Music Production: How To Make Tech House Track In 2022

1. INTRO: Hello, my name is Michael Lev, London-based DJ music producer. And I'm going to show you how to make beat biotech house, top 100 truck. This class is aimed to music producers who know their way around digital audio workstation fairly well and can navigate quickly and easily around the software. I'm not going to waste any time explaining how EQ and compression works. I assume you should know this already. I don't claim to be the best teacher of the year, but with years of experience in the music industry. I know what works in the club and what gets picked up by labeled. In this class, I'm going to teach you how to build a solid track from scratch layer by layer as quickly as possible to show you how simple it is to make a beat board charter and track. I will take you through the whole process from blank canvas to creating unique kick drum, synthesising, original baseline, adding completely customizable clap, adding a whole load of drum sounds to feel high frequencies of the truck creating and processing as synth hook, arranging all the elements into a complete track on top of which adding and processing vocals and filling the track with effects sounds. Once the truck is complete, I'll show you how I mix it and the final step of the whole process, which is mastering to get the track to the loudness standards of the modern sound. My aim for this class is to help inspire and guide you on your own journey, creating your own original music. So click the next video now to begin this journey with me. 2. KICK: Hello and welcome to the class. I hope you'll really enjoy it. So without further ado, let's jump in. So we're going to start by setting the tempo, which is going to be 128. As you can see, this is absolutely empty. Ableton Live project. There's nothing on here apart from a spectrum analyzer on master and an empty midi channel, we're going to start by inserting an instance of serum on the media channel. And we're going to switch to Arrangement View, and we're going to insert an empty midi clip. Then we're going to find G. Then we're going to midi pattern like this. Fall to the floor. Basic kick pattern. We're going to be using a couple of layers of kicks. So let's call this bottom. Wherever you prefer. I call it a bottom, bottom kick, top kick. So we're going to be creating a top kick later on. Let's just concentrate on this for now. I'm going to show you a couple of ways of creating kicks from scratch. So this is one way by using serum. Let's select sine wave and then to make a cake, we're going to utilize envelope decreased, sustained, decrease the decay as well. We want this kick fairly short with a bit of release or 120 somewhere. Maybe increase an attack a little bit. So there's no initial synth click, just like that. Sounds like this at the moment, nothing too crazy. We can copy the spectrum analyzer it. Yeah, Basically, yeah, playing fundamental G, the moment. To make it sound like a kick, we're going to use LFO as a secondary envelope. Let's go to matrix and assign LFO one. To master. Tuning. Slightly increase the amount to about 30. And also we wanted to make it so it's one directional. And now we have to shape our LFO, get rid of BPM. We want it to freely said the rate of envelope. And also don't forget to switch it to envelope. Actually. Every time denote hits it triggers this envelope. As you can see, rate to 1.3 hertz and lower this envelope down. Insert another point. We need it fairly short. Something like that. You can also make it exponential. Sounds more like a kick already we're going to shape it even more. Unlike using a sample, you've got full control of how your cake sounds, how long it is, what pitch it is. I hardly ever use samples for my tracks because it's way more versatile to use a custom-built kick so you can always tune it, and it's always going to sound like from a source. It's always going to sound the best it could sound. Unlike if you would pitch a kick sample, it would lose its punch. If you pitch it too much or too much down. With this one, it's, it's no brainer. You can make it really low. You can make it really high. You can make it longer. You can make it nice and snappy and patchy. Let's also engage the loop so we don't have to start and stop. Hold time. Let's increase it a little bit. Somewhere in there. Also, there is such a thing as a wave table in this sense. By controlling this knob, you interchange between different sine waves. This last sine wave is kind of like analog looking not perfect, unlike this first one we used. What we could also use is to drag this envelope onto a wave table position. And that envelope will then control this wave table position following this shape. We can also switch the position of the wave table so it goes from top to bottom rather than from the bottom-up. Much more easier to see it over here. I'm just clicking on this window to see different view of this wave shape. I know it's quiet at the moment. I don't want to crank it up. We're going to use compressors, limiters, all that because at the moment it's peaking around minus 12.9, which is absolutely perfect for what we want. We want the kick to peak around minus 12. And then by adding other elements, eventually the level will rise to around minus six. That's how you want your pre-master to be. So that's how we're going to leave it for now. Let me just duplicate this channel. And instead of serum, I'm going to insert silence. So just to show you that there's multiple ways of doing this in various sense. So we start by clearing this preset mutant, this first layer. First thing you wanted to do is select sine wave. Second thing you want to do is assign modulation envelope to pitch of this oscillator. We're going to increase decay. Pretty much copying parameters. As you can hear, there's little bit of a click initially so you can get rid of it by increasing attack in here. Also, we can decrease the sustain and increase the Decay. I've just increase the volumes to roughly the same as this kick. Yeah, it's basically just adjusting the parameters to your liking. Bottom line with this is that every single synth both sound differently. Like if you would create a kick and serum, it would sound different than the kick in silence limit. Just demonstrate how to create kick and spire. It's essentially same way. By increasing this wave table mix, we can make it from sawtooth wave, two sine wave that we got sine wave, we can assign an envelope to pitch of oscillator one, pitch, decrease release. If you add a lot of pitch modulation, you essentially going to create a laser sound have to be moderate with this. This is main amp envelope. Raised the volume of that. That's how you create kicks. Different sense. We're going to get rid of the extra kicks were created. I've just demonstrated to you how you can easily create it in pretty much any sense that has an envelope that you can assign to pitch. So the next thing we're going to do is we're going to create. Another midi channel. And then we're going to insert an empty drum rack on that. That will allow us to put a sample on this pad. So we're going to select a sample, I'm going to select this kick. By default, Ableton inserts samples into a simpler instance. We're going to switch from simpler to sampler. It's a bit more advanced, has got loads more controls, and I generally prefer more than simpler. We're going to disengaged snap, makes sure that sample place all the way through. And then from good interpolation, we're going to select burst, the best quality of our samples. We're going to duplicate the midi notes, rename the channel top switch color. Then make sure that this note hits the correct meeting. The moment this sample plays in full, I want only the initial. I'm going to go and global. And then I'm going to assign attack into micro one, decay into macro to release into micro for sustained two, micro three. So now I've got all these four controls that can shape the sound with. While I wanted to do, since I don't want all this information here, I only want initial hit from this section up to here roughly. So I'm going to decrease the sustain. I'm good to decrease the decay. About 90 milliseconds. Going to slightly increase attack. To avoid the click. I'm going to set the release to about 60 seconds. Now. We only here in the very initial bit of the kick, unlike the full thing. So because our bottom layer is lacking the top frequencies, thus where this top layer comes in and we essentially create false sounding kick with top frequencies, bond frequencies all combined into one. Also, it's a bit snappier at a moment where I want to do is also going back in this global and put this little dot up, so it's less exponential. Listen how it sounds changing. I want it around. This sample is stereo. To make it mono, I'm going to go into Utilities and insert an instance of utility. Select left channel. This sample has left and right channels or combined into one stereo channel. So by selecting either left or right channels, you're essentially making it mono. You only let one of the channels through the utility plugin. So you can select the right and left and listen how they sound and select the one that you liked the most, basically, like left channel a bit more. By doing that, I essentially made it mono. So now that we've got all our layers of cake put in place, we can shape them further with EQ. I don't really want any low frequencies on this top layer, so I'm going to cut off all the low frequencies. Also, I feel like it's a bit too much on a high-end. So I'm going to use high shelf to reduce volume of high frequencies a little bit. Somewhere around there. Also, there's this peak here. I don't really like the sound of Always turn on and off anything that you do, just basically monitor and turn on and off and see what improvements you do. Same way on bottom kick, we're going to insert a instance of EQ and do a bit of focus. We're going to decrease the high frequencies. And make sure none of the high frequencies going through. I'm going to change this Q Twenty-four bit more gradual, or maybe even 212. See all these frequencies here. You can also see them there, they've gone. Now both of those layers, they don't interfere with each other. There's also this peak in here that I'd like to reduce. So we're going to insert a bell curve and maybe switch to a 24 dB per octave. Yeah, that sounds good to me. One last thing I like to do on my bottom kick is to put another instance of futility with the phase invert and see how it sounds. Because sometimes when you invert the phase, it sounds better for some reason. I'm not too technical about this, so I just drop it in, turn it on and off, listen and keep the one that I like. It kinda like with it. It's really subtle and it's going to increase once you put processing, which we literally going to do now. So what are we going to do is to group all these layers together and call them kick. Now they're going through this group and channel and we can process them together. Now to make it even bigger, we're going to go into a kid group channel. We're going to insert an instance of EQ. I'm going to use a low shelf to slightly increase the fundamental of the kick around 62 hertz. That's where the bottom fundamental frequencies basically go in and reducing the frequencies that I don't want to hear in this kick. Essentially making it cleaner. And next thing I like to do is to saturate the kick with the satin. I normally use warm tape algorithm and just increase the drive on the whole thing and hear how it sounds. We talk was a bit too much. So I'm basically increasing to the point that is a bit too much and then decrease in back to the point I like. So the kick is now nice and punchy and quite thick. So we'll listen how away sets a moment. It's peaking around minus 15. Perhaps we could decrease dry wet a little bit. Yeah, I like it also. If your system allows, make sure you're always turn the high-quality. I like that. We can drop a utility to increase volume slightly. So peaks around minus 12 utility. So maybe one dB. That's brilliant. That's how you make a kick. So we onto a great style of a track. We've got four to the floor kick going around which we can start creating our baseline from absolute scratch. That's exactly what we're gonna do in the next lesson. So I'll see you there. 3. BASS: Hello and welcome back to a second lesson. So the next step would be to create a baseline. So what we're gonna do is I'm going to create a new media channel, take it out from a kick group channel, are going to insert an instance of operator easily one of the best FM since I ever used. So straight from about turning off to filter, cranking up the level of the second oscillator, going to play some notes. We are going to increase attack tiny bit. Then the second oscillator, where are you going to make it? Plucky removed. Sustained. Again, increased the attack to seven milliseconds. Can also increase release time on the first oscillator. That's a good starting point, which is increased tone to a 100%. Volume to 0. Also decrease the volume of here because we clipping. That's quite a lot. Maybe decrease the volume of firsts oscillator. That's good enough. So we're going to create one bar media clip, and we're going to program a baseline melody. We're going to start with a one-bar pattern, and we're going to extend it with a variations to fall bars. I guess we could play and continue adding notes to our loop. I've just extended the clip so it plays throughout the eight bars. Loop is set on. Just check if we are in the right octave melody. We can now start adjusting baseline to liking. Maybe we can increase decay size of the second modulator. Maybe good way of doing it would be to put a spectrum on the end of the channel souk and see how it affects the sound visually as well. If you increase this, see what happens. More higher frequency content starts to appear. This is pretty much how simple is to create a decent baseline. Obviously doesn't sound as good a moment as he can, but we can a fixed up by shaping the sound. First thing we're gonna do, we're gonna get rid of a low cut filter. Then we're just a Q amount on high cut filter and then decrease it. So no high frequencies get past this point. Probably DO Loop more point here. I think I'd like to increase a decay if the modulator a bit. Maybe even though make sure you turn off a rhetoric. And here and set number of voices to one because it's a baseline. We only want to play one note at a time. We can go ahead and change some notes if we like. I did select measure by mistake. So it should be minor. Has changed the key, maybe two. D minor. Switch, E for E sharp. Like that sound a bit more than from there. You can go in and duplicate the notes and then change pattern slightly. For example, we can shorten that and we can add a note in here, for example, that's how it sounds. Something like that. Then you can go ahead and duplicate one more time. So now you have full bars and you can appropriately leave it, leave this section as it is, or you can always change it as well. So it's like every single bar melody changes. I'm gonna leave it as is. So this will be exactly the same as this. This will be a little bit different. So then we can definitely change the last bit, less repetitive. We can probably shorten, move this down there, increase length of that, and add another note or something. Yeah, so pretty much every bar the melodies changing. So I'm quite happy with this melody. We call it operator. We know what's happening. And then we can also change the color so it's a different color from our kick. Now, we can go and shape the sound even further. What we're going to do next is add saturation. I'm going to add such them. Clean tape was clean tube. We're going to add clean tape and we're going to increase the saturation to taste. That brings out extra harmonics. These harmonics overhead will basically make sure the yolk base is clearly audible on smallest speakers, as well as on the launch system. To further shape the sound. Use EQ. Eq is easily the favorite plug-in in any produces arsenal. I think it's the one you should master. Be very familiar with and know exactly what you're doing with it. I'm going to filter out high frequencies. Somewhere around there. As you can see, we added the high frequencies, but then as they were a little bit too much, we reduce them slightly bit. So the next step I'm gonna do, I don't really like this section here. I'm going to try it out. Yeah, as you can, Here's clear enough to signal quite a bit. The next thing I want to do is boost those fairly low frequencies. We get meaty baseline, the bottom, very, very bottom below. And for that I'm using low shelf boosting around eighth, I suppose. As we clip in a lot, we need to reduce the volume of an operator a little bit. This sounds all right. The last and the most essential part of every baseline, it should be so chain, it's very easy to create a screenshot here, copy. And basically this LFO Tool ducts the sound according to this curve, set the filter frequency turnaround. I don't know, 300 and something. Everything that's above this frequency doesn't get affected by this LR for only the frequencies below the threshold, which is 274 hertz, will get affected. Unlike if you turn this filter off, the entire signal will get ducked down. Listen before and after. Basically pumps with a kick and dances around it. Then we can turn everything off and see what improvements we've done. At this stage. What we can do is shift select all the channels and then press command G group all the channels, and then call it lope because it's going to be our low frequency group. And then I like to process that altogether with some compression for that I'm using Universal Audio 1176. Just to add that grid in this plugin has a little trick that you can do is press, Shift and engage all the ratio buttons. And I believe that you turn on an infinity ratio and then select your parameters accordingly. So basically with this compressor, I'm trying to glue kick and bass together and adding a little bit of that analog credit to the sound. Listen. I like my needle to be just touching around minus 12 minus three decibels. That to me, to my ears, that's like a perfect amount of compression and grid. This is, this is definitely way too much. I'm going to switch to session view so I can see the mixer can also play with release and attack. I like quite a slow attack. Court slow-release. The slowest you can get on this plugin. That plugin adds a ton of color. After that, I'm going to do a final shape with an acute, I'm going to just reduce unwanted frequencies. I felt like there was a little bit boomy. For me. What's left to do is to put a little bit of swing on the baseline so we can select the clip, go to groove section. Press this button, select roof, like these. Mpc, free 16th thousand. That's a bit too much. So let's use this one. Then. Once you select it, it instantly applied at this clip. Still feel like this baseline could do with a bit more grit. What can help us is this third oscillator. We can set it up. Pretty much the same way as this one. So we can copy, attack flex seven milliseconds, then decay around two seconds, and then sustain to 0 and then release to 900 and then start increasing level of that. So according to this algorithm, this oscillator will modulate that and that in its own time will modulate that. It's a sequential sort of modulation. So let's play it and start increasing the level of that oscillate and see how the sound will change amount of sounds you can make. But just like turning this one, nope, it's insane. Sound design is easily one of the favorite things and music production for me. Yeah, I like him around somewhere there and let's change this course as well. Check this out. Let me That sounds brilliant. Survey. Thus, we go onto a lead territory. So set the course on three. That's like the ethics of baseline sound. Without it, It's a bit dull, too low to my taste. And then if you switch this on, can check our levels now see, see we increase the level of the modulation. Now, a whole level of this signal has dropped down chip yourself. Let's remove this. Speaking around minus 70 dB. For introduced that it's counter-intuitive. You increase in volume, but you reducing the volume. So it's always a great idea to check your signal path. So this signal went from the operator onto a low group. So in the low group we've got this compressor and this EQ, the shape into sound even more so now, when they introduced the third oscillator, this compressor doesn't do much. See the needle. Pretty much static. We need to add a bit of input gain. Now, back to the signal. Loved the sound of that. And now we've got our low frequencies of our track sorted. We can move on to create a beat, adding clap, hi-hats, percussions. So I'll see you in the next lesson where we're going to do exactly that. 4. DRUMS (PART 1): Hello and welcome back to our next lesson. In this lesson, we're going to create a beat. So we're going to start by inserting a media channel to color-code it, rename it clap. We're going to create a clap from scratch. You're going to insert serum. Probably a good idea to make a pattern. Can't get rid of the scale because it doesn't matter which keep plays. We're going to turn off the sawtooth wave and add noise oscillator or noise generator, should I say, set it to bright white? This is good. Let's extend this. Call it clap. What are we going to do now is to shape the sound. Let's add some release, but 200 milliseconds. Then we're going to use this LFO as a secondary envelope, modulates various parameters. So set it to envelope, get rid of BPM and we can straightaway assign it to level of the noise. It's a bit too loud at the moment. We can turn it down and turn it down here as well. Going to get louder as we apply our effects. By hypertonic, really need hyper itself, but we're going to increase the dimension a little bit, decrease the size and increase dry wet Nope. Make it a little bit wider. So next stop is EQ. We're going to use this bell curve to make our club little bit tonal. So we're going to do is assign this envelope to game of this frequency and Option shift. We can make it one directional and drag this down a little bit. So it's not all the way. Listen. Now with this frequency, you can pretty much make any tenacity to your clap. The more you increase the game, the more tonal it'll become. Got this q parameter, which you can set. With only three of these, you can create hundreds of thousands of different claps. I'm going to set it to my liking. Somewhere around their necks. Stop distortion. I've just adjusted a little bit of this. I felt like it needed to be short, just like that. So again, to assign this to distortion drive, all the way up drive, nope, we'll follow this envelope. We can apply filtering to it. With filter is the same. We use sample and hold minus in this instance can weigh. Apply our envelope to dry wet. We also apply to cut-off. Think that's it in terms of serum sound design, we can make it mono. And then the next thing we can do is add a bit of punch by using the drum bus. So get rid of Dr. transit. More transient, you add the punch it club gets. For me, this sounds pretty good. There's damp parameter which you can also used to shape the sound even further. To me, this sounds pretty good. Then we can also distort it. Saturation. Get rid of color. Now clipping, we can reduce the output volume. A couple of things we can add to this club is EQ. The low-end. We don't need any of the high-end either. Then we can further enhance our EQ just like that. And the final thing I'd like to add a bit of Weidner. Make it wider. Quite like this plugin. I think it's still free, free plugin by infected mushrooms. So that's it for Clapp, who are going to use some samples as well. Create another media channel. I'm going to name it off. Clap. I think it's good idea to group these together and call it high. Because this is essentially going to be our high frequency group. So wildlife to do when I make my tracks, I like to group things in terms of frequency. So this off clap, we're going to drop in an empty drum rack. I'm going to drop a snare from a sample library. This one here. Again, making it from simpler to Sampler. Going to make this once and then we can just copy it to all the other tracks, voices to one, velocity to 50. I'm going to assign attack, decay, sustain, and release. Notes. We're going to add a media clip in here, and then we're going to place a note in here and duplicate it two times. Then add another note and then increase the length of this. Listen. That's good. We can shape the sound with the envelope. I'm using. Push by the way, had to quickly control some parameters. I'm going to set the attack to about 15 milliseconds decay, leave it as Christa sustained is all the way out and definitely decrease the release to 60 milliseconds. Next thing I want to do, I want to make sure it's in mono. So again, utility, insert utility and select either left or right channel. From the look of this sample, it, it's appropriately already fairly mono sounds. We're going to add some color to it by using such Patna. Also a quite like the sample to be modulated a little bit. So it's kind of like different every time it hits. So I like to use things like frequency modulators in order to achieve that. And here in this particular plugin or quite like it, It's got loads of presets. I just choose something any preset will do pretty much. Then make sure dry wet. All the way up. Next stop, we're going to compress this sound a little bit. The need to heart. Remove the ultimate gain and set it manually. I'm going to add an EQ to the end of the chain. Get rid of low frequencies, make it cleaner. Then this booleq come back to compressor slightly over compressed it. One last thing I want to do is to put the velocity randomizer. Again, this goes back to every meeting hip, slightly different to the previous ones. So I'm going to increase the random to about 15. So it can lay that with something else. This was snack, not the clap. We can copy that. Put it in. And then this is going to be we can lead a snare would clap, leave everything as is. We copied the entire channel. And then we're gonna go back to our sample folder. And we can select a clap and just dropping the volume of that. Somewhere on there. Let's move on onto a high hat. Again. Let's create a new media channel. Copy this whole drum rack so we don't have to set it up once again. And we can just drag and drop a hi-hat sample, going to create a midi clip and put some midi notes. Call it open hi-hat. Let's add an EQ to that sound. Let's get rid of the high frequencies. There's so much information down in this region that we don't really need. That region is occupied by the base. And two compresses slightly. Let's not forget that we can also shape the sound. So let's decrease the attack. Worked through to around seven. Let's get rid of this, sustain completely. Increase the Decay little bit. By decreasing this stain and decay, you essentially made an open hi-hat into a closed one. Around there. Let's leave the release as it isn't. Let's go back to our compressor now. Just tiny three dB of gain reduction. Then to add some more punch to it, we can use transient master, set it to punch, and then decrease the sustained and turn on the smooth, like it. One last thing we're gonna do to a hi-hat is to add some width. 50% is fine. Let's add a secondary hi-hat. Literally just duplicate that. Go back to a sample library. Select a different sample. It's super stereo. So first thing we're going to add to this is utility. And we're going to select either right or left channel, will listen. Right channel, that's fine. Let's keep tq. I says, let's see what the compressor does. Yeah, I'm happy with that. That sounds fine. Let's leave the trends in master as well. And we're going to add some movement to the sound by using another full tool. We're going to use a sine wave, set it to 1.5 of the bar. And instead of volume, we're going to add some padding. Just offset phase a little bit. This is going to be our secondary high hat, which is going to come in later during the drop section. Let's continue with drums. I'm going to be adding another media channel. We are going to be copying drum rack again. Just inserted in here, going back to our sample folder, selecting different sample, going to call this vinyl. They're making a media clip, make it four by long, extended to eight bar, so it loops twice. Put some notes in. Let's go back to our envelope and turned a sustained down. All the way. We're going to go back and copy utility. Select either left or right. We're going to go and copy the velocity randomization. By doing that on most of the Trump channels, we create a more dynamic. More interesting and ever-changing be for our track compressor in the release two, really quick on this one. Just match the volume. I'm happy with that. One last thing we're going to do is put an EQ at the end of the chain. Unnecessary stuff. Let's move on. Create another media channel. Copy a drum rack, copy. Velocity. Create a new media clip. Make it long. And insert drum pattern like this. And change the sample. This room shot. We're going to make sure it's a bit short. Something like that. Copy utility makes sure it's mono. My way of doing it is I make most of my Trump's mono and then pan them left and right and make them stereo that way. So let's add a little bit of movement. This rim shot into again, select sine wave. I really like this plug-in. It used to be free when I got it, I believe now it costs money to get it. I'm not sure how much, but it's an absolute brilliant plug-in. Going to decrease the volume and then increase the padding. Shift the phase two to 70. Let's turn it down a little bit. Room. I like to organize all my projects. When I go back to the truck I made five years ago, I can easily see what's where everything is labeled, everything is color-coded. I used to be really messy and never color-coded anything and named anything. It's a really tough time when you try to find something on your older projects. I think to finish this off, we're going to add just to carve out unnecessary stuff as we're progressing through the beat. I think it's about time to add a drum and bass loop. So we're going to go back to our sample library. We've got this drawn, the base break, which we'll go into quantize and set it to beat warp algorithm and then this transient mode here. So it's only playing forwards. And then this will control how much of that chunk gets played. Increase this as well. Switch too much volume. Some of the other, obviously we don't need any low frequencies in this. I'm going to remove most of it. 5. DRUMS (PART 2): Also one thing I want to add is swing element to our loop. We can also go back and add swing to our previous drum elements. We're going to skip high hats and we're going to add swing to our clap. We can add another drawing based break. This one is pretty cool. This one, I don't really need entire thing. All I want is maybe like this much. Now we've got this loop going, one beat loop. We can go and select the portion. I'm like switching it with my up and down arrow keys on my keyboard. I can just play the beat and then select the portion of the loop that we liked the most. Obviously it's a bit too loud. This sounds quite cool. Let's see what else. We increase this to. See what happens. Now we've got completely different wipe. Quite like this section here. This section is really dynamic. Quiet like that. I just want to leave it here a little bit of EQ. This peak over here. I don't really find it useful. I'm going to do is put a I chain on here. I've got this side chain, which is easy to create this just a couple points. Then it said to 1 fourth of a beat. That's without width. And we can control amount of it by dragging this volume slider. Moving on, we can create another media channel cochlear drum rack from anywhere else. Then midi loop with continuous 16th pattern. Now go into a sample section, go back into a folder and select this tambourine sound. This is going to be a really good example of this velocity randomization. If I insert this velocity onto a tambourine, have a listen how it changes throughout the time. Here you go. Continuous 16 pattern. You can really hear how big of a difference this makes it. Especially if you increase the random amount. I like it to be really subtle. So around 1516, again, we can make it mono. Boom. The easier way of doing it would be to drop this velocity in here and this utility in here. And then copy this onto the channels. Let's insert another photo and select some way. Make it one bar along the belief. Further volume manipulation. Every half bar is louder than the next half BY and then the next half bar is louder again and it's going in a loop like this. This basically add that very top subtle tickling soft sound. So there's a lot of presidencies which we're going to chain with an EQ. First of all, a low cut, Something like that. It to tame it a little bit so it's in control. And then next thing we can make it nice and wide. Founded generally sounds better if you make sound mono. And then I'd widening and then top it off with a side chain. Nice, we can duplicate that. Let's call it a tambourine. Let's keep it very organized without changing anything. We're going to insert another sample. This closed hi-hat. We're basically just layering this tampering with this hi-hat. Rename this closed. While like to do is split this into and pan it to the left. You can see by this level meter, the closed is already panned right. Then this tampering is panned left. So basically created a little bit wider sound. We can further manipulate it by reducing the time of the sample by just decreasing a little bit of that decay. Same on the hi-hat. Little bit more snappy and precise. We just added subtle top tickle with both of those layers. The next stop is going to be more percussions. There's a lot of precautions in this track, so we're going to copy this again. A bongo sound. Let's, let's make a two bar loop. And put some notes in. Let's ship to sound a little bit. I want to get rid of the initial transient. Just like that, we would decrease the volume. Then again, utility. Quite like left sound on this one. Let's put some social partner. Just to color it. You notice I don't really touch the fatness or the color because by default this plug-in already colors the sound quite a lot. Again, we can add a freak to add a bit of movement to our sound. Decrease the mix. So I do with this. And the Q on top. Just thought that we can add back the randomization. Just like this. Then let's duplicate that. Get rid of this. Call this PRC one. Let's call this perk to percussion too. Just like that. Then we can go back to our sample folder once again. Insert another bongo. We're going to have to do a different pattern. Something like this. Squat low. So we're going to have to raise this route. On this left channel is selected, which is this one is really quiet. Let's select the right channel and see how much of a difference it will make. Also, let's not forget at some swing back to precautions. Are we added swing to this? No, let's do that. This is way too loud. Going to have to add some EQ to this. Duplicate that. We're going to shorten this midi clip and half crop loop. Get rid of. Move this over here. Then, as always, go back to our sample library and select a different sample. See on this particular sample, the loudest part is on the left channel. So we're gonna select that. Also. Remember we have shifted the pitch of the previous samples, so we have to go back with this. I'm pretty much happy with that. Let's call it perk three. I'm feeling like adding another room. Let's duplicate that again. We've got this room shot here. Let's change the pattern as well. Let's set this length two bars. Copy the pattern from, from before we can even drop this down. Where is it? Exactly the same? We're just going to layer it with different sample. And we also going to change the velocity. Something like that. We'll do, let's call it a toe eight REM. Like this. We can also pan it. It's not playing in the same positions stereo field wise as our other rim. So it's just going to separate them a little bit. This one is playing on the right side. This wouldn't play in more than left side. Next stop, we're going to add some CLEP fills, duplicate that command J to consolidate it. So it's an eight bar loop. We can get rid of older midi. Call it clap rows. Swap the sample, and go back into midi. Select 1, 16th, and draw some patterns. Listen. That sounds good. Let's shape it a little bit. Next, we're going to duplicate that. Swap the sample with a 909 snare drum. And then obviously we're going to make a different pattern. This needs more punch. Shape it with an envelope increase sustained and decrease decay. Attack was increased. So let's remove that decay to around 900. Then the last, but not least, we're going to copy our drum rack from hi-hats, insert into this new channel. We're going to call it right? We're going to insert this right symbol. We're going to just copy the media pattern from a high hat onto a right channel and shape this ride. We're going to increase the release all the way, so it plays throughout the entire sample. Thus decrease their attack and then decay to about 120. Loose way too loud. Now, as always, we're going to select either left or right channel. Pretty much mono anyway, than wildlife to do on rides is to put an echo. Straightaway. Get rid of the filter. Make it straight. 1 eighth feedback to 0. Play with Dry Wet. There's a lot of low frequencies in this symbol. So we're going to cut low-end quite a lot. Also caught some of the highs. Still not there yet. We need some side-chain. We're going to put another fall at the end. Side chain. Select it too much. This decrease it to 50%. Goya like that. Aside, some widening as well to that, this put it to 200%. Now, we're going to process this high-frequency group altogether. So the first thing I like to put a drum bus, I'm going to increase the damp. I don't want to lose any frequencies. So all the way to 20 kilohertz, I'm going to add some crunch. About 20%. I'm going to add a bit of transient because it's like we're processing this in a group. You don't want to add too much of this. Literally just a touch. Let's decrease dry wet straightaway. I mean, to me this is a huge difference. I love this thing. Thrombus, highly recommend. Then we're going to solve clip it. So I've got this clip ragtag built. So what it has is able to glue compressor attack is default releases auto and ratio is set to four. And the most important thing is this soft Clear button engaged. And then I've routed this makeup onto this macro control. And then I've inserted this utility. And all I'm doing here is rousing gain to this microcontroller. And then there's also this Max for Live device. This is literally just metering because no, not the clip, not the game. If you put them directly in a drum rack, they don't have IN and OUT volume metering. So I'm using this Max for Live devices to just monitor how much volume comes in and then how much volume comes out. So if all of that is to 0, there's no processing, then all I want to do is start clipping so that this clip light is just touching the peaks of the sound Chavis out the moment the rods are really loud, let's let's put them because they triggered the clip. Going to decrease them quite a lot. With open hi-hat. We're going to clip it slightly. Then match it again. Yeah, This is fine. Then what we're going to do, a final shape, who've been NICU. We're going to cut the low frequencies. We're going to type in 12. Just unnecessary stuff. And we're also going to dip down here. Tiny little bit of clean up in there in that area. Just like that. Also later on we're going to be adding a low-pass filter. But that's gonna be in the arrangement section. This is it for drums. I'll see you in the next lesson where we're going to be adding a synth element to attract. 6. SYNTH: Hello and welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to create a synth hook line. So we're going to start by creating a new media channel. Drop in an instance of theorem on this channel. To speed things up, we're going to use a preset for this. We're going to go into our preset folder. I'm going to select this hero sound. We're going to take our baseline outs that we've programmed earlier. We're going to just drop them in here, call this Hero. What's going on? And then color-coded. Let's have a listen how this sounds. Obviously it's way too low in register. Let's lift it up three octaves. Let's do some minor adjustments. We can remove this node, can basically copy this pattern. Let's shorten the notes and we'll delete this. Then just copy this pattern two times. Make all the notes 16th. Listen. Yeah, it just like that. And let's have a listen how it sounds in context. I mean, that sounds good to me already, but we're going to make it sound even better. So let's get on. First thing I want to drop on, this is going to be some saturation we're going to start with. And actually before doing that, I would love to get rid of reverb on the actual serum patch. Reverb delay. Let's turn them off. Too much reverb and delay to my taste. Plus on top of that, as you noticed before, Every single track in our project is completely dry, is because we're going to utilize reverb and delay sense to place our instruments in the same environment. So with this plugin, I like to just go through the presets and find which one sounds best. In this instance, I'm going to choose this guitar grid quite like that gritty sound. Next thing I want to put a bill for overdrive. We're going to increase the drive on here a bit too much. I wanted to just drive the very high frequencies somewhere around four kilohertz. Let's decrease that lobe. Then. Take the dynamic of the tone down and put driver to 5%. Just to brighten it up a tiny bit. Next stop is OTT. So we're going to drop this X4 OTT. We're gonna leave all the parameters as is. Just decrease the depth to taste. Going to shape a sound a little bit after the OTT with some EQ. So I'm going to play the sound and cut unnecessary low frequencies. Also going to cut some top frequencies. I'm going to boost around this area where the sound is speaking. Just to exaggerate this area a little bit, let's put a second OTT. After that, I'm going to put one of my favorite effect plug-ins. It's a halo operator. Let's initialize and have a listen what it does. This little guy, basically a reverb. So this effect plugin is combination of effects. You got a loop because slice you got various envelopes, filter and each effect called this entire block of all different effects, which you can put in any point of the loop. Every now and then I'm putting this little reverb and it goes up automatically throughout the entire track. So next thing we're gonna do, we're gonna compress the whole sound. Needs to 0. In. Rid of an auto gain. Matched again manually ourselves. Also, fast release and super fast attack. Good enough. Let's see processing introduce some more low-end. Not bad, can still cut it. Make it a little bit cleaner. So like we've all other elements I like to group stuff, even though this is going to have only one synth track, I'm still going to group it. I'm going to rename this mid. I know that this is the group that represents meet frequencies of the track. Let's have a listen how this sounds in the context of the track. I just switched all the effects on and off and see what difference we made. I think I'm done with mid-frequencies for now. Now that we've got low, high and mid-frequencies, we go, idea loop going on. We are ready now to move on to arrangement, which we're going to do in the next lesson. I'll see you there. 7. ARRANGEMENT: Hello and welcome back to the next lesson. In this lesson we're gonna tackle arrangement. So we got our loop going or idea that sounds like this. The first thing we can do, move you in a boost markers. The first marker will be called intro one. My intro to be 16 bars. So output next marker here and call it base. That's where I want my base to kick in. Markets in between just two separate eight bar sections. So it's just going to continue adding those market points. The next point I'm going to add on my base to last this long. After that, I'm going to have a short break. After which we're going to have a drop. First trump. Going to put an X marker here. Continuing that way. Markers around roughly six minutes. So generally speaking, house tracks with a long DJ intro and DJ otra last for around 67 minutes. I'm going to have a pretty long drop after which I'm going to have a break for about this long. And then there will be second main drop. After which I'm going to have an outro. Normally I don't do this manually. Of course, a template set up with all these markers placed at eight bar integrals. So I don't have to do this single truck I produce. Good idea to just set up templates like this for your production workflow speedup. I'm just removing the numbers. Can also put this can also put this here to signify this to the end of the truck. So basically this is gonna be our tune. Thus the basic structure intro, introduction of the base small break, drop. We're going to have some vocals in here, and then there's another break. Then there's another drop. More vocals and brides after second drop. There's an outro, truck gets stripped down and there's the end. I'm going to collapse all these midi. I'm going to take all the midi and drag across the entire truck just like that. I don't want my hook melody to start at intro. And also, like I said, I don't want base to start at intro straightaway. I'm going to put that where I want it to start. Also rides, ride cymbals. Definitely don't want those. Actually, let's rename this. Forgot to rename this. We probably going to have rights only occasionally, so I'm going to actually reduce this to eight bars. We're gonna have rights just before the main break. On the second eight bars of domain drop. Probably good idea to rename these narrows. We know what's happening. So don't get confused and also shorten them again. Just like that. Later on we're gonna do variations of those. Also. I just noticed I forgot to add a fourth percussion sound. I'm going to duplicate that one. Go in there and change this midi renamed as perk for. Then go in here and change the root node. Please different key. So we almost like creating a melody with the bongo sounds. Then tune this to plus $0.50 or half semitone. We should have a percussion melody that sounds like this. Let's rename this first open hi-hat two. So we know that this is n different hi-hat. Only want to introduce it on second eight bars of the first drop. And then same with why North. Now we're going to introduce it on the first drop. So let's have a listen what we've got so far. This percussion melody to start from the very beginning of the track. So the interest is there from the first beat. Unlike if we would mute this, what we're going to do first here is to cut the kick, just to signify that this It's been eight bars and a new eight bars have started. And what we can also do here, if we open this up, we can do a double-click in here. So just duplicate that. Listen. Sounds wicked. Remove for kicks in here, and then add this clap role. Just to do a little clap row before the flop. Going to rename this one. But let's have a listen. Yeah, just a quick clap row before the baseline kicks in. So what we can do again, going to copy this name is two and then go in and change the past and slightly. It doesn't have to be anything crazy. As you can see, I've just deleted extra immediately notes. This is essentially now different from this one. Same with this. Now, we can rename this one, go in, delete all these completely different midi pattern. So let's have a listen. Maybe this ofs Now is a bit, a bit to acquire. Soever is the volume of that a little bit. Just like that. Now I want to get rid of all the kick on the main break. Just want quickly increase the volume of those precautions because they're a bit low in the mix at the moment. Just like this. Also on the first break weekend to get rid of snare, of club and hi-hat and just leave the clap. Now I'm starting to think about mixing and how the track is going to progress. What I'm gonna do, I'm gonna insert three return tracks. Name first one short reverb, named second one, long reverb. And I'll name third one. Will give up facts. Just color-code them quickly. The short reverb will be for drums and maybe everything else as well. But a long reverb I'll use on vocals to make vocal figure. And then the reverb effects. Won't going to do with that. I'm going to build a rack, go into the reverbs and I'm going to select Pro are just going to drop on that channel. I'm going to adjust brightness $0.200 character to chorus than a leaf distance as it is, reduced decay rate, stereo width to 120 and dry wet to 100% because it's on the return track. I'm going to increase the space to around 170. I'm going to leave it as it is. Next thing I'm going to drop on that is going to be saturation up. It's a free plugin by the way from soft tube website. Who keep it in neutral and increase the saturation. So now let's just quickly group or groups together. So I'm taking all three groups, come on G to group them. Call this master. We all want to take this reverb send. Want to show automation on a new line. I'm going to drop the automation on this. Just before the drop. I want to drop this down. Just like that. Let's color code this as well. So we know this is a pre-master. Let's have a listen. Let's get rid of the baseline just before the drop, just like that. And then let's go in here as well. Get rid of that. I don't like old to be playing just before the drop. Several listen. Something like that actually were wanted to do quickly is to low-pass filter on the whole drum group. I'm going to grab a filter like this volcano. Then I'm going to group this, open this up. Then assign frequency, peak and type frequency. I'm going to assign to my car1, going to call it low-pass filter type gonna go. This, nope. I'm going to send it, set it too gentle. Frequency older way than the peak is gonna go on here. I'm going to call it peak. Then for clarity, just going to get rid of this. Now I know those three notes are my working notes. Call it a low pass filter. Now I've got full control of filter. We're going to do, I'm going to create an automation in the new lane, then insert a couple of points I want to filter be opened just before the clap. Put it in a little bit, exponential like that. First of all, I'm going to map this to low-pass. I'm going to go into map max. I'm going to switch to 126. And minimum, I'm going to set to 0. Now every time the low-pass is all the way to filter is completely switched off. If you close this, as I turned the low-pass nob, the filter turns on and starts filtering the sound. And then as soon as it's in the upper top position, it will switch off completely. Just like that. Let's have a listen how this sounds. Low-pass filter. And let's come back to a reverb effects and adjust the sound slightly. I'm going to put EQ just inside the rack. I'm going to switch to a bandpass, 24 dB per octave. I'm going to leave it around one hertz. I'm going to get rid of those filters. Let's have a listen how it sounds. Without the EQ. You go low and high frequencies passing through. I just want EQ to pass through only the reverb around those frequencies. That, and I'm going to compress the signal with Glue Compressor. Faster attack, fast release, threshold minus 40. This makeup gain will basically make up for the volume loss under the compression, but I'm going to Over increase it. So the reverb is a bit more prominent. Just like that. This soft clip is just basically a clipper that prevents signal from clipping. I've engaged it, but I don't think the signal will ever reach that point. Then to make sure we definitely don't have anything passing, going to switch this to 12 and more wide if band. Just like that, we're going to have base going on, Brake kicks in. There's a first drop, so we're going to put some vocal in here and some effects. So let's just continue with an arrangement to make things interesting. So always good idea to just cut portions of the track every now and then. I can maybe cut the base around here. The loss kick maybe. That's how listen, I understand. That's where our second hi-hat kicked in. So as you notice from before the vinyl snare has appeared the first time in the track on the drops are just after the effects. Then as we progress through the track, the new hi-hat comes in. Then again to introduce something new, we cut baseline, we caught kick. Then our synth comes in this sense because it's quite a big part of a track. I want it to be a bit more impactful. So I'm going to do, I'm going to delete the drums, like all of the trump's pretty much. I'm going to introduce a second snare roll pattern. So we're gonna go in here. We're going to add more notes. Let's have a listen. We're going to add an extra rises and effects in the effects lessons. So for now, this is the way this is gonna be. So I just want this to play for 16 bars and then a little break from it. We can cut it like that. Also same thing with a baseline and kick. I think we can cut pretty much all of it. Would definitely lacking an impact sound in here. So it's like a rise. And then I should do in the arrangement like this, you just go through the track and then you kind of make mental notes about where and what things you'd like to drop to spy subsections. So next thing I wanted to do, I want to introduce a filter in the lead synth. We can just copy this low-pass filter we created. Just paste it in here. Show automation and the new line. Obviously there is automation, which we don't really need. And then we can just drop in here. So the next time delete since thoughts, I wanted to start low and kind of build up. We've got a ride going on in here. As you remember, they're going to play this and adjust the filter to taste so the listener knows a bit too low. Yellow that I just wanted to hear it enough, but being really far away and coming in, maybe here we can get rid of two kids. This is how I basically extend the full loop all the way from start to finish off the truck and choose to remove sections and make it interesting throughout. Maybe we can add clap in here to spice things up, leave this as it is here, and call it three. And then we can copy this over here, call it four, go in, change the media pattern like that. Delete this, get rid of it from there and copying here. That's a completely different pattern. Now, let's have a listen. We can also copy this here, for example, which is to do a bit of variation. Basically signifies that eight bars have finished and something new is about to drop, which is hi-hat. In this case, we can move in here, call it three, and continue from there. This is pretty consistent here. So we can just go in here and start cutting. Just to add a bit of variation to our truck. Probably even go in here, cut this section and reduced the loop size two to one bar. Now. This is going to play twice as fast than this one. And then we can move on. Maybe caught hold this. Leave all these shakers, tambourine, closed, hi-hat and Karp roofing, but not the clap. Let's hold. Listen how it sounds. It's just this eight bars On the same as those eight bars. So is this always some kind of change going on? That way you can make your track very interesting and not boring at all. Even though it's like super repetitive. We've added vocals. This will add variation even more to attract. So now we're moving on towards the main break. Let's make a window slightly bigger. On the main break, I definitely don't want most of the drums playing. Again, just cut things like that. Let's cut everything literally. Maybe again, leave just shakers. I can copy this in here. Get rid of that rim as well. Even though it's almost the same as this, but this has clapping, It. It's different. For the difference. We can probably even keep the hi-hat. Listen, listen. We made it even more different than that section there. Now I want this filter again, just in here, just going to copy it. And extended law that basically filters down remaining drums. We had also this effect. Definitely wanted the main break and same way we just extend in it. I don't think I want kick, it doesn't sound really good. The filter opens up and I don't want any drum sounds to be playing just before the drop, so I'm going to delete those right now. One other thing I want to introduce is on this low group, I want some high-pass filter this time. So I want to copy this, paste it here, and call it high-pass filter, high-pass filter, and then change this filter, high-pass. And then obviously now you have to switch the positions to the other way. So we're going to map again. So now we have to make it that it starts to affect the sound from one. And then all the way to 127 to 0 position, the filters switched off. As soon as you turn this knob, it turns on and starts effecting the sound. What we can also do, we can map this style slope. That now changes. Filter slope. Just like that. Maybe reduce the peak slightly. I don't want it super resonant on the baseline. Might not sound great. Style. Let's change the style. Tube is fine. Now, let's add a new automation. Let's get rid of this automation and want to do is kick in. Filter. Here. As soon as we lose the kick drum, gradually erase it. Maybe around there. Let's have a listen. What we've got so far. What we achieved with that is that we slowly losing an energy on a baseline. And then with this reverb effect, we're gaining an energy for the Sandy Hook. And that way we kind of like transition and make tension just before the drop. That's roughly the main breakdown. So we're obviously going to put some rises and the effects sounds in this section to make the attention even more significant property a good idea to have this filter copied like this and maybe placed in various other sections of the track. Here, maybe here as well. So this removes very low frequencies from both kick and base. That's another thing I like about the groups. You can group and you can process kick and bass together with various effects. And then this lesson here as well. Yeah, just transitioning from one section onto the other. I have showed you how to arrange the track. You should have a pretty good idea of how to do it by now, of course, more than halfway through the track, the rest is pretty much the same. You just make variations throughout the second drop. An outro, continuing with creating difference narrow and clap raw patterns throughout the second drop and the outro, it's even more simpler. You just remove the sounds from your track the opposite way from when you introduce new sounds as you progressed from intro towards the middle of the track searches like this can cut that. Only first part of the drop, place this Send, and then towards the second half of the main drop, we get this plane again. Same wages cutting drums around, making every eight bars different from the previous and from the next eight bars. So it's always, always changing somewhere around there. We could probably cut the hi-hat. As you can see, I'm doing it even without listening to how it sounds. I like to do that way. Sometimes you can't random stuff that you normally meant to car and you end up with happy accidents and they end up staying in the track. So that's it for an arrangement. Like I said, you should have a pretty good idea of how to do it by now. So I'll see you in the next lesson where I'm going to be adding extra sounds, special effects, transitions, and stuff like that. 8. FX: Hello, welcome back. Today we're going to be making and effects section. Let's start by creating a new midi track. Make sure it's not in drums group. Let's color-code it. Straightaway. Put it in a group called his group effects. And this midi tracks, they're just going to be building a snare built that's going to last for 16 bars. Since midi clip, which is going to copy you drum rack, same way as we did before. And then go back to our sample folder. Select the preferred sample. Now, we're going to have a 16th pattern. Again. Let's extend this clip to 16 bars is going to sound like this. Let's decrease the sustained on this. Next thing I want to do is add some overdrive. Just as the body overall saturation, then let's compress this thing to help. Release. Crucial is quite high. It's quite loud in the mix, so I'm gonna leave the game quite low as well. Purchased squeezes the sample really hard. One in this vertical, in our case. Now let's build a rack that will allow us to have this as a buildup effect. So we're gonna go in, what do you effect's going to pick ourselves a vocoder, put in a group, open this up and the signed release two, not one. Open the rack and then create a new chain. Extend those two bars. One chain will be dry, as you can see, there's no effects on their chain will be wet or just one increment of the side. And then another same, put it to 126 here, and then grab the top and do like that to crossfire them. And then assign this to macro eNobe. Now we control, with this one knob. We control both release and dry wet release. I won't start at around 900 to one hundred, ten hundred milliseconds. We're gonna hide this and we're gonna map release and make the stop position. Somewhere around. Now when the knob is at the bottom most position, it will start with 900 milliseconds. Can call this dry wet. Then let's assign this new lane. Do a curve like this. That vocoder is almost like a reverb but not quiet. So you could have done the same pretty much trick with the reverb, I guess. But I liked the way the vocal sounds different from the reverb. That's why I use it. You can make it full range, believe it halfway through, and then do a little bit of exponential. Also. I don't want to ****** lost, right? So the drop heads, so I'm going to remove 1 fourth, then drop this down just like that. So it's kind of like tells out a bit. And then there's more gap like this in-between the brakes section and drop just to drop the level down completely. So it went to drop hits is more significant role. Next thing we want to do is put some volume automation. We do it with utility. Just simply put a dot in here and decrease it to minus 12 or something. Like increasing in volume than this vocoder also is adding. And so like rising with the buildup, one other thing we can do is a low-pass filter from before just go and high group copied the low-pass and then paste it here. Can even close this like that. Show automation and new lane. Delete old desk because we're going to do brand new automation. So the automation will go from bottom up. Just like very low in the mix, maybe slightly higher. We can also play with it. Reduced it slightly. So there's three different things happening yet, filter is opening, the volume is rising, and then there's this vocoder that gets added. Let's have a listen in a context. Maybe slightly too loud, but you can add it. We can make it touch bit quieter by removing high and low frequencies with the high and low shelf. Just shaped sound like that. Just removed BY of high-end and a beautiful low and lift the middle untouched. So that's it for us narrow. Let's move on and create another media channel, silent, which is going to go and select the preset. This affects buildup long. We'll leave it as is. Good to drop midi note. Let's start really low. It's rising up. Listen. It's not going all the way. So I think we need to change some parameters. This envelope is assigned to pitch and cutoff. So let's crank this attack a little bit. So attack is basically you're responding for how long this effect lasts. Put this rate to 116th, as you can see in this window. Now. Just shorten the mid eclipse, same way we can call this lasers. Call this snare roll. To make things easier, can drop a utility. I could have automated the internal silence volume or gain parameter. It's way easier to just do it that way. Same again, a little bit of a volume race. Starts low. Increasing in volume. Get started even lower. And then the basic Low Cut. Make sure not giving us unnecessarily frequencies. Let me allow that. This main drop after the main breakdowns, think it's lacking impact. So what we're gonna do is drop some noise impact as sticks theorem in here, get rid of that oscillator, turn on the nose January. And select bright white and volume all the way up, release to 0, attack to 0. And then let's put a midi clip. Take the gain down, just in cases super loud. Literally any note as it's just noise and make it one beat long. Then turn off the loop. And while I like to do is have these eight bar chunks, just like that. This is going to be our impact. Let's put a filter on silver band, filter band 24, and put it on a noise generator somewhere on the crank up the volume in here. Then last thing in serum, or going to the chorus to make it wider, right to 0. Delay. So I can delete or five milliseconds Feedback, 50% low-pass filter, open. Just like that. Let's have a listen. I'm happy with that. We can shape the sound a little bit more. So let's add another photo. Let's add say chain. Maybe that's a bit too much. Kind of like jumps where the kick and the final thing would do is remove those super high frequencies around 15 kilohertz. Lie that reduced the low frequencies as well. That's going to be our noise. Hit. One cool trick I do is I take a sample of cassette noise. So let's go back to our sample folder. Select this case certain noise and straightaway reduced again, and then we copy it throughout the whole track. Listen. Obviously that's way too much. This is how it sounds on its own and we have it super low in the mix. Just saw that you barely can hear it. If you turn it off, you instantly notice it's not there anymore. Right? Scholars, except noise. Remove the low frequencies, we don't want those. And let's add some side chain as well. Somewhere along those lines. Pumps like this on a background. Next thing we can add is some reverse crashes. Again from our sample folder. I have resample these somewhere in 2020. And the way I've done this, I went and added a Reverb on a crash cymbal and you resample the end, reversed the samples, so it goes reverse that back to its original. This is just crashed with a load of free verb. Works really well for transitioning between sections. Gonna make it lower in the mix. Then we can drop it around it, our track sporadically. For example, this may be a good spot for it between the brake and drop. Like before, we probably don't want it plain old way. Maybe slightly less. And then we can cut chunks, maybe replace them elsewhere. Maybe like that. Maybe there as well. We can copy this. Going on the main drop. Again. Make it align with the rest so it's stops where it needs to stop. And then those small ones we can copy. Go off to that. Thought that next sound, he's got this short snare, basically being processed the same way. Snare been fed through the reverb, resampled and then reversed. Really easy to do. I wanted to do is just align it, cut the end and make it short like this. That's just adding a whole new layer of low frequencies to our rise. And again, we can just literally go in and copy around. Got one more sample. So let's call this short snare. Then put another audio track. I've got this hi-hat has been done exactly the same way. We go ahead and do the reverse it, I'm going to align to the very start of a new phrase. Make it this of length. This is how it sounds. It's just literally a hi-hat being fed through the reverb and re-sampled. Not even reversed. It was reversed initially, but now reversed it back. And then I don't really like this to be this far away. So I wanted to literally before I had straight onto the ink, Let's get rid of the loop. Only plays once. And then we can just copy it here, reverse it back. Then spice things up. That way. Like this section. That crash is with short snare. And then in this section to crash is playing with the hat impact. Let's call this hat impact. Then it's always different. So then we can just copy it onto the rest of our track. Just like this. And we can do we can do that. It's like it's between all the three samples. We can do a lot of variations. The way of doing this would be to just play the track and see whether sounds needed. I'm going to put one just before the base. Literally asking for a bar sound at the end. That's it, way better. Then we can copy that onto here. Maybe here as well. Then again here. Listen, maybe that baseline is touch a bit too dirty. This luck. This little break just before the drop really helps distinguish the breakdown section from the drop and drop is more impactful way. Just increased the abuse of Clapp volume to increase that field before the end of the phrase. Let's get rid of the loops so the truck plays out. This is it in terms of the effects. Now the truck is pretty much complete. It's time to bounce it down and send it to a vocalist to do some magic. I'm going to do just that and then come back with the vocal stems, which we're gonna do in the next lesson. So the next lesson is all about vocals. 9. VOCALS: Hello, Welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to look at how we can add vocals to our track. So I've bounced down the entire track and sent it to a vocalist, and sometime later I've received the stems. And from there on my job was to filter out and pick the ones that I want to use in the track. So what I'm gonna do is create audio track color-coded. Here's the stems I received. Create a couple. Here's the stems. Really liked, actually wanted to use in the track. Let's have a listen. You got to get up, Get up your data. Well then you got to get up. Get up. You go. One. Lives. Rough. Rough, rough. I like it rough. Give it to me. You know how I like it, Give it to me. Give it to me. More odd lips here. Now my job is to basically make it sound good. Where are we going to do now is start with this lead vocal. Several listen again. I'm not a 100% agree with all the lyrics. Therefore, we're going to chop things up and rearrange little bit. So let's group these and call it vocal works. Maybe turn down the volume a little bit. I'm going to just cut this section out. Repeat it. Then. Just copy and paste this. Hello listener. Maybe those years will sound quite cool in here. Listen. And then we can repeat this as well. Something like civil, listen to the whole thing. I quite like that. It can just cut in-between the phrases just to clean it up. Then we can quickly go in and roughly make the phrases equal volume. Our compressor got less work to do. I can just copy this over here. Since it's the same. I'm happy with that. Let's put some compression. Literally less exactly how it's gonna stay compression wise. We're just going to cut the low frequencies, making sure we don't affect the actual vocal and don't change the sound of it. So it's just tightening it up loop with the EQ and compression. Now though we got it roughly sitting where we want it. We can just go ahead and copy sections across the rest of the track. Then maybe this one goes here. Sounds it, and then copy the entire thing and paste it here. When we go hook playing in this section, there's no vocals. Then it kicks in here. We can copy that year as well. Remember there was this as well in here. Maybe to change this phrase a bit different from that one, we can take this ticket in here and then remove that several listen, wrong place In filter panning. So we're going to remove the panning. Probably have the same thing going on here as well. Let's just remove the panning. Why is it there? We had filter in high group as well. Panning gone. I believe we filter on the snare as well. Since we copied allele wracked with all the parameters. That's good. Let's continue on vocals. So we can pretty much copy this onto a second half of the drop. But then losing this vocal. Hey, you got a leap playing and then stops and then the Warhol kicks in just to remove the cake to make a little transition there. And then we can actually take. And bringing here just the last focal beer before the outro. So that's roughly how the main lead vocal structure will look like. We should probably copied this as well. Let's move on to our other two tracks. We got this break, but I like it quite like this. Give it to me. Maybe before the end of the break. Give it to me. We can probably remove this. Listen. Give it to me. Yeah, just give it to me. Nice. Then this empty clip, quite like this. Let's solo this rough. I like it rough. You know how I like I like it rough. Rough. I like it rough. I like it loud. Loud. I like it loud. Like it rough. I like it. Like this. Last section I get loud. We're going to do is move this over here. I started this thread here. I like it loud. Goodness thoughts with loud. Gonna be our second phrase. And then RAF is going to be first phrase, just swapping these last word places. So let's have a listen out loud. Just allow that. This is essentially the same, I like it and then rough and changes. We don't need anything else from here. Delete all this. We can just copy that. Go in and make it cleaner. Instead of repeating. Rough I wanted here and loud and rough and loud. Loud. I asked her to sing, and here's the stems for that. Let's just create a new channel. Drop it in. See what's in their breath. Loud, loud, loud, loud, quiet like this. Maybe we can just cut this out just like that. And rough. Rough. Then get rid of this. Copy over loud. That's a bit louder. So we're going to increase the volume of this same here. Just increased make it can make it like six db. All of them. Roughly the same. This is a bit too much. Maybe with four. Will listen now, I like it rough. Loud, loud. Just overlapped a little bit of The louder. And louder, and louder. And louder. Much better. Same here. And delete the copy and paste this. Loud. Loud. Sounds nice. Now though we've got eight bars, we can just increase attention. I like it. Do it more repetition. Then repeat this slide that I like it. Loud, loud, loud, loud. Again, we can copy that here. In-between the phrases. Loud. I like it. Just like so. And let's have a listen for the whole thing. What we ended up. Loud. Loud, loud, loud. Loud. Loud. I like it. And allow it to me. Increase the volume of that, Give it to me. Give it to me. Because it definitely has to be louder just before the drop. So I think I'm just going to copy this because she sounds the same on all the tracks and dynamic is roughly the same. So I'm just copying the compressor and EQ that does just a bit of cleaning up. We've got another truck with ADD lips and we've got this section here that I want to fill in. Let's see if we can find a little one-bar loop that we can loop over that section. For red bars, loop engaged to one. We've arrow keys up and down a few. What we've got there. Quite like that. Let's duplicate that, see if we can find anything else. We're gonna leave this as it is and then continue here. There you go. First here. I quite like that. Kind of overlap a little bit. Nice. Let's have a listen walk we come up with. Loud. Could probably copy this. Just in-between those phrases like that. Let's have a listen to loud, loud, loud, loud, loud, loud. I like it loud. To me. I'd love to do something extra on the token bit. I'm just going to go in and stick a little altar boy. Take it out 12 semitones on a pitch and minus five on format. That should give us almost like a power cord sort of thing. Then mix it in almost halfway through. It's like I like it rough. Width. I like it rough. That's what I like it. A little bit of interest. I like it rough. Maybe we can add a little bit of widening with a vocal doubler thing. This is free, common, but to be honest, I believe it's free. So we're going to increase separation, increased variation. That's a bit too much. So we're gonna like 50% on the last bit on. Give it to me. I want it super wide because it's almost like on its own. Give it to me. Give it to me. Yeah, there's no other instruments playing on this section. There is just vocal. So we're going to do, is we're going to automate this amount. So it's going to be 0 throughout the whole time. And then as soon as this hair, so we're going to have 200% widening going on. So let's have a listen. Super wide. That's pretty much the rough vocal arrangement. Now, I'm going to process things further with the vocal group. So first thing I wanted to do here is to drop in a LA to a compressor. We're going to reduce peaks and increase the gain. Notice I didn't put anything like AUTO-TUNE or anything like that. In Nepal calls because I just loved them the way they are rough and unprocessed. There's life to them, this character to them. I want to keep that intact. Next thing I'd like to add on vocals is this EQ. I'm going to reduce 300 hertz. Like so. Then around three kilohertz. Slight dip at 1.5. Hello increased. Listen that EQ shaping the sound, removing low mid-frequencies and adding mid-frequencies a little bit, and also high frequencies. And by using this high frequency selector, and then we select ten kilohertz and just add quite a lot. Okay, see how big of a difference only those two plugins make. Next thing I wanted to saturate the vocal with saturation nope. Easily one of the favorite saturation plug-ins for me, keep it neutral. I'm really glad that they included these in and out volume slider's. Before, I had to make a rack that has Utility before the soft tube saturation and after. So I can control in and out gains. But now it's all in one plugin because as you start increasing the saturation, the volume starts to increase. Check this out loud. And the goal here is to match the input and output gain. And then to clean up the chain, we're going to use an EQ. Just like that. We got ourselves seek vocal going on. One little trick I still want to show you is let's just create an audio track. And I've done that before obviously, but I'm just going to show you how I've done it. And the great thing about this is it's impossible to recreate the same results. It's always different. So that's what I love about this trick the most. Let's go to a current project and go to sample folder. This thing here. So while like to do to come up with super original and cool sounds, I'm creating a new track, making sure it's outside any group are called his truck with sample. And I have this track on my project throughout the whole time. And then I go here, select resampling. Then they turn it off and engage it. Every time now I record anything that I'm hearing will automatically get recorded on this truck. This is something I recorded earlier and that's how it sounds. Sounds like a bunch of crazy random sounds, right? I'll show you how I recorded this and then I'll show you the use of it. I take either group of mid-frequencies or a group of drums or group of vocals. In this case, I think I took the entire ellipse stem and just run through it. So why do I put a bunch of friends and plug-ins on the end of the chain. Let's say we use this vocal group to process some taken a loop writer and I'm taking portal, then I'm taking effect tricks. Also taking thermal, it can be any number of plugins. Great thing about those plug-ins. They can be reduced in size like this. And then you have, you can have like four plug-ins going on, on one screen. Then let's move this on the side. Let's make sure we are on the correct. What I do now, I just hit record. Disengage this. Everything that's passing through these plugins gets recorded on this channel. Check this out. I just hit you get an idea. I just hit record. I just switched between the presets, I tweaked parameters, and everything gets recorded in here. So this was pretty crazy and very intense. But before I ended up with this result. And then take the results that have just like the same way we did with ADD lips, I select a portion. Typically it's one bar, loop. Cycle fruit and play, and see if there's anything that I like and I want to keep in my track. So let's not forget to turn. Well, actually we don't even need those. We can just remove those plug-ins. Now we're back to normal. Let's have a listening. I like it. Just go like that and cycle through the loop. Let's maybe engaged this loop. Just like that. See, I've found this little thing that goes like that. There we go. I quite like this loop sampled up, I came up with. It fills in nicely, we've called in response. This is a technique I use pretty much anywhere in the truck as you notice before, with the drums with my four percussion channels, we got the same thing going on. There's a question, there is an answer. Yeah, It's so very effective technique. So please color-code this. This is pretty much it for the vocal. I think this track is ready for mixing. That's exactly what we're gonna do in the next lesson. I'll see you there. 10. MIXING: Hello, Welcome back. In this lesson we're going to look at the mixing stage. So as you remember before, we have setup to return channels with a short reverb and long reverb. I'm going to start with that. I'm going to Valhalla room onto a short reverb return channel. We're going to select Preset medium ambience, going to dial in the decay time to about 900 milliseconds, make sure that mix is all the way to 100%. And then let's turn this scale down. Let's put some overdrive. I like to drive my reverb to give you a little bit of that character, going to drive around one kilohertz. Then just decreased the driver to like 5% says, very little of the overdrive gets applied. And then with the 12 db per octave slope, Somewhere around there, literally wore my reverb to occupy this area. And now we've got our reverb setup. We can go to a mixing section and we can start applying reverb to our channels. The first place I want to apply would be vocal. Play head here. Several listen and increase send to taste. As you can hear, it just gives the space is really short timing on a reverb. So perfect not to make vocal to distant, but also give it a bit of space. Next thing we'd want to apply it to would be mid-frequencies, which is lead hook line. So yes, Same around somewhere there. Let's hold it. I'm pretty happy with that. Then on drums, again, on an entire group of high frequencies. To clarify all this, we could even do that. So grab all these channels and make them smaller. And now you've got collapsed like this and it's easier to see what's happening. Maybe even do that. Cake base, low frequencies, vocal. Let's do highest as well. Grab them all and make them smaller. Let's do effects as well. Now. Easier to see the group channels. Let's apply some too high. Maybe select a drop section. Let us live. We are given the same identical space to all our instruments, but in different amounts. So vocal and mid-frequencies have a lot more of that space. And drums, for example. Also, we have a long reverb. I do pretty much the same way I would do, is just copy all this, paste it onto a long reverb return channel, and then go into a reverb plug-in and just increase this to like twice as much. Then also go in here and changing filter frequencies slightly to occupy different frequency area. Given that longer reverb, slightly different area to operate in. Now, let's apply it to vocal, see how it sounds. I'm pretty happy with that. One thing I'd like to add to a vocal would be some delay. So I'm going to create another return track, color-coded. I'm going to call it delay. I'm going to drop in Valhalla Delay. I'm going to select the preset and then change this slightly. Horns straight notes mixed to a 100% because we own a return channel duck into 100. So on every time the actual vocal place on this delay to be reduced in volume. And then as soon as the vocal stops here, the delay kicks in, leave everything else untouched. Then let's give this delay some space. Again, I don't want any delay at low frequencies. So I'm just going to cut this like that. So now we're going in and we show automation in a new lane. So there's a delay automation gonna close the browser, get picker window. Now there's loads of space in here, in-between phrases. So count one, this last word, rough to be affected with delay. So I'm going to do is just raise this and apply too late to that last phrase and then drop it down. No delay on here. And then again delay here. Copy this slide that listen how it sounds. Maybe that's a little bit too much. Try and decrease this. To replicate that again. Good. It's going to increase this as well. Let's see how this sense. Then. Let's just copy that over here. Same pattern applying to late, start from here. But then it's decreasing in its intensity. Progressing through the breakdown. And the cool thing about this affects older channels. So I'm literally applying one delay to all vocal channels. I think we can actually copy this as well, just because the vocal suddenly disappeared. And then maybe we can get this one in there. See what else we've gotten this cooperate here. Undo loop, stretch it out like that. As you walk material there is I remember having a really cool phrase somewhere. Let's let's see what this was like. When I got stems and I was listening to what was there, I noticed that and I thought I should use it somewhere, but I couldn't figure out where. I think this is a brilliant support to use it for. Let's have a listen. Maybe let's put it that way. Copy this in here as well. So it's like the same intensity. I can copy this same pattern. We want to be ultra. So yeah, that's it for the return channels. Now that we got our track put in the space, we can go in and do a final volume adjustment. And then after that we can start painting things left and right. We can do both of those things in conjunction. So the best way of doing it would be to just loop the most intense section of the track, which is main drop. And then I'd like to go from beginning and just go one channel at a time. I'm quite happy with the volume of the low frequencies definitely worn at my notes. I'm not gonna touch the panning. It definitely goes in center. So you don't want your main focal to be panned left, the right. Generally speaking, loud. Two slightly separate, one from the other. I'm going to Pandas tend to the right. It just so that there's little bit of movement between those moving on onto a mute. Let's go ahead and turn this back on. Much better. So next, I normally pan a lot more. In Trump's section. I think he was a bit too loud in terms of drums collapse. Definitely center. Quite happy with the volume of that. Just increased slightly volume on those two child. What I'm going to do now, I'm going to split this painting. I'm going to pan them slightly to left. See how more pronounced they became. Let's move on. So open hi-hat. Both of them definitely keep them center point or snare. Going to pan it to the right. And both of our top loops, we can leave them as they are, have already started happening when we're done froms. So let's leave this as is also the closed because they now basically one is a little bit to the left, one is a little bit to the right. Precautions. We can definitely do something precautions. Let's solo them. I'm going to keep this center and then Pandas to the left. Hello. Going to pan that. The right. Here in the context. This has been parent already. Then we can clap roles and snare rose. Slightly. Look whether they are just so we can hear them a little bit more. I'm pretty happy with this. I'm not gonna put any sound effects on the effects group, also not gonna do any painting. So that basically concludes the mixing lesson. I'm pretty happy with the results I saw about making things simple and effective. So in the next lesson, I'm going to show you how I make my track sounds super loud and ready for that club play. So see you in the next lesson where we're going to look at mastering. 11. MASTERING: Hello and welcome back. This is it. This is the final step, making the track loud and ready to be played on a big system. This is the mastering stage. So I've spent a couple of hours cleaning things up a little bit. And now what we're gonna do is we're going to put things on the master channel. So the first things first, I want to start with an equalizer. By ozone. I'm going to set it to 30 hertz, going to select a low-pass filter and then set it to 24 decibels. And then same here, set it to 20 kilohertz. Low-pass filter, 24 dB. We can get rid of those and then set it from analog to digital. What this does is it limits the frequency band from 30 hertz to 20 kilohertz is basically a human hearing range. So we didn't need anything below 30 hertz and then we don't need any information above 20 kilohertz. Then the next step is to compress the sound. I'm going to use 1176 for that. So again, making sure your play in the loudest section of your track. So I'm going to set the play head in the drop section. Also, we can just loop it around for 16 bars, just like that. Let's play it and see what our compressor does. This compresses just going to level things out a little bit. I'm selecting super slow attack and super slow release. And also I'm going to engage this ratio all the way or four buttons and this essentially acting as a pre limiter if you wish. Once I'm done with that, I'm going to apply some EQ. This EQ, I'm going to shape the tone of the whole track. So I'm going to boost him high frequencies, reduce some mid-frequencies, and also boosts and low frequencies. We're going to start from low, set it to 60 hertz, and then give a slight boost. Bandwidth all the way too broad. And then this one, I sometimes go 12, sometimes I go ten kilohertz, depending on the track, depending of the way it sounds. So let's start with ten kilohertz. Boosted around ten kilohertz. That gives a bit of air. Or if you overdo it, you're risking making your track sound a bit thinner. That's why I went up and then I reduce that a little bit. That was a little bit too much. This is cool. We can always turn on and off and see how this affects our mix. This instantly gives our truck more character, more depth. One other thing I like to do with the CTQs to dip around 300 hertz to clean the sound up a little bit. I have to be careful with this and not overdo it. What happens if you crank it to high? Somewhere around there? Sounds pretty good to me once we've done with shaping our track and we can add some character to it. I'm going to use sausage fastener for that. And literally as before, just drop it in, it adds a ton of color. So with this one, I'm just adding the same color as we did before on individual tracks, but now on the truck as a whole. Check this out. Ads width. It adds brightness, brilliant stuff. I haven't seen anyone being used in sausage or fats in our own master. So once we added EQ and color, we can go ahead and clip the sound. So with this again, drop this to 0. And that's the clipping device I've showed you before. Let's start cranking this clip Nawab until this light starts to blink. Now that we increased a lot of gain with this clipper, we have to compensate, which we're gonna do by Justin this gain, which is this utility plug-in. I'll go here is too much input volume with the output volume. Let's turn it on and off, see what difference it makes. If you look at this metering, it just literally catches those very spiky top peaks. So let's say there's like some occasional peaks that come in through and then when it's on, it catches those peaks. Just like that. Now another thing I really like to do is point a utility at the end of the chain and automating break. So as you know, we've got this section that is a break. So a one-to-one with this utility, I'm placing the points like that and I'm decreasing the game by minus three dB just before the drops. So when the break starts, the utility kicks in. If you look in here and then this automation just drops it three dB and then just before the drop, it goes back to 0. So on the break we basically decreasing the volume tiny bit. It's very unnoticeable in a big picture, but it definitely does a lot to the impact of the drop. Just like that. And then I also copy that to the main breakdown and just increase that. So it's going for this loan. Just like that. Then the very last thing you put on your master is a limiter. So I like to use this ozone maximizer like this algorithm here with the trends in setting ceiling to minus one. Apparently these days, this is the streaming standard threshold. The way of doing it is to play the tune at its loudest portion and turn down the threshold until desired loudness is achieved. That's pretty loud. There you go. That's your mastering chain. We can group all these plugins together, turn on and off and see what difference you made. I'm happy with the results. That basically concludes the mastering lesson. I'm going to do a full track playback in the next video. So I'm gonna see you there. 12. TRACK PLAYTHROUGH: Hello and congratulations for staying till the end. Hopefully by the end of this class, you managed to create your own unique original tune, following the steps outlined in this class as a guidance. Now going to hit play and listen to the track from beginning to the end together with you. So sit back, relax and enjoy. Can you go? Good? I like it. And loud. Loud. To me. 13. OUTRO: Thank you very much for taking this class. I really hope you have enjoyed this class and learned that it is very easy to create before chatting track from scratch, all you need is a good idea. A couple of techniques, good-quality song choice and a bit of time and patience. My hope is that you picked up, I think the two from this class of both ton of time and effort into making. If you have any questions regarding this class, please feel free to hit me up at macro-level on Instagram. They'll be happy to help. That concludes this class. I'll just say a massive thank you for your time. And if you followed along and created your own tune, I would love to hear it. So thank you. Unless keep creating.