Sound Selection in Beats Course

1. [INTRO] - Sound Selection in Beats Course: Hey everyone, gratuitous here in this course, you guys are going to be learning about sound selection. Sound selection is probably the number one secret to making really good beats. So first of all, we have sound placement where you are clicking in your sounds. That's probably the most important thing to learn. And as you start to advance, then you want to be thinking about your sound selection. So if you're selecting kick drums and using baselines, you have to be careful what type of kick drum you are selecting. So in this course I'm gonna be talking to you about sound selection. So some things that we're gonna be covering in this course, we will be looking at, I actually have a lot of different things I cover with you. We actually make a beat from scratch. And I talked to you about how I approach sounds selection. But I talked to you about sound placement versus sounds selection. I talked to you about some selection when it comes to your instruments as well as your drum samples for your drum loop. I talked to you about time, e.g. is the note short or long? That's a huge difference in if you want to sound to stand out. I talked to you about pitch, which means taking advantage of octaves for the sound, e.g. are you playing the sound down low in the mids and the highs and volume. If a sound is short or long, if something shorter, typically you can play it a lot louder. And then I take you into a really cool bonus kinda area where I talked to you about how to play sounds for clarity. So we talk about sound placement. We talk about the types of sounds and the big word you'll hear me talk about throughout this course is something called tamper. Tim ARE, so we have our fundamental pitch of a sound. Timbre is the frequencies on top for flavor. Really important to understand because some sounds are very soft sounding sums. Some sounds are really aggressive sounding. I talked to you about again, the length of the sound octaves. I talked to you about single notes versus chords. This is a huge trick to know. If you want to have a lot of melodies in your music and they're not fighting with each other, as well as dry notes versus wet notes. Right here is just a little example of a b I've recently made and I just want you to look at the frequency analyzer. The track is called piece for my family. And so let's just hit play here. And so right now the kick drum is not playing, so there's no low-end content happening. Here's the base. Base comes in. You have a snare. Whenever that snare plays, we're also hearing it up here. Here comes the chorus. So you can hear this track is sounding really, really full, ripe. And this course you are going to be learning how I use watts of instruments in my beats to get you a super full sounding beat. Tons of different melodies. I had a piano at the base of VLR, plucks, RPS. These are things you have to be thinking about. Okay? So if you are interested in learning sounds selection in your beats, I'm revealing so many secrets I've learned over the years to teach you sound selection in your beats. What does that mean when we have our instruments? As you can see, I'm even using FL keys. And again, if you guys use FL Studio, a lot of people talk bad about F0 keys. Fl keys is amazing. We have higher. So you have to be making sure you're taking advantage of your octaves and all that stuff. So if you want to learn to make very high-quality beats, this is a great course to learn about sound selection. So again, we have sound placement where we're actually clicking in our sounds. Sounds selection is selecting the type of instrument at the right time, making sure to take advantage of Octaves, the length of the note, all those things I listed at the beginning of this video. So if you want to learn to understand sound selection in your beats, enroll watched the course and I hope you guys really enjoy this one. 2. Watch This Video First!: Alright, before getting into the course, I wanted to make a video here, just preparing you for what's to come in the course. Because when we talk about sound selection, there is actually so much information and it was kinda tricky to digest into just simple videos that you usually know my courses for. So be ready for that. But I want to prepare you for some terminology quickly right now. The first thing I want to say is when we are selecting sounds, we have to think about time. E.g. are notes that were playing or replaying long notes. Longer notes are going to take up more space in the frequency spectrum. Are we playing short notes? It's going to take up less space in the mix because it's not as long. Now, in addition to the longest short, we also have slow sounds. A slow sound is something like a pad, something with a long attack, e.g. if our attack is slowly fist, that means in this area we have tons of opportunity to place our sounds, okay? And then we also have fast sounds, things that play instantaneous. Most sounds are instantaneous. Some things that I'm specifically talking about are things like plucks. So when we talk about time, we have long notes, we have short notes. We also have slow kinda sounds and fast sounds. Okay, we also have pitch. When we talk about pitch, I'm simply just talking to you about octaves. And in the course, I actually do our drawing exactly like this for you. I just want to do it quick for you. Okay? We're talking about octaves and pitch. So if this is our frequency spectrum, we have 20 hz down here and then 20,000 hz. So again, all of this is based off of our human ears. When we are making our sounds, we are restricted into this whole area. So when you are selecting sounds, maybe you're going to play a sound down here. Maybe you're going to play the guitar up here. Maybe your high hat will live up high. And so we're taking advantage of the frequency spectrum. The last one I want to quickly talk about is volume. Okay? So what you'll notice is all of these go hand in hand, alright? So e.g. you play chords and they're long and then the volumes really loud, it's going to take up so much space in your mix is going to be hard to get other things to fit. If something is very short entail and the time, then typically you can mix it louder because it's not going to fight as much. Now another thing we talk about in this course is sound placement. Placement is where we are actually clicking in our sounds. Sounds selection is making sure that we're selecting the right type of sound at the right time in our beat. Our course here is all about sounds selection, okay? So e.g. are you going to pick a tar, are you going to pick a piano at that moment? And then we're thinking, are you playing down low in the mids and the highs? So again, quick video before we go into the course because you will see as we start going in, I cover a lot of stuff with you. The videos are a little bit longer than what you're used to from me. And I just found that I just had to keep it going to teach you sound selection with a lot of the secrets that I've learned over the years. And it's all based off of this time, pitch and volume. And as you become a better producer, you are thinking about sound placement. And when you get even better as a producer, you are thinking about sound placement and sound selection at the same time. Okay, Let's get into the course. I hope you enjoy. And again, always feel free to reach out if you have questions. 3. 1 - What Is Wise Sound Selection: So just short, what is sound selection? It is when we're selecting our instruments, such as, do you want to use a piano, a base, a VLR? But when we're selecting our sounds to be a good producer, you also want to be thinking in terms of octaves. So I'm just going to introduce you to the frequency analyzer in this course, I will be using Pro Q3 to do that. You can also follow along with the fruity parametric EQ to. So the first thing I want to cover in this course is a frequency analyzer, which allows us to view the frequency spectrum. So if I just play the piano, this allows us to see the frequencies. Now in music, this analyzer is all based off of our ears. So you can see down here we have our low frequencies are mids and highs. Anything lower than 20 hz. Typically we feel we don't so much here anymore. And then 20,000 hz is the highest that human ears can hear. And as you get older, your high-end diminishes so you do not hear high end as well as you get older. So they say, when we're making our beats and doing sound selection, our instruments are all restricted into this frequency spectrum. So this is where sound selection can get tricky, because if I play an instrument here, you can see that it looks pretty full and yes it is, but when you become a better producer, you start to learn the tricks to make things stand out. So the first thing I want to talk about is your fundamental. This is what we call the fundamental. The frequencies on top or left. The overtones are harmonics. In other words, it gives the sound of different tamber, go to different sound. Okay, there's that fundamental frequencies on top. But when I'm making a beat, I'm not looking at the frequency analyzer in terms of like, Oh, well maybe I should put some instruments up here or maybe I should put some down here that's off of my ears. So as I'm making the beat and I'm listening to the beat back. I'm not looking at the analyzer. I would be making the beat and I'm thinking to myself, Yeah, Do you know what I need to maybe play something up high. And then when it comes to mixing and mastering the beat, then you can look at the analyzer to kinda see all meal, maybe something's way out of whack or something. But let's just play the beat here. At the intro. You're going to see that we do, we don't have any low-end information as because this is the kick drum and then this is the base. Here comes the kick. And the snare is around here. We also have high-frequency in that snare too. So whenever this snare plays, you can see it's getting fuller. There's a snare. So right now we're in the chorus. And so the analyzer looks very full sounding. And that's because it's in the chorus. Once it goes to the verse right here, you're going to see there's more balanced because it's quieter. See how it kind of dropped down just a little bit. We have more bounce now get. So what I want to quickly do here for you if you haven't ever heard this before. And so pro Q3 allows us to solo out different areas. And so I'll let you listen to the low-end, the mid and the highs. The kick drum and the bass. Here's the myths. And here's our high-end. And again, I can make this bigger or tighter. So just a quick recap before moving on in this course because again, there's a lot of information, a lot of terminology that you just kinda gotta understand. So when I'm making my beets, I'm selecting my sounds. I'm thinking in terms of octaves. So e.g. you can see down here, you can see C2 is here, c3 is here, s4 is here. So this is going up an octave and all it's doing is it's doubling and frequency. And if we're going down, it halfs the frequency. Okay, music is just math. So when we are playing our melodies, you have to make sure to pick a key and a scale. And if you don't know about that, you can check out my piano lessons for producers course is going to teach you about how to pick a keen to scale and what's all involved. But in short, when you pick a key and scales such as D major or D minor, you are given only seven notes. And if you're going to play your cords, those seven notes have to be in those courts because music is just math. E.g. if I play this piano here and I go like this, this is all in pitch. Sounds fine, it doesn't sound weird. Now I'm gonna do the same thing and I'm going to play one of the notes that are not in that key and scale. So listen here. That note is not in the same key and scale or you can just hear one more time. That's in pitch. And now I'll play when auto patch that note is not in the key and scale. Watch if I play a chord, so that's n. Let sounds musical. I will purposely play a note not in the key now. So watch like that note is not in their care. So what I'm trying to say is when I'm selecting my sounds, I'm thinking in terms of octaves. So if I play a sound down here, maybe I want to play a sound up here now. But I'm not looking at the frequency analyzer. I'm just sharing this with you for education purposes. When I'm making the B, I'm actually thinking in the back of my mind, Oh, yeah. Do you want maybe I should play a sound up here. Maybe I should play a sound down there. Another thing to mention is again, if I play a chord, how long of a no am I playing? If I play a short note, it can typically stand out a lot quicker because it's not taking up much space in the music. And I'm going to cover all that stuff with you. The final thing I want to quickly talk about is sometimes you're going to see those instrument frequency charts out there. That stuff might be interesting for classical mixers, people who are mixing kind of classical music. But what we as beat makers are focused on is making sure all of our instruments aren't fighting with each other. And we do that by playing down low in the mids and the highs were also thinking about how long the note is. A longer note is going to take up more space in the mix than a short note. And we also have our volume. Okay? Alright, so that is it for this video. There's a lot to learn. Again, just to recap here, is that fundamental? And then we have our frequencies on top, which is what we call tamper, that come to a different sound. So when we select our different sounds, different sounds can be more or less aggressive. And before we close out, I will just share this with you here quickly. This is three times oscillator, and this is just a sine wave. A sine wave is actually just a single frequency. When I play the note here, you're gonna see some other notes. And that's just because of how these sensor coded. So don't worry about these little ones, but you can see it's a single frequency. As soon as I click in a different wave forms, you're going to see more frequencies get added. Right there. There you go. And so different waveforms give different tamber. So if we go back to this, a sine wave, a sine wave, and we're gonna go with something more aggressive. So look all these frequencies on top. So while we are selecting our different sounds, we're thinking about Tamar is, is something really aggressive, really bright. Because sometimes you need something really aggressive to cut through the mix. Sometimes you want just a soft sound, something that's going to fill up the body of the track. And these are all things that we will be covering in this course. Okay, so let's move forward. We're going to talk about sound placement for sound selection in the next video. 4. 2 - Sound Placement vs Sound Selection: Alright, so in this video, I want to talk to you about sound placement, verse sound selection. I'm not going to be teaching you about sound placement in this course. This course is all about sounds selection. But in short, sound placement is where we are clicking in our sounds within our drum loop, as well as our melodies. It's all about timing and rhythm, where we can place their sounds. And when you're first starting as a producer, you're gonna be spending almost all your time practicing sound placement. Where can you click in your, your drum samples? And as you start getting better as a producer, when you're doing sound placement, then you start also thinking about sounds selection at the same time. So sound placement and sounds selection are very different, but they're very tightly knitted. And this mainly happens more when we're starting to focus on, let's say, a real beat. The low end for kick drums. So this video, I want to focus about kick drums and the different styles of kick drums just quickly. Because when we talk about sound selection, many times we're focused about our instruments, right? But when it comes to our drum, samples are different drums. What can be happening is we can be getting phase cancellation if we're not careful. So let me explain that. So let's say we have a kick drum here and I will do go to the audio editor. So what happens with audio is it's just waveforms. So the most basic waveform we know is a sine wave because it's just a single frequency. And so what happens is if we have a kick drum playing with a different kick drum and they're off timing just like a little bit. And again, they're playing in similar frequencies, you can get cancellation. So let's say one kick drum is at 5 db and other kick drum is at 2 db. If there's 100% cancellation, you would be left with 3 db. And at the really drastic point of cancellation, you could literally be the difference between a hard-hitting drum and literally no drum when this cancellation is happening. But let's talk about more of a general topic now. So let's say we have our beat. The beat has a kick drum and a baseline. You've gotta be really careful the type of drum that you're using with that baseline. If the drum has a really, really long tail, It's going to phase cancel with that baseline potentially. So you have to think of sound selection in that, in that sense. And that's a really basic way. If you have a baseline, you probably don't want to use an eight away. If you're using an eight away, you probably don't want to use a baseline. So let's look at the different types of kick drums. I'm using the urban heat drum kit. And in the kicks folder, they organize them like this for us, which is really awesome. They have various kicks. These are really big. Kicks. Sounds good. Yes, it has that low end, but it also has a lot of high frequencies, a lot of mid and high content, which it makes it feel bigger than maybe what it really is. Okay, let's go to a short-tailed kick. A short-tailed kick is so powerful because it cuts through the mix and it's shortened tail. So I was telling you when a sound is shortened tail, it doesn't really clog up so much space. And you can typically play out louder. It's going to cut through the mics. Here's a short tail kick. We have our eight awaits. As a bit, a bit of a different style of beta weight. This is kind of a classic aid. Oh wait here. Now in eight, oh wait. It's like a hybrid is like a kick drum and a baseline built-in. So in other words, you have a kick drum and a baseline in one sound right here. Sometimes an 808, I think it's 50 here, can just be like the tail. Okay? Alright, so first let's look at this kick drum. This is kinda like one of those various kicks is what this urban heat drum kit organized it as. But to me, it's kinda like a big drum. We have now a short tailed kick, but it's a little bit lower frequencies. Gonna go to the other short-tailed kick, you're going to see it's much higher in frequency. So again, I'm not looking at the frequency analyzer when I'm making my beats. When I'm making my beats and selecting sounds is all by ear. If the drum has a huge tails such as an eight away, I'd be like, Hey, this track probably isn't getting a baseline now, I've already decided that going forward. So this type of drum is really good for layering. Typically probably be a little cautious how often I'm using it. It could sound maybe a little bit repetitive. But it does have that tail and it's really awesome for layering. We have that short-tailed kick cuts through the mics fine. Something like this. You would probably never have a problem with it with a baseline because it's so short and tail, it has more high frequencies, it would just hit really hard. Here are a couple of examples of drums that you wanna be really careful of with a baseline. This would just fight with that baseline and you're gonna get this weird wobble sound. And that's where the phase cancellation sounds like. I'll, I'll share that with you in a moment. And then here's another example. Especially if that tail, when we have a kick drum, it has what we call it the initial transient. It's very quick. Kinda cut through. But then the kick drum can have a tail such as this one. Again, it's gonna be really hard to hear. But that tail after the initial is what fighter that baseline where you get that clashing. Here's just an example of just a little drum loop I made just, just to give you an example. So this right here is giving us tons of options if we want to add in an AoA. So e.g. let's say I add in this eight oh wait, I'm just gonna go cut itself. Was crank it up. And so you watch them, I hit play. That is not going to fight too much with the beat. And if it is, you can be doing things like side-chain compression. If you don't know about that, I can make a separate video later on here about that. So we can do side-chain compression for the full frequency spectrum. That's sometimes what people do. They go boom, like that. Sometimes some of these cooler plugins allow you to just do like a certain area. So e.g. what's clashing the low end. So you might just cut the low end. You can also change your shape and stuff like this. But that type of stuff is fixing a problem that you sometimes could have avoided with y sound selection if that makes sense. Like if I was only using sounds like this, you're probably never going to fight with this with this sound at all. Okay, That's a cool 808, hits hard. And I'll hit record, goes saw mode and hit play. So 34. So you notice how I went over 2 bar, 1 bar, your beats are going to sound really repetitive. Something like this gives you a little bit more flexibility. Okay? I'm just going to quantize that and hit play. So right here, when this note plays, this could be a potential problem and that's where mixing comes into play. Again, you can do that side chain compression. You could just set it up where it does like the whole frequency spectrum. You can do it where you're just doing just like the low frequencies. So this part right here could be a potential place right there. That's what I'm talking. That could be the problem of your mix. So let's just go back to a beat. So again, we have just started building the beat. We can start adding on here. No problem because there's nothing fighting with us. So let's just go flex. So this is like an art in my opinion. You can start with an ARP. You can do whatever you want as a producer, I typically would like to do at AARP later on in my beats because I usually find the AARP just adds so much fullness in a nice quick way. Because again, it's very quick sounding, right? Quick notes and they're loud and it's, and it's plucky. So right now we're more focused on creating a melody. Once we create that melody, then we're starting to think about, okay, now the next sound is coming in. I should start thinking about wise sound selection as I'm making the melody. It's kind of like as soon as we start talking about one thing, or will we have to talk about the frequency spectrum? We have to talk about phase cancellation. Oh, well, we have to talk about while you have long-tailed kicks and short-tailed kicks, and that's just on the drum loop side. Then we come here to our instruments and I was talking to you about you have your fundamental. Even though this is like an ARP, you can see this is a fundamental. Here are all harmonics on top, which is what? Tamar don't think anything more than that. Keep it really simple. Like to me, I don't like to get nerdy with audio. But sometimes you have to read to understand something and it's really nerdy. But then you realize you're like, oh, that's way too intense for what a beat maker needs. Now you know, this here is your fundamental, that is the pitch of the sound. So when we're listening to our music, we pick a key in this scale, we're given seven notes. Music is just math, which means those notes are spaced in such a way where they sound musically pleasing. So again, we have sound placement. Where are we placing our sounds? Sound placement is very important to have y sound selection because if things are so busy or things like that and you're good sound placement allows for space. It allows for silence, it allows for fullness. It allows for other sounds to come in at different times because if we have this 808 or even this kick drum, but look how much space there is in this area right here that we have left so much space as well as even spacing here. It's not to say that we can't play at the same time as other things, but it's just like, look how much space we have. And then let's say we had a hi-hat. I'll come here to a hi-hat, e.g. Definitely some like that. So if we have a high hat, well, let's say we're playing on every single beat or every single step, and I'm just going to hit play right here. So where do you think that is in the frequency spectrum, right? If you're making beats for awhile, you know, it's in the high-end. High hat, just lives up here. So even though it's playing with the other sounds, it's never going to fight with the kick drum. So let's bring it back. This is what it sounds like. Loud support that it's never going to fight with the beat. It's a high hat, is very high in frequency and you can see it lives literally right here as the hi-hat, right? The whole process is kind of simple, but it's very intricate. Once you start selecting your sounds for your drum loop, if you're gonna be using long-tailed drums, you got to make sure that you're really careful when that baseline is playing. And if it's playing at the same time, you're gonna be having to do more complex mixing. So just be prepared for that. It's not that, that's bad. And if you're good at mixing, that could be a part of the mix. If you're a beat maker who can do it all. And what I mean by that is you make the b, you can do the mixing, you do the mastering. You learn how things can work later on. So let's say I'm making this beat, and let's say this eight away is causing me problems right now. I can think to myself like normal. I know that's going to work later on because I've dealt with this before. I know it's going to work and that only comes with time. But again, something like a hi-hat, high in frequency. It's never going to fight with you with your kick drum and your snare, right? Let's look at the snare. Where is it? Where does the snare live? Here? Is that again, I thought fundamental of the sound. And then we have lot of high frequencies on it. Come here to the other snare. Co-morbid a clap. We have like our snare. This could potentially be it. Again, on a snare, this is actually a cool trick. I'll pass it on to you. Sometimes you get that snare to really pop. So we'll try here. We'll try here. This is kinda like that fundamental, so watch it without it, with it. Pulled back a little bit. But sometimes that's what you can do with a snare to kind of get that body back and it's just nice and quick. Alright, so are there you guys go. So sound placement, sounds selection, sound placement is where we are placing our sounds. It's going to take you your lifetime as a producer. I'm always learning about sound placement. As you start advancing as a producer with your sound placement, you are then thinking about sounds selection. If we're selecting our instruments, I am thinking about a couple of different things. Is it a long, long sound like this, or is it a quick sound? If it's a quick sound, I can use it in different ways, e.g. if this sample is here, I could probably continue to use the same sound like this because it's played so quick. So in other words, I could play them in the same frequency area. Once played long, what is played quick? So it starts with sound placement, which is essentially your melodies or your rhythm of your drum loop. Then it comes into thinking about the frequency spectrum. Where can I place my sounds? It's okay if certain sounds live in the same area because you can think about playing them longer or playing them shorter. And these are just different little tricks to get around how to make your sounds fit in different areas. Alright, so let's wrap up this video. Let's move forward. I want to talk to you further about these different things in simpler videos, okay? 5. 3 - Can Instrument Frequencies Overlap: So again, we have our lows are mids and highs. More of the complex kinda mixers or just do it like this. They do like a low, lows, mid lows, high lows, low mids, mids, high mids. And I guess you can go like low, highs and stuff like that. And that is really nice to know as you start to go on. There is even like ear training tools to understand the frequencies. And again, there's even like those are mixing charts of how you should be mixing different instruments. And maybe not how you should be mixing them, but about where they live frequency wise. But again, as a beat maker, I don't look at that kind of stuff really at all. I'm just mainly concerned with catchy melody. Why sounds selection, making sure everything standing out. Does it sound for making sure of no negative things such as phase cancellation? In other words, if I'm using bad sounds with each other, and what I mean by bad sounds as if I'm using one sound that is fighting with another sound. That's what I'm saying by bad sound. If there are two goods sounds and they're just fighting with each other, then that's just a poor choice on me. Again, Yeah, we have low frequencies, we have high frequencies. If I just hit Play here, this is the beat. We have no kick drum playing right now. This track has a kick drum and a base. We have a snare, which is right around here. So let's just kinda mess around with it. So here's the snare. Here's the high hat. Obviously it's up here somewhere. That's way too high. So again, C, 12,000 hz. Can you hear that? I can. I can't really hear it. And these are very good ear buds them on. So there you go. Let's just break it down a little bit. Okay, I think that'll help you out. So in the case of this beat, you can hear that a lot of, a lot of the notes are actually very, very quick. So this is at the piano sound. And let's look at the frequency spectrum to kinda see where it's playing. So let's open up the piano. So it's around C3. But then I'm playing the low end. And the high end here is the baseline. Okay? So let's look at the baseline by itself. So look at the high frequencies it has. And it really does cut through in the mix. If I were to filter out that. Depending on the track you're working on, sometimes you want your baseline just to be like this. Because again, when it comes to sound selection, we're talking about mixing. Two were talking about do we want to carve out frequencies for space, for other sounds? Because let's say we liked the sound, but maybe in a certain area of that sound, let's say like right here, maybe it's aggressive, so we pull it back a little bit. Maybe right here, maybe we need to bring it up so it's clearer. So we choose a sound because we generally like it. And then in mixing we can enhance it. The examples I'm showing you here a very drastic, here's the baseline. Okay. Without the EQ, the case of this beep, that high-frequency allowed it to stand out. Let's go to the next cell. So this is the key bit sound. Lots of high-energy in there, right? But if I play everything together, you can hear that there's not really clashing going on. It just sounds fall and beautiful. So the reason why I want to share this with you, because I've seen people out there say that if you're playing some instruments in a certain frequency area, you shouldn't play instruments there. This is just like the perfect example of like, what are you talking about? Like is how soulful. And this is only three instruments. We have a Viola, I'll play it by itself. So what I want you to listen for here is that this type of sound is like a pluck sound. What does a pluck sound is a very, very quick, okay, this is actually a pluck sound. It's very quick. So when we're selecting our sounds, we have long kind of sound there, kind of what we call a sustained sounds. And then I'll share a cool trick here with you. So I have a son with this. You can see if I increase the attack, this is what it does. Listen how slow a comes in. So what's happening is if I'm playing this, there's so much space for all these quick sounds to cut through in the mix, and many times when they play. So let's say a quick sound plays right here. Let's say it has reverb and delay on. The reverb and delay is kinda going to overlap. And then what's going to happen is this sound is going to come in. So when we're making our beats, we're thinking about this type of sound selection is a sound really quick sounding. Is the sound slow, like a pad, e.g. I. Have some pads here. Right? So it's slow. If we go to the moral, I'll try to find a pluck sound. So let's go like this one. Just like a pluck sound. Something like this is going to cut through with that pad. Like you'll never have problems with getting it to stand out. Because just the way how the sound is designed and that will be in our upcoming videos. Okay, Let's just keep going. Again. It's a plucky sound, is cutting through the mix. No problem. Again, let's add all these instruments back in and it's kinda like staccato, so like a pluck sound. Another thing here to mention is an arpeggio. So an arpeggio, how it works is let's go to serum. You can use FL Studio's built-in arpeggiator with any of these tools, you can go arpeggiator. And so an arpeggiator is amazing for fullness without really clogging up the mics lot of times. So listen. We're sharing those plucks and they're really quick, but you're still gonna be able to hear all of those other sounds. And so in this track, this ARP is this one right here, and it sounds like this. The viola. These kind of instruments are kinda fighting a little bit right here because they're all kinda quick sounding kind of fighting. But again, this is a sound placement where those sounds being played and when they're being played at different timings, then what's going to happen is they're going to stand up by themselves. But when they are playing together, there is some kind of fighting going on just, you know, just from hearing that could be poor mixing on my end to rape. And so again, another quick sound. Well, I can hear everything very clear like generally. And then again, here is the frequency spectrum. Just to give you a perspective. Again, we don't have any low-end really happening right now. Turn this off so you can select the frequencies. Bring a basin. So this is how much it adds. It looks really full, but it's really not that fall because the baseline isn't playing like this. Like e.g. I'm not pulling like a baseline where it's just like this. Where if I play it like this. And this is kinda like a unique base, this is actually the reason why I played the bass with these quick notes is because how it was designed in harmonics, it's like an ARP. So or like it's on some type of like kinda sequence like an LFO. So I didn't like that. So that's why I ended up doing it like this. But again, let's listen. So tons of fullness. It looks for. Here's the piano with the drum loop, and that's the beat. Okay, So again, in this video, I just wanted to quickly talk about how the frequency spectrum works. And then I just wanted to quickly talk about this beat, the different instruments and how they look in the frequency spectrum. Just to give you a perspective, when I'm making the B, I'm telling you I don't use the analyzer as I'm making the beat. I'll use the analyzer once it goes to the mixing and the mastering. So it all comes down to sound placement. How are you playing those melodies? It's all about spreading it across your frequency spectrum. Don't worry if you're playing sounds in the same area. If you are, you want to be thinking about, well, is it a long note, e.g. again, at piano, Is it a long note or is it a quick note? And in the case of this piano, even the quick notes are still kinda long notes to me. I'm hitting it as quick as I can. Something like the pluck. The effects, add onto that sound. Come here to like a viola. It sounds fuller than what it is. And that's just because of the reverb. So listen. And if I come here to the viola, let's turn off all effects. And I'll just disable the routing because that is adding to it. So here, that is what the velar sounds like. So I had two reverbs in this track. So there you guys go. So we have a frequency analyzer. We're trying to make our sounds fit. Don't worry if two sounds are living in this area. If they are, think in terms of what is it a long note or is it a short note? And when we talking about a sound, remember the fundamental and then our overtones for timber for flavor. Same sound, different tamber. Soap sounds can live in the same area, but you have to be thinking of, is it a totally different tamber? Is it way more aggressive sounding where it's kinda gritty, it's really going to cut through by itself. Or is it a softer sounding sound? E.g. I. Will just go to Init Preset. What we will do is we will get basic shapes. And so what this is, is it's just, we want, I just want a sine wave. We can add a couple of voices, which means that it's going to play like five sine waves at a time and at D tunes them a little bit. There's only this. And so what I want to share with you is something like this. Like this is gonna be a very gentle sound. If we go to something more aggressive, like this one, right? Salt or aggressive, it's going to take up a lot more space in the mix. Cat. And then again, when we're doing this, are you going to play up high? Are we going to go on way lower? This is just for you to see and listen. Softer sound. It's not, it's a beautiful sound. But if we're gonna be using other sounds, something like this says key bit, That's going to cut through, no problem. The viola, It probably cut through no problem because it's such a soft sound. It says. So that is what I'm talking about in terms of like tamber, like how aggressive is the sound. So we're thinking about sound placement. We're thinking about how short or how long the notes are. We're thinking about the style of sound, how aggressive is the sound? Because if we want to play this sound all in the same area, these are the things that you have to think about. 6. 4-1 - Understanding Time Pitch and Volume: Alright, so in this section of videos, I want to talk to you about manipulating audio for full control. Because typically when you hear about why Sound selection, we're thinking about that frequency spectrum. The octaves plane down low, playing in the mids, playing in the highs. But that's kinda really, really basic. You know, when you're making your beat. Yeah, you want to think high, lows. But I want to talk further in regards to time, pitch, and volume. Okay, So we have time. So when we're talking about time, what does this mean? It means that a sound can be played long or short. Pretty straightforward, but it's surprising the difference. A long sound to a short sound along sound can really take up a lot of space in genomics, a short sound, very short takes up less space in the mix. So when we're talking about sound selection and frequencies, Kinda fighting with each other. If the sound is so short, it's not going to fight as much with certain elements. So when it comes to time, what are some things that we can do? So e.g. long, let's say a piano chord that would be something that's long and sustaining something short could be something like if you've ever heard of a trance gate. So this is something I would want to pass on to you. This is a really cool trick and what we're doing is your gating. So if you don't know what a gate is, it essentially is turning off and on audio. And you can use a trans gate to create a rhythmic pattern. So something like this can also be like a pluck. Alright, so now let's quickly talk about pitch. We are now talking about octaves are replaying down low or replaying up high. We're playing in the mids. And then we can also now be thinking about in conjunction with time, with pitch. Let's say we play a piano chord. Let's just say at C5, we also take a pluck sound. We play that as C5 as well. These typically won't fight. The reason is because if we're playing along piano chord, It's just going to be full, beautiful sounding. And the plucked sound typically is quite aggressive in a sense of when we talk about that tambor and lots of frequencies and the high end, it really emphasizes that initial transient. So in other words, we're not really going to get too much clashing when it comes to, let's say, a basic piano chord that's played long and a plucked. And that's playing in the same octave, that's playing and see five, just e.g. if you were to play, let's say a piano chord like this. And then you go and take another piano sound, which I've done many times as a producer. This is where you're going to start getting into a lot of clashing of instruments, not standing out. In this case, you wanted to be talking about sound placement, but this is where sound placement would come into play if you had those two different pianos playing in the same frequency area with pitch. Alright, We can do, just be doing wiser sound placement or if we are being more aggressive in our EQ, or effects like distortion or even things like chorus. Chorus is an effect, it's a delay effect, right? So you have to be thinking about your sound placement as well if you're dealing with that stuff. Okay, So we have time. How long is the note being played if instruments are fighting in the same area. This is where you can start really, really maximizing on making sound stand out other if they're long tail or short-tailed. We have the pitch low, mids, highs. Really, really straightforward. Okay? Now, the next one I want to talk about is a volume. And so when we're talking about volume, if we have a long sound with volume, it's going to take up way more space in the mix. So there's a couple of things that we can do. We can compress it really hard or use limiting on that sound to make it. So it's really, really even. And then because it's so even we can actually turn it down, which means that it's not going to overpower all of our other elements. That's one mindset to have. But now when something is short, because again, it's not taking up much time in the music. We can be sometimes a lot louder with volume. So volume goes hand-in-hand with the time. And then it also goes hand in hand with the pitch. Because when we're making our beat, you know, what are the different elements we have? We have like drums, claps. Alright? The clap usually will never fight. It will always stick, stick out for the most part because it's a clap or a snare. I'm always allowing that snare to stand out. So we have drums. What can fight with drums? Bass, like an actual bass guitar, a baseline and eight await is going to fight with the base. So we have to be very careful with our sound selection when it comes to pitch. If we have pitch and now we're talking about sound selection, our drums, right? Our drums. We have to make sure that we're not fighting with base and Ada weights, claps and snares. I'll just go Clap slash snares. Nothing's really going to fight with this stuff. It all just kinda really stands out. I also shared that little cool trick there with you when you have your frequency spectrum. We'll just do this quickly. So let's say like this is like the lows and we have our highs and our mids. So let's say we have our snare and a snare or fundamental would be around here or something. Again, on an EQ, you can boost up right around here. And it will really emphasize that snare on that fundamental. It just gives it a little bit more body. What other kind of sounds do we have here? We have high hats. Nothing is really going to fight with a high hat. It is so high in frequency compared to most of the elements in your song, right? We have drums, which we can fight with the base and the eight. Oh wait, that's, that's one of the most important things as a beat maker to really practice and understand and be careful of our drums. Either we want to tighten up that tail and I'll share that here quickly with you. So e.g. I. Have this kick drum right here. Right? So let's say this is the kick drum and I already have a baseline. So what I would suggest is you can use the trim here and you can use the out, you can do that, or you can also use the length as well if you can't use as much out. But let's listen to the kick drum now. Okay, so let's tighten it up more, more. So in compared to this. This is going to fight with your baseline. Watch. We can bring in the tail a lot. Still at tales there. Okay, So now you're hearing that click, this is where we can use the out and it'll get rid of that click. So I'm going to keep going until it goes away. There you go, bring it back. So now we have a kick drum that could potentially be way better in our track if we had a baseline or a different eight. Oh wait, this one actually isn't a debate, but I'm just sharing with you what I'm talking about. A kick drum and ate away and base. You can tighten up the kick drum just like this right here and make it even go more. We'll crank it up. Right? We can come here to the volume, crank it more compared to the long tail. So there you go. Let's go back to the drawing. Alright, and then we have our instruments. Now, instruments are super hard to talk about in just a general sense of like, oh, we have pianos old are going to be down here or up here. That's totally unique for each beat. So when you're making the beat, you have to think to yourself, okay, I have these instruments are, they're going to play in the low as the mids are the highs. Depending on the melody, which is essentially your sound placement. Where are you placing your sounds based off of those melodies? Because if your track is so busy sounding, it's not going to sound good. You need to make sure you have proper sound placement. For a good beat, something that sounds musical. Then what you wanna do is you want to select different sounds, different instruments that are just very different. Like maybe you might have a harp, maybe you'll have a piano, maybe you have a flute, maybe you have a trumpet. So when I'm making my beats, this is my mindset I'm always thinking about, okay, well I've played some long chords. Now. It's time for some short stuff. What are some short things we can do things like a trance gate. We can do plucks, we can also do RPS. So an arpeggio is very often like, it can be like a quick notes. And again, that can really stand out and not take up too much space, but really add to the music and then also the type of sounds. So I'll just do this in here. So don't forget about the word tambor and you spell it like this. Alright? When I first saw it, I was very confused. You'd think it's TAM BER, but it's timbre. Again, we have that fundamental note, which would be like this. And then we're going to have a bunch of other frequencies on top of this fundamental note. This right here is what makes the note in pitch to our ears, which makes music. When you pick a key and a scale, you have those seven notes. When you go and play your melodies or your cords, you have to use those seven notes in that key in scale. And then whatever the fundamental is of that note, it's always going to be in pitch. And then we have different frequencies on top which are adding to that tamper the flavor. Okay, so when you ever hear this word timbre, think of flavor, which is essentially you are using, let's say you had a piano sound and then you go to a pluck sound. They still have the same fundamental pitch if you're using, let's say C5, but it's just the frequencies on top that are different, which are giving it a very unique sound. In addition to the volume envelope when I shared with you the ADSR envelope in serum, when I shared that pad, I took the attack and I made the attack longer to make it slow. So we have longshore, I guess you could even do like slow as well. We have a slow kind of sound. It swells in and when it's swelling, we do hear it. But when it's slow, it allows essentially like these short kinda sounds to really cut through. And then along sound is just something like a cord where it just takes up so much. Sometimes you hear them like they're called power chords for a reason. So again, we have time. How long, short, or slow, or fast the note is. You can take advantage of time here. In addition to time, sound placement is a big thing. We have pitched. Do you want to play up high, down low in the mids? When I'm making the beat, I'm always thinking these things in the back of my head when it comes to the drums, right? I'm always thinking about OK, am I using a baseline in this track or am I using an eight? Oh wait, it's really simple. Once you understand that claps and snares, for the most part, I really don't find anything really fights with my clap and snare, the hi-hat, right? So high in frequency, nothing really fights with it. The instruments, things potentially can fight with your instruments. But if you think about all these things about long-short, slow, your timing, all of this stuff is going to help you be wiser in your sound selection and then volumes. So when it comes to our different elements, you just gotta be thinking some elements you can actually make louder and they're not going to hurt the listener's ears as much. You know, a lot of times these shorter kinda sounds because they're so quick and they're going to cut through. Okay, so this video was all about manipulating audio for full control. This is essentially like the secrets of sound selection, which I've shared here. I'm trying to relay a kind of in a very unique way, hopefully time, pitch, and volume. Alright, Once you can really master that, you're really going to understand your sound selection. And you'll be able to just like really just make your beats and have fun. And you just want to always want to keep it in the back of your mind as you're making beats. Don't worry about looking at the frequency analyzer. If you do that, I don't think you're going to have very fun making beats. You just need to think, if I'm going to select a drum, okay, cool. I have a short-tailed kick, I have a long tilde kick, whatever. You just got to be aware that later on in the track, is it are you going, is it going to set a direction for you when you choose that sound? Alright, so let's move forward in this course, I want to talk a little bit more about how to place these sounds with clarity. So we'll cover some placement a little bit. Again, you can check out the safe spots book. It's on Amazon for way more in depth. Um, but I'll walk you through some examples of I have on the list here some things about sound placements, some things about the types of sounds. So tamber, we'll talk more about that a little bit. Again. We'll talk about the length of sound. We'll talk about octaves. We'll talk about single notes versus chords. So when we talk about pitch, right, you could be using a single note which is not going to take up as much space as a chord. I also have dry notes versus wet notes. When you have a dry note which has no effects on it, it's going to sound right in your face. Kaic really, really close to you. As soon as you start applying effects on like reverb, it's going to push it back in the mix. It's going to sound wider and typically more musical, more enjoyable to listen to. So I hope you enjoy a lot of these upcoming videos. 7. 4-2 - How to Place Sounds for Clarity: Alright, in this section of videos, I'm gonna be talking to you about how to play sounds for clarity, just a mindset. And we're just going to walk through building a little beat ourselves. And I'm just going to improvise and I'm just going to go with it. Okay? This is gonna be the easiest way for me to explain things in a real-world setting. So sound placement, the first thing we're going to start with is our drum loop and we will build a little drum loop together nice and quick. Alright, so I'm just going to keep going so that I'm not explaining. I'll explain as I'm doing. So we have this kick drum from their previous video. It's really hard. It was previously that eight. Oh wait, watch if I just copy this just to this is a cool trick. You always copy if you want to change something and then you can go back. So again, this is that ate away. We're going to pull it back. So it's really hard. Again, it's pretty loud and we'll take a snare. I'm going to layer. Layering is how we can make things sound folder. And I just set my tempo at 87 and we'll just click something in random. I'm just going to layer my snare for fullness. You don't always have to layer, but you can if you want, and just do a little bit of swing for a little bit of flavor to the beats. In what Swing does is I'll take a hi-hat because I gotta get a hi-hat anyways. So we have high hats. Again, the urban heat drum kit has closed and open hi-hats. Awesome for workflow. Okay, so I'll take this one. So what Swing does is it adjusts your eighth notes, okay? So each one of these is actually a 16th. And swing, adjust the eighth note, eighth notes. It nudges them over just a little bit. Okay? And so what I'm doing is all of these eighth notes like this one and this one, it automatically nudges them, gives us a little bit looser feeling to the drum loop. Alright, so let's do this. Let's put this in here. What I'll do is I'll just go to, let's go back. I'm going to clone that case so we can clone it right here, and I'll do it like this. So we have two different versions of that drum loop. And I'm just going to keep this simple saw go like John loop one and we'll go drum loop two. And we'll use that same brown but would bring it up and color just a little bit. Now we know that they're different, so we have it like this and then like that. So the note is different. So listen. Alright, we're gonna go to a high hat. Let's just add this in. Remember the hi-hat typically not much fights with a high hat because if we look at the frequency spectrum already, this is what we are dealing with. Period is hi hat, turned down a little bit. So we're just going to build a D here fast. Okay, let's keep, keep it going. So I'm just looking to really fill up this high hat just to add fullness to this B already. So you just have a drum clap and we have a little high Atlas. So I'll click on that for us. Go high hats. And I usually don't like to use that red. Red in FL Studio usually means missing sounds and I don't like that color in FL Studio, so there we go. Alright. So again, this is deceiving. It's kinda looking for the frequency spectrum. So this is why I don't look at this when I'm making a beat. It doesn't make sense. We don't even have instruments yet. Okay, so let's move forward. I'll just get some percussion sounds here. We've used some bond goes on listening to the sound. It sounds a bit to the right here that, so you can just do it from here. You just pull it over a little bit to the left. I just wanted to It sounds center. Another thing I'm hearing in this sound as it sounds, it's a little bit weird in the tail. So I'm just going to pull this back and I'm just sharing with you exactly how I would go about selecting sounds to make beats. I'm hearing problems with the sounds as I'm selecting them and I might just be correcting them. If you want to have this again, I'm going to copy this because I'm going to reset it if you like the sound of being a bit pan to the right, there's nothing wrong with that and it would probably stand out better then being in the middle. But I'm just going to put it more into the middle for now. But you can hear it's much quicker than watch if I bring this all the way back. So it has a weird tail in it. I'm just going to go a little quicker sound and good sound. I'm just gonna do the same thing for all of these. You can also normalize them to make them louder. And we'll just do this. So another thing too, when you are making your beats, is if a sound is very loud, it's going to stand out really awkward. So I'm just going to pull back the volume. Alright, and we have one more sound. So again, pretty long entail. I'm just going to tighten that up. Alright, so I'm just making things tight and then we can always work with it later on. When I send it to the mixer, I always think like maybe I can add some reverb on. Maybe when we compress things, the tails also become longer as well. Alright, so making a little drum loop, I have no idea where it's going to sound like. We're just clicking random things in here. Simple little bongo loop on the chart down in volume a little bit. Right here. I just hear this Bongo is a little bit to the left, so I'll just put it a little bit. Alright, cool. So now let's just add in some instruments. And the first thing that you really need to understand about. Making a drum loop is you don't know how it's going to sound in the beat. So right now if you're listening to like, oh man, this drama sucks. It could. But as soon as you start building out the beat, then all of a sudden you realize, Oh, do you know what, we're getting rid of these bundles? Those are weak or they can really add to the beat. And especially once I start adding in some melodies now, and so again, the melodies are allowed. So we're going to pull that back. So let's just hit play here. It's a bit loud. So again, pull it back and I need to select an instrument here. Okay, so let's go to, let's say strings and let's select something in here. So the first thing I'm hearing is it's too quiet. This is gonna be a really hard sound to create a melody off of. I might push my limiter up, bring it down. We're going to increase our reverb a lot. Increase the tempo just a little bit. Alright, so here we go. This is a very hard sound to work with to make my initial, my initial melody. Okay, so I'm going to go to, for this first one here. It's all about finding the right sound. Another thing I'm hearing with this sound is faced issues with sound itself, in my opinion, is problematic. And again, mono is not even enabled. Kinda sounds, Daisy. So to me, this is a sound, honestly just to kind of stay away from, alright, so I'm going to very aggressive sound. I'm looking for something. And so I'm actually going to stay away from Flex. I usually use Nexus a lot and the reason I do is the sound design is really, really good. And I'm telling you these presets are just amazing for beat makers. To hear the difference. Like, yes, I could play those melodies with flex. But it took me like so many sounds to go through. I just know Nexus so well, like I can just select any of these sounds and we can start moving fast. So again, our melodies, we have to be careful with how long the tail is and a lot of these presets, the sound designers really accentuate the reverb and the delays. And what happens is each sound kinda gets stacked and it makes the mixing harder in the long run, I got to find a melody here just to get going. Alright, here we go. Alright, so I'll stop that. And I didn't actually record. So what we can do is we can come here to the tools dumped score log last 2 min. And as you can see, I was putting a bunch of melodies trying to find what I liked in behind the scenes. And I know that here at the end is the melody because I took a little space. This is my voice. I said around here, okay, here we go. I waited for the drum loop and then I know here we are. I'll listen. Alright, so this isn't right there. So I'm just going to take this. I'll go to a new pattern, hit Control and right-click, I'll paste this in control. And q. In this case, I don't think I want controlling. Q, because you can see how it's snapping everything weird. Hit Control Z to undo that. Shifting Q is the keyboard shortcut we want. You can see right here, I go tools what quantize start times. So what it does is it snaps the notes to grid and it keeps the length of the note, which is really important for this melody in this case. So I'm going to, to solve mode. We will close the Piano Roll, will put it. I usually like to put all my melodies up top. And then I'm just going to go, I use my number pad to go quick around things. So let's listen to this. So I'm just going to edit this up here quickly. This is here, just kinda talking about sound placement quickly in this video. And then we'll move on and we'll talk more about kind of like the types of sounds when it comes to tamper and stuff like that. Okay, so let me just edit these notes here quickly with you. No, I think we're a little too quick there. So alright, so what I'm gonna do is I'm actually going to duplicate this twice so I can play the melody twice and hopefully I can get it right the second time. Sometimes it's hard to play right away. Alright, so this is the new recording. Sometimes I like to do that because in this situation of the melody right here, I just couldn't figure out how I wanted it and I'm just seeing that it kinda just works its way down. So I'm actually just going to copy these notes over and I'm going to go back because I know that I kinda liked this baseline better. So it's like and then same thing here. I want to take this and we will go back and I'm going to remove this as well as this note and I know that. So hopefully this is what it was. That's kinda what I was wanting. So what I'm looking for here is I had to record it twice. Take the best of both worlds essentially. Okay, so we got our basic melody happening. Now an important thing to understand about this is a lot of it is like the notes or when I'm highlighting these, I'm holding down Alt and I'm just able to fine tune them just a little bit. And the goal here is we want to get that length right. If it's too long, it's really not suit the melody. So this all goes with that sound placement, which adds to the emotion. And this is what you're always trying to learn as a producer, the sound placement. Okay, so in here, let's just bring this back just a little bit. The initial sounds, maybe I'll just go a little bit longer. I think this needs to be longer as well. This might be a little bit loud and volume and I can pull it back just a little bit. Maybe this is overlapping too much, and maybe we can tighten those up just a little bit. Alright, so we got a foundation for our track. I'll just turn this down. It's a little bit for myself. Let's look at the frequency spectrum, which again, I never do as I'm making a beat. But just to give you a perspective that all the beat looks super fall like, where can we add anything? So that whole rule of you can put notes where other notes are. It doesn't make sense K, because like the whole beats full. This technically it could be like a finished beat. The melody is pretty catchy. We have the drum loop, the high hats. And again, remember the Mongols did it for the bond was weak, or did they add to this beat? Without the ball goes? To me, the Mongols enhance it. So let's just quickly look at how we can add maybe one melody in here and how I would approach it. So I'm listening to the sound and I'm hearing that it's amid instrument. We do have some high elements to it because I played the left and the right hand. So down here, Let's play it. So down here is the left hand. Everything down here is left-hand. Up here is right hand. If I bring it up an octave, I think this is the melody back. This is just kind of like a nice mid melody. We need to add onto it. And what are we going to do? What are the types of sounds we can add? So this is, again, why I like Nexus so much. It's just really simple. So we have like lead sounds. These are really powerful to cut through a mix. So this sound is a little too detuned. Detuning is out of pitch. Turn up the volume a little bit on that. So I actually have my midi keyboard setup where you can see that I can actually adjust the volume of a midi keyboard. This is really a pro tip. So watch I can turn so he can't hear it. When I'm making my beets. I like to have that setup. I like to be able to turn up and down the volume rate from the midi keyboard because it's all about when you're making the beak. It's way too loud, right? In this case, I need to hear that drum loop and I'm going to be making a beat. I need to feel it, right? So let's go back to the song mode. Right? So how can we add to this? We can start with a baseline. We can, we can work there. That could be cool. Let's work with this detuned sound just a little bit, see if we can get anything. And if not, then we're gonna move on. We'll try and find something else. So, so again, I'm just kind of improvising with you. It's really hard because you're just gonna sit there, you're going to watch me do this and it's kinda boring on your end. So this is kinda cool. This is what we have, what we call port or mental, is a slide. Now, one thing to mention here with this type of sound, it's an extremely powerful. It's almost so powerful that if I add it in right now, it might mess with my melodies that I could make great Now, if that makes sense, so what I'm trying to say is. If I were to use the sound, It's so overpowering, It sounds good. In my opinion, it's suited the song. I think what I'm gonna do is I'll keep this for later. Okay, so watch how it will clone it. We will get another instrument. What is try and find something that we'd like. So I started with a guitar sound. Let's maybe go for a plucked sound, okay, something that's just going to pop through. Somebody that could be cool. Again, I can adjust my volume rate from a midi keyboard or you can use your mouse. But again, it's all about workflow as a parameter. So I'm gonna hit play here how we can mix it louder because it's quicker. That's what I'm trying to say. Let's try playing down lower. This is going to get lost in the mix. I could just hear it. Let's try it up higher, but I kinda liked it here. So I'm going to record that. Okay, Again, I'm just going to use that shift and Q. And what is this? Alright, so in this situation, when I'm talking to you about sound selection and I was saying about compression and limiting. So even though this is a very, very quick sound, sometimes doing a limiting or compression on the sound is going to make it fit exactly where you want. So I'm just gonna go to effects. Here's the limiter. This is a cool little trick. We do it right in the actual VST. You don't have to pull out any plugins. You could do it in here. And then when we actually go to mix the music, then you can start doing your effects and stuff. So I'm just going to limit this just a little bit. And I'm going to turn down the volume to compensate. Let's add one more melody in here. So inside of Nexus, let's just click like the classical here. Let's try to find something cool. Go something. Now I have to know what There's a chord progression. Sometimes they make a beat and I don't know what the chord progression is, so I'm gonna go to the melodies. So I know it's G-sharp, D-sharp, I know it's a sharp and then it goes back to C. Okay, so, alright, so when I'm making my melody, that was kinda like what it was. So my goal here is just, I just got to make sure that same chord progression is going on. Otherwise it will sound louder pitch care. So we pick a key is scale. We are given are seven notes, but then we also have to kind of follow that chord progression. Otherwise things will sound a little weird as well. Just hit Play, try and find something. It's a bit loud. And this could be a case where it's like, you know what, I'm going to send this to the mixer and I just want an EQ on here and I think it's just too bright in my opinion. So I'm just going to just bring this down. It's okay. Sounds Alright. So I'm trying to find something that I like in here. Here is that those gates, so here I'll share quickly in nexus. So how this works is you can go to translocate. So let's just go to like a lead sound will select something really simple like this. Okay, we're gonna go trans gate, we can enable this. So I told you a trans gate is affecting volume, okay, so wherever the sound is not playing, it's actually cutting out the sound. We can add these in. We can actually add the left or right note. You want to do that kind of stuff. You can also make it go faster, right? Again, this is really popular and it traps music. They pulled back the mix. We don't hear it at all. We can increase it. Now. In addition to that, a cool trick for again, because we're talking about sound selection, we have to try and find sounds that are going to work for us. So it's in the modulation portmanteau, so we can make the note slide. This could be a sound, we play it up really high. Also going to come here to the Effects. And let's just again limit this very hard. Again, don't feel that you have to limit and be careful on how much limiting you're doing. But sometimes I find it really allows a sound to really cut through the mix. Nice. Alright, so let's hit start with a clear record there. So here we go. So alright, so we'll get something like that. And let's just see what it sounds like. Now, I want this, these notes to actually overlap with each other. So what we can do is we can make it a little bit smaller grid and we can focus in like this gesso. We have another lead sound I was saying, which is going to fight with this a little bit. But I do think it could stand out in its own way. And I usually like to adjust these instruments in the order that they are in the playlist. It just makes it easy. So I have the first one, the second one, the third one. Now we're going to go to the next pattern and it'd be like this one. So let's just see if we can do something like this. So again, here is our frequency spectrum. You were seeing exactly step-by-step how I'm doing the sound placement. Sound placement. Like you see me make these notes. Is. Impossible to teach, right? I have spent hours and hours and years practicing the sound placement, but this is what it looks like on the frequency spectrum. I still think this has this two out. Alright, so let's try and add other sounded. So I can try and play this sound when the other sound isn't playing, because this sounds, sounds very similar. Very similar sound but again, different tamber just a little bit, but I play this one, it's just like this and then this one, it's much higher, so it's more aggressive. And I could hear that with my ears, especially when I was making the beat. This one cuts through. So even if I play this sound with this sound, this sound will still cut through. But what will happen if we might lose this sound? So sound placement will allow us to hear both and we'll try to take advantage of our care. So let's just hit play and we'll try and find something. Alright, so I got something here and what I'm gonna do is I'm going to duplicate this a couple of times. Your chorus. Sometimes it's nice to have a melody which is longer than other instruments in the beat. It just because freshness to the listener's ears. And I just want to play this because I got it in my head. You're quickly. So it goes like this. Okay, so alright, so I added this up here quickly. Again, I want to go to usually a half-step or a step is kinda nice. This just snap those all to grid but keep the lengths. This is too short of a tail. Did you hear that? I don't want to waste your time here, but this is the things I do to get the melodies right for that sound placement, which all they all kind of go together. Sound placements, sounds selection, the melodies, the timing of the note. All of it goes hand in hand. So sometimes again, some of these notes has slide. So you see how it overlapped right here. If this overlaps, We're not going to hear this note. It's just going to slide. So this needs to be a little bit longer, keep it going. And he also notice if I click where I'm playing. So if I've already edited these notes to here, and I'm happy with them. I'm just going to click right here. And you can see that up here. It's going to move with me. Okay, do you see how it's moving up here? So when I'm editing the notes, I'm going to hit stop. So everything here is good. So I'll click, we'll continue on from here. That doesn't sound too bad how it slit in there. And maybe I'll do that same thing right here. What does increase the length of this? Let's go back. Alright, so something in here I got to play with. I'm just going to pause the video. I'm going to edit it up and I'll get back because this will take too long. Alright, so when I played this sound, I made sure to play it down an octave from the other bleed. So if I go up an octave, it's going to fight with the other lead sound, and it's not going to work out. So I go down a little bit and I'm using the arc control and up or down. This is too low. It's not in the sweet spot. Just doesn't cut it. Alright, so to finish off this video, we're just going to add in that baseline because that's probably going to be the finishing touch to this beat. And then we'll talk a little bit about some other things in separate videos here in this section about how to play sounds for clarity. Okay? So here in x's I'm just gonna go all, I'm going to click base. This gives me all of my bass sounds within nexus of all my expansion packs I have and what to select here. So the hard thing is to really, honestly find a nice solid base sound. It doesn't matter if it's a nexus. Or in other VSTS. I usually find getting a nice base is really hard. Really hard to find a basis just like that suits the track I'm going for. These bass sounds have a bit too much high-frequency. When I'm listening for, I'm looking for just like a nice like sub. So watch it. We can come here and go like sign. I think we can go sign. Yeah. So there's a basic signs sub. Remember, what's the sign? We come here, sine wave. You see that? Solo frequency, that's it. Now, I'll assure a cool trick with you. Again, if we're gonna be adding on things like distortion, you are going to see that it's adding. I'm just going to add this up here. And then here are all the frequencies. For this course. I want to go distortion. And now you can see it start to add in all these frequencies. So you can kinda crank this up wherever you want or what kind of want to fine tune it. The reason I'm saying that is because when it comes to a baseline. We need to have some frequencies on it. Otherwise, it's just going to hit the sub. And when we have small speakers, your base, you do want to cutting through, okay, So without that distortion is just going to cut through a little bit better. Especially this note. This is not going to cut through in the mix. So this down here is probably the lowest I'd want to go. I'm gonna get that baseline kind of going with that melody. Okay, in the case of this video, what I'll do is I'm just going to remove this part of it. I would probably try to make this work in my own beat when I have more time. But what's happening is, it is I'm a little tricky to work with. And so I'm just going to work with just like this, okay? Which means we can make an easy baseline, get everything flowing. So this is just the beat. And I know that the baseline I think I'm going to play, which I could honestly probably just copy this, but I'm going to play it myself and then I'm going to align them up together. Okay, 234. So this is a cool trick. I am going to. So let's just make our notes smaller so we can see them together. I'm going to bring the baseline up closer to that melody. And this is probably pretty much where it was. And so the baseline, I do want to play it on here. So even though the melody is here, That's okay, I'm leaving it where it is. So let's just listen to the baseline with the melody. Let's actually try it down on the F. And I will just quantize the notes, especially the baselines will kinda get them all tighter. Let's go up to the G. So this is the confusing thing is because the baseline, I need to follow the chord progression. The melody actually did not follow the chord progression and this is where the baseline and the melody, I still think we can get them to sound good. But again, the baseline typically needs to follow the root note of the chord. If that's new to you, that's a very important thing to understand. Let me bring the baseline in here. So this is the baseline. I'm going to bring it into the, into the guitar part here. And this is the actual chord progression. So let's bring it down one. Okay, and we're gonna try to follow this. So nope, see that G and a G sharp. Let's keep it on. Did you hear how that sounded way better than with the melody or like with that main lead. The lead is going to be fine. It could do its own thing, but I need to make sure that it's following here. Okay, what I'll do is on the very last notes. So we will literally copy this over everything except those last notes. So on the last bar, so much worse to this, or sorry, on the last beat. So here we go. So this note, too short, it's not gonna do anything for us. It's going to sound really weird. So I can highlight these and quantized just these notes. That's a cool pro tip. Instead of quantizing everything, you can just highlight what you want. You can quantize it and we will bring it back just a little bit. And volumes, so sometimes volume can be too loud like I was mentioning. So check this out. Maybe these higher notes because when we have a baseline, bass sounds good right up to the higher notes. And that can sound kind of weird in the beat. It's almost like we have this sine wave that's been distorted. And it's just like sticking out weird. So we can actually pull back maybe on these ones just a little bit. And this one kinda goes back low. Let's say again, I'm just gonna click here. Let's bring it down now. So here we go. Alright, so take the baseline out. Let's go back to what we have over here. Should be able to paste it in perfect. So this is the base. And so now here is just a little beat that we've made together and you saw everything, how it was done. I don't like that baseline being so quick. So I think I added those notes. Alright, so we're going to take out these melodies. And again, this is the reason why when I make my beets, I like to have lots of different melodies because I can mix and match wherever I want to go. So I am hearing distortion. That is just because we're traveling this song pretty hard. I think actually this Trump's hitting a little too hard. So hi hats, we could remove the high hats and diverse. Slow it down. Maybe we remove it totally the baseline. Snares a bit loud. Right? Pause, come back a little bit. We have two scenarios here. This one's a little louder, so I can increase this one because it's quicker. We can hear it louder. This snare can actually be taking up some of the space of the other instruments. We can also come in here and if you really wanted to, you could tighten that. I try not to do that for everything. Just the sounds that are really bothering me is this snares is a little bit too long. Again, you just come here to the out and you just trim it up just a little bit. That is a really pro tip of NFL studio and it's so quick, It's just like free here. I kinda liked that tail a little bit more, right? So there we go. So just a quick recap of what we covered in this video because I really think the best way for you to see how to select sounds is to actually see how a beat was kinda made. 8. 4-3-1 - Detuned Pitch Fundamental Problem: Okay, in this video, I want to talk to you about timbre, which is when we're selecting a sound, it's characteristic. So again, when, when we play a note, it is still that same fundamental note. If we come here. This type of sound actually itself is actually a little bit out of pitch. And in my opinion, I'd probably pull back. You gotta be careful of the low end on reverb. A lot of times it really muddies up a track, so we can kinda tighten that up a little bit same with the delay. So this sound is kinda unique, but still, we still have that same fundamental pitch, right? So here it is, right there. You can see there's a fundamental pitch. There's our fundamental pitch. Even though we still have it, it gets its way down low on this track. It could be you're here. There it is. That's the sound. So this is just kind of a different sound, just how it's processed. But again, we ever fundamental note and again, don't worry if you're looking at this and every single time you're gonna make a beat, you're looking at what's the fundamental note for a sound that's like detuned. And detune is when we take a sound and we take different versions of that sound and we pitch them up or down a little bit and it sounds. This is a trick in the audio industry to create fullness. So if we talk about the word unisons, so check this out. So I'm going to have no detune. This is the first sound. It sounds just like that. Okay, if I increase detune. So what's happening is we have 13 voices. In other words, you see how it's like this waveform. We have 13 of these waveforms play at the exact same time, but some are pitched up and pitch down. But if I have no detune, it sounds so mono. So actually we increase the de-tune and we're getting wideness. We go more. We're gonna get like Tom's, but it's gonna start on a pitch. It's too much, right? So what I'm trying to say is if we have a sound and you have too much detuned going on as to how to pitch. This is where, you know, like, like the fundamental is going to sound all weird, right? That's the only instance. And in this case, this one has some kind of pitch stuff happening to it. It's affecting that initial sound. So in this case, I would probably try to fix this with EQ and try to kind of in this sound, I'll share that with you. So if we have this sound, I would try to take the EQ and I would make a tighter Q. And wherever that's kind of the pitches of sound a little weird. I'd probably do that to fix it so it sounds better in the mix if that makes sense. Okay? Alright, so that is just a quick example of your fundamental being out of pitch. But for the most part, your sounds are always going to be in pitch, especially when you have good sounds. 9. 4-3-2 - Notes Not Playing VSTi Problem: So one thing I want to share with you here quickly before we move on. If I hit play, you're going to notice this OneNote is not being heard. Listen to this one note on the course tube. So what's happening is I think this note, I have to bring it back just a little bit. We don't hear it be compactly one or two. And we're going to hear this note as if it's there because how it works is it's just going to keep looping over. So now we're going to hear this note and you can actually see the gap. So again, some things sometimes you just got to know as being a producer, some virtual instruments. This is just how they work in order to hear a note. Sometimes you just have to create a little bit of space in order for that to work. 10. 4-3-3 - Timbre and Types of Sounds: Okay, so let's move forward and I want to talk to you about timbre. So let's try to add in another instrument in this beat. So what we're gonna do is we're just going to focus in on the chorus because this is the most busiest part of the song. So when I'm making my b, I want to keep adding my instruments in the chorus. So holding down Control and clicking. And we're just going to highlight all the percussion stuff and bring it down a little bit because we will use this space for our new instruments. Alright, let's get a new sound. And we're going to try to find something that really cuts through. So again, we're thinking about tamber. If we have a sound which is very, very soft, then we are not going to be able to get it to cut through. Very good. We're probably going to need something with a bit more aggressive frequencies. So e.g. something like in the hands up lead. If I go to like leads, these are very aggressive sounds, but we already have to lead sounds. So this might not be a good option, but let's try and play some notes. This sound is actually cutting through, and that is because the actual initial sound of it has that very high frequency. So again, let's look at the frequency spectrum and I'm just going off of my ears. I'm not going off of anything I've seen yet because I'm teaching you just here. Very high frequency sound. If we come to the other ones. Yeah, it has some frequencies, but there's a lot of gaps in there, right? We come here, CCl4, it is in comparing and then same. This one here is very full sounding, but it's still a very soft, still very soft sounding. That initial kinda, that's what's cutting through the mics. Go lower. This is a sound that would stand out. No problem. Let's go to another sound. The volume. This is a sound that's really going to fight with us. So it doesn't really have much of a pluck to it. Kind of long sound, it's meant for a nice melody. So let's try to find some other sounds. Again, this type of sound, it doesn't really have much of an initial transient and any kind of pluck to it. So again, it might be a little hard to stand out in the beat. Doesn't sound bad, right? Because standard out as well go up an octave. Cutting through though, right? Let's try going down them are octave. So you have to be careful because if you're playing a sound too low, you're going to have to play that chord progression. Otherwise it's going to conflict with the baseline. When we play too low. The sound is powerful. But what's happening is it's really affecting that baseline. That's what I heard. And so again, a way around that is if we send this to a mixer insert and we open up an EQ, you could get away with if you want to play down lower, you could, I'm not going to go brick wall, but we can go like something like this. A big problem with this sound from what I'm hearing is the amount of reverb. Listen to it. Turn off the reverb. Also that delay. I would not be doing as I'm making the melody. I would make sure I find that melody where the sound sounds good. And then I would think, okay, I need to eat you that a little bit. Let's just look at a couple of other sounds because again, those were leads. Leads stand out incredibly well because they're just so rich and frequencies. Let's actually look at a couple arpeggios. So what's really nice about Nexus is it has tons of arpeggios built in this type of sound. It just kinda sounds like a pitch. Alright, so here's an example of a sound. This is like an arpeggio. Now I don't know if it's going to stand out in this track. But one thing to mention is you just see here the effects on it. That is really powerful if you just want to use that one sound. But since we have all of our different stuff going on again, just be really careful of that low end on the reverb as well as the delay. We'll try it again. Now. We're not getting that same rich emotion, but when we have tons of instruments, sometimes you got to make those compromises of maybe the sound isn't going to fit as well. Alright, so I recorded the AARP. What I'm hearing though is the low end is maybe a little bit weird for this track. And again, all we have to do is we can just again use like a low cut filter. Alright, so here it is in the beep. So again, I'm going to bring it up a little more. Now if you're listening. Well, sure. Maybe you might think, well, I'm going to trump the volume. But what's going to happen is some of these notes are going to be much louder than the other notes. And this is where a lot of times I would just use the limiter and we could just like limited maybe maybe the releasable increase a lot. It'll just kinda even it out. Turn on the volume else too loud, right. Okay, so we're gonna keep the ARP will highlight the area. Let's go to a new sound. We have all these different types of sounds that we can select. And when myself as a beam acre, What I'm thinking is like, okay, let's try some flute sounds and I make a lot of different beats with these types of sounds. So you can here this is a very soft sounds. So when we're talking about timbre, let's just look at the frequency spectrum. So a very soft sound, it's a very powerful melody, is a very powerful sound. But what I'm trying to say is something like this is really going to get lost in the mix. So how do we get it to stand out? So first of all, I'm hearing tons and tons of reverb and that's gonna be the first thing to fix. The next thing is again, compression and limiting and distortion. So let's just add a distortion on here. Let's add it to a mixer inserts just so you can kinda see that. So I'll just add this to the skull 15. So 15, this one goes to 15 and you can play distortion directly on or if you wanted, you could send it in parallel, which is probably best practice. You can kind of blend in what you want. We hear it, we hear the distortion. You can do stuff like that. I usually have these as very general effects that I can reuse for multiple instruments when I start mixing my music. So if I wanted to do a distortion send. So I'm gonna go back to my history and the school history, and I will just remove the routing. Okay. So we have this. So in my opinion, in this track, because this is a unique sound where I want unique distortion. I'm just going to adjust for distortion. And let's just give that the same color. And we'd come here and again hit F3 is to keep that same color going. And so what's going to happen is I can send it here and I can add the distortion and right there. Okay, So here we go. So very, very loud. I'm just going to pull it back. So it helped the distortion. With the distortion. Now, another thing I'm hearing out of this sound is actually it has a long tail. So what does that mean? So what's happening is I can't I actually can't play it quick. So here in Texas and pretty much any synthesizer, you can pull back on the release and you're going to get quicker sounds. So check this out here, how it's cutting off. I don't want the release that tight and that flute will stand out. No problem. Alright, look how many instruments we have. And I do think that each one adds its own kind of thing to the beat. And the biggest thing is you'll see that once we start building out a song. Okay? Those, those fluids, I'm really trying to make work. That could be something like just for the chorus because I do think it adds to the course. I may have to eat you those in a certain way. Let's try one other sound here again, I'm just going to clone it from here. We have the woodwinds and the Highlander. So I want to go to woodwinds and I heard a cool sound. I think it's this one. I think that this is a sound that could really stand out. It's very sharp. So I was talking to you about volume. We have a sound which is a long playing sounds such as this one. And the volume is going to have to be very low for this kind of sound. It's very high in frequency. It's a very aggressive, it really cuts through nice, not too aggressive. Alright, so let's see if we can try and find something down lower than the mids. Again, in the very low end. It's kinda done in this track. It's like I have the kick drum, I have the base. You're not really going to fit anything in there. If you want to, you you'd be really tricky. In my opinion. I usually I'm happy with where it is. Now focusing on the mids, high, as you can hear that it's a very full sound. Huge. Again, a lot of effects on, and it's not just Nexus, it's pretty much every synthesized or they're always trying to make their preset sound the best. You just got to dial it back a little bit. 234. So I'm just going to quantize everything. So again, I'm just going to turn up the volume. I'm going to have to really hear this, especially when you're trying to fine tune the melody to the chorus. We're starting to add in quite a few instruments now. But again, when I'm making my beats, when you don't have vocals, sometimes it's hard to know when to stop. But for myself, I always like to try to find tons and tons of different melodies because as they start to build out the beat, I'm telling you it just gives you so much more flexibility. So let's just listen to it in the verse first and then I'll try to bring into the course. Same thing here. I might have to really limit this because what's happening is I'm hearing that the high-end of the sound, but the meat of the sound is being lost. Now when I'm mixing the beat, when it comes to a sound like this, it's like, I know that already have at my low-end and stuff. Guess so I'm gonna bring this up a little bit. Without it. If I'm going to do this, I'd bring it back here. Just like a little bit on that low end. But a really good producer knows when to stop. I'm just going to keep adding until it's just like too much. Alright, so we're just kinda keep going just a little bit more. Something like a pad I think is gonna be really hard to cut through in a mixed like this. And so what's a pad? Again, it's one of those slow swelling sound. So how can we make a sound like this standout? First of all, tons and tons of reverb, we want to remove that low-end and then also appear in the AMP. You can see that we can do our release again. This is going to tighten up the tail. Alright, so I'm just going to hit record and replay this. So here we go. Okay, cool. So I'll just play it like that. Right here. I'm seeing I played the OneNote off a little bit, so I'm just gonna bring it over, pull it on shift and the scroll wheel to do this, right? And let's just play it as is, even though the notes are a little bit off. Again, I told you timing. If our notes are a little off time, that can make them stand out in their own way. And also because this is a PAD which is slow, right? When we have a slow attack, the attack can listen. Some sounds are like that. So if you have a late note or something, it's not as noticeable when a sound is like very quick like this. The timing really does. It's really noticeable. Okay, so let's try this again. Perfect. I think that's really, really powerful and we'll just play this cell, this really add to the verse. So one thing I'm just hearing here is just, it's just so powerful that it's like overtaking the whole track. So we got to, so mindset would be the only other uses in the chorus, or we have the EQ it in such a way. So this one can come to a new mixer insert, Let's go to 18. If I was making the B, I would make sure to like, let's say if this is the guitar, I will make sure to go like guitar and then same color and stuff. It had made sure to get this all organized. But I'm just trying to go fast. I'm just going to come here to an EQ and I'm just going to do this lightly. Again when we have an auto gain EQ, you gotta be a little bit careful because it can. In this case, I don't know where I want to go with it, which means that something like this could be powerful. So in other words, if I'm turning this down, it's actually turning it up and it's kind of compensating the frequencies. That's the benefit of an EQ like this. If I have my instrument exactly where I want and I'm just like, Hey, do you know what I want to maybe cut just a little bit right there. That is where I would disable that because then it's not skewing the other frequencies. It's just focusing where I want it to focus on. In this case, I'm going to enable it where I'm going to try to find what's going to benefit this instrument. We are here in the reverse of the track. Let's just say, let's look at the effects. I did nothing on that limiting. Let's just hear the difference care. So 90 just slipped in case we want to go back. So let's bring it back a little bit. So obviously too loud. And again, that low end. So in this case, let's say I like the EQ the way it is. And they can have the auto gain on. I can open up another EQ and I'm going to disable this auto gain. And I'm going to maybe remove some of the low end. Now, there's a couple of ways we could do that. We could use a bell-shape. We could use the low shelf, which is what I'm gonna do. Or again, you can use the low cut like this. It's up to you what you wanna do. I'm just gonna just kinda tame it. Alright, so don't be afraid to just do stuff like this. Pull back a little bit. Okay, so again, now we're kinda crossing between mixing and making a beat. And I don't want to go there in this course. But there you guys go. Tons and tons of instruments. And each one really did have its own flavor to the beat. This is like the main melody of the track. A lot of effects on here again, we can kinda pulled back. No, just listening. Here is this sound again. For me, I would probably come here, take this EQ, and I would probably try to EQ in such a way where I'm not really hearing it kind of out of pitch. Maybe something like that. I don't know. Again, I'm mixing them solo. That's dangerous. You want to mixing something like that, okay, We also have this lead. Listen to all the effects on there. So again, if I was going to be mixing this track, I would select in here, pull back on some of the stuff we got going on. We have this sound. This is the base. So I'm hearing it kinda clicky. So this could be something regarding the volume envelope where either we want to have a little bit softer attack and maybe a little bit longer release, but I do want that attack fast. Okay, here's the arc. Lot of effects. Again, tons and tons of effects, right? I'm telling you it really eats up your space for your next. Still sounds really awesome, just as is. We also have those weird flutes we added in. Gonna be a little bit careful because of the distortion. So in the case of this, I can actually pull it back just a little bit. Alright, we have this bell sound. Might need to be squashed a little bit more, is sounding a little bit thin. So it has high end, it has some body. I think it's kinda lacking in the mids. Kinda like in here. It feels like it's like it's kinda sounds like it's like lacking. Let's just leave it around here. And again, when we have our EQs, you want to be able to turn it off. And on. Social pull back a little bit. When I turn off and on this EQ, we should be hearing a pretty fair volume comparison. So this sounds very natural, very normal sounding. Sounds like I'm processing it pretty hard. So I'm just going to hold back a little bit. And then we have this sound, which is the pad I added in with you, which really added tons and tons of fullness. Let's see if we can add one more end and then we'll wrap up this video. Just kinda sharing with you how you can approach sounds selections. So we have a super full beat. What is one instrument that we can add in here that would allow fullness and improve the beat. So we already have a bass sound in there. We already have a bell. There's a brass, which is like horns and stuff like that. Really, really powerful stuff. Let's try this trumpet lead. Again, tons and tons of effects. Let's crank it up. This trumpet is not going to fit in this area. Guess or I'm playing it. I crank it up. Let's go up higher with it though. It's still really, really fighting with what we have is to try go higher up in the high-end. But when it gets, I'm going to cut through this, try going a little lower. So like I said, we've usually don't want to play anything really, really low because we already got that low end. We've got that base, we've got that kick. So we've got the G-sharp, D-sharp, A-sharp, and then up to the sea. This adds so much fullness to this B, I think I wanna go lower though. Alright, so this type of sound is Horn, has tons of low-end tons of fullness. Again, let's do the quick and dirty trick here. If I was going to be mixing this myself, I wouldn't be spending a lot of this stuff to mix or inserts. And I would be opening up EQs and compressors. Let's just try to work on this. So do you hear it before and after? I just want to hear that low-end nice and thick and huge gas pulled back. We're just going to send this to another mixer, insert as so I'm just going to compress this a little bit harder, just trying to make it really even sounding. We will focus on the EQ. Now. We're going to pull back a little bit on this low-end. Bring up the brightness. Now, this is the problem of an auto gain EQ. If I'm going to boost up the brightness where the low end goal is gone. So turn off the auto gain. So without the effects, the low-end might be a little too much for this beak. Cuts, tighten it up a little bit. So let's put this horn or the trumpet and its own pattern. And so this is what it sounds like. Maybe too loud. I like the beat, I liked the melodies. Now it's just a fact of getting all of these instruments to flow throughout the arrangement, which is a totally different mindset to learn as a producer. So we make the beat with sound placement, which is what you've learned here. We then move on to sound selection, making sure that we're using the right sounds in the right areas, that they're not really fighting with each other if it's not standing out, the first thing to try is volume. Increase the volume. Oh, that's all it was. If it's not volume, then you're going to play up an octave, down an octave. Try to find that sweet spot. Always being careful of the super low-end. Be careful of the base, be careful of the eight away. Also be careful of the kick. And then when it comes to the melodies, think about do I want them to be plucky, like short vote? Want them to be longer. And I'm going to be playing single notes, and they're going to be playing chords. These are all things to think about. Okay? Alright, let's move on to the next video. 11. 5-1 - Length of Your Sound: Alright, in this video, I want to quickly talk about length of sounds just to give a little bit more clarity for you guys. So what I'm trying to say here is when we have our notes, these are quick notes. Metronome. The first thing I want to talk to you about is the actual envelope. So right now we have our notes and if we increase the release, listen to how long those notes become. So if we have another sound, go analog, we will go basic shapes. And again, if you click here, you have all your different shapes you can go through. So here in serum, what we can do is we can create things like plucks. I'm just going to go to a new envelope and we can just click and drag it on the cutoff. And what this will do is it will accentuate the brightness. We're also going to bring this down, bring this in a little bit more. Check this out. Hit play here, how much more it's cutting through. So all I'm trying to say to you is we have our sounds, even though they look shortened tail. We have a very long release, which means that it's a long tail and the sound itself doesn't really have much attached to it. It's a very soft sound, very gentle sound. We go down to the other sound and this is a much more aggressive sound. Alright, let's try a different waveform. Let's try more distortion. So you could just hear how much it's cutting through. Okay, so that is just what I wanted to get across to you. Long notes, short notes. You have to think about how aggressive is it in terms of its timber, right? If we are applying distortion and the sound is very aggressive, if we look at, again the spectrum, you look at this one. So looking at our frequency analyzer is not really going to help you much in regards to when you're making your beats. At the beginning of this course, it was just good for you to understand what's going on. But again, look, that's not fundamental. Here's that fundamental. That's all there is to it. That is the same pitch we're playing over top of it. And what we call the overtones are the harmonics, which gives us that tamber, that flavor. Alright, so I hope that gave you some clarity into timing of the note. And what I'm talking about is just how long does that note play out that can really take up a lot of space in the mix. That can also be used for fullness. So it's not to say it's bad, but just understand that not every single sound can be long tailing. Sometimes you just want some short sounds. Sometimes you want some sounds that are a little pluck easier than others, and that will allow you to take advantage of many sounds all in the same area. Alright. 12. 5-2 - Using Octaves for Sound Selection: Alright, in this video, I just wanted to give you a quick example of taking advantage of octaves. Alright? So again, we have our frequency spectrum, or Lowe's or mids and highs. If I play the same sound as before, which has that long tail, it's just like this. I'm going to right-click and clone it. So now we have, I'm just gonna go sound too. Alright. So it's the exact same sound. I'm going to pull back the tail on the second sound. Now, I'm going to play the sound in the exact same frequency area. It's really hard to really hear it. Let's try playing a lower. So you can actually see it gets too low. Right here. We're able to use the same sound at lower and take advantage of the frequency spectrum. So let's go up, hire somebody like this. This is probably going to cut through the low, low, really cut through the very, very high, high, cut through for obvious reasons that we're taking advantage of the full frequency spectrum where we are using similar sounds in the same frequency area. And they're not like a pluck sound like this one. It's just cutting through no matter what. That's super, super low. Right? We go back to the same sound and I'll do the same thing. Doesn't hear it. It's cutting through in its own way. Too high, even just for usability, it's just way too high. I probably would never use that. That's okay. Cuts through. Now, the reason why we can hear it is just because of the timing of the notes, the sound placement where we're placing our sounds. So if you have wise sound placement, it can make your sounds stand out. So if you have poor sound selection, wise sound placement will typically always win. And a lot of people don't think about this stuff. So take advantage of your sounds. Make sure to play different octaves. Sometimes you can be really creative, such as this baseline. Play it up high. It can be an extremely powerful lead in your beat. Alright, let's move on to the next video. 13. 5-3 - Single Notes vs Chords Fullness: Alright, in this video, I want to talk to you about single notes versus courts. Alright? When we're using a single note, it's going to take up much less space in the mix. When we play a chord, it takes up way more space, which is good if you're looking for fullness. But if you're looking for a sound, a new melody or something, you can get away with just using a single note to add way more melodies in your music without them all fighting with each other, right? It sounds really simple, but a lot of people who don't think about it, a single note takes up less frequencies, a chord takes up more frequencies. I'll just shirt just a quick example because it's pretty straightforward. If we play a note, we play a chord versus a single node, single note chord. Okay? So if you want just more melodies in your track without it taking up more space, you can use your single notes. If you want to add more fullness to your track, you can look towards courts if you've never thought about it, now you're aware of it. Okay. 14. 5-4 - Dry Notes vs Wet Notes Reverb: In this video, I want to quickly talk to you about dry notes, first, wet notes. So not all effects push your music into the background. There's only certain effects, things like really like reverb. It's like a big one. Delay can also push it back if we want to sound boring or face the dry sound. If we want it more pushed back, you can look towards reverb, added some detuned backend to make it sound folder again. But now you know that if you have a dry note, you want something right in your face. There you go. We want something pushed back a little bit. You can use your reverb. Reverb is something super special and our music, right? But there you guys go. So I just wanted to let you be aware of dry notes versus wet notes. And as you saw throughout this course, when I was making the beat with you, I kept dialing back that reverb for really kinda cleaning up the tail. I wasn't really so focused on making it in your face are kinda pushing back in the mix. But this is something you can think about that if you have a couple of different melodies and you want something in your face, less reverb on something pushed back, you can just add more reverb and that's dry notes. It's in your face. Wet notes are kinda pushed back. Wet notes really sell more musical. And so there you guys go. Another trick in your back pocket tools. Let's move on. 15. 5-5 - Trance Gate for Fullness and Space: Alright, in this video, I wanted to talk to you about a trans gate just further because I mentioned it to you. I talked about it in one of the previous videos where we were talking about sounds selection and stuff as we're building out a B I think there. But I want to make a dedicated video and make it easy for you. Alright, so not all virtual instruments allow for a trans gate. So a transcript, what it's doing is it is muting the sound rhythmically. Alright, so in other words, if I played a sound like this, It's sustain if I enable the transcript. Okay, you're getting this rhythmic gating. So this is it without the trans gate. Sounds like this. With the trans gate. There we go. Alright. Could be too aggressive though, so you can pull it back. You have your speed. Now, what makes this so powerful as it's built right in to the virtual instrument. You don't have to open up any other plugins. And then again, you have tons of different presets that they give you are right. So here it is again, without the transcript. So it would actually play the sustained notes. But because we have a gate on, it is muting wherever it is not clicked in. You can make it faster. In this case, again, the mix might be aggressive. And then your delay in your reverb can really play off of these sounds as well. Right? Now, one thing I just want to quickly share with you before moving on is essentially this is just a gate. So if I play this sound right here, we open up a gate. Now, you can use the fruity limiter to do this. You can see it has its gate section right here. So I'll just bring this all the way down. First of all, we will hit play. So this is what a gate is doing. Any volume that is underneath this yellow line gets turned down. Alright, that's what a gate does. And it's actually a very powerful technique for music production. The fruity limiter, it isn't as customizable as pro G. So I'll open that up for you. So pro G is a gate to plug-in. Again, you have your ratio, you have a range, you have an attack of release, a hold, a knee, a look ahead. Common things that you might see on a compressor. So this gives you so much flexibility when you are wanting to do gating. But we will just use the fruity limiter and I'll just share a cool trick with you. When we create this trans gate like this. When we create that chance gate, essentially all it's doing is it's just automating this. So it's turning on and off for us automatically, which is really, really awesome. So it'd be like this. I will just create an automation clip. And then we will just create a point here. And I'm gonna make it hold. And then we'll also come here and make this hold as well. So whenever it's down, it's off, which means we're going to hear it. But you can see how tedious this is and that's why something like Nexus is so awesome. But you can see how hard this is and it just takes so long to create a gate like that. Now, if you do have gross beat, so let's go to modulate. And I have gross B. Again, I have organized my Effects and it just makes things really easy as you can see. So here's gross beat. Now gross be allows you to go down here into the volume. So this one up here is time. It does like all like manipulation of time. I'm just gonna go empty, but you can see if I select volume, let's just listen to this. So what we've got going on is we have this instrument, this piano, and I'll play it in the playlist. Ok, so let's get rid of all of these limiters are these gates. And we're just focused on gross beat now cat. So again, the easiest way is to do it with a trans gate. Right? So simple, gross be, allows you to do this to get and this is why, this is why it's off. If you don't want to be as drastic, we can pull it back. We're going to pick a different one will go faster. Let's try it. Again. Can be drastic. Pull back the volume a little bit. It's kind of a mix knob. Now, these are some presets that they've designed for us. So now we're kind of getting into that nexus. The next is kinda trans gate right here, right? And then I'll tease you guys because in the next video, I'm going to do side-chain compression because I was talking about, you might want to do side-chain compression and I just want to share a couple of quick ways of how you can do that in the other video. But what we'll do here is we will apply some side-chain compression. And if you are confused here right now, don't worry, you will follow along in the next video. So what I've done is I've routed the kick drum into the instrument to be seen as a trigger. And you're going to see that we can see the kick drum now. I'll bring it down. I'm urging get pumping, pumping, right? And the reason why I wanted to share this with you in this sounds selection course is because it is taking a sound and it's rhythmically making it musical. And it's removing the instrument and bring it back in. And really it's just kinda create, allowing you to create space as well as add rhythm. It's just a really powerful trick that a lot of people may not know about as a producer. Okay, let's move on to the next video which will be about side-chain compression and just different ways you can approach that. 16. 5-6 - Sidechain Compression with Sound Selection: Alright, in this video, I want to talk to you about side-chain compression. I have brought up a couple of different examples. So we will use the fruity limiter. Well, we will use a third party plugin to show you how to do that. We will show you how to do it off of an EQ. And I'll also do a third party EQ as well. And I'll also show you the fruit UP controller, which is super, super powerful. You also for other things as well. So what is side-chain compression? What is the purpose of it? And the different ways we can do it, which I'll share here. Okay, so the purpose of side chain compression, there's actually a couple of different purposes for it, depending what you're wanting to do. If you are wanting to clean up the low-end, e.g. if you have a kick drum with a basic tail and you have a baseline, you can be using side-chain compression, e.g. if the kick drum plays, it can reduce this. That's one use of it. Another use of side-chain compression is let's say I'm talking to you and I want to reduce the volume of the music. Let's say you're doing video editing or even in broadcast. A lot of times if someone talks on the microphone, the music goes down when they stopped talking to music and automatically come back in. That's also another form of side-chain compression. And another way to use side-chain compression is for rhythm. So e.g. a lot of times we have our kick drum and it's being routed to the piano like I shared in the previous video. We'll do it together in just a moment. And if I turn this on again, you can hear the kick drum turning down the volume of the piano and it creates a pumping sound, which is very common in dance music like this. Okay, good. I could be more aggressive on it, right? Without it. You just hear how it's just a normal beat piano kick. If I enable this, you're going to see the pumping. The whole goal of side-chain compression in this case is you want to dial it in that the pumping sounds and musical and not to over accentuated, you just want it sounding just right. So let's talk about how to set this up. Alright, so if you have any insert, any Insert can route anywhere in FL Studio. If you simply click one and turn it all the way down, now it can be used as a trigger. So in other words, insert 12 can see insert 13s volume activity. So in other words, if I play 11, which is the kick drum, if I want the piano to see the activity, I would turn it down. If I want to send it as like a subgroup or anything like that. If you know more about the mixer, as soon as you turn up the volume, you are essentially duplicating the audio. So we wanted to bring this all the way down and this is the same thing. It's just going side chain to this track. It just makes it easier. Watch if I go wrote to this track, I can just turn it down. And now it's the same thing as going side chain to this track. Okay? Alright, so now that the kick drum is being sent to ten as a trigger, if we go to Insert ten. Now, not all compressors have what's called an external side chain. All compressors have an internal side chain. In other words, if it's going to be compressing, it just compresses against its own audio signal. But if you want to use an external input, e.g. if we want this kick drum to go into the piano to be seen as a trigger to reduce the volume. That is where you need to have external side chain. And the fruity limiter does have that. You can see we ever here, here's the kick, and then you can adjust your parameters. However you wanna do that. Alright, so I'm not going to be talking about how to dial in settings. That's something that you would really have to kind of practice to get it where you want. Alright, so that is one way we can be doing side-chain compression. I'll also share how to set that up with a third party plugin. So in the case of proceed to this is how you do it. You're going to click the gear cog. You're going to come here. You are going to go to processing and you're going to see stereo side chain. Okay, So we have stereo n, but we want the side chain. Again, we go kick, come back. And so in proceed to, you're going to hit the side chain down here, you're going to click External. And so now it's going to happen is when the kick drum plays. That's the kick drum. If I were to go in, we don't see it. So again, every compressor has an internal side chain, which means that this piano, if I hit Play, this is the piano. It's just compressing against itself. If I want the kick drum to trigger this, I go external. Now. That's the kick drum. And again, we can be aggressive. This has auto gain. I'm going to turn it off. Now, do you hear how clear that kick drum pops through? Turned off. We hear the piano more fuller and the kick drum kinda gets lost a little bit. Now watch how clear the kick drum is. So that is how you can do so much in compression. With a third party compressor, will turn that off. And so. This is another way you can do it now you don't have to write it this way. When we have the fruity peak controller. Now this is unique to FL Studio. So if you're using another doll, this is unique to FL Studio. The fruity peak controller is probably one of the most powerful plugins in FL Studio. It allows you to use this volume as a trigger for anything. So in FL Studio, if you right-click and go link to controller, the fruity peak controller creates what's called an internal controller. If I open this up, you can see fruity PI controller and kick. In. Other words, if I were to play the kick drum, I can literally control almost anything in FL Studio based off of this kick drum because it has now created an internal controller. Okay, So we have peak, LFO, peak and LFO in my case, I just want volume controlling so I would select peak. Alright? So we have to decide what do we want to control. So I'll leave this up here. We're gonna go to the piano. And now this is where you can do side-chain compression on just the low end. Alright? So how do we do that? This one right here does the volume just right-click go link to controller. Because again, we have an internal controller available to us, which is this from the kick drum. You're going to go peek and accept. Now, if I hit play, you're going to see that I'm going to have the ability to manipulate band ones up and down volume whenever the kick drum plays. Check that out. So in this case it is opposite. So let's bring up the volume. I'm going to right-click. I'm going to go type in value. We're gonna go 0.5. Okay, that's going to put it back to normal because I guess one is 40 is bottom and then 0.5 is normal. So if I play the kick drum, you can see that it is actually increasing the volume of the eight. Oh wait, if we bring the volume the other way, it's going to decrease the volume of the eight away. Alright? And you can fine tune how you want this to go. If you want to change the band, you can do that. You just select whatever band you want. So there again, if this might be too drastic, so sometimes you just want just a little bit. The goal here is if the Ada weights playing at the same time, we're trying to make it so that they, essentially they're not fighting. And you can see it's also going very, very fast. So this is where you can adjust the decay time. So right now it's even faster. So this is slower over here. But this is not good because it's not returning to its volume and time. So we want to bring that up a little bit. I'm not saying that this is good or bad, but I'm just saying if you have a problem with your kick and your AIDL eight, this is how you can do it. Now let me share how to do this with a third party plugin. If you want to do the same thing, let's say with pro Q3, I'm going to show you two ways to do it. So one is the exact same way. So let's say I create the band like this. You're able to right-click this knob. And if you're not able to right-click a third party knob, you just move the knob and you come up here to tools and you can see last tweaked. And then that would be the link to controller which you can do. I wanna go to LinkedIn controller and then on the internal controller we will go peak. So whenever the kick drum plays, There you go. So we can adjust this however we want. You can actually even increase frequencies whenever the kick drum plays. One unique thing that pro Q3 has is it actually has dynamic EQ. And instead of opening up this, I'm just going to mute this. Okay? So now we actually have to route it with side-chain compression. So in other words, we want to be able to see it as a trigger. So I'll right-click here, go side-chain to this track. Again, that's the exact same thing as if I click, if I left-click, right there, left-click and turn down the volume, it's the same thing as just going side chain to this track. They kick drum is being sent to the piano as a trigger off of the pro Q3. Again, I'm going to click here, click here, go processing. And we want to go to side chain. Okay, So this EQ can actually do side-chain compression. It's what they call it dynamic EQ. And so I have enabled this right here, okay, I have to click Auto and it turns it to manual mode. And then this little button right here is the side chain. In my opinion, I think this is kinda confusing how they have it laid out. And so if I play the kick drum, you're going to see as a trigger, that's the kick drum. If I disable it, we do not see that volume. And that is because the kick drum is being routed to the piano just to be seen as a trigger. We don't hear it. We just see it whenever it plays. And so I'm going to enable it. We can see it as a trigger. And so what this is is how much compression do you want? And then this is the threshold. So if it's under the threshold, it will compress all the way. And this is essentially like the range, which means it's just how much compression do you want to happen? So it won't go more than, let's say 4 db. So that's the max it'll go, you can do this with multiple things. I can increase the volume here. So let's go side chain. And so you can see, look at this. So if I have the piano, but this is kind of weird stuff. I'm just sharing with you. How we can do things for side-chain compression to control things. So if something is causing us a problem, many times, it's nice to be able to dynamically. Control something when something plays. And that's what I'm trying to share with you. So I'll just share one quick example again with a real piano and guitar here. I just thought, I just wanted to give a little more clarity before wrapping up this video. Here is this piano and guitar. Let's just say the, it's not standing up very well. So I'm going to take this guitar. So I'm highlighted on the guitar. I will hit Control L, that's the keyboard shortcut. I hold Alt and the left arrow. I'm going to put the fruity PI controller on the guitar. Now when you add this plugin on, you'll see has mute, You have to unmute it. So now whenever the guitar plays can be used as a trigger anywhere in FL Studio. So e.g. let's go back to this piano. All the effects are off. So let's open up a new EQ as gold for the permission EC2. And this is a really, really powerful trick. So again, I'm just going to right-click, let's say this one. Go link to controller. And now you're going to see we have two of them, so we have to be careful. Do you want the kick drum or do we want the guitar? I want the guitar, its peak, which means volume. Let's accept it. The guitarist, we can hear super clear, but in this case this is not what we're wanting. Okay? So let's bring this up to type and value. We'll go 0.5. And we're going to turn down the volume. And again, you can adjust this wherever you want. And if it is too fast, you're gonna kinda get it weird like this, not to say it's going to sound bad. Remember a lot of music is with your ears, but sometimes it's nice to have things maybe just a little bit more natural, more smoother. Again, you can play with that tension, Rebecca decay. So as you can see when I adjust the tension, we're able to see the audio a little bit more sensitive. Maybe a little too fast. Again. This is a tool to use if there's a serious problem, like you have two instruments that just aren't standing out. Or if you want to do this for vocals, Let's say you have a vocal and you want to reduce the whole volume of the whole mix, let's say around, let's say I'm I to k or something. You can reduce the volume of all your music and you can keep your vocal available. Alright, so that is this video about side-chain compression. And essentially when we talk about side-chain compression, It's like being able to dynamically manipulate your audio based off of other audio. And I share tons of examples. Just your basic side-chain compression, right? For your turning down your volume of everything, which is the full frequency spectrum I shared how to do just certain areas. Again, you can select different styles of bands to do that too. And that's it. So let's move on to the final video in the course where we're just wrapping up what to think about with sound selection. As I was saying, there's so much to know regarding sound selection in your beets. I hope you've enjoyed this course. So let's wrap up in the final video here. 17. [OUTRO] Sound Selection in Beats Tutorial and Tips: Alright, so I hope you enjoyed this course about sound selection. There is so much to know about sound selection and I tried to break it down in just a real-world setting for you guys when we were making a b, how it actually approach sounds selection. So when we want to take advantage of lots of different instruments in our music, these are all the different tricks that we have. Are you using single notes? Are you using cords? Are you taking advantage of different octave so that you can spread your sounds around? I have here again, the length of the note is the length. Short? Is it long? Again, just because you played the note, short doesn't mean that the node is actually short. Also sound placement, where are you placing your sounds within the track? That is huge. And then sound selection builds off of your sound placement. So again, I hope you enjoyed this course about sound selection. If you guys ever have questions or would like me to cover a different course, always feel free to reach out. I'm gratuitous. My name is Riley Weller. I'm an FL Studio Trainer. Thanks for checking out this course and I'll talk to you in the next one.