How to create Realistic Guitar Parts on the keyboard- Mini Masterclass

[Music] do [Music] hello everyone welcome back dom here and on this video i'm going to show you five ways that you can create more realistic guitar parts in your daw right after this [Music] [Music] hello everyone to start off today i want to share with you a story and my story is when i was growing up when i was in secondary school high school when i was a teenager and i was growing up i was the keyboard player amongst my friends okay and we had several bands and we were playing music we would go to studios and rehearse and play lives and all these things and funnily enough back then synths were not cool keyboards were not cool the coolest thing was playing the guitar so every one of my friends wanted to have a strat they wanted to have a new amp they wanted to have all these great guitar tones i was really good with playing the piano but the cool thing was the guitar so my friends one after the other they started buying guitars and i was like i loved guitars and i wanted to also be able to play the guitar so this is maybe a topic for another video because i'm a completely self-taught guitarist i have never had a single guitar lesson in my life but i can play and i can play very well for production needs i'm not like an amazing guitarist by any stretch of the imagination but back then all i had was my keyboard and i had to learn to create realistic guitar parts i wanted to imitate what they were doing on their guitar and actually sometimes i could do it better on the keyboard they were still learning so it's understandable now the other reason why i needed to learn how to create realistic guitar parts was when i started working for advertising and i had to create jingles i had to create library music and for all these things there was no budget for hiring a real guitarist there was not really even budget for me to go into the trouble of setting up microphones and recording myself playing the guitar so i decided you know what i'm going to try and create realistic guitar mock-ups so that i can produce more music and to be honest with you none of my clients complained back then that was the reason actually and i've never talked about this in any of my previous videos why i bought my first yamaha motif it was because it had the best acoustic sounds out there back in the day and in my opinion still does the montage and that's why i got it i didn't care about synthesize because i could create synth sounds on my own but acoustic guitars flutes and all these things i couldn't just create them from scratch the samples had to be good so all these things combined gave me enough incentive to learn how to play realistic guitar parts on the keyboard and like with the finger drumming if you haven't watched the video on the finger drumming i'm going to leave it right here i had to do this out of necessity i had to learn how to do this because of the things that i was doing and i couldn't just give up and say no you know there's no way you can do this you can do this so in this video i'm going to show you some tricks that i learned along the way that i found that they contribute a lot to creating realistic guitar parts so let's get started but before we get started if you haven't subscribed to the channel please do me a solid and subscribe to the channel if you like this video give it a thumbs up and of course share it so let's start with the first tip and in my opinion the first tip that i have to give you is do not treat a guitar like it's the piano okay it's a completely different instrument it's a completely different philosophy it's a completely different mindset the first thing we need to respect is what we can only play up to six notes at a time you can't play more than six notes at a time i see many people loading an acoustic guitar patch and they start playing like chords that are all over the place that's not possible you have to remember the range of the guitar the guitar can only play six notes at the time and not at the same time i'm going to come back to this later so when you start playing you should keep that in mind for example [Music] see even when i play like a full chord i have the okay let's say the f here one two three four five okay i can add more so maybe i can go but i shouldn't play more than six notes at a time this is very very important so when i play the guitar on the keyboard instinctively by now i'm just playing up to six notes [Music] so this is my first tip don't go and try playing like a keyboard player playing like a pianist this is the worst thing or having massive spaces between the notes for example that's that's not gonna happen you know if you're a guitarist you know that okay this f is on the first fret and this is all the way down to you know 15th fret or whatever so there's no way you can play this on a real guitar it's impossible so you have to keep in mind that you should try and keep your voicing as compact as possible and try and understand that you can't play like super large intervals so this is tip number one and this basically applies to acoustic guitars it applies to nylon guitars classical guitars it applies to electric guitars it doesn't matter it's still a guitar you can't play more than six notes actually six notes is the limit and you should strum them and that brings me to point number two strumming is extremely important for guitars if you have like a pixel acoustic like what i have here here i'm using t guitar from acoustic samples this is an instrument that you can load in highly and sonic and this is a picked guitar now if you're playing with a pick again there's no way that you can play all six notes simultaneously you have to strum them and that's the tip number two strumming strumming is the most important thing if you want to create realistic guitar parts now if you're a keyboard player like myself this is going to be so so much easier if you're not a keyboard player i'm going to show you how to do this in a different way but let me show you how it sounds if you start strumming and if you don't strum okay for example let's play like a well-known track so see i'm strumming over time i'm never playing [Music] i can do this but see the the difference that it makes let me turn off legato for a second so i can show you the difference okay let's play without strumming and that's what most people most pianists do when it's their first time playing the guitar on the keyboard [Music] see i i can't even do it i do it instinctively i'm gonna try this time all that kind of thing okay now without changing any parameter on the instrument i still keep legato off check out the difference that it makes when you start articulating this strumming [Music] massive difference compared to this is this is fake guitar this is fake guitar but if you go [Music] much much better in the context of an arrangement it's going to be really hard to tell sometimes if it's a real guitar or if it's a sample guitar now i'm going to show you a different example here i have this acoustic guitar from tick guitar but i also have this one here this is the nylon guitar from ilia it's one of my favorite nylon guitar libraries let's listen to how this sounds [Music] so this is again i'm strumming this is of course a different type of guitar this is a nylon guitar this is more usual for classical music for latin music for jazz so again you should try and do a little bit of strumming but if you do finger style playing and many classical guitarists do that then you might be able to get away with playing some more regular chords without so much strumming so when you have like picked sounds you want to do more strumming when you have finger style then you might be able to get away with some because they tend to go like this you know they tend to pick all of the strings at once so this is not a problem if you want to play some chords but again you have to have a little bit of so you don't have to do necessarily it's still going to be okay if you do like normal chords but again i wouldn't do more than maybe three notes at a time four tops but not five not six not this that's not natural okay now when it comes to strumming i have two more tips to show you but before i show you these two more tips i want to talk about today's video sponsor and that's skillshare skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of inspiring classes for creative and curious people like us musicians so if you're watching this video i'm pretty sure that you might be the person that might want to learn about learning how to play the keyboard learning how to play the guitar learn about music theory music harmony all those beautiful things that i talk about on my channel or you might be a super creative personality that jumps from topic to topic from photography to videography to music to production to painting skillshare has a class for you whatever you want to do as you know i recently released my modern 80s drum kit and for this instrument i had to do pretty much everything myself i did the design i did the graphics i did pretty much everything and skillshare gave me a lot of help when i was trying to do this because i'm not a designer i'm not a graphics designer so this month i've been checking out the graphic design basics core principles for visual design from ellen lupton and this gave me a lot of information to get started starting to understand how design works what are the concepts because it starts with concepts like symmetry versus symmetry scale framing hierarchy grids so these are all skills that might be really really important when you're trying to find different paths for your creativity and the great thing is that skillshare is curated specifically for learning meaning there are no ads they're always launching new premium classes so you can stay focused and follow wherever your creativity takes you and it's less than ten dollars a month with an annual subscription and for the first 1000 of my subscribers that click the link below in the description you will get a free trial for the premium membership so that you can explore your creativity thank you skillshare for sponsoring this video let's get back to the guitars now like i said i have two more tips to help you create nice strums if you're not a keyboard player and one of the tips is inside cubase so let me show you let me go here and create a part i'm going to show you how you can create very very easy strums inside cubase so i'm going to play a very plain chord [Music] so what can you do inside cubase in cubase we have a tool called the trim tool and it's this one right here with this tool you can use it to create down stroke and upstroke strums and this is how you do it if you go like this and you start doing this see what i'm doing here now that's not what you want to do you want to go the other way around just hold the alt or option key on your keyboard and do this look at that look at that there we go and now when i played back that sounds like a strum before [Music] after and this way you can also create really fast strums or you can create a little bit slower strums let's go for a slower strum and go like this let's try it again or a faster strum like this alt don't forget the old key or let's make it even slower of this one and of course if you want you can do an upstroke strum let's try that now i'm going to undo and go exactly the same thing but instead i'm going to start from the top and do this diagonal line like that and maybe for this one i'm going to do the same like a little bit slower there we go [Music] this was a little bit too much maybe i can just pull this one here like that and one thing that i want to tell you is that your landing note should be the one that's on the grid so if you want to hit bar number three i would actually place these here see like that so because guitarists they always compensate with their minds so they know that if they want to land on the strumming at the right place they have to go a little bit early because if they start like this then it's going to be out of time okay see that's not right you have to make sure that your landing node is on the grid and everything else comes before that so this is how you can create strums inside cubase using the trim tool it's a really cool tool it's way way easier than going and doing this note by note it's a little bit hard to do and it takes more time we have every tool imaginable in cubase likely to help us with these amazing things and that's the reason why so many composers use cubase and that's why so many people creating music for media use cubase because it has all these tools before i leave the strumming if you know how to play the guitar or if you can play a little bit of guitar you know some basic chords i would totally recommend something like the jammy guitar this is pretty much like a midi guitar but you can really create realistic strumming and acoustic guitar parts or electric guitar parts with no effort i've talked about this in a video that i've done in the past so if you want to check it out i'm going to link it right here i've went really in depth on that video but pretty much this is like a midi controller for cubase so now if i use the same instrument the same guitar i can just play and create strumming very easily so let's play something this is another alternative if you're a little bit comfortable playing simple chords on the guitar or if you're a guitarist and you want to create strumming parts this is going to be the fastest way if you're not comfortable with a keyboard if you want to pick one of these up i'm going to have a link down below so that you can get a nice discount and by getting one of these you are also supporting the channel so thank you in advance for this let's move on to the next point now the third thing that i want to talk about is voicing and voicing can really make or break your virtual guitar parts incorrect voicing can really give it away that your guitar parts are fake and that they've been produced on the keyboard by keyboard player so in order to show you this i thought i might really bring a real guitar into play and show you a little bit how it works okay this will help you understand how to get the parts played right on the keyboard so this is a real guitar and the thing that you will see most of the times especially when you try to play chords you will see that you have this kind of voicing so so this is a fifth fourth so a e is a fifth e a is a fourth third another third and then a fourth so you can see the spacing between the nodes so the intervals are a little bit larger in the lower registers and they become a little bit smaller in the higher register so if i play like this [Music] you know i play like a three note chord okay a minor but in the low registers you don't get to see this kind of thing you know it's really hard to play as well very bizarre you will very rarely see a guitarist playing something like this it doesn't really sound good to begin with you know so i'm playing the same chord here and i can play the same chord here okay so here and here you never you never hear that this is one of the things that many keyboard players do they play triads in the low registers and that doesn't sound right you have to leave some space in the lower registers and make your notes and your intervals more condensed in the higher registers so okay [Music] study guitar chords take a tab check how they are actually played on the guitar so you get this okay so this would be something like this totally playable and that's why the guitar is so cool because you can even change the position you can play this in many different places on the guitar but with guitar you can emulate exactly how it's actually played on a real guitar so i can play it like this or i can play like this so now there are some instruments like the t guitar that doesn't allow you to really make mistakes because if you try and play the thing that i showed you before see it doesn't allow you to do this it actually creates a slide and this is actually correct but depending on what guitar library you're using this might not be available the next thing that i want to talk about is expression and of course expression can mean a lot of things it can mean dynamics variations in the rhythm but it can also mean vibrato and pitch band bending especially for electric guitars now this might be a completely different video but when you want to play electric guitar parts on the keyboard there are some techniques that you should know but the very first one and the one that i actually bought my first expensive keyboard was this little guy right here the pitch bend and that i needed so much because again i was so jealous of my friends that had the woman bars on their strats and i wanted to emulate this and back then it wasn't so common for keyboards to have a pitch band it was very expensive keyboards that had this and i remember i had an old yamaha psr that had a pitch button and was so happy so i started using it and i found out really soon that it's a really important aspect when you want to create realistic electric guitar parts so for [Applause] [Music] example [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so as you can see when i'm playing here i never leave one single note alone you know i don't do this all the time but i'm trying to add a little bit of expression to my playing by using the pitch bender so let me play one melody in two ways [Music] [Applause] that's midi guitar okay right off the bat it's never going to convince anyone but if you add expression to your playing with pitch bend adam vibrato adding these nice bands then your performance gets transformed immediately for example see i'm also adding quite a bit of vibrato there [Applause] [Music] by the way if you happen to have the montage and you want to learn how to create sounds like this uh like uh shreddy guitar sounds i'm going to have a video right here and basically as you can see i'm adding expression expression expression vibrato bands i don't articulate every note by playing it on the keyboard that's what gives it away that it's fake if you go for example what should we play i don't know let's play a random melody [Music] or i can play and if you're a good keyboard player you might be able to pull off things like hammer ons and pull-offs like [Applause] [Music] or even sweeps [Music] stuff like this you know i mean again like i said it depends on your skills as a keyboard player but then again if you're a good guitar player you might use something like the jammy if you want to play this kind of sounds on a synth or something like this the fifth and last thing that i want to talk about today is obviously something that you would expect and this is the sound source the libraries that you use the instruments that you use i showed you some of the guitars that i'm using here and it makes a big difference check out for things that add to the realism of your playing for example the guitar has quite a few options and that's one of the reasons why i'm using it has hammer ons it has slides it has chord playing you can do a lot of things very very easily even if you're not a keyboard player for example if i want to go to chords and i go like this i can play a chord here and i can trigger entire strum chord progressions really easily sometimes i like to go solo and play solo [Music] and see i'm also doing a little bit of pitch bend here [Music] and i like because it has fingered playing and also pixel playing but the other thing that i like about guitar is that you have the hand positions and this is extremely important the sound changes completely depending on where you play the chords on the guitar what frets you're playing them at because as you know the same note on a guitar can be played in many different ways where on the keyboard if i want to play this a that's the key it never changes on a guitar you can play the same c or a for example in many different positions so this hand position is really important because it will change the sound dramatically so if i set it to manual and i start playing here [Applause] and then i move the position to 10 for example 10th fret [Applause] so compare this to this one for example [Music] okay see the difference [Music] very very different sound it's night and day so these are things that i'm looking for in a library the same goes for the nylon guitar i like the fact that it has all these little noises and also legato [Music] and it goes without saying that uh one of my favorite sources for guitar sounds is the yamaha montage i've done an entire video playing my favorite sounds i'm going to link it right here and you can check it out for yourselves it's really really good and it plays effortlessly it's great right out of the box so these are just two of the libraries that i use but i have a lot of libraries for guitars there are many amazing libraries out there so i would suggest that you find the one that resonates with you and you pick it out because it's worth it so there you go lovely people these are my five tips for creating more realistic guitar sounds inside your daw in the comments down below let me know if you have more tips that you can share i love the community that we have done in the comments some of the comments that i get are really really incredible lots of useful information and i have to say i'm really proud of you guys i'm proud of the audience that i have so thank you so much for watching if you like this video don't forget to like subscribe and all the good stuff take care and i'll see you next one bye [Music] [Music] do [Music] you

Channel: Dom Sigalas

Views: 24,657

Keywords: create realistic guitar midi, create realistic guitar parts on the keyboard, realistic guitar in a daw, realistic guitar mockups, playing guitar on a keyboard, play guitar on the keyboard, midi guitar paerts, realisitc midi, realistic midi guitar, midi guitar, cubase, cubase tutorial, music production secrets, tguitar, ilya efimov nylon guitar, electric guitar on the keyboard, shredding on the keyboard, how to play guitar on the keyboard, how to play guitar on the piano

Id: xJf6PMgkC68

Length: 29min 21sec (1761 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 12 2021