Transcripts
1. Lofi Intro: you a bit confused. It's cool. Don't lie. You were looking through you to this whole time. You want the truth? Give it to you. It's no longer find my main chick lately. Now you know why. It's not just because I'm in love with dusty drums. Mr Way she dumps. I can never get enough Never pick one. Maybe she's I want to see it and bass notes, Feel it in a kick drum in She's All About the Magic is more than passion. She loves anime cassette tapes and vinyl scratches. So much saturation that explained satisfaction. Love, Let me tell you know just how lo Fi has my heart and soul. It's on my favorite shiners to produce. My name is Key over on, and I'm an artist and educator who's been making music for over 10 plus years. I'm obsessed with making don't meets teaching you how to do the same if you want a long how the war and chop samples layer drums and then mixing techniques to you that lo fi sound. This is, of course, for you. This course is designed for beginning, and intermediate students don't cover any crazy advanced concepts will be using mostly stock plug. It's so if you're ready to love a love every beverage of choice, let's get it.
2. Welcome To Class!: when it comes to low fi there a couple of things that I want you to keep in mind before we actually jump into the beats. The 1st 1 is there's a lot of dilla influence in the drums, which is what makes it such an exciting genre. And so that means that there's gonna be a lot of swing and everything is gonna be a little bit off the grid. So if you're making this, the reason why I I often teach this after I teach a boom BAP was because you have to learn how to feel these drums. It's not necessarily going to be anything that's super quanta ized or directly on the grid . That's what makes it kind of loaf eyes. It has this bob very influenced by dilla, kind of a fly low swing to it, so make sure you keep that in mind. Moving forward that if it doesn't exactly feel if it doesn't have a super intense pocket of first, that's OK. It's something you'll learn, but that it's about taking the drums and taking those elements and moving them a little bit off the grid so that everything is just a little bit out of time, not completely sync up number two. An important part that goes in the lo fi is that grit is good. So you're gonna intentionally add a lot of saturation. Ah, live a distortion. You're gonna roll off a lot of the high end with most of these elements. So it does have a bit of a muffled feel, almost like it was playing off of an old record. And with that being said, you want to incorporate some sort of vinyl If you want to incorporate some sort of vinyl scratches and things of that nature, some character highly recommended, I also added in the track what you're going to find out. You want to make sure that things are coming through in a way, so it sounds like it's off of analog ears. That means a lot of distortion bit crushing things. Do you want to intentionally f to sound up for lack of a better word? You want to make sure that it isn't super pristine and clear cut. And so that's a characteristic going into this, that things are starting to sound messed up. That's usually a good thing, however, Like I say, you want to know the rules before he can break them so you don't want it to sound crappy, but you want it to. You want to have the power to then make it sound intentionally gritty. And that's a fun element of thes tracks that I always have a lot of fun with, because I just love distortion. I love saturation things of that nature, and the third point that comes into low fi is that they're normally aren't a ton of elements. You might have some keys. You might have bass, drums, etcetera, percussion. But then you might also have some vocal elements, different textures. This is where you can really have fun and a lot of low five beast that you hear us in Amman , you to play less things of that nature. There might be horn stabs here and there, and there might also be like vocal phrases, so these are often like romantic or nostalgic, sentimental vocal phrases or vocal singing chops that are placed throughout the track that tends to be a character element of love. I not always but in this track that we're gonna make together, you'll see that there are some there aren't many elements. So the elements that you do choose, you want to choose wisely because you aren't gonna have you are gonna be able to hide under much of thing. So even though the the beats might seem empty because you only have you have so few elements, you can actually fill them up and fill them out. Give him a lot of character. You can tell stories of love I beat because of the textures, the vocal samples, other things that you can add to added atmosphere and a feeling to these beats, which makes them fun.
3. What Are You Going To Learn?: when it comes to low Fi. There are a few key elements that I wanted to talk to you about that will cover in this class. The 1st 1 is a brief overview of audio manipulation. We're gonna learn how to a warp chop and transpose samples. In this case is gonna be a piano sound that we then take and reimagine into our own main melody. Another important thing that we're gonna cover in this class is the importance of swing when it comes to your drums, how to make your drums feel more natural, more than live. Give them a bit more of a human element, so they aren't exactly on the grid. And it gives your track more of, ah, riel life bought to it. Another element that we're gonna cover in this course that I think is very important is mixing how to mix lo fi the importance of distortion e que in river, those air, some key elements that are covering a lot of courses. But in low fi in particular, this is when we're really going to jump into it pretty deep. I hope that you are ready to rock and roll hall kitchen the inside download the stems, get the resource is let's jump into it. Peace
4. Course Project: an important note. Before we jump into the course, I want to let you know that the stem files while I'm making this course are available for download. I will also have so many resource is available for you in the resource is section of this course in. If there's certain things that you see me using in the course that I mentioned, you know you can find them all there as well. That being said, good skills don't happen just from watching that happened from doing so. Please download the stems, follow along for the course project and make your own hip hop track doesn't have to be the same his mind, but we'll see how I lean. My now don't give you all the samples and the stems necessary so that you could make your own hope. That makes sense. If you already have some fun, let's dig into it. Peace
5. Lofi Melody Overview: when it comes to the melody element of low five beats there. Often again, there's no us and nothing is set in stone. But they're often going to be jazzy keys that are sometimes a loop or sometimes chopped up in this example that were about to jump into. I'll show you how to warp and manipulate a piano sample, and then also how you can warp it, chop it and transpose it to make it a little bit more your own rather than simply taking a loop in making using a pre made loop. Although have nothing against that and Lo Fi, there is normally a kind of choppiness that comes to the piano samples, which I'll show you how to do another element that comes into the melody of low fi beats. It is sometimes these air old soul records, so there might be samples or trumpets brass other drums in these samples as well what you can kind of hide, depending on different elements and effects that you use to kind of hide those drums. So if you are using a soul sample or something that has other drums in it, don't worry about it can often be hidden with little tips and tactics. But in this melody, we're going to take a piano sample were going toe warp it, We're gonna chop it up, and we're gonna find something that is a little bit more unique than the simple panel sample that we started with. Let's jump into it.
6. Melody Walkthrough & Lofi Effects: today we're gonna learn how to a low fi. So the first thing you need for low vice and jazzy keys and I can't play keys to save my life. So these keys, which are already pretty low fide but we're gonna do it even more So So this is how the keys sound just on their own on. And then I built this audio effect wrecked for you that has a whole bunch of different elements in it, which I walk you through quickly. So the reduction This is, um this is a doubt. It's a bit reduction, so you pretty much can down sample, and this will be here, but it's really easy to overdo it. And once you you can download this from my website for freaky o Ryan dot com slash resource is and it will show up here in your audio effect rack and ko lo fi effect track. So you can loathe seven after build this whole thing out there pretty much have built this for you. It makes it easy to down sample your keys. There's a frequency shifter here kind of easy that wobble with your keys, so I'll play it back for you. And so you can kind of see what each, uh, each effect does one at a time. So the 1st 1 is reduction for down sampling. It's really easy to overdo this. So you want to keep it pretty light, so I just do a little bit. Just add a little bit of thes. Like I said, he's already are have been re sampled in, um, have some lo fi effects. We're gonna have to push these super hard, but maybe a little something is gonna be your wobble. This is your frequency shifter right here again. Easy to overdo this one. It also changed the rate vinyl distortion. If you want that kind of old school a lot of these old timey pianos, That's kind of what's going to give you that low fi element to begin with. Is this vinyl distortion element again? Super easy to overdo so you can find out in here if you hold shift when you're turning these up, you can get very granular with it. So I might just turn on maybe just the slightest bit a reduction, But you don't. This isn't necessarily something that you're gonna need for this one probably toy with this later once we get into these other knobs cracker volume if you want that real vinyl crackle . But the only thing that I don't like about this plug in is that it's crackling all the time , like even when I'm not playing anything. So I prefer to sometimes just put in some vinyl crackle as an effective we'll talk about later in this tutorial. Of course, I like the gag. Alon Ah, chorus effect right here. I think that it this naturally, has some lo fi vibes. And so this lo fi wet knob Excuse me? This dry, wet knob again, Another one easier overdue. So just watch it. Little read a little bit of reverb, nothing crazy. You know, low fi hip hop has that kind of nostalgic vibe to it. So a little, a little Ah, Weaver goes a long way getting your feelings in this accelerator. I love saturation. If you've seen any of my stuff, you don't put saturate er this bit warmer, saturated on just about anything. Some incredible third party plug is what we're doing everything with stock today. So, uh, we're gonna just throw on some a little bit of saturated on this joint and then another one of my go to is this o T t, which is a multi band compressor. And for me, I like my lo fi. I like my lo fi keys to have a lot of the high end acute out. So I probably going here and do some e que. But one nice part about the O t. T is you Kenbrell ing in some compression and it will allow you to choose where they want your highs mids or lows compressed. And again, this o t. T is really easy to overdo it. But we're gonna bring this in and see how it sounds. So this is no o t t. Right? So the whole thing is compressed, So there's going to some I saw all that like tot that high end kind of those crackly sounds . You can bring that us in as much as you want to taste. I personally love that because I like to do my other stuff with high end. So I'll bring I bring that down a bit. And so these are gonna be your keys. I just wanted to walk you through kind of the effects for it, and then we'll chop it up and actually get something going. But this is, uh if you have just regular keys, you're welcome to play your own keys in here. This will really get you 90% away with your low fi vibes. Just again. Be careful. You don't wanna go too crazy because it's again. It's even easy to overdo it. All right, so on to chop in the sample.
7. Chopping The Sample: All right, So now we're gonna jump in the air, start toying around with these keys, and, uh, just seeing what we can come up with, I like to personally chop up my keys a lot, so we might rock with the loop. This is a pretty good sounding luke, but I just kind of mess around with it and see if we can what we might be able to find with this by kind of toying around with it. So I'm gonna come in here and just listen to her back. So I'm going to just start chopping the sample in certain places. I think would be make for good chops if you are a beginner and you don't know if you don't have a bilton. This is how you chop up samples that this at least how I chop up samples. Mableton, you come in here and you'll put in these things called wort markers, which will pretty much tell a built in. This is where you want to make your chops later on. And these don't have to be set in stone because you will change these as we go. So I just put these in this kind of a rough idea of where I want the's chops and notes to be. I really like this court. Hopefully, we can make something from it and you have to follow my chops. Exactly. You again. This comes on a personal taste. Figure out for me. I just know that Are there certain chord? That's what I'm kind of looking for words that I know that Arthuis certain course I really am gonna want for chops because I like their vibe. So that's why I'm keeping an eye out for And then I'm also looking for sometimes these individual little notes that AARP end of these in between notes, the's can be a really nice to have his kind of filler notes. So that's why sometimes I'll put in a certain shop in certain ones that I hear that I like . That's kind of I'm looking for, like this one, like this one could be useful. And then I like these little These will be good at the end of a measure, all right? And so, depending on my mood, I'm feeling in the sample. If there are a ton of keys, I might just chop the sample up like this just using the audio file. But since they're a bunch of little ones in here, I'm going to jump in here and right click and then say, sliced a new midi track. And I have this slicing preset, which I made which pretty much chop these up into MPC style slices, which again you can get on my website if you want, and I'll have in the resource is below in this course. But this there are a ton of different built in things. What you want is you just want This isn't anything super crazy, but it's a little rack that I built, which you want to be able to control is how whether you can picture your sample chops up just because that's nice to have control over and then something so that you can, uh, kind of choke your your chops if you know what that means is pretty much how quickly they get cut off when they're triggered. So this way they're triggered all the way through, or if this thing they're very short. So that's what you don't need this crazy thing. If you want to tell you work on to download mine but that's just kind of what, But these are the two main macro functions that I like to use. All right, So let's jump in here and see what we can work with. Then turn this down. And I'm also going to copy this effects rack into this new MIDI track, and so I'm going to start. But I'm doing out there's no science to. I'm just gonna start twin around the chops and seeing what we will be what we're working with. I'm gonna play back with the Metrodome and just started feeling things out. Helps. We have been Metro. Another thing to do is bring in like a simple drum loop s. So that way you have something to play along with, which is something I actually might do for this one. That I have something that I can makes it easy for me to see what drums might sound like with my chops
8. Playing The Sample: So what I'll do is I'll come in here and bring in some drums. Just is kind of a placeholder. Thes aren't going to be the final drums by any means. We kind of just a random drum loop, either from a song have already made or from a sample pack from something like Spice. Just that we have an idea of what some lo fi drums might be at a similar BPM, and then I'll play along with these drums. Then we can craft our own drums later. But this at least gives us an idea of what it might sound like. I like that there are a couple chords, and I really like cool . So I think that might be a little pattern that I rocked with him, Kind of like home feeling. I'm feeling that feeling, feeling that Let's do it all right. And so now I click this little button up here, which pretty much plays in, incorporates what I already played into here and now I'm gonna come in because these chops aren't perfect, and this is when I come in, I Kwan ties them on a Mac that is command you and I'm going to rearrange them a little bit . Um, and they didn't just make the chops a little bit cleaner. The nice part. That's one reason I love able to. It is, you can kind of come in and get really granular with samples. So what I'm doing here is this one feels like it's it's rushing. So I'm gonna bring I'm going to give it more. I'm gonna start it maybe a little bit farther back. So that way it plays in time. Well, that's certainly sound good. Uh, and, um, after, if that if that makes sense, I hope it does. But pretty much you can start the sample so that it doesn't get quite so cut off on. Then what I'm gonna do next is coming here, and you can still hear some clicks, some little cliques in transience at the beginning of certain notes. And so I was going to smooth those out a little bit in the filter global section. What this does is it is this is controlling the attack. This would also be a great thing. If you wanted to map this to a macro over here, you could control the attack. But we'll do that another time, uh, you pretty much can control the attacks of this way. You decide. Like and sometimes if you started right right here at the attack of zero, you get those little cliques. So bringing this out that can think it's just smooth things out. This is another one. Of course, that's the first part of our loop that we've got down I like to do is I'll probably keep this same first part of the loop and then just cut with something different for the tail end. Um, that was just two chops that I felt made sense. And and then I think when this in this part, I just imagine we'll use some sort of a ah, some sort of the like those ending keys. If you remember that, get the end of the phrase. There were some really interesting sounding keys in there. So it'll do. Is I'll come in, I'll turn it on these headphones so that what you can hear something like that. That's what I'm looking for s so that you can hear your different shops. And I mean, if you don't, if you don't have ah riel keyboard like me and you're playing off of your laptop keys. You can hit the X in the zebra, and it will. It will shift you up over here. What's chapter playing? So right now, my a my sdf just play these chops. But if I hit X, it will bump me up too. Our student x one more time. It'll bump me up to these these more final chops. I think that might be it. - Oh , I like that. Who am? I have to be it right there. Whoops. That's what we want. Um, it was So now I just come in. I don't feel like recording them again. I'll just come in and collect them in. Um, where did you go? There it is. And now I just loop this and get this last four bars down. - And now I'll come in again and do the same processes before of just kind of more giving more surgical with these slices more fine. Fine tuning these a bit more. I can tell that this one is And what I might do is if I just let this one play. Let's see how it feels without this last shop. There it is. So what I did was instead of ah, instead of putting an extra chop, I just let this sample play all the way out, and I think that works. And I'm gonna come in here because it still sounds little scratching at the start. And there it is. Our sins are full, Lou, who's on a good All right, So now that we have our loop, I'm gonna join those clips that is command J on a Mac and jump into our own drones. Let's get it.
9. Lofi Drums Overview: when it comes to the drums for low fi. Something that I want to make sure that I hammer home is that it's not about being synchronized on the grid. It's about personally going in and dragging them off intentionally. So they have a Bob, have a swing. You want them to feel human, and you want them to feel a little bit late. You want it to have a vibe. It's very influenced by J. Dilla. If you haven't heard much of jail, go back and listen to it. There's just a certain bob to these low five beast, which is one of the reasons why I love them and those characteristics that drew me to them in the first place. Another element that goes into low fi the drums of low five beats are the snares. A lot of the highs are often rolled off the snares, and they're normally a lot of room shots, So these are gonna be super crisp traps, snares. They're gonna be mostly acoustic sounding drums. There's gonna be mostly acoustic drums, drums that sound like they had a really element to them and are often drum loops that air chopped up and then pieces air used for low fi. And last but not least, the drum patterns are rarely super complicated. You'll see a lot of similar drum patterns within low five beats, and that's not a bad thing, since you don't have a ton of elements to work with. You want to choose those elements wisely and use those sounds wisely because you can't necessarily hide under a but a bunch of different traps snares. And you only have, you know, one snare or a bunch of high hats going on that are pitched in different things. And I just have one simple 18th no high hat or maybe even less than that. So when it comes to drums, choose them wisely and again. You want to make sure they have an acoustic sounding feel to them. Let's jump into it
10. Drums Walkthrough: already. Then the next thing we want to do is we're gonna actually mute this drama because we don't want But we might use I'll actually like this drum up a lot. So we might do is you're gonna meet this drum loop. And might Rick come recreate something similar to this? But I want to come in and I'll start with my kicks in my snares first, just so that we have kind of a loose skeleton, and then we can have fun playing around the hi hats. So I gave you some, uh, different options to choose from. So will happen. You see these different sneers. I like this 1st 1 just like that one, too. The see how it goes. And it's just use it actually more so again, they should just to kind of get us going. We could even chop him out of this drum loop if we wanted Teoh. Uh, let's not do that. And this is just gonna be a very quick if you just roll of some of the high end of these snares coming here. And this is just something light for now. Just don't get super snappy. Cool. All right, Let's come in and I like to have these kicks were rocking out. I like the kind of double kick, um, vibe. So I might actually just steal their kick pattern with our own kicks. And Steve Addition sounds like I like that one, too. - One of the cool part about low fi is that it's Ah, very heavily influenced as well by like producers like Dylan. So there's a lot of swing involves Utkan. Um, we noticed these air like dragged off a little bit, which is kind of cool because it gives it just a bop. So you almost want these drums to be sloppy, so these won't be super on the grid type of drums. That'll have kind of a different feel right now. I'm just kind of getting a pattern down, and then I'll come back in here a little bit later and mess with them a bit more to give it a bit more of either some Bob's until a swing or just make it feel a bit more out of time intentionally. That's a little about, and I turn these these little these down just a little bit. Give it more for human field when I was kind of getting a vibe for outfielder, I might drag these snared, actually a little bit early, just to throw things off. Mawr cool. That's feeling good. Let's add some high hats. One of the key. Um, what was allowed one of the keys to high adds, when it comes to low fi hats is I'll show you in this drum loop, too. It's like these there. It's not always gonna be your straight 16 notes when a copy this pattern and bring it back down here to show you, uh, it'll be these these highs that are kind of in between. It's kind of gives you this Bob. And so if you look, they're kind of consistent, so I like to add those in There are a component that I find really helps add some Bach to low five tracks. You know what? I might actually just steal their high at again a lot. This is just experimenting. Seen what works? Look, this, um, not crazy about it. Let's try this one, and with this again, because it's low fi. This is gonna come down to feel a lot of this is how it feels to you how much swag and delay not delay about how far you want your drums to be off the grid. So this it won't necessarily like a super quantities thing. This will come down to kind of just feeling it out and comes down to personal taste. So that's what we'll be doing right now is adding in these these high hats and just kind of getting a feel for the box. And if you could tell from their own heads to they have the acute out a lot of the highs, as is typical low five fashion. So we get him in, just throw on a quick Q. - It's just got this. Uh, it's got, like, a waltz almost again. Some of these these in between hats you want them to be felt more than her time, turning them down just so that they're there. They give they give more of that wall, see feel, But they are going to be these. The ones you want to be more pronounced. - I feel like there should almost be another one in here. A little little high had action. Cool. So I was gonna loop this last bit. See how this feels right now. It just feels a little bit delayed on this last part of the bar. So I'm jumping in here to figure out what's going on. Get a Toyota. Maybe another kick or open, high hat. Not crazy about it. My head open high in here instead. But I feel like there is a high hat. And here that feels a little bit off in this second half of the bar. Cool. Are So that's this part of the drums. I'm gonna add open high hat and will be ready to rock. Let me grab the open higher in here. And so again, we want to really low fi this hat. So we're gonna we're gonna roll off the high end and and then I also liked sometimes pitch these downs, we're gonna warp it so that it doesn't if you don't work, But it's gonna make it longer shorter. Um, so I'm gonna warp it and then put you down a bit. And I want this just be kind of like a slide into the rest of the bar. - Drop these in the wrong spot. So this is just like me to run around with the volume a lot of this will come down to getting the drums to blend well together will jump into in the mixing section. This is just a rough mix. I just want this to stand out too much, which is why I was kind of messed around the volumes. So I think that's kind of our basic drums for now. And we're going to move on to some more interesting elements of the percussion, the drums that ah lot of low fi elements have.
11. Lofi Drum Techniques: are we rocking and rolling. And with these drums, I realized that I do actually like their ride this ride Cymbal in here. So I went and snagged on my drum kits a ride Cymbal so that we can add that to our kid. Um, so now we're gonna work this so that because I can see this is a little bit off and bring this up here. And if you listen to their drum loop because I like these drums, it follows our high hats. Pretty similarly. So I'm going to, um, just, uh, copy these up duplicate. That sounds with our drums. I still feel like there's something off with these keys and it's Yeah, let's try. Let's try these more on the grid. I think that fits better. And those open high hat feels a little bit to that. I was gonna leave him off for now. Sweet. I like that. A lot. Thes are nice. Really Kind of Philip that open space up top. Cool. So that is the rest of our drums. And now we're going to jump into the base
12. Adding Bass: when it comes to base with the lo fi tracks. I like to personally do a little bit of Dilla style base. So these aren't gonna be against super crazy, complicated based sounds and most of the time will probably be just adding to the groove a little bit. They're gonna be super based in your face. I know it awaits in this track, so I'm gonna hop in here. I use the mini V three, which is in our Turia plug in. It's pretty much there are other tons of other ways you've been rocket, but this is pretty much it's a mini move. I just love the move base If you want to, though, you can rock if you're unable to end If you rock there, uh, instrument rack. They have a pretty standard, um, hip hop sub base, which definitely works, uh, for this sort of a thing, But I'm going to rock with my many v three, cause this is my this my main girl. So I come up here and when Iraq with a base standard base standard base, uh, sherbet sound. But I like to pitch my base up, so that way I can hear when notes I'm playing and what I'm going to do now. It turned just a little bit of distortion so that I can hear the bass a little better. So watch it, Years. This is intense distortion plug in called camel crusher. It's free. It'll be in the resource is as well, just like in here. What I'm playing and I'm going to because I'm terrible. Music theory, um, going to just play along and trust my ear. So I play along and find what notes sound good to me. Cool. I think I got those couple of those notes and all right, so I'm wonders. Play those in loosely, and it will give you those. I'm going to Quantas those real quick boom and then coming here and, uh, all right. And those. No, it's gonna join these clips. Quantas, those as well. All right. And now I'm going to come in. And now that I have my notes down, uh, probably have more fun just playing, uh, playing these in also transposed them down and probably drafted this sourcing. I'm keeping a super simple with these again. You can get super jazzy and play these base out to be more fun, but right now I'm going to just keep it simple and we'll see what kind of a pattern come up with this will be This is fun if you like. Actually, if you ever have ah, liken work with a bass player live, you can have Superfund based patterns. But, um, because I'm also a vocalist, I, uh since I make a lot of my own beats and I sing a rap on beats, I find it sometimes based patterns when they're too crazy. They're really fun to make when you're making the beat. But then when you're actually trying to add vocals to them, they could be a little bit distracting. So I always start more simple, And then I feel like if I need to jazz it up later, I can do that. It hear what I'm doing is I'm kind of copying the pattern of the keys that played right here as well. That kind of go up bump. Another little, uh, dilla trick that I learned is from studying a lot of his beats. He put based on total on a lot of his kicks, and so sometimes, just to switch it up will do that to just, you know who doesn't want to be like Dylan. Zoom in and make sure I'm playing. He's in the right places. - I realized I actually like that, um, more than its original part. So I'm going to steal that double kick and add that to the beginning one as well. I can't decide if I like this base. Know how long I want to make it, but we won't worry about that too much right now. It's not about getting your base. Perfect is about getting some base down that physical nice groove again. Keep it fluid. We can always come back to these later, but for now it's a decent pattern. Let's keep it pushing.
13. Lofi Flair (Percussion): Okay, so you kind of got our basic loop going right here. A feeling good. It's up. It's up that this lo fi vibe and I want to add a little bit of percussion just to add some flair to possible sections. So I deleted that open higher from before, Just didn't seem to fit. But I did find another one that I liked from another sample pack that I have. That's one of my other sample packs from height there have created. So I want to try this again and then possibly add some shaker action. So let's try this one more time. So I like that. I think that works a lot better. And I want to add ah Shaker instead. So this will be high at one. This will be I had to ride. It's a ride Cymbal, I think. All right. Shaker kind of got this way. I have here in my head where I kind of wanted to go and get I'm going. Teoh, pick you up the highs Roll off a lot of high end. Gonna drag these a little bit late. Drink this in a bet. There it is. So again, those are things that might if you depending on your vocalist, these converted a little bit distracting. So when it comes to like the percussion element or adding more to the drums, I was kind of your main drums. These are things that I I add, but I'm never super partial to because depending on the beat, sometimes these end up, um, end of being collateral. So these these were probably the first things that get cut. If the, you know you having a hard time finding a pocket on the beat or sometimes they're distracting Okay, on to the next one.
14. What About Brass?: So for this next element of the track us. This is like the meat and potatoes of what we're working with. But I like to add with low five beats, either some sort of textures or, uh, trumpet stabs other elements of that nature. And so I'm working in my Mableton template. It has everything kind of already locked and loaded ready for me to go, which you can. I, uh But you can get from my website. Kill Ryan dot com slash resource is and have it. They're available for you for free. Ah, so we can. Everything already comes in. It's your gain. Stagings already done their samples spots for you, all of that. Good stuff. So I'm gonna happen here. Well, knots place. I'm going to come to my trumpet, and I'm gonna find I found this. Ah, off of a splice pack. And it's a trumpet in our same key. A minor. And so I'm going to mess around with this and see if I can find a certain trumpet stabbed that works. Find a piece I like. I just drag it down to this section. - And when it comes to these trumpets stabs, I'm not going to be using all of these notes. But I'll show you how I make my stabs and these are they become more of textures and then they are any sort of lead melody or anything like that. So this is the Kia secret sauce when it comes to creating textures and stabs out of instruments. So first, I'm gonna take you out the lows CQ I haven't so automatically does that, but you're gonna want to roll off the low end from it and then, ah, bunch of reverb and delay is how you make it happen. So let's see how this goes. Right now I'm gonna toy with it, messing around with these different notes and see if I can find something that works. - I'm also gonna miss run of pitching them up and down an octave decide kind of see if I can get anything. It sounds interesting turning this no up a little bit, turning these notes it down a little bit. - Guess as their textures. I'm just I don't want them to be very apparent. So he's not even be still a little too out. - All right, that works for me. Uh, we can always come back to thes another time, and then the next element that I want to add is a bit more texture to the track.
15. Lofi Textures Overview: the textures toe low five beats are often what brings the tractor life and so low five beats Comptel a story, and this could be something romantic or sentimental nostalgic. Whatever you choose, uh, this is really where you can add some personality to your track so these could be from old video games. This could be from old movies. Could be random sounds that you find and add to them because the drums and lo fi beats aren't super complicated. This is where you can add vinyl crackle in distortion. You can really start to experiment with your textures and your effects to kind of beef up these tracks little bit and make them more unique than just a simple drum loop over and over. So we add some bird sounds at a railway station in here, a whole bunch of fun stuff. And if you have any interesting conversations of things that you want to add to your own, this would be the time to do it. All right, let's jump into it
16. Textures & EFX Walkthrough: All right, so in this section, we are going to ADM. Or textures just to kind of feel the beat out a little bit. One of the most fun parts about low fi is just getting weird and experimental with textures and sounds. So with that being said, I don't want any more of this trumpets, I'm gonna delete that. And I'm gonna create more tracks so that I can add things. And I also I like having some vinyl distortion sounds, even if I don't like it from the vinyl noise effect. Add this in. I think the little vinyl noise, a little white noise goes a long way. Um, so it's gonna I'm trying to turn this way down and just see how that vibes we can mix this in later. Um, but for now, a lot of times do if you're recording in anything from analog or other elements that already have some of this kind of vinyl noise action going on or some white noise, But I like to add that in just why not make it more grungy and then, um, effects. And when you take this, uh, from my samples out here and added actually appearing to my drum section. Uh, because I use this almost more like a percussive element. Um, and so I found this bird sound effect that want to do incorporate cool. - When I was trying to figure out where to place it, I think they're works. I like that difficult. You fashion. I'm just gonna add a ton of reverb and a bit of delay to this, making a more of a texture. I also feel like a hero. I feel like this needs to be pitch down. So when call a quick audible and see other sounds like that's still a strict I just still this still feels a little bit busy to me. But what I think I might do is, uh, we're gonna track this out soon, and so we're gonna find a place for this. But I think it is still having this much trumpet going on. It's starting to feel a little bit busy with the Verdon as well, but I just like having listen. I found this pact that was, like all old James Bond double 07 samples, which I incorporated almost every single beat just because why not like it's just fun in. It gives some different texture and kind of fun to the track. And then lo Fi, you can really have fun with this sort of stuff. Free sound dot org's on my favorites as well. You confined like old bus stations and conversations that will throw in that just kind of make it interesting. But I think this is a good place to start. We're going to mix this bad boy down and then start tracking it out, arranging to be from there. But I think this is our I don't think we're gonna want to start adding a whole lot more than this. Sounded good. All right, let's mix it.
17. Mixing Lofi Overview: Mixing low five beats is difficult, not because it's super complex, but because you have so few elements you really want to narrow in on the ones that are the most important to you. So for me, I don't love super loud, snappy snares, so that's not how I mixed them in Low five. But the kick is very important to me, and it's also something that I think is important and lo fi, because this is a genre where side chain compression is very much an integral part of the entire process. If you don't know much about side obtained compression also to you in this tutorial while we walked through the beat in the mixing module. But it's pretty much three idea that different elements will get out of the way when another element triggers. So in less complicated terms and you hear the kick, everything else ducks out of the way. And that's another element that gives it kind of this box thing swing. That kind of makes it characteristically. Ah, low five beat. So that's a main element that we jump into. Another part of low fi is You can have it because you want it to sound gritty and distorted . You can have it sound a little bit muddy, but do it intentionally. Don't just do it because it's a bad mix. But you if you want things to kind of blend together, what looking me difficult is not having certain elements. Stick out when that's often what you want in other mixes. In many other mixing tutorials that I have taught and that I shoot, I talked about how important it is to have certain sounds that come through so you can hear different sounds of feel different sounds with low fi. It's a little bit of a different animal because you don't necessarily have to have the sounds coming through crystal clear. The point is to have a feeling like it's more of a cohesive thing that is glued together, and rarely will you have certain elements that stick out in a low five beat unless it's intentional. Nous That's what you like, But more often than not, a lot of the highs will be rolled off. Everything will feel like it's being played through an old record player through it old cassette tape or something like that, and often if you have the intellect here to do it, you can. You can re sample it all the cassette tape and then even sample back in your computer or something of that nature to kind of give it that in a log characteristics. So I hope that makes sense. Here's the mixing tutorial on loaf. I don't forget such in compression and your sounds a bit muddy. That's okay. All right, let's do it.
18. Mixing Lofi Walkthrough: when it comes to mixing low fi, Um, the one of the nice parts about low fives that there aren't a ton of elements. So you don't have to worry too much about having a ton of tracks. But before mixing, I just want to come and make sure I don't have any extraneous tracks and everything's labeled properly. Um, we'll come back. We'll keep those transitions for another time. And this is original sample save chops. Cool. So when I mix up to bring everything all the way down and then makes one element at a time , so I kind of a rough mix, I'm going through it. But they like to come back in and makes everything back in. Okay, So, lo fi, you're the kick. It depends how much you want to kick to really thump. And this will be personal preference. I personally like a thumping kick, so that's the way that mix it. And so what I'm looking for is to bring in the kick. Um, and I might roll off some of the high end as well, because in a lot of low fi, almost all the high end is rolled off, but I'm gonna just get the levels right. First, I don't worry about you coming off the highs in a second. And again, this comes down to, um, depending on what you're looking for. But I like to bring in my kick in my base. I like it when their total volume is around, like, seven. So but I dreaded who is bringing the kick around somewhere between, like, 7.5 or negative. 7.5 to 8 and then take it from there. I have this good compressor turn with the attack all the way up in the ratio of the way up . The glue compressor is ah, with some soft clipping. I learned this from one of my favorite producers names D Cap. Uh, and I saw he had this entire walk through where he talked about this and I picked it up, and I love it. So I've been incorporating ever since. Where if you had a glue compressor with some soft clipping, you can really get awesome. Add some cool thump to your kick without it actually raising the volume. Any suffering, the threshold down to around somewhere between five. Or maybe in between summer and they're kind of to taste and then bring it to make it being a bit. So I'm coming in around eight. And so we'll rock with that for now, bringing some base and see how they go together. I'm gonna bring back in some distortion when it comes to mixing your base. The distortion, adding some distortion and eq Ewing, adding. Giving some bumps to your high end will really help. It kind of cut through, especially if it's playing on laptop speakers or phone speakers. Things of that nature because it can. Your base is often going to get lost his playing off a laptop. But I want quite that crazy. And the kick based relationship is one that is needs a course all on its own, and this is something that takes some time to get. This is something I'm still I'm still working on myself because it's, ah, super important. And so I'm constantly trying to hone in my skills on kick based relationship 1,000,000 ways to do it. One way that I like to do it is to side chain my base to my kick. Meaning you come in here, you at a compressor. Fuck side chain audio from the kick, which, you know, a side chain compression is pretty much it means whenever that something is triggered, whatever this aside chain, too, it will duck out of the way as it happens, which sounds weird, but I'll show you what I mean. So if you bring your threshold down between your ratio on your compressor up, any time the kick fires the baseball duck out of the way and since my release is turned up so high, it's taking it a while to come back. Whereas if I turn my release down, this will be more noticeable. Uh uh uh, So you kind of have a sub base going on? I might toy around more of the distortion as we added more elements in the keys. The base, this is this is a hard thing to master right now, just the base without any other instruments because you don't know how it's gonna feel again. A mix is all about how it gels together. So I just kind of get this is just a loose vibe can to get my volumes around 87.5 somewhere in there, uh, means And so this will be something definitely come back to as I bring in more melodic elements. Got your snare, Lo Fi. One thing that I like about it is that the snares since the Heuser rolled off I'm not a guy that loves a super. You know, I don't like snares that make your ears ears bleed. So I like that Low fi kind of has a little bit more of a chilled out, uh, snare and these often be rim shots as well. But with this sound, this will be something that I come back and toilet to in a second. Once we added more elements because normally, keys and your snare things in this kind of medium to high frequencies will compete. So this is just kind of a rough, a rough vibe for the snare as well. Uh, I have the school compressor automatically loaded in the Mableton Temple if you downloaded it, because sometimes you need a little bit of extra snap on that joint. But, uh, this one, I'm just it's just hanging out. It's not even doing much. So this one, I'm not going to be the compressor And this drum loop. This'd one from before which we don't need any more to leave that out of their cool. So that was the high hat. When it comes to your drums and percussion, panning is a huge bonus. It's a huge kind of secret sauce that I use so with you. If you're panting something, that means, you know, I'm sure the right year of the left ear. And if you want to get a characteristic or a piece of your track to stand out, you can often do it with some subtle panning and not have to do it with just volume. So say your high hat is getting lost in the mix. Ah, little, uh, tip intact it that I recommend. Is this before just turned up the volume on it? Try just panning it slightly. You have the hard ban it, but just a little bit someone's. You can get the character or the element to stick out a little bit, and I find it interesting rather than having everything just competing down the center, having some my hands after the right. Some of the left just kind of again keeps things, keeps the listener interested, and this will be another element since its lo fi I saw This is Ah, some fly low type. Uh, I have a heavy fly low influence. So I side chain almost everything I'll do high hats. You'll see here in a second. I'm when it comes to loaf. I really like it to be, um every almost everything to duck out of the way of the kick. So I'm gonna even throw some side, contain compression on my high hats. Uh, definitely some swing going on. Now we're bringing our main sample chops and see how this starts again. And when a side chain this and, um, throw on some, it just affects chain down. Oh, and then start skewing the sample. I'm going to spend some time queuing out these keys because the keys I love keys. But since they take up a lot of that mid range frequency, it can also compete a lot with someone. If you have a vocalist on their or even with your base elements, does a lot of times the keys will have ah based component in there as well. - Sometimes keys have, like some resonant frequencies. I won't spend a time in here honestly queuing those out. But Sometimes I might come in just to kind of see what's going on with the keys, just to see if there's anything I do. A quick, sweet, so resonant frequencies are just frequencies that are, like unpleasant of the year there in just about everything. So if you turn on these headphones and you turn your you all the way up, you gain all the way up. You can kind of scan of your mixing vocals or anything like that. You can kind of figure out if there's some frequencies that you can take out. But this is something to that you can spend a ton of time on, and it might sink your the mo mentum of your track. So something that I just a while I'm kind of rolling filling out the mix of my pop into a few, but then might come back to later. Once I'm actually like digging into kind of like the nitty gritty, uh, you know, crossing the T's dotting the I's type of stuff right there. Boom. So take that one out, all right, turn up a little more saturation on it, - start to mix in some of these other elements and drives doing with this O t t was just take bringing in some a little bit more of the highs on the piano on the keys. When it comes to this, like something like this trumpet, I'm gonna add some auto pan, which pretty much just makes it move from one ear to the other just to give it a little bit of vibration, A little bit of motion. - So in the sun, Okay, I might bring up the snare a little bit now that everything's in here. - Now that everything's playing, we're coming in at four, which is sounding good. I do feel like we're losing a bit of the base. Um, so I might turn up a little bit more of the distortion or eq you up some high end in here, - but it sounded good to me. Let's jump into some quick mastering just to bring all the levels up and see how it sounded together as a whole
19. Mastering Lofi: So one of the nice parts about low fi is that it because of the nature of the music, since everything is going to be, ah, bit distorted and compressed and there's a lot of saturation and vinyl, everything is kind of intentionally raw. Your mixes don't have to be incredibly clean and crisp. It's actually intentionally. It's cool to kind of intentionally muff them up a bit. Um, I'm trying to swear lesson these tutorials, so but that would be a good you know what I'm saying? It's good to kind of intentionally add some grit and some dirt. Seems saturation intentionally distorts stuff, which is kind of makes it fun. But with that being said, we're going to jump into the master track and add a bit of, uh, limiting Andy Cube. So when it comes to mastering attract, this is obviously something that, uh can be an entire process in it of itself. But I find I'm of the mindset that if you need a ton of plug ins on your mastering track, chances are there's something going on with your mix. I normally just have the way that I learned A master pretty simply is to have an EQ You maybe to eke use, uh, some other things of that nature. But a lot of it just comes down to eat queuing and then having the limiter. And so I love the broke you two in the pro l two. But since Rachael into stock plug ins, uh, we're just gonna rock with the eq. You wait and able to limiter similar to the e que scanning that you saw me doing before for frequencies as I'm going to cut out everything under probably 30 um, 30 hurts because I don't have anything playing in here and that your low end gets muddy really fast. And then I'm going to do a similar tactic where I just scanned through these frequencies and see if I can pick out maybe two or three that are sticking out. Uh, and then you take those out of the mix with a hi Q. And let's see if we can find some resonant frequencies. Okay, I think there's one. There's one doesn't sound too hot. Let's see if we can find a few more. Okay, that doesn't sound too good either. Cool. So again, you can spend as much time on this is you would like picking those out and then for the limiter kind of a rule of thumb this Mableton limiter. If you push this ableto member limiter hard, it it doesn't sound great. So, like, I find that I can This l two I can push a lot harder, and it's still kind of before everything kind of really starts to the store. But you're limiter. Think of your limiter as kind of, ah compression on your master track where it brings everything up. Excuse me? It brings everything up, you bring the gain up, but then, as you'll see, it kind of catches the peaks and you'll see ah, little bar here that starts to it tells you how much it's compressing the track. And I don't like the push it much past this negative six on the limiter, Proell to other limiters I find out about or comfortable pushing it. But for this able to one, I try not to push it too far into past that six. Another rule of thumb to keep in mind is for your total track overall for the volume you wanted to come in between like at least is what ballpark that I shoot for, like negative six. The negative three. Probably negative four. You want some headroom So that you have room to push this limiter up. If you're already peaking or getting close to zero for your mix, you are gonna have much room to add the extra extra swag to the track. So I leave this release on auto for this for this ableto limiter, so you have to worry about the gain. But overall track, you want to come in between like, negative three and native five. Somewhere in there, you see, we're hovering around. Probably negative five. It's just with the horn stabs. It'll bump up to maybe negative four. So we're doing all right. So I'm going to push this gain up, start bringing up the volume of the track Overall, I'm gonna turn my volume down, and then I'm gonna see how it sounds and push this up a bit before it gets to the negative six. That's under a son of good to me. This kick it sounds a little bit intense. Maybe a little too lab. I think there was such a thing. There's also a click in there. I'm gonna go in and see if I can find some things clicking once I have the things relatively like a rough master on it. I like to go back in and kind of adjust things from there, because once I have everything turned up, some certain things tend to stick out more than others. So that's what I'm going back in now is I'm looking for anything that might stick out. Our sound different now that we've turned the volume up on the limiter with the limiter. I'm finding the sneers now a little bit too loud for me. - I don't know. What do you guys think? Is anything sticking out? My missing something sounding pretty full to me. Um, I think we're good from All right. So that sounded good to me. And now we're going to start arranging the beat. Tracking out we're getting to the final process are the final steps to getting our finished beat
20. Arranging The Beat: all right. So when it comes to arranging a beat depends, obviously arrangement can mean all sorts of things. But the way that I like to do it is, uh I like to take these because you never know when you might want to come back to this sample. Like to take these keys, Actually, take this entire thing before joining any of these Close because I use almost all audio clips and I'll just take this. I'm going to drag it way to the end of the track groups. Let me get the whole thing. I didn't make a duplicate that. I just dragged way out in the, like three minutes just because who knows? Sometimes I keep it there. This is a backup. So now that that's out there, I'm gonna delete this, and I'm going to close that. I'm going to join all of these clips now that we have kind of our loose structure. Do command J. So that way it's easier to move everything. It's over our intro. I know we are gonna drop into this part of the track, probably until, let's say around the ninth measure, I do know that I'm gonna want my vinyl to play throughout. So this is actually helpful. That's why I do it so I can have this vinyl playing out. Boom. All right, so I got my vinyl. Um, and I know that I want my main sample chops and probably let's see how I was going to experiment and see what ah, how things were sounded. I So I imagine this right here that we just mixed are eight bar loop. This is how I build out an entire beat from an eight bar loop. I figured this might be this could be the hook, or this might be the last part of the verse will dig into how to kind of structure in a range beats in different ways. But right now, I'm just thinking of different ways that we could build this beat out. So right now I'm thinking of averse section that has less or fewer elements to it, and then other elements. We can add in another parts to kind of keep things interesting and build the beat out. So I'm going to duplicate this section, and then I'm gonna come up here and depends on how maybe I'll save the trumpet for the hook section, and then I'll duplicate that. And but I might do is I also let's add like a little a little breakdown, the next part about low Fi. Since it is Liu based, you don't have like, the arrangement. A lot of times it might just be like a main section, like an eight bar loop and then some eight bar loop with, like, a filter on or something. But I just, uh, snags things up a little bit more. So let's see how this sounds. Have a little breakdown. We're just gonna have a different eight bars over here just to make things interesting for the listener. I had some shaker. - I want to do something with these last few bars over here. - Okay , so now that we have this kind of this loose arrangements of the beat so we have this bit of an intro, I'm going to bring in some transitions and then work on the final details that spice the automation that will really bring this tractor life and make it feel more like a full track . And not just a couple eight bar loops
21. How To Automate Lofi: automation is one of the best ways to bring some motion and life into your track. You can really add some kind of fun, different flares here and there that bring it to life. And it's one of my favorite parts of the track. It's also one that can take a lot of time, So we're gonna talk about transitions. But I don't want to spend too much time on this because I want that to be a separate module in itself. But we're going to add some transitions to this track. I've included some in your sample pack, so you have a riser. It's a breath riser. And then I've also included a couple different impacts for you right here and see. These are So this one is just a live hat alive. Open I have. But these one of my favorites for loaf. I like to add a lot of reverb to it. Obviously, you can tell I have a few weapons of choice, not time to go to a ton of it. Reverb, and you've guessed it delay. And that's what my favorite impacts is. Just open like a open live high hat with just a ton of reverb on it. So with intros is Well, I like to have some sort of a, um I think in low fi you can tell cool stories. And so with the track. So I found this bus station I find, like, railway stations or conversations going be a lot of fun to add in. And so I'm going to automate this eso that it kind of fades in with these chops. And then I might also auto automata filter of some sort for these first few bars. So I'm going to jump into that, and we're gonna experiment a bit with some automation. So that is interesting. It's kind of Ah, we'll see. We'll try that, at least for now. A bit of railway station action. I don't know. Maybe you're you're leaving a loved one here at the station and leaving a loved one. Your inner feelings. Or maybe you're about to go on a new adventure. Um, so at its odor filter, I'm going to automate its You go do this little automation button. If you're enabled in, you're going to your auto filter. Easy way to get this to just say odor filter is you just turn it off and on. But I'm automating it on because I don't want it on for the rest of the track. So I click this little pencil, and then I'm going to turn it on just for this section. And then we're also want to automate. Actually, you know what? I think I'm gonna need a little bit more runway for this intro. Slow five people know I'm trying to tell the story, right? So I'm going to actually duplicate this. Went extend my railway story be Give me that storyboard and we're going to, um, keep this filter on and we're going to automate the frequency. What? - What's going to fade this out as we bring in the keys, adding a bunch of reverb to both of the riser and the impact. Since this isn't like your dance TDM track, your rise in impacts don't need to be super in your face, But they're just kind of a nice nice to have, but not necessarily. You won't find these in a ton of, um, low fi tracks. Often more often than not, the lo fi tracks will either do kind of little tricks with their, though they'll take instruments inter out, which will do here in a second, but also just like having some risers here in there. So let me make sure that this is There you go must make sure that this fits bone bone. Cool. That is the wrong riser. That is the wrong riser. Okay. What? Let's see how that sounds. All right. So I want way less delay on that riser. And let's see it a sense. And I'm going to seek you off some of that high end on this riser. Just so it's not quite is in your face. Uh, but I also think I might do is add in that bird sound just is a bit of, ah, drop before we hop into this main part. So I'm gonna add a choke group to my samples. And the way that I do this is I go to my sample chops, I go to my very last shop. I'm going to duplicate it by holding option on a Mac and dragging it over. So this will be a duplicate slice, except this one. I'm going to turn the volume all the way down. And this would be kind of our ghost shop. So this way, whenever. Whenever we need Teoh, cut it off. We have this because automatically, this will automatically stop any sample from triggering. When this one place and I want to wait and my birds and go, I want to snake that bird. What? That bird in the drop. Give me that bird in the drop. Birds in the trap. I want birds and drop a right. - I'm not loving this trumpet. I'm gonna be honest. I don't like this little. It feels like it's to physic. It's to staccato like it was too short. So I just stretch it out of it. It still feels like it is. Let me let me toy around this trumpet, - and I want to actually let that hook rock for one more for a few more bars. So what I might do is to make this interesting. Um, we might take out the shaker for the first part. - I think this lo fi riser was I just turned the volume down a little bit, so I want to see how it would sound. I think that's a nice little transition into our break eso for this transition. I also might add a some sort of another effect on here. It might be interesting. Slight phaser. Maybe this is just experimentation right now. So what I'm going to do is just to add some something a little a little swag to it. I'm going to record this phaser automation in. So rather than drawing it in, I find it. This one is easier if I can just do it by hand. So I'm just gonna record it in, and then I'm going Teoh, add some other chop in here just to make it interesting. So it's not just the same pattern over and over. That sounds interesting. That's cool. That's cool. That's cool. And I'm going to take out these high arts as well. What? We're gonna bring this back, and I might bring my bird back. You were my Burdette Where my bird at? All right, give me this guy and I might bring my bird back. Cool. Kicks out. Still sounds a little bit too thumping me. And then I might add another transition here just with some fun chops because they're dropping into the last Took my dual fun with it. - We're gonna copy. We're going to duplicate this hook. Now duplicate that John Boom! - No , I was doing the most. - And we're going to bring back this original intro. So But we're going to play maybe a different part of this station, or maybe some sort of Ah, so maybe you'd be confined if we had, like, a conversation or something that Adam here, I don't have that locked and loaded and ready to go. But if you're building out low five tracks like, it could be a cool way to kind of wrap up until the story for an outro. - And then for this part of the sample, I might automate the track volume and just fade this out Cool. That, ladies and gentlemen, is how make the lo fi beat and build that joint out from a bar. Lou. All right, Hopefully, that was helpful. If you learned a thing or two. If so, please let me know, and we'll jump into the next part of the course.
22. Walkthrough 2: Chopping & Playing The Sample: So in this video, I'm gonna walk you through how I chop up and play my samples. So once I go into able, then I set my wart markers. I have this MPC style slicing instrument that I created. You can download that from my website, and what you can do is you can come in here and now you can play these like, MPC style chops. So what I'm gonna start doing is playing these out and getting a feel for some sort of a rhythm trying to come with my own melody out of these chops That so I'm going to be doing now. What I'm doing now is I'm looking for a drum loop because I realized that I want a drum loop to be able to play along with. So I'm gonna find a drum loop and drag it in, And that way it gives me a little bit more of a bob that I can play along to as I come up with my chops. - All right, Now I think I have a pretty good idea. So I'm gonna start recording in, um a certain melody that I find that I like and then once I have this kind of a rough sketch of a melody that I play out. I'm gonna go back in and then mess around with the notes to make sure that they're quantifies a little bit better editing the ends of the beginnings to make sure that you correctly thing appearing a clicking here somewhere and realized that I needed to actually go in and edit some of these notes a little bit more in depth coming here. Make sure I have the right notes on, then quantifies my actual MIDI files so that I get the get the clean loop as a work.
23. Walkthrough 2: Drums: I'm going to do now is I found a drum look that I like. And so I'm going to jump in and start replacing this drum loops samples with samples of my own and finding different parts of this drum look that I might be able to steal. Uh, a borrow for my own drum. Looks like this, Bob. So this is one of my tactics is I like to go around and look for different sounds. I think my fit for this kind of a low fi vibe thistles my, these all of my splay sounds that I'm going through and just kind of testing them out with the track. Kind of seeing what? What fits? What kind of has a similar feel to beat what I'm going for us, We'll be doing. I was building up the drum loop, uh, with different sounds that I find it much place Max. And right here I ended up finding I heard a little clique when I was a drift that was in the drums or in the sample. So I find it in the sample. So what I'm doing is I'm coming into edit, disabled, the beginnings and the ends of the samples and going to fade into a slight fade into the samples toe try to. So they don't have that that click when they start playing. Because I don't like having that click that sort of peak, right? Right before the beginning of every sample, - Uh
24. Walkthrough 2: Vocal Textures: in this part of the beat. This is when I start to implement my vocal technique. This is the key, a secret sauce to the beats. I vocal textures and creating different kind of vocal elements and beats that just kind of create a bit of a vibe, a bit of a field. So that's what I'll be creating now is pitching them, chopping them, reversing them, do whatever I can kind of manipulate them, get a bit of a field. So I'm gonna add some reverb delay in a bunch of effects. When it comes to these vocals, a big point of it is getting the mood. Getting a feel more than it is necessarily having a vocal chop that's right in your face, so this is more like creating textures. So that's why I'm just looking for a little bits and pieces. It doesn't have to be a full phrase, so you'll see what that's what I break down right here.
25. Walkthrough 2: Bass: This is the part of the track where I start to add the base, and so far, this is gonna be probably something pretty simple Under mentioned getting any too crazy. So what I'm doing here is trying to find the right notes. I'm just using a simple synthesizer. Try to find the right notes for my base before playing in a base or designing Uh, - and here, amazing. A little bit of an able to cheat code where you can convert your melody in your harmony to amidi track. So I like to do this to make sure that I'm playing the right notes. So this is a way that I kind of double check and see the pattern, but this is a little bit of, ah, hack because a Bolton, I'm just gonna have able to do this for me without having even guess or figured out myself so better able to cheat code, I'm gonna take this MIDI file and then make sure I'm playing the right notes and, uh, copy this up, possibly for some ideas for base malady. Ah, And here I realized that I might have played some notes that I didn't want or I'm trying to still figure out the rhythm that I want. So I'm coming in and thinking about you know what? Maybe I'll switch that up trying to figure out the exact notes that I want, and then maybe I'll replay the man or, um realize that I kind of got them off timing. So I'm gonna actually record them back in manually. - And here I realize that I don't really love this rhythm. So when they come in and experiment with another, want to keep that old ability for backup. But I might try different melody instead here.
26. Walkthrough 2: Hook Vocal Melodies: in this video, we're gonna jump into the hook, advised it needs a little bit more something either military or some sort of other vocal texture. So I'm going to add it this vocal and see if I can make something out of it for a look. This'll all comes down to pitching, Manipulating, reversing, chopping. So I'm just manipulating it. This is all be experimenting with it right now.
27. Walkthrough 2: Percussion: So I realized that after mixing it, the beats still felt a little bit empty. What I'm doing now is I'm gonna come in, and we long for some percussion elements open. Hi hats, maybe Shaker symbols. Anything that might feel the beat out a little bit more because it didn't. I don't want it to be too busy, but another it's actually have has a rough mix. I realized it's who needs a little bit of off to kind of finish it off, - all right.
28. Walkthrough 2: Mixing: going in relabel everything, delete anything. I don't need to make sure that we only have what were needed tricks there, actually. So now I'm going to zero everything out before we mix. I make sure everything's a zero. So that would be can mix things in one element of time. Restores my low in first. So now we have everything organized, everything labeled everything zeroed. I'm gonna go back to the start of the track, find the lives part of the track, start mixing in elements One piece at a time. - Right here. I'm soloing the vocal, because I'm hearing there hoping a little bit because of the side chain compression. I'm gonna mess around with him a little bit. See if I could do something to get get some of the transience under there. So quite a quickie.
29. Walkthrough 2: Tracking Out The Beat: This is the point in the beat where we have our mix. We have, ah, most of the elements that we're gonna use in the track, and now it's time to track it out. This means this is what I'm gonna start to do. More of arrangement. I'm gonna create a bit of an intro, maybe, Ah, bridge the hook. I'm going to just start to join clips together in toy around adding elements here and there , creating more of a real song building this out more than just a simple a par loop like over - over the world. I mean, people automating filters is one of my favorite way to create drops transitions in different parts of arrangement. Right now, Mr about this different band pass, filter, and see if it's going to create the effect that I want and if so, and how can I automate it to drop into the and what I'm doing here is I end up realizing that instead of we're dropping into the hook, I might actually want to drop into a verse. So I'm gonna build a song out piece by piece instead, I copy the hook over here and no money to start bringing back certain elements to create the verse first and then drop into the hook later in the song. - Right ? Okay. - I find that I liked the reverb on these snares, but I only wanted to be in this bridge. I'm gonna automate the reverb on on Lee so that it's for the drop Not for the rest of the song, because I want to take up that space in the bridge. But then when I dropped in a hook dress with song I still want to keep them sharp and snappy way .
30. Conclusion & What's Next?: I hope that you
enjoyed the course. If you did please
leave a review. If you didn't please
leave a review as well. I'm a grown man. I
understand that. I am not for everybody, but the only way to
improve is to get your honest feedback if you did enjoy the course and you want
more materials like this, find all the resources
either below or at key Orion.com slash resources, anything that you
saw in this course, I have available
for free download. I have Ableton templates. I have a free Ableton
crash course. I've got sample packs, I've got free guides, everything that you need to level up. I guarantee that I
can help you do it. So with that being
said, thank you again for taking the course. It means a lot for tuning in, and I appreciate
you for watching a check you on the next
one till we meet again, keep making beats and
I'll see you at the top. All right, check
you in a minute.
Kia Orion, Artist & Music Producer
