Music Masterclass: How To Make An R&B Beat From Scratch

1. Lesson 1 - Introduction: What is good guys. I'm so glad that you're here. My name is Rah. I'm an independent artist and musician and producer. And in this course we're going to be learning how to make a modern R and BB entirely from scratch. We're going to be going over things such as tempo, music theory, core progressions. We're going to bring that all together and even look at arrangement and even some mixing decisions so that we can go from just an idea to a finished product within this course, by the end of this course, you guys will be able to make your own beat entirely from scratch. Not only that, you'll be able to use the principles that we go over to alter things here and there and make them entirely yours. Let's jump in. But just before we do, if you ever get stuck or you'd like to reach me, you can do so. In the skillshare comments below, just leave a message and I'll get back to it. And also you have the option to join the discord as well and become part of the community. I'm always on there, so you'll always be able to reach me. Lastly, we're going to cover some sound design decisions as well and ways to create the sounds that we're going to use for our Beats. If you don't want to go over making every sound from scratch, you can get those at my store, which I'll also leave a description to down below. It's not mandatory, but if you feel like it would help, no problem, without any further ado, let's jump right in. 2. Lesson 2 - Tempo & Time Signature: Okay guys, we are back for lesson two. And we're just going to jump straight in. No need to waste time, so let's not worry too much about all of the craziness that's going on here. I'm going to explain it, but what we've got is essentially what's called a DAW or a digital audio workstation. So I'm not going to cover too much about everything that's required to get us started on this stage. But what I will say is needed is something like this. A DAW, which could be this. Or logic, reason, cue base. There's plenty around, so pick any, It doesn't really matter which one you pick and try and get familiar with it before as we won't be covering some of the basics of the DAWs in this course. We will also be necessary is an audio interface. So I have the Apollo twin here. But there's so many choices to go through at several price ranges. So as long as you have one, that'll be fine. Same with a laptop and some form of headphones or speakers so that you're able to hear yourself. So if you've got that started, we'll be on the same level and we'll be able to jump straight in. If you have any questions about some things you should pick. Maybe you're deciding between two different products, let me know. Shoot a message and maybe I'll be able to help with that. So the first decision we're going to make within this is one that's usually quite simple for us and it's to do with time signature. So for this particular beat that we're going to make for a lot of R and B, it's going to be in a time signature called 44. We're not going to worry too much about what that means in this case. We just know that a lot of DOW workstations, they're going to start out in 44 as default. And the way of knowing that you're in 44 is if I click what's called a metron. I'm here, we should be able to hear four clicks before it resets. We hear one of those is slightly higher in pitch, that indicates it's the first one and we would count it like this. 12341234, we're in 44, and that gives us a really solid basis. Start making R and B. And the second decision we're going to make is tempo. If you have a rough idea about what song you want to make, you can roughly gauge a kind of tempo. And what I like to do is try and tap it in. So in general, for R and B, it can be between 80, ranging all the way up to 120 and maybe even further sometimes. But something I'm going to end up saying a lot in this course is that there's no hard and fast rules in general. It's entirely personal preference what tempo or even what time signature you would like to go for. So I'm just going to try and fill something out now and we'll go based off of that. If I wanted to make some for maybe a bit slower, Should we try 90 mm hmm? So 90 kind of indicates that we're slightly on the slower side of R and B, which I think is the direction that I want to take this. But now that we've made those decisions, let's come back in lesson three. 3. Lesson 3 - Music Theory and Chord Progressions: Hey guys, welcome back to lesson free. I'm super excited for this one. In this lesson, we're going to make our first decisions about what melodic content we want to go into our beat. So in the previous video, we ended up picking a tempo of around 90, which like I said previously indicates we're on the slightly slower side. And now we're going to use that tempo to try and guide some of our core progression decisions. So if you see on this track here, I've got, I've got a plug in which represents an electric piano. You don't have to have this plug in specifically. There's a lot of free electric piano sounds out there, Google around. But if you do need any assistance, just let me know. But we're only going to use this to try and establish our core progression. Anything would work. Anything that allows you to play in a similar vein as you would on a piano. So let's jump into some of the theory that we're going to be using to create our core progression. And the best place to start would be with the major scale. If I start on what we call middle C, which in this case is four, we're going to build our major scale from here. And it looks like this. Every white note from C to C. Or a better way to remember it as it migrates to other keys would be to go one tone. Or what we call a whole step, another whole step, a half step two, or what we call a whole step, two jumps, whole step, whole step on half, a little faster that half. Using those notes, we're going to be able to build our chords and then we'll be able to build our progression. Once we've managed to learn this scale, what we then want to be able to do is build our triad, which is three notes, to create a chord within this scale. To do this, what we're going to do is we're going to play our first note, skip a note in the scale, play the third, skip another note in the scale, and play the fifth. And it looks like this. A good way to remember is just that those jumps, if we move up, we get to a De minor. This is an E minor move up one more for our. As you notice, the notes correspond to the bottom note that I'm playing, A. This is called a half diminished. And then we're back to our C at the higher end. We'll do that a bit faster. It looks like this. Okay, let's build on this concept a little bit more, and we're going to extend that chord from being three notes now to four notes. Okay? In this situation, that would look like this. If I play our regular triad, skip another step, and we're going to play the fourth note a little bit higher altogether, It has a sound that's a little bit more blissful. Let's use this pattern to work out the other chords within the scale, and it will sound like this to read the mound at BC. Half diminished, minor, major, major, minor minor, and major. We call the chord seventh chords. In this particular course, we're going to use those seven chords to build up our progression. And we can pick any order, any number to create something that we like. I'll put that into practice now. We're going to try and come up with a core progression using those techniques and see if we can find anything we like. I think I'm going to start here. That sounds nice already. That sounds nice between these two, maybe. Let's try going somewhere slightly different. That's nice. I'm not fun of that. Even though we have these techniques and we have these, what we ultimately want to do is use our ears to decide where it wants to take us. I think something that I landed on was this. Well, some variation of that. We're going to build on these concepts now that we have our chord progression, and now we know the names of these chords. What I'm going to do is I'm going to use my left hand to play what we would call a bass note, and it exists seven notes below. Our tonic note, or our first note that we're playing in the chord, this is an minor. We're going to look for the minor below, which on the keyboard has a very similar shape, just what we would call an octave or seven notes below. It also has a similar sound, slightly darker, but ultimately it doesn't feel like there's any harmony there. That's a good indication that we found our octave. I'm going to add that low octave to each chord I play to give it a bit more warmth and a bit more low end. And it will sound like this. That's nice. That's lovely. And we're going to use one more technique, I think. Let's use this with the metronome. Earlier we decided on 90 Pm. I'm going to press play, so we get to hear it. 1234, we can hear that slightly higher pitch, note 34. And let's try our progression to this. 234. Super nice. So the last technique I wanted to introduce to you guys is something that can take you very far with these chords. And it's the fancy word is our pegiation. But what it really means is we're just going to stagger the notes that we play. And play them at slightly different times, so it will sound something like this. And if we look carefully what's happening here, I'm still playing the same notes, but I'm kind of randomly by ear just picking notes to play one at a time rather than altogether. And it's totally preference when you would like to use this. That sounds really nice to me. So let's try and record something that sounded really nice to me and I think we're on a really good track. Okay, so as you can see here, we've got our notes that we played in via the piano. We don't necessarily have to have a piano or what we would call a Midi controller. In this case, you can use the same concepts to click in the chords that we'd like to find. So you could click it in here and then, like we say previously, or stagger the notes to play them 12 or three at a time, or even altogether to create a pattern you'd like. So I encourage you guys to create, experiment with these chords and see what you could find. See anything that you would like. Post them in the skillshare comments below. I would love to hear them and even I would be inspired. So we'll leave it there for now and pick this up in lesson four. 4. Lesson 4 - Sound Design: Okay guys, welcome back to lesson four. In this one, we're going to go over some sound design decisions. We've picked out a core progression, but on a regular electric piano it can work, and a lot of songs have that. But there's a potential to do a lot more. So let's dig in and see if we can find some interesting sound. And even go a little bit further to create some of our own and be able to make something that's truly unique and special. So I'm going to load up what we call a software synthesizer. In this case it's going to be serum, but you can use several. I believe there's one called vital which I think is free. Don't quote me on that. And many others like Silength Hive Ana. There's plenty around and for the most part, they all follow a similar framework. And understanding a little bit about sound design in general gains you access to being able to create sound on any of these synthesizers. So as you can see here, we have two oscillators, right? And an oscillator is simply something that generates sound. So if I play a note now, not very nice, but we'll work on that. We have the option to turn these on, and then we get two. We have a filter which is going to cut out the high frequencies in this configuration. And we have something called an envelope here, which basically shapes the way our sound plays over time. We have something that starts off with an attack, so if I play this now we can hear it has a really short, quick playing start. If I bring this up now we can hear it fade in and volume, we have a hold. This isn't on all synthesizers, but on this particular one, it basically asks, how long would you like this sound to be at its highest volume? So I'm going to make a few sound design tweaks just to stop it being super, super annoying. But if you listen carefully when this white line, this white dot travels at the top, you'll notice that it stays there for a little bit before it dips off. Let's have a listen, okay, one more time free to bring up the attack will fade up, come to the top, and then do what we'll talk about now. The next part we have is the decay, which allows us to choose how long it would like it to take to go from our very loudest point to the point which it would play if we held the note. If I bring our sustain right down here and bring our decay right back. You'll notice that once he gets along this arc, it will stay there for around 1 second. And then it will stay at this volume level for however long I hold the e. Cool. And the very last one we have is the release, and that is how long it will take for it to quiet down in volume and finish. Once I've released the note, I'll let go and the sustain will stop and it will play this part. After I've left the note, pay a little bit of attention to what you see on the keyboard and you'll be able to match up where I've played the note to what we would call an ADSR curve. Okay, lastly here we have something called an LFO or a low frequency oscillator. Doesn't matter too much what the jargon about it means, but essentially this allows us to control some of the effects that we have within here over time. And serum is great because it has a lot of configuration of possibilities. You can change a lot of things and a lot of customization. But this LFO basically allows us to change any particular subject over time. As an example, if I take this LFO and I apply it to the cutoff when I play a note, we should be able to see this move in conjunction with the shape that this LFO indicates. So let's have a look. Okay, as we can see, as the LFO rises towards the top, the filter will increase. And as it comes down, the filter decreases. And then in here, we have a lot of options for what we would want our LFO to look like. This is a very common shape for what an LFO would look like and it would sound like this. So now we understand a little bit about how this works. We're going to be able to go in and create a sound, knowing that we'd like to create the genre of R and B, there are a few things that we can use as guidelines to create our sounds. So first of all, we know that a lot of the times, R and B tends to use softer sounds, so that would indicate that we would want to use something like a sound wave. C has this very smooth up and down motion, which is going to give us a lot smoother sound than some of these other waveforms. So if I play a note here, oh, I'll take off the other notes and the other configuration so that we can hear it. Remove all destinations, and in fact, I'll bring up our sustaining so we can hear it. That feels like we're already in a little bit of a closer ballpark. I think I would like something that would have a little bit more beef to it. I'm going to press the unison button, which is going to duplicate our way form and move it to either side of our ears, on the left side and the right side as indicated by this. We can see here that we now have one road to indicate on the left, one road to indicate on the right. And when it says three, we have one in the middle as well. Let's have a listen to how that sounds. That's nice. We have the option as to how far we would like that to be, and the further we go, the more de tuned it would sound. So we're going to go for a little bit of imperfection with this. I think that's a nice place. Okay. Secondly, I think I'm going to skip this filter for now because I've got the main sound that I want. I'm going to turn on this filter and allow oscillator A to pass through it. I think I'm going to go for a filter with a steeper curve which is going to cut off those high frequencies a lot sharper and we'll be able to hear that difference if I ask to turn it off. Back on, we've lost quite a lot there, but we're definitely more in the zone. If I play play A, you can see we're already getting some of that R and B flavor that we're looking for. I'm going to make a few tweaks to the filter. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to ever so slightly raise the cutoff, which means I'm going to let more low frequencies and high frequencies and more mids through. By raising this curve here, I'm going to ever so slightly raise the resonance, which is going to boost and highlight the frequency just before the curve. So let's have a listen to how that sounds. So it's very subtle, but we do hear an ever so slight warping of the sound. So what I'm next going to do is raise up the overall level that feels really nice to me. We're definitely in the ballpark. Lastly, I think I'm going to come over to our envelope and make a few decisions over here with the attack. I don't want it to be right on zero because that always leads to a slight click at the beginning of the sound, which can work for some. But for this particular one, I'm going to give it a small amount, almost imperceptible to the human ear, but just enough to prevent that click coming in at the beginning. So now it sounds like this a little bit more. We still have it. There we go. That's really nice. I'm going to bring up the release ever so slightly because when I let it go, I want it to feel like it's decaying away. It's slowly fading away. Just a bit more. That's nice. So I'm going to bring down the sustain ever so slightly so that when the first punch of that note comes through, it feels quite strong. And then it comes down to a slower level. So it sounds like this, really nice. Now, this is a very cool technique that not a lot of people know about. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to use the L photol here and this will give me an opportunity to show how it works. I'm going to bring it over to this small indicator here. And what this indicator represents is actually a very small increase in decrease in pitch. In fact, just to show you that I'm going to remove it for now, if I bring it up, you can hear very slight alterations in pitch if you listen carefully. Back in the olden days, I say a lot of the hardware synthesizers had this type of emulation where there was slightly waver in pitch due to the hardware that was being used to some. That's a very desirable effect. We're going to try and achieve that now and replicate that using our L photo. I'm going to come here, first of all, I'm going to bring it back to zero so that it oscillates around a center. I'm going to bring the rate up, instead of it being matched to a BPM, which in this case would be the tempo of our track. I'm just going to feel it by ear. Okay. And we're going to come to this very small button here and make it a very subtle effect, almost amount that you wouldn't be able to hear it. So let's listen. That feels really nice to me. We're almost done now. We're going to use some effects to try and bring some life to it. So the first thing I'm thinking is let's add a little bit of a phase. What phase is going to do is it's going to add frequencies into the sound. That's going to oscillate back and forth to create almost a wishing washing sound, really nice. Let's add a touch of M. Let's go reverb. Reverb is supposed to emulate the sound that we hear naturally all around us. It is supposed to give a little bit of a tail, a little bit of an echo to the sounds that we're playing. That feels really nice to me. Okay, perfect. So here we've designed a sound and we can use these principles to make any sorts of decisions we would like and create plenty, plenty of sounds. So now that we've done that, we're going to use this sound on our core progression and we're going to see if we can come up with something very cool in lesson five. 5. Lesson 5 - Drums & Basslines: Okay guys, welcome back to lesson five. In this lesson, we're going to go over building a basic drum pattern to accompany our chords. So as you can see, we've managed to sound design our chords and we've got a really nice basis. What I'm going to do is I'm going to duplicate our clip. So it's going to be the exact same, but just played for an additional bar. Make sure that we've got it at the right side. We do, and I'm going to loop it so that when it gets to the end, it just plays all over again. Perfect. In general, there's a whole world of possibilities in terms of what particular patterns, and samples, and tones, and drum sounds that we'd like to use. But a good place to start is with our kick drum, which is going to represent our low frequency energy. And some sort of clap or snare, which is going to represent our high energy. And they're going to alternate between each other and going to play off each other to create our groove. So I'm going to try and build it, and it's mostly going to be built by ear, but I'm going to start with a kick. A good place to B would be to start with a kick on the one, Let's see if I can find something I like. This sounds nice. Okay, so I'm going to put it right here at the start of our track. What I'm going to try doing is beat boxing. A few sounds over the progression to see if I can get any ideas in my head. I've got something that's kind of slow, kind of alternating just between the kick and the snare. And I'm going to try and build that out now. So I had something like, okay, so we have that lining up here. See if I can find another snare sound that I like. That's an interesting one. Let's try to give it a try, okay? This isn't always the case, but it's generally a core rule of thumb that once we start to recognize where we're putting the patterns, especially of the snares, they'll repeat quite a lot. We might be able to see this if I beat box over what I have already. I'll see if I can find the next place I'd like to put my kick. Okay, I'm thinking here, my next snare happens to be here. Okay, really nice. Okay, so now that we have that which represents our bar, what I'm going to do is I'm going to duplicate those 2 bars again to achieve the same sound. I've duplicated it across the whole track. And if I've done that correctly, it should play throughout. So let's have a listen that sounds really cool. You're going to notice in some situations, I'm going to choose to do something which we call mixing as I go. So we're going to have a special lesson dedicated to mixing. One thing that's going to give us an advantage is making some mixing decisions during the creation of the beat. In this particular instance, one thought that immediately came to my mind is the snare could possibly sound nice with a little bit of reverb. So what I'm going to do is I have what's called a return track here. Which essentially is going to be a track which doesn't make any noise by itself, but when we run our main tracks through it, they're going to add to the sound with the effects that we provided. Here, I have a reverb that's sitting on a track by itself, and it represents the A track here. If I bring up the corresponding amount of A in our main track, we should hear a little bit of reverb and see a little bit of green coming through to indicate that we are actually running this track through a reverb channel as well. We're going to add one more element. In this particular case, it's going to be a high hat, which is used to add high frequency energy and groove to the drum pattern. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a new track. I'm going to create an empty slot as we can see here. I'm going to use this to draw in the pattern that I would like to have. We're not going to get any sound yet, but let me pick a high hat that I like and we'll go from there. That sounds really nice to me. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go to what we would call a drum rack, which gives me the option to place several sounds in a group. And we're going to use that to draw in our pattern. If I come back to the sound that we previously chose, which I believe was in this pack here, drag it into our slot. Now the first thing I'm going to do is draw in our notes on every beat within the bar. And let's see how that sounds. Okay, it's definitely got some energy to it, but it's a little bit sharp. Let me move it so it's at the beginning. Whoops. Just duplicate these over. So I have just moved the tracks so that they're in line and copied and pasted them over. They're a little bit sharp. What I think we can do to achieve something that's a little bit lighter is alternating velocities. What a velocity is, is essentially an indication of how hard we hit it. Now because we drew in the computer is picked a velocity for us. But in most cases, if it was played by a drummer, there'd be variations in groove. One way to achieve that is to alternate. I'm going to copy and paste them over and do the same for the entire clip. And let's see how that sounds. Okay, that's really cool. Let's bring it down in volume. So slightly cool, that sounds really nice. Now let's try adding a little bit of variety and a little bit of interest. I'm going to pick one of these places within this particular pattern. If I make the groove even a little bit shorter, we can then double up the beat in some areas. Let's see how that sounds. I'm just experimenting. I've got no idea if it will work. That feels really good to me as a personal preference choice. I'm not going to put it right here, but I'm going to put it on the one neck to it and duplicate it, so it happens every other time. That could be really interesting. Let's have a listen to our beat. Really cool. Okay, I've copied that all the way along and now we have our basic drum groove. What I'm going to do is I'm going to group those tracks together just for purposes of organization so I know that they belong together. I'll create a group and you can do that in several DAW's. The next thing we're going to move onto is the baseline. I'm going to pick the same software synthesizers that we used previously, Serum. We're going to apply some of the lessons that we learned in our previous sound design course to create our base information instead of picking a sin wave. In this case, I think I'm going to go for something with a bit more sharpness to it. Okay, I'm going to bring up the unison for that beef and what we call chorus. And bring it very close together. I'm actually going to pitch it down. We spoke a little bit about the pitch controls that they have in serum here. This controls very small moves. This controls moves that indication of one note on the piano, a semitone. This controls whole jumps from one note to the next note in the piano, which would in this case be called an octave from a C to the next below. If I play this one here and then pull down this octave button, it's going to be the same note, but an octave lower. We'll try that again. I think I preferred it around there, so I'm going to bring it up, one that feels good, then we're going to filter again. I'm going to go for a very, quite a steep filter and we're going to come a lot lower. Nice. Okay, so now I think I'm going to leave the release very short. Leave the attack, bring it up ever so slightly, but I like where the hold in the sustaining. So I'm going to keep that there. I'm going to add some distortion which is adding warmth and grittiness. Normally we'd hear lots of high frequency buzzing, But because it's been taken out by our filter, now we're left with just warmth and energy and beef. That sounds really nice. And now I'm going to go for some compression. Actually, I don't like the sound of that. I don't think it's necessary. So we Sound assigned our base. Now we have options as to what we would like to play to accompany our main core progression. In most cases, something that will work most of the time, is following the same notes that we chose within the bottom hand of our core progression to play on our base. And that would sound like this, that sounds really nice. But we have some options as to how we can add some more interest. One of the options that I'm going to try and employ in this particular case is the use of those same octaves that we spoke about earlier. As you can see, we were playing our low and our low F that we played when we made our core progression. But by using the high and the high, sometimes we can create some movement without varying too much in terms of harmony. So I'm going to play around with some of the times that I choose to switch between the high and the lows. But again, there's no hard and fast rules, so pick whatever it feels right to you. Okay. Really nice. So I chose to only do it at some points, and I think that was only on when we pressed the F, but that was mostly guided by just my ears. So now, because I played it in by hand, there's a tendency for it to be ever so slowly off the grid in places in the core progression that didn't matter too much. But we want our base to be very tight and very in time. What I'm going to do is I'm going to use something called quantus. Quantus are going to use the computer to align it exactly with the grid. And the grid refers to the exact subdivisions of time that we have locked in with our tempo. The shortcut for that on Ableton is command U. And as you can see, the beginning of all of these notes have been dragged to the nearest line. Let's have a listen. Okay, So we noticed there, just because it's a computer, it may have missed accidentally where I wanted to play that by listening with our ears. And this is a skill that we can gain over time. We'll be able to pick up on some of the imperfections that have been made by ourselves and sometimes by the computer. So I'm going to drag this back, just one subdivision where I would tell you that to play. I heard one small difference here. If you notice carefully, a lot of these notes are overlapping, but this one in particular, there's a gap, which you can hear. What we would like from our base notes is that every time one stops, the next one plays immediately. This is called a legato, where something is always playing in a very long and flowy way. I'm going to highlight all our notes. Come to here and press the legato button, which is going to make sure all our notes are stretched to the beginning of the next. Let's bring that together, make sure that it's nice and in time. Duplicate it over and we've done our basic drums and our base. Let's build on this in lesson six. 6. Lesson 6 - Adding Drum Complexity: Okay guys, so in our previous lesson, we looked at how to build out a basic drum beat and a basic pattern. But now we're going to look at how can we add more interest and more variety to our drum patterns to make them feel more unique, more exciting, and in particularly, more us. So there's two primary ways that we can do that, that we're going to look at today. First of all is by adding more sounds, more samples, and more drum hits. And the second way is by adding loops, sets of pre recorded sounds that go on for a period of time that can be used to add that interest that high energy and most importantly that group. So let's experiment with that. Now, as you guys remember, we've got our drumbeat, we've got our base, and we've got our core progression here. And it sounded really cool, but it's very flat, so is there something we can do to add some extra additional energy and more variety to our drums? So first of all, let's play with the idea with adding some more individual hits. I like the sound of that Shaker. What I'm going to do is I'm going to play throughout the beat and listen very intensely to the drum pattern to see if there's any space that I feel like needs filling. And we could fill it with a sound that we've just chosen. I've already heard that it could potentially go in between our kick and snare as a small extra element. Let's see how that sounds. Oh, that's not bad. I'm going to turn it down because it's a bit sharp. A bit more bit more perfect. That sounds really nice. Now we're going to do a little bit of what we call panning. Panning essentially is the process of moving our sounds from being in the very center of where we perceived them to be, to either being perceived more towards the left side of our track or more towards the right side of the track. And that could be expanded to also being, as we've done previously on either side and sometimes in some cases maybe even behind. But in this case we're just going to use panning ever so slightly over here to move it slightly towards the left, perfect. And by using clever and artful panning, we're able to build a more three D picture of our drums. So I can see I'd want it there as well. So I'm going to duplicate across our track, so and copy that over right till the end of our drum groove. Okay, that sounds really cool. Let's see if we can do that again this time I'm going to go for maybe a slightly different kit. That's quite cool. Should we give that a try? I could hear it just there just kind of a light. I'm going to place that on a new track. I don't think I placed it in exactly the right spot, but we can move that later. Oh, okay. So I placed that accidentally, but that sounded quite interesting, didn't it? Maybe slightly later. Okay, nice. That's where I intended it to be and it feels right to me. So as you can see, I'm really using my ear and experimenting with different things. You get a lot of happy accidents by just letting yourself explore and finding different areas to place the drum hits that you would like. Again, as I always like to stress, there's no hard and fast rules. We can just use these as guidelines to construct songs that we enjoy and get into the ballpark of what we're aiming to make. I had a small idea. What I'd like to do is I'm going to duplicate this sound across and I'm going to place it on a new track entirely. Okay, now what we're going to do is a little bit of audio manipulation. Okay, so I'm going to press this Warp function. So this button allows us to warp several aspects of the sound, whilst it still retains the amount of time which it's going to play for. In this particular case, we're going to alter the pitch ever so slightly. I think I'm going to bring it down, that reduction of negative four and pitch refers to the amount of semites that we've dropped it. But because it's a percussive element, what we're more going to pick up is the overall lack of brightness. Let's listen to it alongside the previous one that we've made. That's pretty cool, I really like that. What I'm going to do is also a little bit of panning. I'm going to bring this, I'm going to push this even slightly further out than that, towards the right. As you can see, if I move some things towards the left, I'd like to move other things towards the right. And overall, whilst there is a lot of difference and variety between them, overall we managed to achieve a balance in the drum pattern, which doesn't end up making the song feel too lopsided. I'm going to duplicate that pattern across. Bring them both down ever so slightly. Okay. That feels really, really cool. Okay, so we've seen some ways that we can manipulate the audio and we can bring in some additional sounds to add some interest in our tracks. Now let's look at the second way that we were looking at adding variety and interest, and that was using loops. In these cases, people have already pre recorded sets of grooves and sets of sounds together. And we can use them in our beats to see if they can add a little bit of interest based on how they interact with what we already have in our project. So let's give that a go. Okay, so that's quite interesting. I find that quite interesting because this one isn't typically something that you would hear in R and B, but it's speaking to me and I like the idea that some things that you do that aren't very typically heard allow you to identify yourself as more unique and add some things that are more follow that urge. If you do get it, I'm not sure if it will work, but it's something we can definitely try. So I'm going to place this in here and one thing that I will do and I will stress is that in many cases, Ableton has actually already Tim shifted this for us. So hopefully it should be in time. In some DAWs, you may have to do this manually yourself to make sure that it stays in time with the project. If we look over here, we can see that it says 85, which in this particular loop pack indicates the BPM. And over here we can see we know we're working in a project of 90. So luckily, that's a small adjustment that's been made. So that may need to be done manually. Just bear that in mind. One way to know that it's been done is you'll notice the loop begins at the beginning of the bar and ends at the end of a grid line as well. So that seems to be neatly aligned along some of these grid lines, which is a good indication that it is already in time. But the best way is just to here. Okay, cool. I really like the sound of that, but it does feel like it may be doing just a little bit too much. So there's a few things that we can do to get the best of both worlds, where we get the additional groove that this is adding without taking away too much from the elements that we've already placed into our own track. What I'm going to do is I'm going to grab a filter. This filter is very similar to the process that we use in our sound design lesson, which is going to take out some of those high frequencies. But rather than having the entire synth, we're just going to use that effect in L isolation. So I'm going to bring it down very cool. I'm also going to do a similar thing that we did to our previous. I'm going to bring it down in pitch ever so slightly. Okay, that feels very cool to me. I'm going to bring it down in volume ever so slightly as well. So as you can see here, I'm actually erring on the side of subtlety rather than doing too much. So that way we're not relying on the percussive loops to give us the energy that we need, but rather just adding it as something that if you notice, you notice and that is a really great way to add interest. I'm also going to pan it ever so slightly towards the right. Okay, that feels really good to me, so I'm going to duplicate that. And let's see if we can apply the same techniques again with another loop. This one could potentially be cool, let's give it a try. Same again, it's going to loop itself to fit in with our tempo. I'm going to turn it down. I'm just preemptively guessing that it may be a little loud. Let's have a listen. Okay, so we have a similar thing that we had with our previous loop here where I like the energy and I like the group that it's giving. But it feels very busy, very upfront, and maybe it's detracting slightly from what we've already added towards our beats. Let's apply the same technique here. We've had a similar problem. We're going to apply the same thing twice. I'm going to add that filter. Do you pre here that gross? Bring it down the volume member so slightly. And I'm actually going to pan it towards the left this time. Bring it down a little bit more. Do you hear that again? That feels really, really good to me. And if you notice, I've only done that on half. Because what we're beginning to get here is the beginnings of an arrangement. So here we can start off with slightly lower energy, and then I'm guessing at some point maybe it's a chorus or a high energy bridge. What we've got here is something that adds more interest, more energy, and keeps the listener engaged and hooked. So if we listen, okay, so we've managed to add interest to our drums, and I think it's really starting to come together. Let's see what we can do in lesson number seven. 7. Lesson 7 - Layering: Welcome back guys, and well done for making it all the way to lesson seven. This is wicked. We've got a really nice foundation and we've got a really interesting drum groove, but we've only got one layer of chord and melodic information. And if we listen to false songs, we know that maybe there's a little bit more going on than that. So that's what we're going to dig into there. We're going to look at how can we add some more layers to add some more interest and make our beat feel a little bit different. We're going to use the same software synth that we've been using in previous videos. If I pull up serum again, what we're going to be looking to do is we're going to look for some ways that we can accompany our main core progression. And other ways that we can add contrast. And when I say contrast, that can be in a variety of ways. If we have our main core progression starting quite low, maybe we can look for something that's in a higher octave or quite high. If we have it in the middle, maybe we could do something quite wide. If we have something quite long, maybe it could be complemented by something quite short. So let's play with those ideas now. We're going to sound design a few different sounds and see if we can come up with something that adds a little bit more to this. So I'm going to start with a small loop and we'll, I'll label this chorus for now, so we have an idea about where we would like that to be. Okay, let's have a listen. First of all, I'm recognizing that we could definitely have some more high melodic information here. So I'm going to do something very similar to what we did previously. I'm going to start with a sine wave, but this time I'm going to make it very short. Oh, make sure I'm on the correct track. There we go. I'm going to raise it two octaves. Bring up quite a high release, Bring that sustain down. So now we've got quite a plucky sound, really nice. What I'm going to do is I'm going to add some chorus to, it makes me feel quite wide. Then we're going to add a lot of reverb. What we've done with that reverb, it makes it feel like it's happening a lot further away. I'm going to turn it down in volume ever so slightly. Using the same notes that we picked up from our core progression, we're going to see if we can find some other patterns in a manner of ways to complement. We could, in one particular case, follow the core progression. Exactly. Let's see how that sounds. And I'll tell you, I actually really like the sound of that. What I'm going to do is I'm going to add some delay, which is going to repeat the chord that we played after we played the initial hit. So if I play it like this, we can hear just a little bit of an after ringing of it playing over and over and over again like an echo. Really nice. I'm going to filter out ever so slightly. I'm going to bring it, filter it to the high. No, I think I preferred the low actually. So we'll keep it in what we would call a band pass where we actually cut the low information and the high information allow just a small fraction in the middle. Notice that it's only doing that to our delayed sounds and leaving the original free, which is a very nice touch. Let's try that again and see if we can record it in. You'll notice that I use the same chord progression, but because we chose to put it an octave up within the synth, it sits kind of above the rest of the music, which is very nice touch. I'm going to bring it down in volume slightly. I actually really like the sound design that we managed to get on that. I'm going to duplicate that, which is going to create another track. Let's delete what we had on the previous. We have the same serum instance on a different serum, if that makes sense. We have the same preset, the same Sound. But this time we can play extra again. Maybe we'll make a few small alterations and then we'll try and play something again. I think I know what I want to do. If you notice, for the longest time we've been playing several chords at once. What quite often happens with some lead information is that we ought to only hear one note at once. To do that, with this particular synth, we would use the mono function, which only allows one note to play at a time. If I ask to play this here, if I go to play another one, it will cut off the previous notes to play the next. If I try and play a chord, it only letting through one note at time. Okay, so why would we use that? We're going to use that in conjunction with another feature of the synth, in this case called portamento or glide, Which allows notes that when we play them consecutively, to slide between these notes. Okay, if I play this here and play them, one happens right after the other. Then if I bring up this portamento, suddenly it slides up and we can hear that jumping pitch all the way towards the top one. That gives us another interesting angle to add information towards our. Let's see if we can come up with something very interesting there. I'm going to use the same notes that we used in our core progression, the notes of the C major scale, to see if we can come up with an interesting melody that might hook into the listener's mind. I don't like how it seems to be happening all the time. I think it may be too much. In fact, I don't think it managed to suit the pluck type of sound that we developed. Let's take off the Portamento was an interesting idea, but one I didn't fall in love with. So you can see we're experimenting with ideas and if it ultimately doesn't feel right to our ears, then we can feel comfortable in saying, actually we'll give that amiss, but still we may be able to find a melody that we like. That's quite nice. So you can see what I did here is I'm playing pairs of octaves, okay? So I'm playing RC, and then a B octave, then a octave, and then a G. Again, this is something that I'm using a Midi controller to do, but you can also do that by drawing in if you would like. So let's try and record that in really nice. And I think what I'm going to do is maybe even try adding some more reverb so that it's even further in the back. That might be a mistake, but again, let's try. I actually really like how that sounds. Again you can see what I've chosen to do is add those additional elements in the second half of our beat. So now we have an even greater differentiation between what we could call maybe our verse pre chorus and our chorus. Let's have a listen a little bit of our verse, or our low energy point going into our high energy point chorus 1234. Okay, that feels really, really great, so I'll catch you guys in lesser number. 8. Lesson 8 - Arrangement: Okay guys, welcome to lesson number eight in this course. You guys are doing absolutely well so far. We've got a really awesome beat. We've got basically a 16 bar loop, and a point of high energy, and a point of low energy. So what we're going to look at now is how can we turn this, what we have now, into a full beat essentially, and give it some high points and low points. And there's various ways to do that. I think the best way to look at this is from a singer's perspective. How would a potential singer or artist sing along to our beat? Giving them enough space to tell their verses, their choruses give them some points of low energy and give them some points where they can really rise. There's several ways we can do that. Often, sometimes people would like to use a Capellas and put that alongside their beats to give them a map to roughly follow. We can do this using our ears and just a little bit of guidance. So let's jump in and get started. So we know that most songs are going to start with some form of intro again. When we come to arranging, we know that No Rule is hard and fast. We can do essentially whatever we like. However, there are some popular trends that we can refer to in the creation of our tracks. What I'd like to do is I'd like to start with my intro at a very low point. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to duplicate. But not just duplicate, I'm also going to duplicate the time so that we've got the space to put something in between here. Right? As you can see that not only have I just copied that over, it hasn't replaced, but it's been put in between. Okay. So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to start out, like I said, at a very low point by cutting a lot of the information that we previously added. So let's listen to just the chord progression by itself, okay? That feels really good to me. So now I'm going to say, let's go into our first first. For instance, again, I'm not going to give everything to the listener, right? I wants, we want to give them some points where they have everything and some points where they have not as much so that we can get some dynamics and maintain interest. So I'm going to take away the baseline and I think I'm also going to take away the high hats as well. Can it leave in for longer? What it feels like to me is maybe I'm wrong, but it feels like we go again for another one of these verses. What I'm going to do is I'm going to bring in the high hats for this second one. So we've got a slightly a bit more energy here. You could choose to think of this as maybe a second part of the verse or possibly a pre chorus. It's hard to know without a singer literally being alongside you. But in general, it's just about following the rhythm of the song, your gut feeling. And over time, it's the skill that you'll definitely strengthen. I'm going to call this, for example, a pre chorus. Okay, And now we're into our chorus. And you may think, okay, now's the time to give them everything. While it's true, we're going to give them a lot, we're going to give them a real explosive. Here we are, We've arrived at the chorus. Again, I'm going to hold off on giving them absolutely everything we've done until the second chorus, when we have the highest moment of the song. But there has to be a payoff for that. So we're going to put it towards the end. For now, I think I'm going to take away our two additional serum patches and just see how that sounds. I think we need a little bit more energy. I'm going to add this serum patch back in. I, let's try taking away one of these percussion loops that feels a lot better. Okay, we're coming out of the chorus now and my inkling is telling me that we're coming into a second verse now. It may feel like we want to copy the first verse over and bring it to the second verse, which to be honest, is something that I do a lot. But I don't want to drop the listener right back down to a very, very early point in the song. I think it makes sense in this case to give them, keep the high hats going with them still, so they still get to feel that whilst taking out some other elements. In fact, something that could be a very cool technique is how about we give them a different version of the elements they've already heard in a different way. They haven't quite had the opportunity yet to listen to just the drums in the bass alone. So let's take out the core progression, which has been playing throughout and see how that feels in our second verse. Nice, That feels really strong to me. A really nice place to carry on the groove. Now my guy is telling me that we're going to be moving into a second pre chorus and I am going to do exactly what I said previously. I'm going to copy the pre chorus over and bring it here and make a add locator for chorus two to add again a variety and keep that energy rising. I think I want to keep the baseline in here. Let's hear how that sounds. Okay. That feels really great to me. Now, I know we're coming into our very last chorus and this is Yes, definitely the time where we want to give them everything we have and everything we created for the I'm. Whilst we should take this out of the previous one, I'm going to now delete that. Instead of just muting it, I'm going to make a note that this is our chorus. Make sure that's directly on the right line. If we zoom in ever so slightly here, then move along. Okay, cool. You can see that. You can see that we have all of our elements here. I think what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to double this again. It's quite common in a lot of R and B records and a lot of pop records in general to have a double chorus just to let the audience have that high, for a little bit longer. It feels like this. Let's come a little bit from before the chorus, so we get to feel that punch really nice guys. And just like that, by using a little bit of our intuition, we've managed to turn that small loop into basically an entire that we've done from scratch. So we've got a few more lessons to go now. I think we're going to make some few tweaks here and there and delve into some mixing and how we can make it really punch and feel loud for presenting, potentially even to an artist or a client. See. 9. Lesson 9 - Mixing & Mastering: Guys. Okay, so we made it to the very last lesson in making a beat from scratch. We're going to do a few touch ups, a little bit of mix, and then just a touch of mastering so that we could potentially show a client or someone how they could sound that full volume. Okay, so let's jump straight into it. So in terms of just a few tweaks, there are a few things that I noticed during our previous play through that I thought, oh, that needs to be picked up. So first of all, if for the very keen listeners, you'll know that I played this by hand and if I put the metronome on, this one here, happened a little bit early for me. I'm going to move that manually to be just on the grid. You can see we have some of these are slightly off. In general, I prefer for things to drag slightly rather than be early. I think it gives a little bit of a better time feel. I'm not going to straighten all of those to be exactly on the grid. I'm happy with some of them being a little bit further forward. But what I don't want is it being that far back. We've made that changed on the beginning core progression. Let's copy it to the others. Great, perfect. Let's have a listen, here's the change we made. Let's make sure it's right. That feels a lot nicer. Great. Okay, so let's make a few mixing decisions that we're going to make now. First of all, I'd like to listen to the drums by themselves. I'm going to make a group out of them and I'm going to solo just those they feel really, really nice. But we want to get a little bit more harmony and a little bit more glue towards them. So I'm going to use something called the glue compressor. Any compressor will do, but this glue compressor works particularly well on buses. What I'm going to do is I'm going to bring down the threshold. I won't go super in depth into how compressors work, but in general what they're going to do is they're going to bring the peaks of our sound. They're going to bring them down in volume to match some of the lower elements. When our kick hits, for instance, which is a very loud transient sound with a lot of very sharp peaks, the compressor is going to grab onto those, bring it slightly down, and every time the kick hits, we'll notice that some other things duck out the way. When there's there breathing and movement between the drums, we can build that into the groove and it feels like they were made or placed in the same environment. Okay, that feels great for me. Very subtle, but that's all we really need for this. Secondly, we'll note that a lot of our melodic information contains low frequencies that we don't necessarily need to have because we already have a base when it comes to low frequency information. Our ears aren't very good at picking up all of the different low frequency information that's happening there. It makes sense to do what we call a high pass or a low cut. If I grab an EQ here, we can use the EQ to shape certain frequencies and change the tone of our sounds. If I play this in isolation, change this to be a curve similar to a low pass filter that we had previously, but this way working in the opposite direction. If I bring it up quite far, you'll hear that we're losing a lot of that low warmth. We don't want to take too much. Obviously it felt quite nice previously, but we don't want to get away in the way of O. I'm going to leave it here empty and that's where our base will go, really nice. I'm going to do the same thing to this high bell part we wrote as well. Because funnily enough, even if it feels like there might not be low frequency information there, it can be deceptive. Let's have a look. There's not much, but we can see every time it hits. There are a few areas and we don't really need that. You can see here because I actually want this part to live in a much higher part of our beat. I can choose to high pass a lot more. And now it sits almost above our keys as well, which is great. We're making space for separate things within our beat, which is really nice sounding. Lastly, I'm going to do the same thing for our high bells here, and maybe this one will be high passed the most. Okay, that feels really, really good. Okay, so now what I'm about to do could be considered mastering. The process of mastering is very complex and has a lot to it then more than I can explain in just a single video. But what we're going to do here is aim to get a lot of volume, subtly control the dynamics, and maybe cut a few tones that we don't like out of our mix and see if we can get something that just adds a little bit of a ten or 5% shine on what we already have. So the first thing I'm thinking is I'm going to add a compressor. So I'm going to use the waves SSL compressor. But in general you don't have to use this one specifically. But if you can and you are able to find it, I would recommend looking for some type of bus or mastering as compressor as they behave slightly different to a regular compressor in that they often impart their own harmonics and their own distortion, which could be pleasing to the ear. Okay, so that's hitting the compressor a little bit too hard for my liking. I don't like to get that many DBs of gain reduction, which is what this line here indicates. It indicates how much compression we're doing and I wouldn't want that much. So what I'm actually going to do is I'm going to use a very simple gain plug in, basically just a volume to turn it down before we go into our compressor. Okay, so if I turn it down and I'm going to bring down our threshold until I feel like we're peeking at a level that I like. And I'm going to make sure that I'm listening to it to make sure that I'm not squashing the sound so much, but rather letting it feel like it's gluing together and giving it body. What I chose to do there was reduce the ratio. The ratio refers to how intense and how much reduction wants to happen. When we hit the relevant threshold at four to one, we'll do 4 decibels of gain reduction for every 1 decibel we go over our threshold, which in mastering could be considered steep. I chose to go for something that's a little bit less that way. When it does reach the threshold, we do slightly less compression, making the compressor not as audible. I really like that. Okay, now this is something that I like to do specifically for Beats. But now we're going to do something called soft clipping. Soft clipping is going to basically place a limit on our audio peaks and instead of reducing the volume, it's actually going to cut them off entirely and replace that with a distortion which can be in some places transparent, can be a slightly audible to the ear. And depending on the way that we like to apply it, we can make it more or less of either. What I'm going to do is I'm going to link these together. As I increase the volume, it's going to decrease the output volume. We don't hear a huge jump in audio, but we will be able to tell by listening to the sound if we get in the desired volume, okay? So as you can see, we got a little bit too much there. I decided to back off the threshold a lot more. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to unlink and now I can control the output independently of the input. That sounds nice. That'll do for now. I encourage you to really listen to your sound and hone in on that to see if you can get it right, okay? And the last thing we're going to use is a limiter which is going to give us our volume. Is going to do a similar thing to our cliff in our compressor, in that once our sound hits a certain threshold, it's going to turn down all the volume that's above it to meet that threshold. So it's a very strong compressor, effectively not allowing any volume to go past a certain limit. As you can see there, I didn't do too much reduction. I only did maybe minus two, minus three at certain points. We don't want it to become too audible as that can have its own effect and impart its own sound onto the track. Okay, so we've done a little bit of mixing there. We brought up some real loudness and now the song feels coherent and full. Now that we finish that, we've got it at an ideal loudness level to export our final track. 10. Outro: Okay guys, thank you so much for tuning into this course. I really hope you enjoyed it. We covered quite a lot of information. So if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me at the discord in the skillshare comments, interact. I would love to see what you guys are creating. With this, I've got a lot more stuff planned, so please stick around. Stay tuned to the channel for more incredible stuff and in the meantime, keep creating.