BEAT MAKING: 5 COMMON MISTAKES EVERY NEW PRODUCER MAKES!

what's up welcome back to the channel my name is simon servida today we're going to look at five common mistakes that producers make uh but first watch this hi my name is simon servida and this is my course pro-level beats [Music] so this course is a culmination of the music theory i learned in university as well as 10 years of experience making beats the best part about this course is that i designed it for the modern producer the great thing about music theory is that this knowledge is applicable to all aspects of music beat making producing studio sessions with artists it doesn't matter if you use fl studio or ableton or logic it works in any dock i've been making tutorials on my channel for a few years now so if you like the way that i explain things there this is pretty much going to be the same thing except a bit more in depth no more clicking around on your mouse trying to come up with the melody no more moving stuff note by note just waiting for it to sound right this is like the ultimate workflow trick this is from someone who's done music for a very long time i've done all the mistakes already and what i'm giving you are my highlights alrighty before we get started we have to make a beat first nothing's coming to mind let's just get a synth and start fiddling around oh oh wait a second [Music] oh and they kind of go down [Music] boom [Music] [Music] it's a fun little balance wait we're going somewhere else i like that yeah we'll just kind of put that in one mistake that i always hear is the 808s are playing the wrong note and before the artsy guys come in here saying uh excuse me music is subjective there's no rules to this yes of course that's right but we can agree that some notes sound better than other notes give me an honest answer what sounds better the bass on the root note [Music] or or on the tritone like this and let's give it two bars so we can really build up that anticipation come on come on let's be let's be real now so the first thing you definitely want to check on is the 808 sample itself in some kits some of the 808s aren't tuned to c you can see in the cymatics kit some are in c c sharp d d sharp some like this have it labeled and some don't and that might cause a bit of problem here's the c and then here's the one on e completely different in fl studio the way to fix this is to set a different root note so this 808 is tuned to e so i'm just going to right click e and now it should sound like the other one and there we go so once you get that out of the way it should be a lot easier now if you want a nice clean bass line the best bet is to follow the chord progression in my chord progression i'm doing a c minor then a g major so for my bass line i'm following that chord progression and playing the root notes here's the c from the c minor and here's the g from the g major a problem i hear a lot is people following the melody instead of the chord progression in this melody it has a g and then it goes to the d so if we do that it's going to sound a lot different it's definitely not the worst but it's a bit weird you know it just doesn't have that sense of root you know just because the melody is doing a g and then a d that doesn't mean the chord progression is g minor d minor so make sure you know what chord progression you're doing so one big mistake that i hear in a lot of beats is that they're too quantized so if you don't know what quantizing is it is the process of transition from a classical understanding of physical phenomena to uh let's click in some high hats now anytime i do that it's going to be quantized you can see the notes and you can see the grids and you can see that the notes are in line with the grid mainly this is to get a consistent rhythm so it's definitely not a bad thing but the problem is the more quantized the more robotic and less expressive it sounds so here are the really quantized high hats everything is the exact same note duration at the exact same velocity it's definitely not a bad thing but if you want to have a bit more feeling and groove into your beat then use less quantization so what we're trying to do is make it sound less robotic and more human there's a couple methods we can do if you have a mini controller you can play that in yourself and that's that's pretty much as human as it gets [Music] i'm so bad and if you can't press a single note in rhythm like me there's a couple things you can do in your dot you can see in these high hats the velocities are consistent and when i played it by hand you can see that they're a bit more random so let's just kind of mimic that the next big thing we have to fix is the timing in fl studio there's a shift knob so when you turn the shift knob the notes are slightly offset on the grid i'm going to turn it up i like to go around here and let's see when i do it way too much that's just that's just drunk you're really looking for that sweet spot in between you want it to have a lot of expressiveness but you also want some consistency in the rhythm and then the last thing you could do is quantize presets so the hotkey is alt q and you're going to get this grid here so under this folder you have a bunch of presets that have a bunch of different grooves i really like the preset loose feel and you can see the hi-hats now they're behind the grid or they're on the grid or they're ahead of the grid there's a bit more inconsistency but that's what we want and that's kind of what i'm implementing in this hi-hat pattern as well by the way quantized presets don't work with triplets so don't touch those just kind of select the ones that you can quantize and then just leave the other ones out of it i like to do that pretty much on the majority of my instruments places where i might not do it are the kick and the snare just because i want that consistent backbone rhythm if that first strong kick is slightly offset it kind of just feels weird another mistake that i'm hearing a lot is clashing for example in this beat i have three melodies going on i have the chords okay i have this flute [Music] and then i have this little pad an example of clashing is if i move this up an octave i move this up an octave and now we have this for me this is clashing because we have three melodies but they're all occupying that same high frequency even though we have all the space underneath it so move around your melodies up and down octave so that they're not in the same space so for my chords i want them to be in the middle okay my flute i want that at the bottom so that's going to be under it and then the pad can go on top so now we're getting a much fuller sound and nothing's competing with each other so let's say i'm adding in one more melody instead of separating it through frequency we can separate it through time so i can just look at these chords i can see that you know there's a little bit of space here it gets a bit busy but there's a little bit of space there so why don't i have my counter melody come in right in those spaces so even if they are in the same frequency they won't be playing at the same time [Music] also feel free to just use eq just doing a simple low cut or high cut can solve a lot of problems the next big mistake that i hear a lot is that there's no headroom so headroom is pretty much the amount of room left that you have in your mix for me i have a limiter at zero decibels and then the beat is peaking near minus six decibels so i have six decibels of headroom so what's the point of having this you know one of the main reasons is to maintain that audio information let's say i turn this cake up and then we record it so here is the original kick and here is the new kick you can see the difference right away so this one transient and then slowly fades out but this one is just wall of sound and then nothing so by having headroom you're keeping all that transient information another reason you need headroom is so that you have room to add components later it's very very difficult to add new instruments and drums when you're peeking like this your beat might be open enough for vocals not when the waveform looks like this and that's one of the reasons why i have fruity limiter on my master the reason it's there is because i don't need to take it off it's not actually doing anything i'm never going above that threshold so it's never squashing my drums and if it does all i have to do is just turn everything down but now i have tons of space for vocals yeah halloween halloweeny i'm a ghost you can't see me disappear like houdini while i'm eating fettuccine and the last mistake i hear is that the arrangements are a bit boring you might have composed the best four bar loop in all of existence but if that's what you're doing the whole time then it's gonna get old really quickly and luckily this is such an easy thing to fix so first thing you wanna do is split up all your sounds you can see on my project i have all my melodies but all the drums are in a single pattern so i'm going to go here split by channel and now i can move them out and look how many sounds we have and this is good because instead of that pattern repeating now we have so many different combinations we can make so instead of that eight bar looped throughout the whole time we can start doing a bit more variation maybe this one we don't have the high hats maybe this one we don't have the rim maybe this one we don't have the 808 in terms of what combinations that's completely up to you you can either do it this way but i know a lot of people also like to just make a duplicate pattern and then they would change it up each time for me and my workflow i like doing it like this because i can just subtract another really easy thing is just move stuff octave so we can have this this can be duplicated we'll have this down an octave we can make this duplicate we can make this up an octave we can make this one go back to its octave before and now we have even more combinations on top of that you can add risers and crashes to really maximize some impacts so all you're really doing is just taking your lube and stretching it to its fullest potential and if you already have a really solid four bar loop then this part is super easy thank you so much for watching the video i hope you enjoyed it once again make sure you guys go check out my music production course pro level beats let me know if you want to see another video like this and i'll see you guys soon if you have any suggestions leave a comment if you like this video leave a like if you really like this video subscribe if you didn't like this video leave just leave get out of here

Channel: Servida Music

Views: 294,842

Rating: 4.9673047 out of 5

Keywords: Servida Music, Simon Servida, Making beat in Fl studio, making a beat, beat making, beat making tips, beat making tips and tricks, beat making guide, fl studio guide, 5 COMMON MISTAKES EVERY NEW PRODUCER MAKES!, 5 mistakes beginners make in fl studio, 5 common beatmaking mistakes, 5 common producing mistakes, fl studio beginner tutorial, fl studio beginner, beat making tutorial, how to make beats, how to make a beat, how to make beats for beginners

Id: DM5n2aNrHYs

Length: 10min 45sec (645 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 30 2020