7 tips to make your tracks more unique

what's going on julie shots here i am back with splice to bring you another tutorial before i get into the details make sure you go check me out on all socials julie shots music i'm ramping up my youtube channel a lot so go check that out today we're to be focusing on the broader concept of just how to make your productions more unique i have seven tips for you now the examples i'm going to show you are more so r b hip hop based but they definitely translate to any genre and a lot of the tips that i've learned i've learned watching other producers outside of hip-hop so like edm producers and pop producers all this stuff translates for any genre you're working in i hope it helps you let's get right into it tip number one is thinking outside of the box in terms of your chord progressions and how you manipulate your chords so a great example of this is sickle mode by travis scott so that starts off with c minor nine because we've got the d is the nine on top then it goes to b flat so it kind of feels like we're in b-flat and then the second part of uh of the beat goes to an e-flat major [Music] and then it goes to a d11 the really cool thing that it does is when it switches to that d [Music] it keeps that e flat for part of the bar so [Music] it's really dissonant so that's just a really creative way to go kind of left field in terms of your chord construction so i want to show you a beat i recently put together where i kind of tried to create three different chord progressions in one so i'm just using addictive keys for my first sound here and i'm using astra for the second sound i've got this keys silver key and there's just so many parameters you can play with in astra that it just helps also with finding the sound that you want to go for especially when you're doing something like this with going into different progressions [Music] so i'm just doing f minor to c minor and then i go into e flat minor i've got e flat g flat as the minor third so i've got three different chords here i go to a b flat for my second chord and then a b so that's definitely outside of our first progression with the f minor to c minor you notice i have an e flat on top here when i end this first progression and that leads well into the e flat minor chord here and then we're using for e flat minor a natural minor with the flatted six so that b is what makes that work and we're playing a major b major so i've got the f sharp is the five and then we're actually adding this the major seven which is a sharp and then we've got third on top d sharp so all those flat keys work within the context of e flat minor and notice i kept this piano up here so the notes i'm playing here so b flat a flat b flat to f so it's really ambiguous and that fits into actually it fits into the first progression we did and the second and then it leads well into the third progression so here we've actually switched to e flat major so that minor to major was a really interesting transition and just gives you a good example of how you can go outside of a key or modulate or do something harmonically that's going to take your productions in a different direction tip number two is using effects duh this one is a little obvious but i want to just go into some creative ways you can use effects i want to go over a little bit of some common effects that are used particularly in hip-hop that you can use on various sounds to just take them in a different direction and create more ambiance and more texture so you can see i have a lot of plugins here on my piano track i just have some basic eq some more eq and i've got a filter here this is just a low pass and then i've added some other stuff i did add some compression just to keep it sort of tamed and the order of this may be you know you could do this a little differently i kind of did it in a weird order but you can get creative with this too it's going to create different sounds depending on which order of the effects you put first and uh and then i've got a flanger here so it's very common to put a flanger on like anything really i mean but but very often on like a piano or a guitar it just sort of creates this interesting effect [Music] so just a lot more ambiance it kind of softens it as well and you can just do so much with with all kinds of effects and when i say effects i mean plugins but also just manipulating audio or even your midi tracks so another common thing to do is reversing audio so we've got midi here we could reverse it like this or we could use a plug-in like i really like melda production m rhythmizer it's kind of like gross beat for fl studio so we can actually reverse it with one of these presets [Music] it doesn't i don't think it works great on this particular track but we can manipulate it a little bit more to see what else might work we could add some half time the movement might be a little fast so with half time you can actually bounce this and stretch the audio uh yourself but i do really like this plug-in cable guys half time you can really manipulate the parameters a lot to get the sound you prefer [Music] so that creates a really interesting effect and again it's just all about playing around with different effects on top of each other um just manipulating as as much as you can really to be creative tip number three is adding ear candy you probably have heard of this term before especially if you follow producers like timbaland who is a master at this with adding the ee wikawiki and all that like that was terrible but you get the point so he just you know he adds all kinds of crazy stuff into his beats babies sounds crazy percussion sounds and it really just creates this bounce that's unique to timbaland so you can do the same you can really get creative with this and i want to show you some examples of how i've tried to do this so this is another beat where i've used some interesting effects i have this vocal chop that i've reversed and cut up and i've also manipulated the pitch with sound shifter this is a waves plugin so this is what the the beat sounds like so when i say ear candy you know it's really like creating a percussive element out of anything so even with this vocal sample that i chopped up the parts that are that you can see repeated here the parts i've chopped up here kind of have a rhythmic purpose more than anything and then it works well with some of the other percussion i have so i have this uh construction sound and i'm off setting that with just a shaker so with those perks in there and the vocal chops it kind of creates this unique bound and i could even get more creative with this in logic's drum machine designer here you can even go into the sample and reverse it if you want [Music] so just endless possibilities with that so don't be afraid to experiment so along the same lines i can actually do something with uh with my snare that hits on the two and the four i actually have it layered up already a snare and a clap but i can make it more interesting by adding another sound on the two or the four so let's just experiment here i've got beat maker open just sort of testing out different sounds and what's great is i can actually manipulate this i can shorten the sample if i want i can add some reverb or delay i can even change these parameters i can use a flanger which i just talked about manipulate the envelope add some eq drive it's just a filter too which is great so this is a great way to just experiment uh and use for a sampler when you're testing out different drums or different perks so i've got some toms a clave and just more some more traditional stuff let's just sort of play around so that might sound cool with just a little added delay the pitch is already sounding good so i don't have to mess with that so i might want to just play with the delay a little bit on this and go crazy [Music] so you can just really get creative with that and the more you play with rhythm the more of a bounce you're going to get you want to be careful not to go too crazy you still want to leave room for the artist but again timbaland is just the perfect example of this of how he fits in these perks and also still keep space you know you don't want to overdo it and have the same perks hitting every four bars you want to space it out you also want to make things more interesting so maybe use some perks and part of the beat different perks in another part of the bead tip number four is adding a drone or some kind of fx to your beat to just fill it out and create a little bit more interest so this can be anything from some like lo-fi texture crackling to like a sustained note is really common like maybe a string note that's just like really faint in the background that just sustains through the whole beat or parts of the beat this can also mean percussion that plays throughout or parts of the beat that just sort of adds a little texture so here i actually have a splice sample that i've added and what's cool is i actually just experimented with uh splice's bridge plug-in so with this i can just kind of play around with the splice app and test different samples i can change the pitch if applicable i can also time stretch i can half time the sample i can double it and just simply copy the sample right in the app and paste it into my session so that's what i actually did here and this loop that i have is a percussion loop and i actually stretched it so it's half the time of what it's supposed to be and it just kind of sounds unique [Music] by itself and i actually really like how it comes in on the second part of the beat i think it works even better [Music] tip number five is the delayed drop this is one of my favorites actually that i haven't used enough i learned this from disclosure i mean i've heard it before but i didn't pay attention to it enough i was watching a video of disclosure breaking down one of his tracks and he specifically pointed out the delayed drop and how effective that is so i have this beat here that's kind of normal it just it has a riser going into the hook and it's got a crash right at the downbeat [Music] so to make this a little bit more interesting is i can move things over and delay the drop so i can move this crash over somewhere maybe the middle of the first bar or right when that kick hits and then i can move the 808 out moves the hats out so maybe they make this crash fit a little bit better i can reverse it [Music] put a fader [Music] so that just creates again a little bit more interest in the beat and again this is something you can use easily in a lot of genres it works super well in edm tip number six is using risers so in the example i just showed you i had this kind of weird sound that was reversed and created this rising effect that went into the hook and then to create that delayed drop i also created a riser out of the simple i had that crash i reversed it so it created this rising effect also in the beginning of the hook so those are very common ways of using risers but you can get creative with it and use risers in different parts of the beep doesn't just have to be going into a drop so something like the reverse crash reverse symbol reverse open hat can go really well leading into a snare let's just try that out to see what it sounds like [Music] so again just a really quick example of how to create interest in the middle of your beat too that riser worked perfectly going into the snare it created another type of bounce so get crazy with the risers don't overdo it but definitely experiment with using them outside of the context of going into a drop and finally tip number seven is to choose parts of your beat where you want to create a lot of interest where you want to maybe go a little crazy and and this is helpful to think of okay i want to focus on maybe the 808 or parts of the drums the hi-hats or on my melodies and i want to make that part of the beat crazy because you don't want to overdo it and make everything crazy and also whatever you're doing to manipulate different parts of the beat can get lost in the mix because you've got so much going on and also think outside of the box when you're doing this so on the 808 maybe you want to create some automation where parts of it is filtered or you've got panning going on and different runs so for example on this beat if i play around with my 808 with some automation i can create a really cool effect one way i can do this is with cableguys shaperbox also shout out to jay cactus he makes a lot of drill beads and i saw him using this on an 808 and i just thought it was brilliant so this is what i'm showing you now so we actually used a drive on the 808 to create some movement let's just experiment with some of the built-in settings [Music] so i do want to be careful with this because i've fattened up this 808 a little bit so i might want to turn down some of these settings [Music] and maybe i only want to do this for the upper frequencies or the mids and the highs and not really the lows i can also pan the 808 and i can just do it for for part of it obviously it would be too much to do it throughout [Music] go crazy with this two at the end [Music] another cool trick that i like to do sometimes is using a phaser on hi-hats kind of creates this underwater effect a little bit so it's giving me some interesting tones i've got almost like a melody going on with this and i'm just using a one of the presets in logic stock phaser [Music] so i just showed you two examples using different parts of the drums we did a lot with melodies already manipulating them with the facts changing up the harmonic structure modulating so again all of this is just showing you different avenues you can go toward creating a different kind of sound in your beats or just being more creative so i hope this helped give you some ideas for creating more unique productions thanks for watching

Channel: Splice

Views: 11,283

Keywords: FL Studio, Fruity Loops, Tutorial, Music Production, Hip Hop Production, Splice, Splice Sounds, ableton live, beats, trap beats, trap music, producer, producers in the studio, hip hop, trap, beat, instrumental, music, type beat, fl gang, 808, beat producer, music production, music producer, studio session, samples, sample pack, sampling, drum kit, sounds, producer tips, 7 tips to make your tracks more unique, unique tracks, make tracks unique, tips for unique tracks, tips for tracks

Id: vgH7QtPR7JQ

Length: 20min 19sec (1219 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 12 2021