How To Produce Music - From Recording To Release.

1. Introduction: Producing music is one of the most creative, exciting, and fun things I've ever been a part of. This class will teach you how to produce music from your home. My name is Andrew Williamson, I'm an artist, producer, multi instrumentalist, and I've been working in the music industry for the past decades. I now have my own production studio here. And in the studio is where I'll be teaching the class. We will start with an overview of how records are produced and released. I'll then delve deep into the practical world, where I'll teach you how to record your own music, how to mix it, how to master it, and how to release it. I'll cover equipment used by some of the biggest studios in the world. Right through to the essential and affordable equipment you may need to start your own home production seb. All the audio that will be using throughout this class is going to be available for you to download so you can follow along step by step at home. There will also be a class project that I'm very excited about. That's because you are going to be producing your very own piece of music. That may seem like a daunting task, but do not worry. I'll be teaching you everything you need to know to produce your very first song. You do not need to be a musician to take this class. We have all the tools to enable you to create great music using samples or virtual instruments. If you are a musician, you are of course, welcome to incorporate those talents into your production. Whether you're an artist looking to produce your first song to release on Spotify, or you're simply a music fan curious to peek behind the curtain and learn how your favorite music is produced. This course is for you. By the end of this class, you'll have all the skills you need to create music. Start building your own home studio, or move on to more advanced learning. Thank you for joining me here, and if you're excited to create some music, let's get started. I cannot wait to hear what you can create. 2. Class Project: We have a class project, which is possibly what I'm most excited about. That's because you are going to produce your very own song from start to finish. That may seem scary, but do not worry. This class is going to teach you everything you need to know. The song needs to be a minimum of 2 minutes long and have four elements. This could be four instruments or four key sounds you feel are essential to your song. These sounds can be real recordings. You've made yourself virtual instruments or made using the samples I've provided. It can be as complex or as simple as you want, but it must be edited, mixed, mastered, and uploaded to Skillshare. I'll be giving feedback on all your creations and any tips I feel will help you on your production journey. E 3. Studio Tour: Welcome to the class and thank you so much for joining me here. Before we dive into the world of production, let's have a quick tour of my studio so you can get a feel for your virtual classroom. My studio follows a very traditional layout with two sections. A control room, where we are right now, and a live room that we'll look at shortly. In essence, the control room is our recording and mixing space, and the live room is our performance space. If we were recording a band, we'd have them set up in the live room in front of microphones. That signal will be transferred through here. I could record and capture it these days, it doesn't need to be as black or white as that. I often record things in the control room. Just for convenience, if I wanted to record my own vocal, I can simply set up a microphone beside me here. Mute my speakers, and I'm good to go with all the controls within my reach. Let's take a look at the studio then. Here in the control room, the walls are all acoustically treated. The sound I hear whilst I'm recording and mixing is as accurate as possible. We have a large mixing console here for those of you unfamiliar with how mixing desk work do not be put off by so many buttons and switches. It's really much simpler than it looks. We also have our main speaker set up and sub underneath. As well as this, we have digital converters, satellites for processing my UD plug ins, some Nave preamps and EQs some now. Minu 87 microphones, guitars, keyboards, lots of cables, headphones and other bits and pieces. Above us we have a steel frame for hanging lighting equipment for any filming I'm doing, such as this class. Behind the camera there is a window into the live room so I can interact with artists or have a look at any equipment I've set up. Right, let's quick check at the live room. Welcome to the live room. The walls in here may look normal, but they're actually not. They're what we call floating. They hang on thousands of springs, so the sound hits the walls, the walls vibrate and stop the sound escaping. The end effect is the room sounds nice to perform in, and it's soundproof. Acoustics play a large part in how recording sounds. You'll probably experience the effects of large reverbs when walking down a stairwell, standing in a cave, or even in a tiled bathroom in here. It's all about being in control of how the room sounds. You've probably noticed that I've got movable wall sections behind me called gobos. They are essentially small walls filled with special acoustic sound absorbent insulation. This means if I wanted to quiet down the drum sound, for example, with a less natural reverb, I can move these walls closer to the drums to dead the sound. We also have lots of instruments in here such as drums, bass guitars, as well as amplifiers, microphones, stands, and more. How do the two rooms work? These stage boxes transfer the audio from the live room through to the recording equipment in the control room. If I wanted to record the bass drum, I'd take an appropriate microphone. Put it in front of the bas drum, plug it into channel one in the stage box. And that would take the signal via cables in the wall for the first channel in the mixing desk in the control room. The first channel on the mixing desk is connected to the first channel on the computer. Simple. Really. 4. The Process as a Whole: Before we start on our first song, we're going to look at each process involved in music production. It can seem quite confusing with so many different stages, as well as this involvement from so many different parties, such as artists, songwriters, record labels, recording studios, recording engineers, mixing engineers, and master engineers, just to name a few. It can leave people feeling lost as to where to begin. The great thing is that thanks to new technology, there are no longer the same barriers to producing music that there used to be times gone by. You wouldn't be able to record or produce music without huge sums of money or the backing of the industry. Now you can produce music from your home and have it released on your favorite platforms from Spotified itunes with relatively little expense. There is, however, a standard structure for how to produce and release music. One thing we need to consider though, is that to have a great production, you need a great song. Now, songwriting is an art form in itself, and that's a topic for another class. But for now, we're going to take a very modern approach to producing music. And we're going to build our song as we produce more than that. Soon, back to this structure I was talking about, to produce music, we go through three stages, recording, mixing, and editing. Mastering. Once your music has been through those three processes, it's ready to release. But we'll cover that at the end of the class A. 5. Recording Mixing and Mastering Overview: Let's break these three stages down and delve a little deeper into what's involved. As I'm sure you can imagine, recording is just capturing all the different elements involved in your song. This could be drums, bass, guitars, pianos, vocals, or anything essential to your music. For those looking to produce more electronic music, this could be importing samples or programming virtual instruments more than that layer. But for now, recording in its most basic instance would be a singer singing into microphone. And that performance being recorded onto whatever device you're using to record with. Once the recording is finished and you've captured all the elements involved in your song, you should have all the audio on different tracks. Now you can listen to your song from start to finish. Now the first time you listen to that audio, it will possibly sound quite mesy and unbalanced. That's what we do at the mixed stage. In its simplest form, we are just balancing the volumes of the individual elements. That could be as simple as turning in the drums and turning up the vocals. As well as this, we now have an opportunity to edit the audio recordings themselves. There is a whole array of complex editing tools we could use, but for the purpose of this explanation, this could be as simple as deleting an odd sound from a vocal take, such as a singer coughing between verses. Other edits could be copying a great guitar take from the first chorus and pasting it in the second chorus. This is also your opportunity to add any effects you feel your song might need. You'll most likely want to put reverb on the singer's vocal, for example, your mix is complete when you can listen to the song from start to finish and you're completely happy with how it sounds. All the individual elements should be clear and well balanced. Mastering can have similarities to the mixing stage, but the big difference is the fact that you're working on the entire song as a whole, the individual elements. For example, at the mixing stage, you have all the individually recorded audio files to work with. That being said, whilst mixing, you might add more bass frequencies to a bass guitar or turned loud back in vocal. Whilst mastering, you generally only work with one file, the finish mix. This means that any changes you make, you make to the entire song, if you add more bass frequencies at the mastering stage, you're adding bass frequencies to the entire song, not any individual element. Mastering is often referred to as the final polish. This is because your song should already sound great. After the mix stage, mastering is the final touches to take it to the next level. This could also involve analyzing the song to make sure it meets any specific broadcasting standards, as well as this master, and engineers will use tools such as compressors to enhance the sound and increase the overall volume. 6. Equipment: I thought we'd escaped the control room as we discussed the basic equipment needed for recording. I really want to show you just how simple it is to record and how little equipment you need to get started at home with it, the distractions of all the excess gear in the control room. As a music fan, you've probably seen countless pictures of beautiful recording studios from your favorite artists posting on social media. If you were to look at the equipment lists of these studios, it would be absolutely astonishing the incomprehensible expense and the rarity of some of the equipment these world renowned studios use would make recording seem like a luxury for the absolute elite and inaccessible to. Most thankfully, this is not the case. Although these great studios are wonderful spaces and produce countless hit records, it is still possible to make great music on a budget at home. What you lack in expensive equipment can be made up for in talent and ideas. I believe one of Billy Ellis's records was produced from her home. Although it does help that she's an incredible artist and her brother is a phenomenal producer. But still you get the idea. A lot of the equipment you see in big commercial studios is just there to give the studio options and the ability to record large numbers of microphones or instruments. Let's look at a large mixing desk, for example. In essence, a mixing console is just one channel for manipulating audio, repeated as many times as you need in my studio. For example, my mixing console has 56 channels. I can have 56 microphones running through it at once. Do you need to be able to record 56 things at once to start recording at home? Of course, not realistically, you probably need to be able to record two, maybe even one. Don't think all this large scale equipment is essential for you to produce something really exciting. What do you need? A basic recording set up consists of a microphone to capture the sounds, A preamp to boost the low microphone signal to a usable audio level. An audio interface to convert the microphone or instrument signals into a format, your computer can recognize a Do or Digital audio workstation, which is simply the software you used to record your audio and manipulate it. Finally, some speakers or headphones, so you can of course, listen back to what you've recorded and that's what we have here, a very basic recording setup. We have a microphone that's plugged into our interface. Our interface has pre amps to boost that low microphone signal. It also has converters to convert that signal into usable format for our computer is then plugged into our computer, which has our Do, which is the Protol software. And then the output of the interface goes to our headphones so we can hear it for playback. Luckily, these days, there are countless pieces of equipment available to fit every budget. There are many interfaces available, but a good example is the SSL two I have here. I think you can buy these for around 160 pounds. It has two channels, which allows you to record two instruments or microphones at the same time, and it also has outputs for headphones and speakers as well. I can control the input gain of each microphone on the front here, which is essentially just the level of signal we have coming in. I can control the volume of the speakers with a nice big control here in terms of gain. If I had a loud guitar up in front of the microphone, I would need to turn the game down as a guitar amp is so loud. If I had a quiet singer, I have to turn the gain up to boost the signal as the singer is so quiet. If you're a singer songwriter looking to start your first home recording sell up, you could buy an SSs interface or similar. Your microphone proto subscription, a set of headphones, and a way you go, this could make your first home recording sellp. Probably not much more expensive than your instrument was. Equally, if you're not a musician and you want to produce electronic music using samples or virtual instruments, you might not need the microphone or the interface, just protos and a set of headphones. 7. Preparing Your Set-up: As mentioned, we're going to be using Protos. There are many dolls available from the free software you might get with a new laptop, right through to programs like Protols designed for the professional market. Protols is a huge industry staple for music production. There are other big names in the field, but you'll find Protols in some of the biggest studios in the world and used by some of your favorite producers. Although you're having a shot of the free trial, there is of course, some significant cost in using the software. I think the Protols artist package at the moment is less than ten pounds a month. Why am I teaching software used by the industry, grades students on an introductory class? Well, there are a number of reasons. But it's important to realize that there is an incredible amount to learn about a recording software. If you do begin a journey into the production world using a basic free software, you may eventually realize it can't do all the things you needed to do when you reach a more advanced level. If you love the process as much as I hope you will, there's a good chance you will end up switching to something like protols in the future. Anyway, in this way you get to grips with its capabilities and understand if it's something you want to look towards in the future. Let's get set up. All you need is a computer to download the free trial of Protols, preferably some headphones or speakers. Go to the class description and follow the step by step guide. I've added some downloadable notes to help you get set up. There is also a link to some samples free to download. You do not need to use these, but you are of course welcome to. There are some individual drum elements like kick, snare, high hat and more to get you started with creating your song. 8. Pro Tools 1: Let's get started for the purpose of this class. I'm going to teach you all the basic functions of Protols. Now Protos has huge capabilities with thousands of options. And I'm going to teach you everything you need to know to produce your first song. However, if there are any tools in the software that I haven't explained, that is because I'm fairly confident that it's something you do not need to use at this stage. Also, protos has many great shortcuts and alternative ways of doing certain tasks. There may be methods I use here that aren't the quickest, but I believe they are the clearest for you to understand. Feel free to spend a little time looking up protol shortcuts to improve your workflow and speed up your process. Although I'm now going to explain how to create your first session and start recording, it is a lot of information to take in. That being said, I have also created some instructions you can download in the class description to help you remember all the steps when you're practicing at home. The first thing we're going to do is click on the protols icon. The location of the icon may be different depending on where your computer has stored Your free trial of protools. I'm on a Mac and have it saved at the bar at the bottom of my screen for convenience. Once protolss loaded, this new window will appear here we can create our new session. If this window doesn't appear for any reason, you can simply click File at the top of the screen and click Create New Session. There are a number of options here. Let's discuss the ones that we will need. We have Create, which is what we will be using to create our new session, which is where you'll find previous protol sessions you've been working on. In this top bar, we can name our session. I'm going to call it class demo here. Local storage simply means we are going to create a new session on our computer. Here we get to choose our sample rate. We'll be working at 44.1 24 bit, and our IO settings will just be a stereo mix. Now down here, you can click on location. You can choose where to save your session on the computer. I recommend your documents for now. Now we simply click Create. Here we have it. Your first Protol session set up. Protols has two windows. This window that we see here, which is our edit window, and another window which is our mix window. I'm on the edit window. If I click Command plus on my Mac, I can switch to the Mix window or simply click Window Mix Window. Now we see our blank mixed window. You'll notice there isn't much to see in either of our windows at the moment, except for some tools at the top of our edit window. Before we start recording, we need to build our own tracks within protools, but we'll get to that shortly. Let's have a look at the main tool bar to get started. Over on the left we have our edit mode buttons. Next to that we have our view section. Then our edit tool section, our main counter display, our edit mode, resolution, transport controls, mid time controls, and sync controls. That may seem like a lot, but don't worry, we're going to cover the basics we need shortly. The first thing we really need to understand is this section here. This is our timeline. Our timeline is simply a graphic representation of the physical length of our recorded audio. We can look at this timeline to see how long our recording is or identify specific sections in our audio. This could be elements of a song structure like verses or choruses. Within this timeline, you will notice individual sections, each with a different purpose. Let's focus on the sections that are useful to us at the moment. The top is our bars and beats. This is the timeline where you can follow the song in bars and beats. Underneath we have minutes and seconds. This is literally the length of time that has been recorded. This is helpful as you can look and see how long your recording is. Tempo, this is arguably one of the most important parts of our timeline. You will notice alongside tempo, there is a small plus sign. If I click the plus sign, I can change the tempo to match the tempo of my song. This means you can edit tracks, copy, paste, and build sections all in time of the song. Our next function is markers. This is incredibly handy if you just record a song from start to finish, all you will see is a series of waveforms on the screen. This can be great in many circumstances, but it can be extremely hard to tell what part of a song you're at by looking at waveforms. Instead, we can set up markers in our timeline for key sections of the song, such as the verse or the chorus. I can simply click on the point in the timeline where I want to add my marker. Click the line here, Name my marker. Such as chorus, For example, I can click again further along the timeline for a verse, a chorus, a bridge, et cetera. If I'm working with an artist and they say, let's record the vocals in the last chorus, I know exactly where to go on the timeline. 9. Pro Tools Part 2 : It's now time to build our tracks. If we go up to track, then this is the window where we get to choose what tracks are added to our session. Every time you want to record a piece of audio, you need an audio track to record onto. Here we have one mono audio track. It is currently named Audio. We can name it anything we want. If we want to record vocal, we could simply rename this vocal Click Create. And you'll see the audio track has appeared on our screen. Now we have an audio track we can record onto, and it's conveniently called vocal. If I go back into that window track, you'll notice the small plus sign. This allows me to add different types of tracks. Imagine we're recording a drum kit. We could choose ten mono audio tracks, for example. I wouldn't rename them as I don't want ten tracks with the same name. I will name them individually in the session. If I click the plus sign, I can now add another type of track. I'd also need a single track to play The click, which is just a metronome which you'd use to play in time to. I would still want it in mono, but here is the difference. We would want an ox track instead of an audio track. Now, what is an ox track? Ox input does not store audio, so you can't record onto it. It simply serves to receive audio from another track or source. We can play our click track through it, but it won't be recording anything. Ox tracks can be used for other things such as submixes or groups. For example, sending all drum tracks to one ox, so you can control them altogether. I'm going to call this ox click for the metro. I would also want a master fader to control the overall song. This would be in stereo. Simply select one master fader. Stereo. And we'll call it master, click, Create. And we have our basic session. We have everything we need in the edit window. You'll also notice if I switch to our mixed window, everything is here as well. Edit window and the mix window are the exact same tracks, just different views. That being said, if I click on a button on the edit window, I will see the same button is selected in the mixed window. There we have it. We have built a basic recording session. Now let's have a look at the tracks themselves and how they work. On the left here, you will notice that all our channels are blue. I can simply select that channel, double click on the color, and change the color to anything I want. Now, this may seem a little childish, but it's actually really helpful. Imagine I have a session where I have 100 channels of audio, such as drums, bass, guitars, strings, keys, and vocals. You can find yourself looking at a sea of audio channels in your mix window, which can make it hard to navigate quickly to where you need to be when you're producing, you want to work fast. You don't want your inspiration or creativity to diminish whilst you spend time looking for a track you need to find. For example, if those are all drum tracks, I can select them all by clicking on the first track shift. Click on the last track, double click on any of the color indicators and change the color. Now all my drum channels are clearly distinguished by the same color. I would then make the next instrument a different color. As well as this, we can change the names of any of the channels as we go by double clicking on the name, type a new name, I try and keep them as short as possible so they're clear and easy to navigate to and click. Okay. Moving on, let's look at the functions of our track. If we use our vocal track, for example, underneath the name, we have four options or buttons. The left button is Track Record Enable. If we click that, that means the track is ready to record audio. Now if I go up and set protools to record, which we do by pressing record and play, you'll see the channel starts recording across the time line. We haven't set up any inputs or microphones on that channel. There isn't actually any audio being recorded, but you get the idea. Notice how none of the other channels recorded anything. That's because they didn't have their track record enable selected equally. When we finish recording our vocals, we want to switch off the track record enable to make sure that we don't accidentally record over our vocal whilst we record other instruments. Our next button here is Input monitoring. Track Input monitoring lets you listen to the live input on that channel at all times, regardless of whether ptoles is in playback or recording. This is helpful if you wish to practice your performance along with the song before you begin recording Solo Button. If I click solo on the track, I will only hear that track playing back. I can solo multiple tracks at the same time. Our next button is mute, which is essentially the opposite of solo. Any channel that I mute, you won't be able to hear. 10. Pro Tools Part 3: Below this, we have all the options of what we can view in our edit window. This is always automatically set to view the waveforms of our recorded audio. But if I click this, a drop down menu appears with a number of options. I won't go into detail about all of these, but the two we need for this class is waveform and volume. Waveform is our general view that we will use most of the time, a recorded audio and make any edits. Let's switch to volume and have a look at what we can do here. As soon as we click volume, this line appears and that line is our track volume. You'll notice if we switch to our mixed window, we can of course, change the volume with our fader. And you'll notice any changes that I make with the fader in the mixed window, change the volume line in the edit window. Simple. We can go one step further than just adjusting the volume. We can use this line to essentially make a map of volumes that our fader will follow throughout the timeline. Imagine we have a guitar part that is too loud in the verse, but too quiet in the course, we could simply click individual sections in the volume line and turn them up or down. Let's look at what happens to the fader when we press play. See how the fader follows the automation that we just set. That's a very handy function. It's important to note that once we make automation on the track, we can no longer adjust the volume of the fader, as it will always revert back to following the automated volume line. The next button to look at is the freeze button. This button is incredibly useful. I think Protols added it around the end of 2015 and it has been a fantastic new function. When you freeze the track, the source audio on the track is replaced with the audio that has been processed by all of the plugins on the track. What does that mean? Imagine you've recorded a singer and we've added lots of effects and processing, which can be hard work on the computer. That is probably fine if you have one track. Now imagine we have 50 tracks all with lots of processing. Eventually your computer will start to struggle with running 100 effects plug ins at once. If we freeze the tracks we aren't using, it stops our computer from struggling and potentially crashing. Freeing up computer power to work on the tracks that we are currently editing or mixing. I can unfreeze the tracks at any point and begin working on them again. For example, if I'm editing vocals, I may freeze all the drums I've already edited to save strain on the computer. Those are the basic functions of this first box. Now onto our insert and sends an insert is where we can add a plug in to our track. A plug in is just a processor, which could be an equalizer, a compressor, a reverbidlay, or any number of things. If I wanted to manipulate the sound of our vocal recording, I could click on any of these inserts. Select the plug in I want. And that plug in will pop up in its own window where I can change the settings. Let's have a look. It's important to note that I have hundreds of plug ins here and I've been building my collection for many years with protols. You'll only have a few free plug ins that come with it. We have a range of EQ's, dynamics, pit shift reverbs, delays modulation and more. Lots to choose from. If I wanted to add reverb to this vocal track, I could click on an available insert to bring up the plug and menu. Go to Reverbs and select whichever reverb I prefer. I have an Abbey Road reverb here for example, which we can open. And it's a great looking and sound and plug in now you can see it's window here and I can adjust settings to change the sound of the reverb equally. I could bring up an EQ in the same manner. If I wanted to boost 200 hertz, I could click and drag up to Boost and down to cut more on that. When we come to the mixing stage, insert spaces where we can add plugins. Before we jump onto sends, we need to have a quick look at these two options, input and output. Input is simply where the signal being recorded is coming from. Output is where it's going. Input could be your microphone, output could be your speakers. It's that simple. If I set my protols input to analog one, I have the studio connected up so that analog one receives the signal from the first input on the stage box in the live room. If we plug a microphone into stage box input one, I then select analog one and protols, then we can record it. Output is just set stereo, which goes to my master fader and then to my speakers. If we wanted to record a drum kit, we could set the kick drum to analog one. Plug the kick drum microphone into the first input on the stage box in the live room. We would then take a microphone for the snare drum and plug it into input two. I would then set the snare track input to analog two. We would then take a toll microphone, plug it into input three, sets track to analog three, and so forth. 11. Pro Tools Part 4: Now we can have a look at. Sense. Sends are where we send a copy of the audio we've recorded on that track somewhere else. Now we can send it somewhere else physically like a set of headphones, for example. Or send it somewhere else within our portal session on what we call a bus. If we're going to send our track to headphones, we click send, then select an output on our computer or interface that our headphones are plugged into any track you want to hear In the headphones, you'll need to create another send on the individual track you want to hear. This will bring up a little fader to just the volume of that send internally. Instead of clicking analog outputs, we could make a bus Send. If I go to this vocal recording, I can click Sends and select it to be sent to Bus 1.2 I could then create an ox track and make the input of that ox track, Bus 1.2 Now, the vocal recording is being sent from the vocal track on Bus 1.2 and has been received on this ox track from Bus 1.2 Now we can hear it on both tracks. Why would you want this? You might ask a number of reasons. I might want a very clear vocal track with my reverb on a separate track so I can control its volume separately. I would send my vocal track to an ox track, then put my rever plug in on the ox track. Another good example would be drums. If I have the drums and ten tracks with every track at a different volume and wanted to turn the drums up or change the overall sound, I could send all the drum tracks to bus 3.4 set an ox with the input set to bus and four, and call that my drum bus. Then I could turn the entire drum kit up or down or add any effects. The only difference with this example is that instead of sending the drum signal as a send, which is essentially another copy of the track, I would actually change the output of the drum tracks to bust. And four, this is because we don't want to hear the drum tracks twice, we only want to hear them coming out of the drum bus. Now underneath that we have volume. If I click here, we get a tiny fader, we can turn the volume up or down. With this is exactly the same as our fader in the mix window. It can just be handy to save switching windows. Also we have pan, which is set to zero. Pan controls which speakers or which combination of speakers your sound is coming from. Zero is straight down the middle and you will hear the sound equally in both speakers. I went 100 to the left, you would only hear it in the left speaker, 100 to the right, only in the right speaker. And the closer I get back to zero, the more you'll hear the signal in the other speaker. Making a stereo field. Lead vocals, for example, are normally always at zero straight in the middle. But imagine two guitars. In a band, you might pan 1100 left and the other 100 right? So you can hear a guitar in each speaker and give the song more width. You've probably been in a situation where you've been listening to music on one headphone and you can't hear the guitar solo or some other part of the song because it's been panned to the headphone you're not using. 12. Editing and Importing: Before we start creating, we need to have a look at some editing features we have available here, which will help us put our song together. See this little magnifying glass here? We can click this to zoom. We can also drag it over the section we wish to enlarge like so I could drag over a smaller section again to really zoom in on the waveform. Or I could press option on my Mac keyboard to click and. But we could also hover over the line at the bottom of the track, drag it down, and get a much larger view of the waveform. Up here we have our smart tools. These are the main three tools we will be using. We have the Grabber tool on the right. If it's selected, we can grab the recorded audio and move it around. Next to that, we have our selector tool, which selects a specific point in the timeline. With this, I can start playback from wherever I have selected. I can also drag over sections I wish to copy command on a Mac or delete by hitting Return. All these things can also be done by simply clicking Edit at the top of the window and scrolling down to the required tool. Our final button on the left is our trim tool. If I've recorded longer than I need to, I can simply drag this back to delete the audio at the end or the same start. Also, you will notice above these controls, there is a button around all three. If I select this, I can use all three without switching back and forth. Let's see how that works. If I'm above the middle line in the way firm it's the selector tool. If I'm below the middle line, it's the grabber tool. And if I'm at the edge, it's the trim tool. If I'm in the top corner, I can drag in a fade out or fade in and make it as long or as short as I need. Now I know that's a lot of information, but these are the basic controls of protools. There is also a cheat sheet. You can download this part of the class to help you practice, or you can rewatch the videos and work along with me. Now for the purpose of this class, as you're all beginners, you probably don't have a microphone or interface at home. You could record using the microphone on your computer, but the quality might be quite poor. It may be worth trying so you can get a feel for the process though. That being said, we're going to begin building our track with samples and virtual instruments. What I'm going to do is create a new session. We'll call it class example. Now I don't need any audio tracks as I'll be important the audio, but I do still need a click track and a master fader. Importing audio is where we take audio from another source, such as your computer, that has been pre recorded and we import it into protols where we can then use it in the same way as any audio we've recorded. I will click Import Audio. Locate the files you've downloaded as part of the class. You can preview any file you've clicked on and listen to it. Once you've found the sound you want, you can simply click Add. Let's start with a kick snare and a hi hat to make things simple. Now you'll notice they're all in this clips to import column here, all we do is click open Protols. Now shows us this audio Import Options window. The destination will be new tracks that we can have our imported audio on separate tracks. Location will select Start of Session. This will import at the start of our timeline. Now if we click Enter, it will take us to the start of the session and we can zoom in on our samples. Now we need to take a look at our edit modes. Here we have shuffle, Spot, Slip and Grid modes. These modes affect how clips are placed and edited on our timeline. Shuffle mode allows you to move clips around, but their movement is constrained by other clips on the timeline. Slip mode allows you to freely move clips around on the timeline with no constraints. Spot Mode provides a way to place clips at precise timeline locations. Grid mode means clips can be positioned and moved based on the grid which is set to our tempo. For example, if I move a piece of audio in grid mode, it will only be possible to place it on a beat of the song. This is a great function as we're about to start building our drum beat. We want to be in grid mode as our grid mode will keep us in time with the click track. You'll notice as soon as I click grid, these lines appear on the screen. That is our grid in bars and beats. If we go up to this section at the top here, we can select if the grid spacing is 1 bar, half bar, quarter note, eighth note, and so on. We'll stick with quarter notes for now. And you'll see on the grid that this line is slightly clearer here. That is the end of 1 bar and the start of another, you'll notice we have first beat, second beat, third beat, fourth beat, and start of the next bar. Let's take a minute to have a quick think about music theory. Music theory is a huge topic and if you play an instrument, you may already know a lot about yourself. On the other hand, many people taking this class may have no prior knowledge of music theory. Let's cover the basics to get started. 13. Click Tracks Bars and Beats: If you don't know what bars and beats are, do not worry. It's very simple. When you're listening to your favorite music, you often tap your foot along with the song. Whilst you're tapping, your foot is normally on the beat of the song. Most music you listen to has four beats in a bar. Not always, but the vast majority. That being said, when you're listening to your favorite song, you can count along 121234, tap is a beat. When you get to four, that is a bar. If you count 1234, that is 1 bar of music. If you did that twice, 2 bars of music, 123-41-2343 times 3 bars of music Simple. Here's a quick demonstration. If I tap the beat with my left hand, 1234, I'm tapping quarter notes, like on the grid 1234. I could divide that up further with my right hand and tap eight times in a bar without affecting the beat. Watch, My left hand is still keeping time with the four beats. 1234, but my right hand is playing eight notes. 12, 341-234-5681, Essentially, my right hand is still playing the beats, but it's also playing halfway between the beats as well. Similar to counting 1.2 and 3.4 and we've just added notes on the S. I could take that a step further and go to 16th notes. And playing four notes for every beat with my right hand. Every bar I'm playing 16 times, but it doesn't change the timing or the beat. It's just dividing that bar wherever we need it. So we could have 1234124. 234 simple. I'm still playing the beat in my left hand, but we've divided the bar into 16 notes of my right hand. There we have it. Barj and beats. 14. Building Your Drum Beat: Let's get started with our beat. We can go to the selector tool and click all three. We'll meet the snare drum and the high hat for now and just work on the krum. We can select the kick drum sample with our grabber tool to edit and copy or command C on my keyboard. Then we can paste this drum anywhere we want, as long as it's on a beat, for example sake. I'm going to leave the first um on the first and paste another, the third bit of the bar, by selecting the grid on the third and paste command V on my keyboard. Now if I hit Enter on my keyboard to go back to the start of the session, click the Space bar to play or play. At the top of the screen, we can hear those kicks and click track together. Now we have a kick pattern. Now the same process again for the snare. Let's mute the kick drum for now. Slick the snare sample with the grabber. Edit, copy or command C. Then paste it where we want it. I'm actually going to drag this first snare to the second beat of the bar, and then paste another. Copy, edit, paste command V on beat four. Now we have our kick drum on beat one, snare drum beat two, kick drum beat three, snare drum beat four. Let's listen to the snare drum on its own with the click track. Now I'll mute the kick and have a listen to kick snare and click. See how we've already got a drum pattern coming together. Let's mute those two and look at the high hats. High hats tend to be played faster. Not always, but generally. Let's switch our grid to eighth notes, so we have the option to place them closer together. Same situation, again, copy the first high hat and paste it where we like. I'm going to put the high hat on every eighth note. Let's listen to that high hat. Now let's listen to it altogether. Now we have a beat that's fine, but sounds a little dull. I'm going to move these around slightly to make it sound a bit more interesting. Let's listen to that. That sounds a lot more interesting. You'll notice my beat is actually 2 bars long. Now that's fine. We just need to remember that if we want to copy the beat and paste it elsewhere, we need to copy both those bars. Now I can take it a step further and add a few more elements like importing some Tom samples and maybe even records some percussion over the top. Let's listen instantly. So much more exciting, there we go really quickly. We have a drumbeat, we can then mute the click as it's not part of our song. Now imagine this was our entire drum beat. One or 2 bars isn't going to be enough for a song. We can simply copy this beat and repeat it as many times as we want. 15. Building Your Drum Beat Part 2: Instead of copying all the tracks individually, the easiest way is to create a group. Simply click on the first track of the drums, which is our kick hold shift, and click on the last track. If I go down to the bottom left here, I can click this down arrow where it says Groups. This will bring up a drop down menu where I can click New Group. At the top of this window, it says Name. We can call this Drums. Now you'll notice all the tracks we have currently selected are already in the right column. We can simply click. Okay, Notice how this new group has appeared at the bottom left called Drums. If drums is highlighted, the group is on. If it's not, the group is off. If we have a group highlighted, anything we do to one track in that group, happens to all the tracks in that group like. So. Now what I'd like to do is switch our grid view to 1 bar. To make it simpler, highlight our drum loop, copy, click the start of the next section or bar and paste. Now we have twice as many bars. Notice that because my Tom samples run over the end of bar two, when I paste the drums at the start of the next bar, cut off the end of the Tom samples. This can be easily fixed by going in and extending those clips individually with the trim tool. We won't worry about that now, but it is something to be cautious of. We could then keep pasting this drumbeat as many times as we need. There are faster ways of doing this, but I think it's important we do it this way. For now. There we have it over 3 minutes of drums. Now, if that drum beat stayed the same for the duration of the song, it would be quite boring. What I tend to do is add or remove elements for different sections of the song to make it more dynamic and interesting. As I'm happy with this drum beat, I'm going to keep the entire beat for the choruses. Move any extra elements in the verses. In this case, I will take out the cow bell and tambourines in the verses. First, I'll make a structure for my song in the timeline. This can be anything you want, but for simplicity, I'm going to make me first chorus, first chorus, bridge chorus. I will also make each section 4 bars long. Before this, I need to make a quick alteration. I started my drum loop at the very beginning of our timeline to make it nice and clear how I was using the bars and beats starting with beat one. In reality, I always leave at least 1 bar blank at the start of a session for a number of reasons. But the most obvious being that I need to hear the click track play before I start recording. And no one to come in in grid mode like we are here. If I select all my drums in bars 1.2 I can simply delete those bars. Now when I go back to the start of the session and unmute my click track. Watch what happens when I press play. Now I have a nice little T plus it's good to have a little space before the track comes in to make sure I'm not losing any information at the beginning of the song or any transience. Something to keep in mind is that you need to turn off groups that you're not using. Always uncheck the groups you aren't using in case you make any mistakes and accidentally delete something from another section of the song that you can't get back. Let's build our structure. Now I simply go to click on the audio I want to remove from the section, then click edit, Delete. Let's listen to the verse going into the chorus. Great, see how the energy increases with those two extra elements being added to the chorus. That's generally what we aim to do with the chorus, build energy. Something to think about is that although I have provided you with drum samples here, you can get thousands of drum samples online, like most things, for a few pounds, you can get some drum samples made in somebody's home studio. Or if you spent more, you can get some high end samples from a well known studio. There are also companies such as Splice, which follow a subscription model. For your monthly subscription. You can download all great samples, not just drums. Thousands of instruments and sounds are available. Now we can move on to our next instrument. 16. Using Virtual Instruments: It's time to move on to our next instrument. Now that we have a drum beat, the first thing we will do is click on the last track of our drums. This is because if we go to create a new track, the new track will appear just underneath whichever track is currently highlighted. If I clicked on the kick drum and created a new track, it would appear just below it, between the kick drum and the snare. This wouldn't be very organized or convenient for us. I want the base to go. At the end of the drums, I click on the last drum. We're going to set up a different type of track compared to what we've had before. We still want one track. We're going to go for stereo this time, and we don't want an audio track. What we want is an instrument track. This is a track that we can put a virtual instrument on using a plug in and control the notes being played using midday information. Once we've selected an instrument track, we can name this track as I'm going for base. Next, I'll simply call it Base and click Create. Here we have another track that has appeared and it's got very similar parameters to the other tracks we've discussed. You'll notice many similar settings, but there are a few differences. Let's have a look on the left here, we can change the color like we did before. I'm going to make this a light green so it stands out from our drums. Now we have a record enable button. As before, solo or mute. We have no input modeling because it's a virtual instrument and we're not working with a live signal. Everything else looks quite similar. We have our insert for plug ins. Sends our usual input and output and our volume and pan here. Now let's have a look at the main differences. Notice that here if we click, we have some different options. What we're going to do is switch to notes because we're going to be writing the music within protols. I'm just going to click on this. We line underneath our track to expand it so we can see what we're doing a lot clearer. I'm sure you'll noticed that there are some lines here that look like a keyboard on its side. That's exactly what this is, a virtual Midi keyboard. Now the first thing we need to do is add an instrument to our channel. Much like the samples, there are thousands of virtual instruments you can purchase online. Some are quite cheap for people getting started, some more expensive for use in big productions and everything in between. Protols comes with a number of free plug ins you can use. Which one you'd like to try up to you. Why not try them all? For the purpose of the base, you could use a Protos plug in called Expand. Simply click on an available insert on your instrument channel. Go to Plug Ins Instruments, and click Expand. This will open the Plug ins own window. There are a number of available slots within the plugin, you would just choose a click the slot, go down to bases and select full picked base. This would just be a simple option for you. You are of course welcome to try any virtual instruments available and experiment with changing all the parameters for that instrument. To show you some of the different options available, I'm going to use a plug in called trillion that I use for a lot of my base production. I'm going to keep it simple for now as we have a lot to cover and we want to get creating. Now if I were to go up to the top bar and select the pencil tool, which just looks like a little pencil icon, I could come back down to the muddy and wherever I draw a line is a note that corresponds to the keyboard on the left. If we sold the base, go back to the start and click Play. We'll hear the note we just added. If I click on that note I've just created, you will hear it play. And if I move it, you'll notice that the note changes. And on the left you can see the corresponding key of the keyboard. Now if I wanted to view this more clearly, I could write, click on the middy track. Go down to open mid editor to let me see a larger view of what we're doing. You can also see a better view of the virtual keyboard as well. Note this pencil tool that we are currently on, it can draw new notes, but if we hover over an existing note, we can also make it shorter or longer. I've made this note 1 bar long, and let's see how that sounds. There we go, our first base note. Let's add another three to keep it nice and simple. For now, we're going with one base note per bar. I may go higher up for the next, in between for the next, and here for the last note. Now, there is a huge amount of theory on why certain notes work together and certain notes should be used. But if I were you and I was starting out, I would go and look at my favorite songs. And you'll find most of your favorite songs have the same four chords. I would look up what those chords are on line and see how they relate to this midi keyboard. If the chords to your favorite song are GEC, you just need to draw those notes on the keyboard C. If you don't know the names of the notes on the keyboard, you can simply search online keyboard notes, click images, where you'll see plenty of great examples. Equally, you could just create notes based on what you think sounds good, draw a second note, and listen back to see if it sounds good after the first note, E. 17. Using Virtual Instruments Part 2: I've now got four notes, one on each bar. I'll go back to the start of the session, click play, and we can have a listen that seems fine, possibly slightly boring and fairly basic. But we can change this base pattern to anything we might like. For example, I may think this last note is too high, and I could change it to a lower note. Or we can make this more complicated altogether. And we can have a note on every beat. Let's delete the notes we have by simply highlighting them and clicking Delete. Then draw more frequent notes and see how that sounds. Now you can make this as complicated or as simple as you want. You can have lots of different base notes and different note durations, or whatever you feel your song needs and you feel comfortable doing. It's entirely up to you. Now, the problem with using Midi notes generated like this fact that every single note sounds like it's being played exactly the same. This can be good for certain things like electronic music, but as this is replicating a bass guitar, we're trying to make it sound more natural. If you think about the bass guitar is playing their instrument. They aren't going to play every note exactly the same because they're human. That's just not possible. What we tend to find is as we play with emotion, some notes will be louder and some quieter, and things won't be quite perfect. We can do a little bit here and make this feel a little bit more like a real performance. The simplest thing I can do to enhance the feel of this bassline is by changing the velocity of the notes. For example, a bassis will often emphasize the first beat of the bar. To do that, all I need to do is go over here to where it says notes and change to velocities. Change in velocity simply alters the amount of attack where a sample is triggered. In a simple example, it would be the equivalent of you lightly pressing a key on a keyboard or heavily pressing that key. The first thing you'll notice is that every note is the exact same velocity. If I click on this first note here, you'll notice that its corresponding shape up here will become highlighted. And I can change the velocity of this to become harder or softer. I'm going to leave the first note at its current velocity, and I'll make the second note lower, and the third, and the fourth. Now we have the first bit of the bar slightly more prominent, and the rest of the notes a little quieter. Again, the next three notes wouldn't be the same velocity because that's not how humans perform. I tend to make these notes a little bit more random. Let's see how that sounds with the base sold. Now you'll notice the first bar sounds a little bit more like a real performance. The next bar sounds back to that robotic static feel. I'm going to do the same thing for all the bars. Let's have a listen to that playback that seems more like a performance, less like a machine. All that's left to do is copy and paste this pattern as many times as we want for the duration of our song. Of course, you'd likely want different chords for different parts of the song, but I'm going to keep things as simple as possible here. That's how we draw the notes for a virtual instrument. If you have a Midi keyboard like I have on my right here, you can simply treat it like a real instrument. Hit record and start playing like so. You'll notice how the notes aren't perfect because I'm human and didn't play them perfect to the grid like a computer. If we look at the velocities they are compared to the computer generated. This is just another way of recording virtual instrument with a bit more real life feel. Midi keyboards can be purchased quite cheaply in most music stores online. If it's something that you hope to get into more, I would suggest a Midi keyboard could be an incredibly handy piece of equipment. There we have it, drums and bass together. Let's move on to another instrument. 18. Adding Other Instruments: Yeah, for our next sound, if I wanted to record a real instrument, I was set up another audio track like I showed you before. Set up a microphone and record the instrument. Or I could create another instrument track and use another virtual instrument. Let's go for a virtual piano next. The process is exactly the same as we did for the bass. Let's speed things up. As you can see, I've recorded some piano. I played it live with the Midi keyboard. I played the same notes as the bass with a melody over the top. It's important to consider that the more traditional route of producing a song is, of course, recording a song that's already been written. You just be recording all the parts essential to that song. The method we're using is a lot of fun though, because I only started with a drum beat. I didn't know how the song is going to sound or what direction it may take. This makes it really interesting to watch it develop. As you can see, my songs turn into some popish ballad, which was never my intention, but so far I like it. Let's add a fourth instrument. You guys at home could add another virtual instrument or another sound sample that you like. But I'm going to add some guitars here so I can show you the different variations of what can be done. I'm going to record it in the control room here just for convenience. Microphone set up to capture the sound of my acoustic guitar. I will set up an audio track. I will then send the sound from the previous instruments we've recorded to my headphones so I can play along. Let's have a quick look at that. I'll speed up the process to save you guys some time. There we have it. We have drums, bass, piano, guitar, and we can have a listen to it altogether. I recorded the guitar part twice, as I like to pan one in each speaker at the mix stage to give the song some stereo width. I also recorded the verse guitar parts and the chorus guitar parts on different tracks. That's because I was finger picking quietly in the verses and had some fairly loud strumming in the chorus. Recording them separately meant that I could adjust the gain of the microphone for each section. Also, as they're going to be very different sounds, I can mix them separately. 19. Recording Vocals: Now it's time to add some vocals. As mentioned, recording real sounds such as vocals is not essential to your class project. You could do it entirely using samples and virtual instruments. That being said, I still want to show you how vocals are recorded in case it's something you want to try in the future. Beside me here I have a vocal microphone set up and you'll notice it has this odd looking device in front of it. This is called a pop filler. Now, I highly recommend if you are going to record vocals to get yourself a pop filler. It essentially removes popping noises when you sing, especially when you have over pronounced words with the letter P. For example, like party or peace or pain. I'm obviously over pronouncing them, but this sudden air pressure can sound unpleasant on the microphone. The pop filter removes this. Fast moving air. Pop filters are not very expensive and they can make a huge difference. Also, they are quite handy for keeping your distance from the microphone consistent, as if you get too close or too far away from the microphone, it's going to affect the sound of your recording. This is what we call the proximity effect, where there are increased low frequencies when your voice gets closer to the microphone equally, if you're too far away, you'll lose clarity, lose signal level, and lose low frequency in your vocal. The pop filter can act as a handy distance guide for you. I'll set up a new audio recording track as before. Set the inputs, enable it to record ready. We then set the gain on our preamp to an appropriate level for the volume of my voice. If I'm singing something really loud, my gain will be set lower. And if I'm singing something quite quiet, it will be slightly higher. We can use the meters and protols to show how much signal we have coming in. We want to have enough signal that we have plenty of level indicated by the green line, but we don't want to have too much level as the signal will clip. In its simplest form, analog clipping is when an amplifier is pushed beyond its maximum limit and begins to distort. If you're using analog equipment, the audio will gradually begin to distort. There are even some situations you may want this as a desired effect, but digital clipping doesn't work that way. With digital clipping, any signal that is higher than the loudness ceiling in your equipment will be lost, which can result in artifacts of noise or lots of information in your signal. Your protos meters will start to change from green to amber or red if you have too much signal and clipping is occurring when choosing the gain on my preamp, I will sing the loudest section of the song to make sure it's still at a healthy level and no clipping is occurring. Once I'm happy with my microphone game, I will then make sure that all the instruments I need to hear in my headphones are at an appropriate level. I'll then mute my speakers and I'm ready to record. I'm going to record a very basic vocal line for you now, and I'll keep it as simple as the rest of our song. We're not trying to win any songwriting awards here, just learn the basics of production. Let's lay down a typical pop ballad chorus line. I just want to feel, for the first time, pray for something real. Hello. Hold you in these ads, in the Osman. There we go. We have a basic chorus vocal recorded. Let's have a lesson back. Swan Sp, something real. Hello you in Oman in the Osman. 20. Backing Vocals: Now we have our lead vocal in the chorus, we can add some backing vocals to fill out our sound. This might simply be repeating a key phrase in a chorus, any different octave style or tone to what we've already recorded. I like to stack quite a lot of backing vocals to add depth and energy to the chorus and pan them in different locations. I'll go ahead in the same manner as I did while recording the lead vocal, set up some new tracks, record some basic backing vocals, and we can see what it sounds like. I want to feel hell for the first time. Pray for something real. Hello old you in these ads, there we go. We have some basic backing vocals added to our song. Let's have listened to all the vocals together. So that's our lead vocals and our backing vocals. Schwann To feel hello for the first time, pray for something real. Hello, old you, Innis mails. You'll see how that sounds. Much more interesting. Let's have a lesson to the track as a whole. We've got drums, bass, piano, guitars and vocals. Swan feel for the first time, pray for something real. Hello in the There we have it. In a relatively short space of time, we've managed to build a song, record all the elements we needed, and we have the fully recorded audio we can listen back to. As I said, this is not some award winning hit song. This is very basic for what we need to do here. But it gives you an idea of how quickly you can create and produce music. The recording process is often not as quick as I've demonstrated here. If I was recording, for example, a live drum kit, I would spend a while putting new Skins in the drums. I'd also try out different microphones. I might have ten to 15 microphones that I'll move around and experiment with their position and how they sound. I could quite easily spend an entire day just recording drums, depending on what type of sound I'm going for. Equally for another instrument such as guitars, you might spend a considerable time trying out different guitars, different guitar amps, moving the microphones, or even choosing different microphones. Generally just experimenting to find the sound you're looking for that can take time before you even hit record. If you're working with great musicians, setting up and experimenting can take much longer than the performance and the actual recording can. This is also why it's important to have things like session templates as much as possible planned set up in advance because you don't want to waste time, especially if you have a musician coming into record. They don't want to spend their days sitting around whilst you spend hours setting things up. So it's great to be as organized as you can before your session. 21. Mixing Drums: Now onto mixing. If we switch to our mix window, here we can see we've got all our individual sections. We've got our drums, our bass piano, acoustic for the verses, acoustic for the chorus, vocals and backing vocals. Let's start with our drums. The first thing we need to do is set up a drum bus where we're going to send all of our drum tracks so we can have control of the overall sound of our drums. I'll click on the last channel of the drums here, then I'll go to track one, stereo, this time an ox track, and we'll call it drum. Now this bus we can use to control the overall volume of the drums, and we can add elements of mixing like EQ or compression. Now we have our drum bus. We're going to set the input of the drum bus to bus 1.2 Now we're going to put the output of all of our drum channels to Bus 1.2 as well. You can do this one at a time, like so. Now I can turn the drums up or down with this bus fader. It's worth noting that I didn't use any sends, I changed their output. As I mentioned earlier, that's because I didn't want a second copy of the drums. I want the original drums coming through that ox track. I'm also going to mute all the other channels for a while as I'm only working on the drums to begin with. There we go. When mixing the drums, I'm going to go to a section that has all the drums included. There's no point working on a section where some of the elements of the drums are missing. The chorus has all the drums. I'm going to highlight the chorus on the timeline by clicking and dragging. I'll go to Options and make sure loop playback is selected. That way when I click Play, I will keep repeating the highlighted section over and over. And I don't need to start and stop all the time. Now the first thing I'm going to sort is my panning. There are two traditional ways of looking at drum panning that'll show you now. You can pan drums from the drummers perspective. This means if you're sitting on a drum stool playing drums, the high hat would be traditionally on your left, your kick drum, snare drum directly in front of you, your Tom, possibly slightly to the right, and your floor tom further to the right. You're essentially panning the drum kit so that it feels like you're sitting behind it. The other way is to pan with audience view in mind. You pan the drums as if you were looking at the drum kit, which would essentially be the opposite. In modern music, you can really do anything you want. But what we're trying to achieve here, building a sense of width and dimension to the drums, I'm going to pan them as if I'm playing the drums because that's what I'm used to. I'm going to put the high hats slightly to the left, maybe around 40. I'm going to pan the rack Tom slightly to the right, say 20. Then I want the floor Tom even more to the right, around 60. Then I'm going to put the tambourines 50 left, and the bell 50, right? This is also generating space for each of these parts, though not sitting directly on top of each other. Let's have a listen see much of a different size, everything sounds a bit wider, like it's a bit more space, more like a real drum kit. At this stage, I'm also going to balance the volumes. We can change these volumes again at any point, but for now, we're just trying to get a nice balance of the drum. Sound. 22. Plugins and Processing: Now we're going to start looking at what plug ins and processing we can add to improve the sound of our drums. The first thing we'll do is have a look at how EQ works. If we take our kick drum for example, first I will solow it so you can only hear the kick drum. If I go to my kick track insert, I'm going to choose an EQ. I have a lot of plug ins to choose from here, but I'm going to use the Q37 band as it comes free. And you can use it too. This is our Q window here. We can increase desired frequencies or decrease unwanted frequencies. On the left, we have high and low pass filters. Down the bottom we have what we call bands of parametric EQ, allowing you to find a specific frequency to cut or boost. Most plug ins and EQ's have presets you can dial in, this can be handy to get you started. Simply go to the top of the window, click factory default, and pick any preset you want to try. This will give you a great starting point and you can adjust accordingly. Plug ins also have bypass buttons so you can listen to the sound before and after any changes you've made just to make sure you've enhanced the sound and not made it worse. Once we're happy with how it sounds, move on to any other processing or effects we might need. If this kick drum was a real drummer plane, each hit of the bass drum might be slightly different because they might hit one soft and the next one harder. What we could do is add a compressor like this, BF. 76, to even out that waveform. The quieter hits become louder, and the leader hits become quieter. As this is a quick introduction and we want to create our first song, I'm not going to bombard you with every button on every plug in. Instead you'll find a link in. The links are provided. That takes you to a website that describes all the functions of the three plug ins for Avid as we just copied and pasted our samples. We don't need to worry about any variations here as they're all exactly the same. We can continue this way across our drums. So we have a really nice drum sound. Something to watch is that I wouldn't normally mix a song this way by sling the drums and working on them in constant isolation. The important thing you need to remember is that a song needs to work as a whole. There is only one frequency range, and all our instruments need space in that range. If I add a lot of bass to the kick drum to make it sound really big and full, it may be competing with the bass guitar as it may need. Similar frequencies. Don't obsess on this perfect drum sound and realize that it overshadows the rest of the song and uses up fundamental frequencies that other instruments may need. We'll continue this way for now as it's easier to make sense for the process. Now our drum sound great but a little dry and lifeless. Let's add some reverb to the snare. We could put our reverb straight onto the snare track. What I prefer to do, put all my reverbs and effects on an ox track. This means our main snare sound is nice and clear and we can add as much or as little of the effect we want in the background. Like before, I'm going to sow the snare track, I'm going to click on the snare, then go to Track. I want stereo Ox and click Create. I will simply name this snare reverb, change the color. I tend to keep this the same color as the main instrument, a lighter or darker tone, so I can differentiate the effects from the audio tracks. Now we need to send our snare signal on a bus. What I'm going to do is going to send a copy of the signal. I'm going to choose the next available bus, which is 3.4 as we've already used 1.2 I'll click 3.4 and this little fader pops up. I'm going to turn that fader up and then I'll go to the set the Ox bus 3.4 I've now got a copy of the signal being sent via bus say and four. And the ox track receiving bus say and four. Now on the snare reverb track, I will go to insert. I will go to reverb and I'll pick a reverb verb is a plug in that comes with protols and is nice and simple to use. Again, we have a number of presets we can dial in and adjust to suit our needs. Once you start getting further into music production, you will likely want to start building your own plug in collection. A lot of the big plug in companies such as UAD or Waves offer free trials, so you can try out the plug ins before you purchase them. This can be great as you can find out what works for you and your set up before you spend any money. A lot of plugins are just digital representations of real life studio equipment or the studios themselves. I'm going to use this pure plate plugin, which is one I particularly like. You can also save your own presets in a plugin, I have my own presets saved for different situations and different instruments. I can load this up and then adjust it depending on what I need. If we listen to the snare and it's reribed together both at full volume, it sounds like this. Now, that sounds slightly ridiculous for what we're trying to achieve here. What we do, we take that reverb track, turn it right down, and add as much as we feels appropriate. We still have that nice, clear snare sound, but in the background we have a nice big reverb as well. It's given our snare sound its own space, as well as adding dynamics to our drums. Now we can bring back all the drums and adjust that reverb accordingly to save a little time. I'm going to go ahead and speed up the process and do the same for all the different drum tracks, adding bits of EQ and compression to any of the individual tracks that need it. Now what I want to do is look at the drums as a whole. The drum sound really nice at the moment, but we really want to tie them together and enhance the overall feel. If I go to my drum bus, I can add Q or compression, or anything I feel that will enhance the overall sound of the drums. If I load up a simple Q, notice if I boost some high frequencies, how the whole drum sound changes. Same with the lows. I can simply add anything I feel relaxing or subtract anything that doesn't feel quite right. Next we'll add some compression. I'm going to use a UEDcpressor, but you can pick any available compressor in your free trial of Protol and try some precess. Now if we bypass our plugin, we can hear the difference, makes our drum send a little bit puncher and a bit more together. 23. Mixing Other Instruments and Vocals: Yeah, onto the base. We're going to use a very similar process, some EQ, a little compression. And that's it. Now we want to mix a piano. I've got the piano panned far left and far right as it gives us a nice wide stereo spread. We're going to add a little bit of Q. You can use the same EQ we used on the other tracks. I'm going to use something different to show you some of the other EQs that are available. Let's listen back to the piano before and after. Now, a little compression that should do for our piano sound for now onto the guitars. As I mentioned, I recorded them both twice so we can get a nice wide sound if we listen to them together at the moment, they don't sound particularly excited. Now let's pan one hard left and pan the other hard right. All of a sudden we have this really nice sound and loads of stereo width, which is great. We will now do the same as we've done before, track new stereo walks, create, we'll call this our version guitar. I will make the input of that ox, our next available bus, which will be 7.8 Then I'll make the output of the acoustic guitars, 7.8 because I still want the first guitar on the left speaker and the second guitar on the right. Now we'll go ahead with the same process as before, some light EQ compression, and see how it sounds. As always bringing the rest of the track in to listen to it together again and adjust accordingly. That's okay for now. Onto the chorus guitars, we'll highlight the chorus to listen to only that section. Same process as before bus with the guitars band left and right. At this time I'm really only using this acoustic for some texture and energy. I don't want the low end bass frequencies of the guitar muddying up my chorus. I'm going to apply a high pass filter in our Q. A high pass filter is an EQ curve that is used to remove low frequency sounds from an audio signal. It's called a high pass filter because it allows the high frequencies to pass. This can be useful for removing all the low frequencies we don't want in our audio. Let's see how that works on its own. It doesn't sound very good, but in the context of the song, I can hear all the parts I want without adding low end that could be conflicting with other instruments. Now, last but not least, vocals, the same principles as before. A plug in we will use that's different though is a D. Now when people naturally sing, sounds tend to sound quite unpleasant through a microphone. A DSR reduces this. If I load up the free protols DSR, here we can see it has presets. And to get started, we could simply load up a vocal preset that should limit the S sounds we hear coming through. After that, it's back to EQ compression, and I'll set up an ox track for my vocal reverb. Let's have a listen, I swannel before plugins and after I'd swan feel all for the first time. Pray for something real. Hello, old Man Hellman. Now that the vocals are done, we can do the exact same thing with the backing vocals. Let's have a listen to all our vocals together. Want feel hello for the first time. Pray for something real. Hello, old man, illness, man. That sounds much more exciting. Know the whole song together. Smart fellas. First down. Something real. Thousands in the thousand. We now have a very basic mix of our song. 24. Mixing Summary: Once we've added all we think our track needs, it's time to listen back. I highly recommend going away at this point and taking a break. This could be for a cup of tea or leave it to the next day. Fresh ears will give you a clearer perspective on how your mix sounds. There is a term in the mixing world called reference track. Now when I'm mixing a song, it's important that I'm making mixed decisions relevant to the genre that songs in. In the ballpark of how that song should sound, a reference track is just a song of the same genre that I think sounds great. Doesn't matter if a lover hit the lyrics or anything creative, it just needs to be a song in that genre that I think has been mixed incredibly well. I'll have the reference track handy so that on my breaks or before I start in the morning, I can listen to the reference track and set my ears and my head up for what I'm aiming for. It also acts as a comparison to my own mix. I'll listen to the reference track, then put my own mix on straight after, and I'll immediately notice any obvious differences or problems with my mix. I might think my vocals are lacking in clarity in the high end frequencies compared to the reference track. Or that the krum in the reference track is much more up front than mine. Just AB the two songs to give you a good sense of what you're aiming for and what you need to improve on. I'm producing a country song. I'll have a country reference track, I'm producing a pop song, I'll reference track, and so forth. Once you're happy with your mix, it's time to bounce it out as a single file, the completed mix. Once your mix is bounced out, but before mastering, go and listen to it again and again. Listen to it in your headphones. Listen to it in your car. Compared to other songs you love on your way to work, listen to it on as many sets of speakers as you can to see if you can spot any final problems before you go to mastering. 25. Mastering: Now you have your completed mix bounced out as one file. Let's get going. First we're going to create a new session just as before. Open protoli session. Call a session mastering or something relevant to you. Protols will open just as before. Now we don't need to create any audio tracks as we'll be importing our mix. We just need a master fader, new stereo master fader create. Now we need to import our mix file, Import audio. Locate your mix and open. Let's drag this bottom bar down. As we're only working on one piece of audio, we might as well make it large and clear. Now it's important to think about what we're trying to achieve here. Mastering is, without a doubt, an art form in itself. This entire class could have been about mastering and we would still have only scratched the surface. We're just touching on some of the basic fundamentals. What we're aiming to do is enhance the overall sound of the song with a little Q, even out the track volumes with some compression, and add a little more volume and energy to our track. Now the first thing we need to do is just have a look at the waveform overall. Now it looks like we've got plenty of headroom checking, there's no obvious clipping, and just generally assessing that the file is ready to be mastered. If we did notice any clipping or artifacts, we'd have to go back to the mixed stage and address those problems before going any further. Our file looks good here, so the first thing we're going to do is create a nice fade in and fade out. It's important to note that we're not fading in or out the actual song. We're actually just fading in and out the silence before and after the song. Why would we do that? Well, the sections before and after our song that we believe to be silent probably aren't actually silent. There's a big difference between complete digital silence and sections of our recorded file that just don't have any music play. We'll create a fade in and out to make sure that those transitions aren't noticeable. All we need to do is make sure that all three tools on our selector tools are selected. Then simply go to our audio file and go to the top right hand corner to drag in a fade out. Or top left hand corner to drag a fade in. Simple. You could also do this by going into our volumes and adjusting our volume like so. Next we'll add a little EQ. Now here's where your reference track will come in, very handy. You can listen to your reference track, compare it to your mix, and analyze the difference in overall frequency balance between your mix and the reference track. You could even import your reference track into protols. You can compare them side by side. You could compare the track using a spectral analyzer, so you could visibly see the difference between your mix and the reference. Or the better option is just to use your ears. If your reference track has more base frequencies than your mix, then you could add more bot end to your mix with Q that or anything you feel enhances your sound. Now onto some compression, we'll add some light compression to tame the loudest sections of the song. And bring up the quieter sections. Again, feel free to use any relevant presets. Your plug in of choice may have to get you started and adjust from there. Finally, we'll add a limiter. A limiter essentially prevents your audio from clipping and allows you to push the volume of your mix. Although the quality of the sound is more important, you don't want your song to be much quieter than other songs you like to listen to. You want to get as much volume as is sensible at the mastering stage. Let's listen to a section of the song before our mastering. I want to fail lab for the first time, something real. And after our mastering, I want to fail lab for the first time. Something real. Hello, you. That is a huge difference. Now we just need to bounce at our master in the same fashion that we have previously. File bounce, make sure we have all the correct parameters and that's it. There we have it, our mastered song. Normally, once the song has been through mastering, that is the song complete and there's no going back. But here, nobody is expecting you to do any of these stages perfectly on your first try. Learning these processes takes years, and we've only just touched on the basics. That being said, go listen to your finished track. If you think you can improve it, go back to the mastering stage, go back to the mixing stage, even go back to the recording stage. Learn change and improve equally. Don't spend six months in your first song. Embrace what you've created and confidently upload it to Skillshare for feedback. Knowing that this is only your first attempt, and you're going to continue to get better the more music you produce. E 26. Release: Let's imagine you've produced your first song. It's been mixed mastered, and it sounds great. Now it's time to release it to the world, if that's what you want. Of course you may want to produce music period. For yourself and that's great too. But for those of you looking to reach the masses, you're going to need to work with a music distribution company. A music distributor is a company, you will upload your music to pay a fee and they will arrange for your music to be released on all the major platforms on an agreed upon date. There are loads of great companies out there, but all my own music is released through Emu Bands as they're a fantastic company to work with and they make the process so incredibly simple. You can just go to Embands com and click, Get Started, follow the on screen instructions, and within minutes you'll have uploaded your mic, picked your release date, and the online stores you want your music to be released from. It's very simple, with very little expense. Beyond this, it's just a case of marketing your music for a new artist, releasing their first song. This could simply be announcing it to your family and friends on social media. For an established artist, this could be a large campaign with tours, radio play, and countless other promotions. 27. Final Thoughts: There we are. You have all the knowledge and tools you need to produce your first song, and you've had an insight into how the world of music production works. I really hope you've enjoyed the class and thank you so much for taking it. I absolutely love sharing knowledge and introducing people to their own musical journeys. We've touched on the basics of music production enough to get you started, so go out there and make some music. Also, why not take some more courses? Maybe songwriting, more advanced recording techniques, mixing or whatever takes your fancy. This is just the beginning and there's so much to learn. The most important thing is fun. Producing music is great fun. I'll be releasing more classes on Scelta in the future. If there's anything particular you'd like to learn about, why not get in touch with your ideas? I'd love to hear them and I might even make a class about. Until then, why not follow me on Scelta and social media? Step up to date, you can find me as Andy Music UK, on Instagram and Facebook. I love to stay connected with people and I enjoy replying to all of your comments. For now, I can't wait to hear your class projects. See you soon.