Lofi Music Production - A Songwriters Guide

1. Intro: Lo-Fi has established itself as one of this generation's most popular genres of music. With YouTube streams and Spotify playlist hitting billions in views and streams, it's fair to say that Lo-Fi is here to stay, and for good reason, beautiful chords, relaxing beats, smooth melodies, and awesome samples are hard not to love. Let's learn how we can make some Lo-Fi ourselves. [MUSIC] Hey friends. How's it going? I hope you're having a great day. Thank you so much for joining me here for my Lo-Fi music production class. My name is Mike, I'm full-time musician and music instructor from the UK. I've been playing, producing, and writing music for the last 12 years. I also co-run a multi award-winning music charity called Time Together In Musical Expression. We run music classes and workshops for people of all ages, abilities, and backgrounds. In this class I'm going to teach you how to write and produce your own amazing sounding Lo-Fi tracks. We'll start by learning about the best instruments, plugins, and effects to work into your track to create the perfect Lo-Fi sound. We'll talk about using texture and soundscapes to create an atmosphere and a space for our song to exist in. We'll then explore how we can create beautiful sounding chord progressions using both instruments and samples. I'll teach you how I build Lo-Fi drum kits and then utilize them to create awesome sounding beats. I'll walk through how to layer and develop a Lo-Fi track to its completion. Lastly, I'll show you how I mix and master our track to ensure it sounds full, professional, and ready for streaming. Throughout the class, I'm going to be producing a Lo-Fi track myself so you can see exactly how we build one from scratch. This class is going to be suitable for beginner and intermediate level producers and I'm going to be splitting certain classes down into easy, medium, and hard levels. No matter where you are in your musical journey, you better get something out of this. I recommend going into this class with a very basic understanding of a recording program just so you can practice and implement some of the things we've talked about in class. I'm going to be using logic today, but I've made sure this class is appropriate no matter what door you're using. I absolutely love Lo-Fi music. It's always playing in the house, and it's one of my favorite genres of music to produce. I'm really excited to be making some with you today. Let's go write some Lo-Fi. [MUSIC] 2. Class Project: [MUSIC] Hey friends. How's it again? Thank you so much for joining me here for my Lofi music production class. It's great to have you here. I really hope that this class is useful for you, and take a load to get information away from this. Just before we get started with the class, I very quickly wanted to talk about our class project, so by the end of this course, you're going to be able to produce Lofi music to a really good standard. I would absolutely love to hear what you come up with, so any songs or demos, or final mixes, please feel free to send them into the class project, and if you'd like any feedback or critique or any help with anything, I would absolutely love to help you out. I think it would be a really great space to share what we've learned in the class, what music we're writing, and what things we're into. Maybe you found a cool drum sound do you want to share or a cool chord progression that you just really like, anything like that post it in stack class project. To do this, you've just got to upload your track or your demo to any site that allows you to grab a link from, so like YouTube or SoundCloud or anything similar, and then post that link into the class project, and then me and any other students in the class can listen to that track and give any feedback or any comments on it, and have a little songwriting chat. Please don't be shy about posting in there. It's really not a space where something has to be polished and finished and professional, please use that space, is a place to learn from and get feedback from. I just think it'd be a cool community somewhere out in space. On the subject of sending stuff in. If you have any questions about anything in this class or anything music-related, please feel free to send in to discussions. I'm always checking on Skillshare and I'll quickly respond to any questions you have. There is no such thing as a silly question. Literally, ask anything that you're confused about. Thanks, guys. I really look forward to hearing what you come up with. Let's crack on with the class. I'll see you in the next lesson [MUSIC]. 3. Plugins & Sounds: [MUSIC] First I'm going to go through some of my favorite sounds that I use to make Lo-fi all the time. A lot of these are going to be free plugins so that you can download on any door that you run. But obviously, any of these downloads are totally optional. They're just some suggestions to create really cool Lo-fi vibe, and it's worth saying that there'll be a ton of different virtual instruments in your existing door. These are just some options here. If you maybe haven't got them or you want something slightly different. These are just some of the instruments and plugins that I recommend, but it goes without saying, use whatever you like. Lo-fi is such like a loose genre and it welcomes all weird instruments and sounds, so get creative with it. It's worth saying all these plugins are going to be linked down in the resources so you can just go straight and just downloads any of them. Let's dive straight in with my first plug-in, which is possibly my favorite, and one of the most important and is iZotopes vinyl. This is a free plugin and essentially it emulates a vinyl kind of sound. You can put this on anything like a piano or a drum kit, even the master of your track, throw this on board and it just creates this wicked sound. Let me show you. Up here we have a grand piano, matched with a pad. [MUSIC] Now I can put Lo-fi vinyl here, as you can see, it brings up this cool vinyl [MUSIC]. That's just the default setting and you can hear that it is mudding up, making it a bit dusty and a bit warped. We can change a load of these settings. I'm not going to go too deep into the settings of each one, but we can change the year and this is just going to give you a massive cut EQ wise. We can go a bit more mid and go to 60s, which is going to be a bit lighter. Right to 2,000, which is going to be a bit fat on wider and modern sounding. Obviously you can play with all these buttons. We can spin it down. This little Lo-fi buttons, cool. We can add the wear on the vinyl and we can adjust all these different dials to just make a really cool Lo-fi sound, no matter what instrument we've put this on. I'm going to put this onto our master track, I think a little bit later. We also just get some of that nice vinyl crackle and these mechanical sounds which give it all such a cool Lo-fi vibe. Totally for free, super easy to install. This is the one I recommend more than any others. Next is some piano plugins. Any instrument can go and Lo-fi. But it seems that piano is a real staple of the genre. Nowadays most doors will have a really nice little piano sound in them already. Like this one, this grand piano, the pad is really nice, but by far my most favorite piano sounds are made by Spitfire, Labs. Labs are a collection of a ton of different instruments that are all free and all designed by this amazing company called Spitfire. I'm going to be talking about a lot of their plugins and it's great because they're all tied into one singular plugin and you select your instrument from there. The whole UI is super easy to use, and I'll find it for you now. Their soft piano is super famous for a good reason it's just really lovely. [MUSIC] My favorite piano sound, and again, through this easy to use self interface, we can add some reverb on here, and so about the dynamics with these sliders too. Amazing. Then this paired with the Aztec vinyl just makes the perfect Lo-fi vibe. But also, but they have a couple of different panels on here. If you want something slightly different. My other favorites is this straight up electric piano DI, just got a really classic electric piano, soft sounding thing. [MUSIC] Super nice. Amazingly, as I was planning this class out as Spitfire released a ton of new tape piano sounds, which are spot on for Lo-fi and I absolutely loved these again, all free, so you really need to go and download them. They just sound perfect for Lo-fi stuff. Basses. Either a virtual bass or bass in real life is going to be good. I don't know why I did that. I'm going to use a regular bass today, that's my preference. But in case you don't play bass yourself, and most stores should have a really nice, clean basic sound, electric bass or some logic has really nice clean, simple sound and electric bass. But if your door doesn't have quite what you're after, there's something called the ample p-base, which is a free download, which is really nice, emulates precision-based sound. Free, really nice, clean sounding. A lot of people talk about the ample p-base. If not, there's this awesome free plugin called the 'kee bass by Martinic, I think is how you say it. [MUSIC] Like a cool electric piano sound in bass, and you can obviously play around with all these dials. That sounds cool. Also people like to use some basses a lot, and you can just about always find these inside your door. It will be something like deep sub-bass. This little creates that low-end rumble without too much of a signature bass sound. You can use that if you like. Guitars. I'm going to play my own guitar in this track. If you play guitar too, there's a ton of good softwares you can use to plug into like an interface or a microphone and emulate a cab sound. I'm going to use logics, inbuilt and build it today. But in case your door doesn't have that you can download something called guitar rig 6 from Native Instruments. I believe it's a little bit basic, but it still has lots of nice clean stuff. Some reverbs and some pedals and the perfect stuff for nice, clean, Lo-fi. But in case you don't play guitar yourself. My favorite guitar sound in plugin is the moon guitar. Again, by labs. [MUSIC] Really nice sounding, soft alternative guitar. No virtual instrument quite gets to the sound of an organic guitar. But what I quite like about this one is it sounds a little bit like it's not trying to be a guitar, it sounds somewhere halfway between. But if you are trying to emulate a real sounding guitar Ample Sound again, have a really nice guitar empty layer, all for free. Raise really nice acoustic sound. Go check out. Another important thing in Lo-fi seems to be atmosphere and texture. We're going to talk about this in more detail later. But these are essentially nature sounds or drones that fill out and create a space for us on, to exist in. They're used all the time in Lo-fi you'll often hear vinyl crackle or the sound of rain or the sound of a city. There's lots of ways of using this texture and atmosphere. The first is you can use a plugin. Again, Labs has got a wicked set called London Atmos. They work super well and they're like Lo-fi vibe and there's loads of different styles to choose from, and then we'll take it from my somewhat local town, London. Points for that. We can also just take samples of the Internet, like rain or thunder or a cityscape. I'll leave a link in the resources that have a ton of copyright-free, and downloads that you can take for your nature sounds and things like that. Or if you want to, you can record your own samples, I don't know. You can go out into town or go for a walk and take a little mic with you or just your phone and record some things that you like. Drums and beats. There's really no right or wrong with drums in Lo-fi. There's acoustic kits used, electric kits used. I'm going to get into how we can make any kits and a little bit Lo-fi in later lessons. You can also just download a drumbeat and drag that into your project. We'll get into that later too. The obvious abruption is to just use a kit in your door. There is quite a cool one on logic called just the Lo-fi kit. Sounds super Lo-fi, and it's just built straight into logic. My favorite way of putting in drums and bass is to download some samples of drums that you like, which we're going to talk about in a minute and then load them into a drum machine or drum kit designer. Now, I'm going to be using the one that's already in logic, which is just the drum kit designer. Lots of other tools have a really similar thing where you just drag the sample you like into a drum designer. But if your door doesn't have that, there's a really good free plug-in called decomposer, and that is exactly what logic does. You could just drag the school sounds in, play them on a midi keyboard or type them in with your laptop and it works great. Samples. I'm really into giving you a free option for everything that I can. I know the last thing you want to do is spend any money. However, for samples, I struggled to recommend anything that's not a splice or a paid subscription. [NOISE] Now, look, I know, but just hear me out for one second. Hi friends editing mic here. I know I just said that. But while editing, I found really good piece of software that provides free, royalty-free samples called band lab sounds. Works just like Splice, but totally for free and not quite the amount of stuff the splice has still really recommend splice. But if you want a free option, I have found one is really good. Go check it out. Where should you get your sample shown in that case? I personally use a subscription called Splice. Splice has a ton of different sounds on it and they're updated all the time. There's always new stuff coming in is great for drum sounds, soundscapes, a chord progressions just about anything and not just within Lo-fi even, literally all genres, it's so amazing for gathering samples and get inspired. The great thing about Splice is after you pay for a monthly subscription, you get a ton of credits to buy a ton of sounds that you like. Once you've bought those sounds with your credits, they're yours forever. My advice to you is head on to Splice, pay for a month, and then just download as much as you can get a ton of free drum kits, a ton of free samples and chord progressions, and a ton of stuff you like, and then cancel it afterwards and you've got a ton of cool stuff for essentially the price of a cup of coffees. On the nose samples. Let's talk about sampler. Most doors will again have some splicing sampler within it. I'm going to use logics today. But if your door doesn't have one, there's a really good free one called momentum, and that's made by Big Fish. Audio. Really cool works just like logics. There's a lot of people read about this one go and get it if you're interested in sampling [MUSIC]. For a bit of an all-rounder is called love fi-lite. Love fi-lite just has a ton of really nice Lo-fi song sounds. Again, all for free. You can muck around with a load of different dials and change the instrument you're using. It has loads of cool pads, keyboards [MUSIC], and since, and has some drums on here as well. Super nice. [MUSIC] Those are some of my favorite plug-ins for creating Lo-fi music. Download as many as you'd like. I think my first top tip for the class is going to be to load up a ton of your favorite sounds before you start writing. I really like to do is just load up my favorite drum sounds, my guitar, and some keys and some pads that I like, so that when I get into my creative flow and I start writing, I don't have to worry about finding a kick that sounds right, or trying to get a good pad sound because all of that takes so much time and can just really interfere with the flow. Thanks so much, guys. Let's crack on with the next class about atmosphere and texture. I'll see you there. [MUSIC] 4. Atmosphere and Texture: [MUSIC] To start off track, we're going to lay down some atmosphere and texture sounds to start. It gives us some of the feeling that it's like inner space and it's used all the time in Lo-Fi. If you've ever listened to Lo-Fi, you know that there's vinyl crackle or nature sounds or sea sounds, or rain sounds, just creates this really nice vibes. Let's start there, shall we? The easiest way you can do this is just by typing into Google royalty-free vinyl sound. Any one that comes up should be absolutely fine. I know I spoke earlier about samples being a little bit dodgy to get for free, but with nature sounds and stuff is not quite on the same level as a singer performing or a guitar player performing. We can download an MP3 from there. But because I've got a subscription to Splice, I'm going to use a sound from there. But like cosec about earlier, you could use like London Atmos by Spitfire, sounds great. Or if you want to get really into it, you can go out and record your own sample. We can go into here and just put in nature sounds, or let's try field recordings. [NOISE] Just some of really nice sounds there. But again, this is a thing we have something like Splice as you can so quickly and easily find a ton of different sounds rather than heading through weird websites. [NOISE] I found this nice rain sample that I like. I'm just going to drag that strain to our door, it should be the same just about every door. Then we have some nice rain sound. A really popular one to use is obviously like the vinyl crackle. I'm going to put that in a little bit later with our isotope vinyl. But that's like a super popular classic Lo-Fi atmosphere. You can add in. What we can also do to create a bit of atmosphere is use what we call a drone. A drone is just one sound that holds throughout an entire song or entire section, is usually just have one note. I often like to use pads and we can just hold down a note [NOISE] and I'm just going to create a droney constant sound which just gives a bit of fullness to a song, and again, gives it a bit of light of the world to exist in. A drone might sound a bit weird just on its own. [NOISE] But equally, sometimes a little bit of lead can also sound a bit weird on its own. [MUSIC] But if you put them both together, hold the drone [MUSIC] suddenly it makes a really simple couple of notes sound way more atmospheric and interesting. Alternatively, we could play a chord. I'll just hold that down to use as a drone as well. What I like to do is play the note or the chord that relates to the key of our song, we're going to be writing in C Major today because that's the really easy one, so we can just hold down a C. Now, there's a bit of an atmosphere to work around, let's start playing some music. Shall we? I'll see in the next lesson. 5. Chords intro: [MUSIC] Let's talk about Lo-Fi chord progressions. This is a tricky one to talk about because I think a lot of you are going to be at different stages of your musical journey. To make it as easy as possible for everyone watching, I'm going to split this down into three different levels. I'm going to go easy, medium, and hard. The easy level is going to be about sampling. It's ideal for people that average one and easy chord progression or those of you who have no idea about music theory or know how to play an instrument, that's perfect for you. Level medium is going to be for those who know a little bit about instruments and theory. Ideally for those people that have come off my music theory class. Level hard is going to be for those really confident on an instrument, really know their way around scales and chords. We're going to go a little bit more into changing keys and doing some fun stuff with that. But just before you jump into those, let's go for a couple of basics. A chord progression is going to give the song a motional movement and it's vibe. Lots of Lo-Fi uses like three or four chords repeated and they just repeat throughout the whole song. It keeps it really nice and easy that way. That's what we're going to be working on today. Don't feel like you need to have loads of different chord progressions in there. It's also quite important to talk about key. Now, if you don't know about music theory, key is essentially just a group of notes and chords that sound really good together. In each key, there will be seven chords and seven notes that work really well. If you want to keep things easy for yourself we can just stick working within one key. This also translates to samples. Lots of samples will have a key next to them. It'll be like in, F. You know that if you're writing the key of F, that sample work great. Things like Splice make it really easy because you can search for samples that are just in a given key, so it makes that putting this stuff together so much easier. I'm also going to be leaving a bit of a cheat sheet down in the resources. That's going to show you how to play the chords on the keyboard and some scales and some cool stuff like that. I can't put everything in there because it would be just super long and that's not all that music theory classes is for. But make sure you check that out if any of this is confusing. Before we jump into chord progressions, I need to talk about tempo. Now in Lo-Fi we tend to use slower tempos because the kind of music is quite chilled out and quite relaxing. So the average BPM of most Lo-Fi songs sits between 70 and 100 beats per minute. But again, you do whatever you like, you don't have to sit within that range. I'm actually going to make this song slower than that today. I'm going to go for more towards like a 60 beats per minute because I want it to be really low and chilled out, and 60 beats a minute is actually around the resting heart rate of a very chilled out human. I feel like to make it as relaxing as possible, trying to hit that 60 BPM super slow, super chilled out is going to work really nicely. We can bring our track right down to 60 beats a minute. [MUSIC] I think I want to ever so slightly quicker, so I'm just going to bring up to a 62. [MUSIC] That was sounding good. However, what I'm going to do is I'm going to double the tempo, because I like couple more clicks on my track. It just helps me keep in time. I'm going to push it up to 126. [MUSIC] Just helps me play a little bit better. Let's hop into our easy chord progressions lesson next. [MUSIC] 6. Chords/Sampling - Easy: [MUSIC] The easiest way to get a clear progression going within your song without knowing any music theory or no instrument is by using samples. Again, I'm going to be using splice for my samples. We can just put in that low five chords and we can have a search around from there. [MUSIC] I really liked the sound of that one. I can just buy on here for one one, which is like nothing. Now all we need to do is drag and drop it into our projects. But before we do that, we just want to check the key and the tempo of our sample because that's going to line up to how we set up our project. We can say here is some C major and 130 beats a minute. I'm just going to go into logic and make sure we're in C major. We're going to take our tempo up to 130 beats. Perfect. Once we've done that, I'm just going to drag this straight in. Line it up. [MUSIC] There you go. [LAUGHTER] Lo-Fi easy. Then we can just loop that for as long as we want it. If we add like one or two more samples in a drumbeat. We've literally got Lo-Fi song is super easy to make your samples. But if we want to go more in depth for these samples. We can sample the sample using the plugin I spoke about earlier. For me it's just going to be logics, simple sampler. If you forgot, the free one is called Momentum by Big Fish Audio. I'm going to load up logics quick sampler by just going into the instrument tab and finding empty quick sampler. Then I'm going to drag our sample into here and then hit optimized and Here is our sampler. Now, I'm not going to go into too much detail with this because as you can see, there's a ton of different dials and options here. Again, if you're using a different door, I don't need to be even more confused. But the main things that I'm going to focus on are these three tabs up here. They just change how the sample is going to work classic one shot and slice. Again, this should be similar on wherever door you're working on. Classic is just going to play as I press down. [MUSIC] As long as I hold down, is going to play through that sample. [MUSIC] But if I hit a key higher up, it's going to change the pitch of that sample, [MUSIC] which is cool. We can move these arrows depending on how long we want the sample. But this is all just repeated so we can keep it back where it was. We can also change it to one shot, [MUSIC] which they're going to play it from beginning to end. Or we can go to slice and what this is going to do is it's going to detect where each node or each chord or a sound has started. We call that a transient so when a noise is made. Logic does a pretty good job at recognizing where those start. But as you can see here, it's got lots of nodes and we don't want all of those nodes. We're just going to turn down the sensitivity here with this slider. It's going to land on where we want them and we can just hit on here and hit delete slides if you want to. We can make new ones like this as well. I just want to line that up so that there's a line starting on each one. Then there's one were rogue one there and then we can use our keys [MUSIC] to trigger each different sound. [MUSIC] We can play about manipulating those codes in a different way. We can adjust the pitch. [MUSIC] Again, whatever sampling you're using, you can just have a play around with these dials and make something that sounds cool. This system also works great with drums and so feel free to drag some drum samples in there too. Let's go back to classic. [MUSIC] Just using that one chord. [MUSIC] But front around on the keyboard. I'm just going to ask a couple nodes, down one node, C. [MUSIC] We're trying cool chord progression like that and totally changing up the sample is being used. One more original, one more personal. Let's try using a different sample. [MUSIC] I like this piano one. I'm going to drag that onto a sampler. [MUSIC] For this one, we want to turn up the sensitivity to just track down all those transients. That's perfect. [MUSIC] Each of these different lines is going to represent a node on the keyboard. As you can see, here we go, I C2,C-sharp. That's just going to relate to the MIDI keyboard that I have here. [MUSIC] There we go. A really easy way to create some chord progressions with samples. Just mark around with the samples you can download. Further means that sampler, if you'd like to mark around with them. Thanks guys. Let's crack on with the next class. [MUSIC] 7. Chords - Medium: [MUSIC] Let's talk a bit more about some Lofi chord progressions. This medium lesson is ideal for people that know a little bit of music theory. Ideally those people who may have just come off my music theory course, we're going to keep things really nice and straightforward and we're going to work around just like a couple of guidelines. The first is we're going to write within the same key. As you may already know, in each key there are seven chords that are going to work really well and we're going to just stick within those seven calls that are in the key. It keeps it really nice and easy. If you're not sure what chords are in each key, you can either Google it. If we're working in C major, you can just Google what chords are in C major or what I like to do is take a look at the circle of fifths. When looking at that circle of fifths I want you to circle what key you're working in, and then that and the five chords surrounding it including the one you've circled are going to be all the notes that work in that given key. There's also a circle of fifths where an inner circle displays a diminished chord of the key as well if you want to throw some of those diminished chords in. Diminished chords do work really nicely in Lofi particularly as passing chords, so I highly recommend you try throwing them in if you're feeling brave. We have the codes that work well in our key. Now, we can play these chords in any order we like and they're going to sound really great. Today I'm going to be working in the key of C major because that's a really nice easy key, it uses all the white notes. I'm just going to [MUSIC] have a little play around, and see what progression I can find. Now, if we're just playing regular triads that's going to sound okay, but it's not going to sound very Lofi. What makes a chord sound more Lofi and jazzy is using extensions on top of our existing triads, so the easiest way of extending our chords and making them a bit bigger is by using sevenths. [MUSIC] It sounds a little bit more jazzy and a bit more Lofi, but if you don't know what a seventh chord is again I'm going to leave it on the cheat sheet how you can play every single seventh chord, but basically what we're doing is picking what code we want to make. Let's say we want to go for D [MUSIC]. We're going to build out our major scale from C, so whole, whole, half, whole, whole, whole, half, and then we're going to play the 1, 3, and 5 to create a major chord, and we're going to add on the seven on top to create a C major 7. Now, if we're working in the key of C, we can use this exact same shape. Essentially, playing a note, skipping a note, playing a note, and so on. We can move this shape [MUSIC] around the keyboard, and we can find every single seventh chord that works in the key of C major. Now, if you're not too sure how to work out seventh chords, I would really recommend staying within the key C just to make it really easy for yourself. Again, I'll go into more detail about listening my music theory class. I don't want to bulk this class down too much with a ton of theory, but essentially all we're doing is adding an extra note onto our basic chords to make them sound a bit more professional and a bit thicker and fuller. [MUSIC] Now, let's take this a step further. I love using ninths, elevenths, and thirteenths as well within my chords. Again, if you've watched the music theory course you know about them, but if we can turn them into our chord progressions too [MUSIC] it just makes them sound a bit bigger and a bit fuller, and you mostly here these big beautiful chords in the Lofi you're listening to. Again, I'm going to break down how we come at a chord progression standard a bit better in just a sec. [MUSIC] I'm just going to change up this keyboard sound to my labs one. I really like the sound of the tape piano, so I'm going to go for that today. Again, to keep it really simple I'm just going to work in the key C, and I like this little progression between C, D, F. Back to D, and then C again. For now I'm just playing in the seventh chords and I'm going to extend them and invert them just a bit later because I'm not actually really good at piano, so I'm going to hit "Record" [MUSIC]. That's our chord progression done. That chord progression sounded great, but there's a couple of different things we can do to make it sound even better. The first thing I'm going to do is add some ninth nodes on top of this course to make them sound a bit bigger. That's C7 [MUSIC] and it's actually going to sound really nice with that nine on top. It says D note there, and I can just add that on up here. I think that D sounds okay. It's just a seven, but I'd like to add a nine on to the F which is just there on the G. Let's see what that sounds like now. It sounds all right, but again we can do a couple of different things that made that sound better. The next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to invert those chords. All that means is essentially changing where the notes and the cord are sitting. If I move some of those notes down, it's going to make this chord sound darker and brighter. Equally, if I move some of those notes up the chord is going to sound brighter and higher pitch, and I can also just drag those notes apart to make the chord sound wider. With inversions, we can also move the nodes of each chord in a progression closer together so that the chord progression sounds smoother and more organic. Let's try and move these nodes around to make them sound a little bit better. I'm [MUSIC] actually just going to move these realms they're flowing. To be honest, I'm just going to experiment with moving some of these notes around a bit and see where they may be fit in a little bit nicer. I'm going to try and take the ninth note, this D down to D2 instead. See how that sounds. It sounds pretty nice. That's sounding good. It just sounds a bit more interesting. Let's try moving maybe this G up. That doesn't quite work. What about this A? Move the A up? You see that sounds lovely, very like Studio Ghibli. Super nice. You can say how that second chord sounds a little bit basic now, so let's see what we can do about that. We've got a D minor chord there, so we can try and move the F hop to make it sound a bit brighter and a bit wider. That sounds okay. What I might do for this one is add in another node that is already existing in the chord. We've got a D, and if I add in another D well, that's going to do is just make the chord sound a bit thicker. I'm just going to say how that sounds. Super nice. Adding in an extra note just thickens up that code a little bit and I'm using the D note there because it's a D chord, so adding an extra D just nicely thickens it up. To me that nine just sounds a little bit to ringy, so I'm going to bring that G down and I'm just going to move these around a little bit more. Very nice. What if we try to move in a note down? What if we move this A? I think that's going to be pretty basic, and it's quit sound right. We try moving this C down, and that would technically make it as C over F. That sounds cool. [MUSIC] Very nice, cool. You can just hear that last chord there just sounds boring compared to these inverted ones, so we're just going to add another D on here and just make those notes flow better again. [MUSIC] Super nice. I guess so just to recap because quite a lot happened there. We built a chord progression from the chords in the key that we chose. We chose C major, and we chose four chords that we liked. We then added some extensions on top to make them sound a little bit more professional and I stuck with sevenths and ninths. Then we inverted the notes in the chord to make them sound a bit bigger, flow a bit better, and just experiment with the code really and try moving around those notes a bit to see what worked best with the progression. Again, I've really done nothing fancy there. I've just played the chord out as simply as I could, but it still sounds really nice with those stuck notes on top. That is another way we can create cool sounding chord progressions. Now, if you're feeling brave and you can hit over to the hard section of chord progressions, it's not necessarily going to be crazy hard. It's just a next step up. I think a lot of you better take it on especially if you know a bit of music theory, so hopefully I'll see you there. [MUSIC] 8. Chords - Hard(ish): [MUSIC] Hey everyone, welcome back. Next we're going to talk a little bit more about code progressions and how we can make them even jazzier and more lo-fi sounding. I should say I've got my guitar for this because I'm not very good on keyboard, a little bit more comfortable on guitar , hence the guitar. We learned in our last lesson, we can take a look at our circle of fifths, or just the codes in our key and any of those codes are going to work really great. Let's go for C minor. [MUSIC] That sounds okay but like we've learned, if we make those seventh codes instead or nines, it sounds much more like Jazzier and much more interesting. [MUSIC] We already know how to do that. How do we take this a step further? Lo-fi has a lot of influences in jazz. We needs to talk a little bit about jazz harmony to understand how to write good lo-fi code progressions. Now, obviously, jazz harmony is a huge subject and it's a very complicated environment as well. It's one of the most complex forms of music you can learn. But we're just going to dip our toes in today so we can just make our code progression sound a bit more mature and a bit more jazzy sounding. A really common way of making our code progressions sound a bit more lo-fi and a bit more jazzy is to use code progressions that move outside of one key. Now what I really like to do and to keep it simple, is again, take a look at the circle of fifths. We essentially use this to understand how our codes and our notes are related to each other. I think the codes and the notes that are closest to our key are the ones we are most friendly with. The further away we move from our key center, the more that code progression is going to sound a bit more interesting, let's say. This becomes really clear if we actually take a look at the code that's furthest away from our key. Let's say we're in the key of C, the furthest code away from that is G flat which as you can hear their sounds simple way. It doesn't sound nearly as naturalist C to an F, for example. [MUSIC] What we can do is just use this knowledge to have a play around with how far we can move outside of our key or the kind of codes we could maybe go to. For example, if we go from C to D to E, that sounds all right. [MUSIC] See, we're moving outside of the key there, but it still sounds all right. We're not moving too far away and we're stepping a little bit further away from the key with the D and then going over to E which is a bit further away. [MUSIC] We can bring it back to a C to [inaudible] back home. I often find sometimes just moving one step outside of our key can be enough to add a bit of interests without sounding too clashy. Let's try that now. Just going one step outside of our key, and let's try in C minor. [MUSIC] We've moved outside of the key of C minor with that E minor. Then we bring it back rounds the key nearly C minor with the F minor [MUSIC] and we resolve on the C minor. [MUSIC] That sounds alright, but again, it doesn't sound super jazzy, super lo-fi. Let's try turning those codes into sevenths instead. [MUSIC] That's something way more jazzy, way more lo-fi now. We've only just used one code outside of the key. We've just pushed it past and then brought it back with the F minor, and then resolved it back on to the C minor. Four codes, super easy, but just jazzy enough to feel a bit more mature. Again, have a play with this. See how far outside of that circle you can shift your codes. Again, using the seventh or any extensions, just make it sound much more jazzy. But if you want to take this a step further, what we can do is use ii-V progressions. II-V progressions are a fantastic way of moving between keys really seamlessly. They're the bread and butter of jazz music. For this example, I'm going to start in the key of D minor and I'm going to modulate to B-flat. Now, I know B-flat is in the key of D minor, but the key of B minor still holds slightly different codes and notes. Sometimes, again, just going that one step away is more than enough to make it sound a bit more interesting without going too extreme or too complicated. A ii-V progression is just playing the ii and the V from the key we want to move into. If we start on D minor and we want to move into the key of B-flat, if we play the ii and the V leading into B-flat, is just going to sound really nice and organic. Again, I'm going to be playing seventh codes just so it sounds a bit more jazzy and lo-fi. [MUSIC] See that. We're going from D minor, ii, V, B. It just sounds really natural and organic and we can make that B a bit more interesting, [MUSIC] a bit more jazzy sounding. In the key D, [MUSIC] want to go to B. Let's do ii-V, B. Then what we can do to get back to D minor is play the ii and the V from the key of D minor, which is an E minor, and an A. [MUSIC] Back to D minor. [MUSIC] Back to the key of D minor there. Not the best guitar playing there, but it just gives you an idea on using those ii-V to move into different keys. Just worked super well. Experiment with this, moving into different keys with this ii-V progression. Again, use this circle of fifths to see how closely-related each key and each code is related to each other. If you want to move another step up from this, try experimenting with flat and sharp fives on some codes, try using diminished and augmented codes as passing codes and try bouncing around between major and minor code. Again, with all of these codes, we can experiment with inverting them, restructuring them a little bit, and putting some different notes in the bass. But this idea of moving outside of key is super common in lo-fi and jazz. I thought it'd be a good time to talk about it. Now, a big point about working outside of key is obviously, once we've moved outside of a key, the notes that we can play as a lead or a melody will change slightly. Just keep in mind when you're moving to a different key that you might have to play at a different scale over the top of it. For example, if we start off in the key of D minor, we could use the D minor pentatonic scale. Then when we modulate into the key of B-flat, just modulate that pentatonic scale into B-flat major instead. Again, it gets a little bit complicated, hence why this is at the hard level. But if you know your stuff, you absolutely know this jazzy and lo-fi sound. There are some more ways of making cool lo-fi code progressions. You can now call yourself a jazz musician. Congratulations. I'll see you on the next lesson. [MUSIC] 9. Beats: [MUSIC] We've got our chord progression. Next, let's move on to some drum beats. I really don't want to make this complicated and I don't want to get into the science and the technical aspects of beats and timings and the rest of that. That's a whole class in itself. But the thing is, and I say this as a drummer, I really don't think you need to know the science behind beats and drums to make a good-sounding beat. We're going to keep things super easy today, but we're still going to get something that's going to sound great. Now, the easiest way of creating a beat is again by using sampling. We can go into Splice and we can find a cool drumbeat you like. [MUSIC] Again, we can just search for Lo-Fi drumbeats or just any beats and then just drag them into our project and there we have, done. [LAUGHTER] But this will be much of a class if I just told you to do that. Let's talk about how we can build our own beats organically. You can either use a drum kit in your door or what I personally like to do is again, go through something like Splice and find singular drum sounds that I like, and I've got some picked out here. [NOISE] We've got a rim shot, a clap, another hi-hat, another kick, a snare, and a shaker. The main things you want to be looking for is yeah, like a hi-hat sound, a kick sound, a snare or a clap, and maybe some percussion to add in a bit of variation. You can also use a ride if you'd like to. Like I said earlier, acoustic kits and electric kits will both sound fine. I really like using things like Splice because the drum sounds have already been mixed and they sound really nice in Lo-Fi themselves. It's just a much quicker and more intuitive way of picking out this sounds. Now what we can do is either drag in each sound at a time. We've got a shaker, a kick, and a clap. We can then go into our project and line these up [MUSIC] and move them around like that. However, what I personally like to do is use a drum kit designer and then play in those drum beats myself on my keys. To do that, you can either open up the decomposer app I told you about earlier. I'm going to be using Logics' Drum Designer. I'm going to open up any drum kit and then I can click on this button and it's going to bring up this drum designer pad. Then what I can do is take the kick through each rows and just drag it in and then we've got a Lo-Fi kick in the drum designer. I'm going to bring this rim shot into here, I'm going to bring this hi-hat here. [MUSIC] Then we have a cool setup already. Now I'm just going to add the claps. In fact there I'm going to have the snare there actually, the clap here. [MUSIC] Now that we have a drum kit design, we can start writing in some beats. Now again, because I don't want to get too much into the science of rhythms and beats and stuff, my advice to you is to really just that emulate the thing you'd hear on your favorite Lo-Fi tracks. I feel like you can take inspiration from a track without directly copying it. Even just changing up the sound of the drums and adding in a slightly different variations on beats and stuff is totally fine. It's sort of what I'm going to do today, and to be honest, a lot of Lo-Fi drums are very simple anyway, it's very much like [MUSIC] very chill. Again, if you want to get fancy and add some little hi-hat frozen, or some little fills and stuff, do go for that. Just experiment, have a play. Use inspiration from the tracks that you've listened to, and start to record something in. What I also like to do is, this may sound really silly, but I guess a top tip is while you're going about your day, try beatboxing. [LAUGHTER] The old boots and cats thing is so appropriate for Lo-Fi because again, it uses the kick, snare, and hi-hats all the time. Use the [NOISE] boots and the cats as the base and the snare and then the [NOISE] as the hi-hat. Just when you're going about your day like [NOISE]. Germane. Sort of like start beat boxing out. [LAUGHTER] A little idea maybe record on your phone and then just play that idea of rhythm in when you come to your door. Let's play our track and just see the kind of thing we come up with. [MUSIC] If you want to, what you can do is just recording one part a time. I can just record the hi-hat in first and then add the kicks and the snares afterwards. But for today I'm going to play in all three at once if I can. Then I might have some claps and some percussion afterwards. [MUSIC] That was pretty at a time. But that's okay because what we can do is use a quantizer. Now, this is going to be a little bit different depending on what door you're using. In logic, we need to select the track we want quantized and come up to this info button, hit ''Quantize'', and we can select how we want it quantized. If you're new to this experiment with 1/8, 1/16, or 1/32. The same with the triplets. I've written in triplets, so I'm going to select that. But you can also select swing. Swing is really useful because it's going to add a bit of looseness to our plane, which is used quite a lot in Lo-Fi and Jazz. Experiment with some swing quantization and maybe not getting those notes perfectly in time. Sound nice and human and nice and loose. I've quantized it into 1/8 triplet, that seems to have hit it into time for me. [MUSIC] What's great about the drum designer is I can open it up like this and see all of the different drum tracks that have been used. That hi-hat is a little bit loud for me [MUSIC] so I can just turn it down a little bit [MUSIC]. Nice and then I'm going to add in some claps and some percussion too. I'm going to add this shaker over here. I'm going to add them in on top. [MUSIC] Nice. What we could also do is get open up our quick sampler and then drag in a drumbeat sample [MUSIC]. Drag that into here. A little bit like our lesson on easy chord progressions, we can chop up this drum sample using the slice feature in our quick sampler, just like we did with the codes, but [MUSIC] this time it's for drums. [MUSIC] That's what we're doing there really is just picking out a cool, steady beat and that's maybe inspired by the things that you've heard in other tracks or it's maybe some of the samples that you've listened to. Maybe you like the sample, but you want to change up yourself, play in a simple beat, then add some other beats on top if you want to like percussion or collapse or some fills or some open hi-hats. I'm going to keep it simple today, but lots of Lo-Fi keeps the beat very simple, almost like a drum machines sound. If you want to add a bit more of a human element, we can use the swing or a humanized feature inside of our door, but I'm just going to keep you straight quantized. I want it to sound like a drum machine today. That's pretty much it. Thanks, guys. Hopefully, you've made some cool beats there. I'll catch you in the next lesson. [MUSIC] 10. Song Development : [MUSIC] Next we're going to develop our song a little bit more by adding on some more instruments and creating a bit of a song structure and getting our track a bit more fleshed out. To keep things really simple, you can just stick with like four chord progression and use that the whole way through a track. Lofi is very repetitive, and when something is quite repetitive, it can be quite relaxing. Obviously, if you want to add loads of different sections in, and change up the chord progression, you totally go for that. But to keep it simple today, I'm going to have one continuous chord progression. What I'm going to do is play with some instruments coming in and out to make it feel like it's developing custom instruments away, print it back in, and it's going to be nice and easy, breezy, and it's going to create a nice relaxing vibe. But before that, I'm going to start layering up some more instruments to thicken out the loop we've got going on here. First, I'm going to put in a bit of bass. [NOISE] Oh, Jesus. What I'm going to do is just follow the chords with a bass note to add a little bit of low end. Now you can keep this really simple and just play the root notes of the chords. If you want to add a little bit extra, you can add the fifth of the root notes, [MUSIC] so on bass, it's two frets up and one string down, [MUSIC] or you can use any notes that will work well in the key. I'm going to throw one or two little five notes in there just to add a bit of interest and maybe add some little slides in there as well. Again, to add a bit of interest. [MUSIC] That sounded good to me. Next, I'm going to record in a bit of acoustic guitar. Essentially, all I'm going to do is play the same codes that are played on the piano, on the guitar, and just layer up some more sounds. [MUSIC] [NOISE] That will do. [MUSIC] Oh God. This is sounding great. I'm going to put more electric guitar on there. [MUSIC] All I'm doing there is playing the C pentatonic scale, [MUSIC] because we're in the key of C major. I know the C pentatonic scale is going to work really well. If you're not sure what the C pentatonic scale is, it is essentially the major scale that the four and the seventh of the scale have been taken away. If you're not sure what that is, you can Google C pentatonic scale or wherever key you are in, and it'll show you what the keys on the keyboard or what frets and the guitar I should be playing, and you want to make things have been more bluesy, you can use the blue scale. That works great too for lofi, so I am going to loop these and play for a little bit. [MUSIC] I quite like that little piece there. I'm going to cut that, like that for a sec. But what will often happen in lofi is other like a guitar or some keys will continually do ever changing lead part, and I'll just move throughout the song doing wherever sounds pretty. But if you want to make something more catchy, you can pick out three or four notes from that pentatonic scale and play them in a repetitive way. [MUSIC] You can make like a catchy lick, [MUSIC] like that. What things I'm going to do is just add on a last little layer, this nice worldly pad from, again from Spitfire LABS. I'm just going to play the notes that are in the chords, but I'm going to play them a little bit like this. [MUSIC] A little bit like that. Just really subtle, in the background there. It gives you a little bit more top end and a bit of something pretty sounding. [MUSIC] We're thinking now I try out with some more instruments there. Now let's start to develop this into a bit more of a song structure. Developing our song is going to be very personal to the thing you want to make and what you're feeling like that day. A very common thing to do in lofi, and what I'm going to do today is, slowly introduce one or two instruments at a time. We're going to start with just the piano on its own. I'm going to slowly introduce more and more bits, so as to feels like it's growing. I often like to guide the listener through the same experience that we went through to write it. If you write your chords first, I think there's something nice about the listener hearing them first and then maybe loop the baseline next to introduce that next. I'm going to start off track with just the rain and the piano. [MUSIC] Then I'm going to introduce the bass and the drums the same time [MUSIC] I think I'm going to have a guitar come in. Then we'll go for the keys. We see with a guitar and the keys are like together [MUSIC] Sounds okay. We can do some stuff in the mixed layer to maybe separate them a little bit more. But I think for now that's sounding cool. I think we'll have that repeat once more round. [MUSIC] There, I think it's a good time to start taking some instruments away. I'm going to loop all these back to here, and I'm going to have the piano playing on his own. [MUSIC] Maybe actually, I'll add the acoustic guitar in there as well. [MUSIC] Again, in lofi, it's just make it about those chill vibe and the way of the instruments just gets it, nice and calm again [MUSIC] Then we can add all their insurance back in here, 1, 2, 3, 4. Let's just copy and paste these as well as these. That sounds really really good to me. But what I'm going to do now, I'll add a bit more interest. I'm going to drag some samples in here. Again, these were all found from Splice. I just went into browse. I went for spoken word. It's going to come up with a load of sort of- Spirit. That was scary. [FOREIGN]. Why are they scary? [LAUGHTER] I thought it'd be cool to have some vocal samples in there so on Splice, I just found this. You know what? I liked that idea. They're from the same pack. I'm going far away from here, and I'm going to write a book about you. I'm going to call it. They all sound pretty similar. Again, all I'm going to do is just drag these in, and I'm going to move them into a place that I feel like works. [MUSIC] You can possibly be jealous of that man upstairs. I think I'm going to make that just kick in right before the drums and the bass kick. [MUSIC] You can't possibly be jealous of that man upstairs, but he is utterly harmless. [MUSIC] That works quite nicely there. Then I think I'm going to put these other two in the gap where the instrument's cutaway. [MUSIC] I'm going far, far away from you, and I'm going to write a book about you. I'm going to call it the Heel and his Victim. That's a very horrible title. It'll do. You know what, I like that idea. [MUSIC] I'm going to move that a little bit closer just so it, once it finishes. You know what, I like that idea. What I'm also going to do is put one more sampling in there, and we're going to use A riser. A riser, if you search in somewhere like Splice, it's going to be like a cinematics swelling sound. If you don't have Splice or you don't want to use samples, you can reverse a cymbal sound and this creates the same sort of effect, but essentially sound like [NOISE] that. [LAUGHTER] I found [MUSIC] this one from earlier which I really like. I'm going to drag that in, and it's going to rise up to bring us back in after our break. [MUSIC] You know what, I like that idea. [MUSIC] I'm just going to move that guitar and keep it around. You know what, I like that idea. [MUSIC]. Then I'm going to keep it really simple and just repeat some of these a couple of times around, and that's going to see our song out. [MUSIC] But obviously, you can go to town here and add more chord progressions, and new sections in. This song is coming out to about three minutes and again, I want to keep it really nice and chill today. That's about right for me. I actually don't want to over-complicate it, so I think that's really nice. We've got a really nice foundation there. But there are several things we can do to make this sound much better. We're going to mix it to a point where sounding more professional, and there's a better balance there. Let's crack on with actually, shall we? [MUSIC] 11. Mixing: [MUSIC] Next, we're going to mix our song to make it sound much more polished and professional. The good thing about mixing lo-fi if you're a beginner is that it's a very forgiving genre. The whole lo-fi vibe is that it's a little bit broken, and a little bit sketchy sounding sometimes, so you really don't need to be a mixing pro. However, just knowing a couple of bits and pieces can really make your mix sound a lot nicer and a lot thicker and fuller and much more professional. But that being said, mixing is tricky to talk about sometimes because how you mix a song is so dependent on so many factors, what instruments you've got in there, your personal preference, and your own opinions. I'm not going to go too much in-depth with exactly what each of these mixing things means, I'm going to make a mixing and mastering class really soon, which is going to go into loads of detail about this. I'm just going to give you an overview on how I'm going to mix this track and talk you through what I'm doing as I'm doing it. The first thing I've done on here is just to make sure all the levels are nice and balanced, I can hear everything clearly and everything just sounds nice. Everything sounds pretty good to me at the moment. [MUSIC] After that, what I'm first going to do, start to pan some of the instruments. On logic, we use these dials to pan our instruments. All panning really means is either sending our instruments to the left or the right and that is just going to give each instrument its own space in the mix. Let's say, for example, this piano and this guitar are clashing a little bit. If I pan the piano off to the left a good amount and I pan the guitar off to the right, [MUSIC] suddenly sounds much more balanced. Before, they were fighting in the same middle space. I can actually balance the volumes much better now that they're panned because I can hear them so much clearer. We can do this for each instrument. Now, I'd recommend keeping your drums, bass, and possibly your codes reasonably centered. But the rest of your instruments try experimenting with how you pan them and create some nice space for your song. I'm going to pan the codes MS right slightly off. The drums and the bass are going to remain central and I'm just going to pan the acoustic guitar a little bit to the left. [MUSIC] Now I'm going to pan these samples too. [MUSIC] I'm going to keep that riser central. [MUSIC] That's sounding good. Next, I'm just going to add some reverb to separate the different instruments. You can keep this really straightforward and just say head into my drums and just click on "Reverb" and turn up like that to keep it really simple. [MUSIC] You can add some delay in there too. Also, add some reverb to our base. [MUSIC] Just wanting to play about with some of these dials [MUSIC]. Add something to this guitar too sounding very dry at the minute [MUSIC]. I like a lot of reverb if you can tell. [LAUGHTER] [MUSIC] Already, just adding that panning and a bit of reverb has really brought this track to life, I think. Then next, I'm going to do a bit of EQing and I'll show you what I mean by EQing. On logic will go to our mixing tab and then up here is the EQ setting inside of logic. Using this, we can just manipulate the frequencies of the sound. These are going to be our meds, are highs and lows and we can just EQ it, however, we see fit. There's really no right or wrong it's totally just personal preference. We're going to start with our keys. Whilst doing lo-fi, but also any mix is if there's like predominant bass and drums, I try and EQ the super low-end out of all the other instruments. Just said the low end of the piano chords aren't fighting with the bass and the kick. Like with this piano, although that it doesn't read that there's any low frequencies there. I'm just going to take it out anyway because there will be stuff happening here. This is the zone I really want for the bass and the kick. This is what we call a high pass filter because it's letting all the highs in and it's just cutting off all the lows. Now what we can do to any instrument to make it sound a bit more lo-fi is get really aggressive with a high and low pass filter. I'll show you what I mean. If I just get really aggressive with this, take a load to that low-end off [MUSIC] and say add a high one as well [MUSIC]. Just sounds extra lo-fi, although it's already been mixed to sound, lo-fi anyway but essentially what we're doing with that EQ is emulatings of old-school stereos that had really bad bass and highs. But we're going to make a little bit more of a modern sounding one today. I'm just going to cut off some of the highs. Then I think [MUSIC] I just want a bit more around here. I just add a little bit more high-end in and I've just cut off the lows to the piano and I'm just going to do the same with each instrument just so EQing as I like it. With this kick, I just want to bend more low-end [MUSIC] and just a bit more high-end with those hi-hats [MUSIC]. Again, if I do that low-pass filter, you can say it sounds super lo-fi, but you can just control how much you want. Sounds a lot lo-fi, that sounds [MUSIC] that there's cool. Again, this is all just totally personal preference. Just keep turning your EQ and the other effects on and off, see what difference they're making [MUSIC]. This is the end of our base [MUSIC]. So essentially all we're doing is exaggerating the frequencies we want, and taking down the frequencies we don't want. [MUSIC] So I want a bit more of that zone around like 150 hertz on the bass, I've just upped that. The same with the guitar. Again, I'm going to cut out a lot of these low frequencies. They're not interfering with the bass. It says most things just getting a little tweak in the EQ and then next, I might add a bit of compression. So what compression essentially does, is reduces the dynamic range in our recordings. Let's say for the guitar recording, we're going to have sometimes where the guitar's a bit louder and then other times it's a bit quieter. What a compressor does is just makes the sound overall more consistent. Again, it's all just personal preference. If you don't think it needs compressing, you don't need to use it. I'm going to use a bit on the bass because I was just a little bit inconsistent with my playing, and so I'm going to open up this compressor, head over to the graph, and essentially it looks really complicated, but you only really need to adjust the threshold, the ratio, and the attack. If you want to keep things simple, you can just tweak these three dials until it sounds good to you. But essentially the threshold is determining where the compressor starts working. If it's at 20 dB, that's where the compressor is going to start working. The ratio is how much compression takes place beneath that threshold, and the attack is how quickly the compressor works. So the lower the threshold, the more intense the compression is going to be. [MUSIC] You can see for that graph, the compressor is really cutting into it, but we don't want to squish it out like that so I'm just going to lighten up a bit. Then the ratio is how much compression is taking place, so the higher the style, the more intense it's going to be. [MUSIC] I'm just going to turn the attack down so it's nice and quick to engage. But yeah, essentially I'm just tweaking these dials until it sounds about right to me. Then because we're compressing, the signal is going to get quieter. We can adjust the gain to just bring that level back up so it's as loud as we need it to be. In fact we can do this with the makeup gain here [MUSIC] We've just add a bit of compression to each instrument. I'm just going to add a little bit onto my acoustic guitar, I think. [MUSIC] In actual fact, I don't like it with a compressor on so I'm just going to leave it. Okay, so that sounded really really nice to me. Then the last thing we're going to do, and possibly one of the most important things is what's called side-chain compression. So using this is really prominent in Lofi music. So essentially what side chain compression does is it activates a compressor on an instrument when another one is playing. I know that sounds a bit weird. I'm going to give you an example with the bass and the kick. So what we're going to try and do is have that kick really stand out, and at the minute the bass and the kick frequencies are in the same space. By adding side chain compression to the bass, every time the kick hits, the bass is going to duck out of the way of the kick, which is going to make the kick hit extra hard. But we're still going to have that bass coming straight back up after the kick. So we're still going to have that nice sound of the bass. For Lofi, I always put side-chain compression on the bass to let the kick through. I know a lot of people like to add the same side chain compression to any instruments that are going to interfere with that kick. It depends how intense you want that kick to be. Again, all comes down to personal preference. For today I think I'm just going to put it on the bass, but let's see how things sound. So on logic, we're going to select our bass and we're going to come to the mixer. We're going to select a compressor here. Then up from the top you can see there's a side chain button. We're going to side chain this to our kick. So let's try and find that in instruments. BBL kick, this is it. If I go into graph now and I play the track. It already has put a bit of compression on there for me, as you might better here [MUSIC] you can see that the signals ducking but only when the kick is hitting. Just like with our regular compression, we can play with the threshold, ratio, and attack to get the sound we want. I often say the attack down. [MUSIC] Essentially the lower we make the threshold, the more intense that compression is going to be, so let's lower the threshold [MUSIC] and add a rollout pumping effect to the bass. I can make the compression really intense and then solo it so you can really hear it. [MUSIC] See how much it ducks when the kick comes in, but we're not going to make it too intense. Again, if I add the ratio, it's going to get a bit more intense. If I reduce the threshold, that's also going to get more intense. You can just adjust these three dials to your liking and that should give your kick a load of extra oomph. Okay, so I'm pretty happy with that there I think. I might tweak it ever so slightly later, but just so you can hear. [MUSIC] That's what the bass is sounding like on its own now. So it's nicely ducking out of the way of the kick. [MUSIC] That's what sounded really good to me now. Any instrument that we want to add a little bit of extra Lofi in this too, again, we can just use the isotope vinyl. So I can to my guitar if I'd like. [inaudible] guitar. [MUSIC] Could add a bit of warp to it. Turn down the dust maybe. A bit of mechanical noise and maybe nicely. Just essentially just play around with these dials and create a lofi sounding guitar. You know what, I actually quite like that. So I'm going to leave that on. Our song is more or less there now guys. It sounded really really good. I'm just going to do a tiny bit of light mastering, which I'm going to show you through. But we're more or less there. Thanks again, guys. I'll catch you in the next lesson. 12. Mastering: Hey, welcome back. So in this next lesson, we're going to talk a little bit about mastering. Mastering is a huge topic and it's one that's hard to get everything into in a short 10 minute video. But essentially, what mastering is mixing our song as a whole, rather than mixing little bits here and there individually. So for example, rather than like EQinq our guitar, mastering would be EQing the track as a whole. essentially, mastering prepares our tracks so that it's ready for like streaming, it's loud enough. We may be compressing it a little bit. We mucking around with the EQ to maybe just accentuate some frequencies we do like, damping those we don't. So essentially, just mixing it as a whole. just another disclaimer, mastering is a very personal thing. Everyone has slightly different methods and ways of working. Again, a lot of it comes down to personal preference. We're going to keep things nice and simple today though. I'm not going to go into any like crazy plug-ins. I'm just going to do a little bit of light Mastering just to make sure it's loud enough if you want to upload it to any streaming platforms, and yet make sure that it's sounding good. Now there's a couple of little things we can do, that work particularly with a lot of Lo-fi. So let's have a look at that now. So to find your master track on logic, you will come to your mixer and it will be under this stereo out. Any effects we've put on here are going to affect the track as a whole. Just for the sake of transparency, I personally use a program called Ozone 9 to do a lot of my mastering. If you're really into music production and mixing and mastering and stuff, I really recommend you look into this plugin because it makes mastering so easy. A lot of it's done at one-click and then you just make fine adjustments after that. But I use that for a lot of my mastering, but today I'm going to show you how to do it a bit more manually because I know that's a paid program. So the first thing I like to do is just a bit of EQ. So similar to our mixing lesson, we can just EQ however we like. We're just increasing the frequencies we want more of and decreasing the ones we maybe don't like as much. So forget about tracker play. [BACKGROUND] [MUSIC] I felt like just a bit more of this top end would be nice just to crispy up a little bit. Just move our EQ curves around the track to see the kind of frequencies we want to be accentuating or decreasing. [MUSIC] What we can also do on the master EQ to give it a real Lo-fi vibe is again use high and low pass filters. Low-pass filters use all the time in Lo-fi mastering and they create a really Lo-fi vibes. [BACKGROUND] So it can be quite aggressive with this. [MUSIC] We can just EQ all of that high-end out. Again, we're emulating an old vinyl or some kind of school sound system. Almost makes a warm, cozy vibe, I think. [MUSIC] This is, again, can emulate a more old-school style of Lo-fi but I've noticed a lot of modern Lo-fi tracks actually don't do this too much, they have a much wider frequency range to yeah, just feel a bit more modern, a bit more crispy. [MUSIC] What I think I'm going to do is just EQ off that ultra high-end. I'm just going to try and say how much of the low end I can take off too [MUSIC]. [BACKGROUND] Again, we can take a load at our if you want to really old school sound. I'm just adding in a high-pass filter there just to like shave off those ultra-low rumbly sounds. Yeah, I've just picked up the top end just a little bit [MUSIC]. Again, I can turn this on and off to see the difference I'm making is only super subtle, but often think one percent difference at a time makes a big change, so [inaudible] [MUSIC] [BACKGROUND] Turn it back on. That's really pretty good to me. So next, I'm going to add a compressor. This works just like we spoke about in the mixing class, is just going to reduce the dynamic range of our track, is going to make it punch a little bit more. But I'm only going to do a light bit of compression because I don't want it to be too in your face and too intense. I want it to be quiet and chilled out kind of track. [MUSIC] So again, [BACKGROUND] if you want to keep things easy, we can just use threshold ratio and attack. I'll take the attack down a little bit low. I like it looser on the master to loosen up a bit. Then essentially, we're just going to play the threshold and the ratio. [MUSIC] I'm literally just fiddling around with these three dials just until it sounds good to me. I think I've got a nice mix there. So this is before [MUSIC] [BACKGROUND] and this is afterwards. So only really very subtle change there, just tweaking it ever so slightly to just dial in what kind of sound we want. Another thing I often like to do is use an exciter. An exciter is essentially just going to add on some harmonic, high-end. Really simple. We're just going to look at the exciter. We can pick what frequency range we want it to start working at. Again, it works more towards the top end. Then we can dial in how much of the exciter we want it to work. [MUSIC]. Exciter at zero. You see it just really beefs up the top end and gives it some sparkle. [MUSIC]. It really makes that range shine through. Again, I'll turn off. I'll turn it back on. It just really brings out the sparkle in that range in that top end. [MUSIC] This is much more of a step if you want a modern sounding Lofi track, but if you want the more typical low-fidelity clunky sound, it's probably best to leave this out. I'm going to leave it on for now because I'm actually going to put on an iZotope vinyl just to see how that sounds. Again, this is going to just replicate a vinyl sound. It's going to give us some nice vinyl crackle and also selecting from these years is essentially going to cut the high-end out. But there's something about it I find that just glues everything together. Again, I'll give you some examples. [MUSIC] It's just the ton of that high-end out, but again, we can control how much by effectively changing the year. The older the track here, the more low fidelity it's going to be. If I go around at 1930 because there's no low-end, no high-end, it's just all in this mid. If you want to go really in depth with this, you can actually trigger this too with the automation. If you want all of the tracks to suddenly come into this ultra low fidelity and then pump back out, you can automate it, but I'm not going to do that today. Even just switching there between the 2000 and off, you can hear that there is more definition when the vinyl is off. [MUSIC] Turn it off. Again, we get more of that sparkly top end. But I quite like it on. Something about it I just find helps glue it together [MUSIC] and I like this on the 2000s as well. The others may be a little bit too cutting in for the song. Now, that crackling is this Dust. I like it, but I just want to turn it down a little bit. I'm going to reduce the gain. [MUSIC] Again, we can just play around with these dials and get the vibe that we like. That's just going to be like the wear and grit. I like it about 14, that's cool. That Lofi button is a bit too much for me. [LAUGHTER] We can also add in some mechanical sound. [MUSIC] Again, it gives a bit of atmosphere. Electrical sound too, which I like, sounds good. We can dial this warp in a little bit. Again, just dialing in the thing we like. I like it with or without. I think for today I'm going to leave it on and you might want to head back into your EQ or your exciter afterwards as well because this is going to obviously change the EQ pattern. Maybe I should explain this first. But again, just have a play around and see what things you like. The last thing we're going to do is use a limiter. A limiter is essentially just going to ensure that our track is loud enough. It's super, super easy to use. What a limiter is going to do is, it's going to ensure that our track is loud enough but that it's not peaking. It's going to act a little bit like a compressor and just make sure our song is loud enough and everything over that is going to be squished down. We're also going to pull up a level meter so we can see how loud it's getting. We want to change it to peak an RMS and we want to ensure that the RMS, that's the average volume, is hitting around 10 RMS. Head over to our limiter. [MUSIC] I'm just going to turn out the gain a little bit. Head back to our limiter. Turn it up a little more. Just hang around 10 there. The limiter, we're just adjusting the gain and we're making sure that the RMS level is hitting minus 10. [MUSIC] Once we have the limiter to that minus 10 dB, we're all good. We're done. That's our track, written, produced, mixed, and mastered and it's still sounding really good. But it's going to Spotify or YouTube or SoundCloud. Massive congratulations to get into this point in the class. I really hope that it's been useful. Let's wrap up the last few other things in the last class. I'll see you there. 13. Finished Track: When you passively meet, Batman appeared utterly harmless. I go in here and I'm going to write it, but I'm going to call it a very horrible time. I like that idea. 14. Final Thoughts: Hey, massive congratulations for finishing the class. Well done. I really hope you enjoyed it and you took a load of good information away from this. I really hope it set you off in your lo-fi songwriting journey or it's leveled up your existing lo-fi music. Again, I just want to stress if there's anything that you make after watching this class that you'd like to share, please, please feel free to send it into that class project. I listen and respond to every single one sent in. I absolutely love hearing what you guys get up to. Or even if you do want me to go and check out your Band page or your SoundCloud, please feel free just to link anything like that in. It's been an absolute pleasure putting this class together. I really love lo-fi music. I listen to it all the time when I'm working or just chilling out. It's been really fun for me to dive into this and teach you about how to make lo-fi music yourself. If you'd like to, you can follow me on Skillshare and you'll get notified every time I make a new class or if I post any discussions or giveaways. Just before I go, if you enjoyed this class or it was helpful for you at all, I would really, really appreciate if you consider leaving a review. Those reviews honestly are an absolute game changer for people like me making online courses. If you get just a minute or two to leave a quick review, I would appreciate it so much, and thank you in advance if you get time to do that. Thanks again, guys, really appreciate you being here. I hope you have a great rest of your day and I'll catch you very soon. Thank you.