FL Studio Sampling 101: Chop, Arrange, and Mix Samples

1. Introduction: What's going on? What music producers and welcome to my FL Studio master course and sampling. I of course am your instructor, Curtis King. Thank you for trusting me to be the instructor that shows you the ins and outs of sampling. Now, whether you're a beginner, intermediate, advanced level sample-based producer within FL Studio, I assure you you're in the right place. There's something to learn here for everyone. Your instructor has over 17 years plus of experience when it comes to sapling specifically in FL Studio and beyond a music producer that you probably seen from my YouTube channel or social medias. And you got to understand, I'm a music lover just like anybody else. Sampling is an operant sooner that it takes something that you already love and make us something that you love even more if you have the right approach to it. Now, three goals that I have specifically for the music producers that take this course. The first goal I want to give you a step-by-step walk-through of how I approach shopping, arranging, and mixing my samples. Second goal that I have for you, I don't want you to just know how to sample. You can literally go to a YouTube video. I have YouTube videos for that. I want to teach you how to control your samples, how to manipulate them in a way that humanizes them and makes them not sounds stiff. Third and final goal that I have for you, I want to show you how to make your own vintage melody loops. And not just a loop, but I want you to make some music that people will legitimately asked you, where did you sample that from? And I'm not talking about samples that you just run through our C20. We're going to talk about some of the plug-ins I use and things like that. But I want to show you the musicianship that is behind these brilliant samples. But that being said, I am so excited to be with you on this journey. I think it's time for us to in module one and move on to module two, Curtis, where do you find your samples? I'm glad that you asked. 2. Where To Find Your Samples: In module two, I want to cover this specific places that I go looking whenever I'm searching for samples, whenever I'm looking for the perfect inspiration or the right textures, all these websites have that one word in common, textures. This first website is called track live. The thing that makes track Lib a little bit different from all the other websites is the fact that they're providing you actual master recordings of some really popular records. If you want to go through the process of clearing a record like an actual song from a certain era or certain artists like say for instance, Ray Charles. I think they even have some Isaac Hayes recordings here. They have a lot of classic stuff within here. This is the platform to go to. Now, I will warn you, I've gone through this process before and I've cleared a sample, it can get a little bit tedious, especially if you want to do it the right way. They want to make sure that you have some kind of performance rights organization to report and to register your work, they walk you through the process. Let's see, that's the one thing I got to say about Trek live. If they have an advantage is that if you're using these master recordings, It's not always that they're better than all the other ones. It's just that they're more authentic in terms of really having vet, vinyl texturing crackle and those things that are really from Ivana like these are things that of course you can duplicate to processing, but it's just nothing like the real thing. And maybe it's just a little bit of bias of my hand, but those records are definitely advantageous if you want to get that particular texture. But hopefully by the end of this course, it won't matter where you're getting your samples from. You'll know how to treat, mixed them and arrange them in a way that made people asked the same questions they asked when you get original samples. So that's track lives. Splice. Splice is my ultimate goal to, aside from the third option, I want to explain, butt splice has over 2 million sounds. 2 million sounds, sounds from ridiculous sounding left field Foley all the way from eight awaits to kicks to snares, any particular instrument you can think of what I really love about splice though, the vocal samples. And somebody is super, super soulful melodic loops. They have an app that you can download, that you can literally download your sounds, but then also drag them straight over until you're done. I love this app and it's a great complement to multiply experience some of this stuff that is on here though, because you have access to not just any producer who's uploading. You have access to some of the best musicians in the world through this platform. So say for instance, do we have this sample? That's a beautiful sample and that's by hidden gym sound designers name Hidden Gems. You have a lot of folks that you can go to when I'm definitely gonna be giving you some names as we go through it. But splice is a place that you definitely want to dig deep and try to find sounds that really fit the aesthetic of what you're looking for. For me, I'm a sucker for like samples that have choir samples that have really pretty bright sounds that are complemented by like live sounds. If the sounds sound like somebody literally quantize and put them straight to the grid. It's not going to inspire a whole lot. I love human error. I felt like human error is an opportunity for me to do something that would be a little bit unexpected or a little bit out of the box. So for me, it's really important that I have samples that have space, that have human error, that have the special little moments that I'm like, Oh, I could take just that one little sound and then echo it, delay it and do all kinds of different things. So it, and then drip it in some reverb and really make it a special little, little punch into what I'm doing. But a lot of that has to do with knowing what you're looking for. Usually when I'm using his desktop app, I'm searching by the key of whatever the beat I'm working on. But if you're just searching in general, the key doesn't really matter right now. What matters is that you figure out sort of the genre in the styles and some of the keywords that you're looking for right now. I would say the most important term for me would be just soul. So let's go ahead and locate the word soul. Boom. Now you give it an abundance of all these different sounds that really are under the category of soul. So now that I have is under the category of soul, what am I actually looking for? I'm actually looking for some keys. Let's get the keys. Now it's going to basically generate all these different keys that fall underneath that category. Something I'd also like to look for is whether or not these sounds are dry our process now, for those of you that don't know the difference when a sound is dry, that means that they didn't apply any effects to that particular sample or melodic loop. When it's processed. Obviously has gone through the process of having these effects already glue to the sound. So I don't mind having a process. I think sometimes there's some really creative ethics chains that producers do. So let's go ahead and go to process. Let's start playing these from the top. Something like that has some special moments, but it still sounds to synthetic. It sounds too predictable and it sounds too straight to the grid for me, I'm looking for something that's just really special. Something that plays along with timing. See something like this. Something like that is just a playground because it has all these different like drop-offs and all these reversing portions of it, I would take that and have a field day with it. Let's keep going now. Something like that. So it's hard to explain, but that's my job to explain. But there's a certain type of authenticity that you hear when a real musician has touched the music. And that's not a shots anybody that's not any disrespect to anybody, but you know, when it's a musician that's actually sitting behind the keys and someone who's just fiddling around. And so when I'm hearing melodic loops that are too predictable, that's what draws me away now, before we get into any kind of depth with this and then get into the last website that I use. Let me explain that as well. Why are we actually hear on splice and why are we using 100% royalty-free sounds? Now, you want to look at the terms of every single sound designer or sound company that says their sounds are 100% royalty free. Generally speaking, when they say that they're a 100% royalty free, they're saying that their only concern is the front end. There are only concerned about you paying for whatever subscription or whatever their individual pack prices are. They're concerned about that. At least that's how it is what my company slap experts with me and oh gosh. But you want to check the terms because some people's terms are a little bit funky, especially if you get a placement or it gets really, really popular on streaming. They're gonna want a little bit of kickback for that, a little bit of money after that. So you want to pay attention. But in the early 2000s, like this was not something you had access to unless you had a friend who could play the keys or you knew somebody that was a musician that you could hire to be a potty a session. You are having access to people that you would otherwise, they have to pay either hundreds or even thousands of dollars to sit in on your session and provide the keys that you're looking for. And splice of courses went and took the liberty of helping you to organize your way through these 2 million sounds. This is why we're actually diving into these royalty-free sounds. But like I said, everybody has different terms. Splice guarantees that all sitewide that these are a 100% royalty-free. I would still double-check, especially if you're going to be pitching this or getting us to sink in licensing, I can tell you right now, I had a Justin Timberlake placement that was in collaboration with Levi's and I use like two or three splice sounds from it. Like the vocals and a few guitars. I think we're in there. I use that specifically from splice and everything was okay. So that concludes Module two and Module three, I'm gonna cover how do I actually choose my samples? I very briefly dug into it when we're going through the splice, but I want to make sure that you understand the psychology and the why behind why I choose a specific samples and the portions of the samples that I go and look for is a lot more to it than just, Oh, it sounds authentic. I want to make sure I break that down for you before we actually dive into these other modules that are going to help you start to master your sampling process. See you in module three. 3. How To Pick Samples: How I choose the samples that I choose, what I'm actually listening for. And how do I know yet That's the one that I'm going to actually chop up. I'm going to use Track live as part of the example, but broke this down so that it's easy to remember. It's a little acronym that I call MSG that should be super easy for you to remember. The M stands for musicianship, the S stands for space for reproduction, and G stands for goosebumps. Let's break that down. As I'm listening to the samples here on track lip, I think there's gonna be a great place to actually do this set because a lot of these I have never heard before. So as I'm hearing them in real-time, I can tell you, oh, I'm gonna stop there because that's probably something I'm going to chop. You're gonna see me do this thing multiple times, but I want to make sure that you see it for the first time in real-time here. I can already tell you just from the first four seconds. Whenever a sample is heavy with drums, I personally, you may be different depending on what genre of music you do. But because I like to pull from Soul Records where the drums are a little bit quieter than what we expect in modern music. That's why I'm gravitating towards those now, of course, I'm gonna show you ways you can filter out the drums bit. I just don't like the way the end results sounds. It's so many different things that you're actually working against because now you're taking that rhythm from wherever time signature that was trying to flip it, trying to add your snare over there, snare and sometimes your snare maybe on top of the kick, and it can just be a clutter of a mess through mixing. And that's just something that I do not find to be enjoyable as I'm sitting here through these samples. But every once in a while, I'll break that rule because there's an exception to every single rule. I can tell you right now based upon that, I probably would end up skipping in It's a beautiful sample, honestly. Also something to look at as you're looking at these waveforms. You can kind of see based upon the transients are the high points within these waveforms where the snares are at or where the base red. When you look at the waveform and you see it gets a little bit thicker and you don't really see too many changes. You'd probably know that as a baseline or some kind of a vocal that is taking up that way form. So a cada either Goto that are just scroll past it because I know that's gonna be something that's gonna be a little bit more of a challenge to add other production over the top of what that sale is, go to another sample. By the way, this is probably by one of the greatest melody loop creators, musicians in our era right now, Frank Dukes is just freaking amazing at what he does. But this already tells me a lot about the MSG acronym that I have. One that musicianship, you can tell based upon the weight at Frank Dukes is running through these keys that there's a level of musicianship that makes you want to listen more as a producer because you're like, man, there's things that I can do with this will keep IT plan. This intro alone. This gives us the S, which is the space for reproduction. Now, you and I are going to basically reproduce this production, the song, whenever we sample a beat. So if we are going to reproduce this, we need space so that we can say something over it. It's almost like imagine having a song, whether it's just allow talking throughout the whole thing and there's not one space and the personal data. And you're trying to wrap over the top of it, maybe in 20 or 50 years, that can be a new style in today and it's just called audio clutter. So you would want to find a way to kind of like filter out the original vocal so that your vocals can be heard. It's almost the same thing when it comes to the musicianship, I'm always looking for space because there's so much space and they're not overproducing it. And because I'm listening and I'm like, I could filter that base out. It's a lot easier to filter that base out than if it was the full drum production of the first sample that we heard. This brings us to the G goosebumps. Every soul once in awhile and maybe you don't get into very beginning, but show here's something that just makes you saying, ****, that is the goosebumps moment. I have those moments all the time when sampling, which is why I love it so much. It doesn't happen for everybody. Some people, they get those goosebumps moments when I hear the way that somebody approaches the flow of a beat, some people have it when they hear a certain guitar solo. When I hear vocals and I'm just hearing like oohs and ahs of like acquire or vocalist and the background. And the music just opens up and I'm just listening and I'm like yellow, there's no drums. There's so many dopamine spikes going off for me, that is the goosebumps. This is right up my alley. That type of genres that I actually gravitates who are gonna be R&B and sold a lot of these are using these minor chords. A lot of these are just played from a place of pain, a place of vulnerability, a place of hope and inspiration. That's what I'm hearing through these chord progressions and the attention to detail that Frank Dukes puts, puts into this, it's ridiculous. Let's go to someone else here. I already got the m, which is musicianship. I can hear the drums are not that bad in terms of being in front of the mic split. I'm already listening to this and saying, I wish I could see myself doing something with his. Now I'm looking for the goosebumps core progression right there, but display it again. It's something that's going to be supremely important to pay attention to is that I like to chop in. Usually intervals of 12 are for what's so special about this sample is that as I'm listening to what I can imagine it being individual pieces that I can either slow down or speed up and then make sense over whatever temple that I choose. So if I do a trap beat, I can make that makes sense because I can take each sound like, let me count the sounds. We hear. The first DO One, 23 fours coming up. Bom, bom, bom. That's another 567. So we hear I hear eight individual chops in my head right now. And if you don't hear it right now, it's okay. It'll make more sense when we pull this up into Edison and when we pull this up into the slicer, but right now I'm already seeing the lines of the individual slices we will take so that we can reproduce this and put them in different places. I want you to start listening to these samples and just listening for these portions that you make cut as individuals. Because now whatever key that's in, so this is an, a minor right now we're gonna end up taking that key and then figuring out how are we going to make this feel different? Because the only thing that needs to stay consistent no matter what your sampling and needs to feel like. There is a beginning of a conversation, there's a middle of the conversation, and then there's an int. That's how I look at every single melodic loop. Every single loop that I've put together must have some kind of resolution, as they say in music theory. Let's go to another one. Already. I'm hearing the drums and I'm like, that's kind of taken me away from at least Mastaba sampling. Some people love taking the drums within the samples and then just layering over the top of them already. I'm thinking it's going to require a little bit of work to really make this owned. At the time period 1981. Something that I've found is that my favorites samples generally come from the 1970's. And because a lot of times, I mean, you know, it was crazy because track lib does have some options that allow you to do that. You don't have the original stems, you don't have the original horn section or the original string section that came from a certain Motown records. So you kinda just given that master recording and so a look, do whatever you want to do with that. What sampling in general, what I found is that when you use sounds that are like before 1975, generally just anything in the seventies or sixties. As you move a little bit earlier, the drums becomes a little bit more tucked in the mix, a little bit softer. But of course, as you find sounds that are a little bit more modern, a little bit more in our time period, you start to hear the drums sit a little bit more prevalent within the mix. Artists who actually move this bar release year. Let's go, let's move this away from the twenties one. And let's go to, let's say, test this theory. Let's go like 197876. And let's go because you don't want to go too far back because then you start dealing with different time signatures that may or may not make sense for the style of music that you make. 1960s and 1970s six is where you're going to find so many of the soul samples, the ones that you'll hear me reference a lot on these delay records, you're gonna find a lot of those that are sitting within this. But by the end of this course, you'll be able to take pretty much anything and flip it the way you do. These are just my personal preferences. I don't know what these sound like, but I can look at the wave forms entail. Some of these have more spikes in the wave forms which are telling me that they're probably very sharp drums that are in it. I'm just take it for a, a test drive and see, Let's test this one out. Man seems to nobody's talking about or I was looking at his other one, this one right here looks like it may be like a guitar or some kind of lead of some kind that is like a baseline is a really thick audio, doesn't really have a lot of spikes and drop-offs. Let's see what this is. That's what I'm saying. At some point in time you're gonna be able to just look at these and say, I don't know if this is a sample that I want to go. So let's actually go to this one. I've actually sampled this one. The position shift. Space watch where it goes. Right there, oops, box. And that's the payoff. If we go inside here to my track lip collection folder, you'll see a lot of the samples that I chose have a lot in common. For instance, a lot of them are sticking right here, 19701969196819741970 to 1975. Let's go ahead and play some of these. One more acronym I probably should have added solo, but it would have ruined this amazing MSG acronym that I have is quality. Quality is subjective and it's all about what kind of experience you want your listener to have and what kind of experience you want to have as a producer who asked to engineer and mix these. Sometimes when folks pull these recordings from the original source, It's almost as if it's a producer that over processed or over compressed a melodic loop, you can't really do anything to reverse that. It just is what it is. As I'm listening to this, I sampled this record, but I remember this being a pain and ask. If you listen on a right ear. You can also hear like this weird like static effect. That really is what happens when you try to send a sample to some noise reduction and you put too much computed noise reduction on it and play it again in the white debt. So like like when you put your phone next to the microphone and it starts to have this feedback. That's what happens when they're adding way too much noise reduction trying to make it sound like a clean recording. I can hear that entail that from listening those kind of things sometimes turn me off, but I'm not looking for the most cleanest because the whole purpose of this is for it to be a certain aesthetic, a certain texture. So I'm not going to take that away because of that. But if it sounds to computerize, I tend to back away from it. I want them to be as worn out as they may be. That's what I'm specifically looking for. Like this. Also some songs that dope thing about using these records from the original errors is that because of the way that they recorded them, you're able to pull like a sound from your left pan and then double that into your right pan in cases not consistent because they weren't recording in the same ways that we record now by having these original records, you can take like the vocal that's sitting primarily in the left. You could take the keys and you could double that down and not have to even worry about that digital frequency interference that we're hearing. So keeping that in mind, most sounds when dealing with royalty free samples, you're not going to worry about that. Musicianship space goosebumps quality, that's definitely watch holds that one. Has beautiful musicianship space. Goosebumps. Quality. One thing you want to apply to your sampling, and I'm going to tell you this early so that you understand why we're doing it when we doing it, even though we don't use every sample, you want to take more chops than you're going to need when you come across a goldmine like this, that has so many different things that you're like, Oh, Oh, Oh, I like I like that. Well, I like the way he said that, Oh, you want that sample and you want to chop a lot more than you'd need. Something. I'll look for a psi from just the oohs and ahs that you hear a vocalist do, especially if you're sampling songs, I'm looking for phrases that I can just take. And I feel like in my head, I can chop it up and make it make sense over whatever style of music I'm choosing to work on? If there is a phrase that I hear a singer sing safe from the sixties or seventies. That is such a general term. Maybe they're talking about love, but it applies to something that someone else may want to write about. Or maybe applying to someone going through something completely different or going through some kind of heartbreak or whatever this song is about. I'm taking that because I feel like that phrase is something that I can either repeat our AAC and find a way to make it modern again, are bringing another spin. So would, so I'm always looking for phrases as well. I want to show you what I sampled from this. I'm gonna do everything I can to please your baby because I don't want you to never ever, ever, ever leave me. Never, never, ever ever, never, never, never ever leave. That can be about a lot of things. This could be a battle rapper who don't want money to ever leave them. The Guess what if I take that phrase, I have now created that Guess what if I make this an instrumental that I'll put up for streaming? I have that for somebody to take and make it mean something for them. So I'm always looking for those phrases as another opportunity to create a special moment in my sampled beats. Now those same guidelines for me apply as I'm going through any samples honestly. So we're going to go here through some Aaron Barbara samples. Remember that name if you don't know it because he's going to be somebody that we're going to have a conversation within this particular course to show you how to make your own authentic, vintage sounding melodic loops. Let's take one of these and I'm gonna show you how it still passes the same task, even though this is not from the sixties or seventies. Already here, the musicianship. Now I'm looking for the goosebumps. S1, the core, the core change space. You're given space here to do some things over the top of this goosebumps. In reality. This is what I'm saying. It doesn't matter what particular sample you're getting your sample from those feelings are those feelings the quality is obviously there as well. And that's the last thing here is really a topic that I think is more so about the culture of sampling. But I think it's a very important thing to talk about. A lot of sample-based producers. They don't really care about the quality of the sample being pristine and sounding as clear as possible and as horrific as possible. A lot of us don't even care about having the BPMs are the keys attached to them? That wasn't a thing. When you are pulling vinyls from some goodwill are some garage sale and you brought them home to a vinyl player and you started to chop up. That wasn't a thing. You're getting those now. And I think this is what makes a lot of these melodic loops, especially when they treat them with that care. This is what makes them so appealing and this is why I've been choosing to use the majority of moss samples now are from my friend Aaron Barbara because this, it takes care of all those categories. The musicianship that I love from the 70s and 60s, this space that I need to add my own flavor over the top of or to add built her resort plug-ins and things that make it sound even more like from that air, the goosebumps that happened from these chords shifts and he's core changes. And I can even add sounds from Splice like the quires over the top of this to give me that same layer. It's almost like I'm rebuilding the samples that I would just usually take from the master recordings of a song from the sixties. And I can just get that right here and build it up myself, take advantage of living in the now. That's what I'm doing is a sample-based producer. There's a lot of sample-based produces at home. He is a man that appears that don't like it, don't won't know parts of it. They want you to go ahead and figure this whole thing out and low-powered. So my understanding, but I do understand at all so that it's up to a lot of you produces that are starting now and sample-based hip hop. So we evolved this in whatever way possible. So that being said, that concludes module three and module four. Ironically, we're gonna be talking about how to find the BPM in the key of the samples in the event that you do get some melodic loose maybe from a sound pack or a sample pack, and they don't have them included. That's very common. 4. How To Find The Key And BPM In Any Sample: In module four, I'm going to cover in great detail how to find the key as well as the BPM of your sample. I want to show you a few different ways to do that. These are ways that have helped me as I progressed and got a little bit better. My ear, he got a little bit better and I'm able to find what the keys are of samples. Now, why is this important? In order for you to add a proper baseline or proper aid await your samples. You're going to want to know what the key, at the very least with the key of your sample is. Bbm is important because as you chop these samples and you start to see that the kicks are following their own grid or off the grid nature, you want to at least have a ballpark figure of where things are landing and you don't want to just always eyeball that you want to be able to know this is the source sound and BPM so that you're able to manipulate it in a way that I feel like it's a lot more efficient. A lot of sound packs, as you know, do not come with the key information or BPMs if you're dealing with splice yet, all those sounds come with it if you're dealing with slap experts, of course all of our sounds come with that information on it. But you want to know how to do this just in case something just doesn't sound right or sometimes they're inaccurate as well. We're gonna use an errand barber sample first to really show you how to do this first method which is using a plugin by a company called Captain plugins. And it is a plugin called mixed and key. Mixing key basically listens to the sounds that are being played. You get to dictate what modes you want it to be in, or what key notation you want it to be flat, sharp, Camelot, I choose sharp and then I just let the sample play. Now the reason why we do on this, on this sample first is because we have the information here that's already accurate, thanks to Aaron barber. So we can see how accurate mixed in key is. It is not a 100% accurate. So I would not put all of my money on this one, but it is helpful. Now it says it's about 89% sure that this particular sample is an, a minor. Well, that's backed up by Aaron Barbara who says this is an a minor, so that's super-helpful. It works for pretty much any style of music, any particular sample. But like I said, it's not a 100% accurate. Something within FL Studio that can get you even more accuracy is something that you have to access through this program that has a stock program called Edison. I'm sure you've heard of it, especially if you're into sampling at this stage of your career. The way that we access that is that we take this sound that we have here and you can access it from a few different places. Obviously, this is here on the channel rack as well as the playlist. But if you double-click and you right-click here and hit Edit and audio editor or just hit Control E. You can open this up. Edison is going to be the most important tool that we use aside from FL slicer, which we'll talk about in the next module, when it comes to sampling within FL Studio, Edison is powerful. It's underrated, but it's very, very powerful. What we want to do is find a loop to basically have FL Studio do It's wizardry to figure out what keys are being played. I wanted to display the sample and don't feel like you have to understand everything I'm doing in terms of looping because we're gonna go over that in the next module. But I want to just basically get a clean loop on this. And then we're gonna go ahead and trim off the rest of it. Nice, Now that we have this, we want to basically trim it. You could do that two different ways. One you can go to edit and then trim, or you can just go back here and push Control, Delete. So now we have that portion that we looped around. Don't feel like you have to remember that quite yet. I just want you to see what that looks like an Edison. We'll go over that a little bit later. Now that I have this sample here that I've trimmed when I push Control a so that I can get the entire sample highlighted. Then I'm going to use as little wizard-like tool that FL Studio has when you right-click on a sample, go to Tools, and then convert to score and dumps a piano roll. Click on that. Here is where it's basically going to dump every key that it can detect within this loop. Let's see how accurate this is. I'm going to drag this sample here to the playlist, the original sample. Now we're going to open this up actually using F0 keys. I'm going to go ahead and Control C and dump this. Took it from where it originally dumped at, which was on the actual sample itself. We don't want to do that, copied it, and then I'll paste it here. How you do that? Control C, control V here. Now it's here, Let's play it. Once again, not a 1000% accurate, but it'll at least gets you in the ballpark. And it's really helpful tool when you start thinking about, okay, well, I really want to try to find at least the ballpark of some of these notes. Because as you're trying to do that yourself, if you don't have prior music theory knowledge or you don't know your way around the keys, it can be frustrating in a little bit overwhelming. So at least being in the ballpark is a good place to learn from blend. I would much rather you attempt to do it this way. Take your time with it. It takes a little bit of patients, a little bit of ear development, but you will get it in notes on, trust me. So we're going to loop this back around. What I'm gonna do. I'm gonna get rid of that. I'm going to play the sample and I'm going to start at C. And I'm gonna go up the keys. And Sal, I figure out a key between these two octaves. That feels like this sample fits someone to play this key long. Then after playing it for that long duration of time, beginning of the loop to the end, if that note feels like it fits in there like a glove, that's probably the key, ladies and gentlemen. So let's try it out. Towards the tail end of that. See you start to see it's not quite the one that fits like a glove. They are going to be keys that sound like they do. So you gotta be very, very, your ear has to get really, really careful about which ones you're gonna pick. I did not think could see. It's clashing with somebody who's high your notes. E is really, really close. Not that one. I'm just doing yp it right now. Yes. I think that's it. Itself is a little bit of disruption there. We have established that this key is a next question I have after we dictate what key this sample is in, is, what is the scale? Is that a minor scale or a major scale that is important because if it's a major or minor, that's gonna tell us basically what keys we can play along with this. Now the way that you dictate whether it's a minor or major scale. We're going to pull up this image that I've found here on Google. Minor scales are usually one whole note and then a half-note. Major scales are usually a whole note up than another whole note and then a half note. What does that sound like when we're talking about on the keys, I'm going to play it for you right now. So let's do major first as it was gonna be pretty easy. Keep in mind if you've never been exposed to this. Basically, that's a whole step. That's a half-step. You're trying to get C to D. That's half the half the duration their bone. That's the whole step. Same thing if you went from the black keys. So this is 0.5.555.5. So this is a whole. Now. Then another hole from this half have this is the whole. The most important thing to keep in mind is that every note is separated by a half note. Even when we're talking about this is not whole notes, a whole Notice total, it's a half note, a whole note from this note, which is E, would be F-sharp. Now, the reason why this is important is because once again, it's gonna tell you all the keys that you can play after you figure out the key and then the scale that it's in, the way that we're going to figure out if this sample that we're messing around with is an a minor or major is basically by taking this key of a. Then seeing based upon this pattern or this diagram right now if we go minor scale, What is it? So starting from here, let's go a whole note of, so this is a half-note. This is how, this is a whole note right here. Does the half note, whole note. This is the first W that you see up here on the screen. First w, Okay. And then the next one's a half. No. You see how that feels? A little bit dark? That's a half note, that's a minor scale. Next one, major scale. So starting from a. We start with a W, which is a whole, another whole. We're gonna skip one. So keeping in mind just those first three notes, because you can keep going down a scale to figure out more keys. Typically the major scales are gonna sound a lot brighter and happier and more Disney esque. The minor are going to sound a little bit more darker. Boom, boom, boom. Let's see, based upon just those keys right there, if we can figure out if the sample that we're working with is a minor or major, try not to look at the screen right now. Does that feel right? Just try minor. Now there's a million ways that you can dictate whether or not this is a minor or major. That's what helps me because as I start to go down now on the keys and scale of this, because I memorized the a minor, I know that it's all white keys. Right? Now if I tried to play that with the sample, every key **** pretty much work within that. But a is obviously the strongest one because it's in the key of a. There we go. That's a minor. See how that can be very helpful, especially as you start to realize that your keyboard, depending on the size of your keyboard, is really just separated into these, these octaves. Once you see that the keyboard becomes so much more small, especially for sample-based producers who are probably getting into this because of a lack of music theory learning just that right there. And then maybe a little bit later on getting into your scales and whatnot and see if you can memorize that right there is going to be a game changer because now when you get a sample, you know, based upon that sample, what keys you can play and say you don't memorize what the minor scale or major scale patterns are. Another cheat code that you can use. Let's see Use here. Let's go to D minor. If I just simply go on the Internet, on Google and just look up D minor, D minor scale, piano. There's all these diagrams that are going to tell me what D minor scale looks like. Boom, which show me right here. Based upon his sample. When I play it, I should be able to play any of these notes right here. And it'll give me the same effect as that last Aaron Barbara sample, where all the keys are working within it. But the strongest being obviously D because that's the key that it's in. Salah you, if that is the only music theory that you learned right now when it comes to sampling, it will be the best investment of time that you make. So from now on, This is what I'm suggesting that you do, especially if you want to add baselines, which you're going to want to add baselines to your samples. So that's how you figure out the key of those samples. Let's test it out one more time actually, since we don't even know what this particular key is here. I'm actually going to open this up and Edison one more time because I want to grab just the sample itself. Just keep table, okay, now that we have this sample, Let's go ahead and just drag this over here to the playlists. And as you can see it falling a little bit short because this is not the true BPM of this sample. Now, one way to find that it's not a 1000% accurate, but it does help you get in the ballpark is to right-click on the sample and detect simple. It says the temple was around 67, close to 70. So if we do seven, it's about 140. If we're doing double time, it says 70, that's not accurate because look at all the spaces here. These are four bars, by the way, let's actually teach you how to count bars in case you don't know because we're going to need, so basically work our samples in four bar measurements. This is going to help to really focus in on. In one particular part of a sample that you want to attack as you add drums and all that good stuff later on in the different modules. So I'm gonna do that right now. Basically this is the way you counted 1234 and you switch that first number for the next bar and you say 234, switch again, 32344234. That is basically dictating what bar you are on. So let's do that here in Rhode songs 123434323443, for that's how you count bars in case, no matter where you're at in a song, you can always find that by basically doing that account. And you can pretty much tell what's coming up next just in case you've never been exposed to that. I wanted to go ahead and teach you that really quick. Now, focusing back here on his sample, this is nowhere near four bars, even though I know what I was a 4-bar measurement, we're gonna need to make a few changes here. Let's double-click the sample. Go down here to auto mode. And what that's gonna do is basically stretched this sample without changing the key. What's natural BPM because it didn't give us an accurate and one unfortunately it's not 70. If you've been playing, you can hear. That's not the BBM and sounds off. Let's actually play it with the metronome, which I actually changed to a hi-hat by right-clicking. And let's drag this temple up and down to see what this actual BPM is. You'll see because you have it here in auto mode. And this is just for this example right now, I generally use stretch mode, which gives it a high quality real-time stretching when we're trying to stretch the sample and change the key we don't want to do because we want to find the actual BPM and a key of the original on auto. Let's drag this temple. I wanted to stretch and get as close as possible just to take cool. So we know at least that portion that we chopped up is a 135 beats per minute. Now, why did FL Studio why were they so off? I mean, they weren't that off there about five beats per minutes off. But it's because a lot of times because these samples are, these songs are being played by live drummers did not always quantize and I'm always on the grid sometimes is break down, sometimes there's chord changes or bridge changes that basically changed the BPM of the song a tad bit. And if it's taking an average of all that, it's not gonna be the most accurate, especially when you're trying to pinpoint certain parts of that song. But we got it now, a spot 135 beats per minute for this song, what key is it in as the next question I have, let's open up FL keys to figure that out. I'll just keep taking different octane. That doesn't feel right. I'm gonna say that this is in E. Now, I want to see if that's E minor or E major. We can go back here to this pattern and we can figure that out right now. If we go one whole note on e, then a half note, we're starting at e. Whole know. That's the minor scale. Now the major will be one half-step up. Now let's see if it's E major or a minor. Let's play the sample now. What do you think it is? A major? Mine was play it again. E minor. Now let's actually double-check that. We said it's 135 beats per minute and it's an E minor. Let's see how accurate that is because track lip actually has a lot of us information on it. It says it's about 141, so FL Studio was actually pretty accurate. It just didn't feel right in that pocket for some reason. E minor, we got it right there it is. Round of applause, bone, bone. So cool. I've showed you how to figure out the key for a song that does not have a key attached to it. Now we've got to figure out this drum loop. Let's double-check with fl Studio Ghibli and right-click detect simple. It says the tempo is 137. Let's go ahead and just assume that it is. It says 137. Let's click here on estimate it. And that's going to basically change the entire BPM of the entire session. Now, now you can see that this is an actual two-bar loop. So it should be accurate, looks pretty accurate like a straight to the grid. If we zoom in. I think that's pretty accurate as players, you can tell by how clean the loop transitions into the other one, that this is the right BPM. This one's a little bit tricky because of the way that the drums are being played as sort of a swing time, someone to choose another one. See you at the same thing still applies. Go to detect temple 136 is what it says. So let's just trust it didn't go down near 136. There it is. So that pretty much works for any sample that you're working with, as long as you're able to count that you're able to figure out the BPM. So keep that in mind as we move a little bit further down. And so these modules, you'll see certain samples will require a little bit more digging in order to figure out what the actual BPM is. Especially when we start chopping a sample, we won't necessarily need that. This is more so when you're choosing samples and you're not going to chop them up or manipulate them, which is something I still do. I don't think that's a knock on anybody's skillset. I just think that it's a matter of what is the sample call for? What is your style of sampling? Which is why I want to expose you to so many different styles so that you can say, Okay, I think I'm more so a producer likes to let the sample breathe or more. So a producer likes to take a canvas, chop it up, and then turn it into another piece of art. Always feel like it's the best to have the ability to do both. But I think that as long as you're exposed to when you'll figure out what feels like home. 5. Chopping Techniques: Edison Method: In module five is going to be probably the hefty us because we're talking about shopping techniques as well as the tools that we are using. Now, I think it's fair to first start off with what do we mean when we say we are chopping a sampled for those either intermediate and advanced, have no fear. You can go ahead and move a little further on this one. But for the levels were having questions about that. Let me make sure that I explained this to you. When someone says that they are chopping a sample, it basically means that they are taking a longer piece of audio and then chopping it down to a certain parameter, whether it's four bars, eight bars, whatever they're trying to chop it down soon. They're chopping it down or they're slicing it down as a language that you get an FL Studio. That's pretty much it, right? You have different slicing and chopping styles, same way that you would have like a shift. A shift has different shopping styles depending on the vegetable or the food that they're chopping. For instance, a chef may shop down cilantro, our onions. They may dice them down on a certain weight. Same thing applies to actual music. You're going to slice it down depending on what type of vibe or aesthetic you're going for, or just what kind of energy you want the sample, new energy you want the sample to have. Same way that there's another style of Dole chopping. A lot of producers do that as well, where they'll basically let the sample breathe. They'll change the pitch, maybe the timing, but for the most part, they're letting the original sound play out, but it's still a chop nonetheless. It's a longer shot, but it's lit shot him on the list. I'm gonna show you what that visually looks like in just a second, but I wanted to make sure that I explained that before we start to dive into some of the tools first that we're gonna be using. In the last module, I showed you that if you take a sample, double-click it, right-click it excludes the excuse the clicking in the background, edit an audio. This is how you access Edison. And in case say for instance you exit on accident. You can click here on your mixer, go to master channel. Here's the same sample that you opened up an Edison. Cool. Now, why is Edison so important one? Because if you have a longer sample, you're probably not going to want to just drag it right here. If you chop everything up here, it's gonna be more tedious because if you have special moments, you're gonna literally go in here and slice right? You got the glowing and slice it in. Remember the slices that you had, the process I'm gonna show you instead of this is going to help alleviate some of the chaos that can happen when you do slice that away. I do slice that way. It's kind of considered manual shopping or manual slicing, but I tend to stick with fl slicers before we get all over the place though. Let's deal with Edison first and then I'm going to show you what I mean by dragging me samples out individually and basically putting them here on the channel wreck. Now, let's do a quick little tour of Edison and some tools that you're going to want to pay attention to if you're looking for an extended overview of the entire Edison, there's YouTube videos for that. We're here specifically for sampling. Stop panel was pretty obvious here these are where your loop features are. Your play button. There's a scrub wheel. Don't really use that. And then up Stop button, right? These are things that you can dig into in your, at your own leisure. But I'm really concerned with this loop feature that basically takes any piece of audio and went to press the play button. Lungs that's yellow. It's activated, is basically just looping it around over and over and over and over again. So you've got the loop button, you've got the play button, and you've got the Stop button. Straightforward. This panel right underneath it. This is where you can save your samples or load samples. Any event that you load up Edison in the mixer. Now you can do that in any particular Mixer Channel by going over here to the FX slots and then just opening up Edison, super straightforward, right? So this is your file features, this is your format features, you're editing features, your tool features, your pitch region features which comes in handy for specifically Ada weights and sometimes finding individual keys of a sample. Your views, snap, select, Zoom. I don't really maneuver too much through here because everything I access up here, I can access here by right-clicking. Everything is the same thing here. And if you ever get lost in terms of what things are, look here on the top left-hand corner. It works across all of FL Studio. In this section, this doc right here, this is an important button. This is your undo button. Now I'm always having my fingers own control Z just in case I mess up. But if you need to undo, undo here, I don't really use the claw machine or the normalized feature. I'm just using this section really to get more control of the samples before I start to dump them into FL slicer. This fade in fade out feature can come in handy, but I don't really use it. I really want to make sure that whatever loop, I basically take the beginning point and end point. So I want to make sure that sounds sonically clear without having to do too much fade in and fade out. A lot of people who try to hide bad loops, right, where they're not actually looping correctly. Are there looping where the endpoint is a little bit too fast or too soon and it loops back to the beginning to sound. Some people are high that by trying to fade in the audio on the beginning of a fade and the audio at the end. That's not what I do. I need to make sure that in its raw state it sounds clean. I'll show you what that means in just a second when we start to loop this run script feature is something that's really interesting because although I don't use too many things in here, this ethics, old-school features. Pretty cool. Let me show you what this sounds like. So you hear this sample as it is. It's a little bit of processing, but checkout what it does when you play it. Very minimal processing. But when you go to get a run and you go to FX, it's almost like having your own RC 20 just sitting here in FL Studio. And if you don't know, are C20 is like a cassette emulator, vinyl emulator. I have one as well for my plugins, which is called a boy, but check out the sample now. So basically it runs it the old-school ethics shame, pretty cool feature that I'd just recently discovered. Everything else here. I mean, you can see what they say here. This blurred, this is reverb. You have a slicing feature that is in here as well. Looks pretty cool. Only issue I have with it is that it's slicing so much of the sounds and I can't really individually take those out using just that soul. Here are the two things that I really pay the most attention to when his section, Not so much this one, but this one right here. This option basically allows you to loop around a piece of audio lists, actually go through the process of looping some audio right now. What I'm listening for now, two things. One, I want to see when the sample repeats, do I hear any kind of clicking in our clipping are like a really very distinct sound. You might have to listen a few times to hear it. If I'm hearing a clicking where it sounds like the sample is just you can tell that it's being looped. It's not a clean loop. When I'm doing is I'm basically dragging these endpoints to see if I can catch it to where the music repeats itself once again, there's no drums, so counting the bars is a little bit more difficult, but it's not impossible obviously, but I want to just show you what this looks like in real time. And I'm using a mouse wheel that allows me to basically Zoom In and Out. Holly suggest getting one of those mouses to go ahead and do some of this editing. If not, you can go ahead and press Page Up In page down on your keyboard. But you've got to make sure you point your mouse in a direction that you want to go in. It's just so much easier to do this with. A mouse will listen with me and see if you can hear any kind of a clicky clipping. Heard it, but very minimal. That means this is a pretty good, It's pretty good loop when I'm looping around sounds, especially in Edison, I'm trying to basically catch a sound when it dips down here. It's like a 0 thresh mark. Not necessarily all the weights at the bottom, but I'm trying to catch it in a place where he won't be noticeable when it flips back around, I want it loops back around. Same thing goes for It's very beginning portion. What I've found is sometimes when you find the lowest threshold, it creates the cleanest sort of loop around. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. But for the most part, that's where I'm keeping my mouse around. Trying to catch a little higher up here in this waveform. Goes as clean. It may take some getting used to, but at least you don't have this annoying playback mark or going back and forth, imagine finally finding it and then it moves the entire window over. I've had that happen in one-to-many toms in the beginning of my sample in career. But that's probably one of the most important things to get a grasp on. And I actually want you to do a little bit of practicing with samples and longer samples that you can basically go through it now, once again, how am I able to dictate? Okay, that's the full loop. How did you know that? Well, one, I'm listening for the music and seeing where does it repeat and when it repeats over against it was don't do num. I like to make sure when I'm jumping into samples that I'm grabbing at least like four bars. You can grab more, but I think four bars is a good place to go through because within these four bars there are countless chops that we can make depending on the nature of the chopping that we're gonna do for this style. One shot to shot, shot for shot, shot, shot. Seven shots. And just look at the waveforms every time you look at the waveforms and they become a little bit larger, you see some of those transients every time they become large, I'm looking and saying something there can be chopped. It's noticeable. That's where the music makes some kind of a dramatic shift or the velocity changes pretty dramatically. Those are kind of things I'm looking for, but right now, not even thinking about smaller shops, I'm just trying to get the things that are the most lovely about this sample. So now that we have a clean loop wellness, we're going to open up the channel rack and we are basically going to be moved this stuff wrong. I'm on the keyboard is down there. I'm gonna take this loop that I just created because I want to find more, more stuff to actually chop up and put into this session. I'm going to go over here to the drag-and-drop feature. Drag this on down and I'll even like name this something like main, main shops with that is now keep in mind when I actually move this over to FL slicer, it's going to change the name so it's good that you're naming them here, so at least you have a reference. So we got one cool chop right here. Let's look for some more. Music. Kinda repeats itself. Changes right here. Let's grab this. Let's see every repeating yourself. It does. I'm just gonna grab the first part of this. Let's grab the first part of this. You can generally sale. The music is shifting once again by paying attention to the spikes in the sounds. Sometimes it's hard to see. So you need to zoom in, which once again you can use page up, page down. In order to do that. I'm using my mouse will though, but as an eyeball it, I can tell it's a little bit close to here. I want to say it's around, around here. The end of the luteal lifo, the beginning of the next one, another beginning of the year. You want to make sure that when you grabbing the beginning point, you don't go too far into the loop. You want to give it a little bit of space in the beginning. Because the more that you loop it, the more that it will expose just how many seconds off that actual loop cut it. So I try to leave a really micro amount of space in the beginning of this loop so that it doesn't like oddball, the timing of it. Sounds good. Let's take the slave off of here. I don't typically chop it that way. I'm always listening to music is shifting and I'm hearing drums in my head, right? I'm hearing a timing of my head, but when you first start, that can be very, very helpful to have this on and then click. Basically what it's doing is linking the Edison. So your main Play button and all of your main tools such as your metronome. Boom, taking this off, let's go ahead and just press this and see if we looked us around. Here, the clipping I hear clipping. Try to get this a little bit cleaner. Clipping may be coming from either the beginning or the end. It's up to us to really eyeball that and see if we have not picked a clean place like this might not be the clean place. Let's try this here. Now the reason why that worked is because the music became a little bit more intense around this section right here. Because the obviously the velocity in the volume of the music is shifting throughout it. It became more intense at the end. That is, unless I choose a portion of it that is not as intense because it's transitioning to the next part. One of that intensity is attached to the next loop or the next part of the music. So by grabbing this end point here, I'm just literally holding down the mouse and I'm dragging it in. Just to kind of show you exactly what it looks like on a mouse, I wanted to change the angle really quick just so you can see how it's looking on my clean loop right there. Pretty much that's the benefit of having a mouse with a mouse wheel on it is that you're able to get that pinpoint in real time as it's playing. So I'm gonna take this portion and I'm going to actually drag it down here. And let's call this course. We're going to call this chorus shop. You can name this whatever you want to name them. This is just so I'd know what's what as I start to chop NFL slicer, then we can just start there. Actually, there's a lot more in this sample that we can go back, you can get, but that's pretty much the process. That is Edison, ladies and gentlemen, that is the power of Edison. There's so much that we can do it like, especially when we're talking about an example of maybe some of the smaller chops that I will probably do for a sample like this. Right there. Not a clean shop, so we got to get this clean. My job were very stubborn mouse, there was just made this Windows updates. So you want to have nearly as much issues as I'm having right now. It's actually a challenge. Trauma shaft, the ease with this mouse. Now we have a smaller shop. They get dragged down, but I just wanted to show you that as an example of some other things that you can do an Edison and ways to get a clean loop. Getting a clean Lou, I feel like it's gonna be one of the most important things that you do achieve as you start to learn and perfect sampling in the very beginning, you just want to make sure that you can do a clean loop. So practice on as many different styles of music as you can and keep in mind that everything is not the same time signature. Sometimes signatures are 1223442223445. That's a swing timing, right? Some of them are, it looks actually check this out right here. You can actually see what timing the project you're working on is. Let me see. This is 400 for timing. It's my time signature was for for timing. 6. Chopping Techniques: FL Slicer Chopping: The next thing we need to talk about is the beast that is FL slicer. Now, I know a lot of producers use FL slice x, right? It's not really my forte. There's a lot here. It can do a lot, but this is really something that I feel like if you are trying to get used to sampling first one, if you are in the beginning stages, don't even look at slice and x, but if you're an intermediate or advanced level, there are so many things here where it's like once you commit to using slice x, you're married to using the features because of the way that it works, I'm just turned off by it because it's just sometimes less is more. And this is why slicer has just been Old Faithful for me, never did me wrong, has always been very, very reliable and easy to use with that said, ladies and gentlemen, this is FL slice or fruity slicer to be exempt, put this on detached mode so it does not get off the window when we move stuff around. So FL slicer toward, let's go ahead and cite that are really quick. So up here you basically have these detailed settings that allow you to change pretty much the same thing. You can change an every FL Studio window that has audio, got the envelopes and the waveforms, right? A lot of his stuff that you do find in slice x as just in different places. But I felt like if you're already somewhat used to FL are getting used to it, it's important to just like no, these are here and you're able to manipulate sound with these. We're focused in on this section right here though. First and foremost, you can open up what are called beat grooves. I do not touch those beat creator grooves. I have not such those, but I'm assuming those are file formats that are pre chopped Kia samples. This is where you can load a sample and we're not going to load it here this way. But just to know, you can go in here, It's pretty cool. You can open up a sample directly into Edison and we're not gonna do that because we're in 2021. Next, you have a slicing tool option. This is gonna be important once we actually get our sound here, but I want you to at least see that this has different styles of slicing, which will make a lot more sense when you see the audio here. Here, this is where you're able to add some things that we're actually going to do in a different way which are able to reverse randomize our flattened the shops. You're able to shift up or shift down, quantized pitch up the beat, wideness stereo. All that is stuff you can do in the piano roll in post. I'm not really concerned with doing that in there, but it's pretty cool that they give you that option to do it here. And I think this is probably where it's crucial for us to actually put a sample in here, basically in order to get your sound from here into fruity slicer, you're gonna take this audio waveform you see out it has a little finger right here with the box around it. Hold down the left-click or the left button on your mouse. Drag. Just to take you drag it over. And then when you drag it over, you get this hot mess right here. So basically what FL did was an auto chopped it in an adult, dumped it, straightened to the piano roll. So these are all different parts of the beat that it auto shop, I won't tell you right now, the auto shop sucks. Don't ever use the auto shop that comes default with fl Studio. It's shops it but it's just a pain to deal with and you don't even want to try to chop alongside with this. So the first thing I would do is basically go in here. And so the Piano Roll, get Control a, and then push, delete, just to get rid of those. Next, you want to take this adult don't feature off because anytime that you edit something is gonna do the same thing it just did and dump all those waveforms back here as shops in the piano roll. Sake that off auto fit. You can keep that on D click, you can keep that on. It really depends on a sample. Sometimes this is a little bit harsh. What it basically does is take away those clicks that we were trying to get rid of any initial audio. We don't really need it though because we had clean shops and what we're doing. Now, It's basically d clicking according to which chops individually, the ones that it may, so it may need it you never know, you just got to listen what your ear and see next, you gotta reverse feature. Right? And as you can see, anytime you click on one of these shops that are auto-generated for you, it'll show up in this window right here, and it's even selling you. This is Slice Five, pretty cool features here that it allows you to change the character of it. You can make it a scratch pull, scratch push. I'd never touched that, but because I know that you can do that. Here it shows you what keys are actually triggering these. So as you are playing them alongside your piano or your midi keyboard, you'll see this says that this shop right here is e. It wasn't line. So cool. You got that. These are the features there. Now next is this pitch and time manipulation doc right here. This left section changes the pitch of your sample. So right now if we play the sample out, actually go down here. When you play to n, This is going to make sure that as you press any of these chops is going to play the sample all the way to the end. I want you to be able to hear this. I want to press this key and I'm gonna manipulate the pitch at the same time. So this is the first one. Keep in mind all of your samples start on middle C, whatever that is for the saucy or keyboard, it's going to start on middle seat. I actually want to take that reverse off because now it's starting to get a little bit annoying. When you are manipulating a sample. The most common thing to manipulate aside from the timing is going to be the pitch of it. And then some other sound design related plugins are techniques and affects and whatnot. So we're doing the pitch manipulation here, but it keep in mind you change the pitch by the sense you're changing the key. And this goes in increments of a $0.100. I mean, it goes a little bit more finite, but you want to move these by, since you want to move these by hundreds of sense, you don't want to do 570. So that's gonna be a horrible thing to try to tune your, your piano or whatever else, your baseline. So, so do it incense. So I look at these since as by the 600s, you're moving down an octave. So if you go down negative 600, that's like going down a whole octave, but in the same key if you go down 1200, whereas, whereas ends that's going down two octaves. So now this should sound really, really pitched down. Now you starting to get a lot of exposure to those clicking. So let's go ahead and push this back on and see what that does. I don't particularly like that, but it's good that I now know what that sounds like. Enough demoed it there. Let's go to 600. Actually for right now, let's take all the slices off because I want to be able to hear this sample clean and we're gonna get the chops back, but we're gonna make sure we get these off. How do you do that down here, you get an auto slicing doc that basically allows you to dictate how many of the low frequencies are being shocked, how many of the high frequencies are being recognized and shopped. I don't want it to recognize any of those I wanted to just be playing so that we get a clean audio. We can really hear it. Because when you have these and you're playing the actual sample, it's playing through the chops, right? They're not playing is all fluid. They're playing to the shops. Kinda hard to see what you're working winds. So let's go ahead and push. All of these are qualities to the left. We've got a clear idea of what the pitch sounds like there. Now you can take it to whatever since you want to. But once again, I do suggest going by the hundreds. Beautiful thing about sampling is that when you do manipulate the pitch, you are manipulating the emotion. And this is part of how you're going to rewrite what people are hearing and rewrite how they're interpreting these records. So many things that you can do just literally by changing the pitch of the yields go up at a whole octave. It's so crazy how many different production styles that you're going to hear. Like you may hear some Kanye or you may hear some just blades that you may hear whatever producer that you're in. So they all have a pitch area that a lot of their samples live in. A lot of those early Kanye records had like very chip monkey sounds. And it's crazy because a lot of that stuff repeats itself in time. I think that's pretty dope, but I wanted to make sure I expose you to that. And once again, we're manipulating these by the sense. Now you want to be careful because sometimes certain samples, because they carry their own unique frequencies, certain samples will not react the same way, right? Certain samples are gonna sound flat out ugly his hail when you take it up all the way, right? Those sounds synthetic. They'll sound way to doctor. But of course that's all up to you and your ears. And what you think, what I'd like to do is just sit with the sample and see what feels right. The original feels amazing. But the whole idea of sampling is to bring new life to it. So I kinda want to commit to actually changing the pitch a little bit too low for me. You can even see some of the nature of the drums changed. They become a little bit more boomy because it's in a lower pitch. Snare. I can EQ a lot of that stuff out, but I want to make sure I get this as clean as possible. Just an FL slicer, little bit too high. Like that. Just contains $0.300 up we chose the pitch shift is right here. Next section of this particular doc is the time stretch. Now we stretched out the pitch. Right now we're stretching out the timing. This is important because you want, want to know what BPM am I actually doing all of my beats. So this is where it's important to have a little bit of strategy, right? So something I like to do is take a drum loop. Now we had this one right here from the last example. Let's go ahead and fit to tempo. This time it's a little bit different because we want this beat to basically fit to the Temple of this beat we're working on right now. Which if I'm not mistaken, the original is 141 is actually now. Click here, fit to tempo. Take their word for it. Time shift is important, especially if you're using a different BPM than the original BPM of the sample. I think, if anything, I want to make this a little bit. What am I thinking? I can play it? I want to make it faster. So I'm thinking, let's go to one SQL-like 166 is what I'm thinking. I'm going to stretch out all these channel because I have some drums on here. Something else that I want to go ahead and change here is we know what the original sample length is and that is down here to eight beats, because it's four bars. We're gonna say it's eight beats. And that's around the BPM that it is, this is going to ensure that everything here is changing according to what that original was. We're gonna shift that again though here in the time stretch if necessary. How do we know if it's necessary? We're going to let this whole sample play out by itself before we do any chopping individually, we're going to have this sample just play out when a right-click or once at a piano roll. I wanted to lay this out for four bars. I'm going to grab this pattern here and see how much I need some manipulate the timing so that it matches with these drums. Let's go ahead and do that now. Way too slow. Way too slow. So in order to make that makes sense, what we're gonna do is we're gonna take this timing. And whenever you go down on the time stretch, it goes faster, you go up, it goes slower. Listening to this, you can tell that the sample is way too slow because it's not even able to finish itself in the process. So let's go down. Let's try 88 or 89%. Got to make it significantly faster than that. Not they're fast. Let's go to 70 to 80. I liked the drums. I want to change the drum to another drum loop. I just wanted to show you what that sounds like with it. Pretty close right there. Right. And all we did is basically change this time stretch feature here. That's if you want to do long style sampling now that comes in handy because once you are able to pinpoint that percentage every time that you're in the channel rack. And you copy this over, clone it over. You bring another sample that has the same lymph bar wise. It's basically going to adjust to whatever parameters you set for the original one. So it's the same BPM, everything stays the same. So then when you add new sample chops, everything is steel pretty much in the same family, which is really important. That's a good place to start. That's about as simple as sampling is going to get right to have one long sample that you get according to time with the beat. Can add a baseline here. But that's going to get boring. And you know what's going to get boring. You may be getting excited if you're a beginning at, at sampling, you may get excited about that. That's not enough. That's where it's gonna be important to understand more of the tools that are within this very powerful tool of NFL slicer. Now we talked about time stretch. We already manipulated that before modes it has an x dot. It looks actually go back a few steps and let's actually get some shops ADL sliced by FL Studio. And then I'm gonna show you how to edit those in the event that you don't like some of the slices or you want to make one a little bit more. So that's the one style is sampling, the other status sampling that is the most common. Let's slice according to the B. Now that we did this, FL Studio basically has laid out every single one of these shops according to the beat. Every shop is 1.5. Note up. That's where it ends right there. This is where you start to bring another life to it. Now this is a style of chopping that once again, producers who'd suit, whose sample they have this style in their bag, but there's a whole, another vibe to the entire sample. With this, I probably would even change the pitch back down. See what I mean. So the other one is cool. It's entertaining, it gets the job done. It's a great one to learn off of, but this is where you start to really unlock the power of FL slicer. I'm gonna take a whole another pattern here. Let's go to pattern too. Let's move this out of the way for right now. And I'm going to loop this around here, a quick little tool that I want to start to get embedded in your mind, especially as we talk about manual chopping here in a second is when you click here on a slicer, if you just right-click it and nothing is happening, right? You could hold it down and create a slice like this. That's helpful. You can hold it down and do that. But it's not always accurate. Hold down Shift and then hold down the left mouse and all of a sudden bone. Now that we have those drums, I actually want to take you through your first shopping session, the small chop way, as you see right here, these are all the chops that were pre-made for us because we sliced according to the beat. Now when you go to according to 1 sixth, the chops become ridiculous. Once again, it depends on a kind of shift that you are. If you want to. Some crazy things can be done. But I think for the sake of this course, it makes more sense to stick to beat. Now one more thing before we jump into this shop and session over this drum loop, I want you to pay attention to this fade-in feature and it's fade out feature here. When you go up on this fade in feature, it basically fades in every single one of the clips are the shops and it makes it to where it has a smooth fade in. You'll notice even more dramatically when I go all the way up. That's once again a style preference thing. I typically put it up. It depends on the sample, but I don't want to take too much of a life out of it. I'm really more so concerned about the way that it fades out because a lot of times that's where I hear the biggest clips on the fade-out. Also add clicked on his earlier. But if you ever want to just have one of these chops playing and not continue into the rest of the sample. Click off the plate in and it won't play the sample to the end. See how just stops there now. Now let's do a little shopping session. The way that I'd do that as a same way I've been previewing, get here with you. I want to loop around a beat and I want to basically just run through all these shops. They want to find the ones that I like. I'm going to record it live. Or if I wanted to do what I could do it here in the piano roll as well. But what fun is that? I want you to actually get used to doing it live. So let's go ahead and do a lot. The possibilities are completely enlist about it sounds like a super Disney cliche, but it really is like that. Now the same way you record any melody or sound in FL Studio is a sandwich. You're going to record these chops. It just gonna be like playing keys, but you're playing chops. Let's go ahead and record. Let's go to notes and automation. And let's play it. Cool simplistic chart that gives it a whole another energy than what it was initially. Let's see what it sounds like in its raw state. Let's see what happens when we quantize these, which is something that I am not a big fan of. But I think for the sake of understanding this, for the beginners that are watching this, it's important that you see it to the grid, but don't get married to that idea. How doesn't want you to see what it looks like and pretty much took the timing of it and how consistent is going to stay. All right, So Control Q quantizes it straight to the grid, which is something you're not going to want to do because the drums are not to the grids. So why would you want it to be sober computerize until the grid if the drums have a natural swings with them, that is part of what gives the music life. But like I said, once again, we want to just get some accuracy here as we're teaching it, Control L extends all the different audios. And actually we can just repeat these over. For the sake of timing and making sure that we have this is due. They're highlight all at ease and make sure that the highlight it and then just push Control B to loop it back around. You got to make sure we go down here to the pattern and actually extend this out as well. Now this is important because this is where we're going to add some more character. We got a basic bone structure of the chops and the different energy that we're going to take with these chops. Now we need to add a little bit of character here in a little bit of unexpected natured. So it just to give it its own style and possess because you know, there's gotta be produces. We've had this sample and shop the same exact way. So let's add your style on it, your flavor on. Something I may do is do another sharp of this module. We're going to shop at the same exact way here. Now see how easy it is to take these shops and give this an entirely new life, just literally by chopping different portions of it. It still feels like it has a beginning and an end because we're taking portions of the way that it was originally laid out, but we're doing it in restarting it and remixed again in a way that feels like ****, this is my approach to these keys. Let's try to reverse one of these and see what that does. I'm going to reverse this 565. Let's draw their 56. Now all the samples are reversed. See how bet like this little things that you can do. It is all about your creativity is only so much I can teach you about that. I can show you an exposure to the things that I use. But this is where you can have literally all the financial world. This becomes your playground by literally going in here and saying, I wonder what happens if I take this and I chopped this individually here. Now that does take me to another option here we need to discuss. I showed you pretty much every single doc here and what it does. I have not shown you how to individually chop these in FL slicer if you click on any of these windows here. And I want to make it less confusing by reversing these, you see how you can literally click over the top of this. And when you click over it, you can pinpoint where the next part of this sample is going to be. So when you listen to this, let's take this. You're hearing, boom. You're hearing two different notes and you can see where there's two different hits on that waveform is more so the base that's taken up there, waveform, say I wanted to separate those by clicking on here, I get a preview to the best of my ability, this is where FL slicer has a bit of his limitations. For right-click here. I can split that slice. Now I have another, have another sample to basically work with. However, be careful when you do that, because once you do that, these shops are going to have to be moved again because now you've extended this now from seven shops to eight shops. Now some stuff is going to have to be moved around. I didn't want to show you that you could do that if you want to get rid of it. Click on the window that you want to get rid of, Right-click and then removed slice and it goes back to its original place. Alright, now that I've shown you pretty much the ins and outs of Edison as well as slicer. You have pretty much the most important tools that you could ask for when it comes to chopping up samples. 7. Chopping Techniques: Manual Playlist Chopping: In this module, we needed to talk about manual chopping. With manual chopping, some of you may prefer to do it this way. Maybe somebody you don't want to manipulate anything within FL slicer. I get it. I understand that every row slices, not for everybody. I just have a love affair with it because of the way that I can take the keys and basically have them all across my midi keyboard. That to me is almost like the equivalent of somebody playing these on the drum pad. I don't use my drum bad because I feel like it's a bit limits it. I like to have more options. And what I've found is that by having the samples laid out, because sometimes I have longer samples than that. Most times I do that go all the way down the keyboard. I want to basically be able to go through all that owes without having to go an octave up, switched down here on the pads. This is the reason why I don't use a drum pads for the samples. Now that's the more traditional hardware approach to it. I just like doing this because this is what I've been doing from the very beginning and I want to make sure that I give you my best. But for those who would prefer to see the audio because there are limitations when you're dealing with the piano roll. A workaround for this would be actually manually chopping the samples on the playlists. How can we do that by basically taking these samples we have right here. Let's actually start with a known of the sample. Now, let's start with the Arun Barbara one and let's listen. So wouldn't see if we want to keep this same BPM. Why not? Let's do that. Remember that sample, let's take that and drag it here to the playlist. Now just on the eye test alone, you know that this sample is shorter than the duration of eight bars right now, our goal is to either speed it up so that it becomes four bars, are slow it down so that it becomes eight bars. Let's test out both. Before we do that though, I want to draw your attention up here to the stretch button. You're going to be toggling around with this a whole lot. If you plan on doing manual shopping, basically what this does is it changes what you're able to do with the sample. You see how, when I go to the endpoint of this window of the audio we dragged in here and I basically, and just going back through here and just cropping the sound, I'm not changing anything. I'm not making it faster, shorter, longer economy. I'm not changing anything or manipulating anything. The way that I do manipulate it though, is to go here to stretch. And what that's gonna do is basically, as it says, stretch out the audio. Let me take this back to where it was originally. So it says the BPM for this, Let's fit it so our tempo right now, and it says, let's actually type in what it says. It says It's one hundred twenty one-twenty. This is basically locking it down. So four bars right now. It's up to you whether you think that sounds good or if you like it or not. But as I'm listening to, it, just sounds like It's WHO doctor TO generic. It sounds too happy. I'm kinda fell on like slowing this whole thing down before I do that and change the key of something, I'm gonna go ahead and click on the audio and change the mode. And I'm going to change the mode, excuse my mouse, to stretch. By changing this to stretch mode, it's going to keep the original key and I'm in control of changing the pitch and all that good stuff. In other ways. I'm going to show you here shortly, right now this is at four bars. Let's try it at eight bars. Stretched. Feels good. Sounds likes, and storytelling spiced up here. Only issue I have what it is, the pitch. So if we double-click on my audio waveform, we can manipulate the pitch in two different ways. One, we can manipulate the pitch here in the time stretch feature by going down by the sense once again, if you wanted to get a little bit more precise, we can mess around with some other sense and just see. Liked that it sounds really good. Now another way to manipulate the pitch when we reset this over here, is to go here to the pitch now. Changed the setting to a multiple of six. So 6121824 y six, because six represents an octave shift from the next scene up octave wise. That all represents six semitones. In the event of this sampling, we have a knob that's six semitones here. Let's try 12 semitones and other equivalent of six and see what happens when we press Play on this, but then take it up to walk. This is to walk down, this is 12. Once again. That's just another way that you can manipulate the pitch literally through using that knob right there. It comes in handy most times I'm using his pitch knob for vocals that are added to the samples because I pretty much want to keep the key of it and then manipulate it from there. Now the only thing with using this time stretch feature is that because you have more control over the exact pitch that you're pitching it down, it's going to change the key. At least we're keeping this in stretch mode. It stays consistent. What key you're changing it. So Tom out all across the board, the pitch, you're going to change the key unless you're going in increments of 600. We talked about before. But for this example, once we figure out where we want to go and I think it was like 800. You can use the same technique I showed you earlier about how to find that new key. One thing that you know for sure is that whatever key it's now in is gonna be a minor scale. So that's gonna take care of that. It's actually run through and just see. This is where it comes in handy to have mixed in key or another program to back you up. We're saying C-sharp minor. Let's look up C-sharp minor then. Bombs. So what it helps to have some backups and when it comes to dictate and a key, that being said with the manual shopping, That's how you change everything there. Now the question becomes, how do we do that other stylet shopping that we did with fl slicer? This is where this way becomes super, super fun because now you can see the audio that you want to manipulate. I'm going here and I'm right-clicking now to get rid of the other part of it. And I can just loop this around. Holding down shift In, hovering over a piece of audio allows you to copy it over. Taking off the stretch mode allows you to now shop these down to your liking. Word shopping according to the line in the grid. These lines in the middle here, you couldn't do a little bit more finite shopping using these, we'll get to that in just a second. But for right now, shopping to the line is just fine. In my head. I'm starting to hear some of the parts that I might bring in Ford shop. So let's just try this out much try basically now what I'm doing is I'm trying to find according to the kick and the snare, which a lot of much shops are occurring. Because I'm a very rhythmic shopper. I'm trying to figure out if I hear special points in the sample that makes me want to chop the manually and have them repeat it. I'm not going for any rhyme or reason. I'm just literally going off of my ear and saying, Oh, that sounds nice. Let's move that over here and just see what it sounds like. I promise you this is not me fast-forwarding the process. This is how it goes. I sit here and then I puzzle piece this together. Sometimes things work, sometimes they don't, and you got to keep on puzzlement together. Only warning is I do not suggest this if you were just getting started within sampling, but I do want to expose you to this. See how piecing this together one thing leads to another idea, shopping something, repeating it. You just got to get in here and get experimental with where you want to get things going. Now, a little bit of framework or groundwork or foundation for those of you that are still very new to this process in the beginning, chop according to the kicks and the snares. So the cakes are obviously the, that's the kick. This is a snare. That's a snare. This is mute. This, this is the kid. Using a drum loop is going to give you a foundation to work with. It's going to inspire your new shopping ideas. I'm chopping this sample of a certain type of way, whether I want to admit it or not according to what this drum loop is giving me. Now, when you chop up without a drum loop, can you do some creative things? Absolutely. I know a lot of my advanced samplers in here. You can agree with me on that, but I do find that in terms of foreign advance and for beginner, it has a lot of benefits. Put a drum loop down here for an advance shopper. It gives them an opportunity to kind of freak the sample in a different way. You may add some kind of weird 1 third timing, like for instance, let's do this real quick. Let's actually change this timing to 1 third beat. And we're gonna go to the grid. We're going to actually repeat this. Boom, boom, boom, boom. Actually not want to go a little bit different with that shop. I want to space it out here. So let's do we're gonna repeat this over. You hear that it's actually played as this is why I say manual chopping is a little bit more for intermediate and advanced, but we're still going to talk about it because on a lot of you in here are sitting at that stage as well. But for those beginners in near stick to slicer for right now, test this out and see if you liked this better. But I would say slicer was a good place to start because it's a lot of these things are taken care of for you. For instance, the fact that you're hearing the clipping in-between these sounds. In order to change that for those of you that are looking to do it in his style, go to the clicking mode and then click to a generic bleed, a small bleed or across faded all depends on how dramatic you want the bleeds. B, I'm gonna say generic for right now. And you see it applies the slices to smooth out the sample shots. Can even take this pitch backup. With the manual shopping, that is how you get the ultimate control over it. Some other things that I like to do with the manual chopping that can take it to another level. And I'm of course, sockets in my intermediate and advanced students in here is I liked to take an individual sound and reverse it into another drug. So probably that one right there would be a good spot sake that shop that I want to reverse highlight it with the select tool, then push Control C to consolidate it down and make a new waveform. If I were to change the pitch of this note before consolidating, it, would change every other note in here and it's actually changed the color of this so that we know this is a anomalies. Everything else, stew blue. Cool. Now let's reverse this. And let's actually fade in little quick fade in here. I'm actually going to change the octave to stretch. Gotta change, does stretch mode even go another octave down? You could do some really, really interesting things, especially when you start to get in here with the manual chopping, I find myself using FL slice or more because like a sale, like to see the samples laid out on the keyboard. But I find myself jumping into this whenever I'm just like hungry to chop something up, like whenever I want to get straight to the point and I don't really want to go through the process of separating the sounds and throwing them in there I'd sent to just go straight. So within here. 8. Chopping Techniques: Sample Stacking: Now that we know how to use Addison, we know how to use Slicer. We want to make sure that we get the most out of the samples that we're sampling. And what that means is basically we're gonna be taking samples and combining them with each other. Now this is a technique that you don't really hear a lot of modern producers doing because they don't want to Clough the mix too much and leave room for the artist. But if you want to do beat saves, you went to instrumental albums. This is something you're going to want to learn because this is going to utilize parts of the sample that otherwise you would leave alone. Now, let's take these manual chops off for right now because I want to focus in on FL slicer. So we have these chops that we had from before. We need to go back into the sample and actually grab some more stuff. That's one. Let's actually do that. Let's go ahead and drag this and drag it into here. And actually let's delete this and make sure we aloneness, but it's all the same key and all that stuff pitch. Alright, so that's one symbol where you're going to make this, I'm gonna say this year. So we know what we're triggering when we actually press them on a midi keyboard. Let's get some more stuff in here. Mind you, this can be anything like you're basically digging through this looking for the equivalent of one shots, melodic one-shot. You're looking for that through here. It could be a horn that you may want to add an echo or delayed. So it could be a vocal. I'm looking for it up for the vocals because right now it sounds really good in terms of the loop, but it sounds really plane as well. So I want to make sure that we add little textures to what that make it feel like it has new life. Just keep taking, just keep taking, adjust contagious, keep taking thoughts. Have you in my view. All right, we're gonna add that in there and then call that U. And right now it sounds kind of crazy by how are we going to make this blend together? I want to show you a few different ways to do that in a second. Now the reason why I'm choosing vocals, because it's gonna be the easiest thing to identify when I start to trigger them as layers over the samples. Now, we have this original sample that we know. Obviously it's in the same key because it came from the same song. Now, although that is true, sometimes was key changes. So this is where we got to really mess around with this and doctorate to our liking. In order to do this though, we're going to need to get rid of some of the musical elements in the background with these vocals and habits aware the vocals sit in the front of the mix and the music kind of sits in the background. How are we gonna do that high-pass filter? So let's take all of these vocal stabs, one shots, and let's put them out on their own channel. Let's put them actually here in channeled Susan's, we got sample here. Let's put Vox stabs. Alright, so let's open up love filtered, love filters. Like the first thing I like to go to when it comes to doing a high-pass filter, Let's go ahead and do simple high-pass. Now let's listen to the sounds as we're playing the list. Play one from here. Now you're seeing how when you have that on your hearing, more of the vocal and less of the music in the background. Let's take it off. Now. You hear that base and at muffle, we can actually take some more of that off, but we're not going to be concerned with that just quite yet. We want to test out everything else. We want to get rid of. Want to get rid of these shops as well because these are so short, we don't know the needs and chop them. You do that by once again, taking these down. It was quite a sample unless basically just see what the high pass filter, how much it blends with this. Same key wise, it's almost like trying to find the right place for these to fit in. But once you find it in so many things, you can add effect wise to it to make it blend even, even more so it doesn't sound so abrupt. But this is once again another style of sampling and shopping. So as I'm going through here, and it sounds so good within the mix that I can honestly play it over the top of the other music and it won't be interfering. So let's play it. I'll probably do a U Oh, yeah. Say it is right here. It's a weird might actually do an auto shop on this one to the beat. It's not necessary, but I liked the way these are blending already. But what I can do with this now, because I have these vocal steps here now I can start doing things like having a delayed so that it blends in even more. Because somebody may wrap to this beat and want to wrap along with the EU parts and incorporate that into the concept. But his song is actually put f delay three on this. I'm gonna move this up manually on his part. Okay, so I don't want to get too deep into the actual mixing of this. I just want to show you that you can layer over the top sounds and make it sound more textured, more interesting, more amazing, more melodic, more musical. Because when you chop down music, it wasn't originally intended for it to be chopped. It was just made as music as a sample-based producer, it's your job to now take these shops and do something with it. When an onion was originally grown, it was grown to be a certain size. When you die set up, you better put it in a pot or do something with it. Same thing here. When you dice these samples up, have some kind of intent with which you'd shop and don't just on chop everything. You can shop a lot in half stuff sitting in here, but don't chop just for the sake of shopping. Listen to that and say, I can see that being a layered sample or I can see that being a switch up, our change up and what I'm doing. So I took another part of this sample right here. I want to drag this over here. Replace this here. We have one sample style right ear. Want to duplicate this and try just extending the entire sample and see if there's a way to build around that other part, right? So we're actually going to stop the shop. We may or may not have to copy this over into another channel that's got a copy of this. So let's copy this over. This is the main sharp. We're now going to speed it up since we did the Chop Shop here, Let's actually speed it up here. Once again, how are we going to do that with the time stretch? Say these all the way out. Now we can layer over the top this new sample that we just put together. And we can let that layer the same way. Even though two different parts of the same song. We've got to actually do the same thing for this one. I think we synthase down to 81%. All right, so now we can take this original sample that we had here since we got the timing right. And at time stretch. I don't like the way the first part of this, so samples are clashing as we're trying to manipulate them to sound good together. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to actually cut this sample in half. I'm gonna do this accordance. Who beats? What I wanna do is get wanted to take that right there. I liked the way that sounds is record that alive actually. Bone. Now we got some sampled shops here. That little mistake here was actually pretty dope. Now, literally would just the same suit shops. We haven't even got to like formatting the beat, which is gonna be another module, but just those two sections alone. Look what we have so far. So we're going to play these back-to-back, since these are two different parts of the beat. If you could do so much with so little with sampling. This is why I love it so much. We haven't even transitioned to any other portions of this beat, but we did chop this up to where we get literally make four or five beats out of the same sample. This is why samples you hear over time get used so many different times because there's so many different shops and reiterations that you can put on top of it, but that's how you manipulate samples so that they sound good as they are blending into one another. Now, although as I said earlier, there's not really a rhyme or reason when I'm actually sampling. There are some things that I want you to pay attention to that are all actually stylistic things, right? The reason why you hear so many of the same note here is because literally the length of this note is not long enough to sound like this and keep the same note and keep the same repetitive nature into the next note. It's not long enough because when you extend this node out, right, Let's just go here and do this. It starts to fall off beat. So another way that you can cheat if you are using a different BPM and you haven't re-adjusted it, is to chop the sample before the next part comes in. So that's kind of what they call the endless loop. You see it a lot of times for vocals as well. So as I'm showing you this, I want to basically make it seem like a vocal never actually stops moving. In order to do that, we can actually switch these around and I want you to hear what it sounds like if we take this and we're basically going to have its say, Phil would doubt. Oh yeah, oh yeah, yeah. I think that's the best one. Rid of somebody's shops. Somebody shouts may since before don't make sense right now. To get this endless shops section going, let's go ahead and take this. If we want to find the end of our doubts. So we will try to get the word not gonna be the cleanest endless sample. What we're gonna find another one that can do that. I'm going to chop this. Let's do that. Let's chop this around. And it's gonna feel like it's steel continuously going. This works so much better on vocals. But I just want to show you what you're able to do. Once you have this to a certain type of grid or certain type of control. Let's see how the sample is kind of an endless loop. You could do that with so many different styles of sampling. I didn't want to show you what that sounds like there as much as you would think. It would disrupt the vibrator beat. It doesn't, it fits in a background. It sounds like something you just play in the background and it works. You want to be very selective about how you do that. But I just want to show you there are so many ways that you can layer it and manipulated within that. 9. How To Add Character To Your Samples: In module six, we're gonna be discussing how to add character and just a little bit of flavor to your samples. I think initially when I first got comfortable with how to actually sample, I started seeing it became a little bit easier to find the timing and add my drums over the top of it and things like that. That's when I started to say, Okay, this is cool that I understand the basics, but how do I separate myself from other producers and how to I'll put more of my personality within my sample, flipping all my shopping and whatnot. So this is where we're going to need to discuss a little bit of detail the effects that I use and that I suggest that you told around with I mean, there's no rules to the effects. Pretty much for me. The only thing that I'm thinking about is what's going to add another character to the sample. But it makes sense for the mood that I've set with the bare basics of the foundation that I've laid out. That's the most important thing to me. We still have the same sample we're working on here. Let's go ahead and replay it is in case of refresh your memory. Now something that we can do and it depends on what you want to work with and what you feel comfortable working with at this stage of your production career. For some folks, it probably would be easier for you to copy over a pattern and then start to fool around with the effects and see if you want to add it like say for the last eight bars of a verse, or maybe you want to just test it out for the intro. You might want to just cologne it over. It's probably the easiest thing. Let's start with that method first. The second method is going to be consolidating these sounds so that you have new waveforms to work with. And then you can basically assign them to their own mixer track. And from there you can add effects that are pretty much just for that particular waveform that you went and consolidate it with that sale. Let's do the first method. First method and the situation we want to mess around with this first portion here. What I want to do first is push Control a. And I want to make space for just this amount of bars, right? So this is eight bars right here. Let's move this over to the side because I want the sample that I'm going to be messing around with to breathe. So as you can see, there's a little bit of extra vocal here from an endless sample we did. Let's go ahead and just cut that off right. Now. Let's focus our efforts here. These are just the sample chops right now, one thing I want to do is make this one unique by clicking here on the piano one of the top left-hand corner go to make unique. Once we do that, we're on a new pattern. Pretty much. You do not want to manipulate this particular channel though, because if you manipulate this is going to change the entire beat. Once again, we're going to clone him. I think it probably would be wise for us to start naming these so we know what's what. So we'll say lead verse sample to. Also, let's extend this out. We know what everything is and I'm gonna copy that over and name it appropriately. So I'm copying that. Go to the second one. We'll call this 1.51111. Then this one right here, it would just be one. We know these are pretty much linked together. This is the one that we're going to actually mess around with and put effects over it to make it have a different vibe on him. So I just copied that over by pushing Control C and then Control V into the next channel. And I'm gonna go ahead and push Control X to get rid of that. Now that we have this chart here that's separate from everything, we can start having fun with some of the effects. Now I want to take this particular version of the chops we did. I want to put it on its own channels. So let's call this. This is just for the sake of this lesson, sample ethics test, okay, so now we basically need to assign this to it's own mixer. Right-click Shanna routing. Boom. Now we have a channel to basically experiment with. Some of the most common things that I'll do when it comes to samples like this, because I mean, they sound so good as they are. We've pitched it down, we've manipulated all kind of different ways. We've change the order of the notes and things like that. Something I want to do is you don't mess around with maybe like a chorus effect or maybe add some reverb. So with that, I'll give it a whole, another lively feel. There's really no rules to Whitman. I'm gonna show you the ones that are the most common ones for me to use. I want to start with a stock ones first. We mess around with this in the last module, but footie love filter is kind of a place that I love to start off with my samples. The reason I start with this, because I know a lot of producers will start off with E queuing first to try to get rid of any of the bad signals, or maybe some signals that they want to add their own instruments over the top of cipher instance, you do sort of a cut in the low frequencies because you want to add your own base, which is something I want to do in the next module. I like to do the effects first because it gives me ideas of ways to approach this sample and then previews what it sounds like when I'm actually cutting these frequencies off. So I'm going through these just basically see if there's something that inspires an idea. I could easily use this effect and it could be like the last eight bars of averse, last four bars, just something that adds a little bit of character, takes away a little bit of the warm four seconds of the beat kind of feels empty for a second and then it comes back and it fills that much more powerful. There's little things that you'll find that psychologically you can do in the music that affects your listener. This is one of them. This is why I start off with the effects first. But when it comes to the actual mixing, I'm primarily going to start with the EQ one because that's where I want to start making Rome for some of the elements that are add on top of the sample, primarily use the simple band-pass, the high pass. And the simple low-pass. It is depends on the aesthetic that you want to go for. So I'm gonna go ahead and mute this for right now, but just know that is one that I use a lot. Another stock plugin that I'll use that kind of gives a chorus effect is ironically not fruity course. It's the flanger and then a flying IS both are stock within your FAL. Let's try flanger first. I typically like to use this effect on intros, kinda gives a just blaze effect. So it kind of makes it feel like the sample is washing away in his kind of light coming into its clarity. In the very beginning, I liked the way that vibes out. Imagine that in combination with the high-pass. And the priest says, and tell me though, those primarily of what I'm using. I'm not really going in here and dig in too deep into some of these other parameters. But if I do hear something that I want to change around that I just kind of like listen for what's happening that's affecting them today. This is a fact. The plan. We can run through some more presets on this. Let's see how it adds more character. So it's at a point where you want another producer could sample literally the same portions in the same way. But this is gonna stand out more because you're adding more depth to the sample. It's almost like taking a movie scene and putting it over new dialogue or putting it over a new score. That's kinda what you're doing when you're adding these effects over it. Let's move on to another one. The other one that I use a lot for sampling is the flooding IS, which is another stock one in FL Studio. Let's hear without now let's hear it with it. Imagine having a beat where the sample plays out as it is. And then for one of the loops that comes in and fight. This is how you create an auditory experience for your listener. And I think this is why it's important to mess around with these effects and have just like a general foundation of where to go. There's really no rules with that though. Those are pretty much the stock ones that are mess around with. I didn't want to expose you to some more that I think can really, really help you control these samples from an ethics standpoint. One that you see a lot of my live streams that I use a lot is Analysts smell, which is probably the least expensive, one of all the ones that are here, a psi from mine, which is the next one, which is called table. Unless smile, endless smile is basically a OneNote plug-in made by the same people who make sausage fan. And I know you've heard of that. And as you turn the intensity knob, you get to basically here in ethics chain that was pre-processed for you to use over whatever you using. I don't use these like throughout a whole beat. You could if you find a vibe that feels right, but I use these for more. So vocals over the top of samples, checked his first setting out. What's ironic about it is that it was made specifically for EDM. So as you go through somebody's settings, you're going to realize, okay, this is probably where they using stuff to build anticipation before a buildup in a drop. Same thing can be applied energetically and sonically to sampling. Let's listen to what these type of things that just gonna give a whole another energy to your beats to the point where people want to be like man, Aside from choosing this fire sample, aside from having a Fi arrangement. And I'm like, man, how did you actually program that? I how did you automate all that stuff? And so this is where these programs come in handy. A little quick tip for automating these. And that's more So I guess advanced for FL and advanced for the sample based produces that are here is to basically go to Browse parameters and then touch a knob. And by touch it, it'll tell you what you're actually affecting here. If you right-click this and go to create automation clips, same way you can do for most knobs in FL Studio. Now, I can have this basically play out. It's actually do it with this. Let's play it out. Extend this out. So say you want the effect to start intense here, right? And then start to fall off around here. We can do that. I think I want it to be climax tier. And then start here with the sample listed like a slow climb on this. Maybe not that Simon. And I'm just right-clicking of his points. That also reminds me though, I wanted to save this for another module, but I think it applies for what we're doing right here. So that's same sort of phasing effect that you heard right now would enlist smile a kind of how it feels like it's coming out of the abyss and then becoming clear, you can do something similar to that. I mean, you could do it pretty much anything you can do want to plug-in with the stock plug-ins, you just takes a little bit more effort. You can do that literally by dragging this band down. High-pass, going to the number seven ban over here, dragging that down to a low-pass. But basically now you're going to drag this, I drag the first one up like this. Drag the ban order, drag that about steep eight. Then you're going to drag this one to about, I'd say about 30 hertz. Drag that back down to 0. And then what you want to do is basically automate this seven high frequency. You want to be able to automate this up and down. This is what it's gonna sound like. Now the question is, how do you automate that? By looking down here at the knobs and seeing as you drag that what is actually getting moved. So if I take this here to its highest point, it's this one. So let's go ahead and right-click create automation clip. As you can see, here's the automation clip that we were just manipulating. If I start there, that's actually the zero-point where nothing is getting shifted. But if I start down here. Now see how that kind of makes it feel like an intro, like the energy is building up and it's anticipating and you're building up all this energy and then it finally drops into the drums. This is where adding character and effects is so important. This is done in your stock and mind you, I'm not showing you stock plug-ins because I'm thinking that childhood cheap, You're not gonna go by no plug-ins, but that's what I use. I literally use the stock plug-ins because they get the job done and it's a lot better on the CPU. I want to show you another cool effect though with this parametric equalizer that we just automate it. I like to do this V-shape dip out and it creates this weird effect that I like a lot. I'm going to drag out this point, created, this point right here. I'm going to create another point by right-clicking This right here. For whatever reason is just like a really cool sounding effect. Actually, you need to hear this without this sample on top of it. Because we didn't put that in effect. Almost like that record effect. It sounds a lot cooler on different types of samples, but let's see, more time. I liked that. Then from there you can always duplicate this over to get the same effect early on. What I mean, That's where adding all that his character is very, very, very important. So that was one little cool effect you can do once again, what are their stock plugin? Now the ones I know that shear probably more so concerned with are going to be things that are like these other plug-ins that you buy afterwards. One of the most popular ones obviously is our C120. And it is a powerful plugin. It does do a lot of that work for you to really add more character to your samples. It kind of does a combination of some of the things that I'm showing you right now. Like it'll have its own built-in, high-pass, its own built-in vinyl crackles, its own built-in flanged jury, his own built-in filtering and whatnot. So it is very powerful. I want to loop this around as you can hear the vinyl and the background. My agenda is go on through the presets right now. I'm not even going into any detail about these particular plug-ins because most of the time I'm only using presets, right? Once you get a preset that kind of captures some inspiration, then you want to go into here specifically and ask, okay, so what does every one of these domains, so this right here is the noise effect where you're adding vinyl sounds. This right here is a wobble effect that basically detuned the pitch for a second. This is a distortion that distorts the sample. This is a digital knob that basically gives it like a digital sound on the sample. This is a space effect that adds a bit of reverb. This is a magnetic effect that adds a little bit of flutter in where to the sound dropouts and whatnot. This right here is pretty much your EQ. This right here is your input gain knob. And this is your output gain knob. This is your stereo width. If you want the sample to sound more narrow or wider. Here's your tone to figure out where you want to basically focus your tone now that he'd like you wanted to sound more base here, do you want it to sound more traveling? Here's a few of your tone modes that you can use, but that's my point, is that once you get in the general vicinity, you're gonna be like, okay, this is close, but let me tweak it away. Some of the presets that I like using on this one are the VHS mode. I like this one a lot. Now that is our C120. There is no way you see me mentioning RC 20 without talking about my own plug-in which is say boy, now i and u are seats are wanting is bought on it and some at the recording of this type, boys above 3995 at say boy plug-in dot com. You're welcome. This one has very similar features, but has some things that you won't find in any other plug-in as well. First and foremost, that has a lo-fi mode that basically allows you to add different sound effects along with. Your production, a lot of sample-based producers now come in the form of Lo-fi producers who want to use ambient sounds in the background. Maybe that's the same thing for you. Even if you're not a lo-fi producers. That's fine. We have all these different effects. Now that you can add your sync button. You got a rainstorm. Vinyl crackles. Got to wobble effect here, a little bit of dark in here. The ratio of the duck. We're going to talk about ducking here in just a second and the importance of it. So next you have a warmth button that basically adds these different analog presets or analog compressions and warmth tool your sounds. So whenever you want to warm up a sample, you will want to basically go over here to these parameters. Eight-bit gives it a more of a digitize effect, kind of what you saw an RC 20 with the digital knob. But this one here is more so centered on like an 8-bit, 16-bit type of folks will primarily use that on froms because you'll really get to get a little bit of that grit in my digital grid out of the drums, but that's pretty much that. And you have like an EQ band down here that gives you that FL Studio love filter by if you've got a mix knob here. Now speaking of ducking, this is another thing that I want to make sure that you're exposed to. There are two different plugins that I primarily use when it comes to ducking my sounds. One of those is called kickstart, and they're both inexpensive, but kickstart, I'll use these especially when I have a sample with heavy, heavy drums, right? When I have a sample that has just like, it's too much going on and I'm trying to like duck those out the way. What I'll do is I'll add this and we actually let's do this on the master channel. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna treat the samp pull that we're sampling as a sample if that makes any sense. So you see right now how my voice is kick-starting right now is basically ducking the very beginning of my voice to a certain ratio. We're gonna do that to the sample now. Now you see how that takes out the intensity of the drums. This becomes really helpful to do some kind of ducking, which you can do manual ducking within FL Studio. It's not the easiest thing to do, especially if you are just getting started with this, I would highly suggest if that is a style that you want to get into, I would highly suggest getting one of these plugins. Kickstart is one that does it. Another one that does it is a plugin called mighty duck, which you can get as slap experts.com. Now as you probably can imagine, a lot of his stuff comes in handy when you have samples that are a little bit more stubborn. Samples that have heavy elements in the background. This is where ducklings gonna get really, really important. But I at least wanted to make sure that you were exposed to that because as we start to run into somebody's modules where I'm making the sample beats in front of you, in showing you this process all over again in real-time. You'll understand why I'm doing that. But that's a quick little tip in case you across a sample that has heavy drums try ducking underneath the drums. Now some other plug-ins that are honorable mentions and mind you, I had to get rid of these because the CPU started lagging a little bit. But I'll use this other one called Easy mix, but I primarily use that on drums And I want to show you what it does right here. I'm actually going to just loop it around here because I want you to hear just the drums right now. So let's go ahead and bring this here, sort of beginning. And I'm gonna loop this around and I want you to hear what it sounds like. Open up easy mix. A little bit more pricier than the other ones by open up easy mix. And as a few presets of lights to use in here for my samples. Check this out. I like to use that one on whenever I want to create like a really big stadium failing within the actual drums, I typically use it on drums because it sounds freaking nuts with the sample. It'll actually play this together, unmute everything else. So certain drum loops sound even crazier than this one with that effect. But I use easy mix just for their presets and knowing that the run these through their own gear kind of inspires new ideas the same way that FL, love filter does for me. Let's move to another one now. Little plate is another one that I use because once again, it's just going to inspire new ideas for the sample. So we're gonna use this not on the drums, actually. We want to use this on the sample itself. Let's go here to the side. And let's turn these drums off right here. Now let's test out this loop of the sample in little plate so you can see what he's capable of doing is basically a reverb plug-in that has humongous sounding reverbs. I like to use these more soul on the outro of songs because it just feels like once again, how the song comes from that low band up to the high band and it feels like it starts to rise up and get life. I like to kind of like dip my samples right back into that low filter. With using this crazy reverb filter, it is kinda brings the right back down. It's almost like it's going back and down underwater. I love using this effect for that. But the thing I'll say about all these effects that I think are most important to keep in mind because you don't need all of these. These are just ones that I've over the years collected and saw that creates an interesting effect. Do what's necessary, listen to what the sample is giving you. Sometimes a sample as you're chopping it up, gives you ideas and inspires you to say, Oh, okay, That's crazy at the way that he sang that. I wonder how it would sound in little plate or in easy mix or whatever the case may be when that happens, try it. If it doesn't work. The beautiful thing about having a digital audio workstations that you can press Control Z or whatever it is on Apple devices, you can literally get rid of it and go back and undo. There's no mistakes in a moment. Do what makes sense, but be purposeful about it. Just try things out and if it doesn't add anything so it don't add it. So some basic things that taken mine. Now something else that I mentioned earlier in his module when it's the last thing we were talking about before we move on to the next one is say for instance, you do want to add an effect, but you want to manipulate it without having to change every single one of these instead of going here to have this to be unique. And this is more so from my intermediate and advanced samplers NFL cipher instance, I want this particular drum right here. Say I want to, for a second. Add that heavy river we had earlier. Basically highlight what I want to consolidate and turned into a waveform, a new wave forms. This is already a waveform, push Control Alt, see, it's in a way 32-bit float. And you want to definitely when you consolidate, you want the WAV bit depth to be 32-bits. I learned that the quality is better when it comes to turning sounds up when you keep it at 32 bits. So make sure you keep that at 30 to bid for the quality sampling, it's average quality. If you have the room for it, go to 512 on that. And then I generally want to wrap the remainder so that we're not having any issues with it interfering with the rest of the loop. So let's go ahead and do that. Let's start. Now what's happening is that this is not linked to any mixer track. Any effects are already glued to this old drum loop and these are steel in the original state. Now what I can do with this is if it's on stretch mode as it should be, OK, and now it's turned a pitch down. I can even have it to where it goes to its own channel now, and I add more effects on here in this chain. We're going to leave that alone. But that is the power of using these samples, putting effects on them, consolidating down the samples and then place them in different places and manipulated in ways that you see fit. That's just the ways that I manipulate samples and I'll give it new character. But this applies to if you're doing FL slicer sampling or if you're doing manual chopping here on the playlist, both are of equal value. It just depends on what your experience level is. I do a combination of both depending on the samples that I'm manipulating around with. But that's that. Next we're gonna take this sample and we're going to actually add a baseline. So this is where that music theory knowledge that we got earlier is going to apply to this. And then being able to listen to what we've been given from the original base that's already in here because there's a base that's already playing in here. We just want to play over the top of it and hit some of the sweet spots and then just kind of keep it consistent throughout without being disruptive to what's going on. 10. How To Add A Bassline And Keys To Your Sample: We're gonna be discussing how to add keys and how to add a baseline to your samples. Now when you get into manipulating the samples and the pitch, and when you get to adding effects to the beat is going to start to feel ironically empty, nonempty, but it just doesn't feel like it's complete. I should say. That's because all of this editing that we did was done deliberately so that we have space to create over the top of that being said, now that you've carved out all this space through your filtering or through your EQ and whatever you chose to go with. This is where we have room now to add elements. We're going to even carve even more Rome once we figure out what this baseline in the original sample is telling us earlier, we established that this is in the scale of E minor scale. I believe. This play the sample and check it one more time. So it's an E minor scale. So what that means is that all of these notes are basically all we have to be concerned with when it comes to. So what this means is that as long as we remember these keys that we played throughout this scale, we can figure out this baseline or at least figure out some of the sweet spots of the baseline. So let's listen to the baseline. Boom, boom. And that's the, obviously the lowest octave on here. And stretch them out. These notes. That's following the original. But we're not trying to do all that because we're going to basically add our own baseline. Why am I using FL keys instead of an actual baseline on 808? Because as I'm mixing and headphones or making my beats and headphones, the sounds can be a bit deceiving if we start off with base and our ears on that, improperly trained for that, everything's going to sound good and a low octave, you ever get an eight await. And it just sounds like no matter what key you play, it kinda sounds like it fits as because our ears start to deceive us when we get into those lower octaves, it makes it harder for our ears and our brain to decipher the difference between notes because it's all sitting there and at muddy low-end. So I use FL keys because it's very clear to hear what I'm playing, especially in headphones. The higher octaves I go, the more clear it becomes. I even do this with my Ada weights and my baselines. Only issue is that the contact library that I'm gonna show you that I use for my baselines doesn't go all the way up here, right on that without some manipulation, I want to use FL keys at stock. And it's really helpful because if you figure it out here, you can copy and paste it to whatever baseline or 808 that you want. So now let's find a sweet spots. So I want to get the one you got. What he got was a rocket figure out soon. Let's lay down those keys. And that's gonna be our new baseline. And in the process we're going to have to make room for it. But let's at least just lay this down while we can still hear the original baseline and then we'll take out that baseline through some dequeuing. So let's lay this down. It's going to sound very basic right now. So we can take that since the loop pretty much repeats itself. Where this slapping it writes a grid just for right now we can always add a little bit of flavor. Afterwards, I'm going to highlight just this section and Control B to loop this around. Now as it is, it sounds pretty stale and we're going to figure out ways to really give it new life. But let's copy this over into the contact library. You can use whatever baseline you would like. I'm going to mute this. Uh, kinda like those notes better. Now let's take this down a few octaves. There's a favorite baseline of mine that is really, really nice, which is called the debase. You're probably noticing is a little bit of clashing with the frequencies are starting to have this distortion and it's clipping going on. One is because the volume of the baseline is too loud. But then what's Because We're competing with the original baseline. So let's mute the new baseline. Let's take this sample. Let's actually start carving out the frequencies of this sample first, better represent the baselines. We're going to open up the parametric equalizer to know the baseline is sitting in this section. Why? Because it says sub bass, bass, low base or low mid. We want to get written carve out sections here. It's actually exaggerate them to see what part of the base every section plays around with mind you, I'm going to use my mouse wheel to get more of a pinpoint so I can really hear what frequency this is, what is actually changing. I know I definitely got to get rid of that frequency. Definitely got to get rid of that one. So what I'm gonna do is I'm actually going to use this band right here. So basically cut off this entire section. What makes sense? So right now we got this on a high pass band. We're going to go to steep eight. We're just going to cut it off so we can actually right-click this and reset it. You can still hear elements of the base, but the base does, doesn't, it doesn't feel like a base anymore now the base feels like almost like another instrument entirely, right? They just compliments or whatever we play on a baseline. Now we've carved out space. You don't want to carve out too much, but it depends on the sample really. After this is before. You can still fill the base. Now let's take it out. Now, the beautiful thing about that now as it leaves room for our new base, the saving deceiving, I thought that was an a right key with us. An example of what I'm talking about. Let's see. Maybe it is, maybe you see how that's out of qi now. That's not the right key. I'm going to go up one. This is why you want to test it out on how your Octave if you don't have the ear forward. Now as I hear this, I'm hearing. Or I can actually chop these up to create more movement in the base. Now I'm just chopping this according to the actual sample itself. Let's see what it sounds like. What the drums over the top of their liked to have the baseline following the kicks. And sometimes it's neighbors but more so the kicks. And so as I'm going back through this baseline, you're going to watch me actually manipulate this base to follow this drum loop just so it feels like the music is more cohesive. It glues together a little bit better. So let's see. Now I kinda want to extend his back out to where I had it. All right, I just want to come do some variation and see what that sounds like. We're gonna keep that right there. So we got this baseline down here. Let's do the same thing now. We can just copy this over, but what does it do the same thing now for the Ada weights in case, say you're doing this for trap beat. And actually let's bring a trap loop in here, just so we have something to build off of. Let's do that. Let's go ahead and just fits the temple. Assignment. Knows what the tempo is. Look and see if the measurements makes sense. They don't drag it out. Let's go ahead and mute this for right now. Now we're gonna add 800 and we already know the keys. And we know that this eight await here is in the key of, and I'm actually want to take some of the tailing off of this. We know that this has already and see how can we double-check that. Editing audio. Hit the pitch regions. Detect pitch regions? Yes, it's obviously in C. Good. If I take this baseline, we put an inputted here. Now, go in here and edit a few things. First, mainly the envelope and instruments settings. Take the attack time here, upset, It's up my leave everything else as is for right now. Now the Ada weights should pretty much stop and start wherever we dictate. So I'm gonna actually push Control L to extend everything. But here we go. These are way too low for this eight away. I'm not gonna do the same thing I did exactly because it's not gonna make sense. Once again, I am following the kick now of this new trap beat we put over the top of this. Now that's a pretty basic aid await pattern. I will probably go in there and start doing slides and whatnot. But for the sake of this lesson plan, I want to make sure that you just see and you're exposed to how to add a baseline. Now, let's talk about keys because we know the scale. That means that we can pretty much experiment however we want with this. Now, all I'm doing is playing up and down a scale. Let's see the importance of understanding the scales or at least be an exposed to like a Google search of what scale you're in when you understand that and you see the key that you can play with, the same thing applies up and down the keyboard. So with that said, my friends, that is how you're going to be able to add keys to which you have going on. Let's actually play around with it and see if there's something that we can add. Actually want to open up mellotron v. This just naturally. Has sounds that fit. I think I'm just vibe with his Nicely played drums for light. Now. Let's turn it up a little bit so because we can barely hear in the background. I want another instrument. Let's try this one out. Nice. Boom. And now you have your melody line over the top of that. So that's how you basically lay a melody line over the top. Some tips for that are don't get in the way of the sample. And if you're going to get in the way of the sample, make sure that you're carving out the necessary space forward. I chose an instrument that I felt like would play very lightly over the top of the original, but also not try to hog up all the rooms. And these are the things that I wanted to tell you about as we start to get closer to some of them are mixing techniques and the way that I approach making all this sound like it belongs in the same beat. But the most important thing is making sure that as you lay these foundational steps, we haven't even started mixing it and it sounds pretty decent. The key here in what I hope that you're getting from all the lessons that I am teaching is that get it right in its raw state. And when you add all of the effects and you add all the plugins, it just gonna be icing on the cake. So you want to make sure that you are picking good sounds. Make sure that you're picking interesting samples that fit that MSG plus quality criteria that I set out there for you earlier. And then also making sure that as you lay these keys down, they make sense with what the musicians were originally plane. But that concludes module seven and module eight, we're gonna keep using a sample because I think it's gonna be a really good way to understand as you go through the process what this looks like. Do me a favor as you learn these things, sit with the free FL Studio session. That's not going to be for a beat that you're going to release. Just sit with the session, have a free session and try these things out. Maybe it's, I'm going to spend 30 minutes today memorizing this particular scale. Then I'm going to find samples on Splice that fit this scale. And then I'm gonna try playing over the top of those are putting a baseline over those, right? Maybe it's spinning time with just trying to get the structure of your samples and testing things out and layering them on top of each other. Take each one of these sections as an opportunity for you to hyperfocus and tightened up on the process. 11. How To Arrange Your Sampled Beats: I'm gonna show you how to arrange this beat that we've been kinda going very slowly through the process. I want to show you how I arrange it as well as how to create seamless transitions as we start to sample more things within this particular sample that we chose. Now as I said before, I'm going to show you more examples later on in the other modules when I actually run back through this process, but in a more fluid way. So right now as you remember, we had a baseline as well as a top-line sense to go along with this sample that we already had. We had a drum loop and so we kept things pretty simplistic. I think I even went into like a trap drum loop as well. We're gonna go ahead and arrange all that is and find some places for everything to land. Now, in order to do that, something I like to do first is make sure that I get rid of the things that aren't necessary. So here, anything that's not getting used when you go over here to the tools and the macros, you can pretty much get rid of anything that's not being currently used. Someone to go ahead and purge all the unused audio clips. Then I'm going to go back and get rid of the unused channels. Just so it makes it surprisingly easy for us as we start to mix what's necessary right now, this is a very minimal approach to a sample, but I just want to make sure that we get this for the sake of these lesson plans, at least a walking you through this process. It's a very unnatural process for me when teaching it while I'm doing it, because I'm usually right there in a flow state of things, but it's gonna make sense as we move forward. So right now we have this intro that has a lot of different elements in it, right? We have this base unless I actually named this synth, because it's gonna be very important as we start to move these two different places. We have our drum loop here. I'm gonna go ahead and name that drum loop. This is drum loop till it as the trap one. Treppe drum loop. This right here is sample. Let's put echo. Just so we know what we're moving around as we move through this arrangement. We want to make sure we know what we have. This is lead sample. Then leaves sample. This is another sample echo. Believe it is. What is this going to? What does that channel that is channeled to? Those are the Vox steps. So yeah, there's a whole list of VOC stabs instead of a sample. Just so we know what's, what. This one once again is another Vox. And we have our eight hundred, eight hundred, so we still have that same eight away pattern. I was going to go over the sample that we had already. So it's a very minimal, supremely minimal setup, but it's still feels like a full production because you have a lot of things going on here. Now, another thing that's gonna be important is that now that we have named all the instruments, let's go back here to the pattern. And I actually want to separate these patterns so I know what's what. So we're gonna go over here to this pattern block, right-click it, and then we're gonna split by channel. Now, when we lay everything out, this is a lease gonna give us what I'm considering, I guess the chorus of this, the course of this sample. We have the base and everything else that we name. So cool, we have that. What does pattern one thing that was just something that we were working on a sort of like a demo in our earlier module. What is pattern one now? Switch up, so we're going to call this, let's just call this verse. This is worth things sort of mix up a little bit and let me see, make sure it's only the sample on this one. So yeah, it's only two sample chops. I'm going to actually change the color of this one because I'm probably gonna separate those vocal chops, right? So let's go ahead and let's split by channel. I actually want to do that again now, so it was renamed these, I'm going to make them Let's make them red. On the wall. They said that the brown eyed is an umbrella. I guess it only did one of them was to the other one. Just so we make sure we have. The same colors going on here, except that bom, bom, cool. So now we know this is verse right ear, right? This also was another one. So let's see what's in this. What is it? Is it just the sample? The vec vocal echo. So we're gonna say rename this vocal three. We're also going to make this color-coding. This red. Boom, boom. Now we know all that is verse also because I did this and the unorthodox way in terms of having that everlasting sample go, I'm going to split this just so that we can keep this width, the verses as we move things around. Now, this is a stylistic thing, was something I liked to do is either display the sample chops as my intro or let the original sample breathe in the intro so that people can get a vibe of what's going on within. So let's actually move some of these elements over and move them all over. So pushing control. And a no here is gonna be at least like an a bar intro. So let's see what happens if we just use as lead sample right now with the chops. Okay, so we're going to arrange now that we have that. Let's actually start with the chorus and then we're going to then move these other elements over. I'm actually going to move the edit 808 element because this is where the beat is gonna have a little bit of a switch. And we're going to move this complete course a little bit later down the line as well. Because what I found is that you want to let the music gradually build itself when it comes in and all, everything's swinging at the same time, it can be a little bit overwhelming for the listener. So take off a base in a sense. We haven't added any switch ups or any drops. But we just want to have that going for right now as we start to build now into this course, I think we're gonna save this eight away part to be sort of an outro. Let's just move this over here to the side. And then we're going to now bring in this complete portion here to be at least one of the course loop around. I'm thinking that it's probably going to make sense with the drums, going to let the drums breathe during the course. Then I'm thinking maybe just the base or the synth. Let's see. I'll say no bass. Want to listen for these things and see what makes the most sense. But right now, I think this is gonna make the most sense. These you'll sound girl, but I kinda want to save that to be a transition for the next section. Maybe even have a baseline I kind of kick up here. Let's see what this sense sounds like halfway through the first course. Then from there we're gonna do a rinse and repeat. Now we just need to leave enough space to actually move this dramatically bag just so we know we have enough space to do what we need to do with the repeat. What I'm gonna do another verse. Same exact way, holding down Shift a highlighted all the sounds. Bone. This first portion, lot of things going on here, but I liked this so far with just the Ada weight and this portion. So now, this right now is in its most simplistic format. As an arrangement, we have an intro, we have averse, we have a chorus. We actually have a little bit of a chorus here as well to lead it in. And then we have the chorus here, then we have the verse again. We have a chorus, and then we have an outro, pretty basic arrangement right now. So at this point with everything laid out, we're gonna go ahead and review things and then just listen to see what doesn't feel like a natural transition. I already hear it, but I want you to hear it back and you'd sell me in your mind, the things that you're hearing of, things that you may want to shift when you start to find those things that's going to help you as you start to build up your sample. They speak registry. If I could say you right now, the things that are poking out to me right now is that that sample where it says they feel would thou could use a little bit more EQ going to make it blend in. And I think the echo right now is a little bit too overbearing. I think I either want to add more reverb so it's so that it feels like it smoothly fits in with this mix right now, this rough mix. And then I also need to add a baseline to the verse. So let's actually do that really quick. I'm gonna actually clone over the baseline that we made for the other part, but we got to move some notes around. I'm going to make it unique. Let's actually focus in the **** and taken notes on, but I want to make sure that we have this as an option. I like that sample. I think we're gonna do a little variation at the end of this loop. On his other part. It sounds pretty solid now that we have a baseline here, we can open up everything back up and then we'll save this baseline for the second half of the verse so it has more minimum. Let's go ahead and fix this other vocal, which I think is the problematic area right now. Some hearing a lot of elements in his vocal stab that feel like they need to be EQ out. Namely there's something in the May at right now that's carrying a note that's conflicting with what we're actually sampling in the background. So let's go ahead and loop. And I kind of want to run an aggressive cutoff from the base frequency right now let's see what this sounds like. I'm still hearing that. Want to pinpoint this. Not as bad. Okay. Now, here is where I want to start to tweak around a little bit wet with this echo I have here. I'm going to manipulate this cutoff so that it's still echoes, but the frequency does sort of look like a cutoff filtering effect that doesn't impose on the next portion of the sample. I'm just trying to make it to where it's a smoother transition with the sample itself. Before I start doing a little bit of magic with the drums, I'm gonna show you something that has been sort of like Mom, I want to call it a secret. It's not a secret, but it's like a way to smoothly transition sounds that normally would not smoothly transition because you're doing a bunch of shopping. So let me go ahead and play this. And I'm trying to get a smooth as I can for right now. We're going to take off some of the amount of echoes like that. All right, so let's play this with the rest of the sample. Also, we need to do a little bit of panning. So let's go ahead and pan this thing to the right. And then we're gonna turn this down. Alright, and I'm also starting to hear a little bit of a clip, the beginning of this portion here of the sample. So I'm gonna go in here. I'm going to remember this section right here at the fade-in. I'm going to make sure that this fades in. Let's do about seven milliseconds. And once again, I'm looking at the numbers in the left-hand corner. C uses eight. Now, lost money. That sounds smooth, but something that we can do and we're going to open up splice for this one. Something that we can do that can make our lives surprisingly easy, is if we start to collect up symbol transitions, this sort of distracts the listener from paying too much close attention to how the sound is being manipulated. I like to use these all the time to make small transitions within my arrangement and we're gonna do that here. So I'm gonna go here to the drum section and I'm gonna look up trend. And if not, just go here, it should be one of these. Let's try this one. I wanted a little bit longer. I liked this running. Go ahead and take this here. The idea is to allow that rise to occur before the drop and then the symbol is going to end on where the course starts. So the last few bars of the verse leading into the chorus, this symbol transition is supposed to land right on there. Now what's important about this is that we need to go over here to the snap feature and go to none because you want to manually move these things over. This is something you're gonna see with the manual chopping that I do when I don't use FL slicer. Let's actually play it right now. Let's see what this sounds like. Unmute this. See how that just everything just feels like it's, it's kind of cohesively coming together. So let's pull out all this stuff together and let's turn it down. When I actually assign us towards OWN channel. Just call this symbol for right now. See how it kind of feels like this is a natural part of the music. That's the reason I use those. You can use any kind of transition effect forward. That's just the one that I prefer. Something that can make this even more interesting is if we find in the ethics section what's called a fall. This is something that I like to use like definitely if you want to be sampling and I guess it really depends upon your style. But because of the mechanics of sampling, sound effects are going to be something that you're going to need to stack up on. I have all these followers. That one's kind of interesting. Doing this one like that I want. So we're gonna go ahead and have that fall right there on the beginning of the sample. Then take this and assign it to its own channel. So this is the S FX. Right-click routes of this track channel. It might even add one more. Like this sound for some reason, I've liked to sound being hearing. They all left and we only eat all their splicing, but we're gonna make sure that we do turn it down. Accordingly. We're going to basically run routes of that part of the mixer and then we're going to turn it down manually here. And these other settings. Now we'll even bring the transition to basically transition the rough chops into the verse. Again. We pretty much have the beat arranged. I think if anything, I wanted to take this right here, and I want to do something special to this section right here, which is the intro. So I'm gonna consolidate this down Control Alt C, which is what I prefer to deal with, especially if you've got amendment manipulating things in reverse and things if we're going to do all that with the arrangement, and if we're going to add more effects, so now we're gonna use this and we're gonna actually titled this intro. We're going to channel route this boom. Now as I showed you before with some of the effects, I now want to go back in here. And let's do the same parametric equalizer TO thing that we did. Let's go to the steep eight. Boom, Let's move this over here to the side. It's about 30. Then move this here. Go here to this section and being manipulated. And then we're going to create automation clip. Now I only want to do it in this section instead of having a goal throughout the whole beats. So let's highlight where we want the automation to occur. Go back to the mixer, back to the parametric equalizer til back to that parameter we're affecting and then push, create automation glue. Now we have an automation clip just for this section right here. So start low here and then have a transition. Since we're already doing this as well in terms of consolidate. And let's do this for the last sample here in the verse. Be careful when you're consolidating to make sure that you highlight, put your mouse around the right place and tronic a solid date. So this is the right way for Monica summer day. This main shop. Right. And we're going to now take this. And I think we're going to actually see what it sounds like. Two goes 12 semitones up and then go lower on the page. Let's see what that transition sounds like. Yeah, I don't really like that, but I now have the ultimate control over manipulating a sound. And I think what I want to do is routed here and put verse change up. All right. This is kind of to avoid having to do too much automation, right? We can do automation which would definitely make it easier on this sample channel. But when you consolidate, you can visually see it enough to move all the sounds over our economy. You have it right here now where you can change the color of it. And I can just say, okay, that's that particular section. So I'm gonna go ahead and click on this and make it light green or something NES completely opposite. Save it. Boom. Now I know that this is a section here that has its own channel that's being manipulated in its own way. So this is verse change up. Now what I want to do is let's do like one of the love filters on this part. I'm going to loop it around so we know what we're actually doing to it. Let's try the flange rolls like that. Let's do this. Now that we have this, let's play everything from SOP and with the switches up and see what we are looking like. Register, it will just return. No need to repeat that over because we know that the verse and chorus of sounding good transition wise, arrangement wise. Now let's see what this last portion is. Sound alike. Now, as I showed you before, something I like to do for outros Is run that little plate or a heavy reverb. This is all about what you wanna do with your b. You want it to sound, just wanted to give you a basic framework for sampling in FL Studio, which is the purpose of this entire course. But let me go ahead and go here to this last section. I'm gonna consolidate it is we're going to make this its own unique channel. Let's change the color on this to like, like a yellow or some or all of our gifts. It says, I think I have row studios, colorblind, loci. Okay, cool. So this is gonna be our outros. We have an anthro, we have an outro. Outro, co with this outro now, we should be able to run them little plate over the top of this and is going to sound larger than life. Just in this section. Nice, I like that. I think I'm also going to run the love filter that we had here was just a flanger it, there it is right there, buddy. So let's take this, let's run that for the outro. A moss are going to do a fade-out. Right-click here. Automate body when it goes straight to the audio here. So I'm gonna go ahead and just fade it out right here using the endpoint. Also think I want to manipulate the pitch of it on this one because I think it calls forward. This a little bit of a little aggressive. So I think I'm gonna go a flange IAS instead of the flanger. That's sunrise or like that. Ladies and gentlemen, we have made our way through our first sampled beat all the way up into the arrangement. Now we need to move our way over to the mixing as well as testing out whether or not we want a side chain. Side chain is really a preference thing, but I at least want to expose you to it because you don't have a sampling course without talking about the power of side chaining, shout-outs. My folks, stolen drums and the side-chain society. But that is something that is really, really, really enriched in the culture of sampling within hip hop side chaining is just something that adds a certain added sued and a certain air and swing about sugar beets. So we're gonna talk about that in the mixing stage and a reason why we're talking about it. And I'm mixing modules because a lot of the things we have to do are found here, right here on the mixer channels. So that is it for the arrangement. I mean, some other things that you can possibly do. Let's look for safer instance, a drum roll. Let's go to my kit that I have for free, which is called Tom foolery. Let's turn it down. It's a little bit, or at alike that Tom role is actually assign it to its own channel. I'm Raul. Cool. Right-click. Route this track. Okay, so now we know everything should be your range. If it's not, then we need to put it somewhere. So this is drum loop. This needs to go. We needed a sign that So its own place. We got these two drum loops here. Let's go ahead and put those drum loops right here. Basically preparing ourselves for the mixing stage, which is gonna be super important. So let's actually make sure that we macro, get rid of any unused audio clips, as well as any unused channels we don't need because we just added some new sounds. Boom. Then also we're gonna take these channels and we're going to route them here. So right here, channel routing, but we're going to select this one route selected channels starting from this track. Now they, everything is separated here, but everything has a home, which means it is now time for us to get to the mixing stage of this particular beam. 12. How To Mix And Sidechain Your Samples: In Module nine, I'm going to show you how I approach mixing sampled beats now, something to keep in mind for the sample beats because you are mixing music that was already mastered. Your approach to what is going to have to be touch and feel no matter what sample you using because, you know, you can try your best to clean up these samples. But when we're talking about what the appeal are, the sort of nostalgia that is created by the style of beats. A lot of that has to do with the characteristics they hold with them when you retrieve them from the vinyls, a lot of it has to do with the dropouts, the pitch manipulation or warps the vinyl crackles and a background. A lot of the errors is what I'm basically saying is a part of the appeal with sample beats. And a lot of that even occurs to not just hip hop and boom bap, but even with lo-fi on notices that the ambient sounds in the background or the deed zoning of the piano is part of embracing human errors. So it's a lot different in your approach in terms of trying to go for the cleanest mixed possible in this, it is very important to definitely pay attention to the basics. We're still going to do some gang stage and our levelling, but we're not trying to go for the cleanest. We just want to make sure we get rid of the problematic areas that don't set themselves up to be a representation of the emotion we want from this beat. So that being said, let's listen to what we have starting and probably one of the loudest sections of this. And I think that's here in the course because you got the base and the synthesized IR and all that stuff. For starters, I want to make sure that on the master, I do one of two things and I actually go back and forth between these. And I liked to see what they sound like. But now right now here on the mixer, I have the limiter. I'm not gonna add so many things to the actual master, but as it is, this is steel given me the volume, it's making sure that the low spots that are within the beat, our steel rising up with it. So it's kind of keeping my beat in a really nice volume as I'm working on it. If I'd take the limit or off look at the difference. You notice it losing a bit of its punch. Now this will my limiter looks like, and I'll even leave a preset of this limiter within the folders so that you can load it up directly in your FL. Right now, my gain knob is at 2.1 saturation. I just literally just turned it. So it was deactivated at his waited until the turn rib. Boom. Now it's ready. Ceiling is all the way up to the top and pretty much left everything else the same. But that's pretty much how I am doing the master channel now an alternative to this. And this is specifically if you're just making a beat. I liked the way it sounds. A lot of producers have their approaches and their opinions about it, but throwing this fruity soft clipper over the top ensures that none of the sounds are going to peek over. And when they do hit the roof, which is I guess 0 is a smooth sort of correction of that velocity because it's a soft clippers. So instead of doing a hard clipper or brick wall clipping, it does a soft clipping over the top of it. I liked the way it sounds. Everybody's not incentive to have the soft clip on a master. For the most part, you would see it on the kick. But sometimes I liked the way it actually sounds right here. But for the most part, the limiter is going to get the job done. Let's listen to both of them and see which one I want to go with. Like the fruity soft clip or more because it feels more pleasing to the ears. But I feel like the limiters given me a more accurate idea of problem spots throughout the bead, I'm going to go with the limiter and I'm going to correct things as such. Looking through here, I can already see some of the problematic areas by what's popping here in the orange. I'm not mixing at a high volume right now. But I don't need to to see what things are coming through a little bit too strong on a mixed right now. One of those being the drum loop. Now, something I could do is add the soft clipper to this drum. So let's do that fruity soft clipper just to ensure that the drums steel hold their intensity, but they're not clipping over the top. This is more than likely going to be the loudest thing within the mix as the drums. The second loudest thing is probably going to end up being the space. Third is probably going to be the actual sample itself. Now as I'm listening to what I can already hear, some problematic areas, especially as the base in a sample or going against one another. And I think it's because there's a lot of frequencies in the sample. That knee, Correct? Actually, I know it's a lot of problematic areas and have an EQ correction. So I'm going to open up another FL parametric EQ. So I'm going to do some subtractive EQN, which is basically going to be rolling down here on these points here in these different frequencies. Then boosting them to see if I find problematic sounds in that frequency. So let's play. Let's actually mute the other stuff. I just want the sap right now. That's problematic. Let's go ahead and now duck that low whistle there. Get that down. It's interesting. The highest points. Let's see what that sounds like with the base register. Now we're also going to do another Parametric Equalizer on the base and get rid of the frequencies of base doesn't need to exist in namely the high frequencies. Everything's live in right here, right? Salt pulling up here. I'm going to turn us down just a little bit for right now. Since we're focused here on the sample than the drum to think it's a good time to at least expose you to what the side chaining looks like. What a side chain him look like. Let's actually run the drums over to channel once, like I said, is the loudest sound. And that's gonna be very important as we start to do a little bit of routing. And we use the fruity limiter to do this side chaining. What does side-chain? The beginning with side chaining is when one sound plays, and whenever it plays it punches a hole in the other one are carves a whole and the other one. Now why would one sounding to do that to the other? Well, you see side chaining, especially in our genre of hip hop and trap. When a kick is over an eight await when a producer wants to kick, to come in a little bit more present and more loud. They'll basically have the kick side-chain to the ATO weight. And whenever the kick comes through, the Ada weight is going to have a bit of a velocity decays edge that makes room for this kick. Now, some people use that a stylistic choice. Some people use that as a mixing choice. It's all up to you and your ears. This case, we're gonna be using this drum loop. Basically carve out some room in a sample so that the drums are hitting. And it just creates this interesting effect that a lot of folks like him, a lot of folks use within their beats. So first matter of business to do this, we need to highlight the drum loop and we need to right-click where we want the drum to punch a hole into. I'm saying this specifically so that you remember when I'm saying we're gonna punch a hole here into the sin, right-click it. And then we're going to psi chain to this track. Now whenever this drum plays. Is going to do something's gonna punch a hole into this sample. But in order to trigger best punching, we're gonna need to go over here. Fruity limiter, and we need to change around a few things. Okay? So for starters, we need to go over here to the compression side of things. And we needed to turn the knee all the way up ratio all the way up. And then we're gonna turn a threshold down. It's a pretty aggressive threshold. We also need to go over here to this side chain input number, which now we know is one because our drums was sitting here on channel one. And let's do a before and after. So right now everything is pretty much as it is. I want you to see if you can notice whenever that kit comes in, let's just focus on the kick and snare if you can notice a ducking occurring within a sample. Pretty cool right? Now, as you can see, this is something that's really, really aggressive in terms of the ducking, what it comes down to style. This sounds so fire on different styles of sampling. But you got to see if it's something that meshes with your ears. I wanted to expose you to it because it is something that could be considered a mixing technique. But this really is another style of sampling had to expose you to it. I don't know if I'm going to keep that there. I liked the way it sounds, but I want to make sure that I don't confuse the sonics that you're hearing, especially if you've never really mess with that before. It also makes the drums filled just that much more powerful because obviously now they're the thing sitting in the front of the mix of the loudest thing already. But now what that sample no longer competing with it now is just drums And it's the base, right? Just turn the threshold up a little bit. This turn this synth. I think I'm going to also put a soft Clipper on this Tom as well. Since it's coming in strong and I'm trying to do my best to stick to the stock plug-ins that are already there so you can save a little money. But keep in mind there are some other plug-ins that I use, especially like for the sample itself. So just to kind of give you a little bit of exposure to it, something I like to use is like the waves plugins in. One of the ones that I use is our compressor. What Superdome bought our compressor is that they have a preset on here that will allow me to basically tame the loud sounds and a sample that go to loud after a certain threshold, and then also bring up the sounds that are too quiet. So it has like a very consistent signal. So like imagine when you're talking like you're talking like this and then maybe your voice goes down. The compression is going to ensure that everything stays at the same level. But it's not a noticeable thing that people who don't know anything about mixing will even understand. So now that we have our compressor open, we're going to basically Goldie here. So a preset that I use, It's a factory preset and it's called bouncy. Now that we have our compressor open, we're gonna basically compress this sound. We want to look for where the volume is average, hitting at where it's going a little bit too high, like a little bit in-between where it goes too high and where it's averaging. And we don't want to be too aggressive about the way that it's hitting the actual ratio. Basically the rate at which the compression is hitting. And then now when we basically turn this knob up, it's considered the makeup gain that has going to make the volume all together rise up as the same. So now that we've kind of crushed, it's just a little bit interesting. Now something I like to do here is probably add a little bit of width to the original sample. So let's go ahead and add a little bit of width that I just sounds it sounds like a little bit more lighting. This is a free plugin, by the way, by poly verse. So you can go ahead and just download this infected much from, I think it's the folks that are behind it. Something else I'd like to do for the base is use another plugin called our base. Okay, now that we have our base open, I want to go ahead and run through a few of these presets and see what feels the best in terms of giving the base a little bit more weight in warmth. It doesn't need too much help because that original contexts sound is already pretty processing treated. But just to give it a little bit of warmth and want to turn that down just a little bit. Like what I have going on here. So we got the mix here sounding pretty good, sounds good loud as well as low. Let's see what the rest of the B sounds like. Okay, so we make our lives a lot easier when we're not actually having some mix individual drums. I want to show you what that process looks like when I actually make another beef from scratch. And I'm sure you went a bonus material. That's pretty much the mixing process as it is. So let's test out the last part of this and makes sure everything is still sounding good. Nice, nice, nice, nice. As you can see what the mixing process, it's actually a lot more error can be, I should say, a lot more simplistic than when you're mixing individual original elements, right? So you haven't like a synthesized from ominous fear. You're having maybe a piano from a contact library and you're putting all these different drums you're getting from different drum pegs. That's why the mixing process can be a lot more tedious when doing what the original production, dealing with original production. But with this, it says tedious as you want it to be. A lot of this has to do with keeping human error intact. A lot of this has to do with listening and trusting your ear that this is the direction that you're feeling emotionally you should go with. But the process is literally taking someone else's Canvas and saying, Okay, I like so many different elements of this. And imagine you could rip the colors off of a painting and then repeat some images off and then create your own on another canvas. This is part of the art form that it is in your approach to it. There is no wrong approach. Body at least wanted to show you if you've never had anybody else do this, which I at least wanted to show you what that looks like my friends. 13. How To Create Your Own Vintage Samples: The easiest way to create a realistic sample anytime is by playing either the midi info in via hardware instrument, midi controller through virtual instruments. Thank goodness for the plane going overhead, you probably hear that playing a physical instrument or a virtual instrument in will always give you a realistic and organic sound. Now moving over to keyboard and piano, specifically, having at your disposal, either 6173 or 88 will always give you a fluid sound because when you switch octaves, you're not having a hit buttons to change the actors. So you get a fluid motion, whether you're playing it or sequencing. Sequencing also has a style in sound to it. It doesn't sound like someone playing. It sounds like the computer playing it that has a style of its own. Let's talk about foot pedals. For now. I just have one, and that's my sustained pedal. And that helps me with obviously keeping the lines sustained when my hands can't. And it actually has a different sound than drawing your notes in via midi. This one here will sound different than something physically held out here. That's because there are different sounds that come in when you're actually holding your pedal. If you play on a real piano, you'll actually hear the hammers on the keys creating harmonics. Muffled sound a bit. As you pedal, there's so much at play when you play all puns intended. Another thing about creating realistic samples, treat it as instead of writing a sample or instead of writing a sweet spot, a lot of music producers will give you a section rather than give you a full composition, producers will grab the one sample. The more you give producers to grab from, the more value you add in, the more realistic the sample is because it's not just one part. So writing more sections in your sample gives, gives a sample more movement in turn makes it feel like something that was taken off a vinyl record. And the more expression, the more realistic your sample will be. Yes, there is a lot to take in and a lot to consider when you're making a symbol doesn't have to be that complicated. Know, you can just throw sounds together. There's movement there and there's things there though would take forever to automate, play, whatever you can, give you a tip. Now this takes a little bit of the human error out of it. Say you can't play as well as I do, but you can play your general idea. Remember what your, what your tempo was minus 130. So I'm gonna bring it down here. You can't play it in at that speed. Slow it down. Capture it. Record that. The like I said, the more movement you give. What started as something simple. Look how fluid this idea became. What started out as a simple one fingered melody. By slowing it down, I gave my mind the availability to process and to think about what I want to happen musically, Let's turn it back up to 130. It came more fluidly when I slowed it down to play it. Now, like I said, it might not sound as natural, but there's a lot of automation. You're not gonna have to go and put in, find the sweet spot of playing things at a slower pace. You can also go and overdub. It has a very nice effect for strings. I'll show you that in a second. It's very clean. This doesn't sound like me. It's still sounds human, which is very surprising to me. It still sounds human. It's just very clean. It's like if I had 15 more years of experience and constant practice, this what I'd sound like, but a little grit and a little dirt never hurts a sample. That's another part of being, of sounding real. I will always encourage playing for realism because that will always allow the music to flow and develop. It's like water in a river versus water in a pond or water and a little puddle. It's stagnant. It's not going anywhere versus water in a river which is constantly moving, it's always refreshing. I know this went from being how to create realistic samples to being more of tried to play as much as you can, but playing as much as you can will help you to create more realistic samples. Let's switch to strings. Now that we're on strings, we're at 130. Even if you've gotta go one note at a time what I do. I started there. You'll make mistakes, but the layers will come. That's a sound by the way, I can't get by doing chords. This is sounding more like an orchestra. Doing this restraints actually adds a more realistic string sounds because orchestras are made up of different musicians playing at the same time with different timing. Is this the same way that we think about our drums having them all on the grid. Nobody plays like that. Real musicians, when we hit things, we're not always on grid, especially meat, even that was not on grid. With strings. It's tedious. It is tedious, but my goodness, does it help look, look, watch again. There's another one. Let's go. We're getting a whole orchestra now as you see me playing these in, this went from one melody to becoming something you'd have to play in as cords or something you'd have to draw in, in different ways. And this already has more alive and more realism to it. So let's add another one. Let's add our base section of the orchestra. So I was doing a minor. They're a little bit of music theory helps go a long way to, boom, Let's talk about shifting chords. Let's talk about going from major. It's a minor. I'm gonna use chill bytes as an example because I can't really think of anything off the top of my head, right? We had a sample called storms over the floating kingdom. It is in B-flat minor, but at 1 at the very end, I go like this. Shifting octaves with my left hand. We had that shift from B-flat minor. This whole thing was in B-flat minor the whole time. And then it goes. I even use an accidental, like a beat and actually play B-flat major and B-flat minor at the same time. This sense of false triumph, shifting from major to minor to switch the color of a chord. It doesn't get more real than that, does it. Maybe you're going for a live musicians sound adjusting your velocity, adjusting your notes, timing because nobody play like that. Versus it's cleaner. But there's not as much character as a real person would have if you have tricks for drawing things in and making things sound realistic that way, use them. As well as putting your mindset into that of a musician. I think I've covered everything that I can. Oh, no, I haven't say we're getting to the end of a piece and I'm happy to say I've had this experience. You're getting to the end of a piece. Your musical statement is ending. Little outros like that will go a long way. By the way, I was meat it sounded like an ended abruptly because I took my foot off the pedal. Little outros, if you can, just sounds like musicians of jamming, sounds like you're jabbing jamming. The more of myself that I get to do this, the more instances of this, the more real it sounds because it sounds like there's multiple people playing it. Even though it was just me, you can find a way to incorporate that into your samples. That's another way to make things just sound that much more real spacing. So say I've got my music is breathing. Then I'll go and say it again. Probably different octaves, same, probably right here. More movements you have, the more space between, between the main motif that you have. The first instrument we had was our voice. We have to take breaths in-between, between singing long phrases. After that little breath, I'm gonna do it again. The closer you get to playing your musical data in the more realistic things are gonna sound. You know what? Another thing, I found another tip, your latency. Latency will mess you up if you're like me and you play things in, look at this very bottom left corner, you see where it tells me I've got 26 milliseconds, 26 milliseconds of latency, and then there's hardware latency. So if you are using hardware, you're gonna run into whatever the hardware has got plus whatever your plugins are giving you. So just get in there, have fun getting there and break things, get in there and try to play. You saw some of the effects of what can be done. When you take things one note at a time. 14. How To Create Your Own Vintage Drum Breaks: This is going to show you basically a walk-through of how to make your own vintage drum brakes. Any event that you either want to sail these drum brakes to other producers or if you just want to create that aesthetic for yourself, this is a very important piece to my sampling process. Having drum brakes creates so many creative ideas for me or inspires a lot of creative ideas simply because once again, we're borrowing pockets. Sometimes you could be on a good 11 day and create these rhythms, right? Using one of your either fpc stock, live drums or using some of your one shots, or using a contact library like some of the ones that I'm gonna show you right now. You create these drum loops, drum brakes add these effects, process them. And then another day when you're uninspired with the drums, always have it's sitting there. So this is why it's an important skill to learn along your sampling process. It's also going to help you get a better ear for which samples to goto, which samples are actually ones that you can do something with an FL Studio. There is a stock plugin that gives you live drums, and I'll also allow you to program your drums here. That's not something that we're going to cover in here because like I said, I don't use it, but I have tutorials on my YouTube channel that can show you how to program that. I might even add that in here as a bonus material, but FBC is pretty dope because it allows you to basically take either drum loops or you can save these presets that have stylized live drums. Now when you're making your own drum brakes, I have found in my experience that you want to start with drums that are as clean as possible. You can obviously break these rules, but I want us, I usually start with drums that are clean as possible. So it gives me more headspace to add effects into process compressed and do whatever I plan on doing. But I like to start with very clean drums and I don't like to Cloud them up with too many sounds only because I'm going to end up glowing this all together. And then when you give this to someone else or you use it yourself, you're married to whatever that particular loop is doing or that break is doing. So it's kind of like a healthy balance. Sometimes it takes a little bit of time, but here's an example of something that we're getting ready to do. Now with these particular drum brakes. They are a combination of sounds from slap experts one shots and they're also a little bit of the live drums that you're going to see here. An EPC as well as concept which has their own libraries that are well-worth. Their price tag in things like studio drummer is also some more vintage ones that kind of do some of the processing for you. For instance, like seventies drummer, which is one of my favorite ones, is go ahead and bring here and let that load up while we're doing all this stuff, we're going to actually start here. And as you can see, when we go down a keyboard, every instrument that is in here, and you can replace those. Obviously, every instrument has their own key assigned. So the first thing I'm gonna do is assign these drums to their own channel. Let's go ahead and put them here. And then we're going to open up Edison so that it records pretty much anything that comes through to it. Have it on this option here where it says record on input. So basically record on input and then from there, or just basically going to press record and that every time we put a sound is getting recorded. You want to make sure this is not too crazy volume because we are going to be boosted a lot of these sounds and soft clipping them. I'm gonna go back here and actually turn this down. There we go. Also something to keep in mind is that if you're going to play a loop and you find that you're going to commit to that loop, makes sure that you complete it by starting it over. What I mean is basically just adding an extra kick after that loop is completed. I'm going to show you what I mean now. This extra kick is what's going to complete it. So basically moving forward, whatever I choose to commit to, I got to add an extra kick so that we can get a clean loop on what we're doing. You don't have to do it, but it makes your life a lot easier. Okay, Cool. So let's take one of these at the end. We're going to actually start laying this out in song mall, but we're going to layer it up with different instruments. Just take this same rules, apply. Open up your drums. Fine. Some clean beginning and end points like this. Drag that out ear to the song mode. Then let's mute this year on the drums. Okay, sweet. So now that we have that here, Let's go ahead and see what the BPM of this is. Saying. 130, cool. Well let's go ahead and trusted on this 130, but that doesn't make it a full four-bar loop, which is what we play it. I could tell by us counting the bars on this one, someone to actually send it back here to 130. And we're gonna keep on extending it out until it meets the end of that bar. So right around there should be the BPO. I start off with Edison because that's gonna give me a natural swaying, says I'm not going to be according to our grid, our metronome. I like to keep it that way so that when I add high hats and things like that on the next layer, it's following this swing instead of a quantize straight to the grid swing. So now that I have that, I can add some hi-hats and things. Like I said, you want to keep it kind of simplistic because you don't want to have to commit to too many sounds and what if you don't like them later on? Let us see what that sounds like. I'm gonna start manually moving some of these over to left for like they're in the right place. I want to vary it up towards the end. Let's see what we can do with that. All right. Now, right now it sounds pretty simplistic and steel to me, I'll be honest with you, but that's the whole purpose is that we're just trying to get a clean signal so that we can start to add character later on. But we got to get something clean in the very beginning. Like the natural swings. Something else I'd like to do sometimes is do a little bit of quantizing and us more stout manner. What I mean is that FL Studio has these quantizing presets that can add some interesting rhythms here. When you click on Alt Q, that gives you the quantizing settings in here, you're gonna be able to click here on this menu, that folder and then see some different styles of quantizing. Not gonna feel more like a live drummer. I like to do loose feel, liked to do hip-hop Westside in drummers swing, depending on what I'm affecting. Get this the high hats, It's what I like to do. Let's actually play it in preview, this. Like this. All right, now we're kind of running out of options here. So you might want to start adding either one shot or if you do have other libraries are easy drummers. Another great program. This is where you can start taking advantage of more of these lives sounds. What does it add needs a really minimal sounds because the processing is going to bring the life out of this. Something else I like to do to kind of give it a little bit more life is our take a one-shot from one of my drum kits. Just to add a little bit more life on top of it. So it's not to steal. We're not over doing it right now, but we at least want to give it a little bit more life, keep the volumes at a reasonable level. So I'm just going to basically follow the key. I'm gonna slice somebody's off the grid a little bit. And then try a different key. Snap it back to the grid. Like the punch on his right now. It's a little clavicle. It's obvious. Once again, go into here and kind of manually shift stuff off. Little crash right here. Like this. Okay, cool, let's do this. Let's leave that as is sliding off the grid a little bit. Now that we have this, What we're gonna do now is take all these sounds, consolidate them down. If I liked the mix already, consolidate them down. My first test before I start processing the actual vintage drum brake is to make sure that it sounds good when I change the mode to stretch. And I tried in different pitches. Usually a great drum break from me involves if I can turn it down like at least $0.600 and I could turn it up in a steel. Sounds good. It has a lot of range and a lot of head space for me to add other things to it. Like even before processing. Because you've got to think those pitches represent different styles of music. As people are speeding up the samples that stretching them, they're toning them down, toning them up. This is why you want to see if you've got a range on it. I kind of like negative $0.300 right now. Like that. So let's take this new consolidated sound. And let's go here and call this drum brake. And we're actually gonna fly this consolidated version here. First thing I'm gonna do is open up an EQ parametric equalizer to, and I'm gonna see if there's parts of this sample that I need to boost up to give more life. I go narrow on these parameters whenever I'm trying to pinpoint what exactly is being affected. But I'm going to boost the sounds up and leave it. I like to make sure that the bands are wide. And just as a reminder, you can go into mouse scroll to basically widen or narrow it. That being said, let's go ahead and boost some of these areas that sound good. We've got a pretty clean drum here, but you're seeing are starting to spike up the more that we start adding boasts here on the EQ bands. So what I like to do for some extra security is either put the FL soft clipper or another plugin They're like to use is smack. Smack et seq is a transient shaper that basically steal allows you to have the smack and the character of your drums or whatever instrument you're using it on without compromising too much of the sound. But it also does apply clipping and limiting depending on what parameter you choose. This is just for added security so that anything that we add, and as you can see, an ethics chain or I like to put this usually towards the bottom of the chain. So anything we add here in between, the drums we know are not going to clip over the top because that is sort of the security blanket for everything else. Now this is where we start to get into a little bit of the fun. And this is where it comes down to what you want to make this sample sound like. Some people like this as is, I prefer to dirty it up. A plug-in from Native Instruments I like to use to dirty it up. Is this plug-in right here called bytes. It is going to add like some 16 8-bit features to it. And it is really going to give it a very vintage field, like the word s sound in. So the next thing I want to do is possibly at some RC 20, that's another plugin that you can use is going to give you more of that vintage dirty drum break from another error. Now, I have some presets on here that I use, one of which I've named dirty *** drums. That's kind of nice. Let's take some of the low man like that. So let's do this. Let's actually take this control alt C of a drum brake that we just did. Now something else we can do to this to really bring it out even more. That vintage feel is something I just started recently using an Edison, which is something I might have previewed. So you want to earlier module. But if you go here to run script and Edison ethics, you go to old school. You've got an old school, it's gonna give it another vintage field. Let's put these side-by-side. Like the process in our economy, like the processing done with the FL Studio Edison preset. But it just goes to show you that in order to get shore beats to that level, to that vintage sound, There's so many ways to go about it and you can use the stock plug-ins to do that. But if you do have the luxury of buying plugins and being able to add other textures. I mean, the possibilities are really endless. 15. Sampling A Song From Scratch (Method 1): This is where I'm going to show you the same things that I taught you throughout these lessons in the same order. I just want to make sure that I showed you in real-time what it looks like. And I'm actually getting in a groove and not having to stop and teach every aspect of it. So with that said, follow along, I have a sample and it's going to actually play as sort of a dual lesson. The dual lesson being how to sample samples that have sort of a swing times. So you have your regular 44 time and then you also have a swaying Thomas like to, like the jazz or bossa nova type of odds. You find those sometimes as some records. So I want to use that for the first example. And then a second Mona's video is going to be an Aaron Barbara sample that we're gonna do some manual shopping on. So with that said, let's go ahead and grab this Johnny old his band. Right-click and open out an Epson. It. Now some of these don't make sense in terms of the way we're going to sample them. Because when it comes to swaying time samples, something I like to do is take the chops in multiples of one. And so, because you've got that boom, boom, boom symptom because you don't have that swing time and going. You kinda have to get a little bit. You kinda have to finesse the way that you'd shop. These are kind of chop them in multiples of one or two. Maybe like kick snare. And that's the shots. So I have two hits. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. It's like three shots, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. They're not sake those two charts. Because I'm hearing that could be one shop, bone. It could be a second shop. Even at That's another sample shop that I can add there as well. Don't have to get a perfect loop on that one because we're gonna end up shopping at any man or woman. No. Real good. A man or a woman, no real good man or woman. A woman, no real good man or woman. No real good man or a woman. No real good man, woman, no real good man or woman, no real good man or woman. No real good man or a woman. A good man or woman, no real good man or woman. No real good man or woman. No real good man or woman. No real good man or woman. No real good man or woman. No real good man or woman. No real good man or woman. Real good man or woman, no. Real good man. A woman, no real good man or woman. No real good man or a woman. No real good man or woman. No. Real good man or woman. No real good man or woman, no real good man or woman. There we go. Finally, sweet. Foundation. It can be like a Vox he had almost. Sweet. All right, let's open up FL slicer. Also determine a BPM as well. So it's getting FL slicer into the mix free slicer. Let's take off the auto dump. Of course, let's do the plates. And auto fit declared. We can keep those on for right now. Sample wise, I'm here in sort of a trappy be for this one. I could just see this being pretty dope. So let's go ahead and right-click and do a tap in. Some don't want us. Sagacity a few different directions with this one. Let's do, let's do 83 illness. Let's just try them. We're actually going to build the drums up on this one. Let's pour some drums from some kits. Actually openness. Halftime. Now, my speed it up from the 1.5 times. Speed at all. Hat times. This to scratch mode. Gonna be gonna go crazy on the same channel. Get FL slicer. So I'm gonna take this first little part here. Feels like the transition, like going into something that's going to be a layer over the top and a layer that's going to be an ad lib. Let's get the first part in here, breaking up. Same way I showed you before. First, let's name this, let's call this. They only had to change the color. Let's first name this. This is Lee sample, lead sample or main sample wherever you want to do. Let's actually go here and the parameters. Let's change the slicing to the beat. And not all as accurate as I would like them to be in terms of where they're hitting it. Because like something like this, I wouldn't want to right-click and split that slice. Take the play to animate or played on and off. I'm going to go right here in the middle here and split this because I want this to be, instead I've done it. I want this to be actually split that one till gonna take this, remove this. Remove this because I want this to be one piece. We're going to split this. Then remove this. This is all in one slide. Split this. So this is own slice right here. Now that's if you're doing, usually have a dude this much surgery which is samples unless it's the established you're going for. But in this event, I want to make sure that we do this because we're going to have to chop all of his stuff up because of the style of sample. Let's get that all the hit in the right place. I think we're going to have this be wondering. I'm gonna do that first. I liked the way that sounds, may even change the pitch. I think I might change the sample on that part right there. But for right now, I like what he's a Sedna. It just so happened at the BPM work for this one, right? Part of that could be my experience in IT are part of that could be just pure luck. Lucky is definitely a component of what we're doing. Sometimes it is R. Let's try different pitches. Because I felt like that middle law note. Gonna complete this. And we've called this long note. That note or is it this long? It might be down when it might be that Britain has been Mrs. Dora. Never know. That's not it. That's not that's not a bad little notes I have in there. Like putting a puzzle. I'm curious, so this one is sampled, so Let's try that. I want us Cologne this one. Let's do the same thing. Don't think about the Cologne is that if you have not noticed by now, anytime you clone it takes on the features of the last one. So whatever notes that you put it in, whatever timing you put it in, it's going to carry that over to the next one. Most times that works for all the samples. Sometimes when they're shorter, you may have to do a little bit more doctoring of the timing, but the pitch stays the same, which is important. Sorry, I need this shop to happen right here. We're going to do another 1 fourth to beat. For whatever reason I just downloaded, I guess, a new version of FLC. You're not seeing some of the red slices. You shouldn't have that happening, but as you can see, it is still true. So don't be concerned if you actually want to turn some of the We still toying around with it to see what else we got. This chronic toyed with this one before. I'll write that on. This one is interesting. This one is interesting because it's not, the samples is not as long as we'd like it to be. We have two choices. One, you could do that endless samples Dao that I showed you where you repeat the notes over and hit it in certain places where it's not noticeable to the ear, or we could just slow the sample. Now, let's try first the easiest one where I think it's slow in a sample down. Actually, no, I don't want to sound, I want to slow it down. I think the easiest thing to do for this is going to be to take the sample and chop it up a few times. I want to slow that down now because I kind of want to hear what this sounds like. Slow it down. Remember we just got to basically hit in the other direction. Which is I just really wanted to extend long enough so that I can repeat it. The other kids in the end now, 16. Right now what I'm noticing is that there's some rough spots here in a sample. And we have to do with the fade ends. Let's see. Alright, cool. So we have one continuous loop That sounds good. Only thing that's kind of stretching out to me right now. That's not only thing that's standing out to me right now, that doesn't feel good as a fact that the sample is a little bit harsh on the ears. Definitely passed the musicianship tests. It pass the space tests, right? And then the goosebumps I got from some of those horn and just the texture of the sample. But the quality is not in the best quality, but you're gonna find a lot of samples that are like this. This is why it's good to train with these. Because it's gonna make you appreciate the other one's more. But then all seed is going to become a better sample-based produce a message with you. We gotta get rid of the ugly frequencies first with some subtracted bq. Okay? Now we're controlling his sample. We're getting a sound on the way we want. So let's see what happens. We widen up a little bit of time. Now what I want to do is layered some of the other samples over the top of it. And that's going to involve some EQ or some filtering and E queuing. We're gonna call this the vocal sample. Because even though we're gonna take this and run this through a similar chain. So what I'm basically going to take this, but share the EQ that's over here right now. You could just copy it over. Save. It says preset. Saved that preset over to here by dragging it over here. But I'm thinking that this is going to have its own ethics chain on his side. And it's going to share this general ethics, the general parametric equalizer here. So we got our basically route this so that it's not showing up to the master channel, but it's showing up here before it shows up to the master channel. And why are we doing that? So that we can have any effects that we add here to the main sample, to this vocal sample. Only thing that I really need to make sure it gets changed and have vocal sample is that there is a high pass filter routes at his track only. Now any sound that comes out of this, which is the vocal sample, is going to first go through its own effects. Love filter to a high pass filter for this. And then it's also going to run through the same effects that are getting rid of those other frequencies in May or may not be necessary. But I kind of feel like everything needs to be treated very similarly. So let's see what it sounds like. I need to make sure that I have a vocal sample ready to go. Let's try that one. Slowed down a whole lot. So at time is not perfect, but at least we can get this down and then tweak around the time parameters after. Let's try a little bit too fast deal. Let's drag it up a little bit more. Drug and back down because you want to make sure that the snares and everything are hitting with the words because you want warming. Now. So let me see how I kind of dragged at the end of that sample. Let's get a little bit speed. I'm actually going to drag it off the grid a bit by using the shift is fine time-shifting button here. That way he's not a straight to the grid, but she's starting to see its slot a little bit off. Now that we have that. And this actually dues another vocal effect. Since we know that this is already works. Mine I needed to have it dismissed. We may not need to have it this loaves. Let's actually reset it yesterday. Alright, so it helps to beat box with this artist. Say the words out loud that you're going to match. If you're going to the style of sampling. That's why you hear me yeah. Actually talking with it. It's something I like to do sometimes is like do a fake echo, right? So basically you repeat it whatever timing that you want and then you through a slow decline on these velocity. Notes down here. Now that we have this, let's start to actually find the key so that we can add a baseline. So all the stuff that we have going on here. So let's find FL keys. As I always tend to use someone who actually mute the drums because the drums carry their own notes, believe it or not. It was like a I believe that's an a major. If I'm not confused, Let's actually pull it up really quick. See what pops up. Let's see. Major, a major scale. Major scale. I'm gonna say piano. Yes, sir. Okay, I feel good. Exotic animal still got them on music theory. That is the, a major scale demands or it has golf. So we know that all the notes that we're using, and it helps in Psalms and keep repeating them. But just so you know what you're working with. Let's get an eight a way to here. So we know that that's a major scale is gone. Let's take that. All right, let's go through the process with that. We're going to let that ate away breed kick. All right, so we got one transition. I kinda want to make another sampled shop to complete this idea. Let's actually clone this channel actually, no, we're not gonna call him agenda. We're going to actually separate it. For the sake of this lesson. I'm not gonna rename these because we know what everything is. Going to lay this all out. You can see what it looks like. We can go a few different directions. We can either mess around with the other samples, which I kind of want to try. But let's see what happens if we did that. Let's see if we take a, another pattern called a sample course. These are gonna be new shops that we're gonna do in the patterns. Something I like to do, especially if. I'm going to a transition. He is, I like to loop around the last few bars of where I'm transitioning just to see that it is a smooth transition. So let's actually start from here. I'll just do that just to get the first note that I'm going to actually step up with the next part. So we're gonna call this. This is the core sampling. I don't even know what the course is gonna be quite yet. My VM right here says, Yes, we got to do some treatment on this one. Like it, but let's also test out the other one just in case the other sample shop that we may. Using cases more potential here. Let's try that out. Now we can loop it around because we know what sounds good as a transition. So I'm gonna focus in on his next section now. See if we can piece together something special. That's kind of mask. Something else I do sometimes is outtake a sample and echo it off. I definitely showed you that in an earlier module, but I want to show you this in real action of what it can do to make the same sample sound a little bit, a little bit different. I think we need to pay off here. So maybe it's sitting in this disorder. Nice little no, right there. I think there's something here. So what I'm basically listening for is what needs to be repeated. Making a seamless transition. That transition into the 13th challenge. Once again, it goes okay. That's the eight away pattern now he calls. So that's why I play the keys once again to get the clarity, we'll go from there. There it is. Everything from the top now. All right, so now we're in a predicament where we have to find a smooth transition between its hill because right now they don't really sound to smooth. It sounds like Sue different movements of music and they both sound good. But we want to make sure that they've married together. Some things that I'll do to kind of transition is in, is out, give a little bit of sample of what's to come in the loop before. By basically doing like an echo from bottom. Basically an echo that builds up and climax right into the next transition. So what do I mean? Let's take this sample shot that we have here. At least this transition, right? We can take this note or we can take, let's take this, let's just take this, let's take these notes right here. We're working with. Let's actually make our lives easy. Let's go ahead and split this by channel. Cool. Now we know that we only have these elements here to work with. So I can already hear it. So we want to do is I want to add another pattern. And I'm gonna copy over the pattern from the course. That's the pattern. And we're going to customize this so we can feel that a transition is getting ready to happen. Then we're gonna bring in reverse symbol to really drive home this transition. See how that very like you listen to what you can tell something's coming up, but you just don't know, but it feels like the transition makes complete sense. Unlike the last sentence I just said, you hear it, listens. Goals. Sometimes taken away as more, sometimes taken away will give you more. Let's go to splice now, because I want a symbol effect to transition this part into the other part. So look it up. Kind of like this one. This one, just like this. And right now, once again, we want to basically put this on the none snap. Makes sure that the climax hits right where the loop starts to change and that the rest hits where the, the Ada weights are coming in for the next session. Here we go. Turn it down. We did a same thing that we did for that other transition here to this pattern. Let's go ahead and clone this. Put it here. And we can even do the same exact pattern if we want to. And which one is his lead sample? Let's take lead sample into the same thing. So this one is a new one. I'm going to copy this, delete and then go over here to lead sample. That's one way to do it. Another crazy kind of way to do it is to take this sample. Let's consolidate it down. Design we are already familiar with Edison's, so you should be comfortable doing this. But we consolidate it down and we actually don't want to mute the original source. So let's unmute that. All we want to do for here is literally take this first section of this sample. And what we wanna do is go to Edison. And I actually want to get rid of all the rest of this stuff. We get rid of this two. I just want the first note. Next, what we're gonna do is we're going to actually tap in here to the reverb. Make sure you add that sale. Turned to witness up a little bit, little bit more. Except now I want you to go to Edit, Highlight, edit, and then excuse me, tools and then reverse. Now take this sample and drag it back in here. And basically we're going to use this almost alike, how we use the reverse symbol. I'm going to get rid of that. And we're gonna transition it here. The whole point of consolidating his down was that we had an audio form to work with. Now let's see what this sounds like. Wrong place. There it goes. So we're gonna take that to where it feels like the note is getting reversed into the note. Look for single kind of accentuating. Right there. The more I start to mess around with this, the more I kinda want to reverse everything in terms of the order of the song. So I think that the part of fall was the course is going to end up being the verse. That's fine. It happens. We need to do now is do a little bit of arrangement so that we can make that makes sense. First thing I think we need to do is let the sample breathe. I think we should let it breathe for eight bars. Sam hypotonic had asked the course for sure. Okay. So we're going to simulate this a few bars over some businesses. That's going to be four bars in another one who was going to be the eight bars? Let's just do this for the sake of arrangement right now. I liked the way that sounds. You've got the drums, you got this transition here. All right, cool. Let's go ahead and do that. Let's bring this in. I think for this one, we're going to let this be the transition for the last part of this. And then it's gonna go into the next portion of his beat, which is nice. We can look at loop that around. And actually I think we can add two more bars. Sorry about that. Not going for perfection, I'm going for more sledges. You can see what this process looks like to complete the beat. Alright, so go over here and I think we're going to open this up for the verse some more. Their goals. So we got this. Now we're gonna go ahead and assign everything to a channel on the mixer, do a little light mix on this. And I believe we have everything we need from here. So let's go ahead and purge all the audio we're not currently using. Let's make sure everything has a home. This is for the eight awaits. Let's go here, here. And let's go get the kick, kick us out already at one, but I at least want to see it here. Silver route and that there. And you've got the clap here. So to clap and the snare can actually go on the same channel for me. Boehm and then the high hats, which are the loops or the audio loops can actually go. Here. This is the transition, so we're gonna call this SF6. Microphone off the way. You can keep this out. I'm basically just doing my microphone, right? Okay, cool. Okay, So the famous starting to bug me a little bit is the fact that this sample right now, the vocal samples a little bit rough around the edges. So I did do some basically I need to do some subtractive EQN on his vocal because it's coming out a little bit hard. Let's vocally. So let's actually looped around certain section. Whereas it Cool. We got some good things going on here. Let me go ahead and do a little side chain from the kick to the sample. To sample, open up the limiter. I'm going to use my preset that I had already for the side-chain. Hi, there it is. 16. Sampling A Song From Scratch (Method 2): This one, I'm gonna show you some manual chopping, this time using a more unorthodox type of sample from Aaron Barbara. Unorthodox because it doesn't necessarily have any drums. And so we're gonna have to really rely upon our ability to pick up on where the sample begins and ends the beginning points and the endpoints that we discussed earlier, we've got to really pay attention to how we're doing this. And this is where having a drum brake as a foundation is going to really help us. The sample we're using is actually included in your sample folder and bonus folder of sounds that we provided you. So as I go along, you can actually mess around with it the same way that I am. This is in 120 beats per minute. And I actually like that beats per minute as a place to kind of make beats. I loved the fact that when you do have time beats in this and when I say half time on, basically meaning instead of, instead of making a beat, that sounds like techno, is boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Like that. Because there's a certain weird swinging bounce twilight zone area in this 120 area that creates the most bounces beats for me. But that being said, Knowing that Aaron Barbara play this sample according that beats per minute, this is going to make our jobs so much easier. So before we put a drum down, I want to see what parts of this sample do I like the most? So let's go ahead and shop do this manually. We're gonna be using two tools, primarily this slice tool right here, and then also this pencil tool whenever we need it. But let's go through it. Of course I'm holding down Shift and I'm holding down the mouse on this slicing tool so that I could make my slices nice. Upper sure, I'll keep that as an outro. I liked the way he does his altro. So for right now, I need to focus in on what is going to be the primary focus of this. What's part of this sample? I liked this being a burst, so I'm gonna pull this down here. Like as being a chorus. Was pulled it down here. Also Mike was being a part of, and maybe this is part of a person right here and just pull this down here. I'm cool mornings. Lot of special parts and a lot of things you can do. So let's loop around some things. Let's focus in on just these four bars for right now. Let's look for per minute that fits the one-to-one or something close. It's actually get this beats per minute where it needs to be. Let's stretch it down. I think we're going to end up right here. Let's see. I want that smear to fall right on top of the metric. It's still a manual. Now, this is a very lazy approach. So sampling in the context of what we're doing here. But it's definitely a good vibe now we need to actually do some shopping in here. It's a create our own production over this amazing sample. Part of that is going to be figuring out what Increments do we want to chop this up in? I'm thinking for something that sounds so pretty as it is. I don't want to go to chop crazy on it, right? I'm listening. So what and I'm like maybe we do a chop of one. Something like this. Like this stopping right here. So I'm thinking we do some kind of a repeat mode. I'm changing here the D clicking mode so that it changes the way that the sample fades in and fades out. And it's gonna make a lot more sense when you hear it back and forth. Take it off the stretch mode. All right, we're just chopping this and trying to give it a whole, another flavor to it. Barely tell his chops. What I'm gonna do is highlight both of these. And then pull at the endpoints on both of these. The same thing as student a double up right here. Now that we have that, let's repeat the same ideas I'm hearing. And then it comes back on a snare. Do the same thing. But now the beautiful thing about us chopping in this way is that whenever we change the women to change the mode, first of all, but whenever we change the pitch of this sample is going to change all the samples at the same time. You know how NFL Slicer, we didn't have really the option of changing all the slices at the same time. Both of these have their pros and cons, but I'm basically saying someone this manual chopping, a lot different because you're able to change everything at the same time. So let's actually go down 12 semitones. Sounds like that. Kind of takes a little bit of the impact away from the sample though, of the sample chops. Rocking with us right now, changed his sins and see if that dose for those of you who asked and you don't have to change the pitch. It's just something that's a preference for sample-based produces would like to change it just to give it its own unique spin. Folks who have heard this sample of this song would feel like, okay, that's kind of predictable. See what you did with that. But depending on your ears and depending on what you like, don't let the peers ways of producer hoods stop you from just let in a sample breathe. I kinda like it in its original pitch because other things that we can do to really bring out that other elements. Now that we have that sharp, Let's go ahead and do some other stuff that we didn't do before. Like for instance, I'm going to insert and I'm going to pull out a splice loop vocal. When I go down here and I'm gonna look for a vocal. Samples of a minor. Look at around kind of like that. The scratch this out. I want to see what this sounds like. Him half the time. We just manually chopping these things. Another dope thing about doing manual chopping in this way is that you can make it unique. And I can actually affect these samples in different ways so that they're all not affect it. When I shorten the stretch on one. When I speed one up, All of them are not sped up. All right. So now that I have these all kind of in their own spots, I'm going to put these all on the same channel. And then I'm gonna consolidate them down because I want to put the same effects on all of them since we did separate some of them from the bunch, it's gonna be important for me to make sure that they all are cohesive in their approach to the mix. So let's go ahead and do some cuts on it. This is nice. Okay, cool. So let's take this consolidated down. Now I want to test out in different pitches since it's gonna be in the same key. Because I have it in stretch mode, because I'm going to go ahead and use the consolidated version. Let's see what it sounds like in a high pitch. Like it. Okay, so. We're gonna keep it original and we're going to actually take this box. We're going to now put it because all that immersion here, add a delay to it. Just put a baseline down. It. Bom, bom. Notice it's a minor which is all liking. Bom, bom, bom. All right. Laid out ideas down while it's still fresh. I think that sounds good. But I think that it's going to be I think it's two loops in one, but they're all smashed together. What I mean by that is this. I think that this is going to be a great addition to the second part of his loping. But I think we should keep the first part of this loop as simple as possible so that we're pretty much walking the baseline, not doing too much. So I'm gonna take out this first node, the second now, I'm gonna see what it sounds like to just have these extended, these notes, right ear. Actually latest out, latest sample out. We're gonna repeat this vocal 2times. Just mute. These are solo, these wrong one that makes extend this out and that was my mistake. Right? Let's just change the face sound. I think we're good to go on his face. Slide it off at a grid a low bit. Somehow we got a natural rhythm that is being Play. Let's hear it now, all with the drums and everything else like that. Now, the original sample has so much going on. We don't really need to add a whole lot of things, but I think will be interesting to add some nice little bright instruments here and there. So I'm going to go to another VST that I have in here and let's see what we have because you don't need much for something like this. I think we want to open up contact. I think I might want to go to some guitar strum minds. You can use whatever your heart desires, but that's what I'm hearing right now. So let's try this evolution, strawberries, what I was looking for. Let's try a preset here. We're going to do lava lamp, I think are becoming come funky kind of fork. Alright, so let's go ahead and mess around with. Effective in taxes. That is the power of knowing your scales. It makes life so much easier. So let's actually play this sample. It's freestyle over this one. Good. It, it feels like it fits coal. Like it's supposed to go with the original sound. Raul citizen, because they're going to both use same parameters. It wrong. Salt liberal on this morning. Add a little effect to the guitar to space it out some more. I'm gonna do in the smile on this one, this one my favorite plug-ins. Alright, so I'm separating the sounds right now because we're going to get sued the arrangement of things. We need to transition this other part of the sample, which is another key. We actually saw it right here. Let's go ahead and separate this because it's gonna be it's own. Whenever you are dealing with this many shops, you're gonna want to get into grouping. Now basically grouping is going to, as it says, group all these sounds together so that when you move one, all of them go with it. What's dope about doing chops this way as well is that we can also extend this out. And it's gonna be music that's already on beat. But it's going to change up, check it out. What I wanted to do is kind of lead the base into this next key change. So I'm gonna make this unique. Instead of going down, it's gonna go up. Make this one unique TO, because we want to change the base again. This one, I think we're going to extend out a little bit more. There you go. What's the ISA is a key change, which means a scale is going to change slightly through here. But you can kind of kinda guesstimate where everything is gonna fall. That by the time you figure out the first scale. What are they looking at his truck? Honest. Test that out. I want to stop guesstimate and they just test it out. Tried to different hospitals. Hello, in Arles, copy it over and let's drop it down. Markers. You have had last semester. No right ear. I think I want to bring it back down to C sharp. Love it, or it has got to do it. Getting some mistakes in there, but I'll try. Alike. It makes that transition a lot smoother. Now, using that as part of this. Let's go. Alright, so fx is final color. Really bring this home. Alright, so let's make some space for an intro. We're pretty much arranged all upon this already. It's not a full beat, but it's enough to get an idea of the things that we would probably repeat for a second beat or second verse and whatnot. So I kind of feel like take this sample and let's extend this out and let it naturally go into here. This baseline habit play towards the end of the first low. The guitars for the second part of the brief. And I'm like getting some from rolls in here as well. Just so people know where the actual drums are gonna drop right here. Stretch it out. I liked the season mortal. Let's try this way. Okay. Mixing a bone but a bang. Cool. We've got to start mixing this. So everything has its rightful position. Not too many channels on this one. So let's go ahead and just put this in its rightful place. I'm going to categorize this as a sound effect, even though it's the reverse symbol and whatnot, that's a nine. This is also going to be in. I think I'm going to actually bring that in for the intro as well. Another plugin I didn't really talk about because I usually use it for vocals, but I like this Reggae influence dub station plugging in. I use this a lot when it comes to wanting to get a different type of bounce in Echo and reverb and delay and all that good stuff on the guitar and vocals or wherever I'm working on. Let's see. Wrong channel and his baseline just noticed that right now. Let's go to the channel. Also something likes to do with the Tom roles is hit this faith stereotypical left and right really easily. Lipid. Highlight all of these. Sometimes you got to make sure you go back for some quality control. Make sure you don't hear a clip. When all the other sounds that together, sometimes you only ear the quality of other sounds. Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes this course on sampling, this masterclass in FL sampling, at least when it comes to approaching samples. The way that I do, I greatly appreciate your patience. I really appreciate you sitting through all these modules. If you have any other specific questions, make sure you e-mail me yet Curtis king, TV at gmail.com. If it is something that I can answer with an e-mail, I'll do that. But if not, I would love to make more modules and more bonus material. That's going to help you along your way. 17. Conclusion: I just want to say thank you once again for being patient and go into the process. I hope that you learned exactly what you came here to learn. Feel free to email me at Curtis king TV at gmail.com. So then that way I can add bonus pieces to this course. Any event I didn't cover the particular subject that you're thinking, um, or the one that you will looking forward, there's no wrong way to do sampling. I highly suggest that you continue your education on and find other sample-based produces watch their process to this day, I'm still looking at other sample-based produces and finding new ways to advance this art form from ourself in sample-based production is something that I love is something that's steel holds very dear to my heart. But also, I just want to say thank you once again and congratulations.