Making Rock Music With NO Instruments

1. Introduction: What's up today, we're gonna be learning how to make rock music without any real instruments. That guitar back there is real and I do know how to play it, but today we're not gonna be using it. Instead we're gonna be using plugins and nothing but plug-ins to create the alt Indie rock type of sound. Purists watching this might be pulling their hair out and saying, well, why would you do that? You can't do that. But there are actually two legitimate reasons why you would want to make rock music in the box. Reason number one, Europe producer who doesn't know how to play an instrument, but you still want to incorporate a rock sound into your song. And reason number two is that you might know how to play an instrument, but you might not be able to afford a fancy studio to record your drum tracks, your guitars, and everything that you want to record. For those two reasons, it can be beneficial to create rock music artificially. I want to make it clear this course isn't just for rock artists either. Even Olivia Rodriguez, a huge pop star, is incorporating a lot of rock elements and did so in her album, sour quick note I have about the song is that I kind of had it reviewed by somebody who I met recently who has actually worked on mixing Beyonce song before. He couldn't tell which instruments were real and fakes. And it was funny because I was like, Yeah, they're all fake. He thought the mix was very good and he only had a few minor suggestions that I've already taken care of here, honestly made me very proud of myself. That is the deal with this course. Just remember I grew my hair out to this link just to add to my credibility for this video. And I'm looking forward to seeing you in the course. 2. The Rock Song: A Listen Through: Before we get started, let's take a listen to the rock song that we're gonna be working on. That's the song, let's dive in to the project. 3. General Notes + Process: Alright, so we are here hanging out in Ableton. Before we dive into this, I just want to give a few notes on general process here. So a lot of the time what I'll do for songs is I will start with the reference chords. I'll figure out in iron down which chords I want for these different sections. So then I will also usually load up at least one or two reference tracks and I'm not gonna play this, so it's My Chemical Romance black parade. I'm not going to play it because I'll get in copyright trouble. That is the song that I used as a reference for the overall sound and a lot of the arrangement for this. Just as a note, I'm not going to be covering mixing extensively. I always recommend sending your stems to a mixing engineer if you have the resources to do so in this track up here, don't worry about it. This is just so that I can make funny noises like this. It's basically just a soundboard things so you can ignore the head, can ignore that. Here's a laugh track. The time I will add locators for some reason in this song, I didn't end up doing it, but I'll add locators up here just so that it makes it easier to know where the different songs sections are. Sir, I'm working on projects. I will mark a layer as read until it's done. Like this bass guitar part. If I wasn't done it I would have it as red. And then after I felt kinda happy with where it was, I would mark it as green. And that helps me just go through and kind of manage my tasks, I guess. 4. Creating Piano: The first thing other than the chords that came to my head for this song was this MCR piano part. So let's take a listen to that. Just that by itself. Basically, that was the idea that started the song. I had a melody idea that would go over top of this. And so that kinda became this. First thing is just like an opening chorus here. Obviously following the chords, these reference chords up here. We're following the reference scores and that's going to be the same for all of these tracks throughout here. And then this piano part is kinda coming in during the courses and then has a buildup at the end that we'll look at. The first thing that's really important that you're gonna see a lot is this randomizer. If you're using midi instruments that are trying to simulate a real instrument, I strongly recommend, recommend using a midi randomizer. And you can find that by going into midi and you could type in random, I think it'll give you velocity. So you're adding some randomness to the velocity. The reason for that is because we come from caveman who sat around fires drumming sheepskin drums or whatever the heck they had. And they weren't perfect and they would mess it up a little bit and that in terms of the velocity and that's what this is for. Yes. So we've got that. I ended up pitching this up 12 semitones or an octave because it felt too low and it felt like it would interfere with the vocal. So I put pitched it up and then we're using addictive keys as our sampler here. So basically, addictive keys is the plugin we're using. And they sampled pianos that are real, and that's why it sounds so good. Then we're dequeuing little bit here. So we're making sure that there's no low-end because this is a high piano. So there's no need for there to be a lot of low end down here and studying stuff up. Then we're doing a little bit of compression, just a hair. And then we're adding this plugin from baby audio called spaced out, which is effectively a delay and a reverb. Actually, you could also potentially use an echo or a delay to achieve a similar effect. But if you wanted to do that without this plugin, here's how you would do it in Ableton or whatever DAW that you happen to be in right now, I would add to insert two return tracks. Then you can go down here, and then I would add in an echo from Ableton. So you've got to echo. And then I would add in a verb, and you would have to adjust this to taste, but you might want to. Usually ping pong sounds cool. And then I'll turn this off so that we can, honestly, it sounds pretty solid by itself straight out of the plugin, but you can kind of hear it bouncing back and forth because of that echo here. That's cool. So I might just leave that just, just as an example for how you would recreate that in Ableton and then reverb, we could blend in a little bit more because it already has a decent bit, has some reverb on it coming out of the plug-in. We probably wouldn't want to go too crazy with that. Yeah, You would just you could just do two return tracks like that. And then we're going to move on. So we have super VHS and you're gonna see this on a lot of the tracks in here. Because I liked the way that it sounds. It adds a level of texture to stop and makes it sound more real. So let's just take a listen with and without it. It's very subtle. Probably. It makes it sound a little bit more worn. Like I said, I use this on a lot of tracks, so that is our piano. And then one thing that we're doing at the end here is kind of interesting note is that we are automating volume track and making this billed at the end. So we're starting from nothing, so we're coming here. Then we're building up. That is, I think just kind of a good note to try to keep dynamics are kind of add to dynamics when you can and make it more interesting. I actually have several layers doing a similar thing in the song that we'll look at shortly. 5. Creating Drums: The drums are really important and probably one of the things that I work on earlier in arranging, just because they really define which parts are going hard, which parts are soft? So let's take a look here. So I'm using addictive drums, which is a, basically a drum sampler where they sampled a bunch of drums and they sound pretty legit. Let's listen to it. For this particular song, I ended up using the plated snare preset and I don't think I adjusted it too much. I think this is pretty close to what it comes what it comes out as straight out of the box. And in terms of how I write the parts, usually I will go into beats. They have this huge library of pre-recorded drum parts. And it's a lot. What you can do is go into, say, toast plus or minus ten so that you're narrowing it to songs that are close to your tempo. And then you can go through and say, Oh, well we want something that's in hard rock maybe. Do we have anything? So you probably might want to consider one of these and you could pick out a chorus. That might be a little too hard. Let's try. The Hard Rock I think is not what I ended up using. I ended up using a lot of funk drums actually. Yeah, we have hard funk grew was one of the ones that we used. But yeah, I'll go in and you can find your beat here. So it's assumed we liked this one, which we don't, but let's assume that we did. He would drag it out here and then you could throw it wherever you want it to so I can put it here. Yeah, That makes no sense. That is not a not a good jump fight for this. I would just go through and experiment with different sections like I didn't use. It doesn't have to be in the same genre always in terms of these parts that you're looking for. For example, for this part, I think I use some type of a, it might've been like a rag, a beat or a Motown thing. I don't remember what it was, but it was something weird that felt out of place, but it sounds so cool in this part altogether. A really important writing note for that. I'll do a lot is to remember that real drummers like filling they liked doing fills. Its like the part where they get to kind of cut out of the norm. They're usually just kind of keeping time and laying down a nice beat transitions. They're able to go a little crazy. And so that's what this is, right? We got Tom role there and there's Phil's throughout, all throughout this because it's a rock song. So what I'll do to find fills is I'll go in here and I'll take off beats and I will hit all. And so we know that these are all the fills that are programmed within plus or minus ten. Then audit of times. Maybe you find one in here that you like. Then you can drag that out and then kind of piece that together. I think in terms of the processing, this one thing that you will want to think about is it a lot of times it's good practice when you're doing drums, especially if you're sending your track to a mixing engineer, you're going to want to do separate outputs for everything. What do I mean by that? You're going to want to go in here and do separate out for all of these. This would go for whether you're using addictive drums or another sampler. You would want to do outputs for all of these tracks here. So the toms, the overheads, the room and the bus, and you would do a separate output. And let's take a look at how that looks here. You would go here and add an input from the drums and then the kick. Now and then hit N. And now we have a separate track here that is playing the kick. Then you would go through and do the same thing for all the tracks. And the reason for this is that it gives you more control over how the drums are mixed. So in this case, I liked how everything's sounded just straight out of the box and didn't feel that it was necessary to do that because I was going ahead and just going to mix this demo of it. But in the case that you're sending to a mixing engineer, you want to get super, super high level of control. This is what you would do. And so now we have our snare. Now it's not, the snare is not gonna be on this main. The only thing you're hearing here is the room and the overhead and these things that we haven't sent out yet. So those are all being lumped together right now. And this one track, I'm going to turn this off or put these on the master, just leave it leave it how it was and delete these, but that's how you would do it. You would do separate layers there. After I was done writing the track. A lot of the times mixing engineers or producers will add layers to the different drum parts for this. For this particular case, I wanted to add extra layers to my kicks. So I went in, I consolidated this whole track, which is why it looks like this. So to consolidate, you would just select this section and go consolidate. Then I would copy out my entire kick part and then I copy that and then put it down here onto a separate track. And we're going to be layering our regular kick with a disco kick that sounds like this. I got this from the stock plug-ins from the side from Ableton. So if you go into samples, go through and search, you can find, you might say kick. You could go in and find a kick that you like to layer on top of your current kick drum. So here's how it sounds like. Here's without it. Out the disk, okay. With it. Selves, add a little bit of a punch. One thing that you'll want to do is make sure that there's not any phase issues. That's kind of what's going on here, where I'm making sure that there's not a phase issue going on. There's a lot of other videos on phase out there, so i'll, I'll leave that to you, but just keep in mind that when you layer like snares are you layer kicks, you're probably going to run in a phase issues and you got to be careful with that because if you don't, it'll neutralize your sound and make it sound flaccid and wimpy and not great. The disco kick, that's the drums here. Really important note that I almost missed. So in terms of our processing on this bus, master bus here, so this is being applied to all of the instruments within this drum part. We're adding a saturation, a little bit of saturation. So I got this from here, or if you just type in saturation driving color, I'm just adding a little bit warmer and then I might have dialed it down a little bit. So let's listen to this without any of our processes. Not bad, but I felt like it could use a little saturation. Now we're using parallel aggressor. They have a setting called just put it on your drum bus. You can accomplish a similar thing with this parallel aggressor plugin. You can accomplish a similar thing with a lot of other plug-ins are just using a compressor. I'm not going to explain what parallel compression is in this video because there's plenty of tutorials on that and how to accomplish that using a built-in plug-ins for whatever doll you're using. But that's basically what's going on here is parallel compression on this drum kit here. Then on the very end we're adding little bit of stereo imaging from ozone in the high-end. Here's without it. You can hear when I add that on its opening up the high end a little bit more and making it feel wider. So we have our shaker to, this kinda goes with the drum kit. We just have a 16th note canister shaker that there's plenty of you could get this from Splice. You could pull up splice and lookup shaker samples or tambourine samples or whatever you want to add in. And I have this kicking in here. That is what's going on just in it. I think it's just applying that same part whenever it's coming in. I usually coming in and high-energy parts are parts where you're building energy panning one. So I'm panning one sample to the left and one of the rights so that it sounds even two separate samples to add a layer of texture. And then we're using this parallel aggression plugin, which you probably wouldn't need. You could probably just use a regular compressor here and that would be just fine. I just kinda went a little crazy with that on this track. And I'm making sure that there's not any Low-income through. Then adding a little bit of reverb, you can use the stock plug-in or you could use Valhalla, which is cool. Finally, I'm just adding a little bit of side-chain compression to this kick drum here. So basically what's that doing? What does that mean? It means that it's ducking out whenever we hear this kick drum, this disco kick, so you can see it ducking a little bit. And that's just to give that kick more room to breathe and make sure that that's coming through in-between. And then when it kicks, the Shakers are ducking out just a little bit. But then when it's not playing, you hear the shakers in full, full throttle and it's really light where it's not aggressive. In rock music, I think generally side chaining isn't used as aggressively. But I like using it a little bit here and there. Here we go. We're gonna move on, I think because that pretty much covers the Shakers. 6. Creating Bass: Looking at this bass guitar, what do we got here? So basically we're having a lot of moments with eighth notes. We're going boom, boom, boom, boom. That's pretty much the most basic bass part you can get other than just the footballs, which were also doing. The reason we're doing eighth notes here, because this is where the riff happens and things are picking up. And then we're pulling back here. Again pretty much as playing the root note of the chords. And then we're building up again. You can see we're introducing some notes here where this is a pretty common technique and writing bass parts where you're kind of changing the couple notes right before the next part leading into it. So it sounds like this. Bomb boom, boom, boom, boom. Yeah. So not just doing the same thing that we did here, but having a little bit of that just to add some variation, because a real basis might throw that in while they were playing. We have a moment where this is kind of like averse moment here. And then for the rest of the song, we're picking it back up. Again, pretty much following the root node and the root note of the chord. And so yeah, in terms of writing that not too crazy, nothing too fancy here. We're again, we're using our randomizer, which we talked about earlier for the piano part just to add a level of realism. So here's what it sounds like without it. Sorry, hold on. This is it without the randomizer? You can hear that it's lifeless and it's just flat. We're just the same velocity every fricking time. See here that where it's different, you can hear like you're adding a human element in there. Just as a note for both this piano part and this base part. A lot of times it can be good to knock notes off a little bit. If you wanted to even add a higher level of realism, you can move the notes a little bit. Just a hair, because real people don't play quantized. They don't play exactly on the beat every time. So it can be good to kind of hit Alt if you're in Ableton and drag so that you're just a little bit of a hair off the actual a place you're playing. That's a good note, right there is. What if you have the time on a project to do that, I recommend kind of manually loosening up the notes a little bit. There might be plugins that do that too if you want. And we're using contacts, so we're using this Garvey Rickenbacker. Another option would be trillion. Yeah, I'm trying to think of any other ones, but those are the two main ones I think are scurvy. And then I'm using super VHS dad somewhere to this. You can hear it adds just a little bit. Then we're restricting the low end here and then boosting the place where the base is kind of living. Just a hair. I mean, it's mainly down here, but I guess I kind of liked that frequency pop and through its covered this drone base. One thing, this probably violates rock a little bit. But one thing that I was feeling when I was working on this was okay, there's certain sections where we're not going to have the bass guitar, but I think it might be good to have the low-end represented by something else, like in these verses. So it's listen. This is a verse year. I should close out this reference court thing because that's not actually part of the song. This drone part here, it sounds like this, and it's only coming in during the verse, during the second verse, the bass guitar kind of takes over still, and it's still kind of owning the show. And then this is happening. It's kind of automated where it's coming in gradually. Yeah. So we're just adding a little bit of something there to add to that transition. So with this, we're using serum. I believe I would've gotten something from splice and then I'm just calling this drone base. Basically you can find some preset that works for you and then dial it in with this ends up sounding like I'm using EQ to restrict it to this range here so that we're not muddied things up too much. Then we're adding a little bit of compression, which we probably wouldn't probably don't need, but I'm not sure what the rationale for adding that was, but that is what's going on with that track. Drone base. 7. Creating Guitars: And now we get into the fun part, which is the guitars. Guitars are probably the most, one of the more critical elements in rock music. Let's go ahead and talk about that. So we've got our rhythm guitar here. So the first thing I'm gonna talk about is what plugging we're using some reason contact, again, a lot of contact plug-ins. You'll notice they, they basically sample real instruments. That's their whole deal. Then we are doing electric sunburst deluxe is the one that I'm using for pretty much every gets hard track on the song. So basically what's going on here for this track is you can select a preset for how it sounds. And so I'm using the crunch modern pop preset. And you can also select patterns, these different parts. And so this C1 down here in the midi notes here, this is mapping which this is telling the plugin which pattern we should play. If I move this up, it's going to play a different one. So these bottom notes here, so I don't remember, I think it's C1 through G1 or telling this plugin which patterns to play. And so we're going with this chord, this toolbox see plug-in, and then we can also adjust certain settings in here. I think I just left it alone and just went with this default here. Because it sounded great. I might have turned down the reverb and the Echo, just a hair for playback. Or four amps and effects. And then on the playback, I actually am using double time. I'm setting the tempo to a2x because they didn't have the rights strumming patterns. So that's a way for you to multiply how many strumming patterns you have. Because without this, Here's how it sounded. What we wanted was like a data, so we added this. Sounds great. And then of course we're just following the chords from the piano track or that reference addictive drum track. This is our riff. And then we're cutting out here for this part where we're changing the way that the guitar is being played. So in order to do that with this plugin, because you'll know what ends up happening. Unfortunately with this plugin is if you leave it on, it plays for a little bit past where it stops. What I'll do is I'll either automate the volume mixer or the volume or the, what I do a lot more often as the device on where you can turn it on and off. So I would look something like this, where you turn the device off right here and then turn it back on wherever you need it again. So that is an important note for this particular, and it's more for electric sunburst specifically in any of the guitar once for some reason, don't stop immediately. And then kicking back in here, we're using this. You can see we're changing the pattern by signaling here and then switching back to our regular pattern. I think I added this second time through, I'm adding some seventh chords in here. So what does that mean? I'm adding just to add variation are right here. Several, this riff part I'm adding in some seventh chords, so making it a little jazzy or adding some. Yeah, so just, you can experiment with what chords work. Then we're going, we have a bridge section. And then, I mean, this gets hard parts basically doing the same thing for the whole song. I'm adding a little bit of overdrive onto this after the processing here to give it some of them. And then we're automating this overdrive during the song that give it some energy build throughout. So you can see we're just building gradually. We're automating the dry wet here. So at the beginning and just really adding that energy. And then we're doing a little bit of EQ here to taste. That is the rhythm, the explosions guitar. So this is basically a lead guitar part. Here's how it sounds. Really kind of spacey out. So I named this explosions gets hard because it's based on explosions in the sky, which is a great band, would recommend checking them out, but they did do a variation of rock. And I like the way they sound a lot. So I'm adding on this particular one a little bit of vibrato here. Thank I use the S effects clouds plug-in and then modified it a little bit. I would've gotten here, I'm still using doubling. You'll notice that I use doubling on pretty much all of them because the doubled guitar almost always sounds good. Sometimes I think on one of them I didn't. And I'll explain when I get to that particular guitar part. But basically on this one, I think the main thing I changed was pulling back the mics on the reverb and the echo because it was super aggressive and super almost guaranteed to make everything feel muddy. So yeah, I think that's the main thing I changed for this one. And then you kinda just have it where it's just as a note, I'm using the melody version of this. There's two versions where you can do the deluxe and the melody, the regular one in the melody. The melody one is more for if you're playing solos or you want to simulate a solo. This one is more for probably if you're playing chords are like they have predefined riffs and predefined strumming patterns. This is more if you want to kind of create your own stuff, pretty much the same part throughout, maybe some slight variation in this bridge here. And then it's just building up at the end and just repeating that along with everything else. That's the explosions guitar. Again, we're adding a little bit of saturation after. Then we have this muted guitar, which is, I think one of the main ones I wanted to talk about because this is the one where I'm not doubling. So here's the part of the song. So basically we're cutting out this irregular other rhythm guitar part. And then we're bringing this in with this muted guitar part. And we're doing the process that I mentioned before where we are cutting the device off and on whenever we need it because it will ring out here at the end if we don't do that. And then what's guitar part or we're using, I think I used it might be honestly the same or the same preset. So it might be the crunch modern pop. And I'm using this toolbox muted pattern. Oh man, what's going on? Why isn't it let me see. Oh, it's because their device it's probably off. Let's try this. Yeah, we've got the two x here and then I might've pulled back some of the might've turned off the echo. I think it turned off echo and reverb because we added our stuff in a little here. But the main reason we're not doubling right here. We're turning that off is because this is a verse and I think it's a lot of times you'll see people Center up a little bit on the verse so that it gives it room to get wider during the choruses. That's what's going on there. And then we're panning this to the right a little bit. I haven't really been talking about panning too much, but it's good to do that just to add spatial depth. Jet, just something to be mindful because if you throw everything dead center, it gets creates more phase issues. And it makes the, it doesn't add any depth to people who are listening on stereo. Yeah, anyway, we got contact here. We're adding some of the overdrive again. I guess we have that automated. I don't think we really need that. I think that's just because I copied the other track. But that's kind of going on there. And then we've got restricting where this lives frequency wise, and then we're adding a flanger. So let's listen to that. Here's how it sounds without either of these things. I thought it's kind of boring. So I liked the flange that I heard on the base or that drone-based. So I added some flange or onwards, kind of tie it together. And then I'm adding each delay ping-pong 16th notes here, which is like a hint. So it's seven, dry wetness. So seven out of 100. And then we're just adding that onto, give it a bounce so that you can because we have it over to the right a little bit. But I felt like it could be cool to have a delay making sure you get here a delay on the left side as well. So when you hear it, you can hear it popping on the left side. I also cut out the low end here, some of this delay so that it didn't make it muddy. Yeah, that's what's going on with this muted guitar. It only comes in, in that one section, so in reverse. Now the cool guitars, these are the My Chemical Romance guitars that we got the idea to make these from the reference track. So this, My Chemical Romance reference track, I was like, okay, what do we do in this part of the song? I got the idea from there. The chords in structure are completely different, but it's still a super helpful to have that. Here's how they all sound together at the very end. You can see throughout the song we're starting, we're building where we're adding stuff throughout. So in this first part, this first riff here have that layer. Then in the second time through. Altogether that would sound like, sorry, I forgot to turn tape back on, so altogether it's unsafe. What's going on here? We have, again, we're adding some random. Actually this would be good to add probably on all of these guitar parts, like adding a little bit of random in here might not be a bad idea. I did not at this point yet, but I think not a bad idea. Let's listen to this with that, without that, just see if how much we can with it. The Akan, you can hear it acting up a little bit where obviously this is a super compressed guitar anyway. But yeah, I mean, you can hear it a little bit. That might be a good notice like add this on all your guitar parts as well. Obviously, when you have a lot of crap going on, like this part here, you're not gonna be able to hear that as well. So yeah, it really depends, but then we're adding contact again. So we're using our sunburst. We're doing the same pattern, but we're just, we're just doing this same part basically is the rhythm guitar doing it higher. Then we're just increasing the volume a little bit and then we're adding to the high-end here to really make that pop out. I think we're using a very similar thing with these, with these two here. So this is the lower, so we have a lower and a higher harmony. Using the melody version. We're using the melody version because we are writing out our own melody. And then we're using the same presets. Preset that we used here was the most likely one of these, like a classic rock rock school, one of those. And then I probably pulled down the reverb or tape a little bit because when you're, especially since we're combining three of them together, you want to be careful not to let your reverbs, your echoes get, get out of hand then with this one. So the second one here, it's the same, pretty much using the same processing in this thing. And then we're just restricting this to here. We don't want it. We want to control where the frequency, where this frequency is popping out here. And then we wanted to, I'm doing pancake on both of these. The second one here is similar, where it's playing a similar part. They're just playing an octave apart. But this one is living in this space and then this one's living here. And then we are pancakes in both of them at the same time so that they just add some interest. Some entry you can make it feel wider and the spatial depth feel like it's there. And that's pretty much what's going on with the guitars, I think. So, yeah, altogether, that sounds like this at the end where it's building up. You can see we have just in terms of automation here we have this little section here where we're bringing the volume back for this distorted guitar part. Again, helping that transition out a little bit to all of our instruments covered those. 8. Creating Instrument Layers: Let's look at sad fairy tale. So sad fairy tale is something that I added much later in the process. And I got this idea and I've used this in a lot of songs that I've been working on. But basically it sounds like an Oregon that's broken and I heard it in Olivia, something similar in Anne Olivia Rodriguez song, I think it was in the song Deja vu. And it sounds kind of like this. Just has this Moby carrying on type of feel to it. And I think it really works for like a rock type of sound. Here's what it sounds altogether. What's going on with how we make this? We're using serum. So serum is gonna be a plugin. I used a lot for any type of synthesized stuff. And so I used a plug, a preset from Splice, which is a tool. I'll pull it up for you so you can take a look at it, but it's a tool that you can install on your computer. It is a paid thing, but it's very helpful for getting presets and then kinda working those presets and there's something close to what you want. I used worldly middle and then I'd probably modified this kind of match what I wanted. And here's what it sounds like without any of this other processing on it. I already pretty close and I'm adding on boosting the high ends here with FAB filter. This is just another EQ plugin. So you could use the built-in EQ, but just boosting the high-end here. Then adding pancakes so that we're panning back and forth. And then adding vinyl to add. What I'm doing is I'm getting rid of Dustin scratch because those can be a little bit, a bit much, sometimes they're good. But I use the Warp feature a lot because it makes things sound like a broken VHS from a Disney film. I think that, that has a special nostalgia for a lot of people. I'll use this on strings a lot, but in this case I'm using it here on this broken Oregon type of thing and then adding a little bit aware. And so that's where you get this sound. Then I'm automating this track and kind of having the volume get louder throughout the sections where it's playing. And it's kind of playing along with the piano here, where it's getting louder at the end and signaling that something. Alright, so that's sad fairy tale Oregon. Now let's take a look at music box. So basically what I did with this is this is just a sampled music box that I just read pitched to different notes, which it probably would've made sense to use simpler or a sampler on this instead of doing this, but this is how I ended up doing it. And here's what it sounds like with everything. In a lot of rock songs, you will hear, you'll hear bells. A lot of times you'll hear like a Glaucon spill or some type of Bell instrument that's high in the higher register. So that's just one thing to keep in mind as you're arranging is that that is a pretty common element. The sample is just the sample right here, we're pitching it, and then we're pancake in it so that it's bouncing around along with this sad fairy tale. Thanks. So there's both our pancakes. You can hear it bouncing around a little bit. And then we can have our h delay, which is set to a ping-pong 1 eighth and then we're only doing a hair. So 77 mix, they're not very strong but enough where it adds something. And then we're using parallel aggressor just to make it pop a little more, very slight. And then we also have some EQ here, just restricting the frequencies. So that is our Music Box moving on. So basically all the instruments in this layer are being side change to that disco kick as well. So whenever we play, whenever this kick drum happens, where ducking out a little bit all of the instruments in this layer, so you can kind of hear it if we play just this layer here. It's really slight. You could almost get away with not having it at all. And you could probably honestly, I should probably make it a little bit more aggressive just to make sure that that kick is coming through. But like I said, small moves I think as the play here. And especially since it's a rock song, you don't want to go too aggressive with any side chaining stuff. In terms of I'll just go ahead and cover this bus here in terms of what processing is going on. All of these, we have tape, which is another baby audio plugin thats gluing all of this together. So here's without With you can hear. That's, that's that's doing a lot and it's adding, adding a water presence and adding a lot of oomph to it. I'm adding about 50% of the mix there. So yeah, that's what's going on with that. And then of course, the side-chain compression I mentioned. And then I I felt like this part of it could use a little bit higher up more of the high-end. So I boosted that sum. So that is the instrument layer in terms of what's going on. Now It's really dive into all these individual layers. Again, we are using, actually, I don't think this is, this randomizer is doing anything because of the particular way this, at least on this with these samples. So I don't think this is actually doing anything, but if you did have a string sampler, you would probably want to add some random to it. Then we're using context strings or we're using, you could use something like serum maybe at this point to replicate strings. But if you're trying to go for like an orchestral sound, you could use something like one of the contact plugins to do that. And then we're adding a little bit of stereo width. And then we're adding vinyl again, which I mentioned earlier. Just add a little bit of warmth to it to make it feel like a Disney film, broken Disney VHS. And then we have super VHS, which is adding more aware and texture and then restricting frequency range with EQ. And then let's just listen to this section altogether. That's that part. And then at the end here we're doing a similar build along with the piano. And there's other instruments that are kind of repeating the same motif over and over. That's the string part. So you'll look at the Oregon. So a lot of the times in rock music, you will hear producers pair up organs along with their pianos. Just something to add extra texture, I think, and add intrigued to the song. So a lot of times they'll have the piano play the same part or they'll have like Oregon that does something in octave above or below what the piano is doing really depends. But a lot of the times Oregon and piano get paired together, I think in rock music and ours is doing this kind of a spooky, spooky organ type of thing. And what does that that's working with the piano part here. What we're doing is I'm doing kind of octaves here, so it's just just one note, but to an octave apart just to, I don't know, I just thought it sounded cool to do that. We kinda keep that theme for this orient the same for the whole song. So even at the end here, we have these notes that are an octave apart, just kind of going up and just repeating over and over and building throughout. Again. Just working with the piano. Add an extra layer of entry. And so what's going on here? So I originally would've had it lower, I think than this. So I pitched it up some to make sure that it was in her good frequency space. That's not competing with the vocal range or any of the other instruments. And then I'm using serum. I used Oregon cocoa butter, which is a splice preset. And then I'm adding, restricting this frequency range here too, where you can see this is where the notes are. And I wanted it to be really clipped off and really controlled in terms of that. And I'm adding impression. So parallel aggressive or again, just kinda threw it on everything because I thought it sounded great. Yeah, there's a lot of plugins that are similar to this. I think there's like sausage fat and basically stuff that just really beefs out a sound and makes it more present. It's kind of what you're going for there. That's super VHS, which is adding again that where little bit of where I've been using a lot of drift and wash on this to make it sound more worn. Alright. 9. Creating FX and Transistions: Last but not least, our effects layer. So this is the last part where you have everything else you're like, okay, all the instruments are feeling really good. I want to add some effects. We have feedback, chaos, and that sounds like this. That's just a sample I think I got from splice. And I am adding Kickstarter onto that so that whenever that kick drums happening, what's not even when the kink drums happening, it's just on that quarter note. We want it to duck out so it feels bouncy. It's going to add, add to the bounce of the song. This is being automated through to turn on and off the whole song. Yes, this is on, but then at the very end here I wanted this to ring through without this kickstart plug-in being on. So that's why it's being automated. You can hear at the end it's not ducking out on the quarter and that's what's going on with that. And then I just turn it up to be a little bit louder than that is the feedback chaos saying, and the reason I'm adding this is because we want this energy to build in the different sections. This is more of an energy tool where we're like, oh well we want to build up here. You can see I also have automated the mixer volume. So it's building up and these different sections. So yeah, it's just a tool for energy. So we're gonna move on from here. So we've covered that. But the reason that was in this instrument layer is because I wanted to duck it out with the kick drum with that side chain we had going on in there. What do we have? We have a reverse rhythm. So what does this, what did I do for this? I actually took the guitar part, so I wanted to transition into the song. So what I did was I froze this guitar part. So here's what he would do. I'm going to duplicate this. And so you might do something like this where you just go, I freeze and then I would reverse this. So this is how I believe how I did it. And then you can shorten it down like this. Made it a little too fast here. I'm not exactly sure what the duration I ended up stretching this out, but something like that. Whatever I ended up doing, I ended up getting this at least this part here. That's how you would do it functionally. It's just like freezing the part, that guitar part and then reversing it. At least for that if you wanted to steal that specific idea. And then we have another, some other stuff layered on top of that. I will cover it later. So moving on, we're gonna go to this thing which is a vibrant slap. I should rename this crazy train, used it. It's a cool effects. I don't know. I like it a lot, so I just had it kinda come in here when it winds down. Whereas it's more building up. I'm using h delay, just adding some pancake or it's going around the stereo field, not going quite all the way with mixed there. And then I am doing ping pong delay, I believe here at an eighth and it's going to bounce back and forth. That's the virus slap. Then I have a Canon section here. So these two are reversed cannons. So this is what they sound like. Really good transition tool. I like the swoop. Her anything that sounds like a swoop can be really cool for transitioning. Here's how it sounds altogether. I'm not always doing the same level of a swoop every time you can see this one's a little quieter, this one's a little louder. Just add some variation. You're just doing this swoop wherever it feels good. And then I'm using a compressor here. This affects fit group here has a thing to control the EQ so that we're not getting, it's not wafting out down at the bottom here. Whenever we have those parts, are those cannon blast things. Then whenever I want like a powerful moment to really be felt, I have these two canons. These are all pan to the side, so I have these pan a little bit left and right. And then these canon blasts here panned hard left and right. So here's what these sound like. And these are the same sample just reversed in the other direction. Got a cannon blast there. That's a cannon blasts. Sorry. Yeah, you're good. Setting some compressions and maybe it's really to taste whatever sounds good as the play. Now we're going to arise. Her would've gotten this out of able tunes. Able tins is a website that sells doll presets or da, templates. So you could get a whole song that's already been produced and load that up. And you're using this to kind of build, build tension, say that something's about to happen. That's a transition and out of a heavier parts, so it's changed. And again, I'm just cutting it out here. Yeah, I mean, that's pretty much the risers. So we're doing that to signals and transitions. We have these two layers here, which are, these are coming in. So this is just like some Foley. Foley is just like ambient noises. So we just have a campfire and people walking on grass during this first really quiet, really quiet so you can barely hear it. Sad, some texture. And we have that going on again here for this part. Honestly, there's not really any reason why I didn't include both of them other than I probably just forgot in there. And so we kind of have that texture and then I have walking. So the songs called how it sir, It's about being in the armed forces. It made sense to have a soldier marching sound at the end, I thought, I think Pink Floyd did that. There has been plenty of groups that have used the soldier walking sound. But this comes in really subtle, really quiet. Could maybe be for to be a little bit louder. And then we have like an electric guitar feedback layers. So we have two of those down here at the bottom. So this is what it sounds like. I think I got that sample from splice. There might be other places you can get samples as well. So we have that feedback as well. So what does it sound like altogether? You can use it to taste certain times with these risers. So the feedback is kind of acting like this riser here. Only it's just a different sound and it sounds more rock and roll. But yeah, you can just use it. How we use it here. Cutting out and bringing it back. Just adding texture, adding that level of realism with the feedback. Yeah, that's what's going on with this. These two layers is just kind of helping the transitions and layering them in. Sometimes having it sustained throughout the transition, sometimes cutting out right before the transition, depending on what felt right. 10. Outro + Assignment: I think we've gone through this whole song. I'm not going to cover any mastering because that kind of goes out of the scope of what we're doing here. But if you did just want to get a basic master, you could use something like ozone, which is from isotope. You could throw ozone on there and use their built-in. They have kind of like an AI processing thing that tries to automatically master track so you could try that. Otherwise, there's a lot of tutorials on mastering. But again, I recommend using a separate mixing engineering and mastering engineer, or at least having somebody who's mixing and mastering separately from you if you're producing it just to have another set of ears on it that pretty much covers everything on this track. How it's her, this rock track that we have made with absolutely no real instruments. We didn't use midi keyboard, we didn't use it gets hard and no drum set. And yet we have a finished rock song. If you got something out of this course, please feel free to leave a review or a comment on it. I really appreciate it. And if you really enjoyed what you saw today, you can sign up at will hearken.com. You can join my email and my Discord to get free beats, free production and marketing tips and all kinds of good stuff. That brings me to the project component of this course. Basically, I want you to go out and make a song or a soundbites and you'll probably at least 15 seconds. That leverages what you've learned. So it might be an EDM song that has a rock type of breakdown, could be anything, as long as it uses something that you'll learn today. I hope you get a chance to work on the project for this course. And I am looking forward to hearing your submission.