Music Production in Ableton Live: Learn to Write Drum Beats in Any Genre

1. Introduction to Drums: Can make a whole crowd of people dance with literally just drums. And it's the beat, the pulse, the rhythm of music. Pay That's why in this class, I'm going to teach you how to make drum beats in Ableton Live. We'll cover Beat fundamentals to advance rhythms and Beyond. I'm Benza Maman. I have a degree in music composition, and I've been working behind the scenes in the music industry since 2010. I've written and produced songs for countless artists, and I've had the privilege to work with the writers and producers of artists like Taylor Swift, Paul McCartney, Luke Combs, and Many More. Recently, I've even got millions of streams, views, and some viral videos of my own, and I can't wait to share this decade of knowledge with you. In this class, you'll learn how to write drum beats in any genre. We'll cover how to use different drum sounds in Aplton, what the pros use, how to make your drums pop in the mix, and just a little bit of music theory so that you can understand the mechanics behind a drum. This class is designed to equip you with the tools and knowledge to take your music to the next level. Whether you're just starting out or trying to refine your skills, I'm here to guide you every step of the way. Don't worry. We'll keep it engaging, and straightforward with plenty of practical tips that you can apply right away. I use Ableton live, but the tools and techniques that I teats in this class can be applied to any music production software. The assignment for this class is to follow along and make a drumbeat of your very own. So if you're ready to make addictive grooves for your music, then let's dive in and make some beats. 2. Counting Rhythm: Basics: Welcome to the drums chapter. And in this chapter, we're going to be going through all things drums. We're going to explore, what are the different parts that make up a drumbeat, and what are the standard drum beats that most people use. Before we jump into the making of a drumbeat, we're just going to do a little bit of how to count a drum beat. This is just a little tiny sliver of music theory. So let's dive right into that. Counting music basics. Music theory goes really deep. But for this lesson, we're just going to go over how you count a drumbeat. We have meses, which are also called bars. There's time signature and subdivisions. So, let's go ahead here and let me create a middy clip. I'm going to loop this. We're going to turn on our metronome, and I'm going to go over the basics of counting. So, you may have heard musicians count before, and they might go like, one, two, three, four. That is the quarter notes of the beats per minute, the tempo of whatever they're trying to play. And the idea is that you know the tempo. So in our case, here we are, let's go to 120 beats per minute and listen to what that sounds like. So if you were to count that, you would count along with every single hit of the metronome. One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. And that is counting this tempo. If the tempo is slower, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. And essentially, counting the quarter notes of a beat is just counting along with every single beat of the metro note. A tool that can be useful for counting throughout an entire song is that at the beginning of it, each new bar, you say the number of that bar. For example, one, two, three, four, two, two, three, four, three, two, three, four, four, two, three, four so on and so forth. You can go all the way up to 16, two, 34 or however long your song is. Counting the basic quarter notes is pretty easy. It's also helpful, though, to be able to count the subdivisions in a beat. So subdivisions are how you divide your bar into even smaller parts. So let's go over that. Here we have the basic quarter notes. One, two, three, four. Let's say we wanted to also count the eighth notes. The eighth notes would be every quarter note and a note in between every quarter note. You would count this like one and two, and three, and four, and, one, and, two, and three, and four. So the eighth notes, you count as and that go in between your quarter notes. The eighth notes are really easy to count if you think about basic house music. It's like, D. And so the in between beat of that high hat, that's where the eighth notes live. Let's say you want to go and count 16th notes. I'm going to move these eighth notes down here. These 16th notes divide the quarter notes and the eighth notes. So we have now four notes per beat, and you count those as one E and. So we still have the one and, but we have added E and to the beat, giving us a count that sounds like this. One e end to two e end three to four end, one e end to two e end three to four end. So that's how you count 16th notes. And if you're talking to seasoned musicians, you can talk about the end of the fourth beat, and you can talk about these different hits because universally, this is how they are called one e and. These are very specific places that mean the different 16th notes. And seasoned musicians who know music theory will know exactly which beat you're talking about. That's the basics of counting straight time or common time. 3. Counting Rhythm: Advanced: Talk about some of the advanced ways you can count music. We have half time, double time and triplets. So as we know now, this you would count one en two en three to four. This is common time. This is exactly how you count this at this tempo. There is something called half time. And this is more common in different kinds of music like trap. You can go up to a faster tempo. But instead of having these big beats hit where they're hitting, you can have something that's called half time. So half time means you are at a fast tempo, but you're counting the time in half. So let's see what this sounds like. We are at 160 beats per minute. And instead of counting en two, three and 40, one, two, three and 40, we're counting it like one, two, three, four, one, and, two, and three, and four, one e en two. Three and four and 12 and three and four end. This means that even though we're at 160 beats per minute, we're counting it like it's 80 beats per minute. We're counting half time. Now, what is the benefit of ever counting something half time? It means that normally your snares hit on the two and the four, and we're going to dive into that more later in this chapter. But now your snare is hitting on the third beat instead. The benefit of doing this is that your 16th notes at this tempo are significantly faster than the 16th notes would be at a slower tempo, and the 32nd notes are even faster. This is almost ridiculously fast, but it gives you new possibilities. It gives you new ways to find sounds because if we go here to 80 beats per minute, Here, our 16th notes are exactly how we're counting them. So here our 16th notes are much slower. So what's interesting about counting halftime is that it gives you a new perspective, a different way to interface with the music, and sometimes you end up coming up with ideas you wouldn't have come up with originally if it was at its common tempo. Next, we also have double time. You can have half time, you can have double time. So let's go to 80 Bats Permitte. And normally, this would be a way to organize drums and 80 beats permitte. If you want to count double time, it's exactly how it sounds. This means you're conceiving this tempo as twice as fast as what it is, meaning you're counting from eight beats per minute, as if it was 160 beats per minute. And the last thing I wanted to show you was triplets. Let's create a beat here. This is in regular eight beats per minute. And let's go down here to the triplet grid. Now, normally, there are four counts per beat, one e and four. Now we're going to go to triplets, which will change 4-3. This means that now there are three hits per beat, which sounds like this. So, when you go here and you want to learn how to count triplets, you count them by saying triple it. So this is one triplet, two triplet, three triplet, four triplet, triple triple triple, triple it, triple it, triple it triple it. This is a swung kind of feeling. It gives you a different kind of groove, which is really cool to incorporate into your music. Usually, songs are either in straight time or in triplet time. It's hard to mix and match these two rhythms. It can be done as a creative choice, but normally the ear tends to prefer when a whole song is in triplet time or a whole song is in straight time. You can have triplets at faster BPMs. You can have triplets at slower PMs. And triplets are a really cool thing to remember in music production. So that not everything is always common in straight time to add that little bit of swing to your music. So now you have the basics of counting music. It's nice to be able to count in your head and explore a little bit when you're listening to songs that you like. You can sort of count them and understand what are they're doing? What are the subdivisions that they're using? Is it in triplet time? Is it in common time? And next, we're going to dive in to making our own drumbeats. 4. Crafting Drums In Ableton: This lesson is about crafting drums in Ableton. So we're just going to go over how do you make and use drums in Ableton. So, there are two main ways that we've discussed before, and just to go over, you can pull in a drum rack, or you can use impulse. You can use a preset drum rack in impulse, or you can use your own samples. So here we have our preset version of impulse. Here we have version of impulse that has no samples in it yet. And here we have a version of drum rack. I'm going to delete these two extra files, and let's go find some samples. So I'm going to go to the Music Production Resources folder. And we're going to go to samples. Let's find a kick drum. And let's drag this kick drum here into impulse. And let's drag this kick drum here into drum rack. Let's find a snare. We're gonna drag this snare into drum rack, and we're gonna drag this snare into impulse. Next, we're going to also drag this high hat into impulse and this high hat into drum rack. We're gonna go to Tom's. Drag a Tom here into drum rack and a Tom into impulse. And let's say we also want to crash. Drag a crash into both. Percussion hit. Now let's go into our instance of impulse that we pulled from Ableton's default packs. This already has Ableton's drums in there, and here we're going to be able to create a drumbeat from Ableton's preset drums. Let's turn this little icon on so we can hear the drums. So here we go. We've easily created our drumbeat in impulse. Let's take the same exact drumbeat, and let's put it in the version of impulse that we created ourselves. The only difference is that where our high hat lives is here instead. Now let's move the same part over to drum rack. And you can see here they're not placing in the right places. So those are three ways to do the same thing. You can see that the impulse that we created and the drum rack that we created had these exact same samples, and the impulse that Ableton created had different samples. Essentially, you just draw in the different beats that you want to happen. So you draw in your kick drums, wherever you want your kick drums to hit, you draw your snares, wherever you want your snares to hit, and you draw your high hats, wherever you want your high hats to hit. Here is where you can just really explore and have a lot of fun. You can play your drum beats by arming them and playing them on a beat pad or a keyboard or your computer keyboard, or you can just program them and see wherever you want your different hits to hit. There are, of course, standard hits that most songs use that make up most drum beats. But I encourage you to really just explore, and maybe you'll find something new. It's important to have fun when you're making your drum beat so that you really can come up with something unique. And you can just start coming up with your own drum beats just by programming different hits, finding what you like. And remember, you can always add from the p to give a live feel to what you're programming. And you can move the hits around on their own. And you can have longer loops than just 1 bar, and I really suggest having a four bar loop as the best way to go because that way, you can have different parts that evolve over time. It's nice to have this crash, but maybe only on the first speed out of four. And this keeps your drum beats fresh. Drum Rack works similarly to the impulse when we put our own sounds in there. Except, remember, the advantage of drum rack is that behind each of these clips, you can put your own unique effects. That is a quick overview of how you make drums in Ableton, and I will catch you on the next lesson. 5. Drum Beat Anatomy: What Makes a Drum Beat: This lesson is all about the parts that make up a drumbeat. So let's dive right in. We have kick drums, snare drums, toms, high hats, rides, crashes, and cymbals. So these are all parts that you'll see in an actual drum kit. So let's go over what these parts are. We have kick drums here. And the kick drum is that low drum hit, that low constant hit. A lot of the times, in house music, it's going constantly four on the floor, is what it's called, the sound like this. So, the kidrum is a fundamental part of the groove. The snare drum is what holds down the back beat. The backbeat is the two and the four when you're counting, one, two, three, four. Two and four are the back beats of your song, and that's so important for knowing where the groove is. If you have a different kind of beat, let's go to eight BPMs. Between the kick and the snare, you have your whole foundation of your beat. High hats make up the smaller subdivisions of your beat. And the hights are really used to break up the beat and show you the subdivisions and show you where the groove is. The high hats also add a lot of energy. We also have Toms, and Toms are usually used for Phils. Tom's have a really big and bombastic sound. We'll do a whole lesson on Phils, but for now, we're just exploring what these different drum hits are. So, let's say you have a two bar loop. The Toms might just come in at the end of the second loop. We also have ride symbols, which are a little bit more of a stand out symbol than a high hat. Rides can be used instead of high hats sometimes, depending on the kind of beat you're trying to make. But oftentimes they're just used as accents here and there. This kit doesn't come with a crash, but we do have a crash in this kit over here. So we'll just layer on a crash at the beginning of our two bar loop here and mute our rides. So in this specific pattern that we're building, the crash and ride are filling similar jobs. The crash is usually at the beginning of a chorus or at the beginning of a transition. You just want to, like, crash into the next section because crash fills up a lot of space, so it makes things sound full and exciting. No matter what genre you're interested in, you're gonna notice the similarities drum beats have these standard parts. Some have more modern sounding high hats with quick little trap fills, some have more old school sounding toms. But at the end of the day, you're always going to have kick drums, snare drums, high hats, toms, and the rest of your symbols. 6. The Two Main Beats: Go to break down the two main beats that make up almost every single drum beat you have ever heard. By now, we've explained that the snare drum lives on the back beat. And the backbeat are the two and four of your beat when you're counting one, two, three, four. So the two and four are the backbeat, and that's where your snare lives. So let's go ahead and put our snares on the back beat. There, our snare is on the back beat. We'll do a eighth node basic high at pattern. We're going to turn down the volume of the high hat. Now, this pattern, so far, is going to be basically every drumbeat you've ever heard can fall into this pattern. Give or take the high hats. Maybe you have less high hats or you're filling in the 16th notes. This is so far 99% of all drums. And what I'm going to do next is the only element that really changes. The kick drum being four on the floor, like so. And this sounds like this. You can slow it down. You can speed it up. You can speed it up even more. Even more. And it doesn't matter how fast or slow you go. This is one of the basic beats that make up all the drum beats that you've ever heard. There is one other basic pattern that make up every other drum beat you've probably ever heard. And that is some version of this pattern here. This pattern here can have more filler kicks, but essentially, this is the pattern. Whether it's this slow, slower. Faster. Way faster. This pattern is the other pattern that makes up almost every drum beat you've ever heard. So this pattern you can explore with adding some more kick drums, but the same basic foundation of hitting here on the downbeat, and then here on the eighth note after the third beat is going to stay the same. So whether you're doing something like this, or you're doing something like this, or whether you're doing something like this, The foundation of your kick drum hitting here and your kick drum hitting here remain the same. So you can experiment with different versions of this pattern. You can listen to your favorite songs, which will have different versions of this pattern. But no matter how fast or slow your beats per minute, most all commercial music has either a for the for kick drum pattern. F on the floor, meaning a kick drum hitting on every corner note like this. Or this hip hop style drum pattern, which is the kick drum hitting here and here. You can listen to your favorite songs, see where they put the flourishes of their other kick drum hits in this pattern here. You can see what they're doing with the high hats. But you'll notice the snares are always on the twos and fours, and the kick drums are always hitting here. The one difference is that if you are counting halftime, even though it'll sound the same, where these are hitting will be a little bit different. If you wanted to do this halftime, suddenly the third beat becomes the backbeat. So your snares are suddenly going to be hitting here. And that is the difference. It will sound the same to your ear, but where they're actually placing on the grid will be different if you're doing halftime. It's really amazing that there are just two basic beats. There are, of course, an endless amount of different beats and rhythms available. But I'm just talking about most commercial music you will find falls into one of these two beats. 7. The Raggaeton Beat: Regatone beat has really broken into the commercial music space over the last few years. So let's explore the Reg toone beat as a solid alternative to the two main beats. We can keep our high hat pattern the same. Drawing in eighth notes here. I'm going to turn them down. We're going to keep our kick drum in our basic four on the floor. Switch to quarter notes, draw these in. And now the snare drums are going to do something unique. Here they're going to hit on the 16th note before the second beat, and then the end. And then again, This is the gatone beat. And this beat is an alternative to the two main beats with your snare no longer just hitting on the back beat. Now the snare is hitting on the 16th note before the back beat and then the eighth note after the back beat. Without the high hat. We're going to cover embellishments and fills in a later lesson. So, of course, with this pattern is right for some really exciting little drum fills to keep it sounding fresh and fun. But the gatone beat is another beat to watch out for. 8. Samples and Loops: Enhance Your Beats: Talk a little bit about Ablet's drum kits. If you go to impulse, you'll have Ableton's preset drum kits that are ready to go. So you could pull in, say, this backbeat, or you could pull in this vintage funky good time, and you'll have different sounds that are available to you. You could use these exact same patterns on a different drum kit. And you have a very different sound. So you're going to start to understand that the quality of the sounds of your drums have a huge impact on the vibe. Versus this. They sound so different yet it's the same pattern. That's what's so fascinating about the sound choice and sound design. You can go and choose any of these preset drum kits from Ableton, or as I've said before, you can use your own samples from the music production Student Resources folder or any other third party samples that you can find. In a later lesson, I'm going to show you some great resources where you can get some different samples online. Look. 9. Ableton Drumkits: Talk a little bit about Ableton's drum kits. If you go to impulse, you'll have Ableton's preset drum kits that are ready to go. So you could pull in, say, this backbeat, or you could pull in this vintage funky good time, and you'll have different sounds that are available to you. You could use these exact same patterns on a different drum kit. And you have a very different sound. So you're going to start to understand that the quality of the sounds of your drums have a huge impact on the vibe. Versus this. They sound so different, yet it's the same pattern. That's what's so fascinating about the sound choice and sound design. You can go and choose any of these preset drum kits from Ableton, or as I've said before, you can use your own samples from the music production Student Resources folder or any other third party samples that you can find. In a later lesson, I'm going to show you some great resources where you can get some different samples online. B. 10. Ableton 12: Browser and Filter Tags: This section, we're going to be covering the new and improved browser. There are some massive upgrades to the browser, and it makes finding the right sound easier than ever. What's immediately obvious is this is taking up more real estate. We have some new tags here. So let's explore what these mean and how this makes finding the right sound easier than ever before. So this is what's called the filter tab. If you open it down, there's a bunch of new functions here. If you close it, this is basically exactly how Ableton's layout used to be. You can click through the different options in your library, you can click through the different collections that you have, different places on your computer, or hard drives, and your plug ins. This is all exactly the same that it used to be. So the big upgrade here is in this filters tab. This allows you to tag your sounds and the sounds of Ableton with specific tags so that you can find what you're looking for even faster. For example, if you want a base sound, you can simply click bass, maybe you want an analog base, and maybe you want it to be a synthesizer. All of Ableton's sounds and instruments have been pre tagged. So by simply clicking here, you are now only looking through Ableton's analog synthesizer bass sounds. Saves you an enormous amount of time if you're working on a track, and you know the kind of sound you want, but maybe you don't know exactly where to find it. By clicking these tags saves you a ton of time and gets you straight to the sounds that are going to be a good option for your song. You can also tag your own sounds with any tag that you want. The tags work for both instruments and for samples. So here we have our kick loop. If you want to tag some of your own sounds, your own plug ins, or your own samples, or even add tags to Ableton sounds, you want to click over here to this edit panel. You want to click over here to this edit panel. This will pull up a menu of tags that you can add to any of your sounds. For example, if we go over to Splice, here we can go to this splice pack that I like. We'll find some drums. And let's say we want to be able to find this again under some tags. So now we can go in and start to tag this. So it's a loop, drum loop over here. We can add any descriptive character that we might like, can add your own tag. For instance, this has a tribal feel to me. Now we can click this tribal tag anytime we have a tribal feeling sample or sound. You obviously do not need to use all of these tags, if for instance, you just want to organize things by genre. Maybe you just want to have all of your house sounds and samples organized under house, and your hip hop sounds and samples organized under hip hop or whatever genre of music that you like to make. You can add your own entire group. If, for example, you want to have a whole group of galactic sounds. Now we have Galactic. Underneath Galactic, you can add drums, bass, synths, or whatever sub tags makes sense for you. So now if we go over to splice and we have all of our samples here, we can click on the tags that we've made. Let's say you want to search through just the loops, the tribal sounds. And there we go. You can understand how useful this is once you have tons of favorite sounds tagged in all sorts of different tags and categories, which makes finding the right sound sample or instruments so easy. If you have a sound that's close, but not quite right, when you click on it, you'll see this new icon. This will pull up similar sounds to the one you've selected, so you can sift through sounds that are similar to what you have. And now we have a bunch of other loops that Ableton thinks sounds similar to the one we chose. As you can see here, we have a rating score of how similar Ableton thinks it is. This one being pretty similar. And let's go to the bottom, it probably will be less similar. Exactly. So, let's say you have a high hat. Remember to unclick your filters when you are not looking for a specific filter. Let's say you have a high hat sound. And that's close, but you want other high hat sound that sound like this. Click the button, and This feature really saves so much time in finding and auditioning the right sounds, and it helps you not settle for a sound that's pretty close because it's so easy to just once you've found something that's basically right, you can click this button and just quickly audition 20 other sounds similar to make sure that you found the right one. Another workflow enhancement is, let's say you're deep in your sample library, finding the perfect sound. And then you move on and you look for something else. Maybe you wanted to find an audio effector or you do something else. You can now use these buttons here to retrace your steps like a command Z that just works for the browser here, so you can go back to where you were before. This is so useful because so many times I'm searching for a sound and then I'm working on the track, and my attention goes elsewhere. And then I'm like, Oh, where was that sound I found 20 minutes ago? Here, you can go backwards and forwards in your search so that you can easily find everything that you've come across so far. So you can assign your own tags, you can use Ableton's pre tagged sounds, and you simply Click on the folder over here, for example, splice, and then you click on the tabs, and it'll pull up everything tagged within this folder, according to the tags and filters that you chose here. You can do this with your plug ins. You can do this with Ableton's instruments. Come pre tag, like I said. One of the most frustrating parts of music production for me, has been searching through all of the sounds and samples. When I'm in a flow state and I have the inspiration coming through, I don't want to spend 20 minutes searching for the right sound. I want to keep letting the music flow through. So, although sometimes I do enjoy searching for sounds, when I'm inspired, I often want to get right to the music. So this enhancement to the browser with filters and tags makes finding the right sound so much easier. 11. Ableton 12: Drum Rack and Simpler Upgrade: Searching for similar sounds function in the browser made its way to the drum rack and the simpler, which helps keep your flow state going when you're using the simpler or the drum rack. So let's dive right in. So if you pull up a drum rack here, and let's grab this golden kit. So here we have all the sounds that came with the golden kit drum rack. Hey. If you hit this button here, now all of these can be swapped out by clicking through these different arrows here. If you want to go back to a sound you had before, simply click here. If you want to switch out the entire kit, you can use the big arrows up here. Now, the whole drum kit has changed. If you want to change it again, click here to listen. So here you can quickly sift through completely different drum kits in case all of a sudden you weren't feeling the choices you initially made. Or let's go back to the beginning by clicking this back arrow. Now we have our original kit, but let's say we click here. Maybe this kick drum sound that is mixed with the high hat doesn't sound as cool as we thought. We can click here and just audition different kicks. Maybe that's more the vibe. To me, that actually does sound better. Now, let's say we like our kick drum, but we're not that into anything else. You can click this button, lock the kick drum, and just switch out everything else in the entire drum kit. To me, that sounds much better, but let's just click through a few different options to see what we have to work with. It's keeping that same kick that we like, but switching everything else out. Of course, if you decide you like the high hat, we could lock that as well and just keep switching everything else out. This obviously makes finding the exact perfect sounds super quick when you're working with drum rack. Now let's pull up a simpler. So I'm going to drag here this simpler, and we have that same looking functionality available right down here. Let's say this is close, but not quite what we're looking for. We can click through some different options here. That's pretty cool. And I like that one. Of course, if after all that, you decided you like the first one, you can click back here. You can also click the Hot swap mode if you want to decide which sound you want to swap this out with instead of having Ableton suggest some options for you. You could click this Worley piano, and there you go. Or you could use these tags to decide, Okay, I want something analog, and I want it to be housy. And maybe you want to base all of a sudden, so let's try this. You can even sort things by key if you've decided to tag your own sounds this way, or Ableton has pre tagged the key for most of its sounds. These upgrades to the drum rack and the simpler our next level. I use the functionality all the time, and it really does make making music so much more enjoyable. 12. Sample One Shots: This lesson is all about one shots. So let me explain to you what those are. One shots are the individual drum hits, like a kick drum hit, a snare drum hit. And the student resources folder is full of one shots. It's almost a folder exclusively of one shots. So you can go to any of these kicks or one shots. Any of these high hats? They're not loops because a loop is usually a pattern that can loop on itself. This is not really enough to loop on itself. But what you do with one shots is you create your own drum kit. So let's go ah. Command or Windows Shift T to open a new Mitty track, select some space. Insert clip. And now let's go to a drum rack, and drag it in. We'll go to our student resources folder, and audition some different one shots. We'll get this kick one shot. We'll try maybe some of these snares. Maybe a clap. Maybe a different clap. We'll find some snaps. And we'll find tos. Now we'll find some high hats. Okay. And some rides. Here we've assembled our drum kit. So when we go to program, we've assembled a drum kit full of one shots. And we'll loop this. Turn this on, so we can hear what our sound sound like. I'm going to turn this off. A quick hack when you have some 16th notes. And sometimes even with eighth notes is to select every other note and pull down the velocity a lot. Then we can pull down the velocity of the high hats altogether. And this gives it more of a live feel to it. You could also, in theory, drag your one sts to the grid itself. As you can look here with this Mon Baton beat that I made, I dragged all of these hits onto the grid so that they're not in a drum rack. They're simply living on the actual timeline. It works the exact same way. I still have the hits hitting where they would in the drum rack or the impulse instance, except they're just living on the timeline. I even have a little fill. You can choose to work in whichever way makes the most sense to you. One shots are all about assembling your drum kit together so that you're ready to make some beats. 13. Play Your Drums: This lesson is about playing your drums. So let's say you want to actually play your drum parts in. You might have a beat pad, you might have a midi keyboard. But if you don't, you can always use the computer keyboard itself. You'll probably want to play to the metronome, and you want to find what's called the pocket. So let's dive right in. So, let's create a new midi track, and let's go over here into impulse and grab our drum kit. Now, I'm going to select this four bar space here, one, two, three, four. Right click and hit Insert Empty Midi clip. I'm going to click on the Midi clip we just created. Gonna hit commander Windows L to Loop, and now this will loop. So if I turn on record enable, our drum pad will now trigger the drum sounds. So now we're playing our drums. If I had a Mdy keyboard plugged in, I would find the notes on the Mdy keyboard that triggered the drums, and I would play them in the exact same way. You'll turn on your metronome, and you'll hit record. And you would obviously play it so that you actually like what you came out with. You would take a couple of times to, like, find where the sounds are, find where the groove is. I like to play to the metronome because then I know that I'm really in time. And you could also play using your computer keyboard. If this keyboard is selected here, then the keys on your keyboard will trigger your drums, and you could record them that way. There's something called the pocket. And the pocket is the groove. It's the feel of the drums. Now, if you're playing the drums to nothing. It's starting the song. The pocket is whatever you want it to be. If you're playing two a guitar, two a synth, two another recording, then you want to lean however they're leaning. But this is what I mean. You want to play your part hopefully in a loop mode long enough that you really start getting in the feeling of it. And sometimes I'll record for, like, two or 3 minutes of a 48 bar loop to really just get into the groove of it where I'm really, really feeling it. So this is what I mean. Notice how one el was playing the beat was leaning in different ways. Just playing a simple eighth note can have different feels to it. You can be a little bit ahead of the beat. You can be a little bit behind the beat. And what you want to do is play it for long enough that none of it feels awkward, that it has a flow to it, whatever that flow is. And because you're actually playing it, it probably will be a little bit before a little bit after the beat, but in a very intentional feeling kind of way. So it's worth taking the time if you're going to play something to play it long enough that you get comfortable feeling the grove and Sometimes I'll just hit record, and I'll just play and play and play and my mind even wanders. And by that time, I've just gone into full groove mode, and I'm only just feeling what I'm doing. And what you want is a natural groove that's in time that has no little awkward jumps or awkward feelings, and it's just one solid groove because that is the live field that we're always talking about. 14. Program Your Drums: Let's talk about programming your drums. We've done a lot of this already. I just want to make sure that we understand the concept. So when we're programming drums in impulse or in drum rack, we have the available sounds here. We then grab our pen tool and draw in where we want the values to hit. So if we want this kind of a beat, we draw our kick drums here and our snares on the backbeat and our high hats like so. If we want a different beat, we could maybe get rid of these 16th notes. If you wanted a four on the floor pattern. You could speed this up. But essentially, you draw in where you want the hit to go. And sometimes you need to do this in loop mode so that you can continuously hear what you're doing to really understand the vibe you're going for. This is really helpful when you want to layer some of your sounds because you can start telling where would be a good place to layer. And and and and and And let's say make this a longer loop. Move this here and duplicate this. And let's say on this last hit, we want to layer all the claps. And this snap too. Maybe we'll meet the snare. Sounds a little strange, so maybe not. But essentially, what we're going to do here is you can layer on your hits, and visually, it's very easy to see where your layers are hitting and what you want to do with them. So that's the benefit of using a drum rack or a impulse, instance is you can easily program your drums. You see where they all hit, and you can easily layer. Let's say you had your kick and snare on the grid, and you wanted to do a combination of having your drums on the grid and having your drums in drum rack or impulse. So let's click here in an empty space, select all of these high hats and drag them all to the top because this normalizes the velocity in case you weren't sure why some of them had different velocities and what that was going to sound like. And now they're all going to be the same volume, and we can listen to what this sounds like with our beat that we made on the grid itself. We can slow it down. And here we have a combination of the high hats that we programmed, and the drums that we programmed, but one of them is in drum rack, and the other is on the grid. That's the basics of programming your drums. You just draw your note wherever you want it to hit. And you can trust the theory of kick drums hitting, where the two basic kick drum patterns are, or these snares always hitting on the back beats and your high hat subdividing, or you can just trust your ear and just go off of whatever sounds best to you. 15. Kicks and Snares Fly the Nest: Sadly, as convenient as it is to see all of your drum hits nicely in one drum rack or one impulse rack. It kind of makes sense for the kick drum and the snare rum to live on their own. Let's look at this drum beat here. There's a lot going on here. And we have our high hats that live in their own world, their own drum rack. We have a shaker. We have some percussion. We have more percussion over here, some layers. And even though it would have been nice to see all of these hits within their own drum rack for the purposes of this here, it's nice to be able to solo your kick drums and your snares. Because they're so fundamentally important to your song. And when you're dealing with the stems of a song, sometimes you'll get all the drums, but sometimes you'll get kicks on their own track and snares on their own track, and then all the rest of the drums together. So it'll look something like this. You'll have kick snares, and then the rest of your drums. This is because how important the kicks and snares are. So it's convenient to have them on their own tracks, because you can quickly use different effects on them, even though you can also do that in drum rack. But for the reason of when you're done with your song and you're needing to export out the different parts for your mix engineer or for yourself, if you're going to mix it, it's convenient to have it on its own track to begin with. And I find myself gravitating towards producing this way. Be I do mix my own music, I know that I'm going to have to export this on its own ways. So why not just have them on their own track? My personal workflow is to have usually the kicks and snares on the grid here, even though they're not always quote of perfectly on the grid, I will move some of these hits around so that they have their own groove, but I like having them on the timeline and then the rest of the drums in their own section. What you would do with a drum beat that existed like this, You could leave everything in a drum rack and duplicate this a couple times. And for this section here, you would have the high hats. I selected everything I wanted to turn off and I hit zero. This keeps all the information in the drum rack in case you ever wanted to go back and just use one, you don't have to copy and paste remove anything. All the information is still here. Next, you can go to the second one and we'll turn off the high hats and turn off the kicks. And finally, we can go to this last one where we're going to turn everything off except for the kick drums. Now we have our kicks, our stands, and our high hats. This is the same method done for the same reason as this up here, which has the kick and snare on the timeline. Here, the kick and snare is in their own drum rack. There's no reason in particular why this is better than that or that is better than this. It's just your own personal workflow. If you would rather program your drums in this view, do it this way. If you would rather place them on the timeline like here, do it that way. And it really is up to you. But having your snares and kicks isolated from the rest of your drums is pretty nice for the end of the production process. If you're somebody who needs everything together at first, that's totally fine. When I first started producing, all of my drums lived in one drum wreck. And then eventually over time, as I got more comfortable making beats, I started producing this way with the kicks and snares living on But you can play your drum kit altogether in the same drum rack and then separate things out, or you can play your drum kit altogether in the same drum kit or program them and then copy them this way. There's no right or wrong way to do it. 16. Understanding EQ: What is EQ? In this lesson, we're going to be demystifying, explaining, and diving into how to use EQ, what it is, and why it's called EQ. So let's go over here to our audio effects, EQs and filters, and we're gonna pull over the EQ eight. Let's go down to this loop right here. Part gonna make it a loop. Part. And we're gonna pull our EQ onto this loop. So, first of all, it's called EQ because it stands for equalizer. So what does this mean? In the EQ eight, it is very visually obvious what the EQ is. We have the low end on the left, and we have the high end on the right. So EQ is affecting the frequency of your sound. If you were to pull up the left part, you're pulling up in volume, the lows. If you pull it down, you're pulling down the lows. If you're pulling up in volume the right side, you're pulling up in volume the high end. And pulling down the high end. You can do big broad moves with EQs, like this. You can do smaller moves like this. And we have different EQ modes here. So let's explain what these are. When they have a shape like this, but effectively these work the same way. What this does, it's called a high pass. And a high pass is cutting away the lows. So anything below this point is essentially left in the dust and cut off. We have this version, which is the same thing just with a slightly gentler curve. So It's just determining the way that everything is getting cut off. This has more of the sound is coming through versus this one is a sharper cut off point. We can go here, which is called a shelf. And in this shelf, you can pull up or down the low end from really wherever you want. So we can start pulling up all the information from here, from here, or from here, or down from here. Most commonly, this is like, Okay, let's just sort of roll off a little bit of the low end like this. This is the most common way that I will use this. But you can use it, however, makes most sense to you. Next, we have a bell. And so the bell is probably the most common form of Q where you can just pull up a certain frequency, and we can mess with the Q, which is how wide or narrow this bell is. You could have it be super narrow, which would be only affecting a very small part of the sound or super wide. What affects, you know, a bigger part of the sound. And what's so nice about this Q is that you can see the sound when you're playing. So what's really great about this is that you can visually see what you're hearing, which can help you make the EQ choices that you want to make. There are two main schools of EQ. You can do subtractive or additive EQ. And let's say you want to boost a little bit of the high end. Or right here. You can boost this point right here, or you could take down everything below it and above it. So instead of boosting the high end, you're taking down the low end, you could then raise the general volume, which is doing the same exact thing as boosting. There was a while where this was actually the preferred method because a lot of engineers swear that you can hear when you're boosting an EQ, and it was a lot cleaner sounding when you were just subtracting the information and turning up the whole volume of the So if you're bringing this down eight DB, and you were just to boost the general track volume eight DB, this is the same as keeping the track the same level and just boosting the top. Subtractive VQ works just like that. You pull down different information. Maybe you want to pull down a little bit less. Keep the track volume the same, but you want to roll off some of the lows. May I this bell form, maybe you like the lows. Maybe in this bell form, you just don't like this part right here. And always with Q, always use your ears. Additive EQ works the opposite way. You want to boost something. So let's go find something we like. And we want a little bit more of this frequency, so we're just gonna boost it up. Now, normally, because we have things in the red here, I would want to take this down. Additive EQ also works like this, if you want to take your high shelf and boost it. You can also lower your high shelf, which, of course, will be back to subtract Q. And a lot of EQs end up being a combination of the two. I don't personally subscribe to the theory where you can never use added VQ. I do it all the time. So you can use EQ as a subtle tweaking of your sound, say, Okay, I really like how this sounds, but I just want to boost right here. Like, you're not trying to change the sound. You're just trying to enhance it a little bit. That's the best use for EQ, just to enhance what's already there. Sometimes you want to use EQ as sound design. You want to change what you're hearing. This is changing our sample drastically this way. And sometimes you can use EQ for this purpose. You're like, You know what? I like what I'm hearing, but I do want to sculpt this sound and change it pretty dramatically. So you can use EQ for subtle enhancements, and you can use it for sound design itself. You can also use EQ to repair a less than good sounding sound. And you would do this the same way that we're doing all of this. You find the frequency you don't like. Let's say you don't like this, like, wobbly kind of whatever you want to call that sound. So we can try to find it. I still hear it. Which means it's still here. Now, I'm going to go and grab our high pass and we'll pull this up. So this seems to be right where that sound lives. So let's say this looks to be about there, so we're gonna get rid of this, and we're gonna pull up a new point and just pull it down with a wider e here. You can tell by me making this very big and bold cut, and you still hear the sound a little bit. You can start to see how challenging repaired EQ can be. It's there for you if you need it. If there's something in your sample. Let's say you have a vocal that has, the singer is their foot, and you need to get rid of it. It's possible to spend the time to really tea and repair things with your EQ. But most of the time, it's better to just find a different sample or find a different loop or maybe even re record something so that you don't have to repair. It's there as a last case scenario, and it's important that you know about that, but it's also important to know that it is challenging, takes a lot of time. It can be frustrating, and it's often more of a time saver to just find an alternative audio file. World of EQ is vast. And EQ is maybe the most common audio effect that's used. It's important to get familiar with it and to just practice using it so you can understand that your frequencies live in the EQ world, left to right, lows to highs, and everything in between. 17. Understanding Compression: This lesson, we're going to be talking about compression. So let's jump right into what compression is. We're going to be talking about how compression controls dynamics, the attack, which is affecting the transient of your sound, the release, the threshold, the ratio, and some best practices. Compression affects your sounds dynamics. And dynamics are the loudness, variance within the sound. So you can see here on the left in blue There is an uncompressed wave form, which has some spikes in the wave form. It doesn't look like a rectangle, really. It looks like a shape that gets thinner and thicker, and there's points that really jump out and points that are smaller. We can now look at the compressed wave form, which is the exact same wave form and what it looks like after compression. The compressed waveform looks a lot more like a rectangle. What's happening, what a compressor does is you set a threshold, and if any loudness goes above that threshold, it starts compressing it, AKA pushing it down. So if you have these peaks that you can see on the left are triggering the compressor to push it down in volume, that's why the example on the right has the same peaks, but a lot less dramatic, and it looks a lot more even, because that's essentially what a compressor is trying to do is to give you a nice and even sound. You can see here in this middle example where the threshold is compared to the waveforms volume. So the threshold on this one is pretty dramatic, but also the difference between loud to quiet was pretty dramatic, loud being the bigger shapes and quieter being the smaller shapes. With a pretty dramatic threshold, the compressed version at the bottom is a lot more even. The loud sections are a lot closer in volume after the compressor to the uncompressed wave forms. You can see our example on the right, our threshold would be pushing down those parts of the audio that are above the threshold, which would make this example also have a lot more even look. So, let's go to this drum loop here. And let's pull up Ableton's compressor. Sort of audio effects, dynamics because it's a dynamic effect, and we're going to pull on compressor. So we understand a little bit about the theory behind compressors and what the threshold does, but you'll see a lot of different knobs here. And compression for me was the most difficult audio effect to really understand and learn. So hopefully I can save you a lot of time by explaining how it makes sense to me. So with no threshold, the threshold of zero, the compressor won't be doing anything, no matter what all of these other knobs are, the compressor doesn't do anything if the threshold is zero. A. The ratio is the ratio that you are compressing things. You can change the ratio from anything that you want. But it's confusing with so many moving parts that four to one, a ratio four to one is probably where you want to be. And until you really get comfortable with compression, I would leave your ratio four to one all the time, because you can always achieve what you need to from your compressor with the ratio 4-1. So I wouldn't mess with it until you're feeling very comfortable with compressors. So Ratio four to one. Attack. Now, to really hear the attack and release, let's pull our threshold all the way down. Now, this sounds ridiculous. So let's just use this to help us hear what we're doing. Attack is the amount of time after the sound happens, that it takes for the compressor to activate. If we move the attack all the way to the left, it's going to activate as soon as the sound happens. Let's ease up the shod just a little bit so we can hear a little more. Here is the attack all the way to the right. It's going to take 1 second after the sound activates for the compressor to kick in. You can tell by what's visually happening here is it's way louder there, then as a compressor kicks in, and it gets way quieter. So if you want to compress something immediately and not let anything through, you compress all the way to the right. If you want the lightest compression you can possibly have with the attack settings, you want to have the attack settings all the way to the right. So naturally, you probably don't really want either of these things. So you want to live somewhere in the middle, and it's by ear that you will decide how quickly you want the compressor to kick in. And what you want to listen to when you're listening to the compressor, especially for the attack, is listen to that beginning of the sound. This is taming our drum beat a lot versus this. We're getting a lot of that smack is cutting through. So it depends what you are looking for, and it'll change from use cases. But with drums, you usually want to compress your kick drums individually and your snare drums individually, and then all the rest of your drums, maybe individually or maybe together, but each of those have different settings that are preferable, and we'll dive into all of those. But let's listen to this drum loop right here. And maybe we think compressing in the middle sounds pretty good with the attack. Release is how long after the compressor kicks in, do we want the compressor to let go of the sound? So a release all the way to the left would mean as soon as it starts compressing, it'll let go, and a release all the way to the right would mean that it's going to take 3 seconds for the compressor to ease up. So let's see what this sounds like this. And you can tell, this is really just squeezing the sound a lot. So let's see what we're going for here. Quick release, we'll have a snappier sound. And then when you kind of have your settings where you like them, with your threshold in a ridiculously low place, this is where you want to ease up the threshold to get to a more realistic sounding place. The knee affects the curve of the compressor, which is more obvious in this view here. The knee, just like the ratio is something that I usually leave alone, and I would suggest focusing on threshold, attack, and release when you're first getting into compression. One thing that you'll notice about compression is that it might make your sound quieter. So sometimes you need to boost back the volume that you've lost. And that's what this output gain is for, it's called makeup gain. You can also just turn on makeup. In that case, we're distorting, so it doesn't always distort it. And sometimes you'd rather use the output gain for that same reason. But it's important to be able to add back the volume that you might be losing with compression so that you can tell if you actually like what you're doing. Cause sometimes you're like, Oh, I don't think it sounds good, but really, you do think it sounds good. It says, you don't like there just making it quieter. Having the volume not changing is important. As. Compression is really important when you have a full song, when you have a busy sounding mix, because sometimes alone, it doesn't sound as good to have things being compressed. When you need compression, in my opinion is to make your sounds live together in a full song. When you have vocals and guitars, and synths, and drums and bass going on, and it's a lot of information. There is where I can really tell that I like the sound of compression, and that I need things to be compressed so that everything can live in its own zone comfortably. Because with full sounding song with everything being very dynamic, it can be a lot to listen to. So my general rule of thumb is the busier the song, the more compression, the simpler the song, the less compression. If I have a song, this a ballad of just vocals and piano, that will be a lot less compressed and a lot more dynamic than a pop synth rock song with a lot of different elements in there because the more elements you have, you need them to live in their own place so that they're not just jumping out at you in weird. So compression really helps hold and glue your songs together. But be careful because if you compress too much, you can kind of suck the life out of your track. So you do want to use compression sparingly. If you can't tell the difference on something, then just have it compressing lightly. Because if you can't really hear what you're doing, then maybe you want a little bit of compression on something, but you don't want to change the sound too much. Those are just some compression basics so that you can start exploring on your own and seeing what compression settings sound good on your songs. 18. Understanding Reverb: Time has come to talk about Reverb. What is Reverb? In this lesson, we're going to be diving in and exploring the magical world of reverb. Reverb makes things sound like you're in a cave. You usually use them on sends. They do have a dry and wet setting. We'll talk about that. And then the main settings you want to mess with are the size, de Kt, room type, and low and high cut. So let's look at this beat here. A common thing we'll do is we'll have a snare reverb. So you can see we have this reverb here called snare, and our snare is being sent to this reverb. So let's slow the snare and listen to what that sounds like, and we'll send it all the way just to be dramatic. Okay, let's turn the send off to hear what it sounds like without the reverb. Turn it on. So the reverb is giving our snare some space. We're going to turn off this Valhalla reverb, and we're going to turn on Ableton snare room reverb. I often send things all the way so I can really hear the quality of the reverb. Then I will back it down to be in a more realistic place. L et's turn it off. It's so snappy that without the reverb, it's hard to even really hear the snare. But with the reverb, I really calls your ear to it. And it's interesting because just having reverb on the snare adds a whole lot of space and dimension to your whole drum sound, even though you're only putting reverb on one element here. Let's turn off some of these other elements in this beat because we have a lot going on, and I really want to make sure we focus just on the sound of the reverb. You can tell that we have this other snare that hits on the fourth beat of every bar, and this snare is going to a huge reverb as a sample already. So reverb is really cool on snares. We can also put reverb on the high hats. I tend to have a unique snare reverb so that I can really tweak that reverb to be perfect just for the snares. I will have the rest of the drums or the rest of the sounds going to a reverb, which is a different sound. Kick drums usually don't have any reverb on them. Sometimes you do want reverb on your kick drum, but usually you don't. And if you're not sure, I would just not put any reverb on your kick drums, 'cause if you do, It's kind of a vibe, but it really, the purpose of the kick drum is really to help you feel. And the reverb is honesty is just a little bit distracting in my opinion. So let's dive into this snare reverb, and let's look at what are the different things we can tweak about this. So, you do have dry and wet, but if you're using it on a send, like we've said before, you definitely want to leave this 100% wet. Next, we have the prey. Now, the pre as we slow our snare is the amount of time before the reverb kicks in. So if we have it all the way, a basically zero all the way to the left, it'll happen immediately. If we have it all the way to the right, it's delayed. The reverb is happening significantly later to the point where it sounds like two different sounds. So what you want to do here is have a clean snare hit, and then hear some reverb for some space. Because you don't want to drown the initial hit or the transient of the sound, which is what the first part is, the crack of the snare. You don't want to drown that out in reverb. You want to be able to hear that nice hit, and then also hear the space. So here at around ten milliseconds, I feel that we are getting that effect. Next, we have the size. How big of a room do you want? This is really done by ear to taste, you know, what sounds good for what you're going for. But the size of the room is, in a way to conceptualize it is, like, what size of a room do you want the sound to be in or do you want your whole song to be in? Are you playing in the Grand canyon in the Tazma Hall? Are you playing in a bedroom? Where do you want the listener to feel like the song exists? The decay The decay is paired with the size, and you kind of have to move both of them a little bit together. But the decay is really the end of the sound. How long does the tail last? So 60 seconds is obviously too long. But when the decay is longer, you can really hear the size in a different way. And sometimes when you're just working on an isolated sound, it's hard to tell where you want these to live. So sometimes you need some general perspective. And that sounds pretty good. You could try having Ls Rivers. Reverb can be a little bit seductive. Sometimes you're listening to a loop or a soloed version of your song, and you're like, Oh, that sounds really cool with this reverb, and you start putting more and more reverb. And then sometimes when you bring everything back in, it just sounds like a and there's too happening. You have to be careful with reverb. Sometimes it's the perfect and colest thing. But sometimes you want a than you think. So, depending on how busy your song is, the more elements you have in your song, probably the less reverb you want, because reverb takes up space on its own. I love reverb, and a really good and tasteful reverb is super cool. Some genres lend themselves better to reverb than others, and reverb is certainly a necessary and very magical part of music. I just urge some caution that sometimes, even though this might sound super cool, that really, for the context of the whole song, it wants to live somewhere more like this. But of course, that's always a subjective creative decision. So let's hop over to audio effects, and we're going to go to reverb and resonance. We have a few different reverbs to choose from here. I like the basic reverb, and the presets are a pretty good place to start. You have these different halls you can choose from. You have these different rooms you can choose from, and these special ones just to get something really interesting. So let's turn this off and we'll pull in our large space chorus. Let's send this all the way to zero, so we can really hear what this sounds like. That's pretty cool, and it has its own sound. So you can tell, Okay, that's a very different kind of sound that might be really perfect for your song, or it might be a little much, depending on what your song is. We have our medium room Standard room. Big room. Drum room, and a hall. It's really up to you what you think sounds best. And what I normally do is I have a unique reverb for the snare, and then I have a unique reverb for the room. And the room is where I send almost every other element. I will send the percussion, the hi hats, and the sins and the guitars, usually to this other room to simulate the effect. Having it being a band that was playing and recording together in the same room, because you do want your song to sound like it was happening in the same place. Whether you're making an other worldly ethereal dance song, you still want all of it to sound other worldly deea, or you're making a really down to earth indie rock song. No matter what you're doing, if you're not actually recording real parts in a real room, you probably want to give some of that room feeling back into your song. Here we choose a room reverb, depending on what sounds good to us. Nothing to character. We don't want to choose something that such a vibe, unless that's exactly what we're going for. Usually you want something subtle that just adds a little bit of dimention. Let's go back to our snare and go back to our snare room. Now, these are some really clean reverbs that don't really catch your ear. This might be what you're going for, or maybe you want something a little bit more dramatic, but either way, reverb is there to help glue makes the sound good, and then also help you create these really amazing soundscapes. 19. Snare Drums: The Backbone of Your Beat: 's talk about the back beat, the snare. The two and four, the foundation and core of the group. This lesson is all about snares. So let's dive right in. Snares, as we know, live on the two and four, unless you have a regaton beat. Snares, which are the element that lives on two and four can also be replaced or layered with rim shots, claps, or snaps. There's layers of snares that are common. We have snare fills, and then the appropriate processing for your snare. We're going to jump over here in Ableton, and I have put some snares on the two and four. We also have a different sounding snare, a clap, a snap and a rim shot. Depending on what kind of song you are working with, you might choose a different one of these snare sounds. Maybe you have a chiller kind of song and you want a rm shot. For that, like, really cool backbeat that, isn't too invasive or maybe you want to snap. Or maybe you want to clap or this snare, or this snare. Your choice of snare sound is pretty dramatic. And whether it's an actual snare or a clap or a snap or a rim shot, I call all of those things snares because they are serving the same purpose. They are the backbeat of your song. They are the two and four beat of your song this really holding together the group. So let's say you like this sound here. But it sounds a little programmy if it's just the same hit every time. So what we do here in music production is that we layer the different hits with different hits so that we get something unique on every single hit. If you have pulled in a variety of samples into your snare drum rack, and this is another reason why it's nice to have a snare drum rack on its own, because you can pull in a lot of layers for your snare and not get too confused by having all your other sounds there. So one thing we can try is just layer it with a different hit every time and see how that sounds. That doesn't sound too bad, and maybe that's exactly what you're going for. Or maybe you want the same layer on the twos and fours. Remember, you can click this key which selects everything in the row, and you can pull down the volume. Because you want your layers to just enhance. You don't want them to really be the star of the show. And then we didn't hear too much of a difference when we did these. So maybe we'll do that just for some variant. I'm going to click here and pull this down. And that sounds more organic, which is usually what you try to do when you're programming drums. The battle when you are making electronic music or making music on your computer is to try and make it more organic and more live. And when you're making live music, you usually want to make it a little bit tighter and on the grid. So wherever you're coming from, the journey is usually to try and pull it a little bit into the direction where it didn't come from, if that makes sense. So it's nice to layer your sounds just to keep it interesting, and you can even do things where you'll have a eight bar loop and you're layering your snares in 8 bars, each one with a different hit or maybe even having an eight bar loop, and then every five hits is changing so that it's not even changing on a predictable pattern to the ear. That is the maximum way for the listener not to catch on to what they're hearing. So let me give you an example of that. Here, we're going to duplicate this, and then if you select both of these clips and hit Apple or Windows J, we combine them together. What we're going to do here, we're going to reset all of our layers, and we're gonna go back to this original pattern of having a different layer on every hit, except for instead of just recreating this exact pattern like this, we are going to change it a little bit to make it less predictable to the ear. So we're going to do this. This is a more random pattern that keeps evolving and changing. So obviously, some of these layers are more stand out than others. You'd want to bring them down. You'd probably want to detail them, find the ones that, are really standing out more than the rest and pull those down in volume. But this is a nice way to keep things sounding more organic. Oh. 20. Snare Drums: The Backbone of Your Beat Part 2: This lesson, we're going to jump even further into the world of snares with some more advanced techniques. So let's go here to our snares and talk a little bit about snare fills. Snare fills are some interim snare patterns to add a little bit of energy to your track. This is a very common snare fill that you will hear. And sometimes this snare fill will even come and replace the basic beat just for a little part of your song. And then everything comes back in. So a snare fill can be something that happens just in one part of your song. Or maybe it is something that you live with for a lot of the song, and it's a little subtler. With a pattern, something like this. This might be a snare pattern that is living more frequently in your song. So you can really experiment, and maybe you want, at the end of at the end of your beat here, you want to do something a little crazier with the snare. Or some different kind of pattern that's just add some more energy at the end of your four bar loop to just impulse into the next part of your song, like I said, to add some energy, because that's a lot of the time what we want to do with drums is to impulse some groove. So Snare fills are really, just like with all drum programming or playing, you just want to play around and have fun and do what sounds good to you. You don't want to overdo it if you're s. You probably don't want to go too crazy with Snare fills and if you can't tell if it's adding or taking away, I would just leave it out. But sometimes, depending on the song, it's the perfect thing to use. Talk a little bit about snare processing. So we'll turn off our snare fills here and we're going to talk about Snare EQ. Here, I had this fab filter EQ. You can also do this with the Ableton EQ eight. And let's go ahead and show you the basic EQ shape for a Snare. Nowadays, especially with the samples that I'm giving you and the samples that you're finding in Ableton, they're gonna sound pretty good. So you probably won't have to do that much to your snare sample. I tend to high pass really everything. They're calling it a low cut because that might be more obvious. They tend to get rid of the low end on absolutely everything except for the kick drum and the base. Some people say that when you introduce a filter, it is adding artifacts, and you want to minimize that. I don't hear that at all. I think that this sounds absolutely great. And I get rid of all the low end because when there's no information competing for this low end, that lets your base really cut through, and base is so important. So here I'm gonna get rid of the low end on my snare. We love this hit right here, this thick part of the snare that we keep seeing pop up here. That's a big part of our sound. If we get rid of it, We still have a snare sound, but doesn't have that thud. So this part of the snare, even though maybe you think snares are higher. This part right down there is super important. So I will usually have a shape like this. This might be all that I do for my snare, but maybe I want to add a little bit of high end at say ten K. 10,000 hertz is a really nice place for the ear. We pay a lot of attention to 10,000 hertz, so this can be a good place for a very important element. Let's boost it. It can be very soothing, kind of that fresh air sound. So sometimes I'll do this for my snares. You could do these exact same moves on the Ableton EQ. Of course, you wouldn't want to do them on top of each other because that would be doubling the move. So here we go. This is usually what I will do with EQ. Maybe you found a frequency you didn't like. I usually just leave it something like this, and I more often than not, don't boost too much. Next, we have compression. So compression, I have here, this R comp by waves, which is by far my favorite compressor. And I will usually use this bouncy preset or start from here and tweak from there. So let's pull down this ratio. This is really containing our sound in a nice way. We can also use Ableton's compressor. And use some similar settings. So notice how the attack is pretty much to the right, which is leaving a lot of the snare crack the body of the snare is cutting through. The release is pretty far to the left. So pretty soon after the compressor is triggered, it's letting go of the sound. For compressing a snare, you want to reset every time that the next snare hit comes in. If you were to hold it too, It just kind of sucks the energy out of the sound. So here we're not changing the sound of our snare. We're just containing the dynamics, which sounds good to my ear. Finally, we have reverb, which we just talked about. We'll send this to a snare reverb. We might tweak it a bit. And we'll turn it down. This is just for some very subtle revert. I usually go for a process or mix as I go method when I'm producing because I do mix my own music. If you don't know what that means just yet, don't worry. We're gonna cover all of that as we go through this course. As far as the practical value of what this means for you is just when I pull in a snare, when I get to that stage, and I'm working on a beat, I will eQ and compress it and send it some re months right away. So that way that I have all that already done, I'm hearing how it's going to sound in its final form basically right away. This is important for me because every decision that you make is informed by every other decision that you make. So depending on how things sound, you're going to change the way that you add a new element. So if you know in your head, you want a huge reverb on your snare, and you don't add that reverb for a while's going to change the amount of space that's available on your song. And without adding that big reverb, you might add a whole bunch of other elements that then suddenly you add the big reverb, and you're like, Whoa whoa, this is way twofold. This can't happen. So it's nice to have your song sounding how it's going to sound in the end as quickly as possible. 21. Kick Drums: Drive Your Groove: This lesson is all about kick drum. So let's die right into the kick drum world. We're going to go over some advanced patterns, talk about velocity, layers, Kick fills, EQ and compression. So let's go ahead here and go to impulse and grab our backbeat. Next, we'll select the area. Insert a midi clip, and we will create our kick drum pattern. Starting with four on the floor. Throwing a snare drum in there. Let's turn this on so we can hear. So let's listen to this basic house beet. And let's speed it up a little bit. So, this is one of the basic kick patterns that you might find. Let's go over how you might spice this up a little bit. You could throw in a double kick on the eighth note after the second or fourth bar. You could throw it on the 16th note. T. You could throw a extra kick drum on the eighth note before the four of a certain beat. Maybe this wants to not have a high head. So your kick drum pattern is obviously the most important thing, and you want to add a fill to your kick or add some variation to keep it interesting. But the sound of your kick drum is then the next important element. So in a moment, we're going to dive into the different sounds that you could possibly choose from, and we're going to hear how different sounding kick drums have an enormous effect even with the same pattern. So what we're going to do here is create a duplicate of this track, and I did that by clicking on the track and hitting Commander Windows D, which duplicates the track. Now we have a second track here, and I'm going to click in this empty space And I'm going to hit command A which selects everything, and I'm going to hit zero, which turns everything off. I'm now going to go to impulse, and we're going to replace this impulse rack with a brand new empty version of impulse. I have some different kick samples here, and we are going to listen to those. So those are all pretty different, and we're going to pull them here into impulse and audition them all as our house drum kick so that we can get a feel for what different sounding kick drums do to a song and how they affect your beat. So let's go ahead. Turn this off. Let's solo this. We'll turn these kick drums off. I'm going to click this key which selects every single mite note within this row here, and I'm going to hit zero, deactivating the kick. We're going to turn on this tambourine, turn on this backbeat, and turn on our new kick. So let's go into our kick channel. We don't need any of this. And let's turn this on. Add this fill. So notice how that makes you feel. Now we'll go to the next. So depending on the genre, and depending on what kind of song you're going for will affect the kick drum choice. Obviously, we have other sounds that are in our feedback loop that we're listening to this backbeat and from this tambourine, which affect our decisions in this moment. For example, feels more out of place with the other sounds we're listening to, but this might be the kick drum you want. If this is the case, you would want to choose some different sounding, high at snares, and maybe even a different tambourine. I just want to show you how drastic changing your kick drum sound can be, and how important it is to pick the right sound. Some producers will even layer their kick drum sounds if they have part of a sound that they like and part of a different sound that completes what they're going for. So, let's do that now. Let's say we like this sound, but it's not totally enough. So we're going to experiment what it would be like to layer our kicks. So let's say this is more of what we're going for. Now, when you're layering kicks, sometimes it's okay to layer the low end, and sometimes you don't want to layer the low end. So we're going to do a quick little experiment here to see if this is an instance where layering the low end sounds good, or if this is an instance where layering the low end is actually not something that we want. We can see we are distorting now with two kick drums coming in, so let's go ahead and turn down the volume so that we're no longer distorting. 22. Kick Drums: Drive Your Groove Part 2: Drums continued. We're going to keep exploring the kick drum with the more rock slash hip hop pattern, and we're going to go over compression and E Q, and let's dive right in. So let's go to our beat here. We'll slow this down to 90 beats per minute, and we'll change up the kick pattern. Remember, the basic pattern looks like this. This offbeat high hat, offbeat being only the eighth notes doesn't lend itself as well to my year for this beat. So let's go ahead and fill out the eighth notes and turn down the high hats. There are a lot more possibilities for different kick drums here. So depending on the song that you're going for in the groove that you feel, you will make different choices. Also, this is a short two bar loop, where maybe you want to make a 48 or even 16 bar loop where the kick drum pattern is changing and evolving over time. Let's go ahead and turn this into a four bar loop just for this experiment. So we're going to click on both of these clips, and I'm going to hit Commander Windows J, which consolidates and prints both of those mit tracks into one. Here we're going to explore some different kick drum patterns you might want to try. This is a pretty dramatically evolving kick pattern, and you probably wouldn't actually want to go this c with it as far as changing it this within a four bar time. But maybe and your ears will tell you what the right choice is for your song. But let's just go ahead and listen. These are just different examples of different kick drum patterns you can fill the basic pattern, which is just these two. This being the first hit, this being the second hit, and where are common places that you can put the other k drum to really flesh out your beat? Well, listen to it one more time. Sometimes you might want to do a more recurring pattern like this. And maybe that's sounding good to you, but some of these double kicks are just not quite what you want. So maybe if you have a 16th note like a kick or double hit, you want to turn down the velocity so that it's not the same exact volume. That sounds more realistic and has more the feel that we're going for with this rolling into the next hit versus being an equal volume. So velocity is for sure your friend, especially when you have double kicks. There are a lot of different kick patterns that you can choose. I'm not going to explore all of them. I just want to get the ball rolling in your imagination so that you can start to see how to get creative with it. And if you have a beat pad or you have a keyboard, it's a great time to playing in your beats because you will naturally feel where you want the beat to go. If you have the chance to play some live drums, that's even better because you really can get a visceral feeling for when the beat feels a little empty or when the beat wants to hit. Just like with the house beat, the choice of sound for your kick drum is so important. So we're going to go and explore some different kick drum sounds now. Let's duplicate this again, and we're going to go and mute this and here we're going to go ahead and mute these two. Changing the pattern slightly here. And now we're going to go ahead and audition some of these kick drums from right here. So let's go ahead and pull in this time, an empty drum rack over our impulse, and let's go ahead and pull these different options in. Let's listen here. Here. So you can see some different sounds were sounding better with this beat than our other beat. And this kick drum, which sounded totally unusable in the house beat, wasn't my first choice for this beat, but you can see how it's a little closer to being able to be used. Like before, let's try and layer. So what I'm going to do here is I'm going to click this key which highlights everything, and hit Commander Windows D, which will duplicate every single midi note here. And it duplicates it right here next to it outside of the clip. I'm now going to hit shift arrow, which allows me to move the clips to the left, and then down to where I want to layer them, and now they're going to be perfectly in sync. I just hit zero, and they are turned on, and we are ready to go. So let's experiment with some different layers. That doesn't sound too bad. That was our same layer that we chose for the house kick. Let's choose a different layer just because we're doing a new beat. That could work. There's something kind of nice about that as well. So maybe we'll duplicate this yet again with Commander Windows D, shift up arrow, move them back to where they started, and we'll go ahead and layer them all. Let's experiment with turning this layer down in volume. And maybe this layer down in volume. Maybe we want to turn that layer up. Now that we're in drum rack, we can try this E Q trick again, but it's going to be a little bit easier to do. So let's go ahead and paste our E Q here. To me, it sounds a little better with the EQ on here. So let's let's go to this other kick and see what this sounds like. It sounds the best to me with this EQ on. So in this instance, we found an example where it sounds better to get rid of the low end on these two kicks. Another thing you could do would be audition flipping the phase with this phase invert and see which sound you prefer. For the purpose of this lesson, I'm going to move on for now, but you know that you can eQ or use this ph in. Both for the same idea of just listening doesn't make the combined sound better. O bviously, it's easier to sign off on your kick dm pattern before you start layering, because once you've started layering, you have more pieces to work with. But that's okay. You can select them all and duplicate them as they are in their different velocities. And move these kicks wherever you feel like they should go anyways, and don't let a layer stop you from changing your kick derm pattern if that's what needs to happen in your song. Obviously, this specific krum pattern is a combination of different kick drum ideas, mostly just to get the ball rolling for you, not something I would pick if this was for a song of my own or a song of a client. But it's cool to see how this simple basic pattern of a hit here and a hit here can evolve into so different ways. And if you're making a rock song, it'll lend itself to different sound quality, different drum sounds, different patterns. And if you're making a hip pop beat, you'll have different kick drum sounds you'll choose if you're making a rape or even different patterns. So it's exciting to see how something so basic can go so many different ways, and depending on where you lean in your groove and in your sound choice, you'll end up with something that feels completely different. In the next lesson, we're going to be exploring some compression and EQ basics for kick drums. 23. Kick Drums: Drive Your Groove Part 3: This lesson is about Kick drum E Q compression and the lack of reverb. There are no rules in music production. There are no absolutes. But don't ever put reverb on your kick drum. I say this maybe you're going to be into some genre that, for some reason, really likes reverb on your kick in which case, go hand, but, start without putting any reverb on your kick drum and finish your song. And then when you're done, if it's just missing the reverb on the kicrum, go for it. But when you're starting, don't put reverb on your kick drum. So now that we've got that out of the way, let's talk about EQ and compression. And we're not talking about this EQ here. We're talking about EQ and compression on the sound as a whole. Because remember, this is part of shaping your combined sound. So this is not what your kdrum is doing. Your Krum is doing a full spectrum thing. This is just part of what's making that sound. So let's go here. Let's undo this hit, and let's pull a compressor on as well. So now, a lot of these samples, especially the ones that I gave you, in the student resources folder, and a lot of the ones that come from Ableton don't need much. So let's go ahead and see what are some E Q moves you might do, depending on what you're going for. One move could be to boost at ten k. So you go ten. That's kind of high. Let's move this down, and let's narrow the queue a little bit. A general rule of thumb is the higher you go, the more specific and smaller queue you can have, and the lower you go, the bigger and broader que you can use. Again, no rules. This is a quick little thing to keep in mind when you're starting, but don't think about that too much. So you might want to add a little bit of presence on top to help the kick drum cut through. There's nothing for the kick drum to cut through at the moment, because we just have a basic drumbeat right now. So this is a move you might want to do. You might also want to roll down the general high end of your kick to give it a more muted sound. This gets rid of some of the punchines, but gives it some thickness at the bottom, which depending on what you're going for, might be exactly what you want. So this is another move you might consider. You could also boost the high end to get more of the punch. In general, the punchier, the more rock type music you're making, and the thicker, the more hip hop type music you're making. Of course, there are absolutely no genre rules whatsoever. Let's experiment with pulling down some of the low end here. Let's switch this two to a low shelf, and hear what that would sound like. This has a similar effect to just boosting the high end because we're lowering the low end, which is doing the same thing. But you can hear how this does have a little bit of a different quality to it. And when lowering, it's good to start with the logical visual place and tweak from there from how it sounds. But at first, there's a big amount of information here, so let's just see what turning all of that down sounds like. Or turning it all up. That actually is kind of nice. Next, there is a low end component to kick drums. And for this example, I'm going to turn off what we just did. At around 40 or 60 hertz, there is the subi kind of car shaking club rattling boom that happens at around 40 or 60 hertz. It depends on your kick drum, and it's usually either 40 or 60 hertz. And you can boost those frequencies if you're missing that low end up, and you are going for a kind of song that i calls for that. You can see in this specific example 40 Hertz is pretty prominent in this sound. Let's trike 60. 60 Hertz is also pretty prominent in this. So our sample is pretty thick in the low end as it is. I'm giving you this as a tool that you would maybe want to use with say, Ableton's stock kick that comes with this pack, because let's hear what that sounds like. So we're going to go here and turn on our kick drum. You're not going to be hearing this move at all, by the way, if you're just listening on computer speakers because computer speakers don't really recreate this low of a base frequency. That's not totally 100% true, but it is a basic way to think about it is that iPhone speakers and computer speakers don't recreate these low frequencies, the base very well. I was talking to a engineer friend for a long time about how that's a way to think about it, but it's not 100% factually accurate. The true answer is a lot more confusing, so we're just going to leave it as iPhone speakers and computer speakers tend to not recreate that one space. Let's go back to this example here. Let's get rid of this. Let's say you don't want to boost at 40 or 60. That sounds good. Let's say you did like this general low end boost. And let's change this here to a bell. Sometimes there's a boxines around 400 ish. Let's see if that is the case. Oops, I need to turn this back on. That's sort of up to you. When we're taking this down, it's letting more of the other frequencies cut through louder because we're not pulling those down. So this might sound good to you. This might sound good to you. I kind of like how this sounds, so we'll go with this for now. Next, let's talk about some kick drum compression. Again, my favorite compressor to use is this waves comp. And just like with the snare, I often use the bouncy preset. So let's listen to what that sounds like, pulling the threshold down. I used to not like how compression sounded on kick drums because I was very used to, like, a huge kick drum and the dynamics just, like, cutting through was very pleasant to my ear, but I have learned that in the big picture when the bass and the harmony part and the vocals and everything is in the song that I do in fat, like how the and most people also do compress their kick drums. And so I eventually learned that I do like how it sounds, but alone, it all was always torn, which is why it's good to do these moves in full context and not just do everything isolated because sometimes you won't tell how the big picture sounds when you're so Zoomed. Let's recreate these settings here with Ableton. So we have our attack. Which is a pretty slow attack letting a lot of the initial hit cut through, which is exactly what we want. Next, we have our threshold, which we will pull down. And here we have recreated a similar sound. Let's see if it does, indeed sound similar. And that sounds pretty good. Remember, if you can't tell what the compressor is doing, if you just can't really hear it, pull the threshold down dramatically. Pull it down way too much because then it least you can hear what's happening. And from this space, you can be like, Okay, I kind of understand now what's happening, then you can ease it up or tweak it if you want to. These are some general basic settings for what you might want to do with the kro. This Krum we created even sounds great without the CQ. I preferred a little bit with the EQ, but we were using the EQ for sound design. We weren't really just enhancing what was already there. We were sort of changing what was there. And truthfully, moves like this should be done in context with everything else. Because you can get a really amazing sounding kicrum, but the base co existing with the drum is so important because together, they are your low end. So because they just never live alone, you do want to make these EQ moves really when you have kick and your bass together, because sometimes we have a thinner sounding kick drum with a thicker sounding base or vice versa. Sometimes we scoop a little hole out of the kick drum to leave room for the base, vice versa. And there's so much that happens when they're playing together that it's just impossible to know when they're playing alone. Ick drums are some of the most, if not the most important part of your drum, so it's worth spending the time to find the right pattern, to find the right sounds, and to process them in a way that sounds good to you. 24. Hight Hats: Add Sizzle to Your Sound: Where would a drum beat be without the high hats? Well, we're going to answer that question in this lesson as we explore all about different high hat patterns, sound choices, and processing. High hats. They really set the pace of your beat. A slow high hat pattern gives a more laid back feel, and a fast high hat pattern really drives the song. You can think about rap music in the late 2010s and early 2020s, how important the high hat is. The high hat is almost the entire energy of the whole song minus the rapper themselves. So high hats are not to be overlooked. Vlocity and chance are huge for high hats because how live they sound can vary dramatically. You can obviously layer them. You can use fills. There are real or live sounding hats. You can do the trap hats, more electronic sound. You can use loops, and of course, they need their own processing. So let's dive into this drum rack here that I made with samples from the student resources folder, and we'll listen to this pattern. So what's happening here? We have our basic eighth notes going. But every other note is quieter, which gives it a more live feel. If I swore to select all of these right here and move all of these values up, it's gonna effectively reset the velocity, and now they're gonna be all the same volume. You can tell how this bar has a really different field than this one. Let's even get rid of this and get rid of that for now just to hear this difference. This has more groove and sounds more live. Depending on what you're going for, you might want a more live sound or you might want a more electronic sound. But for now, let's just go with this slightly more live sound here. And it was nice to add this layer. Let's listen to all the different layers that I picked. So this was kind of nice, but maybe let's have this more trap hat sound down here. So what we're doing is this is a subdivision. Let's get a kick drum in here just so that we can hear what this sounds like in context. We're going to simplify this kick drum pattern here, turn it into a loop. Move this over here. Jesper simplicity's sake. And let's go ahead and out of snare. Turn down, snare. Let's really simplify this Krum pattern a lot just so that we can really focus on the high hat. In this pattern, we have our eighth notes. I put a crash on the downbeat. We have this open high hat sounding thing on the upbeat after the downbeat. We can mute this crash for now. And this is what quarter notes sound like. I'm going to mute all of these intermediary notes. This is quarter notes. That has a certain feel. This is what eighth notes sound like. This is what 16th notes sound like. We can obviously affect the velocity of these 16th notes. Let's go ahead and select every other one and pull them down and just see what that sounds like. And you can hear how the pace is feeling very different depending on the speed of the high hat, which is really the power of these faster subdivisions. What was so interesting about modern trap music, modern rap music is the use of super fast rhythms that are maybe humanly possible, but certainly very difficult to play like these 32nd notes or possibly even faster. So using these super fast subdivisions has an electronic sound to it because it's so fast, it'd be really difficult to play, and to have them perfectly in time would be even harder. So you can start understanding how if you want a more relaxed groove, this might be more of what you're looking for. If you want something faster. You might want literally just a faster drum pattern. So the high hat is huge for setting the pace. It's so important that you spend some time to either play your high hats in, move them around a little bit on or off the grid. If you are doing the 16th notes, and you want the track to feel like it's, like, even faster, you can have some of them. So some of the hits are a little bit early, which will give you a more urgent feeling. You could have some of your hits lag behind the beat to give it even more relaxed feeling. So I'm going to go ahead and move the ends in and then move these hits a little bit further back. I did that because if I did not move the ends in and you move it back, boom, it just deleted all the other cuts, which is not what we want. So we do want to bring these ends in because this won't change what it sounds like at all. And then move these hits a little bit off the beat so that this relaxed beat feels even more behind. Let's go ahead and play. That's so late it's starting to be swung in triplet time. That's not actually what I wanted. And just moving every other hit might not be the right choice, either. Maybe you want to move the two and hit, the ones that hit with the snare a bit. Moving the two and four hit really does a lot for leaning the groove, and maybe the hits after the two and four are more in time. Or maybe the ones after the two and four are behind and the ones before are more on the grid. Or maybe you just don't want it to be standard at all, and it's all a little bit off. This can keep your track sounding interesting just with the high hat. If you spend long enough finding how you want your beat to lean before or after the beat, that's the groove. And then, of course, we have here our groove pool. You can select from these different options. We can go over back to our 16th section, Swing Logic 16th. Let's try that over here. Funky Modern 16th. Let's try that. Let's go to Funky Modern. And that sounds good. You have all of these different grooves to choose from. You can extract grooves from your favorite songs. You can tweak them by hand. You can play them yourself. But whatever you do, I just suggest finding a way to get your high hats to have more groove than just simply programming things on the grid without changing anything. You don't have to change the velocities and the placement, spend all this time. You can do whatever feels worth it to you and whatever you're going for. There are some benefits for having the basic programming feel, especially for trap music that wants to have a little bit more of a robotic energy to it in the high hat section. That might be what you're going for. Just understand what the feeling does emotionally. If it feels a little robotic, do you want that? Do you not want that? So that's just a creative, subjective choice. I want to give you all the tools that you need to see whatever vision you have through to its fullst. We went over some high hat basics in this lesson, and in the next lesson, we're going to keep diving further into the world of high hats. 25. Hight Hats: Add Sizzle to Your Sound Part 2: Jump right back into high hats. Here we have our pattern that has some groove, it has different velocity. It's got a lot going on. We'll mute our trap hats for a moment. And let's open up here this chance section. So maybe just maybe we want to bring the chance down just a little. And we'll see what that sounds. It skipped a couple hits here. So, that's up to you if that's the kind of sound you're going for. If you're throw out an entire song, and you have a really fast, high hat pattern like this. It could be nice. To throw in a little bit of that chaos, you know, the occasional missed 16th note that gets the listener ear paying more attention. This could be a good tool because you're throwing in what might be happening to a live drummer who just might miss a hit. In an overall, really great take. That's not worth redoing. And sometimes it's nice to just change it up. That little random bit of chance is just what you need. So it's up to you if this is something that you want to play with. I personally don't really ever use the chance function. If I want a hit to be missing, even if it's just like one hit on the 47th bar, I will do it manually. I'll just go in. Get rid of it. And that's the way that I like to work so that it is more intentional with my song. But this could be a better way to work for somebody who isn't sure exactly which hit they want to remove, or to truly introduce some element of uncontrolled chaos into the production, which could be really great. Let's talk a little bit about layering. Like with kicks snares, you can layer in the traditional way, which will copy and paste and bring this down with the arrow key and turn on the grid so that we can move faster. And we can layer this way. We can also select this and move it down. That's a thicker, nicer sound. Maybe this is the kind of layering you want to do and you want to pull down this layering velocity. And that was pretty interesting sounding. So, this may be what you're going for, and you can lay your high hats in this way. I don't tend to do this too much, but it is totally available to you. What I tend to do is what we were seeing here mostly from the beginning, which is really having, like, this main high hat sound with different high hat sounds that are coming in, maybe a crash. Maybe we'll have this kind of trap hat sound hitting here. And maybe I liked it better when it was a little bit slower just for this beat. And this, to me, is where i Ha programming becomes really fun. Because you can really you can experiment, and you can move all of these to a different hit or a different hit. Well, keep them the same and just layer in this hit here. On certain hits. And you can start just building a very complicated and exciting pattern that just stays fresh for the listener? And there's no limit to really what you can do and what you can come up with? You can play the part that you hear in your head? You can program the part you hear in your head. You can just program randomly and see what it sounds like. Your general base starting point is going to be what subdivision you're picking. Is it eighth nose, quarter nose, 16th nos? How fast is your high hat going. On top of that, what bigger beats? What bigger sections do you want to emphasize? Do you want to emphasize this downbeat? Do you want to emphasize this upbeat right here? A If you are liking the beats that you're hitting, but maybe the sounds like this sound and that sound together aren't quite doing it for you. Let's listen to this. Clean up the end of the sample a little bit. Fade it out. Making this sound a little smaller, let's not eat up this sound and have a kind of to washy of a thing happening here. Now, we can distinctly hear these two sounds. Maybe we took a little too much out of this. And this is cleaner because I can actually hear what's happening here. Now we go to our high hat. Our trap pat. Excuse me. Let's go to our trap pat. And let's pitch that down. Go over to beat mode, see what that sounds like. Oftentimes these hits do sound better pitched down. This one, not so much. It's okay. So you can pitch the different high hats around to give different feels. You can go into the Mi editor here. Go to Transpose. And you can actually have the high hats pitching up and down. So get a rab our pen tool. Let's have a journey of our high at here. We're really focus on this first part of our loop, so let's have the beginning and the end stay the same, and let's have the middle. So I'm going to click all these points, getting rid of them. And notice because I clicked right here, it's going to make sure that this point is exactly on this. Instead of me just clicking here, this point is pretty close, but it didn't line up exactly on the beat. This is a hack that I used to make sure that the point is exactly on the beat if that's important to you. Now we're going to go ahead, get rid of all these points and listen to what it sounds like with the high at just gently pitching up. Or pitching down. Or dramatically pitching down. Now we're going to try the same technique on our main high head. So let's go over to our main high hat, and let's try having the whole track pitch up and pitch down. And this time, I'll show you the difference. We'll just click here here and here, see what that sounds like. That's pretty extreme. But what about subtly? Or pitching up. You could have them continually going up. Or continually going down. This just adds a little bit of movement to your high hats if this happens to be the right genre to do something like this. In the next lesson, we're gonna be diving into fills, loops, and processing. 26. Hight Hats: Add Sizzle to Your Sound Part 3: Let's take a further look into high hats. So we've talked a little bit about layering the high hats, and we've talked about what that might mean. Now, let's go to this more eighth note pattern here. I'm going to copy it. I'm going to select all, delete everything else. We have a clean slate. And let's go ahead and talk about what a high hat fil might be. Because maybe you just want a little bit of a fill here at the end. You could do it robotically with a trap hat sounding thing like this. Or maybe you want to do it more live with something that sounds like this. Something to give some variation in the pattern. There's no right or wrong way to do this, and I really do suggest studying your favorite drumbeats to know what are the fills and layers and high hap patterns that you normally gravitate to. Even if in your favorite songs, you're not listening to the high at pattern, you should study everything about your favorite songs and listen to what are the high at patterns that they're doing, because maybe there's something really interesting happening there. Or maybe it's really basic. And that will inform you what you may want to do with your Because obviously, the more interesting of a part you make, probably the better, but the more attention it'll draw, which in the big picture might not be what you want. So I encourage you to spend some time experimenting with what are some different layers? What are some different fills that you might want to do with your high hat? Let's talk about loops because maybe you just have a pretty basic high hat pattern that isn't even off the grid, and maybe you're not even tweaking the velocity too much. And for the sake of this, why don't we go back to our house beat? Speed up the tempo. And let's go to BPM, and let's see what we might add here. So, here we have our hats and snare at UK Grunge, which That is a whole vibe. So let's see what that sounds like. Here's about it. That brings a whole new dimension, and it's amazing what finding the right loop can do for your song. Because sometimes you just need a little love in the high hat. Sometimes you just need a little bit of a little loop to really bring your track to a new place. You could try that with a percussion loop and see what that sounds like? Has a different effect altogether. Let's try this pure high hat loop. That has another feel to it. So it's important to not shy away from loops and to build your drumbeat, but just audition and see, is there something out there you could try? You could try this. We'll have a very different feel. And it's just cool to experiment with those. So let's go ahead and bring our UK snare and garage back. And we're going to talk a little bit about high hat processing. High hats are extremely important, but less important in certain ways as far as the i and the snare, as far as they take up less real estate, and they. Because they're so high pitch, it's really easy to hear them. And they can actually be pretty quiet. To still have the desired effect. So not saying that all high hats should be quiet, but they can be. And for a long time, music really did had some pretty quiet high hats, and that was the standard sound and pop music, and that sounded really good. The lower information in the high hat is the ty, dusty, live feeling kind of thing, and how it hits me subjectively. You maybe want that or you want to cleaner sound. High hats sound more similar in this top brains, more airy. They do have their own unique qualities, some are brighter, more metallic, some different qualities here and there. But if you want a cleaner sound and high pass, if you want a tic, real, bigger sound, you can high pass less. I tend to like to high pass my high hats, but that's a purely subjective choice. Next, we can go over to dynamics, grab r compressor, and just like with kick drums, I like to use the R comp, and I will often audition that bouncy preset yet again. It's a really pleasant sound to my ear for drums altogether. And there with our hi hats nice and quiet, high pass and compressed, they really still add that energy, but are really kind of discrete in the mix in a way that I really like. We can use our same settings on our compressor here and see what that sounds like. And that sounds pretty good to me. We could explore the same processing on our loop. But remember, our loop also has a snare in there, which we might want to minimize or maximize or not touch at all, depending if we want a snare added to our beat. I think it sounds better keeping more of this information in. You can, if you really wanted to get rid of the snare, you could go through the work of duplicating copying the snare onto its own channel, you could turn it off, move it down. You know it's going to hit on the four, so you could do this every time. And this is a little bit tedious. I'm not going to lie. But you could go through this work to have ultimate control over your mix, and I would. So then here we're going to delete everything in the middle. It wasn't really necessary for me to copy. I could have just pulled this onto a new track, but you can delete everything in the middle. And now you have complete control over the high head in the snare, and let's say you want to high pass the high head a little bit more. I still think it sounds better like this. And actually, there is a little bit of snare fill I didn't get. That this thing? That should really live on this track. I don't need to be perfect for this example, but I'm just going to show you how maybe this snare wants to be compressed a little more. Then maybe as a whole, we want to turn down the high hats we just added. Let's put in our high hats. Maybe our snare is a little t. Maybe we want to move this snare next to our other snare, and turn them down together. You can effect two tracks at once by shift clicking one of them, and then whatever parameter you move, we'll move them both. That sounds pretty good to me. So that was our deep dive exploration into the world of high hats. You have different patterns you can choose from, different sounds you can choose from. You have loops, you have the processing. It's a lot to take in. And what's most important when you're producing is just to get your idea out of how it's supposed to feel. Is it supposed to feel fast? Is it supposed to make you want to run? Is it supposed to lean back? And focusing on those emotional and energetic feelings will let you know what you need to do and how far you need to go down the road of your high hats. 27. Hight Hats: Add Sizzle to Your Sound Part 4: As we explore the world of high hats, we're going to notice that there are two main kinds of high hat sounds that we need to pick from. If we go to the student resources folder, and we go to samples or drums, and we go to our high hats. Let's look at these two different categories. We have hats. And this is what's called a closed high hat. If you know about what a real drum set is like. If you have your foot on the pedal, it closes the two high hats together, which makes a closed high hat sound. If your foot's off the pedal, the two high hats are then separated, and what's called an open high hat sound, which has a more ringing sound to it. When I first got into making beats, I internalized this as open high hats were the offbeat, like uro house sound. That very, like, bombastic and sort of attention calling sound. And the closed high hats were the more, like, you know, jazzy, like, hip hop sounding hats. And that's just completely my subjective experience. I don't know if that's at all helpful for you, but let's go explore these two different sounds in this beat here. It's a pretty classic closed hat sound. That's a pretty classic open high at sound. So now let's go in here, and let's just do a simple pattern of just the offbeats. And let's hear what this sounds like in context. Our groove here is actually too strong. Versus this. Let's go to our clothes high hat. And let's listen to our open high hat. These are just two specific examples of open high hats and close high hats in general, but you can tell this has a different feel to it. Versus this. With the current kick drum and snare sound that we have, this closed high hat sounds a little better to me, but later in the song or maybe some more bombastic kicks and snares, you might want this open high hat sound. I just wanted to go over these two main categories because when picking your high hat sounds, it's so important to understand which road you want to go down. You want to go down the open high at road or the closed high hat road? And if you are making a custom drum rack or impulse, I do suggest pulling some of each so your song can have both kinds of high hats in there if needed. 28. Cymbals, Rides, and Crashes for Impact: This lesson is about symbols, Rides and crashes. So rides for a change. You can have that vintage feel using rides. We can explore crashes for impact. You do want to be sparing with crashes. And crashes really were the first impacts. And we'll talk about impacts later in this course. But it's interesting to know that a very prominent sound effect came out of live band drummers just playing the old crash drum. So, let's talk about rides. So what they sound like? That's what they sound like. So let's go ahead, make a quick little beat here. If you think about the 1960s, perhaps the golden era for recording music. We had the Beatles. We had the stones. We had the turtles. We had the zombies. Everything that started with the We had it then. And by we, I mean, they, because I was not alive, but I do like the old school music from the 60s a lot. And let's explore with our same kick drum and snare pattern, what maybe a beat using ride symbols instead of high hats would sound like. And for this, we're actually going to go to our triplet grid and go to eighth notes. And we're gonna play it like this. I have two different ride symbols, hitting on two different tracks. Therefore, if they were on one track, this would get cut off right at the next hit, which will sound a little unnatural. So it sounds a little more natural to me to let each hit ring through each other. So that's what we have done here and why I'm doing what I'm doing. So, let's explore using the ride symbol instead of the high hat. And what would that do to just give it kind of a different feel? And for the purposes of this, I think I actually prefer this sound here. So we're going to copy this hit, and we're going to paste it over here. And what we're going to do is we're going to have two audio tracks with the same hit because if you had them on the same track, it would sound like this. Which has a more robotic feel to each hit ring over itself, which is more how a real drum kit would sound, which may or may not be what you're going for. But let's give this az. And maybe our kitrum pattern sounds a little robotic for this kind of a sound. And let's go over to our snare. We'll go over to triplet mode, and we're going to go over to eighth notes. And our ride cymbals are obnoxiously loud. And maybe let's just have every other kick drum. You can tell this is really the wrong k sound. I'm trying to get less of a punchy kick. Well, let's not focus on that too much for the purposes of this lesson. I just want to show you you can use rides for a kind of old school so high end. This has a like I'm fixing a hole where the rain falls in and stops my mind from wondering, W it will com Like a Beatles, Paul McCartney type thing. That's how you do this beat. It's very kind of on the beat and, like, sing along, happy feeling. This is another option that's obviously uncommon in music today. But something you should know how to do this pattern. So it can be nice to pan these in different directions, maybe. And we'll talk about more about panning later, but essentially, we're moving this as if this drum was hitting on the right and moving this as if this drum was hitting on the left, now we're going to group these together. And we're just going to do a global EQ to both of them kind of cleaning up the sound. And that's starting to sound much better. For something like this, maybe you want a big snare reverb. And we're getting further away from what I want to cover in this lesson, perfecting a specific drum beat as far as the other sounds. I'm just showing you that the ride symbols can be the part that drives your beat, subdivisions. It can be the high hat replacement sometimes. Let's talk about crashes. Crashes are big crash symbols, and you put them at the downbeat of a chorus, or you put them at the downbeat of a drop of a dance song, or you put them at the downbeat of a breakdown. You put them in transitionary places where you want to fill up the space because a crash can really fill up the space. You usually want them kind of quiet. Because when they're loud, it really fills up maybe too much of the space. And when there's vocals, sometimes they cover up the vocals and you usually don't want to do that. But maybe you do. So crash symbols are there to add excitement. They're a statement. They're like an exclamation point of drums. So you use them where you want to put that exclamation point, where you want people to feel excited, where you want the song to feel full, where you want to draw someone's attention. You put the crash. You can even build your crash into a four bar loop where it's crashing at the downbeat of every 4 bars. There's nothing wrong with that. As long as it doesn't sound repetitive. These are just different crash sounds available. So you can hear crashes have their own sounds. You can EQ them in all the similar ways. You can get rid of the low end. Or maybe you want to get rid of the high end. That really tones them down a lot. You can tell how much of this sound lives in the high end. This still has kind of a crash effect without a lot of its high end. But I usually wouldn't get rid of this much high end. I would more have more of the high end and turn it down in volume because they're sort of doing the same thing. By only taking down the high end and not turning it down in volume, you're effectively turning up in volume this part. So, you know, you're balancing a edged puzzle and it can be confusing when there's so many ways to achieve similar effects. But in general, with high hats, I mean, with crashes, I will focus on volume rather than EQ. Of course, you can compress them the same way. I will often audition my favorite bouncy preset for all drums. If that's too much, we can go to the drums preset. That actually sounds a little bit better to me. If we wanted to do that with the Ableton compressor, we could try the same settings and see if we like how it sounds with our different compressor here. And that sounds nice. It doesn't actually sound too overbearing. It sounds contained in a nice way. You don't have to only use crashes in this kind of music. You can use it in any kind of music. And it still has a similar effect on what your final output is going to sound like. So now you know a little bit more about the different kinds of symbols besides just the high hats that are available. 29. Toms Epic & Powerful: Now, let's go ahead and explore the Tom drums. Tom's are really great for Phils, and that's where you commonly hear them. They are the big, sometimes even orchestral sounding drums that have a very epic feel to them. And Tom's are exciting. There's no way around that, and there's no denying that Tom's are just super exciting. These are Toms. Met Tom. There are those really big sounding drums. So, let's go ahead and explore. What are some common use cases for Toms? And for the purposes of this, maybe we want to pull in a quick drum loop that we can lay our toms on top of. And let's maybe slow this down. This could be a example, Tom Phil. Doesn't happen all the time. Comes in at the end of the meta. Or maybe you want something a little bit more interesting. Maybe we'll turn this up. And the order in which they're played from high to low. Often does have a pretty big impact. Do we like how this sounds? And maybe it has an announcement before this fil. Toms are often here in these fill sections. You can add your groove, you can turn off the grid. You can move the hits around a little. Maybe the toms are coming in early because the drummer is excited, and maybe these hits are a little quieter. You can detail them different fection, you can add the groove that they want, and really spend the time to get your fills to sound exactly how you want. And maybe it's not the same fill happening every time. You could have a different tom fill every fill. You can spend the time to really detail either playing in your own or programming or however you want. To get a unique fill every time. And it just adds energy at the end of your beat. And we love tom drums. You can also do a sort of Tom run where the other drums dip out for a sec, and it's just a tom moment. This has a little bit of a regga Tone feel, but changing up the rhythm in the middle of your song can be kind of cool. Tom's can also be really great for builds. Or, like an intro section, you know? Where you're building energy. Or some section like this that's growing and turning into a build. Oh And then it goes back into the regular beat. Toms are a lot of fun. And I highly encourage you not to overlook the tons, because in a lot of music production that's done purely electronically, purely on a computer, sometimes producers leave out the tons because they can do the fills with the snares and the kicks and the things they already have in the session. And sometimes that is the right choice. But a lot of the time, it's worth seeing if Tom's got your back because a lot of the time Tom's there for you. And I really like how Tom sound, and I really like how epic and orchestral they can sound. Sometimes, even though they sound amazing and boomy, It might be too much in your track in which case you'll roll off a little low end. That doesn't sound as cool to me, but sometimes in your mix as a whole, I do find myself rolling away from this amazing sounding low end, just because what's really happening is a difference in rhythm, and you're hearing this hit. That's okay if you don't want the low end of your tom to overshadow your k or your base, or you can also just turn it down and not do this and just quieter, Toms. Then the most of the high end is cutting through in the same way, sort of similar like this. It's up to you. The Toms are an amazing element. You probably don't want them to be like the feature thing that your ear is going to all the time, or maybe you do. It's up to you. So Toms are a great tool to have a music production, and I have included some toms here for you in the student resources folder. 30. Fills Transition with Flair: Drum beat will get boring without its fills. So let's dive in to drum fills. We've covered fills in a lot of different ways already. So let's just stop beating around the bush, and let's talk about fills. Your drum beat can be a loop. It can be a four bar eight bar loop. And that's totally okay. But you want to have some fills in your drum beat to change it up right before it rolls around and starts looping again, because if you build a fill into your beat, you're likely gonna sustain interest in that loop for longer. Let's listen to some loops here. I. Let's listen to this one. So here we have a fill that's happening with the sounds that are already in this beat, and it's giving it a little funky up to the end of the drum loop that pulls you in and makes you want to listen. Doom, Domo. It's got that, like, real groovy rhythmic thing that kicks in right at the end right before it pulls back around again. And that just keeps you interested in listening because a fill is supposed to create a little bit of tension right before you roll back into the drum loop. Let's listen to some great little subtle fills in some different songs by different producers to see how they're able to keep that interest flowing. So let's listen to the high hats here. Okay. So it's not totally the high hat. There's some other sound that's coming in, but at the end of this drum loop here it's going. We're adding a new rhythm right before the drum loop rolls around, and it's keeping interest in the beat here. Listen to that again? That was a different fill. He's pulling out some of the drums. It's a more negative fill, if you will. We're like, removing things instead of adding things. What's gonna have the same effect. And he added a little bit of layers to the high hats in this second region, but it's really these fills that are adding so much energy into this beat. Of course, he has a whole song where all of the elements are adding energy, but the drum fill is what's keeping the drum loot sounding fresh when it rolls over. Let's listen to another song. Please lost dancing. U. We lost stand. Right at the end there, more drums are kicking in, and his He has a longer loop than the last song we just listened to. It sounds to be twice as long of a loop. And that's where the Phil's really kicking in. A long time to have a phil. Little the ball stance. That's what it is. It's like the drummer really coming in to, do his little turnaround thing. And it just adds a lot of energy, and it keeps you able to listen to this drumbeat over and over and over. And it's song dependent because the song we listened to before this, the whole song, which is, like, centered around that vocal, the vocal line ended when it needed to end. And that's when we had the drum fill. That's when everything was pulling away, turning around, and then we're looping again. This song is a longer melody. The da da da da. It goes the whole length of that melody before we have the big fill. He does have some subtle fills that kick in every four or 8 bars or however he's counting this, but we're really focusing on the big drum fill right here. Bsm It's like this nervousness that we feel in the drums that when the the steady beat kicks back in, it's a really quick tension and release payoff moment. You can make your fills on your own with going into your snare drum pattern and every eighth bar. You add some different hits in there. You can do it with your high hats, have some different hits in your high hats. You can add some toms or new drums in there for having some new drums kicking in at the end of your 48 or 16 bar loop. Or you could even just pull some some fill samples in there. And you could try to see what that would sound like. So finding the right fill from a loop kind of place is somewhat of trial and error. This already had a fill going on. So maybe it would be difficult to find the perfect thing to layer on that cause it doesn't really need it. Let's try this drum loop real quick right here. That was kind of cool. This one. This drum loop has more of a different vibe than this drum fill, so they don't totally jive for me subjectively, but rhythmically, it's not bad. But the volume discrepancy is too much. We would need to bring down the fill. Because we don't want our fill to overpower the main drums. And if something's overpowering, sometimes it has too low end. It's too big. Low end makes things sound big. So you want something to be smaller, you can get rid of the low end. And that sounds more reasonable to me, the drum fills coming in, but it's still our main driving force and the drums are not overpowered, because what you don't want to do to have this huge, amazing sounding drum fill. And then suddenly your regular beat comes back in and you're like, We to go? 'cause it sounds empty in comparison. So you do want to be mindful of that. Drum fills are such a necessity for keeping your beats sounding fun and fresh and keeping the loopy. Listen And I highly recommend taking the time to, you know, do a little drum fill at 4 bars. Nothing too major, something a little discrete. Do maybe a little bit more at 8 bars, and a 16 bar, you can do the bigger drum fill, depending on the regular cadence of your song. And it's cool too to maybe take the time and not have any of the drum fills be exactly the same. You can just change one little thing, the placement of something on each one. It's not necessary, and I don't do that for every song, but sometimes I do, and it's just cool to have that one moment in the song where the group just did that one thing, and listeners can really connect to that. 31. Processing Live Drums: Talked about programming drums. We've talked about playing drums on a beat pad or a keyboard. But what we are going to talk about in this lesson is live drums and recording live drums, which is a whole beast of its own. So let's dive into that. When you record live drums, you're going to need the space for it, you're going to need the mics for it. And this course is not about recording live bands and really placing all of the mics for drums that you need because it goes pretty deep. There's people who are interested and need some resources, I am available. You can reach out to me. I will send you different resources, or we can figure out a way to get you the information that you need on recording live drums, but I'm going to say that if you are recording live drums, you probably have a friend or a studio that can do that. And what you're going to want to know how to do is what to do with those recordings here in Ableton. Something you need to worry about that you don't have to worry about as much with process drums is phase. We're going to talk about phase. You have less control, also. We're going to talk about the enhancements and the benefits of having more of a live groove. We're going to talk about fixing too much of a live groove, and we're going to talk about layering with audio committee. Include the Student Resources folder, I give you this kissed by an Angel drums session. This is a session of a song of mine. I did years ago. And here we had a live drummer who did three different takes. You can hear how the drums are supposed to line up with this print of the actual drums that made it into the song. Oh, yeah, live drums, baby. And you can hear the different takes that were tried. O bviously, these are mixed, different. There's a lot different going on. And you can sort of compare the different takes to what the final output was, including what we tweaked and changed about the take that we went with. Let's go ahead and just listen to this third take here. There is no doubt that a great drummer playing live drums is cool. That sounds good. I mean, there's just no getting around it. And if you have the opportunity to record a live drummer and a really good one, you just have to go for it because it's so exciting to hear what your songs, what your beats sound like with a of energy. A great drummer playing, especially a great sounding drum kit, especially with a great recording. So let's say you do all those things. You're able to record your drums. There are certain things with live drums you need to worry about. And the first thing you need to worry about is phase. So let's talk about what phase is. There might be multiple mikes pointed at the snare drum. And in this case, we had a mic above and below the snare drum. What we are doing here is I have this phase invert on the snare bottom. This is without the phase. This is with the phase. What happens is a little bit complicated and technical, why phase happens? It happens when two microphones have overlapping territory, and it confuses the way that we are hearing the sound and it sort of cancels itself out in a way. But what's important for you to know is that if you do have two snare mikes, what you're gonna need to go and do is go to the audio effects, go to utilities, and go to Pas invert, and you're gonna have to pull your pas invert onto both of your snare drum mikes and just audition. What did they sound like with no Pas inversion? What does it sound like with one? What does it sound like with the other one? And you just make a judgment call. If you think it sounds better with one of them phase inverted or one of them not phase inverted, you can make that decision. You might also have to make a similar decision with your kick drum if you have multiple kick drum mics. In this case, we have a kick drum mic inside the kick drum itself kick in and a kick mic outside of the kick drum kick out. Here is with no phase inversion. Here's with Fais and version on? Here's with Fais and version on the other one. And you just decide what sounds best to you. So, now that you have flipped the phase and you are liking how your kick and stare are sounding, you obviously need to balance them in volume. Do you want one of these lo? Do you want one of these quieter? And you will spend the time to work out your volumes until you're hearing things the right volume. And it's really worth taking the time to do that because volume is the most powerful thing you can to control. Something being loud and something being quiet is so basic and just so important. There's no point in compressing and queuing and tweaking something to the end of the earth when you just needed to turn it way down. So I have been in sessions with amazing engineers who just with volume, get a song sounding pretty great. And everything else should just be in addition to the shouldn't be finding and saving your live drum recording with EQ. I mean, probably not the right recording or not the right performance, if that's the case. So let's take the time, find your desired volume. And for the purpose of this lesson, I want to move on to address the next thing which you're obviously hearing is that live drums are messy. We don't have our isolated kick drum. We're hearing symbols, we're hearing snares. We're hearing everything. And that gets to the place where sometimes producers don't like to work with live drums is because you're not getting an isolated signal. There's just no way to really do that with a drum kit. It's all so close to itself. It's so loud. But it doesn't really matter because if you're using all of the same take, it's all in there anyways. So it shouldn't be a problem, but it's an obvious thing to point out here. Something you may have to do with live drums is you might have to line things up to the grid. With the case of this song, we had a pro drummer in Nashville, who had played with Taylor Swift and a whole bunch of other famous people, and he's, like, one of the best drummers alive, and the best session drummers. So I was so spoiled in that situation because I got to work with such an amazing musician. If that's not the case, that's totally okay. You can still get so much benefit out of working with a amazing live drummer. And you need to decide if you need these two different snare drum audio files to be separate. Or could you resample them to be in the same hit? So what you would do there, you go to resampling on a new audio track, you solo the snare, you record enable the new audio track, and you would just hit record, and you would record for the whole length of the song. So we're not going to do that right now, but both of these audio files would end up now printed into one below. So, maybe you want these snares to be printed together because you did the phase inversion, you did the leveling, and that's a good snare sound and just having two is a little overwhelming, or maybe you want to keep them different. That's totally okay. But why I'm bringing that up is because you might have to go in and warp this part, and you really might have to go in and drag things to be more on beat. Let's say this was played more like that. And you hear that this isn't hitting right here, and you're like, you know, we just got to move this on beat. And so why I was talking about resampling is that when you have multiple different parts, Do you really want to move them all separately? I mean, you can, and you might have to. And it's okay going into that, knowing Alright, this will just take some time, and you know, it'll just take the time it takes to do. And don't think you're going to be able to do that in 5 minutes. Because if you're, you know, what is this 12 12 tracks or something like that, all different? Are you going to make a mistake? Maybe? I mean, it's like, you know, that's a lot of precise work, and if the drum kit stops lining up with itself, because it bleeds into itself, it might not sound very good at all. So you want to listen and make a judgment call. How can you make this easier on yourself? Can you resample the snares together? You resample all the drums together, and you're like, Yeah, maybe, but the sacrifice then is losing all control over the ability to change things. Another way you might want to do it then if it's just seeming overwhelming to move all of these hits together is you could just make a cut point, and you could say, Okay, I'm going to cut right here, I'm going to scroll down to the bottom. I'm going to cut right here. And notice this little triangle telling you where you cut the first one and you're going to hit command or Windows E, which makes a Then you're going to go over here, make another cut point and then you can scroll up, and you have this handy dandy little triangle telling you where you made your last cut point and you can cut. Now you shift click the top and you shift click the bottom and you hit Command E, which cuts everything. Then here you can turn off the grade with Commander Windows four, and then you can freely move this clip around. If all you needed to do is move this to the left. It's not really worth going in this view and doing all the warp stuff. You probably just want to cut it like with live drums, when you're moving them around, I usually do this cut method. So it's important to know the tools available, what you need to do to tweak your drums. And it's important to when you're recording, take that extra 5 minutes to get another take of your drummer, just like, have them play to the song one more time. If you don't have the right take, and your song is, like, what? 3 minutes long, just spend 12 more minutes in the studio, run through it a few times. That will take 12 minutes of your life, even if your drummer gets a little cranky, having to perform more parts. The amount of time it will take you to save a less than perfect drum part in post production in the production process versus just 12 minutes of getting, like, two, three more takes, it's so worth it to try and get a good take. And if you're recording live drums and you didn't get the right take, I mean, the point of live drums is to get a good live performance. And live performance being key, but good, probably being more important than live. So, I encourage you to take the time to get the right performance. And let's talk about, Okay, you love your drum part. It's perfect. You really, really like how it sounds. You really really like how it feels. But you're like, you know what? The kick drum needs more ump and you did the EQs, and you did the compression. It's It just doesn't have that sound of the produced kick. And a lot of these kick drum samples, they are created and crafted. They are, like many different kick samples processed and combined and resampled and distorted and perfected. And people have spent a long time making just the sample, and people got so good at samples that it's like, Okay, your ear got a little use to samples, and you want a little bit of samples. So what you're going to do here is we're going to create a midi track, and you're going to go, and you're going to drag this kick over into the midi track, and we're going to select drums. This is called audio to Midi. And it takes a audio track, and it creates a midi track out of that audio track, creating all of the middy hits that we're in the audio track. So now we're going to have a midi track basically ready to go already in sync with our kick drum. All we're going to need to do is perfect it because this is not perfect and sometimes makes mistakes, and then drag in our desired sound. As you can see, it was a little confused. It added a lot of different parts, and we are hearing in this live drum kit a lot of different sounds. And what we would do here is you then go into a drum rack. Go into this drum rack, and then we'll go into our resources fold there. Grab some kick drams. We're just going to grab these two just to show you how you would do this. And the way the drum rack works is that this is C one. This is C Sharp one. That's D one. What am I talking about? Well, this F sharp one is none of the things I said, so we're going to have to move this down so that it is one of the things I said. And now we can sol this. Maybe we want also sol our kick drum, maybe we want to zoom in and see what really is the kick drum here. It looks like it's this bottom one. This other stuff seems like it's extra, and we just go from here. And this is b lining up pretty well. So, maybe this is the sound you want. Maybe you want to addition some other sounds. And what you would do is you would go through the whole song, and you would make sure that all these hits line up, and it missed the hit, and you would have to put this hit in manually, or maybe that's what this is, and you would move this up and be like, Are you my saving grace? No. So you could go and see if a different one of these off clips were this hit here. You could add it manually. But you see that base, Oh, I was in the wrong place. So maybe we are here, and we h h, That looks like it's the right thing. So you can see what I did, and we found our missing kick drum. So that's why it's worth keeping all those other grade out clips until you've gone through the whole song in case the hit you're needing is just right there. And Ableton does a pretty good job. It's not perfect, and it's a little bit of a bummer you have to supervise this whole thing, but at the end of the day, I mean, a three minute song, four minute song. It's not gonna take you that long to go through, and it's worth perfecting to make sure that every hit is there. So now you have your live drums and your kick drum sample layer. And the cool thing about this is that your kickom sample layer is in a totally live groove. You can even mute the live krum and see what it sounds like. And maybe that's the sound that you want. So live drums are a little bit of their own animal. You want to process all of these still on their own snares, get their own EQs, and own compressors. I do recommend creating a group just for your snares, creating a group for your Toms, and creating a group for all of like instruments symbols, et cetera, so that you can process things all together because you don't want, like the snare top a bottom to really have their own sound. I mean, you can go deep with mixing and sound design, and you can do all that stuff. But Usually, you do. There is an element of trying to simplify your life here. And so when you group parts together, then you can start making sense of things and tackling it in your mind. And here you go. So you can e Q your snares, maybe send it to a reverb, you can e Q and compress your toms, your overheads, your high hats, maybe you want to pan your overheads, and Panning them wide is nice. In general, the wider, the high end symbol stuff, the better, and the kick drum, the snare, want to be down the middle. Usually. Maybe you do like how the live kick layers, the sample kick. Maybe you don't even want a sample kick. It's really up to you, and you have this session. You can play around with these drums and study them and see how you would approach dealing with live drums. 32. Percussion, Shakers, and Tambourines: Let's talk about adding life and flavor and spice to your drums with percussion. So, you really emphasize the groove with percussion. You add flavor. You can add some unique sounds or shakers, tambourines, world sound, synth percussion, loops, and, of course, how to process them. Let's grab this high loop and this kick and snare loop here. Let's speed this up a little bit. And let's see about adding a tambourine. You're a tambourine loop here. And that's nice. You can find your tambourine loops in the Sud Resources folder percussion. We got tambourine. We got shaker. We got all these other hits. So, you can drag in your tambourine loop. It'll sound something like this. You could turn it down in case that's too loud. And it just adds dimension, and adds vibe to your track. And you could try adding a shaker. Well, that right there isn't quite lining up. So let's see what's going on here. Ah. You never want one of these in the orange. You want these to all be clean numbers here. So let's go and drag the end to one third. Now, it's too slow, speed it up. There we go. So this ended up being the length we wanted. If numbers are in the orange, it's not going to line up, and you can really hear that. So it's always nice to click the end of the track and drag that to a nice strong beat, either a whole bar, if you can, half a bar or at least one, two, one, four, whatever you got next to you. And you can hear how adding these is a nice way to add energy and add subdivisions that's a little less standard, and you can maybe even get rid of your high hats and see what this sounds like. Add the tain. It's nice. I like it with the high hats, but you got options. You could even take some shaker one shots and create your own kind of pattern here in drum round. Depending on what you're going for. And speaking of drum rack, what I might do is yes, there are some amazing shaker loops. And you can also go into the samples folder in Ableton, type in percussion, or you can go to the student resources folder and look under percussion. And we got a lot of different hits here, and you can just drag a whole bunch of different options into a drum rack or an impulse. And let's see what we got. So you can add percussion with loops, which I often do because it's nice having something really live feeling about the shakers and tambourines. And a loop is often recorded live, and it's nice to have that live addition to your song, depending on the kind of music that you make. You can make your own one shots into a drama or impulse and do it that way. And I do that sometimes. But more often than not, I will program my kicks and snares, play my high hats, and then add a loop of my percussion. And that's sort of like the three ways to do drums coming together. That's usually how I like to do it, but it's important to know that you have all these different options. The processing for shakers, tambourines, percussion is a lot like with high hats. They are less important than the kick and snare and often less important than basically everything else in your song, not to say that they aren't important because they are very important. They're allowed to take up the real estate that nothing else does. So let's go back to this tambourine. What I mean, there's just the last priority. Make sure your vocal sounds good. Make sure your kick and Sir sounds good, Your bass sounds good, your guitar, your synth, whatever, and then use the tambourine just so that cuts through, but it doesn't need to be a big player, unless subjectively, that's your idea. You can maybe roll off some high. Maybe you liked it. With the compression, you can go to our favorite compressor here, and you can just sort of dial to taste, you know, Maybe you want it like this. That sounds pretty good. You can explore different presets. You can see what sounds good to you. You can use something like this. And depending on your song and the speed of the song and the quality of the sound, all the stuff, this might be a little different. What I'm usually trying to go for here is a pretty open attack. But something that still contains the sound because I really want to, like, I want to contain the tambourine and the shaker because I want them to add their live feel, but I don't want them to be too dominant. So you can maybe try a similar effect on the shaker. And you can add the shaker and tambourine pretty quiet. Just adding some air, or they can be louder, being more standout characters. It's really up to you. There's a lot more amazing percussion out there. And the next lesson, we're going to dive into the whole wide world of percussion. 33. Latin and Electronic Percussion: Bongos and Bleeps: We talked about tambourines and shakers, but there's obviously a lot of other percussion sounds available. So you can have different percussion loops, which we'll explore now, and then you can also have different percussion one shots, which we'll explore in a bit. So let's look at some different kind of percussion loops. There's a lot of world sounds, Latin sounds, even some synth and electronic sounds. So let's dive into those. This is a percussion loop, but obviously, this isn't a tambourine or a shaker. So this is an example of how you can have some different kinds of sounds to really add a lot of character into your beat. Let's listen to this again. Here's a different option of another percussion loop. Here's another percussion loop. This has more of like a Bongo ga kind of vibe. Here's another example. And these are just examples of really amazing percussion loops that can be added to your beat to really give a whole otherther dimension. So let's just pull up a standard beat here so we can show you what these feel like. We'll grab our drum loop here. And we're just going to experiment with some of these added percussion loops. Go here, turn on loop mode so that we are able to drag this. And let's listen. And that really has a pretty solid vibe. Of course, when you're adding a pretty thick and busy sounding loop, it might be preferable to put it on top of a simpler sounding beat. But for the purposes of just showing some quick examples, I'm gonna keep going. Turn this on loop mode, and let's audition this one next. So you can hear that this loop in particular doesn't seem to lean the right way and fit into the beat as well as this first loop did. So this loop here that we just listened to would probably be best suited for a different part of the song or maybe a different song entirely. Turn on loop mode here. So you can really hear how this loop does lend itself pretty well to the drums that we already have here. It sounds like it's just part of the groove already. Let's try this one. This was at the wrong tempo here. What we're going to do is we're going to hit this button to slow it down. Actually, it's not at the right tempo at all. So what we can do, and we can tell by this orange zero that we are not lining up perfectly on the grid here. So let's click the end and drag it to this bar line of two here, and now this should be in tempo. That one also does sound pretty nice. Although because of the way that the loop is structured, it sounds like a loop. Like, it sounds like it keeps restarting. So if I were to actually use this, I would probably cut this up a little bit, maybe repeat the second half or something so that we don't feel like it's a loop. We'll see if that move made any difference. And that sounded better to me because this first part here, for some reason, it just had a loop quality when hearing it so frequently. So what I did here was cut the loop in half, selecting the space, command E, and then selected what I cut, and Commander Windows D, which just duplicated over the next hit, which used to be the start. So then effectively, we have the start, and then this part actually three times in a row. But by the nature of what this part is, you don't feel and your ear doesn't get drawn to it compared to every other drum sound. So that's why this worked. We'll turn this off, turn this part on here. D. Remember to turn the loop on, if that's not on, therefore, we can drag it. This has that same loop quality as the last one. So we could try the same thing, cut the second half, duplicate it, see if that works. That didn't work as well. So this loop, if we wanted to use it, would take a little bit more attention as to how do we make it not feel like a loop. So this loop also worked really well. Honestly, most of these options just sounded really great. And these are just some loops that I found in a sample pack. So in future lessons, we're going to be covering where can you find some really high quality sample packs to pull from? In the next lesson, we're going to be talking about electronic percussion and percussion one shots. 34. Latin and Electronic Percussion: Bongos and Bleeps Part 2: L et's talk about electronic percussion and percussion one shots. So, here I have some electronic percussion loops, and let's listen to what those sound like. We have our base beat here. And now I'm going to pull our first electronic percussion loop, and we're gonna give it a listen. So electronic percussion is really just exactly what it sounds like. You're making a percussion sound probably out of a synth and a lot of the original eight oh eight packs and eight oh nine packs. Those have some very electronically sounding percussions that sound great for the right track. This is obviously a loop that's been. You could make your own. Let's listen to this example here. We'll turn on loop, and we'll pull this over. And I'm just curious what this would sound like pitched up. That's a vibe two. So we have an entire world of acoustic and electronic percussion sounds that we can use. Let's now dive in quickly to what some percussion one shots of these varieties might sound like. So here I have assembled a drum rack, so let's go ahead and insert this My clip here, and we'll listen to some of the different sounds that I picked. We'll turn this icon on so we can hear, and here we go. This will either play in or program these hits to your liking. Turn on our base beat here. Turn off this loop, and let's see what we got. This first hit sounds like something that wants to happen on a down beat. Then that might happen sparsely over here. That seems like a fun thing to happen maybe here. And so you just will take the time to find a pattern that you really like. Okay. All. And this is just to show you a quick example of what you might want to do here. You really just want to take the time to find a pattern that's really accentuating the beat in a way that you really like. You could add a more consistent groove if you wanted to. This is kind of more sparse to fill in some pockets. You could try something. More consistent. Turning thing like this or some other kind of pattern, the sky is the limit. If I want a consistent sounding pattern, I will probably gravitate towards a loop because a lot of the time those are actually performed, which has the live feel that I feel like percussion really benefits from. And then when I'm looking to do more like one off really unique hits, that's when I will go ahead and program or play in a part on top of my bet. But when I'm looking for something that sounds like this, s. Usually take the time to find something that sounds like that, an existing sample, because the amount of time it would take me to produce something that sounds that live. I will probably have a quicker time finding a sample just because there's so many amazing samples today. If you cannot find what you're looking for, and you have the one shot, it can totally be done. And the way that you would do it is you find your base pattern that you're making, and then you really spend the time to find where the right velocity hits are. And then when you have those, you will experiment with moving some of the beats before and after the grid. So maybe you want the twos and fours a little late. Ones and threes a little early, and that would sound a little bit like this. Which already had more life to it. So you can detail and find a really cool groove in this programming way. But I will only spend 5 minutes looking for an amazing sample if I have something in mind that I do want to have a live feel. I love percussion. It's really that finishing touch to your beat that just makes it sound that much groovier and that much more professional. 35. Building a Beat in Ableton: Now we're going to build a beat using only Ableton Sounds. So let's go over here to instruments, and we're going to take our impulse rack. We'll do this vintage Funky Good Time, and we'll take our drum rack and drag that in. Now, let's delete this other clip, and we'll start our beat with this vintage Funky Good Time. I'm going to select 8 bars. Right click Insert Mit clip, and then click on it, Commander Windows Alfa Loop, and we are ready. So often with a beat here, I will start by putting in the snare or the back beat. I'm going to move this last hit in a little bit, so I'm able to move all these clips, select. We're going to hit plus to Zoom in. And I do like my back beats usually to hit just a bit after the bar. So just a bit of a lean back feeling. See what other sounds we got here? So, already, we're gonna go for more of, like, a hip hop kind of beat. So let's go with these sounds. Here, this kick drum pattern. I can tell this will be the base pattern that we want to go for here. Turning down this hits velocity. And let's just dial this pardon so we know what we want to duplicate here. Sounds pretty good. Here we have a four bar loop. Et's turn this off, and maybe this part will go. And now, maybe let's add our high hat. Turn every other had quieter. We'll add some groove to our high hats here. No. Next, duplicate this here. But at the end of this phrase, we're gonna have more of a tom moment. Next, we might want to add a tambourine or a shaker here. Maybe that? Maybe that. Let's try these. So here we have a kick pattern that evolves over time. We have a snare pattern that evolves over time. We have a high hat pattern with varying timing and groove and velocity. We throw in some tos. The end of the first 4 bars, we have a little snare fill and a little. The end of the second 4 bars, the end of the 8 bars, we have more of a big to fill moment, and we actually skip out on the s at beat four here. What that's doing keeps you able to listen to this loop because it's looping at a long enough time or the group is simple, so this leaves a lot of room for base, for vocals, harmony, everything else. But it keeps it interesting enough where it's not just sounding like a loop. At the end of the day in music production, you really don't want your drum loops to sound like loops. If you're programming or using samples, if they're not actually live drums, you don't want them to feel like they're So the best thing you can do is to take the extra time to program them in large enough loops where they stay interesting the whole time. 36. Building a Beat in Ableton Pro: Let's break down a beat I made using some third party loops and samples. Here's the beat. So let's break this down, hit by hit. First, we have our kick drum. Next, we have a snare. So you can see right off the bat, we have a similar pattern here from the first to the second bar as we do from the third to the fourth bar. So this is a repeating pattern. The second to the third bar has a different pattern, and then the fourth bar seems to cut out entirely. Our snare hit hits on the two and f, the back beat of every measure, except for the last one. And what I did there is I have a different snare hitting on that beat. So what's happening here is the first snare hit is being pitched up one semitone. The second time you hear this sample, it's the original way that it came. So it's a different pitch both times, because this sound will really call your ear. And if it's the same every time, you'll notice that quickly. Here it's hitting on the just like it's hitting here, except for halfway through what I've done, I've duplicated this, and I have reversed it. That way we're hearing this. So it's into the down beat, so we're getting some impulse, some speed ramp feeling into the next beat. But I've turned it down 40 B so that it's a little bit quieter, and it sounds like this. That really gives some momentum going into the next beat. Here are my high hats. This is a pretty standard high hat pattern that I have here. This eighth notes, where every other one is quieter in velocity. We have this other high hat sound that hits on the upbeat before this snare on the first beat in the third beat. And that's really it for our basic standard kick snare, and high hat. So what makes this beat interesting is that we've added some percussions. So let's listen to this tambourine. This is just a tambourine loop I had. This obviously is adding a faster rhythm, which is innately more exciting. Next, we have this percussion here. We can mute our tambourine. Can you eve mute your high ads? And now, this is a pretty percussion heavy beat, which sounds good to me, but maybe some of these different elements would want to be a little bit quieter or louder. So we can dive into perfecting this in a second. I just want to keep showing you the different parts of this beat. We have a crash that happens at the beginning of every downbeat. We have this percussion hit that happens only at the beginning, only at the first downbeat and the third downbeat. So that's just adding some energy right at the very beginning. And we have this. We have a texture. That's just to add some real world ambience. And we have a little bit of a different drum loop here that I have cut to just hit right here. And I have EQ so that we're only hearing this part of that loop. Altogether, this sounds like this. And I forgot to mention, we have a fill here. That's why the kick drops out here is because we have These are different tom hits that I placed here. And just like that, boom, boom, boom, boom, do, do boom. And that sounded good to me. We have this layer on top of it. Hitting only the same hits, and then we also have this layer on top of it. This is pretty subtle, but this creates this. And generally, when I'm balancing the volumes of drums, you want to see how quiet can you have something in there and you still really feel it. So I turned down the high hat, and I turned down the tambourine. Because high end is so much easier for the ear to hear, you can actually have it way quieter. So we've turned down the high hats in the tambourine to make sure that we're still really hearing everything. Even though it's a pretty busy beat, we don't want it to feel too busy. This sound here. We do want to focus on that when it's there. So that doesn't want to be too quiet. I've leaned this beat pretty heavy into the percussion that we're using. So really, the main thing that I'm focusing on is this. This is actually pretty loud in the beat. We'll probably turn this way down. We could turn this down, of course. But I think that this sounds good. And if we really break this down, we have a big fill here at the end of the 4 bars. We have some pretty sophisticated loops going on and some texture. We have some one time hits that happen here and there. We have this crash at the beginning, and we have these hits that only happened at the end of one and three. Every fo snare has this reverb sound. And this one timed with the Phil is rising into the start of the beat again. So there's really a lot going on here with loops and what I've programmed, and what I've played, and it really keeps this interesting and easy to listen to. You can spend a lot of time on a beat and make something really feel perfect for your song, but you don't have to. You can also just lay down the idea that you're feeling at the time and just keep going with your creative process and come back to it a little bit later. It's really up to whatever works best for your workflow. When I first started producing drums were some of the hardest things for me to do. So I would always start with the drums because that always took me the longest, and I used to have the least amount of inspiration for drums. So for me, when I had a drum beat that worked, then all the other ideas came easy. As I've produced over the years, I started to find a lot of inspiration for drums. I no longer feel that way at all. So whatever calls you the most is going to be the best place for you to start and to work on. But I hope that you can see what I've done here with this beat to inspire you making some beats of your own. 37. Study the Greats: Learn from Your Favorite Drum Beats: Best way to learn drums is to listen to good drums. You learn to play the piano, by playing Beethoven or Mozart or whoever. You can learn to produce, and you should learn how to produce by remaking your favorite drums. I have a producer friend who will literally copy the drums from a different song. And we recently sold a song in sync licensing. I won't say the name of it. But my friend literally copied the drumbeat from a different song exactly. And I didn't feel great about doing that, but you can't copyright a drumbeat. And he really went after the reference song that was sent to us, somebody said, Hey, we're looking for this kind of a song, and he copied every single hit And he made sure that the samples that we picked sounded very similar. And then he went on to eQ them and to pitch them to match the brightness. So our drums matched the brightness of the drums in the reference track, and they matched the exact rhythm. I didn't feel great about this approach using it in a song that we were actually releasing, but I do think there's a ton of value for studying and recreating your favorite beats. And I have been in group chats phenomenally successful producers who all have said that remaking stuff, remake stuff, remake your favorite beats, that that is a key to learning how to produce. And I have done this a number of times for just practicing. I don't tend to copy straight up if it's an actual song of mine. Maybe it's ego. I don't know what it is. That's not my method for me personally, but you can do that. And even if you choose to or not to, I highly, highly recommend that for your own practice, for your own learning of the craft, find your favorite songs, listen to them, and then recreate them, because recreating proves that you know exactly what they're doing. If you're able to just listen to a beat and you can tell, Oh, yeah, I know where all the kicks are, all the snares, all the things, then maybe you don't need to actually recreate it. But even going that extra step will probably teach you a thing or two. 38. Learning Activity Make Your Own Beats: Have made it to the end of the drums chapter, and I bet you know what that means. If your guess was that that means a learning activity, you have guessed right. We have a learning activity for you, and let's dive right into it so that you can apply all that you've learned in this chapter. Let's go ahead and pull up drums learning activity. Here we have different samples. Now, these samples do not contain drums. And let's listen to these. You'll notice that the BPM is here on the side. Also here written into the track. So what you would do, if you pick a different sample, let's say one oh two, you would change your BPM 21 oh two. Of course, you can do whatever you want. This says 80 BPM. But I know you. You're gonna be like, I'm doing at 160, and no one can tell me otherwise. No one's stopping you. Use these however you want to do. This one's at 1:50. And what I want you to do is to pull in an instance of impulse or drum rack. And I would like you to create a beat with an impulse pack that already exists. You might try this backbeat room or any of these other amazing kits. And then I'd also like you to create a kit in drum recor impulse with either sounds from Ableton samples or samples that I have given you in the student resources. And make a beat to one or all of these different tracks. I'm sure you've heard that practice makes perfect. And for me in my own personal journey in life, I have never seen that become more true than with music. And the more that I make beat, the better I get at making beats. It's really that simple. There's nothing mystical or magical about musical talent. You might be a little bit more gifted music ally than somebody else or somebody else might be a little bit more talented than you, but at the end of the day, it comes down to who made more music will ultimately be better at making music. So I highly suggest that you make a drum beat to all of these. They don't have to be perfect. You could even set a ten minute time limit to just make the best beat that you can in 10 minutes and then move on, because it's important to do the best you can, but also not to get too precious with your work. 39. Congratulations!: Congratulations on finishing this class. I am so proud of you, and I can't wait to listen to your class project. You can say hi to me on Instagram or Spotify at Benza Maman. And if you like this class, please check out my other music classes on Skillshare.