Record Your First Song: Music Recording and Mixing Masterclass for Beginners

1. Introduction: In the past, if you wanted to record a song, you would have to go into a multimillion dollar studio and have a deal with a record label so that they could pay for your expenses in order to record the song. But today, the barrier to entry has never been lower. You can use a basic laptop computer with a cheap microphone and begin recording songs in your home. And in this course, that's exactly what I'm going to teach you how to do. What's up, guys, My name is mulatto and I'm a music producer from Toronto, Canada. I've had music that I've created featured on network television shows and Netflix, and ad campaigns across the world. I've been a part of a gold selling record in Korea and had some of my music playing and heavy rotation on the radio. In this course, I'm going to teach you how to begin recording and how to make world-class quality recordings from the comfort of your home. So without further ado, let's get into it. 2. CLASS PROJECT: So in this course, the class project is going to be simply to record something, export it as an MP3 or listenable audio file, and then upload it to the class folder so that I can have a listen in this course, I'm gonna be going into a lot of different gear that you can get your hands on to do some recording. But I'm keeping the barrier to entry very low. So if you don't have your hands on any gear yet and you want to complete the class project, feel free to record it on your phone with your voice memos app or on your computer using your built-in computer Mike and a cheap pair of headphones, I would recommend that if you can get your hands on some gear, like some of the stuff that I outlined in the course that will definitely make your recording sound better and I would recommend it. I'm excited. Let's get into it. 3. Overview of the Recording Process: Sound exists in the universe. Sound particles are moving through the air. So how do we capture them and get them into a computer or into a file so that we can press Play and then have that sound come out of speakers somewhere. So the first tool we need in the recording process is something called a microphone. Here's the one right here. They come in various shapes and sizes. Now a microphone has a sensor in it, and when sound oscillations happen in the environment, they will cause the sensor in the microphone to vibrate along with vibrations in the environment. And the microphone has components inside of it that turn that vibration into an electrical signal. So it's going to send that electrical signal, it's going to pass it through a cable. And then that brings us to our next component, which is called an audio interface. So the microphone sends an electrical signal to our audio interface, which I have one right here. For example, I'll flash some pictures on the screen. And then our audio interface can interpret that electrical signal. And it can then turn it from an electrical analog signal into a digital signal that can then be interpreted by our computer. Because computers exist in the digital domain and understand the language of ones and zeros and not so much electrical analog signals. So we need the audio interface to take the electrical analog signal from our microphone, turn it into a digital signal using something called an analog-to-digital converter that exists inside of our audio interface. And then it's going to send that digital signal onward to our computer. And then our computer can interpret that signal and it can record it and save it and do all kinds of fun stuff with that signal once it's inside the computer. And so the third and final stop in our signal flow is going to be the computer. So that's something that we need to think about it that's probably going to be the most expensive part of our setup. But these days, if you're doing simple, basic recordings, you don't need a ton of computing power. And you could get by with a computer that costs maybe a thousand dollars. Back in the 90s and the 2000s, people were using computers with only 20 or 50 megabytes of RAM to actually make their recordings. Computers are much more powerful than that today for a lot cheaper than those words. So you can get by with relatively a basic computer setup and a relatively inexpensive microphone and inexpensive audio interface, create your recording setup and you'll be right on track to start, beginning to record things. 4. Build Your Recording Setup: So now I'm gonna go over the gear that we're going to need and some cheap options for you to start considering purchasing some of these if you don't already have them. So to get started, probably the most expensive part of our setup is gonna be the computer, assuming that we're just getting started recording and we're gonna be doing mostly some basic recordings. We don't need a super strong computer to get started. Apple is great. Macbooks, Mac mini, iMac, also PCS great as well. I don't personally use PC, but PCs can totally get the job done. Two, you're going to want to look for at least four gigabytes of RAM in your computer. And you're going to need some free storage space on your computer to get started. Audio recording doesn't take nearly as much storage as video recording does videos super heavy and you need terabytes and terabytes of storage and your computer. And I don't know how those people do it. But for audio, you don't need a ton of storage. You might want to have a 100 free gigabytes on your computer just to get started and have some space to fill up. But honestly, I've had periods of time in my recording career where I only had two gigabytes free on my computer and I made it work. I would keep deleting old stuff just to make room for new stuff and keep recording. That was with a computer that was getting pretty old to the end of its life and I was running out of space. I did what I had to do. Hopefully you have a couple of free gigabytes on your computer and you can start recording. Now, another thing to mention is that the bigger your projects become, the more computer processing that you're going to need to handle all these things if you're just getting started and you're doing simple recordings with one vocal part or one voice-over, then that's gonna be pretty simple. You don't need a crazy computer to do that stuff. And I think it's more important to just get started and start to learn how to do it. Worry about processing power later. Use what you got. You don't have to go out and spend a bunch of money. Most people have a computer nowadays, so probably whatever you have is gonna be capable of making at least some basic recordings. Personally, I love Apple computers. I'm a big Apple guy. Apple computers come with GarageBand, which is a free recording software. Apple also offers a software that is a more professional tier called Logic Pro, which runs about $200 once you have an Apple computer. Both good options. I'm gonna be showing examples in this course with GarageBand as well as some with logic love Apple, and I definitely recommend it. So the next piece of gear to consider is gonna be our microphone. Microphones can range from $20 to insane prices like a $100 thousand for classic vintage microphones and rare microphones and microphones that aren't being made anymore. But we don't need that super expensive stuff we can get by with a microphone. I would suggest that runs about a $100. This was the very first Mike I ever had audio technical AT 2020s. It's professional quality. It sounds good. A $100, and you can buy one of these at your local music store. And that's gonna get you cooking like hit songs. I guarantee you hit songs have been recorded on this microphone. It's not like the most premium high-end microphone in the world, but it's all good. Most people can't tell. The average listener cannot tell. I've made great sounding stuff on this microphone and so have many professionals in the world. I'll put some other good options in the lesson notes as well. Another thing to consider is gonna be what's called a USB microphone. So a USB microphone actually combines the microphone part of what we need with a built-in audio interface that exists inside the microphone. And then instead of using a microphone cable to plug our microphone into an interface, our microphone slash interface, all-in-one actually just plugs into your computer with a USB cable. So this can be quite handy and more inexpensive than buying both of those things separately. But you're not gonna be able to change microphones. Having a dedicated audio interface, you could have three different microphones and then you could plug them all in. Maybe at the same time if you have multiple inputs, or you could swap them out and choose which one you want to use at a certain time. That's handy if we want to be using different microphones for different things. If you have them built into one, a USB mic, you can only use this microphone. You can't swap out microphones and plug them into the interface because the interface is in the microphone. So that's something to consider. If you only plan on using one microphone right now, maybe that's a good option for you. It's cheap, it's going to be effective. It's got both those things in one that could be definitely a good consideration for you. This audio technical AT 2020s has a USB version, which I will link to in the lesson notes. It only costs a little bit more than this one itself. So that's a pretty good option if you want to save as much money as possible, and if you want to have both those things wrapped into one. So the next piece of gear we're going to need, like I said, is an audio interface. Now there's also a large range of audio interfaces that you can get. But on the cheap, inexpensive side, we're gonna be looking at an interface that has either one or two inputs. Now an input is the amount of microphones that you could plug into the interface and record into your computer at once. Most recordings are just gonna be one microphone out of time. So we're fine to get a one input interface. Just roll with that for now as we're getting started, you can find single input interfaces for around $100. I would suggest the focus right Scarlet Solo, or the focus right, scarlet to i2. This interface is gonna get us started. It has pro level focus, right? Pre-amps in it going to sound great on your mic and it's gonna get us recording. So the next piece of gear we're going to need in our recording setup is gonna be headphones. Headphones are super important because when you're recording a song, you need to hear it and you need to hear the instrumental that you're singing over. But you can't play it out of your speakers because the sound from the speakers is going to go into your microphone and you're going to hear the speakers in your recording. And you don't want to hear that. You just want to hear your voice. You want it to be isolated so that it's clean and crisp so that you can manipulate it when you go to mix your song. Now there's a couple of good options for headphones. You could even use classic, the white Apple headphones that come with your iPhone. And you can use headphones that are like 20 bucks, just something that you can hear. Always nice to have some studio quality headphones. And you can get studio quality headphones for around a $100, even up to $200. If you want something a little bit nicer, I use personally these audio tech Nika ACTH headphones. These are really good. They sound good. They have lots of base. They have a full sound spectrum response so you can hear all your frequencies clearly. I love them. I've used these for quite a few years and they're really good. Now something to consider when you're looking at headphones. You need to plug your headphones into your audio interface. And the headphone jack where you plug it in is usually of this size. Now, if you have headphones that have this jack, the eighth of an inch jack, you're going to need what's called an adapter, which is this. And the adapter just takes the eighth inch size and turns it into the corridor in size so you can plug it into your interface. You can buy this separately at your local electronic store. Our costs $1, they're super cheap. Most studio headphones come with his Jack anyways, this one came with the headphones. Regarding something like Bluetooth headphones, you probably want to stay away from recording with Bluetooth headphones because it tends to have a lag. So if you are listening on Bluetooth headphones and then trying to record, there's gonna be a delay and it's going to make it super hard to record. I've tried to do this before and did not have success with it, almost impossible to record. So you definitely want to have headphones that are wired. Now another piece of gear to consider is speakers. Speakers are not going to be 100% necessary. If our goal is to just begin recording something on a microphone, we can just get by with headphones alone. But having a set of studio monitors in your home studio is always something that's super nice. You can record your voice and then you can crank up the speakers and listen to it out loud and crack the base and make your neighbors angry. And that's always a really fun, gratifying experience. Just crank in your new song of loud and blasting it. Speakers are not gonna be a 100% necessary, but definitely something that's nice to have a couple of pretty inexpensive options for speakers, K, RK rockets. You could get a pair of them for maybe $300. You could probably even find some cheaper ones for around $200. Definitely something to consider is speakers. Now the last thing we may need to purchase for our recording setup is gonna be our DAW or Digital Audio Workstation. And this is gonna be the software that we record that we use in our computer that we hit record and it starts recording our microphone and then we can play it back and maybe we can cut up our recording and do all kinds of post editing and all this stuff. So that's our digital audio workstation. With every Apple computer, you get GarageBand for free. Honestly, that's what I would recommend starting on if you have an Apple computer, download GarageBand, if it's not already on your computer and open up GarageBand and check it out. That's gonna be the easiest thing to start with. If you want more premium features and a little bit of a more professional suite of software. The next tier up on Apple is gonna be Logic Pro. And Logic Pro is great. I've used logic for many years and it's a fully fledged recording software. So I also love Ableton Cubase. Lots of people use FL Studio for making beats. If you're using a PC, there's a free software called The Audacity. If you want the least barrier to entry possible, you can download Audacity for free and start recording. You can check out Cubase, you can check out Pro Tools. Definitely lots of options, but if you have an Apple computer, I would recommend just beginning with GarageBand, that's gonna be the easiest thing to get you started. 5. Plugging Things In: In this lesson, I'm going to show you how to plug all your equipment in so that you can begin to record. So first, we're gonna take our microphone and we're going to take our XLR cable. And we're going to plug it in on the side with the holes into the bottom of the microphone. Now we're plugging in here. And then we're going to take the other side of the cable and we're going to plug it into our audio interface, Mike Jack. So now that our microphones plugged into the interface, we're going to plug in our interface into our computer. We're going to take our thunderbolt cable here. Sometimes you may need an adapter if your interface has a different cable than what your computer will accept, definitely research into which interface in which computer you have. Most modern interfaces are going to be on USB-C. At this time. We plug our interface into our computer. If your interface requires external power, then you're going to have to plug in your interface also into a power outlet. Okay, Perfect. Now we're all plugged in here. 6. Condenser Vs. Dynamic Mics: Now another important thing to note about microphones is that there are two different kinds of microphones. There is something called a condenser microphone like this, 1820s. And then there's something called a dynamic microphone like this, Shure SM57. There's a couple of main differences between condenser microphones and dynamic microphones. The first difference is that condenser microphones tend to be a lot more sensitive. So they're going to pick up a lot more sound. If there's a dog barking in the background while you're recording, you're probably going to hear that dog in the background. Dynamic microphones are less sensitive. They're going to mostly just pick up what's in front of them. And if there's something going on in the background, they're not gonna get too much of that. Now the second difference between condenser and dynamic is that condenser microphones require something called phantom power. Now, phantom power is basically just an electrical voltage that gets sent into the microphone via the mic cable. That voltage comes from your audio interface. In your audio interface, you're going to have a switch or you're going to have a button that says either phantom power or it's going to say plus 48 volts, something like that. You can click that on. And that's going to turn on phantom power into your microphone. It's going to send the power through the cable, and that's what a condenser microphone needs in order to operate correctly and in order to start picking up sound, a dynamic microphone does not need phantom power. You can plug a dynamic microphone into your interface, not turn on phantom power, and it should be working. 7. Install Your Interface Driver: Now there's a piece of software that you might need to install onto your computer to make your computer work with your audio interface. And this is known as a driver. Now, drivers are generally a free piece of software. You can usually go over to your interface manufacturer's website, like the focus right? Website, or whichever manufacturer made your interface, you can head over to their website and they'll have a download section. And you'll be able to find the piece of drivers software that you need to install to make your interface work properly. 8. Recording Test: Now let's make our very first recording. This is just gonna be a simple test recording just to get something, see if everything's working properly. So first, mute my speakers. I got my headphones on. So I'm going to be listening through my headphones. I'm going to hit mute on my interface, cut the speakers. Now my headphone volume is turned up. I'm going to turn on input monitoring so that I can hear my own voice. Check, check. I can hear my own voice now through my microphone. That's perfect. So if I'm singing a song and be able to hear myself, aside from input monitoring, a smart thing that you can do is just take one ear off your headphones so that you can still hear yourself talking as you're recording. So I'd like to do that as well. But regardless, we'll turn on input monitoring. We're going to be hearing ourselves, and now let's try to do a recording. So we're going to hit the record button. Check, check, check, check. And there you see we have signal is coming in as I speak. You can see it's recording what I'm saying. And the audio waveforms are appearing like magic because we're actually recording now and sound is being written from the real-world, from the air, is going through a microphone and is being written into a computer program and recorded and saved forever. It is now recorded. What I'm saying, my voice, the sound of my voice, it's amazing. It's like magic. This is how magic is made. Okay, awesome, That's perfect. So everything is working. Now comes the fun part. We can start to actually record things and start to make music and start to, start to get creative with it. Now that we have the technical out of the way, we can begin to be creative. 9. Finding Instrumentals: What is up, guys, Welcome back. In this lesson, I'm going to talk a little bit about finding instrumentals. Where to look for them, where to find them online, just how to get your hands on some music to start recording on. Let's check it out. The first place where you can look to find beats online is on YouTube. Youtube has tons of producers that are uploading beats all the time. You can find a ton of different kinds of beats on YouTube. You can find hip hop beats, electronic beats, pop beats, army beats, whatever you're looking for, you're gonna be able to find something to record on. A lot of beats are not going to be free. A lot of producers are going to put the word free in the title to get you to click on it. But a lot are not going to be offered for free. Let's just try to find some beets right now. What are we looking for? I don't know. Maybe Ariana Grande, a type beats like maybe you were an artist who is trying to do an area on the ground a thing. So Ariane, a granite type B. Let's check this one out. Okay, We can see free anionic Ronnie type B. And so generally the link to buying it or downloading it is gonna be in the description. Sounds pretty cool. It's got a vibe. Cool, like synthesisers, nice germs. So can we download this? So there's a link to beat stars. So beat sars is a website where you can lease and or purchase beats. It looks like. So download, we can click Download. So I have to follow on beat stars. So let's check that out so I can sign in here. I have an account already so I can sign in and give it a download. Download. Okay. Downloading. Okay. Got it. So I downloaded the file. Now I'm going to get it. I'm going to drag it into my garage band. It's gonna make a new track. Now, this B might have a tag on it. And what a tag is, is when the producer puts like a voice tag saying like set it beats, so and so beats every couple of seconds so that you can't release it without paying for it because there's gonna be a tag on it that's gonna be really annoying to listen to. So you're going to have to maybe pay for it to get the version without the tag on it. So let's see if there's a tag here. Yeah, so there's a tag. Some are tags. So what they do is they're going to offer a free download. But then if you actually want to get the version with no tags and you're going to have to pay for a lease or buy the beat. But nonetheless, now we have something here and we can start recording on it. So there you go. There's one place to find some beats. So another place is on beat stars itself. So beat stars is a website where there's tons of producers also uploading beats. They're uploading beats available for Elise, beats available for exclusive purchase. What are we looking for? I'm not sure. Let's type in Post Malone. See what comes up. Okay, we got tons of stuff. Post Malone and the weekend type B. Sounds pretty sick. Cool. And this one has a free download offered as well. I'm assuming again with tags with our email address. Oh, it's gonna go to my email. Okay, cool. Okay. Download File. Sounds good. It's going to download. I got it. There it is with jag it in. So now we can record on this one. So boom, Perfect. We got beats. Don't meet her on the track. Now the thing to note as well as maybe we're not going to use all these beats. What we can do is just get the free download with the tags on it, record a song on it. And then if we end up liking the song that we record, that we can go back and purchase it from them, or at least the version without the tags and just drag that one in and remove the one with the tags and our song, it's still gonna be there. If we end up hating our song, maybe we just don't least the beat or purchase the beat. As you begin to sing and record vocals, you're going to want something to record on. And these are a couple of places to find things to record on. 10. Setting The BPM: So the last little thing that I wanted to make a note of here when we're going and we're downloading beats, we're finding beats online. A really important thing to do when you begin to record on beats is to actually set what's known as the tempo or the BPM of the beat in our project, in our recording software. So what the BPM is, is basically the tempo that the music is at. It's going to be or it can be faster. And so this is the BPM. It's that tapping that consistent rhythm, that's called beats per minute BPM. And that's basically just a thing that tells you how fast the tempo of the song is when we begin to record, It's very important that we set the tempo in our project to match the tempo of the beat. So that all the drums and all the sounds and rhythms of the beat actually line up to the grid in our recording software so that we are able to easily snap to important parts of the beat. Everything's always going to line up to even symmetrical places. And so the way to easily make this happen is by setting the BPM. So the producer here has listed the BPM. It says 130 BPM for the Post Malone x weekend type II that we have downloaded. So we're just going to set that here. We're just going to type, we're just going to drag it up to 130 and it should line up. When we turn on our metronome, which is gonna be our click, that clicks at that 130 beats per minute. It should line up now. And there you have it. In here, it's lined up. We can go to the drums. Here the click is going with the beat. For example, if our tempo was set wrong to like 122, which is the wrong tempo, it wouldn't line up. You hear that click is not lined up. Back to 130. And it's perfectly lined up. So having that click perfectly lined up before we start recording is going to make so many things so much easier later in the recording process. First of all, it's going to make it easy to just go to where the beat drops, because it's going to drop right on that bar where it's lined up. And then we can just hit record right there easily start recording when the beat drops dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. Or maybe when the beat drops out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Now we're perfectly there. And then it's also going to make effects that we add later lineup properly with the grid as well. Things like delay or reverb. And we're also going to be able to take our things and move them around if we want to. So if I record something here? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And say I like it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I like that, but I don't like where I did it and I want to move it over somewhere else. I'm gonna be able to easily just drag it over and it's going to snap to our grid that you can see at the top. See how there's a grid with numbers and lines. Now it's going to smartly snap to those lines and it's going to stay lined up to the beat because we've set our tempo. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I can put that anywhere I want to know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's going to always be lined up. I can even put it like off the grid a little like yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's still lined up. The reason it's still lined up is because we set it properly, our tempo. And now everything is snapping with the instrumental. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's just a really quick example of how to set the tempo, how to find the tempo. If you have a beat where the tempo is not listed like this, there are other ways to find it. For example, you can say you can just Google find tempo of MP3. And then there's websites like this one gets song BPM, where you will probably have an MP3 file and then you're going to drop it there. And then it's going to upload to this website and this software is going to analyze it. And it's gonna probably just spit out the same BPM, 130 BPM. Things like this aren't always 100% perfect, but most of the time they work, you'll be able to tell though, when you're listening, if it's set to the right tempo, when you turn on the click, you'll be able to tell if it's off. So if it's off, then just keep trying to figure it out. Play with it. Sometimes it'll get close and you can move the BPM up one or down one. C it says 86 BPM here, which is actually completely wrong. I think because it was 130. So that's completely wrong. Don't trust that website. Apparently. Tune bat. Maybe this one works better. Bpm, BPM, bpm. Let's see. Is it going to work? 130? Perfect. So checkout, try this one. Tuned bad.com. That seemed to work. That's if it's not listed and you can't find it anywhere else. Checker that tune bad.com. Yeah, so that's just a little note about setting the BPM, how to set the BPM and why you should set the BPM. 11. Leasing Vs. Exclusive Rights: Welcome back you guys. Alright, so in this clip, I'm going to talk a little bit about the differences between leasing beads, buying beets, and generally about getting your hands on some instrumentals. You may have come across this online. You may have found a beat somewhere, whether it'd be on YouTube or whether it'd be on another website. You might have seen an option to lease the beat or to purchase the beat in what's called exclusive rights. There's a couple of differences here. Leasing beads means that you are getting the rights to actually record on this bead and to release a song on it that gets a certain number of streams or views based on the agreement of the lease that you're getting. So leasing a beat is generally going to be a bit cheaper. You can find leases of instrumental beats for $10.20 dollars, twenty five dollars. And then beyond this, when you lease a beat, you are a non-exclusive leaser of that beat. So that means that music producer that made that beat, they can actually lease that beat to a lot of different people. And most likely there's other artists that are also downloading that beat and creating songs on it as well. Those are also going to be out there, so you're not going to have exclusive rights to that beat. Now, beyond leasing, we have what's called purchasing exclusive rights. So this means that you are paying the producer a sum of money. That means you are going to be the sole recording artists associated with that beat. And that producers now not allowed to sell that beat to anybody else. Now, it's yours and you're the only person that can record on that beat and releases song on it from there on in. If other people lease that beat already vacated, may be still have it, but now you're securing it for yourself. No one else is going to lease that beat after you, you lock it down. The thing about buying exclusive rice is it's generally quite a bit more expensive because you're obviously preventing that producer from now generating more money from that beat by leasing it to other people anymore. So now it's yours for cubes is going to cost a bit more money, but that's another option. So those are just a couple of differences between leasing and purchasing exclusive rights to beats online that I wanted to talk about because I'm sure that you're going to encounter this if you're looking for beats online and you're looking for instrumentals to record over, you're definitely going to have a couple of questions about that sort of thing as you run into it. So I wanted to give a couple of pointers about that. 12. Example Recording: What is up, guys? So in this video, I'm going to show you me recording myself with a little chorus idea that I came up with on the beat that we just downloaded. So we have our beat loaded into GarageBand. And I'm going to sing a vocal part into my microphone. And I'm going to record this course that I came up with super-quick, easy chorus. We're going to get something down so that I can then afterwards show you how to begin processing your recordings. So without further ado, let's do some recording. So what I've done here is I've actually looped a little section of the beat here. This is gonna be my chorus. And what I do is I use this, these little markers so I can actually just click and drag on the top here on the ruler. And this creates a loop. So when the playhead is playing, it's just going to loop that part. It's going to keep going around and around. And I can move this around. I can move it over here. This is the part that I've decided I'm going to record my course over. So what I'm gonna do here, I'm just going to record a little idea that I had and I'm going to show you guys a bit of the process. So you can see I've got signal here and my track is ready. I can click this red button to start recording, or I can click R on my keyboard. So I'm going to set my loop and I'm going to record my idea. Making music, Gail, we do it every day. Making music. Can we do it every day? Yeah. Yeah. That's how we keep the pain away. Yeah. Yeah. That's how we keep the pain away. Yeah. Perfect. So I just recorded two loops to take some of my course idea. I can use this little icon in the corner. That means two takes. I can switch between them. Perfect. So let's give it a listen. Making Music. Gayle, we do it every day. Making music, Gail, we do it every day. Yeah. Yeah. This how we keep the pain away. Yeah. Perfect. That sounds pretty good. It sounds quite ra hasn't been processed, but it's a good recording and it's something that we can work with. 13. Plugins Overview: Okay guys, Now we have our verse recorded. The problem is it sounds very raw and unprocessed. It doesn't sound like a finished song that you might hear on the radio. So how do we get it from sounding like it was just recorded and is very raw to get it sounding polished and processed so that it's more listenable as a completed song and sounds more professional. Well, we're going to use something called plug-ins. Now, a plugin is basically a piece of software that you can actually apply to your recording that does something, it changes the sound of what you recorded in some way. There's various different types of plug-ins that we can use to process our sound and make them sound more polished, completed, processed, shiny, make them sound like they're far away in a room with reverb, make them sound very quiet or loud, or takeoff the low-end of them or take off the high-end, change the pitch or apply auto tune to fix any wrong notes that you might have sang in your recording. Their software plug-ins that do many different things. So in this lesson, I'm going to show you a little bit about how you can begin to use software plugins on your recordings to get your recording sounding more like a finished product. Okay guys, so now we're back in our project. We have our recording here. And I'm going to show you a little bit about how we can begin to start using some plug-ins to process our recorded audio. So in GarageBand here, you can see are recording the way that we can get to see the plug-ins that we can put on our track is by either we can click on this little gear icon, which brings up this bottom window here where you can see there's kind of a graphic here and it says compressor EQ sense. So these are some settings. And if we look on the left here, we can see this title that says Plugins. And we can see actually a couple of little horizontal modules that are sitting in this list here. So these little icons here, these rectangles, they actually correspond with what we're seeing here. This is actually just a simplified graphical representation of these. So we can see we turned it on that switch called flicked on. We turn on Channel EQ. That switch got flicked on over here, turn it off, turn it off. So on the left here, this is where we can see our plugins and we can see them in a row. Now if this is closed, you might have to open this drop-down menu and then you'll be able to see them. The way plug-ins work, the signal flows from top down to the next one, down to the next one, down to the next one. So when we press Play, our audio signal that has been recorded is going to be sent to this chain of plugins. So here it's completely raw. Making music. Can we do it every day? So say we want to apply a bit of equalization. Let's go to our plugin menu, click and empty slot. Scroll down to EQ, open a channel EQ. Now we've seen this window is opened. And when we press play, the audio is going to now be sent through this equalizer plug-in making music. Can we do it every day and we can actually see our audio coming into this bug and we do it every day. Now let's start playing around with it. That's how we keep the pain away. Yeah. Yeah. That's how we keep the pain away. Yeah. Making music, can we do it every day so we can hear what we're doing here is actually, can we do it and it's actually affecting the audio that we've recorded. We're actually changing the sound of it using this device. So the audio is flowing from a recording and it's actually going through the channel EQ. That's just one plug-in inserted in our plugin chain for this track, we can actually insert many more. And so let's try adding a compressor. So now we've added a compressor plugin. You can see that it's loaded up there. It's in the second slot after the EQ. And so now the sound is going to flow from this recording into the EQ and then from the EQ into the compressor. So we're creating a chain of plugins or a chain of effects on our recorded audio now, and they are changing the sound of the audio. So let's play with our compressor settings a little bit and we do it every day making music. Can we do it every day? And you see when I change this setting here, it's actually corresponding to this graphic. But if you want to have access to the full range of settings on any of these plugins. You want to click right here in the middle of it and open up this window. And that's going to have the complete settings of that plug-in similar to the EQ I can open up and this is has the full EQ settings. Now, this little drop-down menu on the right, that's going to allow you to either get rid of the plugin by clicking know plugin, or it's going to allow you to swap it out for a different plug-in. You can see that GarageBand has a whole range of different menus with different types of plugins that you can add. It's got delays, distortion, dynamics. Dynamics are things that affect the volume of a sound imaging which creates wideness or puts things to the left and to the right filter, which will remove certain frequencies. Modulation, which is things like a chorus or a flanger or a phasor. So the main thing is to understand when we're using plugins is that first, the signal flows from our recording into our chain of plug-ins here, and it flows from one to the next in order. The next thing to understand about plugins is that they actually consume computer processing power. So the more plug-ins that you load on a track, and the more tracks you have in your project with multiple plug-ins on them, the more work that your computer's going to have to do to process the sound of what all those plug-ins are doing and to make that sound come out of your speakers. So if you don't have a very powerful computer, you might notice as you're adding a lot of plugins, things are going to start to slow down and it might become more difficult to work with. If you have a more powerful computer, you're going to be able to open a lot more plug-ins before you start to feel the effects of limited computer power because you have a stronger computer and it can handle more if you plan on doing really large projects with a lot of plug-ins, you're going to need a stronger computer to achieve this. But if you're just recording one track or maybe two tracks and just a couple of plug-ins on each one. You're gonna be able to get by with a pretty average computer and it's not gonna be a problem. So it all depends on the size and scope of what you are attempting to do with your software. In the next couple of lessons, I'm going to go into a little bit more detail about specific types of plugins and what each of them do, and how you can use those to polish your recordings a little bit. 14. EQ: The first plug-in type that I'm gonna go over in a little bit more depth is going to be EQ. So EQ stands for equalization. And this basically means that EQ allows us to change the volumes of specific frequencies within our sound. Really any frequency between 20 hertz to 20 thousand hertz from the very low end of hearing range of humans. And our hearing goes all the way up to 20 thousand hertz. And an equalizer gives us the ability to actually change the volumes any frequency that we desire. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to EQ my vocal here the way that I would normally EQ something when I'm trying to make it sound a little bit better. And I'm going to explain to you why I'm doing certain things. Let's give it a listen. Making music. Can we do it every day? Okay, so right off the bat, I'm hearing a bit of a harsh frequency in there somewhere. I'm thinking it's in the mid-range somewhere. So what I can do is I can take one of my bands and see this band here corresponds to this one. I can turn it on and off, and I have multiple bands to choose from that I can turn up or turn down or do different things with. So I'm going to choose my band here and I'm going to edit the queue setting of it. Q is how sharp or wide V EQ band is set to. I'm gonna make it pretty narrow because I'm hearing a pretty narrow frequency in there that I don't like. So I'm gonna make it really sharp and I'm going to just sweep it up and down across the frequency range until I find the frequency that I don't like. So let's hit Play and let's start sweeping. I think it's somewhere in here, somewhere making music. Can we do it every day? Okay, that's it. Making music. Can we do it every day? There's this ring. That's how we keep what I'm gonna do to compensate for that ugly frequency in my recording, I'm actually going to turn that frequency down. Making music. Can we do it every day? Making music? Can we do it every day? Yeah. Okay. So I've turned it down. The frequency is right around two k, also known as 2 thousand hertz. And I'm just turning that one down and I'm making my band quite narrow because that frequency that's offending my ears is a very narrow frequency, so we can make it quite narrow. Making music, can we do it every day? Sounds a bit better. Now the next thing I'm gonna do is just take off a bit of low end. So I'm going to use this device on the left, turn it on. This is called Low Cut. A low cut is a part of the EQ that is just going to cut off and remove any frequencies below the frequency that you set your low cut too. So I can take my low cut here and I can move it up and down. And I can cut off the bottom end of my recording making music. Can we do see there's a bit of low end with a walk-in music. Can we do it? And you can see it there in the analyzer. You can see that there's a bit of low end there that we don't actually need. It's far too low, making Iraq actually just going to sweep up here and we're going to remove that. Making music. Can we do it every day? Making music? Can we do it every day? Making music? Can we do it every day? Nice. Now the next thing that I'm going to do, I'm hearing a bit of a nasal frequency in this recording that I want to get rid of. Now, usually nasal frequencies are gonna be around 500 hertz. This is the key area for where you can remove a bit of that. So once again, I'm going to take my next band here, the one below this one. And I'm going to again make the queue a bit narrower because this is, again, it's a pretty narrow thing that we want to remove. And we're going to sweep and we're going to find that frequency again. I think the nasal area is going to be around 500 hertz making music. And we do it every day. Yeah, right there. Making music. Can we do it every day? Yeah. We don't like that. That's how we keep the pain away. Once again, I'm going to remove that making music and we do it every just going to turn it down a bit. We don't need to go all the way like this making music because that's gonna make our things sound weird. Making music too much. We still want a bit of that. We're just trying to level it out a little bit so it sounds a little more even across the board making music. Can we do it every day? So that helps a bunch. So now what we can do is we can listen to before and after right now. So we're going to disable our EQ, making music. Can we do it every day? And now we're going to enable it. Making music. Can we do it every day? Sounds quite a bit cleaner. Yeah. That's how we keep the pain away. Yeah. Yeah. It sounds good, but I think I want a little bit more high-end in our vocals so that it just has a little bit more sheen, a little bit more polish making music. Can we do it every day? So we're going to grab what's known as a high shelf, which means that the frequencies above this frequency of the high shelf are all going to be boosted on a curve. So as you can see, I've turned it up and everything above it is getting boosted up. So we're just going to use our high shelf and we're just going to boost the top end up a little bit to give our vocal little bit more polish and stand out a little bit more in the mix, making music. Can we do it every day? Good day. Yeah. Yeah. That's how we keep the pain away. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's good. Making music. Can we do it every day? Now there's another harsh frequency that I'm hearing that I want to get rid of as well. So let's grab our next band here, the blue one. We haven't used this one yet. We're going to once again make this narrower, turn it up. The higher the number of the queue here, the narrower it is. So I think five was what we used before. And let's find this other frequency. I think there's one in here that I don't like as well as making music. Can we do it every day? It gets that. Making music. Can we do it every day? Yeah, Actually, there's so many good music. We do it every day. I think it's not actually making music. Can we do it every day? Yeah. Yeah. That's how we keep the pain away. So I'm going to turn that one down as well. Making music. Can we do it every day? Making music gal, we do it. So I'm just going to hit play and I'm going to turn it on and off and on and off a couple of times so you can hear the difference of what we just did. Start with it on making music. Can we do it every day? Making music? Can we do it every day? Yeah. Yeah. That's how we keep the pain away. Yeah. That's how we keep the pain away. Making music. Can we do it every day? Making music? Can we do it every day? Now the difference is pretty subtle, but the way that you're going to come to a Polish sounding finished product is with a lot of subtle tweaks. This is the thing about mixing is it's a lot of subtlety. So if you find you're not really coming up with anything or nothing you're doing here in the EQ is satisfying. You feel free to just go through presets. Once again, presets are a great way to learn, a great way to start understanding what these plugins are doing, and a great way to get a quick start on your mics. 15. Compression: Okay, so the next plugin type that I'm going to talk about is called compression. Now, EQ and compression are the two main mixing plug-ins. That's the bread and butter of mixing EQ compression. So we've done a bit of EQ here. We're going to open up a compressor. So you'll find compressor in the Dynamics folder and we're going to open the compressor. Okay, perfect. As a sound is playing, it's going to have peaks and valleys of volume. So if we can zoom in here a little bit, you can see there's loud parts to this sound. There's quiet parts like that little part is pretty quiet, but then there's louder parts and there's loud spikes right there. You can see those spikes are actually ladder and volume than this smaller waveform beside it. So loud spike, loud spike. So what a compressor does is it will take the loud spikes in an audio recording and it will automatically turn those spikes down. It will lower the volume of the loud parts of a recording, and it will lower the volume of the sound by a certain amount. Now the amount that a compressor lowers the volume of a loud part of a sound by is determined by two things. It's determined by the threshold working in combination with the ratio. So the threshold is the volume at which a compressor will begin to turn the sounds down. So for example, if I turn my compressor threshold to negative ten, if a volume of a sound coming into the compressor is below negative ten, it's just going to pass through unaffected. It won't be turned down, say it's negative 15, which is lower than negative ten. It's gonna be going through and the compressor is not going to touch it because it's below the threshold. But let's say aloud part in our sound comes up. It goes up, and it's actually at negative five, which is higher than our threshold of negative ten. Now that sound that comes in at negative five, That's going to be turned down by our compressor because now it's triggering our compressor, it's over the threshold. So now the compressor effect is being triggered. And the amount that, that peak is going to be turned down by is determined by the ratio. So basically, a compressor just turns down the loud parts of a sound and makes them quieter so that overall, your recording is going to be played back at a more even volume compared to if it was uncompressed, there would be loud peaks and then it could get quiet. And it's gonna be loud and quiet. And things that are loud and quiet, all of a sudden are harder to hear and they're not going to stand out in a total mix as much. For example, if your beats playing and then your vocal is over top of it, but your vocal isn't compressed. The quiet parts of the vocal are going to drown under the beat because they're not going to be loud enough. So what a compressor does is it makes your vocal a more consistent and even volume. Or whichever track the compressor happens to be on. It could be a guitar, it could be the vocal, it could be something else. But it makes that thing are more consistent, even volume so that it will stand out in the mix on its own and you'll be able to hear it without it disappearing in the mix. So for a vocal, it will make the vocal be a consistent even volumes so that you can hear the vocal over top of the beat. And so it's not drowning in the beat. It's going to make it nice and tight and stand out. So let's play with our compressor settings a little bit here. Make him, I'm just going to solo this track, making music. Can we do it every day? Let's turn up our ratio music. Can we do it every day? Yeah, yeah, that's how we keep the pain away. Yeah. That's how we keep the pain away. Yeah. Making music. Can we do it every day? Making music? Can we do it every day? Yeah. Yeah. That's how we keep the pain away. Yeah. Yeah. That's how we keep the pain away. Yeah. So that's a pretty extreme compressor setting. But as you see what I did, I turned down the threshold to a low volume. So that means basically everything that's coming into our compressor is gonna be under this volume. So it's compressing the entire thing. And I turn the ratio really high, which means there's a lot of compression happening. So as you can hear it sounds a lot more squished. Making music. Can we do it every day before making music? Can we do it every day after making music? And we do it every day? And if your compressor is changing the volume of the sound a lot, you can use this setting, the gain at the end to adjust the volume so that it's not too loud or too quiet to get it to an even volume after your compressor has done the work that it's doing. And the attack setting just determines how fast the compressor is going to take effect. So if a loud sound comes in and it's set to a really low attack, it's going to turn that sound down quickly. But if the attack is set really high, for example, over here, It's going to, it's not going to turn it down right away. It's going to let some of those quick loud sounds through and then it's going to start to turn it down 200 milliseconds later. For example, if you want to preserve some of the the transients are the peaks in your sound. You can turn down the attack to let the sound breathe a little more. Or if you want the compression to be fast acting, you can turn it down to a low attack setting, making music. Can we do? So let's play this vocal that's now been dequeued and compressed over top of our beat to hear what it sounds like. Making music again, we do it every day. Making music and we do it every day. Yeah. Now I can use the volume fader here to turn it down a little bit. It's a little bit louder than our beat now, making music, can we do it every day? Making music? It sounds good, it's nice and tight and it stands out over the beat. Let's turn off these plugins just for a second so we can here without those making music and we do it every day. Making music. Yeah, we do see it doesn't sound quite as tight over top of the beat. It's almost sounds like a little weak or a little unpolished. Now we turn those back on and give it another play. Making music again, we do it every day. Making music. Can we do it every day? Yeah. Yeah. That's how we keep the pain away. Yeah. Yeah. It sounds a lot tighter now that compression might even be a little too much like, that's a little bit, that sounds very squished. But experiment with this and don't be afraid to put the settings to a pretty extreme level because in a lot of pot mixes and hip-hop mixes, compression is a super important part of it. And mixers are using a lot of compression, especially in the modern era. So don't be afraid to slam your compressor a little bit. 16. Auto Tune: Okay guys, so the next plugin type that I'm going to talk about, one that's super important nowadays that everybody is using is called auto tune or pitch correction. So I have my vocal here, but it's not pitch corrected, and I'm not the best singer in the world. So we're going to want to tighten that up a little bit so it sounds a little more modern and tight and clean. And I'm like I'm hitting all the notes perfectly making music and we do it every day. So the first thing that we need to know when we're going to use some pitch correction is we need to actually discover the key of our song. So that's gonna be the key that the instrumental we're using has been written in. Now a key is a musical thing that is a certain selection of notes. And the key is going to allow our pitch correction plug-in or our Auto-Tune plugin to snap our voice to the correct notes for that key of the song. Because there are gonna be more notes than are in that key. And there's gonna be notes that we don't want to have our voice snap too, because those are gonna be wrong notes and they're going to sound wrong. We need to get the right key so that our pitch correction snaps our voice to the right notes. So how do we find out the key? Well, there's a really simple way to find out the key. And that's by using a website that is going to tell us what the key is. I found this website called tuned bad. Now this website is super handy for finding the key and the BPM of your song. So click on key and BPM Finder. So we have our B here, Post Malone x the weekend type B. We drag and drop it into tune bad.com. And it's gonna give us the key, so D minor, 130 BPM. So now we can take this D minor and go back to GarageBand. And click this key setting on the top center here, we're going to set our key to that D minor. And then we're going to have to switch to a different window here. Then the plugin settings, we're going to have to go to the top. And here you see the plugin settings. We're going to have to click on this scissors for editors. Click on that and then turn on limit two key and turn on enable flex. And then we're going to take our pitch correction slider here and we're gonna put it to a 100%. And then we're going to hit play and hear what that sounds like. Now that our key is set and our settings are turned on. Making music again, we do it every day. Can we do it every day? That's how we keep the pain away. Yeah. Yeah. That's how we keep the pain away. Yeah. I sound Pro now. I sound like Lil Wayne. Sounds perfect. Making music. Gail, we do it every day. Now. That's a pretty strong Auto-Tune setting. If we wanted to make it a little less strong, we can just turn this slider back a little bit. Let's try like 70% making music. Can we do it every day? Making music and we do it every day, it's still a little picky. I'm gonna try 80% or 85. Making music. Can we do it day? Making music? Can we do it every day? So that's pretty good. That's how we keep the pain away. Yeah. That's how we keep the pain away. Yeah. Yeah. That sounds good. That's perfect. What I'm gonna do is I'm going to show you how to do this as well in logic. And I'm going to show you with the logic pitch correction plugin because I know not everybody is using GarageBand. And the thing about GarageBand is it's not a full professional suite of software like logic is GarageBand has limited settings. And so the way that you enable the auto tune in GarageBand is a little strange. Having to go to this menu, there's a simpler way to do it in logic. So I'm going to show you how to do it in logic now. So I've now opened the same thing inside of logic. And what we're gonna do is we can see here on the left are plugin chain. So in GarageBand, this plugin chain is a little bit hidden. They like to show you the smart controls, those bigger controls because it's a little easier. But in logic you can see your whole plugin chain here at anytime. So we have our EQ compressor, we're going to open up the plugin called pitch correction. So pitch folder and then pitch correction, open it and we get something like this. Now this is what most Auto-Tune plugins look like. You're going to have like a keyboard here. You're going to have a response time. And then you're gonna be able to set the key of the scale that you want to snap your notes too. So same as before. We're in D minor here. So we're going to click natural minor, which is just the same as minor. And we're going to turn our response time down to 0. And now here with this sounds like. So there we go. Now, if you don't know the key of your song and you're just trying to figure it out by ear. What you can do is you can just choose either major scale or natural minor. Basically, 99% of pop songs or hip hop songs are gonna be in either the major scale or the minor scale. And you can just set it to that and flip through the keys until it sounds like it's in the right key. It's gonna be in one of these keys within the minor or major scale ninety-nine percent of the time. So if you think that your ears good enough to hear what it sounds like, it's in key. Most people can, you can just set it to either minor or major. Minor and major are technically the same scale. They're just kind of inverted a little bit from each other, but they have the same notes at the end of the day. So you can either choose a minor or a major scale and then flip through the keys until it sounds like it's got your voice in the right key. So that's a little bit about how to set the Auto-Tune setting AND logic. Now, other Auto-Tune plug-ins like Antares Auto-Tune for example, which is a more professional third party Auto-Tune plugin is going to work the same way. You're just going to set the key and then you're going to set the response time. And the lower the response time, the more Auto-Tune it's going to sound, the higher the response time, the less it's going to be snapping your notes really fast, the more it's going to let them breathe and it's going to sound a little bit less Auto-Tune that way. Now just a little side note regarding finding the key I suggested that you use to combat and you drop your beat in, and it's going to give you the key of D minor, which is correct. But if you play instruments, if you play guitar or keyboard and you have a decent ear, you can maybe just find the key owed by yourself. You can hit play on your beat and you can jam out on your instrument a little bit and just listen and you can probably figure out what the key is. If you have a bit of experience playing the keyboard or playing the guitar, or playing another instrument. If you know a couple of scales like the major scale or the minor scale, don't be afraid to try to find out the key for yourself. But if you don't know where to start or you have no training on a musical instrument whatsoever, then a website like tune bat with an analyzer is a good way to get started and to find a key for your song so that you can set your auto tune and start having your notes being snapped into the right key. 17. Reverb and Delay: Okay, So we're back in GarageBand here. And now I'm going to talk a little bit about reverb and delay. So these are plugins that allow us to give our sound or a recording a little bit of space. Reverb is a plug-in or an effect that simulates what it would sound like if our recording was inside of a certain acoustic space, like a room or a gymnasium, or maybe a cave, or maybe the Taj Mahal where you clap and then you hear the sound echo with reverb for a minute. Or maybe you're in a tiny closet and there's just a little it sounds like you're in a closet. This is what reverb does. It simulates the sound of a room and it allows us to give a little bit of space in our mix and allows our ear to identify a sound kind of standing out from the rest of the other sounds because it sounds like it's lifted up. It's in a room. It has a bit of a space around it. And it gives us a little bit of a lift in the mix. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna go to our track here, and we're gonna go to our list of plugins and we're going to open a new one. And we're gonna go into our menu that says reverb. And we're going to open space designer. So Space Designer is a reverb plug-in. Now in logic, there is a version of Space Designer that has a lot more settings available to you if you want to upgrade to logic. But in GarageBand we have this simplified version of spaces honor that we're going to play around with a little bit. So once again, we can just play with the presets. Let's go check out mediums, spaces, rooms, a nice room. That's a great one. Let's solo our vocal here and hear what that sounds like. Making music. Can we do it every day? Making music? Can we do it? Now you can hear that it sounds like it's in a room. Now we have dry output. Dry means that's the signal without the reverb. That's the signal unaffected by the reverb. Reverb output is the volume of the reverb. So if we turn this all the way down the output, you're not even going to hear the reverb making music. Can we do it every day? Now? We can slowly start to raise up our reverb output until we have a good level of reverb that we're happy with making music. Can we do it every day? Making music? Can we do it and it sounds pretty good? Yeah, yeah. Maybe it's a little bit too much reverb or too long of a reverb for our song. So we can go to the length setting in here and actually turn down the length so that the reverb last for less time, so that it hangs in space for less time. Maybe we only want 800 milliseconds making music. Can we do it every day? So that makes our room sound a little bit smaller, actually making me and we can actually turn that down. Let's turn up the reverb so we can hear this a little better. We can turn that down to like a 100 milliseconds and see what that sounds like. Making music, can we do it every day? So that almost sounds like you're in a closet or something making music. Can we do it or a small room? We can go to like 300 making music. Can we do it every day? Making music? Can we do it every day? Yeah, that sounds interesting to you can play with these settings, play with the length and the volume of it to put your sound into a space that matches your song, that sounds good with your instrumental in with the rest of your vocals in your song. So let's turn this down. Let's make it a little bit longer. Making music. Can we do it every just give it a little bit of light ambient making news and I'll unmuted here and we can hear what it sounds like over top of there be using GAN, we'd do it. So I'm going to actually level these out a little bit. Our Beta, little too loud music. Can we do it every day? Making music? Can we do it every day? That's how we keep the pain away. That's how the pain away. Making music, Gail, we do it every day. Making music. Can we do it every day? That's how we keep the pain away. Yeah. That's how we keep the pain away. Now without the river making music, can we do it every day? Sounds very flat without the reverse. Making music? Can we do it? We add it back. Making music. Can we do it every day? Gives him more of a vibe. You know, it makes it feel like it's in a space. It gives it a vibe. It gives you a little bit of a trail behind it and makes it sound cool. Making music. Can we do it every day? Making music? Can we do it? That's how we keep the pain. Okay, So that's a little bit about reverb. Feel free to experiment. Okay, Now the next plugin, which is in the same category as reverb, is called delay. Now the reason these are in the same categories because they both provide something called wetness to a sound, which when this basically is just a trail or making it sound like it's lasting longer and space reverb creates the vibe of a room, makes it, how's this acoustic kind of trail behind the sound? Delay actually takes the sound and we'll repeat it after that sound occurs, also known as an echo. If you imagine you're in a giant canyon and you say echo across the canyon. And then you hear after your voice comes back to you as echo. Echo, echo. That's what a delay is, or an echo is another word for it. It's basically just a sound repeating a few times. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna go into our plug-ins here and we're going to open a plugin called echo in the delay folder here. Now we open echo and let's just hit play and see what that sounds like. Let's solo or track. What does this sound like? Make, make, make, make it okay, cool. So you can hear already it's echoing. Now that might be a little intense for our song. So some of the settings we can play with here, we have dry wet as usual. Dry is just the original sound without the echo. Wet is the volume of the echo. So let's try that. Making music. Can we do it every day? That's a little more subtle music. Can we do it every day? Yeah. Yeah, that's how we keep the pain away way. That's a little too much. That's how the color is going to be. Basically how much high frequencies and how much low frequencies are in the sound of our echoes. So let's just turn up the wetness a little bit and let's play with the color knob. Making news exam. We'll do it every day because all the music camp or echoes a lot darker now, making music, can we do it every day or can make it brighter? Making music? Can we do it every day? Making music? Can we do it? And that's how the pain away. Now repeat is how many times is it going to echo after the original sound? If we turn it to a 100%, it might just echo forever. Let's have a listen. Making music. They do it every day. Making music. Can we do it? So I was just going to keep going. That's very extreme. Sometimes that's fun to play with. But for our purposes we're probably going to have it be sad a little bit lower. Making news exam, we'll do it every day. Making music. That sounds pretty good. But my one thing about that echo is that it's a little bit hyper like it's a little bit cluttered. So what we can also do is play with the time here. Now it's set to 1 eighth. We can set it to one-quarter. Now this is the duration of how much of a space after the sound is there gonna be? Is the Echo are going to appear after? So right now it's set to 1 eighth, that means an eighth note. So let's try setting it to one-quarter. Making music. Can we do it every day? Day? Now I like that better. That sounds more natural to me and I would probably go for the one-quarter setting in this song. And honestly most times when I'm setting a delay or an echo, I'm usually aiming for the one-quarter setting that seems to be the most common setting that I personally am using. Making music, Gail, we do it every day. Making music and we do it every day. Yeah. Yeah. That's how we keep the pain away. Yeah. Yeah. So that sounds good. I like to usually keep settings like this pretty subtle in my reverb and delay for vocals in a mix. And I think that sounds amazing. It's giving us a bit of ambiance, a little bit of trail behind our vocal in it. A little bit of cool factor, same with the reverb. It just gives it a vibe. So if we take the echo off making music, can we do it every day? At it back? Making music? Can we do it every day? Cool, making music now it's played in our mix. Making music. Can we do it every day? Making music? Can we do it every day? That's how we keep the pain away. That's how the pain away. Making music. Gail, we do it every day. Making music. Can we do it every day? Awesome. So that sounds good. Now, just as an experiment and let's try to take all the plugins we added. There's five here. Let's just turn them all off and hear what it sounded like before making music. Gail, we do it every day. Making music and we do it every day. Yeah. Yeah. That's how we keep the pain away. So that doesn't sound like a finished song, that sounds raw, that sounds rough. It just doesn't sound polished. Now let's turn them all back on. Adjust our volume here. Making music. Gail, we do it every day. Making music, can we do it that sounds polished. For some reason, we're actually losing a bit of volume. I think it's the compressor. I had this gain turned down quite a bit. Making Music, Gayle, we do it every day. And then each track is a volume knob, so we're just going to adjust this one as well. Making music, Gail, we do it every day. Making music. Can we do it every day? That's how we keep the pedal way. Yeah. That's how we keep the pain away. Making music, Gail, we do it every day. It was like night and day music. Can we do it every day? Yeah. Yeah. That's how we keep the pain away. That's how we keep the pain away. So one sounded not like a finished song and then after the plug-ins, it sounds like a finished song. I mean, maybe not 100% done. Obviously, we can add more parts to our song, but just in terms of the quality of the vocal recording, that sounds a lot more polished now. 18. Layering and Vocal Production: So now that we know a good amount about using plugins to mix our vocals and about actually how to record those vocals. I'm going to get into a little bit about some techniques that we can use to make our vocal recording sound thicker or more, even more polished. There's a couple of techniques we can use. The first one that I'm going to dive into is called layering. So what layering is, is we can actually take a vocal part like what we have here. And we can record it two more times, exactly the same. And we can take all three of those recordings and layer them on top of each other. So what I'm gonna do really quick is I'm actually just going to record this part again two more times. And then I'm going to show you how to layer this vocal. So I'm going to actually take the check that we have and I'm going to duplicate it twice. And I'm going to record the part again two more times, one time on each of these tracks. Okay, so now we have two more of the same part, except it's a different recording. It's not going to be exactly the same, but I said the same words with the same melody in the same rhythms. So these are gonna be able to layer on top of each other. Now, let's solo each one of these and listen to how they sound altogether making music. And we do it every day. Making music and we do it every day. Yeah. That's how we keep the pain away. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So already that sounds quite a bit thicker than it did before. If we mute these two making music, can we do it every, Then add the other two making music and we do it every day, quite a bit larger. And then beyond just simply layering on top, what we can do is we can then pan these layers. Now, pan is basically just taking a sound and deciding whether it's gonna be exactly down the middle of your mix, meaning it's going to be equal volume in both headphones. So it sounds like it's in the middle, or you can put it all the way to the left. So it's only coming out of your left ear, are only coming out of your left headphone going into your left ear. And that'll make it sound like it's fully on the left side or all the way to the right. Let's just listen to what panning this first layer completely to the left sounds like. So I'm just going to take the pan pot here and I'm going to drag it all the way to the left, making music and we do it every day. Now that's only in our left ear. Drag it all the way to the right, making music and we do it every day. So now we see what we can do here. We can put things somewhere in our mix to the left or to the right. Now, if I take these layers and I put one of them all the way to the left. And I take the other one and I put it all the way to the right. That's going to make a very wide sounding vocal layer, making music. Can we do it every day? So now that sounds very wide. All of a sudden make, and what I can do is I can add back in the original vocal right down the center, and then keep each of these to the left and to the right respectively. And let's listen to how that sounds making music. And we do it every day. Making music and we do it every day. Now that sounds way bigger than it originally sounded. Let's listen to the original making music. Can we do it every day, straight down the middle? Let's add those in. Making music and we do it every day. Now it sounds huge. So that's amazing. That's an amazing trick for making our chorus vocal part, for example, sound way bigger and make it sound like a core is like it's in your face. That's the part of the song that you want to explode and sound big and triumphant and in people's faces. So this is a trick that you can use to make it sound really wide and big and really catch people's attention with your vocal part. Now sometimes we might actually turn the volume of these down a little bit so they're not overshadowing our main vocal. We might turn them down to like, let's try negative seven on each of the layers and then keep the middle one a bit louder. Making music. Can we do it every day? Making music? Can we do it every day? Yeah. Yeah. That's how we keep the pain away. So let's hear that over the beat. Making music. Can we do it every day? Making music? Can we do it every day? Yeah. That's how we keep the pain away. That's how we keep the pain away. Making music. Can we do it every day? Making music? Can we do it? That sounds massive. So that's the first vocal production technique that you can begin to use. That's called layering. Now the next vocal production technique that I want to talk about. Something called ad libs. Now what we can do is we can actually add some vocals in the background that kind of pop in, in-between our main vocal lines. That helped to just accents certain words or help to create even more ambiance in our mix. So we're going to make a new track. And I'm going to record some ad libs. Now, ad libs can be something where you're repeating the same word that was in the main vocal. Or you can come up with a new word that might be related to the lyric that you were singing in the main vocal. Or you could actually just hum a note. You might not even be saying a word. Or maybe you're saying like, Oh, oh, just in the background to just kinda accent things in adult, even a little bit more spice to your recording. So I'm just going to do a little improvisation here and just try to come up with some ad libs that I think are cool in our chorus sound here. Making music. Can we do it? Okay? Yeah, yeah, Good Music. Gayle, we do it every day. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's how we keep the pain away. Away. That's how we keep the pain away. Thinking music. Yep. Okay, cool. So let's hear what those sound like. Now, keeping in mind, I've, I've copied these axioms settings from my other tracks onto this track as well. Making music. Can we do it every day? Every day? Making music? Can we do it every day? Every day? That's how we keep the pain away. That's how we keep the pain away. Yeah, we do it. So that sounds good. I like how that sounds. What I don't like those I don't like how this is cut off at the very beginning. So what I can do is I can actually move my play head where I want to cut this off. And I can click edit and click Split regions at playhead, also known as command T for the shortcut. Click that. And now it's split my region here and I can actually delete this. So it's not cluttering up things. Making music. Can we do it every day? Every day making music? Can we do it every day? Nice. And so what I might wanna do as well is with my ad libs because it's not the main vocal and you want it to sound a bit different. You want it to sound like maybe it's in the background. You don't want it to clutter your main vocal. So I can actually tweak the settings for this track specifically. Maybe give it a louder reverb that's a bit longer. Making music. Can we do it every day? Every day making music, maybe turn it down in volume quite a bit compared to the other vocals making music. Gail, we do it every day, every day making music and maybe give it even more echo compared to the others. Just so it seems like it's fading into the background. Making music. Can we do it every day? Every day. Making music? Can we do it every day? That's how we keep the pain away. That's how we keep the pain away. Making music. And then what we can even do is use something called modulation effects to make it sound even a bit more different and put it into its own little world. So what I like to do is use something called chorus. One of my favorite effects by far. Let's try to put a chorus on top of this track. On top of all the other effects that we already have on this track. Making music. Can we do it every day? Making music, Gail, we do it every day. That's how we taking here something very wide. Keep the pain away. Making music, Gail, we do it every day. Making music. Can we do it every day? Yeah, that sounds, that sounds cool. It gives you a wider effect. Turn up the intensity. A little too much. So it's giving you a good width to it. Then what we can even do, something I'd like to do as well is to use an EQ and really cut a lot of the other frequencies out specifically for these ad libs that are going to be more in the background. You can do some pretty extreme E queuing on them like this, for example, just cut out a lot of the top and the bottom and put them into their own little frequency range. So they're not interfering with your other vocal parts here. We're gonna boost in the middle here. Let's hear it with the Mix Sway. Making music. Gail, we do it every day. Making music, but do it every day. That's how we keep the pain away. That's how we keep the pain away. Making music, Gail, we do it every day. Making music and we do it every. So, yeah, that really brings things up a notch. I really like how that ad lib is kinda filling out the course. Now, I'm going to talk about one final vocal production technique here. That's called harmonies. So I really like how my course is sounding right now, but I think it's kind of lagging a little bit in the second half. And I wanted to do something in the second half to bring it up a notch. I'm just going to make a new track with the same settings as the main vocal. And it's going to be called Harmony. And what I'm gonna do is I'm going to record a little harmony over the second half of the chorus, over the ends of the vocal lines. So what a harmony is basically, it's just taking the same notes that you're singing in your main melody. And it's taking those notes and raising them up a couple of notes in your key so that the notes layer over top of each other and create two notes out once that sound pleasing together and create a group of notes or a chord using your voice and using the vocal notes that are layered on top of each other. So I'm going to record a harmony. I was able to find one just by singing. I'll kinda show you right now. That's how we keep the pain away. That's how we keep the paint away. The pain away. So I'm going to record that. Do it every day. That's how we keep them away. That's how keep the pain away. That's how we keep the pain away. That's how we keep the pain away. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Cool. But that pan back to 0, so that's how we keep the pain away. That's how we keep the pain away. Yeah. Okay, Interesting. So I saying my harmony and for some reason garage bands Auto-Tune was snapping it to the wrong note. So what I did was I just unchecked limit two key. And that opened up the Auto-Tune to snap it to the wrong note. I'm not sure why, because the node that I'm singing it is actually in the key of D minor. But for some reason, GarageBand is not wanting to snap that node to the right note. So I unchecked limit two key and now it seems to be working. So I'm actually going to re-record my part now, and I'm going to just keep limited key unchecked for the harmony track specifically. Now you might have to play around with this depending on whether or not the Auto-Tune is doing what you want it to do. You might have to Jimmy with the settings. You might have to change the pitch correction slider. You might have to uncheck limit to key or even play with this enabled flex, just trial and error until you get the results that you want. But I'm going to re-record this part now. Do it and that's how we keep the pain away. That's how we keep the vein. That's how we keep the pain away. Honestly, I'm just digging the second one more. It's the same thing. So what I'm gonna do again, I'm going to split this region using Command T. Delete the first one. And I'm going to just copy this one into the first place as well. So I'm going to click and drag, and I'm going to click Option. And I see the plus sign show up. I'm still holding it with my mouse. I'm going to hold Option, see the plus sign and then let go of my mouse. And it's going to copy that. So now these are the exact same thing. That's how we keep the pain away. That's how we keep the pain away. Yeah, Perfect. Making music, Gail, we do it in a volume dominant harmony. Making music, Gail, we do it every day. Yeah, that's how we keep the pain away. That's how we keep the pain away. Music, Gayle, we do it. So that just brings the second half of our course even up another notch. You know, that's, that's great. We're just adding all these little things that make it more interesting to the listener. Imagine if we were just mute all these tracks that we added. We just had our main vocal and we had no plug-ins on it. And this was our solvent making music. Can we do it every day? Making music? Can we do it every day? Yeah. Now that sounds rough. Turn the plugins back on, turn the other tracks back on. Making music. Gail, we do it every day. Making music, can we do it every day? That's how we keep the paint. No way. That's how we keep the pain away. Make it sounds 20 times better, like it sounds like a finished song. I mean, my lyrics might be a little corny. I just did them quickly for the sake of this lesson. But I mean night and day between adding plugins and adding a little bit of vocal production with a couple of layers and add lib track and a harmony track. And it sounds 20 times better. I think it almost sounds ready for release. It sounds amazing. Obviously, we still need to add a verse part and an intro and different parts of the song. But just in terms of vocal production, this is sounding quite a bit better now. 19. Mixing: Okay guys, Now I'm going to briefly go over some mixing techniques. We've already touched on a bunch of them, but I'm gonna kinda just summarize a couple main mixing techniques together for you in one video. So let's close this. So the first concept or main tool that you can use when you're mixing is the volume knob. So each of these tracks here you can see we've got our song, we've got the beat, we've got the vocals, various different vocals. Each one of them has this volume fader. So when we go to mix our song, the first thing that we really want to do is just listen to the volumes of all the different tracks in our project and just adjust them so everything seems like it's in a good spot. Now, we can just start with our beat. We can mute everything else. We can just enable tracks one-by-one, listened to how loud the volume is and adjust accordingly. So we'll start with our beat here. Let's hit Play. Now let's enable our main vocal. That's how we keep the pain away. Yeah. Yeah. That's how we the pain away. Yeah. Yeah. We do it every day. Making music. Can we do it every day? Now let's turn on our layers. Making music, Gail, we do it every day. Making music, Gail, we do it every day. That's how we keep. This might be a touch loud. I don't like to notice the layers to too much. So I'm going to turn them down a touch. Making music, Gail, we do it every day. Making music, Gail, we do it every day. Yeah. Yeah. That's how we keep. That feels good. Now, let's listen to the ad lib. Making music, Gail, we do it every day. Making music, Gail, we do it every day. That's how we keep the pain away. That feels like a good spot. I just turned it down a little bit there. And now let's listen to our harmony track. Do it every day. That's how we keep the pain away. That's how we keep the pain away. Yeah. I think it's a touch loud, so I'm just going to turn it down a little bit to compare it to the main vocal. I don't want it to distract from our main vocal. I just wanted to add to it a little bit but not be too noticeable. That's how we keep the pain away. That's how we keep them, hey, no way, yeah, cool, making good and we do it every day. Making music. Can we do it every day? That's how we keep the pain away. That's how we keep the pain away. Yeah. Okay, That sounds great. Now the second principle of mixing is to control the low end in your mix. So a lot of times if we have a ton of tracks, what can happen is we can get something called low-end buildup, which means that there's gonna be low frequencies in some of our recordings that we don't actually need. But they're all going to be built up across many tracks and they're going to start to come together and cause a bit of a rumble or a low-end Hmm, that's going to muddy up our mix. And it's something that we actually don't need. What we wanna do is just find where we need the base, which is generally going to be in our beat. There's gonna be a, a bass instrument in our beat. And that's what we want to take up the base frequencies. And then we want to remove the base frequencies from almost everything else in our mix so that there's room for the base and the instrumental to breathe and so that we don't get that muddy buildup. So what we wanna do is just go into the settings and make sure that in our EQ that we have done the low cut. So let's double-check this. Let's solo it. Maybe we can even take off a little more low-end making music. Can we do it every day? Making music? Can we do it every day? Yeah. Yeah. That's how we keep the pain away. That sounds reasonable. And then on our layers, we can probably remove even more low end on the layers because our main vocal is already filling out the low end of our vocal. So why do we need even more low end in two more layers, making music? And we do it every day so we can take a bit off there as well. Yeah, we do it every day. Grabbed this one. That's how we keep paint away. And you hear when I did that P sound, it pop the microphone and it created unnecessary base. That's how we keep the pain away. We don't need that. We can roll that off, maybe even a little more off the other layer. That's how we keep the paint away. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. That's how we keep the pain away. And then on our ad lib, I believe we already rolled out for a bunch of the low end yes, we did on our harmony. Because there are harmony is even higher in pitch than our main vocal. We can probably roll off a little more low end from here. This How we can see it's higher salary. I'm going to roll off like around like 300. That's how we keep the pain away. Yeah. So if we had left his low-end like three hundred, two hundred one hundred m below on all these vocal tracks. There you'd be hearing like a muddy rumble that is not necessary in our mix at all. And that we can just clean up and get rid of by doing low cuts on the majority of our tracks. What we don't want to do is we don't wanna do that on our beat. Because if we do that on our beat, we're gonna get rid of all the base and our beats not going to sound good anymore. It's going to sound weak. You don't want a song with no base. That's no fun. That's how we keep the panel want to leave that and that's how we keep those good old way. Where you can do sometimes is momentarily at certain parts of the song, you could remove the base. That's how we keep the pain away. And then you can bring it back down. We keep the pain away, kinda like a DJ cut or something. But for now, just by default, don't, don't definitely don't take out the base of your beats. If there's a certain frequency in your beats, That's annoying you. You can EQ the B2B. That's how we keep the pain away. Sometimes what you wanna do on the beat is actually take out a little bit of around one or two K and maybe like around 1.5 k, because this can actually make a bit more room for the vocal. That's how we keep the vocals tend to mostly stick out in the EU like one to two k range. That's where you're hearing them the most. So if you actually want to remove that frequency from your beats, you can leave, You can create a bit more room for your vocal. Nothing too drastic, but just rolling off a little bit there can definitely help clean up and mix as well. That's how we keep the pain away. That's how we keep them pain away. That's how we keep the pain away. That's how we keep the pain away. That's how we keep the pain away. That's how we keep the pain away. Yes. Although this beat, I don t think has too much frequencies building up in that range, so we don't have to do a ton there, but that's how we keep the pain away. That's how we keep the pain away. That sounds good. Okay. So that's just a couple of notes about adjusting the volume of different tracks and about taking a loan out of tracks that you don't need the low end in. 20. Mastering: Okay, Now that we've spoken a bit about mixing, what I'm going to talk about now is something known as mastering. Now this is generally the final step, adjusting levels and adjusting things. When somebody mixes a song, what they do after the mix is complete is they'll send it to a mastering engineer. And that mastering engineer is going to put the final polish over the mix. And so what mastering essentially means is mastering is just one track at the end of our session that all the other tracks feed into. So you see all our tracks. We have the track of the beat, we have our main vocal, the layers, ad lib harmony. The sound from all of them is ultimately going into one track known as the master. Now, we can view the master here in GarageBand by clicking this little button, switching the view from track to master. So now this is showing our master. We can have some effects on the master. This is master reverb, but what we want to look at is output. So now we have Settings, and you can see the plug-ins here. Now, these are an EQ compressor and some other things including a limiter that are on our master channel. So our master channel being the last single-channel that all the other channels are going into. So what we can do is we can affect basically the sound of the entire mix altogether at once by changing settings of the effects that are on our master channel. And so the main purposes of mastering our number one, bring the volume of your entire song up and make it loud enough so that when you play it back to back with other songs, it's sitting on a good volume and so that you don't notice some kind of dip in volume when your song plays compared to all other songs. It's good when you're listening to music if all the songs are around the same volume, because then you can hear everything and you don't have to keep adjusting the volume on your, on your iTunes or whatever you're listening from. So that's the first purpose of mastering. The second purpose of mastering is to balance the frequencies a little more and to reduce the dynamic range a little bit of the song or aka compress it a little bit. Just help squeeze a little bit of extra volume and a little bit of extra brightness and shine out of the ultimate mix. So what I'm gonna do is I'm just going to turn on these plugins one-by-one and just adjust them a little bit. And so you can hear the effects of some of these mastering effects on top of our mix. So I'm just going to play it and I'm just going to start adding things. Yeah. That's how we keep the pain away. That's how we keep the pain away. Making music. Can we do it every day? Making music, Gail? We do it every day. That's how we keep the pain away. Yeah. That's how we keep the pain away. Making music. Can we do it every day? Making music? Can we do it every day? That's how we keep the pain away. That's how we keep the pain away. Making music, Gail, we do it every day. Making music. Can we do it every day? Yeah. That's how we keep the pain away. That's how we keep the pain away. Making music. Can we do it every day? Making music? Can we do it every day? We keep the pain away. That's how we keep the pain away. Making music, Gail, we do it every day. Making music. Can we do it every day? That's how we keep the pain away. That's how we keep the pain away. Making music. Can we do it every day? Making music, Gail, we do it every day. So that sounds a lot bigger and more powerful. Now, let's disable all those and have a listen. Making music. Can we do it every day? Making music? It sounds good, but it doesn't have the same power. Now let's enable them making music. Can we do it every day? Making music? Can we do it every day? I might have went a little happy with a couple of those settings. But as you can hear, it really just brings up the volume and makes it sound louder and more powerful as the final stage in our process. Now remember, always use your ears when you're doing this. If it sounds like over-the-top or something, then dial it back. You don't have to go too over the top just a little bit, goes a long way. And this is going to help your files after you export them to be a good volume and a good balance of frequencies. So that when you play it back to back with other songs, it's not going to sound like drastically quieter or anything. It's going to sound like it matches. Now just a quick note about what a limiter is. A limiter is always gonna be the last thing in our master chain and is one of the most important plug-ins when it comes to mastering. Basically what a limiter is. Just a very strong compressor. So a limiter is going to set a ceiling of volume. And then you can turn up the limiter, which is going to turn up the volume of all the sound going into the limiter. And it's going to make everything louder. But the limiter is going to be like a brick wall and it's going to stop any sound from going above that level, which is generally around 0 decibels. You don't want to go any higher than 0 decibels or else you're gonna be clipping. So it sets that brick wall and then you can adjust the volume higher. But the peaks of your sound of your song, the peaks of everything going in to your master channel are gonna be cutoff and stopped at that 0. So it's going to make everything louder, it pushing it up to this wall. But the peaks are not going to surpass that. So you're not gonna hear clipping, but it's going to be quite a bit louder. So limiter is always gonna be the last thing in our chain of mastering. 21. Exporting Your Song: Okay, so now that we've completed our mix, we've completed her Master. We've got our tracks, we've processed them. What we wanna do is export or song. How do we export our song and create a file out of it so that we can then send it to our friends or show it to somebody, or put it on iTunes or whatever you wanna do with it, email it to somebody. So what we're gonna do is first we have to select the part of our project here that we want to export. So how we do that, we're going to use these locators. We can just create our locators. We're going to export our chorus part here that we recorded and then a little bit extra after bit. So this process is going to differ a little bit from DAW to DAW in GarageBand. The way we're gonna do this is we're going to click Share. We're going to click export song to disk. And it's going to open this menu. We can name our export. We're going to call it making music V1 for version one. And we're just going to export it to our desktop. Now we have a couple of options for settings here. So a wave file is going to be the most high-quality file that we can export. Twenty-four bit wav file, that's going to be the most high-quality file. And you're gonna get all the information in our music here in that file. Now, WAV files are gonna be generally bigger. It could be 20 megabytes, 30 megabytes, 50 megabytes, depending on the length of your song. If we want to create a smaller size file that's more convenient for emailing or texting to somebody. We can choose MP3. There's different qualities of MP3. These lower ones like low, medium, high. With those, you're going to actually hear an audible reduction in quality that's not going to sound very good if you're exporting and MP3, I would go at least for a minimum of 256. In other DAWs like logic, you would have the option to actually export what's called a 320, which is even a bit higher quality than this. Garageband is only letting US export a 256 kilobit per second file, which is okay, we can do that for now. And so what we're gonna do is export this, we've named it, chosen our file type. We are going to export to the desktop. And I've final setting exports cycle area. So cycle is actually turned on, so I think it's going to automatically do that anyways, but what we can do is just click that anyways, it's going to export between the locators that we've set here of our cycle or loop area. So we're going to click Export. It's gonna do its thing bouncing. Okay, it's now been exported. And so what we're gonna do, we're gonna go to our desktop. We see our desktop folder here. We see making music. V1 is right here. And what we can do is we can just hit Play and our song should be in there making music. Gail, we do it every day. Making music and we do it every day. That's how we keep the pain away. That's how we keep the pain away. Don't meet her on the truck. Okay. Perfect. Now, we've recorded, we've processed, we've mixed, we've mastered, and we've exported our very first song. And there it is. Now we can send it to our friends. We can put it on iTunes, we can put it on Spotify. Obviously, this is a pretty quick version. We don't have averse an intro, a whole bunch of different vocal parts. This is simply a chorus. But that just goes to show you all the different tools and the process of how you can get from point a to point B in recording and being able to now send this, share this with somebody. This came out of thin air sound. We sang sound into a microphone and now we have a digital file that we can e-mail to our friends or put on the Internet. So that's a beautiful thing. And there we go. This is the first step in a journey. So that's amazing. Now we have our file. Now we can play it on the big speakers, baby. 22. Conclusion: Here we are. Congratulations you guys, because you've made it to the very end of the course. We've gone over a lot in this course. Everything from getting your first equivalent to setting it up, to booting up your computer and recording something, to beginning to process your recordings and make them sound more polished and professional. I know there's a lot to understand here. So if you're still putting the pieces together, don't worry, recording music is very multifaceted and it's going to take you a while to wrap your head around all the little things that go into it. But I think the most important thing is just to start. When you get started, you're gonna be able to figure out things along the way and cross each bridge as you come to it. And if you get stuck anywhere, you can go back to some of the lessons in the course and brush up your memory. I'm super excited to hear some of the recordings that you guys make. I'm sure they're gonna be amazing. And just remember that having a recording is better than not having a recording. That's the most important step. You never know. This could be the start of an amazing journey for you. Remember, if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me, give me a follow on Skillshare if you enjoyed the course and you can find me across social media at music by Milano. I hope you guys have an amazing day and happy recording piece.