Music Production: Drums (Micro-Editing Techniques)

1. Introduction: All right. Let's get granular with this course on music production, specifically on micro drum editing techniques. What I mean by micro drum editing techniques is finding ways to get really granular within the grid of your drum loops using 32nd and 64th notes and not just playing a basic rock beat. So, for example, adding little tiny drum roll ghost notes, swapping in different samples, using pitch automation, so on and so forth. What you're not going to get out of this course is understanding how to make a basic rock drum beat. We're going to take styles like hip hop and electronic music and add tons of little details so that we're a bit more stylistically on the spectrum of genres like Sirance trap, so on and so forth. You can think of this sort of as a course on extended drum techniques, specifically within the world of music production. My hope is that after you've taken this course, you can choose to keep your drum beats simple still. But if you want to get granular and add tons of detail to your drumbeats, it's readily accessible based on the techniques available within this course. There is going to be a class project within this course where you'll take a drumbeat that you've created before, and you're going to add some of these micro drum techniques to elaborate it and bring it to that next level so that it's very detailed and nuanced. Of course, there will be a class outlining all the details for this project, but I think this particular project is going to be a fun one. So whether you're a producer with quite a bit of experience already or you're new to music production, I feel pretty certain that there's going to be some techniques within this course that you can add to your arsenal and set of tools as a modern music producer. I hope you're ready to zoom into the grid because we're going to get super detailed. With this course. I can't wait to see you in the first class. I'll catch you there. 2. Class Project: For this project, you're going to take a simple drum beat that you've created and apply at least two to three of the techniques from within this course so that you're adding more detail and creating these little micro drum edits within the larger beat. I'd recommend that you actually try out a bunch of these different techniques to see which ones are your favorites and then apply those favorites to the beat that you're submitting to me. Also, within the course description, you can explain which techniques were your favorite or even at the end of the video or audio submission, just verbally explain which techniques you like the most, how you would like to use them moving forward. And the reason for this is really just so that you can start to see stylistically as a producer where you might want to take your own drum editing in the future so that you really hone in on your own style. Make sure you're starting with a drum beat that you already really apply the techniques that you like the most. And once you've created your beat, which might be four beats long or 4 bars long, which I would recommend as a maximum, then you're going to submit it to me through a public link, again, through YouTube, video, SoundCloud, whatever makes the most sense to you. Now, a couple of those platforms were video based, but again, you can just put a black background behind it. Again, it's based on whichever medium you feel most comfortable submitting. Make sure it's a public link so that I can access your material and give you some feedback as to which techniques I think you applied well, which other techniques might have benefited your beat and maybe some areas of improvement. Take your time when you're creating this beat. There's no rush. Make sure you have some fun with it along the way. If you have any questions, make sure to reach out. I hope you have fun with this project, and I'll catch you in the next class. 3. Sample Bank Size: It's super important that when you're working on these little micro drum patterns that you have a large sample bank to work with, you want to make sure that generally the samples are quite short, or if not, you want to make sure that you're working with Ableton's choke, which is going to make sure that multiple sounds are not going to overlap each other. Let's talk about all those details, and let's dive in. Alright, let's dive into micro drum editing. We're going to start with talking about your sample bank. In other words, the samples that you're gonna be using to create your beats. First of all, you want plenty of samples to be able to work with. If you're working with a smaller sample bank, you're gonna be manipulating each sample considerably, and that is totally an option. But again, I just want to explain that having lots of samples, I think, is going to be super important to get started. Your kick and your snare, some of those main elements can be a little bit longer, but you want to make sure that you're leaving plenty of space for lots of drums to do their thing. So what I'd recommend is your kick and snare can be like medium length. Everything else should be relatively short and snappy. So I've picked out this kick and this snare. But a lot of the other sounds I'm working with just listen to them. And yes, I'm working with some Toms that are a bit longer, but we can always shorten those later. So keep in mind that if you're working with something like this and it's quite long and you want to shorten it up, just take the sample here, drag things in, do a little fade out, and listen to it now. So you can shorten up each of these samples to your liking, and then from there, we're going to be able to dive into all of the details that are going to compose your micro drum beats. So step one, let's go in and make sure each of these are nice and short and snappy, so we have our kick. It's fine. So these bottom samples, these are going to be the longer ones that we have within the set. This sample here, I'm going to take a little fade out and just drag that right up close to the very beginning of that transient. And it's much shorter now. I'm going to do that with each sample, and then I'll report back. All right, so each sample except for the mean kick and snare are now shorter. So here's our kick, our snare, and a couple other longer samples. From there we go into All nice and tight short sounds. These short drum sounds are really important when you're trying to create a four beat or eight beat loop and fit in tons of different sounds. Now, you can also use choke. Choke basically means that one drum sound is telling another drum sound to be quiet. So if I have a long drum sound hitting first, my second drum sound is going to cut that original one short. I did explain choke in my more broad course on drum production, but it's important for this one, as well, too. So I just want to make sure that I address that. So step one with this is to take some longer samples. I have this sound. And I have this sound here. So you can hear I can hit the first sound, and then the second sound plenty of times, and the first sound is uninterrupted. If I go over to this choke section, and if you can't find it, by the way, there's a good chance that you just have your drums collapsed. So pop that open. Make sure that you're going over to the two sounds that you want to be on that same choke. Let's set them both to one. And now, when I hit the first one and then the second one, it just stops that first sound abruptly. So you don't need all short sounds. If some of them are longer, just make sure that you're considering choking that off, especially if you have a lot because then you can have all these long tails washing over your beat. If that's what you're going for, then great. But at the end of the day, if you want to get really granular and have lots of different percussive elements filling that loop, you want to make sure that they're either cutting each other off or that they are actually short samples to begin with. Now, something I should mention is that you want to make sure that generally your pads here within the drum rack are laid out the same. I have my main kicks and snares, sometimes a clap along the bottom. I'll use a lot of high hat elements in the second row. Then I tend to go into more claps and Toms. But even then you can fill this area here, all 16 of these pads. But if you watch on the left, you're actually able to click up through all of these different banks. And you can have multiple banks running at a time. I have a couple of other claps up on the second bank. I need to shorten these still, but you can see, we have lots of extra room for more auxiliary stuff up on this top section, and the bottom section is the more fundamental elements. You can lay it out however you want, but I'd recommend trying to generally do it the same way each time. Now, don't forget, as you're going through different drum banks, I have a drum hits folder, and let's just go to a random folder. Let's say groove criminals. We have a bunch of different sounds that are available within that folder. I'm going to hit down and sample. That's actually a great sound. And as I find sounds that I like, then I'm going to drag them down into the drum rack. Now, if you hit up and down, you can scroll through them, but if you hit to the right, you're able to just preview that sound over and over. So I remember back in the day, I used to kind of go up and then down just to hear that second sample each time, but just hit to the right and that'll replay it. Now, hitting to the left is going to take you back up to the folder that you're in. Hitting left again, we'll close it, and then you can hit up and down to scroll through, find a different folder, hit to the right. And then, again, you can go up and down to check out the samples. Left left closes the folder, so everything can be done right at the arrows on your keyboard. It's really great for quickly going through different folders, quickly checking out different sounds highly recommended. That's it for this class on having a large sample bank to work with when you're trying to create these micro drum edits. We've discussed the importance of navigating through samples quickly, having a particular way of setting up your drum rack, making sure that the samples are short, or that they are on the same choke. Starting with that as your fundamental starting point, you're going to be set up for success and really be able to play around with those samples in an organized and fun way. So that's it for this class, and I'll catch you in the next one. 4. Loop Speed: Taking drum loops and chopping them up and putting them with some sort of fundamental kick and snare pattern that you've created is a great hybrid approach to make sure that you have something that you've partially customized. But using other preexisting loops and then making those your own, this is a fantastic way to be able to work in this micro edit environment. We're going to talk about dividing those loops by two so that they're faster and they work better for this type of micro drum layer environment. Let's get talking about it, and let's dive into Abelton. Alright, so we're going to be working with some loops. We're going to be dividing them by two to make them twice as fast. And as a simple starting point, we want to make sure we have some sort of kick and snare drum pattern established, and then we're going to work some loops in around that pattern. Here's what we have so far. It sounds like this. Kind of a little old school, funky, almost a little old school daft punkish. We're now going to go into whatever folder you have your loops in. For me, it's just called drum loops. We're gonna bust out a few different loops, and I'm just going to drag those in under each other here, and then we'll check them out and start to play around with them. So I've picked out three different loops here. They sound like this. Lots of pump, lots of compression. It's going to sound great when we get working with these. But before I do anything, I want to mention that you'll notice these have kicks, and I already have a kick and snare pattern. So I'm going to shift click these three control G to group and call this drum loops. Now, if you're working with top loops where it's just the top part of a drum kit, mostly symbols, claps, that kind of idea, you won't have to do this trick. But, I mean, ultimately, I want to make sure that you're picking loops that you like, and you're not too sort of constrained with what loops you pick. So if we go over to the left here and select audio effects and go up to our auto filter, we're going to drag that into this drum loop folder. We're going to flip things around, so we're working with a high pass and sweep out all the low frequencies. So none of this stuff to the left is going to be audible. We're just hearing the top parts of the kit. Let's listen again. Alright, we can work with these like their top loops now. Now, the kick is going to have a little sort of snap still. It's gonna have some transient, but that might actually work really well. So let's take all three of these samples. You're gonna click the top part of the loop where you see the little glove. You're going to move over to the left. And somewhere, it depends on which version of Ableton you're using, but you're going to find this little slash two X two. That's divide by two and multiply by two. For right now, we're just focused on the divide by two. So when I hit that, I want you to watch up here where this loop is. Watch it. Boom, it gets squashed and listen to it now. Kind of crazy, right? If I go back out again, versus it's pretty intense. This loop might not be the best one for us to work with. I'm going to still pull in some top loops, as well, too, but I wanted to show you start with the ones that you like. Try squashing them and see how they sound. We're gonna do that with the other two, as well. So we're gonna divide that one by two and this one by two. Let's listen to all three, so we have. They're all pretty intense. Now, this tempo of 123 is also going to play into things. If I'm doing something that's a bit slower, like, let's say, 100 beats per minute, now the speed of these doubled up samples is gonna feel a bit more forgiving. Check this out. You can hear a bit more of the individual trans inside around this tempo. So ultimately, you want to make sure that you're not doing an incredibly fast tempo. At some point you get so fast with your tempo. Let's say, like, drum and bass tempo, like 180, where these loops don't actually have to be divided by two. You've just dragged up the tempo so much that it's going to sound quite detailed and it's going to sound faster. So if I was to multiply this back out, so let's give it one, listen. That's a 100 beats per minute. This loop sounds great. Let's go up to 180 and give it to listen. Notice it's not divided by two. It sounds like this. It already almost feels like we have some of those little micro edits where there's lots of little ticky tacky details happening as we get working with this loop. That being said, for now, we're gonna stick to 100 beats per minute. We're gonna keep this divided by two. And I'm just going to take little slivers of this and listen to them with my initial beat. Let's say we cut this one here, we work with a bit of this one. And I'm just basically dragging around and finding some spots to fill between these sections up here. So I'm looking up here and then filling down here. When you drag, Control E on PC is going to give you those cuts, Command E, whatever it is, depending on your system. Let's actually let's take that from here. And let's leave some gaps, as well, too. I don't want to fill everything in. So let's take this out and this could be a little bit longer here. And I'm just playing around. I don't know how these sound yet. We're about to find out, but I'm basically just taking a look up here and trying to fill in, knowing this is the transient of each drum. So these are the areas that we want to kind of fill out after the transient has had his chance to do its thing. So we see this transient here is unaffected. This one here we could pull in just a bit. Same thing here. These guys are going to overlap, so I'll pull that in. Now, after you've played around with things a little bit, you might get something that looks kind of like this. There's going to be some gaps here and there. We're really wanting to keep in mind where the transience of our main beat is and try not to have too much overlap there. There's things like side chain compression and stuff that we can do to counter that. But for now, let's make sure that for the most part, when these samples are triggered, there is no overlap of these loops, just to keep things simple as a starting point. It sounds something like this. So on this double kick here, which is a bit of a variation. Now, what I did, first of all, is I just took this whole pattern here. Oops, this control D, and duplicated it. However, the pattern, especially this kick pattern does change slightly here. So I would probably take that out. Let's elongate this just a little bit. And again, play around with things just so that there's enough space for all these drum elements to work. So with the little change here we have, even done that much. We found three loops that we liked. We swept out the low end if there is a kick or if it's a full loop, if it's a top loop, you don't have to. And then we took each of those loops, divided them by two, and chopped them up a super simple approach. But while the loops give us a quick and easy result with these micro edits, at the same time, we want to make sure that we have plenty of control over everything that we're working with. So in the classes to come, we're going to be breaking down various techniques that will compile into a similar sound to this, but at the same time, working with all customizable details, all customizable sounds. And at the end of the day, that customization is going to lend itself to your particular style or your sound as a producer. Now, I don't want to stray away from the fact that you don't have to divide each of these loops. Like, if I extend this one out back to its original length, listen in context with everything else. It gives this push and pull to different elements of that loop. I'm going to do the same thing in a couple of different spots just to show you that you can play around with this. You can even technically go back to your original length and then double it. You can multiply it by two. It's going to give you long stretched sounds like if I stretch this out, you'll hear. Right? Slow as molasses, just moving really slowly through that loop. So by stretching out a couple, we'll do maybe one more. We'll multiply by two. Tuck that in. We'll do the same thing here, just to really overdo it just to show you. I sound like this. Lots of detail, lots of push and pull on the length of those loops. We've done enough with all of this that even though we were sourcing loops from the start, we've really made it our own. You can also take, for example, something like your full category here of all those loops and start to play around with things so that you're adding different effects and again, really making it your own. So if I add something like redux like bit crushing and pull down the rate and the bits a little bit, listen to the difference now. Right? So I don't know that that's necessarily better, but you can start to really play around with things, and you can even resample this as a new loop. We're going to talk about that later, but there's plenty you can do from this point to make it your own. So that's our class on taking loops, dividing them by two, and a few fun ways that you can play around with that to get into these really detailed drum edits, these micro drum patterns that can be so fun in a full production. So that's it for this class on dividing your drum loops by two to make them quicker, but of course, you don't have to. This idea of doing it on some loops, but not others gives your beat a really fun push and pull, and it keeps the audience guessing as to what you might do next with your drum beats. I hope you enjoyed this class. And in the next one, we're going to get talking about roles. We're going to go back into our drum rack, work with individual samples, and start to get really granular and customize things just as we want it. So I'll see you in that class. 5. Rolls and Sweeps: Alright, in this class, we're going to talk about rolling or sort of grinding into individual drum hits. We're going to work with the same kick and snare pattern that we had from the last class, and in the classes to come, we're going to continue to develop it so that by the end, we have a fully functioning micro edited drum part. Let's jump in. So to recap, what we have is this. We slowed down the tempo a little bit in the last class to accommodate the loops that we were working with. We can just keep this tempo. Later, we might want to speed it up a little bit again, but for now, this is fine. So let's pick one of our short sounds that we have, and we're going to kind of scroll up through our sounds here. And you'll notice that when I click these keys, no sound happens. You need to make sure this little headphone, this little monitor switch is turned on, and you can preview the different sounds. So let's take this sound here. And if I hit my pencil tool, B, in this case, I'm going to create one little hit. B again, I'm going to shorten it considerably. And I want to switch my view, which is on the right over here so that we're on 32nd notes. You can also do that with zooming, but I find this way just tells me exactly what my grid is, and that can be quite helpful. So what we can do is once we have a sound that we like to work with, let's say this hig hat sound here, we can set it up as these 32nd note intervals. So very quick succession of notes, almost like a tongue roll into different hits like our snare here. Let's listen to it from the beginning. Now, it sounds okay. I might want to consider putting one of these or two of these in a bit of quicker succession. Now, it sounds right. In the next class, we're going to work with changing the pitch and automating things to give it a bit more detail. But as a starting point, it sounds fine. And I'm going to take a couple of these and put them before the last snare hit, as well, too. So we have something like this. You can also try this on different samples, playing around. So we can take the same sound, put it in a few different spots, move it around, try it on different sounds, something like this. What I don't like is that this overlaps with this kick transient. I might just get rid of it. You can keep it. It's still fine, but I like to kind of separate the transients a little bit more when you're going into as much detail with these loops as we are. So I've taken out a couple of hits here, and again, we're working with just two hits on this final little role. It sounds like this. Now, again, this isn't like our whole beat. We're just working with filling in a little bit of the space. We might also want to start to establish a basic high hat pattern around this time. So let's take one of our high hat sounds, maybe this one here, and start to just create a little bit of a pulse. Maybe I use two different sounds. We can play around with that, but it's gonna sound something like this. I know I overlapped one of these. That's okay. We can kind of bring that back this way, boom, boom. It sounds like this. Next thing I would do is probably take down the volume of all these high hat hits considerably and make sure that every second one is a little bit quieter. You can see the velocities down here. It's like medium, soft, and we're going to keep that going throughout easy ways to just reduplicate all of this. I'm just going to transfer that right over that area and then reduplicate that boom, boom, boom. Sounds like this. I'm going to also get rid of any high hats that overlap with these little rolls. Lastly, one more time. It's certainly coming along, but there's some stuff that we can play around with with white noise that'll give us a really cool result to fill in some of these cracks. Let's play around with some white noise. Let's go over into our instruments and pull in analog, a really simple synthesizer. I'm going to turn off oscillator two, and I'm going to set it to this noise mode here. Now when I hit a note, we have this white noise. Now, I want to make sure I'm playing around with things so it's just consistent use right now when I let go, we can hear that sort of sweep down, that release. Kind of sounds like an old eight bit snare sound. What you're going to want to do is click over to where it says level and just click the dark gray and just make a big old square rectangle, this sort of shape here. Tuck everything in, so that means that the sound is starting instantly. It's holding as long as you would like, and it's stopping instantly. It sounds like this. Okay, so we're going to work with that as little tiny sweeps. I'm going to pull this up here. I'm going to call it WN for white noise, and let's make it white. It is white noise. So we have doom chat, doom, doom, doo, doo, chat, too, doom. This little snare here, doom doom, chop, this one, I'm going to do a little sweep beforehand. So in this area, Control Shift M is going to create a little midi clip, and I'm going to dive into here. Use my pencil tool. Doesn't matter what pitch you're on, by the way, 'cause if I hit a low key or middle key or high key, white noise always sounds like white noise, so it will not change its pitch in this synthesizer. Let's just hit a note like C, and we're going to give it a listen as is. It's already sounding half decent, but we want to make sure that we're doing a volume swell into it. There's a few different ways you can do this. One way I like to, there's a few different ways you can do this. You could put a utility onto this channel and you could automate it. I actually like to work with it as audio because it's easy to slice up and reuse and then re pitch and do other things with. So we're going to right click. We're going to say bounce track in place. It's going to do its thing. And now we have quite noise. We're getting rid of any tail information, so any of that extra, like, just nonsense stuff here, you can see there's nothing going on with that. We're deleting that. Now, if I hit A, it takes me out of this automation window. You'll notice this red line will disappear. Right? But now I get my fades on audio clips, which is really cool. Now, if you hit A and nothing happened, this little keyboard up in the top, this little icon here was probably turned on, make sure that it's turned off. I keep it off 100% of the time because I have a mini keyboard that I like to use, and I don't want to play my computer keyboard like piano. So it's one of those things that I just keep off all the time. So with this little fade in that we've done, that sounds quite nice. Let's try the whole thing here. It's sounding great. These are a little cheesy, at least on this sound. I'm going to get rid of the second one. We're going to use those high hats, and we're going to re automate that pitch automation. That sound was just a little too toyish, a little too video gamish. So it's this sound here that we're going to be working with, and I'm going to try out the pitch automation on that sound. Play around with it. I'm also just going to get rid of automation we had before. So there is what we're working with, and we're going to do some pitch automation on that. So if I hit transpose, that's going to set up my automation for this sound. I like that sound the most when I go quite low because it's starting to kind of like the samples are so long off the start that they blend together. And then as the pitch goes higher, they feel shorter and shorter so there's more separation. So it feels a bit like white noise we have. Now, another thing I'll do is I'll just put in some straight up white noise, almost like a open high hat. We're gonna put that right here. We're going to actually get rid of this fade in. And I think it's in the wrong spot, but if we quickly check it out, do, do, do do shut, do do cut. I wish this was twice as long. And this might be one of those things where it's like, Oh, I kind of wish that I hadn't already bounced it, but if I put two beside each other, let's just make sure that it sounds continuous. Now you can hear that little separation there. If you zoom in, you can see here there is actually a little fade or some sort of initial attack that wasn't 100% quick. So what I would do in this case is just bring in a new instance of analog. We're just going to make it a little bit longer. Maybe start with a longer sample. That was on me, but make sure that you're starting with a sample that's long enough that you can chop it. So we bring in analog one more time. We're going to turn off oscillator two, turn on your noise. Make sure this is 100% over if possible. Attack has five milliseconds. It won't go lower than five, so we might just have to play around with that a little bit. And so this time, what I'm going to do is we'll head back over to analog. We'll do a little recording here. Quite a bit longer. Same idea. We're going to take this bounce track in place. Now we have a longer sample that we can work with, and I just basically want this. So we're going to move this over to here, trim it to place, and it sounds like it's quite loud. We can take that down a bit. So now we have the full thing. So we have these little sort of grinds and rolls that we've been doing into mostly snare hits. It also works well with claps, and you can also do it with kicks. But with kicks, what's really common is to do a very short sweep. So let's do it into this kick here. We're going to pull this in super, super tight. So there's something about this little white noise sweep. A lot of producers do this trick, by the way, it just feels like it's being hit harder, and I don't know why. It's like the kick drum pedal is whipping through the air before it actually slaps the kick. It's just a really fun little effect If we listen to it by itself, that's all we're adding. But in context, we have this versus, you can hear it's adding almost a little bit of a high hat sort of sound, or, again, this sort of whip into the actual transient. We might want to do that in a couple of spots. Let's put it there and one other spot. Let's take it and put it here, as well, too. So now we have So you might want to play around a little bit with the pitch of the white noise and the exact length of how that sort of sweeps in. But ultimately, that's the basic idea. So I'm going to lower that pitch by three semitones on both of those samples. Now, I mentioned that white noise is always going to have that same pitch. That's when you're playing around on the keyboard. White noise is meant to be a particular set pitch. But once you have it as audio, then you can re pitch it and play around with lower versions or higher versions of white noise. You can also play around with other types of noise, like pink noise and gray noise and brown noise, and they all have a different frequency distribution. White noise is known for being a little more high in pitch, and it works really well, again, as these sort of sweeps because it emulates around the same frequency range as some symbols. So our full beat ends up sounding something like this. Again, one last thing you might want to do is play around with where these sounds overlap, so we have this high hat is happening at the same time as this sweep. I'll get rid of that. And I'm also going to get rid of this little sample here because, again, our white noise is fully open at that point, and we're leaving space for all these elements to happen. Last time through here it is. So that's what we have for this class. We were talking about taking snare and clap samples and having little ways of grinding or rolling into those transients. We can use individual hits leading in a. We can also work with white noise as these little sweeps or just straight white noise blasts. So, or hit and all of these come together to already start to fill in little spots within our beat. So that's it for this class, and I'll catch you in the next one. 6. Pitch Automation: Alright, let's continue working with our loop. This time we're going to add in some pitch automation. Let's jump back in. Now, the concept we're going to be working with is pretty simple. It's going to be a relatively short class because you can take this concept and do what you want with it, but we're going to take some of our samples and re pitch them so they're higher or lower sounding. We're going to also try this with some of these little drum rolls that we created in the last class. Let's start with doing this on the drum rolls. So the first drum roll we have is these high hats here. What I would want to do is find out which of these drum pads in our drum rack is that high hat sound. One of the easiest ways to do that is just wash the little play buttons. You can see this one lights up at that time. So we're going to select that sample, hit the little transpose knob, and that will set up our automation line to be effecting the transposition of that sample. Let's zoom in a little bit, create a couple of nodes on either side of these four hits, and I'm going to drag one down and all the way over so that the pitch climbs over time. Sounds like this. Sounds like it's sort of revving up into that snare hit. Again, you might want to play around with affecting different samples and see how they sound when you try this on different samples. You could also pitch things down, so we have. To me, I actually prefer that over this. The longer samples when they're pitched down, don't give you those micro edited sounds as much. When you pitch things down, oftentimes you're elongating the samples. So by pitching up, you're actually making the sample shorter. And again, we want plenty of short little samples to accomplish this sound of these incredibly hyper edited micro drum beats. So if I pull that up pretty far, let's say 16 semitones, now we could also try this with our basic snare hits. This is the snare we're using, and it plays quite often. So if I hit that transpose knob one more time, let's say the second snare hit, I want to be lower. And then the last one, I'll make just a little bit lower. So I know it's boom, chap, boom, boom, cha. There's our second snare, boom, boom, chap, boom, boom, cha, there's our fourth snare. I'm just watching the pattern, and as I've been making it myself, I just kind of know where all the middy is laid out, but find those particular spots and then pitch down or up. It sounds like this. Okay, so that's way too low. Why don't we take this one, lower it a little bit, and this one, and raise it a little bit? Let's check it out. It's enough subtlety that is creating some nice variation within this loop. Now, generally, I wouldn't recommend doing this on your kick drum. Keep your kick a little bit more fundamental, but let's now pull in one other little percussion part, and we'll play around with the pitch of that part. So jumping in, again, you're going to double click this top area up here to open up the midi window. So let's find a sound we want to work with. This here is nice. So let's find some spots that we can apply that little percussion sound, and we're not going to go too crazy with it. Maybe something like every other bar, so something like here and here and here and here. This might not work, but let's check it out. Okay, that works. We're gonna go into our beat again. You can see that's the little play button that lights up. This is the one we're going to transpose. Let's go considerably down every other time it happens. It sounds like this. It gives a nice push and pull on that. Almost sort of like playing around with two different cowbells. It adds some fun pitch fluctuation and just gives a little bit more variety to the beat. So that's it for this class on pitch automation. In the next one, we're going to be talking about accents and syncopation. Two very fun rhythmic applications that allow us to add some complexity and groove to our drum loops. I'll see you there. 7. Accents and Ghost Notes: So what are accents and ghost notes? We're going to go into some great detail as to how you can apply those to your beats. But essentially, it's having some drum hits be a little bit louder and others being a little bit more quiet. We'll talk about how to properly balance this out in your loop. Let's dive in. So again, where we left off with our drum loop is here. Lots of variation already happening. Now, we want to make sure that we have some drum hits that are accenting a little bit louder, accent being louder drum hits and ghost notes being quieter drum hits. A great spot to put some accents are along with the kick, you're going to take your high hat and pull up the volume just a little bit. Now, an easy way to do this is to hold Shift and select all of the high hats that are lined up with these bottom kick drum hits. That would be here and here. And here and here. I'm now going to you can either drag up these individual notes or hold Alt over one of these notes and then drag up so they're a little bit louder. Now, because these are happening at the same time as the kick, it won't be too noticeable. In fact, it might just sound like the kick is being hit a little bit harder. But that's the point of accents is to give those harder hits a little bit more impact and to allow people to notice them a bit more. There's so much detail happening within this beat that we want things to be poking out, and we also want nice room for subtlety, as well. It sounds like this. It's off to a good start, but why don't we take each of these hits I'm gonna hold control and just drag them up to another high hat sound so they're even more accented. Check it out now. I'll bring that down just a little bit. I feel like it's a bit over accented. But this new row so here's our kick before we have these extra high hats and without you can just hear it gives that kick a little bit more slap. Now, I'm also just going to take some random high hats and drag their velocity up a little bit. I know it seems crazy that I'm doing this randomly, but I would say, don't do it too randomly. Double check to make sure that it sounds right. But when you get into this level of detail with these micro edits, you can kind of start to randomize things a bit, and it'll oftentimes be held together by the kick and snare as that fundamental part of the pattern. Now, it sounds like this. It's coming together. But without our ghost notes, it's not going to have quite as much effect. What I want to do next is just listen to what the hi hats are doing by themselves. So if I was to solo the four high hat parts that we have, I'm holding control so I can solo multiple samples at the same time that also works for channels. We have this. So the white noise is still playing, but that's fine. For now, it's functioning very similar. Now, quite often when you have four 16th notes happening, one anda, you're going to have a loud, soft, medium, soft sort of approach to pulsing, and you're going to get a little bit more groove just by playing around with those accents and ghost notes. So if I take this first one up, you can see it's quite a bit louder. In terms of the velocity data that we're seeing down here. I have loud, soft, loud, soft. Let's pull this loud here, so it's down to a bit more of a medium, just a little bit above. In fact, we'll take these down even more as well. They don't have to be perfect. We're just playing around with things. So from here, I have another pattern that's the same, and then it's the same here minus these two, so we'll delete those. And I'll just kind of go through and replace what I had. Keeping the same amount of space. This one here, I'm going to have to get a bit more selective. Yeah, these two, and then lastly, boom, these guys here. Let's give it a listen. I think the softs could be even softer, and those are our ghost notes, this idea of certain high hats being much, much quieter. So loud, soft, medium soft, let's take these and bring them right down. So our high hats have a nice groove now, but where you are more often going to hear the term ghost note is actually with your snare drum. Now, if we take a listen to the snares that we have, we have this and this. This one here is much more of a lighter snare. It's going to be our accent. It's going to be our ghost note. And the first time I was ever introduced to ghost notes was when I was learning a Chad Smith from the Red Hot Chili Peppers drumbeat. He does this classic, chat, Kid chat tKid do, do chat ta, Got you, cha, cha, G. So you get this boom, boom, chat chica, Kath all those little tiny chia chicas in between, those are your ghost notes. So if we pull in, so we're going to take this snare sound and complement it with some of these. So let's take our main snare. I'm going to hold control and duplicate it. So we have our tighter snare available here. I'm going to slide it over, so it surrounds one of our kicks. In this case, this kick here. I'll try it twice. It might be kind of overkill. Now we're surrounding this kick. It sounds like this. I don't think it needs to be done twice. Let's just keep it once and bring down that volume considerably. It sounds great. I'm going to throw a couple extra light ones just randomly in spots where I think we could have a bit more fill, have there and there and there. We might eliminate some of these, but let's check it out. Et's get rid of this one here, and I think we've worked quite well with this snare sample acting as a ghost note. So we have boom, boom, cha get these actual little tiny hits. And when you're on a real kit, if you hit the rim at the same time as the actual snare drum itself, you get a large crack out of that snare. But if you just use the tip of the stick to lightly tap, but if you just use the tip of the stick to lightly tap that snare drum head, you're going to get these nice little accented ghost notes. Now, listening to our beat. Outside of the little rolls, everything very much feels like it's on these 16th notes, Tiki tiki ta tiki tikka tikka ta, which is great. But this is a micro drum editing course, so I want to go through and put some of these high hats or other sounds on 32nd notes. In other words, the notes in between these notes. Let's play around with some of these and see if we can get them to sound a little bit more micro edited. Now, before I jump into this, in the top right corner of your midi window, way up over here, you're going to set this to 32nd notes, and that'll change your grid and make things a lot easier to play around with. Let's take the odd sample and duplicate onto these 32nd notes, I'm going to go with some of the lighter samples, which are represented as darker looking midi information. It might sound something like this. So it's acting very similar to the way the role works. I mean, this really isn't that different than this. It's just the idea that now we're thinking of roles as one idea into some sort of accented point. But once we have our basic high hat, especially if it's like a 16th note, chicka chicka chicka, chi ka, cha. You can double up some of those. So it kind of sounds similar to a role, but its function is different, and we're thinking about it from a different perspective. So that's it for this class on accents and ghost notes. In our next class, we're going to talk about syncopation, playing around with groups of threes, playing in between the beats a little bit more, and just generally applying a little bit more groove to our drum beat. I'll see you there. 8. Syncopation: Next up, let's get talking about syncopation. Syncopation is this idea that we can play more in between the cracks of our main beats like one, two, three, and four to create more groove and a fun rhythmic pulse. We're going to play around with groups of three. We're going to play around with being in between the grid a little bit more. All of this stuff is syncopation. Let's get talking about it, and let's dive in. So one great way to get started with syncopation is to play around with different clave patterns. So clavs are these little wooden percussion stick that are quite often used in Latin music. And one of the fundamental starting points with learning the rhythms for these is to pair groups of threes and twos together. Now, we like four, eight, and 16 in music. These are numbers we use a lot. So to break up eight, let's do two groups of threes and a group of two. Three plus three plus two is eight, but so is three plus two plus three. And two plus three plus three. So we're going to play around with all three of these. Three, three, two, gives us one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, two, three, where the two is in the middle, instead of the beginning, sounds like one, two, three, one, two, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, one, two, three. And of course, we can put the two at the beginning, so we have one, two, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, one, two, three, one, two, three. We're going to play around with these different groups of threes and twos using not a clave sound necessarily, but we're going to apply it within our beat. So let's play around this sound here. If I go back to 16th notes for our grid, it's one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two. This might be a bit too much information over top of our beat, which is already very detailed, but just to give you an idea, let's listen to it. Now, maybe the threes are represented by this sound, but the twos are something else. So something like this. Let's take all of these and bring down their volume or velocity. It sounds like this. It's coming along, but that's just one of the patterns we could have. We also talked about having three, two, three, so I'm seeing three grid blocks, two grid blocks, and then another three. Instead of doing that for each of these different patterns, I'll just duplicate it nice and easy, Ps. Sounds like this. So, lastly, let's play around with our group of two first, then our group of three, and then our group of three. Again, we'll duplicate these. It sounds like this. That to me is grooving pretty well. I actually want to play around with this as our first group of three and something else for that next group of three, maybe something like this snap here. So that gives us something like this. Now, it's really glaringly obvious at this point in terms of this little pattern poking out over top of our main rhythm. So I'm going to bring these down all the way to, like, one in terms of velocity and just bring them up the tiniest little bit. It's coming along. Maybe we don't let it play the first or third time. Sounding pretty good. We can also just play around with groups of threes for an extended period of time. Something like this one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, and then maybe a one, two, one, two, at the end. At some point, you want to break all these groups of threes, so it does feel like it's lopable. But if I take that and duplicate it, now we have There was actually a little happy mistake of some of these being doubled up. We can play around with just sort of creating a little bit of chaos and variation around some of this. Let's check it out again. Now, this sound is really poking out. What I might want to do is find that sound and just play around with it so it's not quite so obvious. It's this guy here. I'm going to try playing around with the pitch, so it's much, much, much higher, maybe even a full octave. Now listen to that sound. If I solo it. It's much, much more subtle, right? It doesn't have as much of a defined pitch before we had this. But when you pitch it up, let's say, 12 semitones, it's like, it becomes such a high pitch that it feels more like a tap or something percussive. Now, again, it's quite a bit of note information. You might want to kind of go through and see which ones you want to eliminate. Let's listen one more time. I'm going to listen really slow. This is around the point where I would slow down the beat considerably to see what I want to get rid of out of this complex chaos of loop. Let's check it out. So I'm just trying to take some of the thicker, chunkier overlapped parts where there's, like, three or four elements happening at the same time. I also thought it was nice that there was nothing right here. Sometimes just leaving a little bit of space here and there can be really nice. Even if we take something like this, I know there's a kick. I know there's an accent on the kick with these high hats. Let's just get rid of it. Let's leave a little bit more space and check it out back at 100. It sounds like this. And then we can try that again in some other spot, maybe right here. It looks like there's information here, but keep in mind that snare is, like, done its sound after about this length here, so it's not even encroaching into this area. Let's check that all out at 100 beats per minute. Sounds like this. So there's this nice push and pull using some space, and that can be very effective as well, too. You don't want to fill up every little piece of this beat. A little bit of separation is a very good thing. So in terms of syncopation, those threes and twos are a great way to start. You could also just play around with having some sound on all the off beats like one and two. And this is going to be kind of weird as a tom, so let's put it as maybe something like a clap. Bring up the velocity a bit. We can try that again on the second 16th note from each of these patterns. Or the fourth. I think I like that the most. It has this little upbeat, that's happening before all of our main downbeats. In other words, beats one, two, three, and four. So that's it for this class on syncopation, creating a little bit more groove by filling in between the cracks of our main beats and also working around with these clave patterns. In our next class, we're going to talk about sample variation, taking the samples you've already picked and finding some fun new ways to variate them to create textural differences within your loop. So let's get talking about those sample variations in the next class. I'll see you there. 9. Sample Variation: All right. Next up, let's get talking about sample variations and how you can use them within your drum loops. Let's dive in. Now, to be clear, there are a few different ways that you can approach this, but I'm going to give you a way that I think is relatively simple and keeps things fun and creative. So what you're going to do is find a sample that you want to do some variations of preferably within the beat you've already created, or you can do this ahead of time. But for beginners, this will make a little bit more sense. So for this example, let's use this snare drum, this main sound here. I'm going to hold Control, and I'm going to drag it over into a new section here on the left side, and I'm going to keep holding control and drag it out a few more times. We're going to do four variations right now. They all sound the same. And that's okay. Let's go into some audio effects. We are going to put some different effects on each of these. And the way you're going to do that is to drag just into this little sliver here, past the sample itself. So this version, we're going to create an eight bit version. Let's go more extreme. Maybe a little less. That sounds pretty good. Next up, let's try row on the sample here. You can actually just drag it straight onto the sample itself, and that will bring it into the correct location here. So let's try adding some drive. It's getting quite loud. I'm gonna turn that down a bit. It's getting there. It has a little bit more of that saturation. We can filter it down a bit. We're just trying to create four different sounding versions of this. That works for now. Let's put a phaser on this third one. This may or may not work phasers like to be working with longer content generally, but let's see. Next up, let's put some overdrive on this sample here. We're going to cut out the lows, give it a bit of drive. It's pretty loud. Let's bring down the volume a bit with a utility. And for the other one we'll put on a hybrid reverb. Let's check it out. Maybe every once in a while we want a really big boomy reverb version. The idea is you can use whatever VST effects you want. You're just trying to create variations, and you don't have to just do this with the snare. You could try this also with one of the high hats and maybe one of the percussion sounds and then start creating your variations from there. Now, when I go back into the loop, what I'm going to do is take the snare drums that I have, which happens to be four, and I'm going to pull them up. Two, the different variations that we just created, two, three, four. So we have the redox one hitting first, and this one, and this one, then this one. I think I'm going to go safe, and then so this one's more safe. I think the way I'm going to lay this out is actually with this one first because this is a pretty safe sound. This one's a bit more adventurous. This one's pretty safe, and this one's more adventurous. Let's try it out in the beat. Again, just creates more variation and makes the loop a little bit more interesting. Let's try one more. This time we're going to try out one of the high hat sounds. It looks like these two are the ones that are used the most. I think this one here. So we're going to take this hold control, drag it up to this line this time, two, three, four. It doesn't have to be four. By the way, it can be whatever number you prefer. However many variations you want is really all that matters. Let's take dynamic tube. Let's take a chorus. These are going to be subtle, by the way. Let's take an auto pan, and again, we'll take an overdrive. So let's go through each of these, mangle them a little bit. So here's our first sound. Play around with that. Adds a bit more flick to that initial transient, gives it a bit of saturation. It's subtle. If we played a bit harder, that's when you start to hear that saturation a bit more. So that gives it something. That's a little bit unique. Let's take down the output just a little bit. Next up is chorus. H. Let's go with this ensemble. Why not? Next up, Auto Pan. This one, I'm just going to crank the amount, and it's gonna play randomly a little bit in between the stereo field. So it's not always exactly where we place it, which in this case, would be defaulted to center. That's fine as is. And last one. Let's make that one a little bit warmer in terms of its tone. So now we have four variations of that main high hat. Let's go back into our beats and add those in. So this is the main high hat here that I'm going to drag up two, three, four, here, here, here and here. So I have one of them that's a little bit more anchored, and it's a pretty safe sound. Now we have So the whole point of this class was just to say that you should feel free to take some of the sounds you're working on and create variations. This was just a brief overview. I'd probably go into some more granular detail using some different plug ins that are very specific outside of the realm of what Abelton gives us. That being said, Ableton gives us tons of ability to be able to fuse these different effects together, come up with different variations and things that are a little bit more creative depending on how you combine them together. But as you can see, the variations weren't too tough to they did add some fun textural differences and just gave our beat a little bit of a more unique flavor. So that's it for this class on sample variations in our next class, we're going to be talking about using samples that are intentionally pitched and understanding how to use those properly within your beat. I'll catch you in that next class. 10. Pitched Samples: Alright, let's get talking about pitched samples and how you can use them within your beats. I'm going to start off by pulling in a couple of samples that already exist from the folders that I'm working with, and I'm going to create a couple of unique samples as well, too. So let's dive in. Alright, so where we left off is we had these variations that we created, I'm going to use the next six little modules here to fill in samples that are pitched. And I want to consider what key I'm going to be in. This could start with finding a sample that has a resonating G throughout. Or maybe I want to create my own samples and I know what note I'm hitting on the keyboard. But you want one note that feels very grounded. So maybe that note is a C or a G, for the most part, it doesn't matter. You can also play it at different octaves. The lower the octave, you might need a bit of a longer sample for that sound to really establish. So I'd say medium to high pitches might be a little bit safer, but ultimately you're going to get away with quite a bit here in terms of experimenting. It's a very forgiving process, where it's not for is if you start to not pay attention to the pitch of each of these different sounds. If I'm pulling in some samples that have Cs and some that have C sharps, that might sound fine as the beat by itself. But if I'm constructing a song around that, I need to know what song the key is in. So the two options are, figure out what key you're in, and then try to stick with the notes within that key or start with your drumbeat, understand what the key is, and then build the song around that. Now when I say what is the key, it's basically what is the scale. So am I using something like the pitches from A minor, A, B, C, D, E, F, G or something like C minor, CD, E flat, F, G, A flat, B flat, C. You want to understand the key that the original song is in, so you're pulling in samples within that key. And even then you want to try to gear most of the drum sounds in this case, that are pitched towards the root and the fifth. So if I'm in A minor, then A, BCD, E, A and E are my main focused pitches. If I'm in C minor, C, D, E flat F, G, so C and G are my main pitches that I'll focus on. Now, if you start with picking notes like C, C sharp, F sharp, and G, like a weird cacophony of pitches, then you're going to have to create something that's kind of atonal, something that doesn't fit in a key. And for most people, that's not what they're going to want to hear, and it's not as producers, what most of us want to create. So figure out what the key is, find the right pitches, or find pitches that support a key. In this case, we'll find pitches that support a key because we're not creating a beat after a song has been made. We're starting with the drum beat. So let's start off with instrument samples and vocal samples from these two folders. I'm going to pull in two vocal samples first. Let's take this sample here. Uh Ah. And take this little third note that she sings, which is here and just extract that one sample. Oh. Maybe without that breath, we have Now next up would be to figure out what that pitch is. There's a few ways to do it. If we go into audio effects and we go down to tuner and I pull that in. It's saying it's around an A or a G sharp. It's $0.38 sharp on a G sharp, so that's probably correct. It's a little bit sharp overall. I might want to try to find a way to pitch that down a bit. That being said, we're not going for absolute perfection here. We just want to make sure we have something that's workable. I'm going to bring in an instance of analog, which is a really simple Syth right away, gives us pitch. So that sounds about like the same pitch that she's singing. Let's just double check. Yeah, so playing around with this. It's a little bit too out of tune for my liking, so I'm actually kind of happy that I found this as the first sample, 'cause I think you do want to be relatively picky with this. I mean, like I said, it's fairly forgiving in terms of you don't need to be bang on with these pitches, especially vocal samples. But you do want to make sure that it's gonna blend if there's another instrument happening at the same time. So let's say my Syth part plays a G sharp, at the same time that she sings her G sharp, and they're out of tune with each other, that's not gonna fly. So let's go back into our folder and find something that works a little bit better. Let's try this out here. This one's kind of crazy. I'm gonna pull it in. We're going to take a middle piece of this where he's singing a or saying A it sounds like he's singing, and it sounds something like this. Oh, do. Now, it's too short for the tuner to be picking up what the pitch is. So I'm gonna play around. Again, it's like a G sharp. What is up with that? That even feels more in tune than the last sample. So let's work with that. That being said, I don't want it to be a G sharp. Let's say we're in, let's give ourselves D minor as our key. That's an A, and that should work quite well. Let's also fade it out just a little bit and pull it out to extend it a little bit. Let's try this. Oh. That works pretty well. We can always shorten it if we choose to later. Let's go with one more vocal sample. I found this one here. You ready? Very speaking spell. We're going to take a piece of that, just like we did with the last one. Now, it's kind of hard to tell what that pitch is. It's saying it's about an A sharp. Yeah, it seems pretty well tuned, actually. So let's take that down one semitone. Okay, so now we have this, which is an A and this which is an A. They're very similar, but they should work for this. When I'm hitting it, it's saying G sharp. Again, it's somewhere between a G sharp and an A. At this point, we're just going to roll forward. Now, the instrument samples that you select should be a little bit more forgiving because providing the instrument that was recorded into these samples was in tune, then you're going to be working with samples that are in tune. Sometimes these vocal samples are just people like me at a microphone singing with no reference. So unless they add perfect pitch, there's going to be more room for error. That being said, we're over here with the instrument samples, and let's take a look. Now, something to keep in mind is that oftentimes these samples will show you what the key is. This says FGH brass fall G. So it's very likely a G. Now, it is falling, so it's not all going to be a G. Basically, it sounds like. So it starts on a G and then falls. We're going to raise it up to semitones, so it's an A. So now we have Oh Oh. Now, this last sample here kind of sounds like the GI Joe theme. If I pull this down here and cut it, so we just have that first part now we have, which is a C. Let's take it down. The semitones. Oh. So those are all feeling like they're in tune with each other. I want to pull in a couple of fifths. I talked about the idea of having roots and fifths. A is our key. In this case, we're just selecting it. So ABCDE. We're going to find some samples that are E's or create them. We also could have said that A is the fifth of a key, AGFED if we work down, we could also be in D major or D minor. Let's say we're in A, though. So now we want to find a couple of samples that are E base. We can just kind of cherry pick a couple from here. I don't really want base samples, so let's find something else. Now, this one here is kind of funny. Very vowel oriented. So if I compare that with this. Oh Oh, ya, ya, ya, ya, ya, ya. Hopefully, also a CF long sample, we're going to take this. So it's just here. Aayaa sounds fine. We're going to transpose. It's a C. We're gonna transpose it up four semitones to E and then shorten it with a very tight fade. Sounds like this. Ya, ya, ya, ya, ya, ya, ya. So we're going to work with that and one more. This time, I'm just going to take a sound of erodes, which is a keyboard, pull this pitch in. It's already at an A, which is unfortunate cause it's a note that works, but I said, we want to go with E, so we're gonna take it up seven semitones. Shorten it. What a very pure looking sound. Fade out. Sounds like this. I. Again, it's quite long. Shorten it. That works. Let's put these in our beat and see how it sounds. So let's start throwing these in relatively randomly, not super randomly. I want to make sure that I'm accenting some sort of downbeats, beats one, two, three, four, and the ands, more than the E's and the ahs. So each beat is broken down into four sort of 16th notes or four subdivisions. The first and the third are safest. The second and fourth are going to give you a more syncopated or offbeat sort of feel. So let's listen so far. Just a couple of these have been put in. All right. So I intentionally kind of I didn't loop it exactly. I extended it out a little bit more. Just keep playing around with adding these in. I'm gonna play around with this for a moment and show you what I come up with. Alright, so here's what I've come up with. No. It's not my favorite, but we're working with it for now. What I'm going to do is take all of those samples and group them into their own group and make sure they're also all on the same choke. We've taken a lot of these samples and shortened them, but at the same time, some of them are long enough that they might overlap a little bit, so let's throw everything onto choke two. So to easily do that, I'm going to highlight those six samples, select choke, and go down to number two. Now, there should be no way that those samples can overlap each other. Lastly, I'm going to group process them just a little bit. I want to make sure that they're not standing out quite so much. So I'm going to make sure they're still all selected control G to group. And then we're going to call this group. Inst for instruments. And I'm going to pull in an instance of EQ eight. And I'll trim off some of these high sounds, as well as some of these lower sounds within the frequency spectrum. Now, everything's kind of mid to low mid oriented. Let's give a listen. So now everything's sitting a little bit higher up. I'm also going to saturate this a little bit, too. Let's pull in saturator, add a little bit of fuzz, and we get something that sounds like this. Then on top of that, you can do things like these rolls and sweeps. You can do things like fades. You can create variations of these certain pitched samples that we've selected. You can add different specific effects to each of these individually. There's so many different things you can do at this stage. But again, there's an infinite number of possibilities, so I just want to show you how to basically set that up. And then from there, you can take the wheel and effect these anyway that you want. Now, sometimes it's also fun to take a group like this and just highlight each of those. And then you're going to do the whole divided by two thing, and you're going to crunch down the rhythm. And then duplicate it. Now, let's see if it still sounds good twice as fast. It might be chaotic. Who knows? Let's try it out. I mean, pieces of that could work, but again, you'd have to rework it from that point. Same deal. We could take them all and we can multiply by two. Now, we're only going to hear half of the amount of information. It sounds like this. Sounds fine. Nothing to write home about. But just showing you again, there's all these options that you can play around with. So I moved things around a little bit and here's the loop that we're left with. It works. I usually don't do a lot of this technique in my own writing. It's really good if you're doing something like new disco or glitch hop or something that uses this technique a lot. But it's a lot of trial and error. It's a lot of making sure every sample sits in the right spot, but there are other ways to do this a little bit more chaotically, which we'll cover soon. But for now, I wanted to show you how you can go about finding the right samples, making sure that they're pitched properly, laying them into some sort of a pattern, and then effecting them from there, rearranging the pattern, and making sure that things are fitting together. So, again, there's another way that we can go about this. I could pull in a synth, like, let's say, massive where I have a very large library of sounds to choose from. And then we can create our own sounds and then resample those as part of our kit. So I'm going to pull in some sounds that I like, and then we'll work with those. And as a side note, remember, you're trying to find sounds that have clear attacks. After all, they should have the fundamental sort of role as percussion. So a sound like this might not work so well unless you're chopping a middle piece of that sample. So if there's a long attack or a weak transient on your sound, make sure that you're taking a piece of the middle of that sample and preferably not using the first part. Although, hey, feel free to experiment. So the way I'm going to go about this is I'm going to create a second audio track. We're about to talk about resampling in the next class, so this is a bit of a precursor. But what we're going to do is instead of having this set to external in, we're going to set it to resampling. And basically, once it's set to resampling, anything that this channel can hear, in other words, any channel that is soloed or any unmuted channel is going to record into 15 audio, which is, in this case, the name of our channel. Let's solo the synthesizer sound. We're going to arm our resampled channel, and we're going to record in just a single sound. So let's solo our synth, arm it so we can play it. And also by holding control, we're going to arm the channel that we're trying to record it into. It sounds like this. So you can see that this Syth, even though I have MIDI here has also recorded some audio. And we're going to do that with various presets, giving us a bunch of different sounds that we can work with down on this bottom channel. So here's a fun way you can try this. If I take this midi sample and just continually play it over and over on one of our pitches that works, let's sample it out a few different times here. I'm going to let's start from after our first sample we found one that we like. We've already got it. But what I'm going to do is let these beep beep beep midi notes play and change the samples as we go. Let's get massive ready. I'm going to scroll down a little bit, get past some of these pads. We're going to start from here. Let's go for it. Alright, so a little bit messy, but we have a lot that we can work with here. Now, what's really cool is we could just take this whole thing and drag it up into the drum rack. I'm going to create some individual cuts instead, and I'm going to keep them pretty short. I'm not even going to take full samples. So, for example, something just, like, really simple. So I've picked up some of my favorites, and now we have Right. A few more base samples in this one, but that's okay. We're going to go for it. So we're going to head back over to our drum rack, and we're going to, in this case, let's get a new sample bank going, and we're going to pull each of these individually into that new sample bank. Be cautious how you drag this in as you saw, it can easily select another bank if you drag too low or too high. And we know that these are all at the right pitch because we got to play them on the keyboard at whatever pitch we want or we could put in the MIDI information. Synthesizers, unless they're very retro are known for being in tune, so we're pretty safe. Next up, you would take these samples. Once they're in your drum rack, you can place them in. Now, I might want to sort of sacrifice some of the other pitch samples or it's just too much. Also, I'm not thrilled with the way some of these other ones sound, so I'm going to play around with it for a moment, and you're going to get to check it out. So after placing those in, I also got rid of the road sound, which is that really harsh ding and the brass sound. It was just too video gamy. I got rid of those. I put in a bunch of the new sounds. It sounds something like this. No. And that's working pretty well. And again, from there, we can take our samples before we had all the pitched stuff within instruments, but then we could also group these. Again, I'm just sort of control clicking a group. Now, we had all of these pitched sounds in this sort of instrument subfolder. We could do the same thing. If I shift, click all these new ones, I can label them if I want. But at this point, the beats already made, so I don't need the labels to guide me. I'm going to hit Control G. It's going to pull us over a little bit, we'll scroll back, and you'll see we have drum rack as a new group. We're going to call this Syth because these are individual synth samples that we've created. And then, again, we can take that folder and process these anyway we want. Let's try taking the same way that we process the pitched instrumental samples and apply that to our Syth group as well. So now we have It's getting pretty close. I think I'd still take a few of these out. It might be a little bit overdone right now, and it's sort of shadowing the beat itself a bit, which is sort of the main highlight. But there it is. There's how you can use some individual synth sounds, record those by resampling and pulling those in. But as mentioned, we're going to talk more about resampling in the next class. So that's it for this class on working with pitched samples, there's a bit of a hybrid territory of a snare drum, for example, that might have a very clear fundamental where you can hear it's a really strong E or G or whatever that note might be. You want to consider that if your kick drum or your snare have some really fundamental pitch within them, and you want to use this technique with specifically pitched instrumental stabs and that sort of stuff, but you want to make sure that those samples you pick are in the same key as the other pitched percussion that you've selected. We've also talked about adding in some of your own sounds and how you can go about that. There's ultimately so many different ways that you can put this together, and in some cases, it's very stylistically dependent. Glitch hop, for example, and sometimes things like new disco where they're resampling these are examples of genres where you're going to really want to watch out for this particular technique. But when it comes to really granular micro editing of drums, it's fun to put in some pitches, especially if your song is mostly just the drum beat in a very elaborate way and you're adding in all these other samples. I wanted to kind of cover this territory so you understand what it's all about. So that's it for this class. In our next class, we're going to talk about resampling. I'll see you there. 11. Resampling: So let's get talking about something called resampling. I guarantee you that this is a process in Ableton that you will use outside of the context of this class. It's super flexible. It's super powerful, and we're about to talk about it. It's called resampling, let's dive in. So in the last class, I was showing you how you can take individual hits of a synthesizer and resample those. In other words, re record them onto an audio track. And that was effectively resampling. But we're going to try that out with our drum loop. Now, what I'm going to do is basically create two different tracks here. I'm going to call one pitched. And I'm going to call one drums. They're both audio tracks. And what I'm going to do is within my drum beat, I'm going to mute everything that is not pitched, and then I'll do the opposite, mute everything that is pitched. So eventually we'll have just the drums muted and just the pitch things muted, and then we're going to individually record those into the two audio tracks. So let's start by taking all the drum sounds, which go up to, I believe, this here. Yep. We're going to take all of those. And if I hit zero on my number pad, they are muted. So now, all we hear is this. Okay. Now, the white noise is still happening from the extra channel here, but that's okay. So I'm going to solo this beat so that way, all the Ableton is hearing right now is the sound of those pitched samples. I'm going to also arm the track for pitched. And instead of external input, we're going to set it to resampling. So now, as I record, it's going to hear all these pitched samples and record it to audio in the pitched channel. Let's try it out. There we go and the same thing, but now we're going to arm the drum track, set it to resampling, and let's let it do its thing. Now, I can take what I've done here, what I've resampled. And first of all, I'm going to mute the old mini version of this. But I'm now able to take this and chop it up any way I'd like. Now, I don't know right off the bat, how I want to chop it. I'm going to do it almost kind of randomly, and let's see if we can get something that sounds kind of fun. So here's our halfway point for both of these. I'm going to sort of do a stuttered loop effect here. And then maybe again here towards the end of each phrase. And then let's take this part here and hit R to reverse. And let's take this part here and R to reverse. This could sound crazy. Let's give it a shot. Wow. So now we're creating these reverse effects. We can also sort of just cut out some moments of silence really easily because we're working with this sort of global way of viewing the beat. Let's do that here. Let's do that here, a little bit of silence. Some reversing, sounds like this. This actually sounds pretty cool. So it did work out fairly well. It doesn't always work out that well. Notice that I was kind of constructive about which areas I chose to reverse, but more importantly, the stutter effects coming at the end of every four beats. So, one, two, three, jut cha, one, two, three, jut cha. And that little ju cha part is the stutter, where I've sort of cut and then copied so that way you have two impacts of whatever was happening at the end of those four beats. Now, again, once I have this audio printed, I can choose some other ways to effect the audio. For example, I could take the drums for this first part, actually, let's say this part here and pitch it up for semitones. I could take some of this information, and I can pitch it down five semitones. I'm working with the pitched information, so this might cause a bad result, but we're going to find out. So by changing some of the pitches, it's going to sound something like this. Alright, it's creating a little bit of a hokepokeymlody, but that's the basic idea. So I'm going to take off any transposition from the pitched material. But as you can see, I can go even pretty extreme with one of these re pitchings of the drums, and it'll sound fairly decent. Check it out. Oh. So you end up kind of getting this sort of snare is kind of like future house. So you end up kind of dipping your toes into some other electronic stylings just by doing this process. So, again, this is a great way to think outside of the box of what you're doing in the drum rack, print some material, so you're working with more macro elements and then doing slicing, reversings and reprocessing. As you see fit. So that's it for this class on resampling. Feel free to think outside the box, apply a bunch of effects. The reversing effect is really cool. Highly recommend that you try that out. In our next class, we're going to talk about sample randomization. This is a technique that I used to use a lot. I don't really use it so much anymore, but it sounds fantastic. So let's get talking about sample randomization. I'll see you in the next class. 12. Sample Randomization: All right. Let's get talking about sample randomization. This could mean a lot. It could mean to pull in random samples into a drum sampler and then play them randomly. But I'm thinking of a very particular technique that was used a lot in the early 2000. If you want to hear it fully mastered to perfection, check out a track by Noisia called Red heat. Listen to the track all the way through, and you'll hear really quickly what I'm talking about. Now, this isn't particularly micro drum editing, but it works really well with some complex drums because there's so much chaos happening that it introduces a lot of chaos in the track in general. But for now, you can almost think of this sort of like a bonus class, but here it is, sample randomization. Let's dive in. Step one is you want to make sure that you have some instrumental loops. Whether you create these and put them in a folder or download them, you need to have some pitched instrumental loops. As an example, something from five Pin Media, I have these different groove loops. They sound sort of like this. Okay, so this is what you want to go with. You need to find a bunch of these instrumental loops to start with. You're gonna pick your favorites and you're going to pull them onto an audio track. So it should look like you have a bunch of different things selected, and then once we're at that point, then we can start to randomize things. But for now, pick your favorite loops, and then once you get to that point, I would say resume the video from there. And another thing to mention is you want to make sure that they're all in key with one another. So again, this BPM 125 darky groove APL. Well, it's in A, but you're hearing G sharp, G sharp, G sharp, A, a, a, G sharp, C sharp, G sharp, a, a, a. So that G sharp might conflict. You need to make sure you're pretty picky with which samples you pick. Make sure that they really clearly outline the key that you're in. I'm going to pick out some samples, and we'll resume from there. Alright, so I've picked out a bunch of different samples, and I've made sure to re pitch them so they're all based around A. Doesn't have to be A. It could be whatever key your song is in. Now, something I should have mentioned is that you're not trying to cherry pick every sample that happens to be in A. That might mean that you only get one good sample per folder that you're working with. Listen to all the samples, all the loops, find the ones that you like the most, and then re pitch those. But keep in mind, if it says a sample is in C, it might be C major. You need to make sure that whatever key you're in, if I'm in A minor, that I'm looking for samples in a minor key of any sort. Not major. There's a way you can make that work, but we're getting too deep into music theory. So what I would say is just look for your minor loops and re pitch them all so that they're in A. Pick your favorites. You don't have to just pick the ones that are in A minor. Any minor key will do, re pitch it, and then you'll have your favorite loops in the key of A minor. So the samples I have sound like this. So you can see, they all sort of work with one another. So once you have your loops picked out, we're going to go to this top loop, for example, and we're going to select it. And then we're going to go on the left side here, you'll see there's all these different menus that we have accessible. We're going to pop into clips, and this far right number right here allows us to reset the length of the clip. I would recommend set it to either about half a beat, one beat, or maximum two beats. So right now, what we would have is just a little cord stab on that particular loop. You go to the next one and you do the same thing. And you're going to do this with each loop now we have that happening. We're continuing on. And once you have all those sets, some of them can be a little bit longer. That's okay. At that one, I'd actually keep a bit shorter. Anyway, we're bringing that one in to about the same length as the others. Let's just kind of keep it the same length for each 1.2 and 1.2. Oops. Same thing. You do this with each one, and then you're ready for the next step, which is kind of where the secret sauce happens, 1.2. So we have little chord steps. And you can re pitch some of these depending on how you want them to sound. In the end, do you want the chords to be changing? Do you want all the chords to be within your key but jumping around? For now, we're just sticking with all basically A minor chord shots. Next up, I'd recommend select either the top or bottom loop and shift click so you have all of them selected. You're going to go down to this second option here with the launch section. Hit follow action, and you want to make sure this is set to other. It's going to jump from one clip to any other clip. If you set it to any, which gives a similar result, it's going to literally jump to any clip, including the clip that just played. So some samples will play twice. In this case, I'm just going to go to other, but either A or other will work, so feel free to try both. We've got it set to other, and that should because I had them shift selected, set each one to other. Here we go, O, other, you can see they're all selected. Let's just hit play on this top loop. It could be on any and see how it now jumps between them. Now, that sounds okay, but I actually want to have shorter clips. What I'm going to do is drag each of these in a little bit. I'm going to re select each dragging that top little triangle. So it's like in 1-1 0.2. So we've two more to go, boom, and boom, let's give it another try. Sounds like this. You get the idea. So if we play that along with our beat, we end up getting something that sounds like this. It's a little bit chaotic and a little bit random. So what you're going to want to do is record all that randomness and then find some areas that you like the most. You can also make sure to set some of these to 16th notes or to quarter notes. You can change the length. So let's take one of them, for example, and make it really short. We'll do that with a couple of them. Let's do that for this one, also. And maybe this one will make a little bit longer. And same with this one. Let's try it out now. Sounds like this. So this first sample here I don't actually really love that. At least the sort of development of it. So we're gonna make that one shorter. That works for me. And because some of them are eighth notes, some of them are 16th, based on the loop length, and some of them are even a quarter note, you don't get boom, boom, pop pom pom, you get boom, boom, pop, pop, boom, boom, pop, boom, boom, and it kind of randomizes the rhythm, but all on the grid. Now, what we're gonna do is record some of this chaos. We're going to hit this little record button here, not this guy, but this big guy here. And as it's counting in, I'm going to just trigger one of these clips so that it will start on beat one, so that it'll start to record the chaos and randomness. It sounds like this. You can see it recording, it's doing its thing. Okay, so that should be enough and then turn off this little orange button here. There are some stuff in around here that sounded really cool. I actually really like that. So we're going to get rid of most of the other stuff. Let's take this first little loop here and just duplicate that. I mean, I might keep some of this as a backup if I want to try creating some other patterns. But the next thing you could do is start to effect it with some effects. I might put, like, something like a phaser on this. I think that could sound really cool. So we'll bring in the phaser flanger, and we end up getting something that sounds like this. Sounds pretty cool. Now, at some point, the little micro edits that we did on the drums are getting buried from some of the other instrumental stuff that we've added. So I would recommend making sure that you sort of mix things in place. I'm going to quickly rebalance this out a little bit and then show you our final creation using micro drums and a lot of other sort of pitched techniques as well, too. Okay, so altogether, it sounds like this. You want. Not bad. It's a good starting point. It's a very complex loop. There's lots of instrumental bits happening that are pitched. There's tons of different micro drum edits that are happening. To pull together this pretty complex loop, you can also tell from the process that it's not impossible to elongate this into a three minute track using some of these randomization techniques, using loops, and optimizing your workflow as much as you can along the way. So I hope you enjoyed this class on sample randomization. You can see that as we put this over top of some of the other pitched samples that we multiple methods and over all the complexity of the drumbeat that we've created, things really came together as a fantastic loop, and we could use that as a starting point for a full production. So from here, we're going to start to wrap things up. I feel pretty certain that some of the techniques within this course are going to find their way into your own productions, make sure that you go through the material a couple of times so that you can really sort of dissect what you enjoyed the most, what's making the most sense, and make sure that you watch over some of the classes that were maybe a little bit more complex so that you have that material available to you as well, too. In other words, go through this course a few times because some of the material got pretty dense. But again, thank you for checking out this class Thank you for checking out this course. We're about to wrap things up. I'll catch you in the next video. 13. Outro: Thank you for taking this course on MicroDrum editing techniques. It's such a pleasure to be able to share some of the more extended techniques that I've learned as a music producer to my students so that they can apply it to their productions to help them take their production to the next level. At the end of the day, we can get away with simple techniques and still make things very effective. But we don't want to feel limited when we want to dip our toes into more extended techniques and to get more granular with the way that we're programming, for example, drum I want to make sure that this course is available to students that are ready to take things to that next level. At the end of the day, some of these techniques were not simple, so I want to congratulate you on getting through this full course and just say that not everyone's willing to get this granular and detailed with their drum production. So it says a lot that you took the step forward to complete this course. And again, I just want to say, congratulations. Now, don't forget to apply these techniques to plenty of your productions, if they are techniques that you enjoy the sound of. And if you're working specifically with a music production teacher, do make sure that you bring this into lessons so that they can give you other microdrum techniques that they might have and other insight towards these techniques that might resonate best with your learning style. Also feel free to review this material as many times as you need to. I don't believe that going through this course once is necessarily the best idea. I would say shave through it a few times. Ask yourself what classes you enjoyed the most and hone into those, really develop those techniques so that you start to have your own style as a producer. So feel free to sift through the courses that I've created, see if any others resonate with you and then slowly improve those building blocks that'll help you stand out as a musician. Again, I want to say thank you for taking this course. I really hope you enjoyed the material. And if you did, don't forget to check out some of the other courses that I have available on this platform. Thank you one more time, and I'll catch you in the next course.