Transcripts
1. Intro: There are so many
ways that we can take drum loops and samples
and augment them, slice them up, reverse
them, re pitch them. There are a ton of
options available to us, but sometimes as a
beginner producer, we don't know where to start. That's where this course
on music production, specifically drums,
samples and loops, is going to come in
handy to help you sort out all those details and help you make sense
of how you can best apply drums to
your productions. Whether you want to learn
many of the ways that you can change up drum loops to
best suit your productions, or maybe you want to better understand how each drum sample fits within its role
within a drum loop. What is the role of a clap? What is the role of a high hat? We're going to
cover all of that, as well as specific drum music production techniques
like quantization, swing, drum choke,
and much more. Now, this course is
not style specific, whether you are a
hip hop producer, an electronic music
producer, producing pop rock or anything in between, there's going to be
some information in this course that
can definitely benefit you and help you become a better producer
and drum programmer. So we take this sort of
zoomed out framework of loops are quite
simple to work with, but there's many ways that we
can get creative with them. Individual samples are a
little bit more difficult, and I want to be able to again discuss each type
of sample's role. And then also how do
we fuse all of those sounds together to create a
convincing sounding drumbeat? That's all covered
within this course. It is drums, drums, drums, all the way through. And my hope is that by
the end of the course, you'll be feeling very
confident with the way that you apply your music production
techniques to your drumbeat. Project for this
course is going to be to create a drum beat that uses all of the techniques
from within this course. Now, many of these
techniques are sort of short and sweet in terms of the role of a clap or in terms of slicing up and
reversing loops. Some of these are quite
simple in theory, but when you go to apply them, there's quite a bit
of thought that needs to be taken
into consideration. That's why this
course project has you using all of the
different techniques so that by the time you're done that project and having gone
through the entire course, you're going to
feel very confident applying any one of
these techniques, but especially fusing them together to create the
best drum beat possible. I believe that once
you've covered the basic fundamentals
of music production, it's really important to start to hone in on what your drums are doing and how to amplify
their impact the most. Music and dance are specifically very related to one another, and drums are ultimately the element that will get
people to dance the most. You'll notice that
a lot of styles of music production, hip hop, electronic music, and
pop specifically, are very dance oriented. We're trying to get
the audience to dance, and without the solid foundation
of a proper drumbeat, you'll find that your
production falls short. So that's why I've
created this course specifically on drum
production so that you can dial in your drum
beats to get people dancing and grooving
as much as possible. Having that solid foundation of a proper drumbeat is going
to allow you to easily add layers over top in a
convincing way that'll make the style that you're
trying to achieve feel authentic and
properly dialed in. So having said all
that, it's time for us to jump into the first
class. I'll see you there.
2. Class Project: For this class project, you're going to take every
technique that I've taught you within this course and
apply it to a drum beat. Now, you don't have to go
crazy with each technique. You can use some maybe just once or some of them
multiple times, but make sure that
you're hitting each technique along the way. This drum beat could
be four beats long or 4 bars long. It's
really up to you. Now, every technique from
this course is going to easily translate into any DA. So whether you're using logic or base or ProTools or
whatever it might be, there's going to be a
way for you to easily implement the techniques that I've provided
within this course. Even though I've shown
it to you on Ableton, a lot of these techniques
are very universal. But the one technique I think you're going
to want to check out specific for your DA is how
to add swing and groove. Usually, it's not too complex, but I would recommend
that you do a little bit of side
research just to make sure that you're
applying swing and groove properly within your da. Once you've created your beat, export it as an MP three, and then upload it
to something like SoundCloud or even YouTube
with just a black background, something where you can
share with me a private link so that I can then listen to it and give you some feedback. This project is
really just about dipping your toes
into every one of the techniques I've provided to show you how readily
accessible they are. There's not one
technique you should be afraid of because it
seems tough to apply. Really, they're all quite
simple, and cumulatively, together, they create some very convincing
sounding drum beats. After all, playing
the right groove in a convincing way is all about a lot of little
details all coming together. Now, take your time
with this project. There's no rush. Make sure that you're submitting
something you're happy with. I can't wait to check
out what you supply and make sure that if at any point along the way you
have some questions, feel free to reach out and ask. Have fun with this project. I'll catch you in
the next class.
3. Drum Loops: Alright, let's get started
with talking about drum loops. There are so many ways to
change drum loops so that you can personalize them towards whatever production
you're gonna put them in. Let's get Talking
in great detail. So if you've ever been hit
with an ad that's like, Tech House 2025 or
whatever it might be, and they're showing you
all these fancy loops and samples and
that sort of stuff, you might find that
you've purchased some loops in one
of these packs. Also, you may be someone that
uses splice, for example, where you can go through
a huge catalog of individual samples and loop pick your favorites
and download them. I have been a splice
member in the past, so I have a little splice
folder here on the side. If you're ever wondering how to create little side folders, by the way, just go down to
the bottom here, add folder, and you can direct Ableton
to a spot on your computer, and it'll pop that
folder up in this area. So on one of my hard drives, I have splice
sounds as a folder, and then a subfolder
called loop. What we're going to
do is just listen through some of these
and pick our favorite. Now, I should mention,
these are top loops. Do you hear that we don't have a kick and snare right now? That would just go over top of some sort of pattern that
you have, let's say, a kick and snare or
kick and clap pattern, and you can put this over
top. So it's a good idea. You can see on the side
here. I also have top loops. It's a good idea to have a whole separate folder
just for top loops. So it looks like everything
in this folder is top loops. In that case, I would go to
something like Drum loops, another folder that I have
with more full loops. Let's just pull in
something like this here. Uh, it says 125 is
the suggested BPM. I'm pretty close right
now. My sessions at 1:24. I'm going to set it to 125, not because the loop has to be played at 125 beats per minute. But whoever created
this loop created it in an environment where they
were at 125 beats per minute, and that's where the
groove sat well for them. So we're going to start at 1:25, and I can always
adjust from there. So I've set my tempo up here, and I'm going to just
click and drag this loop, and you'll see that it sort of wants to create
a new channel here. I can't drag it
any further right, so I'm just going to drop
it down towards the top. Now when I hit this
play button at the top, you'll be
able to hear the loop. I'm going to turn
down the loop by 6 decibels just for the
sake of this video. Also, usually, right away, I would say something like loop or drums up at the
top for renaming. I like my drums to be yellow. And if you right click and say assigned track color to clips, now my clips become
yellow, as well. So for organizational purposes, I do that straight at the gate. Now, when I hit this play
button, this is our loop. If I double click this clip, you'll see the loop
pop up down here, and there's lots of
different ways that we can manipulate the clip on
the side or the loop. So if I hit warp, I can turn on and off warping. And warping allows me to create these little
warp markers. I can double click not on the bottom half of the
wave, but on the top half, I can click and drag and readjust these different
points to stretch the loop. Sounds something like
this. Isn't gonna sound bad, but sounds
something like this. So if we wanted to do something
constructive with that, let's say we have one,
two, three, four. There's our four
beats. This to this, I want to stretch twice as long. So it would sound
like this. So you can do these fun little almost, like, sort of record spin
down sort of sounds. You're basically just
stretching out the audio. So those are warp markers. So generally, I would
recommend keeping warp turned on
because right now, if it's off and I
adjust the tempo, the loop has not
adjusted its speed. But if I turn on warp,
and then I play it again, now as I go through
different tempos, we can hear the loop
slow down in this case. Now, there's also these
different types of warp modes, beats, tones, texture, re pitch, complex, and Complex Pro. So briefly, before I go through these different modes, it's
also worth mentioning, you want to scroll
up and open up this little clip window
here and select Loop. If loop is not selected, here's what happens.
And then it just stops. By turning on loop,
you'll be able to hear it continuously as you're creating different variations
to your loop. Now, in terms of the
different warp modes, some of them are very subtle. Like this first one beats, you could play around
for the most part with these different
sort of numbers. Here, you can play around
with this value here, and you're not going to
hear much of a difference. But if you're working with
a drumbeat and you want to keep good clarity
within that drum beat, it might be recommended
that you select beats. However, complex and Complex Pro are also very good at
maintaining the integrity, the fidelity of that loop. So when you're in
this beats algorithm, where you're really going
to hear the secret sauce is not just in manipulating these values incorporating those with stretching the audio. Now, I should mention
that if you do this sort of forward,
backward arrow here, you're going to get some
fun reversed sounds at different points depending on which of these values
you have selected. Let's try it out. Here's 1 bar. Half. Quarter, eight, 16th. It's really stretching
that audio. So you can get some
fun sounds that feel like a sort of
stretched version. And then, again, there's this
sort of forward, backward. That's why we're hearing
the loop like that. Now, if I select this mode here, it's going to play through
and hit a hard stop. Listen, when we have
a set to 1 bar, it's going to sound
like this. Or half. Quarter. Now, this is a great thing to be able
to automate as deejays. Assign something like this to a slider or a knob to be able to cycle through or even a set of buttons so that as you're
playing your beat, you're able to toggle through these different ways of
manipulating that loop. So again, you're going to
want to play around with these in conjunction with
these different modes. The last mode here
is just going to continually go all the
way through if we listen. Now what we have is on the
back half of this bar, you're going to get this
sort of loop effect to continue it through to the
end of the four beats. In the case of half, it's
taking two beats where the back half of
those two beats is doing the same effect.
It sounds like this. So regular skip regular
skip this sort of idea. When it was set to 1 bar, it's regular for
two, skip for two, regular for two, skip for two. Now, you're also able to take
that effect, for example, the skipped effect and sort
of turn it down a bit. If I take this value of
100 and turn it down, let's say to 70, listen to what happens during these
skipped portions. There's this fade out. So you
can really play around with these different parameters
and get some sort of a looped or reversed
version of the loop. There's a lot of different
other warp markers. I'm going to try to go
through these a little bit quicker because I
think this could be a whole course all on its own. So we're just going to kind
of dive through these. Tons is going to allow you
to change the grain size. So let's take the
loop, for example, stretch it out so it's significantly more
stretched and elongated. And then we're going to
play around the grain size and listen to
what happens here. You can hear all
the little, like, sandpapery sort of
little bits that compose each of these
different transients. As it's higher,
it's gonna sound a little more it stretch
trot As you go lower, it's it's gonna be a little bit more granular, hence grain size. So this is more of
a textural thing. We're working with
the tone of the song, but of course, we
also have texture. So if we play around
with texture, we have grain size,
but we also have flux. Let's listen to what happens when we play around
with both of these. Grain size much more
exaggerated at this point. You'll notice that
263 is our max value. In tones, our max
value was only 100. So we're getting
even more stretched. So instead of hearing
little short grains or medium grains iii, we're hearing these
long grains tut t tu, where it's really
sort of stretched out through these little slivers
of different sounds. So again, exaggerated
and pulled in. Really cool for sound design. I don't know how much I
would actually use this like changing this
parameter during a beep, but if you're going
for something more complex and new and
unique sounding, you might want to tap into that. Flux, let's give a listen. So flux is making it so that when we hear these
individual slices, they're not all the same volume. There's this sort of accent that's happening
on certain ones. So how granular do you want the grain size
and how much do you want the grains fluctuating
in other words, fluxing? Get some really unique
sounds with that. Now, one of my
favorites is re pitch. And re pitch, you
can see down here it's suggesting a BPM of 250. It's got it kind of wrong. It's kind of doubling
the tempo in terms of what it's
viewing this loop as. If I hit play, give a listen. It feels half speed, because it's assuming that
it's twice the speed, we're going to hear it
back at half speed. We need to tell it
by dividing by two, we are much closer
to the proper tempo. Now our beat sounds normal. So first just watch that the
BPM is correct down here. Here's the secret sauce, though. As in playing, I'm going to automate the tempo and
listen to what happens. Total wind down turntable
sort of effect. What I might consider doing is taking my song and
recording it all as a wave file for a
certain portion to get everything to
wind down together. Now, this has to be
done towards the end any other mix changes that you make won't be baked
into that loop. This is a bit out of
the context of this, but I'm just saying you could technically use this to have your whole song feel like it's winding down if you take
the right approach. So the same way
we can wind down, we can also wind back up again. So that's just sort of a fun and unique sort of warp mode, but you can see they have
some very textural changes. They have some sort of keeping the fidelity and keeping things
as accurate as possible, but then also this fun
sort of turntable effect. Having said that, this
little area here, divided by two or
multiplied by two, is a great way to make some
quick changes to your loops if you do want to double or half their speed, for example. So even though they're very
simple in how they work, they do achieve a great sound that still stays on the grid. Also, we can hit reverse here. Pretty simple. And then
we can also hit Edit. Now, Edit is going to open whatever editor you've selected. So if you go up into options, settings and file and folder, what you'll notice is
there's a sample editor. You can browse through.
I've used Rx 11, but you could use even
something like Melodynee. You could auto tune the
loop in different ways. So watch what happens
when I hit Edit. It's going to open RX 11, and then I can do some
sort of a change to it and then bring it back
in with those changes. That being said, that opens
up a whole wormhole of being able to manipulate your drum loops
because at this point, anything is possible based
on any VST you might own. But I just wanted
to mention this is a really great
handy little thing, especially if you're
working in, like, audiobook territory or
something like that, and you're trying to
clean up voice samples or instrumental loops of
some sort over and over, RX would be a great
thing to have available on each
of these loops. Another thing worth
mentioning is that if you're not set to re pitch, then this little pitch knob
is going to become available. It really simply
is going to pitch down your loop lower or higher. So what you'll notice is that when it's set to Complex Pro, the pitch keeps the beat intact, but when it's set to beats, we're going to get a bit
of a different result. Kind of like the
inverse of re pitch. Now, the pitch is influencing the tempo rather than the
tempo influencing the pitch. Now, I'm not going to go through every little sliver of everything that you can
do in this program. It's such a deep program. But one other thing
that you can play around with is gain, just simply the
volume of the loop. You want to make
sure that you're not outside of the edges. Like, see how right now, there's a lot of extra space
around to fluctuate. And when I hit around here, that's kind of the top ceiling. Now, usually, your
loop is going to be really close to that
top ceiling anyway, but if you're going
to bring the gain make sure that you're
not distorting it by bringing this wave file outside of that little
view port here. You might be thinking, but
what if I want it louder? Just go over to
your channel here and then turn up the
fader as needed. Turning it down,
totally acceptable. But again, you
might just want to consider doing that here. However, if you have, let's say, four loops in a row and the
third one you want quieter, a really easy way to
do that is to turn down the gain of
that particular loop instead of trying
to automate so that your volume is turning down at that point and
then turning back up, so it can be quite handy. So these are most of the ways that you can manipulate a clip, but there are other
deep dive ways of getting further
down this rabbit hole. But for now, to keep the
class a bit more succinct, I'm going to show
you the other way that we can manipulate
clips, which is, if I do a Control C for
copy and move over here, I'm going to turn off this
little button here so that I'm kind of working more
within this session view. I can select a spot on this drum loop here and
do a Control V for paste. And you can see we can paste that same clip now as a
loop within our session. To loop this, I'm going
to do a Control L, and you'll see our
loop marker up top. That was after I
selected this loop. And now from here, in this view, when I select this top bar here, I have all the same editing
options that I had before. But now I can also, for example, click and drag area Control
E is cut in Ableton. I know it's kind of weird.
You can sort of take some of these sections and squash them you can chop
them around a bit. If you hold control and drag, you can duplicate. That's
another fun thing. Or you can just do a
Control D, control D, control D. Now our
loop sounds like this. So it's not our best beat, but you can see that you can
really quickly and easily chop things up and manipulate
things from this view. Also, if I hit R, as long as this little keyboard
up here isn't turned on, which puts your
computer keyboard as like a MIDI keyboard. If this is turned off and you hit R, check out what happens. Now we have a little
reverse sound. So I could take
this whole section, R and reverse all
three of those. So you can play around with the ability to chop in
this view very easily while still taking
all these sort of clip adjustments and being
able to apply those as well. So that's it for
this class on loops. Now we can start to
break things down a little bit more
sample by sample. I'll catch you in
the next class.
4. Drum Samples: Let's get talking
about drum samples. We're going to be pulling
these in one by one onto individual channels to show you the basics of how you can
create a beat. Let's jump in. So what I've done is I've
created an audio track, Control Control You can create a couple of different
audio tracks here. If you're not familiar
with the hokeys, again, you can just go up to create
and then Insert Audio Track, but they do show you the
hokeys up here as well. So let's say the first one
here I'm going to call. Kick Control R for
rename, snare. Control R. Let's say hats
for high hats. Shift click. Let's make these yellow.
That's my favorite drum color. And we're going to find some
kick samples, snare samples, and high hat samples
and pull them in to these individual tracks. This isn't the way I prefer
to work with drum samples, but it's pretty popular and
it's worth knowing, as well. Now, one thing I want
to mention is if you go up to options
and settings, there's something
really important that you want to work with here. If you go to record, warp and launch, First of all, you want to make
sure that create fades on clip edges
is turned off. So if it's turned on, what that means is
if your snare starts right at the beginning
of this audio sample, it's going to sort of fade in, and it's going to lose some
of that impact or transient. So there are times when
you want to keep this on. Again, if you're
working with, like, audio books or audio correction, this sort of stuff can
be great. I keep it off. And auto warp long samples, I keep this off. So if I'm pulling in, like, a short film or if I'm pulling in a really long loop
or something like that, initially, I find it's better
to have warp turned off, but on shorter samples, I want warp to be turned on. That being said,
one shot samples, like a snare or a kick drum, warped one shot is how
I have this selected. And also the default warp mode, talking about from our last
class when we went through the different warp modes,
I set that to Complex. It's a little bit more CPU
intensive, but not much. Oh, let's go in and pull
in some drum samples. On the left side
here, I'm going to go down to some of
my splice sounds. Let's take a kick. This one here is pretty audible. We'll
pull that over here. We're going to pull in a snare. Let's pull that here. And we're going to
pull in a high hat. We'll pull that onto
the hi hat track. And from here, I'm going
to zoom in a little bit. We can just have a
sort of by the way, I'm shift clicking here and then controls what I'm
holding before I slide. It allows me to
duplicate that signal, or you can just do Control D, which also works as well. So I think that
needs to be here. This needs to be here, and this needs to be here, and we get something like I might just want to
pull these back out. But you can see, we have a
basic sort of boom, bap, boom bap, sort of kick
and snare pattern. From there, I might
want to create a bit of a pulse with my high hat. Now, it's pretty
traditional that every second high hat will
be a little bit quieter. So I'm just going to take the
gain for that sample down. You'll notice we can
work with these samples the exact same way we
worked with the loops. This is just the way
Ableton gives you options to manipulate something
that is an audio clip. So in this case,
I've pulled the gain down a little bit.
Let's take this. I'm going to highlight
this section, control D D D, D, D D D, and we get A very
basic drum beat, but from here, you can change
things as much as you want. If you want the kick
on all four beats, if you want something very
staggered and hip hoppy, play around with
different samples, you can create whatever beat you want all customized
in this sort of view. So that's it for this
class on Drum samples, now we're going to take our
samples and toss them into a drum rack where we'll
have even more control. I'll catch you in
the next class.
5. Drum Rack: Et's get talking about
the Ableton drum rack. One of my favorite ways
to arrange drum parts. I'm using this all the time, and I can't wait
to share some of its most powerful utilities
with you. Let's dive in. I'm going to create a Mi
track Control, Shift, T or again up to create Insert
MiTrack. That also works. I'm going to call
this drum rack. And over on the left side here, if I go over to drums, at the very top, you'll see drum rack. I'll scroll all the way
up, and I'm going to drag that drum rack
over to drum rack. Now, you actually
don't have to create this midi track first. You can just take
drum rack. Boom, drag it straight in. That also works. So again, I'm going to
make sure that I make this yellow just because I
like to organize as I go. I'm going to delete
these other three here. What I will say is that if
you shift click these and do Control G and say something
like all samples. You now have a group
that you can collapse. You can organize your
drum beat very easily. You can also apply effects
to all of the drums. That's a bit out of context for this class because I could talk about all the
different types of effects and all the
different ways to manipulate reverb and delay and
distortion and saturation. We're not here for that. I
just wanted to mention that if you wanted to do something
to your kick, like, add a simple effect to the
kick, you can do that, but you can also apply
it to all your drums, and you would do
that by grouping. This is one way to do it.
There's multiple ways, but this is really clean and Ableton is really good at
doing things this way. So I'm going to delete that, so we just have our drum rack. Now, in the bottom left,
you'll see over here we have something that looks
kind of like an MPC. It looks a little bit like the finger pads
that something like doctor Dre would have used or something like a launch pad, which is a really
popular Ableton device. So now what we're going
to do is we're going to take our samples like before. So I go to Splice sounds. I'm going to pull in a kick
drum, maybe a different one. So let's say this is
the kick that we want. Drag that onto let's say C one. Now, this grid here,
you'll notice on the left, there's lots of
little different sort of versions of this grid. You can have a very
complex setup. We're just working with
one little square for now, and we're going to
pull in a snare drum next let's say this one here. Next up, we're going
to pull up a high hat. Again, just keeping the basic
elements. This is fine. I like my kick on C, my snare on D, and my
high hat on F Sharp. Watch the little midi
keyboard just below me here. When I hit C on my keyboard, you can see it light up.
We're hearing the kick. Here's D on my keyboard,
and here's F Sharp. So I've assigned it to
certain keys on my keyboard. It's actually the same layout as Yamaha keyboards. They would
always have it laid out. So you can just play it a certain way
that feels nice with the long fingers up on the high hat and the kick
and snare beside each other. I played a lot on Yamaha keybod as a kid, played a
lot of drum beats. So for me, I lay it
out the same way that Yamaha keyboards lay
out their drums. Now, from here, I have more of an ability to play
in my drum part. So let's listen to
our tempo, 125. Let's try recording in. It's
going to sound like this. One, two, three, four. Okay, so you'll notice
that when it looped, it deleted a little bit of
the first part of this loop. It's just give me
a second chance. In case I didn't like
it, I can just keep relooping and relooping until
I get the part that I like. Control Z will undo that. So every time it re
loops, you go Control Z, Control Z, Control Z until you find the loop that you
thought was the best. So we're sticking with
this one for now. MetronomsOf. Sounds like this.
It's not perfect, though. If I double click
this top part here, we can see some of my
kicks are really early, some of my snares
are a bit early. So again, control A to select
all when I'm in this area. You can select some of
this gray area first, control A, and then control U. Most of it is on the grid,
but these little guys here, they were so far over that
they're kind of in between. We're just going to kind
of snap those back. You can do with the mouse or just hit right
on your keyboard, and you can manipulate
the different drum samples that
way as well, too. So, again, you could go to
quantize settings that'll open it up here for you
or just scroll down and open up transform. It was set to 32nd notes, and that's why it decided, if I undo enough times, it decided that this was
a good spot to quantize. But if I set it to eighth
notes and then do a Control A, control U, now everything is perfectly on those eighth
notes. Let's give a listen. Now it's really perfect. Maybe I want that sort of drum sampler sound
early daft punk days, but maybe I want some groove. We still have some of
these grooves that I pulled in when we were
talking about loops. Let's set this 868
and give a listen. Significantly more
swung. So, again, the same way that you can
play around with drum loops, you can also play around with these individual drum samples
to apply the same effects. Now, when we're
working with MIDI, there are other tools available. If you look over
to the left here, we have pitch and T. This
Invert tool is kind of neat. It's going to take
all the top samples, bring them down to the bottom, and the bottom ones
go to the top. So I hit Invert, boom. This reminds me of a
song from the 90s. Da, da, da, da. Hey, da da da da. Just listen again. Okay, so I wouldn't have thought
to do that on my own. But again, just simply hitting Invert gives a
really cool result. Now, we've perfected everything
and we've applied swing, but it sounds like
perfect swing. What if I want to
humanize things a bit? You hit the humanize
button. Go figure. I hit humanize,
and you'll notice if we zoom in a bit,
I hit humanize. Things are slightly
off, but not much. It's just going to add that
little humanized flare. If you want it more humanized, you can considerably
mess things up a bit and apply it with this little slider here so that things are
more or less humanized. I thought 10%
worked pretty well, so let's humanize 10%. And then we're going to also tap into one other little function here, the reverse function. Check this out.
When I hit reverse, it's going to take the entire MIDI information and
flip it this way. So we can flip it
this way with invert, or we can flip it this
way with reverse. Let's check it out as it's now reversed. Okay, so not so great. But this can be really
cool with, like, chord progressions and
melodic lines down the line. Lastly, if I hit this
little legato button, that's going to
take all the MIDI information so it
touches each other. It's going to
elongate everything so it touches the next
little piece of MIDI. That being said with drums, this isn't super
important because everything is transient. But if this is a violin sample, T versus all the way to that next note, that
could be very valuable. Hitting Legato looks like this, but if you listen, Things
sound the same to us. So generally with drums, I wouldn't use legato,
but it's up to you. Now, one other thing
I should mention is that if I go over
to the drum rack, every one of these
samples that I select, you'll notice that you can
see the sample over here with lots of ways to
manipulate that sample. I'm not going to
go through every little granular piece
of detail here, but I will show you
the things that I think are most important. Let's say I want my snare
drum to be changed a bit. I can take these
outside sliders and change where the beginning
of that sample plays from. So instead of I could have or just a little
piece of the tail. So if there's, like, an annoying click at the
beginning of the sample, you could pull that in a bit. But maybe this is too abrasive. Another thing you could
try is the fade in option. So as you pull this up,
you'll see this sort of dark triangular sort of
angle that comes in here. This is going to
be your fade in. So And that can really
soften the transient. So you can manipulate where
does the sample start from and how much does
that sample fade in. Same thing works
on the back end. You can choose where
the sample finishes, and you can choose
how it fades out. This is going to
control the sound of the length of the sample. So the fade in controls the
amount of punch or snap. The fade out
controls the length. From here, we can
play around with transpose to make the
sound higher or lower. There's plus five.
Here's negative five. And of course, all of this
stuff you can automate. In other words, you
can tell Ableton at certain points, I
want it plus five. At other times I want
it negative five, you automate the information so that as the song is playing, it can change those
values for you. I haven't really talked too
much about automation yet. So for right now,
it's out of context, but keep in mind you can
automate all this stuff. Another thing that's really
important are the way these two knobs work together. Volume velocity and volume. This volume to velocity
knob is really important because
let's say you're producing EDM or hip hop. You want your kick and snare to be the same volume every time. Now, there's some deviation here depending on how much
groove you want to apply. But the last thing
you want is a sort of four to the floor
kick in a club, and one of the kicks is a
bit weaker accidentally. So if I pull this down to zero, there's 0% fluctuation based
on how I play the note. If I play this snare sample
quiet on my keyboard or loud, it's the same volume
that you're hearing. Doesn't matter how
hard I press that key. If I turn this up all the way, now it's very sensitive. I can play quiet or loud,
and it will change. So for now, what I'd
recommend is probably keeping your kick and snare at
zero or close to zero. We're going to set the
kick there as well. But that's going to bring
down the volume a little bit, and you can compensate that
with this volume knob. So for now, I'm gonna
actually just set this. I'm going to click
it zero, Enter. Same on the kick,
click it, zero, Enter. Now we have something
that sounds like this. This snare sounds wacky, so we're just gonna
pull this back at. Okay. But where you
want the fluctuation of these volumes is likely
in your upper percussion like high hats and
symbols and these sort of elements that add a whole
lot of groove to your loop. So for the high
hat, for example, if I go to zero and I set this to zero, listen
to the sound. The high hat, tat tat tat tat tat tat tat
is very abrasive. But what if I was to take it
and apply a little bit of fluctuation on that volume by turning this
up? Let's say 50%. If I go even more, listen now. It's tat tat tat. You can almost not even hear
every second high hat hit. So if I was to hit tab, if we go over to this
drum rack up top, I can open it up by
hitting this triangle, and I can see the kick, the
snare, and the high hat. You might want to rename these. That's up to you. I usually do. So something like BD
for bass drum and SN for snare and then
hat for high hat. So if I solo this high
hat, give it a listen. Okay, now let's
take that high hat sound and pull this down. Hear how it loses that
groove. Listen to it. It's all the same volume. As
I pull this back up again. Now we're kind of applying that loud, soft, loud, soft, loud, soft, loud, soft sort of groove.
Listening back in again. That works quite well. So again, when I'm going through
these three little areas up here within my drum rack, you can see it pulls
up all the same sort of settings as though I'm in the drum rack and selecting these different
little clips here. The other thing is,
you'll notice it's renamed everything on this grid. Ableton is very
intuitive that way. Some things in Abeltn are
a bit tougher to learn, but this was very intuitive. So, again, I could take
something like the bass drum, and then under audio effects, I'm going to do this
really quickly, but let's say I add a filter so that we're only
hearing low frequencies. Not hearing any of the kick. We're just hearing
that low stuff. On the snare, I'm going to
add a huge reverb, let's say. I'm just being quick and
dirty with this, by the way. Just to show you that you
can add individual effects and a saturator on the
high hat. Why not? Add a bit of distortion. It might get a bit loud. Try
to pull down the output. So now I've added a bit of
saturation to the high hat, a little bit of
reverb to the snare, and some filtering to the kick. I'm not saying this is
what you should do. I'm just showing you you can add individual effects
to each of these, but we can also add
effects to the group, which is where
everything is contained. Again, you can check
out everything in the group by pressing this
little triangle here. But if I drag an effect
onto the group itself, like redux, now, let's say I'm writing something for
an eight bit video game, I'll set my bits and my rate
down and we get something like and that's
applying to everything, but we still have a bit
of reverb on the snare. We still have saturation on the high hat and filtering
on the kick. So you can individually affect everything or affect
everything in a group. That is true whether
you're using this method or whether
you're using the method where we had individual
audio samples and then contained
those within a group. Lastly, what I'll mention is there's a bit of an in between territory of loops and samples,
specifically in Ableton. If I click PAC and
then I type in clip. All these packs that I've
purchased from Ableton, which are free once
you've bought Ableton. And I'd recommend if you
have the hard drive space, just buy all them. But these packs
are going to have different types of
samples and these sort of looped clips where basically
you have access to loops, but it's created the loops
through different drum racks. Allow me to explain.
Let's say we have this sound here and I pull
this over into a new track. Here's the clip. And this clip
is playing this drum rack. Now I can play, for example, on the keyboard, the
kick snare and high hat. And by the way, CDF Sharp,
it's laid out the same way. On this new kit, but
listen to how that tail extends. Loops
don't really do that. Like, for example, if I play
this clip and then stop it, you'll see it has
all those tails, all that sort of reverberation, all the effects that the individual drum
rack samples have. So it functions like a loop. I hit this play
button. I have a loop. But what's really cool
is I can go Control C, tab over, turn off this sort of clip mode over here, paste. Now you can see the loop as
individual drum samples. You can do a whole lot of
manipulation from this point. So this is like a hybrid
environment of you go through and you listen to
some of your favorite. When you find one that you like, you know you're going
to be able to get granular in terms
of the way that you manipulate things using MIDI. But at the same time,
you don't have to. You can just simply
play the clip. As a loop, and that
works as well, too. That's it for this
class on the drum rack, we're going to start
to break things down a little bit more. Over the classes to come, we'll be talking
about quantization, swing, drum chokes,
and so much more. I'll catch you in
the next class.
6. Sampling Loops: So previously, we've
talked about loops. We've talked about samples, but did you know that
you can sample loops? I don't want to
blow over this one concept because you
can get a lot of use out of resampling other loops and other
people's material. Let's dive into this class and
talk about sampling loops. Step one, we're going
to go back to drums. We are going to pull
in a drum rack. Remember to scroll
all the way to the top drumrack
we are pulling in, and I'm also going to
pull in a drum loop. Let's say I go to my
drum loops folder. Again, just pointing to one of my hard drives where I've
kept all of my loops. Let's go into disco House. It doesn't really matter
what we're pulling in right now. Let's pull
this in. That's fine. So what's really cool is
if I was to go over to this other view here and I'm
going to copy this clip, so Control C once it's selected, coming back to this
area, control. And I'm going to zoom in. We had our drumbeat from
the last class. I'm just going to delete that.
And here's our drum rack. So let's say I really
like this sound right here. Just that. I'm going to do a little cut, Control E from here to here, Control E. So now I have this
little individual sample. I'm going to go back
over to my drum rack, and I'm going to drag this
sample in to the drum rack. So now, it can play that sample. If I duplicate that over
here, let's say, now, on this sample, I can choose a different sort of slice point. I can choose just the kick. And then I can take
one more, for example. Let's get a little more sort of granular here and just
pull in this little sound. So now I have and I can
play that on my keyboard. I've taken from a loop some of my favorite
little drum sounds, and I've resampled them
within this environment. And just like before, all
the audio effects that you choose to apply
to your drum rack and the individual samples, that's now all available, but now you're taking the
samples from some other loop. So instead of just pulling
a loop in off of splice, why not do something a
little bit more unique? Why not take the loop
and repurpose it? It's sort of like
recycling or thrifting where we're taking something old and making something
new out of it. So that's basically what
I wanted to show you. Now, you could just
take the full loop. Like I cut things. Let's say I was to Control
J, put things back together. You could take this full
loop and drag it in. And then once you're
here, you can start to choose with these sliders,
which samples you want. Quite often, I'll do it from here just because
everything is sort of already on the grid that I find it to be just a
little bit quicker to say, Okay, I want this sound. I want this sound, and
I want this sound. And then you're not fiddling
with these little sliders, hoping that it lines
up with the transient. It's kind of difficult
to see things. Although we can zoom in. This is still just
more cumbersome. And by the way, to zoom in, you would just hover
over this area, click and drag down or
drag up to zoom out. But again, this is just, to me, not quite as accurate as just taking some of
these slices this way. Let's say, just want
this little slice. I can cut that out, easy
peasy, and pull that in. So now we have and you can really mix and mangle the original loop
to make it all your own. Now, I do want to mention
there's one other fun trick in Ableton if I click
and drag in a loop. Let's get rid of
everything else that I had just so things
aren't confusing. I can right click
this loop and go slice to new Mi Track
and watch what happens. If I do it by transient, it's going to There's
different options here. Like every half note
or every quarter note, you can create a slice,
and that's going to take all those slices and
put it into a drum rack. I'm going to recommend
most of the time, you just keep it as transient. In other words,
every time there's a spike in that wayfle, it creates a slice at
that transient point. So we're just going to hit
Okay. Let it do its thing. And already,
instantly, you can see it's taken that drum
beat if I mute the loop. So the loop is muted right now. We just have this extraction of all of these little slices, and it's done such a good job. Instead of doing it all by hand, it's just giving us a kind of overwhelming
amount of options. What's good about
the first way that I showed you is you can hand pick some of your
favorite samples and use those to
recreate your beat. This just slices everything. And watch what happens
if I hit play. Check this out.
That's essentially playing a chromatic scale, all the semitones and is
creating the sound of this loop. Watch my little minti
keyboard down here again. So I can play all of those semitones and create that same beat or the same loop, but I can also mix
things around. Right? So again, it's a
great way to be able to get all the slices within a loop available within a drum rack, and then you can manipulate
them the same way you usually would and play them on your
midi keyboard or finger pads. But again, keep in
mind this method is going to give
you tons of slices, so it can be an overwhelming
amount of options. It really depends on
if you want to hand pick which samples
you want to repurpose or if you just want
to have all of them available and then see what you can come
up with from there. So there it is, a truly hybrid approach.
We're taking loops. We are resampling them and ultimately
making them our own. So that's it for this class, and I'll catch you
in the next one.
7. Quantization: Let's get talking
about lining up your drum parts so they're
exactly on the grid. Whether you can play
perfect or not, quantization is here to help. Let's go ahead and dive on in. Now, the bottom section here
is going to be transform. This is for quantization. So if I right click and
go to quantize settings, that will also take
me to this area here. In the older
versions of Ableton, it'll pop up a little window, and it's all the same sort of stuff that you're able
to work with here. So let's say I want
to quantize my beat. I'm going to hit Control A, Control And that's
going to create all these little warp markers
on all the main transients. See, this is a pretty
big little spike, and this is obviously
a big spike. This one, not so
much, so it's really just picking up on
the main transients. And from there, you're
able to quantize things. So let's say this was a
bit late and this was a bit early when I had
created some sort of a drum. Let's I'm recording
an actual drummer and his timing or her
timing was off. So if I go, Control A, control U is going
to quantize Oop. And that's going to
pull everything back to the nearest slice of
the current grid. If I zoom in, you'll
notice the grid changes. So that would now pull it to the closest version of
the grid once zoomed in. Control U, you'll see
doesn't do as much now. It's pulling it to
these little areas. But basically, when
it's set to grid, based on how far
zoomed in you are, it's going to quantize
or snap the audio to the grid at that level of
how much you're zoomed in. Now, having said that, I
don't use grid very often, it's quite handy, but usually, you'll find quarter notes, eighth notes or 16th
notes is going to be where you want to
be most of the time. I like eighth and
16th quite a bit. Now, let's say one
of your beats, again, is a little bit off. This is late. If I go to
quarter and I go apply, it's going to pull
it into place. Let's undo. This
time, eighth note, I'm going to select all,
Control A, and apply. That also works, Let's
say again it is off. 16th notes should
also still work. Control A to select all, and then we can hit Apply. And you'll see it pulls
it to that same spot. Now, you have to consider how the grid is sort of subdivided. Now, if I zoom out enough, you can see over
here on the right, it says one slash 32. This is a 32nd note that we're seeing for each of these
little grid points. If I was to now change that
to something like 16th notes, you can see the grid here
changes or eighth notes, you can see it changes again. Now we have these really long, chunky parts of the grid. So we can change the
way we view this grid. We can change the way
the quantization works. Remember, all this is saying is that everything
is going to snap to the closest quarter note or the closest eighth
note or 16th or 32nd. Or if you're working
with triplets, triplet, you can also set 16th note triplets, eighth
note triplets. And what's cool is you can kind of go back and forth
between the two. You can say to Ableton,
I want you to snap to the nearest eighth note
or eighth no triplet, the nearest 16th note
or 16th note triplet, whereas here, it would
just be the triplets. So you have a lot of control
how you can manipulate and quantize the beat
so that it feels more on the grid. So
that's it for this class. On quantization, sometimes
life isn't perfect, but your drum beats can be. Although that's not always the best way to approach drums. So let's get talking
about how you can add some swing to
your drumbeats. I'll catch you in
the next class.
8. Swing/Grooves: While quantization is great, playing everything
perfectly on the grid, it doesn't feel humanized and it doesn't groove
as much as it could. That's where swing and Ableton grooves are gonna help you out. Let's get talking about them. So what's cool about
once you've quantized, you're now able to add groove. So you've perfected everything, and from here, you're applying some sort
of swing or groove. So what I'm going to do
is go up to the top here. I'm going to select
grooves on the left side. I'm going to set 16th swing, and I'm going to pull in I mean, at this point, you
know what, actually, let's go with an MPC swing. These are pretty classic.
I'm going to go in and pull in 16th note 68. Basically a 16th note swing
is if you have one anda, two e enda three end to four
eenda it's going to go Tata, a, get ta, the gig, right? So if you have a
lot of 16th notes, you're going to hear swing
on those 16th notes. If you have more, just
like a one and two, and three and four end, as opposed to one end to
end to end to four e anda, if you're with
those eighth notes, one and two, and
three and four end, you're going to hear one and
two, and three and four. And you're going to
swing the eighth notes. Most drum beats are
going to benefit more from a 16th note swing. So 74 is a more
aggressive number, where something like 54. So let's put like, let's say, 61 we're going to pull
this onto our beat. And once I've done that,
you can't see this. I'm going to hide myself
just temporarily, but you can see that
it's actually added this little MPC swing
section up here. You can choose how much you
want to quantize things. Is it no quantize at all, or is it 100% quantized? At this point, we want
to keep it down at zero. We've already
quantized the beat. You can also choose the
bass rhythm to change. So I explained 16th
versus eighth notes. You can change this,
for the most part, I would leave it at 16th. You can also randomize
the swing at Velocity is going to pull out certain notes more
within the groove. So if the swing is
influencing timing, quite often it's also
influencing the accents. So one and two, and three and four and becomes
one and two, and three and four. And those ands, those
offbeats become accented. You can choose how much to exaggerate those
accents with velocity. That being said, I
don't want to get too hung up on what's
happening up here because you're going to
get some great results from pulling in
that swing already. Now, let's say I want
a couple options. I'm going to pull in three
different options here. Down here, and the
very top section, which is clip you'll notice that there is
a groove section, and you can choose to move
between these three grooves. Now, what I'm going
to do before I apply this swing is I'm going to
create some more warp markers, just so that there's
more ability for Ableton to stretch
and squash this loop. Sometimes it sounds
great straight out the gate, but other times, you need to give it a bit of
assistance and slice it up a little bit more and then play around with the
different grooves. Keep in mind, warp should
be turned on for this. Listen to the three different
types of grooves we have. Now, truthfully,
there's already a bit of swing baked into that loop. So adding swing on swing is
going to sound kind of weird. I'm going to pull in
a more simple beat, which is just a little top loop. Give it a listen, and then we'll try applying some swing to it. It sounds like this initially. And again, what I've done is a Control A to select all
of this area and then control you to add these warp markers and
quantize things onto the grid. Again, you can do that
from this bottom menu. It's really up to you. I like Control A, control you. That works for me.
From here, we're going to try applying a groove. So with no groove. And then
with the MPC swing at 74, now, we're not hearing
a huge difference here. Let's go back to Grooves. This time we're gonna pull
in eighth note swing at 68. We're going to now
apply that over here. And let's give that a listen. Oh, now we're really
hearing things. So you can see it really depends on the type of beat
that you have. If there's a lot of tickets
it tack, tik tack, Tiktata, really consistent 16th notes, then feel free to
add 16th note swing. So again, here's with it off. And here's with it on.
Significantly different. So first, we quantized things, so everything was
nice and on the grid, and then from there,
we applied swing. I think quantizing here
is important first, because let's say I'm
recording a real drummer, and there's a little bit
of natural humanization and a little bit of swing ish. Now we're adding swing to swing, which can give some
really weird results. We want to be adding
these swing algorithms to a pretty straight ahead
beat right off the bat. Now let's say inversely, you have a drummer playing
a really good groove and you really
enjoy that groove, and you want to be able to
apply that to your base, and your base is very quantized. So what you can do is you can right click
your drumbeat here, and you're going to
go extract grooves, and it's going to
read the information, interpret the groove that your drummer or
instrumentalist has, and apply it as one of the
options in your groove pool. So now once it's done its
thing, give it a quick second, you would now be able
to access that over here from your groove pool
or list of groove options. So that's it for this class
on swing and Ableton Grooves. I hope you have a strong
understanding of how you can take the approach
of perfecting your beat, adding swing, and ultimately making your drum beat
as groovy as possible. I'll catch you in
the next class.
9. Velocity: H. Drums are not always
meant to be the same volume. Sometimes they're quieter,
sometimes they're louder, and this ultimately
is going to play into how groovy
your drum part is. Let's get talking in this
class about velocity. Let's jump in. So
let's talk about this small but very
important concept velocity. We've discussed already a
little bit about the idea that any individual drum
sample is going to have this sort of velocity
and volume knob. When you lower this
down all the way, you're going to
have no deviation between loud and soft sounds. Hence 0% a 0% difference
between the louds and the soft. When we pull this
up all the way, we have plenty of variation
within that sound. So to demonstrate, if I
was to play this kick drum with some change in
pressure on the key, we can hear that
volume difference. But if I pull this knob down all the way and then try
playing at different volumes, it's always going to
be the same volume. But what if I wanted
a bit more control? Instead of just using
this knob here or playing the key harder or softer,
there's another approach. If I go into this simple EDM beat that I've created here,
let's give it a listen. Nothing fancy. I just whipped it up for the
sake of this class, but you'll notice all of this information
down below here. And this is velocity
information. This is all the
individual volumes that each of these
drums are played. Now, if I have the
volume velocity knob at zero so that you're
hearing zero deviation, it will not matter
if I have this up all the way or down all the way. You can even hear right
now with the kick currently set to there
as I move it higher, we hear no difference
in that volume. But let's take a high hat, which does have some deviation and lower it and raise it
to hear the difference. So you can as you're scrolling, find the spot that
you like maybe around there, and then
bring that back in. Now, you can also
say every other one. So I'm going to hold Shift and click every other high hat, and I'm going to lower
those down in volume. So it's loud, soft loud, soft. Now, another cool thing is
I can hold Alt and drag over top of one of these high
hits that I've selected, and you'll see that the cursor
changes, and from there, I can drag down all
of those together. Now, I don't think
this sounds better, but I want it to demonstrate
that the high hat, which has a different volume velocity
setting than the kick is able to be controlled through these
velocity parameters. So just remember, if
you want to change the volume of a drum
hit or a percussion hit or maybe something like a piano key or an electric
guitar sampled key, then you would want to make
sure that you're looking at this velocity information. And again, especially
with the drums, if you're moving this stuff around but nothing is happening, that's because you likely
have to go in and double check what's happening on
this volume velocity knob. Again, I'll mention one
more time. If you have it set to 0%, likely, it's going to be on
the quieter side, so you can compensate that using this volume knob here or
your channel fader here. So that's it. These
little velocity nodes can be used on any type of hit. Just make sure you're
watching out for that volume velocity knob on
each individual drum sample. This is a big part of the
way that you're going to be able to establish groove. In other words, these louds and softs are going to
create more of a pulse. So play around with
those and see how they help you improve
your drum beat. So there you have it
a simple function, but very effective, especially
when it comes to drums. That's our class on velocity, and I'll catch you
in the next class.
10. Drum Chokes: If you've ever played
on a drum kit, you'd recognize that a high hat is going to have a foot choke. This allows us to have longer sounds that are cut
off by shorter sounds. This is what a drum choke is. It's available
digitally in Ableton. Let's talk about it. So let's
get talking about choke. Where we see choke
the most is on a drum kit specifically
on the high hat. We have this little foot pedal, and it's called a foot choke. If I have my foot off of the
pedal and I hit my high hat, it'll go until the
sound dies out. But if I press down my foot, we'll get this closing of
those high hat symbols. So you get. And when you press
down your foot, it stops, almost like white noise
fading out a little bit, and then coming to
an abrupt stop. Now, quite often with drum hits, we want to make sure that
some sound is happening, but when another sound happens, the first sound is stopped, and that's where choke
is going to come in. So let's use this EDM drum
beat, something very simple. Now, I want to briefly mention
that if you're clicking around and you're hearing
sounds, that's great. If you're clicking
on these keys to the left and hearing
sounds, that's great. If you can't hear
them, it's 'cause this little blue headphone
button is not turned on. Now when I'm clicking around,
we don't hear anything. So ideally, I would say, make sure that that is left on. Now, this high hat sound
here is quite loud, and it might even overlap a little bit with
this sound here. We're going to play around
with this for a moment, and I'll show you how this sound can be stopped by this sound. First one is open high hat one, and this is WWT one. Okay. So we're going to put those on the
same choke, open, high hat one, is going
to be on Choke one. And this is where we're going
to find this choke menu. When you're in this
sort of opened up group section here,
hit that triangle, find the sound that you
want on a particular choke, set it there, and then we'll set this one on
choke one as well. It's not going to sound
drastically different, but I'll isolate
things so you can hear the difference.
Let's check it out. What I'm going to
do is I'm going to mute everything by hitting
zero on my number pad, and we're going
to just listen to the high hats by themselves. Now, I can hear it, but
I've also done a lot of this sort of method in the past, so I'm
used to hearing it. What if we bring this further ahead so it's a
bit more obvious? Do you see how this sound, which is quite long,
becomes quite short? The second high hat is closing
off the first high hat. So generally, especially
in house music, you have this, hi, a,
chi, da a chi, dah, these really big, sort of washy open high hat sounds that get close from some of
the smaller sounds. You would achieve that by
setting them to the same choke. If I want these two high hats to be canceling each other out whenever the other
one is happening, then I set them, let's
say, both to one. But I might want my crash and my ride having a
separate relationship with one another that those
I could set to choke too. And now those two
are controlling each other and these two are
controlling each other. Now, if I flip this and I take this short high hat and pull it right before
the long one, it will now be choked to
the long one. Listen. You almost don't even hear
it. Let's pull it more ahead. So because it's so short, you're already not gonna
notice it much, but I'm just letting you
know that if you have them on the same choke together, it doesn't matter if
you have sound A, then sound B or sound B, then sound A W one is happening, and then the next one happens, if there's an
overlap, the next one will be muted or choked. So we're left with a beat
that sounds like this. And that little tiny difference of the longer high
hat being choked by the smaller one starts to lend towards that more
professional sound. Now, you can try this
with tom hits or gas or bongos or high hats or
cymbals. It doesn't matter. Choking always works
the same way when it comes to this midi
information overlapping. So it's something
worth considering. I would highly encourage that you explore these drum chokes. So that's it for this
class on drum chokes, all the different drum parts
making room for one another. It's really a strong
utility if you use it well. Let's jump in to the next class.
11. Function Role of the Kick: Let's get right to it.
We're going to talk about the role and functions of a
kick drum. Let's dive in. Alright. So the role of
the kick drum very simply put generally is that it's going to be
established on beat one, and it's going to show the
listener where beat one is. This is really important
when people are trying to dance or anticipate
after a buildup where a drop might be
and to really feel the impact of that drop or chorus or whatever
it might be. Now, some styles don't have a kick on beat one.
It's very rare. Reggae comes to mind, where
the kick is on Beat three, and there's actually nothing on beat one. It's kind of like one. Ta, ta, crop, cha, one, chacha. And it has this very sort
of offbeat sort of feel, which is perfect for Reggae, which is all very
much on the offbeat. But if we're playing
pop, rock, funk, or a lot of electronic styles, we're generally going
to have a kick on all four beats or
beats one and three. So here's our beat with a
kick on all four main beats, one, two, three, four. And here it is with only
beats one and three. I'm using zero on my number pad to mute these other samples.
It sounds like this. Still works very
well. But once we get a little bit
funkier with our beats, a little bit groovier and apply these to
genres like hip hop. And again, I mentioned
funk before as being able to have a solid
foundation for the kick. It's really all over the place. But consider that funky beats are going to keep
a kick on beat one and then play around with being in between the main beats. Like, this is a beat one, this is a beat two, this is a beat three, this is a beat four. We can see each beat
clearly based on the color change within
the grid, dark gray. Gray. So let's keep
our kick on beat one, and then play around with
some kicks in between some other beats one and two, and three, and four. So we're on the end of Beat two and the end of beat three. Let's give it a listen. I'll do the same part of that pattern
over here. Here it is. Okay, now it's kind
of sounding like a bad version of 90s hip hop. But you can see that having that main kick on beat one
was super foundational, and then we played
around between the beats for these other kicks. I could even go one
step further and just have a kick on beat one.
That would sound like this. Might be good for a breakdown or an intro or
something like that. Now, I've also pulled
up something called Soul fi by Teletone. And this is one of
my favorite samplers to use when I'm working within a hip hop atmosphere and trying to create
a hip hop drumbeat. I'm not going to go
into great detail about this particular unit
because you could have a whole class
just dedicated to it. And also, I can't
assume that you have this as part of the tools
that you're working with. But I wanted to show
you that I pulled up just the stock drum beat that comes within this and
listen to the beat, you'll notice the
kick on beat one and many other accent kicks
in between the beats. Let's give it a
listen. One, two, and three, and four, and one and two, and
three, and four. Right? That's kind
of what we were doing with our hip hop beat. One, two, and three and four. Versus Ours is going to sound
a little bit more square. We're not using hip hop samples, but the theory still stands. We have a kick on beat one, and some accent kicks
usually on off beats. Now, whether you have three
beats or four beats or six beats as the main time signature that
you're working with, I'd recommend generally putting a kick on beat one
as a starting point. So that's sort of the
function of the kick. The role of the kick is
the low end of the kit. It is the beef. It is the thing that's going to
get you right in the chest. So that low end energy is mostly just coming
from the kick drum, sometimes Toms, but a lot of styles don't really
overuse Toms. And they'll use them
sometimes in, like, drum fills when we're transitioning to
another sort of loop. But in terms of the kick, that is going to
be the main source of that low end information. So when I'm creating
a drum beat, I generally start with a kick. Then I'll add the snare and clap and then I will add the top end, which is why naturally
our next class is going to be all about
the role of the snareru. That's it. That's the main role and function of a kick drum. As you can see, it's a very fundamental
element of the kit, and that's why I chose
to start with it. In the next class, we're
going to talk about the role and function of the snare
drum. I'll see you there.
12. Function Role of the Snare: As we know, the kick drum
was super important, but what is a kick drum
without a snare drum? Ultimately, these two instruments
work well hand in hand. And now that we've
talked about the kick, we have to talk about the snare, its functions, and its role. So let's dive in. Alright, so
the role of the snare drum. I guess I like the last class. Let's talk about
the function first, and then we'll dive
into the role. The function of the snare
drum within a pattern is usually to outline
beats two and four. In fact, this is generally, if you're at a concert
and you're clapping, you want to be clapping
on two and four. If we have a beat
like, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. There's an old expression I use, which is friends don't let
friends clap on one and three. Two and four is really
that sort of backbeat. It is going to
supply the groove. And when you have
that with your kick, you can create a lot
of really fun rhythms. Now, I've set up my
beat in such a way that the kick drum and the snare
drum are alternating. Just these alone will already get you feeling like
you're in the ballpark where you can start
to add some symbols over top. Let's
give it a listen. Okay, so one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. Generally, the snare is going to be on
beats two and four. There are some other options. You can start to play around. Like, especially when it
comes to ghost notes, you can start to really play around with some
softer snare hits. You could have the
classic drum beat that sounds something like. You have some of these
snare drums as ghost notes. They're much quieter.
We're watching our velocities down below. But again, you can hold Alt and drag up and down to change. The velocities, watch the color. As it gets darker, it's quieter. As it gets brighter,
it's going to be louder. But even in this example, we
have one, two, three, four. The two and four are
our main snare hits, and we have these
little ghost notes happening in between
our main beats. Now, even once you get into
kick and snare patterns, it's something where as long as you have your
kick on beat one, you can really start
experimenting. I'm going to intentionally
play something that I think will
sound kind of bad, but we can try to
find a way to make some small adjustments to make it make sense.
Let's try it. Let's bring our
snare over to here, not on beat two, and then
maybe our kick moves over too. Let's give a listen. Actually, this already
kind of works. Check this out. So if
I duplicate this and bring my high hat back,
something like this. That already works. The kick on beat one kind of saved me, and I still have a snare
on this beat four. The whole beat two
and beat three, we've offset a little bit,
but it still sounds fine. If I pull it over a little bit, I know it won't
sound quite as good, because these little
subdivisions of two E and three E and, the number three and the A, which is this third block, are the most
important downbeats. I mean, technically,
A is an upbeat, but this is kind of the
main eighth note grid. These beats here E and A. So like to E and are a
little bit less significant. I'll move my beats there. You'll hear it won't
sound quite as good. Sounds right, but it's
very sort of offbeat. Like, you start to
get into that Jdilla drunk beat kind of sound. But if we move it over a bit, It's a good starting
point for a beat. So the function of
the snare is really to add crack and smack. It's to give a little
bit of that low end, like the kick, but more than
anything mids and highs. After all, a snare
is literally like a little bent up piece of metal under the
drum that rattles, and that rattle gives
us that nice high end. But the snare is very momentary. It's that's it. It's just a quick sound,
and then it's done. Other drums that occupy the higher frequencies
may be more sustained, and we'll talk about that
as we discuss symbols, but the snare is
giving that punch. So we have that low end
thud of the kick and the upper sort of crack
or smack of that snare. If you just had to have two
drums in your productions, I'd probably recommend having
only a kick and a snare, as it still gives the foundation for so many different styles. So we had this Do, do, chat tick, tick at
you, chat, ticket you. Sort of the Chad Smith
funk rock drumbeat. We've had a house drumbeat. You can even hear. I'm going to pull in a instance of contact with
something called Sol FI. And SoFi is by
this great company called Teletone that
does retro stuff. This is like their
hip hop drum machine. And as I play this,
give it a listen. One, four. There's that two
and that four with the little tiny snares in between some of the other beats. But just small changes to these beats make a huge
stylistic difference. As one other example,
if I was to take all of my high hat
information and mute it, we're up to 180
beats per minute. I'm going to mute
everything except for the kick on beat one, just
to do a little bit of math. I'm going to show you how I
kind of consider drum beats. So I'm going to do a drum and
based drumbeat that's like, boom, pop, boom, pop, boom, pop, boom, pop. So it'd be boom, pop. Boom, pop. It. So I'm thinking, boom,
pot, boom, patch. One more time, boom, chich,
pitch, pooch, pooch. I'm thinking of all the
individual 16th notes as I'm creating these beats. Later, I'll fill
out the high hats. Now, if I take
this and duplicate it, let's listen
to what we have. We have something
that's passable as a drum and bass groove. Now notice we have a
kick on beat one, one, two, three, and four, and
one, two, three, and four. We have a snare on
the two and the four. One, two, three, and four, one, two, three, and four. And then one of our kicks is
in between these main beats. Here's beat three. This is
on the end of beat three. So if you start with
a kick on B one, snare on Beat two,
snare on B four, and just literally play around any way you wish with some
of these other kicks, you get some really fun
patterns. Here's an example. Get to do cat do do cat. Now we're encroaching into, like, punk sort of territory. But again, they all have this fundamental
kick on beat one, snare generally on two and four. Now, I'm not going to dive
into 68, five, eight, seven, eight times signatures that
are not the more common 44, but the function and the role still tend to be about the same. So when you want to
add a little bit of crack or smack of
that snare drum, make sure you're complementing
it with the after all this boom pa and the way that you're
putting those together, that is the foundation
of your drumbeat. So that's it.
That's the function and the role of the snare drum. As you can see, it works hand
in hand with our kick drum, and it also works very
similar to claps, which we're going to
cover in the next class. I'll see you there.
13. Function Role of Claps: Alright, if I'm being honest, the role of the clap is very similar to the
role of the snare, but there are some subtle
things that you need to take note of in terms of
fundamental frequencies, the way disco approaches claps, and some other fun
small details. So let's get talking about it. This is the role and function of claps within your drum beat. Next up, the role of the clap. Now, the clap is
going to function almost the same as the
snare, and for that reason, this will be a bit
of a shorter class, but I wanted to show
you one fun thing that I like to do with the clap. So let's go back
to having a basic four to the floor
sort of beat where we have a kick on every
main beat and we have our snare back on two and
four. It sounds like this. Now, we don't have
a clap in here yet. I do have a clap available, and I like these crunchy
claps that sound like four people clapping in a room all slightly off
from one another. If you're working
with trap or any of these sort of eight oh eight sounds like an eight
oh eight clap, you're just going to have a
more standard sounding clap, and generally, you use that to replace your
snare drum sound. Treat it the same way
you would as your snare, textually a bit different. And claps are gonna have
less of that low end. At the end of this class, I'll show you what
I'm talking about. But for right now, if I keep my clap on Beat two and four, I'm going to basically just offset the clap a
little bit early. In fact, I'm also going to
do this with the Snare. The main reason is because
each of these initial snaps of each individual part of
the kit are very important. And the kick is arguably
the most important. It's really our foundation. So if I offset the snare
a little bit ahead of that and the clap a little
bit ahead of the snare, now we're hearing,
but really fast, these transients
are all happening at slightly different times. So to exaggerate it first, just with the snare, let's
move these pretty far forward. Do you hear that, Dega?
It's called a flam. Right now, this
flam is too much. We don't want this, so I'm going to pull
it closer to the kick. And sometimes you
have to move a little microadjustments till
it feels just right. I think really close to the kick is actually probably
going to be best. Now with the clap,
you can have it set relatively far forward in front of the kick and the snare. You can even offset it back. Let's try both.
Here's far forward. Getting a nice big crunch into that transient to the kick, and I can pull it further back, and it would sound
something like this. Both sound great. And you
can see, in this case, we have snare hitting, then kick directly on the beat
and then the clap. Now, whether you're
ahead of that beat or behind the beat, stylistically, that's
kind of up to you. They both sound
great. I tend to like my claps a little bit before the beat, but that's just me. Now, there is something
that I do quite often, which is kind of
like the disco clap, and you have this boom, clap boom, clap, boom, clap, boom, clap, clap, and it happens right at the
end of the loop. And we can set that
right here right on the offbeat ish of beat three. So on the end of beat
three, check it out. It sounds like this. That was just a
common thing that you would hear in disco records. I don't know if it was
because it was, like, part of their
dancing or whatever else they were doing as they were jiving on the
disco tech dance floor. But basically, you hear this quite a bit at the end
of these basic house loops, and you hear them quite a bit within different loops
that you might purchase. Now, what we're going to do
is mute all the high hats and all the kicks and even for
now the clap, as well. I'm going to go into my
master processing here and just listen to everything below 200 Hertz
with this filter. So just listening to the snares low end, it sounds like this. There's quite a bit of
low end, you hear that. And again, you shouldn't be
listening on your phone. If you have decent
headphones or a good set of speakers, you should
be able to hear that. Now let's try it out
with just the clap. There's no low end. So if
you're referencing a mix, for example, let's
say your song has a clap and you really
like the clap, you don't want to use a snare. And you're referencing a
song that has a snare drum. And you're noticing
that they have more low end on their drums, especially when that
snare is hitting, you don't want to try
to boost your clap, so it has all this low end. It doesn't even exist.
It's not there. This does not have low end. It's just a bunch of
people clapping, right? There's no oh to it. Whereas a snare drum
is a big resonator, and it's going to have that
fundamental frequency to it. So if you want that
sort of low end, you'll need to consider
working with a snare drum. But if you're just focused
on the sound of the clap and occupying that
higher frequency space, then the clap will do just fine. So just keep that in mind,
your snare drum is going to have very similar high end
information to your clap. Your clap is going
to feel generally a little bit more like a few
transients back to back, depending on the sample
that you're choosing. Like, if it's just a raw clap
sample, that works well, but I tend to like the ones bit of multiple
transients happening. It's just really
good for that sort of crunch into the snare, like I showed you when we offset that clap just a
little bit forward. So if you want that low end, you're not going to
get it from claps, but generally it focuses on
layering with the snare, or you can have it
all by itself at the sacrifice of losing a little bit of that
fundamental low end. So that's it. That's
the main role of claps within your drum beat. As you can see, it functions very similar to the snare drum, but there's some
other little nuanced ways that you can approach it. And we also talked about
offsetting transients, which I think could have been
a tidbit all on its own. But I think with claps, this is where I tend
to use this the most it felt like a natural
time to tell you about this idea of offsetting
your drums so they all have their own individual
space for their attack. That's it for this class, and I'll catch you
in the next one.
14. Function Role of Cymbals: Et's get talking about
the role of symbols, high hats, rides, and crashes. We're even going to
talk about top loops, which include some other drums, as well, too, but there's a lot to be learned
from this class, so let's jump straight in. Now, the last fundamental
part of a kit is the symbols. This is the high hat.
This is your ride symbol. These are your crashes, and they all work together to fill out only the
high frequencies. Now, that isn't to
say that other drums don't have high
frequency information. Snares definitely do. Claps do and even brighter
kicks, especially in, like, metal or EDM, where there's
a lot of slap to the kick, you're going to get up into
these higher frequencies. The difference is everything so far has been very
transient based. Kick, snare, or clap, they're all kind
of very momentary. But when you're
working with a ride or even a splashy high hat part
or crashing away at symbols, now we're washing out the
sound almost like white noise, but with little grooves
to that white noise. So high hats are generally
going to create your pulse. Great way to start is to have your high hats happening
on the one and two, and three and four
end of every beat. We get something that sounds
like this. By itself. Now you can hear this pulse. Again, I'm doing that
with the velocity, and you want to make sure
that the high hat pattern you're working
with does not have this knob here down to
zero because then you'll have no change in volume. If I crank it up more, you will hear even
more deviation. I actually kind of
like it up a little bit higher for this
particular rhythm. And then if we bring back in
the rest of the kit, again, we have Now, high hats are going to function differently in different
styles of music. This is a great
starting point for rock or even if you speed
it up drum and bass. But quite often in house music, we have this one, two,
three chicka Forge. So it's like a
double before beat two and a single
before beat four. And sometimes that's
even flipped. So to show you both examples, that would sound
something like this. So I'm going to get rid
of all the high hats on the main downbeats
on beats one, two, three, and four. I will bring back in these
high hats from before. Now we have something like this. But again, you can
also reverse this. So you have the double
here and the single here. From there, I would just
duplicate all this out. So now we have the single
here and the double here, and I can duplicate all that. So it sounds like this.
Which also sounds fine. And, of course, if
you're wondering, could I do doubles or singles
every time? Sure, why not? But the variation of having a single and a double
or double single, whatever order you
want to put it in, just gives more variation
to your drum beat. So, of the three symbols of
high hats rides and crashes, the high hat is going
to be closer to the function of
these kicks, snares, and claps, where they have a bit more transient
information, and they do have
a bit of a tail. But it's not super long. Rides and symbols
are going to be a whole lot longer let's
start talking about those. I should also
mention, note that I have these high hats
on the same choke. So make sure that
if you're wondering how one sound is closing
off another sound, you re review the
class on chokes, but that's why we
have one sound, the longer sound being closed off when the shorter sound hits. So it's not with an overlap of it's the second sound closes
or chokes the first sound. So let's talk about the ride. The ride is generally pretty interchangeable with
high hat patterns. Drummers will get used
to playing something on a high hat and switch
over to a ride symbol, but keep generally
the same beat. They don't have to, but
it works really well, and they're pretty
interchangeable. So let's take our
high hat on this off beat and move it to the ride and give a listen. Sounds fine. We could also double that up, so we have the ride happening
on all the main beats. I'm going to go quieter
on the off beats. Unless duplicate that down the
line, it sounds like this. You could do the
reverse. You could have quiet first and
then a bit louder. That'll also create
a pretty good pulse for duplicating down.
It sounds like this. So the ride generally is pretty consistent because it's
washing everything out. If you wanted to get really
complex on a ride symbol, some of that
complexity is going to get lost with all the noise and the chaos that are happening from the main symbol itself. So for now, I would say,
if you're gonna try incorporating rides into
your upper symbol parts, keep the ride part quite simple. Now, the ride symbol
is used a ton in jazz, and it tends to be where we hear a lot of swing within the kit. So if we go back and add groove like we had before,
we'll get something like this. And that works really
well with the ride. You don't have to
swing the ride symbol, but if you want to add
some swing to your kit, try exploring the ride because it's going to give
a great result. So the role of the ride is
similar to the high hat, where it's filling out
the upper frequencies, high hats will fill out
those upper frequencies with some sort of decay
happening in between the hits. It's mostly filled out, but the ride is just going
to wash everything out like white noise up above with
some subtle pulsing. Lastly, your crashes can work really well for
outtros of songs. They can work really
well as part of if you're doing gospel music, you're going to be all over all seven of your crash symbols. They love crash
symbols. But what I would say is to start, your main function of
the crash symbol is to accent beat one
of a new section. So you don't want to have it
on beat one of every loop, but you might get something
that sounds like this. Just a nice little splash, a little bit of extra layer to all that white noise that's
happening on beat one. But again, it's at
the beginning of sections and not
even every section. Like, you might just
want to have out of a bridge into your final chorus, you might want to crash or maybe into the first verse or
something like that, but make sure you're being
subtle with those crashes. It's easy to overdo them. Find a crash sample
that you really like. This one here for me. I
really like that one. It's kind of
electronic sounding, but it also has some
realism as well, too. There's also a lot
of bad crash sounds, like if I was to pull up
something like or I mean, those wouldn't really work
well in this particular style. Nothing wrong with
China crashes. They sound great in Prague rock, and nothing wrong with this. If you're doing 90s dance music. So make sure that your crash is appropriate for the genre
that you're creating. So those are the main
roles of the high hat, the ride, and the crash symbols. These are all tops, and sometimes you'll see
something called top loops. If you have a good kitrum
and a snare pattern, sometimes if you find that
you sort of lack in terms of creating the right high
hat pattern or ride pattern, you might want to
explore top loops. It's one of the only times
personally I use loops, and even then it's only
about 50% of the time. I do a lot of my own symbol
work within my productions, but sometimes I'm feeling stuck, and I'll go to a top loop. So they might sound
something like Now, in this case, it's not
even symbols at all, but it's also not
low end content. It's not the snare,
it's not the kick. So these might be
a good substitute for something like symbols. That being said,
they can get pretty wacky sometimes
something like this. But let's try pulling that in. You'll see, even
though it sounds wacky by itself within the mix, it could sound quite nice. Let's try it. Notice how
this crash every time? It gets redundant. It
gets really overdone. So I would say if you're
looping, this is 2 bars, one, two, three, four, two, two, three, four. Maybe every eight or 16 bars, you might want to
explore putting crashes around those points. But again, I think it's better
to think of it in terms of triggering into sections
or even breakdowns, but that's a section
as well, too. So it doesn't always
have to be a big impact on a big section. It could be a crash to help
you wash into more silence. Now, on the other
end of top loops, we could find
something like Now, even here, there's a bit
of a snare and clap, but it's like a lot of the
low end has been taken out. It's really just the top part of the loop. That
would sound like this. So I've taken my
pretty basic beat and added this top loop. So you can hear that
chicken chicken, chicken. So they're doing
doubles every time. Chick it, chick it, chick it, chick it, this sort of sound. And we talked about
how that's an option. Single, double, single, double or double, single,
double, single, double, double, double, double, single, single, single,
single, all options. So I think those are most
of the main functions and roles of symbols, and we even discuss Top loops, I'd recommend get
a top loop folder if you're ever feeling
stuck on your kit, you're going to be able
to find great kick sounds and snare sounds easily. But even if you're finding
good high hat sounds, it can be tough sometimes to
get the swing just perfect, compress everything just right. While I'm not one to
use full drum loops, I'm a bit of an
advocate for top loops. I think they can be very
helpful if you're in a jam. That's it for this
class on the role and function of symbols
within your drum beats. As you can see,
there's lots of room for variety in terms
of which drums you're choosing and how you
also choose to implement top loops within everything that you've created personally. There's a lot of groove and nuance to be extracted
from these parts. So take your time when you're
curating the top part of your drum kit because
these symbols play a super important role. So that's it for this class, and I'll catch you in the next one.
15. Drumbeat Walkthrough: Let's go through a
drum beat together. I'm going to start
it from scratch, implement a bunch of what we've talked about
throughout this course, so you can see how we can go about taking all
this information, compiling it together,
and creating a fun beat. Let's jump in. Alright, we're going to start this super fresh, and speaking of super fresh, we're going to go with a
hip hop beat this time. I would usually use
Teletone Soulfi for this, but admitted for you to see the natural process in Ableton,
I'd be bypassing that. I'd be using a special piece of software that costs more money. I promise you, if you get that library for contact,
you'll be very happy. That being said, we're going to go through this bit by bit, and we're going to start off
by pulling in a drum rack. Alright, so drum rack is going
into a fresh channel here. We're going to call it drums. We're going to make it yellow. We're going to pop it open. Uh, this should be
minimized. Okay, cool. So from there, we're going to
basically curate a palate. I'm going to find a kick
drum that I want or maybe a main kick drum and
a subtle accent kick drum. I'm going to find
one or two snares, one or two claps, and
a bunch of cymbols. Before I start making the beat, I just want to find
sounds that I like and I think might work well
together. That's a full loop. You know, as far as loops go,
that one's really simple. I'm gonna keep that
on the back burner as a potential layer to add after. Let's throw these like this and then a ride, and
then percussion. Okay. We are ready to
start creating our beat. So, have this loop
muted control shift M is gonna create a little mini clip that
we can work within. So first of all, we
want a proper beat, which would probably
be like around the 80 to 90 beats per minute. Let's go like 94 ish. We'll try that as
a starting point. Let's just see with the
metronomon how that sounds. Sounds like this. Maybe
a bit slower, like 88. Alright, let's just
see. You might want to speed that up or slow
it down more later. But as a starting point,
step one, kick on beat one. It's got to happen.
The other thing I want to do is make
sure that my kick and my snares have this zeroed out. Set that zero, boom,
zero, boom, zero. Boom, and zero. I might
want an accent kick. I haven't really decided yet, but for right now, we're just
gonna go with a main kick. And for right now, I wanted
the same volume every time. I'm not saying you have
to do this, by the way. Like, a lot of really
good drum loops have variation on the weight of
a kick drum or that impact. But as a starting point, I'm just gonna keep
it very consistent, so we have So we have
something cat catch. Do Do get a little
double in there. Dot cut Sorry, doot doot cut. Do do. Alright, that's
our main kick pattern. It's our main snare,
duplicate that. Maybe a small variation
on the second half. Is there a swing on
this? Yeah, there is from when I did the full
course with you guys. Okay, so no groove. Okay, so here's
something interesting. I've got that set up,
and listen to this. So so bad. The snare drum is like,
Look at this sample here. It's not perfectly lined up. This is why I teach
you guys how to customize this stuff.
So let's pull that in. Okay, we're in better
shape now. Watch out. Sometimes that usually
doesn't happen where a sample that you have that's a one
off has this gap before it, but we know how to remedy it. That's what's important.
So let's take, like, a ride and just kind of
put it on each main beat. We're gonna do that throughout. I might feel, like, slightly
quieter every other. Top, do, do, do, do duplicate. Let's check it out. Okay,
it's a starting point. We can also pull in high hat. I'm gonna just try
it on offbeats for now and see how that sounds. I might do a little extra
high hat at the end, like, we'll do that both
times here and here. I talked about creating
some variation on the back half of this beat. I'm gonna extend out my loop ands clean up
this video a bit. That looks a little
better. Back half. Just gonna put one
extra little kick here. Alright, now, we don't have
to use all of our sounds. The point here is not
to fill everything up, but see if we can sneak in some of these other sounds
here and there. I'm just gonna try
this little clink at a random spot. I
don't mind that. However, I don't love
the pitch of that sound. That is this guy here. Let's try pitching
that down a bit. Nope. Let's play around
with that a little bit. I'm just going to
loop this part here. So I'm just selecting
that Control L to loop. Now let's go in and
play around the pitch. That feels a little more
I want to say in key. I don't know if there is a key, if the kick or snare has some fundamental note
that I'm not recognizing, but to me, that sits in
a little bit better. It is a bit loud, so
I would take this. So I'm selecting the key which selects a whole
row, by the way. So I select that and then hold alt and pull
that down a bit. Yeah, that's fitting in
a little bit better. What other sounds do
we have again? Ooh. Maybe every second high hat, I will pair it with a tambourine. We're getting somewhere. Now that I hear it, it's more of like a dance sort of snare, so we're gonna
leave that for now. I'm curious how this fits in. If I go really
quiet with this Ah, I can't because I set
up that velocity stuff. So we're gonna
kind of undo that. Coming back over
here. Nice and quiet. Yeah, that sounds
kind of nice. I might weak that a little
bit more later. We're kind of speed
running a little bit right now. Again,
we're not using that. Yeah, let's pull in a clap
that we will put ahead. And again, it's
not a bad idea to offset the snare a
little bit as well. In fact, I'm going to
click the snare and then I'm going to go down
a bit and hit humanize. So just the snare drum is
a little bit humanized. It's a little bit off the grid. Let's throw in this
open high hat, and we're gonna
put it on the same chokes as our main high hat. So this is open clothes
and Hat MP one. That means this
guy, open clothes. I have to drag this down
so I can see this area. Open clothes is going
to be choke one. And hat MP one was
the other one, right? So put that on choke one. Now, it should close
that open high hat. So it'll be like I think there's some delay on that sample. I just
want to double check. Yeah, you can see it's doing
that again here, right? It's not perfectly lined up. Something like this with
a very tiny little fade. Be a little bit louder. Whoa. That actually sounded
cool. Happy mistake. When I click this, it
makes a sound, right? So this was doo doo, doo, doo. So that was here
and here, I think. So it was like, Oh, that works. And then I'll throw one of
these again at the end. And I might just kind of, like, toss in a couple extra
little high hats. I think the kick wants to accommodate this a
little bit more. I wonder if that
should be the case. Maybe get rid of
this one. Oh, that offbeat? That sounds great. So with these open hats, if you're gonna kind of do
this sort of on this offbeat, try applying it with the
kick. That seems to work. Now, I want to create some
sort of a swing with this. I could take the whole thing and let's try applying some of the groups we have cause some of them
are pretty subtle. The 16th note 61
is pretty subtle. Let's go for it. I don't like this last
kick pattern here, but it's sounding pretty
good with that swing. I think I can go
more subtle with it, like, maybe in the 50s. Like, I barely want this
particular beat to swing. Just based on how I
think it should sound, there's really no right
or wrong answers here. But we're going to
go into MPC like 57 as one of our options. It's gonna replace the 61. So it kind of happens
automatically. Oh, that's eighth
notes. That's why. Let's go to 16th, 57. There we go. That's
pretty extreme, right? And again, this I want to
change that at the end. Yeah, I think less is
more for that last part, we just did this sort
of offbeat stuff. So let's ride on the
coat tail of that and then finish a
little more simply. So I think this gets us
into a good ballpark. I'm going to select
all and humanize just so a little bit
more it's imperfect, but still grooves
around the same way. I think this puts us
in a pretty good spot. Let's just listen, and
this time I'm going to listen as we watch over here, just to see what our
levels look like. We could also pan things around a little bit. Something we didn't
talk too much about. Quite often, these samples
are already going to be mono, like they're going to
sound in the middle, but occasionally they will be panned a little bit, as well. So in this case,
our pan is going to be these sees for center, and we can drag them
more left and right. Keep your claps, your snares and your kicks generally
pretty centered, your high hats, there's
two ways to approach it. Do you want to feel as the listener like you are
sitting at the drum kit, where the high hat is pretty
far on the left side, or do you want to feel like you're listening to a drummer, or it's going to be on
the right side based on the flipped
orientation of the kit. But if you think about
the angle of you 20 feet or ten feet
away from a kit, that high hat is going to
sit a little to the right. But if I'm at a kit, it's going to be
significantly left. Now I'm not too concerned with huge stereo image for
this particular kit, but I would say the symbols I might pan around a little bit. Let's check it out.
And I also just realize I've been on my
speakers this whole time, so hopefully it
doesn't sound too bad, but let's dive in this
time with headphones. I should sound a
little bit better. I want to put this percussion loop on and just
see what happens. Now, it's not grooving
the same way. And I could extract
the groove and then apply it to that loop.
After I've quantized it. I just don't think that is what this particular beat wants, so we're gonna
get rid of that. Now, the whole thing
is a little bit loud. I'm gonna pull that down
so it's not peeking here. The rides a bit loud.
Headphones up for intensity. I like a dark ride. I'm actually going to
take under Audio effect, I'm going to bring
in the EQ eight. And you can do this with
autoflter as well, too. I'm just going to soften
those highs considerably. I'm just going to add a little bit of
reverb to this clap. And then from
there, I think it's like the last 10%
is 90% of the work. I could be doing this
for way too long. And I don't want to explain
every little process of the mixing process
because there's gonna be full choruses on
that as well, too. But for now, we're just going to add a bit of reverb
to that clap. Let's keep it pretty tight. Sounds like this. So, there it is. There's a basic hip hop beat. You can do what you
want with it from here. Like, we could speed
this up to, like, 100. Or even down to about 80, but that 80 to 100
range in terms of hip hop beats probably will
be where you want to stay. Here's 80. Okay,
that's way too slow. So part of the thing, this
feels too slow, right? But what if I took the high hat pattern and
like, doubled it? Now, those extra
little accents that are happening with
the high hat can kind of help fill out some of that space that we're getting
from the slower beat. And now we have a
slower beat but more room to fill in
those little spaces. So that's it. I just wanted
to kind of show you part of my process of coming up with a beat. This
would be step one. I'd start to come up with
some bass and harmony and melody and then start
to mix everything together. But you can see, as
a starting point, the sounds self
proclaimed, pretty decent. So that's it for this class. It's really meant to be
a behind the scenes, so you can see how I would approach creating an
original drumbeat. Now, we haven't talked a
lot about processing drums. There's going to be more courses
on mixing down the line. There's a lot to
discuss in terms of processing each individual drum, your drum bus, and your mix bus. So that's all going
to be covered in a separate course because
it's very dense material. That being said, you should have a pretty good understanding
of how to create some great beats
while understanding the role of everything that you're applying
within that beat. Thank you so much for
joining me in this course, and hopefully I'll catch
you in the next one.
16. Outro: Thank you for taking this
music production class on drums, samples and loops. I'm hoping that having
taken this full course, you now feel more confident in the way that you approach
your drum production. Now, whether you want to specifically work
with drum loops, keep things nice and simple, but make them your own or work
with drum samples and have a bit more flexibility or even a hybrid technique that fuses those two
approaches together, I'm certain that now
you'll have a bit more of a zoomed out view of
how to best approach your drum production
so that it properly matches what you need for
your stylistic aesthetics. So what I mean is, if you're trying to create a drum beat for an electro track or a Bombab hip hop track
or whatever it might be, you're able to listen to audio references,
analyze the drums, and apply the techniques
that I've given you to best achieve that
stylistic sound. Now, don't forget there is a class project
within this course. So do review the
class that I gave you that outlines all of the
details on that project. Ultimately, the reason
why I want you to submit it to me is
not only so that it can help you improve what you've learned and give you some
one on one feedback, but also so that you can
take all the material from within this
course and apply it to your drums to make sure
that you can later use any one of these techniques
in a real world example. This course is really
designed to give you an approach to drum production that's relatively timeless. I want to make sure
that I'm giving you broadband techniques that you'll be able
to move forward with not only in
pretty much any style, but in five years,
ten years and onward. Don't forget to apply this
material into a bunch of different productions so that it becomes second hand for you. And if you are taking
music production lessons with a particular one
on one instructor, bring these techniques to them and see what they have to say. What is their insight in terms
of how they can help you connect these concepts with
your own class material, but also what is their
own particular angle teaching this material that
best resonates with you. 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. So I truly hope that you're feeling more confident when it comes to drum programming
or working with drum loops. I hope that it helps you improve
your music production in a way that you feel is helping you push forward as a producer. Thank you for
taking this course, and I look forward to
seeing you in the next one.
Josh Cook, A Sound Experience
