Transcripts
1. Introduction: [MUSIC] Have you ever
wondered how music producers write and record music? Well, it's time to make it be. [MUSIC] I'm Wes Singerman, and I'm a music
producer and guitarist, and my career has led
me to work and play alongside artists
such as Kehlani, Travis Barker, Party Favor, Anderson Paak, Kendrick
Lamar, and many others. In this class,
we'll be looking at guitar relating to
music production. We'll start off by discussing some basic recording equipment and learning how to use it, and then we'll work on
creating a guitar loop and building it out with
multiple layers and effects. Finally, we'll add a groove to it and structure it out
into an entire song. For this class, you will need a basic recording
interface, your guitar, with a guitar cable and a DAW, which is a digital audio
workstation such as GarageBand, Logic, Ableton, FL Studio. I will be using Ableton. By the end of this class, you should feel comfortable
recording your guitar and creating songs. Let's
get started. [MUSIC]
2. Getting Started: [MUSIC] Congratulations
on making it to class 5. You rock. If you've been with
me since class 1 or joined anytime in between, you've acquired some of
the building blocks of not only guitar
but music itself. Now it's time to put it
all together and take a look at guitar as it
relates to music production. For this, I'll be using Ableton, but any recording
software will work. You'll also need a
recording interface that connects to your computer, as well as the
quarter-inch cable and most importantly a vision.
Let's get started.
3. Setting up Your Interface: In order to record a
guitar on your computer, you're going to need something
called an interface. An interface is a device
that allows us to connect to the computer in order to
record live instruments. After opening your DAW, in my case, Ableton, open up your preferences
menu and set the audio input device as being whatever your
audio interfaces. I'm using a Universal
Audio Apollo set to Universal
Audio Thunderbolt. You should see
whatever the name of your audio interface is in
the menu section there. Also before you start, we want to set the
buffer size to about 256 just to make sure
that when we play the guitar, that the sound comes at the exact same time and we don't have what's called latency, which is when you play
and then there's a delay in the sound and it comes
a few seconds later. We definitely don't want
that when we're recording. Now your computer should
be ready to record. Let's open up an audio track and select the input that your
guitar is plugged into. Check that you're getting
the right amount of volume. Interfaces have
something called a preempt that allows you to boost the volume or lower
it so that you can achieve the optimal
volume for recording. Play as loud as
you're going to play. If the audio meter
is hitting the red, it's too loud and the
pre-amp should be turned down whereas if you're
barely getting any volume, you need to turn it up. It's as simple as that. Let's
check my volume real quick. [MUSIC] That's pretty quiet. I don't think it's
giving you enough volume so I'm going to turn
up the pre-amp here. Let's see what that sounds like. [MUSIC] This is a lot louder, but as you can see,
it's hitting the red. [MUSIC] Every time I
strum hard like that, it shouldn't be that loud so we got to turn it down
just a little bit and we should be right in that
nice pocket to record. Let's try one one more time. [MUSIC] That should be
perfect. It's time to record.
4. Creating a Loop: [MUSIC] Let's create
a guitar loop. I'm going to jam
out on some chords using the chords that we
learned from our key, in this case C major. I'm going to find something
that sounds good to my ears so I'm just going
to experiment a little bit. I think I want to start
with a minor chord, so let me try D minor. That's nice. That's nice too. I like that, and maybe I can change it
up for the second time around. That's nice. I actually really like that. In this case, I'm
using the key of C and I'm starting on my two
chord, which is a minor. In this case, I'm
doing a minor 7, D minor 7 and I'm going to
play one string at a time just to to get that nice
little rhythmic feel to it instead of just strumming, it gives us something different
to catch our attention. Then I'm going to slide
it up to E minor 7, which is our three chord. Then I'm going to go to
our four chord, F major 7. Again, I'm doing that
one string at a time, strumming down and then
we go back to E minor 7. Then I'm going to
repeat the phrase, but I'm going to do with
slightly different endings so I'm going to have
D minor 7 again, to an E minor 7 and
maybe this time I go to A minor 7 and a G major. The whole thing that I
played sound like this. [MUSIC] That sounds
great. Now that I have something I like on the dog, you can of set a specific
amount of bars to be looped. We'll start with probably
four or eight bars and I'm going to figure out
a tempo that feels good. Most DAWs have what's
called a tap button, where you can click in
the tempo that you like. You just tap, tap, tap, tap and it will set
the tempo for you automatically so I'm going to try that real
quick. We had that. I'm going to tap that into, 1, 2, 3, 4 so it's telling me that it's about
107 beats per minute. And the way that I'm going to
check to see if it's right, is I'm going to turn
on the metronome. Every DAW has a metronome. Ableton has one that's
right next to where I did my tap tempo and
we're going to listen. That sounds about right, [NOISE] I Iike that tempo. Now that we have the
tempo that we like, we're going to finally go
back to recording the guitar. I'm going to give myself
a four beat count which it's going to go 1, 2, 3, 4 and it's just going
to start recording. I'm going to hit this
recording button right at the top and it's
going to give me a one-bar count in and then I'm just going
to start trying to record to this
Click. Here we go. That's great. Now I have a guitar part that I liked
and it's ready to be looped.
5. Layering Sounds: [MUSIC] Now that we
have a nice loop going, let's try and build
it up a little more with some additional parts. For this, I'm still sticking to the key of C. I'm going to use my skills to find a nice melodic part that can fit over the top of this loop. Make sure you open up
a new audio track for this next part and set the input of your audio
track to be your guitar. I'm going to play
this loop again. I'm leaving my click
track on so that I have the right timing
and the right rhythm. I'm going to use my
scale to think of some good melodies that
can work over this [MUSIC] That sounds nice. I'm going
to go ahead and record that. When I hit the "Record"
button, it's going to give me another four counts
and then I start. Hitting the record button 2, 3, 4 and I made. [MUSIC] Great. That sounds great. Let's try adding
just one more thing. I'm going to open up another
audio track and again, makes sure that it's
set to my guitar. I'm going to play
the loop again, just to hear what we have. [MUSIC] It's sounding good. Let me think of something
that I could play here. [MUSIC] Maybe
something like this. [MUSIC] That sounds really cool. I'm actually going to go
ahead and record that. I'm going to hit the
"Record" button again, I got four counts in
and then it's off; 2, 3, 4. [MUSIC] Let's listen back
to what I just did. Nice, I like that. Now this is sounding much more full and less like
just a guitar loop. Next, we're going to go
into using some effects.
6. Experimenting with Plugin Effects: [MUSIC] In every doc,
there are things called plugins that we can use. Plugins are effects or programs
that do specific things. There are thousands of plugins made by different
companies that you can purchase but every doc comes with its own set of
plugins for you to use. For this example, I'll be using strictly the Ableton
audio effects. Since we have this loop, I can now experiment with adding different effects
onto the track and the great thing about
this is because I recorded the guitar
without any effects, I can keep changing and experimenting with
different combinations of effects without hurting or
changing the original take. You can add as many or as little effects
as you would like. There's no wrong way
to do this at all. Let's check it out.
I'm going to start with this original
guitar that I did. Now, I'm going to hit this
little S button here, which is a solo button. That means that it's
only going to play the one guitar and nothing
else that I've done. I have this nice
guitar we can take the click off for now since
we've already recorded. In Ableton's menu there's a set of effects, says Audio Effects. We can come here, we
have all kinds of delays, overdrives, fuzzies, EQs, filters, modulation stuff. Why don't I try pulling
up the modulation menu? Let me see. I think putting a chorus
or a phase around this might make it sound a
little more interesting. I'm going to grab the
chorus ensemble from the plugins menu and I'm just going to drop it
right onto the track. Now, already you can hear it's making a huge
difference in the sound. It starts to widen out. We got a little bit of movement. It almost sounds watery. Each plugin has its own set
of controls that we can use to control how the
effect is behaving. With the chorus, I'm going
to turn the amount knob, which is really going to get
it to sound extra watery. Now I think I like
the way that sounds, but I want a little bit
of reverb on it too. I'm going to go to
this menu that says reverb and I'm going to pull up just a reverb plugin and I'm going to add
that right at the end. Now, this is nice. We're
getting some reverb. On the reverb, I'm
going to increase the decay time so that the
reverb is a little longer, it stretches out a
little bit more. That sounded really nice. I like the way this
reverb sounds, but it is a little bit strong. I'm going to take where it says "Dry/wet" and I'm
going to turn it down. When we're all the way
down, meaning we're dry, the effect is not in play at all and when I'm
100 percent wet, that means that I can't hear
any of the original signal. It's only going to
be the new signal that's being processed
through the river. I don't want it all the way wet. I don't want it all the way dry. Let's try about 30 percent. Now that already
sounds so much better. We're getting all
kinds of new depth, all kinds of new sounds from
just a couple of plugins. I'm going to keep
going with this. Instead of messing
with this guitar, let's try this second
one that I recorded. I'm going to take
this off of solo, and I'm now going to solo the second guitar that I recorded. As you can see, this
sounds plane on its own. It's needing a lot
of effects I'm thinking maybe a
little bit of a delay, which is like an echo. I'm going to take a delay plugin then I'm going to drop it
on the second track there. Already this is so much cooler. I don't like the way the
delay is repeating though. I wanted to repeat on the beat. I'm going to set it up
specifically to repeat on eighth notes so that it matches up a little
bit more with our click. I'm going to put the click
back in so you can hear it. That sounds really nice. Again, this is just a little
bit too wet for my taste. I'm going to take the
dry/wet knob that we have and I'm going to turn it
just down a little bit more, maybe it began about
35 percent or so. Now that sounds really cool. With this, as you can see, I have an EQ that
I pulled up here. If you're looking at
the frequency response, this is how low the
tone that you're getting is going all the way to how high the tone that
you're getting is. I'm going to take some
of this low-end out. I'm going to take
this little thing right here and I'm
going to drag it up and this is going to cut out some of those low frequencies
that we don't really need for
this guitar part. Now, I also like
this guitar part, but I don't like that it's
just right in the center. I'm going to put something
called an auto-pan on it. When we pan something, that means we're moving
it left or right in your speakers so that when you listen to it on
headphones or speakers, you're hearing something over to the right or you're
hearing something over to the left like this. Here's all the way to the right, and here's all the
way to the left. I wanted to move between
the right and left. I wanted to go back and forth. We have something on
here called an auto pan, which is going to do
all the work for me. All I do is just drop the
auto pan on and I turn the amount up and it's
going to start moving it to the left and right,
all on its own. Now, this sounds great. I'm
liking the way this sounds, but I think it also needs
a little bit of reverb. I'm going to take another reverb and I'm just going to drop
it onto the end here. I only want a little bit so I'm going to turn
the dry/wet pretty much all the way down to
maybe about 10 percent. I just wanted to
add a little bit of extra depth to the sound. Now, this is making
a huge difference already in the way
that this sounds. Let's try out that third
guitar point that I recorded. Let's hear the way it sounds. I'll take the click
off again. Again, we're just playing clean guitar. It doesn't sound
too great on its own but I think we
can spice this up. I'm going to go back to
my modulation effects and I'm going to try
a phaser this time. I'm going to drop a phaser
onto this third guitar part and it gets this nice
rear sound to it. [LAUGHTER] I don't know
how to really describe it, but it's a very,
very cool sound. I'm going to turn the
amount just a little bit down and I'm really liking the way that
that's affecting this. Let's put a little bit of
overdrive or something to juice this up a little bit. I'm going to pull up
an overdrive plugin and I'm going to drop
that onto the end here. As you can tell, that's
probably a little too aggressive for
where this loop is at. I'm going to take
the drive amount down so that it's not so harsh. Again, I'm going to
pull the dry/wet down a little bit maybe about 22 percent or 20 percent and we just get a little bit
more edge from it. I ended up leaving it at 24
percent. But this is nice. We got just a little
bit more bite, a little bit of movement
from that phaser, and then all of these things together are hopefully going to mix really well.
Let's listen. This sounds so much
better than before. We have all kinds
of movement now. We have all kinds
of different things that are affecting the chords differently and it's really blending in a lot better
than it was before. The whole point of this is that you can take any track that you record and you can add as many effects as you want
in any order that you want. Essentially, you
can customize and sculpt your own tone.
Let's get sculpting.
7. Exploring Sends and Returns: Another way to apply effects in your DAW is by using
send and return tracks. A return track is a track
that contains audio effects, and the output of any
track in your project can be sent through it
using send controls. This way, you can apply
a common effect across multiple tracks
without having to put the effect on each
individual track. This will save you a
lot of CPU power as every new plugin that you put on takes more and
more of your CPU. It also allows you to have consistent tone across
multiple tracks. Typically, I will use sends
for reverbs and delay. But you can use any effect or any combination of
effects as a return. Again, there are no rules. Let me show you how I do it. On Ableton, there's
a menu that says Create and you can basically click on that and say
create a return track, which creates down here. I've already done
this ahead of time. I created two, one of
them I put reverb on it, and the other one,
I put a delay. Let's mess with this
reverb a little bit. I'm going to want a
longer reverb time. Then I might turn the size of the reverb room a
little bit down. I know I already put reverb on a couple of the
tracks, but for now, I'm going to delete those so that I can show you
how I use the sense. I'm deleting this reverb. I'm deleting this
other reverb here. Underneath the volume, there's a couple of
these little knobs that you can turn up to push some of that output
into that return track. I'm going to do that with
this first initial guitar and I'll show you
what it sounds like. I'm going to start with it
all the way down at zero. I'm going to play this again. Still has that chorus on there, but there's no reverb right now. As I take this ascend and
push it all the way up, you're going to hear how it's getting slightly more and more effected with this reverb until when I push
it all the way up, it's completely
soaked in reverb. This is probably too much. I'm going to dial it
back down until I get to a spot that I
think is the sweet spot. Let's see. Somewhere
around there sounds great. Still hearing the reverb. I also wanted to add reverb on some of these other tracks. I just literally do the exact same thing
with these other tracks. I can take this guitar and I can start to move some of
this ascend up, as well. Get it nice and verb down. That sounds great. I'm going to put a little bit
of extra verb on this one. That's amazing. Now, this third one here. Same thing. I'm going to put not as much on this last take here. The great thing about this
is I only need one reverb. Once I put it on
that return track, I can then go to each
individual track that I've recorded and choose how much or how little I want to push into that reverb. Because it's the same reverb, we get a consistent tone across all of the tracks that
we're using it for. Try using sends and returns
in your own production. Next up, we're going to
get into re-sampling.
8. Resampling: [MUSIC] Something else that
I love to do is re-sampling. This is when I take
the loop that I have and I decide to chop
up pieces of it like a sample or manipulate it in some way that's different
from the original. There are many ways to do this, but I'll show you the way
that I like to do it. On Ableton, you can set up an audio track and
set it to re-sample, which means it's going to record everything that's
happening in your project, but only as a
single audio track. Let's do that now. I'm going
to open a new audio track, and then the input, right
now it says external in. But when I click this menu, there's an option
here for re-sampling. When I click re-sampling, it's going to end up recording every single thing
that I have going on, which at the moment is just
these three guitar tracks put together. Let's
try that now. I'm going to hit the
record button and it's just going to do
all the work for me. [MUSIC] You can see
in the audio form that it's coming in a
little bit differently. It's coming in as a stereo track and it's because it's recording
everything that we have, including all of the effects. Now we can listen back. Before I do this,
I'm going to mute the other guitar tracks
that were already playing and I'm only going to
listen to the new sample. Just to be extra careful, I'm going to retitle this
sample. Let's listen back. [MUSIC] Perfect, it
did its job exactly. Now that we have our loop as a single track with all
the effects already on it, let's try experimenting with changing the pitch a little bit. If I double-click on
this track right here, it pulls up with this cool menu. One of the buttons says pitch. If I just move this up and down, it's going to change the
pitch by half-steps. Each plus 1 plus 2 is
another half-step. If I press play, I'll
show you what that does. We can either use our
mouse to do this or I can use the arrow keys to
do it one at a time, which is what I'm
going to do now. I'm going to pitch it
up and we're going to see what it sounds like. [MUSIC] This is now
up a four-step. This sounds really nice. For fun, let's push
it a little bit more. I'm going to go up
to five half steps. [MUSIC] That's also very cool. Not sure what I like here. Let's try going down. I'm back to the original here. Let's see what it sounds
like when I pitch it down. Now this is down
three half steps. It's beautiful. It
sounds pretty dark. I can't tell whether I like
the down or the up better. Let's keep going down a little bit, see
what it sounds like. [MUSIC] That's cool, but I think I liked it when it was a little bit higher up, so I'm just going to push
it back to minus three. That sounded really nice to me. We can also mess with the
tempo a little bit too. From here, I know we had
it originally 107 BPM. But while this is playing, I'm going to see if I can
maybe slow it down or speed it up and see if it sounds any better that
way. Let's try it. [MUSIC] I'm going to go
up to where my tempo is, and then I'm just going to
use my mouse to pull it down. We're going to bring
it down and down, so here's now 96
BPM, much slower. That's cool. Wonder what it
sounds like when it's faster. [MUSIC] This is now 127 BPM. That's nice too. Maybe I'll find a sweet spot just a little bit
slower than this. This is 124 BPM now. That sounds pretty nice. Already this is taking
on a whole new life. I'm going to take it one step further and chop
up this loop into smaller pieces and then play out those pieces on my
computer keyboard. Let's check out what
that looks like. Before I do anything, I'm going to right-click
where my track is and it says sample then I'm going
to freeze this track. What this is going to
do is it's going to lock every change
that I've made into place and prevent anything bad from happening before
I decide to chop this, and then I'm going to
right-click one more time and say flattened track. That's going to solidify all of the changes
that I may have made, whether it be volume or effects changes or
anything like that. When I right-click
on the audio track, there's an option here that
says slice to new MIDI track. When I click that, it's giving me
some menu options. I'm going to choose
half-note because I want to slice this
up into half-notes. Every two beats is
what a half note is. We're going to go 1, 2, then 3, 4 is our next chop, then 1, 2, 3, 4. Then for the slicing preset, I liked the built-in preset, but I'm going to do the
built-in zero velocity preset because I wanted
to have zero velocity, which means every
time I hit a button, it's going to play the sample
at the exact same volume. If I do that and click Okay, it's going to do
all the work for me and chop it up onto
a little drum pad. You can trigger the samples here with a MIDI keyboard
or any MIDI device. But for now, I'm
just going to use my computer keyboard and we're going to see
what that sounds like. Starting here on
the lowest sample, [MUSIC] that's a little
chop right there. Then as I move up the
keys, that's another chop. This is another chop. [MUSIC] We can start
messing with this. We can start going
pretty fast or slow or doing any type of new thing with this and see how that sounds. Let me try experimenting a little bit. We're
going to have [MUSIC], I like that. [MUSIC]
I'm triggering little bits of this sample. Now already this is giving
me a new template like 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2. Before I move any further, I'm going to mute
the original sample, the one that I
re-sampled already and I'm going to tap in the
new tempo that I'm hearing. I'm hearing it 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4. It's saying it's about
127 beats per minute. Maybe 128 is where
I'll leave it at. Now we're still going to
use that eight-bar loop, and I'm only going to use
the keyboard to trigger these new samples and replay
my sample into a new piece. Let's try it, four counts in 1, 2, 3, 4 then. [MUSIC] Now that was nice. I'm going to try recording this new sample using all
the chops that I did. Make sure your click is on, and we're going to get
a nice four-beat count in and we're going to try
and run it for eight bars. Let's do it, 1, 2, 3, 4. [MUSIC] That was really nice. Let's listen back to what I did. [MUSIC] Now I like this, but if you can hear
it with the click, not everything that I played is really accurately in time. What we're going to do is
we're going to do something called quantizing. Quantizing is when you
take MIDI notes and you snap them into the grid so that they're
perfectly in time. I'm going to double-click on
the MIDI notes that I did, and then if I
right-click on this, it's going to say quantize. If I just click Quantize, it's going to automatically
snap these to the grid so that they're
perfectly in time. When I listen back to the click, it should be perfect. Let's hear it.
[MUSIC] That's nice. [MUSIC] Now this is starting
to sound like a beet. In the next lesson,
we're going to learn how to put a groove on top of this.
9. Adding a Groove: [MUSIC] So now we've recorded
a loop, layered it up, added effects, and
now we've chopped it up so it sounds way
different than the original. Let's get a groove
going on all this. All docks have their own sets of drum sounds
that you can find. But there are also amazing
resource websites like Splice that allow you to access hundreds of
thousands of sounds, including drum sounds,
loops, and samples. Typically in music, we
can put a snare drum, a rim shot snap, or a clap on the second and
fourth beat of a measure. So if I have
something like this, [MUSIC] we have this quick beat. I'm going to put 1, 2, 3, 4; 1, 2, 3, 4; 1, 2, 3, 4. That's typically
where that goes. In R&B and trap music, the groove is what
we call half-time, where the snare or the
snap or whatever you use will hit on Beat 3 instead
of on Beat 2 and 4. So instead of this [MUSIC] 1, 2, 3, 4; 1, 2, 3, we have this 1, 2, 3, 4; 1, 2,3, 4; 1, 2, 3, 4. We'll use a snap, 2, 3, 4. That sounds good. That already sounds like
a Beat 2. There we go. Figure out what groove
is sounding best for your production and
let's go for it. I'm going to go ahead
and add a snap on mine. I'm going to go through
a couple of sounds. I really liked the
sound of that snap. I'm going to add, I'm just going to
actually just drop the audio sample of the snap just directly
into the session. When I do that, it
automatically creates an audio track for me
and I'm going to make sure I see the beat margins
at the top where it says 1, 1.2, 1.3, each one of those are beats. So I want to make sure
that my snap is on Beat 3. Then I'm going to
highlight the entire bar, and I'm going to
copy or duplicate this to each bar of my loop. So we have eight bars now with the snap on B3 of everyone. I'm going to go ahead and
title my track snap so that I don't get confused as to what this
is, and let's hear it. [MUSIC] Now the snap is great, it's a little loud. So I'm going to take
the volume down. I might add a little bit of that reverb from the sound
that we did earlier. Let's try it.
That's really nice. That reverb is sounding great. Now this is starting to
feel like a real song. Got some movement in there, it's got some groove,
but it's still not done. I'm going to go ahead
and add a kick drum and maybe a hi-hat or two, maybe some a little
bit of percussion. See what we can get it to sound
like. Let's check it out. I'm going to keep this
looping for right now. [MUSIC] I'm going
to take the click off because we already got this nice little sense of
where the group is at. I'm just going to find the
kick drum that I like. I like that one. I'm
going to take that, I'm just going to drag
it into my session. I'm going to start to
copy and paste this. I'm going to use my commands. It's Command C for copy
and Command V for paste. So already we got a
little bit of nice, but the kick is too loud. I'm going to turn the kick down. Let's see what happens. We have [inaudible] I
like that. That's cool. I like that. Let's listen. [MUSIC] That's really nice. I like what I did
those first four bars. I'm just going to highlight the first four bars that I did, and I'm going to Command
D, which is duplicate. I could also right-click
and select Duplicate. But it's very important to
eventually start to learn the shortcuts on
your dock so that you can get all speed and you
don't have to worry about constantly clicking and going into menus and stuff like that. You want the flow to continue. I have now a kick and a snap. Let's try adding a high hat. [MUSIC] Like the way
that hi-hat sound did. This kick is still
a little too loud. I'm going to pull it
down just a little bit with the volume. Now we have a high hat. And I'm just going to start copy pasting some of the
high hat stuff on here. That's also too loud. So I'm
going to turn that down. I wanted like,
ta-ta-ta-ta. That's nice. I like that little
two bars that I did. So I copied the two bars and I just duplicated into
the whole thing. Already we have three
drum sounds in there. Sounds like a finished
beat already. This is great. We're
making a lot of progress. Let's try and add
like a bass sound. So in R&B, hip-hop,
and trap music, we use something called an 808, which is essentially a
really boomy sounding bass. Originally this came from a drum machine that
was called the TR-808. And every time they kick
it, it will go [inaudible]. So now we use sounds like that to actually do our bass parts. I'm going to use an
808 to try and create a nice baseline for
the track that we have. Let's check it out. I'm going to press play again
so that we hear what I did. [MUSIC] Like this. Let's find a nice base. That's a nice one. Really liked the way that sounds,
really deep. So in every door there's
something called a sampler. Typically with a
sampler we can take a single individual
sound, like an 808, we can drop it in, and we can actually use our keyboard to play different notes with
that one individual sound. Unable to end the sampler that I like to use is
actually called simpler. We can just open
one of those up. If I drop it into the session, it'll just automatically
open it up. I'm going to go back to the
808 that I really liked, and I'm just going
to drop it in. There we go. Now if I play on my keyboard, [LAUGHTER]
it's very low. I'm going to push this
up a couple of octaves. If I play different notes. So we have now an
opportunity to try and find the baseline
that we want to do and be able to play it out. Let me press "Play" again and
we can see where we're at. [MUSIC] That's nice.
So we just hit. I liked that 808 sound, but I don't like how it cuts off immediately right after
I lift up my finger. I'm going to go here to
where it says attack, decay, sustain, and
release on the bottom. I'm going to increase
the release, which is going to
make it so that after I lift my finger up, the sound is going to
continue on its own. Let's try this one more
time. So as I lift up, you can hear how it's
a little bit longer. I'm going to still
increase it because I want it to be even
longer than that. That's nice. That's very
nice. I like where we're at. Let's see if we can
record this baseline in. I'm going to press
my record button. It's going to give
me four counts. I'm just going to try using my little computer keyboard to get some nice baselines in here. Going to get four counts in. Let's see how it goes. [MUSIC] That was
great I think [LAUGHTER]. Let's quantize this. If I double-click on the
thing that I just recorded, the baseline, you can see
it's pretty on the grid. I did a pretty good job. But if I want it to
be even more precise, I'm going to right-click and I'm going to select Quantize. Again, this is going to snap everything to the grid so that everything is
perfectly in time with the drums that I've already
done and with the sample. Let's listen back now
that it's quantized. [MUSIC] Very nice. I'm just adjusting the
timing a tiny bit more. Let's try it one more time. [MUSIC] I like the
way this sounds. So right now, this is
just an eight bar loop, even with all the drums and even now that it's
sounding like a real beat, it's still not a full song. In the next lesson, we're going to learn
how to structure and finish out a song.
10. Structuring and Finishing a Song: [MUSIC] We're almost
done creating our beat. Time to take all the parts that we have and structure
out a song. Typically, songs are broken
up into parts like verse, pre-chorus, chorus, bridge, etc. I'm going to create a little
intro using our sample. Then when the drums come in, I'm thinking that that's
probably going to be the verse. Let's figure it out. I still have these eight bar
from our original sample and I'm actually just
going to take this and duplicate it a bunch of times. I'm going to make it so
that it's 32 bar for now. Now for the first four bars, that's what I want as my intro. I'm going to take the
drums that I have here. I'm going to
highlight all of them and I'm just going
to delete them for now and just let the sample play by itself
for the beginning. When those drums hit, that
should be the beginning of the singing part
or the rapping part, or whoever is going
to be coming on the track. Let's listen. [MUSIC] I like this and the
drums should hit right here. [MUSIC] That's nice, but I also don't want to
give everything up at front. I'm actually going to mute
the bass for the verse part. I'm going to mute the kick as well for the very
beginning of the verse. I'm going to actually mute for eight bar so that we only have the hi-hat and the snap that's
happening right on Bar 5. From here to here, it's
only going to be the snap, the hi-hat, and our
original sample. Let's listen to what
that sounds like. We have our intro and then
when it goes into the verse, we don't want to
give too much away. I'm just going to get the
hi-hat in there and the snap. That's really nice
and it's super open for an artist to
sing on top of it, or a rapper to rap on it or whatever we're
going to have on this. Then after the end
of this eight bars, we can bring in
the kick and that eight away. That's nice. This could be maybe
a second half of a verse or something
along those lines. Then we got to do
something right here. It feels like something needs to happen right there differently. Typically, in music we have something called a pre-chorus, which is a little
broken down section or something different
that happens right before the big hook. I'm actually going to
take all of the drums out and I'm going to go back
to our original sample. What I'm even going
to do is go back to the very original
guitar part that I recorded and see what
that sounds like. I'm going to mute the
chopped up sample that we did and instead, I'm going to unmute this very first original
guitar riff that I had. When we listen to it,
it's probably going to be that original pitch
that we had because we started to pitch
things around and do all new stuff with
that new sample. But I'm going back to
where we had this guitar. [MUSIC] This is much higher,
but what I had done was I had pitched it down minus 3. I'm going to highlight
all of these, double-click on this and
I'm going to go back to this pitch and minus it
down three so that it matches with the
rest of the song. Now that pre-chorus doesn't come in until right about here. I'm going to slide that
here and I can just delete the rest of this for
now because I don't actually need any
of these anymore. Maybe I'll do the
same thing with one of these other guitar parts, maybe the second guitar
part as well that I did. Let's listen to that. I'm going to take that I'm going to pitch
that down three as well, so it matches with our sample and I'm going to bring this
over for our pre-chorus. I'll delete the rest
of these as well. We can get rid of
this re-sampled track for now and let's just listen
to what this sounds like. The track is going to build up a little bit and
then it's going to break down for our pre-chorus
and for the pre-chorus, it's going to sound a little
bit new and different. Let me start halfway through the verse and then
we're going to listen to how it sounds leading
into this new pre-chorus. [MUSIC] This is sounding good. After this next round through, it's going to be
the pre-chorus or the drums are going to drop out. We're going to have our
new guitar parts or our original guitar parts
coming in as a new thing. That sounds great. But from here we need to go
into a new course. When it comes back in, I want something there to build
just a little bit. Because I feel right now it's the same energy level
that we had for our original versus and we really want something
that's going to sound a little bit
more built out. I think what this is missing
is some percussion loop or something to bring a little bit more energy for the chorus. What I'm going to do
is I'm going to search for my percussion loops, I'm going to search
the tempo that I have. I have 128 BPM, so I'm going to type in 128 at the search bar that's at the top of the screen here and this is going to pull up
everything that I have that is 128 beats per minute. Now I can find something, hopefully that will work. Let's see what this sounds like. That's aggressive,
but I think if I use some effects
to tame it down, it's actually going
to sound really cool. I'm going to take this drum loop and I'm going to drop it in, in my session so that it's right below all of the other drums
that I've already done here. I'm going to extend
it out so that's the length of our chorus. Now, I already know
that this drum sound is going to be way too loud. Right ahead of time, I'm just
going to pull this back. I'm going to probably lower
it about 10 decibels or so. Then I'm going to use some of that reverb return track that we had and
I'm going to send a little bit in there so that
it gets a little spicier sounding and let's hear
what this sounds like. It still might be too
loud, but let's check. [MUSIC] It's a little too loud still and I also put a little too
much reverb on it. I'm going to take
down the reverb a little bit and I'm
going to pull down the volume even more to probably about
minus 18, minus 20. I just want it to
be a little texture in the background to just add some extra grid and spice to the current drum loop that
I already had in there. Let's listen one more time. [MUSIC] Now, that's great, but there's some high
pitch sound that's in that drum loop that I'm
not really too fond of. What I'm actually going to do is I'm going to go back into my audio effects and I'm
going to find a filter. Now a filter is basically just a pretty hardcore
equalizer that you can use to take out
a bunch of high-end or take out a bunch of
low-end or even both. With this, I just
dropped a filter onto that drum track and let's just listen to only the
drum track for a second. [MUSIC] This is a high pitch sounds that
are a little jotting. As I move this filter down, you're going to hear
how it take some of those sounds and it just
darkens them a little bit. Now that's great. I'm actually going to take my EQ that I have here as well and I'm going to remove a little bit
of the low end as well. Let's listen one more time. [MUSIC] If you look on the EQ, every time that
beeping sound happens, you can see this one
little frequency just going really strong. I'm actually going to take
one of these markers. I'm going to push it
up just so that I can make sure that's the same spot that I'm
trying to get rid of and instead I'm just
going to pull it down. As I pull that down, it's
going to start to quiet and calm that frequency
a little bit. Let's listen one more time, make sure that it's
the way we like it. [MUSIC] That's so much better. Now that I've done
that I could probably move the volume back
up just a little bit. Maybe push it back
up to maybe 18 or minus 17 decibels.
Let's listen. [MUSIC] I could even turn it
up just a little bit more. That's pretty nice. I like that. We got a little groove,
it's pretty subtle. Here's what we have so far. We have an intro [MUSIC] and
the intro is really nice, we have drums coming
in here for the verse. Just that nice hi-hat and snap. You can already hear somebody, imagine your favorite
artist singing on this. Here we got the bass and
the kick drum coming in. All that low-end comes in all
at once. It's really nice. Here we're going to be
leading into the pre-chorus. Everything strips back. We're putting another
section in here. Get a little moment
of peace before the chorus comes back in
and then we got the course. It's going to hit them a little
harder than the verse is. There it is, this
is a nice chorus. We structured out our song. We have the verse, we have the pre-chorus, and we have the chorus. I'm actually going
to go through now, I'm going to highlight the
entire song that we have. We have from the verse going all the way to
the end of the hook, I'm going to leave
the intro out. But from the verse all
the way to the end of the hook I'm going to
highlight every track, every part of this and then
I'm just going to Command D, which is also known
as duplicating. I'm going to duplicate this a second time through because
after the first chorus, we're going to want to go
back to the verse and then back to the pre-chorus and then do another chorus at the end. Typically, the second chorus is twice as long as the first. I'll go here to where the
second chorus happens. I'm going to highlight this and then I'm going
to Command D that one more time so that we have a doubled chorus where
the length is double. Now if we listen, we have this intro.[MUSIC] We
have the nice verse that comes in, hi-hats now. This is really nice. Then second half
of the verse here. Then after this, we're
leading into the pre-chorus. We have that new section
and then pre-chorus. Got this nice little
moment of peace. Then we're going to hit
them hard with the chorus. Here goes chorus 1, 2, 3, 4 and then chorus. Nice, I like the way
this is sounding. After we do one of
these choruses, we're going back to the verse. This time it's second verse. Let's make sure that
it sounds clean verse. You see how by removing we only have a few
tracks that are in this, but by taking away things, putting them back, trying to change things
up a little bit, every few bars are going to
sound a little bit different. It sounds like we're building. It sounds like we're removing, taking away things and it really helps us
structure our song out. If you really want to
go super in-depth, what we can do now that we have the song structure
is we can go back and actually re-record more guitar parts, more synth parts. You can add certain effects. There's things like risers that go into the next sections. There's so many things
that you can do to really make your song sparkle and to totally finish it out. But for right now, we have this nice beautiful
song structure. It's two minutes and 30 seconds, and it sounds like it's ready
for an artist to hop on it.
11. Final Thoughts: [MUSIC] What a
vibe. We've created a loop, layered our sounds, added some effects,
chopped it up, added a groove, and
gave it some structure, and now we have a song. Now, it's time for you to
give it a try on your own. You guessed it, your
class assignment is to incorporate
what you've learned into your very own song and submit it in the
project gallery. This is where our
journey together ends, but it's really just the
start of your journey. It's been an honor
teaching you and I can't wait to see what
music you'll make. I'm West Singerman, and
I'm out. Thank you.