Song Idea to Spotify in 7 Days with Logic Pro X

1. What is this class?: It has never been easier to release your own original music. In this class, I want to show you how in just seven days with Logic Pro Ten and a microphone, you can take your song idea from a voice memo all the way to a finished file that you can upload to streaming services like Spotify. My name is Solo Ray. I've been making music professionally for 15 years, producing, mixing, and songwriting. I've also toured across the country performing and music directing. Whether you're brand new to music production, or you just struggle with taking your ideas past that first stage of inspiration and bringing that out into the world. This class is for you. We'll go over songwriting arrangements, the basics of mixing and mastering what does and doesn't matter about loudness. As well as how to publish your music without the need of a record label. So come along with me on the seven day journey. I cannot wait to see what you create. Let's get started. 2. What do I need?: Welcome to song idea to Spotify in seven days. In this class, we're going to go over everything you need to know from the initial spark of an idea, up to uploading something to Spotify and sharing it with the world. You can view this video kind of as a syllabus for everything that you're going to need in order to make that happen. But honestly, you don't need that much. You'll need a computer, and specifically, you'll need software called a DAW or a Daw. It stands for Digital Audio Workstation, and there's a lot of different ones floating around. You've probably heard of some of them. Ableton Logic Pro, that's what I'm going to be using in this class, Logic Pro. If you're going to want to release a song with singing lyrics, you'll need some sort of microphone to do that. There are so many microphones to choose from, and we'll go into that in a later video about the different types of microphones and why you might choose one over another. But if you don't have a microphone and you want to start singing and start recording yourself, at the bottom tier of this is the lowest in price you can go and still get a acceptable, good sounding vocal. I would put the SM 58. The Sure. Sm 58. You've seen this mic 1 million times in every live performance you've ever seen. It's built like a tank brand new. I think they're about 100 bucks. I would definitely search on ebay, reverb, even your local Craigs list, you'll probably have some 58 floating around. It's just a very useful Mic to have because of how durable it is, and it's really good at sound rejections. So it'll only capture what's directly in front and not your noisy room, or your kids running around upstairs, stuff like that. You'll also need an audio interface that's something that you plug the microphone into that brings that sound into your computer. If you're just starting out and you're wondering which audio interface do I buy, I don't have anything. I would recommend you go with one of the universal audio volts. There are a couple different options about how many channels you want available at any one time. But if you just want one microphone input, I really think the volt for the amount of value that you get, just the quality of the hardware, and also they throw in some really great software in there as well. I think it's just very, very hard to beat. Lastly, because we're probably going to be working with microphones and recording, you should have some pair of headphones to be able to listen to sound and not have that picked up by the microphone. So generally, over ear headphones are better for this, that are closed back, that don't like leak sound a lot or Apple ear beds probably are not best just because those can leak sound pretty easily If you have the music going through those as you're singing, the microphone probably is going to pick that up. So make sure you have a pair of closed backheadphones to be able to capture clean audio. Once you have those things in front of you and you're ready to use them, let's make some music. 3. Record everything: The number one key for songwriting, in my opinion is to just record everything. I think that the iphone, and I'm sure Android has equivalents of this as well, but I use iphone, the voice memos app. That's been the most fundamentally useful thing for me as a songwriter. I think that recording everything, if there's just ever fleeting little idea, grab it while you can. You know, you're taking advantage of those inspiration. Moments that seem uncontrolled, that just seem to come and go on their own when they happen, grab them. So that on another day when you're feeling dry, you can go back and you can have all these catalogs and these moments that you can look back on as, wow, I felt that at that moment and I recorded what that little melody thing sounded like. So I just have my phone here. These are my personal voice memos. And so I'm just going to kind of show you how unformed some of this stuff can be and it still works and it's still totally fine. So, you know, if we just go to, I don't know what this is. So that's me trying to play a little melody idea thing I had and my kids helping along and adding some awesome notes to that. You know, here's another little something, another great contribution for my son there, which is awesome. But yeah, like they don't need to be lyrics, they don't need to even be fully fleshed out melodies. It's just little things, little flickers of ideas. Oh, and then here's another thing where we were writing with some friends and so I just set my phone down to record and just had it going the whole time so that I can kind of revisit and see the evolution of the idea. And maybe pull some things from, oh, we had an idea earlier that was really great then we kind of moved away from it. Let's go back to and revisit that again. I can just scroll back and find it. So maybe you need to tell that story about. The reason this is so powerful is you're taking these raw, unformed emotional things. Whether they're stories in your life, things that have happened to you, ideas that come through you, you're just cataloguing it all. And those become the paint colors that you're going to use to tell a story. You're going to use those things to create a viewpoint that is uniquely you. How you see something, and you're going to then share that with the world. So I think that's the first step to songwriting is just gathering as much raw material as you can, as much raw emotion, stories, experiences. Get all that stuff in and then we can mold it into something that we want to say. That's what we're going to talk about next. 4. Choosing your theme: After we've gathered all our material, we've got our stories and experiences and song ideas and all these different kind of things. We've created this little galaxy of information. I think the best thing we can do is choose a theme, choose an idea. Something that we want to actually write about. And I think as specific as you can be, the better. Let me give you an example. So if you're writing a song about having a great time tonight and it's kind of this pop, happy dance tune, mention where you are, mention who you're with, mention what you're doing, you know the time that it is like down to those details where you can really allow us into your world so that we can see the world through your eyes. Like I think that is what is really powerful about music is it allows us to kind of enter into this place. And I think that your job as the artist is to supply that creative vision, to have something to say, to have a viewpoint that is very clearly defined. That even if I haven't experienced what you've experienced, your viewpoint is so well defined that I can enter into it. And it's interesting and I'm learning something about you. I'm connecting to you in that way. So don't feel afraid to whittle down the theme to something super, super specific and then look through that material that you've collected. Your voice memos, your song ideas of little melodies, stories that happened to you, whatever. Gather the things that scratch that same itch as that theme that you've established. Now you have a smaller collection of ideas that all are saying the same thing. And we can jigsaw those together and make a song out of that. And we'll develop those into different song structures, different sections. And that's what we're going to talk about in the next video, is how to actually take this amalgamation of ideas and distill it down into unique song sections. 5. Song structure: All right, we're really writing songs now. We got a guitar out and everything, it's the real deal. So I'm going to take one of the ideas that I've had for a while and kind of been iterating on. And I want to try and distill it down into structures, so I want to try and have a verse progression, something that we can kind of intro the song with. And I want to have somewhere to go to from there. So whether that's a chorus or a pre chorus or some sort of interlude or I just kind of want to play around and find different song structures that we can go to. I have this section that I've kind of been messing around with. I I don't want to fight and I don't want to lose my mind. I don't want to lose my mind. I fight. You're lucky at all, mind? Lucky mind. Just that bouncing back and forth between those two chords. Some lyrics about that. Some of them I have picked out, some of them not quite picked out yet. I want to go somewhere from there. Where could I go from that second chord? And I'm going to try and avoid this becoming like a super deep dive into music theory if you want that. I have a course available on that. But in this, I'm trying to guide it more towards the songwriting specifics of it. But if I mention a term that is unfamiliar or something, I probably go into that in more detail in a different course. No, no, no, no. Lose my mind. So from there, maybe I could go, you know, we haven't done that chord yet, so I'll pick it all the time. I want you go. I don't want to fight anymore, so I've kind of got those two different ideas that I like, both of those. And obviously lyrics are still very nebulous, the melody can still be workshopped a bit to be more specific, I'm sure. But those are kind of, you know, the building blocks that feel pretty good. Good enough to kind of start recording stuff on just for kicks. I'm going to try kind of coming up with a third section that maybe could be sort of bridge or I don't know, just another option to have. So I'm doing this on the fly. So I'll purposely want you to hear some bad things, things that I don't like, so that you can kind of hear how we just kind of stumble upon something that works. I don't fine and I don't fine. My my your Mr. I'm getting old side. Going to get in all the time. In mind time. Love. Yeah. Something like. That's cool. I like that. So maybe there's are three sections, you know, we kind of have our verse sort of deal a little precourse thing and then that could be a little breakdown interlude, bridge section between choruses potentially. So that's a good intro into this world of songwriting. You know, this theme is pretty well fleshed out. There are still lyrics that need to be done. There are still melody issues. You know, the chords aren't final, the vibe is, you know, could change. But we have a relatively clear idea of what this song is going to be. So this is the perfect time to kind of move on to the next step of getting some stuff down on paper, on paper, digital paper. The computer start recording some scratches and start to see kind of how it sounds when we listen back to it. And that might inform where we go from there. But yeah, let's call it for today. Great job on day one. You made it. Let's go on to day two. 6. Setting up your project at 48k 24bit: All right, let's talk about files. Music files fall into two categories. You have compressed and uncompressed compressed files. And this compression is not audio compression that we'll talk about later on another day, but it's specifically a data type of compression. So think P three is a compressed audio file for recording. We are pretty much always going to be working with wave filesv because they're the most common and it's uncompressed. You're able to do whatever you want with it. Aiff is specific to Apple, it's what logic uses. By default under the hood, it'll use AIF files a lot. But when we're talking about like exporting something for mastering or, you know, uploading something to Spotify, something like that. We're always going to be using wave files. So when we're setting up our project in our Da, this will look different depending on what you're using. We need to make sure that we're using these settings for the file format that we're going to use. We're going to record in 48 K and we're going to record in 24 bit depth. Now what these terms actually mean, kilohertz is the amount of samples per second. So 48 K is 48,000 little clips of audio per second that make up a sound. This sound that you're listening to right now is at 48 K. Most videos operate at 48 K. Most CD's are 4041, and there's lots of technical reasons for that, but trust me, set it at 48 and don't look back, thank me later. Bit depth is how low something can go. It's the threshold of audio, 16 bit depths. Something can get this quiet and if it gets below that, it'll just turn off, it'll just fade into nothing. 24 bit depth will go that much quieter, so it's not going to get louder. It's just creating more head room so that our mix can exist. Down here, we kind of have a little more head room and then in mastering it, will master it and it'll dither it down to 16 bit, but we'll retain all the detail that we mixed at. Again, it gets really complicated but just 48 K 24 bit, never look back. You'll be able to upload it anywhere you want if you use those settings. 7. Solutions for click track bleed: All right, so we're going to start recording stuff. Now, as we start recording, there's something called the grid that we need to be aware of. The grid is what everything aligns to. And if I pop up in logic here, these lines here are our friends. I can zoom in. I don't know if you can see that or not. Yeah, you can. These little lines are our friends. We love them. Really 99% of the time you're going to be recording to a click track. That introduces some other problems with, now your timing becomes very important because you're playing along to something that is completely perfect. It's really critical that you have good timing and good tempo. Also, another problem is bleed. If I just play the click coming straight out of the computer, you can hear that clear as day. By the time we start adding compression and effects and everything, that click is going to be very audible in the mix. There are a couple things we can do to mitigate that headphone bleed. One of them is actually affecting what the click sounds like. If we pop over into Logic, and I'm going to press X to open up my mixer. Here you'll see I don't see the click, we can play that. We can hear the click, and we see the volume here, but we don't actually see where it's coming from. You'll notice in the little middle section here, it says tracks single or all. If we click all now, it'll show us everything going on, even if we never really have a good reason to look at it, most of the time, we never need to look at a click track. But if we want to adjust the sound of it, oh, and I just double clicked this little square here and it automatically added an EQ. We'll go into EQ in another video later, but for now, I'm just going to start messing with the sound of this click. Because you'll notice when headphone bleed happens, it's really the high frequencies that bleed in first. The low end doesn't really bleed into the microphone that much. We can use that to our advantage. If we just take away just the high frequencies and leave the low ones in there, then we'll be able to have a nice loud click that doesn't really get into the mic that much. I'm going to turn on this filter and just take away all that high stuff until it becomes like a low pulse. Then I can just turn that way up and that's not going to bleed at all. If I mute logic here, now this click is just coming through my headphones. Let's see if you can hear that bleed. I mean, this is perfectly silent. It's barely barely in there. That's a good way to get rid of some of that click track. You can sing to that and that's totally fine. Another way is just to have some rhythmic element going on. That way the bleed doesn't really matter as much because you can just turn off the click and just listen to that rhythmic element. If we just wanted to drop like some shaker loop in there, actually we could use Logic drummer thing here. I just created a new track and I'm going to have it be a percussion track. I'm just going to have this be very simple and turn off everything but the shaker. Now let's listen to that. Yeah, I could sing to that just fine. That's an option to all these are ways to just mitigate the headphone bleed or at least make it make sense so that we can sing rhythmically along to the click, stay in sync with everything else. But also we are not getting a bunch of extra information into the mic that we don't want. 8. Setting a mood with loops: At this point in the process, I think it's a pretty good time to start talking about loops. Loops can be used unwisely or lazily, or you just drop a loop and let it loop through the whole thing. But sometimes that's a vibe and that's the point, and that's not a bad thing. I think whatever inspires you, if you think it's D, go for it. Just because you're using a loop does not make it less of an expression in my opinion. I think there's perfectly good examples of this, probably the most high profile one, It's just in biber track, run and over, Okay, go. It's just this splice slot, that's all it is. Just slowed down a little bit, even the same key and everything. So it's like everybody is doing this. This is not something that is only lazy musicians do. This is something that is utilized by everybody. I think take advantage of it as great jumping off points. You know, they built a whole track out of that one little sample that basically loves the entire song. If you find something that you love, go for it, use it, You're totally fine. If it's legally cool, as long as you have the rights to use it, if it's royalty free or whatever, then yeah, you're golden. What I'm going to do, I have a couple ideas. I know where I want to take this song. I want to put some loop in there just to set the tone as I'm recording a scratch. And I'll probably go in and edit it later. But I want to find a loop that doesn't have too much going on as far as like a chord progression, I just want to set the tone. Oh, okay, cool. So this is in a different key and the timing is not quite right, But I like sonically what it's doing. So I'm just going to see if we can get this to fit. I'm just going to, okay, this sample was at 4041, but remember from our file types, it's really important that we're having everything at 48 K. When we send stuff off to mastering, I'm going to convert file so that it brings it in as 48. Get rid of the little percussion layer that we had. Now I want to make sure that our tempo is locked in. I was imagining nine somewhere around there, so that'd be like 70 maybe. Oh, maybe a little faster. Yeah, something like, let's try that. Maybe 78. Okay. This is at 80. So I'm just going to slow this down a little bit, depending on your Daw. There are probably a lot of different ways to slow something down in logic. The least destructive way to do it that allows you to, to go back and change things later and it's not a big deal, is editing. There's like this little flex button here and this allows you to manipulate audio a little bit better. There's all these different algorithms, these different ways that it's manipulating the audio. Basically 90% of the time, polyphonic will do it. It's just the most complex way to stretch the audio. There are other reasons why you might do this, like if it's a bass sound or a vocal or something that is like a monophonic signal, then monophonic helps it be a little more accurate. But most of the time, if you used to do polyphonic, it'll probably be fine. I'm just going to hover the mouse over here and then I can stretch it, I'm going to boom, make it there. Then I'll probably also switch the key. I think I was playing A earlier. This is in D sharp. Just pulling on my keyboard here. If I go from D sharp up to a 1234566, I go up six or down six. Let's see what six sounds like versus down six. I, I like both. I think I'm probably gonna do down just so that I don't have too many high frequencies kind of getting in the way. 9. Recording scratch tracks: So I have an audio track here for my voice. I can see the level coming in there. Hello? Hello? I've got a mini track here for my keyboard. I'm going to go ahead and just pick a preset of piano that I've made earlier. You can bring up the preset window thing by pressing Y, there it goes O if you're going to get one plug in on the sphere is the one to get, It can do anything you want to do. It's always useful. It's so flexible. Yeah, I've been using it for ten years now. Still my go to still works, I'm still finding new things you can do with it. Yeah, it's incredible. I'm just going to let this loop play and just try and find a vibe here in the sections. I'm going to add just a little bit of reverb to this loop and just pull it down, just to kind of put it a little bit more in the background. If you're ever recording a Midi instrument, one thing that might be helpful is to turn on low latency mode. This tells logic, whatever track you have selected to put some extra processing power on that so that it will prioritize making that as snappy as possible and responsive as possible when you're playing. Otherwise you might get a little bit of latency. I'm going to turn that on in my control bar here, you can see there's a low latency mode, low latency monitoring mode. If you don't see this or if this bar looks different for you up here, you can customize what this looks like. Customize control bar and display. It gives you all sorts of options. Um, or you can just choose one of the default ones and that's totally fine, but if for whatever reason you don't see the low latency monitoring mode, you can just have it show up if you just customize. And just kind of check it right here if you want to see it. Okay, let's see what happens here. I don't want to fight and I don't want to lose my mind. I don't want to lose my mind when you walk over me. Just want to make you happy. If you need a little runway to be clean fee, I just want to see you smile. Cool. So we're still working on the melody, we're still working on lyrics and everything, but just getting some stuff down on paper and then listening back to it can kind of help identify. Oh, okay, that was a magic moment. That kind of felt cool versus we're still kind of searching. I don't want to, I just want to see you smile. Okay, cool. This is giving me some ideas. I'm gonna try another take and I'm just going to go forward after what we recorded and just kind of keep going. I'm just kind of like putting down a bunch of ideas and I'll come back and clean it up later. If you need a little time I'll be int there and I just want to see you smile. It's getting closer still. Not exactly what I had in mind. I'm going to start writing lyrics down, so I like to just keep it in the logic project itself. But a lot of times if you're collaborating or whatever, not p, you know, pages document or document, whatever works for you. I like keeping it in the logic project. There we go. Okay. I don't want to fight and I don't want to lose my mind. Nails. You want me all the time? I guess Lucky. I guess lucky. I don't mind. 10. Scratch drums and overdubs: So I'm going to try this again now that I've sung it a couple times, has kind of solidified a verse and a pre course thing. Just after singing it, you kind of start to figure out what it actually is and it's kind of getting like a kind of a cut vibe, which I think is fun. I'm going to drop some drums in there, just a loop that will just kind of help me sing a little more rhythmically. And that might inform some other decisions down the road of, you know, how long to have certain sections and stuff like that. Let's see, my tempo is 78 right now. I mean, I could slow that down and that could be kind a vibe. We could try that. Let's see what this sounds like here. If we just kind of brute force this into the right tempo, and then if I quantize it so that it's not swung, I think that's kind of fun. That's kind of a fun vibe. Okay, let's try that. And I'll kind of start playing along with that. And let's see what happens here. You need a little bubble of your own Lay down, read. I'll get the kids to school on time. I just want to see you smile. Okay, cool. So I'm going to take that and now that kind of, I'm starting to get more of a picture of what the song is going to be. Now I'm just going to kind of go back in and try sections again. So, you know, I like this piano part. I don't need to record that again, but I flubbed the line. So I'm just going to record the vocal and go back in and it's called punching in where I'm just going to over dub that one line that I missed and I don't want to lose my mind right there, so let's grab that. I'm going to hit play then as soon as it's time for me to start singing as it's playing, going to press R and that's going to start recording. I'll still hear the original take. If I don't want to hear the original take, then I'll press N, which is going to mute that track, R to start recording, and then to mute that original track. If you press R as you're playing, then you'll still hear it. If you just press right now as it's stopped, then you won't hear it. Just in logic, little quirks about how the program works but now, you know, fight. I don't want to lose my mind. I don't want to lose my mind. Okay. And then is there anything else? Run in my heads along your spine. Yeah, I could do that cleaner. Let's try. Lucky mind. Run in my heads along your spine. All right. Let's take a listen to that. I don't want to. Right. And I don't want to lose my mind. I don't want to lose my mind. Males, you want me? All the time? I guess I'm lucky. Out a mind running my hands along your side and you need a little bubble of your own. Lay down, read. I'll get the kids to school on time. I just want to see you smile. Cool. This is a good scratch. There's that other section that we kind of came up with. I don't totally know where that would fit here, but it might start to present itself later if I start to realize as we start to build the track out, oh, that other section would fit great here. We have that in our back pocket if we need it. But for now, I think this is a good scratch. And now we can kind of move on to the next part of the process. 11. Cut and paste time: Welcome to day three. We're going to be talking about arrangement today. The structure of the song, how many verses, how many choruses, that sort of thing, as well as what instruments are playing, the construction of the song. This is the real meat and potatoes stuff. After sleeping on it, I am starting to get a better idea of where I want to take this song. I do think it'd be nice to bring in that little bridge idea thing we had, but I'm not going to worry about that right now. What I'm going to just do is this take right here is what we ended up liking the most, this felt, the most complete fishing a little bit here. Still not 100% on these lyrics, but that's okay. I'm going to take all of this earlier stuff and I'm selecting it by using this cycle here. So if you just drag anywhere on these markers, it'll create this yellow bar, right? Normally what this yellow bar does is it just loops a section. So if I wanted to just loop this four bar section here, I could just do that drag there. And then it would just loop the section over and over. And every time I hit space bar, it'll go to the start of that section. Another thing you can do with this cycle length here is choose which parts of the project are affected by certain parameters, certain functions. Because I have these selected here, this cycle, if I go into the edit menu, these options will be applied to what are within these locators. If I cut section between locators, it'll snip that little piece there. Also, if I command that, I can also duplicate it. Let's say if I wanted to just do two choruses, I could find a chorus here, go over, just want to make you happy. It was this 4 bars, that was the chorus. I could go repeat section, and then it would automatically make all those edits for me and duplicate that, shifting everything after it forwards a little runway to be clean. I feel you might need to go back and kind of fix some edits that don't totally make sense. Like it's cutting this word right in the middle because it kind of bled over into the downbeat of the next measure. So we can just really easily kind of make those changes just by moving, you know, the regions over getting that full, complete word, you know, et cetera. But for now, because this section is what we were happy with, I just kind of want to get rid of all this stuff that came before it. So I'm going to select all of this with the cycle kind of going up to where that drum loop starts. I'm going to cut section, boom. Completely get rid of all of it. That's how we cut and insert time. Duplicate time. Now let's start editing the stuff and get it into an arrangement that we're happy with. 12. Intro to editing : A quick word on keyboard shortcuts my rule of thumb. If I use the same function, like two or three times in the session, that probably tells me I should just make a keyboard shortcut for that thing. I'm a big believer in just creating your own keybindings because you'll remember them a lot easier than looking up a manual and seeing what they are. If you just decide, hey, I'm just going to have this function, this key, I don't know, I feel like that's just a little bit stickier. That's the way that my brain works anyway. I've also bound the scissor tools manually to be the number three. When I hit three, it'll switch my tool to scissors, and then if I want to go to something else, I can hit Escape. And it'll bring up my whole tool bar there, so I can just click whatever tool I want at the moment, which 99% of the time is going to be a pointer tool. But that's just a quick aside. We're here to edit the arrangement. So let's cut out a verse and an intro and start assembling stuff together here. So I'm going to use my marquee tool and just kind of select this whole verse section and it's going to ask me, hey, there's a note Overlapping here. What do you want to do with that? Do you want to split it in half? Do you want to just keep it or shorten it or whatever? So I'm just going to keep it. I don't mind. And let me make sure that this kind of starts on a downbeat here. Yeah, so this kind is a downbeat, even though there's no note here. I'm just going to move this over here. I do a little move where this is actually the downbeat. So I'm going to use my marquee tool and just delete all of this because I'm deleting this, any overlapping notes. I do want to keep those, I want them in this other region. So I'm going to split this so that it doesn't accidentally delete any notes that I want that way here. It didn't remove it, it just cut it where that marquee was. All right, so now I've got this little verse progression here which we can also use as an intro to, let's say I want the drums to come in probably right away this will have here. But maybe I want a bar of this before it starts. I'll copy this over by option dragging this region. Then I'll move my mouse here and it creates this little tool that I can drag. I'm going to have this just be here. It's just a bar. Maybe if I want to also add a fade if I move my mouse in the upper, let me turn off flex editing here in the upper left, now it's a fade. If flex is on, then it'll be like if I want to stretch it around but I don't want to do that right now. I want to fade it in. I can co over here bring in that cross fade. If that option doesn't show up for you when you mouse over a region like that, you'll need to enable fade tool click zones. If you just go to Settings General Editing, fade tool click zones right here, boom. Just make sure that's enabled if it's not. Okay, so now we've got a little intro here. Cool. I might go in and edit those drums. I'm not totally loving what that's doing right now, but for now we can just move on. Let's get our verse here and where does our chorus section come in? I guess I'm lucky, out of mind, running my heads along your spine and in right there, downbeat. Let's cut this here. When I say cut, I just mean split. Now we have this little chorus here that we can add somewhere. And then it repeats. I just want to see that's the downbeat. I'm going to get rid of this now. We can start using these as building blocks. I'll have this be a little reintro, Also move these around too so that they all start together. I'm going to grab, I'm going to grab this whole thing here. Bring this over. Don't want to. That'd be cool actually, to bring drums in here, proper need a little bubble of your own as I just want to see you smile. So this could be a cool spot to bring in that bridge progression we were working with the other day. Let me just plug that in real quick. Is to school on time as I just want to see you smile. Give that a little bit of quantizing. Select all and just maybe not 100% but yeah, like 50. Just to tighten up the timing a little bit, maybe I'll want some sort of other drum thing going on there. Let me see it one more time. Okay, Right here, I think is where we should go back to either the chorus or the verse. Let's see what this sounds like. If we go into a chorus from there, a minute and you need a little bubble of your own. Drop it down. Drop it down here. Read. I'll get the kids to school on time 'cause I just want to see you smile, re, intro, and then you end. Maybe you to. All I'm really doing with this is getting a roadmap of where we're going in the song. When I start actually messing with production specifics, I know where I'm going, I know how to leave something in the tank for when we get to that last chorus or whatever. This kind of gives me a good mental picture of where the whole song is going. Now let's go back and let's start replacing some of these looped elements. Let's start embellishing things. Let's start to really make this a song. 13. Drums: So let's talk about drums. There's a lot of different ways that we can approach drums. It's a very deep subject right now. We just have some loops going on, so everything feels pretty static and we're changing it a bit. We're stretching it to meet our tempo and that's creating some interesting effects, but it's still very, very samy throughout the song. One thing we can do to kind of breathe some life into it is convert this loop into a sampler track. So that we can play our own rhythms in using these sounds depending on your dog. This process might look different, but for logic, I can just right click on the region and convert to new sampler track. If I do that off of this, because we're like stretching that audio, it's going to take the original audio file and convert that into a sample track. I can show you what that'll do. I'm going to use it off of transient markers, so every time it is a hit in there, it's going to slice that audio. Here it goes. It gives me this region here. If I play all these notes now, right, just like pseudo randomly took all these hits and mapped them across the keyboard. If I play that region that it made, it should sound like the original loop, right? You can understand what it's doing. That can be cool, but I like it stretched. That sounds a little more interesting to me because I want it to affect that audio and that's what I want sampled to it. I'm going to bounce in place. Just right click bounce in place. This is going to render this as a new audio file. The difference between this file and this file, this one is not being stretched by that flex audio editing. This is just how it sounds now. It just created a new audio file, now if I convert this to a new sampler track, it should sound a little different. Yeah. Have a lot more space between the notes and stuff. Yeah, I like it. Sounds cool. So I'm going to punch in a rhythm by using a pattern. If I write, click on this Midi track here, anywhere in this space, anywhere in here, I can create a pattern region. And it gives me this menu here. Now it's by default just selected a C major scale. And here, all these notes I can create a using this sequencer, which depending on the style of music, can be really helpful. I got a little kick here, if I want to add some more notes here. Say I want this other sample that's not in the sequencer right now. I can hit this plus sign, learn, add, now it's turned red. It's learning now it's listening to all the notes that I play. I'm going to play in this note, added that little guy there. Then there's also a whole bunch of other options. If you do a dropdown here, you can do other things like not repeating and stuff like that, which can be really fun. Get a little repeat action here that feels interesting to me. That's kind of cool. I'm going to add a little bit of delay. I think that could be interesting to this. I really like using the sound toys plug ins. I feel like they're just inspiring and I like how simple they are. Yeah, they're cool company. I'm going to filter down some of the highs just to make it a little bit darker and the lows too nice. L'll slan it some compression. So I think that feels cool. I'm going to add like just some kick to it. Logic has a lot of great built in drums, so I'm just going to use one of those just to keep it fast. I'm going to open up my library here. And then I've clicked on, or you could also do that just by clicking on this little triangle. This tiny little triangle right there. See it? And that will open up my little library of preset sounds here. I'm going to go to electronic drum kit and just grab like 88 deal. We can start with that. Let's just play it in. I want to put on a little distortion. Yeah, think it's a little better. Cool, so now we can start making variations on these patterns. I have this one that I like, but we want to have this like start halfway through like that. And then maybe this one we get rid of some of those trills or one thing we could do is add a chance on this little G. We could do it 50% half of the time, it'll do it half of the time, it won't cool. And then for like these sections, I kind of wanted to like super straight 'cause I just want to see you smile. And so one thing that's cool, just because I have a pattern region here, I can still play in notes just fine. And I'm going to copy this onto a new thing. And this one's going to be exactly the same, just with no delay. Smile. Cool. I'm gonna leave that one a little bit looser. Yeah. Is it just a little bit ooh smile. I kind of want just a very simple kind of shaker thing on 16th, so let me grab a lin, my lin. Drum. Manuel Miranda, we go. Yeah, there we go. So pattern. What's name? Jager. Lose my mind. I don't want to lose my mind. Nails. You want me all the time? I guess. I'm lucky, mind. It could be cool to kind of start with drums too and then take them out for the first verse. Maybe this intro lasts a little bit longer. I want to just the, I don't want to fight. Cool. I like how that's feeling. You know, all of this can take a really long time. You know, every 4 bars or something, have something else happen. Either introducing a new element or taking something away or having something change a little bit. You know, the goal is that that's gonna feel very engaging to listen to and enjoyable. That is a not so brief overview on drums. 14. Keeping low end clean with sub bass: All right, let's talk about base. Base is really difficult to translate from different places, from the car to your phone whatever. So there's a couple things that we can keep in mind to make sure that our low end A is not too loud or too quiet. That it's the right level, it's sitting where we want it to sit, in an ideal listening environment. And then also we need to balance that with what are we giving the listener something to hold onto for the base that allows them to identify what the note is. So that it's not just all sub like if you wanted the cleanest, loudest, base possible. Technically, it'd just be a sine wave and put it at whatever frequency you want. Super, super low. Crank it up, that's going to sound the biggest in like a system. Just massive low end. And you can get it super loud because it's like there's very low information in it. But obviously if you did that on a phone, you wouldn't even be able to hear it. Let's take those one at a time. Let's first talk about how to get your base to sit where you want it to sit in the mix. And then we'll talk about how to get that to translate everywhere. But before I show you something here, you know, not every song needs a ton of super loud clear bass. If it's an acoustic thing, you might not need any. So, you know, take us with the grain of salt. This is just if you want your bass to be loud, clear, punchy. This is kind of how I've found success with doing that. I have an EQ here just on the master channel to be able to show you what is going on. So I'm just going to have this display the frequencies of this part of the song. I don't want to fight. Okay, cool. So there's no basin here right now. It's just the kick drum and then, you know, piano, some light drum things, whatever, vocal, this is not a very full mix at all. But I wanted to pull this up to be able to show you the low end. The kick drum is kind of hitting around here, and then our vocals are kind of floating around somewhere over here or whatever. But you can see 50 Hertz is where our kick drum is living. The distance 50-150 hurts, not that much, right? But as we go up, those distances become closer and closer together. Okay? So when we're at like two K, 1003 K sounds a little different. But 1001 K and zero could not be further apart, right? It exponentially gets closer and closer together. Why this matters is because as frequencies get lower and lower, they get closer and closer together. There's less differentiation between those low frequencies. A kick drum that has a lot of base and an actual synth that has a lot of bass. It's harder for those things to live together than it is for two guitars that are both in the one K range, but you can carve pockets for them pretty easily. Okay, We'll feature this one at one K and this one at 1.5 Like, you have a lot more room to carve out spaces, but when things are that low, you got to be really careful about what things you're going to feature and what low end you're going to allow to be prominent in the mix. A technique that I've found that is really helpful in getting loud clear base is to split the base into a couple different sections. We're going to have one instrument that's really going to focus on just that sub information, the stuff that's really difficult to hear that lives super low, it's only job is to carry the weight of that note. And then the actual definition of the bass can be something else. And we'll tuck some of that low end down on our actual base, whether that's a bass guitar or a synth bass or whatever, that's where all the character lives, that's what actually sounds like a base. But the super clear sub information will be on something separate that its only job is to have that super solid sub. There are 1 million different synths that can do this. I like using atmosphere just because I'm familiar with it and it has a lot of the waves that I think sound good, like this sub 37 square wave, which sounds like this. Obviously, I don't want that high information. This is just for the sub super low stuff. So I'm going to turn on the filter and I don't want like any animation or anything on it. By default, I think it has a short little envelope. Yeah. So I don't want that at all. I'm literally just wanting the low end. And then I'll just put, make it mono, only one voice. So that if I play two notes, it'll just go to the one using those techniques. Let's go through and let's start adding some base to this arrangement and start to flesh out that low end. 15. Recording sub bass: All right. So I've got a little sub pulled up and I'm just going to go through and start punching parts in that I've been hearing in my head. I know I want. And then we'll probably come up with some other stuff as we're recording too, right? So I'm just going to hit R to record and start punching in some notes here on your spine. And if you need a little bubble of your own read, I'll get the kids to school on site. I just want to see you smile. Okay, cool. Let's come in here and quantize to yeah, 16th. And I had an idea here. I kind of want that base to follow the kick, but bump don't so I'm going to add this right here and then this note but bump. I want this one to be a little bit quieter. I hit escape to bring up my tools, hit velocity. I could also just grab that by up top here of this little panel. And I could grab my tool that way too. I also want that during those other kicks don't. Same thing. So I'm going to grab this quieter note and option, drag it, grab the, copy these over, trim this and set that to loop with L mind. Yeah, we can do one more and copy this over. And let's also get rid of this last hit. Okay, bye. Copy or pre chorus progression over or chorus, whatever it is, All of your own eat out, read. I'll get the kids to school on site. This one carries over through the end on this region. I'm going to just copy these notes. Option drag, bring these over. I want to see you smile for this bridge section, I want the base to start a little bit higher and then get lower. Whatever flavor base we end up using, that's really going to set the tone for it. Maybe that can do some of the heavy lifting here. And then the sub stuff will really come in when it drops down lower, I'll play the sub in, but I'm probably not going to use it just there to set the notes and then I'll have the other base carry over go. 16. Helping the bass cut through: I'm going to add in some real base or at least a sample library of a real base. And I'm going to blend that with the sub so that the base that you here is going to be this sample. But the actual weight of the low end is coming from this sub thing that's really going to be felt more than heard. If you'll pardon the cliche all here we have our base. All right, so with that sound, let's start tracking base. We could just copy that base over. How would that sound? Too low to here. A quick way just to transpose notes up an octave. If you just command a, select all those guys option shift arrow, we'll bring them all up an octave. You can also just do option arrow up and down and that will move them in semitones. If you want to go up or down an octave, it's option shift arrow. Let's listen to how that sounds together. And also before I do that, let me pop an EQ onto our real base here. And I'm just going to carve out some of this low, the super low stuff, a little bubble of your own. I'll get the kids to school on time. I just want to see you smile. Oh yeah. I want this to actually happen here. Oh, yeah. Great. Let's do that. Same move on the sub as well, and then let's also copy these over here since we made that adjustment. Lastly, let's just do some quick EQ compression on the real base. Real base. I'm going to add a compressor. My favorite compressor ever, Percolabs Distressor. I'm speaking to you now through a distressor. One of my favorite settings is the opto mode. You go to opt and then it tells you opto ten, Opto zero, okay, 100. It basically just becomes this very squishy thing. Yeah, it sounds really lovely. I'll swallow this out. One thing that's nice about the distressor is that it has a built in high pass. If I click that on, it will shelve off some of the low frequencies. Which in this case is good for us. We want that. I'll also add a little distortion to cool. Then let's get some EQ going. I want to add a base amp. I just want the sound not quite as dry. Okay, now let's just do a little bit EQ. So one thing that sounds a lot like low end on phone speakers, small speakers, for whatever reason, the mid range, around 800 to one, maybe 700 to one K. Anywhere in that range, the base can be emphasized there. When you listen to it on a phone, your brain just thinks, oh, that sounds like low. I don't know why. It just kind of has an effect. So I can demonstrate that here. I'll use just a very simple EQ, just a three band EQ. And I'm going to just pump up this 700 region and you'll kind of hear what that does to the character of it. W neat, Kind of like Hong, hong. Kind of that sort of sound Cool. So that's kind of a look at base and how to get that sub information in there. And also how to make it come through on small speakers so that you can actually hear what that low end is doing. 17. Keys and synths presets vs sound design: Keys and synthes, I think out of all instrument categories, these are probably the hardest to define, because it can literally be anything. But that's what makes it cool. There's the sound design part of keys and then there's the actual playing part of it. Those don't always overlap. Sometimes something is completely unplayable, it's just entirely sound design even though it's musical. Whereas other times there'll be a keyboard part that is no sound design, it's just a piano that's totally valid as well. I'm going to go over a little bit of both. I think with the instrument side of things, it's basically just, hey, if you can record a real piano, I would encourage you to pursue that as an option, because even the best piano sample library really can't compare to the sound of a real piano. There's something about just the way that all the strings interact with each other is so complex and it just sounds beautiful. I would always encourage you, if you can, to go for a real piano. And I recognize the irony of me talking about how great it is to record piano when there's a piano right there. And I didn't record it for this song. If I could spend more time and not have to worry about recording a video at the same time, I definitely would record real piano instead of this. But for the purpose of the video, it's totally fine. There are 1 million piano libraries out there and they all sound good, they're all totally workable. You know, on the other side of things, like kind of the sound designer sort of world, I think that there are kind of two types of synth plug ins. Like I'm mainly talking about software here, I'm assuming you don't have a bunch of hardware sys lying around. There are the plug ins that are basically just preset machines that you pick a sound and it sounds good, you might have a little bit of control over the filter or something, but that's all that they really do. Then the other types of plug ins are real workhorse machines. They are almost platforms where you can design something inside of. Not everybody needs to be a master of everything. If learning how to sound design and you come up with these crazy cinematic synth things, is not exciting to you. If that seems daunting, you don't need to do it. There are other people that are very good that have made a lot of this stuff for you to use. So I don't think there's any shame in recognizing, hey, this is not my area, I'm just going to stick to the preset machines because those sound really good and I know how to pick the sound that's appropriate for the moment. I think that's totally valid if you want to get more into sound design and that's something that does excite you and interest you. I have a course available on that where I go into that in more detail. But for this lesson I'm just going to talk about kind of more the preset style approaches and how to tailor things to fit into the track that you're working on. 18. Arranging and recording piano: When I'm using sounds, I kind of fall into sort of both camps a little bit. I enjoy sound designing and making my own sounds and stuff, but I will often save those as presets to use later as jumping off points. So here's a patch that I made for a song, you know, years ago that I just liked the vibe of it. And so I'll often grab it when I kind of want this sort of sound. And then I'll go from there to get it to fit into the specific track. But it's a great starting off point, you know. If I want some sort of atmospheric bell thing, I got my atmospheric bell sort of sound that I always go to. And then I might, you know, oh, for this song the delay might be a bit much or the panning might be a bit much. You know, you tweak it as you need it. I like the sound. I have an idea for kind of a music box sort of feel for this and let's see what that sounds like. Cool, I like that little line in there. I'm just going to quantize it. Cut out the part that I like just, yeah, I didn't really play it right that time. This felt cool. But that there, yeah, we can have it in there for that section for looping. Got our pre steel, then the bridge probably out for the bridge, probably only coming back really on the outro and leaving it. Is that okay? Cool. So that's that, Laird, I want something a little more consistent. I think I am going to want to redo this piano. I think it's just a little too soft and so it's kind of pulling everything in the sleepy direction which is okay, but I'm picturing it a little more up. Okay. I've got just a basic, clean piano. It's the Alicia's keys piano. If you're interested. I'm just going to play through a couple sections here. I, I don't want to fade out me get the kids to school on time. I just want to see you smile. Oh, okay. Maybe there you bring in the felt one. Before that you have this piano and then it goes into here. Yeah. And that could be a cool sort of transition moment. Maybe even stay there for the rest of the song, actually. Because if we switched to this piano, we will not have heard the felt by the time we get over here. So this will all feel new. Yeah, that's pretty cool. I wasn't crazy about how the verses feel still. I like the intro. Like that feels fun. But this stuff, I think I just want to find a better way to do it. Yeah, let's try that. Something softer. I, I don't want to fight and I don't want to lose my mind. I don't want to lose my mind nail. Yeah, cool. There we go. And then this pause I like, and I want to emphasize that on the drums as well, so I don't want to lose my mind. Nails. You want me? Yeah, that's fun. 19. Synth pads: Let's get like a pad thing, going into kind of like widen stuff. And this could be cool. What if I had a tremolo on here? Let's see, I want these both in unison. Faster, Faster, faster. So I'm mainly thinking about back chorus when it hits and a few, I kind of want things to, ooh, open up a little bit there. So I'm going to add this little tremolo thing that we come up with on your spine and a little bubble of your own. I'll get the kids to school outside, I just want to see you smile. Let's add that for here. And then probably not on that down version. Okay, that original sample that we were using. And just put a bot of reverb on and stretch it out with the tremolo in the chorus. What if we did a really exaggerated version of that here to help keep things choppy on that rhythm on quarter notes. If we did that post verb after the reverb, what would that sound like? You don't have LFO tool. It's been around for years. I'm sure there are probably better versions now of different companies that do the same basic idea. It's basically just an LFO that you can just map to different things. For example, I want this to just be like the interface doesn't even work on my computer, Okay? So I'm going to just adjust the shape of this here. Okay. Now that we're getting that, I want to clean up some of these frequencies, get rid of some of the base, and I want to emphasize some of that high stuff if we can. That's what that sounds like. Yeah. In the background. Maybe I'll automate it so that it only turns on when everything else comes in. I'll pop up an automation, go to Elpho tool and the volume is what is going to do that. Let me put this at close to zero, Fine. We get a nice steady fade in and then the lo kick in. Oh, we don't have bass here. I was like, man, why does this feel so small? That'll do it. Okay. Okay. The verses definitely do need some sort of pad or something to help kind of fill out some of the stuff. It can sit below the piano, but it's a little bit too empty. I, I don't want to fight and I don't want to lose my mind and feel need a little bubble of your own. Read out, read. Cool. I'll take this verse here. Bring that over. Bring over our pre chorus. Chop it here. Maybe this is the one that will bring over into this bridge section. See you, smile. We'll let our piano have its moment. Then we can maybe bring it in like creep it in over here. Need cool. And then lastly, a little bit intro stuff because I just want to see you smile. So that's kind of the workflow for adding keys and synths. It's basically just, you know, adding, adding, adding, taking away, taking away, kind of back and forth until the song gets to a point where cool it feels like how you want it to feel. I think this is in a pretty good spot to wrap up for today and we'll get vocals tomorrow, so we'll see then. 20. Getting a good vocal space: Today we're going to be talking about vocals. Recording vocals, commping tuning, all that good stuff. The most important part of this is just getting a good vocal sound. And there are a couple components that go into that. The first one being the room that you're recording in. The room that you are recording in, the space that you're recording in is going to have a huge impact on what the vocal actually sounds like. I think the easiest way to get a handle on this is just to record in different spaces. Try it in your bedroom, try it in the living room. Vocal booths are a thing because people are trying to eliminate the impact of the room on the vocal. They want just as dry a signal as possible. If you want to try and do that yourself, I would caution against just going in the smallest room you can. Because unless it's treated really well, you're going to get all those reflections from all those close walls really close together. That's going to get more of an impact on the vocal. And you'll hear it if you record in that space and listen back, it'll sound boxy and muffled and not natural. A lot of the times I've found that the most natural vocal sound you can get is to do it in a larger space that's not a super small room, but that's not really reflective treatment. As much as you can get will help. Furniture is great, carpets are good for this sort of thing. Just trying to minimize those reflections without completely deadening and making it sound like this. 90% of you watching. I think this is probably going to be the best approach. Have a vocal mic, right? And then some shield thing here. This is not quite like a full vocal room, but it's doing the same idea. It's trying to catch those reflections before they hit the wall and start bouncing around. It's going to limit the impact of the room, but not so much where you're boxing it in and creating all these reflections. It's just stopping them before they hit the wall. That's the idea. Anyway, this is the actual microphone itself, and we'll talk about those when we talk about microphone types. This is, it's called a popper, or a windscreen or windshield, a lot of different names for them, but what it does is it stops plosives from happening. Those big like puffs of wind that blow out the mike. This is dispersing the air that's coming from my mouth. When I have A sound or a B sound or anything like that, there's a large pocket of air that comes out. The windscreen helps diffuse that air so that it doesn't hit directly into the mic. It hits it on an area so it's not overloading the mic and it distorts and gets this gross sound. So those are some tips to how to get a good clean vocal sound regardless of the space that you're in, make sure to be aware of the reflections that are happening. Try and stop them if there's a problem. And make sure that you're not adding more reflections with whatever treatment that you're doing, you want to make sure that vocal is nice, and natural, and clean to get as accurate representation as possible. 21. Comparing microphone types: Next let's talk about microphone types. There are three categories of microphones. We have dynamic microphones, condenser microphones, and ribbon microphones. So we'll go through those one at a time. Dynamic microphones are the work horse microphone. They don't need any power to operate, you just plug them in and they work. They're very good at rejecting surrounding noise. They're great for live use on vocals and drums and all sorts of stuff. How you're hearing my voice right now is with a dynamic microphone. I'm speaking through this. Sure. Seven B. If you've ever watched any podcasts, I'm sure seen this microphone. Now if you're recording in a space that is a little nicer or pretty quiet, where you can get away with accepting some more room tone and accepting more audio into the signal. Then a condenser mic is step up in quality. A condenser microphone does require phantom power to operate. It requires 48 volts, so a lot of times you'll see a little 48 volt button on. A lot of interfaces or micro prize or something, What that does is send an electrical current back through that microphone cable to the microphone that will allow it to work. That microphone there that I was shown in the last video, that's a 87 that does require phantom power to run. It sounds incredible. There's a clarity and a crispness to it. You know what, I'll just show you. I'm speaking to you now on the SM seven. Now I'm going to unplug it. Plug in the U 87 and listen to that. I'll try and level match as much as possible to get them as close as possible and level, but it'll probably change a little bit. This is what the U 87 sounds like. Massive difference in tone. This is a completely different world. And even in level two, it's so much hotter. I'm having to turn down so much of my gear here compared to the seven B, just because of how much volume it's putting out. It sounds great. Famously, Billy Ish when recording a lot of those earlier songs would just sing holding a condenser mic just like this and sing into it. And not even a popper or anything for the plosives that happen, not even worrying about that, just singing a little bit off center and then the plosives just go above the mice. But yeah, that's a sound of a condenser mic, which brings us to the last category, microphone, ribbon microphones. I have here ribbon microphone. And they come in a lot of different shapes and sizes. This has a little ribbon inside of it that wiggles back and forth. This microphone is bi directional. It will record out of this side and also this side. And the tones sound slightly different. This will be a little darker, and this will sound a little bit brighter. Great on guitars, acoustic and electric, all sorts things. Ribbons tend to have a vintage quality to them. This sounds like. Let's listen to the royer. Okay, so this is the royer you can hear. It's a little bit smoother, kind of velvety. Ooh, I'm getting the low end stuff and it feels very, you know, old school in a fun way. So that's this side of the microphone with the logo. If I flip it over now, if I'm talking into this side, it sounds a little bit different. Sounds a little bit more Mm, mysterious. A little smokier or something. Yeah, it's just a really cool character. It's got a really cool flavor to it. Very, very cool Mike. There are exceptions to all of these categories and rules, and there's new microphones coming out all the time. But that's kind of a basic approach for how people use those categories. When in doubt, reach for a condenser first that's going to give you, I think, the highest quality audio for the budget. You know, it's not that expensive to kind of get that sound that tone and I think that's probably going to be the most beneficial for you. It never hurts to have some dynamic microphones lying around. They'll always find something to be useful for, so they're great to have. But if you're going to invest in a microphone, get one really nice condenser that you can really use on a lot of different things and it's always going to work and sound good. And then maybe get one dynamic microphone that you can also have as kind of a fail safe, a backup thing. You can throw it anywhere, it's a tank, it's never going to break. But anyway, enough about talking about microphones, let's sing through some and let's start tracking the stuff. You know, I was actually really impressed with the sound of the Royer on vocal stuff going through my chain here. I think I'm going to sing with that in the next video. Let's give that a try and see how that works. 22. Recording and comping vocals: All right, let's record some vocals. I've got the R 121 here and you can hear even then, Plosive came up, so I'm going to have to be really careful about how I'm singing into the microphone. You're probably thinking solo. Why don't you just go grab a microphone clip and, you know a popper and just do this properly? You know, I can't be bothered. It's in the other room and I'm just going to hold it and I'm just going to be careful. I'm just going to go. I just think that sometimes creatively, whatever's going to get the idea done fastest is best for me. I'm right here. I've got the microphone on my desk. I'm just going to hold it. I'm just going to sing and hold it and whatever sum, it's not a big deal. Here we go. Let's go through this. I've got the scratch vocal lined up here for reference. If I want to listen to that back, I'm just going to leave that muted. We're going to go in. I've got my lyrics here in the project. If I can pop those open. There we go. All right, let's record. Let's give this a shot. I've got low latency mode turned on. Hit R and let's do it. I don't want to fight and I don't want to lose my mind. I don't want to lose my mind. You want the side? Cool. Good. First take, let's go again. I ran out of breath, kind of halfway through there, kind of figuring out how I want to phrase things. Let's go again and I'm just going to record over the top of it and if you need a little bubble of your own cool, that's feeling better. I noticed there was one line in here that I wasn't a huge fan of. You want me all the time, I guess? Lucky. Mind running my heads along? Yeah, that could be a little stronger. That hands line. I'm just gonna grab that again. Lucky. Mine. Running my heads along your spine. Cool. That very last line I think could be stronger. I'm gonna grab that again. I just want to see you smile. Okay, cool. We got in that process of what I have been doing is kind of comping as we go. I've got the main take down and just kind of as I think about it, I'll go through and grab either a whole other take or specific little lines that bothered me. And what happens is that automatically created a comp folder so I can go in here. This is really cumbersome holding this microphone, I'm going to swap back to the S seven, both hands. Excellent. Okay, now let's comp this bad boy. So we have two full takes and then we have a couple individual things. Let's listen through here. I don't want to fight. I can hear a little bit of plosive action on fight. So let's listen to the other take of that. I, I don't want to fight. Oh, it was a little bit before on that one, so let's maybe do the first word here and then cut to fight there. I don't want to fight. Yeah, it's on both of them a little bit. Let's grab it again. I don't want to fight. There we go. It sounds better. Now, we can make that confidene and tidy to where we're just grabbing that new take. I, I don't want to fight and I don't want to lose my mind. Ducky, I don't mind. Make this compo tighter so we're not cutting in between words or breaths. Editing around breaths and stuff. This is similar to video editing if you've ever done that, but we basically don't want to ever cut in the middle of a breath. We can either cut before or after using this little waveform button up here. In logic, I can actually just make the waveforms bigger. It's not adjusting how they sound, it's just how they look. And that makes it easier for me to tell what's happening. So if I just boost this up as much as it'll go just for this, I can kind of see where the breaths are. So I want to make sure that my cut is either happening before I breathe or after I breathe, but before the word happens. Right? Like there are multiple ways that I can make this edit. I just don't want to do this. I don't want to cut in the middle of a breath because you'll hear it running, hear that. And then it kind of cuts up abruptly. So I'm going to move this edit right before the word run in my heads. See that sounds a lot more natural and you need same as before, where that line ended is kind of in the middle of a breath. So I'm going to, you know, I'm just going to take this whole word here and if you need All right. This is a solid comp. I like these different sections. I like the different takes that we have. This feels clean, and then we just repeat this process. For each section of the song, you record a lot of different takes you record, go back to get specific things that you might be worried about getting right. Then you can kind of go back and comp and then you might discover, oh, you know what, we never got a really solid take of this word. Let's go back in and get another verse of that. You'll probably discover stuff like that. That's normal. Yeah, just get a bunch of takes, comp them, and then you got a good solid vocal take, which brings us to the most critical part of vocal editing, and that is the pitch. That's all we're going to talk about in the next video. 23. Tuning vocals: You need to tune your vocals. I mean, I'm going to say that 90% of the stuff, that 99% of the stuff that you're either going to work on or listen to has tuned vocals. And when I say tuned vocals, that doesn't necessarily mean auto tune, auto tune. It's going to just pull that note to the nearest pitch. That's not slamming auto tune. I love auto tune. I think it's very cool. I use it all the time. It does have a sound to it that I think sounds good. We're just so used to how that sounds now that when you hear that tone of Antera's auto tune, the tone that brings to the vocal. In my completely subjective opinion, I think it sounds cool. However, I think the more valuable way of tuning is manually placing notes where you want them. That's just a way of making the vocal sound intentional, where it sounds like what you want it to sound like. There are a couple tools for using that type of tuning. You can do that in Tera's Autotune. They have a graph mode Logic has some built in stuff for flex pitch where you can drag notes around. The industry standard for doing this is a software called Melodine. It's been around for a long time. It's notoriously janky, but it's really, really powerful. I like using melodine for manually tuning the vocals. And then after that, I'll put the auto tune on subtly, just mainly for tone. It just gives it the feel of autotune. But I'm still manually moving notes around so that I can control what it's doing and when it's doing it, I'll use both. I'll throw Autotune on and I'll make sure that it's in the proper key. And it's not just pulling it to any random note that it wants but that it's doing it to the actual notes in key. I don't want autotune to make my voice sound worse, so I'm going to pick a major and the retune speed, I'm going to set it a little bit slower. That's it, that's the only setting I'm going to do. Then before autotune, I'm going to add melodine. Here's what melodine looks like, You have to import the audio into it. There's this little transfer button. So I click that button and now it's listening to the audio. And I'll play it, my audio, and I'll say, hey, this is what we want to work on. I, I just want to see you smile. Okay, cool. Here is all that audio. Now we're going to go through this and make sure that it's doing what we want it to do. If I write Click inside the melodine window, it'll give me all the tools that are specific to this program, such as the zoom tool to be able to zip around. Okay, let's make sure that it's doing what we want it to do. I'm going to grab my Pitch tool and here's where I can move notes around. I turned off the auditune. We can really hear what it's doing, right? You can get super, super specific with it. That line is the specific pitch that that note is hitting. What I can do is if I just double click it, it'll just set the average to be perfect. So it'll just move the average pitch of this to be around C sharp. But let's say that you had kind of a fall off and pitch at the end of the note on your spine. Well, in that case, the average would be way lower than the pitch of that note that I'm really caring about, you know. So you still have to use your ears and make good judgment calls on where you want the pitch to be happening. There's no like magic, make good button, you know, like you have to sing it well, you have to sing it intentionally. You have to edit it intentionally. You can't just like blindly throw something on and expect it to sound natural. So that's the pitch tool of just moving, of moving that blob up and down, that average up and down. I can also edit the pitch information inside the blob by the pitch modulation tool. If 100% is normal, I normally start to go 50. I feel like that's fine. Anything beyond that's going to sound very processed. I don't want to, this is a good example of this. I don't want to part that note of how it starts. There's a little scoop up to it. The important part of the pitch is this note. Oh, don't, right? So if I just pitched this to the average, this is going to be too sharp now. Don't wanna, it's not quite the note that I wanted to hit, so I'm gonna be using the Pitch Drift tool which just kind of brings it so that, well, I mean, you'll see what it does. Uh, see that how it's kind of flattening it out a little bit. It's just kind of bringing the curves more in line with each other. Uh, and then maybe I'll also bring the movement down a little bit. Uh, now let's listen to what that sounds like. I don't want, right? It's getting to that note. I don't want to really fast. I don't wanna, but in this instance, I kind of think it sounds better if we're not doing anything to it. I don't want to. I like that step that feels more natural to me. So I'm going to pitch the second note and bring that down. We can, you know, mess with these. But this one, Ajanta, that feels better to me. Let's bring that note down. Do'anta. Yeah, that sounds better. So, we're kind of going through listening to different notes and just kind of grabbing the stuff that bothers us. I'm not saying all this to try and pressure you into tuning your vocals. I just want to make you aware of the fact that tuning is not something that, you know, only pop, really heavily produced things, only those guys tune vocals, everyone else is kind of natural. The reality is, everyone is tuning vocals. So if you don't want to tune your vocals, I think that's cool. But it's, you know, I want to make sure that you're making the conscious choice to not tune your vocals and not just kind of blindly go there because you're not thinking about it. Just want to make sure that you're really giving proper thought to the most important part of your song, which is your voice. You know that is the carrier of the identity, the theme. Everything is resting on your vocal, your performance. So to make sure that it is exactly how you want it to sound is critical. 24. Video 24 EQ: Today we're talking about the Mix. By the time we get to this stage in the production process, the songs written, we've got everything recorded that we want to record, all our parts are in, and we're just focusing on balancing things together. If that's something that interests you. I have a course that I go really in depth in more details on mixing for right now. I'm just going to go over the basic fundamental tools that mixers use to balance a song out and make sure that everything is kind of in its right place. The primary method we have for this is something called EQ. And we've talked about EQ a little bit already, and you've probably heard that term thrown around to understand really what it's doing. We have to understand frequencies. We've talked about frequencies a little bit, especially in the sub base video where, you know it was the low end and kick drums are kind of hard to play together, right? It's hard for them to find space together. Take that concept that's I think most easily seen when it's that super low stuff and apply that through the whole mix. You know, if you have two things playing the same note, well, we got to emphasize one part of the sound here and another part of the sound here on the other instruments. So that they both have a space where they can exist, they can't both be existing at the same frequency. Otherwise, you're just going to hear whichever one is louder. And you're just not going to hear the one that's quieter. If we play our song back and listen to this chorus section, for example, I'm just going to solo through different sections so that we can identify what these different things are. And then listen to where frequencies are sitting. Try, when you listen to this to identify areas that are the same, whether in the synths or drums or vocal. Try and identify areas that, okay, there seems to be a lot happening in that sort of sound. And then we'll maybe try and focus in some of those instruments. So I'll play through the track solo, things out, be listening for the things that sound the same on your spine. And if you need your own theta, I'll get the kids to school. I want to see you. I'm gonna turn the cycle on here. Just left to right up top. So we can loop this. You need to get the kids to school on time. I want to see you little bubble beto. I just want to see you smile. You need okay. So you probably heard a couple of areas in there. I'm noticing a lot of the low mids are building up two to 300 range in a lot of the sense starting to overlap a bit. There's also some of that energy, maybe a little bit higher and like 500 or something on the kick that is just not totally necessary, adding some clutter. You'll notice if I play back the track, we're clipping a little bit, There's no audible clipping. It's not that bad, but it's enough that it needs to be managed all the level of these tracks as they add up. It's starting to be a little bit too much volume need, right? You can see we're hitting the ceiling there. As long as it's not audibly clipping, it's not a big deal. But it is something that we should try and help if we by using EQ, cut away frequencies and then help everything sit in the right spot because we're using cuts to do that, our actual volume will go down. Let's try and gain some head room with EQ cuts. I think the easiest way to do that first is with the low end. We've already talked about that with the sub base and the real base. Let's do the same thing with the drums. Now with this kick drum, we probably don't need a ton of super low sub stuff. Let me pop open a nice big EQ here. Let's see what frequencies the kick is doing, that kick drum, not the loudest peak that we see in that EQ, that is the fundamental frequency of that note. That's what that term means, it's the most important part. That is the note that that kick drum is. I'm going to high pass everything below that fundamental, because it's not important. The fundamental is really what's going to identify itself as that note. Everything below that is not totally needed, it's not as important as that fundamental. Cool, that's good. Now let's go over to our little hit, drum hit thing. Same thing. Let's look on our EQ and see what frequencies are happening. You see most of that sound. That's not a low end sound, right? That's a very high sound. But if we look on the graph, we can see there is some stuff happening down here. Because that's like so low, I can't even really hear it. I'm going to cut it away so that I don't have those random frequencies eating up my precious head room. You know, I don't need to waste any information on that low stuff that I can't even hear. All right. So already just with those, a couple little tweaks, we're starting to get more head room. And we just kind of repeat this process and go up the frequency spectrum to really identify what things need to be there and what don't. 25. Overlapping frequencies: Let's look at the things that are overlapping, which are all these keys, Things here. Let's focus in on these two paths and how we can use EQ to separate them away from each other. We have this is one of them and the other one is this guy. I'm thinking there seems to be a little more high end information on this one then on the pigment pad. Let's just emphasize that a little bit more. Let's maybe cut away some of the. Let's look and see if we can find a spot to identify here. Yeah, let's say that for the massive pad, we're going to cut away like this region, like 200 region. And then on the pigment pad we're going to cut away slightly higher around here. Okay, let's listen to that. Yeah, let's make it a little more obvious what we're doing. So now we kind of have the high pulsing thing kind of sitting above the lower pad that's kind of blooming out underneath it. Just by those couple EQ moves, we're just kind of pushing them more in the direction of where we want them to be. But there's another thing that we can do to separate things even further, and that's using the stereo field panning. That's what we're going to talk about next. 26. Panning vs balancing: You are probably listening to this video right now on a stereo set up. You have either a left speaker and a right speaker. Left headphone and right head phone. Or even if you're watching it on a phone, you probably have two speakers somewhere on your phone. An exclusively mono system with just one speaker is pretty rare nowadays. They do happen, they are there. But when we talk about stereo, we're basically meaning two audio signals playing at once, a left channel and a. We can use this to our advantage by placing things in this stereo field. Because my voice sounds like it's in the middle to you right now. It is coming through both the left and the right speakers at the same volume. We can make things sound wider if we are only sending them down one part. And that's what panning is. We're basically taking a signal and we're sending it over to one side. This is really easy to demonstrate with panning a vocal. If I take this vocal here, you need a little bubble of your own, that's a hundredercent lay down. Read, get the kids to school on side, that's 100% Right now that's panning a mono signal. But if we're panning a stereo signal, it's not quite as simple as that what is actually happening. And I brought a little es patch here to kind of demonstrate that we have in this patch just a girl saying 1212. You can hear one is 100% left and two is 100% right. Two, now if I pan this using this pan knob, watch what happens. 12121222. We don't hear the left channel at all, it's completely gone. Because what this pan is doing when it's a stereo signal by default, is it is emphasizing the balance of those two channels. It's saying, how much do you want to emphasize one channel over the other? So I pan it the other way. Then we'll start to emphasize the left channel and we'll eventually completely remove the right channel, 121211. Pretty interesting. It's something to keep in mind. If I was going to pan this pad here and I was going to pan it to the left, I can do that, but when I'm just panting this way, what I'm really doing is turning the right channel down most of the time, this is totally fine and you don't even really need to worry about it. But if something really important is happening on the left and the right channels, it's something to be aware of. If you just pan, normally you are turning down one of those channels. So you're potentially cutting out half of the information of that signal. You can actually change how logic pans things. If you right click on this pan pot, you can switch between balance, which is what we've been doing, or stereo pan. Now, stereo pan, visually it does a really good job of representing what it's doing. You can see here's the left channel, here's the right channel. If I pan it, see that how it's taking the right channel and moving the right channel in the stereo field over to the left. Now it's basically taking the left and the right channel, playing them at the same time. If I go back to our little example here, 121-212-1212 now it's brought both 1.2 together, So now we're not emphasizing one over the other, we're bringing them both. So there are pros and cons to this and it's just important to know that you have extra tools in your disposal when it comes to panning. Again, 99% of the time, keeping your pan in balance mode is going to be fine, but it is nice to know occasionally that might cause issues and if it does, that's how you pan something in a different way. Is you can switch to stereo pan mode, so that you're actually grabbing both channels at once when you're panning them around. 27. Widening the mix: Now to get something sounded really big and wide and huge, and to really separate things so that they're living in their own space. Those are pretty much the same goal most of the time. It's a little bit counterintuitive because you might think, if I want the whole mix to sound really wide and really big, I want my whole track to feel huge, Then I should make everything really big, right? And everything really wide. Well, if you make everything wide, it doesn't really sound wide anymore. It just sounds small. What makes things sound really wide is the difference between the left and the right channel. The more different they are, the further apart they're going to seem. So for example, we have these two paths, right? If I really want to separate these and have these live in their own space, what I can do is I'm going to switch these to the stereo pan mode, and I'm just going to let them live in their own space in the stereo field. I'm going to pan this massive eternity one to the right. I'm going to pan the pigment one to the left. See, that sounds so much wider than if they're both in the middle. If I'm listening to both of them at the same time, let's see what it sounds like if instead of using the stereo pan, if I'm just using the balance mode. I mean, arguably that sounds even wider because I'm just turning those other channels down so there's less in the middle. There's no information really existing in the middle. It's just all in the right. All in the left. So that could be pretty cool if we, you know, pan that stuff around to the sides, which allows the vocal to kind of live in the middle. Like listen to what that sounds like, now you need a little bubble of your own if that sounds like too empty. If we don't like how separated that is, we can go to the stereo pan and that gives it a little bit more support. You need a little bubble of your own. Lay down panning is an amazing tool for creating space. You can really start to push things around to make room for the most important parts of your mix, which are probably your vocal, your drums, those things that are really going to define your song. Panning can create an environment for those things to exist in. It's incredibly effective tool. 28. Compression: Compression. Okay, compression is a tool that we use to lower the dynamics of something which sounds weird. It sounds, why would you want to lower the dynamics? Don't you want things more dynamic? You know, exciting Dynamic dynamics in this context means the distance between the quietest moment and the loudest moment. So a lot of times in certain sounds you actually kind of want lower dynamics because it makes it easier to mix. It makes it easier to identify where this thing is existing, so you can place it more reliably. And it also just makes things sound cooler a lot of times a good place to show this is on a group of drums, I think it'll be really clear what the compression is doing. So I'm going to take all of our drum layers here and I'm going to select them all and right click. And I'm going to create a stack which is just going to put them in a big old group, I'll call this Drums. Here we go. Okay, so now I can sell this group and it'll have all our drums in it. I'm going to start out with just logic stock compressor because this graph mode in it I think is really helpful for showing what the compressor is doing and why it's sounding the way that it does. Let's play through the audio. And you'll be able to see it on here, right? This is our audio. And you'll notice this little white line and this meter here, that's the gain reduction. That's how much logic is turning it down, how much the compressor is working when it hears audio. If it gets above a certain threshold, then it will turn the audio down. This graph here is showing, hey, if the audio goes above this, turn it down by how much do we turn it down? By the amount of this ratio. You can see as I switch some settings, as I'm moving stuff around, look at the graph and what it's doing, and you'll start to get a feel for why the compressor does what it does. When the compressor really gets going, it creates this pumping breathing kind of thing. Very, very cool on large groups of things, when you want that sort of effect, that's the basics of what compression does. You set your threshold that determines how loud something has to be for the compressor to start hitting it. The ratio is how much it's going to hit it once it hits that threshold. And then the attack and release determine kind of the flavor of that. The attack is how quickly it's going to pull it down. The release is how quickly it goes back up. So you can kind of tweak those to get things to feel a little different. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to take a different compressor. Now let's try the same thing, but using a nice compressor that I like, the tone of which is this distressor. So without, so that's the basics of compression. Each compressor works differently. Sounds different if you're running into a wall where your compression settings don't really sound that good and you're not really sure what's going on. It just sounds small or you're trying to make something sound small and it just keeps slapping too hard. Try a different compressor. You know, they all have different characters and a lot of times just having the same settings, But just on a different compressor, we'll give it a certain character and a certain edge that you know you're like, oh, that's actually really interesting, let me follow that, let me pursue that further. So don't be afraid to try even the same settings, but just on a different thing. And you'll probably find something pretty cool out of it. 29. Creating dimension with reverb: Reverb and delay. So when we talk about effects, this is like the sauce for a mix. You know, this is really what gives it a three D sort of feel. When people talk about things having depth, a lot of times they're referring to the space that reverb can achieve where it can make things feel far away or close. For a vocal, if we have no reverb, no effects know anything on it, it'll feel very close like it's, it's just like right up here in your face, Adding reverb puts it in a space, in an environment. Especially if we start putting reverb on multiple things, everything can feel like it's part of the same world. What I'm going to do here is have one reverb that is going to be the world that things live in. And I'm going to send a lot of different things to this reverb to function as a stage, so this will be where all the instruments are existing in. Then I'm also going to give another reverb and delay just for the vocal to really put a spotlight on that and to really sell the point that the vocal is the thing that you should be paying attention to. Let's set up this reverb. The way that we can have one reverb and send multiple different things to it, apply that same setting to multiple instruments is by utilizing something called sends us or ox sends. These are all similar terms for the same thing. I have my vocal here, I'm going to create a send. And I can do that just by clicking send. I'm going to send it to a bus. Now, logic has already created some buses for me, as I've been doing other things. I'm just going to grab an empty one here. You'll notice that this channel on the right here now has become this send. It's sending to bus eight. I see the input for this ox is bus eight. I'm just going to label this that it's not confusing. I can click 08. I want to just call this room. This is going to be our room. Let me pop a reverb on here. This is a plug in that is designed around being just a room reverb sort of deal, it's got some other modes and stuff, but what I'm really interested is just having it be a room reverb that I can send other things to and make them sound like they're being played in the same space. So for example, it's got a bunch of different presets and they're all cool. Like if I want to know acoustic guitar ambience Live, great. Let's see what that sounds like. So I just want to see you and if you need so with those setting set, I'm going to send the vocal to our room here. And I'm going to also, let's send the piano there. I can just click up on the send to send more or less. I can option click to just send it zero. That'll reset it to just like full volume. I'll just go in and set that to be zero. I can go through one by one and do this. Or if I know I just want to send everything to this room, I can click all the things that I want to send to the room, then boom, it'll send them all there. I can adjust them all equally or I can option click them. It'll send them all there. All right. Now let's listen back to that B of your own so I can turn that effect up and down with this fable of your own. I'll get the kids to school. That's cool, I feel like the low end is getting a little boomy. Now with that kick, what I'm going to do is just send a little bit less of the drums. But what I'm also going to do is add an EQ to that room reverb. I'm going to add an EQ after this room reverb plug in. I'm just going to take away some of this super low stuff. You need a little bubble of your own. Well, maybe I'll send a little bit less of the vocal for the actual vocal reverb use Valhalla, again, it's just an amazing reverb thing's 50 bucks. It's insane and you need a little bubble of your home. He, we'll get the kids to school on time. Cool and same as before. I'm going to chop away some of this low end actually. Invahal, there's built in tools inside the plug in to do that, so I could just use this. You need a little bubble of your own. Cool, that's good. Let me call vocal verb. 30. Vocal delay: Let's add another send on the vocal. This one's going to be our delay for delay. Love. Good old echo boy. Echo boy is amazing. Okay, so yeah, this is the first time where this is not 100% wet by default. So a lot of times plug ins will have a dry wet thing, right, for a delay. How much of the dry signal? How much of the wet signal? Well, because this is on an ox send, I already have dry on this channel, right? If I'm sending it somewhere else, then this dry wet doesn't really make any sense because the way that it is now, as I send more delay, the vocal is just going to get louder in addition to getting more delay. Because I have a dry unaffected signal being duplicated in this channel. Right? So when you have an effect on a send, make sure it's 100% wet. So that when you're sending signal to that effect, you're only getting back the actual effect. You're not getting any of just a dry duplicate fed back to you for no reason. And if you need let's just pop open. Yeah, like a slap. That'd be cool. And if you need a little bubble of your own, you don't read. I'll get the kids to school on time. I want a dark thing, I just want to see you. And if you need a little bubble of your own, lay out, cool, same as before. Let's chop off some low end. A little bubble of your own to okay, let's listen to that now in context. Need a little bubble of your own with no effects, Bbb of your own effects on to. We'll get the kids to school on time. Yeah, it just adds a whole lot of filling in all those gaps and it just makes it feel alive. Yeah, the reverb and delay really add a ton. And it's easy to wash things out because as you start to add reverb, you are losing definition. It is blurring things together. So you have to be careful to make sure that you're not completely losing out all detail unless that's what you're trying to do. But yeah, very effective. Reverb and delay are amazing. So those are the tools that mixers use. Once the mix is in a good spot and you're happy with it, go ahead and go to bed, wake up the next morning and then come back and then, ooh, you'll have some mixed weeks and you'll see nine things that you missed, you know? So once you get those nine things and fix that, then we can move on to mastering. That's what we'll do tomorrow. 31. The master bus: Mastering is what happens to your finished mix. You have your finished mix, now we're going to add additional processing to that final mix file. You can master your own. Once you have your mix, you can go in and start adding plug ins to start mastering it, or you can send it off to a specific mastering engineer. You get your mix back from your mix engineer. Cool. It sounds good. Love it. Great, thank you. You send it off to a mastering engineer and they do their stuff, or your mixer and your master. They can work together or a lot of guys will mix and master. There's a whole lot of ways to do it, but mastering is essentially the processing applied to that final mix. As a part of your mix, you can have plug ins on your mix bus, like on your main master channel, and that could be considered mixing. There's nothing wrong with that. Generally, I try and keep my mix bus channel, my master channel, clean without anything on it during the mix. Then once I'm happy with the mix, then I can go through and start adding stuff. It's pretty expensive to get a really good mixer to mix your songs. It is not expensive at all to get a really good master on your songs. So if you're going to invest anything, throw 50 bucks, 100 bucks at a song to get it mastered, and I think that you will get really, really, really good results. But okay, so let's worry about our mix bus and let's pretend that we're mastering our own song here. I first like to start with dynamics, just where things are sitting. I feel like that's kind of the easiest way to manage things, so I'm going to throw a compressor on our master, so this is compressing the entire song altogether. I know this kind of looks like 1 million knobs, but it's really just a compressor, technically two compressors going on at once. If we start reading some of the knobs, we can see threshold gain ratio attack recover. That sounds like release. We can start to see that there are basically two compressors here. Here's one, the discrete compressor and then the optical compressor. Okay, so what we're going to do is I'm going to play this back. It's going to hit the optical compressor first, and then the discrete compressor. So I'm going to start lowering the optical threshold to where it just starts. Taking a little bit back here on this meter, I can see how much the optical compressor is taking it down. This one, how much the discrete compressor is taking it down. I just want to touch it. I just want the compressor to be working a little bit. I'm looking for it 2-5 DB, anywhere in there. If it's anything beyond that that's going to start squishing the mix a little too much to where it might not sound natural. Then once this is feeling good, then I'll start worrying about the discrete compressor and a little babble of your own to I'll get the kids to school on time. I just want to see you in a little Bible of your own to cool. I'm going to lower the attack a little bit of the discrete. I feel like it's pumping a little too much for me and you need a little bubble of your own. With this parallel, I'm going to blend some of the original uncompressed signal back in and you need a little bubble of your own. Most of the EQ work. When you get to the mastering stage, we're just making little changes that are going to subtly affect the whole track. This is an EQ and I am going to boost here. I'm just going to add some low end just all across the board. The entire low end, I'm going to come up a little bit and then I'm going to cut some of the mids, again, keeping the curve nice and wide. And I'm just going to cut, I don't know, something out of 500 there. I'm wanting a little bit more presence, more bite out of stuff out of this two K region. I'm going to boost that a little bit. Then maybe at the end of the high, high end stuff, I'm going to boost that as well. If you need a little bubble of your own, get the kids to school. I just want to see you in the net needle bubble of your own. Just a little extra presence, a little extra clarity. It's just clearing a little bit of that mud up. Okay, now we got some compression, we got some EQ. Now we can start getting into a little more fancy stuff, so AI might be a boogie man into some things, but for plug ins, it's amazing. I don't even know if they would even claim this is AI golfo. But it's basically the same sort of idea. It has a template of sound that it views as like this is balanced. And so as you run stuff through it, it'll dynamically start to turn stuff up and down to get it in the right range. And it just kind of does stuff on its own. It's very, I'm not sure what it's doing, but here if we just turn stuff up, I want to boost the low end. I want to brighten a little bit, recover and tame. Kind of show how it's grabbing frequencies, you'll see you need a needle bubble of your own to get the kids to school on time. I just want to see you in using a lot of fancy algorithms and stuff or whatever, it's kind of doing the same thing that my other EQ is doing. It's clarifying things a little bit, it's adding a little bit of top, It's kind of taking away some mids, it's adding some, a lot of low end, it looks like. Yeah. All these little adjustments that it's doing dynamically based on what's happening at the moment. So really cool tool, really cool, big fan of golf. So now that we have our master sounding, good, it's at the stage where we have to worry about loudness. How loud do we actually export this thing at? And that's what we're going to talk about next. Loudness standards. It can be confusing, but it doesn't have to be. It's actually really simple. So I'll explain that all in the next. 32. What are LUFS and do they matter or not: All right. Loudness, right? How loud should stuff actually be? This is what can sometimes be a little confusing. Spotify says this is on their website. We adjust tracks to negative 14 DB luffs, okay? And they have information on how they're doing that and finding that number and all this stuff, okay? If we look here, these are some songs that are recorded directly out of Spotify, into logic. We can see they are making adjustments, right? This Civil War song, just looking at the waveform, it is louder than this Radiohead song, right? That peak is wildly different. The luff reading is going to be, according to Spotify, negative 14. If we actually look at the number, it's not negative 14. This Radiohead song, I mean, negative 12.3 Negative 12.4 it's louder than 14. Let's check the Civil Wars. Let's see what that said. 20 years old. Thank you. Same. You know, it's above negative 14. It's negative 13. So what's the deal? So what's weird is they are turning stuff up and down, right? But it definitely is a bit louder. It's not like a hard rule. If you're not exactly at this number, you're going to get punished and it's going to get turned down like crazy. Because if we were to like level this out to zero, like what this radiohead track was actually mastered at, right? Because we can tell based off of the wave form, it wasn't mastered this, they didn't like set a limeter at what is the true peak? Negative 6.6 You'd have to turn this up 6.2 DB to get this to what they would master it at. We can tell what the lefts they actually had. If we apply that to this track and we'll, I'll leave 0.1 DB of head room. Now, this will be what the actual master of this sounded like when they delivered it to Spotify. I mean, that's crazy. Loud, negative five luffs. That's insane, right? They don't care. They're like, yeah, we'll just, yeah, Well oh, negative 14. Now let's do negative five and submit that instead. And it goes through and you know what, It sounds fine. It totally exists alongside these other songs. It doesn't sound out of place, sounds totally normal. So that's why this negative 14 thing. It is true that they are moving the volumes around of the songs, but it doesn't matter. What matters is what it sounds like. If you need to smash it that hard to get it aggressive and sounding like how you want it to sound like, then do it and Spotify. We'll worry about making it balance with everything else. So this how they adjust the loudness thing, it's not a bad thing. It doesn't really matter or affect anything. Because even if they turn it down six B, 6.2 DB, that's a huge penalty. That's crazy. And it's, you know, lower. It's so much lower than these other songs, but it doesn't sound like it, you know, So that's why no one really masters to negative 14 is because it doesn't make any sense. Why would I, I'd have to cut so much away to have it that quiet. It's just not going to compete. You know, this is the song that we've been working on. If I just put a limiter on here so that we can see how loud we actually are. So we would already be getting penalized by Spotify because we were hitting negative 13 or something. So obviously that's ridiculous. We have plenty of head room to be able to add gain and add limiting and make it more exciting. Don't worry about the negative 14 number, just master it to what feels good to you and make it, you know, exciting but not crunchy. 33. Limiting with headroom: I have pro L two, this is my favorite limiter. I think it sounds really nice. It's got all sorts of presets in here. One of the ones I really like is this wide and open 11 thing that's really important when you're mastering with a limiter is to leave headroom for conversion. When something gets converted from a wave file into an NP three file, there are things that happen in there that are imperceptible. You can't hear them, but they do add a tiny bit of volume if you're mastered, right to the ceiling right at zero. Then when it gets converted into an MP three, it'll distort because it's getting pushed just over the edge. We have to leave a little bit of extra room at the top so that when it gets converted into an MP three, it doesn't distort. And that number that you have to leave is 0.1 That's what people will tell you because it's true. But what you can do instead of having it be negative 0.1 you can it be negative 0.06 as long as it's just free gain. At that point you may as well take it just extra loudness. If you leave that extra tiny little bit, it will still read out as negative 0.1 And when it gets converted it will not clip. I've tested this, It totally works. It's just a little bit of extra gain that you can get for free. You may as well grab it. So what I'm going to do is I set my ceiling there so I know I'm not going to clip. I'm going to let the track play and I'm going to bring up the gain till I see it start to take stuff away. And then I'm going to start to, okay, push it a little more. Okay, That's getting a little too much. I'm going to push it back and just kind of find the sweet spot. And you need a little bottle of your own here. I'll get the kids to school on time. That's probably what I would master it to, somewhere around there. Generally, negative eight, negative eight loves is considered like a good loud master. I don't know if I'd push it that hard on this song, just it seems a little bit sleepier, a little more atmospheric. I'd be okay with it sitting a little bit quieter than that and just a little bit softer. But yeah, if you wanted to push it hard and get it to that negative eight, which that's kind of the standard, then you could do that. And if you need a little bubble of your own somewhere in there, it would be like industry standard, whatever that even means. But yeah, generally, if you pay to get something mastered, you'll probably get it back at negative eight. To sum up, don't worry about the negative 14. Just master your stuff up to negative 0.1 If you want to cheat a little bit extra gain, you can do negative 0.06 and you'll be okay, then you're off to the races. 34. Proper export settings: When it actually comes down to exporting your final master. Here's what we do. So far we've been operating in 24 bit and recording at 48 K. We went over this and how to set up our project at the beginning, if I hit command B to bounce what I have currently selected with those locators. Remember the locators are these left to right guys here, this little yellow section indicates what we're going to export. I'm just going to grab our entire song here from start to finish. And then command B is going to bring up the bounce window. Here is where we can select all the formats that we want to send. Pcm is uncompressed audio, so this is a wave file, IF that sort of thing. This is what you're going to upload to Spotify. I always bounce an identical MP three just to have as reference. If I want to check the mix on my phone, I can check the MP three version and know that that is exactly the same as the wave version, it's just an easier version to share. What formats do we actually to deliver to Spotify or our distributor or whatever? Well, we want to export a wave file and we want to export 16 bit. We want to export 4041 for the sample rate. Then you want to make sure that normalize is set to off because we already have our limiter doing that for us. Head room that we left. We don't want logic to get rid of that by bumping it up to the ceiling. That's what normalizing does. Is it basically do you want us to turn it as loud as possible without clipping? No, we don't want you to do that. We are in control of how much clipping we have. Thank you very much. We'll leave normalize of wave file 16 bit 4041. These are the typical CD quality standard that all streaming services still run off of. So once we have our settings all set, we'll hit okay. You call it what you want to call it. And then you hit Go. And there it goes, it'll start bouncing down. Depending on the size of your project, how much processing you have. This could take a couple minutes or it could take 30 seconds. It really depends on what you have going on. Once you have that file, you are good to copyright upload whatever you want to do with it. That is your finished song. Big, big day. Yeah, let's celebrate. Let's have a good time. Tomorrow we're going to actually go through all the logistics of how do we actually get this thing out into the world? How complicated is that? It's not as complicated as you think. It's pretty easy, actually. We'll talk about that tomorrow though. 35. Distribution: You got your song done, great, that's awesome. So now that you have your master file, that 404124 bit wave file, that's what we can upload to all these streaming services and get your song out there. If you were on a label, then they would just handle this process for you. They would have relationships with all these streaming services and, you know, get it out there. How you can do that on your own though is by partnering with a distributor. All that they're doing is taking your song and putting it on these different platforms. Putting it on Spotify, putting it on Tiktok, yada, yada. One of the most popular ones is probably Distro Kid. You've probably seen ads for him on Youtube and stuff like that. I personally use Distro kid and I've, you know, recommended District Kid to other artists and stuff. I think they're great the way that Distro Kids business model works. You pay a yearly fee and then you're able to just upload as much music as you want and that will live on the platform as long as you're subscribed to it. If you want your song to live on there forever, even if you're not paying, you just want to pay one time and have your song live up there. You can do that through district kid as well. It's $30 $29.01 time fee. And then your song will just live on there. So that's a pretty solid option and I think depends how often you're going to be releasing music. What would make most sense for you? Sometimes it makes most sense just to subscribe because you're going to consistently put out new music. Other times, if you know, you know what, I really just want to put these two songs out as kind of this personal thing for me. Then maybe it makes more sense just to do a one time fee, you know, and not have to worry about the annual subscription. Amuse is another platform that I haven't personally used, but I'm recommending them because their bottom tier is actually free. So if you just want to sign up and release a song, you can do that for free through Amuse. So that's worth looking into tune. Core is another player in the space. They don't do any subscription models. As far as I'm aware, it's only one time fees. And they are more expensive than Distro Kid. And you know, I'm only mentioning them because they're such a big player in the space and they've been around for so long, they're so established that it's pretty safe with that. Like they're not going to go anywhere and all of a sudden your music goes away. So they're reliable in that sense. But I would recommend Distro Kid. I feel like Distro Kid is established enough. They have the options for one time or for an annual subscription. I think it's just kind of the way to go for your album art. You can just honestly use anything, generate something with AI, grab something with your phone, whatever, or you can have a friend that you love and trust make something for you. I think that'd be really cool. Once you have your album art that you like and your 404124 bit wave file, that's all you need for a distributor to put your music out there on Spotify. The very last thing we'll talk about in this week of this process is how to actually get people to listen to your music. That's what we'll briefly go over in the next video. 36. Promote your music: The number one mistake I see artists make all the time on social media trying to get people to listen to their music is to treat everything as content. I think there's a real hunger for authenticity and vulnerability that if you just are open and honest in the stuff that you're talking about as you're posting your music, I think that's attractive to people, you know. I think there's something that really draws people in with that of you just laying your soul out there. I think you'll find more success with trying to bring people into your world. Bring people into your perspective, just to see from your point of view. You're not trying to convince anybody of anything, You're just trying to show what's important to you. You know, I think that level of vulnerability and realism is really attractive to people. Not everything needs to be super highly produced. You know, not at this stage in the production and the mix. Yeah, For sure we're focusing on making things as quality as possible. Quality doesn't matter as much here. Here, the most important thing is repeatability and consistency. So don't spend a ton of time making all these really sick, cool Instagram videos that you're going to use to promote your song. I mean, you can make one of those, run an Instagram ad. Sure. But you're going to have far more success with just whatever is a good rhythm that you can get into. That's going to be a consistent flow of stuff coming out from you, whether that's your songwriting process, and you talk about that at the park or whatever, You find the thing that is authentically you, that is easy to have a lot of that, you can just work into the rhythms of your life. And I think you'll find the right people by doing that. The people that are going to like your stuff. That's the stuff that's going to reach out to them. Thank you so much for watching this class. I hope it was helpful. I hope you learned something by kind of seeing this work flow of getting a song done in a week. And if you recorded a song and uploaded it during this week, I would love to hear it. Make a post on Instagram with your song as the music and tag me in it. I'd love to see it. I think it'd be so cool and you can give me a follow in Instagram as well as here on skill share. Also, if you would leave a review for this class, it really helps out this class reach more people. I would really, really appreciate that negative feedback too. I welcome it all. I want to become a better teacher, so please leave review. Let me know how I can improve. And what else do you want to learn from me? If there's another part of the process that you want expanded on and more info on, let me know. I'd love to create that for you in the future. Lastly, I have a newsletter you can sign up for in my bio that I have some free sounds that I'll give out from time to time and announcements on new courses and that sort of stuff. No spam, very infrequent. But if you want to stay up to date on kind of what I've been doing, that's the best way to do that. Again, thank you so much for your time watching this class. I hope that you make some amazing music. I can't wait to hear it.