How to make Lush Plucks like Four Tet

hey everyone this is oscar from hunt dog i get a lot of students who quote forte as one of their inspirations and forted is famous for these kind of beautiful glistening intricate glassy melody lines that evolve subtly over time and it just it feels like simple but complicated and it's just beautiful listen to this that's beautiful right so if you'll permit me to throw some technical terms at you i would call this a modulated delayed plucky lead sound that's playing a motif over a chord progression that's then complemented with some counterpoint and secondary melodies now i want to show you in a couple of steps how to get to something similar let's go [Music] before we go any further like the video subscribe to the channel we're almost at 1 000 subscribers big milestone let's do this so here we are in ableton and before we get started we set our tempo to 130 beats per minute that's just what this original was at and we program a little drum hit on the downbeats just just once per bar like this okay that's gonna give us like a slow metronome that we're gonna fill up with all these plucky sounds now one of the core elements about these plucky sounds is that they're not random their notes are not chosen at random these notes are chosen from a chord progression and this is crucial to get right at the very start you need to get these chords exactly right because later on you're not going to want to go back and change them you just want to commit up front to what your chord progression is going to be and stick to it now fortet has chosen the following chord progression it's a it's a b flat minor f minor d flat major a flat major that's two minor chords then two major chords i tried picking this out by ear but i couldn't so i googled a little bit did some detective work and on a site called cordify.net you have someone else who did the work already and identified these chords now all i had to do was program them in and then i put a little operator on there just to be able to hear them being played with sine waves let me show you what they sound like and then that just loops over and over and over again okay this is the harmonic backing of the track all these other elements are going to fall into place really easily once we've determined this but the choice of this will set our emotional journey from the very beginning and if we get this wrong we're gonna be working against ourselves the whole time that we're producing so it's really worth taking the time to figure out is this chord progression really telling the emotional story that you want and so well this is because it's the original so let's just stick with this one for now now the next step is to use these notes to create a motif so what is a motif a motif is just a pattern of notes that comes back several times and we start attaching onto it and identifying it as a pattern that comes back this is used in melodies to create like repetition and something for us to focus our attention on while the music evolves around this repetitive motif and honestly the tools in ableton are not super advanced to do that so what i'm going to do is i'm going to rely on a tool called cthulhu besides being a reference to hp lovecraft's elder god of madness it's also a really powerful arpeggiator and so what you do is you load an instance of cthulhu onto your chord progression you open it up and when you hit play you'll see that it's playing all the notes in ascending order so it sounds like this so the power of cthulhu is that you can choose which notes are on or off and which note of the chord it's going to play when so to get somewhere similar to fortet's pattern what i'm going to do is i'm going to set it to eighth notes i'm going to deactivate most of these notes and then i'm going to use my ears to try and figure out what the pattern is [Music] foreign there we go that's pretty close to it so as you can see what it's doing is it's sort of tracing a kind of a mathematical shape over the chords and every time that the chord changes the emotional journey changes again even though we're not playing the chord in itself or just breaking it up into this kind of like arpeggio now the way cthulhu works is that we've been listening to sort of the preview sound so let's actually create a little bit of sound design and let's make ourselves some simple plucks based on some sawtooth waves because that's what it sounds like to make a plug what i would do is i would create a midi track and i would drag a simple wave table on there i would call this the main plug because spoiler alert we're going to make a few more later and it's input we're going to set it to the arpeggiator and we just have to select cthulhu there from the drop down menu and then this is going to now listen to the notes that are being output by cthulhu so let's see what that sounds like [Music] cool these are little sine wave blocks but what we're going to do is we're going to set it to a simple sawtooth wave and now we're just going to dial it a little bit to taste to create something close to what forte did although we might want to go into a little bit of nuance here so first i'm going to reduce the sustain to really make it a pluck so it sounds like this [Music] there's not a lot of filter movement here but there could be a little bit we can maybe tweak this a little bit put a little envelope on there again plucky envelope so no sustain short decay and in the matrix we map the envelope 2 to the filter cut off [Music] there we go just a few subtleties here i might put a little sub on there so there's a sub octave playing and then one thing that i think is important here is to put in some subliminal modulation some subtle modulation so i would use a max for live effect for that which is the lfo so this one you put it in there and what it does is it creates a modulation source so just a sine wave that goes up down up down up down and you map it to a parameter and what i'm going to map it to is i'm going to map it to the decay time so that it gets so that the plugs get longer and shorter over time so it's a little bit organic it breathes it fills and and and empties it it waxes and wanes it ebbs and flows so look i map this to the decay time and look at it go look at it go now this is a bit too much obviously what i'm going to do is reduce the depth and then shorten the average time and then slow it down a lot i only wanted to go like once every maybe 10 seconds or so look at that look at it slowing down i actually mapped it to the wrong one and after to the envelope too i wanted to map it to the amp so let me do that instead [Music] just tweak the parameters to taste i want it to be subtle [Music] good this is nice organic subtleness now one of the other big sound design things here is of course the delays that are like ping-pong delays filling the entire spectrum creating almost like secondary melody lines around this now just because i know what's coming next is i suggest to put these delays on this but as part of a group so i'm going to group this and put the delays on the group so that later we can put more plugs in there and have the same effects affect all of them let's put ableton's simple delay on there put it to ping pong and see already what that sounds like not bad right it's just a bit too dry wet like we can reduce the dry wet leave the feedback more or less where it is i think and just work from here so this is something that's going to create kind of a lushness and we can later automate this dry wet quite a lot so we shouldn't hesitate to either already create an automation lane for it or remind ourselves later on to automate it and what i like to do then is to group something open up the macros map it to a macro and then this way i can make the macro like red and call this the delay intensity something that means something to me the fact that i've mapped this to a macro is a reminder to my future self that i intended this to be a performance parameter that i could map it to a midi controller and tweak the button to give like a an emotional effect now i'm going to spend one more minute sound designing the pluck just because i want it to sound a little fuller and a little more lush very briefly i'm going to just group this and create a secondary instrument that's going to play underneath it that's also going to play something similar but with more body and for that i'm going to use silent and i'm going to find a silent preset that's kind of like a plucky saw [Music] that's already very close and i'm going to just make this secondary i'm going to make it a bit darker and just push it a little bit further to the background just to give that thin wave table pluck a little bit more body and soul to rely on so let me find the right sweet spot so now when they play together it sort of feels like one big pluck okay that's already not so bad right i think it's time to introduce maybe a slightly more advanced drum groove [Music] cool now let me just rename this pluck group and so now to fill it out even more what we want to do is create secondary melodies around it that kind of fill up the space and do secondary motifs that provide counterpoint a counterpoint you can consider that almost as just a secondary melody with an independent rhythm and an independent musical contour that sort of bounces off or swirls around the main motif now to do this it's not super complicated but we just have to pay attention so the first instance of cthulhu that we made that's going to be our main arpeggiator let's let's call it that so the main arpeggiator is feeding the main pluck so let's do a second arpeggiator that's feeding a second pluck i'm just going to duplicate this i'm going to call it arp2 i'm going to duplicate this i'm going to call it pluck2 make sure that plug 2 is listening to arp2 set that as well and so now on arp2 we can choose a different pattern and we can be very free about this so let's just experiment a little bit first let's turn all of these off we don't want the same let's hit [Music] play [Music] so you see how the complexity really ramps up quite quickly now on that plug too i'm going to change the sound just enough so that it's distinct enough from the main melody line just in a subtle way i probably am going to bump everything down or up an octave in the midi so i'll do that with a midi effect let's try down [Music] i'm immediately a fan of that i love it and let's use this momentum to create a third line as well just because we're trying to see how far we can push this so duplicate call this arp3 duplicate this call this plug 3. and plug 3 we maybe are going to put an octave higher let's see what that gives and our three's pattern we're going to need to select it and what are we going to do we're going to do something maybe an 8 steps instead of 16 steps and we'll do a different pattern do something like this and maybe we'll just change the chord slightly we'll just consolidate this go in there grab some of the notes copy them up an octave this is just to give it a different starting and ending point so it's going to feel a little bit fresher and copy some of them up and down this is pretty at random i just want it to be a little bit surprising okay let's check this out [Music] i can put some processing on this plug group as well just to fill it out a little bit let's try a drum bust that's always a good choice so quick mixing decisions cool we're getting pretty close now is the next step i've actually prepared some other elements to get closer to the original so check this out [Music] and there you have it that's kind of like a forte type melody up to you now to use these principles to create your own intricate little web of plucks and delays and if you want to learn more about some of this stuff sign up for one of our classes on www.underdog.brussels it's real online classrooms where we teach this kind of stuff do check out one of the other videos that i'm going to link right now stay producing take care of each other and be good bye [Music] you

Channel: Underdog Electronic Music School

Views: 85,290

Rating: 4.961731 out of 5

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Id: jIgdkBTy_vI

Length: 16min 46sec (1006 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 27 2021

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