Getting Started Producing Music

1. Intro: Hi, I'm Jordan. Have you finally decided that it's time to become a music producer? Did you just suddenly get yourself some audio processing software, a DAW, something on your computer with which you can make music and you want to know how to use it. Maybe you bought something, maybe you snapped and finally got yourself what you always wanted. Or maybe you downloaded many of the amazing free options. Whichever is your case, welcome to my introduction class on getting started as a music producer. This is your chance to learn everything that you need to know at the beginning to get started producing music from scratch using Midi. I'll show you the techniques that you need right at the beginning when you don't really know anything about what to do or how to do it and you just need some guidance to get that first track made. We'll cover chords and a bit about the melody. But most importantly, we'll have a look at the software. We'll discuss what plug ins are. We'll talk about what you need and everything that's just really basic when you're just beginning and you just need to get a track made. I have been a music producer and composer for a number of years. Working mostly on video games and films and that sort of nature. But I also like to make low fi and death tracks as well. I'm going to help you get through it. So let's get started and let's begin our first track. And we'll begin right at the beginning with what you're going to need to get started. 2. Choosing Plugins: Get started, you're going to need what is the most basic thing to begin making music with, which is a DAW or digital audio workstation software. There are many options from many different companies, such as Reaper, Protols, and my favorite, Ableton Live. Any of them are great. The thing is generally when you get one, oftentimes people like to stick with the one that they've begun with. Ableton Live and Protols are both really great options. If you want software that will go the distance, but that doesn't mean that you need to start with those. You can start with something that is free. And I got started with some free, easy software that came with a $200 Miti keyboard that I bought several years ago. That can be a way to get started. Just something free and small and easy that you can work on straight out of the box. That's how I got going. Then I moved on to Ableton later. But Ableton does have a free version. Ableton Live Light, which you can get comes with quite a lot of features, Is something that you don't have to pay for. You can use it for a while, make sure that you like it and that you can gel with it before you end up paying for it and getting the full version up to you. But that's basically the most basic thing that you need to get started and it's not something that you need to pay for. Beyond that, the next thing you really need are plug ins. Now this sounds really weird, how do I plug something into my software? It feels very physical and real life, but it's not. Plug ins are software that talk to other software. You can buy instruments for your DAW software. Imagine your DAW is literally a workstation on which you are crafting something. I like to think of it like painting, painting something on a workstation. The plug ins are just like additional paint you can paint with on that workstation. They are other softwares that plug in to the initial software. There's a lot of free plug ins and it's not just instruments. There are plug ins that do all kinds of things. I find instruments are a great way to get started though. My earliest plug ins were free instruments from Spitfire Audio. Spitfire Audio is an excellent company that make really fantastic free plug ins that you can download and get started right away. You just get their program on your computer, get that installed, and then within the program, you can choose from many free instruments that you just click to install. And they install just like any other software. Then you open them up from inside the DAW itself. You literally go into the program shop around for what you like, click what you like, get it all downloaded, then you go back to your DAW, open it up, and there it is. It's very simple and easy and awesome. The real trouble I find later is once you have enough plug ins, figuring out where the one is that you want, especially if you don't remember the name. I'm someone that buys plugins because I think they look cool, but I forget what they're called. And then later I'm like, I have an amazing plug in that I need for this purpose right now. I can't remember what the heck it's called. That's my problem anyway. Yeah, at the beginning, free plug ins are all you need and do a great job. And there are people that get by for years just with the free ones. Paid ones though, they're paid for a reason. They generally do a lot more. They're more complete in what they'll do for you. I guess free plug ins are free because you still have to do more of the work than they have to do. But then you get those paid ones and they have like AI and like they do more stuff. That's not something you have to worry about in the beginning. And we're just talking about instruments because an instrument is an instrument, you know you'll like it by the sound. Does an instrument sound good is all that matters. When you're getting a music plug in instrument, that's what we're going to worry about in the beginning. To get started, make sure you have your DAW stalled, which just means download it from wherever you're getting it, open it, and let it do its installation process, which in the beginning is super long, there's so many components. Make sure your computer has a lot of space. Make sure it has a lot more than what it's telling you it needs. I would say as much as two to three to four times. I would go as far as to say, make sure your computer has four times the amount of space than what the DAW says it needs. There's so many components and you're going to be expanding on it over time, constantly. It's going to end up being ten to 20 times, especially with instruments, they're huge sound files anyway. Get the initial DAW installed, then once you can open it and it doesn't tell you to do anything else, get those plugins installed. Just some instruments. The DAW will come with instruments. I found my free DW I got started with was frustrating in that the instruments didn't sound like I wanted them to sound. And it made the process infuriating. That's why I'm telling you about spit fly right away. Because you can get a Spit Fly piano. That sounds like a piano and it's free. Get a plugin installed so that you have some instruments to play with. Then that's it. That's all you need to get started. Once you've done that, let's get started. 3. Drawing MIDI: Here we are in our DAW. Opened it up and it's installed and ready to go. If you're using Ableton, it'll look exactly like this, but if you're using something else, it should look something like this or in session view, which is useful but not for us. In this particular instance, what we want is the arrangement view. To get started, we're just going to press the tab key to open up our arrangement view and look at all of our lovely stems that we're starting with. Each line that you're looking across here, 1234, you can make music within then when played, all of them will work together. If I have music here, it'll be played at the same time as this one, this one, this one, et cetera. Unless of course, I decide to mute one of them. Which is easily done right over here to the right, by just turning it off. Turning it on with a click on. Just like that. We start with two Midi stems. By default, two audio ones. You can see this audio one is listening to me right now, but it's not needed because I'm recording the audio elsewhere. So I can just delete these two audio stems. These audio ones will take music files, P, three's wave files, things like that, that I might want to drag in. It may sound strange in the beginning to drag music files in when trying to make music, but it's pretty common to use samples, which is just pieces of music that already exist. Or just music recordings of an instrument that already exists that can soup up the music that you're making. Or even so that you can make a cover of another song, something like that or a remix. We have two audio files that aren't useful, so we're just going to right click on right here. I'm just going to delete it. Right click, delete. Then I've just got my Midi files. Now Midi is what we're going to be making. The music within a Midi file is very different to a straight up audio file. We're going to export it as Ambi three or Wave, which are music files. But when we're making it, it's just information. It's just information that the computer can recognize and play as. Music Midi files are quite small and they're just information, nothing else. They don't make sound in themselves. Here we have, I've just been zooming in by the way, like out zoom in. That's all you may be able to recognize what you're looking at as bars or measures. Especially if you're someone musical and you know what sheet music looks like, you understand how music is arranged. It might be starting to look familiar. But you can see the bars or measures, let's just call them measures. You can see the measures along the top, displayed here. One, this is one, measure two, you can see the measure ends with the next number. See that three up there? That means it's the beginning of the third measure. Some people do this and say, oh, that's four measures, because I'm at the four now you need to be at the end of the number. Now it's four measures, but wait, four measures. Now you'll see it's two different shades of gray. That'll help you to distinguish one from the other. 1234 accidental without blending them together accidentally. That's four measures in there to create a new mini track. Within these measures, we're going to hit on a control shift for mid Windows. Yeah, command shift M for mid on a Mac, and then control shift M for Midi on a Windows. On a Mac. I'm going to hit Command shift M after first highlighting how long I want this to be. I'd like to do it within two measures, four measures or eight measures four being my favorite. But for now I will highlight two measures like this. And I click Command shift M and a new. My stem has just been created. I click it, I drag it up and look at this. I got myself a keyboard here on the left, I've got all my notes. It should be very familiar for musical people. For non musical people, that's totally fine. I would suggest getting a little bit of musical knowledge if you can. I have a music theory class right here on my skillshare that you are free to take if you want to just go watch that one. But very basically we've got our C's right here. C, by default, we can use it to get started. C three being right in the middle, it's a good way to get started. But to get started, if we make anything now, we won't be able to hear anything because we haven't selected any instruments. Now assumably you may have downloaded some instruments already such as from Spit Fire as previously discussed. Let's go and find it plug ins. Now a lot of people will just go, oh look instruments. I'm going to click that. That's cool. That'll take you to the instruments that Ableton gives you itself. Not my favorites, but each to his own. I'm going to always go to the plug ins. I prefer the instruments that I get for myself, a spit fire right here. Whatever I download, it has come here. Now I'm a big fan now. Labs Labs are the free ones, so I'm going to drag labs across and let go and then look. All of my free ones are right here. If you download another one, it'll populate this list. Labs are free and they're also grand. That sounds nice. Let's load it, click load. If you have a Midi instrument such as the Midi piano installed, you will be able to play this directly once you have the plug in loaded, which is cool. As long as you've got the piano plugged in and you've sorted it out in Ableton settings, then you can play it, but not me. I like to draw in my notes. We've got that loaded up again. What I just did was I took labs. I dragged it across, like I clicked down on my mouse. I've got my mouse clicked right now. And I dragged it and I let go. Now I know that it's there, because look, it's down here. I click away, and then I click back. Look, it's right there. If I make a Mi stem down here on the second row by once again clicking command shift M, or control shift M on a Windows, you'll see this one just opens up the music role right here, but nothing else. Whereas this one, the music role is back again. Oh, how do I know what my plug in is on here? It's just music role now. Oh, no, don't worry. Don't worry. You can still get it back down on the bottom right hand side. See labs. Click there it is now. If I want to change it, I don't want that piano anymore. No problem. See the spanner here? Is that a spanner? The tool. Click that. Here we are now, I want to change it. Autograph Grand. I click the arrow. Okay. What do I want? I can clear my selection because I had clicked a piano before. Now I can just scroll or I can click. I want to synth clear. Let's go and have a look. Scary strings, It's quite cool. I just double click that. It's quite cool. But yeah, I'm going to go back to my piano though. I prefer the grand. All right, cool. I go to the second stem. Nothing just miti. I go to the first one. Labs. There we are here as well, labs. But I want to get that piano roll back up so that I can start to make Music. I'm going to double click it, double click, and then here we are again. Let's start drawing in some music with our piano. 4. Our First Chord Progression: Time to paint with our paint brush. We're going to go to this first miti file again, and then here we are. Now I want to compose within a scale, obviously. Well, not obviously, but I do want that, I'm going to say that I want to compose within C major. Now let's say I'm not the most musical person and I want to make sure I'm always composing within C major, and I never want to second guess no problem within my piano role here. I'm going to click scale underneath clip scale, right here. I got my time signature, 44. I've got my BPM up here, 120, and my scale. I'm going to click that. Oh, it's major by default Now all of the blue, it's not always going to be blue, but it is in this case, it's always going to be a color. All of the blue is going to be major. And I can just click that down and change it. Minor. Look at all these options. Look at all these options. Minor blues, that's funky. See how cool? Let's stick to C major though. Nice and simple. Now, BPM is really cool. I can either change it by writing it in. Let's say I'm going to use my keyboard right now. 110, there we go. Or I can click and drag, drag down. I can do that. I can do tap. Tap means I'm going to click my mouse at a rate that I want, and it's going to figure out that BPM, Let's say I'm going to click my mouse right now, along with the beat of click, click, click, click, click. There we go. I was just clicking at 01:33 0.65 and that's what I put in. You can just click it and make it 44 over here. This is the metronome, by the way. You can click the metronome now, very useful. Sometimes I find the metronome useful whenever I'm playing, whenever I'm recording live with my Midi instrument, I'll put maybe 2 bars of a metronome, count in, then it'll count me in and then I can start that I find very useful. But if I'm composing not so much, Let's put this back to 120. I just type that in with my keyboard, C major is chosen. Let's get started. I want to start in the middle. We're going to put some chord down. If you're musical, you know what that means? If you're not musical, then basically we need three or more. Yes. Usually three or more can be two. If you don't, if you don't want anyone to know whether you're in major or minor, you can just do two. But three or more notes played at the same time. That will be in the background of all of our music. It keeps everything nicely in key. We can repeat those chords in what's called a chord progression, and it will just keep the song flowing, keep it moving, keep a general sound. Yeah, you can either make up a progression or you can use one of the many ones that are recycled by all artists. There are only a few chords that are used in almost every song. Anyway, to get started, I'm going to double click the C and then drag that note to the value that I want. Oh, I want to have a quarter note, A half note, a whole note. How do I know? Well, it's all just math here. We already know how long a measure is from earlier. This is one measure. I have filled the note by dragging it across the measure. I'm going to click my Spacebar to play it. There we go. We know by clicking down here that this is the sound of Labs, the grand, my free piano. Now this is a whole. Not this filled up the first measure entirely. And it's in 44. It's a whole. I want a half note here. It's a half, now it's a quarter note and so on. Just dragging across smaller, bigger, I want one whole note on. Look how when I move my mouse up and down on the left there, do you see it? It shows me what the note is in real time. Very useful. What's next? Of course, there we have our stock standard first chord in the C major scale. What a lovely sound. I want that to be a little bit richer. I'm going to put another C right down here. Much better. Cool. Let's do another. Now, You can just draw the next chord in of course, but I'm just going to copy. I'm going to click command C or control C for Windows. Click on the start at the second measure and command paste. Here they are. I'm going to drag it up a bit. Now, is that A and C major? No, because we have notes that do not sit on the color. This is gray and it's sharp, and we know that that's no good. I'm going to drag it up further. Drag it up to the. Going to drag this sharp down to B is fine. There we go. Second card, actually I not that. Let's say C, E, G, B, D. That's good, but I want to invert it. So I'm just going to drag the B to the lower B, D, down to the lower D. Do I want to leave that there? Possibly. See how it sounds. See inverting a chord is so easy when I can see exactly what notes are here at my piano, roll and just drag them as so. Yeah, I'm much happier with that. Okay, cool. That's two measures. I'm going to now, I can either highlight this and command shift M again or just like I did with the chord. Click this command. Click at the end of the measure command V. What's that copied and pasted? Now I just pull up the piano roll like this. And I'm just going to drag these up and down as I want. Now, one thing, which is a really handy feature, is right up here. Do you see these headphones? I'm going to click those headphones on now. Look what happens when I drag this. How useful is that now when I'm creating or moving, I don't have to, by the way, I just double click to that again and it made it disappear. Oh yeah. My mouse gets big whenever I shake it like that because the software is assuming I can't find it, which happens a lot, and it makes it big here. Anyway, let's make this A here. How useful is that? That's right here. This headphones, That was the last one. The last one was. Let's put a little higher on A. Do I want to invert it again? No, now, this inverted, I'm going to delete it because if this inverted around, I'm going to end up with a musical mess. I'm going to copy over a regular chord, then I'll drag it down. Maybe I'll invert this one too. But I'm not going to try to deal with an inverted, from an inverted position. I'm going to leave that to the geniuses. Maybe a C, then I drag it down. Drag it down. For my purposes, I'm going to turn this feature off because otherwise it'll keep interrupting me. But now that you know it's there, you know about it. The only trouble with a chord like that is it's beautiful, but it's too final. It makes it sound like the song is over. If you want to know about cadences, there are a lot of videos on Youtube that can teach you about that. But basically some chords sound like there's still more song to go. Some chords, so like the song is over. That was the song is o and to me, so I had to change it. All right, so let's put this down. There we go. Click here, so that press oh, actually when I press Space, it'll still start from the beginning. Actually, I would have to move the mouse here on the main timeline to change where it begins. When I press space, that's kind of a hard one. Let's hear it altogether. Oh, no, it's very final. Maybe inverting it's the problem. Maybe I shouldn't be doing that. Let's start again from our vanilla cord, and let's just bring it down a bit, maybe to B. Oh, no, I think we already use that cord. Do we use ABC? Why are they migrating over like that? Look at this, Can you see this? It's over in the wrong measure. Move Unbelievable. It should snap to a measure. Not in this case, man, 90% of composing is just playing ABCD. Yep, that sounds terrible. 90% of composing is just playing around and seeing what you like, what sounds good, what sounds decent, what sounds terrible. Oh, that's actually okay. It's very mysterious and we. All right, I'm going to what? I'm going to drag the inverted cord. Risky business. Hmm, Literally one more drag maybe, so that it's right below the other cord. Yeah, there we go. There we go. Oh my God. I think I dragged the cord in this measure. Oh, no, I dragged the cord in the wrong measure. Anyway, play with the chords as much as you want until you get a sound that you can live with. Goodness gracious. 5. Clarify What We've Learned: To recap, we got Ableton Live installed, and we pressed Tab to get over to the arrangement section. And we started arranging by creating our stems by pressing control shift M or command shift M depending on Windows or Mac. And creating our stems. Within those, we can use the piano, roll, double click, and drag across notes within the scale. We can choose what scale by pressing the Scale button we can put on our instruments by choosing them from either the Instruments menu if we're using the instruments that come with the DAW, or the plug ins menu, if we're choosing a plug in that we installed from the Internet, which is of course our third party software. Which we can get for free or we can buy if we want something a little bit higher end. Now we have put in a chord progression. Chords being multiple notes played over each other that is used in the background of all songs. Basically, we made ourselves a chord progression by clicking and dragging across and making the notes up and down the piano roll. We copied and pasted them. When we wanted to do things a bit quicker. We dragged notes around by looking at the note values. We created inverted chords by looking on the left and seeing C four and dragging it down to a C three. Moving, moving those notes around, we created inverted chords quite easily. Now we have ourselves a chord progression and we're going to mess with it a bit by using our first non instrument plug in, which is going to be called. We're going to get Val for free from the Internet onto our chord progression. We're going to be able to add reverb, echo and other distortion effects to give our chords some punch, some loveliness, some extra to make them stronger and make them stand out. Once we have chords that we've messed with and we've added this reverb to, then we can make a melody and add all kinds of things that we want to never in the history of the world are probably, you're going to hear a song that's just piano chords played exactly as they sound, undisturbed, unchanged. You've got to mess with your notes, you've got to, this is how we're going to do it, like the filter to a camera. We are going to reverb our notes in our chord progression using hala Google Vahala. Get it downloaded and get it onto your DAW. Let's get going. Messing with our notes. 6. Adding Effects: We've downloaded Vala. And who here it is? Yeah, Valala, super massive. The free one. There are other ones but this one's free just as before. Click and drag. There we go. Awesome. Now on the bottom left, we've got labs and Valhala. Now, at any time you can get out of it. Don't want that anymore, but oh, now I need it. Click that tool to bring it back up. But other things we can do is we can click over to the left, over here, and click that to turn it off. It's off. Whatever changes we've made to the track will be undone immediately, which is excellent. It's exactly what we want. Sometimes whenever we've messed with something, but we click it, turn it back on, or even better we can write. Click on it and delete and then it's gone. Drag it back on again. Let's go. All right, once all halla is dragged on, it will automatically out a reverb. Let's listen more of an echo. That's its default. Let's click down here. There's a lot you can do in reverbes and other things like that. Lot of presets. You don't have to use presets. You can do it all yourself. It makes a fun sound if you do it while it's playing. One thing I like to do occasionally is capture that sound as it's happening. You could do that. You can scream, record or just audio. Capture your computer, play it back. Just gather that sound itself, the sound of you changing the dials, it's quite beautiful, can be useful in some tracks. Anyway, I'll show you some of my favorite presets. Now there's a lot of options of sound effects and echoes, but my favorite is reverb. I love small brass blat. This one is great if you need something subtle that has a deep and rich sound, but you don't want it to hell and sounding ridiculous. I'm someone that makes a lot of low fi. This sound very old. Like a classic sound to it. I don't know, It's old world. You know what I mean? Retro coolor. Go see. I told you at the beginning, I don't remember what any of my plug ins are called until I look at them. Here is a plug in that is not free. Here's a fun lesson. Make sure you always stay signed in. You don't have to always buy your plug ins out, right? You can pay them off. A rent to own situation where you pay the plug in over time. You own it once you have finished paying for it. And if you ever stopped paying for it, it'll stop being useful until you've started paying for it again. But the program always checks whether or not it's active on the website. If the plug in software is not open on your computer, it won't work because it doesn't know if you've paid for it or not. You always need to make sure this is always open. So here it is. These are all the ones that I am paying like rent to own. It's great because it's $10 a month or something like that and you can use it and then one day they're paid off and then they're yours forever. I love that. I think, I think paying for software, just paying for it, and you have to keep paying for it forever is stupid. But if you can rent to own, why not? All right, so vinyl one is it's default. Let's listen to it now. See what I mean? Brass Blatt goes really well with this Retroclor sound VHS. Oh my God, it's perfect. See how messing with the notes with plug ins, even doing virtually nothing, just moving to a different preset can make all the difference in creating a beautiful sound. Honestly, it's pretty unbelievable how much you can do with so little, so little effort, really. Oh my God, so beautiful. If you're looking to make low fight, you really don't have to do much. Anyway, let's turn off retro coolor. I've put it on here twice. Very silly. And we're back to Valla Bras. Blade's a favorite in the medium section hold. I got a few favorites. Holder chords, quite great. Swelling synth is quite beautiful. Isn't that lovely? How it like builds through the note. Gorgeous. Large. I love sea beams. Listen to that blend. It's gorgeous. Then what is my all time favorite? And I would say the preset that made this plug in famous is a massive as stardust. That's the big one. So I'm going to click out of that and let you listen to a stardust. But I'll let you listen to that. I want you to hear how long a chords. I'm going to delete the second. Lessen this to half its length. Pull that one away. See, I didn't fully delete it, and let's see how long this cord will last for, before it kind of like runs out of steam. Why is it extra long? Oh, I didn't drink. Goodness gracious. I always forget about the lowest notes whenever I make these kinds of cords and let's go, those notes came back because I press control, so it's still going. This is really beautiful and perfect for those kind of like meditation tracks, something yogur, something like that. That's just noise that's too much. But notice that the first two chords really blended together quite well. It played the first one over the second one, it was quite a lovely blend, I guess because two of the notes are the same note, that really helped to keep a coherent. Quite lovely. It could be. It's very useful for a score or something like that. Anyway, I'm clicking down the bottom right hand here, turning it off. Oh, instant peace and quiet. Okay, so I'm going to put it back onto small brass blat. This is just a favorite. See, lovely from here. We can use our second Midi row two. Let's make ourselves a little melody. That would be cool. All right, let's try that. 7. Putting it All Together: We have ourselves a chord progression now to get ourselves a little melody. There is a trick that I like to do, which is to copy and paste the chord progression into our second stem over here. Then from here I'm going to put my instrument back in. I'm going to use labs again. Let's put the Gaelic voices. That's cool. Okay. Let's put the piano back on. What I'm going to do is from here, from our chord progression, I'm going to just move and delete and just swap around indiscriminately. I'm short, I'm lengthening, I'm just moving notes around, drag across, Nothing is wrong, nothing is bad. I'm just painting wildly from this wildness. A melody will reveal itself, it will show itself naturally. This is the play side of producing. Not everyone does it this way. Many people don't do it this way. Cool. From that you hear what you might like, just completely naturally. I find when I talk to people, a lot of producers hear the music in their heads and they sing to themselves in the shower. And they hear, oh, this is what I hear in the shower, this is what the Gods have given me. We're not all that way. I think that's quite lovely. It is completely accidental. I experimented and out of that experimentation idea is formed and I made changes based on those ideas. That's it. I would like to reduce the BPM. I think that would sound nicer, slower. So I'm going to copy that melody across and just change it a bit, just completely unfeeling. The best thing is I never have to worry about going outside of the key with this blue here. A key. Say you something, just send yuck. No need for that. See, I don't like that. I dragged it up like that. Just drag it all back down. I see. I just I just did this. I clicked down and I dragged this square and it highlighted it all, and then I dragged it. Couldn't you hear this in like kind of like a retro to video game? That's what I'm thinking. I'm going to drag it across. Lengthen this note out. Lengthen that out. Nothing's right. Nothing's wrong. It's just a feeling, Maybe. Yep, that's okay. Now, maybe I don't want the melody to be the same instrument as the chord. So I could change the melody instrument or the chord instrument. Uh, I don't know. What else do we have? Hand bells? Yeah, play plays, not working. Isn't that such a weird sound? My God, not bad. It's just strange how it's spatially different. That's what's getting me, I think. Oh, oh, look at all these Origins ones. Okay. So Origins are an amazing collection and the best thing is they're super cheap. And the best, best thing is that if you're a student, you get 50% off Spitfire Audio Plug ins. If you're a music student, get yourself these origins with the 50% discount. It's ten or $15 I believe they're cheap. Cheap and they sound really good. Here's Epic strings. Imagine ten or $15 and then you've got these strings to play with. Oh, look, you can change the reverb, the release of tightness. You've got all these different options quite lovely. So choir. Now it sounds like a Dr. who? Christmas special, which is by no means an insult. Alright. So, from here I'm going to give it just one last thing. Maybe I'll put the piano back on though. We've got my intimate grand piano, which is my favorite of the originals. It's just like the free piano, but it just sounds a little bit richer. And of course, you've got these extra settings, that's what you're really paying for. I'm going to come over here, right click, insert Audio track. And I'm going to drag in a drum sample from Patos. Cimatics is a excellent producer of samples. They release a lot of free ones. You can grab yourself some free ones. This is literally just a sound that's been pre made when I drag it in. Oh, by the way, this blue bar right over here is volume. I'm going to click it and drag down, because I'm just going to assume that this drum sample will be too loud. I can just drag it back up if I need to. I just clicked it and I dragged. Now it's going to change the BPM naturally, according to the one that's already set by me. By double clicking this, I can go over here to the left under Audio is Warp. Warp is yellow, which means it's turned on, it's being warped to my BPM. If I don't want that, I can click that off. Warp is going to trap you sooner or later because you're going to drag in songs and they're not going to be the BPM that you have set on the track, but the song that you dragged in is the whole point. And you want to be on that BPM, you'll need to turn warp off because otherwise it's going to sound terrible. But in this case, I want it, so I'm going to leave it on. It's an audio already made drum sample made by Sematics. You can get these totally free. Some are paid, some are free because it warps to my BPM. It sounds lovely and natural. There you go. Here we have a three stem beginning. Two of them are Y, one is a chord progression, one is a melody. The last one is a drum sample audio file that we dragged in. The three of them together, two made by one, not made by the three of them together are an original that can be the beginning of a full song. Listen to that. You can make that literally right now on day one of having your software as PZ. Just literally, just get started. You got this. 8. Until Next Time: There you go. It is as simple as that, to create your very first track. If you've done it along with me and you're already done, congratulations, how does it feel? If not, now you have what it takes to get started. Now this was a very rough overview. I hope that this was everything that you needed right in the beginning to just get that first track made. That's the big early challenge to just get it made. There's a lot of fear from people, like if I can just make a track, if I can just make something, then I'll feel better. This is it. Make this, this is your way of getting going. If you can make just these first few bars sound lovely and sound coherent, you've got this, you can easily do it. Just get started right now. Start with those chords. Get a knife progression going if you don't know still what to do about a chord progression. Just Google popular chord progressions and have a look at what they are. If you're confused by the results, like maybe it's like, oh, the best chord progression is 1426. And you think, what the heck does that mean? Go to my music theory course here on Skillshare. I've got that covered. I'll have be able to help you out with that. Thank you so much. Get this going. Make it and then let me listen to it. Tell me all about it. Link it here on Skillshare so that I can see what you've made. I would be so excited to have a look. Thank you so much for joining me. I hope you've had a blast. Please check out my other skillshare classes and see what else you can learn while you're here. Thank you again, and I hope you have a wonderful musical day. I hope to hear from you soon. Bye bye.