How to make HUGE 808s!

hey it's andrew huang super simple video today i want to show you a couple ways to make huge 808 sounds because it's 808 day august 8. so i'm going to show you two things today i'm going to show you my absolutely favorite tool that you can buy to make amazing sounding 808s and it makes it really easy but if that's not for you i'm also going to show you how to make your own 808s completely from scratch just using basic stock plugins quick little history lesson just in case you don't already know the original 808 kick drum is from the roland tr808 drum machine that came out in like the early 80s i think so far so good on our history lesson so it's like a cool analog kick drum sound a classic sound but a far cry from what we now consider 808 which is like so originally people opened up these drum machines and modified the electronics to extend the tone and the range of these 808s uh but now we kind of just call anything in 808 if it's that nice deep round kind of blend between a kick and a bass synthesizer yeah history lesson over let's make some 808s okay if you just want to throw money at the screen and be done with it i cannot recommend sub lab enough this is a plug-in from future audio workshop and i use it all the time makes amazing 808s i'll just give you a quick demo so it's pretty basic there are three sound sources there's a synth there's a sampler where you can use samples that it comes with or load your own and then there's this thing that they call x sub which just adds extra simple harmonics to kind of fatten the sound up so let's hear them one by one here's the synth here's the sample in this preset and here's x sub so put them all together i'll just go through a couple presets so you can hear the range of subs you can get out of this it's really great [Music] so each of these three sound layers can be tweaked in the usual ways that you'd expect to be able to tweak a sample and a synth but then they also give you a filter there's a mixer between those three sounds and then you get a distortion and a compressor after that so it's really easy but it sounds awesome and i think i've seen it for like forty dollars and seventy dollars i don't know what the real price is but uh yeah it's a pretty good deal but if you don't have seventy dollars and you don't have forty dollars let me show you how to make your own delete sub lab i am going to just bring in a simpler this is ableton's basic sampler device after this we're gonna put an eq and a compressor now you're going to grab a sound and it can be pretty much any sound and you're going to put it in the sampler i'm going to use something from my new sample pack just to promote my sample pack a bit space slime it's on splice but let's choose something that's as far away from an 808 as possible like how about a hi-hat sure first one i grab drag the sample in now we're going to click loop and we're going to drag this loop region in super small we're going to zoom way way in basically making this a single cycle waveform that sounds pretty good so it's just looping a tiny piece of this sound and turning it into an oscillator now we're going to do a couple things with the amplitude envelope and the pitch envelope amplitude envelope's going to look like this just like a tiny bit more attack than the rest of the sustain and release actually we'll do a pretty short release as well and then a similar shape on the pitch envelope i'll turn this amount up and you can like drag this decay to taste so what we're doing here is actually pretty cool you're mimicking how a real drum behaves so you've got like a drum skin stretched over a resonating cavity and when you first hit that drum skin you're hitting it really hard so it's going to vibrate loud and really quickly but because the skin is so tight it's going to slow down pretty quickly and also the sound is going to get a little quieter as it rings out so you have a sound that's very loud at the beginning and then sustains and then you also have the pitch being higher at the beginning but quickly dropping down with our eq we want this uh low cut off somewhere just below the lowest note that you're going to play in your song because we're using this random cycle and having it oscillate at kind of a random place that just whatever sounds good to us we're going to want to cut any frequencies that happens to be lower than that main fundamental note that we're hearing uh just to keep it clean all right the next thing we're gonna do is roll off some mids and highs and uh this is gonna be really dependent on what sample you've chosen for me i think i need to do quite a lot of work here actually maybe we can low shelf a bit really bring out that boominess oh and also i just have a default compressor on here but we should have a bit more attack actually what if i try an eq3 yeah dipping a lot of the mids with the eq3 seems to be better we could also see if we could get a different part of this sample that sounds better i'm feeling like maybe a less active part of the waveform would give us a more of a low round tone [Music] oh there it is yeah so as you can see it takes a little bit of experimentation but it's pretty fun messing around with it and yeah you're looking for kind of that rounder tone the compressor settings are also really important and i'm like smashing it a ton because if you just look at the part of the sample i've grabbed the level is not so hot there so um the threshold you're gonna have to set according to the volume of the sample that you're using but the uh essential thing is letting in a good amount of the attack first and then having it clamp down so that you really get that punch let me turn the compressor off but match the volume so you can hear the difference right when you have that relatively big attack time i've got it at 84 milliseconds here it just lets a huge amount of volume through before pushing it down so that you get the sensation of that drum hit now to finish this up i'm gonna throw a tuner on here and uh let's just tune this so that when i play a c it has actually a c oh it was pretty close okay so now we're gonna do is find a note that we like gonna get our eq perfectly right and then we're going to record this note to audio because uh you have your eq emphasizing that note that you like but you don't want to have to move the eq around whenever you play a different note so if we just print this to audio you have a sample that you can play across your keyboard and it's going to sound great everywhere well maybe not like really high up cool just put that right on a beat and we will flatten it boom we got an 808 and then you know you can warm that up with some distortion saturation okay check this out roland sent me these a couple years ago now actually on 808 day 808 color scheme uh collaboration with puma shoes even says rhythm composer tr808 right on there so i've got this pair of shoes i think they're cool but they're not really my style says the guy in the 808 shirt so i feel like what i'm gonna do is just if you want these uh they're nine and a half by the way us men's if you want these shoes i will mail them to one random person just um how about share this video no how about share any of my videos on twitter or instagram or facebook tag me and um use the hashtag 808 day i will pick one random person to to send these shoes to within like the next week so fresh so clean wow these can be yours do the thing hope you enjoyed this video i'll see you in the next one

Channel: ANDREW HUANG

Views: 556,624

Keywords: andrew huang, andrew, huang, music, musician, producer, song, canadian, canada, toronto, ontario, AndrewHuang, producing music, how to, how to make music, music producer, making music, ableton, making a song, learn music, 808, 808s, roland, tr808, kick, bass, drum, kick drum, bass drum, bd, drum machine, how to make 808s, 808 tutorial, techniques, tips, sample, synthesizer, sub, sublab, tutorial

Id: Z07NWhI2oQQ

Length: 8min 9sec (489 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 08 2020