Transcripts
1. Course Intro: A ladies and gentlemen and what is going on? It is your boy key, Orion, the man who is obsessed with making a note music and teaching you how to make your own. In today's lo-fi tutorial, I'm going to teach you how to make beats like this. And then I'm gonna teach you how to slow him down halftime so that they turn into this. So if that sounds funny, you please stick around. If you want any more information on what I do. My free resources, trainings, walkthroughs, all of that that I'll link that up in the description below. You can also find the beat school online.com, the founder of beat school and all my goodies are there. But that further ado, please set aside maybe 30, 45 minutes. Grab your beverage of choice, buckle in, and I'm gonna teach you how to make some lo-fi beats. So see you on the inside piece.
2. Making Lofi Melodies: All right. So also if you've seen any of my stuff before, I've got other lo-fi courses also speak in which this is a lo-fi course for beginners. But if you went the super-duper break down every single thing. In terms of every step along the way, I'll have that linked up below. I have a course that breaks down everything super in-depth. There's going to be for beginners, but that's for like super beginner. So if you haven't seen that yet, go check it out and then come back and we'll jump into this. So first I wanted to talk to you about is when I make lo-fi beats, either start with two things. It's either the drums or the melody. Usually is not. Melodies, maybe a little strong more. It's like a group of chords, some sort of instrument, some sort of a vibe that I'll start with first, or the drums in this one, it was the court's first. So I want to walk you through kind of what the chord sound like. The, the initial ones. This is, these are some keys. Couple little things. If we look at these keys, first of all, look at how, because I wanted to send a little bit more natural when you're making your chords. Not everything has to be super quantized, right? See, I've kind of drag doze off. See, I've dragged these off. These are a little bit often. The whole thing about Lo-Fi is it feels a little bit off time, right? Cyclic out of these or all of these two gears, a little bit of that kinda lo-fi swag. The next thing that we wanna do is let's look at these keys and what we did to get that sound that we got. We're going to close these down. So this is an addictive keys. It's called Electric, more preset Electric. And then I added this RC 20 retro color. I love this. It's called no more boring pads. And I added some space to a little bit of distortion. This is what it sounds like with and without it. And with it. Without it. With it gives it kinda just like a little bit of grit, kinda widens it a little bit. We also added this compressor, excuse me, this EQ so that it rolls off a lot of the high-end and low-end, low phase it out a little bit. So that's this first set of keys, the course that I started with. I said, Okay, Those are cool. And then all I did was I duplicated those chords and got this. I wanted another instrument during the hook. Same, pretty much the same chords. But listen to how much more beefy this is. So it goes from this into this. If you are, if you're not listening with headphones, you won't even be able to hear it. But that's this instrument. It's a organ. Says Vox pad plugin from the arteriole arterial joint right here to Vox Continental two. And again, same retro molar pad on here, no more boring pads. Same compressor talk about later. And then here I'm letting a little bit more the high-end ring through the circuit now a good portion of low end. So that's kind of our main chords for the track. That's the kind of main vibe, the overall your meat and potatoes, the track. Next we're going to add some keys. Let's listen to these. This is the main melody. These, I'm not doing anything to really, I've got this preset, ample mix on here and then a little bit RC retro 20. And here I'm cutting out the EQ, I'm cutting out through retro 20. So that's why there's not an EQ on here. And that's pretty simple, just some keys. I came up with pandas little bit to the right because I have this, these bells on the left. Let's say the sounds of that everything. This is ominous, fewer preset, which is beryllium reality. So there's that and then I just gridded up with some retro color, same thing. Normal wearing pads. Yep. And then edit I've had a bunch of wobble distortion, bunch of distortion to this one, but a space. So a bit of a grating sound. So I EQ down some of the highs and then reverb it out. And then the last two pieces that we have going on are these strings. Budget string machine. As you can tell, I throw RC retro 21, I'm doing lo-fi on just about everything. No more boring pads again, edited a bunch of wobble. It just makes the sound. How can you get the sound gritty and interesting, I find that really easy with RC retro 20. And if you notice, I roll off a lot of high-end and low-end on pretty much everything. And then this stag, What's this? That's just kinda impact stab. It's a, it's a blip tripper though that as well. It's a blip tripper, same sort of thing, retro 20, a bunch of delay and reverb on it. So this is what all of the melody kind of instrument pieces sound together. Super straightforward and nothing super crazy here, a little bit of a lead melody, some pads. And then got my chords and something that beef up the chords. So that's kind of the main, the main musical piece of the entire track. Now let's jump into the drums.
3. Secret Sauce To Lofi Drums: So when it comes to lo-fi drums, again, check out the other course that I'll break down everything for you in super nitty gritty. But I want to talk about in this course is the way that I got the BOP in terms of the track. So if you're curious what this is over here by these look like they're put together. This is kinda strange. When I'm putting them in, I'm assembling the beat. I put, I use, I don't use a ton of midi for my drums. Obviously, these are all audio files, but then I like to join them over here. However, I keep this over here. I sort of like a backup in case I want to go in and change anything. So I want to show you these drums real quick. Let's listen at ease. Whoops. And that's what's going on. 1 second, I have something weird going on. Let me pause this in Burbank and action. So let's get this going. So we're gonna take our low n, Let's take our kick and our drums is our drums. Whoops, that's not our drums, that's the slowdown drums. Let's get this. So couple of things that are going on here. First of all, let's talk about this all the time. It's not about effects. If you use good samples, I get all mine from Splice, use good samples. You don't have to worry about effects. So check this out, look at how few effects I have on any of these tracks. Little bit of EQ, I'm rolling off the high-end on some of these high hats. But really nothing too crazy. Here's the thing that I want to talk to you about. A couple of things that make your drums more interesting. First of all, layer your snares. You don't have to get super crazy with this, but this is the first snare. Didn't love that sound, but as I say, it's worth it. And then we'll rocket with this one. And so together. I liked it a lot more than either one of those kind of singular. But if you look at them, how they're mixed, they are mixed to be the same volume. So something to think about. Talk about more in the mixing piece. Another thing is we'll look at our hi-hats, right? They aren't totally lined up on the grid. So if we come over here when I actually should, we can see what the actual high hats look like. Look at how far off I've dragged these off the grid, right? So if you think about or kick and everything is here lining up on one, our hi-hats, if you drag those out, they actually, It's really adds a lot to the BOP. Another thing to the IAT is look at the different volumes you can tell just from looking at them, right? It just by looking at them. This one is at 0. And then this one is it negative 9, distance at negative 23, distance at negative 3.4 doesn't sit negative nine, negative 92. You just get in here and distance at negative 18. You just get in here and just mess with, you wanna make it feel sloppy. The point of what lo-fi is, you want to make it feel human. You want to make it feel gritty, grungy, right? That's the point. This, this I had doesn't have quite as much craziness going on. This is pretty much just let's look at that. This one's pretty much, oops. Yeah, this one is negative 5, 0, negative 16, 0, negative 6, 0. So this is pretty much more, that was a lot more simple. Another thing to look at these open hi-hats. These are different hi-hats, different open hi-hats. There are two different ones that I'm using here. So that's another thing to just to switch it up, keep things kind of exciting. Use different sounds like don't use all the same sounds for things like get in there and switch it up. Last time we talked about on the drums is the kicks. If you look at these kicks, again, these are going to have some balance to them. These aren't all. These are going to be on the grid, but they look like I cut some of these little tails off. And then sometimes if you want to get like a super kinda Bob, you can drag these in really close to that kicking you'll get kinda like signature lo-fi double-click. I'll talk about base a little bit later on. But this is what the kinda drums again, everything together with the sample. Pretty simple, straightforward. It's about having the BOP, having things a little bit off the grid. Different, different volumes, kinda different mixed a little bit differently. I'm going to talk about that a little bit later. How things are pinned to the left or the right? Use wanna make things. How do you make things interesting? It's the small details, all right, Onto the next one.
4. Lofi Bass (the easy way): This video is going to take too long. This part is I'm just gonna talk to you about the base. This is an analog base, Jupiter base to the same criteria, 5, same thing or charities alleles retro plugins, owners one off a little bit of low end. And if we notice it's following not completely, but a lot of what the kick. So again, it's nothing is super complicated with these beats, right? It's like it's just a pretty, if you look at it, it goes. Let's look at how this corresponds with our chords. I'm pretty sure these notes, F, E, C sharp. And these are going to be Yeah, it's pretty much, I'm pretty much just following the same, pretty much the same chord progression as my main chords. So don't overthink this stuff. Could also just use these kind of sustained out if you want. A lot of lo-fi doesn't even have base. It's up to you. Keep it simple. Moving on.
5. Mixing Lofi: Okay, so I wanted to talk to you now about the mix. Mixing in mastering Lo-Fi is a bit of a, there's, there's some, there's some secrets to the sauce. So let's go through these pretty much when it comes to mixing and mastering, I'm going to turn off my mastering chain. Listen to the difference. Crazy. I'll walk you through all of it. So here's the deal when it comes to mixing. It comes to just getting your levels right, getting them to sit in the mix the way you want them to. But here's something I wanted to talk to you about when it comes to mixing is painting. Because when you're mixing your track, and if you look at this, the way that I have my track organized, I'm makes things pretty much from left to right. In this window, I'm able to then you can get over here if you're unable to it just by clicking over here on these little things. But if your logic, all of those you can, you can arrange it. You could mix it like this if you wanted to. It's just different strokes, different folks. For me I lifted I'm makes left to right in I'm mix. For me what's most important into i makes what's most important first, we'll put it like that. So for me, the most important thing normally is going to be my low end. It's going to be my kick, my snare, and my vocals, nine times out of 10. So the first thing I start with as my kick, and again, if we look at these things, they don't have a lot of effects on them. This isn't even doing anything unless I even had that on there. So when it comes to my kick, I've just pulled off a little bit of low end here because there's a frequencies, we don't really need them. And I get my kicks in summer probably, but is that maybe I'll make negative nine, negative 10, something like that. I want it when it's just my kickin my base working together. I like it to sit around like maybe negative eight, negative seven, negative eight somewhere in there with the snare, same sort of thing. When it comes to mixing. Before you move over to the mastering stage, I like it to come in between negative three and negative six because I don't want it to be totally, I don't want to I want to have headroom so I can still push the volume when I'm mastering. Then I bring in these snares, kinda get those levels right when it comes to the drums. And we listened to these listened to kind of how things are panned, right? So I don't want everything coming directly down the center. And this is something really important. Like I kick for me or a base, maybe your snare. But my hi-hats almost always, I'll have panda little slightly. It gives your ears something to do. So there's that. Another piece with the panning is, if you notice, I'm also painting these instruments. Because again, if everything's going down the center, but we have competing frequencies, you can, an easy way to kinda carve out space for instruments is simply by pushing them a little bit out in the stereo field. So let's look at these keys. So lead melody that I have with these strings. Let's get an F, pull up an EQ so we can see. And you just roll off the low end here. So here's the thing. Even if at the CQ on I'm sorry, without these, without any AQ on it. See how it's just in here. That's because I've got the RC retro color doing a lot of the EQ for me. So that's why this is pretty much already dequeued. But if we look at these frequencies where things are popping off, a lot of mid-range for both of these instruments. Strings a little bit more on the high-end, but there's still a lot going on in here. And the same if, especially if we look at our chords or how much this is, we've got mid-range going on for days over a year. Right? And so if I have these keys come in straight down the center Machu, it's got to compete with the organ. In his gotta compete with the keys, and it's gotta compete with these strings a little bit. So instead, all we gotta do is paint this over a little to the right, boom, and we start to get its own. It starts to stick out a little bit more. You can hear it a little bit more as an individual instrument because it's not coming down, it's not competing straight on the center with all your other instruments. And so that's just a little key I wanted, I don't have my chords here pan because I wanted those to feel like kind of a warm bed coming at you straight down the center. But then all these other things, these keys and stuff, if they're competing with a lot of these other things, paint them a little bit off to the side. Good. Let's listen to all of this. Just listened to the instruments and how, listen to where things are in the stereo field. Goes along way. When you're mixing your tracks, work on having everything kinda stand. You wanted to feel cohesive, but you also don't want to paint a super hard right or left and per se and this, you want to get creative, but you want things to feel like it's an int. You want them to feel important in a piece of the track. Don't overdo it. Keep it simple. Let your tracks breathe. P and your stuff. Let's move on to mastering.
6. Mastering Lofi: All right, but the mastering chain, if you've seen any of my other I'm curious, was this one that I did. Let's look at the central. Okay, that's where I came from. Isaac, Isaac wise, this I've got this vinyl on the master excited this little alum, a little wind down here. So anyways, when it comes to mastering, a lot of my mastering chains are exactly the same. It's got some EQ, little bit of compression. Soft clipper limiter. Let's check it out. This, let's get to the hook. Let's get to the good stuff, baby. Eq, super simple EQ right here. I've just, I've just pushed a little bit of the high-end up here, maybe two decibels, a 1.5 to three quarters when it comes to mastering. I also apologize for any background stuff. I'm living at Columbia right now. So there's just a lot of noise and stuff going on outside. When it comes to mastering. You want to keep your decisions simple and small. You don't want to be doing any big, huge sweeps and movements on your master because it's affecting remember your entire track. So these are a bunch of small little decisions and things that add up over time to give you kind of a nice round picture. So the first thing I'm doing here again, like I said, boost and a little bit on these highs at about 15 thousand hertz. Next is this distortion. That again, I've split it into two bands. This band against, again because we're making smart decisions. I'm not going to I don't want to affect everything. So I'm not doing anything with this band. Only things that are more than pretty much 800 hertz. I'm pushing up one decimal with some distortion, about 20 percent distortion, this warm tape distortion. I'm going to turn this on and off so you can see the difference that it makes. Again, if for that, if you're in headphones, you're only going to hear this. But if you are, I want you to listen to in particular the drums, the high hats, the little, see if they get a little bit sparkly or they just feel like they stand out a little bit more. I'm not even sure sparkly or as a word, but I'm going to roll with it. In the snares. Feel like the snares really start to snap war. If your ears and train, maybe it doesn't seem like much to me, that seems like a huge difference. And it's one decibels worth of a change only at 800 hertz. And above. That blows my mind. Okay, next we're moving right along is this classic compressor, this T-Rex classic compressor. But let's, if we turn off our other things that are making it loud, Let's see what each of these loudness pieces sound like incrementally. Again, I'm only shoot for like negative one dB of gain reduction here. We're getting a little bit of volume from this compressor and just gluing things that'll put together. Okay, Okay, little bit, a little bit of volume, a little bit of glue to glue. This. Watch your ears. This is when we're really busting out the volume. This is a soft clipper. And the reason I like soft clippers is because a limiter is going to have a hard if you look at the slope right here. This is like a lot. A limiter is going to have this kind of hard slope. This, I like this kind of a bit more of a softer curvy, slow. You know what I mean? So, so I'm bumping this bad boy by negative or excuse me, by plus 5. So watch your ears. And I'm also putting this little bit of a ceiling on point negative 0.3 db without, but I don't want it to be 0 because again, I don't even want to get close to it clipping. So watch ears and this is with it off. With it on. Huge difference. And then of course we've got our limiter here giving us about maybe plus 3 dB flat. But not least, I only want this thing to be catching my baby, my kicks in my snares. And if we look at our master channel, we could even push this a little bit harder if you really wanted to make it hot. But well, negative one is called Last but not least, this loudness meter. This is to let us know kind of where we're sitting in terms of our overall loudness volume when it comes to the digital, the DSPs, like Spotify, Tidal, Apple Music, those D, those DSPs all have a different kind of loudness that they will compress the track PS2. So there's kinda helps you just kinda figure that out. I'm going to dive in is too much. It's free. Download ulema, loudness meter to Google it. Learn about laughs. Figure that out. Okay, So that is kind of the mixing and the mastering piece of this. The next part that I want to talk to you about what this track is, how we were able to go from this to this. We're jumping into that next.
7. Automation: Hi, So check this out. So we go from our track over here. Transition. Let me show you the easiest way to do this. I like to transition into these kind of halftime BPMs. If you're over here, look at our BPM right For over here, where 170, all we did was we just divide that in half. Boom, when 70 divided by two is, you guessed it 85 and when we're over here, 3d5. So how did we do that? Why do we do that? I like to kinda like low 55, double or halftime, sort of a just like groove. Another thing we also did a couple of things. We filtered. I added this auto filter. Automated this auto filter so that it's on all of our Any instrument is now, although high-end is being cut off. So that's one way to do it is you just get everything, kind of bring everything, all the frequencies into this kinda like it feels like it's kinda underwater. But what the BPM, you can do this in any DAW. Automation is huge. So this is what I'm automating the right now even with this, but this auto filter, right? This is pretty much saying automation is saying, I want this turned on only in this certain spot, or turned off on a certain spot, or affected on the in a certain spot. So with the Master, if we look at our vinyl, look at this, so this effect, That's because I've got this vinyl plugin on. And I'm telling it I only want it to affect the track in this part of the tract. Pretty much I'm saying I'm choosing my vinyl plug-in. Boom, and then what effect do I want here? And I want this spin down. So it has all these things here. Spin down. Boom. You take my little, I'm going to say that the way there, you take your pencil pause and you just draw that in. I want that on or off, whatever it is. So the same thing we can do, the same here. If we look at our Auto Filter device on, we have this on here. It's not an over here. We want it on right here with the drop. And what we're doing here with the drop is we go to our master mixer and you go to our song tempo. Then in here, I've just automated it without the pencil. And I've clicked in some automation points and just drag that down to halftime. So watch this, watch this period. Designate some really cool effects, especially if you want to do a double time, attract halftime, attract whatever it is, and kind of automated BPM throughout the track. That's it for today's tutorial. I hope that you learned a thing or two about low five and it came to melodies when it came to mixing mastering automation. Again, I hate to sound like a broken broken, broken record, but you should check out the other lo-fi course if you haven't already in the description below, as always, you can find all of my resources. Beat school online.com, holler at me, at key Orion, anywhere online slide and the DM luminance you think of the course, let me know what you want to learn next. In. I appreciate you tuning in. Yeah, looking forward to hearing from you. Post your projects down below too. If you want to get feedback on your music, you can post that into the projects underneath. If you mean the lo-fi beats, happy to listen to it and tell you what I think. So. Kitchen the next one. Thanks for tuning in and always check you soon.
Kia Orion, Artist & Music Producer
