have a listen to this from start to finish, to really make sure that we've got everything pretty much in the right place. Sf XY is automation y's. And then we can move on to mixing, which we'll look at in the next lesson. But first of all, we're going to have a listen through might make changes as we going. We'll see volume wise and stuff like that. Whatever we do will talk about it at the end. So have you gave us place for you? Just a quick one. I'll stop it. Just say no, we will be doing panning as well. That'll be the lesson. After next. Just say no, we're not going to keep everything dead down the middle. We will be sort of widening this mix as we go. Sounded pretty good. That needs to be changed, that comes into quickly and perhaps even a little bit too loud as well. So that's due to the sampler instrument for the female vocal. And let me go to the app mode. Zoom out a bit and I'm going to just lengthen the attack has tried 1 s. I will listen for the button. I actually think it's really needs to be very gentle and just come in and lengthen that. Just noticed something where the hat falls at the same time as that sort of thing. Affect sounds right here. I don't actually want the hat to fall at the same time. So to get rid of that, just selecting all of the hats because they're all 2 bar in length. And I'm just going to basically shorten off the middy. So we're only going to hear the hats in the second bar. So what I will do is just for now I'm not gonna delete them, I'll just mute them. But I'm going to meet these ones which kinda fall as well at the same time as another sound. So in this case it's that hahaha kind of vocal bets and tidy that up a bit. It's like yeah, that's, that's fine. I'm going to do that for the rest. So literally every other one, I'm just going to mute. And I'll say, What are we going to do as well, is we're going to automate the volume of the reverb effects channel. So when it comes in right here, what I want is for us to really hear the reverb that's on this fill carryover when the bass and the kick comes in. So I want it to not stop dead is probably the wrong word or the reverb to stop dead and just immediately make space for the kick and the bass rather than have the tail of the reverb here. So what we're gonna do, come down to our main reverb group or bus or whatever it is that you're using. And we are going from bar 39, so I'm just going to give it a bit of a dip. Let's put in a point here so I don't affect anything else and I'm just going to have it go in like this. And then right back up. Let's just see what that sounds like. A little bit too much. I want to add just a teeny, teeny bits of that reverb. Something like that, just gives the kick and the bass a little bit more impact. Perhaps that needs to be a little bit more like that. That sounds cool and we're also going to do the same thing with this vocal hit here. Say, I want this to also be dimmed or the reverb be dimmed here. So let's just do the same thing at, in a couple of points. And let's just see what this sounds like. Someone it, so you have that sort of almost like it stops dead kind of effect. Let's just add in another point here to lengthen that sort of reverb silence. Little bit too long, but we pretty much in the ballpark, this is roughly what it wants. Almost feels like the tracks like getting sucked in and it is almost in a way like having a side chain on there, like it dips the reverb and then it slowly sort of comes back up. So that's the effect, that one. So let's do that for each time that that vocal sample comes in, saying key-based, I can copy across the automation that I've got. If I hold Alt or Option on a Mac and then Control or Command on a Mac. I can actually copy that across obviously if you can't do that, that's fine. Don't worry about it. You can just draw it in as necessary. Now I've lost my place completely heavier. That's where we want our automation. It's fine. And see that one last time. Just set my play head now so I know where I'm actually going to Los times, I beg your pardon. So we'll do it for each time that that hahaha kind of sound comes in. Make sure we get this in the right place. Yeah, that is correct. Great. And then the last one is bar 67. Maturity changes has a bit more obvious as cool as the hahaha hit. And again, we'll just copy the automation over. Make sure it's dead on, and then Happy days. So that's fine. Just adds a little bit of variation to the beat ads, that sort of sucking effects. Subtle load is yes, but it still is noticeable and I think it has a positive effects on the overall track. Now this sounds, I must admit that she doesn't sound that great. It's a little bit weak. Sounding to be honest. Needs to be a little bit more epic than that to really fit in with this beat. So I'm going to just find another hat sound. I'm gonna do this off-screen and so you don't have to bother watching me go through like 50 different hats samples. Hopefully it's not that many, but I'll come back to you in a sec when it's all done. Okay, so I've gone through a few different hats and found one that I think suits subtract just a bit better. It's not like massively different, but it definitely does work a bit better. That is, in the work falls Cool. Btp H t1, open hat 11, that one. So just replace the hat in the sampler. In Cubase, that's easy. You literally just drag it and drop it on top of the existing sample and replaces it. Obsolete. Your sampler might vary depending on your door, but just replace it with this hat. Also went into the midi, all of it. And I changed it. So it was on a, instead of being on C3, it's on A2. And this little triplet fill is also starting on A2, going down. Just the pitch of it works a bit better. So let's just play that. Again, it's nothing like groundbreaking the different, But it just suits to track a bit better. Let's carry on listening through and fats, I'll start again from here because he had a bit of a sort of pause in between. Say, let's just listen to the second half again. It's like just seeing a obviously I tried a different pitch of the hat but I undid it, say they making changes. One thing that I'm noticing in this second half is that the piano is getting a little more lost behind everything else. Now we will be tackling this a bit more using dynamic EQ in the, one of the coming mixing lessons, but I can also tweak that a bit. Now I'm going to go into this last section of it. And if I select all of the midi, I'm just going to change the velocity of it. Make it a little bit louder. Will the impacts of the keys a little bit louder so that it becomes more prominent in the mix. Sounds better. So I just listened to this drumbeat here. Sounds like **** thought maybe this little bit was interfering a little with the rest of the track, but kinda sounds okay. Okay, that's like sounding right so far. Obviously, it definitely needs a good mix, which we'll be looking at soon, but we are getting pretty gross. Everybody. Lovely stuff. Thanks very much for watching. See in the next one, Bye. 23. Lesson 22 Getting Effortless: Hey everybody, welcome back. Alright, so just a quick note for this lesson as we're getting into the mixing side of things now, in this lesson, we're not doing anything to the track. We're going to discuss the approach. You need to have effortless mixes. So if you're already fully confident about this, you can, if you want to skip on to the next lesson where we start panning the elements of the track. Alright, so what I want to do first is actually dispel a bit of a mixing myth that I actually think is quite damaging to people who are in their first years of music production. Now normally when you mentioned mixing to someone, they might think of sort of volume mixing, compression, EQ saturation, or that sort of stuff. And all of which are necessary and valuable skills. But actually, the biggest difference in getting good mixes, like literally 80 per cent, is the ability to pick the right elements in the first place. This has way more of an impact than any technical skills though again, of course, having the technical skill or technical knowledge will help you eke out that last ten to 20 per cent at the mixing stage. But none of those technical skills will help you if you pick the wrong elements of your track in the first place, or at the very least, if you start with elements that don't work together, is going to be the opposite of an effortless mix. The first stage of making sure you have effortless mixes is picking elements that a sound great and B works together? The first part is really pretty obvious. E.g. if you have a singer and the performance is bad, then the truck itself is never going to sound that great. You're only as strong as the weakest link and you might be able to make it sound a bit better than its original state with processing and mixing techniques, but it's never going to be great. The same goes for every single element in your track from the drums all the way to the leads. So the first step, even if it takes a bit of time, should be relatively easy depending on your skill level knowledge and what samples are instruments you have available to all the level of skill of the musician you're recording. The second part requires a bit more care and that is making sure the elements work together. There are a few things to consider when picking the right elements. The first is rhythm. Now, this should be reasonably obvious, and I think it's mostly intuitive to most people. But let's say e.g. you have a choppy base on a choppy lead and maybe even an arpeggiated pattern in your track as well. If they're all playing a different rhythm, then it will likely sound like a mess. So a way to make it work would be to have your chopped up baseline. That's fine. And then have a lead that has more sustained notes rather than being all chopped up, then even your art might work as well in that mix. You need to balance the rhythms of the elements used in your tracks. Now, this is, again, perhaps more intuitively understood by some people, but it's definitely worth noting because some people do make that mistake. They just have too many conflicting rhythms going on and that will make mixing very difficult. Then we're on to frequency. So you didn't have to worry about the baseline interfering or masking the high hats because they're in completely different frequency ranges. But you might have to worry about a lead sound interfering with the hat sound, especially if that lead is sort of very high-frequency focused and possibly has added noise, white noise as well. Then you have the hat, which has a very similar like white noise again kind of texture or Tom rotor. If they have similar textures and the same frequency range, then they're going to tend to blend into one another and the hat will get lost in the mix. And to avoid this, we can use a hat with a different Tambora, which obviously brings us onto Tambora. Now, I often refer to Tambora as the texture of the sound. So you can have a dense texture, a hollow texture, that sort of thing. We use descriptive names for however you describe the sound. And this is what you need to consider when you have two elements that have a different rhythm but occupy the same frequency range. So continuing our example of the white noise, heavy lead and the white noise heavy hat. In this case, you could just change the hat to something that has a very different time. Something that's less white noisy, like a more dense texture, e.g. and it will then stand out against the lead, even though it's in the same frequency range. Now, if none of these things work, then you're probably just going to have to pick a new elements or different sound, try different rhythm, et cetera, until you find something that works really well for your track. See this as kind of auditioning different actors for different roles in your play. So if you consider all these things when picking the elements of your track and you get sounds that sound great, but also works together very well. Then you'll find the mixing process is orders of magnitude easier than if you don't have elements that work naturally together. And this is possibly the fundamental mistake that most beginners tend to make. And that is they just find these sounds which might sound amazing on their own. But then when they put together, they don't really work. And then they spend ages trying to compress them or EQ them and all the rest of this stuff to try and get them to fit together. We're actually, they just don't really work. So picking the right elements that work with each other is like literally 80 per cent of the problem. And then your technical skill, knowledge of compression EQ is the last ten to 20%. And just as an aside, that's why you get some producers who seem to just go into music and they do it for like half a year or year. And they come up with these like number one hit songs. Obviously, you need to actually be good at writing songs, but when it comes to mixing, they're just really good at picking elements that work together, perhaps not so focused on how to use compression or EQ or that sort of thing, is that important? It really is. Okay, So that's enough for me jabbering about that. The last thing I want to mention is once you have the right elements, then of course, you need to then balance these elements together. And that's kinda where sort of basic EQ and compression and stuff like that comes in as well. But it also means giving each element the space that it needs in the mix so that all clear and not masking in any other way the other elements. So the analogy I use is if you have actors on stage, you have the main actor, let's say that's the vocal in your mix. You have all the supporting actors, the drums or base leads or whatever their job is to support and work with the main actor. But if those other actors, altro shouting over the top of the main actor, then it's just gonna be a confusing mess. Same with music. Pick one elements in any given section of your track and make that the main actor. So everything else in your track is supposed to be there to enhance that element and not shouts over the top of it. Alright, so that's the overview of the mixing process, really important to understand that, and that's it for this lesson. In the next lesson, we're going to look at panning all the elements of this track. Thank very much for watching guys and girls see you in the next one. 24. Lesson 23 Panning: Hey everybody, welcome back. Alright, so in this lesson we're going to be looked at panning some of the elements of our track. But before we get into it, Let's talk very briefly about planning and how it is generally approached in modern music. So first, it's important to distinguish between something being mono or it being panned in the center of the mix. So if something is mono than it has literally no stereo information at all. But when we talk about something that is panned center, it could still have stereo information. It's just that the balance between the left and right channels is equal. So it's considered and senza, but it would not be Mano. Ok, so it's just an important difference to understand that some people when you say something's pan dead center, I mean, they think that it's automatically mono, that's just not the case. Alright, so when it comes to mixing, generally speaking, the main elements of the track panned dead sensor, so the bass drums, lead vocals, e.g. however, you could have a very wide lead in your track, or you could have doubled, tracked vocals, panned left and right with the main vocal down the middle. Now, both of these will have a nice sort of big stereo effects. But again, the overall painting is that they are dead central in the stereo field. Now, obviously, feel free to experiment, but you will find that most tracks approach a painting in this way. And for good reason, it's often the tracks with simple padding. So most elements are the main elements panned down the center with one or two of the main elements being wider in the stereo field, but still dead center, like double-check vocals or guitar or whatever. And then say one or two elements or maybe three or four whatever. Perhaps some of the SFS sounds that are then panned from left to right in the stereo field, which kind of give that sense of stereotypes your track. So just to give an example of that, let's actually go through and do that to this track so you can sort of understand what I'm jabbering on about in this track. Clearly, we've got the main pad is one of the main elements of the track. So that's gonna be panned. Dead center. We're not going to change that, but it has also got some stereo width. It's not just a mono sound. The baseline pretty much always is going to be dead center. Very, very rare circumstances or just very experimental tracks where someone might choose to pan the baseline to one side or another. I don't particularly recommend it. And then the drums, of course, are pretty much all panned, dead center as well. And then, of course, the other elements, so the piano, the piano is a main elements, but we can play around a little bit with that. The Adagio strings in C, that's not really considered a main elements. So the first thing that will actually do is pan the digest strings and the piano in opposite directions. So in Cubase, fairly easy. I mean, it should be on the channel settings, but we can just change the pan here. So let's try how it's just experiment a bit for when this comes in. I'm really trying to get the strings to sound like they are coming from the left side, but not like completely. They want to still have a bit of signal coming out of the right-hand speaker as well. And then when this piano comes in, I want this to come in from the right hand side. Let's just pan this over a bit as well. Not too crazy again, I don't want this to be completely in the right speaker. I'm just doing this to separate them a bit. That's quite nice. You could possibly go a bit more extreme if you really want suit. However, the piano being one of what I would consider the main elements, I don't want to throw it too far to the right. And in fact, we might even be a little bit extreme with gain full seat to the right, but I kinda like how it sounds, so we'll keep it like that for now. It just makes the mix a little more interesting overall. So that's all good. Now, in this second half we've got that sort of musical hit that comes in, that sound which drops out when the piano comes in. So what we're gonna do is we're going to pan this sound to the right, just like the piano. That was like 40 to the right. Let's just have a little listen. So when the DYJ string comes in, that's going to be on the left. This sounds on the right. And then obviously when the piano comes in and this sound drops out, that's also on the right. So it kind of keeps the stereo balance. Him pretty decent like that, that's fine. Now I think only one more thing that I want to do, and that is our string effects. I want to have these hits being panned alternately to the left and right. So let's just bring up an automation lane. I'm going to change this from volume to panning up. See, you don't have to do that in your door of choice. And I think the first hit, I want to be dead center, putting in some points here and then we'll have our second hit. Not that it matters, but we'll go to the left. Then our third hits can be panned off to the right. And then again, the last hits will go back over to the left. Okay, so it's just a bit of variation. Nothing too crazy, but just to make the track a little more interesting. Okay, It's fine. Just panning that third hits a little more extreme to the right-hand side. So it's a bit more noticeable. Even have that hit starting off on the left and then coming back to Central. But whatever, that's just personal tastes really, it's not gonna be groundbreaking or sell any more copies of this track. Alright, so pretty basic panning overall in this track. Obviously, like I say, some of these elements already have stereo information like the original main pad. That's already nice and wide anyway, we've given a bit to some of the other elements and just made it a little more interesting. Obviously, we've also got a few sounds in here, like our little fill that's panned a bit as well. So some effects sounds just got a bit of padding information on him. And I think that's about all this track needs. Alright, so thanks very much for watching guys and girls. In the next lesson, we're gonna get into the mixing proper. Seeing the next one. 25. Lesson 24 Mixdown: Hey everybody, welcome back. Alright, so in this lesson we are going to mix this entire track. So it's mainly about the final tweaks here we've been going along like roughly volume balancing everything as we've gone through. So it's just a few last tweaks, bit of EQ here, better compression there, some dynamic EQ that we're going to use as well on the piano has a little more work to do on the piano than anything else just to get this really sort of sitting correctly in the mix. But first of all, only just start in the second half. And I'm just going to start with the kick and the bass. Now it's important here to get the balance right from the first half going into the second half. So I'm just going to play it from 4 bar before the end of the first half, going into the kick and the snare. And I just want to make sure I've got the volume balance right of the kick and snare. So I feel like the kick just needs a bit more impacts and that'll be achieved just by turning it up simple as that. So let's just crank that up a bit. Fraction too much, about -4.6. I'm also just going to perhaps take off the high end a little bit just to bypass it. And I'm also going to relax the reverb on that a little bit as well. I think it's just a bit too much making the kicks out a bit boomy, which definitely won't help the low end of our track. On his own. That's much better, I think. Let's just check it with the rest of the mix. Type D keys is really taming that sort of always clicky sound that's on top of the kick. Not much, just a little bit, but it's just a bit annoying. That sounds so I just wanted to tame that a little bit. That's fine. And then the snare, I think it was sounding kind of okay with that, but just a little bit louder. So what I'm gonna do is actually select both of these channels at the snare, O2 and the scenario to glitched because obviously they're part of the same instrument, so we want to turn them up at the same time. So in Cubase, what I can do is hold Alt or Option plus Shift. And then when I effects, so the volume of one, it'll automatically turned the other up relative to it. If you don't have something like that in your door, that's fine. Just turn them up individually by the same amount. No prompts. Say something like That sounds about right. I'm just going to go back again a couple of bars into the end of the first half. Even the kick could actually be just a fractional louder than it is Troy, just about minus four -3.95. That's fine. Just wants to have a nice bit of punch when it comes in compared to the end of the second half. And that sounds a bit better. Still a little bit of unbalanced going on there, like the end of the second half gets quite loud. It's a bit of a crescendo to the end section. And then when the kid comes in, it almost sounds a little bit on the weak side. Now we're going to tackle that in a different way. So what I'll actually do, I'll do it now rather than in the mixing lesson. So what we'll do is we'll go to our master track Stereo Out, and we're going to add a bit of automation. So right from here, where the second half starts to kick in base and everything comes in. We're going to put a point there. We'll put a point at the beginning and we're going to just turn that down a little bit. And we're also going to have it just very slowly declining in volume as the track progresses, as it reaches that crescendo, it's obviously getting much, much louder. We're kind of taming that a little bit by gently lowering the volume. More like that. Let's just play it and see the difference that it makes. So basically the whole idea is to give this section here where it kicks in much more impact by suddenly raising the volume. Now, obviously, you don't want this to be too noticeable. It doesn't want to be like a huge jump, like it actually scares people. You just want this to sort of help balance between the sort of tension that's built up in this section and then the release that you feel when it goes into this section. That sounds much better. Maybe a little bit too much, but not much. I think we're pretty close there. She kinda like where it was, say we will keep it somewhere around there. Maybe not quite as much but pretty close. And we can always tweak this as we go through the mixing lesson. But that's the kind of thing that I want to do. So we're starting to track off just slightly lower than its full volume. Gradually, very slowly going down and then a big jump up to give that second half a nice bit of impacts. Minor tweak there just to raise that back up, just a little bit too much, but that is absolutely fine. I think we're good. Okay, So next thing I want to check. I'm just gonna have a little listen to this. I just want to know if this female vocal ooze in the second half is like a little bit too much because we got quite a bit going on now, especially for an ambient track, it's getting a bit beyond minimal ready, so we've got the base, we've got drums, we got the piano, we've got the pad, some effects. And of course we've got this female vocal ooze coming in. So I just want to check that that's not overwhelming the mixed when it comes in. Let's be fair. You can't even really care if someone just going to delete it. Because if he can't really hear something in there is just not doing what it's supposed to. It's just going to add more of a sort of clustered feeding to that part of the track. And everything is really sort of building up here so we don't need it in there, that's fine. It can just stay in the first half of the track. It's nice there. Alright, so the next thing is in the second half of the second half where this drum loop comes in. And we've got our dirty orchestra hit, which I did mention that we're going to need to sort out. So let's actually do the dirty orchestral hit first. One thing I definitely noticed is that it sounds a little bit dim, so it hasn't got too much high-end, or at least the balance is in favor of the low-end rather than the high-end. Let me play this again. Just sort of sounds a bit muddy, almost that sound. So let's change the balance. Go to our EQ. I'm literally just going to add a high shelf. I think there needs to be reasonably extreme with this. So we're going up plus six dB, just really changing the balance in favor of the high-end. Let's just have a quick listen. Well, obviously I've been boosting it with EQ sets really loud on its Senate down. Now at the moment, if I turn it down, we've got automation on there. So what I will do is I'll change it with the automation lanes. It's pretty easy to do in Cubase, some doors aren't quite as easy to do like a quick change like this to the automation. So it's pretty easy to do. Like I say in Cubase, we can just do that. And I will talk about a couple of other ways that we can do it. Let's just get this balance right though. Sounds okay at the moment, right? So just say no if you can't do that with automation, so you're an F L and it's a bit more tricky to do that. If you have a gain on the channel, which I believe you do in FL Studio. So you should be able to just adjust the pre-game for that. Another way to do it is literally just a load up a stock EQ plugin from your door in Cubase RB studio EQ. And it's got a volume fader on the side. So you can use that to adjust the volume separately from the main volume fader. In this case, but that's fine. It's just another way of doing it. Alright, so I think that's the only pretty decent. Let's go onto this part here, where the dramatic comes in and you got the dirty orchestral hips. I mentioned. This area is just sounding a little bit overwhelming, too many things going on, so that's just having a listen. So it wants to sound full-on, but it's just a bit too much. So I'm going to actually just also make the volume for this crash, or didn't mean to click that. I'm just going to drop down the automation lanes and I'm going to do volume automation. Let's just find out, say, dirty orchestral hit comes in on the offbeat. So I'm just going to drop a point in there, say one beat later. I'm just going to do something like this, just so it dips at the moment that the base hit comes in. Just sucks out the crash and gives that base a little more room. Also, you can't really hear the new drum loop when that dirty orchestral hit is playing. So if we focus on hearing this, I'll just say for a sec. The loop and the dirty orchestral hit. You can't even hear the loop at all. So I'm just going to delete it from there. And that'll help tidy up this a bit as well. And I think that hits can even be a little bit louder. Let's see. I'm just going to double check the level on the first one. So actually, the whole lot could be just a touch louder. Say again, I'm just going to go in here. Raise that up a bit with just obviously lowered it a little bit too much. Okay, now let's see what this one sounds like. Sound and much cleaner that at least we can really properly here the dirty orchestral hits. And it's not like it's really taking anything away from anything else. I think it's kinda rebalanced that little section just enough. Now we just got this loop here, which has quite a lot of low end in at the moment. So I'm just going to filter out of z. I'm using a filter which is kind of built in CQ bases channel settings. But it's just the same as changing the low band on a band one on a EQ to a low cut or high-pass. Same thing. Now we're just going to fill out a bit of the base, probably something like that. But let's just have a little listen bypassed. So really just taking out the sub, maybe even a fraction more. Because that's sub-basins in there. It's going to conflict with our baseline and make the whole low end sound muddy, which is what it was doing. Hopefully now it should be fine. So that's nice. It's still got a bit of sort of low mid punch, which is lovely. And I just adjusted the reverb just a little bit just to tame it slightly. Now while we're here, let's sort out this hahaha hit that we've got going on, like the orchestral hits just sounding a little bit on the sort of Dem side. So let's just remove a little bit of the low end is the same sort of setting 48 dB slope. And I just want to take out anything really like below 50 hz or any sub that's in there. And I think we're going to want to add a high shelf to that, boost the high-end of it. Just have another listen. Say yeah, let's just brighten this up a little bit. Fraction too much. And obviously, now I've raised the EQ. It's obviously changed the volume balanced. That's a little bit louder than it was. Balanced it out again. Fraction outer butt should be about rights. Can leave it like that, that's fine. Alright, so I think this lesson's gone on long enough. What we've got left to do is just the piano, because the piano doesn't sound like it's really jelly with the rest of the track completely at the moment. So we're going to use a couple of tricks to get that to work. Little bit of compression, some dynamic EQ, which I'll show you how to deal with a completely free plugin, which is pretty awesome, and we'll do that all in the next lesson. Alright, thanks very much for watching guys and girls see in the next one. 26. Lesson 25 Piano Mixdown: Hey everybody, welcome back. Alright, so in this lesson we are going to tackle the piano. The piano needs a little bit of work at the moment is just getting a bit lost in the mix. It also is a bit too low in pitch, so it's actually kind of interfering a little bit with any other mid-range sounds. So actually the first thing I want to do is change the pitch. So let me just play it how it is at the moment, just a couple of bars before it comes in. So it kinda sounds nice, but it is a bit lower in pitch, so I'm going to select both of these, okay, so I'm just going to select all and I'm going to raise it up and uptake by holding Shift and pressing the up arrow. Again, this might be slightly different in your door, and of course he can just drag them up with the mouse, no prompts. And let's just have a little listen to that. I think it fits the track much better. Although I do like some of the mid-range from when it was in a lower Octavius. So we've got a couple of options here. You can keep it really nice and clean. Just having a single note being played at a time, which I do like, especially in a second half here. It's nice, but we could, if you want to, just a little trick, you can do some gay into both sections of the piano in one go, again, hit Control a, and then I'm just going to copy this down an octave. And obviously this is going to play exactly the same thing, just both an octave higher and an octave lower. In the mix. It sounds like this. I think it's a little bit obvious sounding that you've got the two Octavius layered up. So what I would do with the piano that we've just copied, just going to expand my lower zone with a velocity information. Zoom out a bit so we can see what's happening. And with all of that selected that we've just copied, I would then turn this down somewhat, and I'll have to do the second half separately. That's absolutely fine. No problem. But let's just have a little listen to this soloed. So Tenant right down to start off with. So that's really just the high notes playing. Second here. Obviously. The lower notes coming in as I raise up the velocity just helps give it more of a deeper, more mid-range undertone, which is really nice. So that's fine. Now let's go to the second half here. So I'm just switching over to this, which is the piano in the second half. And we're just gonna do the same thing. Except I think I'm going to turn these down even more. The lower notes that we've just copied. The reason for this is that this half is obviously a lot more busy. There's drums and everything going on. So we don't really want to have the piano sounding too thick. It works better in the first half where there is very minimal. In this half, we just really want to hear the high notes or maybe a tiny bit of the low notes. So that sounds a K that's come out of the piano. And I've just very quickly, because I didn't get it quite right, but I want to turn up that hahaha, very, very slightly. So let's just knock that up just a tiny bit. Hasn't got quite the impact that I want when it hits. Okay, well, let it sit like that for a while and if we listen to it and suddenly it jumps out too much, we might go back and change it, but for now that's absolutely fine. Okay, So back to the piano. Let's have a listen to this end section here because this was really some of the notes which are getting quite lost with everything else playing. Still getting a little bit lost, even though we've raised it up an octave, it's just not quite loud enough. Obviously, we can just simply turn up the volume, which might well help a little bit. But what I'm concentrating on here is listening to the softer hits of the piano versus the higher velocity hits or the louder hits, the software hits are clearly getting lost. But the louder hits are cutting through. Okay, so we're going to balance this out by using a little bit and I'm in a little bit of compression. So we go into the channel settings for the room piano. I'm just going to add the standard key-based compressor. Again, this will be exactly, or pretty much exactly the same in any door. So what we're gonna do here is compressed the overall piano, but very, very gently. So when allowed, hit comes in, it's going to be turning it down a bit more than when a soft tip comes in and it won't be turning it down much more. So basically leveling out the piano a bit. Now we don't wanna go too much with this because we do want that velocity information. We want it to have that sort of dynamic feel of some keys being pressed very softly, some being pressed more hard, that sort of thing. But we're just changing the balance a little bit. So let's just get a setup now. I don't want any hold, no attack and no release. This can just be an instant compression, but we definitely want to low compression ratio. So somewhere just under two, which means that everything will be turned down by basically 50 per cent when it goes over the threshold. And all we got to do now is just balanced. The threshold level will say, I'm just going to turn off auto makeup gain and we'll just crank this up a bit. So what we're looking for here really is on the gain reduction meter. So see when we've got a heavy hits, we should be seeing more gain reduction. When we've got a very light hit. We shouldn't be seeing much at all. If we are seeing too much when we get a soft hit by lots of gain reduction still there may need to adjust the threshold to compensate. So let's just go through that. So load and have a little listen. Say that then didn't as good test bed for us. So even on that softer middle hit there, it's just reducing the gain a bit too much. So I'm just going to raise up the threshold. So we can see there on that second hit this one right here, we're getting less gain reduction. And then on heavier hits we should be getting more. So somewhere around, there's absolutely fine. Should be good. It's a very subtle change, but we are just basically making the quieter hits a little bit louder. Great. Okay, that sounds absolutely perfect. So let's leave it like that. We still got softer hits which sound softer. We haven't completely changed that. So all good. Now, one thing that I want to do, as well as EQ the piano, sorry, we've EQ to already, but I want to just remove any of the low end. Let's just say that again. Now you're barely notices because the piano is mainly focused on the mid-range and high frequencies. There's just a little bit of low end from the piano recording or whatever. So we're gonna take that out, but just to absolutely make sure nothing's going to conflict with our sub. Keep that low-end nice and clean. Alright, so one last thing that I want to do to this piano is dynamic EQ. So what we can do with dynamic EQ is we can basically side chain an EQ band and have it dip the frequencies in one part or one element or a bunch of elements when one thing triggers. So what we're gonna do here is we're going to use the piano as a side chain input for an EQ that's going to dip the high frequencies out of everything else in the track. So this is going to help just create a bit more space for the piano. When it comes in, it will have more impact compared to the rest of the mix. Now the goal here is to make it so it's not even noticeable that everything else is being dipped is not like using side-chain where on the kick and base where you want that sucky kind of obvious volume change in the dynamics or amplitude change or whatever. This is much more subtle, but also is just going to help that piano really cut through and be a main element, right? So let's do that now for this to happen, we need to add the dynamic EQ to a group or a bus that has everything else routed through it apart from the piano. So in Cubase, I'm going to just do that now. For that, I want to see whether routing is basically anything apart from the room piano, this track, I want to be routed through to a bus. So I'm going to select everything that's going to stereo out that isn't the piano. Let's just go through and select everything. So obviously if it's already routed through to a group, but that's fine. It can stay rooted through to that group. We will also route that side chain group through to this new bus or group that we're going to make. So let's just get through. We want our reverb routed through to it and we want our side chain group routed through. Now in Cubase is pretty easy with all of that selected, I can just right-click. Go Add Group two selected channel, sorry, you can't see that it's just off the screen. It just says Add Group channel to selected channels. So I'm just going to click that. Of course I want it to be stereo. And I'll just call it premaster and add track. Now everything in the entire track apart from the piano, is routed through this group. So let's just give you a quick example so you know what I'm talking about? Now, we've got everything apart from the piano routed through to this group. We want to add a dynamic EQ. Now, quite a lot of doors these days, Cubase has a dynamic EQ if you've got the Pro version, but some don't. So there is a free plugin which you can use, which is actually really awesome. So if you just go to Google, type in Nova, EQ VS t should be the first link. This is it is a free plugin, so just download the relevant installer for your system. It's all 64 bit VS S3 for Mac and for Windows. So download and install that. I'm just going to load it up on my premaster group. So it's under EQ TDR Nova. Side chaining will work slightly differently depending on what door your m. Again, you should really have already been doing side chain in Cubase. It's as simple as just activating the side chain. And then I can select the channel that I want to use as the side chain input in your door might be slightly different for actually do it the other way, just so you can see what you'd normally be doing and adore. And that is with the side chain activated and make sure that it is activated. It's quite important. And then we go to the channel that we want to use as the side chain input, in this case, the piano, the channel settings. And then we will send a signal to the premaster group, TDR Nova. So this is the side chain input, activates it and then the signal is being sent through. Now it's quite important to understand that what we're sending through here is post-fader, which means that any volume changes we've made or any EQ, any effects and stuff like that. All of that is sent through to the side chain inputs of ANOVA EQ. Now why am I explaining that? Because if we decided to put something like delay on the piano, let's just quickly add a stereo delay. Quickly set that up. 14 on one side, one for docid on the other. It's just turn down the mix. Let's just play that with the delay on this on post-fader. That means that also that delayed signal is going to be sent through to the side chain input, which we don't particularly want. I mean, it is possible that you might want that, but we don't really want the side chain being triggered by the delays as well. We only want the initial hit be triggering it. So in that case, we just change this to a present, which means that the signal gets sent to the side chain before it goes through the fader, before it goes through the EQ, before it goes through any effects. Nothing that I change here is going to affect the signal going into the side chain, bit of a long-winded thing. But actually it's, in some circumstances, it's really, really important to know that. So just for now, I'm actually going to keep the stereo delay bypassed. We might want to add it, but I'm not 100% sure is more just as an example, but it sounds nice. So we'll see what that sounds like in a sec. Let's just crack on with the EQ on our premaster group. So our TD nova, actually, I apologize. One thing we do need to do before we go any further is really figure out exactly what frequencies we want to be dipping from the rest of the track as opposed to the piano. So let's just have a look again at the piano channel settings. And I'm just going to use an EQ. Let's activate band three. So this will be just a normal parametric EQ. I'm going to change the slope of it sits a bit more, maybe not that steep, something like that. And I just wanna do a filter sweep and really find where the most prominent frequencies are for the piano. So let's just play the piano on its own. So round about five K Mark, I'd say. It's really where it suddenly comes really nice and bright. But don't need the EQ on here anymore. We just need to know that we're talking about five K, maybe just before five K. So I'm just going to deactivate that. Now I can go to my Nova EQ. And let's just use band three for this. That's fine. We want about five K, So that's fine. We just want to set it in the right position. We don't want to actually boost anything at the moment, that's fine. So just before the five K mark. And now what we need to do is turn on Threshold says basically activating the compressor for this particular band. Don't actually want any attack. I want this to be as low as possible. The release, as well as just wants to dip when the piano is playing. As soon as the piano has finished playing, it wants to go back to full volume. The last thing we need to do in order for this to work is just flip the switch over from internal side chain to external side chain. Now when the piano hits, we should see this dip down. So you can clearly see that whenever the piano hits, we're getting a dip in frequencies around the five K mark on the premaster group, exactly what we want. So all this is doing is just giving the most prominent frequencies of the piano a bit more room. Whenever the piano hits, say, let's just play it from the beginning, and I'll just sort of bypass this a bit. Now this is a subtle effects, but you really should just notice that the piano just becomes a bit clearer and has more space when this is activated. Okay, so I'll start with it bypassed. For me. I can really hear that. I think it definitely gives the piano a lot more space. Now, I'm going to make this like really extreme it just so you can very, very clearly here what is happening to the premaster tracks. I'm just going to remember my setting and **** to tell you what. Let's just copy that just in case I forget. And then let's just make this super extreme. I mean, obviously it sounds awful because you just complete, you're removing all of those frequencies when the piano hits. Obviously we don't want that. So let's go back to where we were asked to, 0.1. And again, this is supposed to be a subtle effect, is not supposed to be noticeable. And the beauty of it is, is that obviously when you're dipping the frequencies of the premaster, those same frequencies are then still present in the piano. So it's much harder to actually notice it. You really notice is that suddenly the piano has kinda got more space, but it doesn't really sound like you're taking anything away from anything else. So that's sounding pretty decent. Now let's have a listen through from the very start of the track to make sure that everything is sounding okay. Just going to make this a little bit smaller and hide any automation that we've got. Let's just have a listen. So what we think, I think the piano, it says way, way, way better, and it's much clearer throughout most of the hits there. So combination of the compression and the dynamic EQ is really works. Still just at the very end. It gets a little bit lost. It's not actually that bad, but I'm going to just very, very gently nudge up the volume here just to make sure we really do hear that. And I'm really means subsidy. Let's carry on listening. Studying a bit more reverb to those hats. It just sounds a little bit out of place. Sounds much better and it's drenched in reverb. It's fine. Right symbols, just a fraction on the left side. Effects 26, that hits just white cutting through this, just have listened to that timeout up a bit. Sped up. Still not really getting the full length of this hits. So I'm just going to try turning up the individual hits a bit. Sorry, the individual event, I should say. Fraction so much there. Let's just get this correct. That's fine. So I think we are pretty much done for all of the VI, minor changes on the mixing level. We've only got one lesson left and that is to master this track. So he might slightly change the BQ balance on the master channel, but we'll see we need to have a listening and listening with some fresh ears and an arrow side. And then we'll put it through a limiter and get the final render done. Alright, thanks very much for watching guys and girls see you in the next one. 27. Lesson 26 Mastering: Hey everybody, Welcome back and welcome to the final lesson of this course. So this is going to be a fairly straightforward one. We're just going through a couple of final tweaks at the mastering stage. This is by no means a comprehensive lesson on Mastering, just what we need to do for this track. Alright, so let's get into it. They listening back to the whole thing. I think the mix could do, just rebalancing slightly, so just a very slight boost to the high-end. So I'm just going to go into the channel settings on the stereo outs. This is the final channel in Cubase. Let's just play it actually will play it. This point here while we've got everything going on in the track. So I'm just going to set my region around the busiest section. Very, very subtle here would just slightly changing the balance in favor of the high-end and lessening the low end. But it is very, very subtle. You'd be forgiven for not even noticing it if you're new to this sort of thing. But those subtle changes are just feel like it needs it. So that's absolutely fine. Now I want to play around actually before we go to extreme with the high EQ, when I try adding some excitation to this track. In Cubase, we got a plugin called quadrotors, which is basically like a multi-band distortion. And really the best kind of plug-in for adding excitation to attract, especially when you've got a broad range of frequencies, is a multi-brand effects. In this case, it does tape saturation, saturation distortion, distortion, and decimeter. And we've got four channels which each deal with different frequency ranges. So obviously this is a Cubase only plugin. There is another plugin which is called the HY MB. Dr. say, if you Google HY MB drive, you should come across. This plugin is this one and it's completely free. But unfortunately it's only for PC, it's not for Mac, which is a bit annoying. I know we're really doing is just adding a tiny bit of processing to the high-end or the mid-range or whatever, just to give the track a bit more sort of brilliance at the high-frequency. So let's just play it and we'll have a little play around. So we are talking again, very subtle changes here. Just adding a tiny bit of brightness, that plugin is not too bad. The key-based one is better. I will just quickly stick that on because I just want to see what the difference is between the two. So just bypass the other one is going to change the bandwidth. So we're really only dealing with two bands here. It's just split them up. So we're dealing with bands 3.4, mainly dealing with the whole frequency range. It's like ready here. It just brings out this lovely crispiness in the high-end. Always sounds like it gives the high-end more definition. Of course, it's not really giving it more definition. It's just kinda boosting it up a bit and adding some extra harmonics in there, but it's a really nice effect. Um, do apologize. I wish there was something everybody could use Mac PC. Closest thing I've found is NB drive to this. Now, even if I'll take that off, she needs to balance out the output of it as well because it's actually a bit louder than the original signal. That's more balanced. Yeah, it just adds crispiness to the hind. Like I say, it's not like groundbreaking the different, it's just a little bit, It's kinda like the extra two to three per cent they want to add onto the mix at the end. So if you didn't have it, not the end of the world. Alright, so after that's done, then we got really one final process. I didn't want to add too much compression and stuff to this. The only, the last plugin which is going to be a maximizer. So it's basically a limiter. It's called a maximizer in Cubase. And there are endless plug-ins, especially in your own door. You'll have definitely at least one which is like a brick wall limiter or a maximizer or a compressor with a very high ratio. Now in Cubase, if I activate modern mode, all that does is just enable these two controls, which is the release and the recovered per cent. So I'm just going to have a lower released because I want to speak quite quick, just literally chopping off the tops of any loud signal at the optimized dial as it's called in Cubase, is why they call it optimize its basically the input gain. Say that higher you have it, the higher the input gain than the louder the overall signal will be. So let's just play this. So what we're looking for here is the gain reduction meter is always the most important thing on limiter. And we want to see how much the gain is being reduced whenever it is triggered. At the moment, not very much gain is being taken out. So we can afford to push this up a bit more. So basically what you want to do is find a balance between getting much louder and it not taking all of the nice dynamics out of the mix. So we'll keep pushing this up until we can't really hear much of a difference volume wise. And then we'll just sort of back it off a bit as generally the approach that I use. Say listening to it like that, I actually feel like we could turn up the kick very, very slightly. Let's just see what we got. Let's just pop that up a bit. So it's like -3.06. That's where he better the kick just needed a tiny bit of extra volume. Now it's much more punchy cutting through the mix. Say somewhere around his pretty good. We could afford to push this more if we want to, but I'm not sure I really wants they said, supposed to be a very dynamic ambient mics. If we end up really thrashing this through the maximizer, we're just going to reduce the dynamic range, which is going to affect the overall feel of that change of dynamics throughout the mix. So all we really want to do is maximize the volume without affecting the levels or the dynamics. I think that's a really about right. I'm just going to backoff the output just by 0.1 and I just remember 34.3. And let's just give it one final push C where it sounds like. So what's happening there? If I push it any harder than 34.3, is that the loud stuff like the kicks are basically not getting any louder because they're already triggering this limiter. So that's basically their limit volume wise. And then everything else that's kinda quiet around the cake is then getting louder in comparison to the kick, which again, that's affecting the overall dynamics of the track. So we don't want to go that far as an aside note as well. Generally speaking, again, this is a general rules, doesn't mean it's set in stone. You can experiment with this. One track is going to act differently than another track when it comes to limiting. But you don't really want to see much more than about minus 3D bees in gain reduction, some tracks you will find that you can actually push it. You can go down select minus five, minus six dB's. But generally speaking, it's never, ever any more than that. Minus six dB is, is quite extreme ready when you're actually limiting the final track. Alright, so I think we're pretty good. I'm definitely happy with the levels and everything. So let's just sets our loop region over the correct areas where I want. This tracks the end which is bar 76, where we've got our volume fade out. And let's go to the beginning. I'm just going to set the loop region. And then we go, we are ready to export our final track. So I'm just going to save it and I'm going to go Export. This is gonna be the actual final track that you've heard in the promo video. And it's in the workforce, so no extra processing, no behind the scenes, tweaking and stuff like that. This is the version that you heard. The prime mover say, let's just name it. So I'm just going to call it cascade final master. I'll render out as an MP3, but a high-quality MP3, C32 KBS and hit Export. All right, so thank you very much for being part of this tutorial. I really hope that you've learned a whole load of stuff held to make your own awesome chord progressions, how to structure things so it will sounds exciting all about tension and release, the mixing process, everything. I really am glad that you being here for this journey with me. So thanks very much guys and girls, take care of yourselves and I'll catch you in the next one. Bye bye.