Ultimate Electronic Music Production, Mixing, and Mastering in FL Studio

1. Course Trailer & Overview: So you have a desire to produce professional sounding EDM tracks. Maybe you're struggling with a particular issue that just keeps happening. Maybe you feel like your track is missing something, but you just can't quite put your finger on it. Or maybe you're already an expert just looking to learn new tips and techniques. Whether you're a beginner, intermediate, or an expert producer. This course will provide you with invaluable production techniques and secrets to take your EDM tracks to the next level. Hi there, my name is Ben and I have been producing music for over ten years. In that time, I've been able to release innumerable tracks with record labels, composed music for games and TV, even design and mixed sound for film. So what makes me the best instructor for you? Well, in this course, we'll be learning music production from an actual music producer. You see, I understand the typical struggles that can limit producers from ever reaching their full potential. And I want to rectify that by teaching everything that I've learned over the years as a music producer. If you complete this course, you will be able to structure your track effectively, builds layer drum patterns that found fast-food. Both you will know how to tweak synthesisers to make them sound the way you liked or even create your own sounds from scratch. You will have an understanding of how a vocoder works, how to use EQ compression saturation, and even find and correct phase issues within your track. I will guide you through the entire process from proposing each individual element, tips for arrangement and track structure, mixing and mastering. There's also some projects along the way. So I can well, you understand the concepts and there's even an opportunity to interact with and receive feedback from fellow students who have also taken course. Mao for the formalities. The ideal student for this course will have a digital audio workstation. So FL Studio, Ableton Logic, or any other software that you can use to create music. You will have to know how to use the software so that you can replicate the tips and techniques that I discussed a demonstrates. You must also have a very basic understanding of music theory. And when I say basic, I mean understand the difference between minor and major, and know what the fifth note of the scale is. If you think that you have these requirements under your belt, then this course is definitely for you. Anyway, I don't want to waste your time with fancy vegetables are both words. I want you to learn and grow your producers skills to the highest possible standard. So what do you waiting around for? Add this course to your pairs checkout and get your hands on this complete and comprehensive electronic music theory and production costs. Hi there and welcome to this electronic music theory and production course. My name is Ben, and my aim is to teach you everything that I know and everything that you need to know about creating a professional EDM track. I did my best to try and structure this course and a logical, easy-to-follow format. But if it starts to become confusing, please let me know and I will make some updates as soon as I can. I would advise you to get some headphones or speakers for the duration of this course, there are examples and demonstrations throughout that you need to be able to hear. A phone or laptop speaker won't be as accurate as a pair of headphones and you may end up missing something important. So make sure you get yourself some good headphones and have them plugged in as you progress through the course, make sure you join the B on music and sound Facebook group. It's just a little community where we can all come together, chat, share ideas and projects, and ask each other questions. I will also be posting updates for future courses in this group. So if you enjoyed this course, make sure you join that Facebook group to, to receive updates about my future courses. And finally, don't forget to rate the course and leave a review. I'd love to hear about your experience and your feedback is important so I can improve this course and other courses. It also helps other students who are searching for courses. So if you think a certain course has beneficial, your review can actually help another student to choose the right course for them. Let's have a look now at the course overview and what you can expect to find as you progress through the course. So by the end of the course, you will know exactly how to compose structure and produce a full EDM track. You will also know the theory behind how these tracks operates and exactly how to build every element of your track. I actually give you the individual elements of your track first. So that's just everything you need to know before we begin to arrange a full track. Things like how to automate, how to build drums, and how to chop vocals will all be covered before we actually begin to arrange anything. Essentially, as you progress through the course, you'll be practicing various techniques of electronic music composition. And then when you get to the arrangement stage, you will use these techniques and methods that you've learned to create a full track from scratch. Following this, we will have a look at essential mixing techniques and how you can use different plugins to really shape and blend your track together. We'll also look at some mastering so your track can be loud and stand up to other tracks that you compare it against. There are also some projects along the way so that I can see how well your understanding the material and also for you to practice your new skills. Or you can just show off your talent to me and other students by posting these projects in the Facebook group. So let's jump into the course now and start learning how to create a professional EDM track. I can't wait to see what you come up with. 2. Characteristics of EDM: Let's examine some of the characteristics of EDM. It's important to be aware of how a particular genre of music is recognized so that you can be sure your track files under the right heading. The first characteristic of EDM is that it has a high and steady tempo. Tempo is just a fancy word for how fast a piece of music actually is. So if we take a look at our tempo meter up here, we can see that it's set to 126 beats per minute. Beats per minutes, or BPM, is just another word for tempo, but it's a more scientific Reading. 126 bpm means that there are 126 musical beats per minute of music. Anything above around 115 BPM can be considered high. The higher the BPM, the more frantic and energetic your track will sound. So keep this in mind when you're choosing the BPM for your track. Because EDM has a steady tempo, we do what's called a set and forget with the BPM meter. As EDM progresses, the tempo must stay the same. Some other genres like classical will change the tempo throughout the piece. But in EDM, we generally don't do this unless it's for a very, very specific purpose. So set your tempo and forget about it for the rest of your track. Another characteristic to be aware of is that there are two distinct subdivisions of EDM. There is four on the floor and there's break beat. This simply refers to the style of drum pattern that each of these subdivisions contain. In foreign the floor, the kick drum is steady and uniform throughout and it falls on all four beats of the bar. It's the most common drum pattern used in electronic music. And it's great for nightclubs as it allows audiences to jump up and down to the beat. Let's have a listen to a foreign, the floor pattern. The other subdivision then is known as break beat. In this subdivision, the kick drum is not steady and uniform and can fall before or after the four beats of a bar. In this example, some of the kicks samples are falling before the beat of the bar. And that gives the rhythm a slightly funkier field. Let's have a listen now to the break beat example. It's really up to you which subdivision you want to create. Some tracks, even combine the two together. But it's important to be aware that they do exist before beginning to arrange your track. Edm is always set in 44 time. Outdoors, we'll use the setting as a default, but it's important that you don't change it to something like 34 time. If you are making EDM, 44 time simply means that you can count out four distinct beats in every buyer. The reason we keep EDM in 44 time is because it is designed so that listeners can easily dance to the music. 44 time has the least complex of rhythms of all other time signatures, which means that less concentration is needed to dance to the beat. It also means that DJs can easily play or track into their sets. As 44 time is easy to mix into other 44 time tracks. Edm is very repetitive in nature and you will find that you repeating things often. There are some tips I will give you later on in the course that will help you attract to sound less repetitive and flow much better. But for now, you don't need to worry about this. In the next lecture, we'll look at how EDM is structured so that you can build your track on a solid foundation. 3. Breaking Down EDM Structure (Part 1): In this lecture, we will break down the structure of EDM so that we can build our track with a solid foundation. Pore structure is one of the most obvious signs that attract was produced badly and it's not all that difficult to understand. So let's get stuck into the content and structure attracts properly from the very beginning. The first section of an EDM track is called the introduction or the intro. Now the intro actually serves no purpose other than being important for DJs to be able to mix your track into other tracks. However, because EDM is designed with his purpose in mind, we must include an intro and our tracks. An intro is typically eight to 24 bars long, but it can be longer if you wish to build attention of your track more slowly. The intro should also hint at some main elements in your track. So for example, if you're a breakdown has a cool piano chord pattern, then you should probably hint at that piano pattern in your intro. Maybe by fading it in slowly as the intro progresses. It's actually quite important to include these hints in your intro because it allows audiences to immediately recognize your track as soon as a DJ places. The intro should also build slightly into the breakdown. What this means is that as your intro plays, there should be more and more elements being introduced. An intro usually starts out quite empty and then ends with a full hint of what's going to happen in the breakdown or drop of your track. So let's have a listen to this example of an intro. Listen out for how the court pattern becomes much louder in the second half of the intro and how the producer brings in new drums as the intro progresses. In that intro example, you could also hear how there were some upstreams and risers towards the end that we're building tension as the breakdown approaches. Next, we'll take a look at the breakdown section. This is where the tension from the intro gets relieved and the energy is at its lowest. We are literally breaking down the track into its smallest elements before building it back up. The breakdown is also where you can find the main hulk of a track. And it often has very little to no drums. This is so that it sounds much more smooth and free than the other sections of the track. A breakdown can be anywhere from eight to 32 bars long. Let's listen to the breakdown of our example Track. Notice how it introduces the main chord pattern that was hinted at in the intro. And also how it's very empty with a smooth and free rhythm. Let's take a look now at the buildup section in EDM and how it's used in terms of arrangement. So the buildup is one of the most important sections of an EDM track. Overdo it and you may kill the drop. But under doers and the drop may sound out of place. I will be talking about something called the intensity graph in the arrangement section. And we can use this to make sure that we don't overdo or undo the buildup. But for now, just take note of what the buildup should be doing. To build up is designed to tell the listener that something big is coming, which is the drop. It's used to build tension so that when the release of the drop finally comes, it feels much more intense. A typical buildup is anywhere from eight to 16 bars long, with 16 bars being quite long for a buildup. Let's see what our example tracked those for the buildup. So when this build-up, some drums were reintroduced and the chord pattern was actually halfs several times as the build-up played out. This technique is very common and creates more suspense for the listener. They're expecting to hear the full pattern. But instead, by shortening is again and again, you're effectively teasing the listener. So when you do finally give them that flow pattern, it can really make much more of an impact. Let's listen again. After the build-up, we have the drop. This section relieves all tension that has been built so far and is the climax of any EDM track. You really want the drop to get people moving on their feet. So it's often louder and more full than any other section. A good drop is typically 24 bars long, with the final eight buyers introducing something new that hasn't been in the drop so far. Let's listen to a short excerpt of our example tracks drop. In this drop, the kick drum is reintroduced and the instruments change to a more aggressive sound. The melodic idea is still the same however, and so the drop sounds like a more intense version of the breakdown. After the drop, a second breakdown is established. The second breakdown is simply a development of the first. Sometimes it may be a longer version or maybe a version with new instruments or the addition of drums. However, you can't just copy and paste your first breakdown. The second breakdown must carry more energy than the first, otherwise, your track won't flow properly. This is actually another use for that intensity graph concept that I mentioned earlier. The second breakdown can also introduce something completely new, such as a new melody on a new instrument. However, for this to work, you must return to the original idea before the end of the track. Let's listen to see what our example attractors in the second breakdown. So in this track we can clearly hear that the second breakdown is very similar to the first. However, it's much longer and there is the addition of drums towards the very end. This allows the tension to build even more than the first breakdown. In the second build-up, we must again signify that a big climax is coming. Usually the second buildup will be almost identical to the first buildup. There may be an addition of drums or a new instrument, but it generally sounds very similar. The audience already knows what's coming, so it's unnecessary to try and re-imagine a new buildup. The second buildup can also be longer than the first. This can help to create extra suspense. Let's take a listen to our exemple track and noses how they've added a ride symbol in the first half. They've also added an extra snare drum in the second half. Don't worry if you don't know what these are, will be looking at drums and detailed very shortly. So let's listen now. What comes after the second build-up? It's of course the second drop. A lot of tracks tend to copy and paste the first drop for this section, and that's fine, but it really doesn't give the listener anything interesting. For your second drop, you should add in something new, maybe a new instrument, extra drums, or even changed the pattern slightly. This will ensure that your listener enjoys your track the entire way through and doesn't get bored during the second drop. In our example track, the second drop introduces a completely new instrument and changes the pattern slightly. It then brings the first drop back in. But because of the new idea that has just played, it doesn't feel as repetitive. Let's take a listen. The final section in an ADM track is called the outro. This serves the same purpose as the intro, except that it's for DJs to mix into other tracks. The aim of the outro is to steadily decrease the energy of the track so that when the track ends, the audience feels a full sense of closure. If you abruptly stop the track, the listener might get confused as they were expecting more to come. A good outro usually removes elements of the track gradually until only a few instruments and drums are left. The outro can be anywhere from eight to 24 bars long. Let's have a listen to our example. Outro. 4. Breaking Down EDM Structure (Part 2): I'm going to use this lecture to talk about a few other structures that you can use and also two other important parts about structuring in EDM track. So the structure we just talked about in the last lecture is called the standard structure. It is the most common and most solid structure out there. However, you can change the structure around for some interesting results. A delayed breakdown structure, the first breakdown actually comes after the drop. In this case, the track would go from the intro straight into the build-up, and then to the drop with the breakdown coming afterwards. And another structure you can use is the no breakdown structure. With this, there is actually no breakdown in the track. So as your track progresses, it would go something like intro buildup drop. And then a development of the intro would follow the drop. You may also add in some extra elements to embellish the second intro before the second buildup and the second drop. No structure is set in stone. You can play around with the structure of your track, but you must keep in mind that it has to have a good flow. Let's talk about binary phrasing. It sounds like a big complicated concept, but it's really not. Put simply, binary phrasing for EDM means something changes every eight bars. This can be a minor change, such as the addition of a new drum sound. Or it can be a major change, like the introduction of a new section. In music, a phrase is a musical idea over four bars long, and binary means two. So the idea is, if you have a section that is 24 bars long, let's just say it's the second breakdown, for example. Then that means your second breakdown is at 24 bar phrase. With binary phrasing, that 24 bar phrase is actually split into three smaller eight bar phrases. And each of these smaller phrases are slightly different to each other. Don't worry if all of this sounds confusing. But the main part you should take away from this is that every eight bars, you should make some sort of change so that the track progress as well as a place. Column response is something often used in EDM, but overlooked by so many producers. Or many producers may not even know they're doing it with column response, one element of the track will call and another will respond. So imagine you have any prior melody. Well, if you set a piano to play the first four bars, and a synthesizer to play the second four bars, then this would be calming response. It can also be used with vocals, where a word or phrase is repeated with different effects. Let's listen to an example of instrumental column response and then an example of vocal column response. The final thing I want to talk about in this lecture is energy. All EDM is based on this concept of energy, building and releasing it as the Trek progresses. The main way to create this energy is to actually tease the listener before giving them the full package. I think I've said this before anyway, but I want to reiterate it here because if you're tracked doesn't have energy than it really won't work as an EDM track. We'll be looking at energy again when we come to arrange our track. But for now, you need to know that this concept is why so many EDM producers end up missing the mark with their music. So make sure you're teasing the listener in your track. 5. Setting Up Your Project: In this lecture, will focus on setting up a project so that you can work on a track with 0s. So now that we know how EDM is structured, we can actually use this to our advantage when we're setting up our project. With all does we can add in what's called a marker. So with FL Studio, if you hit Command and t are controlling t, if you're on a Windows, it'll drop in this little marker here. We can then right-click and rename us. So I'll call this one intro. And we can then move it wherever we needed to be. So these little markers are great because we can plan out the structure of a track before we even begin to arrange anything. This will keep us focused and it will also allow us to work within a sort of guaranteed frame when we're creating the track. Another way to create markers with FL Studio is to come up here to the left-hand side of the playlist window. Click this little drop-down, hover over time markers and select Add one, give it a name. So I'm gonna name this one breakdown. And again, you can move it to wherever you need it to be. So let's say I want 16 bars of an intro. I'll just move this breakdown marker to the 16, kinda 16 by America. And now I can see straight away that I have 16 bars of an intro here. So this is helpful when I'm actually arranging and I'm, I'm putting in drums and chords and stuff I can see, right? I need to be at the breakdown section by the time I reach this bar. Also, another important part about planning your structure is it's important to get to the point so that listeners don't get bored of ICI actually swore by this rule and almost all of his tracks would reach the drop section before the one-minute mark. So try not to flush out the track more than you need to. You need to get to the main idea fast so that listeners don't get fed up when they're listening. You don't want two minutes of an intro because the listeners would just get bored. So the next step and setting up your project is to set your bpm. Now, this will probably change as you make the track, but it's good to set a sort of rough tempo for where you think you want your track to be. So as I said, a very high tempo will have a high-energy track, and low tempo will be a low-energy check or more mellow. If you're unsure about picking a tempo of 128 BPM is actually a perfect all-rounder. When a 128 is actually considered a magic number in musical science because it's a number where timing, structure, and tempo, they all intersect. So for, for timing, eight bars and 60 seconds will all intersect when this BPM is set. So if you set your tempo at 128, the 30-second bar here, this will actually mark exactly one minute on the clock. So if you don't know what you want to set your BPM at, yes, set it at 128. I'm actually going to leave mine at 128 because I'm unsure what tempo I want to work with yet. So the next thing we're gonna do is we're going to set up some syntax. This is a simple process that can really help your workflow as you progress through the track. So US-centric does what it says on the tin. If you have multiple tracks that you want to apply the same effect to, we can actually just send all of those tracks to $0.01 track. This saves us from having to instead open loads of effects and then tried to copy and paste the settings across each individual track. So the process of setting up centroids and your dot will probably be different. And I actually think Ableton has 2N tracks already available by default. But with FL Studio, we can actually use any of these mics are tracks as US-centric. All you have to do is select the track that you want to send. And then come down here to this little arrow and click the arrow under whichever track you want to send that track too. So let's say I want to send track for to track 11. I'll just click the little arrow under Track 11. And now it's drawn a sort of wire between these two tracks. And I know that this track has been sent to this track. But if we wanted to look neat and tidy and sort of organized so that we can work quickly. The easiest thing to do is to right-click your scent track. So the track that you've sent your different elements to, right-click that, come down here to this little d2 and then click either left or right depending on which you prefer. Now I prefer my syntax to be on the rise. So I'm going to dock this track to the right. And as you can see, it comes over here to the right. And this is a little sends section where we can sort of move it out of the way if we, if we need to, or we can bring it back by clicking this little, I don't even know what that shape is. Click that and it'll drag out this little sends action. So if we have a look at was a track for, yeah, we can see what track for that. The wire is coming out and it's sent to this track here. So now we've made a tidy little soundtrack over here on the right hand side that we can use and we can send any track. So track six, we can send track nine. Always do is just click this little arrow here and it will never move. Even if I scroll along the mixer track, it'll always day here on the right-hand side. So that's why it's handy to dock it to the side. That if you have a 100 different tracks that you're using, you can still send all of them quite easily and quite quickly. So it really helps your workflow. So in the next lecture we will talk about using reference tracks and how to optimize your dad's settings for optimal performance. 6. Optimising Your DAW: So what are reference tracks? Well, reference tracks, tracks that you download and use as a reference when you're creating your track. Ideally, you should pick a reference track that's in the same genre as the track that you're working on. Now we're not copying the reference track, we're just using it as a guide so that we can be sure our track is progressing well. So if you listen to your reference track and you notice that halfway through the intro and you instrument is introduced, you can actually take this idea and introduce a new instrument in your track as well. So I have an example of a reference track here for tech house. I think that's the Jonah I wanted to make. So I downloaded a track in the same genre. So let's listen to a few seconds and name or anything we can notice about the intro and anything we could use for our own track as well. So I can hear there's a cinder block kind of in with the drums. Kick drums gotta lot heavier there. And there's some chords being faded in it for the baseline was just introduced. And I can hear the sound of a crowd as well. And there's some focus being filtered in as well. So we can use all of these ideas for our track. We can, I can say, if I want my track to have a heavy kick drum halfway through the intro, and I want my baseline to come in here as well, and I want to introduce vocals as my intro goes along, we can use all of those ideas. So that's the importance of having a reference track. We can use it as a guide. Now let's optimize our DAW settings for creating EDM. So in FL Studio, we come up here to this little option section, click this and come down to audio settings. And you'll see this little window appears if you're in a different DAW. This window can be found under Preferences and audio, or audio hardware or something like that. And the layout will be a little bit different, but the settings are still the same. So the first thing you'll notice is this device drop-down where we can change the device that we want to process the audio. So if you, if you want your sound to commit your headphones, if you want the sound to come out of your speakers, if you're using an audio interface and you want the sound to come out of that, you can select this here. Mine is set to multi output device, which is just a setting I have set up so that my recording software will record the sound of my voice while I'm playing the sound of my DAW. It's just for making this course because I would usually have this set on my audio interface because that's what I like to use when I'm creating music. The next setting we have then is the sample rate setting. So the sampling rate should be a minimum of 44.110100, which is what minus statue here. For electronic music, the sample rate isn't as important as it is for acoustic music. If you are recording instruments like maybe your voice or a guitar or something, you should probably set as a little bit higher, maybe 48 thousand or even 8,888.2 thousand is really high. And then up to a 192 thousand that's just ridiculously high. And like, unless you have some sort of super computer, you don't need to set the sampling rate is 44.1 thousand is absolutely perfect for all genres of music. It's actually the industry standards. So record label, if you send them a mastered, a finished mastered track, they will actually ask you for a, for your track to be mastered to 44.1. So you might as well just leave it at 44.1, but you can set it a little bit higher if you have the processing power to do so. Next we come down and we see this buffer length or in your DAW, this might be called buffer size. So for this, you should set this as high as it possibly can go. For creating EDM. We're actually, we're working with plugins and virtual instruments so they need more processing power. So status as high as it goes to dedicate more processing power to those instruments. If you're recording instruments, you can actually, you can lower this. But we're talking about electronic music here. So I can't imagine you'd be recording more than two instruments at a time. So just set this as high as it goes and leave it there. Also, the numbers that you get here will depend on which device you have selected up here and also how much CPU you have in your computer. But regardless of whatever number this shows up here, set this little bar as high as it goes, and it should make your arrangement experience a little bit better. Now this next section only applies to FL Studio, but we do have this little safe overloads button. Make sure this light is on. This just stops the interface from freezing if it runs into any issues. It it just makes the arrangement that a little bit more easy for you. So make sure this is turned on. Also make sure this smack disabled lice is turned on. What's marked disable does is it turns off the plugins that you're not using. So, you know, if there's unnecessary processing power going to a plugin that you're not using. This, we'll turn it off automatically so that it can free up the CPU for other stuff that you're doing. You can also come up here to tools, macros, and switch smack disabled for all switched smart, disable it for all Plugins. This will just tell the software to sort of refresh that setting in case your dog's running into some leg. Next, we have this little resampling quality setting down here. Now you can set this to whichever sampling quality you prefer. 512 is high and it will cause your laptop to slow down. And there's two setting here. This is really low quality, so it'll, it'll speed up your laptop, but it won't sound as good. So the higher you set this resampling quality, the slower your computer will process the sound. And the lower you said is, the faster your computer will process the sound, but the sound won't sound as good when it's set at this low setting. I like to keep my in-between in the middle because it's sort of a happy medium between the lowest and the highest. And I really don't mind if I'm losing out on any audio quality while I'm mixing. One final setting that we can do is we can come into this general tab here and come down to the animations dropped down. So if you set this to don't distract me, This will turn off all of the animations that the software is doing so that your CPU is not trying to process any unnecessary visuals, as well as the audio. Now, I actually like the animations and my computer is fast enough to run them. So I like to lead us on both. You can turn it off if you're running into any issues or you just wanted to free up some extra CPU power. So that's everything we need to know to optimize our DAW. Let's move onto the next section where we will learn how to build drums for EDM. 7. Using Swing: So the first thing we're going to be looking at in this building drum section is using swing. What is swing and how can we use it for our tracks? We're actually going to be using this alas, not just on drums, but on almost every element of our track. Swing is quite a hard turn to define, but I think it's much easier to understand once you hear it. So if we have a look at these two drum beats, one of them doesn't have a swing, and the other one does have swing. So the first one I'll play is the beat that doesn't have swaying. And then I'll play the beat that does have swing. So let's have a listen now. Now there isn't too much of a difference between these two beats, but one of them has a better group than the other. And this is because of swing. Swing as like a secret weapon that all EDM producers should know about. So let's take a look at this piece over here. The beat that doesn't have swing. And we'll see how we should go about applying swing. So the first thing we notice is the kick is on the first, second, third, fourth beats of the bar. The clap is on the second and the fourth b to the buyer. But the hass and this precaution and this precaution sample, they're not on the beat of the bar there actually in-between each beat of the buyer. So these little sections in between the beats of the bar, these are called steps. So to apply swing, we have to take anything that's on the second or the fourth step, we have to delay it by one-quarter of a step. Now I know that sounds like there's a lot of math involved, but there isn't. So if we come up here to this little snap to grid drop-down menu, if we click this and we see, we see quarter of a step here. So we know we want to delay the sampled by one-quarter of a step. So I'm going to select quarter step. And what that does is it splits the steps into four smaller steps. So if I zoom up here, I can see I have much more little steps to play with. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna delay the sample that was on the fourth step. We're gonna delay it by one-quarter of a step, by dragging it to the right. Once. We're gonna do the same thing for this sample here, which is also on the fourth step. So turn back on the quarter step, drag it to the right once, and that delays it by one-quarter of a stamp. So if we listen to this little section that we've just made, this little edited section, will hear that the swing has been applied. But if I play the rest of the, that same drum loop that we didn't do any editing to. We'll see that the swing is not applied. Now there was another quick way to create swing in FL Studio. And that's if you come up here to this little pattern section. And if you build your drum pattern here, instead of the playlist, we can create swing a lot easier. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to build a quick drum pattern by adding the kick drum on every, every single beat. So that's a foreign. The floor b's. I'm going to add the clap on the second, fourth beat. I'm going to put the open hat in between. So on the middle step, I'm going to put that there. And then I'm going to put the precaution On the fourth step. Maybe the third step, the same one as the hat. Maybe the second step, and the fourth step again. So the software knows which step to apply the swing too. So this little parameter up here, this is called main swing. And if we put this up, this will actually apply swing for us. So I'm gonna play the Bs and as the beats plane, I'm going to increase this slowly and we're going to listen to how the software is doing to apply swing. And you can notice that without swing applied, it actually sounds very, very robotic. So you should definitely try to use swing in your tracks. But for other does, you will have to use this snap to grid method by changing the snap to grid to whichever subdivision you want and then moving the actual sample itself, delaying it. Now, I think I've explained that. Okay. But if you are confused, please let me know and I'll help you out as best as I can. In the next lecture, we look at the main elements that make up EDM drums. 8. Main Elements of EDM Drums: So for the next few minutes, we're going to look at all of the main elements that make up an EDM drum pattern. Now the first element that makes up an EDM drum pattern is the kick drum. This is the base of all beets. And a good kick drum can really make your patterns on flow. After the kick drum, we have the clap or the snare. A club is much more common in EDM, but you can use a snare in place of the clamp. So this narrow the claps should produce a sharp sound and will often play on the second fourth b to the buyer. Let's have a listen. Next we have a prominent offbeat hat. An offbeat hat will always go on the third step of the beat, or exactly in between two beats. This hat is just as important as the kicker, the clamp, and you should definitely include it in your beats. We also have this hat, which is called the meter hat, and called a meter hat because it plays the meter of the track. Or more simply, it plays on all four beats of the bar. You could call it a four on the floor hat if you like. Let's have a listen to what this sounds like in the patterns of air. After the meter hat, we have this little background sugar. The background shaker is often overlooked, but it can really fill up some empty space and a drum pattern. I've applied swing to my background hats as some of the samples are on the second and the third steps of the beat. So if you're using springtime, you will need to apply swing to these hats. Let's have a listen to what they sound like in the pattern. Following this, we have the filler hat. So these are just extra high hats that you add in for rhythmic effect. They're kind of used the same way as precaution, but we would use a hi hat instead of a precaution sound. Now the fedora hats, they aren't necessary, but they do make a drum pattern sound a little bit more professional. So let's, let's see what they sound like in the pattern known. So we also have these little rhythmic percussion elements. Rhythmic precaution is something that you can add if you want, but you can leave it out if you don't like it or need it. Precaution that uses swing can really add to the groove of your track. If you feel like you need to add more groove than adding in some swing Percussion can help. My precaution is using swing and I think it really does add to the groove at the track. Let's have a listen. Finally, we have this pitched percussion. So pitch precaution is little bit different because it has an audible pitch or note. If we can harm the same note as the precaution, then it's pitched. So bungalows, tablets or cowbells, they all req res as pitched percussion. I'm using a cowbell sound. So let's see what that sounds like in the context of the drum pattern. So these are the main elements that make up a drum pattern. There are additional things that we can do to really make a drum pattern sound good. A book, we'll talk about those when we come to building the drum pattern. For now, we'll just move on to the next lecture and learn about layering and how to choose your drum samples. 9. Finding Sutiable Drum Samples: Okay, so in this lecture, we're gonna talk about drum layering and how you can find these layers to use in your own drum patterns. So if we have a look here, I have two patterns setup. Now this pattern is the same drum pattern that I used in the last lecture. But this drum pattern over here, this is slightly different because of added some extra layers. Ok, so if we zoom up and have a look at this drum pattern, in the original drum pattern, I only used this clap, but in this drum pattern, I have an extra clap, and I also have a snare down here, and they're all layered together to make one much bigger sound. So let's zoom out now and have a listen to the original drum pattern. And then we'll have a listen to the layer drum pattern, see the differences between both. Now it's not a major difference, but you can hear that this pattern is a little bit more full and it actually sounds a little bit more professional because this one sounds very empty and it's, it's a noticeable, it's an audible, noticeable thing when a producer doesn't layer. So you should definitely try to layer your sounds in your track. So now we're gonna go ahead and look for some layers. So I'm going to come into this little sample pack here so you can download sample backs off the internet for free or for paid, for money, or whichever you prefer. But then when you load them into your software well enough or studio anyway, they come over here and I think it's the same enabled in there somewhere on the left-hand side, they, they show up. But I'm, I'm gonna come into this sample practice mode audio. This actually comes with FL Studio. So if you do download the free version of FL Studio, you will get this sample pack and you'll be able to go through all these sounds here and use them to build your own drums. So the first thing I'm gonna say about layering is never layer your kick, okay? Kicks that you get in sample packs. They're already layered because the people who put out the sample packs, they don't want to, they want to sell you the best kind of sounding things that they can. So they already layer things for you. So with the kick because it's a basic instrument, you don't want to layer that unless you know exactly what you're doing. But I'd recommend that you pick a kick that you like. So out of this pack of those loads in here, in the default sort of FL Studio thing, but there's loads in here. And I recommend you don't layer your kicks. Ok. So just pick an example that you like and drag it in here and start building your pattern. However, we can layer or other things like the claps. So let's have a look at the claps Now. So when you're, when you're looking for clap layers, you should look for a short clap and a long clap. So a short clap is relatively sharp and sort of snappy, or another word for that is transient. Okay, so transients are, this is this little short burst of energy that occurs at the start of any sound. So you might, you might hear producers saying that the sound is very transient. Well, we're looking for transient or short claps. So if we go through some of these clamps and we see if we can find any short claps and then we'll see if we can find any long claps. And let's have a listen. So these all sound a bit short? Yes, some of them that one's a bit long and actually there is a tail on and you can see it there. Let's go down here to these house. Generation claps. Yeah. These are, these are big, loud long claps. Okay. That one's cool so you can layer this long clap with one of these shorter claps appear. And when the two of them come together, they'll actually make a much fuller sounding clap. And it's kind of a secret that a lot of EDM producers don't want you to know is that you have to layer your drums, your instruments, you should layer everything. You can also lay or other things in with the claps. You can layer in some snares just for a bit of waste, or you can also layer some percussion. Now camel fat do this a lot. They, they actually use percussion as a layer instead of a snare. So they'll have their Schrock clap on their long clap and they're layers with one of these cool sounding precautions. And that could give your drum pattern something very unique and interesting. So if you want to try that when you're building a drum patterns, go ahead. And now we'll move on to the hi-hats will have a look at the high hat. So similarly to the claps with the high hats were looking for a short hat and along hat, or in other words, a closed hat or an open house. Now, the closed and open that just comes from a drum kit where when you have the high hat on the left-hand side of the drummer, he can either closed or open it when you closest, it sounds very short and snappy. And if you open it, it's kind of more long and sort of has a bit more history to it. So what we're looking for is a closed hat and an open house, or in other words, a shorthand and along hat. So actually because I can see here that there's o hats, which I'm assuming means open at. So these are all quite long. So you'll use these as your long hat. And then this c hat can be your closed hat or your short hat. They're open and it's actually done as an O, but we look at the sea, closed, closed. This one here is closed. So your layer, the short hat with the lung hat, and you'll get a really nice hi-hat sound. Also when we're talking about hats, your other half side, the meter hat and the filler hat. You want to use shortcuts for them. Because if you use long hats, it'll start to overlap the other samples and it'll sound a bit messy. So make sure you're using short hats for the meter hat, which is the foreign the floor had, I think we call it. And you're using a shorthand for the extra filler sort of hats did you use in the place of precaution? Make sure those hats are using short, short sounding samples like this. Okay, so for your background shaker and that you have in the background of the drum pattern to fill up space. You should, you should use a shaker, okay? You can, you can definitely use a hi hat. But the only problem is with using a hi hat if it's to sort of clicky. Like those are kind of fine. But that one, if that's, if you're using that one in the background, it's two clicky and it'll actually end up distracting the listener. So I, I just advised that you come in here to the shakers, the Shakers folder and have a look for a shaker sample. Sort of a short when you're looking for short because again, you don't want them too long to overlap the other samples. There. That's a lovely one. That's a nice one. So we can use all of these shakers in the background as our background shaker. Or you can make your own, you know, you can record your own into your microphone if you get some rice and put it into like an empty milk carton or something, you can make your own. You can be creative. And I definitely think if you make your own samples, if you make your own sounds, you're bringing something unique to the table and something different that a lot of record labels might have heard before. So if you can make your own shaker, if you feeling creative, like you might put something different, maybe some nails or something into a paint can or something, you can make a pretty cool shaker that sounds different to other shakers that are out there. Next we look at the percussion. So we have two types of precaution. We have the rhythm percussion and the pitched percussion. In this. Sometimes you get those separately, like with some of the vengeance packs, it'll say percussion and percussion instruments. And the percussion instruments will be the ones that are pitched. But in here it seems to all be in the same sort of folder. But that's okay. We can just go through some of them and have a listen to which sort of subsection there. And that's definitely pitched. I can, I can Homer. There, I'll pitch sounds. She also, these seem to be pitched there. That'll be a, an untuned can earn on pitched sample that you can use. Just make sure that the percussion samples that you are using are fairly short because you're using them for rhythmic effect. Usually. So you want to, you want to add to the groove with them. So if they're too long, takeaway from the groove and it'll end up sounding too smooth. So the shorter the sample, the more groove that you actually have and actually bear that point in mind for the other samples as well. The shorter that, the shorter they are, the more groove that your pattern will have. So now that we know how to layer and finder layers, we're ready to build a drum pattern. I'll also be giving you some extra tips that I haven't mentioned so far that will really help you to build a professional sounding drum patterns. So make sure you watch the full next lecture through the whole way so that you don't miss any tips. 10. Constructing a Drum Pattern: So now that we know all of the elements that go into building a drum pattern, we know what layering is, we know how to layer, and we also know how to find your layers. We're finally ready to build our own drum pattern. Now I did say I was going to give you some tips in this lecture about making a really professional zoning drum patterns. What I'm gonna do is I'm going to give you these tips first. And then we'll move on and use the sample packs over here to create our own drum pattern. So the first tip I wanted to give you was this here. And this tip is where you add in an additional drum loop that you can find in sample packs as a layer on top of your own drum pattern. So I'm just gonna play the loop on its own and we'll see what that sounds like. So this loop is nothing fancy. It's just some hatsune, some claps. And now what I'll do is I'll play the layers that I've added in without the loop them and see what that sounds like. So we actually have an added in that much of only added in a kick, a meter hat and off-beat hat. I have reverse clap here and we'll take a look at how to do that in a lecture to come. I also have this long clap, Some pitched percussion. There's percussion element and appointed not. We'll also take a look at what a point of note is in some lectures to come. But for the moment, just not as that. I've added in some extra layers on top of this loop, these hats and claps. So let's have a listen to the entire drum pattern with the loop in and we'll see what it sounds like. Now it is important to add in these extra sort of samples yourself, these extra layers. Because if we listen to the drum loop on its own with this kick drum, it's also going to sound very, very empty. So let's have a listen to what it sounds like with the kick drum hands-on. And that sounds fine. But it is important to add in your extra layers because when you add in the extra layers, it sounds a lot more full and professional. So let's take a listen again with all of the layers added in. So the other tip I wanted to give you was this tip over here. Now this tip is very similar. It's again, it's another loop that's added in as a layer, but instead this time it's called a mass verb loop. What amass verb is, it's sort of the tail end of a reverb effect. And it's been looped. But it sounds a bit like wind or air. So what that does is it just fills up the empty space that's left by the drum patterns. So if we listen to the drum pattern, Amazon. So there's actually a lot of empty space between the samples of the ad in this mass verb loop, it'll fill up that space and it's really subtle, but it's quite a clever thing to do if you feel that your drum pattern is a little bit empty or it needs something extra. So let's listen to the entire pattern with the mass verb loop added in. And now if I take that mass verb loop out, and now a lot of backend. Okay, so now we're ready to build our own drum pattern. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to delete and these so they don't get in the way. Edit, delete. And then I'm going to scroll down here so those colorful tracks, they don't distract us. So we're going to start with the kick. And I'm gonna use the mode audio sample pack here so that if you do download the free version of FL Studio, you can work alongside me and you. And you will also have the same samples and I'm using so you can follow exactly what I'm doing. So let's start looking for a kick and going to click the first one here. And what we can do with FL Studio is we can, we can audition the kicks using our arrow key. So we can scroll down very quickly and have a listen to all of them. So I'm going to just scroll very quickly and listened to all the kicks and find a kick that I like the sound of their 13. I quite like the sound of this. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to drag it into the playlist just here. I'll just zoom up on that so we can see what we're doing. Turn back on tracks, and then we're going to paste this kick drum on all four beats to the back. So I'm just going to copy that out again so that we have a sort of a, a two bar pattern. Now not gonna layer My kicks because these kicks to me, they already sound layered. They're quite full and fat and there really isn't any need to add in an additional glare because I don't want to mess up the low-end of my tracks, so I'm going to leave the kick as it is. And we're gonna come up here and have a look at the claps. So as we know, claps, We're looking for a short clap and a long clap. So let's have a look and will audition somebody's claps and we'll find a nice shortcut to use in our pattern. This one sounds nice, so I'm going to drag this one in. So I'm going to place it on the second beat of the bar and also the fourth beat of the bar. And then he's going to copy that out in to the second half of the patterns. Let's see what that sounds like now. So what I'm gonna do is first I'm going to add these to the mixer track by pressing this little track button here. And using this, I can turn these down. Now I don't know why the kick and the clap have gone so far apart, but it doesn't matter for the moment. We're just turning them down so that it doesn't hurt our ears. So let's have a listen again. So now we're going to look for a lung clap. So as far as I remember, these house generation claps. These were fairly long. Yeah. I really like the sound of this one, so I'm going to drag this one in and place it on the same beats as the short clap. And I'm also gonna turn that down in the mixer track as well, just so it's not hurting our ears. Let's have a listen. Now if I take out that shark lab and if I add it back in, it's a subtle difference, but it does make a difference. So let's go over here now and then we'll have a look at adding in a snare are precaution. So we can layer in a snare with our claps To make it sound a little bit fatter or morpho. But I think I'm gonna try adding in some percussion sounds like camouflage, CO2 and their music. So I'm going to come through the, some of these samples and just have a listen and find one that I think might work. This one sounds cool. I'm going to layer this in with my clap. So I'm going to drag it in and place it on the same beats as all the other claps. And we'll take a listen to what that pattern sounds like Now in a minute, just, I'll turn this down and we'll take a listen to what this pattern sounds like. Now that precaution layer actually adds a really cool texture into the patterns. So I'm going to leave it in. The next thing we can look at is our hats. So again, with the hats, like the claps, We're looking for a short hat and along hat. So as I recall, these attack hats were fairly short. So actually this 15 and maybe not. Just have a listen to some of them. 25. I'd like to send a 25. So I'm going to drag that in and I'm going to place it in the middle. So on the third step, I'll zoom up here, the third step of the beat. So let's place this on all the turd steps across the entire pattern. Copy all of these. And what I'll do is I'll turn them down in the mixer and then we'll have a listen to what they sound like in the pattern. Let's have a listener. So now we're going to look for a lung hat or the open hat. So we'll scroll down here and we'll try to find one. Actually like the sound of this. This one's pretty cool. So let's drag this into our pattern. Put it on the same steps or beats as d short hat. And then again, bringing into the mixer just to turn it down a bit. And we'll have a listen to what that sounds like. The pattern sounded pretty good so far, but we still have a few more elements to add in. So the next element we're going to add in is the filler hat. So this filler hat has to be a shorthand again. So we're going to look for one of these closed one of these c hats. And we'll see which one sounds good that we could add in. I like the sound of this one, so I'm going to add this in. I'm going to place it on maybe the fourth step and maybe the second step. So let's copy that across the entire pattern. Here. I think one more here. So now, because these are on the fourth and the second step, we have to apply swing. But we don't have to, but I want to, so I'm going to turn on this quarter step setting and move these by one-quarter of a step. And now we'll have a listen to what the pattern sounds like as soon as I've turned this down in the mixer track. So let's have a listen now. So that's sounding pretty good so far. The next element we're going to have a look at is the background shaker. So we're gonna come up here, close the high hats Fuller and come down here to the Shakers folder and have a listen to some of these shakers that we could add in. Now, I think I remember that these shakers sounded pretty good. Yeah, I like the sound of attack shake or ten. So I'm going to drag this in. What I'm gonna do is I'm going to place it on every step of the beat. So if we zoom up here, That's the first step. Place it on the second step, place it on the third step, and will also place it on the fourth step. Now I've put these on the bottom because it's easier for me to apply swing because again, these are on the second and the fourth step. And because we've already established springtime in our pattern, we have to apply Swing Time to everything else that we add in. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to offset these by a quarter of a step. So now that's applied swing to that little mini pattern, that little mini pattern there. So what we can do is we can copy that out across the whole pattern. And then we can see what that sounds like in the context of the drumbeat. So let's turn this down on the mixer track and then we'll have a quick listen to, uh, the attack shake or sounds like in the pattern. So I like the sound of that. And the next thing we're going to look at is the percussion. So if we come up here and we take a look at some precaution that we could add. I don't know what type of progression I'm going to add, so I'm just going to audition some of these and we'll see what they sound like. I like these. I like the sound of this precaution for. So let's add in precaution for and we'll add it in on maybe the fourth step. And we'll add it in and the third step of the next bar, of the next beat. So this is actually a very common pattern, is to add it in on the fourth step and then the third step. And book because we've, we've added in the fourth step, we have to apply swing to this, to this sample. And then we can copy this little mini pattern out across our entire drum pattern. So let's do that real quick. And again, just to turn it down so it's not way to load. And it will take a listen to the full drum pattern that we've just built and we'll see what it sounds like. So that's how you're gonna build your drum pattern. You're gonna come and you're gonna look for some kicks. And then the claps and snares are precaution to layer in. Then your short your lung hat, some filler hat, a background shaker. And then finally, you can add in a bit of precaution if you want as well. So in the next lecture we're going to look at some panning and then we'll have a look at some automation afterwards. And how we can automate the panning and the volume to make this drum pattern sound even better. 11. Using Panning: So in this lecture, we're going to take a look at panning and what planning is and how you can use it in your tracks. So panning is a relatively simple concept to understand. It simply takes an instrument or drum sample or sort of any element that you have in your track. And it places is either on the left or the right. So if you have a piano in your track and you've pandas 20% to the right. Then when a listener is listening to your attract, that piano will sound like it's coming from the right of that listener. Panning is actually very important for the overall sound of your track because it can make it sound a little bit more wide and in turn, a little bit more professional. So we'll be applying panning to a lot of things throughout this course. Not just drums, but I have opened up a drum pattern that we had in the main elements of EDM drums lecture. And we're just going to take a look at how we can apply panning to this drum pattern and make the pattern sound a little bit more professional. So the first element we have in this pattern is the kick drum. Okay, so let's take a listen to the kick drum. And the first thing I wanted to say about panning is that you never pan your kick drum. Okay? The kick drum along with the bass, is like the foundation for your attract. So you don't want to pan the kick drum or your base, because what happens is the track will sound a little bit lopsided. And you really, really want a strong core for your attract. You want a strong foundation. So we do not, we never panned the kick drum. So we're just going to leave the kick drum as it is, because it's coming out from the center. Let's move on now to this next element, which looks to me like an offbeat hat. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna double-click it and then I'm going to come up here to the mixer track. And when I double-click it, it just sort of highlight where that element is in the mixer track. So I can see now that this particular hash, It's coming out of channel number four. So we can come down here now to this little wheel and this is the panning wheel. So if I, so if I bring this all the way to the left, the sound will come out on the left side. And if I bring this all the way over to the right, then the sound will come out of the right side. And this is called hard left and hard right. So when you pan something a 100% left, it's called hard left. And when you pan something, a 100% right, it's called Herod right? Now generally in EDM we don't pan things hard left and hard right, unless you're after a very specific results. But what I will say is if you plan to do some panning, just maybe keep it at about 90% rice as a maximum. Just because if you, if you end up panning all of these different elements, completely hard left and hard right. You mess up the overall sound of your track. So insulin reset these back again and we'll have a look at planning this offbeat hat. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to slowly pan this to the left until I like where it sounds. So I like the sound of this offbeat has panned. And this is at 50%. You can actually look up here. In this little panel and FL Studio, and it'll tell you what value you've set the parameter at. So it's actually telling me that I've set this at 50%. So let's move on now to the next hat and we'll have a listen to what this sounds like. Ok, so I'm going to open up the mixer track. And actually first of all, I'm gonna double-click this just so it can highlighted for me so I can see where it is and it's all the way over here on number ten. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna solo it and take a listen to just this particular sample on its own. And as it's playing, I'm going to panel to the right. So I'm going to leave it at 50% as well. So the same sort of value as the other hat that is playing at the same time. Because when we add the two of them back together, the overall sound should feel more balanced because they're both planned at the same value. So if we take a listen now, these two samples together should sound balanced, but also nicely spread apart across the stereo field. So let's have a listen. So when you pan things, you can actually pick out the individual elements a little bit better. So when these were kind of glued together in the center, it sounded like this. But if we separate these now by planning one to the left and the other to the right. It sounds like this. And it's just a more pleasurable experience for the listener. So let's very quickly go through all of the samples here and we'll pan them. So this is the lung clap. So I'm gonna come in here and I think I'm going to pan this may be 20% to the right. Let's have a listen. And then I'm gonna come here and I'm going to open up this clamp. And because these are two claps the play at the same time, I'm going to plant this one in around the same 20% to the left. Let's have a listen to what these unlike together. Then I'm going to come down here to this filler hat. And I'm going to double-click it. And it's going to highlight that it's on track six. And with the filter hat, I think I'm going to be a bit more extreme. I'm going to pan this maybe all the way over 85% to the right. So let's have a listen to what this sounds like when it's coming out, mostly from the right channel. Okay? And the next element we have here is the meter hat. So I think with the meter hash, I'm just going to planet slightly to the left. Just for the sake of having a nice sort of stereo image. And also on a real drum kiss, the hats are kind of position to the left side of the drummer. So I'm just going to kind of mimic that using this meter hat. So let's have a listen to the meter has when it's coming out slightly from the left. Now let's have a listen to this background shaker. And I'm going to open it up here in the mixer track. So it's on channel two. So generally, with the panning wheel for background shakers, we actually automated. So I'm not going to touch it now, but we will take a look at automating this panning wheel in the automation lecture that's to come. So I'm just going to leave this panning wheel for the background shaker alone. I'm not going to touch it now because we'll be dealing with this in the next lecture. So I'm gonna move on to this, which is a percussion sound. So let's come in here and it's on track seven as we can see. So I'm going to pan the precaution to the right because on a real drum kids to Tom towns are sort of to the right. So let's pan this, maybe 60%, right? Let's see what this sounds like. And then we'll move on to the next elements that we're gonna, we're gonna pan and this is untracked eight. So let's have a listen to what this is. So this is our pitched percussion. Now we can pan this either left or right, but I'm gonna pan it to the left just for the sake of balanced because I've panned the other precaution element to the right. So let's pan this maybe 55%, right? And have a listen to what that sounds like. Okay? Now let's have a listen to what this is and I think this is the snare. Yeah. Okay, so for the sake of balance, I'm actually going to leave the snare coming out the center because the snare is playing at the same time as these claps. And we've already panned the claps. We've panned one of them to the left and the other one to the right, which is balanced. So I don't want to upset the balance by panning this sort of to the left, to the right because then we'll have two elements coming out the left and one coming at the right. And if I pan it to the right, we'd have two elements coming out the right and one coming out of the left. So I'm going to leave it in the center so that we have one coming at the center, one coming out the left, and one coming out right. So let's see what these are satellite together with the snare and the center. And while it's playing there, I'm just going to pan the snare either to the left of the right and just have a listen and see what it sounds like yourself. And you may like the sound of this, and that's absolutely fine. If you want to pan your snare either left or right, you can, it's up to you, but I prefer the sound of the snare coming at the center just for the sake of balance. So I'm going to leave it and we'll move on to this final element here, which I think is another Percussion sound. Yet. So this is actually a layer with disproportion sound up here. So now we have two options. We can pan this Percussion sound is coming out of 12. Yeah. So now we have two options. We can pan this Percussion sound to the right so that they're both coming out of the right channel. Or we can do what we've been doing so far and pan it to the left so that it's balanced. Now, either of these options is absolutely acceptable and it's up to you, which you want to do. But I am going to pan mine to the rice because I think it creates a little bit more of an interesting sound. And also, as I said before, I kind of wanted to mimic the sound of a real drum kit as if the listener is sitting in the drummers position. So I'm going to keep this precaution and the other precaution coming out of the right channel. So let's have a listen to the entire pattern now with all of the elements planned. So I hope you can hear that the pattern sounds a little bit more professional now. And also that bios separating the different elements that make up the pattern, we're creating more of an interesting sound for the listener. So as I said already, we're going to move on to the next lecture now where we'll take a look at automating and we'll also take a look at automating the background shaker in a drum pattern. 12. Automating Parameters: So we're going to use this lecture to talk about automation. Automation is an important part about arranging any track because it can prevent the track from sounding too robotic. Now if you want something to change over the course of the track, we can actually tell the software to do that for us. And that's what automation is. Every dark and do automation. But the method of doing it is a little bit different. You can find out pretty quickly how to automate a newer dot if you just look it up on the internet. But in FL Studio, it's relatively simple. We just right-click the parameter that we want to automate. So if I come into the mixer here and I right-click the panning parameter. I can see here it opens up this little box and I can click create automation clip. I can also create an automation clip on this. And I can create an animation clip on this. So you can create animation clips on anything you want. So let's automate the panning for the attack shaker of our drums to make it sound a little bit more interesting. So I'm going to right-click the panning and I'm gonna say create automation clip. That's gonna create this little clip up here. And then I'm going to drag this down to the very bottom and we can have a look at how we use it. So an automation clip has two anchor points when you create it. At first it has one on the left and one on the right. And what we can do is we can move these anchor points wherever we want. So I can move this down to the left, and I can move this up to the right. And what that means is the planning is now going from left to right. So let's listen to the pattern and we'll hear that the shaker is going from left to right gradually as the pattern place. So this is a cool effect, but I'm going to show you is a very common technique that producers do with their background shakers. And it can really allow your stereo image to sound professional. So let's see what I did there is I was, I just caused the automation clip at the first BCE because I only want us for this section of the pattern. And what I'm gonna do is I'm going to pan the shakers from left to right. So each, every second shaker would be panned to the right. So I'm, I'm right-clicking. You can add in your own anchor, anchor points to automation clips as well. And FL Studio, you just right-click, but you can try in your own sort of shapes. So I'm sort of drawn in these step shapes up and down. So that when the Shakers play, they'll play from left to right. Let's look this and have a listen to them playing from left to right. So what we can do then is with the automation clip, the little mini one, we can paste it out across the entire pattern. And then we can listen to what the whole pattern sounds like with the Shakers being panned from left to right. Now because we can also automate any other thing that I think I'm going to automate the volume. So with your background shakers, you should definitely automate the volume because by doing this, it can add in a lot more groove and I'll show you how to add in that group using the volume. So I've just right-clicked it and I'm going to create our animation clip. I'm gonna come up here and close that. And then I'm going to drag the automation clip down and I'm gonna do the same thing. I'm going to click this razor tool and I'm going to cut on the first beat, delete the second, the unwanted part of the automation clip. And I'm going to draw in, and I'm going to draw in the shape that I want and this animation clip, okay. So what we do is we make the first checker very quiet. Okay, so I'm right-clicking again to dry it, to add in these extra anchor points. Then we make the second shaker a little bit louder. And then we make the third, the third shaker, very loud. And then the last shaker, we make it the same loudness as the second checker. And then if we draw out this automation clip across the entire pattern, that will make the shaker sound like this. So it sounds a little bit more realistic and less like a computer is playing it. Now if we add in the panning automation as well, it'll sound like this. And now if we add in the entire pattern, we'll see what difference the automation clips make to the overall sound of the pattern. Now if I delete the automation, it sounds like this. And you might like the sound of that, but I tend to prefer the sound of the panning when it's added into the shakers. So I'm going to leave the planning in my pattern and we'll ever listen again. Now another thing you can do is I think the panning here, this panning automation is a bit too extreme. So I'm going to turn, I'm going to drag these anchor points up a bit so that they're not as extreme as they were in the first place. So I'm going to just drag this one down, drag this up so that it's not as extreme. And then drag this one down as well. So this might sound a little bit, a little bit more realistic. Let's have a listen. Yeah, it's gotten rid of that sort of clicky sound that was happening because we had these panned. That's called hard left and hard right. So if I pan this fully left, that's called hard left. And if I pan it fully Right, that's called Herod, right? But generally, we don't do this. We kind of, we might planet maybe 85-90 percent right or 90% left, but we generally don't panned hard left or hard right unless we're after a specific sort of result. But for your shakers, don't pan them fully left and right, just leave them sort of less extreme like this. Now in FL Studio we can pan anything, we can plan our instruments that we have appear in the pattern section, or we can pan our effects or anything you want. We can, I'll actually, I'll open an effect here and I'll open this delay effect, and we'll come up here and we'll have a look. So if I right-click any of these parameters, the volume, the offset, time, any of these parameters. It'll create an automation clip for me. And I can also create an animation clip on any sort of third party effect that doesn't come with the software. So if I open up this God phasor effect, this is a third party plugin that you can buy, but we can also automate any parameter on a third party plugin. Now the method of automating the parameters on a third party plugin is a little bit different, but I'm just gonna show you how to do that really quickly. So if we take this LFO rate, I can't right click it. If I do right-click it, it brings up this because third-party plug-ins have their own sort of system of use. So when you right-click something in a third party plugin, It's not going to bring up that little window that says create automation clip. But what we can do is we can click and move the parameter that you want to automate slightly and then come up here to tools, down to last tweaked and then create automation clip. And what that does is it'll create the automation clip in the playlist window for about I was just moving there, which is the LFO rate. So as you can see here, God phasor, LFO rate. And now I can automate that to go from sort of down the bottom. And actually I'll leave this open so you can see what the automation clip is doing to the knob. So on the bottom it's left and on the top it's right. So we'll see as the, the pattern plays that this NADH is moving from left to right. Let's have a listen. So that's how you use automation in your tracks. But it's really not that hard to understand. It's just something we use when we want the software to change something for us as the track is playing. In the next lecture, we're going to look at tuning our drum samples so we can sort of glue them together a little bit more. 13. Tuning Your Drum Samples: So in this lecture, we're going to look at tuning our drum samples. So tuning your drum samples is very important for the overall sound of your track because it can make the arrangement and the mixed sound a lot cleaner. It can also help to glue the different elements that you use to build your drum pattern. It can help to glue them together and make them feel as though there are more part of the same family. So again, like everything we've been talking about, every DAW has a different way of doing this, but every dark and do this. Okay, so if we come on to the master channel, I'm going to open a plug-in in FL Studio called Edison, which is up here. So edison, when you open, it looks like this. And, and it's a really powerful plugin. But one of its main uses is that it can tell you what the pitch of any sample, or drum or vocal or anything that you put in it can tell you the pitch. So let's open up this kick drum here and we see the sample window comes up. So I'm going to click this waveform and Dragon into Edison here. And if I right-click and Edison on the waveform and I click regions. And then I come down here and I say detect pitch regions. We can see that Edison has scanned it and it says that it is in D-sharp. Okay, so always take the first pitch region it gives you, so D-sharp three. So I'm going to tune the rest of my drums to D-sharp three. Now if the key of my track changes, if I change the key of my track to e, let's say I make some chords and E minor. Well then I will have to change the drum samples to match that. I will have to pitch the drums are tuned them so that they are also tuned to E. But for now I'm just going to tune the rest of the elements to the kick drum because I don't actually have a track here yet. So the kick drum isn't D-sharp three. So let's go and tune the rest of the samples to D-sharp three. So I'm just going to and sort of closes over to the corner here, so it makes it a little bit neater. And I'm gonna go through each of these samples. So I'm going to double-click on the clip sample and again onto the master channel, open Edison, drag it in. And let's see what the pitches. So it's actually already tuned to D-sharp, so that's perfect. We don't need to touch it. Let's open up the next sample. So there's next sample is the long clap. Let's load. Let's click on to the master channel and open Edison again. And we'll drag in the lung clap and we'll see what pitch this has. So again, scroll down to regions, detect pitch regions. And we can see, if we zoom up here it says a, a four, so its an a. Okay? So now we have two options we can tune, we can tune this sample to the root, which is d sharp. Or we can tune it to either the third or the fifth of the chord. Okay? And this was one of the requirements that you needed for the start of the course because I'm not going explaining music theory. But if you know what the third and the fifth is for D-sharp, you will know that the closest thing to a is the fifth of the sharp, which is actually a sharp. So if we click this little, this little pitch knob here, we can move this either down or up, OK, we'll pick it up and down or pitch it down. So I'm going to pitches down to I'm going to pitch it up, sorry, from a to Asia apps, I'm going to pitch it up by $0.100 on $0.100 in the corner here again, I'll just show you a picture back down. If you look at the cornea here, it'll tell you how much you're pitching it by dragging up and it says $0.100 among a $0.100 means one semitone. Ok. So that drugs that pitches it up from a to a sharp. So I'll just reset it and we listen to the clap. And then if we set it up. So now if we listen to both of those claps And the kick together, they should sound a little bit more related to each other. Now, I'll just on pitches so that we can see what it sounds like before. It's a very subtle difference, but it does make it sound a lot cleaner. Okay, so lets us again. And what you'll do is you'll go through all of your drums and you'll pitch them to either the root note, which is D-sharp, deterred, which would be g, or the fifth, which will be a shock. Or depending on the key of your track, you tune your drums appropriately, will also be tuning other elements as we go through the course, such as vocals and external loops. And you know, some of the effects and stuff that we'll look at later on. But for now, with your drum patterns, have a go at tuning the drum samples to each other and see if it makes a difference to the overall sound. 14. Manipulating Your Drum Samples: In this lecture, we're going to look at manipulating your drum samples. So we can do some pretty cool things like reversing a sample. And I showed you this before in one of the last lectures where I actually reversed a clap sample. And we'll do that again here and I'll show you how to do it. But first, let's take this kick drum out here and we'll just loop this little section so that we can hear it as a place. Okay, now I'm going to open up the sample window and we'll have a look at all the things we can do. So first of all, we already know from the last lecture that we can manipulate the pitch. So I can pitch this all the way up there. I can pitch it all the way down. And we reset that. We also have this setting which is a multiplication or a time stretching knob. So if we drag this down, so if we drag this down and actually shortens the waveform, and if we drag it all the way to the right, it lengthens the waveform. Now this can be a cool effect when you team with the pitch knob, if we pitched this up maybe to $0.600. You can layer this sound in with another kick drum and it can make a really cool sort of techno sound. Let's just really quickly grab a kick drum here, like this one. And we'll listen to what they sound like together. Look this, backup it. And you see if we had, if we turn this down a small bit, it might sound a little bit better. It'll sound like this. So that's a pretty cool effect that you can do with the sampler here. And it's going to reset these little parameters again and delete that kick drum that I had. Just reset this back up to wherever it was. So another thing you can do in the sample window is you can stretch the time. And with this parameter, it stretches the time a lot more than the multiplicate or does, if we stretch this writer's, as you can see, the sample gets ridiculously long. But again, using this knob, you can make some cool effects and layer it with another kick drum to make a sort of interesting kick texture. We set that. So if we come down here to these precomputed effects, we can see here there's a little button to reverse, and this is what I did when I was reversing the clap. I just had this clicked on and it reverses the sample for us. And when we turn the light off, it puts the kick sample backs normal. So let's have a look at reversing a clap sample. Into our drum pattern. Ok, so we'll just looped drum pattern and we'll come up here and we look for a clap. You can use a shortcut or a long clap or any type of crap that you like. But I'm going to use just one of these short claps Here. I'm going to drag this in. And what we do is to reverse the clap anytime we see a clap playing here. So there's attack Lab 16. We put the reverse clap immediately in front of it. So let's reverse this sound. And as you can see, it's immediately, I'll drag it up. It's immediately in front of the of the original clap. So let's look at this and see what it sounds like with a reverse clap. I'll just make the loop living longer. Okay? Now what we can do is with that Clap, we can drag it across to all the other collapse like this. And the last clap. And if we played it, and now if we play the entire loop and we listen to the reversed clap alongside the original claps, it'll sound like this. And if you're using a reverse clap, what you would do is you'd come into the mixer and you'd make the reverse clap a little bit quieter than the other claps. So the other clap seemed to be down here somewhere. So I'm going to bring this right down and we'll have a listen now. So another way you can manipulate your sounds is if you come here and you have a look at these in an hour's parameters. Now, I use the out parameter a lot, especially for the likes of this shaker. So this shaker, it's quite a quick sound, but you can see the tail of the sound continues way past all the other shakers. So what we can do is we can move this out parameter up, and it actually fades out the sound of the sample a lot quicker. So as you can see here, the sound has gone from here to here. And if we look here as well, if we look in a playlist that what it's doing, It's actually getting rid of that tale that I don't want. So now let us into the sample. This is a handy parameter for if you drag in a sample and it's a bit too long, but you really like the sound of this. We can actually, we can actually take that sound and reduces by using the out parameter. Like that. Take this long clap. Reduce it by using the out. Reduce it even more. So now it sounds like this. And what you can do is you can have two versions. So you could have this sort of short clap as a layer. And then when you get to your drop section, you can have a second clap that doesn't have the out parameter turned on. And it sounds like this then. So let's have a look at doing that. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to make this sample unique so that any changes I make to the sample doesn't affect the other ones. So as you can see now, this has gone to number two. So this sample is now completely different to the samples over here. And I'm gonna do is, I'm going to delete this one and I'm going to copy this number two sample. And I'm going to effect these ones. So I'm going to turn up the output parameter the full way up. And you can see it's not affecting these ones, it's only affecting the number two. So let's have a listen now to see what the pattern sounds like with the short clap first and then the lung clap after. So this is a really interesting technique that you can do in your tracks to create progression. So the tracks sort of grows as it plays out. I'm going to show you one more thing that you can do with your kick drum and to manipulate it. So if we go back into this sample window, we can come, if we click this, this is just called effects target. But we can come down here to pogo. Okay? Now, what pogo does is it sort of changes the shape of your decay envelope. You don't even know what that means. All you need to know is that when you drag it to the left, it kind of pushes the waveform up against itself, is kinda squashes it up against this wall. And if you put it the other way, it does the same thing but with a different sort of curve. Okay, but both sides sound different. So let's have a listen to what it sounds like on the right-hand side. Here's what it would sound like if we didn't apply it. And here's what it sounds like, completely left. So what you can do with the pogo is if you've a kick that you want to add more transient to or you want to make it more clicky. We can drag the pogo a bit to the left and it'll make the sound more clicky. You can also drag it to the right to make the sound a little bit more soft. So that's just another handy tool that you can use to manipulate your drum samples. In the next section, we're going to look at building chord patterns and how you can choose instruments that sound good for your records. 15. Constructing Chord Patterns: So this lecture is all about building card patterns for EDM. Now, you may never use chord patterns in your tracks, or you may always used chord patterns in your tracks, but it's important to understand how to construct a chord pattern. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna come up here and we're gonna start with a simple polyphonic instrument. So I'm going to choose FL keys. Polyphonic means that the instrument can play more than one note at the same time. So a piano. We know what the piano that we can play, chords that we can play more than one node at the same time. If you have an instrument that can't play more than one note at the same time, then this would be considered a monophonic instrument. So instruments like the flu or the recorder there, monophonic as they can only play one note at the same time. I'm going to stick with this piano though, because I know that it's a polyphonic instrument, and I'm going to right-click on the little instrument here. And I'm gonna take a piano roll to bring us into where we can start inputting notes for our court. So the first thing we noticed is this looks a little bit different to the playlist window, but it works on the same principal. Okay, so we have bar one, bar two, bar three, bar four across here, and we also have our beats. So this is the first beat, the second beat, the third beat, the fourth beat. And then in between these beads we have our steps. One, step, two, step three, step four step. So it operates in the exact same way as the playlist. So I'm gonna start by putting in a nought here at C. I'm going to play around with some of the notes that I could add. I might add one in here on the third step, and then I might add one. And the second step, maybe the fourth step, and then the third step again here. So let's see what that sounds like so far. And I think it's a little bit faster. I'm going to bring down the BPM down to 128, our happy medium. And I'm gonna have a listen again. So when you're creating cord patterns, one thing that you wanted to make sure is that your notes are not touching each other. Because when the nodes are touching each other, it can sound a bit amateur If he doesn't again to this pattern. And now I'm going to shorten the nonce that are touching each other. So I'm going to shorten this not so that it's not touching this one. And I'm gonna shorten this note. It's not touching this one. And I'm also going to shorten this one because when it loops, when the playhead loops back around, this note is actually touching this not so I'm going to shorten it here, and that's us into the pattern. Now. When you use shorter notes, it actually creates Marvel groove. And groove is very important for EDM because that's what gets people up on their fees and dancing. You don't want your chord pattern to sound too smooth. You wanted to feel like it's sort of stabbing the listener with these short, these are called staccato notes. That's just the musical term for short and kind of snappy. Let's have a listen again to these staccato notes in the pattern. So what I'm gonna do now is I'm going to duplicate this. And I'm going to drag the duplicated nodes up to the fifth of the chord of C, which is G. So let's listen now to what it sounds like when we're playing the root node and the fifth note at the same time. And again, I'm going to duplicate it and I'm going to drag the duplicated nodes up to the third of C, And I'm going to make it minor. So C minor, we have D-sharp. So let's listen to this minor chord pattern now. With the short notes, the short staccato notes adding to the groove. Let's have a listen. Now, I wanted to add swing to this pattern. So one thing I could do is I could come out of the pattern and I could use the swinging up here so I could turn this up. If we, if we turn on the metronome, which will play the meter, we can hear about the pattern will sound like when there are drums playing. So let's turn on the metronome and have a listen to the meter of the track while the pattern is playing. Now I'm going to come back into this piano roll by clicking this. An interesting thing to do at your chord patterns is to duplicate the top notes. Again, bring them up maybe to the octave. So that's another node of C. So we have C5 down here and then we have C7 up here. And what we can do is if we change some of these nodes. So I'm, I bring this up to a D, and I bring this C up to a D-Sharp, then I might bring this C down to another node of the scale, a sharp. And I might bring this not down to G, which is the fifth. And I'll leave this one on C. Let's see what this pattern sounds like. Now. I'm going to turn off the metronome and I'm actually going to press command and press the down arrow, which will shift the notes down an octave so that they're not as high. So now, if we want to shorten all of these knots at the same time, what we can do is we can highlight them all and we can try and drag. But what you'll notice is the drag isn't working if not making them any shorter. And that's because these notes here are as short as they can possibly go. But if we come up here to our snap to grid, dropped down again and we say, we want to make the steps smarter. So let again choose quarter of a step. And now you can see it splits the steps into four smaller steps. And we can now shorten all of the nodes at the same time. The shorter the nodes, the more groove your pattern has. Let's listen to these shorter naughts in the pattern. Let's turn on the metronome again. Now what we can do is we can copy this whole pattern out and we can duplicated again and paste it over here. And if you want, you can change the root naught, which is C. So this is a chord of C. We can change the root node to another node of the scale. So I'm going to drag this down to G sharp, which is the sixth in a minor scale. And I'm gonna see what that sounds like now. So I can hear something's clashing and it's this G. So this G is clashing with this G-sharp. So I'm going to actually pitched this up that it's also a G-sharp. So now we have G sharp and a D sharp, which is the fifth of G-sharp. And we have C, which is the third. So these nodes are all part of the same chord. So it should sound good. And you can have your pattern a lot more empty. We might take out this knot here, these notes, and we'll take them out of the same place in the second half of the pattern. And we could remove, sorry, we can remove these knots as well. Remove them in the same part of the second half. And the more empty your chord pattern is, the more the other elements in your track will shine. And we'll have a look at that when we come to the arrangement stage of the course, when we're looking at driving elements and the elements in your track, that should be kind of taking center stage. But for now, just know that you can have your chords as kind of sparse or as full as you like. So I'm just going to delete these now again and start from scratch because there is something I want to talk about, which is syncopation, okay? Now if you've studied music theory before, you might know what syncopation is. But if you don't know, syncopation is where your nose or your drum hits fall outside the main beats of the bar. So we know that we have this beat one, beat two, beat three, and beat four. So these notes at the moment are not syncopated. And when you don't use syncopation, your cards can start to sound very boring. Like if I was to paste in a, another node here, halfway through this knot here as also not syncopated because it's exactly halfway between both beats. So it's not going to sound syncopated either. And I can Paste another note over here halfway through these two. And it will, it'll sound equally as boring as the first on syncopated pattern. Let's have a listen. However, if I was to move these knots, Faust and move this to the right, which will be on the fourth step. And if I was to maybe to move this one to the left, which would be on the second step. This will create syncopation. Now again, we shouldn't have those nodes touching. So I'm going to use a half-step here just to make these shorter. And if we listen again. So this pattern now has a bit of syncopation. But if you really want to make good cord patterns, you should try to avoid having notes on all four beats to the buyer. So see here I have a note on the first beat and I have a note in the second bead. And I have a note on the third beat and I have a note on the fourth beat. What you should do is you should try to avoid this. So let's move this note out to the third, third step, and that's moved disk knows, maybe to the second step. Now this pattern will be really syncopated and it'll sound much more Groovy. And again, we can duplicate this out and we can drag it up to the fifth, and we can drag it up to the third in the minor. And the pattern was, I like this. So I can't show you step-by-step exactly how to build a chord pattern because everyone has different ideas in their head and everyone has different sort of ideas about what sounds good. Omar doesn't sound good. But what I can do is I can give you these sort of tips and guidelines that you can use when you're creating your core patterns so that the cords and your track don't sound boring a robotic. Let's have a listen to this pattern again with the syncopation that we've just added. So in the next lecture, we're going to look at choosing different instruments for your card patterns. 16. Choosing Instruments for Chords: So in this lecture we're gonna talk about choosing instruments for courts. Now this is absolutely the most important part about making electronic music. You don't need to know how to design your own fancy sense because if you're designing sounds that don't fit together well, then it's just a waste of time. So I think it's important to look at how to choose presets, first of all, that fit together before we actually go and make our own sounds. So what I have here is a little cord pattern that I created on the piano. And it's fairly simple. It's just this started with the syncopated rudeness and which I duplicated out the fifth. And then I duplicate it again up to the third in the minor. And then I just changed this naught. I brought it down to D, and I brought this node down to D. So it's really simple. Then I just sort of pasted that pattern, pasted that mini pattern out across. And then I change the root node up to D-sharp, changed it down to G-sharp and then back down to G-sharp again. But the top part of the chord stays the same. It's the same the whole way through. So let's listen to this chord pattern on the FL Studio stuck piano. Let's have a listen. Now the first thing I'm gonna say about choosing your sounds is definitely don't choose the sound of the stock piano. Everybody who makes music, they know the sound of stock pianos off by Hertz. So if you're intended to send your tracks to record labels that reject the straight away because they know the sound of the stock piano. So you can download. There's literally millions of free piano plug-ins out there on the internet that you can download news. So I suggest that you download a free one and use that instead. What I'm gonna do is I'm going to come in here and I'm going to replace it with a piano, piano plug-in that I have, which is called piano V2. So let's see what this pattern sounds like with the new piano sound. Now a lot of EDM uses a piano sound as the base. So if you want to stick with a piano, you can, or you can change it and turned it into a synthesizer. What I'm gonna do is I'm going to keep this piano sound for now, and then I might come back and change it later. So like our drum samples, we must layer are chords. So I'm going to come up here to add, and I'm going to add a synthesizer to layer with the piano. So I'm going to layer one of these presets from ds. Ds darn is just the third party synthesizer that I have. But you can download lots of third-party synthesizers off the internet, combine them as well. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to come in here to the preset section and I'm going to go down to lead because this is where the pluck sounds there. And these are the types of sounds we're looking for are chords. So we're looking for plucks and we'll have a look at what blocks are and a little bit more detail when we're going through making our own sounds. But for now, if you are choosing your presets, make sure you look for these flock sounds and depending on the synthesizer you are using, the word pluck might be PRK or maybe PLC, or an abbreviation of the word, but you're looking for a pluck sounds. So I'm gonna start here with this autumn pluck. And I'm going to see what this sounds like layered with my piano. So I'm going to come in to the piano roll and I'm going to copy, edit, copy the pattern. And then I'm going to come into my synthesizers piano rule. And I'm going to edit, paste this cup, this pattern. So let's see now what the synthesizer sounds like with the piano as a layer. Now, I quite like the sound of that synthesizer with the piano. I'm just going to mute the piano to see what the synthesizer sounds like. Amazon. So the first thing I notice is the synthesiser is a bit loud, so I'm going to open it up and I'm gonna hit this Settings wheel so that I can assign it to a mixer track. And I can turn it down then just so I can hear the piano a little bit better. Reason I'm turning down the synthesizer is because obviously the synthesizer is layer. And we want the layers to blend and sound like they're one big instrument. We don't want to be able to pick out the different sounds. We want all of the sounds to combine to create one big sound. So let's listen again and see if we're getting one big sound. Now we can open up that synthesizer and we can change the sound and see if we can find some sounds that don't fit. Will instantly, I can hear that this sound doesn't fit because it's sort of Louder and it's actually taking over from the piano. So I'm going to, I'm going to keep going and I'm not going to pick this out. I don't like the sound of this. Let's turn it down again, so it's not overpowering the piano. That sounds quite nice. I really like the sound of this crunchy presets, so I'm going to leave that in there. So when you are layering your chord patterns, a good way to layer would be to think of the final instrument that you want to create. So if we turn this down fully, we know that the piano is the main instrument. So we don't want to, we don't want to distract from the piano, but we do want to add to the piano. So let's bring in this little instrument here. Now I can hear that this instrument has quite a lot of high frequencies. It sounds, it sounds like it's hissing. So we know now that we have a main instrument and sort of a high pitched instrument. With these layers, we're actually missing an instrument that can give the pattern a bit of waste. So if we listen again, the pattern sounds fine, but it's missing the waste that it needs. So I'm going to duplicate this ds torn plugin by coming down here and clicking clone. And then I'm also going to come back into the piano roll and copy the piano pattern into our new synthesizer so that we can hear it. So hit Edit and then paste. And then I'm going to pitch this down an octave. Okay, so I pressed command and the down arrow so that it's gone down enough. And we can see here, these are the like the ghost notes from the other patterns. So we can see the other patterns are actually on this octave. And Arab pattern now is on the octave below. So let's listen to what this sounds like with the same preset as the other synthesizer. So what you don't want to do is you don't want to have the same sounds layered with the same sounds. So this preset is the same preset I used in this synthesizer. So what we want to do is we're gonna change this. So let's change it. Let's see what the next preset sounds like. And actually what I'm gonna do is I'm just going to assign it to a different links attract because it's assigned to the same one here, it's also on one. So let's turn this one down. I don't like the sound of that, but I do like the sound of that, this synthesiser sound very, very good with the other two centers, with the synthesizer and the piano layered. And let's hear what this sounds like with the full pattern. So this extra synthesizer that we just added, that's adding waste to the pattern. So if I turn back up the original synthesizer that we had, it sounds nice and airy. But if we wanted to add a bit more ways, we can add another layer that's pitched an octave down, and it sounds like this. So I think these layers down pretty good. I think they are combined together to sound like one big instrument. And this is what you want to do with your layers too. You can have Twenty-five different layers as long as they all combine to sound like one bigger instrument, then you know that you're layering correctly. You also have to listen critically and just make sure that the presets that you're choosing fit together well. In the next lecture, we're going to learn how to tweak these presets and manipulate them so that they can sound the exact way we want. 17. Introduction to Synthesis: So in this section, we're gonna be looking at sound synthesis. Synthesis is a huge subject, so we're only going to cover the basics here. But if you are interested in synthesis and sound design, make sure you join that Facebook group that I was talking about earlier. As I will be releasing a course on synthesis and sound design in the future. And I'll use that group then to announce when it's out. So let's say you have a pattern here, but some of the synthesizers don't sound exactly the way you want. So let's say this bottom synthesizer here, the final synthesizer be added in the last lecture. Let say that you just don't like the sound of this and you want to change it slightly. So we can come into this incisor and we can actually tweak different things like the oscillators here. We can tweak the envelopes, we can tweak the filters, and we can turn on and off effects. And we can do all of these kinds of things to make the sound different. For example, if I was to change the sound of the oscillator here from sawtooth. So this is what it sounds like with sawtooth. And if I change this synthesis, this, sorry, this oscillator to maybe post number four, it'll sound like this. The components that you find on this synthesizer will be the same on any synthesizer. The ya'll have oscillators and amp envelopes and filters and self. So don't worry if you're afraid that your synthesizer looks different because they all operate in the same way. So let's move on now into the sort of first lecture in this synthesis section, where we learned about synthesizer components and what their functions are. 18. Synthesiser Components: So in these slides, we're going to cover the very basics of sound synthesis so that you can make informed decisions when tweaking or creating or sounds. There are various different components that combined together to make a synthesizer. And they all have their own specific purpose. So let's find out what these are and how we can use them for our EDM tracks. So the first topic I'm going to talk about is polyphonic versus monophonic synthesizers. Now, we've already mentioned this briefly when we were building a chord pattern. But I'm gonna go back over it again here, just so that you can be sure about what it means. So a monophonic synthesizer, or a mono synth, is a synthesizer that can only produce one note at any given time. So if you want to use a monophonic synthesizer for chords, it's actually not going to work. However, most modern synthesisers or polyphonic, which means that they can play more than one note at a time. This makes them great for chord sounds and pads. These modern synthesisers can also function as a monophonic synthesizer if you wish to use it in that way. There was only one real benefit of using a monophonic synth or setting your synth to function as monophonic. And that is that they are more expressive than a polyphonic sent. The reason for this is because polyphonic synthesisers sacrifice a little piece of the sound design in order to be able to play more than one note at a time. So if you don't need to play more than one note at a time, for example, baselines or lead melodies, then you should probably just set your synthesiser plugin to monophonic if it gives you that option. So let's take a look at Voices now. A voice in physics is just a resonating medium. So if we take a guitar, for example, well, each string on the guitar is a voice because they're each mediums that resonate separately. In theory, a guitar would have six voices. Well, in a synthesizer, the voices are just the little signal paths that your synthesizer uses to create the sound. These voices are directly related to the Polyphonic concept that we talked about in the previous slide. So if you have four voices active, then you can only play four notes at the same time. But if you have 16 voices active, you can play 16 notes at the same time, but a more advanced level, voices can provide additional texture into the sound that you're trying to create. If you set your synthesizer into unison mode, then the plug-in starts to process all of these voices separately. You can then Detune each of these voices differently to make a much fatter sound. Now, very few synthesisers actually allow you to manually tweak each voice. But we are usually given a unison button and a D2 nub that we can play with, the more voices that we set to detune the ticker the sand will get. So if we have a look at the example here on screen in the bottom left, it's just a screenshot from a plugin called Spire. But the picture in the bottom left corner is of the voices where we can set how many nodes we want to be able to play at the same time. So in this case, we can only play four notes at the same time. And if we take a look at a little example to the right, we can see that this is the unison section where we are given a detuned knob and a density knob. Or we can say how dense we want the sound to be. And below these, then we have the Voices section where we can say how many voices we wanted detune moving onto oscillators. These are the actual sounds that the synthesizer is working with. There are four main types of oscillators, and these are sine, square, sawtooth and triangle. I'm not going into why they're shaped the way that they are. But all you need to know is how each of them sound. So let's have a listen to each one now. I will say that before we do, you might want to turn down your volume or take off your headphones because these sounds can be quite piercing when they're in their purest form. Ok, so let's have a listen now. The first example here is the sine wave. The second example we have here is the square wave. Third example is a triangle wave. And the final example we have here is a sawtooth wave. So these are what synthesisers use to create the sound that you hear. It's then routed through other components such as the ADSR and filter to fundamentally change the sound into something new. Some synthesisers will give you much more oscillators than these four here. But that's because they've either been shaped by a way of shaper or because of frequency or pitch modulation. So if you're given another oscillator shape to use, it's actually based on one of these four shapes. If you play around with the different oscillator options on your synthesizer, you'll be able to hear the different sounds that they produce. Next, we'll examine the ADSR component. So with this, there's actually two types. There's a filter ADS or and then an amp ADSR. The filter ADSR controls the filter and it makes the sound more or less bright. The amp ADSR controls the volume and it makes the sound more or less loud. For this course, we're only concerned with the AMP ADSR. But it's good to be aware that the other type exists. Adsr stands for attack, decay, sustain, and release. And you can see what the graph here on the right-hand side, how it works. So attack is how long it takes the sound to reach its loudest level. So you can set this quite long to make a cool, sweeping kind of pad sound. The decay is how long the sound takes to reach the sustain level. So to sustain something means to hold it. If you were to keep your finger on the note of the synthesizer, this would be the sustain level. Making the sustain level a little bit quieter than the decay level creates a more natural sound. And finally, the release then is how long it takes for the sound to reach minus infinity or 0 after the note has been released. So if you take your finger off that note, how long does the soundtrack to fade away, to silence. Everything in the ADSR is a measure of time except for the sustain, which is a measure of volume. And the typical sounds that you find on a synthesizer are dependent on the ADSR settings. A pluck sound is short and has little to no sustain level. So if you keep your finger on the nose, the sound will still fade away to silence. Bass sound is similar to a block sound, but the sustain level is a little bit higher, so that when you hold the note, the sound of the bass holds as well. This is important because a lot of EDM just uses a pedal naught baseline. And we'll have a look at what that is when we come to building bass patterns. A lead sand then is designed for playing lead melodies. So the sustain level is often really high so that the full melody can be hurt. And then you also have a pad sound, and these are just long sweeping sounds designed for ambient music. So you'll often find that the attack time is very long and the release time is very long, the sustain level will also be high. But when we have a look at tweaking our synthesisers, we learned that we can adjust these to make them fit our tracks better. Now let's have a look at the filter. This part of the synthesizer is the most responsible for shaping the sounds that we get out of it. Or to put it briefly, the filter just blocks part of the sound and lets the rest of the sound through. There are different filter shapes that you can use, such as lowpass or a bandpass. And I'll include an article that you can read that will explain each of these. The most common shape that's used is the low-pass filter. And it does exactly what it says on the tin. It lets the low frequencies through and it blocks the high frequencies. Or in other words, it lets the basic part of your sound through an blacks. The more hissy sounds. The point at which the filter blocks the sound is called the cutoff frequency. For example, you could block lots of the histones are, you could only block a tiny amount of the hiss sound. You would use the cutoff parameter to justice. You can also automate the cutoff parameter for a very interesting sound. Let's listen to this example of a chord pattern where the filter is cut off. Frequency has been automated to slowly allow more high sounds through. This is also called opening the filter. Let's listen now. Opening the filter is a common technique used in EDM because it creates tension. The sound is teasing the listener as they're slowly being given more and more of the full sound. When they finally do get the full sound along with other elements such as drums and vocals, it can really make the experience much more intense with the filter. There is also a resonance parameter that I wanted to talk about before we move on. Because this is particularly good for techno and acid sounds. When you turn this up, it really accentuates the cutoff frequency. So as you open the filter at the sound is much more accentuated an in your face. Let's listen to an example of opening the filter with the resonance turned down. And then an example of opening the filter with the resonance turned up. Moving on to the LFO. This stands for low frequency modulation and at a little bit like automation, except it's kept within the synthesizer. The equivalent of using an LFO would be if you were to move a volume slider up and down a certain amount of times every second. The amount of times it moves is controlled by the frequency. So if we set the frequency at three hertz, it will actually move the slider up and down three times per second. The LFO is how we can create vibrato or tremolo effects with the synthesizer. So these just make the sound kind of wobble between different volumes are pitches. So sound that wobbles between volumes is called vibrato, and a sound that wobble is between pitches is called tremolo. An LFO can be used for almost everything in dubstep. An LFO is used to control the cutoff filter, and this creates the web-based sound that is so famous. We can also change the shape of the LFO to one of the four oscillator shapes that we looked at already. But it's quite easy to understand. If you can imagine the slider moving in the same shape as a sine wave, then it will move quite smoothly because the shape of a sine wave is smooth. But if you imagine a square wave controlling the slider, then it will actually jump from up to down, exactly the same as the square wave is shaped. So the shape just controls how fast the slider moves from up to down. Next we have portmanteau. This is a simple but really fun parameter to play around with Puerto mental forces. The sound to slide up or down to notes. It's very commonly used in the genre Russian electoral house, which was made famous by the track astronomical by Tony Ag. So let's take a listen to that astronauts via melody without porta mental and then an example with parliament who applied. The higher you set the portmanteau more aggressively, it's slides. You can also control how long it takes to slide up and down if your synthesizer allows it. But if you set the ornamental too high, you might end up masking some of the notes. So make sure that all of the nodes are clearly audible when you're using portmanteau. The next component will have a look at is the mixer. This mixer, it works the same as any other mixer. It's used to make sounds into other sounds. So with a synthesizer, you can have more than just one oscillator playing at the same time. You can set all of these oscillators differently and then mix them into each other as layers. It's kind of like layering our instruments, except that we're layering the individual sounds that make up an instrument. So most synth presets that you find will be using more than one oscillator because it makes the sound much more full and interesting to the ear if you're making your own sounds, tried to use more than one oscillator and mix them together. Next we have the effect section where we can apply some standard effects like reverb or distortion. This can be used creatively or for an interesting result. It can also be used practically to make a particular effect, such as low-fi. But these effects can be applied when you're mixing by using plug-ins as well. So it's up to you if you want to use them now or when you're mixing. Finally, we have the most confusing part of this whole lecture. If you were confused so far, you'll definitely be confused by this part. There are millions of different synthesizers and all of them look completely different. So when you open a synthesizer, it takes a bit of figuring out how to use it. You can always search for some tutorials or articles that will tell you how to use them. But where's the fun in that? Get stuck in and figure out how they work. By figuring it out yourself, you'll actually be teaching yourself sound design in the process. So now we're ready to tweak some presets and design our own sounds. Let's head back into the dark for the next lecture and have a look at that now. 19. Tweaking Synthesiser Parameters: So in this lecture we're going to have a look at tweaking synthesisers so that we can change the presets to fit the sound that we want. So what I have here is I have this chord pattern that I made up very quickly, just so that we can hear what we're doing. And I also have this plug-in called spire, which is actually the plugin that we were using in the example pictures in the previous lecture when we were going through the slides. So what I've done is I've loaded up this pluck preset. So p ok, which is an abbreviation of pluck, and it's called white one. Now I picked this one because I actually don't like the sound of it at all. And it's really piercing and it's just, it just doesn't sound that good. But what we can do is we can tweak the parameters all over this synthesizer and fundamentally make it sound better. So let's just take a listen to the sound as it is now with the pattern that I made earlier Playing. Okay? Now if we look up here, we can see that the release time is really, really long because it's taken a long time for the sound to reach silence. So the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to come down here to the release and the ADSR. And I'm going to turn this down. And while I'm turning it down, I'm going to have a listen to the pattern just to hear what I'm doing. Ok, so let's listen to the pattern and then turn this release time down as it's playing. Okay, so I much prefer the sound of this release time as opposed to the release time when it was up really high. So I'm going to leave it somewhere down here. Next, what I'm gonna do is I'm actually going to turn off the effects over here. So this is our Effects section and I'm just going to muse to delay. I'm going to mute the reverb. And I'm also going to use this saturation or a kind of distortion effect. So let's see what it sounds like now without the effects muted. Another thing we can do is we can come over here to the mixer section of this synthesizer and we can change the mix of the two oscillators that are running at the same time. So oscillator three is just a noise oscillator. And noise is the sort of static sound that you get on those old televisions when it's showing you the black and white kind of screen. That's called static or noise. So let's just see what the noise sounds like. And this noise is layered in with this oscillator to, which is just this oscillator here. And it's called piano a2. And what you'll notice about the shape of this oscillator is that it's not one of the shapes that we were looking at, but it is comprised of those four shapes that we're looking at. So somewhere in here there's triangles and squares, and there's saw waves and they're all combining together to create this chip. Okay? So what we can do is we can turn back on this oscillator three, and we can actually come in here and change the sound of the oscillator. So if I click piano a2 and I changed this to Maybe a sinewave. And we'll see what it sounds like when it's a sine wave. And I can change it into any of these shapes that this particular plugin comes with. So we have brass one. Let's see what this sounds like. Let's see we're violin one sounds like. And just for the sake of demonstration, let's see what sent three sounds like. Okay, and as I was playing, I'm, I'm not sure that I liked the sound of the white noise playing at the same time. So I'm going to mute that oscillator because I don't like it. And I'm just going to leave the main sound, which is oscillator two. I'm going to leave that on. So let's hear what it sounds like now. I can also come down here and I can adjust the attack time so that it takes longer for the sound to reach the decay time. So that's just the attack and see what difference that makes. So a kind of sounds like the volume is sweeping up to the decay level. Let's adjust the decay now and see what happens. So you'll notice that nothing actually happened there when I was adjusting the decay level. And this is because the decay is actually a measure of time, not of volume, but the sustain, if we recall, is a measure of volume. So if I turn this sustain volume slider down, then we should hear a difference. So I'm going to just indicate m. I prefer the sound of both of these sliders up, so I'm going to leave them up. We can also come over here to the filter section and we can adjust the cutoff frequency. So let's have a listen to the pattern as we change the cutoff frequency of the filter. So I think I prefer the sound like this with the cut-off frequency down, just because it sounds a little bit more mellow and less intense. We can also turn up the resonance of the filter. So let's listen to the sound and adjust the resonance. So I prefer the sound of the resonance down as well, so I'm going to leave it down. Let's just have a look at the unison section now where we were talking about voices. So what I'm gonna do is, well, first of all, let's come up here and we can see that with this particular setting, we can play eight nodes at the same time. Now we can change this up to 16 nodes at the same time. Or we can have it down at one node at the same time. And if I leave it down at one node at the same time, you'll notice that the cords won't play properly because the synthesizer is only able to play one note at a time. Let's have a listen to what that sounds like. So I'm going to switch this back to four. And for the sake of making chords, I'm just gonna put this up as high as it goes, just in case we add in extra notes. I don't want the synthesizer. I don't want the synthesizer to kind of prioritize certain nodes over other nodes. So I'm just going to set this as high as it goes in case we add in extra notes later. So coming back now to the unison section, I'm going to change the amount of voices. So at the moment is only set on one. I'm going to turn this up to five. And remember, the more voices that ticker D sound will get. So let's have a listen to what it sounds like with five voices. And if I put it back to one, and let's try it all the way up at nine voices. So with nine voices, I think it sounds a little bit to tick. So I'm going to put it back down to five voices, I think is where we had. And while it's playing again, I'm just going to adjust the de-tune and the density just to see what these knobs do. Okay, so let's have a listen. And finally we have the LFO section. So let's come down here to where it says LFO one. And we'll switch over to this. So what we can do is we can map the LFO to something. So if I click this and I map it to the filter, and I map it to the filter is cut off one. Then what will happen is as the synthesizer plays, this LFO will affect the cut-off one on the filter. We can also set the timing to be free, or sort of faster or shorter depending on what you select here, but I'm going to leave it at free. We can also change the shape as we were talking about before. Now, spire gives you all of these different shapes to choose from. But if we notice we have sine triangle and square. So let's change to square just for the sake of consistency because we were looking at square waves in the last lecture. Okay? So if I come over here and I turn up the amount of LFO and I if I if I just turn this up fully, let's just hear what that sounds like. And if I turn up the rate, you will actually adjust the cutoff much quicker. So you can hear that all of these changes are very sudden and that's because we're using a square wave. So let's come back in here now and we'll pick a sinewave, which is a lot more smooth. The shape is much more smooth as you can see, the sound that we get now shouldn't be as sort of jumpy as the square wave. Let's listen. And if we don't want it to be as extreme, we can come over here and turn down the amount. And also if you want to sync the LFO sort of the default rate to your BPM, which mine is set to 140. At the moment, if we hit the sync button, it'll sink. As you can see, it's sinking to one quarter note or a crutches in sort of UK terms. And we can see that it's now sinking to the BPM of the track. So let's listen to the sound now with this succinct LFO. So there are the parameters that you can tweak in your synthesizer to sort of make the sound fit your track a little bit better. In the next lecture, we'll look at starting from scratch and making our own synth sound. 20. Making Synthesiser Sounds: So in this lecture, we're going to have a look at making our own synth presets. Now this isn't sound design course, so it's going to be very brief. I'd maybe stick with tweaking the presets for now, but I do want to show you that you can make your own if you wish. So the first thing I'm gonna say is that every synthesizer has a different interface and setup. So you might have to experiment a bit to figure out how your particular centers setup. Because I can't go through every synthesizer and how to use them. But if we apply the knowledge that we've learned so far, we'd be able to figure out most synthesizers just by experimenting. So what I'm gonna do is I'm just going to click this initialized button here just so we can make sure that all of the parameters are set back to the default. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna come down here to the oscillator and I'm going to start trying to make some sounds. So the first thing you'll notice is that the wave is set to sinewave, but the image that this synthesiser gives us doesn't look like a sine wave. And that's because of the type of synthesizer that Spire is. Okay, so Spire is a wave table synthesizer. We're not gonna go into detail about what this is. Just the main thing to know is that if you have spire to get the actual shape of the sine wave, you have to turn this WT mixed up and that means wave table mics. So we're just gonna turn that up fully and then we're going to start playing around with the different sounds. So let's see what the sine wave sounds like with the pattern we had in the last lecture. Okay, so I don't like the sound of that straightaway, so I'm just going to change this to something else maybe let's try sent to. Okay, so I think we have a good foundation now to start shaping our sound. So I'm gonna come down now to the envelope section, and I'm going to start adjusting the ADSR just to get it to sound the way I want. So I think I want this to be a bit of a plucky sound, so I'm going to turn up the decay. And then I'm going to turn down the sustained so that it's more of a pluck sound. And then I'm might leave the attacker It is. And the release will be sort of short because it's a plucks answer that's here and see if we've made a flux Arna. Ok, so it's getting there, but I think there's too much release, so I'm going to turn out the release. Okay, let's see what it sounds like if we turn to sustain fully down. Okay, so I've just turned the decay level down as well just because I wanted to sort of reach the sustain level a lot quicker than it was when I was up here. It was taking too long. But we wanted to be very quick and plucky. So I'm going to bring the decay down again. Okay? Now that's two-block E. So I'm going to, there we go. The next thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to come up to the unison mode and I'm going to make the sound a little bit fatter. So I'm going to turn on three voices. And I'm going to see what this sounds like. Mit tune it a little bit more and maybe make it a little bit denser. Okay, so I'm liking the sound of this so far. Next I'm gonna come over here to the filter section. And to turn on the filter inspire, we have to first set it to the type of filter that we want to use. Now the most common type of filter is this perfect or so I'm just going to leave it here on this prefactor and I'm gonna set it at lowpass four. So we have low pass band pass, high pass. And then we Vr peak or a notch filter. But I'm going to leave it on lowpass four. I'm going to adjust the cutoff frequency and I'm gonna hear what it sounds like as a place. And now let's see what it sounds like if we adjust the resonance. So I kinda like the sound of the resonance around here. It's kind of adding in a bit of high-end to designs. So I'm gonna leave the resonance up there, and I'm also going to leave the cutoff frequency around here because I'm liking the sound of it. The next thing I'm gonna do is add in another oscillator that turned it off. I was meant to just turn it up. This turns it on. So I liked the sound of this oscillator, but I think that the sound needs a bit more to sort of function as a proper modern synth sounds. So I'm going to turn up this second oscillator. Maybe you just up to the top as well. And we're going to click into it here by clicking oscillator two. And again, we're going to turn up this wave table mix. And there we're going to add a different type of sound in on top of our other oscillators out. So let's try this piano one and see what that sounds like together. So I'm going to turn it down to see what it sounds like without it. And I'm going to turn it up to see what it sounds like with it. Now for this oscillator, I think I want to change the octave and a lot of synthesisers will let you do this. They'll have a little sort of octave shift button. So I'm going to shift this up an octave. So you can see here it's gone to plus one. And this will make this oscillator sound higher than the other oscillator. So let's have a listen to what it sounds like now. Maybe if I bring it down and down again. So I'm gonna put it back up because I like the, I like the sound of the higher end of that. The second oscillator is adding in. I'm also going to de-tune it by adding in three voices again. Let's see what that sounds like. And with spire, we also have an option to pan the oscillator. So I can pan this totally to the right, or I can pan it totally to the left. And this is useful if I wanted to pan, say, oscillator two to the left and then maybe oscillator one or sorry, oscillator to the right and then oscillator one to the left. Let's see what this sounds like. I think I'm just gonna put these back to the center. And what I'm gonna do is instead, I'm going to use this wide option that spiral gives us. And this just makes the sound a little bit wider. So I am going to apply this to oscillator two that we're in now. And I'm just going to listen as it's happening, just to see what I'm doing. So I like the sound of the scent when the wideness setting is set here. And might also turn up this oscillator just sorts of bit louder. I'm liking the sound of this. And what I'm actually gonna do is I'm actually going to add in a third oscillator just for a bit of weight. So again, turn it up, don't press T oscillator three, that just turns it off, but I'm going to turn it up here. And I'm going to click into oscillator three, and I'm going to pitch it down an octave. Immediately. Again, turn up the wave table mix and we're going to apply one of these stands. So I'm just gonna try brass T2 and see what this sounds like. Turned it up a bit. Okay, I'm going to pitch it up again. I don't think I think it's actually pitched too low at the moment. Ok, so this particular sound doesn't seem to make much of a difference and I'm going to try a different May 1 be oregon one. Let's try with this sounds like so I can hear what this particular sound, but it is adding a bit of weight. So I'm going to maybe turn this down to just around here so it's kind of louder than the rest. And again, I'm going to apply a bit of whiteness to it just to see what that sounds like. So let's have a listen to the wideness parameter as the patterns playing. Okay, so it's not making much of a difference. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to come back into oscillator one and maybe widen this one to see what that sounds like. So let's have a listen again. But as I've been tweaking it, I've noticed that it's actually a little bit to plucky. It's to plucky for what I want the sound to be. So i'm gonna come back down to the ADSR and I'm gonna turn up the sustain level a bit. And we're gonna have listened to what this sounds like. Okay, so I like the sound of the sustain level when it's somewhere around here. Next, we'd just have a quick look at the effect section. So the first one is sort of, It's a saturation plug-in and we'll be looking at that when we're doing mixing. But I'm just gonna set this at the moment, just to tube. And I'm going to turn up the drive a small bits. I'm going to listen while I'm well, I'm affecting actually, sorry. Before you make any adjustments to the plugins, you must turn up the dry, wet, dry where parameter and dry means AF and wet means on. So at this way would be a 100% on, and this is a 100% off. So I'm going to turn this up somewhere in the middle. And we'll do that again, will take a listen and then adjust the drive setting. And I'm going to turn down the dry wet nap. So I like the little bit of Ras penis that this saturation effect is adding in. I'm gonna come over here to the chorus, and I'm going to turn this up to somewhere around this same area, maybe a bit more. And I'm just gonna see what this sounds like. So I don't like the sound of the chorus at all, so I'm not going to use it. So that's coming here to the delay. And again, we turn up the Dry Wet and we'll just have a listen to what it sounds like. So with this effect, we can actually make the delay on the right are different to the delay on the left. So I'm going to turn the delay on the left down a bit. And then I'm going to turn the delay on the right of a bit. So let's see what this sounds like. So I think the delay is a little bit too loud, so I'm just going to turn it down just so it's kind of subtle. An x, we just have a look at the reverb. And again, we'll turn it up and we'll just see what it sounds like. So for the moment, I'm actually going to leave the reverb and the delay off because I can apply these Using effects when we come to mixing. So I'm just going to leave them off for now. But I'm, I come down and have a quick look at this sort of EQ section. And I might just boost the high-end a bit. Just were kind of sounds better. I think we have to turn it on using this EQ button. I'm just gonna boost the high-end and maybe take out some of the mids. Just to make it sound a little bit more pleasurable to the year. Now this is all stuff that we can do. And when we're mixing anyway and it is will be still applying the EQ on top of this. But just for the moment, I want to hear what it sounds like with this sort of EQ settings. So let's have a listen. And I've just noticed upon listening again, that I think the resonance is a bit too high. So I'm actually just going to turn off the resonance completely and I'm gonna make sure that it's off on all of these oscillators and see the resonance was making that sort of tweeting sound like a bird. So I'm just going to turn that down because I think it was way too piercing at the level that it was. So let's hear it now. And this is the process of making your sense. You know, you come over here, you'll change something and then you realize something down here needs to be changed again. And then when you're changing this, you realize that that affects something up here that you have to change. So the whole process of making your own sounds and sound design is kind of a back and forth between the different parameters. And you're just tweaking different things until you get the desired result. Now I know I kind of went through that quickly and I'm not going in depth with some of the parameters that are on the plug-in. But you don't actually need to know what the different parameters are doing in order to create a sound. So I think the best thing to do for you would be to just go into your plug-in and sort of figure out how it works. You know, adjust some of the parameters. Cbo kind of sound it makes and see what kind of sound you can get out of it. This method of experimentation is actually much better for sound design. Then, you know, sort of watching me do it and explain what each of these different parameters do. But as I said, I will have a sound design course coming out in the future. So make sure you join that Facebook group and just so you don't miss any sort of announcement about us, but that's all we need to know for the moment. So let's move on to the next section where we'll have a look at building base. 21. Main Elements of EDM Basslines: So let's examine the main elements of an EDM baseline. Well, first of all, base is used to establish a sort of harmonic foundation for your track. So if you have a chord progression that maybe goes C, G, F, and C, well then your baseline will more than likely follow this by going C, G, F, C. Now a lot of EDM tracks, they don't actually use chord progressions. It's just kind of one chord the whole way through. And in this case, your baseline will also be centered around that one chord or that one knows which is called the root node. Now there's different types of patterns that you can have with EDM bases. There's rolling baselines, jumping baselines, petal notes, sort of techno baseline. There's sigh baselines. There's all these different types of baselines that you can sort of create. But some of the characteristics will be the same across all of them. So let's just examine some of the most prominent characteristics of an EDM baseline. And then when we come to the next lecture where we look at constructing a base pattern, we'll go into more detail with what these different types of patterns are. So one of the main features of an EDM baseline is that it uses a short pattern. Now, this pattern here that I have is actually two bars long because this half of the pattern is different to the second half. So it's actually, it combines together to create 2-bar pattern and usually an answer using a chord progression. And then your baseline pattern could be, it could be 32 bars long. But if you're only using one chord in your track, your baseline should never really go above two bars, okay? Anything more than two buyers, it'll start to get too complicated and it won't be easy for the listener to dance to if it's ever played at a nightclub or anything like that. So make sure that you're using short, sort of precise patterns and you're just repeating it the whole way through. Another characteristic is that EDM baselines, they center around the root node. So in this case, I'll just play this example for you and then we'll examine what's going on with the base. So let's listen. Okay, so this would be considered a rolling baseline, but we'll look at that again in the next lecture. But let's click into the pioneer and we'll just have a look at what's going on with the notes. So the root node of this track is e. And we can see that the baseline is sort of centering around E, but it's also incorporating the other notes of the ii chord in. So it's going from E to G to B, to G to E, and then back to G, and then back up to B. So these are all nodes of the chord of E-Minor. Now with an EDM baseline, you will rarely find it using other notes that are outside the chord. So for example, if this was maybe a D and maybe this was a C, you'd rarely find that because the pattern is so short and the track is only centering around, this one knows. You will rarely find it incorporating other notes that are outside the court unless it's using ornamentation and we'll talk about that in just a minute. But let's listen to what this pattern sounds like now that I've moved some of the notes. So as you can see, it kind of throws the whole sound off. So I'm just gonna move this back down to B and I'm gonna move this back up to E. So if you are constructing a baseline mixture, you're centering around one note or you're centering around one court. And let's just quickly talk about ornamentation. Ok, so the extra nodes here and here, these will be considered sort of ornamentation not so if I take them out, the patterns sounds like this. And what the ornamentation naughts are doing is they're sort of letting the baseline flow, number one naturally between the E and B, this big jump. But they're also filling the space that's left between this third step of the second BCE and this fourth step here. This fourth step here of the first page. Now what ornamentation actually is? Well, if you think of an ornament, you know, if you have an ornament in your house, and why why would you place an ornament, let's say on the mantelpiece above your fire. Well, you'd place it there for aesthetic purposes. You know, it's because it's nice to look at. Well, it's the same thing in music. Ornamentation is where we place some notes in her, some sounds or something, and we place them in for aesthetic purposes. So let's listen again to this pattern with the ornamented notes in, and we'll see what that sounds like. An another characteristic of these ornamented notes is that they're often shorter than the other nodes. Now if I lengthen these ornamented nodes than they won't sound like they're there. For ornamentation. Dell actually sound like they're part of the main pattern and it'll throw off the entire sound of the pattern. Let's have a listen. And maybe you like the sound of that and that's fine because all of this is objective. But for me, I quite like it when these notes are quite short, I think it adds to the groove and it feels more like ornamentation to me. So I'm going to leave them short. Okay, so now that we've cleared up what ornamentation is and we've sort of cleared up the characteristics of an EDM baseline. We're ready to just move on now and construct our own baseline. So we'll have a look at the different types of baselines that there are. And we'll create a few patterns that you might be able to use in your tracks. 22. Constructing Bass Patterns: Okay, so let's start to construct a base pattern. So the first pattern we're going to look at is a rolling baseline and this is where denotes kind of roll up and down towards each other. So if I, if I put in a note here of E and then B on the second beat, and then maybe e again on the third beat, and then maybe be again on the fourth beat. What happens is with a rolling baseline, so just shortened these and note will go in-between that allows the baseline to sort of roll up and down. Okay, maybe we'll put one here. Put one on deterred step and then again on the fourth step. And this would be considered a rolling baseline. And let's have a listen. Okay, so it doesn't sound very good because remember that thing we talked about before, which is syncopation. And so the first part of this pattern is all playing on, on syncopated beats. So let's just move this G to syncopated more. So we'll move it onto the fourth step. And then we've moved this, gee, maybe we remove this one onto the second step or something just to syncopated more. And again, we don't have not touching. So let's shorten this node so that none of the nodes are touching. So let's have a listen. You might lengthen this node because there's a lot of sort of empty space after it. So let's maybe lengthen this one and see what that sounds like. So this is considered a rolling baseline because the notes are rolling up and down to each other. So let's delete this now. And we'll have a look at a single note baseline. And this is a baseline that's used generally with house. So if we stick with our E as the North that we're using, a single note baseline will only incorporate the naughts of E. So maybe, again, thinking of syncopation, we might lengthen this or there's no empty space and then keep them short. Maybe we'll put a note here. So maybe again, lengthen this. Maybe get this in a bit shorter just for the sake of keeping things sounding a bit reel. And then we'll add another note here. And then again, maybe on the fourth step and the third step of the next B. So we'll just lengthen DES like that. So let's see what this pattern sounds like now. And this is the single note baseline. Ok, so let's have a listen. Okay, so let's delete these again and we'll have a look at a different type of baseline, which is a jumping baseline. And this is where denotes jump opened down to each other. So if I paste in again R, E, and let's say it jumps all the way up to this. Octave, E appear in octave above. So we'll make this really short because it's kind of an ornamentation or it's kind of leaping up. And then I'll play like a second half of the pattern. And this piece, maybe like this. And then again, we'll use this e. And maybe we'll leap up for the whole second around the third step of this beet. We might make this note a little longer than this one. And then again, we'll paste in this E And maybe this Shirky here. Okay? So now we can see that the baseline is actually leaping up and down. So let's see what this sounds like. And you could actually turn this into a rolling baseline if you just shorten these notes and maybe add in some extra ones that allowed the baseline to roll up and then roll back down again. So if we paste in a G in the relief this with an E. So now this sort of pattern here, this is rolling. Okay, so let's delete these. And again we'll start from scratch, delete. And I've just turned off that loop. And then we'll have a look at a common techno baselines. And one of the most common things to do with the technical baseline is to actually just place a bass note and sort of root node of the track. And then have, have that bass note play for the entire BCE of the first beat. And then again for the second piece, again for the third base beats and again for the fourth beat. And this is commonly used actually in the style of big room, which was sort of made famous by Martin directs and his track animals. But let's have a listen to this sort of big room technol baseline. So with this, you'd actually have it layered with a kick drum. So if I come out here and we just layer it really quickly with the kick drum loop, this section just to see what it sounds like. And this would be to sound when it's layered with the kick drum. Come into this. And another thing that you can do with technology is turned this into MSI style baseline. So with psi music, you actually leave the first step empty, and then you paste the baseline on every other step of the buyer, okay, like this. So let's see what that sounds like with the kick drum. And you can make these notes. You can make these notes longer, just so that they don't sound as plucky as there. So I'm just going to turn on the quarter setting and make them a bit longer. Let's see what that sounds like. And finally then if I delete this and restart from scratch for the last time, we have a pedal naught baseline. So a pedal note baseline is where if you have chords, so let's say, I think the example I gave before it was CGF and see, so you would just have your baseline playing underneath the chords. So this would be a pedal note because it's being held for the duration of D bar. So then you'd paste one upon g. You paste the gnawed on F, And then you'd paste the node again down on C. And this is what a pedal naught baseline would sound like. So let's take a listen to this. So that's a pedal, no baseline. Okay, so I'm gonna delete that again. And I'm going to give you one final tip before you go making your own base patterns. And that is to allow one beat of the bar for breathing. Okay, so let's say I have a rolling baseline that goes E, G, B, and then maybe like this, okay? And I paste that across when there's plays because each sort of beat of the bar is filled, there's no room for breathing. So let's just listen to this pattern. It's going to sound very, very repetitive and like we don't have any space for breathing. So let's just isn't. What you wanna do is if you have a baseline like this, if you have a sort of pattern that's playing across all four beats of the bar. And then it's just looping like this the whole time you want to allow space for breathing. So let's delete these knots. So relieving the last beat of the bar for a breath. And then we're going to extend this node out. So it's kind of like there's a bit of space here now for the baseline to catch its breath before it jumps back in and it starts rolling up and down again. So this is a subtle change, but it can really make a difference to your music. If you're using a rolling baseline and it can break up the repetitiveness of the track. So let's just listen to this now. So just bear these points in mind when you're making your baseline. Tried to allow some room for breathing and keep in mind that there's ornamentation notes and there's different styles of baselines that you can apply. And the next lecture we'll take a look at choosing some presets for your baselines. 23. Choosing Bass Instruments: So when you're choosing your base, since as I said before, at the most important part of electronic music is choosing your sounds. So it's no different with the base, okay? You have to make sure that your bass sound fits the rest of your tracks. So if you've instruments like I have here, I have two layers of chords, and I also have a melody. And you have to make sure that the baseline fits the sound of the chord. So at the moment, I think the baseline sounds OK, let's have a listen. And what the baseline is doing in this sort of pattern is it's just playing the same pattern as the chords, but it's just in the base and it's the same notes that are playing. A show you. Its d, b, c, and g. If we come into the baseline, it's D, B, C, and G. And the reason I picked this up rather than down is because with some bases, when you copy the pattern out and you have these sort of low notes. Sometimes the nodes can actually be too low. So let's have a listen to what it sounds like here with these notes. Sort of really, really low, okay? And that just depends on the synth sound that you choose. So for this particular send sound, these nodes need to be higher so that the, you know, the sound of the bass isn't lost. Okay, let's go into the synthesizer here and we'll have a listen to some of the different base presets that there is, and we will try and find some that work and that don't work. Okay? So we already know, I'm just gonna click out of this. We already know that this sound fits. Alright, I'm gonna have to choose that to make it go away. But we already know that this preset, this base progressive fits. Okay? So let's find, let's go through the presets and find one that doesn't fit. What we'll do actually is we play the pattern at the same time while we're listening. But obviously, this base preset definitely does not fit. Okay, it's completely distracting from the rest of the pattern. Let's listen to it on its own. And even though this particular preset sounds cool on its own, it sounds really imaginative. And if it was playing on its own and the track, maybe it would work. But because it's playing with other instruments, we have to think about everything that's involved. So I can't pick this particular basin because it's too distracting and it sounds nasty with all of the other instruments added in. Let's say you come across a base preset. And it doesn't have a lot of low end. Now this particular base does have a lot of low end. But what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna come into the mixer really quickly here. And I'm just going to load a EQ and I'm going to cut some of the low end out. Okay? Don't worry about what I'm doing here. We'd be looking at EQ in detail when we go into the mixing section. Okay, so don't worry what I'm doing. Just know that I'm I'm cutting out the low end just so I can hear what it sounds like if we found a base that didn't have low end, but we really liked the sound of the high end of the base. Okay, so let's listen to what it sounds like now. Maybe not that extreme. Maybe just turn it down a bit. Okay. Okay, so now we have a baseline that we liked the sound of, but unfortunately it doesn't sound very basic. Well, what we can do is we can layer it again. And I know I'm always talking about layers, but you really, really do need to layer in electronic music. So we come up here to the add, and I'm going to add in FL Studio, One of the most basic sense that there is, which is the three oscillator. And your dial will come with a very, very basic synthesizer as well. And I think able to analog, I think it's called, and basically it's the most basic sense. It gives you an oscillator here. So these are the shapes I can choose. And then there's not much else that we can tweak to sort of shape the sound. But that's okay for this particular layer, we don't need to be able to tweak any of the other parameters. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to turn down the second oscillator and I'm going to turn down the third oscillator just so that they're not interfering with the first one up here. And I'm gonna leave it set to sinewave. So what we're creating at the moment, it's called a subspace. And this type of base has a lot of low end and a lot of weight to it. Okay, so we can layer this. So based in with our original base that doesn't have a lot of low end. And we can blend them together to make the base width. No low-end have based with low end because we're using the low end from this synthesizer. So when you're creating a so base, always pick a sinewave because a sine wave is the cleanest wave that there is out there. And when you are layering in a sub bass, you kind of, you want the cleanest low-end sound that you can get. Okay, so I'm going to leave it on sinewave and I'm going to close out of this. Ok, so the synthesisers come in down here. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to copy this pattern by pressing command and see. And I'm gonna come down into the piano roll of this synthesizer and I'm going to press command and v. So let's see what this sounds like Now. As a layer with the baseline that we found that doesn't have a lot of weight to it. Okay? So we can hear that this sub base is way too high pitched, So I'm going to pitch it down. And I'm gonna pitch it down again. And what we can do is then we can add it to the mixer track by pressing the Settings wheel and then track. And we'll just turn it down so it sounds Monica layer. So that's just a little technique that you can do. If you come across a base that you really like the sound of. But it doesn't have a lot of ways are low end too is you can come in here and you can layer a clean sine wave as a sub bass underneath, and it'll add that weight that the original base was missing. But if you have found a bass sound that you like and there is enough low end on it. Well then we don't need to layer in this extra so base. If you are layering your base. I would advise you not to layer too much. Stick with this one man sound and this sub based. And if you don't need the sub bass, then don't add it in. Okay? You know, if you only have one base layer, that's absolutely fine because the base is part of the low end, it's part of the foundation of the track. And as I've said so many times before, you don't want to mess up the foundation of your track. So if you have a preset that you like and it has enough sort of weight to it. Just leave it and use it as it is. Or if you have under preset that you like. But there isn't enough weight to it, then we can come down and we can add in an extra subbase. So for this particular bass sound that I found here, there is enough low end. So I don't need this additional subspace, so I'm gonna just turn that off. And the base that I have now, just with this one layer is completely sufficient for EDM, okay? Now if you have a track, let's say that doesn't have, that doesn't have any cards and it's just sort of baseline driven. Which should sound like this. Well then the base Sam that you choose, it doesn't have to fit the other instruments in your track. But it, what it does have to do is it has to fit the other elements in your track like the drums and the vocals. Also the preset that you use will make different types of baseline patterns sound difference. So at the moment, this particular preset that we have sons, you know, it sounds are right with this pattern. But if I deleted this and I change this to a rolling baseline pattern. So maybe I add in some shorter notes like this. Okay? Maybe like this. And then if we listen to this pattern with the baseline, it might not sound as good. So that's another point to bear in mind is that the pattern that you're using might sound better on different base presets than it will on other base presets. So again, same as choosing your chord sounds. You have to listen critically and you have to listen to the baseline in the context of your track. So let's say I came in here and I had the baseline, a kick and some drums already made. Well then you have to I'd have to listen to that baseline and see does it work with the drum sounds that I've picked? So at the moment I think no, I think this base pattern doesn't work. So I'm going to listen while I'm changing it so that I can pinpoint the correct preset that I like. So let's listen. Now I love the sound of this baseline with the drums that I'm, that I'm using here. Ok. So it is important to sort of audition the sounds that you're using in the context of the track that you've built around it. Next, we'll have a quick look at making our own basins. 24. Making Bass Sounds: So let's have a look now at making a base scent. And making a basement is no different to making any other Cent, you're going to be tweaking the same sort of parameters, the oscillators, the envelopes. You're gonna come over here to the filter. You're gonna do the same stuff as you would do with the other instruments, but you're keeping the fact that you are trying to make a base in mind. Now, essentially, especially for house music, a base is just a pluck sent with a sub based layered underneath. Now, I think we already know how to make a block sent. So let's just make one and then turn it into a base by layering in a subbase. So I've just got this sort of rolling, I'm based melody, but it's kind of mixed with a single note based melody. But it's fairly simple. Let's just take a listen to what this sounds like with the default preset with spire, the plug-in that we've been using so far. Okay, so it's just a straightforward, simple based melody. And now we're gonna go and have a look at making a base sent. So again with spire, the first thing I'm going to do is to get the shape of the sine wave. I'm going to turn up this w t Next. And now we can see we have our sine wave here. What I'm gonna do is I'm just going to change this to, let's test some of the different sounds here. Let's try base for see what that sounds like. I'm going to try maybe violin three. Ok, so I'm liking sound, violin tree. So I'm gonna come over here to the unison mode, and I'm going to change it from maybe one voice to three voices and see what that sounds like. Let's have a listen. So I might increase the Detune a bit and just see what that sounds like. Okay, so next I'm going to come over here to the filter section and I'm going to change it to perfected the sort of filter setting we've been looking at so far. And then leave the cutoff down because I want it to be plucky. If I turn this up, it won't sound very plucky. And that's fine when you want to open the filter, but I want the bass sound at the moment to be plucky. So I'm gonna leave this down, down to the left. I'm going to see what it sounds like now if I turn up the decay, I don't think it would make much of a difference, but I'll just see maybe if I turn down the sustain. So I prefer the sound with the decay may be down here. Let's see what it's like if we turn up the attack. Now, I prefer that plucky sound, so I'm going to leave the attack down. So the next thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to come in to the second oscillator and I'm going to turn that up and we're going to use this as a layer. Ok, so again, turn up the WT mix the wave table mics, and we'll have a listen to some of the presets in here, and I don't use a sinewave yet. I'm going to use that maybe with a turd oscillator as a sub base layer. But for the moment I wanted to find another sort of main layer to layer in with our first oscillator. So let's try maybe brass one. Let's see what this sounds like. I'm just going to turn it up a bit so I can hear it better. Let's try another setting. We come down here, maybe Dianne, one of these by N1. Okay, so I can hear this is adding in a particularly nice sort of house plucky sound. So I'm going to leave it with this buyin setting and I'm gonna come in here again to our unison section, and I'm going to set it to three voices as well. Let's see what that sounds like. That's de-tune it a bit more. And now let's use this wide setting to make this second layer whiter than the first layer. Ok, so I'm gonna turn it all the way to about three o'clock over here. Let's have a listen. And so I'm thinking that I wanted to sound a little bit thicker, so I'm going to actually add in another unison voice. Okay, so let's add in maybe five lyses. So let's add another two voices to our three already. And let's see what this sounds like. And yeah, that's already sounding a lot thicker. Okay, and now what we're gonna do is we're going to come in here to the third oscillator, and we're going to layer this in as a sub bass. So I'm actually going to leave this down for the moment and just turn it up to a sine wave. And then as the melodies playing, I'll gradually increased this until we reach a sort of desired sub base level. Okay, so let's have a listen. And so let's have a listen and increase this oscillator three. So I like where the sub bass is sitting at the moment in relation to the other oscillators. I'm just going to open the filter a bit to see what that sounds like. Very. And the final thing I might do here is I might come back to oscillator one and see what that sounds like if I pitch it an octave up. Okay, so let's see what it sounds like without the oscillator pitched up. And now if I pitched that oscillator up, let's make it a little bit wider. Okay, so I'm liking the sound of this base, so fact. So what we could do now is we could come over to the effect section here and add in some effects like some saturation and stuff. But I think they're going to leave that for the mixing section. But what I will do is I will just shape the sound a bit using this EQ setting here. Now if you're a synthesizer doesn't have an EQ setting built in, you can just open the mixer track and you can sort of load an EQ setting onto this slot and shape your sound before you start doing any mixing. But for now, because spire has the EQ built-in, I'm just going to use this EQ here to sort of shape the sound. So I'm going to turn it on by pressing the EQ button. And I'm gonna take a listen to what it sounds like if I boost some of the high-end. Okay, so let's listen to the pattern and then I'll increase this as it's playing. Let's have a look at adjusting the mid-range section. So I think this bass sound is a lot more aggressive now with the sort of shaping that we've done with the EQ. But I'm thinking that I might change the sound of this oscillator because I think it's a little bit too soft for the sound that we're going for. So I'm gonna come down here and I'm going to change, I'm actually sorry, I'm gonna mute these oscillators first and then I'm going to come down here and I'm gonna change the sound of this oscillator, which is oscillator one. So let's listen to the pattern and will change the shape of the oscillator as it's playing. And maybe we'll try one of these brass. The brass to OK. Now I prefer the sound of brass one, so I'm going to leave it on brass one. So let's turn back on the other oscillators and see what this sounds like Now as a full sort of layered bass sound. So that's all you have to do when you're creating your base. Come in and set an oscillator. You can kind of tweak the unison, mess around with some of the planning and the white Settings. And then adjust your filter to be more open or closed depending on the sound that you're going for. And also don't forget to layer in some other oscillators to get a fatter sound. So if I just play oscillator one, It sounds a bit ten. But if I add in the second oscillator, then as another layer, it sounds like this. And then if I add in the third oscillator, which is just the sub bass. And it's just creating this sort of waste that the synthesizer is missing. It sounds like this. So you can apply this same process to any synthesizer that you're working with. Just play around with the different parameters, see what kind of a difference it makes, and then go about creating your base scent. In the next section, we'll take a look at building leed patterns. 25. Main Elements of EDM Leads: So what are some of the main elements of an EDM lead? Well, first of all, we have to look at what a lead is. A lead is sort of a main melody that you add on top of the other elements in your track. Now because you're adding it on top of those elements, a lead melody will usually be higher in pitch than the rest of your instruments. So depending on the genre that you're making, your lead will either be very simplistic with a short pattern or it will be very complex with a long pattern. But I think that also depends on your own personal style and your own personal taste. So if you're intending to only use sort of one chord throughout your entire track, I will say, keep your melodies short and sort of simplistic. So no more than maybe three or four, maybe five notes at a maximum. You don't want it too complex because the rest of your track is sort of sparse as it only has one chord the whole way through. So having a really complex melody just wouldn't make sense in the context of your track. However, if you have a track like I have here where there's lots of cords going on and they're sort of a big progression will then your lead melody might be a little bit more complex, and it will definitely have a longer pattern like you can see here. Now I've actually just noticed that I spelt melody rung. But that's okay, that won't affect what we're learning here. So if you do have a long chord progression, then your melody will incorporate notes from that chord progression. So if we just have a quick look at the chords that I'm using in this track. We'll see that I'm using. If we just scroll down here to the root nodes, we'll see that it's sort of F, D sharp, a sharp. F sharp, a sharp. Okay, so it's just sort of a repetition of this four chord pattern here, which is F, D sharp, japanese sharp. And if we come in here to the melody, and we have a look at what the melody is doing. First of all, you'll notice that it's actually much higher up and pitch are chords. We're down here somewhere and I have to scroll up to get to the melody because the melody should be sitting on top of the rest of the elements in your track. But if we notice here, the first note is C, And in our court pattern, the first chord is F, So c is the fifth of F, so it is incorporating notes of the chord. It also has a little f in here as well. The next court I think was D-Sharp. And if we were using a sharp, which is the fifth of D-sharp, because we'd have D-sharp G, and Asia. The next sort of long note we're using is a GI, which is, as far as I remember, it was also a sort of D-sharp chord. So we're using now the third of D-sharp. So your melody will always incorporate the notes of the chord. Okay? Now I do have these sort of ornamentation nodes, which are the smaller ones. And these are, these mightn't be using the notes from the chord, but that's okay because they're shorter and they're just there for aesthetic purposes as we learned when we were building our base. So we don't really need to worry about the ornamentation notes. We just need to look at the main sort of long notes that were using. And you just need to make sure that these long notes are falling within the notes of the chord that your chord progression is playing. Now some needs can be very, very simplistic. I mean, if you're making sort of techno music, you might have a lead that only has one node, and it's just maybe a few different, a different pattern with the note F. And that's it. It's only two bars long, and it's got a few sort of repetitions of the note F, And that's your lead. But the thing that makes it a lead is the fact that it's sitting above Earth's higher in pitch than the rest of your instruments. So let's just have a quick listen to this lead pattern with the cards in the background. And then after that, we'll jump straight into constructing a lead pattern. Ok, let's take a listen now. Okay, so let's jump in now to the constructing lead Patterns section where we learn about the different types of leads that we can use in our track. 26. Constructing a Lead Pattern: So in this lecture we are going to have a look at constructing lead patterns. Now, I've just sort of created very quick two patterns here, one with a kick and a simple offbeat based on OneNote. So it's just playing on the third step of every beat and it sounds like this. And then over here I have a second pattern where I've just taken the offbeat based and I've added some chords. So instead of just playing a echoes AFC and wherever look at constructing lead patterns for tracks with only one chord. And we'll have a look at constructing lead patterns for tracks with more than one guard. So here's what the pattern with more than one chord sounds like. Okay, so it's a fairly simple chord progression. It's probably one of the most common chord progressions has ever used, but that's okay. We're just having a look at building leads and making them fit the courts. So there's a few different sort of types of leads that we can create. Okay, so I'm going to come into my lead pattern here, and I'm going to open up the piano roll. And the first type we're gonna talk about is the sort of very sparse technical lead. And this is where you might use a max of two or three minutes on OneNote. So attractors in the key of a. So I'm just gonna place in a note here on the first, the first beat of the bar. And then I'm gonna place in a node again on the fourth beat. And that's it. That's our lead. Just two notes on the root node of the track. And I'm gonna paste this across. And this is one type of lead that we can use. So that doesn't do what this sounds like. Now for the sake of syncopation, we might offset this a bit and maybe put it on the third step of the last beat and see what that sounds like. So this kind of lead is very common in techno because techno itself as a genre is quite empty. You might just have a kick, a base, a lead, and maybe some extra drum sounds. And that's all that will go into a technical track. So it makes sense to keep your leads simple. If the track that you're working on is simple. Now you can develop this idea and turn it into a more house, sort of base lead. And because houses, a very syncopated genre will have to add in some extra sort of notes here on the fourth step and maybe the second step. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna come up here to the fifth of our rootNode a. So this is E. Will add in a short note here. Maybe we'll jump back down to a. And then I'll have another a here on the third step. And then maybe, maybe we'll put a c here on the fourth step. And we'll just copy that pattern across. And maybe this will be our sort of house sounding lead. Now what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna apply Swing really quickly. So let's see what this sounds like in the pattern. Now I think there's a little bit too much going on. So I'm just gonna listen again and take out some notes that I think shouldn't be in there. So maybe we'll take out this toffee. And maybe we just change the pattern of this n bits so it gives it a, a bit of space to breathe. Same thing as our base pattern. We want to allow the patterns from space to breathe. We don't want to copy the we don't want to have the exact same thing going on the whole way through. So let's see what this sounds like now. And now let's see what that sounds like in the pattern. So the type of lead that you're gonna create really depends on your style. And also the type of track that you're working on. I'm just gonna show you really quickly another sort of style of lead. And this is the stator lead. And the stator lead is used a lot in the genre Melbourne bounce. So this is where, let's say you paste in some notes that are on the root note of the chord. And I'll just place them in randomly here. Like this. And what the stator lead does is it stutters between these notes. So what you do is you add in an extra note right before another node and you shortness as short as it can go like this. And then maybe you add in another one. I'll just turn off this quarter step so we can see the actual proper beats of the bar. So maybe you add one in over here again. And you might add one in front of this note here. And maybe again here. And this is what the lead sounds like. Now if it's stuttering between these nodes. And it's because these sort of extra notes are really, really short. That's why it sounds like it's stuttering. If these were longer than it wouldn't sound like it was stuttering as much. It would sound a little bit to smooth. Let's hear this. So you want to make sure that these nodes are sort of short so that it sounds like the pattern is stuttering. So let's just hear what this sounds like in the main pattern over here. I'll just close this history section. So let's see what this sounds like now in the main pattern. Another thing that you should make sure of is if your lead pattern is playing alongside some other patterns. So you will have to listen to the sound of the lead in the context of all the other patterns in your track. And you have to make sure that this lead sound that you've lead melody that you've made, you have to make sure that it fits the sound of the other patterns. Because it's really easy to make the lead sound really complex with loads of different notes and stuff. But if that doesn't fished, the general sound of your track and all of the other elements that you're using, then the lead in your track won't work. So you need to listen to all of the elements in your track and make sure that your lead is fitting in well with the rest of the elements. Finally, I just want to come over here and talk about a sort of lead that's based on courts. So as I said before, the chords that we're using here, R, a, F, C, and G. Okay, so let's keep that in mind when we're building our lead pattern. So that's a, F, C, and G. So that's coming in now to the piano roll. And I know now that the cords are a for the first bar, f For the second bar, c for the third bar, and G for the fourth bar. So what I'm going to do is to remember that I'm just going to place in a short note here on a, F, C, and G. Now when you're creating a lead pattern for cords, you have to make sure that you're using some long notes that are also notes that the court so let's say we take this C here and we place a long nose here. And we place another long nose, maybe back on a down here. Let me look at f. I will place one of the islam notes all the way up on c again. And maybe we'll place, let's at the same place again, let's plays an a here. The next one is C. So let's look at, we'll place a c again just for the sake of consistency. And maybe we will change the second one down to a G so that it fits the chord of C, which is C, E, G. And let's look at the g, m. We might pick maybe a, B, and then maybe we'll jump down here to a D. And what we can do is then we can use the shorter notes to fill up the space in between. Now I could decide I want to walk from the a to the C. So I'm going to add in a short, sort of short note here that sort of walks us from a up to c like that. And then I might add in another short note, maybe on the d, just to see what that sounds like. Then I let it in. A shorter knows. That kind of brings us to the F. So I'll add that in on the beat down here. Then may be again, I've added a short note on the a, and I'll add an a short note here on the B again, so that it walks us down. And then I'll leave this sort of second half of the second bar alone just for the sake of some breathing space. And then we'll have a look at adding in maybe a G here so that it kind of jumps down on them, back up again. And then maybe we'll, maybe we'll have a big leap, maybe will jump up to an E, And we'll jump down to a G. And then here we could add in a bit another G, and we can add this in here and make it short instead of not touching the other note. And then again, we could walk from the G to the B by adding an, an, a, a really short a. And then we could maybe add in one more node here. Let's add an a G just to bring us between the B and the big leap down to the d. Okay, so let's hear what this pattern sounds like Now on its own. And now let's hear what that sounds like in the pattern here. Okay? I'll just delete these ones because there are remnants from the other pattern that we were looking up. And let's hear what it sounds like now in this pattern here, okay. And I still have Swing Left. And so I might turn this off because I don't think I like the sound of the swing in this particular pattern. Let's see what it sounds like without saying. So that's one way to build lead patterns around chords is to sort of make sure that you're using long notes that are also notes of the chord. And then sort of fill up the space around those notes with some other sort of ornamentation notes. And one final tip I want to give you is a lead where you use an app, okay, so this type of lead is much better for chords, but it's where you base your lead on an arpeggio. So an arpeggio was really simple to understand. If we take a look at the key of, if we take a look at the node of a here, and arpeggio would simply walk up the notes of the chord like this, and then walk back down. And that's it. It just repeats over and over against. So this would be an arpeggio for the Court of a okay. And you can change these notes around. You could maybe bring this up to an a, and this would still be an arpeggio because it's sort of like a broken court. Okay? So like if you had the chord of a, you might have in a, another a and an e in there. But because you've broken it up between these mini notes, it's called an arpeggio or a broken chord. So let's listen to what this one sounds like. But what we can do is we can sort of elongate this broken cord out and we can make a lead out of it. So what I'll do is I'll bring are a up to this node. And then I'll follow the same pattern. Let's jump up to the a image, jump down to the e, and then back up to the a, and then back down to the a again, maybe. Okay. Now that's one sort of arpeggio pattern. So let's see what that sounds like. And then for the second bar will change the pattern up slightly. Ok, so I know it already changes because we have a change of chords. We moved on to the F. What we can do is we can change the sort of rhythm of this pattern to make it sound a little bit different. And then we'll repeat that dash dot, whole, entire pattern across here. So I'll just change the rhythm slightly. So let's add an a C and we'll make it a bit shorter. So in London a c that may because that's the F up to the sea and maybe up to the a. Let's copy that across. And this can be our full pattern. So I'll copy this then across the entire pattern and we'll just change the notes so that if it occurred. So we know here that we're looking at a C chord. So I'll just move these two a g. Willie that with 0s because that fits the courtesy. Limit, this to a G. And then the final chord and the pattern is a G. So we'll just move these seas of two a d so that they fit the chord. And we moved this F up to G So it fits. Emily moved as a, maybe up to a b. So now this lead is built out of two different apps. We have this Arab here, this arpeggio, and this second arpeggio here. So let's see what the pattern sounds like on its own. And arpeggio lead can sound really, really good in certain genres, especially this kinda genre which sounds a bit like am base onto or something like that. But let's listen to the arpeggio lead pattern in the full pattern here, let's have a listen. And we could also apply swing to this app pattern to make it a bit more, to give it a bit more of a groove. Let's listen to this. So it's hard to tell you exactly how to construct a lead pattern because again, music is objective. So what you think sounds good other people might like, and what you don't like other people might love. So it's really up to you what you like, but just bear these points in mind when you're creating your lead patterns. So if you only have one chord, keep the leads sort of short and simple. And if you have more than one chord, you can use this technique or you can use these sort of lung node based on the notes of the chord technique. If you have the ability to sort of sing a melody along, try that as well. And you might be able to make up your own melody while you're sort of singing along to the track. But definitely look at trying these different options and see which one works best for you. Next, we move on to choosing lead instruments, where we'll take a look at choosing some presets for our lead sounds. 27. Choosing Lead Instruments: So in this lecture, we're going to take a look at choosing our lead instruments. Now, the one thing I'll say before we start is that you need to make sure that your leads stand out from the rest of the elements in your track. Ok, so try and pick a sound that sort of different from the rest. If he doesn't do this example of a sort of a Vici style track that I have here. And we'll notice that the lead, the instrument that I've chosen, is completely different and it stands out from the rest of the elements in the track. So when we do add in that lead melody, it really shines and sort of takes center stage. So that's listen to the full sort of drop section here. And then we'll have a look at changing the lead sound and tweaking some parameters on the scent. So let's look at us now. So the lead pattern is relatively simple. It's actually comprised of two smaller patterns. We have this pattern here at the start, and it's based on the OneNote pattern that we were talking about before, except that I just changed some of the notes. So it was it started out with g the whole way across here and then I just moved some of the notes up and down. But actually I just move these nodes up. And then I also moved these notes up here. And then the second half of the pattern is the exact same rhythm. But I've just changed the notes to fit the chords. And we were also looking at this in the last lecture where we sort of duplicate the pattern and change the notes to fit the courts. So let's have a listen to the pattern on its own really quickly. Now the reason I've actually chosen a lead sound like this is because it does mimic a, a Vici style sort of lead that he used to use. And because the track sounds vary, VGS, i have chosen elite that would fit his style, but let's come in here now to the plugin and we'll have a look at changing these leads sounds and tweaking them if we need to. So let's just work backwards here. Let's hit this button to the left and we'll see what this preset, this rush sounds like. Let's see what this sounds like. Now this type of sound is known as an acid sound. And techno music uses this sound a lot. And what they do is they kind of did close the filter and they'd open it slowly as the track progresses. And perhaps this would sound good in the pattern. Let's have a listen to the pattern, you know, bearing in mind. We always have to listen in contexts. We always have to listen to the lead as it's playing with all the other elements. So I'm going to have listened to what this sounds like in the drop pattern. So it sounds okay, but I don't think it's really shining. I don't think it's really sitting on top of the other elements as well as the other leads out well, so I'm going to change it and we'll find another one. So let's see what this router sound sounds like on its own first, with just adjust some of the parameters here. So I've just opened up the filter a little bit. So it's kind of sort adds in a bit more high-end. So let's hear it in context. I don't like this sound at all. I think it's a little bit too harsh on the ear, so I'm gonna change it again and have a listen to what this repeater sounds like. And that's the same sort of sound is the last presets. So I'm just going to skip it. Let's see what reasons sounds like. Okay, so I really like the sound of this just by listening on its own. I'm going to just to filter here and see what I can do. Okay? So because I'm liking some of this, I'm going to listen in context and see if I like the sound of the pattern or if I like the sound of the instrument with the drop pattern. So let's see. Okay, so it sounds nice, but I think it could be actually pitched up a bit just because it sounds a bit low. So let's pick it up and see what it sounds like. Now, I just press command and up there just to shift it up the octave. Let's hear what it sounds like now. So now I've found a lead sound that I really like. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to clone the plug-in so that we can start to layer. Ok. So I like the sound of this lead. So now I'm going to layer on top of it. So this is our main leads on that we're going to use. And now what I'm gonna do is I'm going to come in here and I'm going to command and copy this pattern. And I'm going to paste it into the layer pattern. And I'm going to start changing some of the presets to see what they sound like together. So let's try this radiant preset as a layer. And actually the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to turn it down in the mixer track just so it's not hurting our ears. Let's have a listen again. So I don't think this particular preset is adding anything to the overall sound, so let's change it nevertheless into this pyro preset. Now I like the sound of this. I think this is adding a pretty cool texture and it sounds like it's sort of screaming. And I think that's really cool. I think that could work in the track. So let's listen now at the drop pattern with this sort of screamingly, it sounded as if it doesn't. And you know, out upon second listening, I think I'm going to just kind of close the filter a bit because I think it's sort of screaming a bit too much. So let's see if this preset, Let's just close the filter. Let's have a listen to it on its own. Okay, so with this particular preset, they haven't actually set up the filter. So I'm actually just going to skip it because I'm not a complete fan of the sound when it's in context with the drop. So let's listen to this pusher preset with, along with the other preset. Now I think that's actually adding in something nice. Let's have a listen again, I'm going to mess around with the filter. And now let's listen to that in context with the drop pattern. So I actually think this preset sounds a lot better than the last preset that we were using. And like everything else, choosing your instrument sounds is going to be subjective. It's kind of what you like and what you think fits your track best. But you do have to make sure that your lead sort of stands out from the rest of the elements because it's meant to sit on top and it's meant to catch the attention of the listener. So make sure you're choosing a lead sound that stands out from the rest of the elements and then layer it with other presets that sort of adds to that original sound. So now let's move on and we'll have a quick look at making some meat instruments. 28. Making Lead Instruments: So in this lecture, we're going to have a look at making our own Lead sounds. Now, we're going to stick with the same plugin that we've been looking at so far, just for the sake of consistency and to stop you guys getting confused. But the process again is the same on any synthesisers that you're using. So let's start here with oscillator one by turning up the wave table mics. And then we'll head down here and we'll check out some of the different types of sounds that we could use. Let's try violin to, let's try this inter one. Ok, so I like to send this into one. So I'm going to add a unison voices to make it a bit thicker. So let's add four voices, and let's de-tune it a bit more than the sort of default detuned setting. Now I'm going to turn up the release just to see what that sounds like. And then maybe let's turn up the decay and let's see what it sounds like if we turn up the attack at it. Okay, so now I want to stick with this sort of plucky sound. And what I'm gonna do with this lead instrument is I'm going to use the panning instead of the wide settings. So I'm going to pan the first oscillator, maybe sort of to the seven o'clock, maybe eight o'clock setting with this sort of wheel. And then I'm going to add in the second oscillator. What I'm gonna do straight away with this second oscillator is I'm actually just going to punish to the opposite side, which would be four, maybe five o'clock. Just the exact opposite of oscillator one. So that we're creating a nice spread across the stereo spectrum. So let's listen to what this sounds like now. So again, we turn up our wave table mics and we'll change some of the sounds. So let's see what piano A1 sounds like. Let's try pitching it down a bit. So I think with this second oscillator pitch down, I think it sounds a little bit more full. So I'm going to stick with that and I'm gonna try out some of these different types of sounds. Let's try vocal six. Okay, so I like this and the vocal six. So I'm going to start messing around with the unison setting. Maybe de-tune it a bit more. Now because this is a lead. I'm going to turn on this perfect oh, Filter. And I'm actually going to open the filter fully so that we're getting, because when it's closed, it's more of a plucky sound, which can be cooled for the progression of your track. But I want the filter open because this is the drop section and this is where the lead should be at its fullest and its loudest and sort of taking center stage over the rest of the instruments. So let's leave this filter open. And then for the sake of balance, I'm going to add in a third oscillator, and I'm going to leave this oscillator in the center. But I might just add a bit of whiteness to it just for the sake of that modern sort of wide sound. And again, turn up our wave table mix. And let's have a listen to what the sine wave sounds like. Let's pitch it down. So I pushed it back up and I'm going to have a listen to maybe some of these settings here. Maybe this guitar. Maybe pitch it down again, see what that sounds like. And we'll try pitching it down one more time to create a sort of spread. Okay, so now that's too low, so I'm just going to leave a backup at this minus1 octave. So I just pitched it back up again. But I don't like the sound of this guitar sort of wave shapes. I'm gonna change it to maybe brass to let's do the sounds like OK. So you can see here now up at my CPU meter that it's starting to cause latency. And we looked at this when we were setting up our project. A way to sort of refresh the software and tell it that you wanted to close the unnecessary plugin. So I'm gonna come up here to tools, down to Macros and click Switch smart disable if Rob logins and if you watch the CPU meter up here, it should jump from 6766 down because I'm only using this one plug in at the moment. So let's press this button. And as you can see, it's jumped from 67 right down to 42. And that's freed up a lot more CPU space for us to be able to make our center and we can actually hear clearly. So there shouldn't be any more skipping or lag. Let's listen. Okay, so I like the sound of this brass to wave shapes when going to add in some extra voices. And I'm going to de-tune it a bit. And let's hear what this sounds like. Let's close the filter down a bit and see what this sounds like with a closed filter. Maybe open at a slight bit more. So now I think I'm just going to leave us fully open and we get the full, sort of, the full wall of sound that's coming from this synthesizer. I might just turn down the release a bit because I think it's a little bit too long. And I think the notes are sort of running into each other. So there we go. That sounds a little bit better. Let's try adding some of this saturation. Let's turn up the Dry Wet Anobit and will turn up the drive. So you get the Marv Martha sort of distorted sound. Now we can use this locus. Setting to get rid of some of the low distortion which is, and that's causing an, an, an unwelcome sound in the overall sound of the instrument. So let's just turn this up a bit and see what that sounds like. It's turned down the Dry, Wet and objects. So it's only a subtle effect. So now it's, now it's providing a subtle sort of distortion. And if we mute it now it'll sound like this. And let me add it back in. It adds in this subtle distortion sound. Let's have a listen. And finally, like we've been doing with all of our sense that we are making so far, we're going to turn on this EQ section and just boost the high-end a bit. And I'm actually going to cook the lows, I think a small bit. And this is a very common shape that's used in mixing. And it's because of something called the Fletcher and Munson Curve. But we'll have a look at that when we come to the mixing stage. But it's just sort of a scientific reason why we'd seem to prefer this sort of shape on the EQ. But let's have a listen to what this sounds like now. And now let's see what that sounds like in the foal drop pattern. Now, you'll notice that it's a lot quieter. So I'm just gonna communicate the mixer and turn up this track that, that, that this lead is on. And let's have a listen again. Much you can do then is you can come in and you can clone this and you can layer it with presets like we did here. Or you can make your own sort of presets to layer in with it. But again, like every other instrument we have to layer are leads. So if you have major sort of main lead sound, which can be this, you might then clone this and make another sort of layer, maybe with a bit of clicking. Or as we said before, transients and to sort of add in the clicking IS that this sounds seems to be missing. Now this particular layer here is actually providing that trickiness that we're missing with this one. So what I can do is I can come into the mixer track and just turn that down. So the two, the two sounds are fitting together a little bit better. Let's have a listen to what the layer that we made sounds like with the layer that we're using as a preset. And if we take out the layer that we made, and now if we take out the layer that's a preset. So you can see that the two layers are complementing each other. Well, this layer is a preset and it's sort of clicky and this layer is a layer that we've made, but it's not Kikee. So the two are combining together to make a nice clicky and airy leads out. Let's listen to this and the full dropped pattern and see what that sounds like. So that's all you need to know really about making your lead sounds. It's not much different to making any other instrument. The only difference is that you're thinking about the sort of the finished result. And you're ensuring that it sounds more like a lead than it does like a pluck or a base. You just have to think of the finished product whenever you're creating your own sounds. So let's move on now and we'll have a look at building pads and strings for EDM. 29. Pads vs. Strings: So in this lecture, we're going to have a look at some pads, and then we're going to have a quick look at some strings. Now in EDM pattern, strings are not all that common. And if they are used, they're usually used in transitions are as filler in the background. We'd be having a look at filler and transitions in the next few sections to come. But for now I'm just going to show you an instance where you might use a pad or you might use a string. And this is as an accompaniment for a vocal. So you can use your pad as a sort of chord pattern, except that the chord D naught to the chord are being held for a long time and that's what a PAD does. It's this sort of lungs sweeping sound. And but it holds the note and it'll hold it for as long as you want, exactly like a string would do in an orchestra. And that's why strings and pads are sort of intertwined. But we can use our pads to play the chord progression of the track. And then we can layer that underneath our vocals and to create a sort of typical commercial house type sound. So if I just saw this pad here, it sounds like this. And you see when you bring in the vocal, then you get this very sort of typical commercial house music sounds. So let's have a listen to it with the vocal layered in me. Now the difference between a pad and a string is that obviously a string is an acoustic instrument and it sounds like this. So let's just solve this string pattern here. Now strings are a little bit more expressive. Pad sound is very in your face and it sort of hits you as soon as it starts. Like as soon as that pattern started hits you in the face. Whereas if you take a listen to the strings, the attack on a string is a lot more slow and it's sort of flows between each note. And this is called the Gatto in music, but we don't need, we don't need to worry about that. All you need to know is that the strings are a little bit more expressive. So if you want to add some expression or sadness into your track, you can add some strings. And let's listen now with the vocals layered on top. Now because that's all there is to patent strings. It's simply just an accompaniment that you might use or you'd use it as filler or a transition. I'm just going to come into this pattern here and give you a quick look at two sort of options that you might use. Now the first option is obviously to have all of these notes on the first beat of every bag like this, okay, and then the pattern would sound like this. If I turn on the metronome, it would sound like this. So if you add that then into your track with the vocals, it'll actually give a different sort of vibe. Then the technique that I'm about to show you. So let's just listen to this pattern in the track when all of the nodes are on the first beat of the bar. Ok, let's have a listen to turn off the metronome. Come show me what. This next technique that I'm about to show you is something that Daft Punk use all the time. And I'm, I'm dubbing us the Daft Punk chord timing because they use it so often and it actually, it creates a bit of a groove in your track. So what we do is we take all the chords that aren't on the very, very first beat and we offset them. We bring them forward by either one or two or three or four steps or whatever, you just bring them forward. So I'm going to bring them forward onto the third step of the barren front. And then I'm going to shorten these so that they're not touching or they're not overlapping each other. And this is called. But it's not called, but I've dubbed it the Daft Punk timing because they do it so often and it creates a bit of groove in the tracks of a elongate these here. Let's turn on the metronome and we'll have a listen to what it sounds like now when the chords are actually falling before the beat of the bar. And if you team this particular technique with some drum elements like we have here, I have a clap sample over here. And it can take a very amateur sounding pattern that falls on the first beat of every buyer and turn it into a more professional sounding pattern that has a little bit more thought to it and a little bit more groove. So let's have a listen now with this pattern, when it's offset by bringing the notes of the chord forward into the barren front. Okay, so let's have a listen now. Show me. We might turn off this clap here just to stop the latency. And again, I'm going to come up to Macros and switch smack disabler for our plug-ins. Now the reason this track is skipping so badly is because it's actually a full arrangement that I've done. And I have, I have effects on all of these different instruments here. I have Mastering going on as well. So the software is trying to run all of these things at the same time, but I just wanted to show you this particular track very quickly because it's using this sort of Daft Punk chord timing. So let's have a listen again and hope the latency less than come back. So obviously, pads and strings give very sort of different sounds. But it's up to you which sound you want to use in your track. Strings are a bit more expressive and sad. And pads are a bit more in your face and sort of electronic sounding. And they have that commercial house field. So let's move on now to the Choosing pad instruments lecture. And I'll show you sort of the biggest headache when it comes to choosing your pad presets. 30. Choosing Pad Sounds: Okay, so in this lecture, we're going to take a look at choosing our pad instruments. Now the one thing I will say about pad instruments is that they're usually bland and non-distracting because we use these types of instruments in the background or sort of as a filler element. We don't want to distract from the main elements of the track. So if you find a preset with lots of sort of intricate LFO and modulation and other stuff like that that might distract from the listener. We're going to actually tweak the parameters to turn these off. We wanted to keep the sound as simple and as bland as possible. So I have the start of an arrangement here, and it begins with these chords here. And then it jumps into this vocal section. And then it comes into this section where there's an arpeggiated chord pattern. But I think this arpeggio leaves a lot to be desired. I think there's a lot of space left behind each of the nodes. So I think I'm going to fill up that space with the pad sound. Let's just listen to the track, maybe up to here, and try to notice how the track feels a little bit more empty when it reaches this first section. Okay, let's have a listen now. Okay, so let's go about adding our pad instruments. So the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to come into the chord pattern. And this is just the main chords and they're playing on every beat of the bar and they're being held for that full beat. And I'm just going to copy it by pressing command and see. And then I'm gonna come up here and I'm going to create a new pattern called pad. Okay, let's go into that pattern and we'll use this doing three plug-in that I have already loaded at the bottom here. So we'll go into the piano roll and we'll paste this chord pattern in. And we're going to pitch it up as well because I'm thinking that I want this pad sound to be a little bit more high pitched in area, then the app that's playing at the same time. So let's come out of this and go back into the plug-in. And we'll open up the sound bank section and we'll load maybe this essential collection volume three and we'll load the pads subfolder. So I'll just move this out of the way and we'll take a listen to what this first Arun and pad preset sounds like. I have to switch this to pattern. Sorry. Let's listen again. And I'm not sure you can notice this bird, the release time of this particular sound is still going. Okay? And I said I'd mentioned the sort of main headache that we get with pad presets. And that's when you load them up. The attack times are ridiculously high and the release times are ridiculously high. And the reason for this is because pads are designed for ambient music. I mean, that style of music, they have these very long sweeping chord progressions. So that's why pads can work great in those styles of music. But for us, these kind of attack and release times don't work. So what we're gonna do is we're going to turn down the attack dome so that the sound starts much earlier. And we're going to turn down this release time so that the notes are overlapping each other. I'm also going to come in and turn off some of the effects, like the delay in the reverb just so that we can hear the main sound a little bit clearer. I mean, ever listen again. Let's add this to the mixer track. I'm going to turn it down slightly, just so that it's not going to overpower the sound of the apple. Me add it back in. And now we'll see what it sounds like with the half plane above it. So I like the sound of this pad, but let's just go back into the plug-in and change it just for the sake of this tutorial. And we'll change it may be to this belief preset. So let's see what this belief preset sounds like on its own. Now I don't really like the sound of this, so let's move on to the next one which is blizzard. Let's move on again to Bobby. So I really like the sound of Bobby. I think there's Bobby preset is pretty subtle and distracting. But again, the attack time and the release time is very, very long. So I'm gonna just turn these down so that the sound starts with a bit earlier and the release time so that the sound doesn't overlap. The other notes are going to come in and turn off the reverb. And then I might, I might adjust this cut-off frequency as it's playing just to see what sort of sounds we can get out of this cutoff frequency. We'll, okay, so let's have a listen. So I much prefer the sound at this preset with the cut-off wheel a little bit open. So let's go back in to the arrangement and we'd have a listen to the Arab while it's playing with the pad. Let's turn it down just so it's in the background and not distracting from the main app. And now upon listening to it in the arrangement, I actually think that the cutoff wheel is two. It's too open, it sounds too bright and two Airy, so I'm actually going to turn it down and make it a little bit more subtle. Let's listen again. We're just close this plug-in and then take a listen. Maybe turn it up slightly. But I'm really liking the sound of this so far. And let's listen now to the final result with our tweaked pad with the app. So that's all you need to be aware of when you're choosing your pad sounds. Just be aware that you're kind of you're using it as a background instrument. And you don't want it to be distracting from the other main elements in your track. Next, we'll have a quick look at making some Pat instruments. 31. Making Pad Sounds: So in this lecture we're gonna take a look at making a pad instrument. Ok, so what I have here is I have this really, really long sort of cinematic chord progression. And it's literally just for the sake of listening to the pad. So let's come in here and out to the plugin and we'll have a look. We'll just initialize this and we have a look at creating our own pads out. So let's listen to some of the pattern NOW with this initialized setting. Okay, so maybe we'll turn up this wave table mix to get the final shape of the oscillator. And then we might try some of these different oscillator shapes. Let's try violin three. Let's see what this sounds like. Okay, I like the sound violin tree. Let's see what it sounds like with brass one. Let's play it again. And let's try it now with maybe there's para far. Let's see what this sounds like. Okay, so I really liked the sound of brass one when we were playing through there. So I'm going to select this again. And as usual I'm going to come over and I'm going to tweak the unison voices. Now, this is a pad sound, so I wanted to be fairly tick. So I'm going to pick maybe this six voices here. And we'll just up the detune slightly just to make it a little bit thicker. So let's see what this sounds like now. And now let's see can we adjust the attack? Ok, let's turn the attack of, and maybe we'll turn to the decay up as well. And let's just see what happens when we do this. Okay? Now I think that attack is a bit too long, so let's just turn it down a small bit and we'll see what it sounds like now. And I'm not sure if you noticed this when you're listening, but there is actually a clicky sound that's happening like a little pop or a click that's happening, right as the north starts in the chord pattern. And the reason for this is because when we were talking about synthesisers, remember we were saying about how many voices are synthesizer can play at the same time. Now this particular chord pattern has lots going on it as 12345, maybe six. Six or seven different notes being played at the same time. And if we come over here and we look at how many voices we've set to allow to play at the same time, we'll see that it's actually set to four. Okay? So we need to turn this up. And the reason that clicky sound it's happening is because the synthesizer is trying to determine which nodes should have play. If there's seven going on, which three notes is it not going to play in which foreigners would at play, and that causes a clicky sound. So what we're gonna do is we're going to turn the voices all the way up to 16 just to save any issues. And we'll take a listen to the pattern again and we'll see if there's any clicky sounds this time. So as you can see, that simple adjustment, just turning the voices up to 16 has removed that clicky sound that was happening before. The next thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to turn on the filter to the perfect oh, setting. And I'm going to bring the cutoff frequency right down and just listen to what it sounds like. I'm going to sweep through it as it's playing, just to hear, to find a point, sorry to find a point on the wheel that I like where the sound is. Okay, so let's have a listen to the pattern and I'll start adjusting this. And we'll find a point that we like. Let's turn up the release so that it sounds a little bit more expressive so that the nodes aren't stopping as suddenly as they are. And I'll start adjusting this cutoff frequency again. So I kind of like the cut off frequency set here. I like how mellow it sounds and it's not kind of overly in your face. So what I'm gonna do with this pad sound isn't going to add in a second oscillator, okay? And I'm going to pan the first oscillator, maybe summer over the eight o'clock region to the left. And I'm going to pan the second oscillator somewhere over at the eight o'clock, or sorry, the four o'clock sort of region on the right. Okay. So now we're going to have two different sounds coming out of either side. We're going to have oscillator one coming out of the left and oscillator two coming out of the right. Ok. Let's have a listen to what this sounds like now with just the kind of default oscillator sound. Let's turn up that wave tablet mix to get the full sound of the oscillator. And maybe we'll try violin three. Okay, so I'd like to send a violin tree. So I'm going to come into the unison section and I'm going to turn up the voices, maybe to five. Actually I've turned it up to six, which is the same as oscillator one. And just up the Detune a bit again. Okay, so I'm liking this sound, but I think for the sake of balance, I'm just going to turn down oscillator to a bit. I think it's too a bit too loud. Let's listen again. Yeah, I think that sounds a bit better. And let's bring in a third oscillator here just to make the sound a little bit more interesting. So we're going to come into oscillator three over here. And we're going to again turn up the wave table mics just to get the shape. And what I'm gonna do is I'm going to change it to maybe piano a3. And let's take a listen to the pattern now with this third oscillator added in, maybe turn it up slightly. And now I think for this oscillator, I think that piano A3 sounds very, very similar to some of the other settings that we've used. So I'm going to try and find a oscillator shape that sounds different to the other shapes that we've been using. So let's try this buyin one. I'll just mute those other two oscillators just to hear exactly what oscillator three sounds like. Try sitar. And let's pick it up the octave. Okay, and let's add back in the other oscillators again. Okay, so I like the sound of this. I'm gonna de-tune it not as much as the first two, maybe only by half, which is three because we detune the other ones by six. So that's teaching this, this oscillator by three. Again up the detuned just slightly. And what I'm gonna do is I'm going to widen this particular sound. So I'm not going to widen the too much. Maybe just leave it at 12 o'clock position. And let's see what this sounds like. Now, I'm going to come somewhere into the middle of the pattern just to get a full sense of what's going on. Okay, so it's a bit loud, so I'm going to bring it down. Let's adjust the cutoff frequency because I think there's too much high-frequency it's happening. So let's listen. I think I might widen this third oscillator even more than I had it. Okay, so I'm liking the sound of this so far. I'm going to come over here to the EQ section, turn it on and I'm actually going to do the opposite of what we've been doing so far. I'm going to take some of these high notes out, okay? And then I'm going to boost some of the mids, just slightly like this. And these sorts of settings I think, will make the sound a little bit less harsh. Let's have another lesson. And again with pads, we can add in some extra effects like distortion. Let's see what it sounds like with distortion on it. Generally, I don't think distortion is a good sound to have an iPad, but you can try it if you want. We have phasors. Phasors can sound really good on pads on and take a look at phasors again, let me come to the mixing stage, but let's have a listen here quickly to just this phaser as all I did was turned up the dry wet knob and let's see what it sounds like. The frequency turned off the race. So I've actually just tweak these knobs randomly, but I think that the sound that it's giving back to me, it's actually quite nice. I think it has quite an eighties sort of feel to it. So I'm actually going to leave it as it is. I like to sort of out of tunes sounds. Yeah, you see it sounds kinda AUTO-TUNE. Sounds like it's straight out of Stranger Things, but let's add some reverb really quickly just to hear what it would sound like if it was in a room with some other instruments. Maybe turn up the pre-delay. Maybe not that much. I didn't some decays so that the tail goes on for longer. You can also add course, sorry, you can also add a chorus effect to the sound as well to make it a little bit thicker. And we look, of course again lumber doing mixing, but I'm just going to leave this out for now. So I think this pad sound is quite nice. It's only three oscillators and it's relatively simple. But I think the overall sound that we've achieved is subtle. But we'll add a sort of nice texture and do any track. Let's have a listen again quickly before we finish this lecture. And I might use that out of tune phasor just to see what it sounds like without. And that's that just d could offer. You can see. And we can open it back up. So in the next lecture, we will keep the same pattern. And we'll look at changing the instrument to strings out. 32. Choosing String Instruments: So let's have a look now at the same pattern as the last lecture, but will change the instrument to some strings. Ok, so I've loaded up this Mellotron five plug-in that I have from Korea. And I have it already set to this string section here. And there's a good few string presets in here. And they're all sort of live samples from real string instruments. So let's start at the top one here, the first one. And we'll hear what this sounds like with the pattern that we were using in the last lecture. Before we do though, I just want to say that strings are strings. Ok? So if you want to use string sounds in your track, you can use any sort of string preset that you have because the sound of strings as actually sampled from actual string instruments, the only thing you have to be aware of is that the sound of them work with your tracks. So there are different types of strings. You know, some of them sound all or some of them sound more sort of sad than others. And all you have to do is think critically, listen to them in your track, and just think which sort of string precess sounds better in the context of your arrangement. So let's cycle through these string presets, why the pattern is playing. And then I'll just mention a few other important points at the end of the lecture. Okay, so let's cycle through these now. So let's see what the next preset sounds like, which is called strings. And with Mellotron, we can, at the moment we're set on this a, this, these M K23 violins, but we can turn this, we can change it from a to b, and we can change it from B to C. Or we can have all of them go on at the same time. If we put it up here to all. I'm going to leave it on for the moment though. I think I like the sound of this. Let's see what the next preset sounds like. Which is this acoustic electric block. Let's see what the next preset sounds like. Age strings. So this particular string sound is quite heavy, so this might not work in the background of your track because it's very full. And at the very heavy sound, let's keep going and see what other sort of presets to have. Let's see what the next preset sounds like. Chamber strings. So as you can see here, there's loads of different strings sounds. And I mean, I've only just made a small dent. I've only gone through, I think five or six here, but there's loads to go through here in this particular plugin. And that brings me to the last few points that I want to talk about in this sort of short lecture. And that is the different types of string sounds that you can find and that you can use. So what this plugin is, this Mellotron five, this is a sampler, okay, so all of these different elements here. So this, if I bring this down to see this sound is a cello. Alright? But this has been sampled from a real cello. So there are real notes that have been recorded on a cello and they've been mapped to these little white keys. So when I press this key, it's actually playing. Now you can see it there where it lights up on the cello. So they have various different instances of cello notes that they recorded. And they match up with these notes up here. So when I play this note, it matches with this note that they recorded. And if I played this note, it matches with this note that they recorded. And these are samplers, okay, because these are samples of an instrument, they also have samples of a violin here. So that's not that they've recorded. And that's this not that they've recorded. So there's loads of samplers out there that you can find. There's loads of free ones. There's actually a F31 that comes with FL Studio, and it's called direct wave. It's down here in the sampler section of the adding Instruments tab. This is quite a useful tool for trying to emulate real life sounds like guitars, strings, horns, you know, any of those orchestra sounds. So you can use the free one that comes with FL Studio, or you can download a free one on the internet. There's also paid samplers that are extremely good like contact. Just by Native Instruments. You can have a look at that as well if you want. But I have this Mellotron version five, okay? So if you want to use a sampler like this, all you have to do is download a sampler or use the F31 and FL Studio, and then download some samples to plug into it. So you can search on the internet for string samples or sample packs and stuff like that. And you can download them and then plug them into your sampler. Another way to emulate some real-life sounds like strings, is to get something called a sound font. And this is just a file format kind of thing that uses sample-based synthesis. Now you don't need to know what that means, but all you need to know is that if you look up sort of string sound fonts, you'll be able to download them and use them in your tracks. There's also things like string plugins and there's even synthesized strings. So these are string sounds that are made with a synthesizer. They don't sound real at all, but they do have their own uses, so we'll take a look at them in the next lecture. But that's all you need to know for the moment about finding your string sounds. Let's move on now to the next lecture where we'll take a look at synthesized strings. 33. Synthesised Strings: So in this lecture we're going to take a very, very quick look at some synthesized strings. Now I've actually loaded up a native plug-in to FL Studio, which is called Citrus. You can find it up here. Under sinned classic minds over here. You're as might be over here depending on how many plugins that you have. But this plugin comes with all versions of FL Studio. So if you want to use some of these synthesized strings sounds from as you can. Okay, so what we're gonna do is we're going to come in to the plugin and I'm going to right-click this presets option. And it's going to open up this massive window with all of these presets. And I'm going to come down to sent string. And I'm going to click it. And we're just gonna cycle through some of these synthesized string sounds. If you are using a send string, again, I just advise you to use it deliberately. Don't try and use it in place of a real string because it's not going to sound the same. Did they don't sound as good as real-life strings? So if you are looking for a real string sound, maybe download a sampler or one of those sound fonts that I was talking about in the last lecture. But let's take a listen to these now. I'm gonna play the pattern and it's the same pattern we've had for the last two lectures, but we're just play through it and we'll have a listen to some of these presets. Let's try the next one. And the next one. Okay, so there's plenty of send strings and this, There's actually loads, look, there's laws in this plug-in. I'm going to try this phase strings you what this sounds like really quickly. So they don't exactly sound real, but they do give their own sort of vibe and sort of effect. So if you use them in your tracks, make sure you are using them very, very deliberately. So that's all there is to it. You just have to find a nice sort of synthesized strings sound. I'm not going to show you how to make a synthesized string because the process is the exact same as making a pad. You just might open the filter a little bit more to add in some more of those high frequencies. But I would advise you if you, if you want to use a synthesized string, there's plenty of free plugins that you can download with synthesized strings sounds. So this is the final lecture in this section. We're going to move on now to looking at loops and what external loops are an internal loops and how we can sort of add variation and stuff to them. So let's move on to the next section now. 34. Internal vs External Loops: So in this lecture, we're going to have a look at internal loops versus external loops. Okay? So a loop is just a musical pattern that is intended to be repeated over time. Now so far we've been making patterns for drums, chords, leads, et cetera. But a pattern is just a fancy word for a loop. And the main difference between internal loops and external loops is that internal loops are the loops that you create yourself inside the dark, either by recording them or using the data to actually make them. So an example of an internal loop would be this synth sound that I have made here. Because I made it myself. So I made it inside, internally in the software. Okay. And then an external loop would be this a look that I've sourced from outside the DAW or in other words, it wasn't made internally here by me. Okay. Alright, so that's just a fill sound that I've looped over the course of the track. Another big difference is that you can actually change internal loops very, very easily. So if I came back into that sense that we were looking at two seconds ago, I'll just zoom up here on the knots. And I can very, very easily, I can change this F sharp note. And I can change this up to maybe a C-sharp if I want to. And it's very easy for me to do that. Okay? But the problem is if we look at the external loop, I can't do that. I can click into a knight, can't change, let's say this sort of peak area here. I can't change that. Okay? Now we can do a few things with our editing skills and stuff. But if we listen to the actual sound of this particular drum, Phil, I can't change the sound of those snare drums that reuse. I can't go in there and let's say I don't like the sound of the snare that this loop uses. I can't change that. And that's because it's an external loop. But the great thing is there are external loops for absolutely everything. So if you find one that you kinda like, but there's something small about it that you don't like. It's not gonna take you long to find a different one that you'd like everything about. Now the thing is with external loops as well. It can be very tempting just to use them alone. Ok, so, you know, there's, there's loops for everything. So you can download kick loops, you can download synth loops, you can download base loops. You can download drum loops, you can every element in this track you can actually just download an external loop for and drag it in and create your track out of external loops. And that can be very tempting. But then There's actually nothing original in the track. Because, because you haven't actually done anything yourself, all you've done is just kind of pasted in some loops that someone else made, then that track isn't very original. So the way we're supposed to use external loops is as a layer or in addition to the other internal loops that we've created in our track, the most common external loops that you'll probably use. Our drum loops are precaution loops like this one. Just to fill out some extra space in the drums. If I, just, if I just solo, sorry if I just soloed the drum section here, like this. And maybe these. And I'll just play the drum loop without that additional layer in. And now if I add in that external loop, sorry, there's a Filter1 is am I just turn that back on so we can hear it properly. So now if I add back in that external loop again, and if I take it back out. So what I'm doing is I'm using this external loop in addition to my own internal loop, which is the drums. And just another reason why we would add our own loops on top of the external loops is because if we only used this particular loop throughout, the whole track would get very repetitive. Okay? So we add in our own extra bits so that we can create variation. And then maybe you might add in this bit when sort of the intro ends maybe. And then you can add an extra bits as the track plays out. So it keeps the track progressing, as opposed to if you just only use this loop and pasted it the whole way through, there's nothing actually changing the entire time that this is playing. And that can get very, very boring for the listener. So make sure you are adding in your own internal loops and your own elements on top of the external loops. So let's just have a quick listen to this, maybe up to here, this sort of section of a technical track where I've included some external loops. And this one here, which is the mass verb and effect that we were looking at before. But I've actually used these to fill up space and add to my own arrangement where I used some internal loops like this synth, the base, and where I made my own drum sounds. So let's take a listen now and afterwards we'll move on to the next lecture, which is using external loops. So I hope you can hear the difference that the external loops are making this track. Let's move on to the next lecture now where we're looking at using external loops. 35. Using External Loops: So in this lecture we're going to be using external loops. So when we use external loops, we're using it as an addition or a layer to our own ideas. So I already have the main sort of foundation of a track here. But we're gonna go through it and we're going to add in some additional external loops. Okay, so I'm just going to play the track may be up to the drop around here. And then afterwards we'll go into the sample packs over here, I'm gonna see about adding some external loops to the track that's ever listen to the track now. Okay, so I've already added in a few external loops. I have this which is a drum fill. And I've actually looped that drum fill over here. This is just creating extra intensity as the build-up progresses. And if I took it out, it would sound like this. Ok. So when you're using this, this external loop as a layer, it can really add to the intensity of your track. Same thing up here I have another one of those mass verb loops that we were looking at before. And this is just to fill up the empty space in the background of the drop. So let's go into the sample packs now and we'll have a listen to some of the external loops that they have here. And then we'll add some of them into our arrangement. Okay, so I'm gonna come up into this may be hyper deep dub tech sample pack and open up the Wave section. And here we see we have all these different types of loops that we can use. So I'm opening up the drum loops and let's go for some hat and top loops or some additional hats that maybe we could add in here. So let's listen to some of these. Okay, so I like the sound of this silliness, or silliness or whatever. I like to say that this loop. So I'm going to drag it in and then replace it here because I think this part of the arrangement is a little bit empty. And as you can see with this loop, it actually extends past this little 4-bar phrase. Okay? And the reason for this is because when you drag in an external loop for not always going to be linked to your BPMN. So as you can see here, this loop that we've just chosen is set at 120 fiv BPM, but our track is set at 138. So what I need to do now is I need to click this little mini waveform on the top left corner of the clip. And then I need to come here to fit to tempo, okay? And it'll open up this little window. And usually the estimation is pretty accurate, but sometimes it might be off and you might have to type it in yourself by clicking, typing BPM. But if you don't know and the estimation seems to be way off, you can actually tell it to scan through these different so you make an estimation and you kind of guess what do you think it might be? Would have been maybe 50 to a 100 or would it be a 100 to 200 BPM? And the software then we'll scan the clip and finish your temple. But in this case, the 125 that it's estimating is actually bang on. So I'm gonna click that. And now you can see the loop fits into our 4-bar phrase. So you might have to do this with your external loops or maybe in a different software, I think able to automatically syncs it and stuff like that. But, but FL Studio just click that little mini waveform and then hit Fit a temple. So let's hear what this loop sounds like in the arrangement now from the start. Okay, so I like the kind of texture that these additional external hats or adding in. So let's paste them over here into the drop section just to fill up some empty space over here. And maybe let's go in and we'll look at adding a percussion loop maybe. So let's have a listen to some of these. Okay, so I like the sound of this one, this park jewel a. So I'm going to drag that in and I'm gonna see what it sounds like here in the drop section along with everything else. And again, you'll notice that the loop as extended past the 4-bar phrase. So I forgot to do at that time, but we have to fit the tempo, a 125. The estimation is bang on. And now it stretches up to our BPM. Let's have a listen again, and this time in time. So let's just turn that down on the mixer track because it's a bit loud and replay it again. So you can see the importance of adding in these little additional external loops on top of your own sort of internal loops that you've built. Let's go in and just take a quick listen that maybe some of the music loops that we could add. Okay, so let's drag in this particular loop. I like the sound of this. Put it there. Again. We have to fit the tempo. And a 125, it seems to recognize it, so we'll just click that. Now if we listen to this music loop that we've just added in. And then we team with one of the sort of music loops that we already have. Okay? You've probably noticed that that sounds horrible and that's because they're both in different keys. This clip has a set key and it's actually different to the internal loop that we've made up here. So not only do we have to time stretch the music loops, we also have to pitch them to the key of our track. And this process is no different to tuning our drum samples. So if you remember from that section, we just double-click it. Add the sample or the thing that you want to pitch added to the mixer track. Open up the plugin Edison, which is over here. And then what we do is we come into the sample window. Let me drag that sound into Edison. Right-click highlight regions, and then come down here to detect pitch regions. And what this does is it shows us the pitch of this particular clip. And I can see F-sharp E, So it seems to be centered around ie. And if we look at the pitch of, if we look at the key of our track, we can see that attract is centered around G. Yeah, so it's centered around G. So we need to patch this up to G. So using the pitch we'll hear. And remember, every time you see a $0.100 up here, that's one semitone. So we're gonna pick this up from E. A $0.100 would be f, another, a $0.100 would be F sharp, and then another a $0.100 would be G. So now this clip is pitched to G. So if we listen, if we listen again, our own internal loop pattern and the external loop pattern, it should sound better and it should sound in key. So let's see what this entire drop section sounds like now with the additional external loops. So there's music loop, there's percussion loop, and there's hat loop in conjunction with our own internal loops. So the kick drum that we've added, the instruments, we've added the base, the other instrument up here. Okay, let's see what this sounds like now. So you can download loads of external loops off the internet and you'll find them in these sample packs. Okay, so you can download sample facts and they come with all these kind of external loops that you can use. But I just really, really quickly want to mention a website that you can go to, which is called supermen. Okay? And when you, when you log onto Superman, you can literally search for any sort of loop at all, like any sort of genre. And he sort of keyword. You can type in strings, you can type in kick drum, and it'll throw up loads of loops that you can use. So I have loops here in different sorts of genres that I've searched, knife, guitar loops. And all of these loops are free to download and free to use. Okay, let's go into some of these. Okay? So what you can do is you can log on to looper men and you can download your own free external loops to use in your tracks. In the next lecture, we'll look at adding variation to our internal loops. So we're starting to come into the arrangement section now where we're starting to build the track and focus on how the track is progressing. So let's head into that lecture now. 36. Adding Variation to Internal Loops: So this lecture is all about adding variation to internal loops. So we've been making loads of internal loops or fact. Now it's time to add some variation to them. Because EDM is such a repetitive genre, variation doesn't happen as much as other styles of music. And when it does happen, the variation never strays too far from the original loop. So we only kind of alter the rhythm or the notes. Slightly. Variation can be added when you feel like the pattern has been going on for too long and need something new to break the monotony. Some great places to add variation area in like transitions or the second half of the drop, maybe the second breakdown or the second drop. Anywhere you feel like you need to add in a breath of fresh air. Or maybe you just want to take a break from the main loop for a few seconds before jumping straight back in. So if you look at drum patterns, we don't actually add variation to the loop itself. We only remove elements or we add elements in. So for looking at this drum pattern here, I'll just highlight the different elements that we have. And so as you can see, it starts with the kick drum and this clap. And then I add in this open hat. And then as it goes on, I added another closed hat. I add in this filler hat, and I add in another open hat again as a layer. So we're actually adding elements in as the loop progresses. So if I just play this for you real quick, you'll hear that it starts out with the kick, the clap and this mini hat. And then as it goes on, adding more elements, OK, so I'll just start it up here just so it's not enough to lung. Okay, let's have a listen now. Another fundamental level, this loop is the exact same. I mean, it's still got the same sort of backbone to it. Alright, so that's the playing, but we're actually just adding in extra elements and this is creating variation. So remember way back at the start of the course when we were looking at binary phrasing, this is the time to utilize that knowledge. So when we're building our drum loops, we add in a new element every eight bars. Or if you're trying to decrease tension, like let's say the outro, we'd actually remove an element every eight bars. So what we're trying to do is we're trying to make the listener Go, you know, oh, something changed there. They need to notice that something has changed in the track and this stops the track becoming too repetitive. So let's take a look now at the instrumental elements. So I have this chord pattern and this sort of baseline. And the baseline is just playing the exact same rhythmic pattern as the chords. So it's literally just copy and pasted the sort of bottom notes of the chord pattern. So let's listen to what this sounds like. Okay, and as you can see across the entire drop, it's the same pattern. It's this pattern tree and it goes the whole way across. And this painter, instead of piano, this painter, and this goes across the entire drop as well. And this base number two, it goes the whole way across. So this is very, very repetitive. So what I might do is in this sort of final eight bars of the drop, I might add some variation to the patterns. So if we come in here to pattern three, and we'll just solo it so we can have a listen to what it sounds like. Okay, so one way to add variation would be to add some extra notes above. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to copy the patterns so the rhythm of the patterns or that are not sort of changing the overall idea. And I'm gonna bring this up to e. And now what I'm gonna do is I'm going to come in and oops, I'm going to change some of the north. So I'm gonna make a little mini melody on top. So I might leave these two being a jump up to G because it's the chord of E-Minor. And then maybe jump up to G again for this node. And then this next sort of rhythmic pattern and the second bar. Now, this is actually our key because we can see we're actually using a chord of B. So we've got to be a, D, and F sharp. Okay, so I'm going to pitch this. And I pitched this may be up to the B. And oops, I might change this note to a D to mimic this one down here. And I might change this note to an F sharp to mimic this F sharp down here. Then I might do the same thing with discord patterns. So I'm going to move this maybe down to a G to mimic this node down here. And then I might raise the pitch of this node to be, to mimic this not down here. Then I lower this pitch. So I'm copying the same sort of idea that I did over here. And maybe there were this one down to a D. Okay. And the reason I'm lowering this one instead of hiring, because the next bar, the next sort of phrase is actually at a lower pH. So if we hired this up, if we put this up to a B, it wouldn't make sense for the melody to sort of the contour of the melody would kind of jump straight down. And so far what we've been doing is we've been kind of smooth. We've been stepping up, stepping down. So it's important to keep the contour of your melody the same. So I'm going to move this down. And then with this section again, I'm just going to change some of the notes. So we have a C sharp, but we're actually in the court of C. So I'm going to move this down to a C. And then I'm going to move this note up to an E. And then maybe we'll move this north up to a D. Alright, let's just see what this sounds like. So this is a sort of variation of the original pattern. It's not going to sound any different rhythmically, but it is going to sound different harmonically. Okay, let's have a listen. And if we copy this entire pattern and we bring it into this piano tree or PAN R3. And we delete this. And actually I'm going to pitch that down the octave because I think the original pattern was down the octave and sound like this. And then if we listen to this in the second half of the drop, it sounds like this. Okay, so another way to add variation would be to, let's just delete this sort of melody that we've created. Edit, delete, and then delete the extra CNO Stan here. So another way to add variation would be to sort of remove some of the notes of the pattern. So let's remove, maybe there's not, and maybe this not. Okay. And that's through the same thing here that's removed the first notes on the second beat. And maybe the same notes again, this on the third beat, it's the third step. Okay, let's quickly do the same thing over here. Certainly these, oops, delete these and maybe delete these. Then. Maybe you might delete this middle one here. And then we might delete this long one here. Okay? So now the pattern has changed rhythmically, but it still will fundamentally sound like the same original patterns. So let's have a listen to what it sounds like. And what this does is it opens you up to using other patterns then on top of it. So you could add in a lead, sorry, I'm just going to paste the and into this instrument just so that we have consistency. But I'm, you can then add in an, another element here because you've created space, but leading some of the nodes, you've created some extra space to add in another element. And we look at this again, let me come to driving elements when we're talking about arrangement, okay? Because driving elements are very, very important for having a good structure in your track. But for the moment, just notice how the variation that we've added, we've only taken some notes out, so the pattern sounds a little bit different, but the fundamental idea is still there. Ok, let's listen. And finally, just while we're on the subject of adding variation, the most important place to add variation is in your transition. So this little section here, this is a transition from diverse. Okay? We're transitioning from the verse into the drop. Okay? And as you can see, as that transition was coming up, first of all, this ridiculously loud upsweep was sort of signaling that something was coming. But the main point here is the actual transition itself. So what happened in the transition was these drum elements were actually removed. There is a fill loop added in. Ok. So what the variation in this transition section does is it sort of pulls us out of the main idea just for a split second. And then it plunks us back in. When the drop comes in. We'll be looking at transitions again properly in a little while. But it's good to be aware that adding variation to your internal loops in the transition sections is important for the overall flow of your track. And the next section we're going to have a look at effects for EDM and we'll learn why this really, really loud shoplifter was being used in the track. 37. Main Elements of EDM Effects: So effects are a very important aspect of electronic music. And what they do is they signify when something in the track is about to change. They can also signify when something in the track has changed. So an example would be to show that a new section is coming. Like here. We're moving from the intro to the breakdown section and we're using this effect to show that it's coming. I'm using this effect to show that the change has happened. Okay, so let's take a listen to this upsweep on its own. And now let's take a listen to this reverb kick drum effect on its own. Okay, so let's listen to these in context now. So this upsweep is going to bring us from the intro section. And this cake reverb effect is going to bring us into the breakdown section. Okay? So there are so many different types of effects through our lung effects. There are short effects. There's up sweeps down, sweeps up lifters down lifters, impacts. There's reverse symbols, there's affects symbols. There are so many different effects that we can use in our tracks. So let's jump into the next lecture where we will look at effects in context and we'll look at how to use them in your EDM tracks. 38. Choosing Effect Samples: So in this lecture we're going to have a look at choosing effects. Now what I've done is I've taken the same sort of arrangement that we had in the last lecture, and I've just removed the effects that I had added in. So we're starting with a blank template to add in our own effects. So if we come over here to my sample packs and I'll just scroll down to where I keep my effects, like choosing here effects. And the first thing you'll notice is the sheer number of different subcategories of effects that there actually are. Now this might seem overwhelming, but I'm actually going to simplify it a bit for you here. Ok? So there's actually only three types of effects, okay? And these are effects that tell you something's coming. Effects that tell you something has happened. And then miscellaneous effects that don't fit into either of those two categories. So these arcade drifts here, these would be miscellaneous. Okay. These are just affects that don't tell us something has come in and they don't tell us that something has changed either. Alright, another type of miscellaneous effect would be, let's have a look here. Let's maybe your scratchy effects. And also maybe some alarm effects appear. It's up, listen to some of these. That's very loud. That's actually a common effect that's used in the breakdown section. But anyway, let's have a look now at effects that tell us something is coming. So these are the legs if you're up lifters. Okay. And then there's a facts that tell us something has changed. So these are the likes of your down lifters. So let's have a quick listen through the arrangement may be up to the drop here. And let's take a note of the different type of effects that we should be using. And throughout the different sections and the track. Ok, so this is the intro section. We might use an effect here to tell us that the breakdown is coming. So to tell us that something is about to change, then here we would use an effect to tell us that that change has happened. Here again, you might use an effect that tell us that another section is coming, which is the build-up. And then an effect that tell us that that change has come. And finally again here, you might use an effect to tell us that another change is coming, which would be the drop. So it's relatively simple. It's just three sort of main categories. But all of these sort of subcategories are split between these three main categories. Okay? So let's go through and start adding in some effects. So I think I'm going to add in a sweep up and this would be to signify that a change is coming. So I'm going to use the sweep up for this first place where we noted that we needed an effect to signify something was coming. So let's test out some of these sweeps. Okay, so I liked the sound of sweep up 28, so I'm going to drag that in to our arrangement. Gonna drop it in there, and then we'll move it back here just so it kind of fits the, fits the overall arrangement of the track because the breakdown section comes here. So we want that effect to stop before the, you know, the section that it's actually pointing to, we want the effect to stop before that section has come. Okay. So I'm just going to turn it down in the mixer track. Actually it's already on a mixer track, so okay, the reason and the reason this effect is already in a mixer track is because it's the effect I used in the first place. So I obviously do like the sound of this sweep of 28. I'm just going to leave it in there for now because the point is that the same, ok, so this effect is sweeping up and it's telling us that something is coming, that a change is about to happen. So next we need to look at inserting an effect to tell us that that change has happened. So we can use various different types of effects. We can use sweeps down, we can use impacts, symbol effects, and let's use it, uh, his unexplored sound. Okay, these are quite popular for breakdown sections anyway. So let's have a listen to these hate and explode sense. Okay, so let's use this hit unexploded 24. We'll drag that into our arrangement and we'll drop it there. So they'll drop it on the first beat of the or the breakdown section. Sorry. And I'm just going to come in and turn that down in the mixer track so it's not extremely loud. Okay. So let's have a listen to what this sounds like so far, just with the sweep up and then this Hazen explodes and okay, so next we're going to add a, another effect here that will signify that something is coming. And that's the buildup section which is here. So we can come in and we can use a different type of upsweep or a different kind of effect this time maybe we might use an uplift. And the difference between an uplift or in an upsweep Is that an upsweep is all sort of noise. It's all sort of air and an uplift or actually has a pitch. So it has a sort of knows that you can harm. But that's not really important because they're all sort of under the same heading and they're all doing the same thing. So I'm going to use actually first let's have a listen to some of the sounds. So let's listen to this uplift or twenty eight. Twenty nine, thirty. Just find one that we're like. Ok, let's use this 36 and I like the sound of this, so I'm gonna drag it in and drop it into the playlist. And then we're going to make it fit our arrangement. Now if we zoom up, we'll see that it's actually the actual waveform ends before the bar, before the first bar of the buildup. So again, as with any sort of external loop or any sort of sample that we're using, we must fit it to our tempo. So in this case I'm just going to use the estimated version because as I said before, it's usually quite accurate. So let's just hit that. And there we go. It snaps it back to this beat and we can drag this forward then. And now it should be lining up exactly with the first beat of our buildup section. It's opened up in the mixer track and we'll just turn it down so it doesn't overpower everything else. And then we'll look at adding in a down lifter. Yeah, so a different type. So last time we used a hits and explored sound, let's use a down lifted this time. So I like the sound of this down left or number 39. So I'm going to drag this into the playlist. And I'm going to just drop it there. And because the sort of the tail-end of this sample doesn't really matter because the, you know, the tail end of the clip is completely silent. We don't need to fit it to the tempo because it doesn't matter where it ends up that it matters is for this type of sample where the type of effect, sorry, is where it starts. And whenever we drag in a clip, it'll always snap the very start of it to the grid. It's just the end of the effect that you have to worry about, but in this case, it's absolutely fine. So let's zoom out again. And I'll just turn this down in the mixer track. So turn this down. And now we'll ever listen to these two effects. So wanted to signify that the buildup is coming and this one to signify that the buildup has come. And I'll just come up here quickly and turn on smart disable it for our plug-ins just before we press play in case we run into some lag issues. Okay, so let's listen now. Okay, so finally we're going to look at adding in the sort of final effect to show that the drop is coming. And then one more effect to show that the drop has come. Okay, so we can come back into our Effects section. And this time I'm going to show you a little sort of trick that we can do with our effects. And that is we can reverse the sound of them. So if we liked the sound of, let's say we liked the sound of one of these sweep down effects. Okay? So what we can do is, let's say it's number ten, right? I say we liked the sound of this. So when we drag this and we'd like the sound of this sweeping down, but we don't want it to sweep down in this section, we actually wanted to sweep up to tell us that the drop is coming. So what we can do is like our drum samples. We can come in here and open up the sample window. And we can hit this reverse button. And that just flips the sample around. And now it's turned from a sweep down into a sweep up. So again, we're concerned with the end of it here. So we have to make sure that the end of it lines up. And as you can see, it's actually falling a bit behind the virus. I'm actually just going to drag it very quickly and just kind of lining up manually. But you can also click here and fitted tempo if you want. So let's zoom out again. And now what we can do is we can add this to the mixer track and turn it down just so it's not going to overpower anything else. And finally, we will add in a different type of effect for the droplets out in a cymbal effect. And we'll try one of these may be 24. Okay, so that's just throw in Cymbal Effect 27 just for the sake of it. Okay? Now, obviously, because we're only concerned with the start of this effect, we don't need to do any adjusting to the tempo. And finally, I'll just double-click it and added to the mixture track like we did with the rest effects, turn it down. And then we'd have a listen now to the, We'd have listened to this flow section. So starting from sort of halfway through the breakdown, into the build-up and then into the drop. Okay, let's have a listen now. Now the thing is with some of these effects, they don't actually fit very well. And I was just going through it very quickly. But you will have to make sure that the sound of your affects fit the sound of your tracks. So the likes of this effect here, there's a lot of low end rumble and I don't think it fits the overall sound of the track. So just be careful that when you're choosing your effects, you know, make sure you, you're picking effects that fit the overall sound of your track, just like you would with your instruments are your drums. You gotta make sure everything in your tracks sounds like it's part of the same family. If you want a bigger sort of effect sounds. So let's say in the buildup here, you want this, this, this sort of sweeping up effect. You want it to be much bigger than the single sound that this is giving. You can, of course, layer in other effects, you could have five or six different effects layered here. And they're all contributing to one bigger effect sound that's telling the listener something big is coming. And you also have to think of it that way as well. You know, the drop is a big section. So you're probably going to use some bigger sounding effects. But then the likes of the breakdown, an intro here you might use, you're not going to use six or seven different effects here because the breakdown has the lowest energy of your entire track. So you might only use one sort of short effect here or maybe a very, very subtle effect. So think of it that way to think of the overall flow of your track and make sure that everything sort of matches up and let your effects and telling the listener that something big is coming when something small as actually coming. So make sure you're effects kind of match the sort of sections that they're pointing to. Next, we'll just take a quick look at how we can make some of our own effects. 39. Making Effect Sounds: So in this lecture we'll look at making our own affect sounds. So the easiest effect to make is the upsweep. And what we do is we take a very, very basic synthesisers. So I've literary taken D3 times oscillator or the tree XOR c or whatever you call it, it's literally just three oscillators, the exact same oscillator. And what we can do with this is we can set the oscillators to produce noise. Okay, so I'm gonna turn the second oscillator down fully and I'm going to turn the third one down fully just so that they're not interfering with the sound. So we're only using this one oscillator and it's set to this noise setting. Okay? Now you can use any synthesizer to create noise, but I'm going to be using the 3x oscillator just because it's really, really simplistic and it saves CPU. So let's close it. And what we'll do is we'll draw in maybe an eight bar noise pattern. So that's four bars as we can see. So bring it all the way across to eight bars over here. And let's paste this pattern then into the playlist window. So now the noise sounds like this. And if not very nice to listen to, but what we can do is we can automate the volume. And so this is the volume setting here or sorry, no, that's the panning. This is the volume here on the right. And, but what we do is we right-click remember and create our automation clip, okay? So we can just drag the left anchor points down so it's silent at the start. And as the pattern plays out, it slowly gets louder and louder. We can also adjust the shape of the curve by dragging this middle bit here. So I'm just going to drag it down. So it's not as sort of linear and a kind of increases gradually with this exponential curve. And let's just listen to what this sounds like now. And if you want to make this sweep sound better, what we can do is we can apply a filter. Let's come in here now to the plugin and we'll assign it to a mixer track like this. So now it's on track one and I'm going to open up a filter. So I'm going to pick the standard fruity loved filter. And it's going to open up. And what we have here with the filter is kind of no different to the filter on a synthesizer will be looking at filters in a bit more detail. Let me come to mixing, but for now, I'm sure you recognize the cutoff and the resonance parameters here. So I'm just going to turn the resonance down fully and we're going to automate the sound of the cutoff. So let's right-click and say create automation clip. Close the filter plug-in. And then we'll come down here to the anchor points and we'll drag the right anchor point up so that the filter opens as the pattern is playing. So let's listen to what this sounds like now. So that's just a really basic way to make your own white noise sort of upsweep. So I'm going to delete these patterns now and we're just gonna have a look at maybe making some symbol effects. So if we come down here and our sample packs, and I'm going to come into my drum sample pack and I'm going to add in just a simple sort of crash sound. Let's find one. Ok, let's use this one. Because this one doesn't have any effect on it already. And that's just loop at this section so that it doesn't keep looping. We'll have a listen to other centric. Now what we can do with this is we can add it to the mixer track. And we can apply some different types of effects. So let's say we apply a reverb effect. Now I'm just gonna pick a preset for now, but we will be going through all of these parameters and what they mean when we come to reverb what mixing. But for now, let's just pick a preset maybe large hall. And let's open up a delay effect. So I'll use the fruity delay bank. And again, we'll be looking at what delay does and the mixing section. But for now let's just pick a fun sort of delay sound. Let's click this classic ping-pong. And if we listen to the cymbal sound now, with all these effects applied, it sounds like this. Ok, so let's delete this now and we'll have a look at making a riser sound effect or an uplift or so I'm gonna come up here and I'm going to switch this back to all so I can see everything that's sort of loaded onto the, the pattern palette. And I'm going to replace this 3x oscillator with spire because we've been using it so far. Okay, so let's, let's replace this with Spire. And with every synthesizer that you use, it will come with this pitch bend wheel. And this is where we can sort of slide up and down between different pitches. Okay? So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to set the pitch wheel to bend up by 12 semitones because 12 semitones is an octave. Okay? Now I know you might have heard that age is an act of an AES, white notes, or eight full tones is an octave, but 12 semi-tones makes up an octave. So I'm just gonna click this 12 so that when I bend habitual up, it'll bend up by a full octave. Okay, so let's just close this now. It doesn't really matter what preset we're using. And we paste in the, paste in the same pattern, which is this just sort of long note. Alright? And if we wiggle this pitch, bend wheel and then come up here to tools, last tweaked. And then click Create automation clip. It, create an animation clip on the playlist window. And we can drag the right anchor point up so that the pitch bend wheel moves up as the pattern place. Let's have a listen to the pattern and we'll watch the pitch bend wheel as it plays. And if you want that to bend even more, you can set the pitch bend wheel to bend up higher. Or you can set the pitch bend wheel to bend down by 12. And then we can drag this left anchor points down so that, so that's going up a full active by the time it reaches the middle, and then it's going up another full active by the time it reaches this right anchor point over here. So I notice when we're listening there that it was kind of quiet and that's because I still have this filter left on. So that's just turn that off and we'll have a listen now to this pattern. And I'll open up spire so that we can see what's happening with the Pitch Bend. We'll, Okay. So let's watch this as the pattern place. So you can use this pitch bend wheel and automation sort of technique on any synthesizer in your track. So if you want to automate it so that the main sort of melody in your track is slowly bending up and pitch as the build-up is playing out. You can do that too. So they're just some basic effects that we can create ourselves. But there really isn't any need to create our own effects when there's source or many effects that you can download here. And you can use these in your tracks. So there's no, there's no real need to create your own except for this pitch bend technique, which can sound really good when you use the elements that you've sort of already added to your track. But other than that, we don't need to create our own. We can just use some of the effects that come in these sample backs. Let's move on now to the next section and we'll take a look at vocals. 40. Introduction to Vocal for EDMs: So in this section we're going to learn all about using vocals for EDM. Now, EDM tracks often make use of vocal phrases, vocal hooks, loops, chops, samples, et cetera. But what are all of these things and how do we use them? Well, that's what we're going to learn in this section. So before we move on to the bulk of the lectures, I just wanted to give you a few examples of each of these vocal types. Let's start up here at the beginning with vocal phrase, going to bring it back. And I'll play it again. Going bring back. The next one we have is a vocal hook. Let's see what that sounds like. Talking to myself. Can't get overview. You just love yourself. It's a made you do talking to herself. Can't get overview. You just love yourself. It's a made you do. Let's look now at a vocal loop. Right? All right. All right, all right. Let's now have a quick look at vocal chops. And now let's have a quick look at a vocal sample. Gone away probably has it now he showed it to me and they put them down on the ground is start kicking stab wounds in his back and you know what, over Syria. Alive when we got here. Okay, so that's what each of these vocal type sound like. Let's move on now to the first lecture in this section where we'll have a look at vocal phrases in detail. 41. Vocal Phrases: Okay, so what are vocal phrases? Well, vocal phrases and electronic music simply referred to very short sentences or phrases that add to the character. So those typical, you know, 123 jump. Those shouts that can be heard before the drop comes, their vocal phrases. So a vocal phrase can be used anywhere throughout the track. Their work particularly well before the drop and in breakdowns as it gives the listener something familiar to cling onto, which is language. You definitely don't want to overuse the vocal phrases. So if you are using them, just pick one or two and then build a pattern out of them. And the reason for this is because if you use too many random phrases, your track and sound messy and amateur, every element in your track needs to sound as if it's part of the same family and your vocal phrases are no different. So make sure that you're not using too many and they fit together well. You can find vocal phrases in sample packs, or if you're feeling creative, you can record your own. So I'm gonna give you an example here of some vocal phrases and context. Okay, so there's three different types of vocal phrases being used. There's this ad live phrase, let's have a listen. Ok. And then I teamed that with this phrase, which is the same woman. So it's the same person speaking. So it kind of glues all of these separate phrases together. Let's have a listen to this phrase deep down inside my soul. And then when we come over here to sort of a chorus section of the breakdown, we have this vocal phrase, which again is the same woman speaking and it sounds like this. But when we combine all of them together, they sound like this. Okay, I'll just play it from here so we're not as into both these would just listen to this one and then we'll have a listen to this one. And I move that sample at it the way it would go, lets us now deep down, it's not so deep. So you can see that this particular vocal pattern is built out of three separate vocal phrases. So let's have a listen to the full track, maybe up to around here. And then we'll come into the sample pack and we'll have a look at trying to match some vocal phrases together. Let's have a listen now. Deep down inside my soul, deep down inside my saw. Okay, so let's come over here into the sample packs and scroll down to where I keep my vocals. And I'm just going to this vocal pack five. And we'll add in here to vocal phrases. Okay, so let's just have a listen through to some of these phrases. Let start with 18 here. Ok. Let's try 17. Stress 16151413, tray out. Okay, so you can combine all of these together to build a full sort of vocal pattern. So let's just come down here really quickly and I'll solo this track, maybe two or three of them, and we'll just drag in this sample, this, sorry, this vocal phrase, Mileva, listen to it. All right, now let's try and team this vocal phrase with some other vocal phrases. Let's listen to eight LBJ, drop, keep, Do I belive. Ok, so this particular voice here, this sounds very, very similar to this phrase that we have here. So I'm going to drag out this phrase. And like all of our external loops, we also need to fit these vocal phrases to our tempo, Okay, so we're set at 128 appear. So I'm gonna do the usual and I'm going to click Fit to tempo. And I'm just going to click the estimation because I don't know what this particular vocal phrases set out. So I'm just going to leave the software to guess for me. And I'm going to do the same over here with this one. And it's estimating around 150. So now let's listen to both of these together. Key, why belive, don'ts. So we could use these two vocal phrases as a vocal pattern. So if I duplicate this and I drag the second one out here to this bar, and I'll just come back up and I'll solo the music to music part. And we'll just listen to what these vocal phrases now sound like with this baseline and kick drum. Ok. Let's have a listen to why belive don't. Keep the y belive, don't. And you can add in more vocal phrases or even less vocal phrases depending on the sound of your track. But do keep in mind that you shouldn't add in too many vocal phrases. Otherwise, the overall sound of your track will become a little bit muddled. So my advice is to maybe stick with two or three and then use them to build a little vocal pattern that you can repeat across the track. So I'm just going to delete these phrases that we dragged in and we'll move on now to the next lecture, which is looking at vocal hooks. 42. Vocal Hooks: So in this lecture, we're going to learn about vocal hooks. So we'll hook is just a fancy word for a musical idea that catches the audience's attention. And as memorable and electronic music, a hook is like a snippet of a verse, a chorus, and as longer than a phrase and a loop, you can essentially think of it as a mini son. Now a hook would work best in the breakdown, but they can also function well and the drop, you can find these hooks in sample packs or you can record your own. But the one thing I will say with this is that if you are taking Hawks from a sample pack, you have to make sure that the sample pack is royalty free. And what this means is if you're tracked goes up on commercial streaming platforms like Spotify or YouTube or something like that. Where you're earning money from us. If you're using a hook that isn't royalty-free, you will actually owe the person who made that hook a percentage of your earnings. So it's much, much easier to just check the description of the sample pack that you're downloading and just make sure that it says royalty-free. You also can't take a hug from another song because this would cause copyright issues. If you really want to use a hug from a song, you actually have to contact the artist. So let's say I wanted to use a vocal hug from one of Katy Perry's tracks. I would have to contact Katy Perry and ask her for her permission to use that hook in my track. If you get permission, then it's okay to use that hook in your track. But without permission, you could run into all sorts of copyright issues, swayed advise you not to use someone else's hook in your track unless you have permission to do so. But if you record your own, then you won't run into any of these issues because that hook is 100% original and 100% belongs to you. So with that being said, let's just listen to this example of a vocal hook I have here, and we listened to it in the context of an arrangement. So here I have a sort of a breakdown section and then it moves into a drop. And you can actually see down here that the vocal hook continues past the drop. So let's have a listen to what this sounds like. And then we'll come in here to the sample packs and we'll see how to add vocal hooks to our tracks. Ok, so let's have a listen now. So that is what a vocal hub could sound like in a track. Let's come in now to the sample packs and we'll just find some vocal hooks to use an air track. So I'm just going to scroll down and I'm going to use this one that's already highlighted, which is loop masters. Kate wild vocal hooks. Acapella has volume three. Okay, so I'm gonna come in here to the wave Loop section. And as you can see, it opens up all of these little sub folders. And vocal hook packs are great because 90% of the time they give you the BPM, they give you the key, and then they give you the name of the sum. So I know that my track is 127 BPM. And I also know that the key of my track is in c-sharp, okay? So I'm going to try and find a vocal hook that matches these two things as close as possible. Now I can see here that I have a one to two, and a D minor. And D would be pretty close to C sharp. But the only problem is that my track isn't Minor, Okay? Mine is major. Alright, so we have the chord of C-sharp, E, F, and G sharp. And that's the court of C-sharp major. So if I was to drag in this D minor and then pitch it down to C sharp. It would actually be playing in C-sharp minor, Nazi sharp major. So if you're unsure of your scales and keys and stuff, you could just close this and then go and find a different sample pack that isn't C-sharp major. Or another option would be to take into account that this is in D minor and then change your track so that your track is in D minor. But if you're like me and you already have the arrangement started, this can be a bit painstaking. So what I'm gonna do instead is I'm going to use my knowledge of scales and keys, okay? So I know that with C-sharp major, the relative minor of that would be a sharp minor. Okay? And what we have here is we have some A-Minor, so A-Minor is pretty close to a sharp minor. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to take this a minor song. And it's also set at 110 BPM, which is closer to one to seven. Then 97 is. So I'm gonna take this one and I'm going to audition Some of the vocal hooks in this folder to drag into my track. Now if you're unsure of the relative major and the relative miners and stuff like that. That's okay if you just take the key of your track. So let's say you're a track is in D major. If you just Google, what is the relative minor of D major, then Google will actually answer that for you really, really quickly and you'll find out that it's B minor. But I already know that for my track, a sharp minor is going to work. So I'm going to drag in maybe this part to lead. Yeah. So I like the sound of this pack to lead. So I'm going to drag this into my track. And I'm going to place it there. And I'm just going to delete the vocal hooks that we had already so we can start from fresh with a blank slate. And then I'm gonna move this vocal hook that I just dragged in over to the start of my arrangements, the start of the breakdown here, okay? Now the first thing I'm gonna do with this is I'm going to stretch it so that it fits my tempo. And we can see here that the software has scanned it and it has estimated that it's around 110 BPM. And if we come over here, we can see that the software is actually bang on. Okay, so I'm going to click this and it's going to stretch it for me. And then what I'm gonna do is I'm going to pitch it. Okay? So I know that this particular vocal hook is in a minor. And I know that I need to transpose it so that it's actually playing in a sharp minor. Okay? So I'm just going to pitch it up by $0.100. And if we remember from before that $0.100 is one semitone, then we'll know that pitching it up by $0.100, we'll actually pitch it up by one semitone, which will bring it up to a sharp minor. Ok, so now that's pitched and stretched. We can close the sampler and we can have a listen to what it sounds like in our track. Let's take a listen now. So that's sort of the process that you should use when you're adding vocal hooks to your track. But at the end of the day, it's really about what sounds better. So technically, if you're vocal hook is way out of key. If it actually sounds good, then it doesn't matter because all the listeners will here is the final version of your track. So if it sounds good, it is good. 43. Vocal Loops: So in this lecture, we're going to focus on vocal loops. So vocal loop can be any sort of vocal that you intend to loop over time. They don't necessarily have to say anything as long as it's vocal based and it has some sort of rhythmic element to it. Vocal loops work graze in both the drop and the breakdown. However, you shouldn't use them throughout the entire track. It's better to maybe faded in during the break down. Let it take over during the drop and then have a section with no vocals. It just helps to break it up. You don't want to bore the listener. So again, vocal loops can be found in sample packs or you can make your own by looping different words and adding cool effects. Let's listen to this example of a vocal loop that I'm using in my track. Ok, so it's really, really short loop. But I've actually repeated it a lot of times throughout the breakdown and the buildup and coming up to the drop. Okay, so let's listen to what it sounds like in context. And then like the other lectures will come in here to our sample backs and we'll see how we should add vocal loops to our track. Okay, let's have a listen now to a vocal loop in context. And really say, you really see the, really, really saying. The same thing for brains are really good words. Okay, so that's what a vocal loop would sound like if you use it in your track. Let's come into the sample back section and we'll scroll down into my vocals folder. Mileva, listen to some of the vocal loops that I have. So as you can see, they're kind of split into two different PPMs. The first one being 140, and the second one being one to eight. Now remember we said before that one to eight is a happy medium. Well that's why these vocal loops are set to 12z, because it's assuming that when you're trying to fit these vocal loops to your tempo, using a BPM that's pretty close to 128. The vocal loops that are set at 140 then are designed for tracks that are a little bit faster, like dubstep and drum and bass. I'm gonna come in here to the 128 BPM one though, because my track is set at 128, it's just a matter of finding which BPM is closest to the one that you have said in your track. Ok, so let's come into this 128 BPM folder and we'll have a listen to some of the loops in here. So let's take this house loops 34 and have a listen to what this sounds like. Let's try 36. Now let's try maybe 391 more. We'll just try 40. See what that sounds like. The music I found. Ok, so let's just take House Loops 40, and we'll drag it into our project. And we're loaded up here. Okay, now I'm just going to delete the vocal loops I was using already, just so that we're kind of starting from a blank template. And the first thing I'll do is make sure that it fits our temple property. Now I know it already says 128 BPM, but I'm just gonna make sure it fits exactly by pressing the estimation button. Now, obviously if your estimation is somewhere way off, if this says like 75, don't clickers. But because it seems pretty close to 120 days, I'm going to assume that the software knows better than I do, and I'm going to click it. So now that the tempo of the loop fits the tempo of our track, we're now going to figure out the key of our track and transpose or pitched this vocal loop so that it fits the key of our track. Ok. So I'm gonna click in here to our piano roll and I'm going to check wacky, the track is set out and I can see here it's sort of residing around F. Ok. So if I come back out into the playlist and I double-click the loop, it brings up the sample window. And what I can do is I can add it to a mixer track. And then again, we'll do the same process. We add a plugin called Edison. And then we drag in the waveform in the music and then place it into Edison. For my soul. I found. Okay. And then we right-click and then come down to regions, and then come down to the very bottom and click detect pitch regions. And what this does is it scans the file and it tells us what key it's setting. So I can see here it's somewhere around D-sharp, maybe D, C sharp. So I'm going to assume that the first one is correct, and I'm going to use that as a basis to pitch the vocal loop. Okay, so let's close Edison coming here to the vocal loop. So I know that the vocal loop isn't D-Sharp and my track is an F, So I'm going to have to pitch this up one semitone to e and one more semitone to f. Okay? So now let's see if this, oops, Now let's see if the key of this vocal loop fits our trek. Okay, so I think that sounds pretty good. I think that this vocal loop does sound like it's in key with the track. So then once you have your vocal loop in key and in time, we can then paste it out across the entire section that you wanted in. So I wanted in some of my breakdown and then into the build-up. And then we can have a listen to what the track sounds like with that vocal loop in it. I'm just going to turn it down because it's really loud and it was turned down fits the track. Now I've just noticed there that there's a little bit of a clicky sound at the end. And that's because there's a bit of silence happening between each vocal loop. Okay? So if I come over here and I just look at the wave form, I can see that the waveform starts somewhere here, but our bar starts here. So it's slightly out of time. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to highlight this one. I'm going to come up here and I'm going to click stretch. And this turns on stretch. And then whenever I move this out, will actually stretch the wave form. So I'm going to stretch it so that the start of that sort of peak of the wave form is starting at the very start of our Barnett, somewhere around there. So now I can see that the buyer matches up with this sort of peak of the wave form. And I'm going to come, I'm gonna zoom back out and I'm gonna see what that sounds like Now. So let's have a listen. So I think the loop sounds fine now. So I'm going to turn off stretch again so that whenever I drag another wave form, it doesn't stretch it, it just draws out this sort of extra portion. Okay, next, we're gonna take a look at vocal chops. 44. Vocal Chops: So in this lecture, we're taking a look at vocal chops. So a vocal chop is when you take an existing hook and then chop it into smaller pieces. These pieces then gets shuffled around and maybe other pieces get deleted. And you use the remaining pieces to create an interesting but fast-paced rhythm. Vocal chops work really well if you don't want to use a hook or if you can't find a royalty free hook. So the reason for this is because you can use a hook from any song and then chapters beyond recognition to use in your tracks. You can also record your own hook to chop, or you can just find one in a sample back. Here's a vocal chapter that I made earlier. And it started out life as this vocal hook. Let's take a listen to how it sounded before it was chopped. Do get it as one. That's what you don't me. Sometimes these are the things you gave to me. I saw that I announce me, I'm all bought the path. Delay me. Okay. And now let's take a listen to what it sounds like after I've done a bit of chopping. One DOM, now, keeping one DOM, now heaping. So I just took little bits and pieces from everywhere throughout that vocal hook. And then I sort of rearranged them and made this rhythm. Let's have a listen to what it sounds like in context. Okay, so I have this sort of house music breakdown. So whenever Lesson Two at the vocal chap sounds like with these cards and the pads and stuff. Okay. Lets us and now meaning one dom. Dom. Dom. Ok. So I'm sure you get the general idea of it. So what we'll do now is we'll come into my sample packs and we'll take a look at chopping our own vocals. So I'm going to close this house loops folder that we were looking at in the last lecture. And I'm going to open up a vocal hock. So I'll just come up here to one of my full vocal packs and will choose maybe this one. There's production master Alexandra vocal sessions. Okay, Let's come in here and we can see again, we've got all these sub folders with different Sachs. Now for vocal hooks, it's not as important to sort of find a BPM that's closely related to yours because we're actually chopping up the whole completely and then rearranging all of the pieces. So it really doesn't matter which of these you choose. So I'm gonna choose, let's say the 100 bpm one, which is about 25 beats per minute away from my project is set up, but that's okay. We don't need it to be close to 125. So I'm going to drag in one of these hooks here. Maybe we'll drag in this verse. I'm going to plop it in the playlist. And what I'll do is I delete the chops that I had done earlier. And I'll solo this so we can go about applying some chaps. So there's two ways to apply chops, okay? You can come up here and you can select a razor tool and you can go through it yourself and sort of chop these little pieces out like this. Or I'm just going to undo all of those and just pop back into the sample view. Okay, so, so you can chop it yourself or you can come up to this little waveform like we do when we're trying to fit something to our tempo. Click it, and then come down here to chop. And you can let the software do the chopping for you. Okay, so you can pick all these sort of rhythms here, but I'm just going to use sharp auto slicing so I can make my own rhythm. If you pick one of these, it actually rearranges it for you. So maybe just for the sake of demonstrating, let's pick this 112 loop and we'll see that all the pieces now I've got flipped around. Let's take a listen to what it sounds like. Bbb. Okay, so that sounds a bit robotic, but we can choose as try maybe another setting really quickly just before we do it ourselves. Let's pick maybe starter to. Let's try this. Ok. So I'll just undo that again. Now, I much prefer to rearrange all of the little pieces myself because I just have more control over it and I have more control over the rhythm and how the overall chap sounds. But feel free to use one of these sort of auto-generated settings if you want. But I'm going to select here sharp auto slicing. Okay? And the difference between DO medium and sharp is that sharp was sort of look at every one of these peaks and troughs and soften it'll chop it very, very precisely. Whereas with dual autos lysing, the chops that you get are less precise. So what'll happen is with sharp auto slicing, you'll have lots of small little chops to mess around with and withdraw lotto slicing. You'll have lots of big little slices to mess around with. I prefer my slice has to be smaller. So I'm going to select chapped. And as you can see, it's kind of analyze the waveform and chapters depending on where the different peaks and troughs are. Okay, so let's start rearranging some of these pieces. So I might drag this piece and I might start a down here. And I'm just going to solo the chops that I'm working on. So I wanted to hear what I'm doing with the chops, okay? And I'm gonna have to zoom up here and make sure that it's the, oops, I'm going to set this to none, just so that I have control over where it, exactly where it goes. And I'm going to, I'm going to paste it in here. So it's exactly on the first beat of the bar. Okay. Then I'm going to come over to our chopped vocal again. And I'll just zoom out a bit so I can see what I'm doing. And I'm going to pick maybe a different segments. So maybe this small segment here and drag that over. And we might place it, let's say the next. The next beat, we place it at the start and then we'll use another short segment, maybe this bit. And we'll drag this over and started on the next step. Let's use another segment for maybe over here, let's pick this one, drag this over and started on this step. And then maybe let's try this one and we'll drag this over and put it on this. Okay, so let's see how that sounds so far. And if we like it, we will keep it. And if we don't like certain bits, we can chop and change and remove them and start adding different bits in. Let's hear what it sounds like so far yet. Okay, so it doesn't sound too terrible. So I'm gonna keep going. I'm going to add in maybe this bit here. Let's come over and get something from the end. Maybe this piece, actually that's too big. I might leave that for another bid, but I'll take maybe this smaller piece because I have lots of big pieces in my chops at the moment, I just want to use a few more, smaller pieces. Let's use this piece and we'll put it here. Let's use this short piece and we put it maybe here. And then finally we'll use that big piece that we had. Okay? And that's put us let's just leave it there. Okay, let's see what this sounds like now. Okay. What I'm gonna do is I'm just going to chop the tail off this so that when I lupus, they all sort of fit together a little better, okay, like that. Ok, so let's zoom out and I'm going to turn back on my grid setting and double-click this to get rid of the loop. And then when un-solo this, and we'll delete the original vocal hook from above it. I've come across here and delete that. And then I'm just going to paste this pattern out across the entire breakdown section, okay? Like this. Now, now before we actually proceed with listening, we do have to pitch this to make sure that it's in key. So I'm going to double-click one of the samples added to the mixer, career and open Edison. And then we'll drag it in like this. So baby hold me close. And then we'll double-click regions, detect pitch regions. And let's see what sort of key we're looking at. Okay? So I can see here that we're looking at C, B, C sharp, D sharp, F sharp. Or actually instead of this method, because we used a vocal hook in the first place, we can just look and see here walkie, it's, and so it's actually in B major. So I'm going to check the key of my track, which is, I think G sharp minor. To scroll down here. Yeah, C-sharp Minor. Okay. So again we have a major and a minor, sort of a clash. So we're going to have to look at relative majors here. So my track is in the key of G sharp minor. And the relative major of G-sharp miner actually happens to be major. So we're actually ok. We don't need to do any pitching at all. So let's have a listen now to the breakdown with our vocal chops in there and see what it sounds like. I might turn them down in the mixer track for us just to just was not overpowering. Let's have a listen. Okay, so now when you're making your vocal chops, you might make the pattern a bit longer. Now are our pattern was very short. It was only one buyer, and then we looked at that the whole way across. But you could make a 4-bar, you could make an eight bar, you could even make a 16 bar long vocal chopped. That's all different the whole way through and that would create a lot of interest for the listener. I did a four-bar pattern here quickly, just for the purpose of this lecture. But when you're creating your tracks, you might want to extend this pattern out to maybe four bars or APRs or as I said, even longer. Okay, in the next section we'll look at the final type of vocal, which is vocal samples. 45. Sampled Vocals: In this lecture, we're going to take a look at vocal samples. So a sample is when you take a piece of audio from an existing piece of work, and then you use that audio in your own tracks. Now because we're actually taking audio from other people's work, we have to be very careful with copyright. So you will need to seek permission to use somebody else's work in your track. However, there is something called the public domain. And the public domain is basically a place where you can find out which works of art and history. I've actually gone past their copyright date. So melodies like the traditional Happy Birthday tune were once copyrighted. But now because this tune is so old, the copyright for it has actually a lapsed. So what you can do is you can use the public domain to find out sort of which works of art are free of copyright that you can use in your tracks. So for example, American films before 1964 are okay to use. And foreign films before 1923 are okay to use. Tv shows before 1970. Sung's anything before 1924 is okay. You can also just Google what you're looking for, followed by the word public domain and you'll find it. So for example, folk songs, Public Domain. It'll throw up a list of folk songs that no longer have copyright applied. A lot of house music tracks actually sample old soul music and then use that to form a hook. So in this example track here, I'm actually using vocal samples from a pack that I've downloaded, which is called lo-fi vocals. And in this pack, there's hundreds of different sort of vocal samples drove very short the vocal phrases. But again, we can use these phrases to build a longer sort of vocal for our track, ok. But all of these low-fi phrases have been sampled. So inside this factors, phrases from Sat Nav systems, from speeches that presidents have given over the years, from TV shows, from all documentaries and all radio shows and all this kind of stuff that we can sample. Let's have a listen to what some of these low-fi phrases sound like. Nutritional should home, church, MAN, non-diseased, Moody. Who? So these ones are in German and I don't speak German, so I'm just gonna move on because I don't understand what they're saying. Let's try this phrases. One-to-five. Intellectual content, radiant. Unlike those prophecies, seem foolish. But I don't think enter the Internet ten stories high street because it says Olympian human truths of in internet guaranteed and new frontier. So all of these have been sampled from a piece of work that already exists. So let's have a listen to the example Track where I've used some of these low-fi vocal samples. And we'll see what it sounds like in the context of a Melbourne bounce track. So sound is governed by the exact number. But it's here that the mass being did from two experiences on which our visual world is base. And now we have full struck to this core and this Asiatic influence. So I'm not going to show you the process of actually finding these vocal samples because it's really, really simple. If you just search for something on the internet, like maybe an old TV show or old radio show, favorite speech that you might have. And then if you just download this piece of audio and drag it into your tracks, that would be assembled vocal, we use sampled vocals the same as we would use vocal phrases or vocal hooks. You're going to apply the same sort of effects and the same principles. Okay, so let's move on now to the next section where we will learn how to manipulate these vocals. 46. Introduction to Manipulating Vocals: So in this section, we're going to learn a few different techniques that we can do to manipulate the sound of our vocals. Maybe you want them to sound higher or lower, or maybe you just want that infamous Daft Punk synthesized vocal sound will be taking a look at things like foreman shifting, vocoders and vocal doubling. So before we jump in, I'm gonna give you a quick example of these things so you know what to look forward to in this section. So up here, I have this original vocals. So this is what the vocal sounds like without any of these vocal manipulation techniques applied. Let's have a listen to what this sounds like. One day when older, looking back to all those three, there's nine. One day, when older, we will find a magic dies. Now let's have a listen to what foreman shifting does to these vocals. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Now let's have a listen to what a vocoder does. And finally, let's take a listen to what vocal doubling does to these vocals. One day, when older, looking back, one day, we will find that. So now that we know what each of these techniques sound like, let's jump into the first lecture, which is formant shifting. 47. Formant Shifting: So for this lecture, we're going to take a look at form and shifting. Now this is an extremely common technique that's used in house, tech, house, techno, and lots of other EDM genres. It's primarily used on vocals and can be used on a main vocal or even on a backing vocal as a layer. So before we look at how to do farm and shifting, it's important to understand what it actually is. So we must ask ourselves, what is a formant? Well, to put it simply, a formant is the shape that you're mouth makes when it's trying to create a vowel sound. Okay, So in English we know these commonly as AEIOU, but there's actually many, many more shapes than these five. Okay? We have shapes like Ooo, our air, our oil. All of these are forming shapes. So what form and shifting allows us to do is it allows us to manipulate these formats. We can use them to gently shift the sound of the vocal. Or we can be much more extreme and creates a sort of demon or chipmunk sound. The process of forming shifting is really, really easy and we do it using plugins. So before we come in here to the sample packs and form and shift our own vocals. Let's just have a listen to this form and shifted vocal in context, and we'll see what it sounds like in the arrangement. So now let's find a vocal and will apply forum and shifting. So I'm gonna come in here to my sample packs. And again, I'm going to scroll down until I come into my vocal folder, focus five, and we'll pick any of these you can apply form and shifting to any type of vocal. So I'm going to come into these vocal loops and I'm just gonna pick one of these very, very quickly. Okay. Let's scroll down a bit. Places. Party. Ok, let's use this vocal loop 77. Okay, I'm going to drag this in. And I'm going to place it in my arrangement. And I'm just going to delete the vocal that I already had in there where I already applied some form and shifting. And what we're gonna do is we're just gonna solo this and we're going to apply some form and shifting. So here's what it sounds like Now before we apply farm and shifting prop, prop. So to apply this technique, we double-click it. We opened it up in the mixer track and we're going to load a pitch shifting plugin. So I'm going to solo it. And we can come in here now you can load any sort of pitching plugin like isotope nectar. There's actually plug-ins out there that are dedicated to this form and shifting. And they actually sound a lot better than what we can do here. But for the moment, I'm going to use a very standard plugin that comes with FL Studio and it's called pitcher, okay. So picture is actually an auto tune plug-in, so it's designed to auto junior vocals, prop, prop, but now I don't have the auto tuned turned on, but that's okay because we're not concerned with AUTO-TUNE. What we're concerned with is this little foreman section down here. Okay? So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to turn it on by pressing this little light. Now you can see that the light is lit up and it means that forum and shifting is being applied. And the interface of this plugin makes it very simple. They say, if we put the arrow over here to the right, your vocals will sound more like a woman or a chipmunk. And if we put the vocals over here to the left, there sound more like a man or like a sort of deep guttural demon. Okay, so I'm going to leave it up in the Center for the moment. And I'll loop the sample that we have. So this vocal loop, ok, and then look that so that it keeps playing. And then I'm going to apply the form and shifting as the vocal place so we can hear what it's doing in real-time. Okay, so let's press play and I'll start adjusting this little perimeter. Now this particular plugin might not sound very good, but you can download plenty that do this forum and shifting a lot better. But this is how simple form and shifting can be. And let me team it with some pitch shifting. It can sound even better. So if I turn up the gender here, right, sorry, I turned the gender to the right here, so it sounds more like a female. But if I also Pitch Shift S and I shifted up fully, I shifted all the way up as sort of high pitched as it can go. And now it's teamed with this form and shifting. The final loop will sound like this. We can also see what it sounds like. If we turn the gender back to a man. Or we could try pitch shifting the entire loop down, and then changing the form and shift over to the female setting. And now let's see what it sounds like when we turn the setting to the male setting. Okay, so I'm going to reset this pitch back to where it was. And I'm just going to load another plug-in just to show you that you can get better ones out there because the FL Studio sort of default picture plugin, it's not great, but it does the job that it's kind of designed to do. What I'm gonna do is I'm going to show you a more expensive plugin, which is isotope nectar. And we're gonna use this to apply forum and shifting instead. Okay, so I'm going to close this preset window. I'm going to come over here to overview and I'm just going to turn off the EQ and the compressors. And I'm gonna come straight over here to pitch, pressed the light to turn it on. And then we're gonna come over here too. Format. Okay? So we use this shift parameter to shift the foreman's down or up. Okay, so what I'm gonna do is like we did with the pitcher effect, I'm going to play the loop and will ever listen to what it sounds like as I adjust this parameter, let's have a listen now. And if we just try the pitch shifting technique that we were looking at earlier, if we use this more expensive plugin, it'll probably sound a little bit better. So let's just boost to pitch up to sort of a high pitched sound. Okay. So that's, that's what it sounds like before the farm and shifting. And now if we form an shifted all the way up, it'll sound like this. And if we form an shifted all the way down, it'll sound like this. And now if we turn the page all the way down and then we turn the form and shifting all the way up. It sounds like this prop, prop. And now if we turn the form and shifting all the way down, it sounds like this. So it's really up to you what kind of effect you're looking for. But foreman shifting is a very common technique used in EDM. So it's important to be aware of it. Let's just listen again really quickly to what it sounds like when we leave the pitch normal and we form and shifted it the whole way down. I'll just close these and we'll take a listen. Now. In the next lecture, we'll take a look at vocoders and how you can use them for your tracks. 48. Vocoders: So in this lecture, we're going to take a look at vocoders. So a vocoder can be used on vocals to make them sound like a robot or to turn the vocals into courts. We do this with a vocoder plugin. Most softwares will actually come with one for free, but you can't download better ones off the internet. A vocoder works using a modulator and a carrier. So the modulator is the sort of element that you want to apply the effect too. And the carrier is the element that the Vocoder bases the effect sound off. Okay? Or to put it simply, the modulator is your vocal and the carrier is your instrument. And chord pattern. The instrument you actually choose as your carrier will affect the final sound of the vocoder. So make sure you change the instrument a few times and see what kinda sounds you can get out of your vocoder. Let's just have a quick listen to an example of a vocoder being used in an EDM track. And then we'll move on and we'll learn how to apply a vocoder to our own vocals. So let's listen now. So now that we know what a vocoder sounds like in an EDM track. We can go ahead and delete the carrier. And we can delete the modulator, and we can start from scratch to make our own vocoder. The first thing we need is some vocals. So let's come over to our sample packs. And I'll just scroll down here and we'll pick one of the vocal folders. Maybe these ultra deep house focus ok, will come into this. And we'll see that were greeted with a whole range of different sort of focus that we can choose from, and they're all in different keys. Now the beauty of vocoders is that we don't need to worry about what key the vocalist in because the Vocoder will actually change that for us, all we need to be concerned about is the actual sound of the vocal itself. So let's have a listen to what this house vocal seven sounds like. No. My heart is broken on. Okay. I don't like the sound of that. Let's see what vocal six sounds like. Robin law and flying high, we can reach the Manila. Okay, so I do like the sound of these house vocals six. So let's drag these into the arrangement and we place them here. And again with everything, we have to make sure that it fits our tempo. So the software has recommended a 120. Let's see what that sounds like. So I'm just gonna take a quick lesson. In flying high. We can reach them. Modern life, come on back. So nevertheless, come on. That's sounds pretty okay to me. So what we'll do is we'll add it to the mixer track by clicking this track button. And I'll just turn it down slightly so it doesn't overpower us. Okay? The next step is to create a carrier pattern. And I'm going to right-click and choose Find Next empty. And I'm going to type in carrier. And let's just open the pattern window to see what this looks like. The next thing we need to do is add an instrument to use as a carrier. So I'm going to come over here and I'm going to add a very simple instrument, which is the 3x oscillator. Let's click that. And as you can see, it comes in here underneath another 3x oscillator that we're using in the track. Now we need to put some notes into our carrier. Okay, so I'm just going to copy out the piano chord pattern here. So I'm just going to copy just these top chords. And then I'm going to paste them into our carrier. Down here. Right-click, say piano roll, and then paste. Okay, let's take a listen to what these sound like. So it's just a pure sine wave. It's nothing too extreme. But what I'm gonna do is I'm going to turn down this second oscillator and turned down this third oscillator because we don't need them for this particular demonstration. Now I'm also going to switch mine to a square wave. And the reason for this is because a pure sine wave doesn't really sound good with the Vocoder, but a square wave does. So it's just for the purposes of demonstration. Let's see what this square wave sounds like with the pattern. And as you can see, it's very piercing because these sort of waveforms in their purest form, they can be quite piercing. I'm also going to pitch this down because I think it's a bit too high. Let's hear it again. Okay, so now that I'm happy with pattern and I'm happy with the sort of octave that it's sitting in. And I'm also happy with the sort of sound that I've chosen. I'm going to add this to the mixer track. And as you can see, it's coming here now on track 29. So I'm just going to turn it down so that it's not as piercing. And our next step is to side-chain the carrier to the modulator. Okay, and we do that in FL Studio, as I explained the side chain section, we just right-click this and we click one of these side chain options. Now, I'm going to click side chain to this track only because I only want the sound coming out of this track. Okay, I don't want the sound of the carrier to be playing at all. I only want the sound of the carrier to be going straight through the vocoder, which we're going to put over here. Okay? So our next step is to actually load that vocoder. So let's load up a vocoder plugin. And we're gonna use Voc codecs. And this plugin comes with FL Studio. So you can use this plug-in in your tracks as well. Next, we have to tell the vocoder that we wanted to take a carrier input from our carrier over here. So we're going to come back over to this sort of carriers lighter. And we're going to set the value above that to one. And then we're going to come over here to this modulator slider. And we're actually going to set this to 0. Because if this is set to one. Carrier sound will be coming through on the modulator. And we don't want that because the modulator is only reserved for the vocals. So when you open the plug-in, it will say 10. And what we do then is we come along and we swap it so that it says 01. The final step in setting up the vocoder is to come back into the playlist and then paste the carrier pattern underneath the vocals that you want to apply the effect too. So let's have a listen to what this sounds like so far with the vocoder set in its kind of default settings. So that's sounding pretty good. But we can come along now and we can actually tweak some of these parameters and make it sound even better. So the first thing that we can tweak is this bandwidth parameter. And what this does is it makes the bands of the vocoder either bigger or smaller. Now, if you look down here, you'll be able to see those bands. And while it's playing and there's up, and you should be able to see that the bands down here are getting sort of wider and thicker. Okay? So let's watch and see what happens when I increase this parameter. So I'm sure you can hear that depending on where we set this parameter, the sound changes drastically. Now it's just a matter of finding these sort of setting that you prefer and that you think works for your track. I'm just going to reset mine for the moment and we'll move on to the next parameter. The next parameter is that we can tweak is this, and this is the modulator band width multiplier. Okay? And that's a big confusing title, but if we simplify it, when you set this parameter over here to the left, you're astounded will be more resonant. And if you set this parameter over here to the right, the sound will be more raspy or breathy. Okay. So again, I'm going to reset it and then we'll move on to the next parameter. So this parameter is actually like a foreman shifter for the vocoder. So when you shift this to the right, you can see that little symbol here. This may make it sound female. And if we shifted to the left, according to this symbol, it will make it sound like a male. Just listen to what this sounds like really quickly. Okay, so I'm going to reset it again. Another parameter that we can tweak to change the sound is this. And this is the modulator unison shift. And what this does is basically a unison detune. Okay? So let me set this on the left. There'll be no detune and it'll sound very thin or like one voice. And if we set this on the right. It'll sound much ticker or like, you know, more than one voice. Now in order for this setting to actually work, we have to put a number in this little box and we do that by dragging up. So I'm going to put a number in here. Let's just say two. And now we'd ever listened to what it sounds like on the lowest setting. And then we'll have a listen to what it sounds like on the highest setting. Okay? So let's listen now, this is the low setting. And now let's increase that and we'll hear what it sounds like on the highest setting. And if we come down here and we increase the amount of voices that the unison is using, will see that it sounds like this. Let's decrease the setting and see what happens. The next thing that we can tweak is the actual amount of bands that the vocoder is using. So you can see the bands down here. I was talking about them before. So if I set this really, really low, you'll be able to see clearly each band across this sort of spectrogram. Okay, so let's have a look at the vocoder when it's set at five bands. And now if we increase the amount of bands right up to the very top, which I think is a 100. Yeah, we'll see that there'll actually be a 100 bands across this spectrogram. Let's have a look. And as we can expect, the more bands that were using, the clearer the sound gets. And that's because there's more sort of snapshots of the vocal being taken. It's like using a five megapixel camera versus 100 megapixel camera. Obviously, the 100 megapixel camera is going to be able to capture a lot more detail. Okay? So again, this parameter, it kind of depends on what sound do you prefer and what sound you think works for your track. We can also tweak this order Setting up here. Now, these order settings, we don't need to know what they actually do because it's kind of confusing. It's sorted the slope of the cut-off frequency of all of these different bands. But all you need to know is there's forest settings. And you can choose any of them and whichever one sounds better, is better, okay, so let's have a listen to each of them. Let's start with number one. Let's have a listen to two. Let's have a listen to three. Now. Let's have a listen to four. So you can use all of these parameters to sort of shape the final sound that you're getting. So I'm just gonna put in some random here. I'm just going to maybe increase this, decrease this turned us up to a female setting. And then maybe let's increase this up to sort of halfway. And let's have the bands maybe down to around 50. Okay, so this is completely random. But you'll see that the sound that comes out of the vocoder now is completely different. So that's how a vocoder works and how you can sort of tweak the parameters to get the sound that you want. The final quick thing I wanted to mention in this lecture is just about the carrier instruments that you choose. Okay, so I'm gonna come back into our carrier here, which is this 3x oscillator. And what I'm gonna do is I'm going to change the shape of the waveform as the vocals are playing, okay? And you will see yourself that doing this actually drastically changes the sound of the Voc order. Ok, so it's important to find a good carrier instrument to use. Let's have a listen to what some of these waveforms sound like as the vocals are playing. Okay, so different instruments will actually sound better as a carrier. It's just a matter of finding these instruments and then tweaking the vocoder plugin to make sure that all the parameters fit the carrier. In the next lecture, we'll have a look at vocal doubling. 49. Vocal Doubling: So what happens if you've decided that you don't want to use any of the effects we've been looking at so far. And you want to keep your vocals clean. Well, there's a few important tricks that we can do to get your vocal sounding clean, but professional, because vocals can really let you attract down. It's always something that the listener will focus on. And if they had been sort of processed amateur early, it can drag the overall sound of your tracked down. So we're gonna take a look at one of these tricks, which is doubling. So vocal doubling is great for when you don't want to use lots of effects, but you still want that modern wide sound. If we use it, the vocals will sound cleaner and more focused. When you're doubling. It's not just a matter of duplicating the track. You also have to adjust either the timing, the pitch, or both. And the reason for this is because of the way we hear things. Ok, so the doublets track has to be slightly different in order for our ears to perceive it as being lighter. When the sound that's coming into your left ear is different to the sound that's coming into your right ear. We perceived this as being white. This is the main principle that panning is based on as well. When you're panning some elements to the left and other elements to the right. Make your track field wider as the sound that's going into your left ear is different to the sound that's going into your right. You can also use a plug-in to do doubling for you. I'm going to take a look at that in just a moment. But for now, let's listen to this example of a doubled vocal track in an EDM arrangement. So now that we know what it should sound like, let's come over to the sample packs here and we'll start from the very beginning. The first thing we're gonna need is a vocal track. So I'm just going to come into this production master Alexandra vocal sessions because it's the first one I saw. And we can see here again, we're given all these sub-folders of Sung's. Now the particular track that I'm working on is a trap track and it's set at 150 fiv BPM. So I'm going to use a BPM that's close to this, and I might just pick this, rewind at 150 VPN. So let's open up this folder and we'll ever listened to some of these vocals. Ok, let's listen to this course. Dry. Rewind. It fails. Let's try this dry to care for everyone. Feel. Let's try maybe this v2. Let's see what this sounds like. The beat is taking over. Can we, okay, so I like the sound of this V2, so I'm going to drag this into our playlist. And I'm gonna plop it here. I'm just going to delete the vocals I was using already. So we can kind of start from scratch. And I'm going to come back down to the new vocals that we've just added. And I'm going to make sure that they're fit to the tempo that we're working with. Okay, so I'm going to select Fit to tempo. And the estimation this time is a little bit off. It's estimating around 160, but in the sample pack it says 150. So I'm just going to trust the sample back. I'm going to type in 150. And as you can see, it is stretched it and we now have a vocal that's forebears lung. I also need to check that these vocals or in the same key as our track. So I'm going to come up here to our track and I'm going to find out what key it's in. So I'm just clicking into this pad pattern and I'm just going to look at the key. And I can see that the key of the track is an e. And if we look over here at lucky the vocal is in, we can see it also in E minor, so I shouldn't need to do any pitching. Let's listen to see what the vocal sounds like in the arrangement. We found some closure. Okay, so that's sounding pretty good, but the vocals also sound a little bit ten. So let's use the doubling technique to make them feel a little bit more modern and professional. The first thing we're gonna do is add these vocals to the mixer track. So I'm gonna hit track. And the vocals now have been added to track 41. And what I'm gonna do is I'm going to just duplicate them. So I'm going to drag out a second version up here. And then I'm going to make this second vocal unique. So if we leave the vocals like this, they're not going to sound doubled. They're actually just going to sound louder. Okay, let's take a listen. It is taking care of by deleted. Now if I add it back in. And the reason it doesn't sound doubled is because we haven't actually made any changes to the second vocal. Yes. We have to affect either the timing, the pitch, or both. Okay. So to affect the timing, we can zoom right up and I can turn off my snap to grid setting. And I'm just going to move the second vocal very, very slightly. Maybe about that much, so that the second vocal is now sort of delayed behind the first vocal. And if we listen to what this sounds like now, it'll sound a little bit wider. So if you like the sound of this as it is, what you can do is you can add the second vocal to the mixer track. So I'm just going to click track and assign it to a new track. And then what we can do is we can pan one to the right and we can pan the other one to the left. And this will give the vocals a wide and clean sound. Let's take a listen. So now these two vocals have been doubled. But there's one extra thing that we can do to make them sound a little bit thicker. And that is if we come into the sample window and we adjust the pitch very, very, very, very slightly, ok, because you don't want to make it sound out of tune. If I adjust the pitch too much by like a $0.100, it's going to sound terrible. Okay, but what we can do is we can adjust it by a very small amount, like $0.10, maybe $0.15. Never adjusted, I'd say maximum 30. Okay. So golfers somewhere underneath 30 and I'll just say maybe $0.15. Okay? So now it's very, very, very slightly detuned. And this will make the vocal sound tech. Let's take a listen. And obviously just to make it fit the mix of it better, we'll just turn them down so they're not overpowering nebula proper listen to what they sound like into full context of the arrangement. Let's take a listen to maybe down here. Okay, let's have a listen. And if we just quickly see what it would sound like without the vocal doubling applied. If the vocals had been left alone. And if you hadn't done any of the doubling technique, what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna make this one unique. Let's listen. And now if we turn the doubling effect on. So as you can see, the doubling effect makes a very big difference to the overall sound of the track. The vocals still sound clean, but they also sound a lot more professional. Let's delete the vocal doubling that we did. And we'll have a look at this third one here that has no vocal doubling honors. We can also apply doubling using a plug-in. Okay, so let's have a listen to the vocal as it is. The bead is taking more care. We found some closer. And if I come into the mixer track, and if I load a doubling plug-in onto this vocal, so I'm going to load isotope nectar to turn off the EQ and compressor. Just come up to the Pitch Window. Or sorry, not pitch, it's harmony, sorry, coming to the has_many window. And we're going to change the voices from down to unison and up to unison. Okay? So what does harmony module does is it creates an artificial harmony. I'll, I'll just show you really quickly what the down and up harmony sounds like on the vocal the bead is taking. Moreover, Can we saw for the harmony to actually work, you will have to change the key over here, so it's in minor and it's also in E. So the algorithm now knows what sort of key to pitch the harmonies to. Let's have a listen. The bead is taking more care. We found some pillows or more, we plague and say they. But what we can do is we can use this module to create a doubling effect. So if I set both these two unison and then I drag the gain and the pan of one. And I drag up the gain and the pan of two. It'll sound like this. The bleed is taking over. Can we blows are more wheat. And say, if I turn the module off, we will be mine, our natural cut back on. Now if you don't have isotope nectar, That's absolutely okay. There is a free plugin that comes with FL Studio and it's called stereo shaper. And what this does is it sort of applies what's known as the haas effect whenever look at what that is when my mixing. But for the moment, if you twist this Tulane up, it'll actually make the vocals sound doubled. Okay, let's take a listen. The bead is taking care. We found some time will be more. So with isotope nectar, it's applying sort of a timing and PITCHSHIFT. But with the stereo shaper, it's only affecting the timing. But that's okay because both of these are based on the doubling principle. So let's have a listen again, just with stereo shape or soloed Mileva Lesson Two at this sort of plug-in doubled vocal sounds like indie arrangement. So this is the process that you would use if you were to apply vocal doubling. In the next lecture, we'll take a look at a different technique that you can do to get that wide modern vocal sound. 50. 12.5 Vocal Layers: So in this lecture, we're going to learn about vocal layers. So vocal layers are particularly useful when establishing a chorus or a focal point of a track. They can also be useful for the progression of a track because when you add in an extra layer, it can keep the vocals sounding interesting if they're on a continuous loop. Now most songs will actually do this diverse with Sam tin. And then for the chorus or the HUC delight in multiple layers to make it sound much more fast and full. So to add vocal layers, we can duplicate the main vocal line and then add in some effects like Chorus and distortion. We can then pan these duplicated vocals, either left or right to make them sound wider. And now in this particular example, I actually recorded all of these vocals myself. And I recorded the same sort of vocal line over and over again. And I sort of built them up on top of each other to create layers. There's also some harmony being used in these layers as well. So let's have a listen to this example track. Ok, so this is a slow mellow house track and pay particular attention to when we get to this chorus section. And there's these five layers of vocals. Okay, so let's have a listen. I'm not ready yet last round. Then. It can just be. Okay. So all of these vocal layers are combining together to give a sort of full chorus sound. So if we move the play head to just before these vocals start, and we can solve for them in the mixer track to hear what's going on. So the first vocal is the main vocals. So this vocal layer sounds clean and it doesn't have a lot of effects applied to it. Let's have a listen. If we solo the next vocal layer, we can hear that this one has a chorus effect applied. Let's see what this chorus effect sounds like. Now let's move on to the next vocal layer. And this vocal layer is a harmony layer, and it's been panned around 90% to the right. There's also a chorus effect on this vocal as well to make it sound a little bit thicker, let's have a listen. If we take a listen to the next vocal, we can see that it's another has_many layer and it's panned the opposite direction around 90% to the left. And this vocal layer also has a chorus effect applied. Let's have a listen. And the final vocal layer then is this one. And this vocal layer has been left in the center. And it has an amplifier on it to make it sound a little bit distorted. And a phasor effect, and we'll be taking a look at all of these effects in the mixer section. But for now, let's have a listen to what this vocal layer sounds like unadorned. And when we add all of these vocal layers together, the final result is a much thicker and much more full sound. Let's have a listen to all of these layers playing at the same time. So this is how you can use vocal layers in your track. You can drag in and main vocal from maybe a sample pack over here. And you can duplicate it like this and apply different effects to it. Or if you're recording your own vocals, you can record the same vocal line over and over again, maybe with some harmonies, and then apply different effects to each of the layers separately. So I'm really, really quickly just going to show you how to apply some vocal layers to a vocal that will drag in from one of these sample packs. And I'll just use this deep house vocals because it's right in front of me. And I'll choose any of them. It's just going to be a quick demonstration. We're dragging this vocal and then move it over to maybe here. And let's have a listen to what this sounds like on its own. Now I'm just going to turn off the effects on the master channel because we can't really hear the vocal properly. Let's see what it sounds like now. Okay. Just quickly turn that off. Alright. Let's see what this vocal sounds like Now on its own. Rather than law and flying high, we can reach the morning light. Come on baby, you should take. So to apply a vocal layer to this focal, what we would do is we would duplicate it like this. And we'd add the duplicated track to the mixer. And we'd apply some sort of different effect to it. Ok, so if we may be trying to down and we add just very, very quickly, I'll add a chorus effect. And I'll just pick one of these here, maybe super fat, I don't know. And let's just see what it sounds like when it's layered with this main vocal Here. We can reach them more. So because we're using it as a layer, we might turn that down a bit more, just so that the chorus sound is a little bit more subtle. Let's have a listen. Okay, so I actually made a mistake here. I forgot to make the second vocal unique. And this is what happens when you don't make the second vocal unique. You end up applying the same effect to both. Okay, so I'm just going to really quickly make the second vocal unique. And then I'm going to change the mixer track to a different mixer track so that it has no effects applied. And now it will sound like this. Rather than law and flying high, we turn up the chorus. Come on. Come on. And let's see what the vocal sounds like without the chorus effect. Rather than law and flying high, we can reach the morning. Come on back. And let's add a backend. Never lose. Come on. So that you can use vocal layers in your tracks to get a much more full and modern sound. In the next section, we'll have a look at points of North. 51. Points of Note: So in this lecture, we're going to take a look at points of not. We're going to have a look at what points of note are and how they should be used in your track. So when you're creating EDM, it's important to not fall into a state of stagnancy. And this means as the sort of sections progress, we don't want to bore the listener. So what we do is we introduce a point of note every four to eight bars. So a point of note is something that takes the audience out of the track for a split second and breaks the repetition of the loops. So because of this, a point of nodes must be short. The most common point of note used is symbol. Okay, so a crash symbol will be used every four to eight buyers to take the audience out of the track. But you can also use claps. Instruments are short sound effects. Essentially, a point of node can be anything short that isn't part of the original loop. If your track is starting to feel a bit repetitive, point of node can help to break the audience out of the trends and then refresh the track. Let's have a listen to these points of note here in this technical track example. Wow, this entire distortions happen. So now that we know what points of note sound like in context, let's delete these ones here, and we'll come into our sample packs over here, and we'll add our own points of note. So in that track, the points of note that we were using, we're symbol effects. So I'm going to come in here to my effects, my Effects folder. And I'm going to try and find some different effects to use. As a point of note, let's maybe try this folder and have a listen to some of these effects. So let's maybe try dragging this point of note in. And we'll place it here at the start of the second bar. Let's just double-click it and add it to the mixer track so we can turn it down. And we'll have a listen to what this sounds like in the arrangement. So that sounds okay, let's close this folder and find some different effects to add. As a point of note. Let's come down maybe to the very bottom here and we'll have a look at these effects sounds. Okay, so let's have a listen to some of these. Okay, so this is pretty short and we can actually use this as a point of note. Now it might not sound very good, but I just wanted to demonstrate that you can use any sort of sound to pull the audience out of the track for a second. Okay, so let's drag this into the next bar where we wanted to add a point of note, and we'll see what this sounds like. Let's maybe try one more of these effect sounds. Let's, let's scroll down a bit and we'll try maybe 66. I just listened through them very quickly. Okay, so let's try this. Affects sounds aging. And we'll drag it into the next barrier where we want to add the point of note. And I've just turned it down the mixer track before we play it because it'll be very loud and we'll listen to what it sounds like in the arrangement. So I don't think this particular point of note or this one or this one, to be honest, I don't think they really fit the sound of the track, but I'm just demonstrating how you can use different types of sounds as a point of note. Like everything else in the track, you need to make sure that they sound like they belong, okay, so they should sound like they're all part of the same family. And other very quick thing to mention is that you will need to pitch these. Okay, so the same process before we open up mixer track, we opened up Edison, drag this in and detect the pitch regions. And then what we do is we adjust the pitch using the pitch will we need to make sure that the sound fits the pitch of the track. And you don't have to do this either. You don't have to use different points of note sounds. You can use the same one over and over again throughout the track, as long as it breaks the repetition of the loops. Okay, so let's, let's come over here. I think this is the drop section. So let's have a listen to the drop without the points of nodes. Ok, well, maybe we just listened to around here. And then we'll add them back in and we'll see what difference it makes OK, discourse in this country. Okay, and now if I add these points of note back in and we'll take a lesson again. This portion, this portion. You see this. So in the next section, we'll take a look at transitions. 52. Transitions for EDM: So this section is all about transitions. Now, transitions in EDM are very, very important. Their function is to break us out of one section and then transition us into the next section. And it's very important that you don't disrupt the overall flow of the track. Your Transitions need to sound natural and smooth. So let's quickly have a listen to this EDM track, which is a sort of fusion between country and house. And as the track is playing, I'll highlight the different sections where there are transitions happening, ok, so that you can listen to each one and understand its role in the track. Okay, so let's play through the track now. And I'll highlight all of the transitions that you need to listen to. It didn't give us a good idea, especially data values that are smaller. Yes. So now that we know the role of the transitions playing EDM, let's move on to the first lecture in this section where we'll have a look at the easiest transition that you can do. 53. The Easiest Transition: So let's take a look at the easiest transition that you can do. Now for this track here that I have, which is a technical track, I want to transition from this sort of section here where all this stuff is going on. And I want to transition into this section where there's more stuff going on. So I've already put in two points of note that I want to sort of take the listener Out of the track for a second before dropping the backend. But I still feel like it needs something more to sort of transition us into this section. Let's just take a listen to this portion of the arrangement as it stands. And then we'll apply a really simple but effective transition that you can use. So let's listen to what it sounds like now. So I'm not sure if you noticed, but around this section of the track it sounds very robotic as it's transitioning into the new section. So what we need to do is we need to add a transition. And the easiest transition that you can do is to take something out, okay, before something new comes in. So if we listen to what this sounds like Now, I've just taken out the kick drum and this sort of kick drum layer. Okay, Let's hear what it sounds like now that I've just taken out these two elements here. For the first, for two barriers right before the new section starts. Let's have a listen. Now you can take out more if you want, or you can take out less depending on the sound of your track, I'm going to see what it sounds like if I take out more elements. And now let's just see what it sounds like if I took out less elements. So let's add these two kicks back in. And maybe let's just remove this hat sample. Okay, let's see what it sounds like now, when we've removed only one small element. So this is the easiest transition that you can ever do. It's just as simple as taking something out before something new comes in. In the next lecture, we'll have a look at using drum fields as a transition. 54. Drum Fills as Transitions: Let's use a drone. Fail to transition us from this section into this section. So width drum fills, you can either make them yourself or you can use a drum fill sample. So first, I'm going to come into my sample packs here, and I'm going to come into the drum fills folder. Now, I've organized all of the drum fills into one folder that you might have to find all of these separately in your sample backs. Let's just have a listen to what a drum fill sounds like. So if I drag this particular drum fill in which his drum fill 25, if I drag this into my track and I place it here, you can see that this is quite a long transition and it's going on for two bars. Now, like all samples that we drag in, we must make sure that it fits our tempo. So I'm going to click this little wave form and select Fit to tempo. And the software has estimated that this drum fill is at 128. Now the sample pack doesn't tell me otherwise, so I'm going to have to go with this estimation. Lets click it now. And as you can see, this drum fill has now been snapped to exactly two bars in length. Okay, let's have a listen to what it sounds like in the context of our techno track. When you're using a drum fill, you can also combine it with the easiest transition that we looked at in the last lecture, which is to take an element out before a new element comes in. So let's again remove some of these 6x. So I'm just going to remove the sort of second half of the drum filter kicks from the second half here. I'm going to remove those and we'll see what it sounds like now. Now, if you want, you can also make your own drum fills. So if we come down to our drum sample pack, and here in drums, and let's just add very, very quickly a snare sample. So maybe this one, this one will do. Let's drag that in and we'll just quickly try to build our own drum fills out. So I'm just going to copy this across and maybe placed one here. Maybe here, like this. Now, you'll spend a lot more time making a drum fill. You should generally use more than one sample here, just more than this one snare drum. But I'm just showing you for the purpose of the demonstration that we can also make our own drum fills. Okay, so let's have a listen to what this drum fill that we made sounds like in the context of the arrangement. When I'm making music, I prefer to use the drum fill samples that I was showing you already because they're already made for me and I think they already sound pretty good. But it's up to you whether you want to use a premade drum fill or a drum fill that you make yourself. Next, we'll have a look at using a vocal shout as a transition. 55. Vocal Shouts: In this lecture, we're going to use a vocal shout as a transition. So a vocal shout is when you use a vocal phrase, a vocal loop, or a vocal sample as a break or fill. As a break, or fill as a break or a filled. In EDM, vocal shouts are used most often right before the drop. Lets have a look at using a vocal shout in this technol track that we've been working on. So what we can do is we can come into our vocal pack and we can use maybe a vocal phrase. I'll just pick one from this vocal phrases pack. And let's audition Some of them gave on Dan's Sandy cannot let the base key. Let the base key. Alright, let's maybe used this vocal phrases 36. Ok. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to drag this in to the playlist just here. I'm not going to place it right before the new section begins. And again, like every sample we dragging, we must make sure that it fits attracts tempo. So I'm going to select Fit tempo. And I'm going to use the estimation here because the sample pack doesn't tell me otherwise. Let's have a listen to what this vocal shout sounds like Now as a transition. We can also combine it with the easiest transition that we looked at. And we can remove some of the elements here. So I'm going to remove the kick and maybe the bass. And we'll have a listen to what this focus shout sounds like now with the elements removed as a transition. So that's how you can use a vocal shout as a transition. In the next lecture, we'll have a look at instrumental transitions. 56. Instrumental Transitions: Let's have a look at using instrumental transitions. So I have this sort of instrumental section in the technical track that we've been looking at, where there's lead melody comes in. I also introduce a few new drum elements down here. So let's just have a listen to this little section. Maybe, maybe a bar before the lead melody comes in. And then just a bar after that lead melody comes in. Okay, so let's have a listen to what it sounds like with no transition. So as you can see, I already have this point of note here to take the audience out of the track for a minute before dropping the backend. But I also feel like we need to do something to introduce this new lead melody. So what we can do is we can make an instrumental transition. So if we come into the melody pattern and we just have a look at the melody notes here. Okay, so there up on the sort of six doctor, and they play an F. Let's just have a quick listen. Okay. Now what I'm gonna do is I'm going to duplicate this pattern by right-clicking this and then selecting clone. So now this has gone from melody to, to Melody tree. And what I'm gonna do is I'm going to come over here and I'm actually going to delete all of the melody notes. So edit, delete. And then we're going to create what's called an Anna Crucis or an upbeat. So when Anna Cruises is kind of like when a melody begins before the section that it's playing. And so for example, if we just take one bar here and we create an Anna Crucis by maybe nine, or the first node of the melody is F. So I'm going to place a long note on C, Okay? Because C is the fifth of f, and it will sound good when C kind of steps up to F. Okay, so let's come back into the playlist now and will place this sort of Anna Crucis right before the melody. And we'll ever listened to what this sounds like Now. So this pattern is going to introduce the new lead melody, and it's also going to help to transition us from the section without a melody, into this section with a melody. Now that was just a bit quiet because I have to drag this automation kept back because the cutoff filter for the lead instrument is actually closed until there's automation clip actually starts. So I'm just going to drag it back so that the cutoff filter opens earlier. So we can actually hear this, this little upbeat note. Okay? Let's have a listen again. Okay, and you can make this note, you can make this little Anna Crucis. You can make it shorter. So let's try maybe half a bar, so only two beats. Let's have a listen to what this sounds like. And again, if we combine it with the very first transition that we looked at, which is the easiest transition. And we take some elements out. We might take out these chords. And maybe we will take out this sort of, maybe we'll take out, you know, we take out all of the instruments. Ok, so let's take out all of these appear. Let's have a listen to what the instrumental transition sounds like now without some of the other instruments in the track. Now you can make this Anna cruises as developed as you like. Now, I can add in more notes if I want. So let's say we kind of maybe walk our way up to the naught of f. So maybe we go from E and we hold this. So let maybe, let's say that this now is our Anna Crucis. Let's have a listen to what this sounds like with a more sort of developed our necrosis. So all you need is some sort of instruments that's going to introduce us to the next section in the track. Okay, in the next lecture, we'll have a look at using silence as a transition. 57. Silence as a Transition: So in this lecture, we're going to have a look at using silence as a transition. Sometimes leaving your transitions totally silent can really work for your track. And what you do is in this case, you let the sound of the previous sections sort of wring out before the next section comes. So if we take a look again at this technical track, I have a buildup section here, okay, that transitions into a drop section. But I know that I want to use some sort of transition that will bring us from the build-up into the drop. So let's just have a listen to the arrangement as it stands at the moment. Okay, so let's add some silence as a transition. So what we're gonna do is we're going to zoom in and we're going to have a look at the bar right before the drop section begins. And I'm just going to delete essentially everything, every sort of elements that is in this buyer. So I've just cause this vocoder loop and half. I'm going to delete all of these snare elements. I'm going to delete all of these drum elements up here. I'm gonna delete this. And I'm going to move this backwards, and going to move this backwards. And now we have no audio elements in this full bar before the drop. Okay, so let's listen to what this sounds like. This sort of silence transition. Okay, so I really like the sound of this silence as a transition. But I still feel like I want to make more of an impact when the drug actually comes. So what we can do, we can actually extend this silence by r, And we'll extend it to two bars. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to come up here to my razor tool and I'm going to cause everything at the start of this drop. Okay, so I'm just going to draw the whole way down here. And I'm going to also cut this automation clip. And then we're going to come up here. We're gonna zoom right out the full way out. And I'm going to just highlight everything behind this first buyer of the drop section. So now what we've done is we've kind of split the track in half. And we've highlighted everything to the right of the drop. And I'm just going to simply drag everything to the right by one buyer. And that's added in another buyer of silence here. Okay, so let's go back to the build-up and we'll have a listen to what these, these two bars of silence sound like now. Okay? So this is how you can use silence in your tracks to create a sort of transition. In the next lecture, we'll have a look at using the big hit. 58. The Big Hit: So let's have a look at using the big hits as a transition. Okay, so we're back at this build-up section of our technical track and we have no transition to bring us from the build-up into the drop. Let's take a quick listen to remind ourselves what this sounds like. What the big hit transition is, is where you use one big reverb clap or snare or some sort of effect sound. And you place that right in front of the dropped section, the genre. Big room house actually did this for years with something called the reverse snare. And I actually have a folder of reverse snares here throughout so-called drops snares. And they sound like this. So what you can do with these sort of drop reverse snares is you can drag them into your arrangement and place them right before you are dropped against. Okay, again, we're gonna have to fit it to the tempo because it's kind of extending out past this beat. So fit to tempo. And now that it's fit to the tempo of our track, we can have a listen to what it sounds like in the arrangement. Now I might stretch this sound just to make it a little bit shorter. So instead of having it on two beats and going to stretch it to only have it on one. And turn off my stretch tool again. And we level isn't what it sounds like. If we combine this with the first transition we learned, which is to remove some of the elements before another element comes in. We can take out some of the elements that are playing at the same time as this snare, maybe this instrument as well. And maybe this, okay. And we'll leave the rest end and we'll see what this sounds like. For this big hit sound. You can also use other sort of sounds like a clap maybe let's have a listen to a clap we could use. Now for this, you want a particularly kind of loud and in your face clap. Maybe this one, these ones are a little bit too short and snappy. We want a big loud clap. So let's use this one. And we'll place it in there like that. I mean, I've listened to what it sounds like. Ok, so it sounds a bit warped. And the reason for this is because it's been stretched. And if you ever come across this sort of sound in your FL Studio projects, just open up this sample window and you see this time parameter that we were looking at before. If you just click this and pull it down, because what happens is it's been stretched out. So if we just pull it down as much as we can and it'll bring it back to its normal size. Let's have a listen again. You can also duplicate this and maybe instead of having one big hit, we can have two big hits right after each other. Let's see what this sounds like. Or you can make any sort of rhythm that you like. Maybe we might offset this a bit so that it sounds a bit sort of syncopated. Let's listen to this. You can use the big hit transition in any sort of way you like. In the next lecture, we'll look at using effect sounds as transitions. 59. Effects as Transitions: So let's have a look at using effect sounds as a transition. So interesting, sound effects being used as transitions can really make your track Shine. For example, if you have a vocal hook in your track and it's singing about maybe, I don't know, calling calling a girl on the phone. Okay. And your transition sound effect, was the sound of a phone ringing or it was the sound of the phone being diode or something like that. That can really add some interesting flavor to your arrangement. So again, we're looking at this sort of buildup section where it transitions into the drop section. And again, we're looking to add some sort of transition to bring us from section to section. So I'm going to come into my sample packs and I'm going to come down to where I keep my effect sounds down here and effects. And we'll just have a listen to some of these effects that we can throw in as a transition. Okay, so let's come into maybe this folder which is just called Fx. And we'll have a listen to some of these. Now I think this particular effect might sound cool as a transition. So let's drag this in and we'll place it kind of maybe a bar before the fire, before the drop section starts. And I'll just have this vocoder loop. Actually first, we'll just hear what it sounds like with everything added in. Okay, so we'll just see what this effect sounds like here as a transition to bring us into the drop. Lets see what it sounds like. Now I think it's coming in a bit early, so I might move it over here to the last beat of the bar before the drop section starts. Let's see what this sounds like. Now, I still think that the sound, the sort of main point of the sound is actually here. But our bar starts here. So I'm going to turn off the grid and I'm going to drag it forward until I think the main sound is kind of matched up with r bar. And I think that'll do it. So let's have a listen again. When we've matched the main sound of this sample up with our last b to the buyer. And if we team this particular sound, if we team with the team with the transition that we were looking at before, where we remove elements. So maybe we have this loop and we take out some snare drums. We take out these. And then maybe we just take out that. And we leave it at that. Okay, let's see what this sounds like. Ok. And we can also use other types of sound effects like maybe we use this alarm folder. Let's have a listen to somebody's. Ok. Let's use this am effects alarm age as a transition. And it's quite long. So I'm gonna make it maybe a two-bar transition. And I'm just going to fit this to our tempo. Used the estimation. And then I'm going to stretches so that it's a lot shorter and I'm going to stretch it so it's a lot shorter and it fits into two bars. Is that you'd have to move this. We'd have to move it again so that it's actually starting on the bar. We turn that off. Let's have a listen to what this alarm sort of sound effect sounds like as a transition. And if we team is, again with the first lecture we were looking at where we take some elements out. We'll take out some of these elements that are playing at the same time and will have a listen to what this sounds like. So this is how you can use effect sounds as a transition in your tracks. In the next lecture, we'll have a look at bringing all of these transitions together to make a much more professional sounding transition. 60. The Combination Transition: So in this lecture we'll have a look at using a combination transition. So the most professional of transitions will use a combination of all of these sort of mini transitions that we've been looking at so far. Maybe you have an effect layered with a vocal shouts, layered with a big hit. Or maybe you have an instrumental transition combined with a silence transition. And also the easiest transition that we were looking at before. In this particular example, we're again going from the build-up into the drop, okay, and the transition that I've used has combined a drum fill, big hit sound, a sort of vocal shout. And also the easiest transition that we were looking at before, because I've also removed some of the elements. Let's have a listen to what this more professional transition sounds like. So when you're using transitions in your track, try to sort of combine all of the transitions we've been looking at and create a more full and more interesting sounding transition. In the next section, we'll have a look at using filler elements and extras. 61. Using Filler & Extra: Let's have a look now at using filler and extras in EDM. So filler elements are any element that is used to fill up empty space without distracting from the main track idea. An example might be the sound of wind in the background as your main instrument place. Filler elements are important as it prevents your track from sounding too empty. Extras then are sort of short or one-off elements that you add on top of the main idea to access different parts of the track. It could be maybe as synth melody that plays above the main melody, or maybe a short sound effects that can kind of take over for a few seconds, like a police siren. So in front of us, I have this arrangement for a Russian house track. And I've sort of highlighted all of the filler and extra elements that I'm using throughout the track. So what we'll do is we'll have a listen to, maybe hear, okay, which is about a minute and a half, just so we can get a feel for this drop tone filler, this synth extra that we're using, this sound effect extra and this external loop being used as filler. So let's have a listen now and then we'll jump straight into the first lecture, which is using external loops as filler and extras. Okay? Okay. Okay, let's jump into the first lecture. 62. External Loops as Filler & Extra: So in this lecture we'll have a look at using external loops as filler and extras. So what we can do is we can drag in an external loop to add to our track. And then we can make it really, really quiet so that it kind of plays behind the other elements and fills up some empty space. So I'm just going to play this short arrangement that I've come up with. And I don't really know what kind of genre it's going to be yet. But I know that I want to add some sort of filler element to maybe here in the track. Ok, so let's have a listen to what it sounds like so far. And then we'll come into the sample packs and we'll drag in some external loops. No way. Okay, so let's come into our sample backs and will find some external loops to use in this section of the track. So the first kind of external loop I might try is a percussion loops. So I'm going to come in to where I keep some of my percussion loops here. And we'll just try these miscellaneous percussion loops. Let's see what some of these sound like. Okay, so I think I liked the sound of this one here. So what we're gonna do is we're going to drag this into the playlist and places into the section that we want, the filter element. And I'm going to zoom up and make sure that this clip fits our tempo. So let's have a listen to what it sounds like Now. I'll just paste it out so it plays across the entire section. Okay, so I don't think it sounds too bad, but what we're gonna do is we're gonna add it to the mixer track. And then we're going to turn it down. Okay? Because this is a filler elements. This is just used to fill up space. We don't want it to be distracting and we don't want the audience to necessarily focus on it, okay, so we want to keep it quiet and will have a listen to what it sounds like now that it's kind of filling up the empty space. Maybe make it a bit louder. Okay, so that's what it would sound like if we used an external percussion loop as a filler element. We can also use different types of loops. Ok, so let's maybe come down and we'll try a vocoder vocal loop. Okay, so I'm going to come in to Vocoder. No, actually, so I'm going to come in to vocal loops and I'm going to click vocoder loops. And we'll test what somebody's sound like. And then we'll drag one in and we'll use it as a filler element. Ok, let's use this vocoder loop, which is 27. And we'll drag this in. And the first thing we'll do is make sure that it fits our tempo. So it fits our tempo now, so I'm going to paste this vocoder loop across the entire section. I'm going to add it to the mixer track. And now I have to make sure that the Vocoder loop is in the right key. So I'm going to open up Edison, which is over here. And I'm going to open up the sample window. And we'll drag in the vocoder loop, will get Edison to detect the pitch regions. And we can see that it's in C. And if I come into my track here, I can see that my track is in the key of B. So I'm going to transpose this loop down by $0.100 to bring it from C down to B. And now it's in the key of our track. So what we can do is we can turn it down so that it's not distracting the listener. And we'd have a listen to what this vocoder loop sounds like as filler. Maybe turn it up a small bit. And if you wanted, you could continue this little Vocoder loop out into the kind of build-up section. Just for the sake of consistency. Let's hear what this sounds like. Now, if we take this filler element out, we'll notice how empty the section sound without us. Now I thought it back in. So that's just how you can use some external loops to fill up the empty space in different sections of your arrangement. Next, we'll have a look at dropped on and drop blasters. 63. Tone & Drop Blasters: So in this lecture, we'll take a look at drop blasters and drop tone. Dropped plaster is this huge sound that kind of slaps you across the face. Whenever the drop starts. They can sound great on tech house and technical tracks. Dropped blasters were recently made popular by Fisher with his track looseness. On the other hand, dropped tone is like a single petal note that place above the main idea of the track. It's almost always very high in pitch, and it's usually a string sound, but it can also be a pad sound. Let's have a listen to both the drop bluster and the drop tone in action. Now, we will go down even further. So if we come into the dropped last year for a second and we have a look at what's going on. We can see that there's a note that's playing the main root node of the track. And another note that's playing the third sort of minor note of the track. Now, you can add more notes if you like. So I might add a note up here on F and maybe a note up here on a sharp again. And we'll see what this sounds like. Now if we add that into our drop, it'll sound like this. But you can also take some of these notes out and strip it back to it's sort of bare elements, which would be the root naught, okay, and we can leave it with just this node here. So let's see what this sounds like in the trap. When you're choosing the sound of the droplet master, you have to make sure that it's a hard sound, okay, so that means it's loud. And in your face, the preset that I've chosen here enhanced is quite loud and in your face. But if we choose a, but if we choose a more subtle sound like maybe just pluck sound. And we have a listen to this. Okay? This sound is a little bit more soft. So if we listen to what the soft sound is like in the drop, it will sound like this. So it actually feels like a bit of an anti-climax. So you must make sure that the sound you're choosing for your, your, your drop plaster is loud and in your face. And we can choose, let's have a listen to another sort of lead sound and see what, see what that sounds like. Okay, so this is quite loud in, in your face. So we could use this sound as well, and it would also sound good in the drop. On the other hand, we have this drop tone, okay? And drop tone is basically the complete opposite of the drop plaster. With the drop tone, you want to pick a soft sound like this. And that's why string sounds are great for drop tone because strings are soft and expressive. Dropped tone will also be very high in pitch because if it was sort of down in pitch, it would distract from the main elements of the track. And it would sound more muddled if we had a sort of low pitch dropped on sound. So you have to make sure that the drop tone that you're using is at a high pitch. Minds up here at a sharp eight, which is a really high pitch. You can also use a synthesizer sound for your drop tone. So if I come in here and I picked maybe, maybe this soft Jupiter sound and we'll see what this sounds like. I'll just turn it up and we'll have a listen to what this sounds like, the drop. Now maybe that's a little bit too high pitched. You might like the sound of that and that's okay, but I'm just going to pitch mine down one octave music, but it sounds like. But if we were to use a sound that's kind of much more in your face. Like let's say we used this drop bluster, the strap last your instrument, and we tried to use this as drop tone. Okay, so what I'll do is I'll a pitch it up to maybe a six. Okay, so it's high-pitched and stretch it out so it's the same length as the drop tone. But if we have a listen to this and this blast or instrument now as dropped on, it'll sound like this. Okay, and this kinda sounds out of place. It's sort of distracting from the main baseline down here. So let's just undo all of that and we put everything back to normal, just where we have the dropped on. And we'll take one last lesson to the build-up and the drop with the plaster and the trapped on. Okay. What we do in the next lecture, we'll look at using a synthesizer pattern as filler. 64. Synths as Filler & Extra: So in this lecture, we're going to take a look at Saint filler and sent extras. So a cent extra would be an additional sort of sent element that plays on top of the main idea. So it could be sort of rootNode stabs or maybe alternating notes or something like that. Which is very, very simple. But a plays on top of the main idea. Since filler than would be an element that sort of plays behind the main idea. So this could be maybe an arpeggiated pattern in the background, or it could be like the drop tone, except we use it in a different section. So let's have a listen to this example of a cent extra that I'm using in this techno track. Then we'll learn how to turn these cent extra into a cent filler. So let's take a listen now. Let as look at club. So if we click into the cent extra pattern, we can see that if I zoom up here, we can see that it's actually a comprised of one much smaller pattern that has been pasted across every beat of the bar. So if I just solo, this pattern will have listen. Okay, now we could change the notes if we wanted to. We could change maybe this note up to an F sharp and maybe this one all the way down to the lower B. And we will just do the same thing over here in the second half of the pattern. And it would sound like this. Okay? And if we listen to what this sounds like in the pattern, it would sound like this. Or we could change this pattern completely and let's just delete it. And we could maybe add in a b and maybe just do some alternating notes. So maybe from B up to the high B and back down again like this. And then we'll copy this across the entire pattern. So like this and whatever, listen. Okay, it actually, it kinda sounds like something from Mario. But if we ever listen to what it sounds like in the drop, it would sound like this. So you can kinda see the idea that we're going for. Okay, so it's a very, very short pattern. Syntax tree has a very, very short patterns, so it will usually be just one beat lung. So make your pattern in this one beat. And then whatever your pattern is, maybe it's, let's add this affair. Maybe this is your pattern, ok. Make it in one beat and then just copy it across the entire pattern. So maybe across the one-bar pattern like this. And then you're going to add that pattern to your drop section, okay? And this pattern would sound like this. So the idea with this synth extra sound is that it's kind of short and repetitive across the entire section. Now if we were to turn this synth extra into a synth filler, all we would do is we would selected in the mixer track and we just turn it down. So it's kind of subtle. So it's less, it's less obvious. So it's sort of filling in the empty space. Turned it off a small bit. So this acid sound, this is still the main, this is still the main focus. Okay? And when we're using this sent filler, this is just filling in this sort of empty space that's left behind by this pattern. Ok? But if we turn it up, it will turn into a synth extra. Because now it's actually sitting above this main idea. Now, we could turn this into a sort of an arpeggiated sound. And we could use this as a synth filler. So let's just create a quick arpeggio for B minor, which could be like this. And we'll just copy this across the entire pattern. But as you can see again, this entire, full one-bar pattern is just repetitions of the pattern that's in this one, BCE. So let's have a listen to what that sounds like on its own. We might change the instrument just sorts of bit clearer. So maybe, maybe this one and replace it in here. And what we'll do is we'll turn it down so that it's kind of subtle in the mix. And it's just filling up empty space. That's maybe turn it down a little bit more. And I'm going to just turn off this pitch bend effect that I had on it because it's actually making it sound out of tune. So let's listen to what it sounds like now. And again, to turn this into a cent extra, We would just turn up this slider so that it's sitting above the main sort of lead idea. Okay. So it really depends on what you're trying to do. Are you trying to fill up empty space that's left behind by your main idea? Or are you trying to add to your main idea by having this sort of additional sent in there. Okay? And that's basically the difference between a synth filler, which fills up space and a cent extra, which is like an additional sound. Also, there's no sort of guideline on what type of instrument you should choose as your scent filler or your cent extra. But you do have to make sure, like we do with all other elements that it fits in the sound of your track. In the next lecture, we'll have a look at using effects for filler and extras. 65. Effects as Filler & Extra: In this lecture, we're gonna talk about using sound effects as filler and extras. So I have an example of a track here where it sort of comes from the intro into this eight BR breakdown. And then there's a drop. Okay, but the pattern that's in the breakdown leaves a lot of empty space. So what we're gonna do is we're going to add in some effects to fill up the empty space. Let's have a listen to what the track sounds like now, without any of these effects added in. Okay, so we can add in different types of effects. We can add in a sort of ambient sound like a movie to sort of set the scene of the track are recognized in other sort of effects to kind of tell a story like police sirens. I'm a bomb Warning alarm, maybe a phone ringing or a ticking clock. I'm going to add in some location ambience and see what that does to the overall sound of the track. So I'm gonna come into where I keep my location ambiance, which is here under ambient. And I'm going to scroll right down to the different locations that we can use now we can use we could use a bare maybe, or we could use a big city street. Let's try, let's see what this big city streets sounds like. Ok, let's try maybe construction site. Okay. I like the sound of construction site. Let's drag this in and see what it sounds like when it's kind of layered in with the breakdown section. So I'm just going to move it to a point that looks fairly busy, maybe here. And I don't want to stretch as I'm going to turn off stretch and I'm just going to cut it so that it's only filling up the breakdown section, which is D zeitgebers. So I'll just extend this past there. And I'll use the razor to maybe cut it at the end of this chord pattern. Ok, let's zoom out. Now because we're using this effect as a filler sound, I'm going to come into the mixer track and I'm just going to turn it down a bit so it's not overpowering the courts. Ok. So let's have a listen to what this effect sounds like. In the breakdown section. Now let's see what it sounds like if we change it to one of these buyer crowd loops, maybe. Let's pick this loop number three. And what I'll do is I've, I've, I've obviously cut the waveform out. It's way over here. So I'll just scroll back to it and we'll place it on the first sort of beat. I'm going to turn off my snap to grid so I can move it manually. And again with the other end of it here, I'll just maybe make a loop out of it. So, oops, Mansi, Curtis, Maybe here on this bar. And we'll make a loop out of it. So we'll loop it across the entire breakdown section like this. Okay? And I'll just pull this back so that it's kind of even with the courts. Let's have a listen to what this background sounds like when the pattern is playing. Ok, might just turn it down really quickly. So as you can see, using ambience sounds like this kind of sets the scene for the track. So if you're intending to sort of tell a story throughout your track, you can use these ambient sounds to kind of set the scene. Okay, so now let's have a look at using a different type of effect, which is kind of like a foley sound effect. So maybe we'd use a ticking clock or sort of bomb warning alarms. What I'm gonna do is I'm going to come into my sort of effects folder here. And let's try one of these alarm effects. Okay, so I think there might be a bomb Warning alarm sound in here. So this one will do, let's use this and we replace this bar sound effect with this alarm sound effect. Now because this alarm effect actually has a rhythm to it. It kind of has four bars. We need this to sync up with the tempo of our tracks. So I'm just going to right-click and select Fit to tempo. Let's see what kind of differences makes. Oh, it's just solo it. Okay, and now let's listen to it. In the context of the breakdown. We might make it a little bit quieter just because it's meant to be a filler element and it's kind of meant to be subtle and in the background. Let's listen again. Let's try one of these other alarm effects. Maybe. And there we go. There's the bomb warning sound. Okay, so let's add that bomb warning sound into our track. So I'm just going to. Reveal the rest of the waveform. And wherever listened to what this sounds like when it's sort of filling up space alongside this chord pattern. And using this sort of Alarm Sound is actually very, very common in EDM. Let's just see really quickly if we can find the sound of a ticking clock, I think there might be one in this affects loops, but I'm not sure. I can't find a quickly, I'll just move on. Well, I mean, we could use these effects loops as filler anyway. So let's drag in this sound and let's see what this sounds like if we're using this as filler. Now we also need to make sure that it's fit to our tempo because it has a rhythm to it. And it says here 127 BPMN. So I'm going to type it in one to seven. And then what we'll do is I'll just cut the tail off this and then we can loop it throughout the entire breakdown. So let's see what this sounds like. I'll just turn it up so we can hear a little bit better. And maybe let's try one more of these effects loops. Let's use this one. Drag that in, and let's see what this sounds like in the context of the breakdown. So as you can see, you can use various different types of effects to kind of fill up the empty space in any of your sections. Now, again, like the synth filter, if we were to use this effect as an extra, what we would do is we would just turn it up so that it's kind of sitting above the main cards like this. So it really depends on how you want to use a Do you want to use it as a sort of subtle filler? Or do you want to use it as a kind of Louder extra? So next we're going to have a look at the reverb swell. And this is the last lecture before we start the first assignment are the first kind of project. So let's go ahead and jump into that now. 66. The Reverb Swell: So in this lecture we're going to have a look at the reverb swell and how we can use it in our tracks. So the reverb swell is an extremely common technique that's used in buildups or to transition from one section to another. And what happens is the track sounds like it's slowly getting further and further away before suddenly jumping back and kind of slapping you in the face with the next section. Before suddenly jumping back and kind of slapping him in the face with the next section. So let's have a listen to this example of a buildup and then a small portion of the drop. Now I don't have the reverb swell applied, but we learn how to do it after. Let's have a listen now. Okay, so let's start to apply the reverb as well. So what we're gonna do is we're going to come up to the mixer track. And we're going to come on to the master channel. And what we're gonna do is we're going to add a reverb, a reverb plugin. So let's just add the standard fruity reverb too. And we'll have a listen to what this sounds like Now on the master channels. So the master channel is the channel that all of these different tracks go through. So everything, every element in your track is going through the master channel. Let's have a listen. And if we turn up the wet level, okay, so what we can do is we can load a preset on here, maybe, maybe this large hall preset, and we'll see what this sounds like. That sounds fine. So now we're going to come into the playlist window and we're going to highlight the area where we want to create the automation clip because we're going to automate this dry wet level. So I'm going to right-click and I'm going to select Create automation. And then I'm going to drag this anchor point down to the left so that the reverb is off and it slowly turns on as the drop progresses. Next, I'm going to add another anchor point by right-clicking. And I'm going to put this up to the very top. And I'm drawing this anchor point in line with where the transition starts. And then, and then I'm going to come back up to the automation clip and I'm going to drag the right anchor point all the way down so that it turns off by the time this drop stats. Okay. So what'll happen is the track will sort of swell up with this reverb effect. And then in this sort of silent transition that we have, the reverb effect will turn down and then will be into the drop section. Okay, so let's come out of this and we'll have a listen to what this sounds like. Now you can adjust the shape of the automation clip to make it a bit more aggressive. That's maybe make the slope a bit steeper. And let's see what this sounds like. And to make this sound even more professional, what we're gonna do is we're going to come back into the master channel and we're gonna get rid of all the low end as this reverb effect swells. Okay, So we'll open an equalizer plug-in above this reverb plug-in. Let's just use the standard fruity parametric EQ to. And it will open like this. And what we're gonna do is we're going to right-click this first band and we're going to say type. And we want a high pass. And what this does is it lets all of the high frequencies passed. But as you can see, it cuts out these low frequencies. So we're going to automate the frequency level so that this plugin cuts out more and more high frequencies as a reverb swell plays out. Okay, so let's set this back to somewhere normal, maybe just 60 hertz. And what we'll do is, we'll right-click on this frequency parameter. And actually, sorry, first we have to highlight the area that we want the automation tip due to sort of fall into. And we'll right-click this frequency parameter and we'll say create automation clip. Now don't worry about any of the parameters on the equalizer yet because we'd be looking at equalizers and a lot more detail when we come to mixing. For now, just know that you have to automated the frequency parameter. Okay? So let's close this. And what we'll do is we'll grab the anchor point on the right. And whoops, sorry. We'll bring it up so that the low frequencies are being caught out as the reverb sound is swelling. And then what we'll do is we'll just make sure that all of the low frequencies are allowed to turn back on for when this drop section starts. Okay? And maybe let's just turn this anchor point down a bit so we're not cutting out all of the low frequencies. We only want to cut out maybe some of them. Okay, let's have a listen to what this sounds like now. So I think this effect is actually starting a bit too early. So I'm gonna move this over to where it's in line with the end of the chords. And I also think that it's a bit too much. So I'm going to turn it down and maybe we'll adjust the slope so it's not as aggressive and we'll hear what it sounds like now. So this process is how you would go about applying a reverb swell to your tracks. 67. Introduction to Arrangement: So we are nearly ready to begin arranging of full EDM track by ourselves. There's just a few more tips and guidelines that I want to give you in this section. And then we can move on into the mixing stage of this EDM Production course. We're just gonna go through these slides really quickly before we begin this arrangement Tips section. Okay, well, now that you know all of the elements that make up an EDM track, you can use them to create your own arrangement. You can use some of the patterns that you've created already, or you can start from scratch and build a completely new track. I'm not actually going to arrange a track for you in this course. And the reason for this is because everyone does it differently. It can actually be quite an unstructured process. You know, you might build your drum pattern in bits and pieces, or you could even end up changing every single one of the instruments halfway through. But all of this is okay if we stick with the theory that we've learned so far will be able to produce a professional arrangement. So as I said, everyone has their own process of arranging and if I was to do it in front of you, my process would be completely different to your process. So you wouldn't actually learn anything other than how I arrange a track. So because of this fact, I've provided a checklist for you to use at the end of this section. And on that checklist, you'll find all of the tips and the guidelines that I've given you so far about creating a professional sounding arrangement. There is a project at the very end of this course where you will have to provide a full EDM track for me to listen to. So make sure you download this checklist and make your track the best that it can be. 68. Driving Elements: So the first sort of arrangement tip that we're gonna look at is driving elements. And this is probably the most important rule of arrangement. So in all forms of music production, there should always be one thing in focus for the listener, okay? They need something to listen to. Otherwise, their brains will try and focus on too much at once and the whole experience becomes on pleasurable. And we can make sure that this doesn't happen if we use driving elements. Imagine your track is like a boss, okay? And the people on this bus are the elements that are in your track? Well, there can only be one bus driver, okay, there's only one person who actually drives the boss who actually controls where the bus is going. And it's the exact same thing in music. You can't have more than one driver at anytime. Now of course, on this bus, that driver can get off and another driver can get on. And that driver can get off and the same driver from before can get back on. And the same thing can happen in music. You can have a driving element that's playing through the breakdown, and then a new driving element that plays through the drop. And then you can reintroduce that previous driving element from the first breakdown. So in practice, it's kind of like if you have one sort of busy instrument that you want people to focus on, then you should keep all of the other elements simple. Like the baseline should be simple and your lead elements should be simple. Or if you have a busy baseline, then you should keep the instruments simple. Okay? Maybe you're using a vocal hook. Well, in that case, you should use simple instruments and a simple baseline. So there's more than likely sounds a bit confusing, but I think it'll make more sense if I played through these examples for you. Okay, so, so this first example here is of a percussion driven track. Ok, so this cowbell pattern, this is the main element of the track. So this is the main element that I want my listeners to focus on in this track. And because this is the main element, my baseline is incredibly simple. Okay, it's just two notes. So let's have a listen to what this percussion driven track sounds like. Now let's take a look at this baseline driven track. So in this particular track, the main thing that I want the listeners to focus on is this baseline, Okay? So I'm gonna solo it for you. Okay? But what you'll notice is the precaution from before I've actually taken that out because if I had left that in, then there would actually be to driving elements at the same time and it would sound very confusing. Let's have a listen to what the baseline driven track sounds like. Now if I was to actually add these cowbells in, we'll take a listen to what it would sound like now with these two driving elements trying to fight each other for space, okay? So both of these are trying to fight for your attention. And you'll notice that you're kind of floating between kind of paying attention to both and the whole experience of trying to do that isn't very pleasurable for the listener. So let's listen to what it sounds like now with these two driving elements. So I'm sure you can notice that the overall sound is very muddled and that you're trying to concentrate on your floating between one and then you're listening to another and then you're going back to this one in the back to this one and you're trying to concentrate on both at the same time. So we don't do this. We pick one main element that we want the listener to focus on and we develop the track around that. Okay, in this case we have an instrument driven track. So the instrument is this. Ok, it's just a simple piano pattern. And because the instrument is driving the track, my baseline is very simple. And in fact, the baseline is copying the exact rhythm of the piano. So if we take a listen to what this full instrument driven track sounds like, and watch what happens if I take out this sort of simple baseline and I add in this more complicated baseline that I had in my baseline driven track. And we'll just have a listen to what the baseline sounds like when it's trying to fight for space with the piano. So again, you'll probably notice that it's very hard to just concentrate on one element. And this will prevent the listener from fully engaging with your track. So please make sure in your tracks that you're thinking about these driving elements and you're only given the listener won maintain to sort of hold their hand and take them through the track. 69. The Intensity Line Graph: Okay, we're going to talk about the intensity line graph for music production. Remember this from all the way back in the lecture about EDM structure? Well, we're gonna find out what it is now. Also this intensity line concept doesn't just apply to EDM, it actually applies to all genres of music. So it's a useful tool that all producers should have under their belt. Intensity versus time, okay? That's how this graph is set up. How does the energy of your track rise and fall as it progresses through the arrangement? So this is kind of based on a feeling like how does your track actually feel? And what you'll notice is that the intro is often building intensity. The breakdown then drops the intensity very low and it starts building a backup again. And then the buildup pushes the intensity higher and higher until the drop gums, which is the most intense section of an EDM track. And you'll also notice that in the second breakdown, the intensity rarely falls as low as the first breakdown. And this is because the intensity levels, they shouldn't be jumping all over the place. So if you suddenly go from the most intense section, which is the drop, into the lowest intensity section, which is the breakdown, then your whole track will just die at that very moment. You have to think about the listeners who are on the dance floor. They're jumping up and down. They're having a great time during the drop. And then when it comes to the second breakdown, they don't want to stop moving and have to sit down until the next drop. So the second breakdown will often have higher intensity than the first breakdown. And this is a theoretical concept, so there's no formula to get it right every time. You just have to listen critically and really try to feel the energy of your track. It should rise and fall moderately, not drastically. On the bottom right of this slide, you can see an intensity line graph for Martin galaxies track animals. And I've also included a video where I just played through the track and reveal how this intensity line looks as it place. So you can find that in the next lecture if you're confused as to how to draw an intensity line graph for your track. It's just a very simple tool that we can use to make sure that the energy of our track is flowing well and the contour of the line isn't jumping from, you know, from extreme to extreme. So I hope you understand how this intensity line concept works. And I'd really like if you went and listened to maybe one or two tracks and just drew out the intensity line for each. Now you can do this in your own time. I don't need to see the finished graphs, but if you draw an intensity line for many different tracks, you'll start to notice something about them. And what you'll notice is that they all look very similar as in the shape of the graph and how the intensity rises and falls in attract will be very similar. If you go and do this for yourself, you'll learn what a tracks intensity line should ideally look like. And then you can use this for your own tracks to make sure that your intensity line looks the same. And that's all there is to it. It's just a simple graph where you plot the intensity or the energy of a track versus the time. In the next lecture, we'll have a look at a few things that you can use to generate a new track idea. 70. Forming the Main Idea: Let's have a look now at a few things that we can use to generate a new track idea. You might already have an idea in your head that you want to develop. Or you can use some of the loops and patterns that we've made so far in this course. But if you're finding it difficult to come up with a track idea, these tips might just help you jumpstart the creative part of your brain. So the first tip here is supermen. And this website is amazing. You can find millions of free loops and free samples that you can use in your tracks. And all of these loops and samples are completely copyright and royalty free because of a clause that's actually on Looper mins Terms of Use page. So it really is a brilliant resource to use in your projects, either to generate ideas or just for some additional external loops. Now I will say really quickly that there is an acapella page where you can download vocals, but these are not copyright-free, ok, so you will have to contact the person who uploaded the vocals if you wish to use them in your tracks. Apart from that, it really is a fantastic resource for us music producers to use. Next we have this, which is actually listening to attract and using it for ideas. So this is basically the same as using a reference track. So you find a track you like, and you copy the structure and ideas in the track. And again, does not mean that you copy the track exactly. But for example, if you listen to the track and halfway through the intro, a piano element comes in, then you can use this and introduce a piano element halfway through your intro as well. But the pattern that you use in your track must be different. So you're only taking the shell of the other track and then filling it up with your own original music. Finally, we have this tip, which is to use plug-ins, okay, so there's many, many plug-ins out there that can really help you to generate a new idea. One of them is rave generator, which you can see a picture of in the top left. And another example is this full arcade package by output. Now these in particular are amazing and can instantly give your tracks a professional sound at the touch of one button. So definitely look into investing in some of these arcade plug-ins. Now this was just a really, really quick lecture. If you're stuck for ideas. And I hope that you can take some of these tips on board and start generating a new track. In the next lecture, we'll have a look at the last tip in this sort of arrangement section, which is where to start when arranging a full EDM track. 71. Where to Start: This lecture is another very quick slideshow, and I just want to help you figure out where to start with your track if you're stuck. Some producers, they start with the intro or then others day, they start by making the drums. But if you're like me and you start by forming the main idea of the track, then there's one place that you should start. And this is the breakdown. So don't start with the intro, start with the breakdown and I'll explain why. So the main idea of your track is going to be the main sort of driving element. And the main driving element is almost always introduced fully in the breakdown. So it's really, really easy to make a track flow. Well, if you start with the breakdown and then you build the track from there, you should actually do the intro Last, okay, because the intro is designed to foreshadow or kind of hint at the main idea of your track. But if you haven't actually major track yet, how can you hint at what's going to be in it? And this hinting aspect is very important because as I said before, it allows audiences to immediately recognize your track as soon as it's played. So definitely, you know, if you take nothing else from this lecture, take this and that is to do the intro Last. But that says, you now know everything that you need to start arranging a professional EDM track. In the next section, we'll have a look at what we should do when the arrangement is finished and we're ready to start mixing. 72. Preparing for Mixdown : So this section only has one lecture and it's all about preparing for mixed on. So when you've come to the end of your arrangement, you know, when you're finished and you think that you're ready to start mixing, there's a few more things that we should do to make the mixing process a lot easier. So the first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna create a new save as, okay, and the reason we do this is because any of the changes that we make in case we don't like the final mix that we've come out with. We can always revert back to the original file and easily start again from scratch. So I'm going to come up here to the file and I'm going to hit Save As we're just going to rename this. Now this particular track is called Goos to at the moment, so I'm going to rename it as Goos to mix one, okay? And I'm gonna hit Save. And now this particular project is completely separate from the other sort of original project. The next thing we have to do is we have to make sure that everything in this arrangement is coming through on the mixer track. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to play this instrument. And I can see that it's coming through here on Channel nine. I'm going to play the next instrument. And I can see that that's coming through here on this channel six. We can check the vocals they're on track to. We can check this, it's untracked 21. So what you'll do is you'll check everything in your arrangement and you make sure that they're all coming through in the mixer track and that they're all sort of assigned to different mixer channels. So as you can see, everything's coming through. They're in different sort of indifferent mixer channels. Okay? So the next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna make sure all of the unnecessary effects are turned off on the instrument plugins. So I know if we click into this particular sound here, okay? And if we play it, there is a delay effect on this particular plugin. If we take a listen again, when I stop is the sound keeps going and that's delay. And that sounds great for the arrangement. That kind of helps to work flow because you have an idea of what the final version might sound like. But for mixing, we need to turn all of these unnecessary effects off. Okay, so if I come into the plug-in here and I come into the effects both which is already open. We can see that the delay plug-in is on. Okay? So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to turn that off. And I'm also going to come over here to the equalizer. And I'm going to turn this off. Because when we're mixing in EDM, we want to be working with this sort of purist sound, the sound when it's at its most raw. Okay? Now there's also this distortion plug-in active, okay. And if I turn it off, it sounds like this. And I'll turn it back on. So I actually don't think this is making much of a difference to the sound. So I'm just going to leave that off because I don't want it to interfere with anything that we're doing later. So I've turned off all of the effects on this particular preset, and we're ready to move on to the next instrument and turn off all of the effects on that as well. Okay. So for example, if we just take this first one, this first pattern, it sounds like this. Okay, what we're gonna do is we're going to come into the plugin and we're going to come down to the Effects section. And as you can see by this light, the effects are on, okay? And there's effects on one, on channel one and channel two. And there's nothing on channel three. So on, there's a reverb and unwanted, there's a delay, and whoops. And what we're gonna do is we're just going to turn down the mix of one and we're going to turn down the mix of two that these sort of plug-in effects are not coming through in the sound. Okay, let's have a listen to the sound now. Okay. And if I had turned these backup to sort of where they were, it would sound like this. Ok. So I want the sort of, I want the purest, the most raw sound that I can get. Okay, so you're gonna go through all of your instruments in your arrangement and you're just going to turn off all of the unnecessary effects. And what I mean by unnecessary is sometimes you'll come across a plug-in and there'll be maybe a distortion active or a phaser or something like that. And for these particular effects, you want to keep the sound of them. You want to keep the phasor and you want to keep the distortion, you want to keep that in your arrangement. Okay? So in that case, you can leave the man, but things like reverb delay, the equalizer on a plug-in, the compression on a plugin. We're going to turn all of those off because we'll be doing our own reverb delay, an EQ, and compression will be applying all of those plug-ins ourselves anyways, so we turn them off on the instrument. We're also gonna make sure that there's no effects on the master channel. And I have an effect here, but I have a turned off. Okay, so just if you haven't effect loaded on the master channel, make sure you just turn it off by pressing these lights or however you do it in your DAW. We don't want any plug-in kind of effecting the sound that we're hearing when we're trying to mix. So turn off any plugins that you have loaded on your master channel. And I know that when you open FL Studio for the first time and you check the master channel, it actually loads a limiter here on the bottom slot by default. So what you should do is if you have the limiter there, I'm on the master channel. Turn it off, okay. Now if you have send channels, okay, remember we were taking a look at sand channels and how to make them if you have some effects on your sand channels, like if you're using reverb or delay or something over here, just turn off the plugin like this. So if you had a delay on slot for, you just turned it off like that. Because again, those kind of effects are going to interfere with the overall sound that you're hearing. And then afterwards, when we're finished mixing, all of these elements will come back and we'll just turn back on these plug-ins like this. But when we're mixing, we definitely want the send plugins off. Now this part is optional, okay? And what you can do is you can set up buses. And a boss is basically, if you think of a boss, it carries lots of people, while Boston music carries lots of instruments. So what you can do is you can rename this channel, maybe let's rename as drummed boss, okay? And what you would do is you take your snare and you'd run it through the drum bus. You take your clap, run it through the drum boss, take your other snare, whatever layers. Put all of your drums through this one bus channel, okay, and then what you can do is you can mix all of these kind of elements separately. And then you can turn all of them up or down like this with just as one slider. So instead of having to turn up the precaution separately, then turn up the snare, then turn up the clap. You come over here to this drum boss and you just turn up the drums. And then you can just turn up the instruments and turn up the vocals. I'd like to leave all of mine separate because I'm a control freak and I just have this little extra degree of control. But if you want to set up Bose's, you can do that too. And once you have all of those things done, we're ready to start mixing, okay? We'll be learning all about mixing and all about the different plugins that you can use and sort of what they do to shape the sound of your track. So if you're ready to start mixing will jump into the first lecture now. 73. Introduction to Mixing: So we're about to begin the mixing stage of this course. Mixing is the process of balancing all of the individual audio in your track so that it sounds good on any playback system. Things like your headphones, earphones, the car speaker, and your phone speaker. Mixing is a huge subject and it could form its own course, probably about the same length as this one. So what I've done is I've given you as much as possible without going into any unnecessary detail. You don't need fancy plug-ins to get a good mix. All does come with lots of great plugins that you can use. Some of which famous artists actually swear by. Even laid back Luke likes to use the FL Studio stock plugins in his mixes. So before we jump into equalization, I just want to show you a quick example of what a mixed track sounds like vs and non-mixed track. Ok, so this is kind of just to show you the importance of mixing. So here's what a track would sound like if it was mixed. And then we'll have a listen to what that sort of exact segments sounds like if it hadn't been mixed. Okay, let's take a listen. And here's the unmixed version. And I'll just really quickly kind of AB the two. So as it's playing, I'll jump between both of these so you can hear the different side-by-side. So now that you can see the importance of mixing, let's move on to the equalization section. 74. EQ for Mixing: In this lecture, we'll learn about equalization for mixing. This is also commonly referred to as EQ. So what is EQ? Well, EQ is the process of shaping a sound either by boosting or cutting different frequencies. You can target a very specific part of the sound and then either eliminated or boosters. For example, if you're a piano, sounds great, but do you think it's a little bit too clunky or maybe it's too heavy for the track. You can use EQ to eliminate the low frequencies and leave the high frequencies in its essentially the audio version of cropping an image. Okay? You want to crop your girlfriend out of, you're next Instagram post or whatever. Just like we want to crop out the base frequencies of the piano sound. Now as this course has gone on, I keep mentioning the word frequency. So what is a frequency? This is just a scientific term that we use to describe how many times something happens per second. And in this case, it's a measure of how many times a sound wave is repeating every second. You see in order for anything to make a sound, it has to vibrate. So you can think of the frequency as being, how many times per second do maybe the speakers have to vibrate in order to produce a particular sound. And because of this, frequency is actually directly related to pitch. So if you have a riser effect in your track that's rising in pitch as a place, then this riser is also rising in frequency. Your speakers will have to vibrate faster and faster in order for it to sound like the pitch is rising. An easy sort of analogy for this would be to think of a fly, okay? A small fly has small wings, so he must move those wings many, many times per second in order to actually be able to fly. And this produces a high pitched sound. But a big fly who was big wings, he can move his wings less times per second, and this will produce a lower pitch. Now, frequency is measured in hertz, and we can use these hurts to target different pitches of the sound and either remove them or boost them. A human can only here between 20 hertz and 20 thousand hertz, or in other words, 20 vibrations per second, 20 thousand vibrations per second. So you'll often find that an EQ plugin is limited to within this range. However, for other animals, it can be different. You know, dogs can hear up to 30 thousand hertz. And whales can actually here up to 120 thousand hertz, but we're not making EDM for whales. So let's just stick with the 20 to 20 thousand range. So what are some of the main parameters that you can find on your EQ plugin. Well, there is a frequency parameter, there is a gain parameter, and there's a Q parameter, ok? The frequency parameter tells the equalizer which part of the sound you want to adjust. So if you set the frequency to around 100, this would be a low-frequency. And any change that you make will only effect around this part of the sound. But if you set the frequency to around 15 thousand, well, this would be a high frequency. And any change that you make will only effect around this part of the sound. The queue setting tells the EQ how precise you want to be. So do you want to affect this very specific area? Or do you want to be less precise and just boost this area in general? And narrow Q will affect a specific area, whereas a wider queue will effect a more general area. The gain parameter then tells the EQ how much of a boost or a court to apply. So if you set the gain Hi, it will make the affected area much louder than the rest. And if you set the gain low, it will make the affected area much quieter than the rest. And when we use these three tools together, we can really shape a sound and make it fit better into a track. There are some further tweaks that you can do where you can actually change the shape of the curve. Okay? So there's four main types of curves. And these are a bell curve, a shelf, a low cut and high cost. A bell curve will actually look like a bell and this is where it gets the name. It can also be called a peak or a notch, the shelf curve then we'll actually look like a kind of flat hill. The low current will drop off completely to the left. And this can also be called a high pass. And then a high court will drop off completely to the right. And this can also be called a low-pass. Now if you look at the image on this slide, you can see some of these shapes in action. The Locard shape is on the very left where the line kind of completely falls away. If we look now at where the number one is, you know, where the line kind of dips down and then back up again. This particular curve is called a notch because it's kind of cutting a notch out of the sound. The curve at the number three, where the line kind of goes up and then back down. Well, this is called a peak or a belt. And finally the curve shape at the number six, where the line climbs up and then stays kind of level. This is called a shelf. It also looks a bit like a shelf that you can put things on. If you want to think of it that way. We'd be going back over all of these again in the next lecture and actually using an EQ. So it might make a little bit more sense then. But for now, this is all the theory that we need to know. So let's jump into that lecture now. 75. How to Use EQ : So in this lecture, we're going to learn how to use EQ when we're mixing. So the first I want to make is that you should EQ all in one go, okay? Now this isn't a necessary process, but it's a lot easier to remember what you did to other instruments, ok, and what I mean by this is, let's say we have this, this sort of pattern here. Okay? And if I apply a sort of a high-frequency boost to this element. And then when I look at the other sort of instrument that's layered with this one. Okay, I don't want to also apply the same sort of high-frequency boost to this instrument because the two of these are supposed to complement each other well, so if this instrument has a high-frequency boost, then I'm more than likely going to remove the same frequencies out of this instrument. So because of this, it's a lot easier if we do all of the EQ in one go. So we do all of the EQ for this plug-in, and then we move on to the next one. And then we do all the EQ for this one, and then we do all the EQ for this and all the EQ for this and are the EQ for this and so on. Okay, so let's come back to this sort of main pattern on track nine and we'll ever listen to what it sounds like again on its own. Okay, so the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to open up an EQ plugin. And I'm actually going to use the sort of default EQ that comes with FL Studio so that you can use the same plug-in in your track. Okay, so we'll open up this plugin and it looks like this. Now each of these numbers here, these are called frequency bands. And what this simply means is how many times can you affect certain areas, okay, so with this plugin, we only have seven. So we can only do sort of adjustments like this. We can only do this seven times. Some other plug-ins allow you to draw in your own bands and you can add as many as you like. Some other plugins have less and some other plugins have more. It just depends on the plug-in that you're using. Okay, so I'm going to set this back to default, so we're looking at it when it was flat again. So we're looking at it when it's Flash. And now I'm just going to explain the process of actually applying EQ. Okay? So to apply an EQ, you grab one of these bands, okay? And what you're gonna do is this is your gain, sort of your gain parameter. So you're going to boost the gain as high as it goes. And then you're going to make the queue narrow. Ok, so it's only sort of effect, so it's only affecting a very small area. And then as the sound is playing, you're gonna come up here to the frequency parameter and you're going to move it either up or down. Okay? So you're gonna kinda see you're going to start at the bottom. And you're going to move this as the sound is playing. And you're going to find any frequencies that you don't like, Okay, any frequencies that are making a nasty sound. Okay, so let's do this really quickly for this sound. Now, you can hear that this particular frequency, there's a, there's some sort of resonance. There's a bit of a, a home going on if we listen again. Okay, and now what we're gonna do is we're going to reduce this because we found the nasty frequency. And now we're just going to take it out. We don't want that nasty frequency and the final sound. And we're gonna do the same thing with these other bands here. So we're gonna boost as the whole way up, make the queue very narrow like this. And then we're going to sweep through and find another nasty frequency. Now, I've found another nasty frequency that I don't like. So again, I'm going to cut this out. Okay? And you're gonna do this with maybe all of these bands or maybe less of these bands depending on how many nasty frequencies you have in your sound. And don't get too bogged down with this Roni looking for the very, very specific sort of nasty frequencies. So find where they are and then cut them out of the sound. Once you've caught all of the nasty frequencies out, then what we do is we load a second EQ plugin. And we use this second plugin to shape the sound. Okay, so the first one is to cause all of the nasty frequencies out. And now we use this one to boost all of the nice parts of the sound. So with these bands, you're actually, you're gonna boost them, okay, same way as we did before. But you're going to leave the queue allowed wider. Okay, so we were using a narrow Q with the last plugin. Well, with this one, we're going to use a much wider Q OK. And I'm going to sweep through the frequencies and I'm going to find a frequency that I like. Okay, I kinda like the sound of this frequency. So I'm going to come up here to the gain parameter and I'm going to turn it down a bit. So it's not sort of overpowering. But now that we've found the frequency, I'm going to play the sound and adjust this to find the gain setting where it sounds the best. Okay, so let's have a listen. So I think the gain settings sounds good here. We can also use this EQ to kind of remove parts of the sound that we don't like. Okay, so if I take this third parameter and I boost this up flow. And again, we're gonna keep the queue quite wide. And I'm going to sweep through and I'm going to find a frequency that I don't like. Ok, let's have a listen. So I don't like this particular part of the sound. Okay, so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to come over here. And again, I'm going to turn it down to flat. And then I'm going to listen and I'm going to cut the sound out until I find a nice level for the gain parameter o, until I find a nice level for the gain parameter. Okay, let's have a listen. So now if we listen to this sound without the second EQ on, it sounds like this. And if we turn it back on, and again turn it off. So you can see that there's second EQ is actually making the sound a little bit brighter and kind of in your face. So what we're doing is reusing the top EQ to kind of find the specific and cut them out. And then we're using the bottom EQ to find the general. Okay? What you'll do is when you have all of this done, you'll move on to another instrument. So in this case I'm going to use the layer that plays at the same time. Okay? And we'll do the same thing, ok, so when you come in here, your first EQ that you load will be for the general. So again, if we take this and we kind of, we'll have a narrow queue and will sweep through the sound. I'm just gonna do it really, really quickly here. I'm going to make the cubit bigger. Okay, I don't like this frequency. Let's do it with number three. The qx, oops, make the queue if it narrower. Mileva lesson. Okay, there's a nasty frequency around here too. So I'm going to cut that out. And you'll do this again with all of the bands. And then you load your second EQ. And again with this EQ, we're trying to shape the sound, but the only difference is we're trying to shape it so that it fits with this instrument. Okay, we could, so we could have a listen to this track on its own. And we could find the nice frequencies. Okay? And we could, we could maybe, I think it sounds quite nice there, and we could end up boosting this around 2 thousand hertz. Okay? But if we check the other instrument, we can see that this is also boosted close to 2 thousand hertz. It's boosted to 1.51000. Okay? And if we played those two at the same time, they're gonna sound like they're fighting for space. So what we should actually be doing is we should be listening to them at the same time. Okay? So we're going to listen to this instrument while the one that we've just e cubed is playing so that we can make sure that this instrument is fitting nicely with this one. So let's have a listen and we're going to find the frequencies where this instrument, it's clashing with the other one. And then we're going to find the frequencies where this instruments sort of compliments this one. Okay? So let's do that and let's have a listen to some of the clashing frequencies. Okay, so these two frequencies are now fighting for space. So what I'm gonna do is I'm actually going to pull this out of this instrument, ok? And it might sound terrible when it's being played on its own. But the thing is throughout this track, it never plays on its own. It's used as a layer. So we have to make sure that this instrument is complementing this one. Now if we have a listen to what it sounds like, it sounds like this. And now let's find a frequency that's maybe complementing the other instrumental. Okay, so let's have a listen now. So maybe around here, there's kind of 450 hertz. And for the sake of demonstration, let's just do another one. Maybe let's try and find a higher frequency. That sounds good. Okay, so now these two instruments, when they play together, they're going to kind of fit together like a jigsaw. Okay, so let's have a listen to the two playing at the same time. And then I'll turn off this second EQ and we can see what it sounds like. This is before EQ. And if we turn the EQ back on, off, on, off. So I'm sure you can hear how much of a difference that EQ actually makes to sort of shape the sound. We're going to move on now to the next lecture where will further establish our knowledge and we learn about the presences on 76. The Presence Zone: In this lecture, we're going to learn about the presence on. So the presence zone is located between around 1.5 thousand hertz, all the way up to about 5 thousand hertz. Okay. And this is called the presence on, because it's the area where the human ear is the most sensitive at hearing. So if you boost anything in this area, so between 1.5 thousand or 5 thousand, if you boost anything in here, it'll sound a lot more clear and a lot more bright. Okay, so I'm just going to reset this. And what we'll do is we'll have a listen to these vocals to reset this to. We'd ever listen to these vocals and will boost the presence zone. And we will see what kind of a difference it makes. If I don't count that, go back. So I'm sure you can notice that your ear is quite sensitive to some of these frequencies. You know, as we were sweeping through, some of the frequencies sounded quite harsh. And this is because our ears are most sensitive to this sort of range of frequencies. If I was to boost a frequency down here, maybe in 370, it won't sound as harsh. But if I come up here to the presence on so you can see the benefit of using the presence on, okay? And usually anything that you boost within this zone is going to sound good. And I'll just give you another example here. If we take these sort of distorted keys and I come into the pattern, I'm just going to turn off the loop and we have a listen to what they sound like. So they must be turned off. We'll just check with the air. Track ten. So there in track ten. So let's solve this MOOC, what they sound like. Okay, now if I load an EQ plugin and then I tried to boost the presence on can maybe be bows down here. And if I turn that off, and then back on. Okay, so you can kind of hear that it sounds instantly better. Boss. Alright, and this is a huge bush. That's the problem. Okay? The problem is, everything sounds good when it's boosted here. But when you're mixing, if you boost everything in this sort of frequency range, then everything is going to clash with each other. And we looked at this briefly in the previous lecture where we boosted the sort of same frequencies on two different instruments. If we do that in our mix, if we boost, you know, all of these different tracks in the presence on, they're all going to fight. So here is the number one rule of using the presence on. You should really only boost the main elements in your track, okay? Things like the vocal, maybe a lead instrument, and maybe chords, and that's it, okay? You need to be very, very careful when you're using it that all of the elements are in sort of clashing together and fighting for space. So if for example, I come into my arrangement here and let's say I'll just him up. Let's say I boost my double-click this the vocals. So let's say I boost my vocals in the present zone. Okay, well then that means with these chords here, I'm not going to boost these in the presence on as well. Okay. So let's just find out where these are, the mixer and we'll turn them on. Okay, now if I open up an EQ and may have a listen to the present zone of this particular instrument. You'll notice that again, it sounds very good, but if we play these two things at the same time, it suddenly doesn't sound as good. So what we do is we take that presence on and we cut it. Okay, because something else that's playing at the same time is kind of occupying that space. So we don't want this instrument to occupy that space, so we cut it out and then we find maybe a different frequency that works. Maybe not that one, maybe maybe some of these frequencies. And you can see as well by doing that, that the vocals Get a lot clearer if we listen to this instrument without the EQ on. Pay particular attention to the vocals and how clear they get when we turn this EQ back on. So I'm sure you noticed that when we turn to the EQ back on, the vocals kind of seems to get louder and this is because we created space for them. So using the present zone is a very powerful tool to kind of draw attention to certain elements in your track. But you really must be careful about using it too much, especially when to sort of elements are playing at the same time. Just pick one main element that sounds the best with the present zone and then remove the presence on, from some of the other elements. In the next lecture, we'll learn how to apply EQ to instruments. 77. EQ for Instruments (PART 1): So in this lecture, we're going to take a look at EQ for instruments. So I have a couple of instruments in this sort of buildup section. If we just take a listen, I'll just mute the vocals. Okay, I'm gonna turn on these channels again. So I'm just going to start at the top here with this pattern one. Okay, so this is this instrument. Okay? And it's on track nine. So if we come into the mixer here and we can see that it's already highlighted untracked nine. So I'm going to solo this and I'm going to load up the first EQ plugin. And with this one, if you remember, we're looking for all of the nasty sounding frequencies. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to let the pattern play. And while it's playing, I'm going to adjust some of these parameters just so that we can eliminate some of the nasty frequencies. Ok, so let's have a listen to the pattern and I'll start tweaking some of the EQ parameters. Okay, so we start with two here. I'm going to boost the gain and I'm going to narrow dequeue. And then I'm going to sweep through an ever listened to all the different frequencies. Ok, so there's a nasty frequency here, I think at around is that 211 hertz. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to lower the gain like this and cut that frequency out. Next, we're going to listen again and we'll try it with this third band. So again, I'm going to boost the gain and a narrow the q. Okay, and let's start from this position because we've already sweeps through these frequencies here. So let's have a listen. Okay, so there's clearly a resonance, sort of nasty frequency somewhere around here. So I'm going to cut this out. Okay, and we'll do the same thing again with this fourth band. Boost gain, narrow the Q. And again, whatever, listen. Okay, so it's already kind of said it a nasty area, so I'm going to take some of that out. And again, with the fifth band, we're gonna boost it, narrow the queue. And I've listened to some of the nasty frequencies. I might just make dequeue a small bit whiter. And around here when 1424, we're going to do the same thing and we're going to cut out this frequency. Ok? So now the sound sounds like this. And if we turn off this EQ, you noticed that the sound gets a lot more sort of messy. So I'm going to turn it off and we live a lesson. And then while it's playing, I'll just turn this back on and you'll hear the sort of the difference in the sound. So this EQ is actually making a massive difference. And I didn't realize how many sort of nasty frequencies were actually in that sound until we came along and we did this EQ. So now that we're happy with these EQ settings, we're ready to go onto the second EQ. And this EQ is to shape the sound. Okay, so we're going to find the nice frequencies and we're gonna boost them. And then we're going to find some of the kind of not so nice frequencies and we're just going to cut them out with a much more sort of general kind of curve. Okay, so let's just start with this second band again. And I'm going to boost it up and I'm gonna have a sweep through and find some nice frequencies. Okay, so I'm thinking that the kind of main portion of the sound, the sort of presence of this sound is somewhere around here, which is 771 hertz. And so I'm going to leave the, I'm going to leave this band here. And I'm going to just turn it down a little bit because I think it's a bit too much. And I think we might make the cue a small bit narrower, just so it's a bit, a bit more focused. And again, we'll use this tarred band here and we'll sweep through and you'll find some nice frequencies, or maybe even some nasty frequencies. So let's listen to the sound. But I don't like this particular area. I think it's a bit muddy and kind of cluttered sounding, so I'm going to lower the gain here. And not too much, I'm not, I'm not trying to make a really aggressive sound. I wanted it to be kind of transparent. And again, just slightly narrow the Q, so it's a little bit more focused. So let's try and find some frequencies up here to either boost or a kind of cost. Okay? So I'm going to just take this six band and maybe now the Q is small bet. And we'll just have a listen. So this area here sounds a bit harsh. Okay? So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to lower the gain just a tiny bit. Okay? I don't wanna take too much of these frequencies out because this is in the present Zone and it's where our ears are most sensitive. But at the same time, this sound is a little bit harsh in this area. So I'm just going to kind of take out these frequencies and then I'm going to widen the queue. Just sorts of bit more kind of generalized. And I might just boost again, even, even more so than that. I just wanted to be kind of subtle. Okay. Let's have a listen. Let's hear what the sound, sorry. Let's hear what the synthesizer now sounds like without this EQ Effect on. And I will turn it back on. So I think the sound is a little bit more focus now, I think we've kind of captured the main area of this particular instrument. The last thing left to do is to do some low and high cuts. Okay, so that's why I left this 17 band alone. Ok, because we're going to use these to do a high and low cost. So I'm going to right-click and select type. And I'm going to change the shape of the curve to a high pass, okay? Or in other words, a low cost. So we're only letting the high frequencies past. And what we're gonna do is we're going to drag this up until, until we kind of kill the base out of this sound. Okay, we don't want any of the base frequencies in sort of, well, anything that isn't the kick and that isn't the base. Okay, so the base frequencies around here, they're reserved for the kick in the base. So which your instruments, you have to remove these low frequencies. Ok, so let's have a listen to the sound again, and I'll sort of move this up and down until the base frequencies have been removed. Okay? Okay, so I think somewhere around here, I can't really see it, but I think it's somewhere around 200 hertz. I think this is sort of D area where the base frequencies are gone out of this sound, but we're still kind of retaining the main portion of the sound. Okay, next, for the high frequencies up here, I'm going to change this to a shelf setting, okay? And it's actually already set on a high shelf. And the reason, OK, hang on. There's there's two different types of shelf's. There's a low shelf and a high shelf. And what a high shelf is is when the shelf kind of goes up and it goes off to the right here. Ok. So when you pull this down, the kind of line that you're changing will always be on the right. Now if I change this to a low shelf, what'll happen is instead of affecting this line on the right, will actually be affecting everything to the, to the left. Okay. So I'm just going to change it to a low shelf when we see what happens. Alright, so now I'm affecting everything to the left of this band. And you can see it there with the blue line and the exact curve of the shelf. So I'm going to set this back to a high shelf because I only want to affect the high frequencies. And I'm just going to pull some of them out because I don't think they're necessary for this particular sound. Do you know there's a lot of kind of hashed frequencies up there that we don't need into sound. So I'm going to pull that out. Just suddenly, not too much. And now we'll have a listen to this sound without any of the EQ's on. And then we'll turn them back on and have a listen to what it sounds like with the adjustments that we've made. Okay, so I think this instrument is sounding good. It's sounding pretty clean. And I think we can move on to another instrumental. 78. EQ for Instruments (PART 2): So because I've kind of applied EQ to this pattern one, I'm going to start dequeuing everything that is playing at the same time. So I'm going to base all of the EQ that I'm doing with other elements. I'm going to base it off the EQ that we did with this element. Ok? So if we take this fluorophore pattern and we find where this is on the mixer. We can see it's on channel six. So if I solo this, it sounds like this. Ok, so the first thing we have to do is we have to solve this and we have to load up the first EQ. And this is just to cut out any of the nasty frequencies. So I'm gonna do this really, really quickly just so that we can get to the next part of the lecture. Okay, so I'm just going to play the sound and very, very quickly go through and find some nasty frequencies. I think these frequencies are kind of okay, but I'm just going to pull them out very, very kinda subtly because I think they're a tiny bit higher, so okay, let's have a listen to the sound without the EQ and then I'll turn it on as the pattern is playing. Okay, so I'm noticing that this EQ is doing a good job. It's kind of cleaning up the sound and making it a little bit clearer. So now we can move on to the second EQ. And what we're gonna do with this EQ is we're going to listen to the other instrument that we've already applied, the dq2, okay, which is this Icarus. Oops, it's this Icarus plug-in, okay. And the reason we're going to listen to both of these playing at the same time is because I've already dequeued the sound. So I want to make sure that this sound, It's fitting well with this sound, okay, because if I EQ this on its own and I don't really listen to the other instrument, then I'm kind of doing it blindly. Whereas at least if I have this other instrument on, I can here which frequencies are complementing the other instrument? Ok? So the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to apply a low cut just to get rid of some of the, some of the unwanted bass frequencies. So I'm going to leave the instruments soloed for now. And I might just make the queue a little bit steeper. And if we come over to the high frequencies and we have a listen to what's going on up here. I might just take them out very, very suddenly, very gently. Just to get rid of that sort of that hissy sound, that sounds like a bit like static. But even move this a bit to the right just so it's kind of just a very, very upper end at the EQ here. Okay? Now we're ready to go back into the playlist and have a listen to both of these instruments playing at the same time. And will EQ the, the two instruments kind of side-by-side. Okay, let's have a listen. So I'm going to start boosting things. I'm going to try and boost this for my turn it down just a small bit. And never listened to some of these frequencies. Well, the first thing I'm noticing is that this sort of frequency is actually clashing with this instrument. So the two of them, these two instruments are fighting for space around this frequency. So I'm going to cause this frequency out so that it allows this instrument a little bit extra space to breathe. And I might just kinda narrow the Q, so it's a bit more focused and pull out a bit more. And now will boost this three band and Mileva, listen to the pattern as a place. So I kind of like the sound around here. Now I'm not a huge fan of it, but I do think it is adding something to the other instruments, so I'm going to boost that ever, ever so slightly. Ok. So here's the default setting. I'm, I'm, I'm only going to boost this very, very gently, like this. And I'm going to listen to both of these instruments again. And I'm just going to adjust maybe something in the high end here. I might add in some high or I might cut some out. I don't know yet. So let's have a listen to the instruments. Okay, So I might add in some of these high frequencies up here because I think this sound is missing some of those high frequencies that this sound could give it. Okay? So what we'll do is turn this sort of six band down again. And we listen to the two instruments playing together. And then I'll boost this six band. Okay, let's have a listen. I don't want to add too much in because then I think it gets a bit harsh, but we just add in a small bit. Okay, so let's play the pattern and we love to listen to what it sounds like without EQ. And then as it's playing, I'll add these EQs back in and we'll see what kind of a difference they're making. Okay, so upon second listening, I think we've actually caught a bit too much of the sound out here in this plugin. So, and I think it's coming from this, this four band. So I'm just gonna boost that. Again. Not folly, but just a bit more, just so we're getting a bit more of that sort of that frequency range back into the sound. Let's have a listen again. Yeah, I think that sounds a lot better now. So this is the process that you'll use when your EQ in your tracks. Ok. And from here, we'd go on and we'd EQ all of the other instruments. And we'd listen to all of the instruments that we've IQ you'd already, when we're dequeuing the new one. Okay. So what I mean by that is in this particular case, we were listening to this worldly while this Icarus was playing so that we could here which kind of frequencies were complementing each other. And if we were to then go and EQ this Spire plug-in, we'd EQ the spire plug-in while Icarus and the early replaying. Okay, and if we were then to go and EQ this piano over here, we'd EQ the piano while spire, Icarus and the world you were playing. And you do that the whole way through until you get to your final instruments. And at that point basically all of the instruments are on. So just make sure you're using the kind of two EQ technique, okay, the first one to cut out the bad sounds and make the overall sound a bit cleaner. And then the second one to boost the nice frequencies and kind of shape each of the instruments and make them fit together like a jigsaw. Also don't forget to cause any of the low frequencies from your instruments, ok, because the low frequencies are kind of reserved for the kick in the base. So your instruments don't need those low frequencies because when they're added back into the mix and you bring the base and the base will fill up that kind of that empty space down to the low end. Ok, so in the next lecture, we're going to have a look at EQ for base. 79. EQ for Bass: So in this lecture, we're going to have a look at EQ for base. So I've already loaded up the base in our mixer here. And it sounds like this. I'm gonna go through the exact same process that we did with the instruments. So we're going to load the first EQ. And then we're going to select this second band. Kind of boosted up fold. Bringing the queue narrow. Not too narrow, but just kind of get a narrow ish. Then we're going to listen to the sound as it plays and sweep through. So let's do that now. Okay, so just kind of a resonant frequency somewhere around here, which is 87. I can't really see it, but that's okay. We'll just turn this down. And I've listened to the sound now. Okay, and we'll take this turd band and again do the same process, narrow the queue. And we'll sweep through kind of starting from here, because we've just swept through these frequencies are ready. So let's listen. Okay. So that's a really, really resonant frequency there. So we're going to pull that out a lot, kind of a bit more than the other frequency. Ok. Let's hear what the bass stands like now. Okay, and we're gonna do the same thing. Again. We're gonna boost this fourth band, are going to narrow the queue. And we're going to have a listen. And again, it's, it's actually opened on a kind of a terrible, nasty frequencies. So I'm going to pull that out. We'll do it again for the fifth until we basically run out of bad frequencies or we run out of bands. Okay, let's have a listen. Okay, so this particular frequency, it's not very, very harsh, but it's still, it's still not very nice to listen to. So I'm going to pull it out. And, but not as much as some of the other, sort of the other bands that we pulled out. Lets try it. This sixth band. Oops, I'm after turned down the Q for the fifth and let's try this sixth event. So these ones are in terrible. There might be one somewhere in here. Oh, yeah. We just pull this out. Not as much as the other ones. Just kind of a subtle sort of adjustment. And now let's have a listen to the bass. Actually first let's have a listen to the bass without the EQ, and then I'll add it in as the basis playing. Now with the base, what we also have to do is we also have to cut out some of the high. So like the opposite of what we were doing with the instruments. Where we were cutting the base frequencies out of the instruments were going to be cutting the high frequencies out of the base. So let's change this to a lowpass to let out of the low frequencies and kind of slip through. And then we'll just kind of actually will adjust the queue so that it's a little bit steeper. And then we'll sweep through and we'll find a point where this low cut Sounds good. Okay, somewhere around here is okay. It's kinda getting rid of that unnecessary hiss. And we're still retaining most of the sound of the bass. Okay? And again, we're going to load our second EQ. And this time I'm going to have a listen to the other instruments while the bass is playing. So by this stage you'd have eQTL your instruments. And now you can listen to the base as the instruments are playing. So I might just turn it down slightly so it's not overpowering. So let's come up here and we'll start moving these bands around. So I'm going to boost the second band and I'm going to kinda sweep through and find a place where the, where the base sounds good with D instruments playing. So I think this kind of area is kind of complementing the sound of the instruments. Well, so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to leave this boosted, but I do want to boost it by too much, okay? Because base frequencies are very, very heavy. So when we're doing any sort of adjustment, we're just going to make it very, very subtle. Ok? So it's just a small kind of a contour and we'll have a listen to what this sounds like now. And I also noticed when I was sleeping through that sum of the frequencies up here are actually clashing with the instruments. So I'm going to have a listen and find those and then pull them out. Okay? Yes. So I think it's somewhere around here, so I'm actually going to pull these frequencies out. And that should clear up a little bit more space for the instruments. So now that we've enqueued the instruments and we've also e cubed d base. It's time to move on and we'll start dequeuing the drums. And we'll start dequeuing the drums. 80. EQ for Drums : So in this lecture, we're going to learn about EQ for drums. When we're dequeuing drums, we need to be aware of something called the mud zone and something called the screech, so on. So the mud zone is predominantly in kicks. Ok, if I just sold my kick drum solo it here in the playlist view. Okay. So we just find the kick. Here it is. And we saw this. Okay, when we EQ this, um, there's something called the mud zone and I'll just show you it's usually around between one hundred and two hundred. So somewhere around here, there'll be a horrible, sort of muddy sound. If I just narrow the q. Okay, somewhere around here. And it just feels like the sound of the kick drum is kind of muddy, are cluttered. Okay, so we're going to pull that out. Not too much actually like kind of subtly verse because we don't want to get rid of the base frequencies. You know, if we pull this out too much, will lose all that nice kind of base. But at the same time this frequency is making the sound of it muddy. So we're going to pull it out just a bit. And we'll ever listened to about the kick drum sounds like now. And with the kick drum, We're also going to try and find where the attack is or where the sort of the transient or the clicky sound is. Okay? So I'm going to boost this and kinda narrow the q and just find where the attack of the sound is. Ok. It seems to be somewhere here, so I'm going to lower this. So it's a little bit more subtle. But what this is doing is it's creating a little bit more of a punch or a more of an attack sound for this kick drum, let's have a listen to the kick drum without the EQ plugin and then we'll turn it back on as the kick drum is plain. I actually think that this band here is a bit too loud, so I'm just going to turn it down a bit again, just so it's really, really subtle. And we listen again. So let's listen to the entire drum pattern. Ok, so I'm going to own solo the kick, and we'll just listen to what the drums sound like when they're all playing together. And I'll just zoom out so we can kind of see everything. Okay, let's have a listen now. Okay, so there's a few layers going on. There's some of the hats are layered and some of the claps or layered. Okay, so we'll come back into the mixer and we'll start to EQ this drum pattern. So if we start over here with this open I had, and I'm gonna solo it. Okay? And we're going to load an EQ plugin. And with drums, it's not as necessary to do the kind of this, you know, the hashed frequency kind of pulling out the bad ones because the sample plays for such a short time. And, but of course, by all means you can do this, alright? And it will, it will make your mix a little bit cleaner. But it's not a necessary step to take with your drums. So I'm just going to turn this back down. And I'm going to instead just boost the nice frequencies and kind of caught some of the harsher frequencies. Ok, so let's have a listen to this hat and then we'll sort of will sweep through and we'll find some nice frequencies. Ok, I'm going to narrow the Cuba. So I really liked the way There's had sounds kind of around this 7,500 max. So I'm gonna just try understand slightly sorts a bit more subtle. And then I'm going to maybe take this two band and I'm gonna sweep for frequencies that I don't like. Ok, so let's have a listen. Okay, so I don't like these frequencies kind of around here, this two thousand, three thousand mark. Okay. So let's pull some of these out. And I'll just widen accused or we're kind of taking out more of this area. And let's have a listen to the hat now without the EQ and then with the EU. So I think this EQ is kind of making the hat sound a little bit brighter and a little bit more pleasurable to the ear. Okay, so the next thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to find a layer, ok, and I'm going to, I wanted to see if there is a layer that plays alongside this hat, because then I'm going to EQ the two layers side-by-side. And I think perhaps that we're looking at is this one here, which means that this here, okay, this hat is also a layer on track 26. So let's turn that on. And what we'll do is we'll load an EQ plugin again. And we'll have a look at what the sound looks like. Ok, so it's all kind of focused in this area. So what we'll do is we'll listen to both of the hats playing at the same time. And then we'll kind of sweep through and find where the two sounds compliment each other. I might just turn this down a bit so I can hear both clearly. Okay. I'm just gonna turn it down just a tiny bit. Okay. So I think somewhere around here, around I think it's one hundred, four hundred it's complementing the other hats. So I'm just going to turn it down very, very slightly and kind of narrow the queue. And I'm also going to, I think, caught some of the frequencies around here because as I was listening, I notice that there are kind of clashing. Definitely, definitely up here. We don't need these sort of frequency, so I'm gonna cut these out. And because all of the sound of this as kind of focused up in this half of the EQ and going to apply a low cut. Just to get rid of all of this book that was the wrong shape, sorry, a high-pass. And I'm gonna get rid of all of the low end that we don't need. And I'm going to come back to the other one here and do the same thing because I know I forgot to do it the last time, so I'm just going to apply a high-pass. And again, drag this up like this so that we're kind of eliminating any unnecessary frequencies that are kind of filling up space when they don't need to. So just to kinda loop back to the start of the lecture again, where I was talking about the screech zone and this sort of frequency that I took out. Okay. If we just saw this and we've listen. Do you hear the kinda screech that's kind of coming off all of these high frequencies will, this is the screech zone. Okay? And generally, we'd kind of, we wouldn't boost this too much. But we might end up cutting some of it out just to get rid of that sort of screeching sound. Now obviously don't pull out too much because a lot of the high hat is high, high frequencies and it's a sound that kind of needs to retain a lot of these high frequencies. Um, but you know, that's not very pleasurable to listen to. So we might cut them out just ever so slightly, just subtly. Just to make the overall sound a little bit cleaner. And we can use the other layer then that doesn't have that same screeching sound. Ok, so this particular sample that we're using, it doesn't sound very screeching. If I take this number five here and we boosted, it doesn't sound as creatures, so we can actually boost this area. And we can use the two layers to kind of compliment each other. So this layer is now adding in the highest that this layer is missing. So if you remove, if we removed this one, you can see that they're both complementing each other. Well, you can see that they're both complementing each other well. Finally, when you're doing your Drums, you'll also have to listen to the layers against the instruments. Ok? So the instruments that you've already dequeued, you're going to listen to the drums that you've IQ, you'd ok, so in this case we've EQ these two hi-hats, these two layers. So we're going to listen to what these two sound like when they're playing alongside these two instruments that we've already dequeued. Okay, let's have a listen to what this sounds like and will make any adjustments as we need to. So I think this sounds okay. I don't think any adjustments need to be made. Alright? So this is the process that you'll use when mixing your drums. And you'll go through the different elements and then the different layers, check them against each other, EQ them against each other, and then check them with the rest of the elements in your track to make sure that everything is sort of fitting together well. In the next lecture, we'll have a look at EQ for vocals. 81. EQ for Vocals : So in this lecture, we're going to look at EQ for vocals. So I have two types of vocals in this track. Okay, I have the main vocal, which is this one here. And I also have a vocoder vocal, okay, so that's these here. And I need to also turn out the vocoder, which is this. Well, I've listened to these. And let's listen with vocal. And so we need to get these sounding good together. And we also need to get them sounding good in the context of everything else. Ok, so let's start with this main vocal and we'll load up an EQ plugin. And again, because it's sort of a main sound, we're going to do the cutting out of the Harish frequencies. So I'm going to narrow the queue and listen to the sound and cut out any of the frequencies that I don't like him. Okay, so I think this particular frequencies that it'll be boomy. So I'm going to cut that out. Let's boost number three and have a listen to the sound again. Okay, there's a horribly frequency there. I'm going to cut that right out. And with four again, narrative Q and we love Listen. I'm I'll asked him. Okay. There's a nasty frequency in there. It's not as loud as the other one at three, so I'm not going to cut it out as much. Let's try band five here and we'll just sweep through AMA. Okay, so there's a frequency in here that's, again, it's actually not as loud as the frequency that's in four. But I still want to cut it out. So I'm just going to bring this down very slightly less than four. And we'd ever listened about the vocal sounds like Now with this first EQ setting applied. And if we turn it off, I played through it with the effect on, and then I'll turn it off maybe halfway through. So you can hear that this one EQ plugin has actually cleaned up the sound a lot. All right, and now we're ready to apply the second dequeue, which is to shape the sound. So let's move this down to the center. And again, we're going to find some frequencies that sound nice and boost them. Amal as him. I'm, I'm I'm I'm okay. I kinda like these frequencies around maybe 5 thousand. So I'm going to do stores like this. Narrow the QGIS sorts of bench mark and a focused. And then we listen again and try and find maybe some nice frequencies or maybe some frequencies that we want to take out. Ok. And so I definitely don't like these frequencies here, so I'm going to cut these out and maybe just narrowed the QoS Babette. And then we listen again with this fourth band. So I like kind of something that's going on here around the one hundred, ten hundred Mac. But I don't want to, there's a lot that I don't like up here and there's stuff that I don't like here, so I'm going to narrow the Q. So it's a much more focused kind of setting. And I'm going to just boost that ever so slightly. Maybe not that much, just the smell bad. And that's kinda widen the Q a tiny bit. Hit OK. And now let's cosh, and some of the frequencies here in the middle. Okay, so I'm going to narrow the Q of this six band. And I'm just going to very gently caught some of the frequencies out of here. Okay. And I'm thinking I'll widen the q small vet. And I'm thinking I might boost this two band a bit more and widen the queue is smothered largest, bringing in some more of those higher frequencies. And we'd ever listened to about this sounds like now. My I'll ask him, let's turn off the plug-in. So it just makes the sound a little bit brighter and it's kind of adding in some air, some nice kind of clarity. Next, we'll check this vocal against some of the instruments that we've EQs. And we'll check it against some of the drums that we've EQs. I think we execute this, 112 and I think 26. So we'll have a lesson now to add the vocal sound like with the other elements that we've applied EQ to. And if we turn it off. So I think this is making a sort of a drastic difference and I think it sounds a lot better with these EQ plugins on. Next, we'll EQ devoted and vocals. So let's listen to this one. I have to turn on the, the carrier modulator will play, remember that from the vocoder section. So let's have a listen to what this vocal sounds like. And I already have an EQ on here just to cut out some of the low frequencies that I don't need in the sound. So I'm going to leave this EQ open. And what we'll do is I'll just move it up so that we can add in some plug-ins below. And we'll add in our first EQ that we're going to use, which is to cut out some of the nasty frequencies. So I'll play the sound and I just kind of sweep through and find some of the nasty frequencies. So there's only really one kind of problem area and it's here at 790. So I'm just gonna cut this out. And and we don't need to do anymore because I didn't find any other nasty frequencies that I didn't like. So now we'll add the shaper EQ, which is this one. And what we'll do is we'll have to listen to this other vocal at the same time so that we can find where these two sounds are complementing each other. Okay, so let's narrow this queue and have a listen. But I can hear that around here. These two, these two sounds are actually fighting for space. So I'm gonna cut this out. Not by too much, I don't want to ruin the sound, but I just wanted to clear up a little bit of space for the main vocal. So it's a bit clearer and the audience can hear it better. And let's try boosting now some of these other frequencies. So let's have a listen. So I like this sort of area. So I'm going to just bring this down a bit and kind of use a subtle boost. I might even widen the queue just to bring in kind of all of these frequencies here because they all sound nice when they're teamed with this main vocal. So let's have a listen to both of these now at the same time. And then you would apply the same process to this other vocals. So you'd soloists and also solid the carrier. And what you do is huge. You check the sound so you'd add in your, your, your first EQ, okay, find some nasty frequencies. So I'll just do it really, really quickly. Ok, so that doesn't sound very nice. Let's pull that out and we try it again really quickly. Okay, maybe something here. Just pull that out. And then again with shapers. And when we're shaping At this time, we're going to listen to what it sounds like alongside all of these vocals that we've already applied. E q2. Okay, let's have a listen. Just lower the volume so you can hear both of these side-by-side. Maybe somewhere around here. Sounds OK. So I'll just boost that ever so slightly like this. And we pull up another one and we'll have a listen. Now I actually think this area is adding in something very, very nice. It's adding in a bit of kind of waste into the sound. So I'm going to add some of these frequencies in, okay? And I might narrow the Q of this third band just slightly so it's not kind of overlapping. And then we might cut out some of the high frequencies because I already know that it's going to be clashing with the sound. And again, we have to make sure that all of these sound good with the other elements. So I'm going to turn on the instruments that we dequeued and I'm going to turn on the drum samples that we've enqueued. Okay? And Mileva listened to everything sorted together and make sure that everything is fitting together nicely. And if you have more vocal layers, you'll apply the same process. You know, you come on to that vocal air and open up the two EQs and then listen to all of the vocals playing at the same time while you are applying some EQ shaping to this other vocal. Okay? In the next lecture, we'll look at using the EQ plugin as an effect. 82. EQ as an Effect: So in this lecture, we're going to learn how we can use an EQ plugin for effect. So you can also make elements sound as if they're in a certain space or if they're kind of coming from a certain device. Things like a radio or telephone effect and maybe an outside the club effect. We can do all of these with an EQ. So we're going to have a look at these, OK. So we're going to have a look at both of these things now. And we're going to apply them to this vocal. And the first thing we'll take a look at is the radio or telephone effect. So we need to open up an EQ plugin and it opens like this. So the first thing we're gonna do is we're going to apply a sort of a harsh low cut or high-pass. Okay, so we're going to let all of the high frequencies past, and we're going to cut out a lot of this low end. So I'm going to make the queue much steeper. And I'm going to drag this right up until we've gotten rid of a lot of, a lot of sort of low frequencies, even more than this. So maybe around here, which is 600. And then with the high-end, we're going to apply a low-pass or a high cook filter. Okay? What we do is here, again, we're going to make the cue a bit steeper. And we're going to drag this down until we've gotten rid of a lot of the high frequencies. Ok, so maybe here around three thousand, three thousand, four hundred and thirty-five. I like the sound of this kind of EQ. Now I think it's sounding a little bit like a telephone. Then we're going to take one of these middle bands and we're going to boost it ok, so we are going to boost the mid ranges and we're gonna do it quite harshly. And you're going to find an area that kind of sounds like a telephone. So I think around here, there's sort of 1000 is low, mid range. I think this sounds like a telephone. And I'm actually going to use the six band to cut out some of the kind of the higher mid-frequencies like this. Okay. I'll just make that a little bit wider. And we'll have a listen to this effect now. So now this vocal sounds like it's coming through a telephone. And the reason why this particular setting Sounds like a telephone is because when they were inventing telephones and they had to figure out a way of kind of transferring your voice down the line to the other person on the other end. But because there was so much information from 20 Hertz all the way up to 20 thousand. They didn't have enough sort of firepower, let's say, to actually transfer all of these frequencies down the line. Okay, it would have been, there would've been a big delay and the whole phone concept wouldn't have worked. So what they did was they conducted a study to find out what the most important frequencies were. So can we get rid of some of the unnecessary frequencies? And they found out that humans are kind of very sensitive to these mid-range frequencies. But we're not as sensitive to the kind of the low frequencies and high frequencies. So then what they did with telephones was they got rid of these high frequencies and low frequencies. So when they were kind of transferring your voice down the line, they could transfer it much quicker because they were only sending a certain portion of the kind of entire frequency spectrum. Okay? So that's just the theory behind why, you know, why this particular shape. Works and why this sounds like a telephone. Now, if you want to make it sound even more like a telephone, you can load up a distortion plug-in. So if I come in here and I open maybe this blood overdrive, and if we turn up the preamp, we'll see that the sound gets distorted and it'll sound even more like it's coming from a telephone. Now that's incredibly loud. So let's just turn it down using this post gain. Maybe boosted a bit more. So now the blood overdrive, it's kind of adding that, that small element of distortion that you get with a telephone. Let's have a listen again. And then as the track is playing, you can kind of turn these off. And like let's say this is, this is your first section. Then it comes into your chorus sections. So you turn the plugins off. So you can use it as a sort of interesting arrangement technique. Now, i'll just delete these plug-ins again and we'll have a look at making the vocal sound like it's outside of a nightclub. Okay? So I'm going to turn these on again. And again, we're going to open up an EQ plugin. And for this, we're going to apply a very, very harsh low-pass, okay? Or a high cut filter. And I'm going to just up the Q bit, so it's a bit steeper. And I'm going to drag this right down. Malala. Malala. So now you can see that the vocals sound a bit muffled. And then what we do is we boost some of these kind of low mid frequencies. Okay, so let's have a listen and will boost some of these frequencies. Ramallah, Ramallah. So this effect actually works really, really well when it's on the master channel. And it's something that you can apply to the build-up section right before the drop. Okay, so we'll have a look at that really quickly now. So I'll just turn this plug-in off so it's not affecting the vocal. And I'll turn back on all of the plugins. And what we'll do is we'll command to the master channel, and we'll open up the EQ and we'll apply the same settings. So a hash low-pass that trek up the queue of it, bring this right down, and then boost kind of around 200. Alright? And if you've listened to this, the whole trackless sound like it's outside the club. Maybe we'll just take out some Marty's high frequencies. And if you apply this to your build-up section and as the build-up is playing, you sort of automate this seven band to kind of open, let's say to kind of increase as the build-up is playing. So I'll just do that now. I'll highlight the buildup. And then I'll right-click and say, I'll right-click this, the frequency band, ok, so that moves this kind of open down. So I right-click this and select Create automation clip. And then if we come down to whether automation clip is and we can turn the right anchor point all the way up to the top so that it kind of opens as the build-up is playing. And you'll see that the buildup sounds like it's outside the club and then it gets much brighter and brighter until we get into the drop section where all of the frequencies or backend. I have a lesson. So this, this EQ effects, this is essentially teasing the listener. You know, you're only given them the kind of the lower portion of the frequencies. And as it starts to open up, the listener's hearing more and more of that full sound and they're getting excited, you know, they're getting, they're anticipating the drop when it comes with the fall out of the frequencies. You know what I mean? Now this outside the club effect sounds much better if you team it with a reverb plugin. So we'll just have a look at that really quickly. I'll open up the reverb and I'll just load maybe one of these presets, maybe large hall. And we'll just have a listen to what it sounds like. I'll turn down the wet gain as much. And actually I'll just turn down the decay just so it's not as much. China's wet and wet knob up again. Let's try putting this above the EQ and see what happens. If we start turning down this as well. If we start to automate the sort of this volume knob for the EQ. So the EQ slowly starts to fade out. We'll have a look at doing that now as well. So in the build-up, let's say the EQ kind of fades out as the build-up plays on. And then when we get to the drop section, there is no EQ in at all. Let's have a listen to what this sounds like. So we're kinda sounds as if the listener is sort of outside the club, standing in line, waiting to get in. And then they're kind of walking through and they're they're getting closer and closer to where the dance floor is, let say. And then as soon as the drop comes in there on the dance floor and yet they're getting that foal, that full sound of the frequencies and there's no more reverb. In the next lecture, we'll have a quick look at an advanced EQ technique, which is mid-side EQ. 83. Mid/Side EQ: So in this lecture, we're going to have a quick look at mid-side EQ, okay? And mid-side EQ is where you EQ the mono signal and the stereo signal separately. And this kind of technique is great for making sounds bigger and wider, and it's very simple. You are effectively using the same techniques as irregular EQ, but you're actually shaping the sound of the Mano signal first and then the stereo signal after. And the principle that works on is that concept we were talking about before where I was saying that if the information coming into your left ear is different to the information coming into your right ear, then the sound will feel like it's much wider. Now mid-side EQ is a kind of advanced mixing technique. And if you never use it, your track will still sound perfectly fine. But it's good to be aware that it does exist if you ever want to use it. Okay, so that's opened up an EQ plugin, okay? And the first thing I'm gonna say is not all EQs will actually allow you to do this, especially the kind of the stock plug-ins because this is an advanced techniques. So you will need to find another EQ that lets you do it ok. And I have one here which is the FAB filter procure. So if I open up this and we'll use this, I'm just gonna make it a little bit bigger so that we can see it. Okay? And if we have a look at this, the first thing you'll probably notice is that there is no bans on it. Ok. I remember in the other plug-in we had kind of 1-2-3, 4-5-6, seven. Well, unless we have none and that's because we can add in our own and we can add in as many of these bands as we like and as many as we, as we need. Okay, so I'm just going to set this back to default and we'll start again with no bands. So the sound we're going to be tweaking is this lead instrument. Ok, and the process is the same. We're going to find the nasty frequencies and cut them out. And then we're going to find the nice frequencies and shape the sound. Okay? But the difference is when we're cutting out the hash frequencies, we're going to be using the mid. And when we're shaping the sound, we're going to be using the site, okay? And the way we do this is we just add the point. Now some other plug-ins might have a button somewhere around on the interface that says they can change the different processing modes from, you know, from stereo into mid-side. But with this particular plugin, we just click down here and we change this band from stereo to mid. Okay, so now let's find some of the nasty frequencies and I'm gonna make the cue a bit more narrow. Okay? And that's fine, the nasty frequencies and kind of cut them out. Okay, so there's kind of a nasty frequency somewhere around here. So I'm going to bring the gain down and we'll just pull that out of it. Maybe not that much, maybe only by six db. Okay? And again, we'll add another band and it's already set to made. So we'll turn off the queue and we'd have a listen to some of the nasty frequencies. Ok, so there's another nasty frequency around here. So I'm going to pull that out by just dragging down on the gain knob. And we'll go again and try to find some art and nasty frequencies. Ok, there's another frequency and here I don't like, I'm going to pull that out like this. And we'll go again. So again, we'll turn off the queue and then we'll sweep through the frequencies and see what we can find. Okay, just one more hash frequency around here. So I'm going to pull that out like this. Ok, so let's listen to the sound now. And let's kinda play through and we'll turn off the plug-in and then turn it back on and we'll see what kind of a difference it's making. Ok, so we'll play through it with it off and then I'll turn it on halfway through. Ok, So now that we've got rid of some of the nasty frequencies, it's time to shape the sound. Okay, so we're going to add another band just down here for a second. And we're gonna change the processing mode from mid to cite. Okay? And now this band is going to be only affecting the stereo signals. So these mid bands, they're affecting the mono signal. And this side band is going to affect the stereo signal. So what we'll do is we'll use this to sweep through and find the nice frequencies and then will boost them. Okay? So first of all, we have to change the shape of it. And you can change it down here from low shelf too. I want a bell. Ok. And I'm just going to bring up the Q and a sweep through and find some nice frequencies. Okay, I kinda like the frequency's around here, so I'm just going to pull down, I'm going to pull down the gain, a small base. So it's not as aggressive. And I might narrow the queue just a small bit. And with bringing in another side band. And again, I'm going to have to change it from low shelf to Bell and narrow the queue. And then we'll sweep through and find some other nice frequencies, maybe not that narrow. Ok. Let's turn out. Okay, so I haven't found any frequencies that I like, but I have found a few frequencies that I don't like. And one of them is this, so I'm gonna pull this out, okay. And again. I know there's another one or two kind of areas that I don't like. So I'm going to find those and pull those out as well. Again, we have to change the shape. It's just something that happens when you add in a band too close to the edge. It assumes that you wanted to add a certain type of shape. But I want to change this back to Bell. So let's have a listen again. So I definitely don't like these frequencies here, these kind of low mids. Okay, so I'm gonna pull these out. And again, I think there's one more kind of frequency area that I don't like. So I'm going to pull that out as well. Okay. So let's sweep through and find that maybe with a less narrow came somewhere around here. Yeah, I'm going to pull this frequency out. So that's mid-side EQ. Okay? And if we look at the green bands, these are all the mids. And if we look at all these bands, these are the side EQs. And now I think this band is actually in stereo, so I have to change this to side. And again, there's a yellow on here and it should be blue. So I have to change this to side. I forgot to do that in the first place, but if we listen again now with the proper mid-side settings, it sounds like this. And if we turn the plugin off kind of half-way through the pattern, will notice the difference that the mid-side EQ is making. Not only to shape the sound, but also to make it feel a little bit wider and a little bit more full. Ok, so keep that in mind when you're listening. So I'll turn it off and then I'll turn it back on as it's playing. And the reason it sounds wider is because we've, we've made the EQ, so we've shaped the stereo, stereo sound. We've shaped that differently to the mid sound. So the two frequencies. So let's say there's one waveform for the mono signal and there is another wave form for the stereo signal. And where both of these were kind of the same before. Now they're different because we've changed the shape of this EQ, okay? And that's why the sound feels more full and it feels a little bit wider. Finally, like Oliver instruments, we have to cut out some of the low frequencies that we don't need. So I'm going to add in another band here, and this time we're going to keep it in stereo. Okay, so we're affecting both the mid and the side frequencies because we don't want any low end in this sound at all. Ok, so let's listen to the sound and we'll sweep through and find the point where it kind of loses most of the low frequencies that we don't need. If I move this, it actually kind of boost stat. So I'm just going to leave that where it is. And you can also change the slope. So you can change how steep it is with this 12 db per octave. And what that means is for every octave, this line is dropping by 12 decibels. So if I set this to 24, it'll be dropping twice, twice the volume level and per sort of octave on this, this EQ. Okay, so if I set this to 24, it'll make the line much steeper. So as you can see, it's kind of become a much steeper slope. So the higher you set this, the steeper the slope will be and the lower you said that the more kind of gradual slope will be. Okay. So let's have a listen and we'll find that spot where the low frequencies are eliminated. Okay, so I think this sounds pretty good. So I'm going to close that and we're ready now to apply it. Some compression. 84. Introduction to Compressors: In these few slides, we're going to learn all about compression and why we use it when we're mixing. It can be a very powerful tool when used correctly, but also a very destructive tool if it's used in the wrong way. So it's important to understand what it's doing and how to use it. So what is compression? While a compressor takes the dynamic range of a sound and effectively reduces it, it pushes the loudest parts of the signal down in volume, but leaves the quiet parts sort of untouched or at the original volume. Then when you boost the overall sound, the parts that were much quieter now sound much louder. And the final result is a dynamic range that is much less than the original dynamic range. So what is dynamic range? Well, it's very simple. It's just the difference in volume between the loudest parts of the sound and the quietest parts of the sound. So if you have a piece of music that is very loud in the chorus, but then it's very quiet in the verse. Then this would have a large dynamic range. If you take a look at the images on the right, then you can see these, these two waveforms, okay? The waveform on the top has a large dynamic range. The sound signal kind of on the very left, is clearly much bigger than the sound signal that's on the right. Whereas if you have a look at the wave form on the bottom, this waveform has a small dynamic range because all of the different sound signals seem to be the same size or kind of the same volume. And this dynamic range principle is how compression works. The image on the top would be a wave form before compression, and the image on the bottom would be a wave form after compression. So let's look at what some of the main parameters are and how you can use them. If we start from the left and work our way in, the first parameter is the threshold. This tells the compressor when it should turn on and start compressing. So if you want to compress all of the sound, you would turn the threshold all the way down. But if you only wanted to compress a very specific areas such as, you know, the very loudest parts of the sound. You would use the threshold to kind of find that point. This way, the compressor knows not to turn on unless the audio gets to a particular volume level. If the audio exceeds this threshold level, then the compressor will turn on and start compressing. The next parameter is the attack, and this tells the compressor how quickly it should turn on. This is useful for sounds like drums, where you still want that initial transient to be loud. If you turn the attack all the way down, the compressor will turn on immediately and compress all of the sound. But if you adjust the attacks so that the compressor trends on after a few milliseconds, then you can let that initial transient, or let's say the clicky part of a sound through so that it doesn't get compressed. Sometimes if your attack setting is too low, the sound will feel like it's kind of squashed. So if your sound is feeling a bit squashed, turn up the attack and it should make it feel a little bit more natural. Next we have the ratio, okay? And this is where we set how much compression we want to apply. You know, do we want the compressor to push as hard as it can, or do we want it to kind of push more gently and be more subtle? You should set this ratio anywhere between 110, okay, if you said it more than ten, That's actually no longer compression and we'll be taking a look at what this is in a few lectures. But if you are using compression, keep the ratio below ten. Now you can see with this compressor in the image, it actually won't allow you to set the ratio more than ten. So with this particular compressor, you won't make the mistake of putting the ratio too high. Release then is the opposite to the attack. How quickly do we want the compressor to turn off? If you set this really low, it can feel very robotic and the listeners will actually be able to hear the compressor in your track. If you set the release higher, it won't be as obvious, but you may end up compressing some parts of the sound that you didn't want to. For example, with vocals are high release time can sound very natural and very nice to the listener. But with drums, a high release time can kind of overlap with some of the drum elements and you might end up squashing Some of the transients that you didn't want to. And the reason for this is because the compressor is still on from the previous drum has and it accidentally catches the start of the next drum head. So for drums, a lower release time can work better at the end of the day, it's all about how it sounds. So if it sounds good, it is good. Finally, we have the makeup gain, and this is designed to make up any of the volume that you may have lost while compressing. So because the compressor is reducing the loudest parts of a sound, it's going to also reduce the overall volume. So we can use this makeup gain to turn the volume back up to where it was in the first place. Now we can also use this gain parameter to push the volume even louder than it was before, okay? But be careful not to use this too much or the sound will become distorted. So what are some further tweaks that we can use with a compressor? Well, on some compressors, you will find a parameter to change the shape of the knee. And the knee is kind of like the attack, but there's one slight difference. So remember with the attack, we're setting how quickly the compressor turns on. Well, with the knee were setting how aggressively the compressor turns on? Does a turn on immediately and, you know, instantly start compressing the sound? Or does it kind of warm up and gradually start to compress the sound? The knee is great for making the compressor sound a little bit less obvious. It also works great on vocals, pianos, and also on boss channels. We'll actually be looking at the NEA again when we're using something called Glue compression. We also have multiband compressors. Okay? And if you remember from the EQ section, we had seven bands on our EQ plugin. And we can move them to kind of focus on different frequencies. Well, it's the same thing with a compressor. We can actually compress the low frequencies different to the way that we compress the high frequencies. And this is really useful because sometimes the low end can be very loud, but the high-end can be very quiet. And if we were to use a normal compressor, it would just reduce the volume of both. But if we use a multiband compressor, we could apply compression to only the low end, which would then make the sound much brighter and allow the high frequencies through. So this is all the theory that we need to know. Now we can jump in and start using a compressor for our tracks. 85. Determining When To Use Compression: So in this lecture, we're going to learn when to apply compression. So we're going to look at how you know when compression is needed. Ok, so let's solo the vocals here. Okay? I'll just solo these and we'll have a look at them. And actually I saw them in the mixer track, but we'll have a look at their sort of volume levels. Ok, so I'm looking at this vocal track now. And I can see here the level meter. Ok, so this is showing me a sort of live updates to all the different volume levels and the sound. So we can see, we can see here with this, see this bit that's falling down, okay? This here. And then it falls. This is your peak meters. So this tells us the level of the loudest part of the signal. And we can see with this vocal, it's around nine, okay, around nine decibels, somewhere between 96. So I don't know, maybe seven. Okay. So it sat around seven decibels. But if we look at the rest of the signal down here, we can see that this is where the signal is kind of an average of and this peak is where the loudest parties. So we can see that the difference between the loudest and the quietest parts of the signal is huge. Okay? And this is the dynamic range. And we can see that there's a huge dynamic range with this particular sound. So because this sound has a large dynamic range, then we need to use compression to kind of reduces. Okay? So what we do is we come over and we load our compressor plug-in and we go through all the settings until the dynamic range is sort of reduced. So maybe it would be up here and the quietest part might be down here. It won't be down here anymore. Okay. But on the opposite end of this, if we come over to something like the organ sound that I have somewhere over here, I'll just find it in the playlist. Ok, here it is, on 29. So if I solo this and we have a listen, well you can see that the peak, the sound is here. But the kind of average is down here. Okay, so there's actually not much of a difference between the loudest and the quietest parts of the sound. So with this particular sound, we might not even use compression at all. Ok? Now, we might use a compressor very, very suddenly are very gently because it actually, it doesn't need compression as it is. Because as you can see, the loudest part of the signal is very, very close to the quietest part of the signal. And this is the easiest way to determine whether a sound needs compression or not. Okay, if we come over to some of these other instruments, but have a look at the piano. So we can see the peak of the sound is up here and the average is somewhere down here. Okay? So this kind of sound would need compression because the dynamic range is very large. Let's have a look at another sound, maybe this synthesizer instrument. Ok. And again, the dynamic range is kind of moderate. Alright, so the peak is up here and the average is somewhere down here. So we might apply compression to this, but with a much gentler setting. Let's have a look at one more type of sound. Maybe this electric piano. Let's see what this sounds like. Okay, so this again has a huge dynamic range. So it's kind of the peak of the sound is up here, and the average is down here. So this particular sound would benefit from the uses of compression. And again, if we just have a look at this next instrument, which I think is another synthesizer. The dynamic range isn't that, it's not that big, okay, you can see the peak is here and the average is somewhere down here. So the peak and the average are very close together. Which means that this particular sound has a small dynamic range and we might not even apply compression at all. Ok? And if we do, it would be very, very subtle. So with all that being said, let's move on now to the next lecture where we'll have a look at how to use compression. 86. How To Use Compression: So in this lecture, we're going to learn the techniques that you will apply when you're using compression. Okay, let's come up to this synthesizer elements and we'll just have a listen to what it sounds like. Ok, and I can see it's on track nine in the mixer. So I'm going to find it and it's already highlighted for us. So the first thing we must do is determine whether or not this sound actually needs compression. Okay, so if we come over here to this level meter and we'll have a look at what the sound is doing as it place. So I can see that the peak is somewhere around here, and then the kind of average of the sound is around here. All right, so it's not a huge dynamic range, but we're still going to apply compression just for the sake of demonstrating how to use us. So if we come over here to our effects slots and reload a compressor plugin. So I'm going to use this e compressor. And when it opens, we can see that the, well, first of all, the interface is fairly old looking, but that's okay because we still have all of the sort of parameters that we need. We have threshold ratio, attack, release, and the makeup gain. This over here is called the attenuation. And this shows us when the compressor is actually turning on, okay? And you'll see that in action as we apply the compression settings. Okay, so the first step that we're gonna do is we're going to adjust the ratio. So, so I'm going to turn this up to maybe, let's just say maybe 3.5, okay. And we might change this after depending on how it sounds, but I'm just gonna leave it at 3.5 for the moment. And then we're going to adjust this threshold, okay? As the sound is playing. And we'll watch over here for when the compressor is turning on. And you'll, you'll be able to see that, you know, the compressor. The further down we pulled this threshold, the more the compressor will be working to really push the sound. Okay, so let's adjust this threshold and we watch what's happening on the attenuation meter. Okay, so now when we're adjusting the threshold, we kind of have to find a point that sounds good, but also isn't isn't being compressed too much because you don't want it to sound very obvious. So usually somewhere between kind of six and between 06 dB is fine for compression. Okay, so what we're gonna do is we're going to have a lesson, a justice until it sounds good. And then we'll leave it at that level. Okay? So we can see that the average of the attenuation is kind of around three and the peak is somewhere between 69. Okay? The next parameter that we have to adjust is the attack, ok? And this is what's causing that. I don't know if you can hear it, but a sort of kind of clicky and distorted sound at the very start of the notes, right? It doesn't sound very pleasurable. But as we increase this attack, you'll notice that, that, that clicky sound is gone. Okay? And the reason the clicky sound as in there is because the compressor is turning on immediately and it's kind of compressing all of the sound. And that just doesn't sound very natural to our ears. Okay, so let's play the pattern and we'll adjust this attack until data. That clicky sound is gone. Okay, maybe somewhere around here, the clicky sound has done and might even increase it a bit more. Next we have to adjust the release parameter. So we're going to again increase it until we find a point where it sounds nice. And now this is kind of a subtle parameter, or you might be able to hear it very well. But I'm just really listen to the sound and kind of find a point where you think the compressor sounds good. Okay, so if I turn this write up, It's actually, as you can see here, it's catching, all of the sound is catching the start of the next note. Whereas if I lower this down, it's turning off very quickly. So it's up to you really, if you want to catch all of the sound, or do you want to only catch some of the sound? Now I kinda like the sound when the releases turned to pi. I think it sounds kind of smooth and it's kind of akin to buttery graphics. I think it sounds very nice with the settings. We're going to leave it there. Next we have to adjust the makeup gain, okay? And we can see over here how much gain reduction is happening. So it's somewhere between six decibels and nine decibels. So I'm going to adjust my makeup gain two around that, around 60 V. That might be a bit load. If we listen, if we actually play it up to 60 B, you can see that's really, really loud. So let's maybe not put this up to six dB and we'll just kind of adjusted as we're listening and Missy will find a point that sounds good for the makeup gain. So maybe around there, maybe around 1.7. And your compressor might be completely different. I know with most compressors, when you turn this to the same value as you're kind of attenuating by. It can sound good. But whatever algorithm this compressor is using, it seems to be a lot kind of louder. So it really just depends on the compressor plugin that you're using. But you have to use your ears, okay? Not your eyes. So you really have to listen to the sound and find a point where it sounds good, not, not look at the parameters and see what looks good, okay, because that doesn't really matter. It's how it sounds. So let's have a quick listen to the pattern without compression and then we'll turn the compressor on kind of halfway through. And if I want that compressor to be a bit more aggressive, I can turn up the ratio, so I can adjust this from 3.5 to maybe seven. Or I can turn it all the way up to ten. But I'm noticing a tiny bit of distortion is coming in here when it's set to ten. So I'm gonna put this back down and maybe we'll leave it where we had us at 3.5. because I liked the sound of that. So in the next lecture, we'll look at compression for instruments. And we might use some different compressor plug-ins to kinda see the different interfaces that you might have to deal with. 87. Compression for Instruments: So in this lecture, we're going to have a look at using compression for instruments. Okay, so let's come into one of these instruments patterns that we didn't look at in the last lecture, which is this one. And I can see that it's, I can see that it's on track six and the mixer. Okay, so here it is. So what we'll do is we'll look at the level meter and determine whether or not this sound needs compression. So I can see the peak is up here around 15. And the kind of average of the sound is down here. Okay, so this has a sort of moderate dynamic range. So this sound could benefit from compression. So let's load up a compressor and we'll use a different compressor to last time. So last time we used this E compressor, this time we'll use maybe solid dynamics. And you can see that this compressor looks completely different to the other compressor, but we still have all of the same parameters. Okay? We have threshold, we have a ratio, we have the release. We have a button to switch between a fast attack and a slow attack. And we also have a knee here. So this is kind of a gradual knee. And this is a very aggressive needs, just turns on very suddenly. And we also have the makeup gain over here. And then right in the middle, we have this attenuation meters. So this is going to tell us how much compression the compressor is actually applying. Okay? So let's first adjusted ratio parameter, okay? And we can turn it, I think between one and up here, six or infinity. Okay? So I'm just going to leave it at maybe 3.5 again. We'll just leave it here. And we might change this value after if the sound is kind of more out of control. Okay? The next thing we're gonna do is we're going to turn this threshold back to 0. Ok? And then we're going to listen to the sound. And we'll turn it up until we find the point where the attenuation is reading on this attenuation meter. And also, it sounds good to our ears. Okay, so let's put this back to 0 and we'll have a listen to the sound. And I'll adjust this threshold as the sound is playing and we'll find that point. So I can see it's metering there on the attenuation meter. I'm gonna push it a bit more. Okay, maybe 17.1. And now I think I'm going to actually turn up the ratio a small bit. Okay, I'm gonna turn it up to maybe, let's try 4.2. Let's hear what this sounds like. Okay, and we can switch between a fast and a slow attack. Let's see what a slow attack sounds like. And let's turn that back off. So after listening to that, I actually think it's the other way around. I think when this is turned down, this is a fast attack. So it's kind of catching the sound immediately. It's catching it as soon as it begins. And then if we turn this off, it's a slow attack. And it's kind of letting the first part of that sound through its only catching kind of the second half of these nodes. Now I prefer the sound with the slow attack, so I'm going to leave the setting. I'm going to leave the setting their next we have to adjust the release. So let's have a listen to the pattern again. And we've turned off this release until we find a point that we like. And if we don't find a point, we're like we'll just leave it back at kind of the default setting, which is very, very short, Okay? So I think this is kind of really setting is too much. So I'm gonna bring this down. And maybe we'll leave it somewhere around 15 milliseconds. Okay, and now let's try the different knees settings. So at the moment it's set to a soft d10. Okay, but let's try what it sounds like when we switch to a hardening. Ok, so let's switch kind of half-way through the pattern. And you can hear instantly that it sounds much more aggressive with this hardening selected. So I'm gonna leave it back on the soft money because I prefer the sound of the kind of subtle compression. Okay? So now we're going to adjust the makeup gain. And I can see with the attenuation meter that it's kind of around 36. Ok, so it's the sixth light is kind of lighting up sometimes, but the three light is always on. Okay, so I'm going to adjust this makeup gain between maybe 36 db. So let's have a listen and will adjust this. But if it starts to get too loaded like the last lecture, we'll, we'll turn it down and we'll find a point where it sounds good. So maybe 4.5 dB. And we also have this dry parameter, okay? And the dry parameter is for parallel compression. So what this does is it mixes in the original signal. Okay, so the signal without compression, which sounds like this, it mixes this in to the signal that does have compression. Okay? And if we use this, if we use this, we can really kind of make the sound a little bit more full, okay? Because what it's doing is it's taking all of the good parts of the dynamic range from the original signal. And it's also adding this to the kind of control sound of the compressor. And you're kind of getting the best of both worlds. It can also make the sound a little bit more punchy. So this kind of parallel compression setting, this works well for drums. So we'd ever listened to the pattern and while it's playing will adjust this dry parameter, which will add in some parallel compression. Okay, so let's have a listen. And if we push this up, it's actually going to boost the volume because we're mixing two sort of signals together. So just be careful not to put this to high and start again. So let's maybe keep it around 28 here. We just want to be subtle with it. I don't want this particular sound to be to punchy. So let's have a listen to the sound before compression, and then we'll have a listen to the sound after compression. And let's very quickly choose another instrument pattern and we'll just apply some very, very quick compression. So maybe this, whatever, these distorted Keyczar. And I think these might be the electric piano yet. So it's on track 10010, which is here. Okay. So when we're looking at the level meters, we can see that the peak is up here and the average is somewhere way down here. So this sound could definitely use compression. Okay, so I'm going to load a compressor. And again, let's just try a different compressor for the sake of demonstration, let's try this VC 2A. And you can see that again, the interface looks completely different, okay? And we actually don't have as many parameters. We only have this peak reduction parameter, which is the threshold, okay? We don't have the option to change the ratio. We don't have the option to change the attack. We don't have the option to change the release. Okay? And that's because this particular plugin has all of those kind of parameters built-in. Okay, so whatever algorithm, the Native Instruments, so whatever algorithm they have built, they think it sounds perfectly fine. And all you need to be able to use this, okay? And you'll get that, you'll get some compressors that have more parameters and you'll get compressors that have less parameters. What they've given us instead is this input gain, okay? So we turn up the input gain to kind of tell the compressor how much of the compression sound we want to get. Okay, so I'm going to play the sound. And I'm going to adjust this. I'm going to turn off the input gain. Okay, so I'm not getting any sound at all out of my software. So I have to come up here to the audio settings and just kind of flick between these two different output devices. And it should reset it. Okay, so sounds when we sat and let's adjust this input gain and will ever listen to what the compressor is doing. So we'll find a point where this input gain sounds nice. Ok, maybe not too much, maybe a bit more than that. And the next thing we'll do is we'll adjust the threshold. So as the sound is playing, I'll adjust the threshold and we'll keep an eye on this attenuation meters. So this is going to move this way to tell us when the compressor is actually compressing. Okay, let's have a listen. Okay, so it's moving now. I'm going to push it a bit more. And maybe a bit more than that. Ok, I think that's too much. Let's just pull it back. Okay, so I think that sounds better. We also have this dry knob over here where we can do some parallel compression, but I'm not gonna do parallel compression for this particular sound. Will just have a listen to what the pattern sounds like before compression. And then we'll have a listen to what it sounds like after compression. So this is before compression. And this is after compression. So this is the process that you'll use when you are compressing your instruments. In the next lecture, we'll have a look at compression for base. 88. Compression for Bass: So in this lecture, we're going to have a look at compression for base. Now we're gonna be using the exact same process as all the other compression that we apply. But the only difference is with the base, we're going to be using a much higher ratio. Okay? So we're gonna be using a ratio somewhere between six is to 110 is to one. Okay, so let's come into this base pattern here and have a listen to what it sounds like. Ok, and we'll open it up on the mixer so I can see it's on track eight. So if we click in here, this is the base instrument, okay? And we'll have a look again at the levels. And I can see that it's peaking above 15 and the average is kind of somewhere down here. Okay, so it's not a massive dynamic range, but we're still going to apply compression because it's a bass instrument and the base frequencies are very, very heavy, so we don't want them getting out of control. Let's come over here to our effect slots and we'll load up a compressor plug-in. Okay, let's load a different one. And then what we've been using so far, let's pick maybe this liquid compressor two. And again, when it opens, we can see that the interface is completely different, but we still have the same parameters. We have a threshold, we have a ratio, we have an attack time. I release time. We have an option to change the knee between hard and soft. And we also have a Makeup Gain kind of parameter over here where we can adjust the makeup gain, okay, and reset that. We also have a gain reduction meter, which is also the attenuation meter. We'll show us when the compressor is actually doing some compression. Okay? So the first thing we're gonna do with the bass is we're gonna set the ratio quite high. Okay, so I'm going to turn it all the way up to around eight. Okay, so 8.3 is to one. And we'll ever listen to what this sounds like Now. Okay? And it's not going to actually make any difference until we change the threshold. So what we're gonna do is we're going to reduce the threshold, bring it down until we see the gain reduction meter is telling us that the compressor is doing some compression. So let's have a listen to the sound and we'll adjust this threshold parameter. So I can see now that the gain reduction meter is kind of peaking and it's showing us how much compression the compressor is actually applying. So it's somewhere down. I can't really see that. But I think it's kind of between 15, so maybe three. Ok, so we might adjust the threshold a bit more. But now I can hear that this is actually, this is making a big difference to the overall sound of the bass. So I'm going to bring that backup, okay? Because they don't like the sound of it when it's kind of set at 20. I don't think it sounds as natural. Let's bring this back to Bill, actually, 19.1, that actually sounds OK. Next we'll adjust the attack time. Do we want the compressor to turn on very quickly and catch all of the notes. Or if we wanted to turn on slowly and let some of the nodes through. Well, when the attack time is quite fast, we're actually losing some bass frequencies. So I think it sounds better when the attack time is quite slow. So I'm going to bring this right up to maybe 28.5 milliseconds. Next, we'll adjust the release time. So let's bring this all the way down. And we'll bring it all the way up. So I prefer the sound of this release time quite slow, okay, I think it sounds, if you, if you listen to the bass, it sounds very smooth appear when, when the release time is very high. But I don't like that. I want the base to sound more aggressive and more punchy. Okay, so now the bass drum and not the bass drum, sorry, the base. So now the base sounds like it's kind of punching. Finally, we'll adjust the makeup gain. So we look at the gain reduction meter. It's not actually doing that much. So maybe we will only turn us over by maybe one or two db. Ok. And this particular compressor gives us two sort of levels that we can monitor. We can monitor what's coming in, which was this. And the signal then coming out of the compressor is this. Let's have a listen to what the base pattern sounds like without compression. And then we'll turn it on kind of half-way through the pattern. Okay? So for the base, you're going to apply compression in the exact same sort of process that we were doing for the instruments. And what you're going to set the ratio much higher, okay, somewhere between 610. In the next lecture, we'll have a look at compression for drums. 89. Compression for Drums : In this lecture, we're going to look at compression for drums. And it's not exactly what you think. And the reason that it's not exactly what you think is because when you drag in a drum sample into your, into your arrangement, it's already compressed. Okay, this sound here, this is already compressed. Remember I was saying before that the sounds you get in sample packs are already layered for you and they already sound good. Well, part of why they already sound good is because they're actually compressed for you, okay? And the way we can tell if a sample has been compressed for us already is if we add it to the mixer track like this, and we reset the slider back to 0. And if we watch this level meter, if the sample is hitting 0 here, 0 dB, then that particular sound, that particular sample has already been compressed, even if we turn off all of these plug-ins over here. So if we watch all the plugins are off, the volume is back to kind of the default setting. And if we watch the level meter, it'll be hitting 0 here. Okay? So this sound is already compressed. We don't need to apply compression to this particular sound because it's already compressed. And again, if I load any of these drum samples, they're all compressed because when you pull them out of the sample pack through already compressed for you. So again, I'm going to turn this back up to 0. Just turn off the compressor and the EQ. And then we'll have a look at this level meter and we'll see that the sample, okay, it's hitting 0. So there's no need for us to go and compress this again. And again. If we look at this, which is this sort of clicky closed task, again, if we reset this back to 0, turn off the plugins and we have a look at the level meter. It's hitting 0. Ok? And the thing is, if you go and apply a compressor on top of these already compressed sounds, you're gonna end up making your drums sound really, really squashed. Okay, so basically, my advice from this lecture and which is compression for drums, is to not compress your drums. Ok, don't apply compression to your drum samples because they're already compressed for you. And the same thing applies to drum loops, okay, if I come into my sample pack and we'll just drag in a drum loop. So I'll come in here to my loops really, really quickly. Just find a loop Dragon, which is maybe this one. Let's just take this, drag it in here. And I'll solo that and just loop it so we can kinda hear playing over and over. Right, if I add this to the mixer track. And first of all, even before we've played it, I can see that these samples here, whatever this is, it's actually hitting the top and it's hitting the bottom. So this, this loop is already compressed. So there's no affects. The volume is set at kind of the default. And if we watch the level meter, it's hitting 0. Okay? So this loop does not need to be compressed. It's already compressed for us. I'm actually going to expand on this point at the very, very end of this compression section. And, but for now, you need to be aware that your individual drum samples, like the kick or the clap or the hash, or even your drum loop here. These do not need to be compressed because when you pull them out of the sample pack, there already compressed. So when you come to compress your drum samples, do what I did. Turn off all the plugins, reset the volume back to the default, and then have a look at the level meter. And if the sound is already hitting 0, then there's no need to compress that particular drum sample or that external loop. In the next lecture, we'll have a look at compression for vocals. 90. Compression for Vocals: So in this lecture, we're going to have a look at applying compression two vocals, okay? And the process of this is no different to applying compression to any other element like your instruments. So let's go ahead and open up the vocals in the mixer track, and we'll just have a listen to what they sound like on their own. And if we have a look at the level meter and we kind of determined whether or not this sound needs compression or not. We can see that the peak of the sound is kind of up here around nine, between 69. And the average of the signal is somewhere right down here, it's close to the bottom. So this particular sound, this could definitely use compression. So let's come over here to our slots and we'll add in a compressor. Let's add a different compressor this time, let's maybe add the FAA 770, this BT compressor. Or actually I think we use this when I'm ready. Let's just replace this with maybe the CPS one. Okay. We'll just try this one. Okay, this is a different one. So again, you can see that the interface is different. I just wanted to go through different compressors and kind of show you how the interfaces are different. Book the kind of parameters that you can tweak are the same. Okay, so we have to threshold. We have the attack, we have a ratio, and we have a release. And then over here we also have the makeup gain. Okay? So let's go ahead and set the ratio to maybe a bit higher. I'm gonna set it up to a 4.5. And I can see the sort of the reading here, the value of what the ratio is setup. And then I'm going to adjust the threshold as the vocals are playing. And the kind of find a point where this attenuation measure is kind of reading and also where it sounds good. Okay, so let's have a listen now. Okay, so this meter is clearly reading. We can see that the needle is moving from sort of the 0 position right past seven db. So this compressor is doing a lot of gain reduction and I don't want it to be doing this much gain reduction. I kind of want the compressor to be subtle on the vocals. So let's actually reduce this threshold of it. Just so it's more subtle. Okay, so now it's only catching the really loud parts of the signal and it's kind of letting the quieter parts through. Okay, next we can set our attack. So I'm going to listen to the vocal as a place. And I'm gonna set this all the way back down to the smallest value and will sweep through and have a listen to what each value sounds like. Edges can again. Okay, and I think when the attack time is really low and it sounds a bit strange. I can, I can hear the compression when the attack time is really low, especially because it's a vocal. We, as humans are very adept to listening to the voice. Okay, so, so even if your listener has absolutely no idea about music production, does still be able to hear the compressor on the vocals. Or worse, still kind of noses that there's something wrong and, but they don't know what it is, but they know that they didn't like the sound of it. So I'm going to set this attack time a little bit higher. Maybe up to about 30 milliseconds, maybe even a small bit Mar. And next we're going to set the release time. Ok, so again, drag it down to the bottom and we'd ever listened to each sort of value and what that does to the sound of the vocals. So I think I kind of like the sound of the release when it was somewhere around the 300 to 500 mark. So I'm going to leave it somewhere in between. And now we're going to come over to our makeup gain. And we can see that the compressor is reducing the signal by about seven decibels. And I'm not going to push the makeup gain that much. I might just push it by maybe four or five decibels and we'll see what happens. Ok. So that's 5.2 decimals. We might push it a bit more, maybe up to 6.626. So now let's have a listen to the vocal without compression. And then as it's playing alternative compressor back on and we can see what kind of a differences making folds is bad, don't edges. And if we listen to what this sounds like in the mix, it sounds like this. Okay, and next we're going to have to apply compression to these sort of vocal, that vocals. Okay, So these are over here in the sort of chorus section. And if I just saw this and I will have to solo the carrier, they sound like this. And if we have a look at the level meter, and we can see that the peak is kind of up here around the nine. And the average is maybe somewhere around 15. Okay, so it's not a huge dynamic range, but we're still going to apply the compressor. And we're gonna put the compressor after the vocoder here because we want to compress the sound of the vocoder as well. And we don't want the compressed sound going into the Vocoder. I want to compress this whole sound as a kind of a total sound. Okay, so let's load another compressor and we'll try maybe this very comp. And as you can see, this compressor again has a different interface, but we have an input knob. We have an output and we have this threshold, okay? We also have attack and the recovery here. This is your release, okay, so how quick does a kind of recover? So the input again is how much kind of sound we're going to get out of the compressor. And the output is your makeup gain. And then all of the other parameters are the same as what we've been looking at before. We also have the attenuation sort of needle over here and it'll show us kind of how much the compressor is compressing. We don't have an option to change the ratio. And that's because this plugin has that ratio value built in. Okay, so let's have a listen to the sound of this vocoder. And I'm going to reset these parameters back to sort of 0. Set this back to 0. And now we can start to tweak this input again. Let's just booze as boosted slightly by maybe 3.8 decibels. And then we'll come to the threshold and will adjust this as the sound is playing. Now I can see what the needle that it's, it's kind of reducing the sound by maybe two decimals. So I'm just gonna push that a little bit more. Okay, so after listening to this plug-in, I actually think that this threshold is kind of the opposite way around. I think this way is kind of more compression. If we look over here and this way is less compression. Okay, so I'm going to, I'm actually going to adjust it the opposite direction. Okay. So it's kind of peaking up to now. And I'm just going to push it a little bit further. Okay. And we can see that it's kind of between 24, which I'm assuming is three. And what we can do is we can boost the makeup gain by about 3dB. Let's just try and maybe 2.51. Okay. I think this is loud enough. I don't think we need to go any further. And let's just have a look at the attack. Let's see what happens if we boost the attack all the way up to like a fast attack time. And let's try a slow attack time now. Now because these are backing vocals, because they're playing at the same time as the main vocal. I don't want these getting out of control, so I'm going to leave the attack time fast and I know it kinda sounds more dynamic when the attack is set to really slow. But I think it sounds better for the purpose of what they're doing, which is backing vocals. I think it's better to leave the attack set too fast. Let's come up to the recovery, which is also the release. And we'll try tweaking this parameter. So I think it sounds a little bit better with the release time kind of slower. And I think I said this before anyway about vocals. Higher release times kind of sound better on a vocal. A kinda makes it feel a little bit more smooth. So let's see what this sounds like with the other vocal. We might turn it down as morbid. And let's see what it sounds like in the mix, okay? But some of it, and I'll just mute this organ sound because the AMP is making noise. Okay? So that's kind of the process that you'll use when you're using compression for your vocals. The only thing you have to be aware of is that different compressors have different interfaces and different parameters that they'll give you, okay? And sometimes you'll have to play around with these parameters to kinda figure out how they work. You know, is twisting it to the right to turn it off, or is twisting it to the left to turn it off. In the next lecture, we'll have a look at compression for buses. And this is also known as glue compression. 91. Glue Compression: So in this lecture, we're going to have a look at compression for buses, which is also known as Blue compression. And it's called Glue compression because it's actually used to glue different sounds together. It's a very light are subtle form of compression, often used on both channels to blue the individual elements together and make them sound a little bit more related. So because it's a subtle form of compression, Ronnie going to be applying a small ratio of less than 3.5. So I have this bus channel setup and there's four different sounds that are playing a very similar pattern. Okay? And I want to use this bus channel. I want to use this to glue all of these individual sounds together a little bit more. So let's come over here to these effects lattes and we'll load up a compressor plug-in. Now there are compressors out there that are deliberately made for this, such as this kinda solid bus camps. So this, this compressor is designed for gluing different elements together, but we're gonna do it with a different compressor and we're gonna use just a normal compressor, maybe this vec1 60. And I can see now with this compressor, okay, there's no ratio parameter, okay? And we need a ratio parameter to be able to do the bus compression properly. So I'm going to replace this with a different compressor that does have a ratio parameter. So let's use, so let's use this CPS one. I know we've used it before, but I just want to use a compressor that has ratio now. But because the ratio is important for glue compression, we're gonna use a ratio of nothing above 3.5. So we're going to leave it may be down a two. Okay? And now we'll have a listen to all of these four layers playing together. And I'll find a nice threshold. And again, we only want the attenuation to be, to be very gentle. Okay, we don't want this needle to be jumping sort of all over the interface. Okay, so let's play the pattern and we'll adjust as threshold. So as you can see, the needle is only moving very slightly. And because glue compression has to be subtle, we're gonna make sure that the attack time is very high. Okay? And we're also gonna make sure that the release time is very high. Maybe five hundred and one hundred and thirty two appear. And the makeup gain, because we're not doing that much of a reduction, I'm only going to boost it by a very small amount. Maybe 1.6 even that might be too much. Maybe around, whoops, maybe around one. Let's have a listen. And let's turn this plug-in off and then we'll turn it on again, kind of half-way through the pattern. Okay. Let's have a listen. So I'm not sure if you can notice that. Okay. I'm not sure if you can kind of hear how it very, very subtly kind of glues the sound together and you definitely won't hear it unless you're on headphones are kind of good speakers. But the compression, I can hear that it is actually, it's doing something very, very gently and very subtly to just make these sounds kind of blend together a little bit better. Let's have a listen again. And I'll turn it off kind of half-way through the pattern and then back on again. So glue compression is grazed to apply to your boss channels, okay? And you will have already, like you'll, you'll still apply the compression to these instruments, ok, the compressor and solid dynamics. I have compressors are ready on these instruments, but the glue compression is just used to kind of blend those sounds a little bit better together. So, so definitely if you are using these boss channels and apply this blue compression technique, because it will make all of the elements sort of fit together better. In the next lecture, we'll have a look at multi-band compression. 92. Multiband Compression: So in this lecture, we're going to have a look at multi-band compression, okay? And a multiband compressor works the same as any other compressor. We're gonna apply the same techniques. The only difference is that it's like having three different compressors in the one plug-in. So let's load a multiband compressor up in our affects Ladd. Okay, so I'm gonna choose this ozone seven dynamics. And we can see when it loads that it looks completely different to any other sort of interface we've been looking at before. But that's okay because again we have ratio attack, release and the GNI. And we also have threshold here. And over here, we have the makeup gain, okay? And the only difference is that this is the pink compressor that kind of corresponds to this frequency band. So once I set it, everything before 417, so this way, we're compressing all of this. And in this blue compressor, it's between 4172 thousand were compressing this. And with the yellow we're compressing this and with the red where compressing this. Okay? So this, these sort of bands up here, these are the only difference between a multiband compressor and normal compressor. And we're going to apply it to this piano sound that I have track. But the first thing we need to do before we even apply any compression is we need to set these bands. So we need to make sure that these bands are set correctly for the sound we're listening to. So I'm going to solo the low band and we're gonna find the low frequencies of the piano. So we just want to do with the low frequencies. Next, we'll ever listened to this mid-range band. Okay? Maybe move it down a bit. And then we listened to the high mids and we'll see is this range Correct? I think it's taken in too much high end. Okay, and finally, we'll have a listen to this really high, this high band here. Okay, so now these bands are set correctly for the sound that we want to compress. We're ready to start compressing. So let's solo this low-frequency here. And I'm going to reset the threshold. So the first thing we're gonna do is we're going to set the ratio. And because it's a low frequency, I want to set this a little bit higher. Maybe 5.2. We'll bring down the threshold. Okay. Maybe not that much. And we can see here with the red, sort of the red meter that this is the attenuation. So this is how much compression is being applied. Next, we'll set the attack. And if you set this to low, especially with the piano, you'll get a distorted sound. I don't know if you can hear it. So we're going to set the attack a little bit higher. Maybe party. Next we set the release, okay, and again with the piano, I kinda wanted to sound smooth. So I'm going to set the release a little bit higher. Maybe around 200, or maybe even as Mother Moore. And I'm just going to come up and switch smack disable for my plug-ins, just so that I can kind of give more processing power to this particular plugin. Oops. Where did that go? Here does. Okay. And next we'll look at tweaking this blue, this blue compressor. Okay? Again, turn up a threshold and we'll soloist so we can hear what we're doing. And I'm going to set the ratio a bit over two, maybe 3.5. turned down the threshold. Now I think that's a bit too much. I think we're kind of cutting some of the piano sound out. Herbert, sort of cutting the attack of the piano, the sort of aggressive sound. And I wanted to keep that in. So I think that's an okay setting. Let's move on now to the attack. And again, I'm going to put this up to kinda the same as the first. So maybe around 30. And again with this up to around 400 like we had in the first, the first compressor. So let's have a listen to what this sounds like. Okay, and we'll compress the next band, which is this yellow band. Again, set the threshold all the way up. And we're going to turn this ratio maybe not as much as the last one, maybe around three. And we'll keep the attack the same as the last time, and we'll keep the release the same as the last time. Like this, maybe 393, that's fine. And we'll bring down the threshold as the sound is playing. And I'm putting too much of the piano sound out there. Okay, so I think that sounds better. And we'll move on to the last compressor, which is this high, these high frequencies. And we're going to leave the ratio R two, maybe even bring that down a bit because we don't want to compress as much as the high frequencies, because the high frequencies of a piano, they sound quite nice. A piano sounds nice when it's bright. Okay, so again, we're gonna keep the attack the same, maybe around 30 and keep the released the same. And then we're going to bring down this threshold as the sound plays. Okay, so let's have a listen to all of the bands in together at the same time. Now we can go back into all of these bands and apply the makeup gain. So with this particular band, we're really losing a sort of a decibel level of around four. Okay, so I'm going to boost this by four. Then I'm going to solo this band. And we're going to have a look at where the gain reduction is with this one. So again, it's around 4.8. So I'm going to boost this by around 4.8. You're going up maybe 4.6, and then will come into the next band and solo it. And we can see that the gain reduction is around maybe 2.8 to 0.9. So we'll bring up the gain, the makeup gain by about that, by around 2, maybe, maybe 2.7. And then will come into this final band here. And we'll have a look at the gain reduction. And it's maybe one decibels or we'll bring this up by about one, maybe 1.5. So now let's listen to the kind of the full sound of the compressor. And if I turn the compressor off here. So you can see that the compressor is actually making the sound a little bit more full. I'll just, I'll play it again and I'll turn it on kinda halfway through and you can have a listen yourself. So multi-band compression is useful for this. It's useful for making a sound a little bit more full. And, but it's also useful for when some frequencies of the sound don't need to be compressed. So what you can do is you can compress maybe the low, and you can leave the high uncompressed. In the next lecture, we'll have a look at what a limiter is. 93. Limiters: Let's find out what a limiter is and how we can use them in our tracks. So a limiter is the exact same as the compressor, except that the ratio must be set above ten. Now, 99.9% of the time, you won't use a limiter in your mix. Okay? It's more so something that we put on the master channel when we come to mastering. But we can use it for instruments that are particularly out of control. So you'll never need to use a limiter on your instruments like this. You won't need to use a limiter on these instruments or anything else, really, for that matter, the only thing, the only thing that you might use a limiter for would be a base. Ok? Just solid the base. Okay, and maybe if we come over to this sort of section where the base has long notes. This is the only case where you might use a limiter. Okay? So first of all, if we were to take a compressor here, like this one, and if we were to turn the ratio up as high as it goes, and in this case it goes up to 20. This will be limiting. So anything above ten is limiting. Alright? So if I turn this up to 20, were now limiting the sound. And if I bring the threshold down a small bit, you can hear that the whole instrument is under control. Okay? Now if we were to load an actual limiter plugin, which bear in mind, is just a compressor with a high ratio. And you may also get a parameter like this, which says ceiling. But this is just the threshold. Okay? So if I turn this threshold down, as you can see, it's blocking the sound that goes above this. And where a compressor, it would kind of push the sound down and it's kind of, it's more gentle. A limiter is very aggressive and anything that goes past this green line is just cut off. So we only use this to control some very out-of-control frequencies. Maybe we want to get rid of these little plucky sounds at the top there you can see the, you can see there in the purple. And the way the waveform kind of starts up here and then it goes down and levels out. So if we wanted to remove these sort of plucks, we'd leave the ceiling here. And you can see the final result then is just everything under here. So it's, it's sort of a level sound. But as I've said, you will rarely use a limiter, okay? Even for your bases are right, you won't use a limiter. You'll just use a compressor with the ratios at fairly high to maybe around eight. Okay? And we will be looking at limiters again when we're mastering and we'll be loading one on the master channel here. But for now it's good to be aware that they do exist. And all they are is just a compressor with a really high ratio. Next, we're going to have a look at the misconstrued truth with compression for EDM. 94. The Misconstrued Truth with Compression for EDM: Okay, so if you've ever looked up anything about music production, then this lecture is probably going to contradict everything that you've learned from that so far. But please hear me out and try to understand the theory behind why there's confusion amongst the EDM Community. First, we must look at where we're learning all of our information about mixing. For most of us, this is probably off YouTube and there's plenty of amazing tutorials on YouTube that explain how to use compression. And what we most commonly hear is that you must use compression and every single instrument that you're using needs compression. And the problem is that this is probably true for that particular person on that particular YouTube video. But it's not true for us in EDM. And the reason it's not true for us is because this person on YouTube is probably mixing bands. So live instruments that are played by a human where every note sounds different and has sort of different levels of volume. And this live instrument that a human is playing is playing for the entire four minute long song. So therefore compression is definitely necessary. But we're not playing our instruments life. Our sounds are made using a computer and the notes will be the exact same every time the computer plays them. And what's more is that we're building are tracks out of really short loops. Which brings me to my next point. In EDM, there is hardly any dynamic range at all. The results, so very little or even no variation between each note when it's played. But if we're looking at Mr. YouTube in his studio, he's probably not mixing and EDM track, which is why he tells us that we must use compression. And yes, if you're mixing a band, you will have to use compression on everything. But with EDM, compression isn't necessary. And if you look again at the sort of theory behind how a compressor works, then you will realize that it actually doesn't apply. A compressor is reducing the loudest parts of the signal, and it allows us to hear the quiet or parts of the signal a little bit better. But in EDM, there isn't exactly any quiet parts. The dynamic range in EDM just isn't big enough to warrant using a compressor. And this brings me to the last point. Okay? I'm not saying that you shouldn't use a compressor. There are times when it's applicable, like vocals are long external loops or even some of the instrument patterns you make could benefit from compression. All I'm saying is that compression is not necessary. Okay? You can mix in EDM track perfectly fine without using compression at all. And in fact, I have done this. And what's more, this track actually got signed to a label. So what you should take from this lecture is don't use compression for the sake of us. Or don't use compression because you heard that you should be using it on everything. You should only use compression if you think that the sound could benefit from us. And be very critical with this if you apply compression and afterwards, it sounds a bit squashed. Turn it off. Because this is the number one problem that EDM producers face and it's trying to avoid a squashed sound. But it can be very easy to avoid if you just don't apply compression to things that don't need compression. And for EDM, that's basically everything except for vocals and very long loops. You can use compression, but please be careful and make sure that it's actually doing something good to the sound because it's very, very easy to Rouen a track by over compressing. So this is just something for you to take on board if you are using YouTube as a sort of extra resource, okay? The techniques that you may be learning from someone on YouTube may only be correct when working with a certain type of music. So please, when you're learning from someone that kind of works outside your genre, outside your style of music. Please be vigilant and don't end up ruining your tracks with misinformation. 95. Saturation for Mixing: In this lecture, we'll take a look at saturation for mixing. And this ties into the last lecture in the compression section that we were looking at. I told you that compression for EDM is not necessary. Well, one of the reasons why someone would argue that it isn't necessary is because everybody wants a fat or kind of full professional sound. Well, saturation is walk and do this for you. Not compression. Compression just makes things louder, but saturation makes things fatter. So what is that duration? These plugins add harmonic distortion into your sound. So instead of distorting the initial sound, it kind of ads in some distorted harmonics and then blends them with, with that initial sound. You can use these plugins to make your baselines more audible and fatter. You can also use them to make your drums sand more aggressive. Or you can even use them to reduce some of the harsher high frequencies. So if a saturation plugin is adding in distorted harmonics, what exactly are harmonics? Well put simply, these are just frequencies that are multiples of the route frequency. So if you have a frequency of 500 hertz, then 11000 hertz would be a harmonic as wood, 1500 hertz, 700 hertz would not be a harmonic because it's not a multiple of 500 hertz. Now, there are things that are called soap harmonics and overtones. But we don't need to know any of these for this course. All we need to know is that a saturated plugin is going to add some harmonic distortion to the multiples of the root node. And this particular type of distortion creates a different effect. And it sounds much more clean and much more excited than regular distortion, which just sounds aggressive. What are some of the main parameters on a saturation plug-in? Well, there's only three standard parameters and these are at the input, the drive, and the output. You might also get a color or a tone, or maybe a character parameter. But apart from that, you're actually going to find a whole range of different parameters on different plugins. So let's start with the input. Unlike compression, if we turn this up, we're getting more of the saturation sound out of the plugin, especially if we turn the output down. These two go hand in hand. If you set the input low and the output high, you won't be getting much of the saturation effect on the sound. But if you set the input high and the output low, you'll get a more saturated sound out of the plugin. Dr. parameter is simply how much distortion Do you want to apply to the sound? Now be careful not to turn this up to the point that it actually sounds incredibly distorted. The final sound should be clean, but also much fatter. You may also get that color parameter that we were talking about. And this just changes the actual sound of the saturation. Do you want a warm and fuzzy sound or do you want a bright and gritty sound? So essentially, it just shapes the sound that you're getting out of the plug-in. After these main parameters, you'll find many different parameters on many different plugins. So you will have to experiment with them and see what kind of sound you can get. Now because all of these saturation plug-ins all have different parameters. There isn't much further tweaking that we can do. However, I do want to make you aware of these two other types of saturated. So there is a type of plug-in called a wave shaper, and this is a distortion plugin that also adds harmonic distortion into the sound. Now, you can use this to draw different shapes onto the wave and then create your own unique distorted sound. We can use them to create an analog or digital distortion sound. Wave shapers can be very powerful, but they can also be very destructive. So make sure that the final sound that you hear is pleasurable to the ear. Finally, we have harmonic exciters, and these are very similar to ordinary saturation, except that they're only focused on the high frequencies. So they won't make your baselines sound fatter, but they will make them sound brighter. So only use an exciter if you want to distort the upper frequencies of the sound. Now that we have all of this information, let's move on and start applying saturation to our tracks. 96. How to Use Saturation : So in this lecture, we'll have a look at the process that you'll apply when you're using saturation. So let's open this distorted keys pattern. Ok? And if I play this in the pattern view, it sounds like this. And if we find that in the mixer, it's here on track ten. Okay? Now I'm going to go through sort of the three main types of saturated that we were talking about. So we talked about normal saturate or plugins. And then we had a look at wave shapers, and we had a look at harmonic exciters. Okay, so let's first, I'll just turn on this slide and let's open up a normal saturation plugin. So I have one over here and it's called supercharge your GT. And this is a really, really good plugin for kind of getting a fatter sound. So very quickly if we just have a look at the interface, we have this input, okay, so that's just the input parameter. We have a side chain parameter, but that's only for the compressor and we're not gonna touch the compressor or the side chain. In this lecture, we have a saturation plugin. So this is the drive, okay, how much saturation do we want to apply? And how sort of aggressive do we want it to sound? Do we want to mild, moderate, or hot? We're going to skip over this whole compressor section and we're going to come back into the saturation. And this is the character, okay? And this is, again, we can shape the sound that's coming out and we can make it fast, warm, or bright. We can also mix in some dry signal, which is similar to parallel compression, except this would be like parallel saturation. Again, this is kind of linked to the compressor section, but we can use it for the saturation as well. And finally, we have this output parameter, which has just how loud the sound is when it comes out of the plugin. Whenever I'm using this plug-in, the only parameters I ever need to touch is the saturation. And the character will turn up the input for the purpose of this demonstration just to get a better sound out of it. So I'll just boost the input. Okay? And we can see here there's a little light and the lightest telling you when you have the perfect sort of input level. Okay, so at the moment it says perfect. And then it says, I need to kind of push it a small but more so that's what I'll do. I'll push it very, very slightly. And as you can see, we kind of have the green light on for most of the sound. So now we're ready to go and apply some saturation. So let's listen to the sound and will boost this knob, the hallway up and we'll see what kind of a sound it makes as it's traveling around. Okay. Okay. And we can switch this from mild to moderate. Alright, too hot. But then if we turn this saturation down, so we want sort of less of this heart sound. We can get a very nice sort of Harmonic Distortion sound. Ok, maybe a bit less. Next we're going to skip over this compressor section because I don't want to compress the sound. And we are going to come into this character where we can kind of shape the sound that's coming out of the plugin. So I think for this particular sound, i want a warm setting because I think the sound is kind of warm anyway. Genoa kinda has a lot of nice, sort of low end and it's, it's quite a warm sound. So I'm going to keep the setting on warm. And I'm going to adjust this parameter as we're listening. Now I can push it all the way to the very end. I'm going to try it with a fat setting. And we'll try with a bright setting. So I actually think the bright setting sounds the best after listening. So I'm going to just turn this down a bit because I think there's, there's too much of an effect going on. But I'm going to turn it down to a kind of optimal level. And maybe we might turn down the saturation just a tad so that it's not kind of, so that it's not kind of as distorted as it sounded. And we can switch this, we can switch this back to moderate. If we don't like the sound of the hot, hot setting. I still think I prefer the sound of the heart. So I'm going to leave these settings here and we'll have a listen to what the signal sounded like before the saturation. And then we'll have a listen to what it sounds like. Alternate on as the pattern is playing. And if we just take a quick listen to this in the actual mix, okay? But ever listen to what it sounds like here. First without the saturation, and then I'll turn it on. I'll just turn down these vocals just a small bit. So you can hear that the saturation is adding in a bit of fatness to the sound. It's making the sound a little bit thicker. And that really is the beauty of using these saturation plug-ins. Now let's have a look at a wave shape or ok. And there's a wave shape or plugin that actually comes free with FL Studio. And it's up here, fruity wave shaper. And we can load this. And it looks like this. And if we hit this Settings wheel down here, it'll open up sort of a setting section where we can adjust the pre or the input. And we can adjust the mix, which would be the sort of parallel saturation where we mix in a dry signal. And then we have this post which is the output. So let's use the wave shape or to create a soft clipping shape, okay? And this is where the sound is kind of gently distorted. Okay? So a soft clipper looks like this, where the line and the wave shaper kinda goes up like this. And then it's kind of rounded off towards the top. Let's have a listen to what this sounds like. I'll just solo the electric piano. And if I turn it off, and we can move this down, okay, we can move this down a bit and this section down to make it even kind of even more distorted. Let's have a listen. And I'll turn it off kind of halfway through. Now, we can also kind of bend this, this sort of this bottom half of the soft clipper and we can get a more aggressive sound. We might push it even a bit, a bit more. And if I turn it off. And we can also use this wave shape or plugin to completely distort the sound. And if we, if we kind of drew in a line here like this, this would really distort the sound. So we also have to add one in like this. If we, if we bend sorry, the the plugin isn't and I was wondering why I wasn't getting any sort of a sounder to that. I'll just delete these again and we'll kind of start from scratch. Ok. So if we add in another kind of another sort of anchor point here, and we drag it over to the left, will get a more distorted sound. Okay? Now, we can also delete all of these like this. And if you just want to get sort of more volume out of the sound, when it opens up. It'll just open like this. And if you just push this like that, you'll get a nice kind of clean, fatter sound. Okay? Can even push it as model that more. And that's kind of the easiest way to use a wave shaper is just to simply kind of bend the slope. Okay? So let's have a listen now to this bed slope shape in the mix. And then I'll turn it off kind of halfway through. Sorry, I have to turn on all the other instruments as well. Okay. So you can see how powerful of a tool this sort of stuck plugin actually is. And it's really great when you start to get to grips with how to really shape the sound, you know how to use this kind of distortion for your benefit. So now let's turn this off and we'll have a look at an exciter, a harmonic exciter. Okay, so if you come up here to bows on 7's exciter. And with this it's kind of like a multiband sort of saturation plugin. But what we can do is we can just push this amount, okay? And this just says how much saturation Do you want to kind of add in? So usually with these, we don't add in as much sound into the base frequencies. We might add in a bit more into the mid ranges. Then we'd add in a bit more into the high mid-range. And finally, we'd add in kind of a good bit into the high frequencies. Let's have a listen to what this sounds like. And if I turn it off and back on. So the sound of an exciter is a lot more subtle than the two of these. So then these sort of, this proper saturation plugin and this wave shape or plug-in, the sound of an exciter is a little bit more subtle, but it makes the sound brighter. So in the next lecture, we'll have a look at applying some of these saturation plug-ins to instruments. 97. Saturation for Instruments: In this lecture, we're going to have a look at applying saturation to some instruments. So if we come into this top pattern here and we have a listen to the instrument and kind of what it sounds like. Ok, so it's this sort of synthesizer sound. So I'm going to find that on the mixer and I can see it's on track nine. So I'm going to bring up the track nine, will come over to these effects slots over here and we load up a saturation plugin. So I'm going to load a different one this time. And I'm going to pick this E tube tape warmer. And again with this saturated plug-in interface looks completely different, but the concept is still the same. Okay, so we have these a and b where we can choose how much drive we want to get out of these different tubes. So we've tube a and to B. And then we also have this tone parameter, which is the same thing as color or character. So let's turn on tube a and we'll have a listen to what it sounds like as we apply some saturation. So we're going to find a kind of optimal point between the, you know, the most distorted sound and then sort of not distorted at all. We're going to find a nice sort of happy medium. Okay, So I think somewhere around here, which is 6.9, I think this sounds good. Now, we could also turn up 2B B to 6.9, and we just have a listen to what this sounds like instead of tube a. So what does jus be Sandec will increase it, maybe just have a proper lesson. Okay. And we can also kind of blend the two together so we can have 2A and 2B on at the same time. So maybe you want to just turn down the to be just a bit so it's kind of blending of it better. And we'll turn it off and see what it sounds like without and then back on. So I think it sounds pretty good with both of these tubes. I think today is kind of adding a speckle and then 2B is adding in a small bit of waste in the kind of low frequencies. We can also use this tone parameter to kinda shape the sound that we're getting out. So we can boost to high frequencies or we can boost the low frequencies. Ok, so let's play the sound and Mileva listen to what both of these kind of extreme sound like. So I kinda like the sound when it's more so on the low end. I think it's just adding in a bit of weight to the sound. So let's have a listen to what it sounds like. Without the saturation plug-in, and then we'll turn it back on as the pattern is playing. So you can see that this plugin is actually kind of giving life to this instrument. It's making it feel more alive and more full and more fat. Now let's have a look at maybe a different instrument like this one. Okay, and we'll find out where that is in the mixer track by coming in here and we can see it's on track six. And we can solve it. Okay? And what I'll do is I'll load up a saturation plug-in. Let's load a different one this time. Let's maybe load the super tragic GT. And let's see what this sounds like on this particular instrument. So I'm going to have a listen to it in the pattern mode. Okay? We're gonna boost the input until we get that. It's actually telling us to turn it down. Okay? And now we're at the sort of optimal level. Now we can start applying some saturation. Let's try and moderate. And I just wanted to be kind of subtle. I don't want it to be very obvious with the extra distortion. Maybe a bit less than that. And now we'll come over to the character. We'll, and we'll kind of twist this and then see what it sounds like with the fat setting. And then we'll try some of these other settings. Okay, let's try warm and bright. But back to fat again. So I like the sound of fat. I'm just going to find a sort of middle of the road and sort of a happy medium. And maybe I might come back and switch this setting back to mild. And I'll kind of boost this just the smell that more, a bit less. And now if we have a listen to the instrument sounds like before saturation, and then I'll turn it on kinda halfway through. So you can see that with these particular settings, it's quite subtle, but it is actually making a nice difference to the sound. Finally, we'd have a look at maybe another instrument. So we'll come over maybe here in the arrangement and we'll just take one of these maybe this cords to let see what this sounds like. Oh, I have to solve it in the mixer so we find out where it is. It's done 31. And I'll come across and when a solar that. Okay, so it sounds like this. So now let's load up our saturation plugin. And I'll load a wave shape or this time. And we'll use this saturation plug-in now to shape the sound. Okay, so I'm gonna hit the settings. We'll I'm going to turn up the pre small bit to get more sound out of the plugin. So now I'm going to draw in a curve that looks like this. And I'm going to play the pattern as I'm moving it to find a sort of optimal position. We can push it even more. And if I turn it off and then back on. And now we can also change the shape of this may be to turn it into a sort of a soft clipping sound. Even more. And we can also change the sort of the curve of this. We can boost it. Or we can, we can kind of go the opposite way with this and create a sort of very squashed and distorted sound. But I'm, I'm going to leave it kind of back here. Maybe just push it a small but more. And we can also move this point maybe down here to see what this sounds like. And if we drag this anchor point down, will create even more of a distorted sound. And I can drag it right down. And moving this down. And then moving this. And again, if we come right down, see what kinda sound this mx. So it's really a matter of kind of experimenting with the sort of sound or the wave shaper. And just kind of drawing a few different types of curves and see what, see what you like. My try bending this. So I like the sound of this saturation now I think it's making the sound a lot more full. Turn it off, and then we'll turn it back on again. And now because the sound is kind of jumping up and volume, I'm just going to turn it down here in the mixer. So it's at the same volume as before, but it feels a lot more sort of fat. That's all that you'll do when you are applying saturation to your instruments. You know, you'll load the saturation plug-in. Just have a play around with the different parameters and see what kind of sound that you can get. And if you like, is keep those settings and then move on to the next instrument. In the next lecture, we'll have a look at saturation for base. 98. Saturation for Bass: So now let's have a look at how we would apply saturation to a bass instrument. Ok, so I have my base loaded up here for this track, and it sounds like this. Okay, and if we open up the mixer track and we load up saturation plug-in, Let's first load up the super charger. And then afterwards we'll have a look at kind of doing the same thing with the waveshape or ok. So let's know the super charger. And we'll play the sound and we make sure that the input is at the right level. So it saying turn it down. And now we're at the sort of optimal level to start applying some saturation. So will boost up this mild saturation and see what that sounds like. And maybe we'll try moderate. And then hot. Now I think, I think this setting on hot as a bit too much, but if we turn it down, we could get a perfect blend and be a bit less than that. I think I prefer the sound of the moderate setting, so I'm going to switch it back to that and maybe just boosted smothered up to about 6.7. Okay, and now we're going to change the character, okay, so with the bass, I generally stick with the fast am setting because I want to kind of a fat sound for a base. So it feels a little bit tech. But we can also try and maybe the warm. And then we can try the bright. But I think that is kind of a blend of the two. I think fat is a mix of warm and bright together. So I think it's kind of the best of both worlds. And it's going to turn it down a bit so it's not as aggressive. And then we can boost the output because I think it's kind of a smoother quiet. So we're just boosted by maybe 1.5 dB, maybe a bit more. Just push it. Ok. And now I think we're getting a sort of nice gritty sound out of this super charger on the bass instrument. If we have a listen to what it sounds like without, and then I'll turn it down halfway through and then back off. And if we have a listen to what that sounds like in the mix. So in the arrangement, I'll come over here and we'll just play that and then I'll turn it on or turn on the saturation plug-in kinda when we get to here halfway to. So as you can see, it's kind of giving the track a bit more low end and a bit more weight. Now let's have a look at doing the same thing with the wave shaper. So we'll turn off this super charger and will come down and we load a wave shaper. So here it is. Load that. And we'd ever listened to what it sounds like. Now it's not going to sound any different because we haven't made any sort of change to the shape, okay? Or we haven't affected these sort of pre and post parameters. So I'm going to boost the PRI a small bit just to get some extra sound sort of out of the plugin. And let's just boost this up and see what happens. Okay, so now that we're kind of pushing the volume, let's try and create a more gritty sound. Okay, so I'm gonna add an anchor point here. And then maybe just drag this a bit to the left and see what happens. If we boost this even more. And we're getting some sort of grids into the sound. Okay, and I can keep this sort of strange. We constraint that back out to kind of lose that volume. So I might just push this a tiny bit. And as much as we had. And we can even, we can even move this back as small batches because I think there's too much grit. So let's turn off this wave shaper and see what it sounds like. And then we'll turn it back on. And then what we'll do is we'll compare the sound of the wave shape or to the sound of this super chatter GET OK. So what I'll do is halfway through, I'll turn off the wave shape, right? And I'll turn on the super chatter. So I think with the wave shape or we have a bit more aggressive, the super charger. And you may like that, or you may not. But if you want to kind of replicate the other plug-in, you would bring this back. So it's not as, not as sort of gritty. And it's all about playing around with the shape of the wave. Now, I actually did prefer the sound when it was kind of appear at, i like that grip. So let's have a listen to the bass and the mix without the wave shaper. And then we'll turn it on kind of halfway through. Okay, so I'm going to turn on all these other plug-ins. So I'm sure that you can notice how important that these saturation plugins era for EDM. Okay? It's not about compression, it's actually about the saturation. And there's many, many EDM producers out there who don't use compression and they only use saturation. So it's up to you kind of which sound that you prefer. You can use one or you can use the other, or you can use both. In the next lecture, we'll have a look at adding saturation to our drums. 99. Saturation for Drums: So by now, I think you'd have realized how important saturation is for EDM producers. And it's almost like a secret weapon to get that modern fat sound. So I've said before that we don't add compression to our drum samples because they're already compressed for us. Okay, but what we can add to our drum samples to really make them shine is saturation. So let's take this clap sample and we'll open that up in the mixer and just solo it. Okay. And as you can see, I don't have compression on it because it doesn't need compression, but we're going to open up a saturation plug-in Now my favorite saturation plugin to use with drums is actually this blood overdrive, and this comes free with FL Studio. So I'm going to load this up. And we'll just have a listen to what it sounds like in this default state. Ok. Now what we can do is we can boost this. Maybe there's prevent. Okay? And if we change this preamp and we start to add in some, this is the drive, okay, so we start to add in some distortion. Okay? That might be a bit too much. But with these two sort of small tweaks that we've done with a stock plug-in. We can turn the clap from sounding like this into sounding like this. Okay, and if we add in maybe just a hat, just to see what it sounds like with some other drums. And we'll turn it off. And I actually add this blood overdrive plugin. I add this to everything hats as well. Okay, so I'm going to add the blood overdrive to this hat sample. And again, we're gonna push their prevent. I'm just going to solo the hat. Okay, so we want to get some more sound out of the plug-in and then I'm going to adjust the drive. And now this blood Overdrive is adding in some sort of extra harmonics and it's making the sound of the hat really sparkle. Let's have a listen without and then width. So we might have a bit too much on there. So I'm just gonna bring this back down. And let's add back in that clap. Now let's try maybe a different saturation plugin. So I'm going to use this PRC. Okay, so it sounds like this. Ok. So let's load up maybe the wave shaper and will come in to the interface. We'll have a look at adding some kind of subtle distortions and subtle sparkles. So I'm going to add an anchor point near enough that up. And I'm gonna drag it out here as the sample is playing. I'll just follow it in the mixer track. Okay, and we can maybe changed the curve of this. And if we ever listen without the plug-in and then I'll turn it back on. And now let's have a listen with the other drums that we've kind of applied saturation to. Solely for the purpose of demonstration. Ireland, I'll turn on some of these instruments. Okay, so maybe this one and this one. And these are actually linked to an instrument send here. So I need to turn that on to get the sound out of them. And we're going to really focus on the drums. So what I'll do is I'll turn off the saturation on all of the ones that we applied it to. And we'll have a lesson and then we'll have a listen again and I'll turn them back on. Ok. And now we'll turn them back on. And we'll listen again. And if we bring in maybe the sugar and the cake just for, just for some added sort of realism. Okay, but if I turn off the saturation plug-ins again, it would sound like this. So using saturation on your drums is a great way to sort of make them pop out in the mix. In the next lecture, we'll have a look at using saturation for vocals. 100. Saturation for Vocals: So in this lecture we'll have a look at using saturation on our vocals. Now using saturation on your vocals is a brilliant tool to get them sounding tick. So I have the vocals from this track sort of soloed. Okay? And what we're gonna do is we're going to load a saturation plug-in here. And I'm going to pick the super charger, okay? And what we'll do is we'll get the input level right. So it seems to be already okay. So we can start applying some saturation. Okay, and we can try moderate. So now be careful using extreme settings with the saturation and the vocals. Okay, because, because we're humans and we're so kind of adapt to listening to vocals. So if you overdo the saturation like I have here, so they can sound very, very obvious. But if you turn this down and get a kind of perfect blend, Zach, go back edges. And then we can shape the color to three s. Let's try warm. So let's try bright. Folded. Okay, So I like the sound of the bright setting. So I'm going to turn this down a smallest to a folder. And then we can boost the output just a small best just to get some sort of extra volume. And if I turn this off halfway through, the vocals are playing is bad. So you can hear that the vocals are kind of much more in your face when we're using this saturation plug-in. Let's have a listen to and the vocals in the mix without the saturation. And then we'll turn it back on. And if they don't, like the example in town, edges can again transplantation influences. Okay, so now let's try using the wave shape or to do the same thing. So we'd open up the wave shaper. And what we'll do is we'll just turn up the input small bit. This civil. And that will start to shape the sound. So I'm going to add in maybe an anchor point here. I'm going to turn this down a bit to create a sort of soft clipping Sound. Three tau, I'm gonna boost. This curve is bad. Ok? Now we can also add in some sort of excited harmonics by again kind of dragging another anchor point down here to the bottom, and I'm dragging it to the left. So we strengthen this out, we'll lose that sort of volume. So but I don't really like the sound of this kinda distortion. So I'm just going to take it away and maybe boost the volume again. So three. And if we listen without the wave shaper is bad, okay? Edges k again. And maybe it's a bit too loud so we can lower this, post, this sort of output gain. Maybe, but I don't go back. Edges can again. So again, using saturation is like a secret weapon that all EDM producers should know about. Especially because a lot of the functions that compression can provide and it's not really applicable to EDM. So what EDM producers use instead is saturation. We're gonna move on now from this section and we'll have a look at applying reverb to our tracks. 101. Reverb for Mixing: In this lecture, we're going to have a look at reverb and how we can use it for EDM. Reverb is a plug-in that will give your track depth and it can places in a very specific space. For example, a very common reverb sound in tech house is to emulate the sound of a club. So you'll often find very short room reverbs on a tech house track. So what is reverb? Well, reverb plugins are based on the scientific principle of reverberation. And this simply means that a sound is bouncing off objects in a room. It could be the walls or it could be other objects in the room because the sound is bouncing so fast. Alright, here's can't distinguish each individual sound, so they get blended together to form this phenomenon that we call reverb. When you're using a reverb plug-in, it's essentially trying to mimic the natural sound of reverb in physics. So the plug-in does this by duplicating the sound many times and then repeating as too quickly for our ears to be able to distinguish. And this will emulate the sound of reverb that we hear every day in the real world. You can think of sound as being like a ping-pong ball, okay? If you bounce it off a hard surface, it will bounce very hard and very far. But if you bounce it off, say a soft surface like a bed, then it won't bounce very far at all. And this is why certain rooms, like, let's say a bathroom has a lot of reverb because there's a lot of hard surfaces in that space. But a wardrobe or a closet, for example, has much less reverb because there are too many soft surfaces that prevent the sound from bouncing. This is also why recording studios have soft walls and carpeted floors. It's to keep the sound as pure and raw as possible. So let's have a look at some different types of reverb. There are many, many different types and some of these include place, room, hall, chamber, spring, and convolution. And I'm I know this may seem like a lot, but it's actually not because we can break them down and kind of put them in separate categories. If we take room, Hall, and chamber reverbs, These are all trying to emulate a certain space, okay? So these are spatial reverbs. Room reverb will sound like it's in a small room. A hall reverb will sound like it's in a gym, or maybe a church. And a chamber reverb is somewhere between these two, kind of like a happy medium. After these spatial reverbs we have placed and spring reverbs, okay. And these are just emulating exactly what they say. Remember those toys you probably had as a kid where you spoke through a plastic megaphone or microphone and your voice would sound as if it was in a big cave or a church? Well, this is spring reverb because inside of that small plastic toy, there's a physical spring, and when you speak, it vibrates. Then when you stop speaking, the spring continues to vibrate and these vibrations bounce around inside the toy to create a reverberation effect. Spring reverb plugins will try to emulate the sound and they can sound very metallic and harsh. On the other hand, plate reverb is similar except instead of a spring vibrating, a big metal plate vibrates and it creates the reverberation effect. It's kind of like how a symbol will vibrate when a drummer hits us. So we have spatial reverbs, spring reverbs, and plate reverbs. Well, what about convolution reverbs? These are just reverbs that were actually recorded in a certain place. So for example, you can use a convolution reverb to make your vocal sound as if they were actually recorded in the Sydney Opera House. Now because these reverbs are based on specific places, there isn't much tweaking that you can do as it will room the sound of the space. But they're pretty cool to use when you want to hear what something would sound like if it was maybe inside St. Paul's Cathedral or even the Taj Mahal. So now we know the main types of reverb. Well, what are some of the main parameters that we can tweak? The first parameter on mentioned is pre-delay. And this tells the reverb how long to wait before applying the reverb sound. It can be used to make spaces feel bigger. In a small room, the sound bounces back very quickly because the surfaces are close by. In a huge theatre, the sound will take much longer to bounce back. So we can use this to our advantage and increase the size of the space. The pre-delay can also make a space feel more empty because the sound has nothing to bounce off before it hits this sort of imaginary wall at the back of the room, then we have the decay time. So how long does the reverb tail last? Four. In a big church, the decay time would be very long and the sound can bounce around for five or six seconds. But in a small room, the decay time is much shorter because it's bouncing around so quickly that the sound energy fades away faster than a big open space. Or you can even think of it as the sound getting tired, the more it has to bounce off surfaces. The size parameter increases the actual size of the room. And it does this by adjusting the volumes of the reflections. If you're in a small room, the reflections that bounce back will be much louder than if you were in a huge space. Because the sound has less distance to travel and therefore loses less energy as it's traveling. The width just makes the reverb sound wider, but it can be used alongside the size parameter to kind of help the space feel more realistic. A small room is not going to have a wide reverb sound. So we'd use this parameter to make the space more narrow. The EQ settings can also be called dampening and all these do is shape the actual reverb itself. You can make the reverb sound muffled, and this will make the space feel like it's full rather than empty. This would also be called a dampened space. With this EQ setting on this reverb, you're setting the reverb range. So it's currently set between one hundred, ten hundred hertz and 10 thousand hertz. But we can adjust this to focus the reverb on a certain range of frequencies. You may also get a diffusion parameter, and this is pretty common on reverb plugins. The diffusion is how many reflections there actually are. Or in other words, how many hard surfaces are in the room to bounce off. It can also be used to actually shape the room. For example, a square room with four parallel walls will produce a reverb that sounds a bit like a twang. Whereas a room with maybe eight walls that are not parallel will produce a reverb that's much more lush and pleasurable. You can try this by clapping your hands in your bedroom. The reverb probably won't sound very nice. But if you clap your hands in the kitchen instead, you might find that the reverb sound is much more pleasurable because there are many more surfaces that are not parallel. There's also a modulation setting with this reverb, but this parameter isn't very common on normal reverb plugins. The modulation will just make the sound of the reverb wobble. And you can do some cool effects with this. But we won't be looking at it in this course because it's not a very standard parameter that you will find. And moving on now to further tweaking, there really isn't much I can say here because there are so many different parameters that you'll come across, you'll just have to test them and see what kind of a sound you can get. Let's finish up with the slideshow and head back into the DAR, where we looked at how to use a reverb plugin. 102. How to Use Reverb : So in this lecture, we're going to learn how to use reverb for EDM. And the first thing that I'll say is we'll be using to reverbs, okay, we'll be using a short reverb and a long reverb. And the short reverb is kind of designed to give to track a sense of space. And the long reverb. Then we use that for air, or just a sort of pleasurable sound. So let's go into one of these instruments here, and I'm going to pick one that we haven't listened to before, which is this sort of sinth brass sound. Ok, and if I maybe click over to the drop section, this might open the filter. Okay. And I'll just turn off that annoying home that's coming off the organ sound. So we'll have a listen to this instrument. Ok, so the first thing we need to do is we need to find where this is on the mixer track. So I'm going to hit play and I'm going to scan through and find which track it's coming through. And I can see here it's on track 22. Okay. Now what we need to do is we need to open where our sense tracks are. And we need to send some of this signal to descend tracks. So let's apply some of the signal to the first centric. And then we see that this sound is also coming through on the same track. Ok. Next we'll open up a reverb plugin on the soundtrack. And we'll come down here and we'll use maybe this NXP room. Ok, because we want the, because we want to use the short reverb to sort of put the track in a space. So we're gonna pick one of these spatial reverbs, which is room. Okay? So first of all, with all reverb plugins, there are presets, so we can click into some of these and I've listened to what they sound like. Okay, we can try maybe this large restaurant. But if we just come through the main sort of parameters here, I must find out what they do, okay, because the first one is pre-delay And we were looking at that before. And this kind of tells the reverb How long before to actually turn on the reverb sound. Okay, so you can hear that 500 milliseconds is quite long. And we can kind of use this to make the room sound Mt. Next we have the reverb time. So this is the same as the decay time, and this just tells the reverb how long to play the reverb for. Okay? After this, we have this roll-off parameter, okay? And this is the same as the dampening. So we can make the reverb brighter by turning this all the way up. Or we can make a kind of more muffled if we turn it down. Next we have the diffusion, which is sort of, again, how many reflections there actually are. If we have this set really high, there'll be lots of reflections. And if we set it low, there'll be less reflections. Now, this next parameter which is or T, high-cost, okay, this, you'll only find, OK, you'll only find this on some reverb plugins. And what it means is any frequency that's above the frequency you set, it will die away more quickly. Okay? So if we set this really low, and all of these, all of the frequencies above 140 hertz, they'll die away much quicker than 140 hertz. And if we set this much higher. So what you can do with this is you can use it to set the resonant frequency of the room, okay? And we don't need to know what that means for this course. All we need to know is whatever sort of value you sat here. The values above it will die away much quicker. And again, I'm gonna set it low because I think it's really obvious when you set it low versus high. Finally, we have the mix parameter, and this is the same as the dry wet parameter or kind of how much of the reverb sound do you want? Okay. So if I put this down, you'll start to hear more of the dry signal, which is the original signal. And the reverb will sound much quieter. But when we're using a reverb as ascends track, we should set this mix or the dry wet knob at a 100%. And we use the Send level to control how much reverb we're actually getting. So we use this knob and said, Okay. So once you've kind of made URM your short reverb, then we can move on and make a long reverb on a different centric. So we're going to send the signal from this instrument into the second reverb as well. And on this one we're going to load a much longer sounding reverb. Also because the short reverb is used to establish space. Okay, so we're using a spatial reverb for the short reverb. We're not going to use a spacial reverb for the long reverb. So I'm going to come down and I'm going to pick one of these, maybe a Platyrrhini variable k. So this plate reverb plugin looks the same as the room reverb plug-in, but the algorithm it uses to process the sound is different. Okay, so if we have a listen to, just listen to just the plate reverb on its own, will see it sounds like this. And it's much longer and much brighter. Okay, we can set this reverb time right up to 40 seconds. On this sound. This will take 40 seconds for this sort of reverb sound to die away. Okay, unless we adjusted ourselves. So again, we can look at the pre-delay And we can kind of turn this up if we want to. But with Plate Reverb, generally, this pre-delay is set to 0. Okay? Next we have the reverb time. And because this is the long reverb, we're gonna use a longer reverb time than the short reverb, maybe around 1.7 seconds. So the short reverb was using a reverb time of 0.93 seconds. And in this one we're using a reverb time of 1.7 seconds. So let's hear what this plate reverb sounds like now with the 1.72 reverb, time. Again with the roll-off, we can make it sound damper. But generally we're trying to add air or sizzle. Okay, so I'm going to turn this right the way up because I want these, these sort of high frequencies to kind of shine through with this particular reverb. I also think I want a higher diffusion time just because it sounds nicer. It's more pleasurable to the ER when the diffusion time is set quite high. With this or T High Court, I'm gonna set this high too, because I want to keep those high frequencies in there for as long, as kind of, for as long as possible. So if we have a listen again, maybe not that much, maybe not that many sort of high frequencies. Let's have a listen to what this sounds like. Yeah, that sounds better to my ear. Okay. And again, with all reverb plugins, you can change the preset, but we've just kind of made our own sort of settings here, so I'm gonna leave it. And once we have the two reverbs made, it's time to sort of set the reverb level for this instrument. Ok, so first we're going to apply the short reverb to put this instrument in a space so. As it's playing, I'm going to increase this sort of send level. And then we'll find the optimal level for when this instrument sounds nicely in a space, okay? Okay, so I like the sound of this reverb when it's set at this level. Now it's time to blend in some of the long reverb, okay, so we'll start from 0 and as it's playing will increase, this sand level. Can maybe a bit less. So this is the process that you use to apply reverb to your instruments, ok. And then as you go along, you're going to do the same sort of process with maybe this instrument. You're gonna set your short reverb and then along reverb. And again with this instrument, you'll set your short reverb and kind of put it in a space. And then you'll set your long reverb to give it a nice sort of air or sizzle sound. Ok, and we don't need to change any of the settings on the short and the long reverb because we've set them okay. And they're on sand channels and we need to make sure that everything is in the same space. You just set this up once, you set up your short River once and your long reverb once. And then you go through all of your different tracks and you add them. You adjust the level so that they have a short and a long, okay? The one thing I will say is that your drums. Ok, so like this, we won't be using the long reverb. We'll only use the short reverb on the drums. And this is just because it sounds cleaner. Okay, so when you're applying reverb to your drums, you're only going to use the short reverb. And the final thing I'll say is that you don't apply reverb to your kick drum at all. Okay, not even the short reverb. We leave the kick drum alone and the base, okay? If you're using a sub base, are kind of one based instrument, be very careful, definitely don't apply long reverb. And if you're applying short reverb, make sure you only apply a very, very small amount, okay, and I'll show you what that sounds like. Now, I'll just double-click into this really quickly and we'll have a lesson. We only want the sound of the reverb to be subtle. Ok, so I can start to hear it there. And that's probably more than enough. And the reason we don't apply reverb to the low frequencies, like your base in your kick drum is because the low frequencies can be very, very problematic for the overall sort of mix of a track. So we tend to keep them as sort of clean as possible. Okay, so I might not even apply reverb to this base at all. And I don't need apply reverb to the instruments that are kind of playing at the same time. Maybe this, this synthesizer instrument. Okay? Put it in a space like this with the short reverb. And then use the long reverb to add some air. Same thing with your vocals. So let's solo the vocal track. Short reverb to add it to a space. And then the long reverb to give it some air. Okay, and if we turn back on one of the other instruments that are using the reverb. There's probably too much on this. Sorry, I also have to turn on the this instrument track just to get the proper sound of the instrument. You'll hear that these two instruments, so this instruments, sorry, and the vocals, they sound like they're in the same space. And you'll also notice that when both of these stopped playing, the reverb for both of them kind of decays the same, okay, because it's being processed by the same plugin. And this is really important to keep all of the elements in your track in the same space, okay, we need to always make sure that the sounds we're using fit together well. In the next section, we'll be taking a look at what delay is and how we can use delay for our tracks. 103. Delay for Mixing: In this lecture, we'll find out what the layers and how we can use it for EDM, it's more of an aesthetic plug-in and doesn't really serve a practical purpose other than sounding good. But as we always say, if something sounds good, then it is good. So what is delay? Delay is very similar to reverb in that it's based on the reflection of sound, but where reverb is based on reverberations, delay is based on echos. So when you shout your name off the top of a cliff and the sound comes shouting back at you a few seconds later. Well, this is delay. What happens here is that the space is so ridiculously huge that we can hear each reflection of sound separately. And this is exactly what the plug-in does to recreate that effect. It duplicates the sound and then repeats it slow enough so our ears can distinguish each reflection. So just like reverb, there are different types of delay. With stereo delay, the sound will feel White and will appear to repeat at the exact same time in both of your ears. With mono delay won't be wide. But again, the sound will appear to repeat in both of your ears at the same time. Mano delays can feel ten and very outdated, so be careful to only use it for a specific effect. Slap back delay is when you only have one or two very quick reflections and then the echo stops. It's generally used to mimic the sound of a room and was a very popular effect used with music from the sixties. It was actually often used on Paul McCartney's voice. And you can hear this in action if you listen to the EDM track out of sight by the bloody beet roots. Ping-pong delay is where the reflections kind of alter between left and right. So it will feel as if the sound is kind of bouncing between each of your ears left and right. What are some of the main parameters that we can use for delay? First of all, we have the actual delay parameter itself. So how much time is between each reflection? If you set this really high at, say, five seconds, then each reflection will play every five seconds. You may get two parameters for this delay function, left and right. If so, then you can set the delay on the left differently to the delay on the right. This will create a pleasurable stereo effect for the listener. And I'll show you what I mean when we're actually using this plugin because we can change the processing mode and have to delay parameters. Next we have the spread parameter. Now, this only applies to this particular plugin, and it only appears when it's set in a certain mode. But we'll just mention it here really quickly. Okay? So this just adds a slight difference in timing between the actual delays themselves. So if you set this at 0, it will sound as if there's only one reflection bouncing around. But if you set it above 0, it will sound like this reflection is kind of stuttering or as if there's, there's more than one reflection. It's kind of similar to the diffusion setting on a reverb. Then we have the feedback parameter, okay? And this essentially controls how much delay there actually is. So if you set this low, there will only be one or maybe two kind of quiet delays. And if you set this high, there will be lots of delays. It's the same as the decay parameter on the reverb. You know, how long do we want the delays to continue before they fade out? Now, you should also know that if you set the feedback parameter above 100%, the delays will never end. And they'll actually get louder and louder until a really horrible screeching sound can be heard. So I'd advise you to maybe keep the feedback below 100%. You can create some interesting horror movie kind of sound effects if you do set it above 100%. But this generally doesn't sound good in music. Next, we have the width. You will find something like this on most delay plugins and adjust sets how wide the actual delay effect sounds. So if you set it to 0, the delays will sound thin and Mano. But if you set it to 100, the delays will sound wide and full. When your team this with the Spread parameter, you can really make the delays sound more interesting for the listener. We also have this color section, and here we can just add in some distortion to the delays for extra effect. Now this isn't exactly standard, and we'll actually be doing this ourselves using different plugins in a few lectures. So we can ignore this for now, but it's good to know that we can use it if a delay plug-in has it available, and that's kind of it for the main parameters. Your delay plugin will probably come with a lot more that are unique to that particular plug-in. Just like the one we have in this image. It also has a diffusion modulation and EQ section where we can change the sound, but these are kind of unique to this delay plug-in. So I've tried to cover the main parameters that you'll find, but I can almost guarantee that your plugin will have a lot more with different names. And this actually brings me to the final slide. Okay, so, so delays are similar to reverbs in that the plugins are all completely different. Aside from the feedback and the actual delay time, the parameters that you will find can be completely different. So make sure that you play around with each one to kind of figure out what it does, then you can really start to make your own unique delays sounds. 104. How to Use Delay: So in this lecture, we're going to learn how to use delay. Delay can be used to sort of add stereo width or as a fun, rhythmic effect. You will have to make sure that your plug-in is linked to your tempo, okay? Because if it isn't, then the sort of delay reflections will be out of time. Now, you can set these manually if you use a BPMN two millisecond converter. Okay, so you just go online and you look up BPM to millisecond converter and you type in your BPM, which is 95. And then it will give you a sort of a list of all of the milliseconds that will fit your bpm. So let's take this drum loop here and we'll look at adding some delay. Okay, so the first thing we're gonna do is we're going to come in and we're going to add this to the mixer track. And then we're going to send it to one of our soundtracks. So I'm going to send it to track one. And I'm going to command to that soundtrack and open up a delay plug-in. Now I'm going to use the same delay that we were looking at in the slides. Just for consistency's, I'm gonna come down here to this Valhalla delay, okay? And when it opens up by default, it sounds like this. Now, you've probably noticed that the reflections are kind of out of time. And this is because this sort of, this millisecond delay time isn't sync to the BPM. So this overall as an effect, it kind of sounds messy. But with this plug-in, we can change this so that it is linked to our BPM by clicking this note option. And now we can see that we can set as per knows of our BPMN. So if we set it to maybe a 16th note, it sounds like this. Okay, and maybe an eighth note for a quarter note. So if we start here over at the left, was that with the mix, and this is the same as the reverb. If we set this at 0, there won't be any of the delay effect in there. Okay? And as we increases, will slowly be adding in the delay effect. Now if we set this to 100, what that does is it is 100% that delay effect. So we don't actually hear this drumbeat at all. All we hear is the delay. Okay? Now if we add back in that sort of the original drum loop. Now if we come down to the style parameter, this just changes the kind of the mode from single to double dual, sorry, ping-pong and all this is in here ratio as well and quiet, ok, so with single We get that spread parameter. But if we change this to jhu, we get two. Okay, so we can change this one to note as well. And we can set it differently to the left channel. Then we can sync this sort of parameter to the BPM. And we can also make it different to the kind of the left. So if we have them set the sort of the same. It sounds like this. But if we said it differently, it can be a little bit more interesting for the listener, okay, so I'm going to set it differently now. Maybe even more than a quarter note, a half note. So with this plugin, we also have this sort of this ratio mode. And this is where we can kind of set the ratio of the delays. Okay, so what happens is with this the reflections kind of speedup depending on what ratio you have said here. Okay? And if I set this higher, kind of slows down the delays and rosette is lower. And maybe we'll change this delay parameter and see how that sounds. Okay, and then we also have this ping-pong modal can, and most delays will have this. And this is where the kind of the reflections kind of bounce from left to right in your ears. Okay, but if we set this the same, maybe we set both at a quarter note. It'll sound like this. Okay, so see how it's kind of bouncing from left to right. If I make these faster, it'll be a lot more obvious. So ping-pong delay is probably the most common style of delay that's used. So next will come over and we'll have a look at the feedback parameter, okay, and this is the same as the decay on a reverb. So if we set this lower, there'll be less, less sort of reflection, sorry. Okay, and if we set this higher, there'll be more. Okay? And those reflections will continue out for a longer time than if they were kind of set down here at 26. Okay, you can see how that ends really quickly. And if we set this empire, they'll take a little bit longer to sort of fade away to silence. Okay, then we have the width parameter where we can change this from mano, which will be 0. Okay? And then we can slowly increase the width. And we can also make it sound a slightly different by turning in the opposite direction. And it's just kind of based on that principle we were looking at before where we delay the timing of assembled to create a sort of stereo doubling effect. And so when we turn it to the right, it's delaying the left channel. And when we turn it to the left, it's going to delay the right channel, okay? It's just up to you which kind of setting you prefer the sound of Either right or left. And again, that's kind of where the standard parameters end. Okay, now we have this color parameter where we can make the delay sound kind of distorted. Okay, we can also add kind of a slight amount of reverb to the sound itself. Ok, change the size of that, make the room smaller. And then we can change this EQ so that there is maybe only kind of high frequencies and being heard and reflections. Or maybe we want only low frequencies heard the reflections. Maybe even less than that if we turn it right down to kind of kind of like 500. You also have the modulation where you can kind of control the depth, okay? And we just kind of mess around with these to see what kind of different sounds we can get because these parameters, and they're not standard. Okay, so you probably won't find this on other delay plugins, but it's important to kind of mess around with the different parameters and see what kind of sound you can get. Okay? And then finally we have this mode over here where we can change the mode from taped to Hi-Fi to all these different kinds of sounds. Okay, so digital sound different. And it'll sound different to ghost. One of my favorites to use is this reverse pitch. I think this is really cool. Let's have a listen to this and action. If I kind of increase the EQ, maybe less feedback. And we'll make these a bit longer. So this can be cooled for those kind of funky break beat drums. And finally, I just want to say similar to reverb, we won't be pulling delay on any of the low frequencies, such as your bass drum or your kick, okay, because this will kind of cloud up the low end and it would really destroy the mix of your track. Your track will end up sounding very messy. Also, you don't want to overdo the delay, okay, because it's very, very easy to kind of cloud your track and mess up the overall sound. It can get very messy. So with this, even the mix of this is quite a little bit too much. So we'd come in here and we will adjust this so that it's kind of more subtle. Because if you have it set up really high, it's cool when you're using this, maybe this beat on its own. Okay, But if we remember from driving elements, if you have this kind of effect on your drums, it's going to distract from sort of the main elements in your tracks. So we keep these kind of effects subtle. Just to fill up a little bit of empty space. In the next lecture, we'll learn how to make the slap back delay effect. 105. Slapback Delay: So in this lecture, we're going to learn how to make a slap back delay. So we can use a slap back delay to kind of create a stereo effect and make your elements sound like they're more in the room. This type of delay effect also sounds pretty good on vocalist and we're going to have a look at the vocal track that we're using in this EDM track. Now to make a slap back delay, it's very, very simple. We're gonna be using a very short delay time and a very short feedback level. You also have to make sure that the delay is set on a stereo setting. Okay, so lets click into this vocal track and we'll have a listen to what it sounds like if we solo it. Okay, so that's what it sounds like Now. So we're going to come over here to this third sends channel and we're gonna send some of the signal into it. Okay, so let's turn this up and we'll have a look and see is the signal coming through. Okay, yeah, I can see the signal coming through. So now we can load a delay plug-in. So I'm going to load the delay that we were looking at before, which is this Valhalla delay. Okay. And it opens like this. And let me open it. It sounds like this. Okay, and very simply to create a slap back delay effect, we're going to turn down this sort of this millisecond thing until it's kind of very, very short. Okay? And then we're going to turn down the feedback. Very, very short as well. So maybe even less than that if bad on that board. Okay? And that's it. That's how you create a slap back delay. Okay. And if we turn it off and the vocal and then turn it back on, will notice the difference. Okay, let's have a listen. If bad on. Okay, so what kind of creates a sort of stereo effect? And it makes the elements sound like it's more in kind of an empty room. So let's have a listen to what it sounds like in the entire mix and alternative kind of off at the start. And then I'll turn it on as we're kind of halfway through. So it's kind of a subtle tool that we can use, but it also creates a lot more of an interesting sound for the listener. Now we can also apply the slap back delay. We can apply this to instruments to, okay, so let's have a look at applying some to this synthesizer. But less than that. Sorry. Now it doesn't sound particularly good on this instrument because the notes, if you ever look for not very syncopated, okay, it's kind of just very robotic. But if we have a look at something that is maybe syncopated like this, maybe this SAM, this sort of sinth brass sound here. I have to solo that in the mixer trek. Just find it here it is. Okay. I'll bring it over, bring the playhead over so that the filter is opened. Because in the arrangement the filter is kind of closed when the play head is back here. So we're going to move the play head so that the filter opens. And we'll apply this slap back delay effect to this sound. Okay, so that pretty much sums up slap back delay and you can create it with any delay plug-in. I'm going to open up really quickly one of the delays.com with FL Studio. Whoops, this delay bank here will open this. And if we listen to this instrument, oh sorry, I have to open the filter. Okay, so again, we're going to set the feedback time really short. Okay, and with this particular plugin, it, it's kind of set in mono. So if we, if we pan this delay to the left, and then we'll copy the value of this. And we'll load a second delay here, and we append this one completely to the right. And then we'll paste that value in on the feedback time. We'll get a proper stereo slapback effect. Let's have a listen. And if we maybe add some more volume to this particular instrument, salsa more sort of send level. Oops, it might sound a small bit better. In the next lecture, we'll have a look at adding some interesting effects to the delay sound. 106. Adding Effects to Delay: In this lecture, we'll have a look at adding some interesting kind of additional effects to the delay sound. Okay? We can add in things like EQ and distortion to create some really cool effects, like a radio delay or a low fidelity. So let's open up this vocal in the mixer track. Okay, and I'm going to change the delay from the slap back that we had before. I'm just going to maybe change this to note up to about 1 eighth and will turn up the feedback and we'll just kind of leave it there. So, just so we can hear the sound of the delayed but better. Ok. Maybe a quarter note. Okay, so let's first make a radio delay. So what we do is we load an EQ and we were looking before at how to kind of create a telephone effect with an E gives we're gonna do that again here. We're going to use a high-pass, bringing up kind of up to the kind of high mid-range. Then we're going to create a low-pass and bring that down to the high mid range. Okay, so somewhere around here. And then we're gonna boost maybe something kind of in this region. Okay, I'm just going to change this to an eighth note so we can hear it a bit better. Let's have a listen again. Maybe even a bit more of a push. This is high pass up a bit. And then if we add some distortion to this EQ, so will come into the wave shaper. And we'll add distortion. The simple way we know how which is to create an anchor point here, drag this over, and then maybe sort of make a sort of shaped like this guy, maybe not as much. Turn it down. Okay, so that's a radio delay effect. We can also change this to ping-pong. So it's kinda bouncing between the left and the right just for an interesting effect. And will also change this to an eighth note. And we'll see what happens. Now. We can turn these off and we can add other fun plug-ins, like I have one called byte appear, ok, and this creates a low-fi effect. So if I load this up underneath the delayed login, it will affect the sound of the delays. And we can come in here to these presets and maybe we'll try at some bytes. Let's see what this sounds like. Okay, maybe not that one that's trying one of the other presets. Lets try maybe one of the distortion ones. Let's see what these are like. Okay, and what we can do is we can turn down just so it's more subtle. So you can load interesting effects like this now, to create lo-fi with FL Studio, if you come over to this effector plug-in, and if we load this up, it looks like something a DJ would have on his mixing desk, but we can come down here to Lo-Fi. And if we grab this yellow cross hair, we can kind of move this to support. Sounds good. So if I turn this up just so we can hear it better if bad, okay? Okay, and we can also use this to add some other different effects, like maybe a ring modulator. Okay, and we can also try maybe a flanger edges. So as you can see, when you add additional effects to the delay sound, you can create a much more interesting sounding delay. We're going to move on now from delays, and we're gonna have a look at stereo imaging. We can use this to really make our tracks field white, full and more professional. 107. Stereo Imaging for Mixing: One major aspect of mixing electronic music is the stereo imaging. This can directly cause your track to sound amateur when it could very easily sound professional. Modern professional EDM tracks sound very full and wide. And this is a result of some great stereo imaging techniques. We can use these techniques to create width, but also depth within a mix. Professionally produced music will always feel like it's in a particular space. And that's what we're going to try and achieve with this section. So what is stereo imaging? Well, this simply refers to where exactly the elements are placed in the stereo field. And the stereo field is simply like a 2D semicircle in front of your head. So do elements sound like they're coming from the left side or do they sound like they're coming from the right side? Maybe some of these elements are coming from the center. Also. How far away are these elements? Are they deeper in the space or are they closer to you? Now if you were to turn this 2D semicircle into a 3D one where the sound can be above or below you. This would be surround sound. We can also use surround sound to place objects behind you, but music is never produced in surround sound. There is also such a thing as 8D audio or by now reload you, okay, but if you ever listened to those tracks on YouTube, than you're actually being deceived because YouTube converts everything into this 2D stereo semicircle anyway. So you're not really getting the true experience of 80 audio. However, if we go back to this 2D semicircle, well, we can use this concept to help us mix music. Let's learn the different ways that we can create width and depth within a track. First of all, we have panning. Now. We already know we're panning is right, just placing something either left or right of the listener. We can use this to make a track field wider because we can really push the elements right out to the very edge of the stereo field. There's also something called the haas effect, and we've actually done this already without knowing it. It can sometimes be called the precedence effect. And it simply means that if one sound plays slightly behind another sound, for us, humans perceive it as one sound. Reverbs are also based on this principle where the reflections play too quickly for us to be able to hear each individual reflection. With the haas effect, we simply duplicates and delay a sound by anything less than 40 milliseconds. Does it sound familiar? We've already done this when we were learning about vocal doubling. We'll have a look at the Haas effect again in this section. And we'll also look at a handy plugin that FL Studio comes with for free that does this easy stereo trick with the turn of one parameter. Next we have micro shifting. I love using big words, but we've actually done this already as well. So again, when we were looking at vocal doubling, we adjusted the timing and the pitch of the duplicated vocal. Well, the timing adjustment was the haas effect and the pitch adjustment was micro shifting. So we'll have a look at it again in this section, but it should be fairly familiar and easy to do. We can also use reverbs and delays to create depth. So if we increase the sound of the room reverb, this will push that element backwards into the room. If you can imagine standing at the back of the hall when the DJ is playing a track. Well, the source of that sound is very, very far away. So all you can hear are the reflections off the walls. But as you walk closer and closer to the DJ, the source of the sound gets louder and you start to hear less reflections off the wall. Then when you're standing right up beside the DJ, You can hear the music very clearly and the source of the sound is very close by. Well, we can use reverbs and delays to mimic this effect and create a sense of depth within our tracks. Just be careful not to overdo this and completely drowned elements in reverb. We want to push it backwards just a small bit, not push it completely to the back of the room. Finally, we can use a stereo imaging plug-in to help us achieve the whiteness that we desire. So if you don't feel like doing all of these things, you can just use a plug-in that will do it all for you. Let's head back into the dot and we'll learn how to use stereo imaging in our EDM tracks. 108. Using Panning for Wider Mixes: So in this lecture, we're going to be using panning to place elements either left or right of the listener. Now this technique is often overlooked or kind of deemed unimportant, but that could not be further from the truth. I'll also say that you have to make sure you're panning with your ears and not your eyes. Okay, don't look at the panning parameters and kinda decide, You know, you've panned, this may be too much to the right, okay. Because if it doesn't sound like it's pander too much to the right. It's probably not pander too much. Okay. I also just want to reiterate that we don't pan are low frequencies, ok, so we don't pan the base, and we don't pan the kick drum. And generally we also keep the vocal in the center, okay, so we don't pan the main vocal. You can pan the backing vocals to make some interesting sort of wide vocal sounds, but we don't pan the main vocal. So with all of that said, let's start panning some of the elements in this track. So let's come into the mixer and we'll ever listened to maybe some of these instruments. Okay, so let's listen to this top which is pattern one, which is on track, sorry, track nine. And we can maybe pandas, lets, let's not go too extreme, maybe just 20%. Let's see what that sounds like. Just very, very subtly. And I'm going to pan the layer the opposite way, very subtly as well just to create a slight sort of wider sound. Next, if we come into this sort of buildup section, I can see that I have an electric piano layered with a normal pianos. So I'm gonna append these a little bit more extremely. So let's take the electric piano, which is this. Okay? And I might decide to pan this very much to the left, okay. And then we can take the piano and maybe panicked very much to the right. And if we listen again with the other elements, now, I can also pan Some of the drum elements that are in here. So I think it's only a shaker that's in here at the moment. If I just highlight this. Okay, I can pan this if I want, but I think I'm going to keep the shaker in the center. And maybe I'll pan this drum element. Kinda maybe let's pan this slightly to the left. Okay? And let's find some other elements that are going to be playing. Let's come over here to this sort of more full section. And we'll have a look at maybe panning some other element. Let's see what this is. This is, this is the organ sound. So we can pan that slightly or we compound it aggressively. But I don't like the sound of it when it's panned kind of aggressively. So I'm just gonna keep it kind of slightly panned one of these directions. Okay. And if we have a look at maybe this drum element which is also in here, it's on track 12. And it's gonna mute that Oregon because it's gotten annoying sort of AMP sound. Here on track 12 if he doesn't do this. Okay, we could pan this may be a bit to the left as well. Just like it would be on a normal drum kit. Then I'm also going to have a look at the sort of the backing vocals which are in here as well. These are vocal did vocals. So I need to turn on the carrier, which is this. Okay? And we're gonna append these maybe hard left and hard right to create a very, very wide sound. So when these are layered with the main vocals, it sounds like this. Ok, let's have a listen to all of these elements playing together with the panning that we've applied. Okay, and when the drug comes in, and I'm going to just turn off that that organ sound again when the drug comes in. And there's a piano which is layered with, and a synthesizer which is layered with the Oregon. Okay. So I might decide I want to pan that synthesizer, which is, I'm just gonna check what track that's on. So we come in here, it's on 22. So if we come over to track 22 and I my pan this very much to the left to kind of reflect the instruments that are playing at the same time. So it's a synthesizer layered with a piano, layered with the Oregon, okay. And the piano was very much to the right and the organise a bit to the right as well. So to create balance, I'm going to pan this synthesizer to the left. Okay, let's have a listen to what this sounds like. Okay, let's have a look at maybe panning some of these extra drum elements. So we'll come in here and we'll have a listen to what other drums there. Okay, so there's this open house which is playing at the same time as this other hat down here on 12. Ok. So this one's pan to the left. Let's pan this one to the right for balance. Okay, let's have a look. This Percussion sound. Now I might decide I'm gonna pan this very much to the left. Okay, and we'll take a look at maybe one of the claps. If we come into the arrangement and we'll find were one of these clamps are, this is a clap yet, so it's tracked 37. And we'll solve this. And we could decide we're gonna append this one very much to the right. And if we have a look and see if we can find the clap layer that plays at the same time, which is here, ok. We could pan this one very much to the left to create balance. Okay? So let's have a listen to what this lets us listen to what all of the instruments sound like intersection. And again, I'm going to turn off that organ sound because it's a bit annoying. So I'm sure you can hear that panning is an important part of any mix. Okay, now, I just applied panning very, very quickly here. But when you're listening, you will have to listen critically and make sure that there is balanced within your track. Ok, so if we come over here to the Master, the Master channel. I can see here with these left and this is the right. Ok. So I can see with these, using these two kind of these peak parameters, I can see if there's too much going on the left or the right. And generally, these should kind of be even as the track place. So if I kind of go back and maybe I'll go forward a bit, I'll just skip forward to maybe this section here. If we watch the left and the right peaks on the master channel, We'll see if our track is balanced. Okay, so at the moment it looks a bit, it looks a bit heavy on the left side. Okay. So maybe we have some elements that are panned a bit too much to the left. Let's skip on to another section and see what this looks like. Now this could also be caused by something that's too loud on the left side, maybe this left vocalists to louds. We might turn that down, but you do have to make sure that you're whole track is kind of balanced throughout. In the next lecture, we'll have a look at using the haas effect. 109. Using the Haas Effect (Precedence Effect): So in this lecture we'll have a look at using the haas effect for wide mixes. Okay, and if you remember from before when we were doing vocal doubling and what we do is we would duplicate the audio like this. And we zoom right up and then come into this, this snap to grid section and delay the duplicated vocal very, very slightly, okay, like this. And this would create this sort of doubled sound if we ever listen to just the vocals. Okay, and then if we were to pan this one left, then pan this one all the way to the right. And sorry, I have to make this unique. I'll just make the second one unique like this. And then if we were depend this second one to the right, it would create a very cool stereo effect. So this is how you create the haas effect with audio. Okay, I'm just going to reset all of these things. And we may be make sure that this is back snapped on the grid. Now will have a look at applying the haas effect to an instrument. Ok, so if we come into the pattern view like this, ok. So this instrument sounds like this at the moment, but what we're gonna do is we're going to clone it. Okay, so again, we're gonna duplicate and we're going to come out of that and sort of copy the pattern into the other duplicated instrument which is here. And then we're going to pan one all the way to the left and pan the other one all the way to the right. And to create again that difference in timing, we're gonna zoom right up, turn off the snap to grid, and just move the notes frame slightly like this. Mavletova, listen to others. Pattern sounds like maybe even less than that. Just so it's very subtle. Tribe it more back. Okay, and if we compare this to what it would sound like without it would sound like this. Okay, and back on. So that's how easy the haas effect is. Okay? You just duplicated the instrument, then pan one to the left and one to the right. And you delay the midi pattern slightly. Ok, I'm gonna reset these. And we'll just have a look at using a hassle factor plug-in. Okay, so if I reset this pan, and what we're gonna do is we're going to load a stereo shaper plugin, which is this one here. And here with this delay nab, this creates the haas effect for us. And again, if we twist it to the right, we're delaying the left channel. And if we twist it to the left, we're delaying the right channel. We can also use this stereo shaper on vocals as well. And we can use it on anything really. So let's just play it vocals. And we load up a stereo shape, our plugin, which is down here. And again, we'll just move this knob to apply the haas effect. Ok, so as you can see, you can use the haas effect to create a really, really wide sound within your mix. In the next lecture, we'll have a look at using micro shifting. 110. Microshifting : So in this lecture, we're going to have a look at using micro shifting for wide mixes. Okay, so before when we were using the haas effect, we would duplicate the, the audio and then we would delay the timing. Okay? But this time we're going to duplicate the audio. And I'm gonna make it unique just so that any changes we make aren't going to effect the other vocal. And now, instead of changing the timing, okay, we're gonna change the pitch. So again, we're going to have to pan one very much to the right and the other very much to the left. Okay? But with the second one, we're going to alter the pitch very, very slightly. Ok, so we're going to maybe move it up by around $0.20. Let's see what this sounds like. Okay, and if we turn off that PITCHSHIFT, it sounds like this. So as you can see, it kind of sounds the exact same into it just sounds like we've kind of made the vocals louder. So, okay, if I take that out and I had a backend. Alright, so by altering the pitch, we're creating a difference between the left side and the right side of the stereo field. And because there's a difference, because the signal coming into the left is different to the signal coming into the rice. This makes it feel wider. Now again, we can also team this with the haas effect like this and make an even wider sound. Now, let's delete those and we'll have a look at applying the micro shifting technique to an instrument. Ok, so the vocals are back to sounding like normal. And we'll come into these chords here, this chord pattern, and we'll have a look at how to apply micro shifting here. So if I switch to pattern View and I'm going to solo this in the mixer track. So it's untracked 27 all the way over here to the right. Let's have a listen to what it sounds like. Ok, let's maybe go to a different part of the song where, where this particular instrument has the filter opened just so we can hear it a bit better. Let's have a listen. So what we're gonna do is again, we're going to duplicate this or Colonus, OK. And it will load up the instrument. And what we're gonna do is we're going to duplicate the chord pattern. So we're copying the exact chord pattern. And we'll paste that into the second piano roll like this. And then we'll pan one to the left, the other to the rise. And then in the second one will create a difference in pitch by coming over to this pitch wheel here. And we'll just change it by, again, not too much, maybe $0.20. Okay, let's have a listen to what this sounds like. And again, I'll just open that back up. And again, if we were to turn off this PITCHSHIFT, it wouldn't make much of a difference. Okay, so let's apply some pitch shifting again. And we could even push that pitch shifting because with instruments, this is just called detune and this can actually sound really good on an instrument. Ok, and again, we'll turn it off. And we'll apply pitch shifting again. I've been that much. So I'm sure you can hear that by using this micro shifting, the instrument sounds wider but also a bit more full and take, okay, and it's a very useful technique that we can do in our EDM tracks to get that wide and full sound. Okay, if we've listened to what that sounds like, maybe in the mix will just turn on all the other instruments. And if we, maybe it will skip on to maybe this section here. Okay. And I'll turn off that Oregon again just because it's making noise. So micro shifting is just another technique that you can use to get a wide and full mix. In the next lecture, we'll have a look at using reverb and delay for depth. 111. Using Reverb & Delay for Depth: Okay, so now we're going to use reverb and delay to kind of push instruments back in the mix, okay, to create a sense of depth. Okay, so I'm going to come over to this piano and we'll just sort of that by coming into the pattern view. Okay. Now, like I was saying, let's say this piano was playing at the very, very back of the hall. Okay, let's say, let's say you're in a room. And this piano which is here, is playing right at the very back. Well, you're going to be hearing more of the reflections, okay. Like this. And as you walk closer, you start to hear more and more of the source signal it's called. And then when you're right beside the piano, it'll sound like this. Because you're so close to it that the source sound, which is this, is overpowering the reflections which are here. But the further away you are, the reflections will overpower the source signal. And that's as easy as it is to create depth. If we want to push this piano back in the mix, we just increased the room reverb. So let's add in maybe the vocals just to see what it sounds like with another sort of element. So I'll solo these. We can bring it forward by bringing this reverb level down. But you can see that with both of these sort of elements kind of in the same space or in the same depth, that kind of fighting in that sort of area. So I'm going to push the piano right back so that it's kind of sitting behind this vocal. Him. I can push it right, right back. And maybe let's try pushing another instrument back. Let's push this synthesizer back. Okay, I have to, sorry, I also have to solo the instrument bus. Okay, and that's over here. Let's push this right back in the room. I was saying before to be careful not to overdo this and this is pretty much overdone, okay? This, this doesn't need to be that far back in the mix, especially because it's a driving element. It's kind of driving the rhythm and the chords. Okay? So I can push that as far back as I did with the piano. We could even keep that right to the front and we could push the vocals back by using the reverb. But generally, we keep the vocals right to the front and may kind of push the other elements back. And once you can do with the delay, is you can use the slap back effect to kind of create even more sort of depth. So where this instrument is sitting in the room now, it's quite far back. But if we team this with the slap back delay that I have loaded here, we can make it sit even further back than it is now. By increasing this. So now, so now it sounds like you're getting D kinda slapback reflections off the wall in the room as well. It kinda sounds like this instrument isn't even in the same room as you. Whereas if I turn this delay down, now it feels like we're closer. We're closer to this instrument. So we can use delays as well to push things back. In the next lecture, we'll have a look at some stereo imaging plug-ins that we can load and kind of used them for a wide mix. 112. Using Stereo Enhancing Plugins: In this lecture, we'll have a look at using some stereo imaging plug-ins to create wideness for our tracks. So let's have a look at this electric keyboard and we'll have a listen to what it sounds like. Ok, I'm going to find it in the mixer track and I'm gonna make sure that it's not panned either left or right, but back to the center. And what we'll do is we'll open up a stereo imaging plugin. So I'm going to come into my effects. And firstly, I'm going to use just the standard fruity stereo enhancer, Okay? And very easily, if we ever listened to the electric piano, we can use this knob to make it wider. Or we can use this now to make it thinner. So if I want the sound to get a little bit wider, I'd turn this, this way towards the plus. So this stereo enhancer comes free with FL Studio and it's actually really, really good. I like the sound of it, especially on electric pianos and pianos. Now, I can turn that off and we can have a look at a different one, like maybe this stereo imager which is produced by nomad. Okay? And again, we can turn it from mono by using this slider Mano. This would be normal. And then we can really push the width by dragging the slider to the right. Okay? Now that's a bit extreme. But this particular integer is actually very, very good. Okay, and if we turn it back on weather patterns playing, okay, I'm gonna close this, and I'm also going to try one of the most kind of popular stereo imagers, which is ozone. Ozone seven imager, okay? And this comes with the plug-in isotope ozone. So I'm going to open this and just close the presets window. And we can see that this is a stereo imager, but it's multiband, so we can adjust the stereo image for the laws. The law mids, the high mids, and the highs. It also has a vector scope, okay? And this is just that semicircle we were talking about before. So this light here, this is u, OK. And as you can see there when the kind of light we're showing, it was showing us the left and the right. And it shows us kind of where sort of elements are placed in the stereo field. So we can see that this is kind of wobbling back and forth from left to right. Okay? So a really cool thing we can do with ozone seven is we can tell the bands to learn so I can play the sound and they'll actually adjust themselves automatically. So if I hit us Learn button and I hit the play button, you can see that they start to move. And it's kinda figuring out where exactly these little bands that should be placed. So then when I turn off learn or sorry, am I have to pause it and then turn it off? And once I turn it off, it has the bands set. Then we can come down and adjust each of the bands separately. So I'll keep the low frequencies Mano by dragging this down and we'll have a look at this in the next lecture. But I'm going to drag this down. And as you can see here with the little symbols, I'm Mano is kind of one and stereo you have to, so the higher up you drag this, the more wide it'll feel. Now if we have a look at where the kind of main proportion of the sound is according to the learning algorithm. It's in this sort of blew this law mid range. So I'm going to drag it the low mids up quite a bit. Ok, maybe about 36. I'll drag the high mids of a bit less, and then I'll drag the highs not up as much and will never listen to what this sounds like now. Okay, and the beauty with ozone is we can add in this stereo wise sort of effect. And this is literally just the haas effect that we were looking at before. So if we drag this down to one and have a listen to what it sounds like, it'll sound like this. But then as we start to increase this write up, we can see even with this that the sound is much more excited. It's much more kind of spread out across the stereo field. Now 17.3 is a lot. So I'm going to leave this somewhere down around. I think seven is usually quite a nice area to leave it in. Okay, and lets, Let's turn off this plug-in while the pattern is playing and we'll hear, you'll hear the difference that it makes. Ok. So this is how you can use some of these stereo enhancement or stereo imaging plug-ins to really push your tracks and get them sounding white. In the next lecture, we'll learn how to use stereo imaging for low frequencies. 113. Stereo Imaging for Low Frequencies: In this lecture, we learned how to use stereo imaging for low frequencies. So I've brought up this bass sound here, and this is the base that we're using in the track. So let's have a listen. Okay, so it sounds like this. And the first thing we're gonna do is we're going to come into this ozone plugin. And we're going to check, is this sound in mono or is it in stereo? Okay. And I'll know if it's in mono because Mano will just show kind of one line down the middle here. But if this sound is stereo, than the sort of, the shape that comes out will be kind of spread out across this semicircle. So let's have a look. So I can see that the spectrum, sorry, the vector scope, this is showing us that the sound is in stereo because it's spread out across the semicircle. Okay? Now if you don't have this plugin, you can turn it off and you can check here by putting the track into Mano, Ok. And we'll learn what this particular parameter does in the mixer. And when we come to actually mixing the fader levels. But for now, just know that when you twist it to the right, it turns the sound mono. And kind of when you twist it to the left, it makes it more stereo. But we'll show you how to users when we're applying the finishing touches to the mix. And for now I'm just going to check it in mono. Okay? And what's going to happen is when I reset this, if I hear a difference in the sound, if the sound gets wider when I reset it, then I'll know that it wasn't mano to begin with. Okay, so let's have a listen to the sound now in mono, and then I'll reset it as it's playing. And we'll know whether the sound wasn't modeled to begin with or not. Okay, so I can hear that the sound wasn't in mono to begin with. Because when I reset this to sound changes and gets wider when you're mixing, okay, we want to keep the low frequencies of Mano, Ok. And the reason we keep them in mono is because in a nightclub, the speaker systems that the DJs are using is a mono system. So by keeping the base in mono, we can ensure that it will always sound good when it's played in a nightclub. Okay? And as we all know, the base and the kick or kind of the most important parts of an EDM track. So we keep the base and the kick in mono. Now, I could just come down here and kind of turn this optimal, alright, and make a mono base and that would, that would be fine. This would ensure that this particular base is in mono. But I like the sound of the wide base, okay, these kind of high frequencies which are wide. So I'm going to use ozone to make the low frequencies mono. But the rest of the frequencies here, I'm going to keep them white. Okay? So if we come up to this lower band and we solve it, we can then move it around and find where the low frequencies are. Okay, so I'm listening now. And if I put it up here, now I'm including to many of the kind of higher frequencies. So I'm going to bring it down just until we're getting that sort of soap. The main weight of the base. Okay? And I'm gonna make this mono. So you can see here with the vector scope before it looked like this and it was all over the place. But now it's model. And then we can add back in those other bands, and these are still white. But we've just ensured that the low frequencies are in mono. And this will mean that when this base is played in a nightclub, it'll still sound as good as it does in stereo. And we can do the same thing with a kick. Okay, we can come over here and play the kick drum. And we could come in and load up ozone and just kind of adjust the low frequencies and keep the high frequencies kind of not model. But there isn't really a sort of nice kind of high-frequency sound with this particular kick drum that I wanted to keep in stereo. So I'm just going to use this to put it in mono. So now I can be sure that this kick drum is in mono and it'll sound good when it's being played in a nightclub. So that's all you need to know about applying stereo imaging to low frequencies, ok, we need to make sure that the low frequencies are mono. Apart from that, you can make any of these instruments or any of these other elements as wide as you like. In the next lecture, we're going to learn about phase and how you can correct any phase issues that you have in your track. 114. Phase for Mixing: In this lecture, we're going to learn about phase and how we can correct it within our tracks. For me, this was one of the most important techniques I ever learned about mixing. And it's such a simple process to fix phase issues are like these parasites that can wiggle their way into your track and prevent it from ever sounding good. It can cause you're tracked to lose stereo width, to lose nice bass frequencies, lose volume, gain unwanted volume, and even create a horrible water equality when played on certain speakers. So we definitely need to know how to correct any phase issues. First of all, what is phase? It's essentially when you have two audio signals that are playing at the same time, where are the peaks and the troughs in relation to each other? So if we just look at this image on the slide, okay, we can see two sinewaves. One is black and the other is orange. You can see that the black sine wave is kind of slightly behind the orange one. So when the very top of the orange sine wave is playing or the peak is playing. The black sine wave is only starting out and hasn't reached its peak yet. And what this means is that these two signals are out of phase. What happens is if we were to render this audio file as it is now, we will be combining these two audio signals into one final version. But when these two signals combined together, they're actually going to fight with each other. And the black sine wave will make the orange sinewave quieter. Now I know this is all a bit too much theory, but it's really easy to locate the issues and fix them. So don't worry if you don't understand what all of this means. So how can we locate and correct these issues? Well, first of all, I want to say that an EDM, nothing will ever be perfectly in phase. However, we can make the phase better by applying a very easy process. So how do we correct the phase issues? Well, we just find the two signals that are out of phase with each other and then invert one of them. And this flips the waveform upside down. So instead of canceling each other out, they actually complement each other. Easy, right? Well, how do we find these issues in the first place? If you just play two elements at the same time and then invert the phase of one element. The sound will either lose based frequencies or gain bass frequencies. If the sound gains bass frequencies than it was out-of-phase and is now in phase. But if the sound loses bass frequencies, then it was already in phase and is now out of phase. You may also notice that the sound gets kind of wider or more full. And this would be another indication that the sound is now in phase. All does can do this by default because it's a very important but not widely known issue. If you do a quick search on how to invert phase in your DAW, you'll find out pretty quick. And it's more than likely one little button that you didn't even know existed. So now we know how to locate and correct phase issues. Let's jump back into the dark and get our track in phase. 115. Locating & Correcting Phase Issues: Okay, so in this lecture, we're going to find some phase issues and then apply the process to correct them. So the first thing we have to do is find two instruments that play at the same time and the easiest place to start would be your layers. Ok, so I'm gonna start with these two layers here, which is this sort of main I'm chord pattern and then another layer that plays alongside it. Okay? Now NFL studio, it's really, really easy to invert the phase and we just click this little button here on the mixer track. And this reverses the polarity. It says up here, and that means the same thing as inverting phase. Okay? So what we'll do is we'll listen to the two elements playing at the same time. And then we'll invert the phase while it's playing and we'll see which setting has more bass frequencies are sort of more stereo width. Okay, let's have a listen. Okay, and if you come across an element that's kinda particularly hard to here like this one. It's kind of hard to notice which, which sort of setting is is better. What you can do is you can come in to the playlist view and loop. One particular node like this. Ok? So all we're hearing is this nose and it's very easy then to notice and the phase issues. Okay, so let's have a listen again. Okay, so I'm noticing a very, very slight difference, okay, when this phase is inverted and I think it sounds better when the phases, and so I'm going to leave it on, okay, I'm going to leave this phase inverted so that these two elements are sort of sounding good together. Ok? So now that we have these two things in phase, what we have to do is we have to get other, other elements and phase. Okay? So what we're gonna do is we're going to maybe do the same thing. Okay, so we'll, we'll highlight one node like this. Oops, I'll just zoom out a bit more so we can make the loop shorter. Okay? And I'm going to mute this one, and I'm going to turn on the other instrument with German to check the phase of which is this. Ok, I'm going to turn it up just I can hear it but here to get better. And now we'll check the phase of this instrument by flipping the phase as a place, a Mileva listen to which sort of settings sounds better. So I'm not sure if you'd notice that either, but when this phase is inverted. Sound kind of gets a little bit more full and a little bit more wide. Okay, so now this element, ok, this is in phase with this, and this is in phase with this. So that means that this must be in phase with this as well. Okay, next we're going to check some other elements. So let's come over to maybe the piano, which plays at the same time as those electric keys that we just got interface. So let's maybe look the whole pattern. Just have a listen. And I'll solo the keys and allows all sort of the piano. Okay, and let's flip the phase as the pattern is playing and we'll see if we notice any difference. So again, it's kind of hard to hear. So I'm going to make the pattern smaller by dragging this alarm. So now we're listening to this and will invert the phase as, as playing and ever listen to any differences. So again, when the phase of this is inverted, I think it sounds sort of more full and more wide when playing alongside this. So now this is in phase with this, and this is in phase with this. And because this is in phase with this, that means all these four elements are all in phase together. And this is the process that you'll use when you're getting your instruments and phase. Okay, let's check one more and maybe the lead instrument which comes in sort of here. We'd ever listened to that. If we just highlight this sort of area. Okay, and we're solo, maybe this is and we'll solo the actual leader instrument, which is this. Ok. and now if we invert the phase as it's playing, and we'll kind of determined which setting is in-phase. Okay, so with this instrument, I don't think it's making any sort of a difference. So I'm going to leave us set to the way it is because I don't want to mess anything up just in case, just in case if I do inverted, it kind of messes up the phase of everything else. And I think it sounds fine as it is here with the phase normal. Ok. Let's have a look at getting some drums and phase. So we're going to sort, we're going to highlight some of the samples are played at the same time. So maybe these hats, okay, and let's solve them. So it's this one and it's playing at the same time as this. Okay. And I'm going to turn this down just so we can hear both. And will invert the phase of this one as it's playing alongside this one. And we'll see which settings sounds better. Ok, let's have a listen. Okay, it's a very subtle difference, but I can hear that the phase, when it's inverted on this, it sounds better than when the phase sort of isn't inverted. Okay, let's try one of the clap samples. So let's get these two claps the play at the same time, which is this one here on track 24. And it's this one here which plays on track 37. Okay, let's highlight both of these. And I'll make this one a little bit more quiet. Now we can hear both playing at the same time. So what we're gonna do is we'll invert the phase as they're playing and we'll find the best setting. Again, it's a subtle difference, but I think when this is inverted, we're kind of getting in a few more high frequencies and the sound is getting a little bit suddenly wider. Okay? So I think this sounds better when the phase is inverted. And finally, we're going to check the kick drum against the base. Okay? And this is probably the most important part of applying phase correction. Check your kick drum against the base. Okay, so if we highlight the kick drum, which is here, and then we play the bass at the same time. Maybe make that a bit longer. No, actually, let's bring it back. Okay, so now we can hear both playing at the same time. I'm just gonna make this a bit louder. So let's flip the phase of the base as the kick drum is playing. And we'll figure out which setting kind of adds more bass frequencies. Let's have a listen. Okay, so when the phase of the base is flipped, it gets a little bit wider. So I know now that the, that the correct setting is when the phase is inverted. Okay. Let's just check one more instrument maybe let's check this pad. Sound against the piano. Okay, so I'm going to highlight the piano which is here. And then I'm going to highlight the pad which plays here. Let's just get them kind of in similar volume. All right, and let's flip the phase and see what happens. Again, I'm kind of noticing that this is sounding a bit more wide when the phase is flipped. So I'm going to leave the phase inverted. Let's check this pad against this Oregon. And we'll turn this down. Let's flip the phase. Okay, I think this setting sounds good. I think when they're both flipped like this. But the phase inversion on, I think it sounds good. Now you may make a track where there are kind of little vase issues like this one. Okay. And it just so happens that when I'm flipping the phase, not a lot is happening. And it's kind of hard to hear the sort of the subtle differences. But you do have to check your phase, okay? Because there are times in your track when you don't even know what's happening. And then as soon as you kind of flip the phase, all of a sudden the sound gets much more full and much more wide and sort of bright and it just sounds much better. Okay. Sometimes it can make a subtle difference, and other times it can make a huge difference, okay, so make sure you're checking the phase of your track and correcting any issues. In the next section, we'll learn about side chain and all of the benefits that come with us. 116. Phase Issues: Follow Up : Okay, so just to kind of follow up on that last lecture, okay, where I said that some elements will make a subtle difference, okay? And you might not even be able to hear it at all. And other elements like these will make a huge difference. Okay, so let's listen just two. These are backing vocals and this, unlike this, it's sort of a vocal, that Vocal, But when I flip the phase, okay, it makes a massive difference. Okay, so let's have a listen to what it sounds like. As I flip the phase. C, you'll notice when both these sort of phase parameters are off, it sounds much more full and wide. Let's have a listen. And if I was to flip this, we create phase issues because this signal is now kind of fighting with this one. So let's have a quick listen again and then we'll move on to the side chain section. Okay, let's move on to side chain now. 117. Sidechain for Mixing: In this lecture, we learned about side chain and what we can use it for in our EDM tracks, side chaining is extremely common and there is one form of side chain that you absolutely must use in order for your tracks to sound clean and professional. So side-chain is when you use one audio signal to control a certain parameter in the dark. You could use maybe the audio signal from the vocals to make the reverb turned down so that they sound much more clean and upfront. This can allow you to use a huge amount of reverb because the vocals will still sound clean whenever they play. Basically, if you want something to happen, every time an element plays, we can use side-chain. So what are the most common ways that we can use side-chain? Well, first of all, there is the famous and absolutely essential technique of side chain compression. And this will force all of the elements to sort of dip or duck in volume whenever they kick place. If you don't use this type of side chain than your track will sound very robotic and amateur. We can also use side chain to control volumes. So maybe your lead instrument is distracting from the vocals whenever they play together. So you can use the signal from the vocals to turn the lead down whenever they play at the same time. You can also use side chain to control effects. So we can make the sound of the delay become quieter whenever an element is playing. Now with FL Studio, we can also do something called peak controlling, okay? And this is a form of side chain that allows us to control absolutely anything that we want to, but other dogs can't actually do this. So when we come to this lecture, you can just skip it if it doesn't apply to you. So let's head into the dark and start using side chain for our tracks. 118. Using Sidechain Compression for Volume Control: So in this lecture, we're going to learn the process that we use when we're applying side chain compression, okay? And it's really simple. It kinda, it just involves taking two elements. So the element that you want to side chain and the element that you want to control the side chain. So let's just say that I want this vocal. Whenever this vocal plays. Oops. So whenever this plays, I wanted to turn down maybe this instrument. I have to turn that on in the Instrument Bus. Okay. Let's have a listen again. So anytime this focal place, I wanted to turn down the volume of this instrument. So this is the signal we're going to use to control the other element over here. Okay? So I'm gonna take this and I'm going to link it to this track. And I'm going to right-click and say side chain to this track. Ok. So now the signal from this is coming in here and it's not gonna make any sound because the side chain signal is silent and it's just kind of reading what's happening here and using that to determine when and when not to turn down the volume of this. So if we load up a compressor on the element that we want to kind of turn down. And I'm going to load the fruity limiter. Okay. Because this is how you cite Jane and FL Studio. You come into the limiter and you come into this compression section here. And then I changed the side chain value to one. So now it's taking the signal from this. And if I adjust the ratio again, it's the same thing as any other compressors. So how aggressive Do I want the volume to turn down? I'm going to set this to maybe 4.5. And then we bring down the threshold and you'll see that the volume will start to decrease as the vocals are playing. Okay? So you can see there that every time the vocals stop singing, the volume increases, okay? And every time the vocals are singing, the volume decreases. Let's have a listen again. So this is probably a bit too aggressive. So we could turn down the ratio and we could also bring up the threshold a small bit just so it's not as sort of obvious. So it's just kind of subtly making things cleaner. So this is the process you use, OK. You take the element that you want to control, the side chain and then you link it to the element that you want the side chain to happen on. Okay? Then on that element that you want the side chain to happen on, you load a compressor, okay, and in Ableton I think it's the glue compressor and, and you'll set it to take a side chain input from this, okay? And then you'll just go about doing the same sort of compression adjustments. We can also adjust the attack. How quick does the side chain happen? The release, you know, how, how quickly does the side chain kind of turn off again and all these different things. And it's just like using a normal compressor, except this time you're taking the signal from this sort of controlling element. So this lecture covered how to use one element to kind of control the volume of another to turn the volume down whenever this is playing. In the next lecture, we'll have a look at using an element to control the volume of an effect. 119. Using Sidechain Compression for Effect Control: So in this lecture we're going to learn how to use the signal from one element to control the volume of an effect. Ok, so if we take this vocal here, okay. It sounds like this. Now let's say I really like the sound of the vocal When I have lots of reverb on it. And that sounds fine. But when we add it back into the mix, it sounds like this. Okay. If I move it down a bit, I'll just move these. Okay? So a completely does not fit. There's too much reverb on this animal. And so what we can do is we can use the signal from this to control the volume of the reverb. And it's really simple and FL Studio if you're using sand channels like this, and the side chain is already setup view. So I'm going to load a limiter and I'm going to set it to the compression setting. And then I'm going to tell the limiter to take the side chain input from track. So let's change this input to two. And now it's taking in a side chain signal from this track. And we can do the same thing. We can adjust the ratio, so maybe up to about 3.6, and then we can bring down the threshold. So we're affecting the volume of the reverb with this vocal. And you can see it's starting to happen there with the purple. Okay? Now it's very obvious there. So if I just solo the vocal for a second and have a listen. Okay, so it's kind of making the vocal cleaner, but allowing the nice tale of the reverb to continue. So now I can notice when in, in-between the words 123, the reverb is sort of jumping up and down. And I don't like the sound of that. So I'm going to increase the release so that the side chain doesn't turn off as quick. So if we increase this, it should stop that particular sound from happening. Okay? And now we fix the problem. Now, we could make the threshold a bit sort of more, add in some more reverb sound. Let's have a listen again. And we can maybe just decrease the decrease at a small bet and we'd have a listen to what it sounds like now, indie fault mix. So let's have a listen. So that's the simple process that you can use to control the volume of an effect. Now if you're not using these soundtracks and maybe you're using like a boss channel or something for your reverb, you have reverb here. What you can do is you take the vocal or these are the elements that you want to control the side chain. And then you just link it am so say side chain to this track. And then again, same thing. Open up the limiter and adjust the settings. Okay? In the next lecture we'll take a look at the most important type of side chain for EDM. 120. Using Sidechain Compression for Ducking: In this lecture, we're going to look at the most important form of side chain that you can use in your track. And this is so important that if you don't use it as a record label, will outright reject your track. So you really need to remember to be using this side chain technique to kind of duck the elements behind the kick drum. So if I just highlight the kick drum in the mixer track, so it's untracked 16. And I'm going to highlight that or soloist. Okay? And now if we play one of the instruments that's kind of playing at the same time, maybe this one. Now at the moment, this is not side chained. And when you do side-chain elements to the kick drum, it makes a huge difference. So what we're gonna do is we're going to link this kick drum to this instrument track by right-clicking and saying site changes this track. Then the same process we're going to open up the limiter, okay, come into the compression section and tell it to take the side chain input from this first side chain kind of input that we assigned to this track. So side chain one and then maybe adjust the ratio. I find that for side-chain, a ratio of above four works best. And I generally use around five, okay? So a compression ratio of five, I could see it up there. And as it's playing, will adjust this threshold and find an optimal point for the side chain. Let's have a listen. Okay? Now if I turn this off, it sounds like this. And I'll turn it back on as it's playing. Okay, so what it's doing is it's ducking the volume of this element every time the kid plays. And it's really, really important to get a good groove in your track. Okay, so I think I was doing it a bit too aggressively. So I just adjusted the threshold. It kinda turn it up a bit. Okay, and now we're going to do this to every single instrument that plays at the same time. Okay? So let's take the side chain input from the kick drum and link it to this lead instrument. Okay? Alright. Now we're gonna open up the limiter, coming to the compression section and select side chain one, adjust the ratio so it's kind of the same as the first instruments or around five as May 4.9 be 5.1. That's fine. And we'll drag down this threshold until we find an optimal point. Okay? And we're gonna do that again for this instrument here. So let's take the side chain input by right-clicking and saying site changed at this track. Then we're going to open up the limiter, come into the compression section side chain one. Ratio up to about five, okay? And threshold will bring it down as it's playing. Okay, so this doesn't seem to be working. So I'm going to try the second side chain input. Okay, and now that's working, I can see that's working there. So I'm going to un-solo these just so I can hear this instrument a little better. Okay? So let's find an optimal point. Okay, and that looks and sounds good. So let's turn back on these instruments and keep the character man. And I'll make sure to turn on the instrument track. And then we'll have a lesson kind of as the buildup, as playing and then into the drop. Okay, so you can see the importance of using psi j. Now if I turn and all of that side-chain off and we'll have a listen again, okay. Okay. And if I turn it back on. So such ended his track side chain to this track. And again side chain to this track. So when I'm site chaining, when I'm doing this docking effect, I will side chain all of these instruments, ok, the base and these instruments, these instruments, I might even side chain this sort of background checker to make it have a better groove. Now if we just have a look at the drum elements, okay? We don't side chain D's. Okay, so like the individual hats and claps and stuff, we don't need to cite Jane doors, but if you are using an external loop as a layer, we would side chain that. Okay, so I'm just going to drag when really quickly. Let's drag in just an external loop. I'll just fine on really quickly. So maybe this one, we will just drag this in. Fit to tempo so that it plays in time. And if we have a listen to just the kick drum and this element or this layer. Ok, so what I would do with this is I would side chain it as well. So if we take the kick drum input and then we're going to side chain to distract by right-clicking and saying side-chain. Then we'll open up the limiter. Like this. Come to the compression section. Take the input from one, it just the ratio, so up to around five, and then bring down the threshold as a place. And this will just make that particular loop kind of fit into your track better. I'll just add in some, some of the other drum elements that we're using. So maybe some of these, this hat and we'll keep the instruments on. And then we'll just kind of un-solo everything and we'll have a listen to the docking effect on everything. Ok, so definitely make sure you're using this side-chain docking technique in your track, okay? It's absolutely essential and it's one of the fundamental kind of techniques that we do in EDM, okay? And in your DAW, the process will be different. I know an Ableton, you just open up the glue compressor and I think you take the input from, you kind of assign the input to whichever track you want to control the side chain. But in your dot, this process might be different. So make sure you figure out how to use side-chain and your DAW and definitely start using it in your tracks. 121. Peak Controlling: So in this lecture, we're going to have a look at something that's unique to FL Studio and this is peak controlling. Okay? So we can use any of these elements to control any parameter within the DOD. Okay, so if I take these courts and we'll have a lesson, I can open up a peak controller on this track. And what this does is it maps the input. So it maps the peaks and the troughs from this particular element. Ok, so you can see that happening there. And we can use this sort of this map to control anything that we want. Okay, so let's say I want this chord pattern to control maybe the panning of the vocals, okay? Okay, what I can do is I can come in to the vocals, right-click on the panning and select link to controller. And this will bring up this little window where we can select this controller. Okay, we can, we can come down and we can select, Sorry, it's at the top. We can select the flimsy peak controller for that particular instrument. So we select peak. And then if we just had except, you should see that when this place and it starts to adjust the panning, the vocals. Okay? So you can see that happening there. And if you've listened to what that sounds like in the mix, will just come in and maybe click this part. Mileva listen. Okay, so we can use the PI controller to control any element within the dark. In the next section, we're going to have a look at some additional effects that you can use for your EDM tracks. 122. Extra Effects for EDM: In these few slides, we'll go through some of the additional effects that you can use for your EDM productions. There are literally millions of interesting effects out there that you can download and use to add a cool texture to your track. We're just going to cover some of the basic ones here. And we'll only focus on the presets because they're not an essential part of mixing and using the presets for your track will be absolutely fine. So what are the main additional effects that we can use? Well, there are phasors, Flanders, chorus, and filters. Remember when we looked at phase before and we said that if elements are out of phase, it can make the audio sound different. Well, a phaser will actually play with the phase of elements to create an interesting and pleasant sound. Because the phase is constantly moving, we can create some movement in the track by using these phasors. Flanges then are extremely similar to phasors because they also play with the phase of a sound. A flanger will sound much more extreme because of the way it processes the audio as opposed to a phasor. Both can create very unique and interesting results. Next, we have a chorus and this just duplicated the sound many times and makes it sound like there's lots of the same element playing. For example, you can make one vocal sound like a full crowd is singing with a chorus. They also work great on instruments to make them thicker and more full. Finally, we have filters, and these just apply different EQ shapes to the sound. A highpass filter is the exact same as a high pass on an EQ plugin. Except with the filter we can apply automation so that it opens as the track place. Let's jump back into the dark and start adding some additional effects. 123. Phasers: In this lecture, we're going to take a look at phasors and how we can use a phasor in our track. So these sound particularly good on instruments. Okay, so let's open up this electric piano and we'll have a listen to what it sounds like. I have to solo it in the mixer track. Okay, and let's open a phasor plugin. So if we come in here and we may be open, maybe let's open the default phasor, which comes with FL Studio. I mean, I've listened to what this does to the overall sound. Okay, let's try another preset. Maybe let's try this deep fish. Okay, let's try maybe this talking phasor. So this preset sounds like this. Okay? So there are, there are very interesting, they can add an interesting sound to your attracts. Okay? And if we maybe try a phase or that you have to pay for so kind of a better quality phasor. You can get some really, really nice sounds. Okay, and let's try and maybe some other presets. Lets try combat and okay, let's try maybe frequency navigation. And maybe let's try phase to, let's try this. Okay, so they can sound very interesting in your tracks. And you can use them on any element that you like, okay? So you can use them on vocals, you can use them on your drum samples, or you can even use them on some external loops. In the next lecture, we'll take a quick look at a flanger. 124. Flangers: So in this lecture, we're going to take a look at Flanders, Okay? And flanges can sound good on vocals. They can also sound good on drums, and they can also sound good on instruments. So they can kind of sound good on any sort of element that you apply them to. Okay, so let's open up these vocals in the mixer track and we'll solo them. I'm just going to unlink dust from the controller that we had at linked to in a previous lecture and reset the panning. And we'd ever listened to what the vocal sounds like Amazon. And if we note up flanger plug-in, Okay, so we'll use the stock flanger with fl soloist and we'll hear what it sounds like. So let's try some of these presets. Fast flanger. Maybe let's try modulation. Let's try ultrathin. Ok. And really quickly with just try maybe classic flanger. So these can make some really interesting kind of sounds in your mix. And if we load up another plug-in, maybe one that doesn't come with fl. Okay, let's try this flare plug-in and we'll see what this sounds like. If I press play. So we'll try some of the presets. Maybe all you need is bad on. Let's try. Maybe boxy swirl. And just one more just for the sake of demonstration, let's try this sharp jet edges. Ok, so that's what a flanger can sound like when it's on your track. And just like phasors, they can add a really interesting element to your track. So let's move on now from here, I'm going to take a quick look at course. 125. Chorus: So in this lecture, we're going to take a look at chorus, okay? And chorus can sound good on vocals, or it can also sound good on instruments. Okay, so let's open up this vocal track and we'll add a chorus effect to it. So I'm going to solo that and turn that off. Okay, so I'm going to turn off the flanger and we'll load a chorus. So I'm going to first of all load the fruity chorus, which is the default chorus that comes with fl. Okay? And we never listen to what it sounds like. Okay? And if we pick a kind of fatter version, maybe this fact clean or not. We'll try and pick maybe 50 detuned. Let's try this. Yeah, okay. So this is quite thick if you listen to the vocals on their own. So they sound very thin and you can tell that only one person is singing. But if we add in this course affect, suddenly it sounds like there's more sort of Singers singing the vocal line. So now if we replace this with maybe a better chorus, so one that EM, one that doesn't come free with fl. Okay, we'll try this coral effect. I'm okay and if we try maybe some of the other presets, so let's try deep White. Ok, so these concerned Grace when they're being used as sort of backing vocals as a layer. Ok, so if I just come across 02:00 AM, maybe here, where I have some backing vocals playing at the same time. I just have a look and find them. And, oops. Maybe let's try it on one of these. Okay. So with solar the vocals and Mazola, one of these kind of backing vocals. And it's this one here. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna reset the pan and I'm just going to turn off the vocoder just for the sake of demonstration and we load in a chorus effect. Okay, open up may be the same one that deep, wide. And whenever listen. Okay, so it sounds good when it's layered in with these, kind of, with these main vocals. Okay? Now chorus can also sound good on instruments. Okay, so let's try maybe the electric piano again, we kind of like to look at this about, um, if I just sort of that in the mixer track, which is here, OK, turn off the phaser that was on it already and we'll try a chorus plugin. So let's try maybe a different preset. Let's try intense. Okay. And if I turn that off, it sounds like this. When we add back in that chorus sound, it, it sounds like this. And you can then adjust the volume of that so it's only kind of a subtle effect. So again, chorus can add a sort of interesting texture into your track. In the next lecture, we'll have a quick look at filters. 126. Filters: So in this lecture, we're gonna take a look at filters. And the filter can really be used to sort of drive the progression of your track. Okay, if we come into this piano instrument, ok, if we add a filter to this, so let's load one of the free ones that comes. Just loved filter. And what we can do with this is we can adjust the cutoff. Okay? Remember this from the synthesizer section where we were adjusting the cut-off. It's the same thing, but we can apply it to real-life instruments like piano. Can you can kinda automate and create some cool effects like this. If you were to automate the cutoff filter. Or you can automate it so that the filter slowly opens as the, as the track placed. So in this case, it would be here where the piano comes in. We would keep the filter kind of closed and then open as the drop is coming. So that's how you can use a filter for sort of the progression of your track. Now, you can also use some of the presets that come with it. So let's have a look at some of these. And if we have a look at what a melodic band pastors, it will sound like this. Ok, so it's kind of adding in resonances, some sort of resonant frequencies as the filter is playing. Okay? But we can also use these gays things to create a sort of cool automated sound. Can you see the way the sound is kind of cutting out? If we try one of these, maybe this level driven noise gate or a sequenced gaze. And we do that by drawing in a sort of shape on the LFO. Okay, but I'm not going to show you how to do that in, in this course, okay? But for now, just try some of these presets. Okay, let's try mangled. So you can, you can create some really, really cool effects. And you can team this with maybe one of the other ones that we were looking at. So let's team it with a phasor. Ok, so you can use all of these as kind of an additional effect in your track to kind of create an interesting sound for the listener. You can then team them together like I have done here to create your own kind of unique sound. But as I said, there are millions of these kind of creative plugins that you can download and use in your tracks. So don't be afraid to download a few and try them and see what they do. Or even just stick with these stock plugins that you have in your door because most of the time they're actually pretty good. In the next section, we'll learn how to actually mix a track using the faders. 127. Using the Mixer for Stereo Separation (FL Studio Only) : So this lecture is all about using these Stereo Separation parameters to really kind of push the wideness of ATRAC. Now this technique only applies to FOR studio. So if you don't have FL Studio, you can go ahead and skip on to the next lecture. But if you do intend to mix your tracks, NFL, we can use these Stereo Separation parameters to really, really push the whiteness and kind of the fullness of ATRAC. Okay? So if we kind of start at the beginning and work our way in and we can see that we're on this vocal track. Okay, so let's see what that sounds like. I'm just gonna solo it. Now this is also linked to this. So I'm going to own linkers and we've turned that off metabolism. So remember before I was saying that you can make it Mano by turning this parameter to the right. Well, you can also kinda push, you can kind of push the stereo image by turning it to the left. And if we do it again. So generally I wouldn't do this two vocals. I kinda like to leave them as clean as possible. Okay? But we can push things like instruments, Okay, so if we try these electric keys, OK, we can use this to really stretch the stereo image. Now I'd rarely go past the kind of nine o'clock position. Ok. Because after that your trackless sound too wide or kind of artificial. So I'm going to pick an optimal point and leave it there. Let's try this instrument. Okay? And again, we're gonna wideness. Same thing with this. Okay? And we can do this to anything we want to make kind of wider. It'll sound nice. And the piano, because the piano was already a stereo instrument. So if we solo the piano and we find that in the mix. So I'll solo it now. So let's push that stereo image. And now maybe, let's push maybe the organ sound. Okay, so that comes in here. And then if we listen to all of these elements in together, it sounds like this. So the bass sound is a bit loud. And we can also maybe push that lead instrument that's playing. So that sounds like this. If I solo that. And when we get to the drop, it sounds like this. Ok, so that's separated and make a kind of wider, alright, and if we add everything else back in. Okay, so you can use this Stereo Separation parameter to either make things wider or make the monel, okay, just make sure that you're not pushing things too much, otherwise your track will sound too wide and sort of to artificial. In the next lecture, we learned the correct process to use when we're adjusting these fader levels for a final mix. 128. How to Mix a Track Using The Faders: So in this lecture we'll learn the actual process of mixing attract using these faders. So the first thing that you have to do when you come to mix your track is you have to turn the volume down. So we're going to turn the volume right down until we can barely hear us. Ok. Let's move into maybe a more busy section like the drop. Okay? So now we're at the optimal mixing level. So you're probably wondering, why do we turn the volume down? And the reason is kind of based on the scientific way that we perceive sound as a human. When you listen to music, the louder something is, the better it will sound. And the problem is if you mix your track at a really loud level, it's going to sound great. But as soon as you turn it down and you're listening at a quiet level, the whole mix will just completely fall apart. So what we do is instead we mix at a quiet level. So then when it sounds good quiet, we know that when we turn it up, it's going to sound even better. So make sure you're turning down the volume, either with the dye itself, okay, or the actual sound on your computer or speakers. Definitely do not turn down the volume with this master fader, okay, because this will do something different and it won't sound any better. Afterwards if you use this volume slider. So if you're NFL, Make sure you using this one up here, or you're turning down the actual sound on your speakers themselves. Next, what we do is we start with the main element and we mix everything around that, okay? Because we have one kind of element that we want the audience to listen to. So we're going to start with that and make sure that everything kind of complements that one elements. So for me, it's this lead sound. It's actually in a different section of the track is over here. So let's listen. Okay, so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to turn down the fader level. And we're gonna bring it up until I'm kind of hitting around 90 B. Ok. Well, I'm already noticing that nine dB is pretty loud. Okay, so it's sounding a bit too loud. So I'm going to kind of mix it in until I think it sounds good. Somewhere around here. Okay. And the only reason I didn't push it further, it was because it would be too loud and it would actually start to sound good and I wouldn't be mixing accurately. So I need to make sure that it's quiet enough that I can hear is but not too loud, that the volume is kind of taking over from the actual sound itself. Okay, next we're going to mix in the elements around it. So let's start with maybe this instrument here. Okay? So I need to solo this instrument track. Okay? And the way we do it is we start from the bottom and then you kind of mix it in until you can just about hearers and then we leave it there. Okay. So let's have a listen. Okay, I can just about here that, but I'm going to push it a small bit because I wanted to complement this element. Next, we'll try this instrument over here, because it's playing at the same time. Again, we're going to turn it down to 0 and mix it back in as we're listening. Ok, so now I can just about here that, and I think it's kind of complementing the other two instruments. Well, now the instrument is playing here is the base, okay, but we're not going to mix the base in until the very end. And this is just because we're going to bring in the bass sound to kind of warm up the entire track. We don't want to mix it into early. Otherwise your track can be two bass heavy and the sound of this, when it's playing, we'll throw everything else off. Okay, so we'll leave the base to last. Let's try another instrument, maybe this piano. Ok. So I'm going to start from 0 and mix it in. Okay? I think here is kind of an optimal level. Let's try another instrument. Maybe this. Okay, so this is way too loud for the moment. We're going to start from 0 and mix it back in. And finally, we're going to try the organ sound, which sounds like this is the moment, way too loud, but we're going to start from 0 and mix it back in. Okay, so then when we turn these instruments, this whole track back up again. So I'll reset this. And because they were already sounding good when we were listening to the quiet signal, I know now that when this is turned up, they're gonna sound even better. Let's have a listen. Okay, so now we can turn down this again and we can mix in the base, okay, because the base is the last instrument that we need to mix in. So let's have a listen and mixing this base. Okay, start from 0. And I'm just using it to kind of warm up the overall sound. Maybe a small but more than that. And I actually think that's a bit too much, so I'm going to pull it back. Now we can start adding in some drums, ok, so I'm going to leave this play. I'm going to start adding in some drum sounds. Okay, start from the bottom. Mix it in until you can kind of just about heres. Okay? The next, the sort of, the next element is this. And this is a clicky sounds. We're going to start from 0 and mix it back in. Okay, let's try. We leave the kick drum out until the very end. Let's try this shaker. Okay, too loud at the moment, but we'll mix it in from 0. Ok. So it's kind of, it's kind of subtle at the moment, but it's complementing the other elements. Well, okay, let's try some of these other drum sounds. We have. Where are they going to have to, sorry, I'm gonna have to skip in a bit to where they play, which is here. So let's mix in this clap. Okay? Okay, let's mix in this Percussion sound. Let's also mix in this open hat sound. Okay? Okay, and let's try the final clap, but that we have in the drum pattern. So now I know when I turn up the volume, the overall sound will sound good metabolism. And now we can add in the kick drum. So I'm gonna turn this back down and we'll come over to the kick drum, which is here. Okay, and we'll mix this in until we kind of like the sort of sound of the kick drum in the mix. So somewhere around here. Maybe a small bit more. No, maybe a bit less. Okay, so I think this sounds good. Now let's come back out and maybe mix the vocals. So I know that a lot of the elements I've just mixed are playing here. Okay, so we can mix in the vocal sound to make sure that the vocals are sitting right within the mix. So if we have a listen now, we can hear that there are way too loud, but we're going to start from 0 and mix them in, okay? Okay, so maybe somewhere around here. Let's mix them, these backing vocals. So we'll start with the one on the right. Let's turn it down to 0 and mix it in. Oh, I have to turn on the carrier because it's a vocal that sound. So let's do that again. Okay, and let's try the other vocal. Vocal. Okay, so now I know that when I turn it up, it's going to sound good with the vocals in. So this is the process that you'll use when you're mixing your track, okay, turn down the volume and start with your main element, and then mix the track around that main element. Make sure you leave your base and your kick drum unto last, just to kind of warm up the overall sound of the track. And once you have the whole track mixed, you'll be ready to start mastering. 129. Introduction to Essential Mastering : So in this lecture, we learned how to master our tracks so that they can stand up to other professionally produced tracks. Now, Mastering won't fix your mix, so it's important to get your mix sounding great. Before you start this stage, I hear so many producers just leaving problems and then saying, oh, we'll fix it in mastering. But the problem is mastering will not fix your mix. Mastering is like the package that you put your product into, okay? You can make the packaging as fancy as you like. Put the product inside is what really matters. Or in other words, you can't polish uttered. So what is mastering? This is the final step in audio production, where we put some final touches on the track. We have to make sure that our track is loud enough and we'll playback on any audio system without damaging is mastering also makes your track louder, which is cool because Lauder always sounds better. So how do we go about applying mastering? Well, we would use an EQ to put a final kind of shape on the track. Maybe warm it up a small bit and remove any harsh frequencies that don't sound good. Then we use some compression to kind of glue all of the elements together. And we can also push the gain here to get some extra loudness Out of the track. Following this, we use stereo imaging to make the track wider and more full. And then we use a limiter to cut off any sounds that go above 0 db. This just prevents the track from distorting when being played back on certain audio systems. Finally, we have to check the levels to ensure that everything is looking good so that when a labeled downloads and tests your track, the numbers that they see on the screen will make them happy. So let's head back into the dark and we learn how to apply mastering to our tracks. 130. EQ for Mastering: In this lecture, we're going to learn how to use EQ for mastering, OK, and before we even begin to apply effects and the master channel, we have to make sure that first of all, the master channel is kind of set a default, so there's no effects already on there. So let's go file to fault. And you also have to find the kind of loudest part of your track. Ok, so the part of your track that has the most going on, we're going to find that point. And I already listened and I think it's somewhere around here. And we're gonna loop it. Okay, so we're going to listen to the loudest part of the track while we're doing the mastering. And then when we're finished mastering, we can listen to the whole track again and make sure that all of our levels are okay. So the first effect we're going to load is an EQ, okay? And I'm gonna use this fat filter broke you just because I can add as many bands as I like. Whereas with the other EQ we were looking at, I could only use seven bands. So the first sort of step with this is to apply a low cut somewhere around 30 hertz. Ok, so I'm gonna drag this band up to around 30. Let's say maybe 28, okay? And we can adjust the queue to try and keep as many of those frequencies in as we can. And again, maybe we could change the slope of the line, so am I double it to 24? And again, I'm going to change the QGIS so we're kind of looking at a flat, a flat line and move it down just slightly, maybe to 27. Okay? The reason we do this is because all of these frequencies down here, humans, we can't really hear them. We more, so we feel them more than we hear them. Okay. Anything below 20 hertz? We can't actually here. So this is just kind of creating unnecessary kind of mode or mess in your mix when they're not actually frequencies that we can, even here, okay? And the thing is speakers and headphones and stuff. They're always cut off at 20 hertz. You'll see, you'll see if you ever read the box for speakers or headphones or something. It'll give you like a frequency response range further speakers, and it's usually, well, always between 2020 thousand, okay, because these are the frequencies that we hear. We can't hear above 20 thousand and we can't here below 20, we can only feel those frequencies. So it makes sense to kind of cut some of those unnecessary low frequencies out and keep the final Master sounding clean. The second kind of step before we do anything is to roll off some of these high frequencies. Ok, so I'm going to roll off frequencies above. Maybe let's go for 18 thousand. And I don't want the slope to be this aggressive. I really want a kind of subtle slope going off like this, just to roll off some of those high frequencies. So I'm going to choose six dB. And I'm going to even move this up again just so we're getting rid of some of the nasty kind of hashed frequencies that again, we can't actually hear. They don't add anything to the kind of harmonic sound of the track, okay. So let's have a listen to what it sounds like so far. Okay, so now we're going to use this EQ to shape the track. Okay, so we're going to start finding nice frequencies to boost and finding nasty frequencies to cut out, OK. And when you're doing this, you're going to be using a very sort of wide Q. You see here the way it's kind of focused. But we did just the cube to make it a little bit wider. So it's kind of bringing in some more of these sorts of frequencies. We want this to be subtle. So we want to kind of use as many frequencies as we can to kind of mask the fact that we're actually boosting frequencies. If you use a queue like this, it's going to sound very, very obvious that you've boosted these frequencies. But if you use a wider queue like this, it's going to be more subtle and kinda harder for the listener to realize that you've actually applied EQ. And that's the whole point of mastering is to keep things sounding as transparent as possible. And we listen to the track. And then we'll start boosting and find some nice frequencies that are in there. Okay, so for this part, I'm going to reset the Q Just so I can kind of hear each frequency properly. And then we'll find the nice ones and will boost them. Okay? So, so I kind of like the sound of the low end here. So I'm going to bring down the gain. So it's a lot more subtle. Maybe never really go above 3dB. I'd say it's, that'd be too much. So let's boosted by maybe two dB, and again will spread that Q out. So it sounds much less obvious. Let's have a listen now. Now we're going to find some other nice frequencies that we can boost. Maybe some frequencies up here in the high range. So let's add an another point and we'll adjust the queue so that we can hear each frequency kind of clearly. That's a Alyson. So I think somewhere around here sounds good. So I'm going to bring the gain down again, and I'm going to spread out that Q, Not that much. But maybe like that and I'm gonna move this up just a touch. Okay? So now we can see the contour of the lines are kinda gone up there dipping down and they're coming back up again. This is a fairly common contour that actually sounds pleasing to the ear, okay, to kinda booster lows, boost the highs, and then kind of leave the mids kind of cut out. But what we're gonna do is we're going to be even more precise and we're going to add in another point, okay? And boost queue. And we will find some other frequencies that we don't like. And we're gonna cut them out of the mids. Okay, let's have a listen. So you can hear these frequencies are kind of Honky, okay? Like a, like a honky tonk. Let's have a listen again. They don't sound very nice. So again, I'm going to cut them out like this, and I'm going to spread that. Q. Alright. I don't want to cut them out too much. I don't want to be too obvious with this EQ, but I do want to take out those kind of Honky frequencies. Okay, and finally we're going to add in one more point. And we're going to apply sort of aggressive. So with a sharp Q like this, we're going to cut out 10000500 hertz, okay? And that, that value exactly one hundred and five hundred somewhere around there. I don't know why. But when you cut out sort of a, a kind of a deep curve here, it just sounds much, much cleaner and much, much better. So we're gonna cut this out now by too much. Maybe only when four dB, but definitely deeper than this sort of dip that we have here. Okay? Okay, so if we listen to the track now, and I'll turn off the EQ while it's playing, and then we'll turn it back on. And you can hear the kind of subtle but important difference that it's making. Let's have a listen. So now when we were playing back, I was noticing that some of these midrange, these high mid-frequencies are kind of creating a nasty sounds. I'm gonna move this up, okay, and I'm going to kind of adjust accused or not, really including these high mid-frequencies. Okay. Let's have a listen again. Okay, so that is how you apply EQ when you're mastering, you cut out the really low frequencies that you don't need. You roll off some of the high frequencies that you don't need. And then you kinda go about shaping the track. But make sure that you're keeping its subtle. You just want the EQ to kind of warm the track up a bit. You don't want to completely change the overall sound of the track. In the next lecture, we'll have a look at using multi-band compression for mastering. For mastering. 131. Compression for Mastering: So in this lecture, we're going to have a look at using multi-band compression for mastering, OK. And FL Studio has a really, really good multiband compressor that comes for free with the software, okay, and it's called maximise. So we're going to use maximise to apply the multi-band compression for our master. Ok. So you can follow me along using these settings as well. So the first thing we must do is kind of define where the laws, the mids and the highs are in our track. Ok, and we do this by clicking this bands button. And then we can kind of move the band to kind of focus on the specific frequencies of our track. So I'm gonna hit this solo button. So we can listen to just the laws. And we're going to find the point in the track where the laws kind of turn into the mids and then we're going to leave it there. Okay. So obviously this would be too much. So I'm going to bring these laws down. Okay? Maybe around here. I can only kind of hear the kick in the base. Okay, next we're going to define the mids. So we're gonna take these meds here and we're gonna find kind of where the cut off point for the mids turning into the highs are OK. Let's have a listen. I seem to be listened to the highest now, but that's okay. We'll just find where the highest turn into the mids. Okay. Maybe somewhere around here. Let's have a listen to the mids. Yeah. So the mids are usually, you know, you're kind of correct when you can't hear the high hats. Okay. So maybe even a bit less than that. Okay. I can't hear the high hats in the midst of the moment, but I can hear them when I click into these heights. So that's generally the area that you want to go for when you're finding you're at all frequencies, generally, you want to only hear kind of the kick and the base, okay? But if you start to hear the snare in here, the clapper, some percussion sound, you're probably a bit too high, so you should bring your laws back. So now we're going to adjust the input gain for each of these bands. Okay? So we're going to be using this pre parameter. And we're just gonna boost this. And you'll see here it moves the band up. And if we scroll kind of across, we can see that this is around three, maybe four dB. So I'm going to reset this and then we're going to boost this input frequency until the kind of kicking the bass sounds at a nice kind of optimal level. Ok, let's have a listen. Maybe somewhere here. Let's do the same for the mids. And now let's do the same for the highs. Okay, so now we have the pre parameter set for all of these frequencies. Now we can start to apply the compression and we do this by drawing in an anchor point and moving this sort of grafting. Okay, so I'm gonna delete this anchor point that I added. And what we're gonna do is we're going to find kind of, you see the way this is the peak here. You can see where there's kick drum or where the low frequencies are kind of peeking out. Okay? And you can see down here, the low frequencies are kind of sitting around here. Like this is the average, let's say of the, of the low frequencies. Well, we're gonna pick somewhere in between. We're gonna pick this midpoint here. And then we're going to drag this anchor point down until we feel like we've compressed the low-end enough. So this would be your ratio. Ok, so if you do this really aggressively, This would be like ten to 181621, that kinda thing. So we're going to have a listen to the low frequencies. And then we're gonna move this anchor point until we feel like we've compressed the sound enough, okay, until the bass and the kick drum, or kind of Andhra control. So let's have a listen. Maybe somewhere around here. Okay, next, let's move on to the mids, OK. And we'll do the same thing. We're going to find the peak and we're gonna find the average. And we're gonna find somewhere between. So it's somewhere around here, maybe a small bit higher. And move that up. And we're going to drag down this anchor point until we feel like we've compressed the sound enough. Might move this anchor point down slightly. Okay, and I'm gonna move this backup or small, but I think it's too compressed. Maybe let's try it back down again, just see what that sounds like. And I can use this to kind of adjust the knee so I can I can make the compressor turned on kind of much more gradually. Okay, so I'm going to do that. I'm going to just kind of curve this a small bits. What's not as obvious like this. Okay, and I'm gonna move this anchor point back down again, and I'm gonna move this down one. So now we can see that we're kind of shaping this sound. Okay, next we'll take a look at the high frequencies. Alright, we're gonna do the exact same thing. Find the kind of peak, the average, and go for somewhere in between. And then we're going to drag down this anchor point. Now with the highest, you don't want to kind of compress them too much because music seems to sound better when we have lots of high frequencies in. So I'm not going to compress it with as much of a ratio as let's say the mids are the laws, okay? Maybe just something subtle like this. Then we are going to come onto this master section and we're going to compress this to okay, but we're not going to use the same sort of technique. So I can see that the peaks are somewhere around here and the average is maybe somewhere down here. But I don't want to be as aggressive with this. I want to be more subtle. So I'm going to kind of just roll off. This is kinda top, sorry, this kind of peak at the sound. Okay, going to roll this off by compressing it just very, very slightly. This is just a kind of glue these sorts of frequencies together even more than they already are, okay, is expanded. And now what we'll do is we'll go back through all of these frequencies and will find how much we've sort of compress them by, and then will boost the post gain, so the output gain by that same amount. So if we look at the low frequencies, I can see that I'm kind of compressing them by maybe around 3dB because I think this is the 0 line. And I can see up here at three. So when the kick drum is playing and stuff were kind of cutting 3dB out every time. So I'm going to boost the gain, the output gain side by three dB. Okay? And I'm going to be more precise with this, with the Master. With the master up again. Ok. I want to make sure that it sounds natural and kind of subtle. Ok, let's do the same for the mids. Okay? So I'm gonna go for somewhere maybe in between sort of three or 1. May 3 be around 2.3 because I can see that the deep cuts are at around 3dB, but then there's some smaller cuts, maybe around one db. Okay, so I'm gonna go for a kind of happy medium. And then again with the highest, we're gonna do the same thing. And this is nowhere near three dB. This is maybe 1.52 dB. So let's try boosting it by maybe 1.7. Okay? And again with the master will do the same thing because we compress this two. So I can see that this has been kind of compressed by maybe two dB, but are not going to push the master as much. Okay, I don't want things to get distorted. So maybe something around I think was 0.9 up there. Yeah. Well, we could push it push it to smother Mar maybe up to 1.5. Okay, so now favor listen without the compressor. And then we'll turn the compressor back on as the track is playing music. Okay, so I think it sounds a little bit too compressed. So I'm gonna come back in, just maybe boost this up a bit more just to kind of open that compressor out of it. And then maybe change the curve so that the knee is kind of more subtle here. Okay. And I think that sounds much better now it's not as kind of over compressed season. Now at this particular plugin, we also have DES, this sort of Stereo Separation novel K. So we can push this in the mids kind of outbursts. And again with the highest mic and push it a little bit more just to get that kind of wide high sound. Let's have a listen. Sorry, we have to listen to the master because I have this soloed. Let's have a listen and CC, and this is true. Now if you don't have maximise, you won't be able to use these Stereo Separation nubs. Ok, so in that case, you would use an actual stereo imaging plug-in. Okay, we'll have a look at how to use these plugins for your master in the next lecture. 132. Stereo Enhancers for Mastering: So in this lecture, we're going to learn about stereo imaging for mastering. And the first thing I'll say is that these must be multiband stereo images, okay, because we don't want to kind of widen the whole track because then we'll end up widening the low frequencies as well. And as you know, low frequencies should be kept in mono. Or stereo enhancement isn't an essential part of mastering, but it really does make the tracks on better. If you don't have a multiband stereo imager. And if you don't have Maximus to be able to use these stereo kind of separators. Then I would suggest you just kind of skip this lecture. Then I would suggest then, then I would suggest, then I would suggest, then I would suggest that you then I would then I would suggest then I, then I would suggest that you just kind of skip this lecture, okay, because if you use any other stereo imagery, like maybe this stereo enhancer, you can't control which sort of band, so which kind of frequencies you're looking at. So when you widen this, Your Widening everything, okay? And we don't want to do that. We only want to widen certain frequencies, okay? So because of this, I'm going to replace this with a multiband imager. And isotope ozone has a great one. So I'm going to load up this and we can see the kind of frequencies starting to appear here on the vector scope. Okay? Now again, we're going to have to set the bands. But the thing is we can use isotope to learn. So I'm going to set it into learn mode and then I'm going to play the track so the algorithm can kind of set the bands forming is okay. I have to set it to learn again. Okay? So it's adjusted the bands. And I can see here that the laws are around here. Let's have a listen to check and make sure that all these frequencies are correct. So I might bring this down as well, but let's check the low mids solidus. That sounds okay, let's try the high mids over here. I might just take these back a bit. Ok, I think it kind of messed up there. And now let's try the high frequencies up here. Let's see if the sound okay. Okay, so now all of these bands are set for my track. So I'm going to make the low frequencies monel, okay? And then I'm going to maybe widen the low mids. Ok. Not too much, maybe maybe just around 16. Then I'm going to widen the high mids a bit more, maybe 21, and then we widen the highs a lot more, right up to maybe 26. Ok. Let's have a listen to what it sounds like. This is the same as the c. And again, we can use this stereo sort of sterilized knob. And I'm gonna set this to seven. What we had is setup before, okay, so maybe 7.1. And let's turn it off and we'll have a listen. And while it's playing, I'll turn the plugin back on. This is the spacing of the CSU. So you can see that this imaging plugin is kind of making the overall sound a bit more full and a bit more wide. In the next lecture, we'll use a limiter to make sure that no volume is getting past the 0 dB mark. 133. Limiters for Mastering: So in this lecture, we're going to use a limiter to get a kind of final push a volume and make sure that nothing is going above 0 db. So let's load up a limiter plug-in. Okay, I'm going to load fruity limiter. And it'll open like this. And if we hit play will be able to see the signal coming through. Ok, let's have a look. So there's the signal coming through into this limiter plug-in. Okay? And we're just going to use it to kind of push those peaks right up to 0. And then we're going to set the ceiling to cut them off. So currently the ceiling is set at 0 dB, and I can move that down if I want. Now generally, we don't set, will set the ceiling between kind of 0 and minus 0.2. Okay? But for EDM, I'm gonna keep it up at 0 to kind of keep as much loudness as I can in there. Now let's boost again, okay, so I can see that we're fairly close to 0 and that's good. Okay, we don't want to boost the limiter gain too much. If you're kind of, if you're boosting the limiter by too much, you need to go back in and either remix your track or used the compressor to kind of get a bit of volume out of it. Okay, but we're kind of close to 0 as it is. So I'm going to boost this just to get that final push so that we can get up and hits 0. Okay? The very slightly to divi. And now I can see we're hitting 0. Ok, and that is all we need. Ok. We only need to be kind of touching 0. We don't need to be flat to 0 the whole time. Like things used to be back in 2012 when we were going through what was called the loudness war. And everyone was trying to be kind of louder than each other. Nowadays, streaming sites will either turn your track down or they'll turn it up depending on where you set your master at. So it really, really doesn't matter where even if your master is hitting tree, the streaming sites, we'll turn it up so that it is hitting 0. Okay? But if you plan to get signed by a record label, you will need to be hitting this 0 Mac. And my track at the moment is okay, I can see it's hitting 0. And all I did was pushed again very, very slightly. And that is limiting for mastering In a nutshell. Okay? You're just going to use it to kind of push that final bit of volume that you need. Set your ceiling anywhere between minus 0.20 and then just leave it there. In the next lecture, we're gonna be checking the tracks levels to make sure that when record labels kind of download and test your track, that the numbers they see on the screen will make them happy. 134. Checking The Track's Levels: So now that our track is mixed and mastered, We have to make sure that its levels are acceptable. So for this, we need to use a loft meter, okay? And loves are just a measure of how loud your track is over the total length of the track. Ok, so it takes the average loudness of the entire track. Now, you can download these for free or you can buy a package that kind of has a few other different levels, level meters built-in. Okay. So I'm going to be using levels by master the mix, okay? And that's down here. And we're going to come over to the layoffs section because we want to measure the loves of the track. So to do this, we're going to have to listen to the entire track. So we're going to have to kind of listen and watch these loves and then come back at the end and see what the kind of integrated or the average loves are. Now, lofts are how these streaming sites kind of a measure your track, ok, so YouTube, I think it turns it up to maybe minus 13. And then Spotify might be minus 14 and then I don't know, desert could be minus nine. They all have their own sort of layoffs level that they're looking for. So your Laughs should be anywhere between minus 14 and minus nine. Okay, that's the kind of range that we are going for. If you're below minus nine, these streaming sites will turn down your track and it might end up sounding a bit too over compressed. Because of the compression race that YouTube or Spotify or D's are used. And if you're kind of, let say above minus 14, so maybe your track is at minus 18. These streaming sites are going to try and boost your track. And what might happen is it might become distorted or it might end up kind of losing quality. So because of this, make sure that your loves is reading somewhere between minus nine and minus 14. So now we're just going to listen to the entire track, okay, the whole way through. And at the very end, we're going to check what this lux meter is reading. Okay? I'm just gonna extend this out so that it doesn't kind of loop back on itself. And we can pause us when the track finishes. Okay, so let's hit play and we'll watch this loves meter change. And then to use a technical term. And you see again and again. So we'll go to the input. And this is a family. So if you adjustment. So to determine the anther, the first is a very, very high, a big amount. Okay, so if we look at the level meter, we can see that the lumps are around minus 10.4. And this is okay because we're between the range of minus nine and minus 13. Okay? So minus ten is kind of on the outside. And then minus 13 would kind of beyond the more quiet side of a modern master. Now you'll notice that kind of at the start of the track there, this stereo field when red. And that's because we have sort of elements pants. So when the tracks starts, this element is panned to the right. So what happens is the stereo field is kind of reading that the track sounds a bit kind of offset to the right. But this is a computer, okay, and I think the track sounds fine as in, in terms of kind of whiteness and in terms of balance. So I'm gonna ignore that. And this is red because these are loudness units. Okay, so what kind of measures the volume difference between the quiet as parrot on the loudest part of your track. And this is just telling me that there's kind of a big gap between the quiet parts and allowed parts of my track. But this is kind of the same thing as dynamic range, okay? And it's kind of up to you again, this is a computer and I quite like that the track starts out quietly and then kind of grows to this sort of loud drop section. So I'm going to ignore this warning as well. But by all means, if you want your track to be kind of loud hallway true, then you'd want to keep an eye on this sort of reading as well to make sure that there's not too much of a gap between the quietest and the loudest parts of your track. In the next lecture, we're going to have a look at actually exporting the track. Ok, so what settings are best for when you're finished with your track and you're ready to render it to a final WAV file. 135. Rendering The Final Track: So by now we have composed, arranged, mixed, and mastered our EDM track. The final step in this music production process is to actually render an export the track. So I'm going to come up here to file and export, okay? And we're going to export a wav file. An mp3 file isn't good enough quality. And the industry standard for record labels and kind of the whole audio industry anyway, is a WAV file. So we're going to export this and we're gonna give it a name. So let's say we call it goose to maybe Final Master, okay? And then we're going to hit save. And then it brings up this little window. Okay, so we can choose whether we want to export a pattern or a full sunk. Now, I want the full songs, so I'm going to leave it on full sang. For the tail, you want to select either leave remainder or wrap remainder. Definitely do not select caught remainder. And this just decides how the actual kind of tail end of the effects are processed. Okay, so let's say at the end of your track, you have a kind of big reverb as well. And you want the sound of the reverb to kind of wring out when the track ends. Well then you should select leave remainder, ok. If you select wrapper Mender, what this does is it takes that reverb tail and it moves us to the front so that if you're creating loops and things, the reverb from the end will be at the front so that the whole loop will blend more seamlessly, okay? And cut remainder just kind of cuts that sound off, okay? And you don't want that to happen. So definitely either choose, leave a rap, but if you're kind of rendering the full sun, definitely select leave, remainder. Next, we're going to make sure that the track is on wave. And I can see that it is. We're going to set the bit depth, okay, so anywhere above 24 is fine. 16-bit is a bit too low, okay, that's kind of going back in time to the era of CDs. So definitely for a modern music, you want to set the bit depth anywhere kind of above 24. Okay, I'm going to set mine a 32-bit float. And that just means that 32-bit doesn't really exist yet, but the software will kind of try to emulate that sound. Next, we can choose either stereo, mono merged Mano left only, or mono write-only. So for a final master version, we're gonna pick stereo, okay, re-sampling. We want this as high as possible. We want the highest quality that we can get, HQ for all plugins. So high-quality for our plug-ins and disable maximum polyphony. So, so if you're using maybe like a stock piano sound and a kind of has a maximum amount of keys that you can play at the same time. And let's say it's five. This will just turn that off so that if you do have a pattern with like ten keys playing at the same time, allow the rendered into this final Master. Next, we're going to turn off this saved playlists markers. And what this does is when you render at the final track, if you have you Intro breakdown drop up here, that'll actually render into the audio file. So your audio file will have these little kind of yellow markers, but we don't want that in the final version. So we're going to turn this off and make sure that split mixer tracks is off. Okay, if this is on, what happens is the software will kind of render each individual track separately. So you'll end up with stems, okay, so you'll end up with the kick drum and a zone. You'll end up with the vocals on their own. You'll end up with the electric keys on its own. So make sure that this is turned off so that you end up with one audio file at the end. That's kind of That's kind of a merged version of all of these separate elements. Okay? Make sure trim PDC silences on, okay, because NFO studio, what happens is while you're mixing, let's say the software will try and combat latency. So if you're using a kind of heavy plug-in, this could kind of make that element come in at the wrong time. So what FL Studio does is it adds silence into certain elements so that everything plays at the same time. But when we're doing the final Master, we don't want that silence in there in case a kind of messes up the timing of our track. So make sure that trim PDC, CG-islands is on. And then you just make sure that your insert effects are enabled. So these are the ones that you're using when you're mixing and make sure your master effector enabled. So these are the kind of, so these are just the effects that we have on the master channel that we're using for mastering. Okay, next we're going to come down and we'll hit Start. And the software will start to render your final mastered EDM track. 136. BONUS Sending Your Track to Labels: So you're sitting on a track that you really want to send to record labels. How did we do this and what is the correct format? Well, it's actually quite simple. First, upload your track to a stream website. Soundcloud actually works best for this process. So I'd advise you to use that for your private stream of the link. And that brings me to my next point, which is you must always make your uploaded track private. Okay? Labels will not release, attract that someone may have heard before. So make sure that your demo is uploaded as private. You must also enable downloads so that the label can easily download your track and tested to make sure that all of the levels are looking good. Do some research and find a suitable label to send your track to. The label must release your genre of music. So you know, don't send a house track to dubstep record label. Now if you're a quite a small artist, try finding smaller labels to release your music. A big label generally won't sign a small artists, but the smaller labels can sometimes be running low on Demos admissions, and yours will have a higher chance of being chosen if it is good enough. Besides, from here, you can actually work your way up the ladder of labels. Most record labels talk to each other and you have a higher chance of being discovered if you're signed to a label rather than if you're independent. It's a bit like being a soccer player. If you're signed to a smaller club, the big clubs will be scouring to find undiscovered talent so that you can come and play on their team. Once you find the label that you want to send your demo to, we're ready to write the email. So keep this short and sweet. Okay, just introduce yourself as an artist. What kind of music you make, and a few relevant references to any labels you've been signed two before, or any other artists who support you and your music, then give them a short description of the track. Is it a hard-hitting, high-energy electro house track? Or is it a groovy underground deep house track? Let them know the vibe before they even listen. Finally, just insert the link to your private demo and sign off with a thank you and your name. Now you can use your artist's name or your real name here. It really doesn't matter. I would not recommend sending your demo to more than one label at a time. Okay? Because if five labels respond and all of them onto sign your track, it can be particularly awkward to have to explain to four of them that you're going with a different label. And this can actually annoy some labels and you may end up getting your name blacklisted by them or any labels that they're associated with. So keep it to one at a time and just enjoy the process. I hope this advice has helped and I wish you the very best mature label hunting. There is a link to a very useful website attached to this bonus lecture where you can go on and search for labels in your genre. You can also easily organized them by SoundCloud followers or Facebook likes. So if you're looking for a smaller label, or maybe you're looking for a bigger label. You can easily find them on this website. So good luck, and I hope you get signed to your dream label. 137. The Valediction: So this is the valid diction, or in other words, the big goodbye. You have reached the end of the course and now know everything that you will ever need to create a professional EDM track. I really do hope that you learn something along the way and enjoyed the lectures and tutorials throughout. Now if you didn't or you feel like I could improve something, please don't hesitate to let me know so that I can fix this and make improvements to my future courses. Also, I am genuinely excited to hear each of your final EDM tracks and see how far you've come since the very first project. So what's next for you after this course? Well, from here, you can continue to create EDM tracks, learn more and really pushed to become the best that you can be. Make sure you join my Facebook group, BL music and sound to enter a community of fellow music producers who just like you want to learn and improve their sound. You can also upload any kind of future projects that you're working on and share them with other students who have taken my courses. You can then ask for constructive feedback from the group to really fine tune your sound. Remember, many pairs of ears are better than one. Also, don't forget to leave a review. If you enjoyed the course and learned something new, make sure that you raise it so that other music producers can find us and learn some of the same things that you did. Finally, I just wanted to say thank you for taking the time to complete the course, and I really hope I see you again on some future courses. Take care of yourselves and happy producing.