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.