Make a Beat From Scratch Course Vol. 1

1. 1-1 [INTRO] - Make a Beat From Scratch Vol1: Hey, of One Gratuitous here. Welcome to Make a beat from scratch, volume one, where we are going to be creating an emotional rat beat from scratch. So I'll walk you through step by step, how to create a custom drum loop with one shot drum samples, as well as create our own melodies with virtual instruments. Once we go to the studio, we'll do all that stuff. I first want to start the course up here on a real piano because this is where I practice, and in all honesty, this is where I've created some of my best beats. Because I found my melody on this piano, then I take it to the studio. Okay, So you can see I have a microphone here. I have a mixer. Don't worry about the, my keyboard, I'll talk about that in just a second. But I just have two microphones they plug into a mixer. And I practice with a drum loop. I don't always use the drum loop. I'll explain that as we go along. But this set up with headphones, I have them right here. Okay, close back headphones. This has been an amazing way to practice. Most people don't want to hear that word practice, right? But if you want to become a good beat maker, it all starts with the piano. Because you become super versatile, you learn to play the keys, you know chords, play your drum loops. If you already have melodies going on, you can quickly improvise and add your melodies in. Okay, again, I'm going to start off this course by talking about the equipment I'm using, how I set it up. That's going to be beneficial to you to understand the workflow. One thing also just to mention a Midi keyboard. The problem with it is it's really good when it connects to our computer to player virtual instruments. But the keys are cheap. You get latency, which is when you press a key, there's a little bit of delay there when it goes to the computer. When you have a real piano, you have no latency. You get really nice piano keys. When I record, um, you know, I'm not really recording, I'm just listening back through a mixer, into headphones. A mixer allows me to put reverb on the piano, I can put delay on, and then I can plug in my drum loop if I choose to use a drum loop. Sometimes I play without a drum loop. I just listen to like the reverb piano on here, or I can do it with a drum loop as well. The thing that I'm doing here is I'm putting myself in a real situation as a beat maker, practicing as if I was in the studio making a beat. I'm playing over what we call a click track, just like a drum loop. All right. The drum loop should be at least five to 10 minutes long. So you hit play, that is 5 minutes of constant practice. If you can get to that level of five minute practice and you can do it 5 minutes and then 5 minutes and 5 minutes. I usually like to have a couple different drum loops, like a dance drum loop, a hip hop drum loop, Really, really good for practicing. I'll break all that stuff down when we get further into that in this section of the course. Again, we're starting up here. I want to break down my workflow, my process. And then I will start from scratch with you guys. We will hit play with the drum loop. I'll have to improvise, so you'll watch some of that stuff. You can skip that part of the course if you want, if you want to just get right into the beat making. But I will try to make this course as raw as possible. And what that means is I'm going to try to make it where you're seeing almost everything that's going on, but I still have to make it kind of fun and, you know, engaging for you as well. One last thing to say is pianos, you can get them for free, okay? So don't think that a real piano, it costs a lot of money. A lot of people give pianos away for free. It's just the fact of how do you get it into your home, as well as your living situation. Can you have a piano? Because they are allowed. So let's move on. Let's talk about the equipment I have here for the really, really awesome workflow. What I'm practicing, because you should be practicing the piano every day. I don't think you need to spend hours, but it should be at least five to 10 minutes a day. And when you follow my process here, it's actually fun. You get to play with effects and all that kind of stuff de right. 2. 1-2 - Why Piano is Like Skateboarding: All right, in this video, I just want to give you guys a quick analogy, a quick comparison to skateboarding and making beats. Because skateboarding is actually super hard to learn if you know what an ally is. And we'll break that down just quickly. Okay. When we go to make a beat for me, I like to do everything from scratch. And what I mean from scratch is I already like the high quality sounds created for me. I already like the pianos and I'm talking like virtual instruments, one shot drum samples. I like the guitars already recorded for me. I like the pianos, I like the pads, bass lines, all that stuff. Super high quality recorded for me by professional designers. Okay, when you have high quality sounds, it makes all the difference. When you make beats, I have the high quality sounds, but once I have the sounds, I like to make the beat from scratch. My own Midi notes for the drum loops, one shot drum samples. So we have just single kicks, single claps, and I like to make my own drum loops. So no premade loops, no premade miti, packs everything from scratch. Okay. Now the thing is it's really, really hard, right, To get to that point of being able to improvise on this piano and becoming a really good producer. So let me just give a quick analogy to skateboarding. This is a little tech deck I had as a kid, and so when we talk about skateboarding, it's very, very hard. And what's the hardest thing to learn? It's the Ali. If you don't know what an Ali is, it's just like this, right? Kick it down, and you jump. It's just a jump on a skateboard. And the thing to understand about a Ali is that it is the fundamental of everything when it comes to skateboarding. If you want to do a kick flip where you're spinning the board or if you want to grind, you have to all onto the rail or onto the ledge, right? It all comes from the Ali, which is like the piano, okay? When you make a beat, everything comes from the piano. When you become a really good producer, even if you're going to be sampling music, it's still about timing, right? You can have your chops, your slices. I like to do everything from a mitty keyboard when I'm making my beats. I don't like the drum pads because keys are the same thing as drum pads. Just a little bit of a different feeling. That's all it is. Skateboarding, the Ali takes so long to learn, but once you learn it, it's the foundation of everything. Same here with the keys. Once you learn the keys, you're on your way. Okay? The secret to learning the piano as a beat maker is understanding that you have to choose a key in a scale. That means that you have seven notes available to you in that key in scale. For me personally, I like to use the key in scale minor. That's just something that I picked up over the years. The thing is, if you only choose one key in scale, you memorize it really good. Because when we go to make our beats, it's just about knowing how to play the keys. We get our notes into the program and then we can adjust our notes however we want. It's not about learning it perfectly. Okay? The thing is, when I play the piano, I make a lot of mistakes. And that's okay. My timing isn't perfect. We're not trying to be classical piano players. Classical piano players are very, very good beat makers. We are playing this piano a lot different. We are focused on catchy loops and improvisation, which not many people in the world can do. Why? Because when we have a melody, we are trying to fit another melody over top of that melody and make it as catchy as possible. If you think about some of your most favorite beats, they are typically really, really simple. But they're just so catchy because of how they put the melodies together. That is what a good producer is, is knowing what's catchy. You can have ten instruments, you can maybe only have two instruments. But it's about knowing how to use this piano. It is the foundation of everything as a producer. Okay, So I hope that little analogy made sense. Because the piano is the foundation, just like the Ali is the foundation of everything. Pretty much in skateboarding. Okay, let's move on, Let's talk about the equipment, and then we'll get into actually playing the piano. 3. 1-3 - Piano Practice Setup [OVERVIEW]: What I do with this mixer is I plug in a drum loop, so no melodies, just a drum loop. And then this mixer allows me to have effects like reverb or even delay, where I can actually play the piano keys. And on the headphones I can hear delay. I can hear reverb off of a real piano over a drum loop. And what's the benefit? It's in real time. I just have a right microphone, a left microphone, and that plugs into a mixer. Then again, I'm just plugging in a drum loop into the mixer so I can listen on headphones. Again, these are closed back headphones. I highly recommend closed back headphones because it blocks the outside sound. Another alternative is you can just get like earbuds. But the thing is, you're not really blocking out total sound like a close back headphone would do for you. They don't have to be expensive. You just want them blocking out the ambient noise around you. So that one, when you play a piano, a piano is actually pretty loud on your ears as well in some hearing protection. And then you can turn up your volume from your mixer, with your drum loop in here, as well as the two microphones. In order to get this set up, you want at least four channels on your mixer. So what is a channel? A channel is where you can plug in a microphone, so this is the green cable. You can see it's channel one, okay? This one's channel two. And then this one right here is going to be channel three. So line in three and line in four, and that's where I plug in my drum loop. In the case of this mixer, all mixers are kind of different. They can be a little confusing, but you will follow along pretty easy as we go along here. So the green cable, let's follow that. So you can see there's the green cable plugs into the left microphone. This black Lar cable is in channel two. And that is my microphone right here. It is, a black cable. So now when it comes to our drum loop, in the case of this mixer, you can see that it has line in three and line in four. Okay, And so we have a left channel and a right channel. Now that is how I have to plug in my drum loop into this mixer, so I can take advantage of this gain ****. So this is like a preamp. So imagine you have an audio interface where you have your volume ****, just right here, right? So what happens if you turn the volume too much? It's going to distort your recording, which you never want to do. But in the case of a drum loop, if you ever hear in analog recording or within tape saturation, if you drive something a little hard, you can get distortion, right? So sometimes when I plug in my drum loop, I can drive my drum loop extra hard and it actually distorts. It gives me a really cool sound. You can see I can do E Q on the drum loop, so I can go my high frequencies and low frequencies. Again, as I'm practicing, I can customize the drum loop with different EQ settings. I can drive it hard, which is like kind of like adding distortion or even compression onto it just by over driving that. And then down here I have effects. So this is an effect section. Again, I don't want to talk about this mixer so much in this course. I just want to explain that this is just how I do it in a really simple way. I just plug one microphone into the left, one microphone into the right. I plug the drum loop in that allows me to distort it or drive it a little extra hard. If I want to, I don't do it all the time. We have E, Q if if I want to customize it, add more base so I can hear the high hat more or make it $1 kind of sound. I want $1 It would go this way, right? Typically, when I'm doing this, I am just doing my effects for my piano. And usually what I found is on the left here, because it's on the base, I usually don't put as much reverb on. I like that left side sounding a little tighter sounding. And then the right side which is, you know, your higher melodies, I can add a lot more reverb onto the right. So as you can see, this is the left channel. Not as much effects the right channel I put more effects on. Okay, so again, just to recap, so like a closed back headphone does not have to be expensive, just closed back blocks out the noise. You can hear the drum loop and the piano really well. Again, when it's all into a mixer. The benefit is it's in real time. When I hit these keys, you can't get more real time than when it's actually triggering the string. There is a little bit cost to get a set up like this, but if you've been in the audio industry for a while, if you picked up gear over time, that's essentially what I've done. And then I might have picked up maybe just one mic stand just for this set up, and I was good to go. I pretty much already had this equipment and I already had the piano. It was a very low cost for me. And again, the benefit of this is what I'm doing is I am playing a drum loop through the mixer so that I can play in real time with a real piano, get the absolute best experience of practicing. And there's actually two ways how I like to practice this piano. So I don't always practice with the drum loop. Okay. Sometimes I play just with the headphones and just the piano. Sometimes I'll play just the piano, no drum loop and then sometimes I will play the drum loop. And then on this MP three player, I will have a couple different drum loops. I'll have, you know, kind of like a rap drum loop. I'll have a dance drum loop, more of like an emotional kind of drum loop this way as the beat makers forcing me to practice over that drum loop in a real world setting that beat makers need to learn. All right, These are the things that you will not hear being taught out there. And I do this honestly, almost on a daily basis. Another thing with these drum loops is I usually try to make them about to five to 10 minutes. Because you'd be surprised that five to 10 minutes of practice is actually a long time of practicing as you're playing the piano. So what I usually do, like let's say I have three drum loops on here. Again, like a dance, a hip hop, and like an emotional drum loop, I will go through each one. So that would be like 15 minutes of practicing with different styles of drum loop, which means that I can practice the piano and it's all in real time. So it's by far the best practicing experience I've ever had in all my years. And I just want to pass it on to you, okay? 4. 1-4 - Drawing Connections [Piano Setup]: All right, I just want to quickly talk about this mixer set up for a real piano with the two microphones. Okay? But how I like to set it up is I'd like to have four inputs on the mixer, these inputs. So one input is for the left mic and then one input is for the right mic microphone. And these don't have to be high end microphones. It's just so that you can capture the audio that goes into the mixer. So that you can apply reverb on. Okay? The mixer to have effects on as well. Then your left plus right drum loop. Okay? How this works is when you listen to music, it is a stereo file, which means it has a left and a right channel. Sometimes you might just have a simple eighth jack. Might have like an eighth jack, for example. Let's say you have like a little MP three players, like a little like Music Note. Sometimes you can just plug in your cable right into the mix and it could just be your eighth inch cable that plugs in, depending on your mixer. My mixer does not have that option. Sometimes if you want to plug in your drum loop that way. Okay, let's just go back. If you want to plug in your drum loop this way. Sometimes you don't get the benefits of applying the effects onto the drum loop, and sometimes you're not able to EQ it and sometimes you're not able to do the overdrive with the preamp. Okay, let me just break this down for you. Okay. In my situation for my mixer, I have this is like an XLR L R to plug in the left microphone. And the microphone is just a condenser microphone, a little bit more sensitive. You don't have to drive it as hard. Sometimes these lower end mixers might struggle to drive dynamic microphones. Dynamic microphones, what makes them awesome is that they're not as sensitive. They don't pick up as much room noise, but a condenser microphone is really sensitive so you can pick up the audio really easy. So we have a left mic, a right mice. They don't have to be paired. Mine wasn't. I just had random microphones I had from, picked up from over the years. And then here mine is actually a four inch input and I need times two, but this is how I want to break it down for you. Okay? So we have four inputs, and so this is our mixer. So we're going to have one for our microphone one. Okay? We will have microphone input, okay, for microphone two. And then we need to plug in 12 for our drum loop. All right, And then what happens now is our preamp. You know, we have a preamp which allows us to drive our audio, and then mine has just a high and a low for the EQ section. Okay. So again, my drum loop is able to be driven by one **** if I want to. Again, I'm always a little bit cautious on how often I do it, because you could potentially break this channel by pushing your audio too loud. But hey, sometimes it's cool just for to practice with. So I'm just going to go EQ section is right there. I will get the purple again. We'll go preamp. Okay, so we have preamp Q. I'm just going to put one **** here. Mine actually has two *****, but this is like for our effects. Okay, so I'll explain how that works in just a second. And then you are actually going to have a volume **** down here. So this is the preamp, okay? This is what's actually driving the microphone so you can hear yourself. You want it at a volume where you're not distorting, but you don't want it too quiet. Otherwise you're going to get background noise and stuff like that, you know, like his, once we have our volume and our effects where we want, this is just kind of allowing us to kind of trim that volume to kind of cut back the volume. Okay. And then I also have headphones right here. And then I'll just quickly talk about the headphones. So in regards to the headphones, like I said, you want to make sure that you have closed back headphones. Okay. So closed and what this is going to do is it's going to block out all noise. Okay, So it's kind of like an enclosed environment environment with your head where you can hear your piano and your drum loop. And you're also protecting your ears from the piano because the piano is actually pretty loud. Okay, So just keep that in mind. This one requires a quarter inch input, so sometimes you need to go from like the quarter inch from eighth inch, because a lot of headphones are eight inch or whatever we have on E two. And this is 3.4 for a drum loop. So we'll go left for the left microphone, right for the right microphone. And then I'll just go D L for the drum loop. Okay, So what happens now is there's like a little effect section, so I'll just go like effect in here. There's going to be like one **** to dial in like what effect you want if you want to be like a reverb. And there's different types of reverb, there might be like five or six different types of reverb. There's like delays, there's choruses, there's different effects. Okay, so you can have one **** to choose the effect you want, and then you have one **** to dial in the amount of global effect. And then here, if it's all the way at zero, okay, then this insert gets no effect. Let's say microphone to again because like I said, the left one was on the left side of the piano. That's usually the bass notes. I didn't want as much reverb. Okay. Whereas on the right microphone, which picked up the highs of the microphone, I found over the years just a little bit more reverb, not tons, but just a little bit more reverb. And you'll feel that it's just a little bit more musical as you're playing the piano. And then depending on your global effect, that's where you'll start hearing your effect. For the drum loop. I have tried playing with the reverb and stuff like that, but it doesn't really sound too good for the drum loop. You just want the drum loop just to hit as a normal drum loop. And what makes it powerful is depending if you're listening to a hip hop drum loop or a dance drum loop or whatever type of drum loop, again, we just call these a click track that we play over. It's really nice to be able to drive it a little extra hard if we want some distortion. I found that to be cool. I found the E Q section to be really useful if I want more highs or less highs, or more low end. Because again, when you hear like the low end, it allows you to play different sometimes. And then for the effects, usually I don't have any effects. Or if I do, just very, very little, and then I can adjust my volume there. Okay. You're also going to have one for your headphones, a volume volume control for your headphones, and then a volume output if you want to send it out somewhere else. But that's it. Okay, so I like to have four inputs and then I'm just going to go plus effects. This is for the mixer, so I'll just go mixer. For the mixer, I like to have four inputs plus effects, okay? One input is for the left microphone, one input is for the right microphone. And then 3.4 is for the drum loop because your audio file is actually stereo and you want to be able to hear stereo. It just sounds way better but and depending on your budget, you know you can figure out what works for you. But this has been the best experience for me, okay? And then also for the left and right microphone for input 1.2 A lot of times on these mixers there's like a button right here and it allows you to say, I want these two to be either combined for mono or I want them to be stereo. And you can play around with that. But I have found stereo to sounded the best. Okay, so again, for inputs we like effects for reverbs and delays. You want to have closed back headphones. They don't have to be expensive, but you want to make sure that they are closed to protect your ears from the piano, as well as you can hear the drum loop and your reverb. And it allows you to practice super, super good. All right, and then again, if we have an MP three player or our phone, so I'll just do this. And then in my case, I went from an eighth inch and then it went to four inch like this. Okay. So it kind of plugs in and I needed some kind of adapters and stuff like that. But however you get your, I'll just go DL. Okay for drum loop, however you get your drum loop into here and then again you turn up your volume. If this is your headphone, your headphones plug in, but then it's controlled by a volume, right? And then you just adjust it on the mixer. That's what makes a mixer so powerful You can connect so many different things. You get to adjust the different volumes. You want to get that sweet spot where you're able to hear the piano as well as you're able to hear that drum loop. Again, don't be too loud on your ears. You have to protect your ears. Being a music producer, you're always listening to audio, and your ears are super, super important. But that is a quick overview of how the mixer set up works. We have a left microphone, which would plug into there. We have a right microphone which would plug into there. And then our drum loop here would go into the 3.4 and that's going to get messy. Okay, one last thing to say. Finding a mixer with four inputs and effects is actually pretty tricky. So you're going to have to go on a little bit of a hunt. Sometimes you might have to get a bigger mixer, but the bigger mixer starts getting more expensive as well as it takes up more space. But again, this has been the awesome practice workflow for practicing piano as a beat maker. Okay, all right, so let's move on. 5. 1-5 - Wiring the Piano Mixer: All right, I'm going to quickly wires up with you, just like you just saw in the wiring diagram video. Again, I'm going to do this really, really quick so that we can actually start moving and getting into actually making a beat, practicing on the piano. Okay, again, every single mixer is going to be a little bit different. But what I look for in a mixer is it needs to have at least four channels. And when we plug in that drum loop, I always like to be able to have the volume **** where I can overdrive the drum loop to get distortion. As well as being able to have EQ to boost the highs and lows, as well as add effects on to any of the inserts. Sometimes it's actually a little tricky to find a good mixer for that situation. Okay, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to plug in the left and right microphone, okay? So these are XLR cables. Again, that is an XLR cable. Okay? And that is going to plug into just insert one right here. Nice and simple. Now some mixers. On insert one, you might see an option for a button for line and high. The high Z would be for like a guitar input. And a line input is something that's already been amplified and it's already at allowed volume, typically what we call a line volume. And that's what you're using these four inch jacks for. But I'm plugging in a microphone, so we're good to go. Okay, so I'm going to plug in the other microphone, and again it is just an XLR cable, just like the other one. Okay, so just like that, it's a black cable. And I will plug it in. Just like that right there. Our microphones are connected and we're good to go. Now if we are using a condenser microphone, this mixer does have phantom power. Now the next thing I will plug in is the headphones. Okay, so in the case of this mixer, I do need to have this four inch adapter. This is an eighth inch jack. Typically what we see on earbuds and stuff like that, you know, if you want to plug into your phone and it just plugs like this, this one does not allow me to do the thread, so I just plug it in just like so. And that allows me to plug it into headphone jack right there. And that's it. And if I want to adjust my headphones volumes, it is the phones. Okay. That would be literally it. If I just wanted to play piano with headphones, all I have to do is literally just turn this thing on and you can see if I hit the microphone, the biggest thing is that you just don't want your microphones to distort. Because microphones you typically you want to have nice and clean. And then again, for these drum loops, I can distort again depending on your mixer. Sometimes you might just have RCA jack you may have to plug in with RCA. In the case of mine is a left and a right. So you will see I have these left and right. Okay? It goes into just a connection like this. So if you get into music production, it's nice to have all these different kind of cables like sometimes it's nice to have. So this is what we call male, This is female where we're inserting it in. So what I'm trying to say is sometimes it's nice to have the male as well as male. Sometimes it's nice to have just female here and male, and then sometimes it's nice to have the male and then female. And so what this is doing is it's taking a stereo input such as your MP three player. Okay, So when I have my drum loop, it's going to plug in to here. Okay? I have another cable for that, which I'll talk about in just a second. So I'm just going to plug these in. This is going to be for our drum loop. Okay? And all I have to do now is I have to plug in another cable. So this is an eighth inch, and this is just going to go right into the drum loop. So whether it is your phone, an ipod, whatever it is, all that happens is this, boom. Another thing also to mention is sometimes it's nice playing over a metronome. So what is a metronome? I'll let you hear it. I actually had this from when I was a child. It's kind of broken. I can't change from 100 beats per minute. So I can actually plug this into the mixer and I get an absolutely amazing good practicing. I have so much flexibility, these tools aren't too expensive. Like the mixer is maybe $200 Yes, the microphones, you know, everything could kind of add up if you have to buy it from scratch. But like I said, I had a lot of this equipment when I was first, you know, starting over the years and it's come in handy. I'm able to use it for practicing on the piano. Because again, if you want to become a really, really good beat maker, it all comes from the piano. All right, so let's get into the next video. 6. 1-6 - Finding a Melody on the Piano: All right. So now that you know how all this is kind of connected, I just have my two microphones. They're plugged into a mixer. And I'll let you hear my voice with the reverb. So I have my right microphone. Okay? It sounds on the right. And then I have my left microphone. Okay. Left again. The left one. Because it's on the low frequencies. I don't like as much reverb. The one on the right has a lot more reverb because it makes the keys if I play some keys. Okay. So as you can see here, I just have a couple different drum loops off of my phone or I showed already an ipod or an MP three player or whatever is easy for you. The phones kind of nice because you can just have like a cloud service like Dropbox or Google Drive. You just add it from your laptop onto the phone. Right. It's all in the cloud. And then you can just play your drum loop right from here. Nice and easy. I'll just play a couple of these drum loops and I'll share exactly how I approach it. If I click here, you can see that this is the drum loop, okay? Now what I can do here is I can actually distort it. All right, so here's the bass churn down, turn down. But as I'm playing the piano, sometimes it's cool to have that super, super distorted sound. That's just how I play around and have fun with it. But typically I'm just looking for a nice clean sound and then this is it. So let's get into some melodies. This is from years and years of practice. About 05:10 minutes a day. I'm telling you, you guys can get here, okay? So I need a bit louder, little louder on the drum loop, a little more bass, Okay? So here we go. Something simple. The thing is, the hardest thing is we got to try to find that catchy melody that works with this drum loop. Okay? And that's share, watch, I'll just go to a dance drum loop now quickly. It's all about trying to find that melody. Okay, the drum loop is near the end, so I'll bring it all the way back to the beginning. And here we go. Now one other thing to say is in my drum loop, I have it where I know when the loop begins. Again, just listen for the drum loop. I'll let it play, and then I'll say, okay, I play here. Okay? So watch. Okay. Now is where I play. Okay? I'll listen over time. Now, here is where I'd play, Okay? And if you hear, my timing isn't perfect. I screw up on notes, but that's okay. Because I'm trying to figure out the melody in my head because I know with FL Studio I can adjust my Midi notes and that's what makes life as a producer so easy. We don't have to be perfect, we just need the idea. Okay? I'll go to one other drum loop and we will try to find what I'm looking for here. I'll add a little more ver bond, a little more effects trying to find out the fort location. So as you can hear, everything there is improvised, right? So, you know, nothing here is on script. And this is where if you keep practicing, you will learn the improvisation. So when I go to make my beats, it's really just a matter of choosing what I like. Not so much about learning the piano or anything, because I already know how to play the piano. It's about trying to find that right melody and the right sound. So if you know about sound selection, right, it's all about those two components. Knowing how to play the keys as well as sound selection and getting it just to fit right. Okay, so even like that last melody, that last melody kind of suited that drum loop. The other melodies, even though they were in pitch and you know they sounded okay, they weren't like a hit. Whereas that last melody was a little bit more potential to be like a hit. It suited the drum loop, and as a producer, that's what it's all about. It's learning how to make the melody suit the drum loop. And in this set up right here that I'm showing you, this is such a good way to practice. I have my drum loop again. I'm going to wait for it to come in here. So one other thing I'll quickly share in this video is I also use the foot pedal a lot. So just the 1 ft pedal to sustain. What I think about the sustained as is, if you have any experience with beating so far, I just got to turn the reverb off of my voice. The biggest thing when it comes to the sustained pedal is it's like a filter. Okay? If we have virtual instrument where we have a filter where we can cut off frequencies and open them up. I'll just share that here quickly with you because it's actually a super cool concept when I'm practicing this piano. Because when I hit the keys, I have not just quick stabs because of the reverb and because of the room, it's not well acoustically treated. The notes sound a little long, right? But if I hold down the sustained petal, you can't see that story. But I'm holding it down now here. How much longer those notes are? Quick, long. For example, if I'm going to play my notes because I have a reverb, I hold on the pal. A lot of times when I'm playing my melodies, I also add the actual pedal. And what that's doing is when I'm playing the melodies in FL studio, that's essentially saying, oh yeah, I want those notes a little bit longer than the other notes. Because again, making beats is all about timing long notes or short notes. Okay? That's to do a sound selection to get tons of instruments to fit. Okay, I'll just do one last example here. So let's just go back to this drum loop. I will start with a melody that I'm already familiar with and then I'll take it off from there, and we'll hopefully try to find some melody. And if we don't, that's okay. We will just hop down into the studio. I give a breakdown of the studio, my equipment, and then we'll actually get into making a beat. And again, it's going to be an emotional rat beat. So when we make a rat beat or an emotional rat beat, the first thing we're thinking about is tempo. How fast is that beat beat? This drum loop is 96 beats per minute, which could be suitable for an emotional kind of beat. So here we go. Okay, so just adjusting this, the EQ, a little bit of where I want it made it a little bit louder. That drum loop. Okay. Turn it up. Okay, So I'm taking advantage of that pedal. So again, listen, close that. I'm trying to create a loop. I'm trying to find a melody that can loop over and over and over with this drum loop. Once we got that laid down, then it's just a matter of when we make our feet, we start adding more melodies over top. Let's just try one last melody here, and then we'll move on, okay? One last thing I'll share with you guys is when we're making beats, it doesn't have to be complicated, just has to be catchy. So sometimes when I'm playing my melodies, I'm just hitting the same case over. So you know, stuff like that. So watch. All right. So I hope that gave you insight into how I practice on a piano. I would come up here, make that melody. Once I find it's like, oh, that's a special melody. Then I go downstairs and then I start making the beat from scratch. In this case, I don't think I found that little special melody. But again, it's a little hard as I'm recording the video and improvising all at once here. So, but I will walk you through step by step, we will find an awesome melody downstairs. We will make our own drum loop from scratch. But again, I want to first start with a walk through of the studio so that you can see exactly the tools I'm using. Nothing too expensive. I think the studio is probably less than seven grand. That's over, over ten years of producing, maybe even 12 years now. But still, the price point isn't actually that high and I can create exceptionally high quality professional music and it all comes from high quality sounds and just understanding workflow. So let's hop into the studio. I'll give you a walk through of the studio and then we'll actually get into making a beat, which is what this course is all about. But again, understanding how to practice is so important because people want to get in there, they want to make a beat. But you have to understand that again, just like the all you have to learn the basics and then you have to keep practicing. If you ever look at a skate park, what do you see? Everyone is practicing all or they're practicing that same trick over and over and over and over. And when you go to make a beat, don't get stuck on trying to just make one beat. You have to make hundreds of beats over your years. Hundreds, even if the beat isn't done, or if you're stuck, or if you feel that you're taking too long in a certain area, it's okay just to create a new project to start from scratch. Save it, make sure you have a music folder so everything is organized. I'm telling you, if you just have fun, be creative. Don't worry about following exact whatever. Because as a beat maker, it's all about actually making mistakes too. Because when you make a mistake, all of a sudden, wow, you find that cool little whatever it is that makes that beat special. But I just know that a lot of people, when they start up, sometimes they take so long on one project, but they're never experimenting on other projects. But again, up here, this is where I practice where, where I've made some of my best beats. I found that melody go downstairs. I make the beat instantly right off of the melody. And okay, so let's move on. 7. 2-1 - Music Production Equipment: All right, so before we get into this, I just want to walk you through my actual set up of my little studio for my mindset, okay? I actually want to start here in the music production world. If you want to be a producer or if you are essentially doing online business, you need a way sometimes to scan documents and contracts. Sometimes you need to sign it, scan it, even though in this digital age, right, a printer has always handy to have a round. Okay. It's always nice to buy a printer scanner combo because you never know. I also like to have a little side desk because this is the clean working environment. I throw everything here and I try to keep it organized as best as possible. Again, I have my earbuds. This is just a nice quick way just to grab them. All right? This actually works out really, really good. This is a little tablet that I use for drawing, which you already saw in this course. I draw on the screen with you there for my speakers. I do like a bigger speaker. We'll talk more about that in a moment. My absolute best workflow in FL studio was actually having four computer monitors. It just gave an amazing workflow. I was able to put the channel rack like down here. I was able to put my plugins like on a monitor up here, the playlist on one, the mixer on one, and they were full screen. It was absolutely amazing. But because I do beat making education so often, I just have to work off of one computer screen because that's what you see in the videos. And what this allows me to do is because it's on an arm that I can pull in and out. First of all, it's really easy on my eyes. Right? Nice and easy. And then it's also floating. Okay. Now check this out. This is a cool little thing that I've custom built. It is a pullout tray from a mitty keyboard, and it's very, very affordable. There's soft closing sliders that you would see in your kitchen that if you wanted to get forks and knives, whatever you pull out your drawer. These are soft closing sliders and I just put the Midi keyboard on a slider so I can work just like this. This set up you're seeing right here is the best workflow I've ever had as a beatmaker. We have a 49 key Midi keyboard with an audio interface right beside you, because you can quickly turn up and down your volume. It's with an arm's reach. You can also see I have two sets of speakers here. So these ones here are my Yamahas. So that's my left and right speaker. Okay. Yes, it is blocked because again, my set up right now is mainly just for beat making education. But even in this set up, I can still get really good results. Because what happens is I make the beep, I mix it generally, and then I listen on different audio systems and I tweak it to where I want. Anyways, now I have this little mini speaker here. Okay? Now you don't have to purchase this exact same model. But the reason I purchased it is because it's name brand. I guess it's recommended out there, but it's okay. Like, you know, it's a decent little speaker. But what makes it beneficial is it's a single speaker. When you have these types of speakers, you have what's called a crossover. So you actually have two speakers. You have a woofer and a tweeter. There's a crossover point, sharing frequencies, essentially, okay, When you have a single speaker, it's just one speaker. So you're able to hear frequencies essentially out of one speaker. And if you can't hear the low end, then this is kind of replicating like a cell phone speaker or small speakers. So it's nice to be able to switch in between your speakers. Now, not all audio interfaces allow you to switch between speakers. Okay, So this here is the Mackie Big **** Studio. But why it's so awesome is because right here you can switch between your monitors A and B. A Remy Yamahas and B is just this little speaker right here. Okay. Another really cool thing about it is that you can actually adjust the volumes in between to get a fair volume match. But this isn't the best audio interface. I've had problems with it. One of them I've had to warranty, and so they fixed it. But again, it's just, it's kind of like entry level, maybe a little bit into intermediate level. But I say at the very, very low end of intermediate, the reason I like it is because I can switch between the speakers, so awesome. But in terms of actually, you know, real results, it's okay. Okay, another benefit of it, two headphone speakers. So one of these plugs into my earbuds, which I used for my courses and stuff. And then the other one, so the other one goes right into my headphones. All right. So upstairs I had closed back headphones. As you can see, these are open back. So in the studio we typically want to have open back headphones because the audio can breathe, it can leave the cans, it can leave your speakers, which means that you're going to get a more natural sound. All right, so I use these headphones in the studio. Don't worry of like, oh, I'm going to go buy these ones. It's just all about learning the equipment for you, if that makes sense. Okay. But one thing to say is an open back headphone is horrible for recording. So for example, if I want to do my courses, you can see I have a microphone here. I cannot use these headphones with a microphone so close because you get the horrible feedback. Sound. That's why I'm using these earbuds, so I don't get the feedback. Okay, so these are just kind of limitations of Just equipment. And again, that's just because I do beat making education. Okay. But if you're just making beats and you're not having to record open back headphones are in the studio. I use a track ball when being more gentle on a computer, such as like doing research or from doing stuff on the website, like blogging. It's a lot more kind of gentle on my hand, but when it comes to really actually working productive and fast a mouse by far. But in terms of making beats, I found that if I was doing my training, my voice would speak much faster than I was able to do something on the mouse. So this would slow me down. I have to use a mouse for that kind of stuff. Okay. But again, I just have both just for protection on the computer to work healthy. Again, this keyboard pol tray is what we call ergonomics. It's working comfortably. You can see right here, it screws to the desk, and I'm actually able to push this in and out. And then my mouse is right here as well. This chair here as well is an ergonomic chair. I'll talk more about that in a moment. You will see gamer chairs out there nowadays. Those are not ergonomic chairs when you are on a computer a lot. Okay. If you're younger you're like, oh, whatever. But as you start to get older, it is important to protect yourself on a computer. Which is why I have an ergonomic keyboard tray, really, really awesome and not too expensive. But these are the small little improvements that make a huge difference to comfort. I like when it has the mouse on the side and you can actually swivel this. All right? You can swivel it. I just have this so that it just doesn't shake. I just cut a little piece of wood and it doesn't bother me at all. This is an ergonomic chair. What makes it so awesome is if I go back, these do not rock, and you'll find that on lower end chairs. My recommendation if you are looking at an ergonomic chair, is to make sure to buy it locally. Go into a store, make sure you can sit in it many times. The store dealer has better deals than on line. Over here is just mainly for doing courses and recording. These are what we call a single channel preamp. It has like an E, Q, a compressor, a gate, a DS. It allows me to fine tune that audio before I bring it into my audio interface to record. Okay, essentially you could plug this microphone in directly to the audio interface, but sending it into a preamp typically is built a little bit better. You're going to get just a little bit better improvement. This appear is called a power conditioner and I probably wouldn't recommend it if you have not very expensive equipment and my equipment isn't overly expensive. What I do is I just plug everything into this unit. It's essentially just like one of these, you know, little power strips that you can turn on and off. But that's it for over here down here, I just have audio cables and they're organized by like RCA cables and TRS cables, XLR cables, really, really simple. All right. Just about being organized and knowing what you need for workflow. Okay, so let's just finish off this video with kind the set up here just quick. Okay, as a beatmaker, we typically need to have speakers, right? For a speaker, I like to have a bit of a bigger speaker, a seven to eight inch speaker, because it's so nice to hear that low end. Honestly, an eight inch speaker isn't even low enough, like you're not even able to hear those low lows. I actually have a sub wafer back here. And how the sub wafer works is you actually need four audio cables. And this is something that got me when I was first starting, because you need to make sure that your audio cables are long enough to the sub, then it goes from the sub to the speakers. My recommendation is don't buy one cable that's shorter than the other. Just make sure to buy even ***gth cables so that the audio signal is being received at the exact same time. Okay. Those are just making sure that we're following best practices, okay? But again, this is the setup that I really like for an amazing workflow, A 49 key Miti keyboard. A lot of people when I tell them that they for some reason go to a 61, a 61 key is more expensive, okay? It also takes up way more space on your desk. This desk right here is actually a pretty big desk I got from like Ikea. So it's a really cheap made desk, but it's been an awesome desk because it's so big. All right, And I've actually been able to make really, really good use of it for my studio. But a 49 key takes up a lot of the desk. The 49 key is pretty big. People get a 61 key. It'd probably be about where my hand is. It costs more. It's bigger. You will see when we make this beat in the course, I can improvise on this piano very well. 49 keys gives you tons of room for your keys. The biggest thing is that I like semi weighted keys. This one here is the M Audio Oxygen Pro. But over time new Miti keyboards get released. Don't get caught up on this exact brand. Just make sure to buy semi weighted keys because they feel a little bit better. Like I mentioned upstairs on the piano, it's not like a real piano unless you buy like the 88 key version. But those are like minimum 1,000 bucks. And then I haven't even personally tried an 88 key for the key quality, but a 49 key semi weight is good enough to make beats. You have your transport buttons, so you can see here the Loop button, this one right here. This is a really, really nice feature to have an FL studio, because it allows you to switch between loop and song mode. We have stop, play, record back a bar forward a bar and loop. I really like this Loop button. Okay. But again, 49 keys is more affordable. It's way more than enough keys to play to make high quality, professional beats. Because again, when we make beats, you have to understand the process. Your first melody could be with two hands, but then after that, a lot of the times you might just be playing with one hand. And then you have your octave button right there, so you have tons of keys to play with. Okay, 49 keys. What makes it awesome is you can go right here to the audio interface, turn up and down your volume. Now that I have this little slider, it's really awesome. I can just do this. If you don't have the slider, I would still suggest looking into one of these monitor stands. Because again, it allows you to get a little bit of a floating feel here. So that you can at least bring the screen closer to you when you need it, and then you can push it back. And again, it's all about working in comfort. Don't worry about spending tons and tons of money, it's just about knowing what you need to get results. I will also quickly just talk about my acoustic treatment. I built this when I was really, really new to making beats. Maybe about two or three years in. And I actually built it too thin, so when you make acoustic treatment, it should at least be like two, 3 " thick. Because the thing is, when it comes to the word acoustics, and acoustic treatment is you want to absorb the base frequencies. Because base frequencies are so powerful, even though it might look kind of fancy in the studio, it's not thick enough. Okay. I had a little bit of a gap in there. Gaps, air gaps are important as well. And then, yeah, down here I have a custom built computer for music production. The biggest thing with your computer is what we call the CPU. Music production at the moment doesn't really take too much advantage of like a graphics card or anything like that. I'm not going to go too much into that, into this video, but if you do purchase a music production computer, I highly suggest purchasing a pretty decent one because it's going to last you so long. This computer, I think I built it in 2016 or 2017. It is now 2023 when I'm making this course. And it's still doing me really, really good. You will see at the end of this course, handle the whole project. I think there was 22 patterns, tons of plug ins going on, and I was able to handle the huge project on like a 67 year old computer. Okay. Another thing to mention is you can see this little foot pedal right there. My subwoofer is an M audio sub wafer. I can actually turn off and on that sub, in other words, I can hear these speakers with and without the sub. And if you do have a sub wafer, I highly suggest do not put the sub wafer very loud. The whole goal of that sub wafer is just to hear the base. All right? And then when you turn off and on that petal, you can hear the difference between that fullness and then when you're making your beats. I'm telling you just makes the difference. But you have to think about yeah, price as well as living conditions. Sub wafer is loud, you're going to create a lot of base, right? But there is the home studio really, the most important thing is just a nice computer that can handle whatever you're throwing at it. Computers in 2023 are much more powerful, but out of everything on your computer, the CPU is the most important speakers. Miti, keyboard, audio interface, working comfortably for a fast workflow. And then also the plug ins inside the computer, which we will talk about in the next video. 8. 2-2 - Virtual Instrument Recommendations: All right, so in this video I want to walk you through the different plug ins that I use, both virtual instrument and mixing plug ins. And what you'll discover is a lot of the plug ins I use are FL studio stock plug ins. And I do that for a reason because I don't have to pay extra money for them. Number two is typically they're going to be maintained and updated the longest since this is FL Studio, they want to keep all their tools up to date and long lasting, that's a huge thing to understand. Yeah, so does price long term use. But where FL studio doesn't satisfy me, then I will go to some third party plug ins for certain situations. But for the most part, I do like to use a lot of FL studio stuff. Okay, here are my instruments just for you to see, okay. Three times oscillator, F, L keys, flex harm, these are all studio plug ins. Nexus is by far my favorite. I'll be using that almost throughout the whole course. Mainly the reason is because it's so simple. I'll explain more about that in just a moment. I have pigments studio stock plug in. There's serum si***ce one And then citrus is also an studio stock plug in. Okay. If you are new and you're thinking what's the best one to buy, I'll give a little explanation as we actually look through the plug ins in just a moment. And then in my samplers here's an FL studio FPC. So it's kind of like a drum pad. You can kind of add multiple kick drums or you know, sometimes it's useful if you want to do like layering and stuff, but for me I really don't use it too much. Okay. And then there is also slices in there as well, which is really powerful for sampling, okay? I really like slices for sampling, okay? For my mixing plug ins, again, I'm very, very organized in my stuff. As you can see, delay distortion and stuff like that. Now if you look closely, what are you seeing? You're seeing fruity everything. So this means FL studio stock plug ins. So for my chorus, my ****** or for my delays, I try to use FL studio stock stuff as much as possible. I don't have to purchase third party plug ins. I don't have to worry about their licensing. I don't have to worry about them going out of business. It's so simple, right? And they're super high quality if you know how to use them. Distortion. I have some third party stuff going on. Okay, so again, Camel Crusher is one of the most popular distortion plug ins. It's free or it was free, but see, the thing is the company went out of business and so I've seen in other Daws, some people are having problems opening up this plug in in newer versions of their Daws, of their music program. So you just got to be careful, you know, if you can use the L Studio stock stuff and learn how to use it really good. Like for example, in my El Studio template you can see I have the fruity blood overdrive. Why? Because it's an FL studio plug in. The distortion is awesome. You have so much variety in what you can do with it. And if you don't know, you can write click and you can even change the theme that you can get like red and stuff like that. All right? Okay, so let's continue through so we're on distortion. So dynamics now for me, if I were to get third party mixing plug ins, I really, really like a filter. Okay? They are expensive. But I'm telling you that I use them on a daily basis, and I've used them for almost ten years now on a daily basis. The workflow, as soon as you use a filter and go and then try any other plug in, it is not the same. And there's some plug ins that are copied. A filter, but a filter is like the tried and true original. Okay? For example, if you're going to be using like the fruity limit, for example, if you have the fruity limit, then let's slow up for pro L two. The pro L two is like one of the best limiters out there for music production because you can push it really loud and it's pretty transparent, so it's not going to distort. And I'll explain more about that as we go along. But for the fruilimter, what you can do is you can actually just increase like the attack time and then you're not going to get as much pumping in your limit. That's just one thing to keep in mind, It's just about knowing how to use the tools because the fruity limiter is actually super powerful. If we go to the compressor here, if we bring it down, you can actually do upwards compression. Okay? Upwards compression is we're emphasizing our audio. Not all plug ins allow you to do that stuff. Like I said, the FL studio plug ins are actually really, really good. Okay, let's continue through for my dynamic dynamics just means like compression, multi band compression limiting. And here is the classic clipper. And then also for FL Studio Transient Processor, which is new. It's cool, allows you to emphasize your transience and stuff. You can do this with compression as well, depending on your attack and release settings. But having a dedicated plug in that really emphasizes it for you is pretty cool. Okay, Everything that you're seeing in this list is everything that I use. Okay? So I have quite a few different dynamic things. And I'll open these up in just a moment. I just want to go through the list quickly with you. Look at the EQ's, all you see is a filter because it's such an awesome E Q. It allows me to do so much stuff with it. And then I also have the fruity parametric EQ two for if I'm doing these tutorials or training, sometimes I'd like to do a comparison between them. I don't need to have tons of EQ's. The A filter pro three is phenomenal, okay? Especially at the high price tag. It's like you want to make sure you learn it and you know that you're using it all the time because it's so powerful for imaging. What this means is like wideness and stuff. What do you see? Fruity, fruity, fruity, everything's fruity. Fl Studio. Stock plug ins, miscellaneous effects. So Edison FL. Studio, fruity vocoder. Fl studio, New Tone FL studio, Picture FL studio. Vote. Fl studio. So these are all FL Studio stock plug ins modulate The blue glitch is super, super powerful. I believe this one is free. He also has a paid one. I think it's on version two for the paid one. Fruity Peak controller. Fl studio. Gross beat FL studio. Okay. Reverb, fruit reverb two and the Fruity Convolver's. Those are my plugins. You guys just saw all my plug ins. How much money did that cost me? Not that much money like yes, Nexus and Science One and serum pigments and then fab filter and then the racks and stuff like that. So it does add up, you don't have to purchase all at once. And the thing is these are the tools that allow me to do literally everything regarding music production. Okay, So the thing is your music program FL studio, your doll is like a studio on your computer, right? But the thing is, sometimes the tools don't allow you to maybe access the full audio of how you want. For example, if we open up like the pro Q three. What makes the pro Q three so powerful is watch, first of all, workflow. I can just double click here and we create a band however we want. But you can actually split it. Watch. I can the left, or sorry, I can Q the right. Different from the left. This is audio channel. All right, So a lot of plug ins don't allow you to do this. Now another thing you can do is you can switch between the mono content mid, that's the mid. And you can also just do the side content that would be like the wideness of a sound. And you can do this all within a filter. And again, you can create so many bands, you can highlight them all, You can do all these different things. And it's just the workflow, okay? Once you experience the A filter workflow, you're like, wow, okay. Workflow is important. But also being able to access everything in your audio. Like I'm saying, the side, the mid, not all E Q's allow you to do this and fab filter just makes it super easy. Right, the left, the right. I don't use those things all the time. And a lot of times I'm going to be, let's say we recorded a guitar with two microphones and then one microphone was closer than the other microphone or something. Again, that's where a lot of these things come in more handy, like the right and the left. Because when we use virtual instruments, our audio is like the highest quality that you can possibly get for audio. It's virtual instruments that doesn't get any higher quality than that. So when it comes to our EQ and stuff, a lot of the time we are just kind of trying to get things to fit a little bit more. We're not really fixing when we record, right, Let's say a guitar, we record our guitar into the microphone. We are kind of fixing problems. A lot of times maybe the room or maybe they weren't close enough to the microphone, whatever. A lot of times that's where EQ and these tools are fixing. But when we are beat makers, a lot of times we're not really fixing. We are just enhancing or we're just trying to make things stand out. Okay, so there is a different mindset there. Okay, so let's just quickly go through the virtual instruments and then I'll go through these mixing plug ins really, really quick. I'm not going to go through all of the mixing plug ins because there's quite a few. But Nexus by far is my favorite virtual instrument. Back in the day, Nexus used to require an E licensor dongle. It was horrible if you lost the licenser dongle. It was just a USB license key that you'd have to plug into your computer. If you lost that, you lost nexus. But in Nexus three and up they removed that. So I have started to use Nexus again because this is where I really learned beat making at a professional level and there's a reason for that. So first of all, it's super, super easy to use, okay? Super lightweight on your CPU, which I will talk about in a second. If you double click up here, you get the performance monitor. You can see how much CPU usage or like how heavy certain plug ins are, and you can see pigments is right there at the top right, lightweight. The sounds are amazing for beat makers. And the reason for that is if you know him, his name is Manuel Slice. Okay. I don't know if I'm saying his name correct, but he is a phenomenal sound designer targeted at like dance music. And as a beatmaker, his sound design is unmatched. All right. I've used a lot of sounds over my years, and whenever I use sounds it's just like they're full. They're so powerful, they're so easy to use. They just work as a beatmaker. That's what I'm looking for you in life. When you purchase different tools and stuff like that, you know, there's name brands and stuff like that. This is like a name brand which I would highly recommend to you. Okay. Now you might think like, oh well I use Flex and it's like, okay, you can use flex but you're not getting his sound design. Okay. Manual's sound design. It is unmatched, in my opinion, it is phenomenal. And as you go through, like most of these sounds, okay, we'll click on this one. So again, there's manual. Manual again, so manual did a lot of the sound design in Nexus. And I'm just telling you that once you experience high quality sound design, it is game changing. Okay? Because again, when you use all these other scents and stuff. You're not getting his sound design. It's not to say that these scents are bad. Okay, these sins are good. And I'll explain more about them in just a moment. But this is just something that I've learnt over my years. When I first started making Beats, Nexus was one of my first virtual instruments that I purchased. And you do not need the high end, like I think they have a starter pack that's like all you need. And then maybe you can choose a couple different expansions. I think I purchased a couple different ones. I started using FL Studio. I purchased Nexus and I was like, cool. Like these sounds are nice. I was able to make my beats. But then as I started to progress, you start seeing tutorials and you're like, do you know what I'm going to try different sins. I see everyone else using science one, I see everyone else using serum. But I started to use them. I started to use, you know, the presets that are included. And it was just like, man, it's really hard to make beats. Like I found that the presets like either they weren't in tune or they just kind of do weird things with the presets. Like they're just not a simple preset that's like catchy and powerful and pitch. And what I'm saying is, now that I've gotten more experience with beat making, looking back and I realize how I learned beat making so fast and it was because I was using Nexus and I was using manual sounds. Okay. So that's like a super protest. I'm passing on. Ok. We will be using Nexus throughout most of this course because again, it's super easy to use. And again, when we look at the CPU, notice that it's pretty lightweight, especially once we get into big presets. Because when you have virtual instruments, for example, let's say si***ce one, we have this is a synthesizer and you have voices. The more voices you add, the heavier it is on your CPU because it's just making the sound thicker and fuller sounding. What I'm saying is Nexus sounds super, super thick and big, but it's light on the CPU. Some of these synthesizers, once you start adding voices, for example in Serum, you can see the right here unison is what they're calling it. But essentially it's just voices, right? And you can add up to 16 voices per oscillator, for example, if we, if I just play this, okay? No, but you can see that the CPU usage starts to go up, so it's like 24. And I'll enable this one, okay, Now it's up to like 32. And this is only one virtual instrument. One preset, and for me when I make my beats, like I can have like 7810 virtual instruments going on. And if each one is very hard on the CPU, I will not be able to have that many instruments open. So again, you want to have a virtual instrument that's pretty lightweight. You want really, really good sound design. And again, that's where I use Nexus a lot. Okay. Okay. Again, Nexus, what it is, is just like a rumpel, you just like, let's say this is like a pack, I'm just going to go all and then you can select like bass bell, brass chords is different. Let's just try one. Yeah, See, I don't recommend that kind of stuff. So if we use a Rom Pl, sometimes a Rompler has things like pre made drum loops. Don't like that. Pigs are cool, like they're passable. But sometimes they might be like their own drum loop and pig in one it's like that's using someone else's music. I like everything from scratch but like lets an R Pidio very, very powerful. But again, bass bell brass, you can go to guitars, leads, organs, pads. And again, it's just all just right here. And you have so much, so much variety as you're going through. It's super, super easy, so it's an amazing workflow. Okay, FLkeys is one of my favorite piano plug ins. You have to dial it in right, okay. So for example, if we send this to the mixer, and I'll break all this stuff down as we go through the course. I'll actually explain the keyboard shortcuts and what I'm doing, but I'm just going to keep it fast for you. So if I click this, now we have like piano and reverb. What's going on there is on the master I have a bunch of these plug ins. So I have like a gate and the gate stopping that reverb. Okay, so FL, a lot of people talk bad about it. It's one of my favorite piano plug ins, they just don't know how to use it. And FL keys also gives you a couple different styles of pianos, right? Go to one more, okay, So I don't want to go through all the sounds and stuff, okay? But the ground piano is like one of the nicest little pianos I've found. I've tried different plug ins over the years, and like I'm saying that I have solidified my list down to this for the time being. It's very cost effective and awesome sounds. Okay. So si***ce one is awesome. Okay. It's been around for a very, very long time. There's tons and tons of sounds you can get out there. But again, you have to be making sure that you are getting good presets that are designed for beat makers, which is sometimes really tricky. But as a beatmaker, what you'll discover is that's what happens when you first start, you got to find the sounds that work for you and then those are your sounds, okay? To make sure, don't bring in junkie sounds into your producer files, your music folder. You never bring junky sounds. You always try them first. If you like the sounds, then they can enter into your music folder. All right, so one is awesome. It is just like a basic synth. What I mean by basic is just like in conventional when it comes to oscillator one, oscillator two, you also have a part B, so you have essentially four oscillators. And then again you have all your voices. Eight voices, eight voices, and then again, eight voices, eight voices. And then you get your different wave forms. And then you can do all your synthesis kind of stuff with filters and envelopes and all that kind of stuff. So it's a very, very powerful synth. But if you are new and you're looking at a synthesizer, I don't think I'd recommend science. We, when you're brand new, this is something that maybe if you're a little bit more advanced or you want to get into sound design or you just want to learn all of these synths. But for me as a beat maker, again, I'm just going to go back to Nexus. The reason why I like Nexus is it has synth kind of sounds like watch if I go to like leads. We just play some of these so it's kind of a different sound. See that was a little out of pitch mm. Let's get a nice one. Okay, so something like this one. Sound super, super powerful. And again, pretty lightweight on the CPU. Now that is a lot of the sounds that a lot of people are wanting out of a synthesizer. Because again, this is a RomplerArompler is different than a synthesizer. A Rompler is like pre recorded sounds. A romper is typically a lot larger than a synthesizer. It might be like 30 gigabytes or 40 gigabytes. So that's something to keep in mind. And this is the reason why I'm saying that you don't need tons of virtual instruments. Because again, they can take a lot of space. But what I'm trying to say is like, here's a lead. You heard that Super powerful, right? But if I want now, I can go to, let's say, classical and look like harps. You cannot get this type of sound in a synthesizer. Okay. This is like a recorded sound. Okay, moving forward again. Si***ce One and Serum are similar when it comes to, let's say, synthesis. Now someone who really, really loves sound design, they would say, oh no, they're not the same thing at all. But from a general point of view, as a beat maker, si***ce one, you got to create your sound. Okay, serum. You got to create your sound again, unless you're purchasing presets. And again, those presets have to be designed for beat makers, which sometimes is a little tricky. Serum is powerful. I like serum, but for me as a beat maker, I really like Nexus. It's just simple. But si***ce one and serum like the same purchase. What I'm trying to say is like if you're going to purchase one, I would probably say purchase serum over si***ce one. And the reason is because it just gives you a little bit more flexibility with what we call like wave table synthesis. And I'll just share that for you. For example, if we come here and we select a wave table. Again, this is getting into different sound design stuff. But if we click on this, so you can see that we can of morph between this and if I just bring this down. I'm not explaining this in this course, but watch if I click this onto the wave table. And we increase this. So you can see that as the sound is playing, it can morph, It can go through that wave table. Okay, You see that. And so this is what makes serum a little bit more powerful than si***ce one. All right? But what I'm wanting to say is then there's pigments. So what I'm looking at right here in the CPU, because again, computers are getting way more powerful than they've ever been. Okay, so a new computer nowadays is going to be able to handle all of these synthesizers, no problem, but my computer is a bit older. All right, so I still think about, I want this synthesizer to be lightweight. And again, Nexus is lightweight. You can see pigments. It's open up just by itself. And I have just went to a new preset, new preset, which means that like nothing's loaded. You can see just idle, it's at 4% Pigments is a little bit of a heavier synth than the other synthesizers that I've shown you. Even when I opened it up, it just took that extra two, 3 seconds to load. For example, if I just right click and go like Nexus. So watch will go like Nexus pretty quick. Again, my computer is a little bit slower and older. And Watch, I'll get a right click and we'll open up like pigments. So we'll go pigments. So you can see it's just heavier. I'm still waiting for it, so it opens up. It's just something to keep in mind that what I want to say is that pigments, if you have not purchased any synthesizers, pigments is a really good purchase because you get that wave table synthesis just like serum. You get your basic synthesis just like si***ce on E. You can treat it as like a sampler nexus. In other words, you can drag in your own waveform and just be really creative with it then. I think this is new in the newer versions of pigments. I'm not sure what harmonic is. I'd have to play with that. But what I'm saying is pigments, you get a lot in one synthesizer for the price. And they're all similar price, I believe. Okay, what I'm trying to pass on to you is if you want to become a really good beat maker, you need to have good sounds. And Nexus provides that because of manuals. Sound design, like I said, I've tried a lot of sounds over my years, from a lot of different sound designers. There are sounds in here not by manual. Okay, so as you can see, but the ones by manual, I'm telling you that they're just unmatched and I've just never had a better experience then. Now you might be thinking, well, what about Flex? Because Flex is new and kind of similar to Nexus. But Nexus by far stands out. Flex is really powerful. But again, what are you not getting? You're not getting that professional sound design from manual. Now, it's not that these sounds are bad, it's just comparing to Nexus. It's just, Nexus is just like wow compared to like, okay, these are pretty good, right? Also I find a lot of them are kind of over processed or they're just kind of really hard to use. Another thing with Flex is that we can't really resize the window any smaller than this. So it's a really, really big plug in. It's kind of always in your face, especially at these menus. Whereas like Nexus, you can resize this thing to like however you want, which is really awesome. And that is a nice feature to have. All right. At the moment I think Nexus is a Nexus four. Don't feel that you have to upgrade. All right. Nexus three has been awesome for me. I might upgrade maybe in the future. But again, just having high quality tools is where it's at. Don't feel that you always need to upgrade to the newest. You just need to have the tools that work for you. Another thing with Nexus compared to Flex, because again, Flex is what we call it, a rambler. You are coming here, you're selecting a sound and you can play it. Another thing with Flex is I have found that a lot of their precepts are really heavy. In other words, if I am opening up many instances of Flex to create my beats, I'm not able to have as many instruments when I use Flex with my older computer. Again, if you have a new computer, it's not going to matter. But Nexus is always just lighter. It's like, I'm saying, I've never had a better experience than Nexus making beats. Another thing too that Nexus provides you is, again, this isn't like a sales picture or anything. I'm just telling you that me as a beat maker, this is the tool I use. It has a built in R pigator for example. Let's just go to a lead and we'll just click this sound in here. That's a good one. Okay, so electrical piga, You can literally click in Gio right in here. Okay, another thing it has is it has a trance gate, which is a super, super powerful technique for beat making. What it's doing is it's turning off and on volume really quick without the trans. With the trans gate you can apply this to any sound like. Let's say we go to a. Let's go brass. We'll select like this sounds a horn watch. We can put the transcat on the horn. We'd have to adjust the mix, so we got to make it more aggressive so it turns into like a dance sound from a horn before. Okay, in addition to that, you also have a huge like mod matrix. If you want to just do crazy routing and stuff like that, I'm not going to cover that. You have all your basic effects. In recent years, I have found myself applying some effects in here so I don't have to do it in mixing. And then when it comes to mixing in our mixer inserts, I'm just enhancing. But since the plug in is open, I take advantage of the tools it has. For example, if we come here, you can see these are all the different effects that you have available to you. Talk box is really, really powerful. You can see you have all these different effects built into Nexus for your sound. And again, you can do this to multiple. For example, if you want to grater on here and you want like ring mode on there, super, super powerful. You have your reverb, and again, if you have a reverb, you have different styles of reverbs, you have different styles of delay. One thing to mention, it doesn't matter what virtual instrument that you are using. Typically, these sound designers are really trying to make their preset sound the absolute best. And what that means is that they load on things like reverb and delay. When we play the sound. It sounds super, super beautiful, but when we go to actually mix the music, you will notice that I'm going to be doing a lot of low cut. Maybe some high cut. The low cut is removing the low end of that reverb so that we can hear the reverb, but it removes that low end so that our kick drum and our base can really stand out. Same thing on the delay. We are trying to, we want the effect, but we don't want it to drown our mix. And it doesn't matter what synthesizer you use. Whenever you select presets, typically they're very, very heavily processed, so you typically have to kind of dial them back. Okay, so that is it for virtual instruments. Let me make a separate video and we will do the effects. Okay? 9. 2-3 - Mixing Effect Recommendations: All right, so continuing on now, we're going to talk about the mixing plug ins. Okay, so again, there's a lot of information to know about virtual instruments and your sounds. Like I haven't even talked about kick drums and stuff like that. I will quickly talk about it in this video, since I mentioned that when it comes to my sounds, my whole sound kits folder. And let me just open that up for you so you can see my drum kit folder that I have all my drum kits in is 4.3 gigabytes. Okay. I've been making beats for probably 12, 13 years. I've purchased a lot of drum kits over the years. And then what I did was I figured out these are the drum kits that I like to use all the time. They give me super high quality and variety. Those are the two things that you need in your drum kits. Okay. Variety is super important. For example, do you have bongos And do you have different styles of bongos? Do you have lots of different styles of kick drums like short tailed kicks, long tailed kicks, eight oh, weights, things like that. Okay, You have to have variety. And then the second thing is it needs to be quality. Like do they hit hard? Do they have like weird background noise? Do they have clicks and stuff because the sound designer didn't edit them good, right? These are things that all of a sudden now you have to go and do extra work every time you use that sound kit. So what I was trying to tell you before is your music folder, you should always be creating your own custom music folder. As a beat maker, you should have a Sounds folder. Okay? In the Sounds folder, you're going to have a drum kits folder. Okay? In the drum kits folder, you want to make sure that you're only bringing in high quality drum kits. Okay? Because for me, I like to make my beats with one shot drum samples. But I just want to share that over my ten plus years of making beats, my drum kits folder is only 4 gigabytes and it's about 12,000 sounds. That is so many sounds. Because as a beat maker, if I want different sounds, I can just layer sounds. I can Q it different. I can apply effects. I just need to have variety and quality. Okay, That's all I'll talk about when it comes to my drum kits folder. Okay, for example, let's go to this drum kit here. So kicks, short tail kicks. You can hear that they're really shortened tail. These pop through your speakers and you hit your subs super hard. Okay? Various kicks, these are kind of like big kicks, right? And then there's also like eight weights and stuff like that. Okay? Okay. Not going to get too much into it with the drum kits, but really, really important knowledge to know. Okay, so let's cover the mixing plug ins really, really quick. So like I said, I like to use fab filter plug ins a lot and there's a couple of reasons for that. Number one workflow, the workflow is just so nice. Okay. It's also really visually pleasing on the eyes. So for example, just, I'll just make a quick melody. I'll explain all this stuff as we go in the course. I just want to make it quick. For now, here's this quick melody. Okay, and maybe we'll make that a little bit longer. Okay, so what I want to share is just how visually pleasing fat filter looks. I have to turn on the effects right here. So here we go with the proceed two. What makes it so powerful is there's a bunch of different styles of compressors built in right into the compressor. So it's not like I need seven different plug ins to do different things. Each of these different models allow me just to get way more aggressive compression or whatever. Okay, so a lot of times I will go through these and I can pick the right style of compression that I'm looking for. Another thing too, is in recent years I have been able to get my medi keyboard set up for this stuff. So you can see I can get hands on mixing again, I'm just using my Medi keyboard right now. And in order to set that up for the third party plug in, you can right click the **** and you can set up a global link. Okay, you go over eye global link and then you just simply move a **** or you can come up here. So for example, you have to move it first and then you come into tools, you go to last, tweaked, and then again you can set up your links that way. I have a free tutorial on Youtube about how to set up your ***** and sliders and stuff like that. Just look up project links versus global links into Google with gratuitous. Okay. Okay, so again a filter I like to C two, it's just an awesome compressor. There's built in different styles and it's just really, really awesome. In recent versions, they have a new scaling mode where you can make it bigger and smaller, makes it really easy on the eyes. Q Again, I showed you this one, this is just a phenomenal E. Q. You simply just click a band in, just like this. You just double click wherever you want to click, it just creates a band. Okay, let's just highlight all those. We can delete them. This now has what we call like dynamic Q, but a lot of times I'll be using the other tools, but sometimes if I'm mixing a song, sometimes it's nice, let's say, in this area, it's just a little bit aggressive. I could just bring it over. Okay, again, these are just the features that this EQ gives me and I really, really like it, okay? Three pro G is a gate, something that is lacking in FL studio is they do not have a very good gate. It is built into the fruit limiter, but this is the only gate you have. All you have is you have your threshold and your gain and then you have like a release, but git just disable that. A real gate has like an attack. A release has like a threshold. It's essentially like a compressor, but it works in the opposite way, where it's turning down volume. If it goes above, we can't hear it. And if the audio goes above it, you can see that we can control the tail. This is really powerful. For example, if I was recording my voice and there's lots of background noise, you can use a gate for that. But even for making beats, like let's say we had a drum loop and we just want to tighten up that drum loop. We just want to hear the drums more and less like reverb or something that was in there. This is where a git is. I use the gate not all the time, but sometimes to clean up the tail, Really, really powerful. I use this multiband compressor all the time. Okay, so here is one of these, what I usually do a lot, I usually just create four bands. And then what makes a multiband compressor so powerful is when we have a single band compressor. Okay, so this is called a single band compressor. And visually this is like what it would look like. So I'm just going to click in one band. This is what you call a single band compressor. It's just one band. If compression is going to happen, this is what's happening. It's compressing all the audio. But whereas if we have a multiband compressor, where we start adding in more bands, because again this is one band, we add in another band by clicking in here. So now we have two bands. You can see that they can act different. And so what's going to happen is it's just going to sound a little bit more transparent. We can sometimes be more aggressive in our compression, which means we can have way more control. All right, and again, the pro and B is just really visually pleasing and I just really like the work flow of it. Okay, We have things like look ahead if you want that. Which allows you to look ahead into the audio to have more control on the peak of the audio. You can even do upwards as well. Okay? So in other words, you can emphasize stuff, okay? Okay, So let's just move on. All right, I will do the classic clipper after pro L, one of the most reputable limiters for audio plug ins when it comes to mastering your music, you can push it really, really loud. And again, when we are mastering our music, it's all about just having a nice consistent solid beat. We don't want to push too loud, we're, we're hearing distortion or weird pumping. We just want to have control over our loudness. And the L just allows you to push it just where you want. And it's just an awesome limiter, like I was saying before, if you are using the fruity limit, you can play with the attack, you can increase it quite a bit. Because I find the fruity limit pretty aggressive. It's just about knowing how to use the tool. Again, all this stuff I have set up to my ***** and sliders and stuff like that. If I'm making my beats myself, a lot of times I use my Met keyboard for hands on mixing. It allows me to get a really, really nice work flow. You can see here I also have opened a classic clipper. What a clipper is doing is it's like a limiter, except I guess they say it's like no attack and no release it instantly. Just like cuts off the peaks, which means let's just open up the fruit limiter. This is actually a great example. Let's just come here to presets and we'll go default, bring it back to normal. I'll turn everything off here. What happens in audio is we have peaks. And when we're mastering our music, what's happening is the peaks get in the way we can use a clipper. So for example, we have soft clipping and hard clipping. Clipping is a little bit more gentle, Hard clipping is just like really cutting off those peaks. So what I want to share here with you is watch if I go to the classic clipper and I'm going to bring down the volume here and turn it up, do you see how those peaks are like cut off? And if I turn it off, I'll bring up the volume to make it a fair volume comparison. Okay? So again, just look at those peaks in music production. With digital audio, typically we do want peaks. It makes the music sound a lot more natural to our ears and stuff. But for a lot of these digital sounds, like the synthesizer, if we use like a clipper very aggressively on it, like this, a lot of times it allows us to get a sound sitting exactly where we want. Okay. Sometimes you've got to push things a little hard. But you can see right here, this has been clipped. This here is like no clipper. When I'm making my beats, a lot of times I'm not that aggressive, but I'm just doing this for demonstration that you can see that that's what a clipper is doing. Clipping off the peak, which means that we can then increase our volume. Because you can see it right here. It's gone over the threshold, which means that on a limiter, it reduces the volume. So you can actually hear pumping. Whereas this like we can increase it by quite a bit and we're still not going to get any pumping because it's been clipped. Okay. Those are the main plug ins I use on a daily basis as I'm making beats or mixing and stuff like that. Again, fruity reverb, super, super powerful. With my template here, I actually just have two reverbs and that allows me, so let's say I had FL, I can send it to one reverb or I can send it to another reverb. I could do whatever I want with it, and it just gives me two different flavors of reverb. It's just a nice thing to have really quick because for example, if I play a note no reverb. And if I click on Insert ten. So I'm highlighted on it. And if I want to add reverb, there's reverb. If I want to add more reverb, there's reverb. If I want to add delay, there's delay, right? So again, it's just about having a nice template. Should be minimal. Your template should not be super slow or anything like that. It's just designed to help to save you clicks. Okay, To reduce the amount of clicks. All right, for my delay, send here you can see it is just a delay. It's a fruity delay, so it's an FL studio stock plug in. And then for the EQ, you can see I have just cut some lows and cut some highs. But again, what am I using? I'm using the parametric EQ two. It's a pretty lightweight plug in. I don't need to open up the A filter plug in for that because a filter plug ins are a little bit heavier on the CPU like I was sharing before. As you can see, like pigments right at the top, nothing's even playing. If I play Nexus, which will trigger the synthesizer to play more. It's Nexus number two, this one. Let's hit play. Let's see if it increases in CPU, so you can see it has increased, but that's because it's playing. Whereas pigments, let's put that on pigments. Let's just see if there's a difference. I put it to pigments. Number two, hit play. So you can see that the synth goes up. Plight 20. Pigments is quite heavy on the CPU, just to give you an idea. So again, when you're selecting your virtual instruments and you're selecting your sounds, these are things that you have to think about but they're not always talked about. All right. These are things that sometimes you figure out as you go along. Some synthesizers are way heavier than others, okay. Okay, so again, a lot of stock stuff here is a fruity stereo enhancer. This is awesome to create that fake wideness effect. It's a stock FL studio plug in compressor. I just used the fruity limiter for this because again, I believe it is lighter weight. So let's go to the fruit limiter. I'm not sure which it's actually compressor, so goo compressor. So you can see idle, it consumes no CPU, which is awesome. Whereas some of these other ones, they are consuming some CPU, right? Hit play, play here, it's off. That's because the audio was not routed again. Let's route the audio. I have this one right here. Let's just send it to 11 and I'll send it to the distortion. I think it's we Wideness. Okay, I'm going to send it to Wideness. Now this compressor is going to be triggered hippo. Again, this is the reason why I was using the limit because it's very lightweight. If we look at, I'm going to come here, we will type in master just so we can read it easy in our list, because again, these are things you have to think about. Let's just make this bigger. There it is, that's the one I'm looking for. Again, let's just enable, I'll just enable that one. Hit play. Just the fat filter plug ins are just a little bit heavier on your CPU. That's all I'm just wanting to get across to you. We won't look at this performance monitor anymore, but the percentage is just like how heavy is it on your computer. Essentially what I'm saying is for this stuff I try to use the stock FL studio stuff as much as possible because it's typically lightweight. And there you go, right. Distortion. What am I using here? Fit, blood overdrive, stock, plug in, parametric. This is parallel compression. What am I doing? I'm using fruit compressor. The fruity limits. The fruity limiter is a limiter and compressor built in, and there is actually the fruity compressor. So I'll go installed, I will go effect, I will go fruity, then we will go fruity compressor, which is right here. The fruity compressor is actually a super good compressor. I really like it. It even has different styles of compression all built in, just similar to like fab filter, the proc two. I'm not saying like similar models, I'm just saying similar in a sense that we can just select different styles right from the actual plug in itself. Which makes this. Type of compressor so powerful that you can just quickly find different styles which is super, super powerful. It gives you everything that we know in a typical compressor threshold ratio gain. The only problem for someone learning is that it's not visual, it's hard to know what you're doing when I teach and when I personally. These are really good for teaching because it's good for you to see what's going on. Great. Sound Easy to use, really good workflow. I just really, really enjoy them. Okay, again, that is my plug ins for the effects now. Okay. I don't want to take up tons of your time. But again, there you guys go. Not tons of plug ins, in my opinion. It's all about selecting plug ins that are really high quality, that hopefully the company will be there for a long time. That like they don't get bought out by somebody else or that they don't close down or that they don't change their licensing to be weird, like for example, pigments. I really don't like how they make you install their software, to install their product. So in other words, you have to install like their software, then you have to download their plug in through their software. I don't like that. I like when the plug in allows you to install an executable file, which would then install the plug in. And then it's just a simple digital license that you enter in, for example. Let's come here to help. And it's already authorized, but usually if you go authorized or something, a little window pops up. You just copy and paste in your code and you're good to go. Those are like my favorite types of licenses. All right, so I don't want to go too much into that because when it comes to selecting your tools, you want them lightweight on your CPU. You want to have a good license, which is like you just download the executable file, you install a license. These are things that are really, really important for the long term of your producer career, if you do as a hobby or professionally. These are things that you don't want these plug ins fighting with you over time, which I have fought with with some things over my time and it's just been horrible. Okay. Super high quality tools that I'm using here. If I are you, if you're brand new I would suggest getting Nexus. But the starter version, if you're interested in any other add on bundles, they have expansion packs. You got to be a little bit careful because sometimes they have things like they're called sequences and I'll just play one for you. I don't like this stuff at all. It has it, the kick drum, it has chords in there for you and then you'd be able to kind of play with at the right hand. I don't like these sequences at all. So if you are going to purchase expansion packs, make sure that you are getting a lot of like leads or pianos. Ones that allow you as the beat maker, to make your own melodies. Okay? Because the other stuff is kind of like you're using someone else's music. And as a beat maker who makes custom beats, that doesn't align with how I think about beat making. I like to create my own melodies from scratch in our piano roll, just like you see right here. Right, right. And then if I'm going to make my drum loops, I like to use one shot drum samples. Right? We have kick drums such as like a, you know, short tail kick collapse. We are making our own beats from scratch. We need the high quality tools to allow us to do that. We essentially are hiring the professionals, and what I mean by that is we're just purchasing their high quality sounds. We know that we have high quality sounds. This isn't by manual, but a lot of the sounds in here are very, very high quality. Okay? A lot of the sounds are by manual, not all of them. Okay? I'm just saying that a lot of sounds, just a lot of the sounds and nexus in general. I just get that amazing, high quality professional sounds so that me as the beatmaker, I can focus on by melodies. Okay, if you have low quality sounds, it just makes the process super hard. If you want to learn sound design, you can. But like I have said in my previous courses, sound design is a separate industry than making a beat. Okay, there's sound designers, then there's beat makers. There could be a beat maker who is a sound designer. But you have to understand that to learn a synthesizer, to learn how to create sounds, is a different world than someone who has an ear to create amazing catchy beats. All right, so that's it for virtual instruments. That's it for the effects. Now you know the tools that I have available. Don't get tricked out there into thinking you need tons of sounds, or tons of virtual instruments, or tons of plug ins. Keep it really, really simple. And for example, like this is like the best example. My Q's, I have two EQ's. I mainly just use the pro Q three because it's just awesome for workflow. And I keep this one here so I can quickly access it for training. Sometimes I decide to use it for things like in my sense because it's really lightweight on the CPU, but it still allows me to do my EQ and stuff like that. All right, so it's about being smart. Okay, let's get into actually making a beep. I hope all this information has been valuable to you, and let's move on. 10. 3-1 - Understanding Melodies and Drum Kits: All right, so moving forward with the course, in this video, I want to quickly talk to you about melodies as well as, again, your drum kit. Just quickly. And then we are going to get into actually making the beat from scratch. Because I want to get all this knowledge out of the way. Because again, I'm not teaching you how to make melodies. I'm not teaching you how to play the piano. I'm not teaching you how to make drum loops. This is, you know, you will just be watching, learning how to make a beat. I'll explain what I'm doing as I'm doing it, but it's not going to be like my other courses where I'm actually teaching you step by step. I'm just going to be doing and explaining quickly as I'm doing. Okay, But in this video, I want to give you an explanation of the what, why, and how so that it answers a lot of those questions as you're following along. Okay, the first thing is melodies. Okay, so let's just open up nexus. And you'll also see in the bottom left of the screen. I now have this open for you guys so you can follow along with my left clicks, my right clicks, and any keyboard press is okay. Okay. So when it comes to our melodies, how this works is you have to pick a key and a scale. All right? And so if I go to view and we go to scale highlighting, if you look in the actual piano role, the one with the white lines are the ones that you're allowed to place your notes in. So when you pick a key, a scale, you're only allowed seven notes. Which means that any key in scale you select, you only have seven notes that you are available to play. So let's go like major, okay? You can see how it's all changing. So wherever the white notes are is where you are allowed to play, like if you go to a major or something like that. So wherever the white notes are, that's where you can create your melodies and everything will be in pitch. That's one of the secrets of making beats. You have to pick a key in a scale which tells you that you only have seven notes. So when you click your notes in, whether it be single notes or chords, you have to use these white areas, okay? So in this case, all of these notes I'm allowed to use in my melodies. And you can see it goes back to, this is what we call an octave. So either we go up an octave or we go down an octave. And you can see that this is my key and scale. I'm in the key of C and my scale is minor. So there you guys go. When I make my melodies, if I'm playing notes, all right, I'm only clicking them in, in the white lines. The next thing I want to quickly talk about before moving on, is when I was talking to you about a drum kit. I said that it needs to have quality and variety. That's the most important thing. Now something I left out there is when you are selecting a drum kit, you have to think about genre you're making. For example, in this course we are going to make an emotional rap beat. To further enhance that emotional rap beat, you want to be selecting a drum kit that really specializes in emotional rap beats. Okay, if you're going to be making a dance beat, you want to make sure that you're using a dance drum kit. And the reason is because the kick drums are way different depending on the genre you're making, so just keep that in the back of your mind. Okay, so for example in FL Studio if we go to packs, you can see we can go to like drums, we go to kicks. Let's just play some of these. You can hear that this is like a really good dance drum. Make sure you have headphones on or earbuds as you're listening, so that you can actually hear the low end. Otherwise, you're not going to get the most out of this course here once we actually make the video in the next video. Okay, so the next video we're going to get into it. But again, I just want to quickly let you hear that these are all kind of dance drums. If we're going to make a hip hop beat, let's drag it in there for me. I'd probably tighten up this tale quite a bit. It's a bit of a different kind of kick, this is really good for dance music, but if we're going to be making an emotional rap beat in this course, let's just open up the exclusive audio Drum Bundle Trio. I'll talk about this drum kit a lot, so let's just do urban heat, for example. So these kicks would be really good for like rap or emotional beats. Okay, that's all I wanted to talk about in this video was the melodies. When we're clicking in our melodies, we have to pick a key in a scale. Fl Studio makes it really easy that you can just see all the white lines and that's where you can click in your notes. When I play chords, for example, like this, you can see that this right here, it's all on the white lines. Which means that it's in the key in scale. Our notes are in the key in scale, which means our chord has to play those notes. The concepts pretty easy now that you know that when I make my melodies you'll be able to follow along. Then when it comes to the drum kit, make sure that you are selecting a drum kit that does suit the genre you're going for because it's going to further enhance that genre. When we get into making this beat, the first thing you will see that I'm going to do is I'm going to adjust my tempo. And then you get to decide that, do you want to start with the drum loop first, or do you want to start with the melodies first? Each beat is different and there's no right or wrong way. And when I teach you guys, I always tell you that you want to learn both ways. You want to learn to create your melodies first, and then learn to create your drum loop first, and then add your melodies over after. Okay, so let's get into the course. We're going to make the beat from scratch now, so I hope you enjoy this. 11. 3-2 - Making the Drum Loop: All right, so let's just get right into it. So again, I'm going to be using the exclusive audio drum Bono Trio and we will just work through this kit right here. And the first thing when I'm making a beat, I think to myself I'm making a dance beat or an emotional kind of rap beat. Those are kind of the only kind of two styles of beats that I like to make. And then for my emotional rap beats, they're usually kind of, they differ quite a bit. Okay, So first thing is you just tempo. What kind of tempo? Anywhere, for me could be from anywhere from 70 to like, let's say maybe even like 110 is 115 for an emotional rap beat. So how I will know though is I'll set it around, let's say 97, I'll start making the drum loop. And then depending on how the drum loop turns out, I might think, oh, I'm going to boost it up a little bit, or turn it down a little bit, but set your tempo first. Okay, I'm just going to turn up my volume a little bit because like I said, when I make my beats, I like to be able to hear those kick drums. And it just allows me to enjoy the beat making process a little bit more. Okay, so we have short tailed drums. It's a cool one. When I'm selecting drums, I'm trying to make sure I'm getting very different styles of drums. Sometimes I layer drums. This is a cool drum. I might take out the reverb tie, a little bit of it. These are things I listen for as I'm selecting sounds. Okay, watch even tighter, that's cool. Okay. And I might just take one big drum here, just listen to what we already have. Something like this is a really big sounding, that's kind of cool. Okay, so I got a bunch of drums, doesn't mean I'm going to use them all, but it's just a starting point. Now when it comes to our clap or snare, they're essentially the same thing. Like they're doing the same thing. They just sound different. I use a clap, some beats, I use a snare beats, I use both. I layer them, okay? Layering, super powerful, nice snare, cool snare. And I might use this one as well. Again, we can always tighten things up in F L by using the in and out *****, okay? So if you are using the in and out, you want to normalize that when you use the, you can control it for this dead space. You want to use the trim fully up and then you can see you can fine tune here. It's long, that's cool. Maybe bring it back a little bit again. I'm just selecting sounds and then I build my drum loop. Since I already have the sounds to work with, let's get one clap, maybe two claps, something like this. I can hear that the initial sound is late. Sometimes, I don't like that. What we can do is we can just use the sample start and we bring it over before then with it. A lot of times I'm looking for the transient where the actual peak is right here, right he goes. Then the reason I'm doing this is so that when I layer my snares like this, that it doesn't sound a little bit off timing or weird. If it is off timing, I'd right click, go to the piano roll and then I'll hold on shift and use my mose wheel to fine tune it. But again, it just takes extra work. Sometimes will just do the sample start so that it's just tighter right away. Okay, at 97 beats per minute. And the easiest way to start a drum loop, or actually let's just get, let's get a couple of high hats quickly. And I was going to say the easiest way to start a drum loop is with your kick and your clap. All right? You start with a kick and a clap, and then you start adding your high hat. And it just gets a little easier as you go. Okay, so I've got a bunch of different high hats and there's also open hats too, so it's kind of a weird open hat. Could be cool. Okay, so I got a bunch of variety here to work with. One other thing I'll quickly mention here in FL studio when I do my courses, you can see I use FL Studio like this. But if I was just going to make beats by myself, you are actually able to adjust your top menu however you want. And I have a saved preset here. And if I go single tool bar, you can see it gives us a lot more room to work with, which I think I'm going to do for this course. All right. Just that way everything's a little bit bigger and easier to see. And we've got more screen real estate. That's what it's all about, okay? All right, so again, tempo kicks, snares, and we have some high hats down below with an open hat down there too, okay? Okay, so like I said, you're going to put your kick on the one, and then when it comes to a snare or a clap, you're going to put it on the two and the four. So kick, kick and kick, snare, snare, snare. And the reason I have so many is sometimes it's nice to layer here, and then we layer differently, and that can be really powerful. Okay, so for now we're just going to kind of build a basic little drum loop for an emotional rap beat layer. These, we have to check the phase, right? This might be just a little bit fast. Turn up the swing just a little bit. Try that on the one, turn it down a little bit. Next kick, turn down a little bit more. And then again we have velocity right here. We can click, we can adjust the velocity down. It's not one kick, so it's not so static. That's cool. We'll work with that. We'll do a double there again or something. I'm going to click cut itself. That's going to make sure that the kick drum is clean. Because since it's so tight beside each other, for a drum like this that's spaced quite a bit, sometimes you don't go to worry so much because if it's a short tailed kick that does have some tail. But I don't think that the tail is going to fight, but you can always go cut itself. And what it will do is when you play the sound, the next sound immediately starts fresh and it cuts off the other sound so that you always have clean bass. All right, but when the drum is so far apart, like this, you don't got to worry about it. But in the case here, we can't just go cut itself on all the drums. So right click, there's cut itself. Cut itself. And cut itself as well as cut itself. Okay. In FL studio if you come here, I just clicked into the channel sampler. We clicked into the wrench, and you can see we have a cut group that is where the cut is actually happening. So you can see if I click into these ones, this is two. This one here is one. And then this one here is on four. You can actually cut other sounds. For example, if this sound is playing, you can cut off this sound. And it all comes from the group here. All you have to do is hit F one and you can learn more about that, okay? All right. We've got a basic drum loop, okay? Now this is where we can spice up our snare, make it a little bit more special. Okay, so this clap I'm going to bring up, put it here. This one we'll put here. Do you hear how that just adds so much more life for the listener? So we have to think from us as a producer standpoint, we want to make sure that this drum loop is fun and good sounding. And from a listener's standpoint, it's got to be fresh. If the snare is always just like the same snare over and over, it can be boring, but we come here, right? You should be able to hear that clap, this sound. And it's a very high frequency sound. So if we open up an EQ here, again, checked out my sound selection course. I teach you all about frequencies and stuff, but where to place your sounds, You can see this is a very high frequency sound, right? We come here, we'll open this one up, right? We have that resonant frequency right there, right, on a snare. But the clap didn't have that. It has way more high frequencies and we can really hear it cut through. Okay, got mute. This one. This one sounds like this. Now when I'm selecting sounds, I'm really not thinking so much that way, but I'm just sharing with you that this is what's happening as we're selecting these sounds, as we're adding them in. These are the benefits that we're getting by layering. Okay? And then this one, the benefit of it is that tail you can hear it's much okay, this is a tight snare. Pretty tight clap. And this is like a long, okay, let's keep moving on. This is like a cool snare. I could either layer it because I affected it here. Let's bring this tail way back. Okay, it's okay if we select this type of snare, we're really going to have to make it work. What we could do is we can play around with it as like a percussion element or something. Okay, for now, let's hold on Alt and we'll bring that way down. Let's work on some high hats. Actually have another snare here. Maybe what we can do is we just layer it in there as well. Make it nice and full. We'll just turn it down so our clap isn't super loud. Okay. Without this one, I'm not hearing too much difference. Maybe just a little bit fuller sounding. But since I select this sound, I might as well just use it there. Okay, so this is the snare and bring it way down. Go to a high hat. Okay? This high hat is a little bit of a weird high hat. It has a little bit of low end to it. Okay? You can hear it right here. I can hear that sound right there. Turn off the auto gain, that's what makes the pro Q three a little special. I'll explain that once we get into the mixing and mastering stuff. But the three has an auto gain feature which allows you to keep the level the same no matter what you're doing. Which is really cool. Allows you to hear a little bit more accurate. It's not perfect, but it does allow you to allow you to mix quick, quick. What I'm saying is this high hat, I can hear this frequency. It's not like a normal high hat, something like this. Like a high hat, a little bit different high hats in the urban heat. So not like your normal high hats. I have 25 there. Let's go for 25. Let's make 25 main. Okay, so we've got a drum loop high hats, so I'm just going to click some random stuff in. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't turn down a little bit. And in our velocity we will just maybe bounce just a little bit. Get a little bit of bounce going on. Okay, get the other high hat. Having multiple high hats for me just makes it so I don't have to get like the perfect high hat. If you get the perfect high hat rhythm, it just makes the drum loop like amazing. But it is really, really hard to get that right. So this is kind of like a little cheat, little trick so that you just use multiple high hats and then you can get multiple rhythms going on and you get a super full high hat kind of sound. Can you put this on the offbeat? All right, we'll just see how that sounds. Can we have this open hat? This one is a little bit of a kind of like a digital open hat. Tighten it up a little bit and this is more of a little bit more like a real open hat. Open hats are really powerful in certain areas. Typically you want to use it maybe at the end of the drum loop, so we'll listen. Okay, here I kind of brings in the drum loop. If I were to do it like this, it could be a little bit repetitive. So what we can do is we can start adding in this drum loop, for example, here. And we go to another pattern, and then we can add this in, maybe like this, okay? So it only plays on every second bar. Okay, Play that. Then here we can spice something up a little bit different. So I have an open hat here and we have this sound. But again, it's really, really loud, so we can maybe use the, we'll make it that's kind of cool. And then because the snare back here, that transient might not really fit like I want it to be a little softer sounding and we can just make our own sound right here in FL studio. When I'm talking to you about quality and variety, it's like you need the quality, you need high quality sounds. And the variety. I have so many sounds already. And then here in FL studio, I'm just making a new sound as I'm making a beat off of this one sound. Don't think you need tons and tons of sounds. So what I'm trying to say, okay, try that. All right. I'm trying to add in a pattern right here. So we will go, I will make unique. And we can do something a little further back. I'll bring this back just a little bit. Turn it down, it's a little bit loud. And I'll turn this one up. What I'm trying to do is just add something a little bit more variety in there. I might need one extra sound. We'll see how it goes, we'll try something like this. Did you notice how I clicked here? To start, I didn't have to come all the way to the beginning and hit play. I already know that I like it up to here. What I'm going to do is I'm going to play from here so my ears can hear this open hat. And then it's going to get into the part where I'm wanting to listen to. But the reason why I want to listen to this hat, this one right here, is because it just allows me to get a perspective of, okay, it's going to work or it's not going to work, okay, Because it's got to kind of b***d with the other sounds too. Nope. Okay. And we can go cut itself, make it clean, you know, So each sound is just, instead of an overlap there, turn on the volume of them a little bit. Again, we're focusing right here on these sounds right here. It sounds okay. I'm just trying to get this to force to work, okay? I still think this is too loud, so I'm going to come up here. I'll turn it down. We can also go to the fine which is going to adjust pitch. I will turn those up maybe just a little bit, just play with some random stuff. Again, what I'm doing is just trying to make this hat, it'll sound a lot different when I play in the pattern here. Turn up a little bit. That's because I'm adjusting the fine, I'm adjusting pitch of these two sounds, but not this one. And here is the velocity. And how I access that is first of all, you have to click on the sound. Then you're going to click into here because it's called the graph editor. And then you can adjust your velocity, your pitch. If you want to do pan, maybe you do pan. Just a little bit. We'll go like left and right. I think this is right. Another way we can do that, just go to the piano roll, right click, and you go to note pan. There's our notes there. It shows up here now in the piano roll, so this one is left and then this one's right. But I just want it just a little bit, just subtle. Okay, so in the piano roll, we're doing it in the graph editor is the same thing. It's just here, It's just really, really quick. You don't have to open up the piano roll to go to a different window. You can just click there and you can just adjust your stuff. And if you want to adjust it later, you go to the piano roll. And you can do it again just by clicking in here. I'm just right clicking to do that. Or you can also click right there. Okay, So yeah, this is kind of blocking it, but again, I can just right click to do that. Okay, so let's listen to what we got. Go to song mode and hit play. And that will play our whole drum loop. It's okay. I need to change this sound up, so let's get something different. I will go percussion. Let's maybe just go drums. That's cool. I will put it into its own. So if I were to put it here, what will happen is, I believe it will take the exact same parameters I've already adjusted there. If I leave this open, we take this, put it here, you can see it keeps that same cut and the out stuff. That's not what I'm wanting. I'm just going to delete this. And we'll put it there. Listen to this again. I'm going to click from here. I want to use the out a little bit on that. Right here, there's a little gap. So I'm just going to use the trim as well. It's too loud. All right, So let's get into another loop here. I'm just going to add some percussion stuff going on, so we'll get some bongos, get maybe some tambourines or something. That's cool. Okay. So when it comes to our different percussion elements, what we're doing is yes, we are creating a different loop, but essentially at the same time we're doing layering. At the same time we already have a bunch of drums going on, we already have a collapse going on, all that kind of stuff. But now, if we're going to create a percussion loop, what is going to happen? Again, layering on top of what we already. Okay, I'm just going to create a quick percussion loop here. If I come here, you can see that the last sound used was here. And then these are all bongos. I like this sound a lot. I might work on it by itself in its own loop. If we listen to this, I can put it on every beat, maybe let's just play with that first. If I click into the sound, I'm hearing that this is late, okay? This actual sound is late. When the drum is hitting, it's playing later and I don't think I like that again. All we have to do is we can just use the sample start to tighten it up just a little bit. I think that's too much, so we got to get this right. Okay, so what I'm going to do is type in value 1% let's go 0.05 or something. See if that does it for it can turn it down a little bit. This bongo, I don't think I like that. Or I could just turn it down here in the volume. See what's happening is I'm not highlighted on it. As soon as I'm highlighted, you can actually see it. And I'll do that. Again, same thing here. I might as well just turn it down. Totally. We'll come back to this one to bring up the philosophy. I like this sound again, just bring this down again. The more stuff we have, the more we can add and take away as we're building the beat, which is a huge thing as a producer. Once we get to the arrangement right now, we're just doing the drum loop in this beat. We already do that. Sound. Now we're into bongos. Let's maybe put this on the two and the four to emphasize the clap a little bit. But I'm not going to make it too loud. I will make it pretty quiet sounding. All right? Another thing is it also has a lot of low end in the mixing. I might cut the low end off of that. For me, I usually don't do mixing at the same time as I make a beep. Sometimes I do depending on if I'm wanting a certain sound. But for now, I'm just going to keep it simple. I'll just keep that in the back of my mind. Maybe I'll adjust it, we will hear how it sounds. Okay. Right now we are in percussion. The last sound used was right here. So I know that I can start right here. I'll click into this sound. Now we just make a quick bong loop to go with this drum loop. Okay, So we'll go song mode again. The biggest thing to understand about a drum loop is volume is a huge part of making sounds fit. If your sounds are too loud, it's going to be hard to get them to fit in a musical way, okay? See it's sounding really repetitive, right? So what we can do is when I used to use FL studio a lot, like when I was always making beats by myself. I would always have my channel rack bigger. So that's what I'm going to do here is we will make a longer pattern. So watch. If I click into here, you can see we are going to go over 2 bars. So we will create a two bar loop here. And we'll get something kind of fresh sounding. And then I'll add it back. I'll bring it back over. Okay, so this sound, I got to be careful how often I use it. It's a pretty powerful sound and it's really cutting through the beat. So I don't want to because it could be really annoying. But if we use it, sometimes it can work okay. I'm just going to click some stuff in here and then that will just give me a quick idea. We'll click it in there, keep it going. I like the beginning of it. It's a different kind of sound. I might get one more sound in here just to spice it up just a little bit. We can add something like this, then again, I'm just going to tighten up that tail just a little bit. Okay? So I'm just wanting this sound in here just to kind of spice it up randomly. Too loud. Too loud. This sound here. This sound, I'm going to put it way at the bottom then. Now I'm just going to be listening for the bongos. Okay, This sound down here actually didn't use too much, so I want to add that back in a little bit. We can even layer a little bit, turn down the velocity on this one in itself. Okay? So I think this is going to be our drum loop. And the biggest thing that you need to understand when we are making a beat, that we have no idea how the drum loop is going to sound until we add melodies. Right now, again, you could be listening to this and be like, oh yeah, it sounds really good, or it doesn't sound good, but once we add melodies, that's what's going to dictate the beat. Okay, So just keep that in the back of your mind. So that is it for the drum loop. Hopefully this is going to work for us and we will move on. 12. 3-3 - Making Our First Melody: All right, so all I did behind the scenes was I just saved the project. So make a beat from scratch, volume one, which is what this is. So again, our tempo, we can always adjust that a little bit if I'm feeling that it's not going to suit our melodies. So I'm just going to now work off of the melodies. Okay, So for me, I always like to put my instruments at the top and to add instruments. There's multiple ways in FL studio you can click down here, you can right click here. I think you can even go up here to add and you can add your stuff from up here. Like instruments, right? For me. I find the easiest way just to write, Click and go Insert. And then I'm going to go Nexus. Okay. You can also do the plug in database, I think it's F eight. Yeah, F eight. You can add your stuff in like that. But for me I just like to right click and then if I want to duplicate Nexus, like if I want to keep using more instruments of Nexus, I just right click and go clone. All right. It's a really, really fast workflow. Okay, so I got my Midi keyboard set up here. When it comes to our melodies, we want to make sure that it's not way louder than our drum loop. We want to get it in a sweet spot for me. What I do is you can just move the **** right here, okay? And you come up here to tools, you go to last tweaked, and you can set this up as a global link on your media keyboard. So that if I'm focused, if I'm focused here, you can see that I can adjust my volume off of my made keyboard. And this is actually such a powerful workflow thing that you can just get that volume exactly where you want. You don't have to go back to the mouse. So let's hit play here, and I got to find a melody. I don't know if I'm going to use this piano, Let's just play around with it, Try it a little lower, so even all those kind of weird sound effects and stuff going in the background, I think it really adds to the beat. And that melody actually really, really worked out. We might just go with that right away, right off the bat, to keep it fast. That was the first melody. I improvised. Again, none of this is planned, It's just all improvised. Okay. When you learn to make beats at a professional level, like I've been practicing all my years, this is how fast it is to make beats. I literally made the drum lok with you played that melody and we had it. So one thing just to mention, let's say you play a melody and you're like, oh, how do I get that back? You can go to tools, dump score log to selected pattern, and you can go last 2 minutes, last 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 2 minutes. Sometimes it is really useful. So you can come in here and then you have to find where you played the melody. It's a little tricky, but I find myself doing that quite often. Sometimes when I make a beat, that's just how it works. But that melody was pretty simple, so I will hopefully be able to play that. Okay, so what I've done here is I have played my drum loop over 4 bars, so I'm in a new pattern, now I'm in pattern seven. You can see here's all the patterns we have. I don't have them labeled. I usually label after because when I'm making the beat, it's all about workflow. And then for pattern six, I ended up making the channel rack bigger. Which honestly is like the best way to make beats. Because you can really just create fresh patterns. If all your loops are just 1 bar loops, it's going to make your music sound super repetitive and kind of boring. If you expand this, it allows you to make bigger patterns. But usually you want to do 1 bar loops, two bar loops, or four bar, anything bigger than that, it gets really, really complicated. So keep it simple. Okay, so now on to pattern seven. And I think the reason I have this is because I went to tools score log and it just pasted it in like this. So I can remove all these. And I'm just doing that by left clicking and holding. And then you can right click or you can hit your middle scroll wheel or hold on, click and shift. Lots of different ways to do things in FL studio. And I'm going to press control in X just to cut those to get rid of it. Going to hit the plus of my number pad because what I did was, I know six is my last pattern. I can also click up here to click six now to create a new pattern. A lot of people approach FL studio, different for me, I work everything off of the number pad. It's the fastest way to work in FL studio. And my workflow is, I know that six is my last pattern. I can visually see it. I just hit the plus on my number pad and I'm good to go to my new pattern. And I know that I want to work on this piano melody. Now, you could also hit the plus and stuff as well, or there's tons of other keyboard shortcuts for you. But again, if you follow my workflow, you want to use the number pad. If you have a laptop and you don't have the number pad, I would recommend getting like a USB number pad. Just the workflow and FL studio off the number pad is so awesome. Okay. Okay, so let's see if I can remember that. So let's just hit play here on my actual mittikeyboard, my transport buttons, I have the stop, the play the record, the forward to bar, back bar. And I can go loop, right loop will change the song mode. I'm going to be in song mode, I want to make sure I'm at the very beginning. So I'm just going to hit stop twice. That's just a best practice kind thing. You hit stop twice, It brings you all the way to the beginning. Sometimes if you hit play and stop puts you there, so I'm going to hit stop again. I'm at the beginning, so what I'll do is I will actually expand this to make it over 8 bars. That way this melody can be fresh. I'm going to keep the same chord progression as we go along, but I'll just play the melodies just a little bit different to keep it fresh for the listeners ears. We are in a new pattern. I hit record, I hit play, and let's go. Okay. Okay. So that would just give our listeners ears to some freshness. So I'm just going to click into the piano roll. I'll push my immediate keyboard in a little bit. Now I can get right into editing. Okay, so again, it's all about workflow. Now here you can go to your grid to make it however big and small you want. I'm not doing anything really, really fancy in this one, so I can put it on step. And then when I quantize, we have two options for quantizing. If we go to tools, you can see that we have quick quantize, which is control, and E. And then we have quick quantized start times, which is shift and E. I typically like to use the shift and cue because it keeps the tail of the sound, but it just snaps the beginning of the sound. When we make our music, things have to be in time. But if everything is perfectly on grid, like for example, if everything's perfectly on grid, it's not musical. But for me, I do like to quantize a lot and I'm going to hold on shift and Q to do that, and it snaps it perfectly on grid. And if I want, I can always hold on shift and the scroll wheel to fine tune things manually. In this case, I wasn't trying to do anything fancy like this, like that or anything. If I was recording this, I tried to keep that as much as possible. For example, let's say I played something random like this. Sometimes it's really hard to dial this in with a mouse. If you play it and you get it exactly where you want. A lot of times what I would do is maybe I would highlight everything. If I press Control in a, I zoom in here and you can hold down control shift and select them. And then now you can quantize everything. And it won't quantize your role or a flam or whatever you want to call it, okay? All right, so let's go back. I'm just going to go to my history, Okay, so we go to current project history or I could have just kept going. Do so let's just go all the way to here as soon as I quantize. Okay, so that's where I want to be. Okay, so let's go back to the drum loop in case I need it. Okay, so let's hit play. Because what I did was I quantize that. Hit stop, this could be a little bit longer. So I'm just going to adjust this stuff as we go along here. Okay, so right here I just played two notes, so I'm just trying to see if I could add just another note in there for a little bit extra fullness, but it might just have to be a single note. Okay, so you can see that. Let's just highlight these so we can see them when we zoom out. That's kind of a pro tip sometimes if you're zoomed in and then all of a sudden when you zoom out, you're like, oh no, where was I? If you're zoomed in, sometimes you can highlight your notes like this and then you're going to zoom out. And then, okay, I was working in there. Okay. Sometimes it's a nice little trick. Okay, so let's hit play. And what I was trying to say is right here you can see I played two notes on top of the, off of the bass note. Here, I'm only playing one single note. So I was thinking like, can I play another note? But I think it's just going to be the one note. And then in here, I was thinking that I should just kind of go a little direction, like a different direction than what it is. So I'm trying to just go like a different melody like that, Something like that. So it'd be like go to the G maybe, and then G sharp and it'll work its way down. I'm going to expand this one. If you just click and hold, you're going to be stuck into your snap. You hold on Alt, you break free from the snap. You're going to fine tune it. At the same time, I can highlight all of them and we can go to bring them over just a little bit. Okay, another way to do that is you can come here and go no snap, and then that way you're break free. But again, that takes time because you've got to go here, you got to extra clicks, you just hold on Alt. I don't know all the keyboard shortcuts, but you have to know a couple of them to improve your work flow speed. And that Alt one is very, very powerful. Okay? Here. Needs to be a little bit longer, okay? Needs to be more musical. It's not a little too tight. Again, did you see how I just clicked here? To start from here, I don't have to start all the way back here. I just literally said, I want to start from here. Okay. And then we will just make it a little bit smaller so we can see our bottom notes. It's loud. Okay. Did you hear the difference? So these notes were way louder than these notes. Again, it might be a little bit too long, and we can adjust those a little bit. If you highlight it, it does not make the noise. Okay, Keep that in mind. You'll put that on the G. No, maybe we can play them fast like this. Maybe turn down in volume and tighten it up again, too tight and a little bit longer. And again, this is just our very, very rough starting point. So in other words, I'm trying to get these melodies where I want them. I'm going to hit play. Then later on we can get into like compression EQ, different effects, whatever. And then also all our other melodies. But we need to get this kind of sitting nice where we want it again, I'm going to click around here. I think it's too. Okay, So let's just try that one more time. So we're going to go all the way to the beginning. This is sounding okay. Our other melodies will hopefully help make this more into a powerful beat. I'm going to click into it now. Again, I was talking to you about reverb and stuff. Got to make sure you cut that low end. So I play those fast notes kind of twice. So let's just listen to that again in here, I might bring it Bran back down. So listen to one more time. So again, as a beat maker, you're listening to her loops over and over and over until you get them, right? What I'm listening for here though, is that we have this melody happening, right? And if I change it up too much, it's going to sound really, really weird. So a good loop is really, really repetitive, but it's catchy and then there's some variation going on. Okay? We don't want like tons and tons of variation. So again, we want to keep it really, really simple. One last time and then I will go Nexus and we will add in another melody. But again, it's important we get that first melody because that's like the foundation of the track. We got to get that right. Everything from there we start kind of adding on. And then a lot of people, when they talk about their Midi keyboards and stuff, that first melody is typically where I'm playing with two hands. Once I get into the different melodies, sometimes melodies are two hands, but a lot of them are just one hand. So a 49 key Mdy keyboard, I'm telling you is the sweet spot is the perfect keyboard, or the perfect size for making beats. Okay? Okay, so let's hit Play for this beat, and then we will start adding in some melodies. Okay, something in there I don't like. Let's just come back to here again one last time. I just want to almost copy what I have right here. What I'm actually going to do is right here, we will take this. I think I'm going to leave the end there. But what I'll do is I'll take this and I'm just going to literally bring it over so we get the same thing. Another thing there is if I click and hold on shift, you can see I can't go up and down. So I lock in. So I know exactly where the notes are in terms of playing one last time from here. Here is a little bit weird. I might want to do the D, the D sharp. Okay, so I'm just going to play a quick melody over this. And I'll cut off this to go to a different video so that it's just easier for you to digest. So I'll just try one other little sound here quickly though. There he goes, more like a B. 13. 3-4 - The Melodies Continue: All right, in the last video when we hit play here and we had this kind of sound that was cool, it sounded powerful. But I'm kind of wanting just like a really unique beat for you guys in this course. So again, like I'm saying, when I was upstairs on the piano, I was telling you that once you get to a level of me right now, like being able to play the piano and stuff, it's not so much about u playing a melody now. It's more about trying to find the perfect melody for the track. And that's what makes an amazing beat from just like an okay beat because, you know, I could just make an okay beat. We just select a sound, we play some melodies that are in that key and scale, and we're good to go. But a good, a special is something where it's just like wow. Like how did you get those melodies and sound selection like all just to be perfect. Okay, so let me just get into this hit play as if I was going to be making a beat. This tuned one was okay. But I'm just going to try to find something else. I like that a lot, that's something special to me. Okay. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to a new pattern by hitting the plus my number pad. So let me record that first and then I'll explain some more stuff, Okay? So again, I am in a new pattern. I'm going to hit record. I'm going to hit play, 234. So, and that's it, that's how I want that melody to play, and that would be like a chorus. Okay. Now the E, Q and stuff, I might have to adjust it a little bit, but what I'm going to do is, again, you have control and Q for quantizes, but that's going to snap everything to grid, which is what I don't want. And another problem is sometimes notes will not play if they're touching like this, depending on your virtual instrument. So what you'll have to do is highlight these and then you can tighten them, are actually these ones only. And you can hold Alt and you can just bring it back a little bit and then those notes will for surely play. But what I want to do is instead of snapping it like that, I just want to go shifting cue. So this way was controlling it. Snaps it all the way to grid. I don't want that, I just want to go shifting que what it's going to do is it just snaps the beginning of the notes to the grid. And we're good to go then I might need to just adjust the ***gths a little bit, but let's listen to it first. Everything looks to be in time, so I will just quickly hit Record here, Okay? And I'll hit Enter, and we will hit play. Okay? So some of those notes are too quick, but the first thing I'm going to do is just turn it down just a little bit. Okay, And a quick way to do that is maybe just adjusting the release on here. That could be like the quickest way to add a tail onto this instrument. Let's add a lot more tail. Say wait, way too long. No, don't like it. Okay, so what I want to do is I just want to fine tune these notes just a little bit to here. I just want these to be a little bit longer. Just the tiniest bit longer right here needs to be longer. I kind of want to be more like, kind of like look a little longer. Again, this is all just comes down to personal opinion, as well as just my ear of knowing what I want for a catchy melody longer. And again, this melody is only playing here a little bit longer. A. Okay. So again, I'm going to turn it down to one we can add in actually quite a bit of reverb on this. Again, that low end we're going to cut now within nexus. What makes it so powerful is here's effect. I'm just going to limit this a little bit. It's just going to make it sound super, super consistent. And it'll also pull out that reverb a little bit to the release here is just going to maybe even it out just a little bit, make it a little bit smoother sounding. I'm going to turn down a little bit more cool. So let's go onto another melody. Get, just going to hit the plus of the number pad. Go to the library. Let's add something in super random. Okay, let's try Memories, tons and tons of effects right off the bat. Let's pull back just a little bit and I'll hit play. Get off my keyboard. I can turn on that volume. Okay? You see that in the top right here? That's my Navy keyboard. The slider here. This sound right here. I usually don't mix as I am making beats. But I'm just hearing, right now, it's a very full sound. If I go Insert, can we do Q? No, we got to do it from here. So I'm just going to go Q. Usually, I would EQ within FL studio. But what I'm going to do here is I'll just do a notch. I just want to peak. There we go. So I want to peak and we're just going to bring this over maybe around here. I just kind of hear, It's just very, very harsh in the midst. Pull it back just a little bit, I can't. So without it, it's a little bit thin sounding, but it's, it's gonna allow me to put, play these other instruments really easy. Now, I might turn up this a little bit. Now I'll do that from the limiter, can't the biggest thing to remember when you're making a B is the chord progression. I got to remember what the chord progression is. So what is a chord progression? It is typically your lowest notes, all right? And it's how the lowest notes go in order sharp. I'll go down here. We have G sharp, we have sharp, we go to C, and then A. I just want to hope that's what I did for the whole time. G sharp, sharp, sharp, and then again here, sharp. And I'll just zoom in there just so maybe you can see a little lit better. We have G sharp, sharp, sharp. Okay, so that is our melody. G sharp sharp and then A sharp. Perfect. So when I'm playing my melody with the other instruments, I just got to remember that it's, that's a super powerful sound. Again, Nexus. Let's see who designed it. Okay. It wasn't manual, but a very, very powerful sound. Extremely powerful. But again, that chord progression, I have to know as I want to improvise, otherwise it will be out of pitch. It'll kind of sound weird. Let's go a little bit lower on that counter Sounds horrible. To counter, counter, counter, counter, counter, counter, counter, super, super powerful. Again, if I didn't remember that, I could just come here to tools and last 2 minutes, I'll try that. We're here with you just to give you a perspective of how you can do that. How we do this is we want to figure out what was our first note. Okay, I'm just going to look here. What I'm going to do is zoom into here. So I'm holding down control and right click. Okay. We're going to zoom into this area wherever this note starts. Okay? So this is where it started. I think, like in the mid is where I was happy with it. Right here is where the notes were. Okay, so let's hit play here. So I'm going to go to pattern mode. I'll click here, I'll hit Play. You can either hit Play here or here. See I screwed up there. Okay. So something like that. Okay. I'm, I will grab these, but I don't think I need that extra note. I think I just need the one. But for now, I'm just going to hit plus on my number pad. Hit control and right click. It's going to put me all the way to the beginning of the piano roll. I'm going to press control and V to paste that in there and we will. Let me just bring that back. Okay, and I'm just going to press Shift. And again to quantize that. And then I think I have to bring it back. So we'll listen from here. I think what I need to do is these notes might need to come either here or this note has to go over. I think this note, okay, let's put it in there, let's hear how it sounds, okay? So no, so I know something is weird here. I've gotta bring these all over. Keep playing that over and over. So I went, okay, I'm going to hit the plus my number pad again and we will go tools and we will go dump score log again. I'm just going to get those notes, so I know these ones are the ones that were good. Okay, so I will grab these and we'll go click here. So that's weird, like it didn't get my last notes, but I think I can figure out where I want those. Again, this is what it takes sometimes to make the beep. So it could be boring to watch. But again, these are some things I do to get exactly where I want. Okay, so we have where we will stop playing. So I'm here. Said I just work my way down. Okay, So we're going to grab this, bring it over to here, and then it goes to the F, and then it's going to come here. Okay? So sometimes it's really tricky to get it where you want. Again, let's try to put this in here, okay? So what I'm going to do to clean things up nine, I don't want, you can come here and you can go delete. Or the keyboard shortcut is shift control and delete. So I will go shift control and delete. Hit Enter nine is what. Okay, so that one was not good either. Delete number nine here. Now how it works is when I keep deleting a pattern, it's kind of bringing it back up. So I'll delete this one, because then I think this is it. We have eight, which was okay, we're going to come to this one now. The biggest thing here is that, again, it has a lot of effects going on. So I'm going to remove a lot of this low end, especially on the reverb and stuff like that. Another thing I will quickly do here on the effects, I'm just going to limit this just a little bit. It's just going to keep that base line really tight sounding. I will increase the release as well on that. Just hear how consistent it sounds. If I bring the threshold all way back up, it's just really, really spiky. Okay? It's not really super tight for a base line, I just want it sounding really tight. Tons of control over it. So this is too much, this delay bring you back a bit. Okay, let's actually listen to it with that much limiting going on, so it doesn't sound musical. What's happening is like the notes are just super long tail and it doesn't have any punchiness to it at all. So I found around maybe like the 70 was kind of nice. We'll go like 70 and we'll leave it around there. Okay, we'll try this again. Go. One thing I'm hearing from this sound is it's really spiky. What we could do to help that is on the envelope, we can maybe just put the attack up just a little bit. Okay? Do you hear how it's rounding out the sound? So before you hear that spikiness, right, and then when it goes to help make seven, it's rounding it out. The biggest thing as a producer is to know what you're listening for something like Nexus. Yes, you choose the sound, but once you choose it, you actually have tons of flexibility on how to mold that sound. Right. That's again what makes it so awesome. I might put this to like that eight, just kind of a little bit. And again, right now when I'm playing it, I am playing up in higher frequencies and higher octaves. I need to listen to this as the notes being played. So I'll just play it in the pattern here, how it's kind of spiky. So I'm going to try to increase a little bit more. Okay, so now watch you go back. You hear that very spiky 16. I'm getting the benefit of the bass, but I'm not hearing that spikiness which is cutting through. And let's just hear how it sounds. Okay, so added just a little bit of the spikiness in, we'll pull up on this threshold is a little bit turning down a little bit. Okay, We'll get another sound. Okay, so maybe we try pads. Okay, So I think that dream of you sounded powerful. So by itself is what it sounds like. Now, a couple of things to think about when I was talking to you in the sound selection course, is when we are selecting our sounds for a beat, we have to be thinking about, do we want just a single note? If we add just a single note, it's not going to take up a much space in the mix versus a chord. Chord takes up way more space. That's not that it's bad, a chord is fullness. But sometimes if you want to keep adding a lot of instruments in the to make your mixing easier, sometimes just using single notes, if it sounds full as it, sometimes that's the way to go. I'm not sure what I want to do here, so I'm just going to keep playing around. Very powerful, okay? I'm just going to make sure I'm in a new pattern, okay? So I'm just going to hit the plus my number pad. I will hit Record. And I'll open this up just so you can see the notes that I'm playing at the same time, okay? All right, so very, very simple melody. And I'm just going to open this up just making sure we are on time, okay? I'm in the case of a pad many times I do just hit control and Q which will quantize the beginning and end of the note, okay? As you can see this one's and these I think will be out of place as well, but again, see how tight they are. A lot of times I'd like to add just a little bit of space. Sometimes ST's do not trigger sounds if it is touching, okay? Keep that in mind. We'll do this as well here and again, some more space, okay? Listen to it like this. Sometimes it's nice to put the metronome, okay, by itself holding down Alt and the scroll wheel. And that's going to allow velocity change just a little bit there. You want the notes to be a little bit consistent, mixing will help with that, but that's the benefit. As a beatmaker, we are able to adjust velocity, which is, in short, it's like volume. It's not, but in short, it's like volume. When we record a guitar, sometimes we are stuck with the audio recording. It is what it is with an audio recording. Then you can use your audio effects. But with Miti as a beatmaker, we can fix problems really right here. We can fix it at the start, at the core, so that when we go to add on compression or we go to add on EQ, whatever, we have already fixed our volume problem right here. Okay. Other producers, other recording engineers. They don't get the luxury of this. That's what makes you know, if you are a beat maker, a ranger, mixing and mastering your own beat, you have full control. Unlike anybody else, that's what makes you special as a producer. Okay, so I'm just going to, there's two ways I can do this. I can hold on control, left click, I can hold shift and click to do that. Or the keyboard shortcut in FL studio is control and B as in bulb, just like in the bottom left corner. Control and B. Okay, so here is that. Let's see if it lines up good sometimes on pads because they're so slow and swelling, this one's a little quicker, but some pads are very slow and swelling, so sometimes you have to come here and you actually have to bring them early. Okay. So if this is on time, this is early, this is late. Sometimes you have to make the pad a little bit early because it's so slow and swelling. Okay? We will just hold it on control Z, Control Z, and we're back to normal. Okay? Let's listen to it in the beat, okay? Another really pro tip I'll pass on to you is listen to this metronome. When I take away the metronome, listen, it sounds empty. What we will do in this video, I'll make this one quick sound here with you. We will add in our own fake metronome. It's a really pro, powerful tip. Don't share it with anyone, it's just between us. And we will add it in. And then I'll stop this video. We'll add in some more melodies in the next video. Again, to keep these videos short, what I'm going to look for here is some type of percussion element that has a nice transient, okay? And what that means is something that's going to cut through. We can even use something like a snare. Could be cool. Okay? I'm going to take this, we are going to tighten it up tight. If you do out and you don't have enough, if you want to tighten it up more, you just use the ***gth. Okay, I'm going to use the pitch. We're going to go maybe up to 24 and we're just going to crank it, bring it back maybe down a little bit. We'll go to like, let's say 18. Think about a metronome. Metronome sounds like this right now. What makes a metronome a little bit special is it goes like 1234. If you listen to it has one of the sounds is a little bit more enhancing. Okay, one like the downbeat. I don't think I will do that. We can do that if you really want to. Like, all you have to do is put on every single beat, so it's sound like this. Then what you would do is the very, very first one, the fine, you can go like this or maybe up higher, there's a little metronome that we did. But the reason I'm doing this is because we're going to add this in. So we'll add it in here. And what we'll do is I'm just going to add this into the mixer right away. I will just add effects on on my Mi keyboard. I have it set up where I can literally just hit one button and it loads in an E Q and a compressor. For me, I just would have clicked here and I would have want Q Q. I also would have want dynamics and compression. But the thing is, how long does it take to open up a plug in 123. It takes time, right? Fl Studio has introduced Midi scripting, and it allows us to get a really fast workflow to custom code like our own Midi device. However we want, I put a little separator in there, and I'm just going to click this actually, I'm just going to give this a color. We make it like that, okay? And we'll add this in here with control and L. So now what we're going to do is we're going to compress it really, really hard. Okay, hard open up the attacks a little bit. Okay? We are going to maybe just put some effects on, I'm not sure what I'm looking for here, but I'm sharing with you that we're going to add our own little metronome, but we can make it special and fit in the beat. And it adds so much rhythm to the music that a lot of people don't realize, okay, we will leave it around there. We can also add with our sense, but for me I think what I might do is I'm just going to add a chorus directly on. Listen to this, going to make it sound a little bit wider, a little too much. Now what we want to do is we also want to listen in mono on the master. Once we get to the mixing and mastering, I'll break this down for you, but to the right is Mano without chorus. Maybe a little bit less, okay, mono Then maybe just a little bit of effects. So we'll just add a dedicated reverb directly on here. If you put the reverb before the compression, you're going to hear that reverb a lot more and you don't have to dial it in as much. Okay, let's try this. Okay, let's, let's listen to the beat. I'm going to remove the chorus. I'm going to add airlock compression onto it. I'm going to add distortion onto it. Without it, with it we can bring down the pitch just a little bit. Make a little bit moder. I just wanted to quickly share this little pro tip about creating a little metronome in your beat. And again, it doesn't have to be the sound we did. We could have done any sound. Let's see if I go. Clone. Let's go. Okay, good have kept it at nine. So what I'm going to do, let's try a different sound. Okay, so watch, we'll paste that in there. Listen to this. It's really cool how FL studio. I just put the pitch up a little bit. Let's listen to both of them at the same time without it sounds a little fuller. Let's try this now. This sound, you can see it's a bit to the right. I can just hear it on my headphones here. My ear buds. Just going to center it a little bit more. I should have want right click and clone, then I want 45 in there. Then what I'll do is, because I already did that, I'm going to right click, go copy the value. We'll paste it in here. And we'll paste it in. This same sound but pitched up. I'll paste it in here. And we will delete this one. Okay, let's save it. Let's listen to it without it again. If you wanted to, I could adjust these at different pitches as well. And what that will do is it will create a really thick and full metronome sound. Because when it was just the single sound, when it was this one, it sounded really thin in my ears. It cuts through, but it didn't have much body, so let's listen to it by itself. This one, this one is really on the high end as well, so I could bring it down. That one has a little bit more body. Maybe we'll bring this one down to 12. Okay, so let's listen to it now. Okay, cool. So let's stop the video here and we're going to make more melodies, try to find more variations. Because once we start getting into arrangement, right, we start adding and removing instruments and stuff like that. It's always nice to have multiple instruments so that you can mix and match. And then when it comes to verse one, verse two, I like to kind of mix up my verse one and verse two. You know the odd beat will be verse one is the same as verse two, which is the same as verse three. But for me it's kind of rare that my beats are like that. I always like to kind of mix and match. It makes the arrangement easier, it makes it fresher for your listeners ears, and it makes it more fun to work on the beat, can. 14. 3-5 - Finishing the Melodies: Okay, so our beat is starting to grow. Here we have our metronome, what we just did. We have this piano, we have a kind of, that, it's called Duff Pink instead of Daft Punk, and so it sounds like this. Or one melody. Okay, our next melody is this one. Our next melody is this. So we have to decide, is this our bass line? If it's our bass line, when I mix the music, I can EQ it in such a way where we enhance the bass a little bit. So that's something to keep in the back of our mind that, do we not have a bass line, is this our baseline? Okay, And then the other sound is our pad, Beautiful sound, kind of smeary. Once we get into mixing, we will address whatever we need to do to make it sound like a professional beep. What I wanted to quickly say before moving on to a new instrument is I like to decide I want to put my instruments up top or down below. Usually, I like to put them up top. What I'll do is I'm just going to bring my instruments down low. And I'll just do this just for organization. I'm just going to grab all of the drum loop stuff and we can bring it down. Okay? I'll just do this. Then I will grab these and we'll bring them up. Okay, here are our instruments and then drum loop stuff. What I'll do is I'm going to leave some space because as the beat continues to grow, I don't know how many instruments I'm going to add. But what I'm trying to say is I like to add multiple instruments so that when it goes to the verse, I have tons of variety to work with. Okay, let's hit play here and I'm going to have to open up a new nexus. Rightly can go clone. The fastest way to flow and I will just find something random. Let's maybe go to woodwinds. And we will select maybe something like like this. Listen to all the reverb, so there's a lot of reverb going on on that sound. We can increase the mix but then turn down the decay as well as the low cut which is cutting the low frequencies of that reverb. All right, so let's just hit play and let's just see if it's going to work. Woodwinds for me usually come later because they're a very powerful sound. But we'll listen, okay, so very, very powerful sound. Maybe should try to play another different sound here. So I'm going to record that. I keep going towards that melody hoops, so that's what happens when you are in a pattern with other stuff going on. So let's go to this pattern. We do one, I wasn't at the beginning, so these are the mistakes that you make on record. Again, this is why I said you hit stop twice. You can hit play. No, I screwed up so I hit control and Z. Okay, we'll leave it like that. I think that's how I liked it and I want this to be like this. And we'll add this in here. I will bring this back a little bit so we can keep working in that same area. Same with the drum loop. Okay? We're focused on the melodies right now. Here again, what we'll do is on the, let's just cut some of the reverb out a little bit. Same with that, and then on the effects for the Nexus, I'm just going to limit just very, very gently. It's just going to help flute cut through as well as not be piercing or anything either. Or just kind of tame it a little bit. I'm going to increase the attack a little bit so it doesn't clamp down maybe as hard. Okay, clone. So this would be a sound for like the chorus only pretty aggressive sounding. Okay, we're going to a different sound. Try a guitar sound. You just got to make sure that you're playing in the right deci. Listen to the sound by itself. Hear all the effects, tons and tons of effects. Sound designers, what they do is they make this sound sound really good by itself. But in the mix, I just know that you just want to fine tune it a little bit. It makes your mixing so much easier for me. I found that was cool and then the tail is actually a little bit long. We can actually pull back on the release and make it tighter here. How tight the reverb is, 0 so we can make it longer. Now that might be better. I have recorded on hit play 234. Perfect. So let's listen to this by itself. Let's hit controlling. Let's quantize all of it. And we are actually able to hear the notes. Let's just do this. We can just maybe tighten up the notes just a little bit, okay? We got another melody here, we'll listen to it in the beat. Now, I'm going to turn down my music just a little bit again. Now it's getting loud on the ears, so I would pull back because you can get to hearing damage now. All right, so we are onto a new sound here quickly and we want to add something in super powerful, a lead could really, really cut through. Try like antenna. Nope, we're going to go up very, very powerful. Again, a lot of reverb. Okay? So what we will do is we want to be in song mode, okay? Okay, turn up the volume of, it's kind of quiet. Okay, so I played some notes there. The first melody. So I'm just going to go tools dump to score log last 2 minutes. And I'll just cut this because I was playing with this, not that one. It was right around here. So I gain just go pattern click here. Let's see, that's, I think what I liked. Okay, so I'm just going to go control and we go to a new pattern Control. Right click, because as you can see I'm like on bar 45. So control, right clicking, brings us right to the very, very front of the play list control. And V will paste in those notes, but I don't know where they are. So again, I'm going to press control and right click it brings us right into the notes. And I'm just going to bring all these over. Okay, let's listen to this in the beat, okay? Because what was happening was 14 is the super, super long notes where I just played randomly. And then I took it and I put it into 15. But what I'll do is I will delete 14 after. Let's hit play here. And I know that the notes are not in time, but that's okay. I'm just going to quantize the beginning of the notes with shift. And this note right here is to same with this. We will make these longer. No, see it's not musical. A little bit longer. Okay, so just grab it. Okay, we add that in again. So in here. So try the D. I don't think it's going to work. No. Okay. So I think it's just gonna have to stay where it is a little bit longer than that. And then again, I'm just going to cut some of the stuff out as well. And on Nexus it has this little drive **** is just kind of like an instant distortion, Drives the notes a little extra hard. It'll allow frequencies to be added, It'll allow consistency. And hopefully the note just stand out a little bit more from what I'm hoping without it, with it put 40. Another really cool thing with Nexus is you have like a spread. It actually puts like the notes on the left and the right, which is really, really powerful for mixing. If you're on headphones, you can hear that it's way too much. Let's go back a little bit. Eight. Another cool one is Spike. So certain notes, it really emphasizes. So we'll crank that up just for you to hear that. Because again, this is the power of a tool like this. As a beat maker, I just need to have high quality sounds. I don't care about the sound design stuff. But then this allows me to select sounds and then fine tune them however I want The spikes going to be a little bit weird, a little bit. Okay, let's try another melody. Let's see what we can do. Some plucks, maybe try to come together. See you can't hear this sound. So a couple of things that you try is you try to go up an octave, okay? At the beginning. There, again, that's what I'm saying, that you have to play down low, up high, and all of a sudden you hear it and it cuts through the mix. And you're like, okay, cool. It sounds like it's going to cut through, try to find a melody. If you find something that works cool, keep it. But it's all about making sure that the sound is standing out by itself. And then when you go to mix the music, it is just like so powerful, right? Okay. What I wanted to quickly do was I went to 15, we're going to go to 16 and I want to go dump to score log. Because I was playing something cool that I liked in the beginning. It was like around here. So go pattern, play again. A lot of times I do make my beats by going to the dump to score log because sometimes you play it and you got to go in and do it. Okay. So I think it starts like kind of like here or maybe like here. I think this is kind of what I liked. Okay. And then there's a second part that I liked was near the end where I went. Okay, and I'll explain that in just a second. So let's quickly add this, oops, panel open. I must have not copied it. Let's go back. Okay, we're going to highlight all this stuff, hopefully around maybe to here. And then I'm going to control and see I'm pretty sure I copied it. Sometimes what you can do, because sometimes copying is really annoying. You can cut it and then undo it, and then you know that you copied it. It's a really helpful tip. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go down a pattern Control, right click in here. Control, right click. And we're going to bring that over and we'll quantize that. We will put this in here. I'm just going to put it down here just for now. Listen, then what I'm going to do is come up to the previous pattern and then I'm pretty sure I played some of that melody over here. So this is where I was starting to improvise. On the high end of the piano. The. Just going to take all that to there, and we're going to hope that it's going to b***d. I'll paste it in here. First of all, you have to click and then hold on Shift. And now it doesn't go up and down. I'm going to put it maybe around here. Okay, quantize that. Listen in the beat, there's the 17. And that last note you can remove and hopefully it's going to flow by itself. A powerful trick is you hit the metronome and you hit play. Two notes being played there. And something a little weird happened right here. This might, so I'm just going to go back, listen to it in the beat. So Alana River. So what I'm going to do, let's try to limit this again, very hard in this sound. It's the release, it's too long of a tail. And then I can actually maybe add some rever back on to this sound. Again, the tail is a big thing that you have to think about with your sounds. The actual tail, after the note is played, how long does it play out just by itself? Sometimes watch this if there's no effects. I'll, it's actually up here. Okay, But I'll just play it down here. Listen to the tail. No tail. As soon as you let go of that note, there's no tail. But typically you want to have some tail because it makes it musical. If it's like this very long tail at zero, we increase it. You have a soup or super long tail. Okay, what I'm saying is if we dial back so we don't have as much tail and this is just release ADSR, it's the release. We are controlling that release. We're making the sound itself tighter then if you add effects on it's, just adding it to be musical. Let's listen to it now by itself. Suto delay. Oops, I double clicked. It's right here. Sometimes El City does that. Kyles, just leave it as it is. And we'll hit Play a little bit more Reverb, less tail. Let's try one last melody. I always say that, but the thing is, when you're making a beat, it's really hard to know when it comes to you. Because if there's no vocals yourself, you are the one who has to make the beat and decide does it sound full as is. Because when you don't have vocals, it's really hard to know when a beats actually done. Okay? All right, so I went for that one. Let's go last one. This will be a really good beat for you to really see in this course because we have a full beat pretty powerful. Once we get to the arrangement, the mixing and the mastering, you will be able to see each step again. Just keep in mind, look how much stuff I have going on. I'm on an older computer and Nexus is able to keep it really light weight for us. I don't have the CP meter on this one, so I have to go here. Yeah, if I hit Play, let's hit play here. Pretty lightweight. Some instruments are a little bit louder. I mean, a little bit more heavy. Number three, let's see, that one is like this bell memories, but okay, again, picking wise plug ins is really important. This sound? Yeah, let's just turn it down just a little bit loud and may limit it just a little bit more. I don't limit all the time. It's just like a quick and dirty way to even out the sound. But if you do it too much, you're going to wreck your music. Okay. As you can see, I'm just doing it very subtle just to keep it a little more consistent. So when it comes to mixing that, I don't have to compress as hard. I can just work with it. And then if I am compressing, maybe I'm just trying to shape it a little bit of however I want. Okay, let's try to get another sound. Here I'm in pattern mode. Hit stop twice in the play. Okay, rainy morning. So let's just try to find something really powerful again, I'm just playing that chord progression, okay? And then the right hand, you know, I'm just trying to try to play some chords over top of that, but what I'm going to do is the first time around I'll play it, then the second time around, something like that, so it's a little bit fresher. And again, once you start learning the keys and all that stuff, you start to learn this stuff over time. So if you're like, wow, how are you thinking of these melodies? It's because a lot of practice on the piano, right? And that's what allows you to be a really good producer. Okay, so let's do that. Cool, So I'm just going to just solo this out and let's go back to that single screen. And you just got to adjust the stuff down. Okay, so let's go back to the melodies and we will hit play. Let's just quantize it with shift. And because these aren't like fast notes or anything, make it really easy for us to edit this one. Let's grab this one and this one. Bring it back just a little bit. Click from here. And I played that on purpose, those notes together. Okay. Powerful, very, very powerful. We'll listen to it. You can't really hear it too much, but I just know that the chords are powerful way over. So again, that low cut effects threshold, the loud, increase the attack, make it a little bit more spiky. We'll drive a just a little bit. Let's just try one last instrument just for the sake of this course. And we're looking for just that one sound to really make it, to make it a final track. Let's try Dance Core, Let's just the regular one, let me listen to a couple of them. This is just really, really cut through a mix, okay? So not to promise that anything is going to work here, but again, let's see, we are already at 18 patterns, okay? So this sound is very similar to the other sounds, so I don't think it would be wise to even work with this at all. I'm going to try different octaves. Cool. So this record, that, that's all I want out of that very oh, I actually recorded in the same pattern, so good thing it was a short melody, so I'm just going to shift and Q. And then we will just listen to that. Add it in like we have to add it in, and let's listen to it metronomes on what we could do to spice it up. We'll just put it here and here, because what I'll do is I'll duplicate this. You can actually, instead of highlighting them all from here, you can just go from the keys and go down shift. Click over, and maybe we just adjust the notes just a little bit here. Okay, so let's listen again. Now you can see that they're this long. Okay? That's just because I duplicated it. Let's listen. Let's try it a little bit different. Go to F, because again, the white notes, we can click them anywhere in the white notes. I'm just going to go like this. Okay? So in, in it and then down to the D shirt. Okay, let's try that. So let's listen one more time. Again, it's a little bit hard to cut through, which is where mixing is going to come in, but I do think it adds to it. Again, we can apply our effects or whatever we want to kind of help that cut through again. We can kind of fine tune that just a little bit. Okay, one last sound. I know I said that in the last one, but that was more of like a lead. What I wanted to do, I want to try strings. Okay, let's just try some strings here quickly. Again, watch this. We're going to tighten these up. Tons we can lock this so that I don't have to keep playing with that release as I go through different sounds. I want something to be really, really attack. Nope, let's keep going through. I want to be more string like sounding, but I did have more attack. Nope, nope, this is the spike can come in. We'll just crank it up. If I go do it keeps the lock, which is really cool. Tons and tons of effects. Again, let's just lock that. Okay, I'll do that. Very simple. I just played over two octaves, essentially the same Ds over and over. I'll just leave this open so you can see that. You can see it there. All right, so there you go. So I just played over two octaves there. What I'll do is, because I know this one was good. Okay, just going to zoom in here. We will quantize that essentially. We can just bring this like this. I'll click bring it over. And it was in the middle right now, I don't see the lines. I think it's like that. And what we'll do is, okay, so see this is the reason why I made space with the drum. So I'll bring it back and we'll add this in here like this. So let's click on that. Let's just clone. And I'm going to try a different string just to try to find something because it fit a little bit better, because that one's pretty aggressive. And let's go hybrid. Listen to it by itself. Way too much effects put them together. So together, let's try like that. Maybe now it's kind of fighting a little bit, so I'm going to keep the first one. Okay. One last one and then we will wrap it up. Okay. And I always say that, but again, since we have so many instruments, it's like, I think it's just going to get too hard for mixing. And then also my computer, in terms of power and stuff, I want to be able to mix well in the course with you. Okay, let's just try to find one type of little melody that's just like, oh, that's what makes this beat unique. Something that's really special. Just trying to think about what sound could we use like se of our piggiosI haven't added a base. Sometimes a bass is powerful up high, I'm going to try that, let's forgetting me go up high. That sounds like a potential to be something really catchy. The volume, the effects on that. Let's just bring them back a bit a little too aggressive. For the effects, limit it a little harder, so it sounds super serio, powerful. So let's just hit play, let's just see if I can find something. So, so I was just trying to find a melody that really works with this track. Okay, that's powerful. So again, let's just again, pattern for 2021 and I will just go dump to score log. Okay, and we'll take this and I think that was near the end. Okay. So so we have 12345678, So I think it starts from here. Yeah. So let's take it from there. Okay. So you see how I did that. First of all, there's a lot of notes here. It's like, it can be confusing, but there's never 9 bars, there's 8 bars that broke it down. And I think that's going to do it for me. I paste it in there, which I shouldn't have done because I'm on bar 40. So I'm going to undo. Hold on, control, right click. Brings me weighted back to the beginning control V Control, right click. And we'll bring it right back here to the beginning. I see if I quantize like this, it's going to make all the notes weird. I'm just going to quantize just the beginning of the notes. Okay, I think this is going to be the beat. This is it. All right? I'm going to wait to delete this to make sure that if you can see what's going on is I have 21. 21 is this weird dump to score log. If everything's good in 22, I will delete 21. Okay, save, save a lot. I always have my hand by control. S, Let's listen to this. I want to be like this. I like it near the end. Near the end. I'm just going to listen to it again because I want, maybe we go up a little higher on our notes to make it wrap around better sec. Let's listen from here. So I might put it back down to there. I'll leave it back up and then go up higher in an octave. Because if I go higher, it might be a little bit tricky for mixing, but we can always adjust our volumes right from here. Let's just try to tighten those up. Let's just delete those for a second and bring the on the volumes. And maybe actually wait, we're gonna play both notes at the same time, but we're going to bring these way down volumes like this. It's too loud like sometimes you can adjust the velocity, maybe what I do. Let's take these out and let's just bring these down. I'll bring the velocity back up. So. It was like that. A little bit different. These were the notes before, and then these are the notes that I did. Let's try this. Delete these. Add these notes in before, maybe I just need to add an extra note in from back here. Listen a little bit more the way how I had it, it went up, okay? A lot of music, a lot of times it would go up at the end or something and, um, try this, try the, that kind of sounds cool. So I'll play for like the six, Let's go. I like that to do. Okay, cool. I'm going to limit this a little bit more and I will just start this a little bit way too much. Okay, cool. So I'm saving it here now. I'm going to take a break for the day. So what I'm trying to say is in the next video, I guess we will get into some arrangement. Usually when I make a B, I really don't have any order for the arrangement and mixing and the mastering. I actually do all that together in what I call audio painting. Okay, I don't want to cover that too much in this video because it's already pretty long video. But audio painting is always about preparing the listener for the next thing to come in the track. We're always preparing the listener for what's to come. And what that means is, when we are going from verse one, well what's coming after verse one? Is it the chorus, If you go to verse two, does it go to a pre curse? And then the chorus And what you have to do is you have to prepare the listener. And for me that's called audio painting, okay? And within audio painting, everything for arrangement, mixing, and mastering all goes in with audio painting. When I make the beat, I really don't have any structure where it's like, okay, now I need to arrange the, I need to find whatever. Sometimes I would just mix the beat just as a whole right here. And then once it goes into the verses and stuff, then I might start adjusting volumes a little bit more fine tune. But a lot of times I do mix the beat like this. And also if you look on my master chain, I don't have an EQ, so I'm going to delete that right now. But a lot of times I do have a compressor, so if I hit play, this might be compressing, maybe just a little bit hard. The actual main melody, this one right here, this is really triggering this bus compressor, the master bus compressor. When I switch to A which is less compression, you're going to see that it's not triggering it as hard. And maybe we go like 12 or something. What I'm saying is, when I'm on B and we play the track, this melody is getting lost a little bit because of our compression. Now I go to A, it's just going to cut through a little bit more and maybe be a little bit more aggressive on the compression. I don't know, we haven't done any mixing or anything, but I kind of do mixing and mastering together as a whole because that's the benefit of being the producer. Like you can just adjust everything last time with everything, turn it up, remove the metronome, it's missing something added back in. But that metronome, we just got to make sure we get the volume right. And then also, I might not need all three I was just showing with you. That's kind of cool. And then in the next video, we are going to be moving on to the next stages, which is again, the arrangement, the mixing, and the mastering, which all goes under the umbrella of what I call audio painting. I've also written a book on audio painting. You can search for audio painting by Riley Weller. I'll talk to you in the next video. Again, you might want to take a break with your ears, make sure you're not listening too loud, and I hope you are enjoying. 15. 4-1 - Recap and Listen Again: Okay, so welcome back. It is a new day for me and what we're going to do is just do a fresh listen for our ears. We will listen to the beat a little bit and we'll also listen to just the individual tracks. All right, another cool little trick, sometimes you can highlight and you can mute multiple sounds at the same time. I'm just right clicking to solo out and bring in all of them at the same time, okay? Okay, so let's just listen fresh. So here is the song again. All right, so this was our first melody. We'll add in this sound. This is the base to go with it. So solo, what you'll notice when we get into the arrangement is some sounds work together with other sounds really good, and then some sounds, they are more powerful by themselves. It's all about understanding for each song what combination that's going to be for your song. All right, because I have so many instruments, that means I have so much opportunity to mix and match these instruments. We have the pads. Okay. It's like that woodwind. It's like the steel guitar. The steel guitar Sound It's a lead sound. Now, in behind the scene, before I started recording this video, I just quickly went through each sound and listen to them individually. Just quickly. And if they were really, really overpowering with too much reverb and stuff because I was already sharing that stuff with you. Sound like this. I just opened it up. And then in the case like the reverb, I may have done some low cut and a little bit of high cut. Nothing too intense because I want to focus on that in the mixing. But once I make the beat, I can just gently go through each sound and just listen. It's like, do you know what that has Way too much effects. So we're just going to pull back a little bit. And I just did that just to save some time in the course here. But everything I was doing in regards to the low cut of the reverb, which is cutting the low end of the reverb. And why you want to do that is because when we have our kick drum and our bass, we want to have as much space in the low end spectrum, okay? So if I open up an E Q, we have our frequency spectrum. When we make our music we are restricted from 20 hertz to 20,000 hertz. So when we have these different instruments like watch if I just let's play that bass sound. I think it's this one right here, so I'll play it. So you can see it has a lot of bass, right? We go to like let's say this piano. So it's also got some bass. And it's okay if the instrument is playing in the bass, but it's just understanding that if you have tons of reverb on that low end, it's just a nice little thing just to cut the low end. And it allows your bass to really shine through and make your mixing a little bit easier. If you cut too much, it's not going to sound musical either, so there is a balance. All right, so what I'm saying is I went through the sounds just quickly and I just quickly kind of adjusted reverbs and maybe the delay if it was enabled. Okay. And then also may be adjusted, the release tail. I was explaining that some of these sounds, it's at 52, so let's increases a lot. I play a sound, I'm just playing a single note just quick and that's because the release, right? If I break back to zero, go back to 52. Now here how short tail that is. Now sometimes that's something I will also do as I go through the sounds. I'll adjust the release tails a little bit because it makes mixing easier. Also sounds aren't going to overlap each other, which means that things are a little tighter sounding. It makes the mix sound tighter and cleaner. Even before we get into our effects like, you know, as you can see, I haven't wrote it anything to the mixer. Okay, so let's keep going for our sound. So again, piano, bass line pad, the woodwind. That's the steel guitar, This is a lead sound, it's a very, very high frequency sound. We open it up, let's just look. So it's like a pluck sound, but we can mix that in such a way where that high end is really cutting through when we get into mixing. See this is a type of sound that has a lot of effects on a lot of reverb, might pull back on the high, on the high damp. I don't really hear too much of a difference from what I did there, but I was just pulling it back just because the effects sound so big. By itself, it sounds beautiful, but once we start adding in all of these sounds, you've got to be a little careful when it comes to mixing. This was that one where I went over the octaves. So you can see I played the D sharp here, then I played the D sharp just lower. That's on D sharp seven. D sharp six, this is a sharp six, and then a sharp five. So I just played the same set up, just an octave lower. That's all I did on that one. Okay. And then this one here, I think is actually the main chorus melody of the song. It's just like a little pluck sounds. All right? Okay. And then we also got the drum loop stuff, so I'll play that quickly. So made this here with you. This is like just the drum loop by itself. Now when we actually make the beat, like I mean, when we arrange the song, I may right click and I may make unique which is essentially just coming up here and going clone. It would be cloning the drum loop. Then maybe we might add a little bit of variation. When I make a drum loop, sometimes I break it apart. Sometimes I'll put the drums into its own pattern. Sometimes I put the claps into its own pattern, sit with the high hats, and sit with the percussion elements. That way, when we arrange the song, we have total flexibility on when we can add and remove elements. That's the most powerful thing in arrangement is having full flexibility. Sometimes it just takes a little extra work. Get to that flexibility though, okay, again, this one here is the drum loop. Again, nothing is organized yet in terms of labeling. So that is something that we will do here shortly. In this drum loop, I just want you to focus on the claps. So as you can see, I did a lot of layering these two snares. These two sounds play always, it'll be like 1234, These two are always playing. And then what I did is this sound plays only on the two. And then this sound here plays only on the four, okay? And then again, as you can see as we go down, some other sounds start layering on top of each other. This one here was just an open hat. You already saw the process of all that. So I'd play it from here. And then what I did was because if I played number two, if I played it, let's just remove these for a second. If I played number two like this, I just thought in the drum loop it would sound too repetitive for the listeners ears. I used pattern two, just like this on every second bar. And then pattern three came in. Spice it up like this. And then pattern four is just like pattern three, but I added some extra notes. Okay, so again, just freshness for the listeners ears. And this is a sound that plays on every beat, like the metronome. Okay, Again, it has some low end frequencies, so let me just copy the value. And I'll crank that up so you can hear it better. Let's look at the EQ, okay? I'm just hearing like some low end. So watch If we were to cut that, maybe it could be just like this. We could also tighten this up, make it a little tighter, we can pull it back to still get some body back. Let's say without it. Okay, I'm going to remove that because that is on the master and I'm going to put the volume back to the way it was. Okay. Go to the next sound here. This one is some kind of bong loop. I think this one is 2 bars, so again, I'd have to do this to see it all again. When I made beats by myself a lot back in the day and I had my four computer screen set up, having the channel rack bigger like this allowed me to make my drum loops like this. Which means I don't have to do so much of this, make unique stuff. To make unique stuff is kind of annoying. For example, like let's say we come back to pattern one, which is the drum loop. And then I want to make unique. You would write click make unique. And what that does is it makes a clone of the pattern. Then you can spice it up however you want, but ideally, making the channel rack bigger. So I'm just going to click into pattern six here. We're going to scroll down again, making the pattern just gives more freshness to the listeners ears. So that's just not just a 1 bar loop, which is just four beats, this is now eight beats, right? We have 1,234,567.8 We're just giving some freshness to our listeners ears. All right? And it sounds like this, this sound right here, this sound really cuts through in a unique way with that drum loop. So I think that's a really cool sound. And then our last sound is this metronome. Now, again, I'm not sure if I want to keep all of these. Once we get into mixing, we will look into that. Okay, I'll wrap up this video here. This was just allowing me to hear the song again as well as for you to hear the song again if you took a break. In the next video, what we're going to do is we're going to organize all of our sounds. So it might be boring for you, but you will see my workflow for you to get everything organized. Because what you want to do in FL studio, you want to label and color so that what happens is when you add everything to the mixer, it's the same color in here, it's the same color in the playlist, and it's the same color here. And then when you add it into the mixer, the color and label follows. So you don't have to redo your work like twice. You just do the work once and then it's all done for you, which I'll share in the next video. So if you already know how to organize, you can skip the next video. But I highly recommend you watch it. If you are newer to FL Studio, you will learn my fast workflow. Because the thing is when you come back to the project in a month or in three months, you open it up, it's all organized, You can work super fast. And you'll see, I know exactly where everything is. Okay, so let's get organized in the next video. 16. 4-2 - Organizing Patterns in FL Studio: Okay, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go through this really fast because since we have so many instruments and stuff like that, it's going to take a little bit of time in this video. So I will explain the keyboard shortcuts as I'm going, but again, you can always see everything in the bottom left of your screen, right here where my mouse is. Okay, All of these keyboard shortcuts are available to you. If you click here, you can see F two as Rename and Color. You can also push in your middle scroll wheel or shift and click or right click, and you can see that there's rename and color as well right there. Another option is color selected. You will see the gradient which is Shift Alt. And what the gradient does is, so if I'm only going to be coloring a single sound, I will just push in like my middle scroll wheel. I can just rename this and color it from right here. Okay, if this is open, if you hit two, it gives you a random color. But if I have multiple sounds highlighted, this is where I will be using the color selected most of the time. When I'm doing this, it's usually the percussion elements. For example, if I'm with drums like kick one, K two, kick three, kick four, I would highlight these. And then again, the keyboard shortcut was Shift Alt and that's what I would do. Then it pops up this little window, then you're able to adjust your color. You hit this right here and it puts it the same, and you will see that it puts it all blue. So it's a very, very fast workflow, okay? So again, I'm not going to be talking about all those keyboard shortcuts, We're just going to flow and get right into it so that we can get moving fast. Okay, So I'm just going to start from the top one here and we will work our way down. You could work your way from pattern one, but I'm just going to work from here and down. And I'm just going to left click it and get into it. So what I do is I left click, hit F two, and this one, and I always write in capitals piano and then hit F two to give it a random color. So that one is going to be green. Fl Studio stores that color for us. Since we just hit Enter, I'll hit middle scroll wheel, type in piano, and now I can hit F three. Fl Studio remembers that last color we used, or you could just click here. And as you can see, FL Studio also saves the color there as well. But again, I like using F three, which will use that last color. Okay, So let's keep going. This sound right here is okay. Sometimes I don't know how to label a sound, so I'll just click it and we'll just go like lead. Okay, I hit F two. I'm also going to hit control A to highlight the text and control C. I didn't do that last time, and I'll explain that in a second. So we're going to come here and we will push in our middle scroll wheel. We will hit control V because that is the lead. And then we hit F three because it's that purple color. Okay, So I am coloring it this way and in here. And then what I'll do after is I highlight it all, and then we add it to the mixer. So for example, you can see piano. If I add it to the mixer, the keyboard shortcut is control and L, I'll explain that after though, You can see that it's green. It's green. And now it's green. And it brought in the label and the color for us. Okay, I will go file and I will just go default. Okay. And then I'm just going to put this to no mixer. Insert this one here I'm just going to say is the base. So when I click here, it's the same thing as coming here and renaming the pattern. Okay. When I'm clicking into one of these, I'm actually clicking the pattern and I'm renaming the pattern. And it shows it in the play list, but I'm actually renaming the pattern. So this one here is base, hit F two, this is going to be a pink kind of color control. A control C, Enter. Come here. Control V, F three, Okay, going to come here. This is the pad. Hit F two. Pad. Perfect. Sorry, I forgot to hit control and on that and it's giving us different colors, sometimes it doesn't. Right now everything's working out good. So this is a woodwind. F two wood wind. I'll just go. Perfect. Oops, I forgot to go control C. Okay. And then I come here. Middle scroll wheel, or again, shift click or you can right click, but it takes longer. Okay. Middle scroll wheel, F three. Because I opened it up and closed it. That's why it's not giving me that same color right there. But I can just click there. Okay. I'll explain that again. What I did was I came here. Let's say this is like the steel guitar. I will go guitar and I'm going to hit F two to give it this color. Okay? Then what I did was if I hit F three, right now I have that blue color. But if I come here and then I hit Enter, now I have gray. Okay. Do you see how it's like that? So you have to make sure that right after you open this up and you hit Enter, that you're going to hit F three and it gives you that color. All right? It just, it saves the last color that you hit Enter on. It's a really powerful workflow once you understand. Okay, So I'm just going to say this is lead to because like I said, sometimes I don't know how to label things and I just make it simple. It doesn't have to be like perfect when someone's like a real musician like these things matter. But where we are just beat makers, we're all about creating catchy melodies. So this one. I'm not sure what to label this one. I'll piano two, let's just say. Okay, and I'll go two. I'm just going to look for a different color than the other ones sometimes if it's not giving me a color, because right now we already have blue and stuff like that. Sometimes I just click into here and I'll just go orange. One thing to mention, I usually never like to put anything red in FL studio because typically red means missing files and I've always just avoided red in FL studio because missing files you never want to experience. Okay, I will maybe click this and we'll go accept. And I'm just going to go control a control and I will enter. And this one here is the piano three, we will keep going. This is, I think, also a guitar. Do I have steel guitar? Maybe I'll just put regular guitar, so I'll just go guitar. So this is 18. I will go guitar. And F two, that's a different color. As you start adding in tons of different instruments, you're going to run out the colors. But F three, there's another Sound. This is lead three. Okay, I'll just go lead three. Let's maybe give it like a yellow. Okay. So I'll enter control C again. If it's not highlighted, that's what control A does. And then control C copies. And I'm going to enter, and I'll come here and if you click to the right side, it will give you like an icon. I don't worry about this stuff that takes way too long in terms of organization. Some people want to even color all their stuff in the playlist. I don't do that stuff, I just know that piano is going to live in track one. And then sometimes I even mix and match. Like if I wanted to spice something up, for example, like I would clone it. And then if I wanted to right click and go make unique. And then if you want to spice it up a little bit, sometimes I put it into like the pattern just right below it. Okay. What I could do here is I could highlight everything and bring it back up. Or we could just right click and go delete. Yes. Okay. All right. So let's keep going again. You will see me do this control and right click a lot to zoom into an area and then to go to 100% zoom, we just go control and right click as well. Okay, let's go back to 2020. And it is, I don't have this one right here. Ten. That was lead three. Okay, so I got distracted control enter. This is lead three. There we go. We will click here. I will go. Let's listen to it. These are strings two. I think I already have a purple actually, that one stands out. Three, I think 21 is these melodies that we didn't want. So I can delete this. Okay, there's the keyboard shortcut as well. All right, so we have 21 patterns in this track. All right, I'm going to go one last time. Okay, this is the plug again. Like I said, I think this is the main chorus melody that's really going to cut through once we get into mixing. Let's maybe make it like a light blue or something. Okay? Control A control C, awesome. Okay, pluck three. That is done. So now I'm going to move onto the drum loops. When I was doing single instruments, I just pushed in my middle scroll wheel, it pops up. When we get into multiple sounds, typically I will color like if it's like let's say the bongos. I would typically highlight all these and make them all the same color because it just makes it so simple. In the mixer for, let's say if I have one pattern with the drum loop, I would typically make the drums their own color. But if I had something like an 88, like for example, let's just right click and clone this. Let's just say this is an 88. I would typically make like the 88 a different color than the kick drums because an 808 is like a different instrument, It's like a base line, even though it's kind of like a kick drum. And the reason why is because when it comes to mixing, I want to make sure that when I look in the mixer, I can quickly find that eight hight because it's not really like a kick drum, if that makes sense. Okay. But in this case, all these drums, they're like a part of the drum loops. So I'm just going to put them on one color, even though they're all in one pattern. I am going to make the claps a different color and the high hats a different color. We probably should break that apart just to make things simple. Okay? I will bring all this down too, because one will be for claps and one will be for high hats. Let's just. The keyboard shortcut to clone is control shift and you will see it will go pattern one, pattern two, pattern three. Watch control shift. And I'm just going to come here to pattern one. And I'm just going to say drums. Looking down here, we don't have that same blue because we have done so much other labeling and it's pushed the color out. Let me just enter. What I'll do is a push on the middle, scroll wheel, hit Enter, and that will store that color for us. And you can see that right here is drums, but we want to put that blue color on. I'll click it, hit two, it pops up. Or again you can come here and you can go rename. Okay? But again, as you can see, it's just slower. So knowing that keyboard shortcut is really useful. You don't have to know all keyboard shortcuts. Just some of these ones really speed you up. So there is the blue right there. Okay. Now, because I clone this three times. So drums and then pattern two is the same thing and pattern three is the same pattern on drums. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to click and hold and press control an X that's going to cut the sounds. I don't want the sounds there. And so now our drums are just drums. Okay, I'm going to hit the plus on my number pad because that's the part of my workflow. But again, you can click here and go to pattern two. Can also click here. And selector patterns. Again, multiple ways to do things in FL studio. But if you want to follow my fast workflow, use the number pad. Okay. You can see I can go through all my patterns just by going plus or minus. I'm just going to go plus. I'm going to hit F two. We're going to go clap snares. Same idea. We will just maybe give this a green. Okay. I will, I will enter, I will first highlight these. Okay? These are all the claps, just because I know they're playing on 2.4 Okay, Then now the keyboard shortcut for that was control selected gradient. I'm going to go shift Alt and C and this gradient editor pops up. I'm going to select the green right there. That's the one we used. And you just simply click the arrow and it'll put it to last for you. Rather than clicking first here and then last here, it's just extra clicks. It's all about reducing the amount of clicks. I will put the claps in here. That's because I'm on the pencil. I usually like to be on the paint brush. Yeah, that's paintbrush and that's the draws. The pencil. I like the paint brush because you can just click and drag it in just like this, just like you saw there. And then I can just bring it over. Okay. Another thing to mention in the play list which when we get into the arrangement is you will see that I usually like to be in or bar because that allows. I'll quickly share that with you since we're talking about it. Like if you in the playlist are on like a quarter step, If you are zoomed out, you really don't know if you are lined up, which makes it really, really hard. Okay, and if you are out of line. So let's just highlight this like let's say like you're in between something like that, you can actually quantize in the playlist here in tools you can see quick quantized start time. So just like when we are quantizing our melodies, you can quantize the patterns in the playlist. So watch. If I click this one and go shift que, you're going to see it snaps to grid. Let's go to a wider snap. So shift and right, so you can see it snapped it. But what I'm saying is if you're zoomed out, you really don't know where you are if you are on one of these fine snaps. So you will see when we are arranging that, I like to be in either at or bar, okay? All right. So paint brush makes it easy to click in and then you want to be on a bigger snap in the playlist, in the actual piano role. So if we go to a melody and just since we're on this topic, I usually like to be like in step or like half a step. Just, you know, when it comes to programming the melodies step is like the easiest to click in your notes. Anything finer than that, it gets really, really tricky to your notes. All right? Okay, so we have drums claps. And what I want to do is I want to remove the drums, because remember I'm in claps, we just want claps. And then the High hats, these are going to be removed as well. So now you can see we have drums and claps. Okay, so let's go to our high hats. Just going to hit the plus on my number pad. Let's just highlight all of these to get rid of the drums and the claps. Now we only have the high hats, so I'm just going to hit F two. I will go high hats, hit F two to give it a round of color. That's good. I will highlight these and then I'll open up the gradient editor there with shift lin. All right, and I'm just going to select that kind of tan color and there and go accept. Okay, we're going to add the high hats in. Okay, So there are our colors. Here is an open hat, so I'll just go open hat and that's a good color. I usually don't re, label the percussion because it takes way too long. Okay. The melodies are really nice to have. So that I can quickly see here and see here for the melodies, but for the percussion elements, it's like, I know that those are going to be drums. I know that that's going to be claps. I don't worry about making the same colors for every single project. Some people like to work that way. But the thing is, each track is so different for me when it comes to how many drums I have. Maybe for example, let's say we have two types of claps. This is a powerful thing for a chorus, like I'm just going to click here. I will go make unique and I'll just click on it Two, let's just make it a little bit of a lighter color. For example, this would be clap one. This would be clap two. Now two, we add another special clap. And then what we would do is like in the chorus, maybe we are only adding this clap only in the chorus. Okay, imagine like this is the verse and then it comes into the chorus. Now the chorus plays like the double clap. And it can make the clap sound super, super big. Again, I'm going to come here and delete that pattern. But what I'm saying is, when it comes to my beats, each beats so different, I don't like thinking in terms of this. Color has to be this. It's just too technical. I just want to make sure it's colored. So I can see it here. I can see it here. And I can also see it here. Which we haven't done yet, but it's coming because since we are labeling and coloring, you're going to see it all comes here into the mixer. And it makes it super easy when you come back the next day. That's the open hat, and I don't think I colored it again. Let's just click here F two going to enter to store that color. Come here, and three. Okay, because it's just a single color. So I put it in my middle. Scroll wheel, this one here. Let's listen to it. I'll just say open hat two, just for the pattern open hat two. And I have two to give it a random color. That's fine. Okay, And then what I'm going to do is I'm just going to open up the gradient editor. Red. Hit there. Done, okay. And then this one here is the same color so I will go open two and then like number two or something like that, hit three because I use that last red color and that's it. What I will actually do, because open hat two is like this. Open hat two, number two. This is a cool little trick I like to do. We're going to use that same red color. You click here and then you can just either make it a little bit lighter or a little bit darker. And you're going to see it just differentiates that the same color. I might go just a little bit darker, make it a little bit more similar, We'll just leave it like that. We know that this is like the open hat, but this one is like the second variation of it. And you're going to see it just makes it super easy as you go along here is tame two. I will hit Enter again, middle scroll wheel F three, and that's just because it is a single sound. Here we are going to highlight the sounds. These ones are Bongos going to keep it simple, we'll click here. Bongos, hit F two again. Once you start having so many patterns, colors get a little bit tricky. Let's just make this like a purple like that. I will highlight all of these and open up the gradient editor with Alt shift and boom, boom, boom. And then here is the metronome, this sound right here, that is a part of that sound as well. I missed that. I will add that in there. If I click it, maybe that so tricky because usually in these trainings I don't expand the channel rack. If I expand it, you can see I used it later in the pattern. Okay, that's why I missed it. Click here and you're going to see this one as the metronome. I already have that really bold color there. Let us go metronome and F three, and that's it. Okay, so there is our project. Now what we want to do is we want to add it into the mixer here. All I do is I would just double click, bam. And what I'm going to do is I'm just going to actually remove these ones because they're already routed to nine. And how you can do that, you can just right click to remove it. So with all of those sounds highlighted, I'm just going to right click a mixer. Insert. Okay, an empty one. You're going to go to routing, Channel routing. And you're going to see two options here. So the first one would route every single sound to insert ten. That's not what we want, We want each sound to be on its own individual mixer Insert. We go route selected channels starting from this track, starting track ten. The very, very first sound will be going to ten, and then it just goes in order. All for us, all our color coding is going to pay off right here. Okay, boom. I'm just going to take a second to load since there's so many sounds. And there you go, Look at that, right? Make sure to save this one here. I am actually going to label metronome just so that I know that I might even put a little spacer in between there. Just so that I know that that's the metronome. All right. It just differentiates it. So for that 1234 sound like this. Once we get into the mixing again, like I said, I'm not sure if I'm going to keep all those sounds now. One final touch I do very often is I'm just going to bring over mix Er inserts to create what's called subgroups. And we're going to do that really, really quick here. Okay, I'm just going to hold down Alt and the left arrow. And I'm just going to put this right in front of the drums. I'm just going to put one right in front of the clap. Okay, there is the claps. And I'll put one in front of the high hats. I'm remembering the colors just as I was doing this. I don't need one for the open hat, because this is a single. Sound These two sounds right here. I could potentially put one for that. I might just leave it for now and I'll put one for the bongos. Okay, I'm going to push in my middle scroll wheel, that's going to save that color for me. And I'll come here and I'll go like drums maybe. Okay. F three. And then again you can make it like a darker color and you'll see it differentiates it a little bit. Might be a little too aggressive. We'll pull it up just a little bit. It makes it pop. Maybe just a little bit what I'm going to do, I'm just going to click on 23. Now I'm going to hold down control and shift and highlight the other ones. I've highlighted everything. I'm going to right click and go route to this track only. So what's happening is all of these sounds are going to the drums bus. This is a very powerful thing for mixing. Okay? And then same thing here. I will push you remember scroll wheel, and I'm going to go clap. Hit F three. Sorry, I'm just going to make it just a little bit darker. Okay. Hopefully it pops a little bit. There you go. That one's a a little bit better then this one here to enter. This one is, sorry, keep hitting F two, so we're just going to go high hats. All right? And I keep forgetting to make it a little bit darker. The colors sometimes don't line up, but at least it pops a little bit. Same thing here, I'm just going to highlight these. Put them all to the claps. And then same thing here, put them all to the hats. Okay, so what's happening is the kick drum first goes to the drums bus and then it's going to go to the master eventually. I'll talk about this sub mix in just a moment. All right? If you use my FL studio template, this is a new improvement that will be coming eventually when I'm mastering my music, sometimes the audio so loud and I want to be able to turn it down before it goes to the master so that I can use my plug ins in a better what we call mastering chain. And I'll explain that later on. Okay. But that's just kind of like the quick summary. The audio goes into the drums bus. In the drums bus, I can now just turn down the volume and it turns down the volume for all four instruments. If I add a plug in onto drums, it is affecting all drums. Same thing with the claps. Again in FL studio, they make it really easy because all you have to do is follow the cable. In the case of let's say pluck, we click on it, you can see it goes to the submix, but in your case, it's probably going to the master. Okay? Every single sound will be going to the master. But in the case of this template here, to make it simple, it's going to the sub mix so that I can turn it down. And then from the sub mix it goes to the master. Another reason why this is powerful is if you ever work with like vocals or anything like that, you can send all your instruments to the sub mix, but then you can send your vocals directly to the master. And you can do side chain compression. So which means you can gently duck this whenever the vocals play. And like, that's a super pro tip to get your vocals to stand out over your instruments like no matter what, okay? You don't have to fight so hard with EQ and effects and stuff. Okay, same thing here. The high hats are going to the high hat sub. Now the reason I do this is just to keep it simple. Sometimes each track is different depending on the drums. Sometimes I don't want all drums going to one bus. In that case, I might only put three of the drums into the bus. And then I'll have another drum and that way I can process it totally different and be more aggressive with it or something. Like I said, if it's just one single sound, I won't worry about it. And if there's two, it totally depends on the sound we will see once we get into mixing. This one here, was that tambourine sound. Then this one here. This one is for the bongos. I'll hit it in. Do the same thing, we'll go bongos again. Let's make this a little bit darker, we can see it a little bit more. Again, don't get too technical with this stuff, Just make it really, really simple because it's just important that colors are there so you can see them. Explain this so that when you come back later on, this is how fast it's going to be. So check this out. If we wanted to rebuild this track like this, I'm just going to do it over here nice and quick. Okay, so watch, I can hit one and you can see that this is all to do with like the drums and stuff. Now what I'm going to do is I'll just hit like the plus of my number pad until I hit the first piano. Okay, so here's piano and you can see it's just like I know exactly where everything is like this boom. And it's like, okay, so I want piano. I can literally click piano. It's like, okay, it's right here. Piano, I know. Mixer, insert ten. So I'm going to go okay. Well, first of all, well, that's green, so it's a little confusing but that's okay. Because I know it's not there. I know it's in ten. So I'm going to go. It's, oh, it's ten right here. Watch this. So there you go. So you're going to see once we get into the mixing, it's just the workflow. And then again, it's all about if you come back in a month, in two months, you don't remember what you did. So it's kind of just making it easy for yourself. Don't worry about making the colors perfect. Just make it so that there's colors which is such as like green, green, and then green. So I'm good to go make it simple. One last thing just to mention before we wrap up when you make a beat, this is called an original composition. There's also what's called sampling, where you take audio and you chop it up. But within original compositions, there's kind of two ways to make beats. The way how I showed you here is the easiest way to make a beat. What we're doing is we're simply just adding instruments. We're building on top. And then essentially all instruments means chorus. Okay? In other words, this right here, open up big. This here is our chorus. Another way to make a B is to actually change up the chord progression. What I'm trying to say is when you go from different chord progressions, it makes the beat making a lot harder because a lot of these melodies won't work with that different chord progression. That's another way to make a bet is like the chorus is a different chord progression from the verses. And a lot of times those types of beats are super, super catchy and powerful, but they are more advanced. A beat like this, we are simply just adding melodies on top of each other so that we can add and remove whenever we want. Within the track, it allows you to produce beats super fast and still get really, really good results as well. There's no right or wrong way. I'm just sharing that when you make an original composition like this, again, you can just make your melodies add them on top. Or you can change your chord progression from verse to chorus. But again, the melodies won't really match from verse to chorus. So you'll have to create new melodies with different instruments or the same instruments for that, which makes it more complex. Okay, so let's get into the arrangement in the next video. 17. 5-1 - Mixing the Melodies: All right, so actually change of pace. In this video, I'm actually going to mix the music with you first. And what I actually usually like to do is I like to mix the chorus. And what that's going to do is when we go to arrange the song, everything's already generally kind of mixed. So that when we are adding in our different combinations, things are already b***ding together. Because if we go to arrange the song right now, such as like if we put the lead and then the steel guitar and stuff, sometimes if it's not mixed then it can sound weird and for me it distracts me if that makes sense. I like things sounding like kind of nice and balanced and where I want them to be. And typically that involves the mastering too. But then I will arrange the song, do the audio painting, making sure everything is good, but then I will go back, make fine tuned adjustments to the mixing as well as the mastering. And it's just kind of back and forth tweaking that way. But I typically like to get the mix done because I was actually trying to arrange the song and then again, I was listening and I was like, oh, I don't really like how it sounds like that. So let's first start with the mixing. Okay, so before we get into the mixing, I want to just explain my little set up here in FL studio. So what you're seeing right here, the channel rack, the playlist, and the mixer, This is by far the fastest workflow that I've experienced in FL studio and I like to have wide. The reason is because it gives you access to all of the FL studio options for a mix er insert, such as like mono or being able to enable or disable the effects. Another thing is if we click the arrow and you go to view, you can see track inspector on left side. So I'm going to right click to disable it. This is how FL studio comes by default over here. But when you use FL Studio, your moe is more on the left side than on the right side. So here I'm going to enable it. The effects are now on the left, which makes it faster for me. Colorful mixer, I like to put that on medium. Okay, Now if I ever want to make the playlist big to do the arrangement and stuff, I can always hit Enter and you get a nice big screen. Okay? You hit Enter, it goes right back. Same with the mixer, if you ever want to be big, which I usually don't, but you can make it big. Okay? All right, so let's just hit stop and let's just get right into the mixing. Okay, so now again, this is why I have the sub mix because you can see everything is going to the submix except for the ones that I've routed to a subgroup, but then that is going to the sub mix. And I set this up manually. I went through every single mixer insert. And I did that just by highlighting them all. And I right clicked and I went route to this track only. And then now what's going to happen is right now if we look at the Master and we look at our limiter. A loudness meter is a big part of mastering nowadays. And if we hit Play our masters pretty loud and we haven't even mixed the music. Okay, so this is where the sub mix comes into handy now. So I can just pull it back a little bit. For one, it's not going to be so loud. I'm going to have so much head room when I'm mixing my music now. Okay. So I just pulled it back just a little bit like you're seeing right there. And I also locked it into a group where we can always see that sub mix as well. Okay? Okay. So right now I just have the song looping over and over as you see like this, the thing when I'm mixing my music, you're listening to something over and over and over and over. If you like the beat, cool. If you don't like the beat, that's sometimes just the way it is. But you have to keep listening over and over because that is just how this audio industry works, okay? All right, so when you start a mix for me, okay? Because again, everything at this point is opinion based. There are some best practices you can follow, but everything's opinion based. So a lot of times I might start from one instrument when we're mixing our music, we've got to make sure that we're not mixing and solo. So what that means is if I'm going to mix this song, I'm not going to solo out the piano and then open up effects and everything. I am going to try to do it as much within the mix as possible. This piano, let's open up an EQ. I'm going to turn up my volume just a little bit. Can we hear the piano? I might start with compression on the piano. I want to hear a little bit more off of my keyboard. I have this set up where I can adjust all of my parameters right from the my keyboard, so you will be able to see what I'm doing with the *****, okay? This piano, I have auto gain on, so we will be able to hear the piano louder if I sold it out, just for you to hear it. Without it, this is obviously going to be too much. But I just want you to hear if you're new to mixing and stuff like that, don't worry, I'm just. I'm just going to get into this. Okay? I'm just trying to get this piano to stand out, make it nice and even sounding go up a little higher on that threshold so that we're not clamping as hard, But I will be aggressive on the ratio. Okay, I'm going to close, I'm going to put the EQ after the compression in this case because I just wanted to start with that compression. A powerful thing with Q three, we can solo out to listen to that piano. You can also click here and move the mouse up. And it's going to boost frequencies for you to hear. I'm listening for where's it going to cut through that sounds musical there and there. I'm going to turn off this auto game because when I'm doing that, it can be turning down frequencies at the same time. I'm just wanting to enhance that area. Let's go a little bit louder again. When I'm moving my mouse up, we can hear those frequencies louder. Listen for offending frequencies, things that are kind of, we don't like I'm going to say around here. So I'm going to bring it back. And as I'm holding it down, I can use microbial. I'll pull that back a little bit. I'll trump the volume just a little bit and we'll just add brightness to it. Pull back a little bit may make it a little bit wider if things are tight. If we go tight, you know you're be more surgical Wider can typically sound more musical. I'll go up just a little bit higher in the frequencies. I think it needs to be a little bit louder as well. There's two options I can do. I think I might just turn it up a little bit. Let's turn up the volume from here. I can also see this a little bit to the left before I get really too heavy into it. Probably best practice is to grab everything here. I'm not going to grab the drums. I can grab the clap group and the hat group and we can grab all of this and we can grab the bongos. Just for purists, people who want to follow more best practices. This way I can turn things up and down. The reason why I want to do this is because you could see when I was turning it up, I didn't have so much up. If I wanted to go up, I would have had to open up a plug in. But a lot of times I like to be able to turn off and on the effects, to be able to hear before and after. And I don't want to open up a plug in to give me more gain. I want to be able to do that right from right here. Okay, so let's just bring that back to where it was. So let's hit Safe. And I will hit play again. So here's that metronome. Gotta turn that down. I'll bring this back a bit. Okay, gonna bring the Submix back up on this piano? I might turn down the bass just a little bit here. All like that. Low in frequencies. Again, we do have the bass line and we also have our kick drums. Let's turn down on around here. Now when we're mixing our music, some people really like to take advantage of the octaves because like for example, I'm playing in the scale of C minor, I can maybe adjust it right there. That could be like, um, the root note of the chord. Let's hit Copy, and I'll turn this off. We'll go back, turn up the volume a little bit more. I'm going to turn up the pianos a little bit more. If I highlight all these again, let's just bring the volumes up just a little bit more. Turn down just a little too much. Turn a little bit more. Another thing to mention is as I'm turning down the volumes here. And as I'm turning on the submix, it's going to be hitting my compressor different. So that is not good. Okay, it's not keeping a consistent volume for that mix. Ideally, I could put the compressor on the submix and still get the same benefit of compression. Maybe we will do that actually, just so I can hear that compression always at a consistent level on the master. Let's just turn it off for now. Okay? In other words, if I turn the volume up and down here, you're going to see that it doesn't change here. Okay? You can see it's still at that minus one, or if I turn it up here, whereas before, if I was turning it up and down here, it was affecting the compressor. But we want to be able to hear that because once you set the threshold right of the compressor, you're sending your audio in. The more you're driving it, like, the more compression you're getting. But if we're turning down the audio, then it's not going to hit the compressor when we are mixing the music. Some people like to put a compressor on their master, which is what I'm doing here. What that's doing is it's going to make the mixing a little bit easier. Again, everyone approaches things a little bit different. But it's a pretty powerful technique. It doesn't have to be too intense, it's just gluing it together. Let's bring that sub mix weight back up. So hit reset. Let's just try to hit that low end. I'll create another band. I'll disable this one. I'll just pull it back just a little bit, make it a little bit wider. And again, I'll just put it around here, turn up the volume of it. So let's go to like two, maybe the high end we can pull back a little bit before. To me, this sounds a lot more musical. This sounds super thin and gross. Again, we can pull back a little bit in Q three. You can also adjust your Q scale, give you a different perspective. Just a, I don't want to spend too much time here. I'm going to move on. Okay, now we're on to this lead. Okay, so this is a cool little trick, if you have a Midi keyboard that allows you to do this stuff. So I'm just going to push in the lead. Copy that for now on the lead, so I don't have to keep opening up an EQ and a compressor. I just hit a button and then I'm just going to copy that back in. Okay, and you can see now I have an E, Q and a compressor on this lead sound. Let's just compress it super hard because when you have a lot of instruments, sometimes you got to do different things. You can see down here, I'm adjusting my knee. And what that does, let's see, I can make it a little bit easier for you to see. So right here, look at the knee. Okay. When it's a soft knee, if I put the compression, the threshold around, let's just say 20, I'll put it to 20. Keep it simple. If I adjust the knee, you can see that it's making it actually at 20. If I have a softer knee, we're actually compressing way down here. Okay. In the case of this sound, I just think I just want a really, really hard knee. I want the compression to happen just exactly where I want it to happen. And I can be very, very aggressive on my ratio. Let's just be very aggressive on the attack and release. I'm going to open up this lead and on the Rea, I'm just going to pull back the delay a little bit. See at the high end. Okay, so without it, with it again, I'm squashing it super hard. So I'm going to open up the attack just a little bit. I like that. What I'm going to do is let's open up the EQ. Now we can sculp it a little bit. Right here is where this sound is really popping through. But again, the power three, We want to take advantage of the benefits of it, so we can solo it out and listen to the certain frequency area. Again, if I go up higher, I can hear it aggressive. What I'm listening for is what is musical, what's popping through, what benefits the song. I like it around here. What I might do on this one might put the EQ before the compression. What that's going to do is it's going to make the compressor work harder. Just copy this, take off the auto release so that it's a little even faster without it. To me it's sounding tighter like this, but it's lost in the mix. Pull back a little bit. Now again, a powerful thing of three. If your E Q is too small, you don't see the features there. I want to see that I might play a little bit with mid inside here. Might pull back a little bit on the side. And this we could maybe make mid. Okay, so just dead center. Try wide, I don't think so. Can we just going to put that back to it while stereo and we're just going to pull a little bit on the whiteness, Maybe we can boost up on the mids. Okay, so I'm going to copy this over. Let's remove this. This sounds way cleaner. I can again, highlight a little bit and pull back. Maybe maybe it's too aggressive without it. Go back to that compressor, Let's copy it. Let's a little longer attack, but we'll just allow it to pop through a little bit more super subtle. If anything, a lot of the stuff in mixing it is very subtle. And then it's just decision based, this base line. Let's work on the base. Again, I'm just going to push in my middle scroll wheel, hit control C to copy the base, I'm going to hit the button on my Midi keyboard. Or what I would have to do is come here, open up an EQ, open up a compressor. But it takes time, so watch how fast this is. Hit one button, boom, there we go. Okay, on this compression, let's be very aggressive. Okay, again, on that knee. On the knee, going to be very, very tight on it. Again, when you are working on individual instruments, you can be more aggressive on your ratio and it's not going to be too like, noticeable or anything. What we're looking for is we just want consistency. We want a really tight base. Again, let's go a really, really fast attack and release. I'm thinking I want a little bit longer release. We want more control over it. I also think we want a little bit softer knee, just to control that a little bit more without it. The thing is, is that the auto gain is on, so I'm going to turn off auto gain. You can see I'm turning up the volume from my Midi keyboard. It, it could be compressing a little bit too hard. Pull back just a little bit, open up the attack just to get to pop just a little bit more. A little bit more on that threshold. A little less ratio, especially with your base. A lot of times a higher ratio. Again, just gives you more control because the low end you really want to get right. So without it and then with it probably attack is a little bit more. Okay, What I'm going to do is we're just going to copy the state and I'm going to go to B. And now we can try something totally different. Okay, I'm just going to go up prosci a little bit higher and more aggressive. Way more attack and faster release. Let's go down on that threshold again, remember hard knee means that we can typically go lower threshold then a softer knee, we've got to be a little bit higher because otherwise it's good to just always be compressing, it's spiking through, so let's clamp down on that attack a little bit. A little bit harder. Knee, we just want to where we want it turned on the volume. Okay, so let's close that. Let's open up the EQ. We can fine tune it just a little bit. Maybe what we'll do is we'll boost up just a little bit on that low end. All right. Widen just a little bit this high end. So this is the base. I might boost it around here just to help it cut through in the mix a little bit more. And then around here we can cut just a little bit, maybe it's aggressive. Then without it, again we just highlight, we pull back just a little bit. Could have come over to little higher frequencies. Try putting it before the compressor. I think I like it. Another thing we can do is I have my sends here. What the sends are doing is just going to add fullness onto the track, such as if I want some distortion or parallel compression for a bass sound, I'm going to try to add distortion. For the distortion, I just have the fruity blood over drive just set like this. What's going to happen is the base goes to the sub mix and then the sends also go to the sub mix as well. Okay, click it in, I'll pull back just quite a bit. Same with the parallel with the exit. Adds high frequencies to the sound. They just boost them. I'm just looking for maybe a little bit more smoothness on the high end. What I do for that is I have the parametric EQ two, and I just boost the highs, cut the lows. We have distortion on there as well, just to even out those frequencies. And then I also have some compression here as well to smooth it out, what I'm doing is the base will go to the exciter as well to listen to it by itself. Mute the again, this stuff is supposed to be really subtle. But in mixing and mastering, it's like the subtle stuff a lot that adds up to what you want. Do you hear how the high end got brighter but not aggressive? The parallel? I'm just going to copy the value. So let's bring it up. It just adds a lot of thickness to the sound. Let's see here may pull back just a little bit. Okay, I will come back without it. Do you hear how it just adds a lot of thickness on the low end? Okay, again, that's what parallel compression is doing. And then the distortion just adding frequencies and a little bit more fullness similar to the parallel compression. Just adding frequencies. Okay, When we add frequencies, it just adds fullness to a sound. Again, this is dangerous mixing because it's by itself. Another thing too, is this base line for the delay might cut a little bit more. The mod, it's sometimes cool, adds some pitch effects and stuff. Okay, back to the beat. It's like way too loud, right, Without it. So it sounds fuller, right? I'm going to pull back the brightness a little bit. Okay. We'll move on to the next sound. Here's the pad. So again, I'm just going to push my metal scroll wheel. Copy that. Hit the pad on my May keyboard and I'm going to paste this back in. Now we can work off of this pad. Okay, so I'm just going to throw off the auto game. And let's just compress this pad really, really hard. So again, really, really hear it cut through the mix. Very fast attack, very fast release. This is just so that we can hear the effects of compression and we can fine tune it. Turn up, I'm just turning down the volume. You can see a little bit right here right now I'm listening for the pad to fit within the mix. Just in terms of volume, Not in terms of compression, just volume to turn off. Okay, with it, I think it cuts through a little bit more. We can copy it over, we can try a different style that's like punch. Different styles of compression are more and less aggressive, so we've just got to be a little bit careful. Again, we can adjust our knee, there's the volume again. Don't be afraid just to try things like you're seeing here. Like you might see that this is not conventional. Like maybe I'm compressing super hard, but let's turn it off and on. Sounds pretty musical to me. I like that it could be just a little bit loud again, we have our E. Q. Now we can fine tune where we want our pad. Let's just cut some low frequencies on this pad. You don't have to do this for every single sound. A lot of people say you have to do it on everything. I'm just going to fine tune it a little bit. I might do the highs as well. Okay, just a little bit now. Again, listen to those frequencies around. In here is where I'm really finding. I want the frequencies to stand out. So maybe we can just cut just a little bit here. Starting to sound a little thin though. What we can do for that is again, we can add it into the parallel compression. We can bring back the highness to make it smooth. I'm just going to cut some more high frequencies so that these frequencies are not being sent to this exciter. Okay, so I'm just going to be a little bit steeper on that on the pad. I'm just going to click here and maybe pull back a little bit on this release to make it tighter. Sound Let's listen to it by itself. No reverb, let's pull back a little bit on the high frequencies, okay, in the beat. Now, just got to be a little bit careful because sometimes you can be taking away that sound that we have. Right turn on the volume of it. Now another send I have is wideness. What this is doing is just going to make the sound wider. I might do that for the path. Let's make it really wide. Sounded Let's be a little bit more release. I hear my computer is struggling just a little bit here. Let's turn down this pad just a little bit, so I'm just looking up here. All right, so again, usually it's always in the top left of Po Studio will be, because I'm on the single bar, just right there right now, okay, On the EQ. Hold up a little bit on that. I feel like it's being cut a little bit too much. Okay, now we're onto the woodwind. A sound like this. We've got to be a little bit careful, very aggressive sounding. I'm going to open up an E Q on there. Just a single EQ for now. Again, let's just cut the low end a little bit on that. I'm going to cut some high end on that as well. I don't do this all the time, but by doing this, it just allows more space for the other instruments to fit in as well. So listen for the frequency that we want to kind of pop through. I'm going to turn this up a little bit. I'm going to turn off the auto game because again that affects the sound. We're going to go bigger. This is where we can play with like mid inside. Just crank it. This does have a built in compression. It's called dynamic E, Q. We can try it the other way, we can just crank it up to emphasize what I'll do is I'll pull it back a little bit and we'll crank it up a little bit. Here we get like a b***d between both of them and we'll be wider and we'll take advantage of the plugins we already have to save on CPU on here. I might just add a fruity blood over drive. And what this is going to do is it's going to compress. Or essentially compress, but in a more aggressive way with distortion. Turn it down. Now let's be more aggressive. So you can see that I'm turning off and on here. Before and after turn back. I want to hear it sounded like it's kind of emphasizing like the breathiness of this woodwind. Without it, by enabling this, I'm really hearing the transience a better. And that's because we are accentuating the sounds like you know, in these frequencies, right? We're accentuating those breaths or those notes a little bit can turn down on volume now though. All right, onto the next sound here. This is a steel guitar right off the bat. I'm just going to just add the distortion parallel and the exciter on. Again, the volume is turned down quite a bit, we don't hear it too much, but it will just help the sound be very, very even sounding the woodwind. Let's pull back on this quite a bit. All right, so let's just open up a compressor. Let's just hear the steel guitar. Sometimes when we're mixing our music, sometimes it's nice to put everything to mono, just to hear before and after. This is a really faz sound, I don't know why it's panned, I'm just going to leave. I might have done that by accident instead of a compressor, so open up Q I got to enable it. I'm just going to this one in mono because I want it to stand out, but it is a little bit Paz sounding, and I'll leave the auto gain on this time. I'm going to go a little bit more for a sound design EQ here. When we're qing, we have like corrective E. Q, where we're trying to get things to fit. Here. I'm looking for more of like a sound design. It'll be aggressive on it. Down here maybe, who's the highs we emphasize? Maybe just a little bit here. This is really cutting through again. I watch you want to go back to stereo, how wide it sounds. We can even maybe make this a little bit more mono sounding. You've got to be a little bit careful when you're adjusting. You can really skew with like the wideness of your music. But I just just a little bit down in volume now, I'm going to increase the high end on that. Another thing I'm going to do here quickly is I hear like my buffer under runs a little bit. Audio you can see 66 under runs, and I'm at 05:12 So let's put this to 1024. Sometimes it's what you got to do, especially for the bigger project. And again, like I mentioned, I am on an older computer, but it's good to know I still have some head room here in terms of if I really need it, I can still go to the 2048. Okay. In addition to that, you can even go triple buffer if things are getting really bad, which we will see once we get to the mastering. Okay. Because we still have quite a ways to go here. Clicking here, I see pro two, but it's actually three. I'm just going to go three. Scared me. And I was like, because we just did all that. Q I think I like it the way it is. I'll just leave it there. And then again, we can always fine tune it. Maybe we could pull back just a little bit. A lot of times when you do EQ, I find for myself that you can really wreck the sound than if you just didn't do anything at all. Again, let's just continue on, turn down a little bit. Still listen to the lead again, quite a bit of effects. Built the reverb, that's the delay. Let's cut the highs. Sometimes mod is powerful, right? Add some pitch weird stuff, some thickness to the sound. What we can do is instead of opening up plug ins, again, we can always just do it from here. Let's just limit it. Maybe here, let's listen to it in context of the beat. This one, I might pan a bit to the right when it comes to panning. Some people just go like only right and some people go only left. But I think what I'll do is I will just maybe pan a little bit to the right here. Turn down in volume a little bit. We can open up an E key on that. We've got some low end. Let's just try to cut a little bit of it. We don't want to cut too much because again, sometimes that makes the sound. We'll go to six, maybe cut some high end and we can boost the key a little bit. Turn it out a little bit, is that it could pull back just a little bit more and we can maybe cut a little bit more aggressive on the low end when we're cutting the low end, we can boost back up for a little bit more body. Because sometimes if you cut the low end it makes it sound thin, so you boost it back up. So without it, in this case, we are going to actually turn down the volume a little bit, is off and on. I can hear every single note really, really clear. We can turn down a little bit again. We can also send that to our sends a little high end when. Processing like this, we can actually turn it down in the mix. When I'm putting distortion and parallel compression, it's removing a bit of that transient. In other words, it just sounds super long sounding and that's something you got to be a little bit careful. This one, we're here, we will turn off the effects, pull back just a little bit again. This is the light mix. We then get into arrangement and then we go back and fine tune everything. Because when things are soloed out or in different combinations, we just fine tune it and we get to where we want. But right now we're just making everything stand out as is. Now we're onto this piano Sound Again, we can turn on this lead still, because you have to decide what is like that main chorus Sound, And then the other ones are just making everything sound full as a whole. This pianos crank it up. Let's again start with some distortion, parallel oppression. And I'm excited. Let's add some wideness on there. So on this piano, what I'm going to do, we're going to bring another mixer. Insert over. Okay, I'm doing that by holding out Alt and left. And I will go piano. And I'll paste it in here with the same color. So I'll go like a piano or something. Okay, And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to send it to the piano effects again. Piano is going to all of these sends piano is also going to the sub mix. Again, all of that stuff is going to the master. Okay, Piano is going to piano effects. And so what I want to do is really add tons of different things on here. Then what we do is we b***d it in, okay, for the fruity chorus. Where did that load up? Okay, just want to behind somewhere. Okay, the piano is going to the piano effects. Let's listen to it by itself. Quickly, increase the depth. Bring it back. And I'm just going to fine tune this here. I want wet only and we can find tune the crossover. You can put compression on here. But again, distortion is just another form of heavy compression to the point of distortion, okay? But again, what's happening is it's way too loud, so we pull it back, we get the benefit of body again. Let's go back to this distortion. Sometimes this is what it takes to get a sound exactly where you want. I don't know how it's going to sound, because again, I'm doing this all in context of solo, which is not good, but we'll get rid of that pitch and maybe we'll just boost up in the body and we'll put the EQ before all this stuff. Okay, solicits into it now. Then again on here I'm also going to put a fruity blood over drive. Drag it on. Sorry. Sorry. Very, very aggressive on the hundred. We'll go just a little bit, and for the exciter, I'm going to really, really crank it, so it's a lot smoother sounding. And for an EQ, let's just bring an EQ just to tame the high end a little bit. Let's just cut this a lot. It's just not as aggressive. So I get, I can drag this, pull it back just a little bit. Go to the actual piano and listen to the rever. Okay, so the pre delay. Let's increase it just a little bit. We're going to pull back on the mix a little bit soon with the high. Let's increase the mode for the limiter. So it's a 41. Let's just try to push it even harder. Less Deka, way more mix, less mod. As you can see, I'm mixing within the VST, right? Doesn't always have to be in the mixer kit. Save it, we will move on to the next sound. Here is the guitar. Let's just turn up in the mix, let's just add maybe some Baer bond wideness. We'll purp key on the bill. We'll sculpt it just a little bit in this mix, again, you can use the high cut, but another option is also your low shelf. Right now it's a little too loud in the mix. I'm only doing that just so I can hear it as I'm queuing a little bit. I might cut a little bit in the highs again, in our 2000, I guess 2000 Hertz is like where we can hear most aggressively, I guess as humans. Okay, so before it's not that it sounds bad, it's just maybe it doesn't stand out and it pops in an awkward way. And then with the EQ sounds a little bit more controlled. Okay, I can even cut a little bit more on the low end there. I can even adjust the Q if I don't want to hit more of the mids again. If you like it where it is, you hit Copy and then you can switch it between A and B. Okay. Right now there's no difference because we copied it over. Or if we go to B, maybe you watch, We go tighter, here we go lower to go a little deeper, maybe I think we need to just a little bit lower down before. So this could be too aggressive and that piano is pretty aggressive. Could turn up here from this piano, I might turn down the exciter. I think I'm going to pull back a bit on that distortion on here. I could just get a compressor, but in this case let's, yeah, I might just use pro two sometimes you can just use a limit. But again, I just want to be careful on how heavy the plugins are. Let's just look at the CPU usage of pro L compared to pro two because these are just things you have to think about. So what I'm going to say here, two test, okay, and then I'll be able to find it right here at the top, so it's a little bit heavy on the CPU. Let's open up, let's just go two test and I just want to see the difference. We're seeing pro L two at about seven, okay, is weird. Hard to see the pro two test play now. So we can see that Proc two is much gentler on the CPU, So I'm just going to use Proc two because we can get similar results. What I'm saying is I want to, on this piano that is very, very high in frequency, I'm just going to be very, very aggressive, very hard knee, and we're just going to tame it. Okay. Auto game. Okay, so these are these piano notes and the ones that are really, really loud. We are instantly controlling them by being extremely aggressive. We are at the point of limiting. And maybe on the guitar, actually, sorry. We will just open up an compressor and let's just kind of play around with something here quickly. So let's turn that guitar back up in volume, We'll make it just a little bit more even. Okay, again, I'm just using my ***** on my made keyboard. So again, let's just start with fast attack. Fast release is the easiest way to kind of start. Let's just go a little bit of a harder knee, turn up the volume, okay? Because I turned off the auto gain. This compressor does have an auto gain, so it will compensate, but I usually find it's hard to compare the before and after. Let's open the attack this a little bit and just be a little bit longer than that release. Having a lot of control over the guitar Right here, it's sounding very thin Sound and like we're just hearing at the high end. When I add the compression on again, just look here at the red line and you'll also see the audio. When I add it, the guitar sounds way fuller and more part of the beat. I'm not compressing overly hard. I have 1.5 ratio is again wat we can copy it and then now we can adjust the attack a little bit. Let's go a little bit more on the attack. A little bit longer release. Let's go very fast release and we are going to hear those tales a little bit louder or we should, but what's going to happen here is it's going to kind take over the rest of the beat. So if we have a much longer release, what's going to happen is after the guitar plays, it stays at a quiet volume, which means all the other instruments can stand out. But if it's too long, we're going to hear like a weird pump. So I'm going to bring it back a bit. This is why A and B is so powerful because you can go before and after. I like this right here. This is where I initially said it, so let's copy this over. And what I want to do is I want to have the release maybe just a little bit longer and we'll just move on. Okay, we're going to turn out that guitar down as a little bit. Okay, so now we're onto this lead. Sound. Now this leads on the right. Now this lead, we can do the same thing it's at. Let's type in the value. Okay, I'll try the same thing. I haven't tried it before in FL studio, it's saying 48% right? Let's try the same thing. We'll type in value. I'm going to say I think it was 48 right. So we're going to go 48. 48, right. 48 left. That's very cool. Fl Studio is an awesome music program. Okay, let's do a similar thing. I'll just bring the E Q over now. I could've sent these leads into one subgroup, and then you just use one E Q for both of them. But we're just going to fine tune it just individually just to keep things simple. This lead is also being sent to the sends, let's do the same thing here. It's just a quick and dirty way to add fullness to our sounds. Yes, it's making it a little bit louder, but it just makes it so much fuller sounding. I'm just going to try to tweak these to the point where it's not sounding so thin. Maybe it could just be the exciter that's making it sound thin. Okay, Got to turn it down in volume a little bit, okay? 18. 5-2 - Mixing Drums and Percussion: All right, so moving forward now, we're just going to finish off with the drums here. One thing I just want to quickly say is if you are mixing your instruments, a lot of times, a lot of mixing engineers like to also do subgroups for their instruments, and it does save a lot of time. In this video, in this course, I just did each instrument individually. And now we're going to focus on the drums, the claps, the high hats, and what we call the percussion elements. Okay, so let's get right into the drums. For the drums, let's just crank them up a little bit, let's hear what we're working with. Let's click onto the drums, it sounds like this. What I'll do is I'll just open up a compressor on here just to control them just gently. Okay, we'll just go very fast attack, very fast release. I'm listening for these drums, I'm just what is the main, what's hitting? I hear this rolling drum a little bit offending when it comes to this compression. I might maybe just bring this up just a little bit. This will just tame just the louder drums just a little bit. We're just going to keep them a little bit more even. Okay, we'll go back to the beat. Okay, we just got to figure out what's our main drum. I'll just work off of this first one here. Okay? And I will open up a compressor and an EQ on that. Okay, we have a single drum here, let's work on it really, really hard. Okay, I'm going to turn off the auto game. Let's crank it up. It could be a little too loud, it's just distorting, Okay. So let's compress a little harder so we don't even really hear it right. So what I've done here is I have molded the drum to be a lot tighter and we're really, really emphasizing that the initial transient and we're clamping down on the tail of it. Let's just save it as it is and let's just try a different style. Okay, so let's just do a different style of compression. We go punch, we're going to bring this up. And again, this is what I would do if I'm mixing my music. Just being really, really aggressive, trying different things faster on attack now. Much louder, open the attack a bit, Turn down that glitching I think is just auto saving. So is this sound bad off, turn away down? A little faster attack but before and after. Okay, so I'm going to like like this. Okay, for this drum, let's just see if we can play with some EQ. See if we can get something a little different. Let's just try a little on the low end. Okay, so we're going to turn off the auto game too loud. Let's put this before the compressor. And what that will do is the compressor will tame this boost. Let's copy this. I think I liked it a little bit lower. It's just going to give you a nice low end kick, crank it a little more turned down. Okay, let's just see if we can bost anything in here. Help cut through just a little bit more. High end on drums helps a lot. We're turning down a little bit here. Boost it up a little bit. Let me it a little bit brighter. We need to turn out a little bit more, go a little bit higher in those frequencies just so we can hear them. If we go too low then we don't really hear it except for like a sub, let's say 42. Okay, turn out a little bit, we'll just bot, actually what we'll do is on the drum bus we will open up an EQ here. And we're just going to boost the highs just a little bit on all the drums just to help them pop Just a little bit. We'll say from two K, 2000 in Q three, instead of typing 2000 you can two k. All right, come back here. I'm going to remove this. I think I like it just as it is. Just a little boost there. Okay, let's work on this other sound. So just going to kick control, hit my button. Going to get a compressor on there as well. And just paste this in here and get the same color Ok. Let's crank this one up again. Let's crank it, This one hits hard. Let's compress it super, super hard. Turn down, what we'll do is on the main drum bus, let's be a little bit more aggressive on our compression. Let's put that to like 1.2 We can go up just a little bit on our threshold. What that'll do is it'll allow us to be more aggressive on our drums. Our drums can pop through harder. Okay, on this knee, bring down, cranking up the volume. We're not hearing anything, so we're going to bring this back. Because my attack is so fast, I'm not hearing the drum at all. We're hearing a bit of the tail, but I want to be able to hear the drum. So we're going to open up the attack with my compression. Here I am, compressing way too hard because the drum doesn't have any bounds. Drums too loud. Cool. So without it turns a little bit more for this drum, it does have quite a heavy til I may just tame it just a little bit and we'll get a little bit more punch out of that drum around here. Okay, a little boost again. We are in 12 with these drums. Let's just be a little more zoomed in for your drums to stand out. There's different areas where you can boost. Again, you have your high end. This is like you click. Okay, here's a knock, Sound, knocks. If you do this it could become boxy, people say and stuff. But I just want these drums to stand out and I'm just going to boost where I want. I'm going to crank this. Okay. 1 second. I'm going to go to my settings here and I'm going to go to audio and I'm going to see if my underruns are still happening. So I'm just going to increase my triple buffer so I don't have to keep worrying about that throughout the rest of this course. Hopefully, listen without this EQ, the drum gets lost. I can try to put the EQ before the compression. Now I want to this drum right here. Let's listen to this one. Okay? So I might just open up just an EQ on that one. I don't need to compress that one. This one here especially, was like the main drum. And then that's like another kind of main drum. All right, This drum, we can maybe just tame the low end as well. Okay, We can kind of boost it like that and try to find an area where it's kind of knocking a little bit more but controlling the low end because we already have a lot of bass happening. And then we can try to find somewhere where it's kind of cutting through in the mix. All right. Okay, let's try in there. Let's play around with this so that our timing sounds a little bit better. If we don't hit our timing right, it'll sound a little bit weird. And so what I'm saying is when it comes to a drum, depending on where you boost in your low end, you can kind of affect the timing a little bit. Okay? So you just got to be a little bit careful when it comes to your drum. I just hear that this drum, it's just kind of hitting this a little bit weird. So I just want to fine tune that. Let's maybe listen to just the drums and the claps in the high hats, okay? Without it, maybe boost some highs as well. Okay, now we're on to this drum right here. It sounds just like this. It's a really, really round, so it doesn't really hit so much like a drum, it's just like a big sound. So I just want to find to maybe the EQ just a little bit on this. Maybe we can cut the low end as well, so that the other drum really cuts through in the low end. Maybe we'll cut a little bit here. Cut a boost in here. Again, maybe the other way round. I don't want to thin it out too much. Okay, so again, I'm just trying to get these drums to mold to where I want to fit the beat and it's kind of hard to teach, so just kind of just kind of follow along as I'm going along. Every track is different, so when I'm adjusting stuff, it sells just random. Okay, so for these drums what I'm going to do is I will send them to the sends here just a little bit on the distortion. This will just help even them out. Again, the exciter for the drums as well, just a little bit of high end, nothing too much. Okay, let's go to that EQ through this compressor. Let's copy this. Let's go just a little bit longer. I'm going to go 15. I'm going to open this up a little bit. Go to 1.5, maybe ten, and we'll increase this to 1.5 We'll make harden to Ne a little bit. I just want those drums to be a part of the track, but I still want them to hit hard. All right. Go up to 20, open up a little bit more, a little harder. Let's go to 1.75 Let's just leave it around there for now. Turning down a little bit, maybe a little bit more aggressive from the distortion, the effects. We'll bring it down a little bit. Okay, now we're onto the clap for the, let's just just hit control copy. Open up some plug ins, okay, all of these sounds are going into here. I'll hit B. We're going to turn off the auto game again. Let's just have fun with it for me, I always like to put a little bit of compression on different things. Don't feel that you have to use any of these for certain things. If you want to use mastering for this, you can do whatever you want. Let's try bus, turn off the volume. Let, faster attack ratio, harder knee turn up more, let's go heavily into it, open up that attack a lot. Just wait coming back. On the ratio. Let's pull the ratio quite a bit back. I'm hearing something when it switches between before and after. Because remember I have like a clap and then a snare. Okay, let's look into the snare. I like this one. Sound Right here I'm hearing it's got some body. It's making it sound dull. I want to take this and we're just listen to before 24. This snare, it's just got some muddiness in here. I'm just going to maybe cut that okay, before it's got some muddiness like that sound. And then with this, it just cleans it up. So I don't know how it's going to sound in the beat. But that's what I'm hearing when it goes from the first here. The clap. I really, really like this. And then when this comes in, it's just a little muffled, is what I'm hearing. Continuing a little better, let's brighten it up a little bit, turn on the volume. It's too much on the high end. Widen it. Let's maybe just do the mid, okay? Because sometimes these snares or claps can have like, you know, mono and wide content. Let's just do just the mid, turn down a little bit more. Let's copy it. I'll go down. Let's put this to minus ten, or let's let us sue my Crow bill. Let's go more. Let's make it wider. Crank it. Yeah. This is an important part of the track, like we got to get this right, you know, Let's do stereo let's, let's maybe emphasize it a bit, tighten it up more. This sound, I just want to tighten it up a little bit on. Okay? We want to tighten it up just a little bit, okay, For the E. Q, Grant the volume back, being too aggressive on this. And then we'll go to the mid turn down just a little bit again, on this clap, we can turn down the volume just a little bit without the effects. It's quite a bit quieter, but I'm just going to keep it. I like the way it sounds. And I'm going to send it to the exciter again for brightness. Just a little bit. Just little bit. I still want to be able to hear everything else, but it just adds a little bit of body to what we're looking for now. We can also try wideness on here, but it might make it too big collapse going here to wideness. Without it, I'm not hearing much of a difference on the wideness. Better copy the value and just crank it up just to hear if we can even hear it. Because the sound itself could be super wide too, So we're hearing it there. Let's just leave the volume up a little bit higher. And the collapse, we will bring it back quite a bit. Without it with it, collapse might just be a little bit loud. Okay, on this compressor, copy it. Let's just make it a little bit more. Because if we control the transient, the peak a little bit more, we can actually make it a little bit louder in the track. Okay, high hats. So same thing. Let's control seat. Hit my button on a mitty keyboard again, that just opens up a compressor and an EQ. And I'll put the high hats and we'll get that same color back. And now we have compression right away. Okay, so now we've got our high hats, we can actually hear them right. Everything was just a little bit quiet before, so let's just make everything super, super fast. And again, we can try a different style of compression. Let's go pumping, crank it up, the volume off, I like it. Let's try to open up the attack a little bit. And what it will do is it'll allow us to actually hear like the clickiness of the high hat. Do you hear that? I don't always start with compression like that, but especially for this course, you can learn a little easier when we just clamp down super hard and then you can kind of pull back. Because I just wanted to control the high hats. By doing this, I get to be able to hear the high hats very, very clear. But we're lacking the click. So listen to the click, you hear it cut through. It sounds more natural, right? But the thing is, it might be cutting through in kind of a weird way, like not in a musical way. So we can really be aggressive on that peak, on the transient. And what I'm saying by transient, if we go to a high hat, you can see that the transients like the very, very peak of a sound, okay, at the very, very beginning. And so on our attack, if we are very aggressive, we're clamping down on this peak. When we are gentler, we're allowing the peak to come through. Okay, a long attack is fast attacks, very aggressive. This is clamping down super hard on the high hat. I can hear the high hat, but it's not really musical. This here, the high hat is just cutting through in like a weird way. And it's also sounded really thin as well. Compression will sometimes thicken stuff up too. Volume more fair off things are cutting through. I want that attack a little faster. Increase the volume. That's the benefit of mixing with a Midi keyboard you can get hands on. You can do two things at once. Instead of the mouse only doing one thing. I'm going to turn the volume, it's off right now. Turn on. Let's open up the attack a little bit more and be a little less aggressive on that ratio, Okay? Now best practice really is being able to turn off and on the effects and not hear the loudness difference. You can actually just hear the difference before and after. And in order to do that, you got to, instead of making this 5.9 I would turn down the volume here and then off and on say, oh, okay, I can hear it, but right now I just like it was there like 5.7 or 5.9 or something. Then I'm just going to turn on the volumes just a little bit. We're looking up here again. We can come over here to our sense there's some distortion on. We can actually push them really, really hard this time. Try the exciter got to be a little careful on the high hat, could be piercing even though it's supposed to be smooth. They turn it down. High hats are cutting through. Nice, turn it down. Let's open up the EQ. Let's just see if we can fine tune that a little bit. This is the benefit of working with a subgroup. I don't have to work on the individual mixer inserts, I can just work on them as a whole. Then if there's a problem like with that snare, the snare here, I took out a lot of the mid stuff of it on the high hats as a whole. Let's see if we can enhance it. We can make it smoother or just cut through a little bit more. One of these high hats has a really clicky sound to it. Like that one? Yeah, that's the one that's clicky, so I just got to be a little bit careful. You can see it's right there. What I could do is I can open up an EQ directly on that, or I just can just avoid it a little bit with the bus. Again, this is the bus doing all three sounds. You can see that they're all routed to the subgroup. Hit play and we're going to see if we can get this high hat cutting through just a little bit more, just being a little cautious of some bad things happening. Okay, because again, it's not just one sound, now it's three sounds in this subgroup 123, and then this E, Q is controlling all three sounds. Okay, let's try a little over here more. Okay, it's more like in the lower highs, more like a shaker sound. Okay, so let's just play the high hats by themselves, Okay, so we'll click the high hats, play that. It's this sound right here, I think is being a little bit weird. So I'm just going to open up an EQ here and I just want to find what that offending frequency is. And then I'll try to do it on maybe the subgroup or even I already have an EQ open up here, but it's just my CPU open up, so many plug ins and I'm trying to maybe reduce the amount of plug ins at this moment. It's a limitation of not having a powerful computer. Okay. This sound right here, again, really cool feature of pro Q three is we can click here and you can do spectrum grab. Right now it is enabled, okay? And what that allows you to do is I'll display this. You hover your mouse right around the frequency, and it'll freeze it. And I can grab this frequency right there. Should have grabbed it. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to grab this and bring it down. So I'm going to turn off this auto game. Turn it off and on. Try one other frequency here. Okay, We'll try this one right here. I will grab this one right here. Okay, it's a little smoother I guess sounding. Let's just play the beat with it. Yeah, no, I'm just going to remove that EQ for the high hats. Maybe I'll pull the highs a little bit down and we'll open this up just a little bit. Okay. Drums. Okay, clap. Okay, turn on the clap a little bit. Turn up the drums and just a little bit the high hats. Let's bring them down a little bit over here in the send. Let's try to really crank up the exciter that might balance out, that one click hat a little bit more again, once we mix this track. Once we start arranging the song, then we come back and we fine tune our mix, especially after we listen on different speakers. This is the open hat, so let's crank it up. We'll hear it in a second. I hear this woodwind, I hear this woodwind could turn down a little bit. Right now, we are focused on the open hat, which is right here. This open hat yet louder. This is the problem that sometimes you run into, which is why it's nice to turn down your, your volume is much lower because this is the problem you can run into When all of your instruments start getting so loud, it's hard to get them to stand out. So I maxing out for volume. Cool. So now we've got these two sounds here. Let's just crank them up to see if we can hear them. Okay? This sound, we'll do the same thing. So I'll just bring this over to the sends, boom, boom, boom, and we'll see how it sounds. And it's just a nice way to add fullness and continuity with the track. Out on this open hat, I might add some reverb. Okay, this is why I have these. It just sounds a little bit out of place. So I'm going to click here to listen to that quicker. Go delay. Maybe add it all. Maybe no delay. Okay, let's listen to the drums. I'm not able to get this to stand out. Let's click into this sound and open up a EQ on it. Let's cut that low end on it. All right. Like that. Yeah, it'll sound a little cleaner. Then we can turn up the volume here, because again, like I said, I'm running out of head room to turn up the volume without having to get into plug ins, which is really annoying. Best practice when it comes to your volume is first you want your volume coming into the mixer, essentially like where you want it balanced, then in the mixer. Adjusting your volumes down lower will give you way more flexibility. Because again, what you're seeing here is I am maxed out for my volume, like doing stuff like this. And it's actually really, really annoying right now on here. Let's just crank this up, okay? And then I can balance it how I want. And then if I don't get enough volume, I can even come here and turn it more. So let's listen. Let's crank it up here. Crank it up more again, The compression is happening, and that's why we're not hearing yet. And let's turn off the game. Turn off, Okay, so we hear it better. Now, let's try to set our compression in such a way where we are just really enhancing it, right? Try a different style of compression. Too much ratio. The release, I'm going to be a much longer on it and the hold, I'm going to adjust the hold and what that will do is the rattling of the Cameron. We're not going to hear so much open up the attack so we can hear the click a little bit more. Come back here, I want to adjust the sample start a little bit, so I'm going to copy the value in case I screw up this out. I'm going to trim a little bit off the ***gth, so I want to get rid of this stuff. Okay, bring back the hold. Let's copy it. I'm going to be more aggressive. Be softer, knee, bringing up way higher off. So it's a much louder sound now. Right? That is because I went into here and turned up all the volumes. Let's turn down just a little bit. Okay, Turned back on. Just trying to find where it's just going to suit this track. It's pretty good there. Let's copy that. Let's bring it a bit down a bit. No, cool. Let's turn it down a little bit. What I'm going to do is I am going to put wideness on this sound turn down though distortion on this. Q. Let's open up the, I think we've got some body going on in here so you can actually see this late in there, right? So I'm just going to do a low shelf instead of a low cut. Okay, I'm just going to just tame the low end. We go tame the high end as well. And instead of boosting, let's cut where I don't like. Maybe we can cut the mid to make it sound wider off. Let's put it before the compression. And I'll be a little bit harder on that tack. Just trying to get the timing right of this put to an exciter. It might control the high end a little bit more parallel compression, turn down, this is sometimes why you need to compress so hard because it's just not going to cut through. Turn off the wideness though. A little bit of wideness, maybe just a little bit of re by itself, okay? Maybe just a little bit of re going on. Just subtle. I might just put distortion directly on to this sound. See how much different it sounds. Sometimes if the low end is sounding a bit weird, you can use it to pre band. It sounds weird. No. Okay, so we get rid of the distortion. Okay, cool. Now we're onto these bongos. Okay, so what I will do is we will go to dynamics. And I'm just going to put a free limiter on there just for extra gain. Just I'm running out of volume. And again, I don't want to go through each individual one because this one, there is a balance in between them when I adjusted their volumes. Okay. So I don't want to really go in individually and adjust their volumes because by the way, I mixed it already just gently when I was making the beat. This one I kind of like the balance, right? So I don't want to remix that balance. I just want to take all of the bongos and I want to boost them. So I'm just going to take a free limiter. I'm going to put the ceiling all the way to the top. And we're just going to crank it and we could turn it down now. Okay? And then, so now we can start working off of this. Okay? The reason why I put the ceiling at the top is so that we're not doing any limiting. I just purely want volume. I don't want to do this too much because I'm not going to have too much control on the threshold. Let's just, let's be very, very aggressive and the knee, let's try, maybe very, very hard just so we can really, really control these bongos. Okay, so what we will also do, let's try one more compressor on there. Again, we want these bongos really, really cutting through. We'll go higher on the threshold for this time though. We'll limit again. Let's turn off the auto release. When you have a release on, sometimes it could be a bit of a slower release I think, like always, but it's more like controlled and more natural. Whereas a manual release, you can just put it super, super fast so that you're just cutting off the peaks. The audio sounds super, super consistent. Now for the Q on that, turn it down here like that little, let's see what it sounds like. This sound, this sound like within it. And then on these bongos, I think I'm just going to cut the lows a little bit on that as well. This sound right here, this sound, very aggressive sounding. Again, we could just use the EQ of FL Studio. We got to listen in context of the beat though. Here's the song, let's do wide. Then over here we can maybe do mid for more like the bongo slaps. Let's try to crank these up again. We have not done our sends. Let's just add that to the sends. And again, that's going to really even out our audio for us. Then we can turn it down quieter. Cool. Now one thing we can do here on the Bongos solar out here, we can pan just a little bit. Turn down still. Same with this one, just a little bit. Again, you can, just to make things sound cool, you can pan as well in here. But I usually like in here, it's just nice and visual so you know exactly what you previously did. Let's listen to the whole beat. And again, our metronome is already done. We can fine tune it right here. This tambourine we are going to turn with an. Let's get one more EQ on there. Cut the low end a little bit on that. Maybe we'll just do this here. We'll just cut the highs a little bit. This will just make it a little clearer sounding. I can't even hear it again. When I click here and move the most up, we should be able to hear it. Listen to it. So let's listen to it myself. So maybe around here I'll turn it up. Okay? So let's listen to it without it, So we're kind of being too aggressive on it or we could just turn off the auto game because that kind of skews the frequency spectrum in a different way. Grab it, bring back, try it out again. Okay, we'll leave it there. These bongos I think are too loud. Maybe this one individual sound. Let's make this bigger. And it's this sound right here, I think. Okay, so let us bring this down in volumes a little bit. Okay, so I will leave the track here. The next video we will just do a light master. So what we will be focusing on is the limiter, a little bit of compression, a little bit of slight E Q. A lot of times I might not Q because I'm the one mixing it. E Q is usually useful if you're listening to someone else's music and you want to kind correct it. But sometimes it's nice where if I listen to the track, let's say export it. Put it on like an ipod, and then I listen from one song to the next. And it's like, oh, do you want that track? All it needs is just to be a little bit brighter. That's where I'd come to the master, add an EQ. And just again, in mastering, we're just doing very, very subtle brightness and stuff like that. In the next video, we will look into the mastering and what that is is just loudness. Okay? We want to make sure that it's loud. We want to make sure things are clear and everything is kind of consistent. We don't want things too dynamic. In other words, we don't want some sounds really quiet and some sounds really loud. We just want to have a nice cohesive track. And that's where mastering will add that polish and like that shimmer to your music. 19. 6-1 - Overview of How Mastering Works: All right, so now we're into mastering. Mastering is probably my most favorite part of making the beat because it's where you really get the final look at the track. Now again in this course, I went mixing, mastering, and then we're going to do arrangement. And again, that's just so that everything is sounding really, really polished. And then when we arrange the track, I'm not going to get distracted in terms of oh, does it sound good, or oh, it's not loud enough. Then if anything is distracting, I can quickly go and adjust certain things. For example, let's say these claps come down, hero hit play. If there's a problem with some of these layered claps, I could always come in and just adjust them individually. That's the benefit of being able to mix and master within one project. Okay? All right, so I first want to talk about a mastering chain. Okay? So if you're just going to be making your beat, typically you will have the master bus. But again, all of my inserts are going to what we call a sub mix. And then from the sub mix then it goes to the master. The reason why this sub mix is going to be here is when we get into mastering, typically we want to have our levels at a spot where we can really control our music. If our music is so loud, going into the master it we have nothing to work with. Okay. Which is why I can just do turn it down here on the submix or even on the master track. You could always open up a gain plug in. A plug in that is just affecting volume, it's not affecting anything else. For me, I usually like to use the fruity limiter for that. I know people might use like the fruity balance, but the fruity limiter gives you more control over gain. Okay, you can see you have way more boost and cut. So what I'm trying to say is if you were mixing your music and it was way too loud instead of coming into all these individual mixer inserts. Because now, you know, we've worked hard to get a balance. If we are going to go and adjust all these individual sliders, all the inserts again, we are going to mess the balance of our mix all the time that we put into that. So what we can do is again, on our master we can just open up again, plug in. So I know it says the fruity limiter, Let's just say gain plug in. Okay, so now this is again plug in. So if I hit play here, let me just go song mode. So hit play. So we can see that if our ceiling was at zero, you can see some limiting is happening. So I would turn this down just a little bit, and then that way nothing is going to be too loud. So that when I get into mastering, I am having a sweet audio spot, okay? Because we are in the digital world, We have the power to be able to do stuff like this. So a lot of times you will hear people talk about gain staging and it has to be perfect. All your volumes have to be just right, going from one plug in to the next. Sometimes it matters, such as if you're using analog plug ins, analog emulation, in other words, if you are sending too much gain or too much volume into those analog plug ins, you will get distortion. But everything here that I have done is just all digital stuff. So in other words, we can boost tons, we can then turn it down later and we're not going to get distortion That happens more in the analog world. Like if I'm talking with the microphone and the mixer, if you push it too loud, you're going to get distortion right within FL studio. And I'll share this with you just if you've never seen this before, let me just clone this one. And I'll just go test drum. We'll do Red because that's the color that I don't like in FL studio. Because again, Red's missing files in FL studio. Let me just do this, okay? We have test drum and it's going to 51. Okay? Now, watch if I take, let's just say this EQ, and I'm just going to just use it as a gain. So we crank it up. Okay, and then I come here to another one and we will just crank it way down. Okay, this one, let's say the boost, and this one here will be the cut. All right, so boosting, boosting. Volume cutting is cutting. And so if I hit play right without it, make sure there's a little bit of a volume difference but we're not hearing crazy distortion or even if I crank this up so you can see that I boosted this one by 18 and then this one by 18. And I come here and turn it down, right. The thing is when I turn it off and on, it's a volume difference. But if I play it here, I'm not hearing really any distortion or anything like that. And we have cranked it up tons. So if I were to send this audio, so it's going to be really loud and the reason it's distorting is because it's coming right in here into the master. And then even if I click in here so you can see that it's actually hitting the ceiling at whatever. So what I'm trying to say is, don't worry if your volume is way too loud on the mixer inserts because in the mastering stage you can simply just come here and we can turn it down the watch, right? Do you hear distortion on that kick drum? No. And that's because the ceiling, We are driving the ceiling. All right. So what I'm trying to say is don't worry about being perfect with your gain staging. A lot of purists out there are really, really stingy about it. In other words, like you got to get it right. But as you're seeing here, it doesn't matter so much unless you're using analog emulation plug ins. But best practice is to make sure that you are kind of hitting a nice volume for each plug in. Because if you're pushing too much gain in, for example, let's go back to the master. If I'm pushing too much gain in, then the volume will be going right up to zero all the time. Which means I don't really have much control with my threshold. So I want to make sure that I do have a sweet spot for the volume. That way I can actually use the plug in as intended. And it's not all kind of weird. All right? So by following best practices, you are going to get the benefits of working normally. And I just wanted to share that with you, okay? For example, if I hit play. So you can see that right up here we're at zero, right? If I increase the input even more, I wouldn't even be able to use this compressor because it's just always at zero and it's just starting really, really bad. Okay, But again, this is why I can have this sub mix where I can simply just turn it down because watch hit play. You can see that the volume is a hit zero, and I don't like that, so I'm going to bring it back just a little bit. So let's say 3 decibels, maybe again. Let's look here now. We can actually use our compressor as normal. It's not hitting zero or anything. I think I'll just leave it here for now. And then we will fine tune it together. Okay, how it works is all of our audio. So this one here, these inserts are all going to the Bongos. This is called the subgroup. The Bongos is a subgroup. And then what happens is it comes into the master. Okay? But in my case, how I have this set up is it goes to a submix, then from the submix to the master. And again, the reason I like to do that is because I want bongos to be process totally different. So I can process the super hard. I can remove it from the submix and put it just directly to the master. All right? And that just gives the flexibility of doing whatever I want in terms of subgroups, vocals later on. And that's the power of a template. Okay, all mixer inserts go to the master. This is called our two bus. It's our left and our right stereo file. Okay, In mastering, we are typically being very, very gentle in our effects such as compression, EQ, multiband compression. You will see me use a clipper as well. I really like using a clipper. And then usually our very last plug in is a limiter. Okay? This is called our mastering chain and you always want the limiter last, okay? And at the moment in the industry, the output output can also be called ceiling on a limiter is minus one. That's just what the industry trend is. In the very, very beginnings when I was starting making beats, a lot of people would go like -0.1 Okay, so the -0.1 and then some mastering engineers will go -0.3 Nowadays, most common is minus one. The reason for this is because when you convert from this project to an MP three, there can be distortion in that conversion process. And that minus one of gain just gives a little bit of extra head room so that you're not getting any MP three distortion and stuff like that. Okay, Again, a lot of the stuff is super, super technical, especially when you get into the mastering side of things because this is the official file that you're sending out to the world. Right. Okay. So all audio comes into the master. We hit it up with a mastering chain. For me, I would typically do some light compression. I would do some multiband compression. And that's just going to help even things out a little bit as well. And then I like to do a clipper as well, and then I will do some limiting. One last thing I will just mention in this video before moving on, because in the next video, I actually just want to get into the mastering with you. Nowadays, there is loudness, LUFS, mastering levels have drastically changed when it comes to measurement. Audio measurement, there's been RMS, there's been those VU meters. But nowadays what's happening is LUFS, it's all based off of how our ears hear frequencies. Because when we look at frequency chart for hit play, our ears hear frequencies at different loudness. And I guess around two K, supposedly, our human ears are most sensitive to two K, They say, again, that's more of like the real science kind of stuff. Lufs takes into account frequencies for loudness when you are mastering an album. Let's say you have one beat two beat three, beat four. You're going to have different instruments, different drums, different sounds. Lufs is really powerful in that sense of being able to measure from one track to the next. Okay, You're going to be able to get a nice, fair volume comparison if you don't have fab filter. You can also get the free uline loudness plug in. Okay, I believe it's still free. It's called the uline loudness meter, I think. I'll just quickly talk to you about these three settings. Okay, Integrated is more for broadcast. Like if someone's running like a radio station or a TV channel or anything like that. What Integrated is is it measures literally the whole song from beginning to end. If I highlight all this, and I'll just bring this over a couple of times. So it would be measuring this right here. And if we listen to it, it'd be much quieter than the rest of the song because it's just the piano playing, if that makes sense. And then here it's really loud. But then maybe later on again, we get back into a quieter part of the song. Maybe like the verse or something. So what I'm trying to say is integrated isn't really a good choice for mastering your music. That is what these streaming platforms are playing your music back at. Okay, but we still want to master our music where the song itself sounds polished and balanced and just sounds really good as itself. And then the streaming platforms, whatever they choose to play your music at, they can play it at that, okay? Right now this LUFS stuff is still kind of new to the industry, so things can change over time. So what's most important is that you master your music in the sweet spot so that your music is always sounding good if someone cranks it or turns it down for themself. Okay, For me lately, I have just been using the short term when it comes to mastering my music. The short term is a little bit more accurate in my opinion. And I think it's over like three second period. So if I hit play here, so what should be the number you're going for? It depends the style of music that you're making. Like if it's dance music or rap. But around maybe A -11 minus ten is kind of a sweet spot. And when you're new to making beats, that might be a little bit hard to achieve because you might start hitting distortion. So that's the reason why we need to compress our music, limit it, and use like a clipper so that we can get up to that loudness without causing distortion as well as the peaks. Okay, I really like showing you the fruit limiter because it shows the peak. So visually for you when we're mastering our music, the thing that's in the way is the peaks of the audio. Okay, here we go. So you can see that these peaks are what is going to cause pumping in the music. If I just crank this up and turn it down, do you hear pumping? Then I'll turn it off. It sounds way more normal and natural, but now the pumping is going to happen. That's because the peaks are going over. Especially if our attacks very fast and our release we're going to, it's just going to sound super smeary and pump and just like loud and just not musical. The fruity limiter, in my opinion, is like a super, super aggressive limiter and it's really hard to get a nice master with the fruity limiter. If you use the pro L two, you will just hear it's just way more natural sounding and you can push it really, really hard without that pumping. But again, just look at these peaks. It's these peaks which is causing the problem of our music. Okay, so our goal is to try to control our peaks. And how we do that is when we are mixing our music, you saw me using a lot of different compression. And that's just because I know when I mix my music and when I go to master my music, I have to compress it so that the peaks are more controlled. Otherwise, it's going to be way to what we call dynamic. And then it's going to be hitting the limiter super hard and I won't be able to get that loudness that I'm looking for without unwanted pumping and distortion. So if we compress and control our instruments going into the master, it just makes mastering a lot easier. So which means that if I'm using a compressor or a multiband compressor or even a clipper, everything is just shaving off the peaks gently, where the average person is not hearing any weird stuff and you're just getting more fullness, more excitement, more energy in the music. Okay, again, that is what we are trying to control and mastering. We're trying to bring down our peaks so that we get a nice, awesome master. All right, and the Fred Limiter is really good to visually see and learn. You now understand, hopefully. Okay, so again we have our audio. The peaks are going to be what's in the way of getting loudness. So we want to control those peaks and we do that through compression and clipping and limiting. Okay, so in terms of the short term I like to use this and again that -11 minus ten, maybe minus nine around in there. Because if you are quieter then when it comes to like let's say cell phone speakers or you know, earbuds, they're going to really have to crank up their volume. And it's nice that if your music is a decent volume, a decent master, that when someone turns up and down their volume that they have control on how loud to put your music. And when you're mastering your music at that -11 to minus nine. So hit play when you're mastering the music from a T -11 to minus nine, your music typically will sound very, very balanced. Nothing's really going to be too spiky. Nothing's really going to pop out to you in a weird way. Because when it comes to mixing our music, especially vocals, if you do not EQ the vocals right, they can sound like they're sticking out of the music in a really unmusical way. Almost as if like the vocals don't suit the song. And when we have E, Q, that's really what we're trying to do. We're trying to get those vocals to sit in the mix, right? So when it comes to mastering, we're just to level everything out so it sounds really musical and full and energetic. Okay? And then the last one here is momentary. This is just like super, super quick. And for me personally, I don't really find it too useful when I'm mastering my music. I just look at short term and then again, if I'm mastering from one beat to the next, I'll kind of look for that sweet spot. And then even though it's at like, let's say minus ten and I go to the next beat. Sometimes it can be a little bit louder or quieter on the other beat. Especially when it goes to different parts of the song. When I'm from one beat to the next and you're trying to get the volumes the same so that the listener doesn't have to change the volume up and down. Then I might just go into each track and maybe just reduce it by 0.25 you know, right here. So for example, if the gain is at one, then maybe it's like, oh, well, do you know what this track I need to put it to like 0.75 or something. And then maybe the other track, oh, maybe it's only 0.5 This track right here, maybe it needs that 1 decibel. So in mastering it's just very, very subtle moves a lot of the time to make it so that because again, for myself, I create my beat tapes by gratuitous series. So which means that if there's ten beats on that beat tape, I need to make sure from one track to the next that generally the volume is pretty similar and nothing's weird from one track to the next from the listener's point of view. Okay, Again, in this course on the limiter, it's our very, very last plug in, It's at minus one. I usually use the short term to use for my loudness. And then we will try to get to that sweet spot of mastering with the pro L two. We have a couple options here, you can go small and it allows you to view your audio in a different way, like this. Again we can see the peaks. Just like in fruity limiter, I can hold down Alt and up at the same time. If you look down here, you can see the out is moving at the same time. But you can hear the L two. I am getting tons of limiting happening, but we're not really getting weird pumping like we were getting from the fruity limit. The pro L two is a super awesome, transparent limiter. I'm not saying that this is good, but I'm just sharing with you that we can push it really hard and it's not too noticeable to the average listener before. This is way more dynamic. But in mastering, we want to polish off that audio. We don't want to be this dynamic. We want to control a little bit more and listen. I can pull back a bit bit heavy or maybe like five. Again, I'm holding down Alt. Look down here. At the same time as I'm going up and down what this is doing with the pro L two, I'm able to hear the audio at a fair volume comparison, which is super important in mastering on Alt. Again, it's just kind of getting like those peaks. We will make a separate video going step by step from beginning to end, but since we're just kind of talking about all this kind of random stuff about mastering, you can just see quickly. Let's go up a little bit more. Turn off, listen to like that drum, especially even like the clap enable it a little bit more, it's going to be too much. You can see this, but again, if we were compressing and clipping a lot of these peaks could be controlled for us. All right? And we can do it in maybe more natural way then If I was happy with this, I would just double click this sco binus one. You do it that way. Another way you can do it is in the L two. You could just click here. And then when you turn this up and down, it will give you the number that you're looking for. Again, with this enabled, it's the same thing as holding Alt. Essentially, it just saves you a step. So for example, if I enable this, crank it up. It's giving us a fair volume comparison. Right now, a lot of limiting is happening. But it's the one to one. And as soon as I remove this, it keeps our minus one, so it's going to come really, really loud. If you're listening, like it doesn't sound overly bad, I do hear some distortion happening, but it's a balance sounding, so let's put it like seven again, compression, multiband compression. A little bit of clipping, we'll get this track sounding very, very polished. Okay. Okay, so let's put this back to one. And then again, so quickly, a mastering chain, how it works is you can do some single band compression. We call this like a mastering bus compressor. The thing when it comes to a single band compressor in mastering is you do want to make sure that you are selecting a compressor type that isn't like super, super aggressive. If it is super aggressive, you might have to do much longer attack times. But for the A filter models here, like the clean and stuff like that, they are very, very transparent. And even like an attack like this, your transience like the collapse and everything can cut through very naturally. You'll even notice even if you are being quite aggressive, the pro two really is a very clean compressor. Then again, EQ, I would just be very, very subtle and typically where I would be using EQ and mastering because I have made the beat, I've mixed it, and now we're into mastering. If I was working on my beat tape series where there's multiple beats on that beat tape, if I go for a bike ride, put earbuds in, and I'm listening from one track to the next, and all of a sudden I hear that this track right here is just way too dull. Or maybe it's way too bright or I just hear something, it's like, do you know what? I just need to cut some mids out of this track. I would come here and be like, okay, do you know what? I think maybe around here, 0.75 and then that would be what I would do for the EQ because I just hear a difference from track to track. All right? And it's just a nice, easy way to do it on the whole rather than just an individual instrument. But the power of mixing and mastering in one project is if I'm on that bike ride, and I hear that one instrument, and it's just the one instrument I'm hearing that's causing the problem. I don't have to go to the Master. Q I can just go to that instrument. And again, many times, if I've mixed the music and I like it exactly as it is, I would come here and I would open up a new EQ and start from fresh. Because the thing is, I already like the way the sound sounds, now I'm opening up a new EQ just to adjust what I heard that I didn't like. All right. It's a really, really powerful way to work. The next time I go for a bike ride, I'm listening to each track one after another and all of a sudden I think, yeah, do you know what that's the fix that was good enough. And again, I fix that, maybe on the single instrument rather than on the master. And again, that's the power of being the producer who does the beat, making the mixing, and the mastering. We can fine tune as we go, wherever we need to get into, we can do that. Okay, so quickly, a clipper. How it works is it's like a limiter, but from my readings it's like it has no attack and no release. So in other words, it's like instant. And when we deal with compressors and limiters, the attack and the release, what it's doing is it's actually turning down the volume. So it creates like a pumping sound. It's actually turning it down to prevent distortion. If something's too loud, it's actually turning it down. And if we are being very aggressive in our limiting, it might be like, but it doesn't come up in time and that's how you're getting that weird pumping sound. A clipper on the other hand, because it's so fast, it's literally just shaving off the peaks and you are just getting loudness. Now, I like the classic clipper here a lot. This is the older version. The newer version I think it is. Just like a new skin, a new GI guy graphical user interface. In other words, how it looks, it's just been updated And yeah, it's called the T soft Clipper. The reason I like this one so much is because it has a soft Ne and a hard knee right here. And you can compare like this. This is how easy you can compare. You have to hit copy two and then you just select what you want. And then let's say you want to compare A to B. I'll quickly let you hear that before we get into the mastering chain. Yes, see what was happening was our gain isn't loud enough. So if I go to like a, the softer knee again, if you remember on the pro C two I was sharing with you when you have a hard and soft knee. So let's just copy this over. If I go hard ne, very, very aggressive and we'll go into more zoomed out again that hard knee. How it works is when it comes to compression and limiting. Audio actually has to go over, let's say, -18 If the audio goes over -18 with a very hard knee, then compression happens. If we have a bit of a softer knee, what is happening? You can see that compression is actually happening before -18 This line is actually -18 Okay, so if I go all the way to hard knee, this is -18 but you can see that compression is actually happening before -18 Okay, let's go back and what I'm saying is here on the clipper, it's the exact same idea. If I have a very hard knee, the audio has to go over that very hard knee. Whereas if I have a softer knee, we are going to see the audio much sooner. Okay? So this is why that we're seeing the audio here on a very soft knee. If I go to a hard knee, we won't see the audio. We actually have to turn up the volume. Okay? Soft need, only the peaks are being clipped here. We're getting more like the body of the audio without it. If we go to the pro low two with the clipper, you can see that not much limiting is happening. Because it's clipping the peaks and it's bringing it down. I turn it off. The reason why is just because it's louder. So let's just turn it down a little bit. We'll go like minus two off. Let's actually be more aggressive just for you to see what we can do with this. Okay, I will go minus four. Turn on, we're distorting. Turn back. Still distorting. Let's just put this up a little bit, maybe a little bit less still turn up. Okay, Before and after. Okay, so first of all, look at the wave forms. So the way form right now it's off. Look at the way form on the limiters. So this would be the actual waveform that gets exported. Okay, now I'm going to turn on the clipper and listen to how much more, louder and more energetic it is. But look at the waveform, right? It's about the same in terms of its peaks, about just as loud, right? Look, those peaks are about just the same. But the thing is the valleys, the valleys are much deeper and when we are using compression or clipping, what's happening is the valleys are kind of coming up and we're kind of chopping off those peaks. So again, look at like the valleys in here. Okay, so turn on, those valleys are a lot tighter, which means that our music is actually louder. But again, the problem is that we are affecting these peaks pretty heavily. So it's just going to be a lot more even. Right. Our valleys are up higher, which means our audio, which is more polished, louder. We're listening on earbuds or on a cell phone speaker. The music is just going to cut through because it's louder, it's more even less dynamic, but you really don't hear too much of a difference. Like it's not like it's wrecking the music. But now we're getting more into a little bit more of like a mastered sound by chopping off these peaks. Again, some distortion is happening, especially when that drum hits, we turn it back just a little bit of. Okay, again, let's wrap up this video because I just wanted to talk a little bit about how the audio goes into the mix. Okay, all your inserts would go to your master. In the case of this project, all inserts are going to a sub mix, and then from the sub mix it goes to the master. The reason I have that is just so that I can turn up and down the volume here. And again, if you remember earlier on in the course, I put a single band compressor on the submix so that I can turn up and down the volume and it's not going to affect the volume going into the sub mix, right? So watch if I hit Play. You can see it's all around here. Watch if I turn down, it's still compressing even as I'm turning this up and down. Okay. Whereas if I had the compressor on the master, and if I'm turning this up and down, the audio going into the master is going to change, which means that the threshold isn't going to be accurate. If I was turning this up and down, that's why I put it on there. Now one thing to mention is I have a compressor on the submix and then I have a compressor here on the master. So I'm not sure the approach we will take. We'll talk more about the mastering chain in the next video, as I start adding the plug ins and as we start adjusting our volume and working our mastering. But it is not rare to see two compressors and mastering. Sometimes what a mastering engineer could do is they might keep a threshold up high to do the peaks. And then they might have another compressor that would come down lower in the body and have a much gentler ratio. Again, that's just taming the whole, having a little bit of control, add excitement in. And then sometimes they have the other compressor and then the other one might just be hitting like the peaks of the audio. Just for example, when the drum hits, it's just controlling that a little bit more. Okay, okay, so let's get into the next video. Let's actually get into the mastering. 20. 6-2 - Mastering a Beat Loud: All right, so again, we have mixed our audio, it is all going into the master, in my case, it's going to the sub mix, and then to the master. And again, just so I can turn down the volume a little bit so that when we get into our mastering chain, it's just not too hot. We can kind of control it a little bit more. Okay, so what I'm going to do is let's just remove this EQ. I have a single band compressor, I have a multiband compressor, and for me I usually like to create four bands. And Prom B, it'd be something like this. Okay, I just attach them like this and then we create another one. But for me, I already have a template created and I'll share that in just a second with you. How I approach this is I highlight everything. Which means that all my adjustments I just do to all bands at the same time. For example, if I highlight these right now, I can adjust my ratio. For example, let's say we put it to like 2.57 Let's just say I click this one, you can see it's 2.57 We click this 12.57 so when we highlight them, we are affecting them all. And this would just allow our audio to be about like the same kind of naturalness. We just get more control when the compression is needed in the certain area. Okay. It's just about maintaining like a balance of the track. Nothing's really too loud or nothing's really popping. And I'm just going to click here and I'm going to go to my template. Okay, once I hit play, we will fine tune this. Now the order that you are putting your plug ins in does matter, but I don't mean it matters in a way of right and wrong. What I mean is it just matters in a way that just be aware that if you put one plug in before another plug in, you are processing it first. With this, then the audio is going into the single band compressor. If I put an E Q first and did some EQ, that audio signal is now going into the plug in, that's after it. Okay, so we call that Signal Flow, or in this case a mastering chain or a vocal chain. It's just called signal flow. All right, so I think I might do the multiband compression first. What that will do is it will help balance out the song in its own way. Very, very gentle. And again, multiband compression, what's happening is each band is compressing independently of another. Whereas if we go to a single band compressor, even if the high hat goes over this threshold, it's turning down the volume of the base. So it's like this. Imagine the audio is playing. It's kind of going like this, like boom, boom, boom. Where we come over here, what will happen is you can see each band is able to be turned down by itself. In other words, if the very, very low end is too loud, then it might get just a little bit more reduction. Each area is able to compress its own way, which means it's not going to be as noticeable to our ears. But we just want to make sure that we're not wrecking the audio. We just want to control it, okay. Again, that's what a multiband compressor will do for us. I just highlight it and then I will adjust it all together at the same time, single band compressor is just evening out the track for me. And again, you can always play with different styles. That's what I usually like to do, just have fun with it. The classic clipper, you already saw how that worked. Again, let's reset this so that we can start from scratch. I usually find anywhere around, maybe every track is different. But sometimes it could be like ten or could be up to maybe around here. If you really have had. I find that you're getting like loudness, but you're not getting like the body of the music. I find the ad here, it just feels more musical. But you're controlling those peaks a little bit. Then again, on the limit, we have that minus one, I am on short term. We will then try to adjust for our final loudness. Okay? Okay, let's just tip play and let's get into a mastering chain. I'm just going shut, vowing a little bit. Okay, so the first thing to do is let's look at the limit. And you can see it is 17. I want to boost this way, way louder. Again, we can start from the sub mix. Let's just bring this right back up all over to the top. I do have more head room on the insert, so let's just crank this up even more. Again, this is why I actually like this one. I like the compact one, it's just a little bit smaller to see. I'm just looking for this right here. Ore again, I'm looking for that. -11 two minus nine. Let's turn this off and on. Okay, what I'll do is on the mastering chain, let's just turn these off for now and then we'll add them in as we go. Okay, let's actually start with the submix here again, in mastering, just to be careful, could be loud on your ears. Let's just turn this off and on. You can see that we're getting distortion happening with the compression off, way too loud, right? Again, the reason why we were so much quieter is because I had all of these plugins on, shall reset it, and now we're going to get to that volume of what we were looking at. Again, let's turn these off and we're going to turn on the sub mix a bit. Again, I'm looking for that. -11 to that minus nine. Saw this reset. It's nice to start at a volume. At a loud volume, and then you work it into what you want. Might just go just a little bit louder. When I'm doing this, I'm holding down control and my scroll wheel. Fine tune, just a little bit more. Or you can hold down control and click right to get more fine tune. Okay, let's just start here. Let's open up this compressor. Let's just go before and after. Let's copy, let's bring down the ratio just a little bit. We will do a little bit of compression before we get into our mastering chain. Might be a nice way to get more loudness, Let's just be faster on the attack. Now I just want to stop here. One thing to mention is depending on the style of compress you're using, your attack and release settings will be way different. I'll share that with you. So I'm going to go copy. And I think like pumping is aggressive. Watch this and we'll go four to one. You hear how aggressive pump is? I'm going to go to B again. We'll go four to one. We're hearing compression. Way too much compression is happening, but you can still hear it. Still sounds pretty musical. If I go to this one, you're going to hear it's just like so much heavy compression is happening before. What I'm trying to say is on the, we can have a much faster attack because it's a much cleaner sounding compressor. If we go to a pumping, we might need to have a much longer attack again. Maybe our ratio has to be way less because it's so aggressive. Let's put this like 12, let's say this one's pumping again, we get the same threshold, so they're both at 17, and let's put this to 2.5 And we'll open up a little bit, we'll go like 515 before this is much louder. And the reason for that is because it's much less ratio. Let's turn it off. Let's turn it down just a little bit off, the submix. What I'll do is I will turn up the volume here. Let's go at three. Turn it on, sounding pretty balanced. Another thing to quickly mention here, if a sound feels like it's too loud in the mix, but once you hit compression, it can really start evening things out. In this case, I want this pluck, I want that to be like the main melody of this chorus. Right? If I turn off the compression, I was just hearing that the pluck can almost sound a little too loud. But again, once we get into compression, limiting all that stuff, those loud sounds all of a sudden fit better in the mix too. So I'll come here, I will enable it. It's not enabled yet. I have to enable it here. It just becomes more even in the music, but we're getting a lot of kind of pump against stuff happening. So let's try to like a faster release. Let's try a little bit longer attack were 14, maybe just a little bit less ratio, like 1.2 With a less ratio, we can have a faster attack. So let's go ten. And again we're just trying to control it. Let's go like the clean, right? This is way too much compression happening again. Let's go much faster release. So let's go like, let's say five. Might have to open it up a little bit as well. We'll go seven, Let's go like 1.5 off. Okay, bringing back a little bit. Three again, our threshold could be maybe a little bit too deep. So let me put it like, let's go 14 and let's be a little bit more aggressive on that ratio. Go 1.75 off this lead this one right here. I'm going to open this up a little bit. I think I might just cut a little bit, I might put it a little bit higher in frequency on the distortion. I might pull back just a little bit. Okay, so I've been back to the compression. I think I like the pumping and I'm going to just go a little bit less on the ratio because again we're going to get into into the multiband compression which will even a lot of things out for us. So put 2.5 and again, I just want to speak before and after. I might just go a little bit. We'll go 7,121.12 Okay. Turn a little bit more. 2.15 A lot of this is before and after. Before and after, off and on, off and on until you get to like a sweet spot where it's sounding balanced and polished. No weird pumping. I might go up a little bit. We'll go 15 and we'll go 1.15, we'll go 15. Try five, let's copy it over. Let's just go like, really, really fast. We'll go like two and then go back to 12. Switch before this knee. Let's maybe make it just a little bit harder. So we hit more of like the peaks, not the total body. We'll go to like maybe 48, we'll go 40. It can be a little bit more aggressive, so 1.18 a little bit loud going in. Let's just bring this all way back to here because we're at nine there. When the drum was hitting, I was just hearing a little bit too much distortion. This might be like a little sweet spot here. Just a little bit more gain going into everything, okay? I'm just going to save it. Okay? Again, I'm keeping that limit open just to keep an eye on our loudness. You can also see we're getting a boat minus five of reduction, only like they really, really loud parts of the track. Once we get into our multi bank impression compression and our clipping, we'll be able to control our peak a little bit more. That drum will still hit hard, but it won't be the distortion. Another alternative, Myco copy, we can use more. Look ahead so we can put this to like one and we'll get less distortion but it won't be as loud. I'm just going to put this back though. Okay, let's open up the multi bank compression now. Again, we're going to highlight all these. The threshold is way too low because it's just always compressing. What this is going to do is it's going to allow each area just to shave just a little bit off. And we can go to a more zoomed in scale. Again, we can put this to like 15, again, like 15, just very quick. Maybe a little bit less here. Got ten, we'll go like 1.151 0.5 Now the prom B has a range ****. In other words, we can limit how much compression we want to happen, which is really, really powerful. In other words, we can go a little bit lower into the threshold, but just limit how much compressions can happen. In other words, it's always going to get a little bit of compression. So let's just copy over. We'll just go a little bit lower. A little bit higher again. We also have that knee. A harder knee means that we're just going to get more of like the peaks and then softer more like the body of the audio. Let's go a little bit faster. Don't want to squash it too hard. Bring us a little bit off. We'll put the attack a little bit more. Let's just try as much longer attack, 50, need a little bit longer. Release 15, and we can be a little bit more aggressive on our ratio now that not much compression is happening. Very, very fast. Release five, listen to the clap. I think the clap is not standing out and everything is being a little bit too smeary. The clap is sounding way better here. Okay? I will go much less, 1.25, Let's down the range a bit more, or what we can do. We go a little bit more in the body. We just go, I think that might be a better option for like 2.5 and more aggressive. Again, this is only 1 decibel, right? Ogle minus two on the attack, 25, let's say. Let's copy it over. Let's go longer release, 25 off, let's go very, very fast release, let's try to just hit the peaks. So again, harder knee. I'd go louder now so as to 1.1 leave you a little bit longer. If we have too long of an attack, we're not clamping down on the peaks. And there's a balance between allowing the peaks to come through, but if we allow too much of the peaks to come through again, such as like the drum, we get distortion and stuff, Let's try to put this to 15 and then our ratio will go down less like 2.2 So you can see that this is always being put down here. Might go up a little bit, maybe like five. Let's switch between before and after. Let's turn up, we're going to go up a little bit, we'll go like 1.2 This does not sound good, I don't like it. We're going to really, really tons of weird pumping going on. Let's copy it over. Let's try a little bit of a softer knee. That way we'll get a little bit more control over it. Maybe not as much pumping, a much more gentle ratio, 1.25 typically in mastering like we are dealing with like 1.15 and stuff like that. With this release, what I was finding is a two facet release. The instruments are coming up quite a bit, and if I have a longer release, everything is a little bit more. I can hear all the different instruments a little bit more. If we have too long of a release, nothing's going to come back in time. Okay? Right. So everything's telling pretty smooth. I can hear all the different leads. I can hear like the pluck, I can really hear this sound. Okay, we'll move on to the next sound here or the next plug. Again, mastering this is just usually how I would go and then as I'm listening from one song to the next, then this ones being compressed too hard. And then I adjust, we work on it now and then you come back with fresh ears like another day. And then you. You might pull back. Like I said, I usually find for myself, I'm usually too aggressive the first time and then I will pull back. Okay, so we have another compressor on here, this one. Let's try to score into the body. Very gentle. Now, a really cool feature of the pro two because when we are mixing and mastering our music, there is the drum, there is the snare and the bass, which are typically like the loudest parts of the song. And that can be triggering the single band compressor here to be pumping with the whole song. And if you hit the side chain, you can adjust to remove the low end a little bit. Now this isn't actually like removing the low end, it's just what the compressor sees to compress against. In other words, that drum and the snare is probably in this area. It's not going to be triggering so much on that. Which means that more of like the instruments and the smoother elements of the music, it's compressing against that. You're going to get maybe a little bit more smoother compression, especially in the mastering here. As you can see there here, this is like the bass and like the kick. So without it turn up though, let's copy it over. Let's a little bit more attack with like a 0.75, Try a little bit longer release, like 15. Open up the attack more. Maybe I can pull up this a little bit more. We'll go like 22. All right, so let's look into the clipping now. Let's try to play around with some of the soft and hard knee settings here. Okay, this sounds not bad. As I'm adjusting this here, if I'm going to be turning it up, typically I would come down here and turn it down by the same amount of. So we're still getting some distortion over here. Try a little bit more. This could just be just a little bit loud, pull back maybe 8.4 again, this is the benefit of being able to mix and master in this one project. Might be clipping is a little bit hard, so go back and back -1.7 again, we can copy this over to A. Now let's try to do a softer knee in this case, because again, a softer knee, we're digging more into the body. We might not need as much gain reduction. Let's put this like 0.7 and I'll come here go -0.7 Again, this is why I like the number pad as well, the number pad in addition to using FL studio, but also just typing in your numbers into plug ins. This sounds very clean, very polished. Able to hear that drum pretty good. Maybe 1.5 and then -1.5 We'll pull back just a little bit, big more to the body just a little bit. Usually, I don't like it at 12. I go maybe anywhere from maybe like minus eight to overhear. Let's just drive it a little harder. I'm hearing distortion, okay? I'm just playing around with things. Over here, I'm losing that piano a little bit. I do like it around here, so pull back a little bit. Again, quite a drastic difference in volume. And that's because I'm a big boost here, we've got to compensate now 2.5 boosts and -22.5 boost doesn't mean it's going to be the same volume on and off, we have to listen. But again, look at the gain reduction. We are at about minus five. Minus six is where it was. That's a little heavy for a limit. Okay, we might not want to be that aggressive. Let's turn it on. So we're getting to like no gain reduction. Now it's all happening in the clipper and we want to balance it between both might go like -1.5 goes to minus one of 0.5 I can reset it here again, remember -11 to minus nine, we're a bit on the hotter side of things, so again, I can kind of compensate. I'm just trying to get a nice balance, kind of master. Okay, I think I like it around here. Okay, we'll stick around here. Us go -1.2 Now we might need to bring it up just a little bit here. Okay, watch, we can come back to the small and we'll do this. Okay? We are at that minus nine. Let's see if we can bring it up just a little bit in volume. Let's go like 2.5 Let's go to, what we'll do here is we will copy it over. Yes we are a little bit hot, but let's just work with it. A little bit longer attack that might make the limiting not as still, maybe like 300 and we'll go a little bit faster release, we'll like 250. We can also do a little bit more look ahead which won't cause as much distortion when we're using a tool like a limit. You've got to be really careful because you are affecting so many different elements of the song. We can be affecting the drum, we can be affecting the snare, we could be affecting other elements. But mainly the drum and the snare are the two elements I listen for as majesting this limit right now. If I go a much faster at tack, we got to listen to the snare. Okay, The snare is just being squashed, super hearts. We're not really hearing any like that spikiness. Let's open up the attack now. Do you hear how the snare is now? Back now, the only thing here is maybe the snare and the drum could be popping out of the mix in a weird way. That's where I'm just going to try to balance this attack, where I'm controlling the snare without really wrecking it. But I'm still getting like a nice polish. Okay, we'll leave it around there, Save it. Let's look at our chain, so no effects this right here, maybe we're just a little heavy on our compression. I might just go like 1.15 Open up a little bit, we'll go like 13 for our gain, we'll go to 2.05 Now I understand that this is on the sub mix right here. Anything that we're doing here is going into the master, which is affecting our mastering chain. But I'm just going to control it a little bit more. On the multi bank compressor. Let's just copy, I like the way it is now. We can just fine tune it. Maybe just a little bit more. If we go to school a little bit faster release, we'll go like maybe 45, 24. Just a little bit of a softer knee. So 28 et a little bit less ratio. So 1.3 23 instead one, maybe let's go like to 20 and we'll go down to six. The reason I'm thinking that is one of those drums when it's hitting it's just a little bit distorting. And this might reduce the volume so that the drum doesn't distort and it can absorb that heavy hit I saw before. Let's go less release five, a little bit more eight again. Just because it shows eight, that just means that it can go down to 8 decibels of reduction. Okay, we're still about 1 decibel gain reduction. Because again, we're on scale three back here. Look how little it's moving, right? Coming to 12, still very little, moving six. It just looks like it's moving very heavy because it's quite zoomed in. Let's try much softer. Knee, we'll go like 36 again. Always play around with things. That's why I like to do the AMB. So let's call more. Let's go at 15 forward back to what we had. This might give being, compress this a little bit more, but I am able to hear everything pretty smooth. Let's go to 25, let's go to 20 of, let's go before. Yeah, I like this. And then maybe let's go a little bit more on the release. Okay, the clipper, you can see we are doing a, it might be a little bit heavy, so we just got to be a little bit careful how much gain that we're driving in because just because we're not getting gain reduction all the time, that's okay. The whole goal of this is to the super loud parts of the audio so that when we come here, we are controlling our peaks. I'm liking it here. I'm just hearing some distortion a little bit on some drum hits. But the thing is the average person really wouldn't hear that distortion too much. It also might cut through better on certain speakers. When we have distortion, sometimes distortion makes things sound like it's hitting harder. Okay, so let's go to see again, once we get to mastering, you essentially just have to choose eventually, but when you're just working on a single track, essentially almost anything goes. But a lot of times you do want to do what's called a reference track. A reference track is mastering your track and then comparing it to the reference track. Maybe like one of your favorite commercial songs from a professional release that has been professionally mastered. You can just kind of compare your master to that in terms of loudness, EQ, balance, all that kind of stuff. A couple of things I don't like about reference tracks is some people actually try to mimic the reference track. And I understand that you don't want to stand out in a bad way with your music, but at the same time you got to adjust it to how you want. But if someone listens to the reference track, to your track, you don't want someone listening to your track and thinking like, oh, there's something really weird with your track in terms of volume, in terms of like EQ balance or not enough base. That's really where the benefit of a reference track comes in, just to hear because audio is a little bit different than something like graphics that you're drawing. Audio, it's like we have to hear. The thing is if you keep listening to this audio isolated, which is what we're doing right now, we don't really have A reference to what another song could sound like. We can get so used to how it sounds right now, but all of a sudden you go in your car, you listen to the music, then you listen to your beat and you're like, oh, my beat sounds really weird in terms of the E, Q, that's where the reference comes in to think so that you can kind of tweak and adjust. It sounds more like the reference track, so it's not sounding weird. But sometimes I find that people use the reference track not to cheat but like to cheat if that makes sense. But reference tracks are super powerful. You want to use them so that your music does not sound weird in compared to someone else's. But again, you just want to learn it yourself as well. But again, like I said, when it comes to audio, it's not like graphics. When we listen to audio, we kind of think that this sounds good. But as soon as you hear another song that sounds really good, then you'll know, okay? Yeah, I got to maybe tweak my low end. Has to be tighter or it has to be louder or stuff like that. Okay, so again, I'm hearing that distortion on that one drum hit. A couple things that we could do to fix that is we can come to the drums, we can open up either a compressor or a limiter. We can just go compressor again. Very hard ratio, very hard knee. And so what we're looking for here is the loudest drum, we're just getting into very loud drum, that's causing us distortion. Because remember this is just the peak and that is being brought down a little bit cool. I think we have fixed our distortion problem with the drum. And again, that's the benefit of being able to do it all in here. Finally, let's look at our final game. So I'm just going to copy this over. Maybe we'll go a little bit more than 550 and we'll go to like 1.5 maybe we're just a little bit loud. Let's go faster attack, let's go 400. Same with the release, so there you go. So that is hopefully our master again. We can, after I would export this and listen to it, then I would fine tune it when I'm listening to the other tracks that I've mastered. That's just a little walk through of how I would approach it. Again, I'm not a professional mastering engineer at all, but that's how I would approach my mastering every single track is different when it comes to the plug ins I use. But typically I do like to use a multi band, single band, a clipper, and a lima. It just allows me just to polish that mix how I want. And if you can get really good at understanding these tools, you can have a pretty weak mix and really enhance it in mastering. But when you have a really, really good mix, the mastering just becomes a lot easier because you're not really trying to fix anything in the mastering, you're just enhancing it. Okay, so let's wrap up this video and then we are going to get into the arrangement of this song. 21. 7-1 - Arranging a Beat [Part 1]: Okay, so now we are into the arrangement. Now, in my opinion, the arrangement is actually the hardest part of the song because what's happening is you've made a beat. Most people can get to the point of making a loop, right? We have a couple of melodies and stuff, but the arrangement is where we are turning the beat into a song. To me, that's like the hardest part for a couple of reasons. Number one, it is really draining, okay? It takes a lot of effort to try all these different combinations, and really the arrangement is what takes a good beat into like an amazing beat. All right, so hopefully I can get the arrangement sounding good in this track. This could be a bit of a boring video for some of you you're just going to watch Be Arranged this song, it really is just trial and error. Trial and error. And then again, later on we get into audio painting, which is listening from the listener's perspective and adding in sound effects. When we're transitioning, if we go from verse one to the chorus and then from the chorus to verse two. When we are transitioning from verse chorus, typically you always want some type of transition. A reverse symbol to a forward symbol or a snare roll si***ce is even a type of transition, and we'll talk more about that as we go along. All right, so the easiest way to start an arrangement is I'm just going to hit Enter on the playlist. Hold down control, right click, all right. Makes it nice and big and easy to work. I will just drag everything and you can just press control and, and then you can see it's duplicating. You can do it that way. I will just delete here. Or what you can do is you just hold on shift and click, but you can see it slower. So I'm just going to do a couple of times. Okay, now what we'll do is let's see if we can just create some type of intro. Okay, we can maybe try to do this as like a filter. We can filter the actual intro. Then what we'll do is we can remove the metronome, they remove the bongo. Some people like to get really organized. When it comes to the arrangement, they like to put like time markers in. I don't work that way. I just know generally by visually seeing where I am. Also a quick thing just to cover when it comes to the arrangement is usually for myself. When I make at each beat is different. So sometimes we have an intro. Sometimes we can start with the chorus, which maybe we'll try here, but it won't really be the chorus. It'll be like a filtered chorus. And we'll try that as we go along here in just a moment. But usually a really powerful trick is you just tease the chorus near the beginning of the song. Let's say you start with verse one, then you go to the chorus. You don't play the full, big chorus, so you might only play it, as you can see, this is 8 bars here, maybe you might only play it like this, like the chorus. Okay. Yeah, all these like a delete. Let's say, not the pluck. Sometimes you may want to just play the chorus just like this. And then you would go into the verse because this teases the audience. All right, so if you play the chorus too long, too early, you have kind of given away the excitement of the song. Okay, so let's say we come in from a filtered chorus. Don't worry, we will do that in just a moment. And in order to do that, we go to the mixer. I would go to like the master, open up an E Q, and then we filter it. And I'll let you hear it since I'm already here. So this is what the filtered sound would sound like. And we automate this, it'd be like this. So let's stop. The very intro of the song could be like this, right? And it's building up. We can even do something with the Q and then you could do some type of effect here, like a tape stop, and then it would go into the song. Okay, We will do that after once we get into it. All right, so we have our chorus. Let's just say like a filtered chorus. Now we're going to get into figuring out what, what are our melodies. This plug I think is the chorus will remove that, the base. Let's just try to remove some of these. We can maybe add them in back here after we're going to have to select these in the right order because some of them don't mix and match by themselves. Just remember that it's all about finding the combination here. Okay, so good. We're just going to keep trying to find what sounds good. One thing to mention is the lead here, these two leads. One is kind of panned left, one's panned right. So for me, if I was going to use these most of the time, I want to play them together just for balance. It's not kind off centered. Let's just mute this one. Turn off the woodwind. Don't sound too bad by itself. Let's try it with just this one now. We will try and play a bolt together. This lead three, I'm just going to turn down just a little bit more. Okay, I'm going to remove this. So again, it's just all about about finding that combination right here. We'll make a break. Okay. So he we, we'll remove that. Okay. I'm going to hit six. Come here to the lead. I'm going to bring back the reverb on that a little bit. It cuts through a little bit better. I want this lead again. This is where the keyboard shortcuts come into play. And I'm on full screen here. It's taking over the whole track, and if I hit Enter, it's going to keep making everything all over the place, I keep this big. And then the keyboard shortcuts F nine for the mixer and then six for the channel C for this lead. I want this lead to pop through a little bit more. Again, we're all in the same color. We have lead. I know leads right there. Nice and easy, but it might be a bit loud this guitar, so we'll bring it back again. So we did mix for the chorus, but now I'm just fine tuning for the verse and then we adjust as we go. Okay, let me try and pan this a little bit. Makes it cut through. I also don't have any sense for this instrument sitting with the piano. Let's lead, let's add some. Have to be a little bit careful on how much high end. Come back here to F six the lead. I think there's some slap back might pull back on the release just a little bit, tighten it up more, sounding better without the reverb. So I'm going to pull back quite a bit. And again, this is where I am still mixing and mastering as we go along to make it work for the whole song. Okay, let's go back from after the filtered course. Maybe we will remove this pad. It might be a little bit too early and I think the pad might be just a little bit loud. Okay. So I'll bring it back just a little bit. Try no base drum hits pretty hard by itself has a lot of fullness to it. We can maybe add that in a little late. No, too early. I might just keep that going for a little bit. So I have a guitar. See what we can add in. Could you go to this steel guitar? I can't really hear it, so I have an EQ on there. And again, I was a little bit cautious on all the plug ins I was opening. But now that we are done mastering, I know that my computer is able to handle this pretty good still. Let's compress this steel guitar, Be more aggressive. Okay. So I'm listening for the steel guitar, this one right here, okay? And I'm just going to hit tab to bring that back. Let's emphasize those transients a bit. T her knee, don't worry about super, super aggressive. I'm just looking for the sound. I'm going for again, we're going to come back just a little bit more. I'm going to copy this over. Let's try a different style like punch. The release might help smooth it a little bit of it. Could just be that it's just too quiet, just in general. So let's crank it up a little bit and then here on the sands, I'll make it more even sounding again. Again, still mixing a little bit as we're going here. I feel it's a little bit muddy sounding. So again, I'm going to open up another EQ. It's just kind of not cutting through in the mix. So see you sound a little bit better. So without it here it goes. Then bring some more brightness in now. Okay, put before the compressor. No, I think I like that. Okay. I'll be less aggressive on the ratio. A little bit more control, okay? Just looking for just control of this sound. It might be a bit loud now. Again, anytime you are adjusting your ratio, just always go back to adjust your volume balance Again, if we listen to this off and on F nine, okay? Let's hit six as well. A lot of effects and stuff on there. So I'm just going to pull stuff back a bit. And same here. Let's go to the effects Turn off ensemble. I might pull the wet back just a little bit. It might sound a little bit too wide. Okay. It might sound a little bit cleaner as in the beat. Let's listen to it here. We're going to turn up though, it just needs to be compressed very hard. So I don't think that I'm applying enough compression turned down a volume of it. Okay. So I was just trying to get that steel guitar to stand out so that as it goes throughout the song, we're actually hearing it better. We'll come back a little bit more. I start back from the beginning to give a perspective of like where are we? Does it even sound good? I'm not sure on the base. Maybe here F nine pushes up a little bit more. Okay, so we have 4 bars, 4 bars, 4 bars. So I want to make it to go into here. And then this I guess will be like the chorus. All right, so let's try this lead, come back here. Okay? Just kind of like rushed, so we'll start from here. Take out these bongos. Let's put these bongos like in the chorus. And then maybe in verse two we can play around with the percussion more. Maybe the high hats will take out a little bit and then we'll build up again, F nine, pull back a bit if you're listening. What's happening is like we have no chorus. It's building up. And then the chorus just happens. But we need to figure out what is really driving this track. Maybe we'll take out the piano. That sounds a little better. A little bit different on this chorus. Let's go six, and that's 13, so there's the pad. Let's go to the effects. We'll just add an effect on here. Let's add a little bit of chorus. Let's listen to it by itself. If you saw what I did, I clicked on pad. And what that's really doing, whenever I click any of these, it goes to the pattern, right? If I click pad, I know that the pattern is focused. Which means that I could just come here and hit play if I'm in full screen. And if I click here. And if I click pad, let's say I can go to Pattern mode and I know that I can listen to pad. Let's go back to hitting Tab to get up to Nexus again. It's all but workflow. When I'm working really fast here, I just want maybe a little bit of movement. I find that the pads is a little static. This might just add just a little bit of what I'm looking for. Let's get a different sound. Maybe a phase, subtle, little slower. Okay, let's go back to the beat. And as you can see, when I clicked into the play list, it changes. For me it's a workflow thing. I clicked here to solo out the pad again, we want to be careful about mixing and solo. And then now it's time to go back to the beat. The workflow. Click Play verse one. We need to add one little extra thing in there. Try maybe the steel guitar. Get rid of that piano. May you play it only on the chorus? See, we're getting a little bit more build up, but it's a little bit slower. So which means when this chorus comes in, take away that bass maybe. And then what we'll do here is where we can fine tune it, so the bongos, let's get rid of those as well. Metronome, We can get rid of the metronome and tell the chorus maybe. Okay for the drums again, you'll see me zoom in a lot like that. What we can do here is we can take the drums and we can chop them up a little bit. You just got to watch close as I do this. This is the drum, this is the drum. I'm going to bring it back, and we will go boom, boom. And it will be a sound like what I'm going to do is, because I know that right here is where the fourth bar is. Hold on Shift and click to duplicate it. Bring it over. And what I'm going to do is I'm just going to bring it over like this and we drop it in. Sound like this. Then we will also get the clap. Maybe what we do is we remove the clap there like this. All right, And then in the song now, same thing. We can chop it up like this if we want to. Same thing here. So there is that hat sounds a little bit more like a chorus now, right? So let's just say I'm happy with verse one just to keep get moving with this video. I'm just going to duplicate this over. We'll do it twice. Let's get rid of these leads. So I'm just clicking to restart. Let me just get rid of the metro and the tambourine, maybe the open hat as well. So let us do it like this. Again, just this slows down the song. High hats are usually pretty aggressive. They're very, very energetic. Take away the bassline, take away the pad, can't really hear this woodwind have a lot of distortion I think. So I'm going to pull back a bit on that and we can turn up the volume though with the Q again. Let's open up one more again. Once I have the sound where I generally like it, I like to open up a new EQ just to start fresh. I'll just do this just to cut out some high frequency so it's not so aggressive. This might make it just sound thinner and just cut through again. I'm mixing a solo, so be careful. Let's go back to the mix Wideness. Let's add a lot of wideness on this sound. Get rid of the strings, maybe we will get this piano playing with it. Let's try to add this piano back in. Let's try it right here. So let's try just this because that's kind of like how I originally made the beat. And then everything else is kind of adds on top of the piano, maybe no base. Do you hear how now I'm kind of working with the percussion. The percussion is actually adding to this progression. I, I think, I like it like this. Maybe no metronome. Could we just be a little bit loud still. But when this tambourine comes in, I'm really hearing it. We can maybe do that and then keep the piano going in here. Let's just fine tune it. I think this guitar, I just got to compress it a little harder. I'm going to go copy. So that turning a way up. So without the compression, the guitar, I wasn't hearing the body. Okay. I was just kind of hearing at the peaks of it. So without that, without it kind of just getting lost. Open up just a little bit more turned down. No bungles yet. Bongos may be course only try to lead in here instead. Okay, cool. And then what we'll do is same thing here. Everything here we can remove. And what we'll do is from right here, we will copy all this. Okay, control. And it goes right here. Okay, so in other words, we are doing a similar boom, boom. This is just a rough starting point, so that once we get into more audio painting, it will add up. Again, look at the time. We're about 2 minutes, right? So typical songs about 2 minutes, 3 minutes, 30 seconds. Do we continue? Maybe not. Okay, so again, let's remove the metronomes, remove the high hats. Maybe no instruments, I mean, no drums for a bit. The pluck sounds just a little bit loud still. This piano will get rid of maybe the woodwind. Okay, we can add the drums in there, just maybe quickly like that. Bring it back in. So what I'm struggling with here is figuring out what is really like the main element of the song. Okay, because some songs are super easy, that's just like that's the main element. Then you just add things on here. There's a lot of different ways I could take where I'm going. So it's just about creating consistency and then build up, trying to know base a little bit better. That base really does take up a lot of space in the mix. Us louder, this woodwind, maybe we can put it over here a bit. Oops, that's the effects. Like I said, I want this pluck for kind of like the chorus. So again, combinations. Okay, let's try this then we can maybe start cutting some things out here for the build up. Again, si***ce is a big part of our transitions. I will do the same thing here just to bring it over. We can work off of it after time. Maybe no hats, maybe the metronome will help, maybe emphasize the drums because it's on the one. And this might line up pretty good because we're almost going to go into 330, coming up here, 3 minutes, 30 seconds. This could be like a fade out. Okay, so let's go back to, let's just start at the beginning, let's work off of that filter. So I'm going to come back here to the master and I push m middle scroll wheel to rename a plug in. You can also give a different color. So let's go a green. Okay, And I want to go high cut filter, okay? So high cut filter cuts the highs. That's usually how I like to think of it. Nice and easy to understand. And so we start off the beat like this, so go back here, let's go lower. The thing is if you go too low on this filter, you're not going to be able to hear it on certain types of speakers. Okay, so we want to make sure of translation go a little bit higher now. I'll just copy it there. Let's go a little tighter. Let's go 36. Let's just try it. Do you hear distortion happening? Kiss was too aggressive, right? So you're hearing the distortion? I'm hearing the distortion there. So what I'm doing is I'm just listening for what I like before I create the automation clip. That's not too bad there. I can try this one as well. The thing I'm going to go with, this one, is gentler and there's not going to be as much distortion happening. So what happens is we play this at certain times, all right? So this filter is only on when we want it to be on. What I'm going to do is just going to hit Safe. I'm going to right click and hold, okay. I'm going to right click and zoom into this area. I'll hit Tab to bring that back. Then in the case of a third party, plug in an FL studio, I can just right click here. Sometimes VST three versions allow you to right click to access the menu. If you can't, then you just got to move the **** and then you come to Tools and last tweak and then you can see this is the band one frequency which is this. And you can just go create automation clip. All right, what did that do? That's what we just created. Okay. So what we'll do is if I adjust this like this, right click to make a point, you're going to see that as the song plays. Okay, that's what happens. So what we want to do is we want to bring excitement into the music. And so if I drag right now, it's because it's like this. If I'm in slide, you're going to see that this end point moves, okay? So I don't want that, I do want to disable that right now. And I just want this, so I want it to just kind of build up like, so you can even right click here and you can get different curves. Like if you want a different kind of single curve. So if I bring it way down, it might just have a different type of curve. I'm hearing that distortion. So let's bring it up a little bit there. Let's try a different curve. All right, another one we have here is a double curve. This could be a good time to use it, maybe something like that. Because I want to bring up the song to a point of excitement and then tease again. You can create different bands and you can do stuff like that, but then it gets really, really intense. I'm just trying to make this as simple as possible, off of as few bands or as few points as possible To create a point, you just right click. All right, that might be pretty powerful. Let's bring it over a little bit. I will remove this point here. I will bring it right up. And then we'll make this the double curve. Okay? Something like that. And I will hit F nine. And again I'm going to write click in here. Again, what I'm going to do is on the mix ****, right click nine, I'm in the mixer. Here's the high cut. I'm going to bring it all the way down the mix **** and I'm going to right click and create the automation clip. And it'll create it right below it. What this does is we actually have to turn on the filter. Right now, it's the double curve. I think the last point you used to keep remembering that you can either do single or hold is pretty powerful here as well. I'll just do this then we'll right click here and bring it right down. Sometimes it's nice to filter it out. I'll just go single curve and this will be a single curve, okay? So sometimes it's nice to smooth it out. Not just instant off, but we'll listen. Okay? So I want you to watch the mixed **** of the high cut filter. What I've done is I've automated it first from zero. It's going to instantly turn on. Okay? This filter will do its thing, depending off of this band, one automation clip, and then you're going to see that it turns off. Okay? And this **** will be off. If I hit Player right now, it'll be on now. Watch this **** right here. All right, so now I get got into the track again. Here is the filter from the beginning. Look, this is what the filter is doing based off of this band. One, to increase it a little bit. I want nine as well, okay? The filter is going to totally open up fully and then it's going to turn off. So this is okay, even though we're seeing it, this is not doing anything to our mix anymore. Okay. So if we ever want to use that again, all we have to do is just copy it over. We can do something like this. You can come here now and you can write, click and make unique. And you can do things in a different way. So let's try to do this again. Okay, so watch this. I'm going to write click and make unique. All right, And then here I want the slide to actually to be enabled because it'll save me some clicks. So watch this, okay. And then here, let's, so if I click and hold on shift, I can't go up and down. So let's bring this over until we get about here. And maybe we'll just remove this one in this case. And we'll try this. Okay, so maybe too much. Maybe here. And would you like this? This is getting into like the audio painting now, preparing the listener. Let's bring this over again. Again, it could be like transition out. Now in this case we're going to click and go make unique. Again, we're going to make this one smaller. Okay? I'm going to write click and go smooth. Or sorry, I'm going to go single. Then I'll click and I'll make unique. Because if I don't go make unique, what would happen? It would be like this. Okay, Watch both of these. You can see that they're both moving. And that's not what I want. If I go make unique, it's essentially, I have a whole bunch of automation clip stuff going on, but I know that each one's unique. And then I'll just keep it in the same area. I don't have to worry about recoloring it or relabeling it, that stuff gets really intense. I'll just keep it in the same area. So I know that these two kind of go together. And I can do something really, really fast like this, bring it up a little bit. So that's the super, super subtle stuff that makes a beat sound way more professional just at the end. This is actually getting there. This isn't actually too bad. I was struggling with the arrangement a bit. Okay? Maybe we'll just take that out right there when I'm working in a beat or bar. Because if you remember, I talked about this before, Sometimes it's a little bit tricky if you want to chop things up. I might go to like a half a beat. With half a beat, I get more fine tuned control. Let's just look back up here and I don't want the whole thing. Maybe just a little bit. A couple notes. We're going to bring back more or this again. Let's just bring it like this. The hats, maybe we'll do the same thing. Just like that. Just near the end, maybe no clap. I can maybe try to bring the clap in. Just in the last hit. This is where you got to fine tune. Because when it comes to the arrangement, like you have to listen to this over and over and over, and it's just the way it goes. Okay, so you can see I screwed up here, right? I did not clone this. So what I'm going to do is I got to right click, make unique. And then I got to bring this over. Okay, so I screwed up and that's good for you to see that that's what happens when you don't go make unique here. Let's start from the beginning. Let's listen to this. I made a point around here before and I made it double curve. Let's make it the other way. If you're working with these automation clips, a lot of times I do go control and right click and zoom in them, on them. And it just allows me way finer tune control. Now when it comes to your automation clips, some people, they might want to put them way down here. But for me, I just kind of put them wherever it's easiest. And right now I'm working in this blank area, which is like a perfect spot for them. One more time, a little bit more. Maybe we can add the piano in here like this. I'm going to do this now. Again, remember I'm in that half beat beat. Let's bring the piano back in on this piano. I think it might be a little bit too bright, actually. Another thing too is that it's not being sent to the sends. And sometimes it's just as soon as you start adding all the other stuff to the sends, they are sounding more full and more even. And then the other instruments are not not to say that everything has to be sent here. And you don't want to be using this as a crutch. You want to mix your music, get it to where you want, and then this helps polish and get everything a little bit more even. Okay, so let's just b***ded just a little bit with pianos. You got to be a little bit careful with distortion. Distortion is super, super audible with piano, but other instruments like guitars, a lot of times you can get away with like a lot of distortion. So let's just kind of play around with that. Again, like I said, I think the piano was just a little bit bright. It might be just a little bit too much. So I can maybe b***d between the distortion chan down a little bit. All right, those effects. Get rid of that. Or I'll just put it near the end. Okay, let's get rid of that maybe, and maybe the instruments as well. And then I got to go back to what I was doing on the piano when I work by myself. Like sometimes I'm working, working, working, get sidetracked. But I know I got to go back. So if you're watching and I'm all over the place, it's just the way it goes. All right, maybe here it goes. Let's listen to the beginning of this. Maybe I'll try like this instead. Here's the same drums, it's just great out. I'll do it so you can see it better. Let's try this, okay, And then we'll put that in. The only thing I don't like about that is it doesn't have the hard drum at the beginning. But again, let's listen to it. Yeah, I know, but again, you don't know. If you don't try, what I'm going to do is delete that. What I was hearing here is I think we just got to remove melodies before it goes into the chorus. Okay, it's a bit more like this. Maybe this guitar will go maybe the strings as well. F nine to the mixer. This distortion, I'm going to take out some body, okay, Make a little thinner sounding. Okay, back to the piano now let's open up a new EQ on it. Again, look how many more plug ins I'm opening up. But again, that's just because now I know that the tracks almost coming to an end, so I can push it a little further. The biggest thing to test with your CPU is in the chorus. If your computer can handle the chorus with all the instruments, all the percussion, all the plug ins, because essentially this is where everything's happening. Then you know that your CPU can kind of handle the buffer size that you set, which is really awesome, no wonder runs a max do on triple buffer. Okay. Again, I am on an older computer. If you were to get a computer in 2023, your computer would be way more powerful than mine. So you shouldn't have to struggle. However, depending on the plug ins you're using, which is why I spent some time talking about Nexus and stuff, right? Like I have a huge project going on, Fabfilter plug ins aren't overly too CPU hungry either. And look, we're doing great. So back here to the piano and I want to focus on the EQ for this piano, okay? So I think it just kind of has like some weird high end going on on it. Maybe a little bit on the low end as well. Boost up a little bit. And I'm going to open up the mixer with F nine. So this distortion, I'm going to pull it back because like I said, distortion is super, super audible on piano. So you just got to be careful. Now, overall, maybe just a gentle boost like this. I'm going to cut a little bit, let's go like 1.5 And why I'm doing that is because I have a boost, a boost here, even though we have some cuts. But I think that the EQ will be louder when it's off and on. So I'm just going to compensate when it's off and on. I'm trying for a fair volume comparison here. Okay, Maybe a little bit too quiet. I am listening for the piano reverb and I just hear some high end on it that I don't like. This high damp can make the reverb a little quicker, I think on the high end. So let's go back to the beginning. We've come very, super, super far away, like look where we are. So let's listen to it again and this is what you have to keep doing over and over. As you can see, I have done some stuff in here, some stuff in here for that audio painting. We don't have any reverse symbols going on or any kind of snarls yet. Not to say that we're going to do it, but as the song starts progressing. And then the final thing that I do is called the walk around test. And what that is, is once the track is actually I feel done, I would stand up, hit play, do something else, but listen on my speakers and I'm not so much listening for the mix and stuff. I'm just listening for how does it sound from beginning to end. Does it sound rushed? Does the arrangement sound good? Chorus, verse one, et cetera. Is it too rushed? Right? Is the combination of your instruments good? I am also listening for something is too loud, if one certain instrument is way too loud than the other. Okay, let's stop the video on this one just to take a break and then I will continue on the arrangement. Hopefully finishing up like a rough arrangement. I'm not going to spend tons and tons of time on the arrangement because again, it's just trial and error over and over, but it's all about finding the combination of the instruments for me. I like to kind of mix and match throughout the track. So as you can see, like verse one is a little bit different than let's say verse two right here, right? And then verse three again, I even added in the pluck and like I was saying, this is the pro stuff right here, okay? The beat can be an okay beat, but as soon as you have a really good arrangement, that's what really takes the beat to the next level. All right? And this is where most of the time is spent. This is why I said it's so tiring because trial and air. Trial and air. And the hardest thing many times is actually being able to hit play and listen to the whole song for the 3 minutes, right? Like it takes a lot of patience. And like if you have problems with attention and stuff like that, it's very hard to just listen to the track through. And this is why it's so tiring. All right, so I'll talk to you in the next video where we will continue on with the arrangement, okay? 22. 7-2 - Arranging a Beat [Part 2]: Okay, so let's just hit play. Let's listen to the beat. Let's listen to our arrangement. How far we've come. If everything is sounding okay, then we will move on and we will try to add or remove where necessary to complete the structure of the song. We have the beginning, which is the chorus, but it's filtered so it's kind of like an intro. And then I've done verse one again, filtered a little bit for our audio painting to prepare the listener before we change the structure. So again, this is like verse one and then we've come into the chorus. Okay, all of this here is the chorus. Again, if you were listening close, I said that sometimes it's nice to tease the listener. Here we are, teasing the listener with the chorus. We're not playing the full chorus, we've just played it for the 8 bars. And then again we come into verse two. Again, we have a little audio painting. I might want to add the filter. It could just be a matter of just that. Right? But we don't know how we listen. Again, same thing. I tease the listener with the chorus. It's like a smaller chorus played three, okay? And then here we can play the chorus twice. All right? And I'll just leave that piano in there. And then here we might just do like a fade out, okay? All right, so let's hit Save, because this is where we're starting from. And let's hit Stop. Let's listen to from beginning to end as much as possible without getting distracted. Very, very hard to do. Okay, right here needs to be some type of transition. Bring this back. Maybe no clap. Here's a cool trick. Let's go to F six, and I'm going to get that first drum. I'm going to get the drum that hits the hardest. Let's say this one, so I'm just going to right click it. I'm going to go clone. The quickest way to create a new pattern I think is F four. But you come here and you can go to find next empty. So it's four. What it will do is right after pluck it creates the pattern for us. So let's go find next empty. Let's go reverse kick. The easiest way to probably do this is to get the kick and just drag it in. And then you can reverse it and stuff like that. I'm going to first start by trying to click it in and then I'll explain as we go here. Okay? Okay, reverse kick. I'll put it here. And then I'm going to open this up and I'm just going to reverse it. All right if we listen to that. All right. So I'm just going to use the trim and then that way there's not as much dead space. So I will put this right here. So now let's just listen to it by itself with the percussion elements. All right? Okay, here, it's late. Okay, so what we'll do is to keep things simple. And also visual, we'll drag it in. Okay, and then this pattern right here, we will go delete. And then here six, so this is our first audio clip that we're working with here. This kick is the reverse one, so we don't need it anymore. Okay, so I'm going to right click and go delete because we're going to use it as an audio clip. It's in our audio now. And I'll click this. So we'll double click it, we'll go reverse. And I think that's all I need to do. So let's unmute it. Let's hold on control, right click, zoom in, and what I'll do is hold on Alt. And I can fine tune it just like this. All right, now let's listen to this. I'll going to hold on Alt on the scroll wheel to adjust the vertical. My goal here is to try to make it line up with the drum. Pretty cool, right? That sounds cool. All right. What we can also do on that is we double click it. You can play around with like pitch and stuff. Kill us. Increase this a bit and adjust the trim. When we adjust the trim, it just makes it quicker sounding, that could be cooler, so it's a little bit longer. Again, I'm just focused on right here just trying to line it up so it sounds really, really powerful. Let's maybe just drag it right up with it. All right? And I will turn it down quite a bit. Okay, So I'm just going to save. And what we can do now is usually my audio effects, like audio like this, I usually like to bring it way to the end just because I know in the back of my mind anything audio clips like this is way at the end of my mixer. Some people when they use FL Studio, you'll always see they're using audio clips everywhere. For me, Midi is by far the absolute best way to make beats in FL studio because you have the most control. As well as even in the arrangement like you can quickly do things, you have the ultimate control when doing Midi. Audio clips in this case as you saw, it's just way quicker for this type of technique. I want to go six, I'm highlighted on it, I want to go F nine. I am going to label this. I'll go like Rev kick, okay, and we can just give it a random color. Pink is perfect, and I will go control an L. What I'm thinking to do here is I just want to take the low end and really, really boost it up. It'll be really, really prominent to the listener, okay? Even more, it might sound cool, all right. Way too loud. Okay. Maybe we can try it again. We're here. If I get in time, it's okay. I don't want to over abuse it. And maybe here we're, we're boosting by like 20, right? So, try one more time from here. That's pretty cool. And even here, like we can kind of do, we can keep using it to be created with it a little bit, maybe we just put it on on its own. We can almost make it as like I'm both a transition and even like melodic. And I'm just going to add one more track in here so we can insert one perfect and that's where this kick drum will live to play around with. Perfect. Okay, So I don't want to use it too much but it sounds kind of catchy. Turn down though. Just subtle. Like we're not using it as an instrument, just subtle. Kind of. I kind of like it super, super subtle. I try to do it twice here, like boom, and then boom. It sounded okay. Maybe we'll try like this. And to make things simple for myself, I can just put this to a bar and that way I don't scrip at all. It's just really, really easy. All right, so right here, the track is starting to build up, so let's go back and listen one more time for here. Piano it could just be a little bit too bright still. Piano -3.7 That reverse kick makes the initial kick hit a little bit harder as well. Right here, we need, we need a little bit better transition. I just heard that we now see, I don't want to keep redoing the same thing over and over. So maybe we could take the ending of this one and try that quick. Okay, we can try something like that, so it just totally cuts out. I think this guitar might have to go. No, not too bad. Try the guitar just a little bit more on this guitar. Maybe just the end notes. Sometimes that's a powerful trick because these notes might distract the attention of a change. But then we bring it back in May, we can try another note with it. It'd be like this thing from here. Okay, right here at the beginning of the track here is a super, super powerful plug in. It is modulate, this is a third party plug in. It's called Blue Glitch. Again, I think there is a paid version. It's on version two for the pad. The first version I believe is free. Okay, blue glitch. What we'll try to do here, hopefully it didn't crash. Everything's good just because so many plug ins are happening. So this is typically why I always save. Often how it works is you are going to select an effect. Prefect is a tape stop, a modulator, a shuffler, gator delay, et cetera. Okay, right click, deletes, and we click them in. What I want to do is I want to click it right here. And then again I'm going to create another track and we are going to highlight this area. And we're going to do a tape stop right here. How this works is the plug in is on the master, the mix effect is all the way off. I'm going to right click and go create automation clip. It adds it in right there and then the same exact thing, we're just going to go boom, and then boom. Okay. Then again, we can even just do something like that as well, so it fades out gently, or you'd be really aggressive on it. So here, this will take some time, but I think I want to stop before we actually start the song. So it's not like this. Let's go to the plug in play. So we got to fine tune this in the right way, and it is pretty tricky. Again, when I do this stuff for me, it's just a matter of trial and error. Trial and error until I get it right now. Okay, So we're close. That was a little bit better. Okay, so I got it sounding like this. Cool. It's a totally different direction than what I've kind of gone before. Okay, and then the kit kind of brings it in weird. Now, I might also just want to add another sound in here. And what you do is you just click it and then you can see it highlights it up there. So I'm going to put the re trigger in. Now a cool trick with this is sometimes it's nice to pull back the mix a little bit so it's not so aggressive because I'll let you listen to it with it fully mixed in. And it's just really, really aggressive chops, right? So it's pretty aggressive, so I'm going to bring back the mix quite a bit and we will hear the effect, but it's a little more subtle. We can also filter it a little bit, it's just like an EQ. Let's try a shuffler instead. So again, I'm just going to replace it, reverser again. The mix bring back and we can filter it out a little bit. One last time. Let's go back from the very, very beginning. Okay, so that is how we start building a song. That's not too bad, okay? And these strings will collect us a little bit. Turn up a little bit, turn it down. So again, just kind of fine tuning as we go along here. This piano, there's just something I'm hearing about it, so there's a lot of distortion going on. I'm sure it's a little bit more. The piano maybe is a little bit louder again. We also have this mix, this tape stop. I might use it here again. I'm just going to fast forward a little bit. No, what I can also try to do is right click and go make unique. And what I'll do is maybe just try to use that. Trigger shuffle one I had and I'll go slide, we'll bring this back to here. Okay. That's pretty cool. What I did was I just make unique and I took advantage of what I already had on this re, because I make unique. This tape stop one is good to go and now I just use the reverser thing there, which I think was pretty cool. I can also use this here too, which is just a slight filter near the end, like this. Listen, so let's try to do this. Let's try to go single curve and remove the slide. And I'm just going to move it over just the slightest bit like that. I might not get like the sound. That's cool. A little bit better. No, I still heard it there. So I'll leave it right there. And maybe we can remove these. Yeah, I'll leave it like that. Okay, This again as well. It's hard when it's so zoomed out. So what we can do here now to finish off this track, just simple for the course. Just highlight here, okay, And I'm going to extend it quite a bit past and I'll hit F nine and we will come here all the way to the master. Sometimes in FL studio you might get a long tail if you export the track and typically we have to do this fade out. Now back in the day in FL studio, you didn't have to do the fade out as much. But the fade out here will make it so that you control when the song actually ends. I highlighted, I went to the master fader, went right click, and I went create automation clip. Okay, And it created right here for us. And so what we'll do is we're slowly bring it down, just like this. Okay, So a nice fade out where we're letting the audience, or our listener, listen to the chorus for our 16 bars, 12345678. And then again, we are playing it for the next eight, which is 16. And this is what I was saying, that this is essentially what the listener is always listening for. They're always wanting that big final chorus and we gave it to them at the end. Okay, sometimes it might be around here that we give it to them. But as you can see, we have teased the chorus here. We have tease the chorus there. And then we gave the big ending right here. So listen to that fade out. Okay? So this is the fade out. And I'll open up the master volume, and you can see this where this will actually start turning down in volume. Okay? I'll play it from here. There you go. The fade out. Still fading out. We play this piano just a little bit more into the fade out, maybe something like that. And then also the strings. Then you can cut by holding down the right alt and right shift, and then you have the left click. Okay? You can cut out wherever you want. And then from here you can hold Alt and fine tune. Maybe we just do this just a little bit here, okay, And then I'll maybe just bring just a little bit longer, like that. Cool. All right, so there you guys go. So there was the arrangement. I hope you guys have been enjoying the course so far. In the next video, I'll quickly talk about how to export the track and then I guess we'll just do a summary of everything that we've covered and learned. This was a huge course. All right, this one took a lot of my time and I hope you enjoyed it. Um, talking about this stuff and doing it at the same time is really, really hard because it takes a lot of time. It distracts me from maybe being creative and then maybe certain sections could even be boring for you, depending on what we're doing and stuff like that. But you saw everything from beginning to end, right? Made the beat. It's a mixing, it's a mastering, did the arrangement. Another thing too is like when I'm making the beat myself, some things I just kind of know. But when I go to explain it, like I was trying to do the arrangement before and I was like, well, no, no, no. This isn't working out like this doesn't feel normal. That's why I was like, oh, I want to mix and master it so that it can be loud. And then when I do the arrangement, it's like all you're doing is putting the pieces of the puzzle together because it's already done like the mix and master, and now we're trying to make it cohesive in terms of flowing. And then as it's going, that's where I was doing tons of mixing as well. Because just because you mix it once doesn't mean it's done. And in this case, I mixed it as a whole. Like in other words, I mixed the chorus. I mixed all the instruments where they're all b***ding. And then when it came to the verses, sometimes maybe something needed to be a little bit louder or maybe something sounded too thin. And that's where when I listen from beginning to end, these are the things I'm listening for. Next video, we will talk about exporting just quickly. And then we'll do a final conclusion of everything that we covered really, really briefly. 23. 8-1 - Walk Around Test and Exporting Properly: All right, so now I want to talk to you about the next steps. So after you've made the beat, mixed it, mastered it, arranged it, now I want to talk about what are the next steps. Okay, so for myself, I would export this song, which I did. And I did listen on other ear buds, and I'll explain that in just a moment. But this is where I get into what's called the walk around test. So I talked about this before. But the walk around test is once you think the track is done, you should be able to hit play. Listen to that track from beginning to end and be happy with it. And what I'm listening for is what we call the audio painting. So again, things like this is like the audio painting. So if I hit Play the tape stop, right? So that's a form of audio painting. Even right here, this is like a form of audio painting. I have removed the drum and the clap in the high hat, and then we put in this reverse kick drum, right? So that's some type of audio painting is preparing the listener because if we didn't do that, it doesn't transition for the listeners. What I call the walk around test is I would hit play and I want to be able to listen to this track from beginning to end, that the audio painting is making sense, that there's good transitions, okay? You need to have some type of transition. Whether again, it's a reverse symbol, it's a snare role, it is some si***ce. And then I'm also listening just for the balance of the mix as well. Maybe I think to myself, do you know what, maybe this lead right here, Maybe it needs to be just a little bit louder. Maybe these strings, maybe they're too loud. What I'm thinking is I'm going to maybe duck that by 0.2 D B. I'll maybe boost this by 0.2 D B. And it's like you're doing this, you are now changing the balance of the song. So you just got to be a little bit careful. But when I'm listening to the song for this walk around test, I am just trying to think from the listener's perspective of does the song sound balanced? Is it consistent? Does it need more compression in mastering? Okay, so when I listened on the other ear buds, what I heard was maybe the kick drum was a little bit loud. I also heard the strings were a little bit loud, and this piano sound was a little too aggressive. I found it was a little bit on the left speaker, a little too much or something. And it was just really aggressive. So I'd have to go back and somehow try to adjust that so that on different audio systems that's just working the way how it just kind of sounds natural. So again, when I make my beats, I like to use speakers. That's my most enjoyment in speakers, but again, not everyone, depending on your living environment, these earbuds, I've never really mixed and mastered a beat with them. So I did that in this course and when I tested on the other earbuds, it was a decent mix. But again, some fine tuning to get it to where I'm happy. But again, just because we've mixed and mastered it right here, doesn't mean it's done. Like you have to listen to it over listen on different audio systems. And then what you're going to do is you're just going to keep in the back of your mind, or you can even just write it down. You just think about different things that are bothering you with the track, and we are not doing really major changes anymore now. Again, it's just like that. 0.2 D B and I would come to the mixer. Let's say the strings were a little too loud. I'd come here, so again, look up here in the top left. It would be like, let's say instead of 13.2 maybe, I'd be like, it's a little bit loud, I just want to pull it back just a little bit. I might go to like 13.5 or 13.7 or something. Just really, really subtle moves. And then I have to think to myself, the strings, is the whole strings too loud or is it just maybe too bright? Because if it's too bright, then again, I'm going to come to the mixer. If I was happy with the strings exactly as they are, I would just open up another EQ. Then that's where I would maybe duck some high end. Right? I would just go like this. Then maybe I would just duck a little bit high end. Again, I would remove this auto gain stuff. Because again, auto gain, what it's doing is if I boost this up, it's going to compensate for the other frequencies so that it still sounds like the same volume. But once we get to this stage, I'm happy with the way that the sound is. I just hear a problem like let's say again those strings. Let's say it's too bright, I might come here and just duck like maybe 1 decibel or something around wherever the offending frequencies are. Then again, I would hit play. I'd listen in my studio and then I'd export it. Go listen on different audio systems. The process doesn't have to take that long that you have to do that every single time of in the studio, go test in all the systems, then come back to the studio, go and test, because that's a lot of work. But usually it's nice to have like one or two audio systems that you really know well, and then it makes the process a lot easier. Okay, in this video, I just want to quickly talk about how to export the song. Again, here is the master fade out. So what I did was I right clicked and held here and I went nine. I went to the master fader, I right click and went Create automation clip. Okay. And then I just faded it out. And it gave us that fade out sound. I thought this was a really good way to end the track. I think it suited it. And then, so now when I go to export the song, this is where the song stops right there. So sometimes you have to think, if you are creating a beat tape where you have multiple beats. You have to think about the fade in time and the outro time, okay? If you're just working a single beat and you export it, well, it's just a single beat and it's good to go. But when you go from one track to the next, you want to try to get that timing to the point where it isn't too rushed and it isn't too long. So you might have to make this either a little bit longer or just a little bit shorter, Okay? And then to export it I use fat filter plug ins. So on the pro L two again, we have that loudness meter to see our loudness. If I hit play around here again, again, when I was listening to the music, this piano was just a little bit aggressive. So I'd have to fine tune that on my own. Okay? If I come here to the chorus, I like this, I like that the chorus is quite a bit louder than the rest of the song. So watch if I reset this. We come back here, we'll listen from here. I'm going to turn on this piano. Yeah, this piano is the one that was bothering me. We're going to come back here. You can see it's around that minus ten. But then once it goes to the chorus, it's going to go up to like that nine, which means that the chorus is more exciting. It's fuller, more energetic. Okay. I could maybe push it just a little bit louder for now. I think this was a really good training for you. Okay, here on the limiter, I'm happy with my loudness. Let's say I'm not hearing any audible distortion in regards to my mastering. So I think it's at a good spot. Hit save. Now here in pro L two, we want to do what's called dithering. So if you don't have pro L two you can dither in FL studio, so don't worry for me, I just export to 16 bit. But some people they want to do like the 24 bits and stuff like that. For the higher quality it's just like a lower noise floor. But 16 bit has been CD quality for years and it's very high quality. Okay. So because I use the A filter plug ins, I will use the dither in a filter. You even have different options of dithering. Now, dithering is like super, super quiet noise that they put in to kind of randomize. I don't want to go into it in this course, but dithering is not really that important. But it is something for best practice that at the end of mastering you put dithering so that if you're going from 24 bit to 16 bit, so whenever you are changing bit depth, you just want to do dithering. Now again, don't worry if I'm using fabfilter. We're going to do it in FL studio as well. But this is where I would say, okay, I'm going to go to 16 bit, I just leave it on the optimized. And then I would hit control R to start the export or you go file export right here. Control R is if I was going to do online distribution, if I want to put it on Spotify or something like that because it's a wave, it's the highest quality. If you just want to send it off to a friend, you can go MP three. And in FL Studio how this works, you can even export both at the same time, which is a really powerful thing that I often do. If I was releasing a beat tape, it saves me a step of having to export the wave and then convert it to MP three. You can just do it all at the same time with fat filter. If you were going to do 24 bit, I believe that you'd want to go 24 bit right there as well. Okay, When FL Studio actually exports it, it is 24 bit. All right, so again I keep it 16 bit. Now if I disable this, you can see that you can't adjust the MP three, this whole export window. Depending on what you're doing, different settings apply. Okay, so let's just disable everything. Let's quickly talk about if you want to export a wave, okay? So wave I would just go 16 bit. There's your dithering now if I am dithering with the pro L two, I would disable it here. You just want to dither once, okay? Because what it does is it just adds a little bit of noise like super, super quiet volume. And if you're doing it twice, then you're adding more noise, you just do it once. Then when you export, you're good to go. I'll quickly talk about the MP three. So if you click MP three, you can see you got your slider right there. So you can just adjust your quality. I probably don't go less than like 192 or something like that. 256 is where I think I export my MP threes for my beat tapes. That way it keeps the file size down a little bit and you're still getting decent quality for the average listener, they're not hearing any difference. And typically for an NP three, where you're going to hear the quality difference is a lot of times like in the high end, high hats can kind of sound like swirly like they're kind of like. And that's just something just to listen for, but the average listener doesn't hear that. 256 is good, but you can go higher if you want. But again, there's your file size, okay? And then you just hit Start and it would export for you. And that's it, that's how you export your music. So I just want to make one last video just to say thank you and just to overall wrap up of everything that we've covered in this course about how to make a beat from scratch volume one, which was an emotional rap beat here in FL studio. 24. 8-2 - Recap of the Music Production Process: All right, so thank you so much for taking the course. So I'm gratuitous. That's my artist and producer name. My real name is Riley Weller. I hope you enjoyed this course about how to make a beat from scratch In FL studio, I showed you how to make a drum loop from scratch, how to make the melodies from scratch. We first started on the piano upstairs, which I thought was a really cool approach to this course. If I create a volume two of this make a beat from scratch, we're not going to go so much in depth about a lot of the kind of fine tune stuff such as like my studio, my equipment, even on the piano, like I wouldn't be showing you about the mixer and stuff. We might start at the piano again because that's usually how we start the beat, go onto the piano, play my keys, and then as soon as I find a melody that feels special to me for that day, then that is usually the melody that I try to work off when I go to make the beat. Now one thing I just want to say is for the mixing and mastering, I'm not a professional mixing engineer or mastering engineer. Okay, so just understand in the music production world there's beat makers, right? And beat makers are their own skills. And it's really important to understand that even arrangement, there are professional arrangers in the music industry where I believe like this is all they do is they arrange the music and it takes a lot of skill to arrange the music so it's energetic and full. In this course, the arrangement I found was a little bit rushed when I was listening on my ear. Buds. But again, that's where I do this walk around test, where all of a sudden I hear it felt a little bit rushed there. So I go back, I look at the track and I figure out how can I improve that? Maybe I need to make it a little bit longer, the verse, or maybe I need to have better audio painting to remove instruments and then do a slower build up. Okay, for the mixing and mastering everything you saw. Again, just take it with a grain of salt as they say. In other words, you can follow along, but make sure to do your own reading and everything. All right. This is how I approach making beats to get the sound that are on my beat tapes. So if you've ever listened to my beat tapes by gratuitous series, at the moment of this course, I have released ten of those beat tapes. So each beat tape has ten beats. And I always encourage my students to learn by making beat tapes and why? Because you learn the beat making, you learn the arrangement, you learn the mixing, you learn the mastering. And then when you put it all together into essentially like a beat tape, a product, you learn the whole process of putting together like an album, which is becoming like a lost art as a music producer, right? A lot of producers are just releasing one bet or they work with an artist, they just do one song. When you are putting together a compilation of your music album, you get to learn the whole process, right? And this is my approach to how I would make a beat, all right? Make a beat, mix it, arrange it, master it. I really do find when I mix and I usually just do like the chorus. So I mix and master like the chorus as you saw there. And then that just allows all the instruments to be loud and be cohesive. And then when it goes into the verses and stuff, then I can just add and remove melodies. And everything is loud and cohesive so that when I arrange, it's easy. I don't get distracted. Another thing to mention is right here. This is called, I think like static mixing, so everything is just set the way it is. But professional mixers, a lot of times when they go from verse one to verse two, they will start getting into automation sometimes as well. Especially for vocals like, for example, with vocals like some words are quieter than others, right? So some vocals, you know, some words are really, really loud, some words are quiet. So a lot of people think, oh, I'm going to use a compressor. But the best way to approach it is to do volume automation. So that you're actually manually clicking in, you know, your automation clip, just like this, right? You'd be clicking in to get the vocal sounding very consistent with volume automation. And then if you're going to use compression, then it's not going to be pumping and be weird. You can really just get the benefits of compression which is kind of gluing the audio very consistently. But what I'm saying is if you are in verse one to verse two, sometimes people start getting into volume automation. They would kind of highlight this area, they'd come here. Now one thing to say in FL studio, I usually don't like to automate these faders. And the reason for that is because if you create an automation clip and then you go back and forward and stuff that the fader can always be changing on you. So another alternative that I would like to do, a lot of people, they like to use the fruity balance. And I don't think I have that loaded in, miss. No. Okay, so I'm just going to go to here and we will go to Effects Fruity, and we'll go Fruity Balance. Okay, so a lot of people like to use the fruity balance for automation. And you can just right click and you create the automation clip. So what this is going to do is you can see when I create my automation clips, I usually like to highlight in the area that I'm working in. Sometimes you'll see people create the automation clip for the whole song, but I just usually like to work in just the area I'm working in. This one is for the guitar, let's say at the very, as soon as it comes in. Maybe we want to kind adjust it a little bit. Right click, right click. But some of these notes, like these first notes right here, are just a little bit loud, So we pull it down and we'll listen to that. Or maybe we want them way louder, right? So do you hear how much louder it was? Right? So again, in the case of this, I'm just going to reopen this and not save that. All right. So I hope you enjoyed this course. I try to cover so many little intricate details that I could think about that I could remember to say and tell you things like the walk around test, just as we went along. Just different things because again, within music production, there's so many things to know. If you're just making the beat, There's so much to knowing just making the beat in the arrangement. There's so much to know within the arrangement. And again, I kind of call that concept audio painting, all about preparing the listener for the next step of the song. What's to come? If we are in verse one right here, then we're going to be going into the chorus. And you can see, what did I do? I have a filter. I chopped up the drums a little bit. We have a reverse drum there. We're just preparing the listener. We also removed the guitar a little bit as well. We prepared the listener. Boom, it goes right in. I hope you enjoyed again. If you have any questions, always feel free to reach out to me. Hopefully, I will see you in another FL, studio beat making chorus of mine.