How to Produce: "Take My Breath" The Weeknd Tutorial

hey there everyone this is ill factor from beatacademy.com welcome back to the channel in this video i want to share some music production tips and techniques while recreating the beat in the weekends take my breath so let me show you what it sounds like when it's all said and done now here's my goal for this video it's not necessarily to point you to the exact sounds patches or presets that are being used or that i think the producer and artists are using but more so training and developing your ear and helping you identify the why behind the sound selection i think that's really important because that's what you can take with you and implement into your very own projects now the goal isn't also just to replicate these songs i i recently do this a lot in my channel where i'm breaking down these songs and it can almost feel like okay what do i learn from copying all these songs what you learn are the techniques to capturing the type of textures of sounds that you like that you find interesting from other songs but yet now know how to put your own fingerprint on them and make them your own in your projects that's the goal for this video and all the videos that are on this channel so if you haven't already subscribe be sure to to check out any of the videos and for more further in depth and mentoring and helping you take your next step with your music production you definitely want to visit beatacademy.com and take advantage of all the resources that i have available for you there all right so back to the drums so definitely disco authentic disco vibe everything down from the texture to the groove so where i go to is well if any broke don't fix it let me see if i can find a disco loop something that has that rhythm the texture that i'm looking for and luckily on my hard drive from the years and years of producing i have stashed away a bunch of records and break beats that i can go through so i start digging through a couple of them and i find a loop that i like using [Music] so i'm just getting that one bar riff of that drum loop and what i want to do is you can as you can see here that the right side the right signal is a bit louder than the left and the hi-hat is a bit more predominant there so i'm going to be using the ableton live utility plugin and just focus on the right channel here that's going to change that into a mono signal by just focusing on the right channel i'm going to lower the gain a little bit here then we're using an eq8 to just carve out some of the low end because what i want to really do is focus on the hi-hats and the texture that that's there and then i'll reinforce the kick and snare with a separate drum rack we'll come back to this compressor on a bit right now we have a drum rack here loaded with some sounds and we're just going to go ahead and create our foreground beat this is going to be our kick and snare pattern so let's just solo that it's pretty straightforward and then what we're doing is just browsing through the sounds that are similar to the texture and the vibe that we hear in the reference and i usually have an array of disco type drums tucked away as well so i'm using that here there's a drum kit that i have for that and now what we're going to do is blend the two the foreground bead the kick and snare with the drum loop now one thing i want to do and a really quick easy way to add some grit and texture to drum brakes or drums in general is by actually pitching them down so i'm going to go to the transpose knob here and let's just try a couple semitones so we'll go two semitones down and i'm going to shorten or shorten the decay of that drum break by heading over onto the beats mode and go to preserve transients and make sure that i'm selecting forward and then lowering the number value just a little bit there and then back to the compressor that's on the loop we're going to be side chaining so the kick drum that's in the drum rack that's going to be our signal that's going to be our source that is going to cause the drum loop to duck and get out of the way every time that kick drum is heard and that the reason for that is it's going to re-emphasize the groove and it just kind of gives more spotlight to my kick drum that's over here once i have the drum loop and the drum rack together and i've got a nice blend for the two i'll group them by hitting command g and create this drum bus group in which i'm now going to process both both tracks together to glue them and get more beef to them so here's the drum rest the drumbus plug-in from ableton live and if you're following along using pro tools fruity loops logic or any other platform any daw be sure to check the videos on my channel that walk you through how to recreate this but essentially we're adding some saturation with the drive knob just a little bit of distortion to the high mid frequencies but the major focus is this boom knob which is adding a nice low end beef to the drums it's adding some harmonics to the low end here and then the transit um knob here is great so if you wanted to you want that kick and snare to be more evident and a lot more choppy you would crank the transit knob to the left you want it to have more sustain move it over to the right essentially that's going to highlight more of the drum loop in the drum break so we can possibly just go back in here raise the number value here up a little bit and control more or less how uh how short and punchy we want the drums with the transit knob next i'm going to do some eq here so i have the eq8 just to take out some of the i'm going to be using the excellent audios rc20 but just using a little bit of this and this is uh the retro color here adding a little bit of noise some distortion and as you can see the the dry and wet signal is just a little bit and that's just to add a little bit more warmth and texture to the overall drums i mean technically i could probably use this eq to draw to warm this up too yeah that's that works fine so i'll just bypass that and let's just then use a glue compressor here what i'm looking for with the glue compressor is just to kind of balance the level with the loop and the kick and snare kind of sandwich them all together all right now let's focus on the guitar part that we can hear throughout the whole song which does a great job of adding this really cool atmosphere and texture to the song it's got this eye of a tiger type of thing so i figured it was an easy enough part for me to play so i grabbed my electric telecaster here and just plugged directly into my interface to dry sound and let me go ahead and play that for you here so let's just drive straight from the guitar into the interface and i'm going to add a little bit more uh grip by just adding some saturated here and let's boost a little bit of that high mid and remove some of the low end and then adding the echo plugin to add an eighth note delay [Music] and then the reverb does a great job of putting it in some nice uh depth here now a lot of the motion so we've got some depth we've got some delay and depth here but now we want to create that motion that that movement sonically that we hear with etar and for that i'm going to use one of my favorite plugins to do that with and that is the meta flanger here from waves it's got a unique approach it's got a unique sound to just your basic stock flanger or phaser and so i'm just as just by the fall i'm using the stereo metal flanger here and this is exactly the way it comes when you load it up so i'm just playing around with the mix until i get a good balance and opening up the stereo imaging just a little bit here now we're going to sidechain that similar to what we did with the drum loop here with the kick drum see what it sounds like together now the snare drum now that i'm listening to it is a bit dry so i want to wet that snare drum up so we're going to go to our snare drum here and i want to brighten it up with this eq and let's send that snare back and reverb does a great job of sending some sounds back in the mix now for the base i'm going to be using you guessed it ik multimedia's moto bass i mean it's just great if it ain't broke don't fix it i love this plugin does well and there's so many other plugins that can accomplish the same thing so if you've got any great electric bass patches or plugins feel free to use that as well i'm going with the 60s p bass and all i'm doing the only adjustment i'm making is under the play style here is i'm muting the bass lines by default [Music] it um i don't know just it just sounds a bit too artificial and then when i mute it and i'm increasing the detached noise here so that it just it sticks out a little bit more and it actually complements the guitar part a little bit so here is the whole riff what's important here as you can see is the notes aren't are not directly on the grid when you're recording when you're playing you know acoustic or electric bass patterns you want to make sure that you're not rigid and robotic with your note placement so it's really important that you're adding the swag and the groove and the overall vibe into uh the midi performance here so i'm making sure that you know they're not way off but they're not completely on right so you want to make sure that when you're quantizing that your quantizing settings is not set to 100 but that you can set them somewhere around 48 or something like that that will nudge it to the nearest 16th note but yet doesn't you know directly have it stiff sounding so that's that's a key aspect there then the eq8 we're going to cover up some of that low mid here and boost some more of the detached noise i'm just using the stock compressor here to just compress the signal a little bit and then using the side chain here which we're gonna go into our kit here and choose the kick drum for that [Music] and not too much just just enough to give a little bit more of that pulse so let's see what it sounds like so you see how that increased detached noise really helps it stand out and almost uh kind of matches the same muted texture of the guitar and now for the arpeggiated type synth that we can hear throughout the song we're going to be using ableton live's analog any two or more oscillator synth that you might have in your dw would do just fine and so it's bright it's got a bit of shimmer to it so immediately i'm going to go with our sawtooth waveform that's the decision as to why we're going to start there because it's it's got that bright shimmery type of tone so let's just solo this and take a listen to the pattern all right so now let's go ahead and start with our filter frequency we'll start here lower this down and what we want to do is maybe take this oscillator and put it an octave higher and then have oscillator 2 the same original octave and just detune that slightly and that's going to cause it to give a really cool widened chorus effect so i need to first go to the amp and amp envelope let's give a little bit more release so that the note lingers a bit longer and it increases sustain a bit more and i'm going to just give a little bit resonance and under the filter envelope i'm going to go ahead and lower the decay a little bit maybe right here and bring the sustain down and what that does is it is you can see it it creates a shorter more of a pluck type of sound um and that's that's helpful here i'm gonna go back into the amp envelope and maybe just bring the attack up a little bit and then over here into the unison mode let's go ahead and increase that over that's a cool place to start from now let's go ahead and incorporate a little bit of chorus so i'm going to go over here to the audio effects and we're going to look for course drag and drop that here and now let's add just a little bit of delay so i'll grab the delay plug-in and set it to every quarter note and what's going to create the nice atmosphere is going to be the reverb so that will go directly after the delay i'm going to go to my bass track and we're just simply going to drag and drop by holding the option key that same side chain compression and put that right after the reverb and now we've got this really cool wurlitzer part that's playing that's panned a little bit to the left and also realizing that the the scent that we just created is also panned a little bit to the right so i'm going to go move that a little bit to the right and then we're using under the uh instrument here electric i'm literally just using the whirler worldly 2 soft piano patch and dragging and dropping that right onto this midi track [Music] and that really complements the groove really well so we'll put that with everything else i'll send a little bit of reverb that i have on my return track b here and this is just a big room reverb preset in ableton live now during the course section we have this really cool 80s type of synth that's happening and so let's go ahead and focus on creating that so i'm going to use ableton live's wave table for that and it's definitely we're going to start with a sawtooth right it's got that brightness that brassy type of feel to it so head over here to oscillator 1 set that to a sawtooth and let's check out the part so that [Music] so it's really bright what we're going to need to do is soften that up you can immediately head over to your free your filter cutoff or frequency cut off here [Music] now let's layer that oscillator with oscillator two same thing sawtooth but this is going to be a whole octave higher so 12 semitones and we're going to slightly detune this just like we did with the analog see how that creates that nice width there with that synth and so we'll open this up make it brighter but now let's create some movement here so let's assign envelope 2 to this frequency cut off head over to the matrix click the filter 1 frequency and assign that to envelope 2. and let's go ahead back to envelope and we can start with just changing these parameters lowering the sustain a little bit very extending the decay and then we'll also do the same thing here in the amp envelope that's definitely not staccato so we're going to leave the sustain up maybe the attack a little bit and then lower the filter frequency down then let's go ahead and add some units in here we're going to classic add some more voices yeah that's really cool there let's head over to our effects let's add a little bit of delay so let's use our echo plug-in right after that and set it to maybe every quarter note [Music] and let's add some atmosphere and depth let's put our reverb right after that [Music] and let's go ahead and drag that same compressor with the side chain let's get it from the base over here drag and drop that over to this and let's see what it sounds like all together i need to brighten this up just a little bit we'll do that now [Music] now there's this really cool reverb type of snare drum that happens at the end of of a two bar phrase so uh i went ahead and just created another drum rack here and if we've got this snare drum playing the same pattern [Music] but the trick is adding the reverb directly onto the snare drum track so add a little bit of delay we're using the eighth note here with the echo plugin [Music] and then a reverb right after that [Music] now adding a little bit of motion here i'm using the ableton live flanger as you can hear the flanger is actually flanging the reverb tail which adds a little bit of that motion in the ambience and that's really cool that's a really cool trick to do um with uh reverb stuff like this [Music] and since it's always moving it's never going to be the same once it it continues you know lubing and playing the same pattern so that's something really cool there so let's see what it sounds like with everything all together [Music] well thank you so much for taking the time to watch this video i hope you found it helpful encouraging and inspiring in some way and that you picked up a tip or two that you could utilize in your projects and as my gift to you for watching i'd love to send you a sample pack as well as this ableton live session so that you can follow along re-watch the video and implement these production tips in your projects so you can access this by simply visiting beatacademy.com pack or click the link below in the description box and if you're serious about producing your own music or you want to learn how to produce your own music and you're serious about taking your next step forward then i would encourage you to visit beatacademy.com and take advantage of all the resources and mentorship opportunities that i have available for you there looking forward to seeing you there subscribe like the video and i'll see you next time

Channel: Beat Academy

Views: 23,887

Rating: 4.981873 out of 5

Keywords: Beat Academy, ABleton Live, Tutorial, take my breath cover, take my breath tutorial, weeknd type beat, weeknd take my breath, take my breath instrumental, how to produce take my breath, pop production, weeknd in the studio, busyworksbeats, kennybeats, sol state

Id: i8ee8HwNe-M

Length: 23min 4sec (1384 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 06 2021