3 Tips For FIXING Your Beats (DO THESE!)

today i'm gonna be showing you three tips to help you fix your beats [Music] [Music] all right to show you these tips in today's video i'm going to be going through some of my subscribers beats and seeing what i can do to fix them the first beat that we're going to look at is from my subscriber named godstar let's take a listen to what he's made so far [Music] now right off the bat i want to say this is a pretty cool idea i love what he's built so far but from my understanding he was having some trouble figuring out what to do next and this is a really common problem that i used to run into especially when i would use similar sounds in my beats like godstar is using here so let's first start by analyzing these sounds and figuring out what's happening here notice how these sounds are being played and what they're doing we have a very dense base that's constantly playing throughout this idea right now now this sounds great but with the way it's being programmed there isn't really a moment in the beat where the bass lets up and stops playing and you'll notice the exact same thing with these chords right here this pad sound [Music] again this is a cool sound but yet again it's just constantly playing without any breaks really and this is something that i used to do as well i just love these big dense sounds that would sit in my beats and so when i would start making my beats i would use sounds like these but then when it came time to building my beat and then arranging it i would just get stuck time and time again instantly i would begin to struggle because there was just so little space remaining due to these huge sounds so let's take a look at what i did in order to help fix the speed idea [Music] now there are some key ideas that i want to point out here take a listen to what i did to those extremely dense sounds that i talked about earlier if i just solo them here [Music] they're just no longer constantly playing this is what allowed me to come in and create this drum pattern and have it actually fit since there's more open space in this beat now now what i did with this base was pretty straightforward i cut parts of this baseline so we have more open sections in this loop now you can see i just completely deleted these sections right here if i had a bit more control over this project i would probably come up with something a bit more complex in my baseline maybe add some additional notes but nonetheless the bigger problem has been addressed here we finally have a bit more space in this beat now same thing with these chords here my approach was very similar i tried my best to minimize just how present this sound is now i could have done something similar as my base and just created these hard cuts but i felt like that would have been a bit too jarring hearing a very ethereal sound like this suddenly stop isn't something that would make sense typically [Music] that doesn't sound too great so what i decided to do instead was modulate the sound instead i use shaper blocks in order to take this loop and reduce its presence to give a quick explanation of what this is doing it's reducing the frequencies and the volume of the sound according to the pattern that you see right here [Music] now these chords are no longer constantly playing they're sort of just going in and out during this loop which again is helping create a little bit more openness and just as a side note you definitely don't have to buy shaper box if you wanted to do this yourself you could just manually modulate your sounds by using events for example and if you don't know how to do that check out the video in the corner where i walk you through how to use events to help you shape and improve your beats in case you don't have shaper blocks so after using these techniques i was finally able to open up this beat a lot more to the point where i was able to introduce more sounds and not have the beats sound huge and overwhelming now i do want to point out that this pattern that i've built doesn't inherently sound bad if i were to apply them to what godstar had originally built here [Music] this still sounds good but i would say that this loop to me sounds a bit too large to be the core idea for the entire beat most likely the listener would end up getting fatigued listening to these huge sounds constantly play with no break at all it would also be a lot more difficult for me to build even more into this beat if for example i was trying to build a hook something like what we have here would probably be better suited for the hook itself since it feels so much more bigger and then it could transition into the section that i built which to me feels better suited for a verse [Music] so that's the first tip if you find yourself struggling to add more into your beat you might want to analyze what your sounds are currently doing if you're using sounds and textures that are just constantly playing and are very very prominent in your beat you're going to struggle to find a good balance especially for the verse section you'll want to think about minimizing adding more into your beat isn't always the answer sometimes taking away elements or reducing them can be the right answer in a particular situation let's move on to beat number two this here is a beat from sado let's take a listen [Music] by the way guys if you enjoy my videos and you get value out of them think about subscribing and hitting the like button it really does help me out if you ever get tired of my videos it's really easy to unsubscribe now with this beat here unfortunately they were only able to send me the single file the full beat so i'm going to be a bit limited in what i can do to fix this but i wanted to make sure to include this beat in this video for a very particular reason because one of the things that sato is doing in this beat is something that i would do often and it would end up ruining so many of my beats in fact just to tell a quick side story i actually ended up spending thousands of dollars taking my beats to multiple engineers to see if they could help me fix them since they sounded similar to this i just had no idea what i was doing wrong so i did what many other producers do which is blaming my issues on mixing and mastering and after i spend thousands of dollars taking my beats to multiple engineers what actually happened was that they sounded the exact same for the most part they had the exact same problems within them but they just sounded slightly more polished unfortunately i ended up wasting a lot of money and time because the problems with my beats were not at the mix level they were at the production level and this is exactly why when producers ask me to make videos on mixing and mastering i'm always somewhat hesitant to do so the reason being i believe that they're facing a very similar problem and they think that mixing is the key to fix all their production problems but in reality it's their production decisions that are causing these issues and not the actual mix but obviously the hard part is to know exactly what is being done incorrectly at the production level so let's go back to this beat and analyze what's happening here one of the big mistakes that i used to make and so many other producers make is to just throw reverb onto a sound to make it sound cooler as their first solution to everything if i was making a beat and i was having trouble getting my snare to sound good in my beat or i was struggling to add a melodic sound into my beat because it didn't really fit well with what i was making instead of trying a different more well fitting sound out and seeing if i could find something that fits better and making my decisions on a production level the first thing that i would do is just try to throw reverb on the sound and what happened was my textures would start to sound cooler to me and i thought mission accomplished this is helping my beats they sound better now and i believe that's exactly what's happening with sado's beat right here let's take a listen again but this time see if you can hear if any of the instruments don't have reverb on them [Music] i'm struggling to hear anything outside of the base that's at least somewhat dry everything has some level of reverb on it from what it sounds like to me now to fix this since we're making a hip-hop track the drums are typically the sound that's going to be a bit more forward and beat but even if you aren't making a hip-hop song usually it's going to be a good idea to have some texture in your song that sits a bit more forward so with that in mind i programmed this drum pattern on top that's using very dry sounds that sit more forward but like i mentioned sado was only able to send me the single track so unfortunately i would say this beat still isn't entirely fixed there's still a ton of reverb all over the place but i just want to show the difference this would make if i use dry drums that don't have any reverb so again this is the before [Music] and this is the after again i would have liked to dive deeper and fix this more but you can instantly notice how this beat starts to sound a lot more present and grounded instead of sounding weak and floaty this beat now has an added sense of dimensionality to it and for those of you that have watched my prior videos on this exact topic you know how important this is so the next time you're in the process of making a beat and you're having a hard time getting your sounds to fit into your beat my advice is to stop using reverb as your number one solution every time that's exactly how this type of thing happens i spent thousands of dollars to learn this lesson the hard way don't be like me now if you're still having a hard time understanding why this is so important let me explain this a different way let's say you're a baldy boy and you want to do something to cover up that crop circle on your head and you see a commercial for hair in a can a spray that instantly covers up your bald spots you decide to order some to help you solve this problem so you get it you spray it on your head and all of a sudden that big old bald spot magically vanishes you have found a great solution to your problem yippee later on that day you drive into work and you park in the lot and as you get out of your car you notice that there's a huge scratch on the side you're about to get sad and cry in what your pants like usually do but then you realize hey why don't i just use my hair in a can it helped me cover up my bald spot it may help here as well you decide to spray it over the huge scratch and it sort of helps now obviously it doesn't work quite as well on your car as it did on your head but it sort of solved the problem mission accomplished kind of anyways you go into work and you go and sit in your cubicle and you start your day's work but then your boston comes up to you and says hey i need you to work this weekend so be here saturday 8 am sharp but you had plans to go to your grandma's on saturday and massage your feet you need to figure out a way to get out of this otherwise your grandma's going to be really angry at you and then all of a sudden you get a bright idea the hair in a can it might work here too so you walk up to your boss and you decide to spray them in the face and as you can imagine this is probably not gonna work here in fact it's probably gonna make your problems even worse so just because something is great at solving one of your problems doesn't mean you should start using it to solve every problem that you have just like if reverb helps you fit one of your sounds into your beat that you're making doesn't mean you should start using it on every single sound so this is what happens when you use reverb on all your sounds your grammar will get angry at you for not massaging your feet moving on we have the final beat that we're going to be looking at this beat here is by deacon imix let's take a listen [Music] so we have a cool little lo-fi beat here and one of the things that i want to point out is what he does in his beat you can hear we have that main loop and then we go into the verse section where it starts to minimize a bit more [Music] now when you're trying to do this technique one of the things that you might think of is to use eq to accomplish this you get rid of the high end in order to create that second section of your beat and this is a tried and true technique in hip-hop and one that you might even do but if you do this technique one thing that i would suggest is to not use an eq and rather use a filter and do so in a very particular way let me show you why visually i have this other loop here that i will use as an example if i were to use an eq to try to do this technique and remove a lot of that high-end presence you can hear there's going to be a pretty stark difference [Music] this loop just sounds a lot less loud and a lot less present because there's just a lot of information that is being lost as you can see up here and this is the reason why using an eq and creating this type of simple cut like this might not be the best tool you want to use but how filters can differ from an eq cut like this is that they have an additional option of resonance and you can see right here we have this resonance control that we can adjust now what this does i'll show you this visually is that it creates a little bump right at the point of the cutoff and depending on the settings that you choose you can control just how narrow and just how loud you want this bump to be now you might be wondering so what well this can be especially helpful in this type of particular situation instead of having these two different sections in our beat with these huge differences in how present and loud each section is what i can do instead is to use a filter to create a pretty substantial resonance so now even though we are losing quite a bit of information in this area above the cut right here we've gained a bit more information in this area right up here so even though the frequency distribution of our two loops are going to be different at least the overall output and how loud these two sections will be will just become a bit more close depending on what settings you choose and this can help just create a bit more of a fluid transition between the two sections because they won't be as starkly different and just as a bonus tip here another thing that you can do is to add some distortion onto your new loop just like i said we lost a lot of information in the frequency readout right above here but if you add some bit crushing this will start to reintroduce some of that information back in the higher end but do so in a different way and you can see this visually as well so even though we lost a lot of that high end we've replaced it with just a bit of a tiny bit crushed version this was a very common technique that was done way back in the boom bap days and depending on what type of bit crushing you use you can replace that high end in many different ways that will also sound different this is an idea that is helpful no matter what genre you make if you want to use this low-pass technique now if you found this video helpful head over to betterbeatmaker.com that's where you'll find my online beat making program this is entirely designed to help you with these exact types of problems if you feel like you've been making beats for a while yet there still seems to be some errors that hold you back constantly but you don't know what they are and you have a hard time figuring out what mistakes you're making i designed a full online course that helps teach you to be able to identify your problems within your beats and how to go about fixing them but if you're not interested no worries if you've enjoyed this video though please do like and subscribe hit all those buttons my free drum kit's available in the description box below as well as a link to the discord and i'll see you guys next time

Channel: Navie D

Views: 17,767

Rating: 4.9662447 out of 5

Keywords: Fixing beats, how to make better beats fl studio, how to make better beats, navie d, how to make your beats sound better fl studio, how to make better hip hop beats, how to make better hip hop beats fl studio, how to make better rap beats fl studio, how to make better rap beats, how to make your beats sound better, how to improve your beats fl studio, how to improve your beats, Fl studio tutorial, Fl studio, How to make beats, Beats, Beat making, Beat making tutorial, Beatmaking

Id: s2DGHnfSMKo

Length: 15min 12sec (912 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 07 2021