Full Track Sessions: Pixel Burn (Synthwave, Cyberpunk Track)

1. Introduction: I. Hey, everyone. Welcome to full track Sessions for my latest track, Pixel Burn. So in this class, what we're going to do is I'm going to show you how I made my latest track. I'm going to walk you through all of the sound design choices I made. I'm going to walk you through all the arrangement choices I made. I'm going to walk you through all the harmony theory choices I made. I'm going to pick apart every element of the track and just show you why I made the decisions I made. But then, most importantly, I'm going to give you the full session of the track, and you can do what you want with it. We'll talk a little bit about how that works, but basically, you can move things around. You can make your own remix of the track. You can delete my content and use the session as your own template for your tracks, which is a great way to just kind of hit the ground running, making some of your own music. You can just study it and dissect it, a great which is another great way to learn how to make music. So I'm giving you everything here. I'm going to give you the whole Ableton session. And if you're not using Ableton, I'm going to give you all the stems for this track. So you can put it together in any dt. And I'll walk you through how to do that, too in this class. So once you dive into this class, you're going to get all the files, all the everything, and then I'm going to walk you through how I made it. It's really fun. These classes have been really popular, and I'm really happy to bring you another one with this track that I'm really happy about. Fun little synth wave jam called Pixel Burn. Let's dive in. 2. Tools you will need: Alright, Hey, everyone. Welcome to Full Track session. Here's how this will work. First of all, thanks for being here. I'm really excited to share this track with you. Um, so, like I said, in the intro, I'm going to just give you this full session. It'll be coming up in a couple of videos, so just relax. I'll get to the link in just a minute. I want to tell you a few things first before I give it to you, so don't jump ahead on me. I mean, I guess you can if you want. So first of all, you don't need Ableton to do this. So I'm going to give you the Ableton session, which is exactly what I'm looking at here on the screen, including all the samples and all the everything. But if you're not using Ableton, I'm going to give you the stems. If you're not familiar with what the stems are, that's basically, like, here is a snare track. It's going to be one audio file that is the entire snare line going all the way back to here, including this silence. So what that means is, let's say you're using, I don't know, logic, you can just drop that whole audio file in and line it up at the beginning and do the same thing with the kick, line it up at the beginning, the high hats, line it up at the beginning. And if you line up everything at the beginning, all the way on the left, then everything will be in sync. And then you can go through and play around and just start editing and chopping up and doing some automation and having some fun with the track. So you don't need Ableton. Just kind of an extra step if you're not using Ableton. I've other software you may need. I've tried to use mostly standard plug ins on this track. There are a few that are not Ableton built in. So if you are an Ableton user, you'll see the plugins I've used here. Most of them are built in. Here's EQ eight, the Ableton limiter. So they're just the built in stuff as much as possible. There are a few like on these choir samples where I use, yeah, EffectIx and this stutter plug in. I can't remember what it was called. Uh, so those are not standard. I'll talk about those a little bit when we get there. So just watch out for those. But otherwise, most of the plug ins here are just the standard built in ones for Ableton. So you should be able to just use it right out of the box. And you shouldn't need any other software or anything. Okay, let's go on real quick, and let's talk about let me just tell you about the song. Let's talk about the song real quick. 3. Some notes about this song: Okay, so let me tell you about this song. So, I this summer wrote a whole bunch of Synthwave tunes with the intention of collaborating with this singer, which I'm still planning on doing. But a few of them I just kind of kept going with and kind of wrote them out as instrumentals, which is what this one is. So there may be a version of this that comes out later that has this singer that I'm excited to work with on it. There's a whole bunch more of these synth wave cyberpunk style tunes that I'm working on that have that may come out. I have about 20 of them now that I've been working on. I just really love this genre, this sound. I always think of it as, like, if you asked AI to write music that sounded like the 80s. Like, it would get it wrong, but it would be like, this is what it would come up with. Like, this is not like, how the 80s sounded at all. It's like a caricature of how the 80s sounded. And so I kind of like it for that. So there's no AI in this, obviously. This is all actual intelligence or whatever my brain does. Alan Intelligence, let's call it. That's my AI. That's pretty clever, right? Whatever. Anyway, um, so, yeah, so what a lot of this is is it's like a pop song form that I kind of filled in where vocals were going to be. So you've got these choir samples in here, kind of filling some space, kind of harmonic shifts to fill some space. This little kind of hip hop loop fills a little bit of space. Um just playing around with form. There's another sort of harmonic shift here, these little kind of twists and turns to keep it interesting all the way to the end rather than having lyrics. That was kind of the game I was playing was, How long can I keep this going without having lyrics and without a major change? So, yeah, I really didn't think I could keep it going any longer than this. I was really happy to get to where I got, which is four, I don't know, just shy of 4.5 minutes, which is pretty long for this style, I think, the song. It's really kind of centered around this base. This base is really kind of the driving force of the whole track. Oops. Let's go to, like, here. I just love that tone so much. So everything really kind of wraps around that bass tone. That's really the center of the whole thing. So, yeah, that's basically the gist of the tune by itself. So, what I want to give you now is in the next little thing, I'm going to give you an MP three download. So here's the full track as like an MP three and a wave. Let's give you a wave two so that you can hear it. You can, you know, study it, play with it with my mix, which, by the way, I don't love my mix right here. Um, I'm still kind of on the mix, but we'll deal with it. Um, so here's my mix. I'm gonna give you to download the next thing. And then we're gonna talk about usage information, which is, like, the rights I'm gonna give you to use this thing, and then I'm going to give you the full shebang. Alright? Here we go. 5. Usage Information: Okay, before I give you the full session, we need to talk real quick about what you can do with it, okay? So, here on the screen is the license that I'm giving you. This is a creative common share alike license. Here's what it means. Basically, in a nutshell, you can read this. This is going to be included with the download in full detail. But if you download it, you are agreeing to this. You are free to Share. You can copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format for any purpose, even commercially. That means that you can remix and release versions of this song, if you want. It's just got to be different from mine, obviously. Adapt. You can remix, transform and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially. The licenser, that's me cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms. So I can't say, no, just kidding and then sue you. Okay, you agree to attribution, which means you will give me credit and not even me. So what this means is, if you use this and publish it, you have to say somewhere wherever it's appropriate, say that this is based off a original track or a session or even a class by me. And specifically, please credit the company name doctor J teaches music or the URL. That's how I want attribution done for this. If you do something. If you don't publish it and you just make stuff on your own for your own use and to share with your friends, you don't have to do any of this. Just share it with your friends. That's fine. But if you release it on Spotify or something, then you need to include attribution. Share like, if you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license. So if you put out the version of this tune, you should also make your session available to others. I don't really care about that so much, but if you like, you should do that. And that's kind of it. Okay? And then there's a little bit more to read if you want to read it, and then there's some links to a whole kind of legal thing if you want to read that. But that's the basic terms of it, okay? So basically, the main thing to know is you can kind of do whatever you want. If you release something that uses this, then credit doctor J teaches music, which is my brand name now. Cool. Cool. Otherwise, have fun with it. Okay, let's dive in and give you the download. So in the next session, I'm going to give you this download link, and then I'll be back and I'll talk about how to use it. So this is going to be a big download, okay? So, click on it. It might take a few minutes for it to download, and then just save the file that downloads and then watch the next video, and I'll walk you through how to open it, how to use it, and how to deal with it. Okay? So just download everything and then watch the next video. Here we go. 7. How to install this session for Ableton users: Okay, now you've downloaded files, and you had two options to download those files. You could download either the Ableton session or the stems, okay? So let's go through those. If you downloaded the Ableton session, we're going to walk through how to open the Ableton session in this video. And the next video, we'll talk about how to reconstruct it in any other D, Okay? So for Ableton, you have this ALP file. If you're not on Ableton, this ALP file is useless to you. You can delete it. If you are on Ableton, here's what we're going to do. Go. And this is true on Mac or Windows. It shouldn't matter, but I'm going to double click on it to launch it in live. And this is a little confusing what it's going to do here, okay? So just stick with me for a minute. It's going to think and do this preparing installation bit for a minute. Just let it do that. Okay. Now, eventually, it's gonna pop up with kind of a finder window or windows your save as stuff. Okay? So find a place to put it. I'm just gonna put it on my desktop for now. Okay, and it says, You already have this on your desktop. Mm. Uh, I'm going to say keep all fine, whatever. Okay? Now it's going to extract everything. Now, here's the confusing part. Once it's done extracting everything, nothing's going to happen, okay? It's not going to open it automatically. It's just gonna sit there. So now that it's done, it's going to be sitting on your desktop. So now you should go to your desktop and you should see it sitting on your desktop, a folder called Bixelburn here it is. And there is your session, and you can double click that to open it, okay? Or drag it to your Ableton application to open it. And that should open everything. You can move this folder if you want. But just remember to move this folder, if you're going to move it, not any of these folders inside it. You need to keep these inside or else this folder, everything's gonna fall apart if you do that. So if you have to move it, move this folder. But ideally, when you save it, don't save it to your desktop, save it to where your sessions are or where it's going to stay. That's the best way to do it without things getting all confusing and strange. Okay, so once you have that, you can double click and open this, and then you're good to go. You don't need to do anything else. Now, let's go over and talk about how non Ableton users can do this. Maybe I'll load up logic to do this. Here we go. 8. How to install this session for users of any other DAWs: Okay, let's jump over to logic, and I'll show you how to assemble this track session in any dog, okay? So any dog with the timeline. So FL, logic, even garage band, ProTools, whatever you want. Okay? So I'm just going to do this in logic because that's what I happen to have here. So first, I'm going to make a blank session. I'm going to click on audio. And I believe there are 21 tracks in this session. So I'm going to make 21 audio files. Create. Alright, there they are. Now, you downloaded a folder called stems. And it looks like this, okay? What I'm gonna do, let me just kind of stretch this out for us a little bit. Ah. Why don't you want to do that? There we go. Okay, so what I usually do when I'm assembling stems like this, you know, you could very delicately pull these in in a correct order, but usually, I just grab them and drop them in. Some dos will let you do this and some won't see a flogic wheel. No, but sometimes there's a modifier key that'll let you No. Sometimes you can press a key and it'll let you drop them all horizontally, so they all drop onto their own track. If I drop it right now, it's going to drop each track individually, like one after the other on the first track, which is not what we want. So let's go back. So that's not gonna work. So we got to do them one at a time. That's fine. So let's just put that there. Okay, so it's saying that here, we're at 441. So this is saying that my logic is set up at 48 samples per second, and these files were rendered at 441, and do I want to convert them? Now, if I'm really setting these up for, like, mastering or maybe even for remixing, I'm going to think about this a little more carefully. Probably, if you want the highest fidelity, the best thing to do here is to change your session to 88.2. That's probably the way to get the best fidelity, because then your session is exactly double the sampling rate of the audio files. Then the conversion is a lot easier, you're less likely to get artifacts or weird things. But if you don't feel like being that nitpicky, just say, sure. So, there we go. We're just going to change our project. I'm going to drop the next one. And I'm just going to go through and do these one by one. Now, important, make sure when you drop each one down that you are exactly up against the left side. Okay? Because we bounced these as you always do with stems with any empty space on the left side. So Oops, I just pulled in buzz synth three times 'cause I wasn't paying attention. That's what I get for trying to talk and do this at the same time. Um, Looks like I got choir sample twice here, too. So if they're not all exactly up against the left side, then they're not gonna be in sync. And that is not going to sound good. Rp. Bend. Okay? It's scroll down. I think I see a miscalculation. 'Cause there are more than 21 tracks here. Car hats. Loop. Way more than 21 tracks. It's odd. Okay. Well, let's add more tracks. Uh, let's add ten more. And kick low. Kick high Risers in Ex. Just riser. Oh, I know why, 'cause we were getting groups also. I'll talk about that in a second. Since Toggle sin ox box. And then here is a wave bounce of the whole thing. Okay, so now I've got all my tracks in there. Let's take this bounce of the whole thing, put it on top. So now I might just do a little housekeeping. Put that there. I might move my drums to the top. And I also might get rid of my groups. Like, this is a group. It says Pixel Burn drums. I don't want that. I'm going to delete that. And then rebuild drums. So kick but you can figure out what's a group by just kind of comparing visually to the Ableton set or from the previous video. Kick snare. Oops. Let's put that up there. I like having the empty track. It just makes things a little bit easier. Kick high. So I'm just clicking and dragging to rearrange these. Put that under kick. Rip loop. That's another drum. Basin, base, Brighton. I think I'm still missing hats somewhere. There they are. Okay, so organize your stuff, how you like it. But hats up there. Okay, it doesn't really matter, as long as you've organized it somehow. So here's my whole mix. I'm gonna mute that. You can put it in there as a reference just to make sure everything's lined up correctly. But in theory, if we now go to the very beginning and everything's lined up right, we should be able to hit play, and it should sound the same. Cross our fingers. Okay, so you might need to do a little bit of rebalancing, which would be really great practice. But then you'll be right up and running. Okay. Now that we've done all of that, let's talk about the actual track. So let's go through, and I want to talk about this session, how I made this track and give you some insight into the decisions that I made while I was making it. Here we go. 9. Some notes on the session: All right. Let's get into it. Here we go. So, let's talk about this tune. So how I laid out this track, I've organized all of the tracks into groups. This is kind of typical for me. You could close all of the groups if you wanted. And you just have this nice, tidy little thing, which is handy to look at this will kind of tell you what I was thinking here. We've got drums, bass synth, bass, risers and effects, guitar and choir. That's kind of what this tune is about, right? It's about these things, drums, bass, some synths, some effects, and then guitar and choir. So the main two elements, melodic elements are guitar and choir. So I'll go through all of this soon. I'm just kind of doing big picture stuff here first. So let's open up drums. One thing you'll notice is that there is quite a bit of side chaining happening here, mostly to this kick, and you'll see that kind of all over the place that a lot of sinths are connected to the drums. Let's even look down here. Yeah. So this compressor is connected to the kick. So if you don't remember how side chaining works, just a quick refresher, what's happening here is every time that kick hits, it's forcing this synth to kind of duck under it, okay? So you can see here the kick is coming into this compressor, and it's basically forcing the volume of this scyth to kind of scoop down and then come back up. It's not super obvious here, but let me kind of do this as a visualizer for you. It's cutting a little hold there. Let's see if we have it. This one might be more obvious. Yeah. He that. That's just making room for the kick so the kick can really stand out. So there's quite a few things side chained with a compressor to the kick in this track. Um, I did this low kick and high kick thing. I'll talk about more when we get into the drums and just kind of picking apart the drums, which we'll do in the next video. So extra loops. Base, I talked about how the whole thing is really kind of built around this base. We'll explore that in the sound design walk through. These synths, just really fun buzzy stuff. Some arp things, risers, you know, your typical risers, backward synths, or backward symbols, I mean, this kind of Vox robot thing is this. It's not really a robot. It's a backwards. So I think it was initially a backwards keyboard of some sort. And I just played something, reversed it, and that was it. This vox box, something similar. Yeah, it's Yeah, it's just that. So just a little sound effect that's in there. And then this guitar is really just a big guitar solo. That's not me. I was going to do it. I was gonna play it in. And then I just found this sample, and I thought, I'm just gonna use this sample I don't really feel like playing it, and it's a rather nice sample. And then these choir samples, I treated quite a bit to give them that stuttery glitchy thing. And to work with the harmony, which comes in more with these, which are just big blasts of the harmony. Set. And that's it. We've got a couple of returns, reverb delay, and then some drum parallel compression, really is what's the main thing that's happening here. It's actually not doing a ton right there. So that's kind of the big picture of what's happening here. Alright, so let's go through and talk about the drums. 10. Drums and percussion walkthrough: Alright. Let's focus in on the drums. And let's just walk through it. Drums are pretty simple here. A lot of this synth wave stuff, drums are just really clean. You know, there's a characteristic kind of synth wave sound. There's not a ton going on now. So let's solo the drum group, and let's go to just somewhere where everything is cooking, like, right here, let's just loop that spot. We'll talk about other spots in a minute, but I just want to get kind of the main groove here. Stay. Cat. So here's what we have. First, let's go bottom to top. So first, we have these hats. Okay? Let the loop. Um, Nothing fancy. This is a loop I grabbed from my library of stuff. So I think this was actually probably a 1 bar loop that I stretched out. And then, oh, yeah, you can kind of see that it's it is now a two bar loop. That's where it restarts. So this is the file. So it's a two bar loop. It probably was a 1 bar loop, and I just, um, made it a two bar loop, so it was easier to move around. But that's that. Um, snare. That is like a synth wave snare. Big fat. Probably even better with some of this return on it. I everything's just get that. So that's snare, just nice big single snare sample that I just rendered into a loop so that we could move it around here. And when I say rendered into a loop, this is what I mean. What I mean is, if you go back in the session far enough, I had a file that looked like this. This was like my snare sample. And even at one point, I put one there. Oops. There, and then I like, copied it, pasted it, and put it there. And then I said, Cool, that's what I want to do. Now I want to, like, copy and paste that or drag the loop out or something. But I want to make sure that I stay perfectly on the grid. So what I'm going to do is copy this whole bar, including the empty space. And then in Ableton, I'm going to go Command J, and that's going to turn this into a full bar, which also has the silence. And now I can just, like, command D, and it'll duplicate it, D, duplicate it, or I can loop it if I turn it on looping. I can just drag it out and it'll stay right on the grid as long as I set that up correctly. So that's what I mean when I say, like, render it out so that it's easier. So it's not just one sample that I have to worry about getting off the grid. So that's what that was. Okay, let's skip the high kick for a second, and we'll come back to that. Here's the low kick. Right? Same thing here. We had one kick sample. We did a quiet one and a loud one. Got a little ghost kick in there. Ghost means just like a little one. So when I make ghost kicks, here's how I do it. So I probably started off. Well, I know, I started off with one kick sample. So I had something like that. And then when I was making this pattern, what I did was I put my kick there, there there and there and there and probably not there, 'cause that repeats. And then for this kick, so I just kind of copied my kick pattern, but I left off this little kick, right? That's the quiet one. So to get that, here's my silly little trick. I'm gonna make all of these a little bit bigger. Actually, just these two. Okay. Here's my kick. So this is my kick. To get a quieter one, what I do, this is like a super fast and easy way to get a quieter kick. The majority of the loudness on this kick is right here, right? So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go here and copy that much of it. I'm just gonna leave out the actual hit and then go here, there. Now I've got, like, a quieter hit there. That's probably even too much. Let's go like there. I put that there. Stretch it out to there. There. So there's my ghost kick. I just leave off the attack and just copy a little bit of the tale and a little bit of the attack. That gets you like, that quieter kick. I could go through and find, like, a quieter kick sample, but this is just easier. It sounds just as good. So that's how I got that little ghost kick in there. Ghost kick is just like or host note is just a fancy term for a note that is just kind of quieter than all the ones around it. Okay, now this kick, let's listen to the high kick. Okay, that doesn't sound like a kick very much, does it? Listen to this together and see if you can find that sound in the drum mix. Sounds like a wood block or something, giving you a little extra groove in there. Here's what that is. This is something I like to do a lot. So what I did is I took our low kick, and right at the end of it, I added this EQ. So this IQ is basically I just found where my real sweet spot of my kick is, which down here. It's right about there. Right? I just want to get that real nice kick sound, and I don't want anything about it, right? Then what I did is I duplicated that track. I'm gonna delete that for just a second. So I duplicated that track, and then I went down here, and then I put another EQ eight in. But watch this. Here's a trick I bet you didn't know you could do. I'm I'm on the low kick. I'm gonna click on EQ eight. Command C. I'm going to copy the effect. I'm going to go to kick high. Click down here, Command V, paste the effect. Now, I have the same effect, right? So now I'm just gonna hear more of this super low thumpy thing. Definitely not what I want. But check this out. Because I have the exact same setting down here, all I have to do is go here and then go Oop. Right? Now I have perfectly carved out the space I need for my low kick and my high kick. So now the low kick is down here, the high kicks up here. And I like to also sometimes just leave a little a little gap. So, I mean, that just went up a little bit. So that basically separates out the boom and the beater, right? So I've got the boomy stuff and the low kick and the more, like, beater stuff and the high kick. And when I did that on this particular kick, it got this kind of almost rim clack kind of sound. So I thought, well, if we put, like, kind of, like, a little bit of a dotted rhythm delay on that, it'll give us this cool kind of groove. So that's what it is. Without this delay, this high kick is a lot less interesting. It's just that. But with a little bit of delay on it. Make j. It's just a kit. Yeah. So these drum fills, these are, like, supersynthwave, super 80s drum fills. I love these. I could listen to these all day. These are just samples I grabbed, like, just search for, like, synth wave drum fills. Alright, here's some more hats. Ready talk about hats. This is getting really long so let's jump ahead. Here is just, like, a drum loop that I added for this section. I just needed another element, so I toss this in here. Well, I really like the juxtaposition between this and the kick. With this, of course, I took out its kick of this loop, so it's got all of its low end chopped off because I wanted this kick to continue, right? If I would have kept this kick in, it's two kicks going on at the same time. It's gonna get too mudd. So it's generally not a good idea, but together, and then some of these little fill elements are still going. And then just bass. Um, I think that's about it. This little hip hop loop comes back another time, then just fills. That's about it for drums. So relatively simple on the drums for this one. Cool. Alright, let's talk about some of the sound design elements. 11. Sound design walkthrough: Okay, let's talk about some sound design. So let's start first with this bass sound. So, here it is. And what I've done here is I've turned off almost everything so you can see how it's kind of built up. So what I did here is I started with this preset. I'm not even going to lie. I started with this preset, I think, hell for Leather something. I think this is an Ableton preset. I tried to use some of the built in Ableton presets as much as I could. So I'm just going to loop this section right here. Okay, so with everything else turned off, this is just kind of the default what Analog is doing, okay? So let's look at it. We've got square waves, two square waves, a tad out of tune, about $0.10 out of tune, a little bit of noise mixed in, a little bit of resonance, pretty sharp envelope. Nothing out of the ordinary, okay? So if we close that analog up, so it's right here. We're just going to close it up 'cause we're in a group here, an effect or instrument rat. So first thing, let's turn on this arpeggiator. That gives us the thing. Let's look at how the arpeggiator set up, right? This is going up. And it's gonna repeat notes as if I only pull the note down. Okay, that's great. That goes with that. Now it's at a little EQ to give us a little extra high end, cut out some low end. Brs up a little bit. Okay, multiband dynamics. This really kind of flattens up the low ends a little bit. Okay, and a little bit of reverb. You can see these are mapped out here for reverb, and I have adjusted all of that. Is that I think that might be on already. Yeah, definitely is. That's pretty good. Okay, drum bus for a little bit of compression. Much getting there. Another round of Q fatten up to low end it brightness to the high end. Now we're getting there. Another compressor. And these are more things that I add. Alright, and now this compressor is ducking it to a side to the tick here. Another Q. Making it mono here. I like basis manos. That's good to have your basic mano. And then a limiter, kind of get the whole thing. So a lot going into my base there. I kind of just kept piling stuff on until I was just really getting this big fat tone. But I think a lot of it just comes from the compressor and these EQs are just really doing the heavy lifting of kind of all of it. Okay, let's move on. The other scents, Bright sins. Um, the star of this one is this pedal. So this is like a guitar effect pedal emulator that I put on this synth without it. It's terrible. It's not terrible without it. It's not too far away, but itsly gets that bite. And it cuts through the mix, like so much better with a little bit of extra distortion. And I like this overdrive setting on the petal effect to get this distortion. I works really well. I tried to saturate her on it, didn't like it. That's why it's off. And I think I just turned these off. Let's back on. Compressor for side. You'll see you'll see a DSR in a lot of effect chains here. And that's because DSR is just kind of in my default effects chain. Whenever I start a new effect chain, there's a DSR at the beginning of it. Usually, I delete it if it's not necessary, but it usually does no harm if I don't need it, so sometimes I delete it. Okay, let's look at this buzz synth. This was dry from this muddy. So brightened it up with an ink cue, a compressor, and a limiter. And probably adjusted a bunch of stuff. Table position. That means we're probably on a wave table. Synth definitely R. So you're gonna get a lot of variation by adjusting this table position here. To Guitar synth. Now, this is not a guitar. There's guitar tracks later. This I called guitar synth just because it sounds like a guitar. Oh, guitar G synth. This sounds like, and I believe it is. Is it the pitch G? Yes. It sounds like just a big open G string on a really distorted guitar. And that's all it does. And you can hear it ducking with side chain. So I just wanted something that would hit a G really hard right there. So this is what we have a simple, let's see what we have without this. Yeah, another wave shaper some more effects on it, just to really sharpen it up and give it that really distorted guitar sound. Interesting that it didn't use the pedal effect on that one. Descending scale. This is almost a copy of, I think the Bright sinth. And this is the only time it happens. I just needed this little riff right here. I just wanted that to happen. And so it's basically a duplicate there. And this arp is an audiophile. And interesting about this arp is that this That sound and this sound are the same. But this thing is just backwards of this. So this is just a reversed. It's like the first, I don't know, bar or so of this arp sample reversed. And it makes that cool kind of intro thing that I like. Let's talk about these risers while we're here. These are pretty much just backward symbols. Symbol crashes. Yeah, pretty light. Here they are back to back. But sometimes. Here's the this thing again. Another sample, something backwards if we reverse it. You know, a base sample that I reversed, reverse it again. There you go. Real quick, let's talk about the guitar Inquirer stuff. Since I guess that falls under sound design. So with the guitar stuff, these are all just samples. Here, there's just this guitar bend that I just really wanted right there. I was just like, thinking about, What should I do here? And then I was like, I just want to go, Who right there. So I just put Just this h thing. That's not the sample I was thinking of. The sample I was thinking of is this one. That's what I really wanted right there. This one is just a G 'cause we're in the key of G, obviously. So here I just wanted this very light note that would just kind of pitch up. Very ghostly to give us a little mysteriousness. And then this sample is just playing a G D G. No, sorry. G G, G, G. It's like the first three notes of 100 songs by Green Day. And then this little thing goes through, like, a lot of the song. It's just really kind of under It's really kind of low in the mix. Going like, all through that. And then this guitar solo was just over the top. I was just like, hysterically laughing when I put it in, and I couldn't stop laughing. So it stayed in. Yeah. The choir stuff, I was just really inspired by that song, that new track by that band President. I just really liked how they were using choir to chop up. So this is what it sounds like. So if I turn off all my effects, So the effects I used here is um two to get this sound. First is this stutter master to. Just to give me this chop jump. So this is obviously not an Ableton thing. And then this effectrix that's doing something a little more glitchy right here. So when that turns on, you go through this effect matrix, basically. We've got all these effects, and then we step through and different effects turn on at different times. So this is kind of like a glitch plug in that I like. So this is where we are. You see these effects turn oh So it's kind of subtly in the mix there, but I liked it, so I was playing around with it. And then an EQ. And then this choir sample at the end, there's really nothing on it. It looks like I was playing with the extrix and then I just decided to just leave it how it is. So just Bunch of volume automation on it, it looks like, for different things, but that's it. Okay, let's move on and talk about Harmony. 12. Harmony and theory walkthrough: Okay, let's talk harmony and theory stuff. There's really not a lot here. This is G minor firmly in G minor and never really leaves G minor and never really leaves a chord of G minor, actually. I mean, it kind of does. So let's look. So if we look at this baseline, it's kind of the main driving things beginning, we're really just playing around G minor. G, up to the minor third, to the two to the one. Just whoops, I got some stuff solo. You know, four, five, you know, really, you couldn't get more G minor than this right here. You know, one minor third, two, one, four, five, you know, that just screams G minor. That goes pretty much all the way through down here. Same thing. We're just, like, screaming G minor. These harmony notes here are all supporting G minor. This next section, that note. You just have one bass note that we're kind of just bone, boom, boom, boom, boom. And you guessed it, it's G. So still just cooking on G minor. Slap So that's minor three to two. That's still really comfortable in G minor. So this Well, okay, before I do this, let me jump back to one thing. There is a sort of implied chord change in this choir thing. So there's this. So this is kind of an interesting thing because the choir changes chords, but the rest of the band doesn't, right? And it totally works. It's just fine, because that chord change they're doing is super simple. The choirs really just going 15 then back. So 1515 is what this sample is doing. So it's G minor D major, I think, orca D minor. Um, and that's fine. It doesn't really conflict with anything. It's just really safe cord to do. So it kind of makes it feel like everything else is changing around it, but it's not. Like, nothing's changing except for that sample. So, okay, now back to this. Oops. This feels like a big harmonic change. Let's look at the base. We're on a D. So this kind of feels like five because we're up on D, which is a five of G minor. But right away, we go D, B flat, we're back to the third. So that still kind of implies G minor. C A, A G. We're back to G. So we're not we haven't left G minor. We've maybe left the chord of G minor, but only for, like, that first beat. We're really still in G minor. So that's really is. Back to where we started. Fire stops all G minor. The guitar solos A G minor. I just wanted to do that again. Whenever I'm sad, I just come to my studio and go. This thing really nails down G minor. Is about as G minor as it gets. So, to sum up, we could not be more firmly in G minor in this song. Um, it's almost one complete G minor chord. There are some kind of fives implied throughout there, but there's really no other harmonic motion. Um, so really simple harmonically. 13. Arrangement walkthrough: Alright, let's talk about the arrangement, quick. It has kind of a funky arrangement. Because it's like I said at the beginning, it's an instrumental track that was kind of converted from what I was imagining to be a track with vocals. So, you know, let's call this all an intro. Let's kind of look at it like this. And like this. This is a fun way to just kind of see the arrangement a little bit. Is just kind of smoosh your tracks down. No, open up. There we go. So if you really kind of just do that Okay. Alright, now we can kind of see the whole song all at once. So we have this intro and then I'll call this Verse one. Let's open up this. So this kind of verse one. And then when we get to this kind of drum break here, Bridge Bridge callback with that kind of toggle sinth right here. And then that intro thing again, backwards sin Still bridge, I think. This is kind of like the B section of the bridge, second half of the bridge. 'cause we're gonna bring back in a verse. Right here. Yeah, but it's a harmonically different verse. So, this verse, we've got a little bit of a harmonic shift happening. So let's call this kind of a okay, I'm gonna call this something really weird, okay? Check this out. Here's what I really think is going on here. So I just, like, paused the video and really thought through this and worked this out. Here's what I think we've got in this. Now, you'll note that in this particular track, as you can tell, by the way I'm talking about it right now, I did not plan out the arrangement. I just kind of followed my heart and went through it. And that's perfectly fine way to do things. So now I just kind of figured out what I just did. And it's weird, but I kind of like it. We'll see. So we've got intro, and then I'm going to call this verse one. I'm going to call this bridge. One or bridge A, I guess. We'll call this bridge two. No, sorry. We call this bridge A. This bridge two, where we get the kind of scaling it back. This we're going to call pre chorus, where it does this kind of fake harmonic shift section. So pre chorus, hold on to that for a second. Put a pin in it. So pre chorus, then to hear for verse two, And then here for Otra. So this for pre chorus, again, and then the end. This is weird, okay? So why don't you call this chorus and this chorus? I mean, I guess we should, but what it feels like to me is that this doesn't feel like a chorus. This feels like a pre chorus because it just doesn't have the energy of a chorus. So it feels like a pre chorus without a chorus, which is really strange, but I kind of like in a weird way, um, if we just called it a chorus, things are a lot easier, right? Like, our life gets a lot easier if we just say, This is a chorus, then the chorus comes back, and then everybody's happy. That's fine. We could do that, but it just doesn't have the energy to me to really feel like a chorus. So I'm going to call it a pre chorus to nowhere. It's like missing. It's a pre chorus without a chorus. Sad. It's a lonely pre chorus. That's what we'll call it. That's my new technical term, a lonely pre chorus is a pre chorus without a chorus. Um, strange, and it should probably have some kind of CDA, too, instead of just stopping, but I like it just felt like stopping. So a couple nontraditional things here, but um, that's what I decided to do. And so that's what I did. You can do whatever you want. You're in charge. So kind of a funky arrangement, but I like it. 14. What comes next?: Alright, that's the end for this sort of quick class on my latest track Pixel Burn, and my walk through on How to do it. And all the files you need to have fun with it. So take it, enjoy it. Learn from it. You will be able to find this track on all the streaming services in short order. So yeah, keep an eye out for more of these full track sessions. I plan on releasing a whole bunch of them because I think these are just a great tool for you to have. And I think that because I think they're a tool that I wish I had when I was learning. So that's why I think you probably will like them. If any of this is hard, if there's any part of this you don't understand, I have classes on all of this. So if you're like, that harmony thing, I didn't understand what you're talking about. Go watch some of my harmony classes. If the arrangement thing didn't understand, watch my arrangement class. Any of that stuff. So you can always dig deeper on any of these topics through those big classes that I have. Uh, this is just kind of scratching the surface kind of thing. Okay, one more thing, and then we're done. 15. Bonus Lecture: Hey, everyone. I want to learn more about what I'm up to. You can sign up for my email list here. And if you do that, I'll let you know about when new courses are released and when I make additions or changes to courses you're already enrolled in. Also, check out on this site. I post a lot of stuff there, and I check into it every day. So please come hang out with me in one of those two places or both, and we'll see you there.