Masterclass: Producing Hip Hop Beats from Scratch - with Willie Green Womack [Wiz Kalifa, The Roots]

[Music] [Music] yo it's justin coletti from sonic scoop what are we doing today we are kicking off a whole new series on hip-hop production with one of my favorite sonic's group contributors paul womack aka willie green if you are not familiar with paul willa green womack he is a tremendous producer engineer mixer he's worked across genres but notably in hip-hop he's worked with artists like wiz khalifa the roots open mike eagle billy woods he's worked in other genres too big gospel artists like donnie mcclurkin he's worked in rock and across genres but today is all about hip-hop production and he is going to be creating a track a whole hip-hop beat production and arrangement from the ground up just a blank session and found loop and then a whole bunch of stock tools inside of steinberg's cubase daw that is paul's preferred daw he's been using it for like two decades and for good reason you'll see that he's building this track from the ground up using practically all their stock tools he'll use a couple little cool add-ons too like backbone a couple others but these concepts are going to apply no matter what daw you work in not only today we're going to be looking at beat making and hip-hop arranging and production from scratch from the ground up he's also going to do a video for us on vocal production in the hip-hop context from tracking to editing and comping to tuning to sweetening whole bunch of stuff and then they'll also be installment about mixing when it comes to hip-hop all done by paul wooley green mo womack all done in steinberg's cubase again using mostly stock tools similar ones that you'll find in your daws but if you are shopping around for your daw big shout out and thanks to steinberg for partnering with us on this series cubase is one of the best out there it's one of the longest running daws but in a way it's like the youngest daw because new features keep on getting added onto it and a lot of the features we end up taking for granted in the world of daws music production and music software seem to hit cubase first they have an amazing development team that keeps on adding in new features that set the standard for other daws so definitely check them out steinberg.net big thanks and shout out to those guys big thanks and shout out to paul womack for doing this with us big shout out to you for being here remember to hit like and subscribe down below without further ado let's get right into it paul mr willie green take it away peace everybody what's good my name is willie green i'm a producer and engineer here in brooklyn new york and welcome to my studio the greenhouse recording company we're going to do a production series here where i'm going to create a hip-hop track produce it from top to bottom we're going gonna record it we're gonna produce beat we're gonna edit we're gonna mix it we're gonna break it all down for you right here uh shout out to sonic scoop shout out to steinberg for putting all this together with me we're gonna do the whole thing here in cubase all the techniques that you can use to make your own tracks so let's just dive right into it i've got an artist lined up who i worked with for a long time liquid from lma flossie might have seen some of my other videos uh talking about her records but we're gonna make one from scratch for her got a nice sample that we're gonna use and let's go ahead and put this whole thing together huh so let's start with the sample i spent a lot of years actually digging through vinyl to find the right record oh this cover might have something crazy for me in here or i know this producer so i know it's gonna sound a certain way or this engineer's drums are always hidden but it's hard to produce from samples nowadays especially from other people's records it's hard to get clearances and that's not what we're doing here but i wanted to do a sample thing for y'all so honestly i was just on instagram one day i was just on ig and a good friend of mine a fabulous artist named siggy who i'd done a bunch of records with just on ig during corona times out in the park socially distancing and just singing and playing his guitar and i heard this bit it was just on his ig live and it just really caught me so i hit him up and i was like yo can i use this i'd already screen grabbed and grabbed the audio he gave me the blessing sir siggy shout out to you everyone listening to siggy's records they're really wonderful and here's the sample from an acoustic version of his song place come to my place [Applause] from my place so ciggy's got a great voice but it sounds a little raggedy but i don't mind the challenge right sometimes you gotta pull what you want out of the sample and leave the rest behind so let's look at how we're gonna do that i deal with samples i just drop them right in cubase i just drop them right in and i do my editing so this is just the plain sample and let's see where we want to go from there so the first thing i want to do is i want to chop out the bits that i want to keep for my main loop take the full sample i'll just drag it over to the side and then just chop out the little bits that i want to keep so let's start here all right so just that much i'm gonna put in the click so you can hear how that works time wise [Music] so it kind of works time wise but i know i want those chord changes i know i want that we could be a family [Music] we could be a family right like that's kind of the vibe that this this this song that the sample puts me in you know we're all dealing with different parts of the pandemic got different stuff going on my wife and i are expecting our first child i'm in a i know in a sentimental mood so that really spoke to me so i just want to start with just those little bits just these two pieces of the chop what do we have here so that's the turnaround on it um and here's just the rest of the sample we just put that over to the side for a second we'll come back to that we'll we're going to need more but here's my first initial chop and then we've got to clean that up i know you all are looking at me crazy like what are you going to do with that rumble well here's what i'm going to do with the rumble we are going to open up spectral layers so the first thing i got to do so we'll take these two pieces we're going to bounce them together as so so it's just one piece and then we're going to go up to our extensions and we're going to open up spectral layers so spectral layers is a different editing tool we've edited audio for a long time looking at waveforms like this but this is a different way it's a graphic editor so i can look inside the sound so do some spectral editing here okay so the first thing i hear we've got a click there where i didn't do the greatest chop so we're gonna switch this to transient mode and we're gonna select that click delete it get it out of here cool that's clean that's gone so i can start cleaning out rumble and everything down here like this we're gonna unmix the components of this and that's gonna separate that bit that sample into three components it's going to separate it into the tonal aspect the transient aspect and then whatever it considers noise if we go back to the top if i solo just the tonal aspect in this case it sounds a little funny because it's not a drum or anything and the noise [Music] so that's mostly stuff that we don't want so with these layers first i can turn down the noise let's duck that i don't know 7 db [Music] all right so now that's gotten rid of a lot of that high-end hiss i don't mind a little noise in my sample what's gotta go is that rumble that's just not hidden and we hear that in the tonal so i'm gonna go ahead and select let's do everything below 200 for right now so we don't want to take out everything under 200 because we've got a guitar hit the low end of that hit so let's take this and then when that hit let's off get this out of here let's hear that again from the top [Music] and there's a little more rumble here at the end look at that [Music] let's do that in context with the rest of it now [Music] so we've got that now there's some random ambience obviously ciggy's sitting in the park and so like that whistle i don't know if that's a bird some kind of hawk or falcon that's in here i can take that out if i want to take that out we select our eraser and we can just go ahead and get that right out of here i can take it out of the noise and then i'll be gone but i kind of like that bird though i like that bird we're gonna undo that and here's why i'm into this idea of ambient loops right if you take anything and put it on a grid and loop that piece for four bars at some point any random sounds that are within that loop are gonna come back around at a certain point in that four bars right that kind of randomness is something i really enjoy in music it's very easy to put everything on a grid and have exactly what you want in every certain place and that's great 98 of the time but sometimes you want something a little random in there a little bit of flavor a little bit of ear candy in there and i like that bird and that bird is going to come around and hit at the same time in that loop every time so i want to keep him in there right so we're going to keep the bird and we're going to start [Music] at here bottom end of that guitar hit that i do like is just a little bit too much so we're going to delete that okay so we're gonna keep that we're gonna rock with that as our first piece of the chop that's our main sample and now here i have bounced that and now let's hear but time wise we're still a little off right like we put our clique in right so i like the sample but that it doesn't lock in the timing so then we're going to come over here and we're going to look at audio warp [Music] we're going to put this in free warp so i can see my grid and we're going to warp this sample to lock it to the grid so we know first and foremost that downbeat has to be at the top of bar too [Music] so this sounds like it's rushing a little bit so we're going to nudge that back [Music] now this last hit has to come up to before [Music] okay and then that is just now we've got our loops we'll trim this back we can loop it out for days right so now we got a loop now we can build on something so i've got it here chopped out and stretched out the same way that we just did that's a nice loop i want to get to the drums but that's not quite enough to carry a record right so let's let's chop some more [Music] so right there on this second one i've added an echo of the downbeat so when you get that i'm i'm beat one on beat two i'm echoing [Music] so that is the same piece right here i put it on a different track but now we're gonna start putting a little bit of sauce on it for some interplay with these samples [Music] so i went to the trusty phone line filter preset and the eq here it really does a good job sometimes i might adjust this resonant peak here but just to give it a different texture to what we just heard so we've got some frequency dynamics if you understand what i mean and then we're going to splash into this delay so that ring is out [Music] and we let that ring over but i want a little bit more so we went back to the sample and chopped out another bit so that is from the end of ciggy's performance if we look back here wherever i found that open guitar right so there it is so we take that [Music] and we just add that in i want to reinforce the strum that's on the downbeat and then i want to put a little bit of motion at the pickup to bar too so i'm leading the loop okay so now we're getting some more movement going on there but i'm a four bar loop type of dude you know if you got the right two bars you can loop out two bars forever and if it feels good you know rock with it like to have a little more interplay so we have that downbeat strum but i want a little more strum action so i went to the sampler track and i just took a little piece a little [Music] strum so we've got that going a little bit of room we got a little reverb on there and then a little eighth note delay just to give a little more movement uh so it's kind of bouncing let's give that give it that bounce there that's the inner play with the delay and with the and with the sample that combined with everything else gives some real nice movement [Music] okay so now that's got some movement to it you can wrap on that now this movement it guides the kind of flow that i want to get out of the out of the artist if i just give them this it's cool but it doesn't give a lot of rhythmic information to spark any kind of flow from that from the mc i'm not going to tell an emc rap this a rap like this you got to call mc who you trusted approach the song how you want but it doesn't mean you can't give a little bit of guidance to how they want to attack it i prefer to do that musically than writing an email like well spit it like this and everyone would be like well wrap like this rapper on this song because i want that rapper on that song i'll just listen to that song or i'll call that rapper but if i'm bringing somebody in i'm bringing them in for their musicality so i want to give liquid a guide here so when she writes to this is gonna i'm gonna imply some rhythmic ideas that she can just take in so that's where the delays come from and those extra strums like that right so that's cool but i know we're gonna want a hook and i don't think this is the hook so i just kind of start building things up and then knowing okay well i'll take some stuff out when it comes to the when it comes to the verse so i did a little more chopping here on the hook and that sounds like [Music] all right so that sounds like some finely tuned chaos which is how i like things but let's really look at it i'll take these two i'll put the click on [Music] similar move that we did on the verse chop we've got a sample and we're bringing in a little more the vocal here [Music] i want that my place so i added a little bit of that and then [Music] so i really want that woo i don't know who said woo like that in the crowd when they were listening to siggy but i loved it so i want to put that in and sure there's some noise in there but it's kind of this wave kind of effect that we get from the static i kind of feel it so we're going to rock with that [Music] all right so we've got a little randomness like this bit here from kids who are playing so you know i want this idea of family kids running around so we'll leave that you know maybe it'll stay i kind of like it [Music] so here the voice got a little bit loud here so i just took my pencil tool and drew in a dip so i know every time i copy and paste this piece of the sample that will always stay with it it's a little a little loud there see i'm bringing down a little bit of volume in other places just to kind of make everything fit in because this fits here but i've got the filter that is going to echo off [Music] okay we're bringing a little back a little that noise it's really the guitar that went out of there again kids running all that kind of stuff but here's where kind of the cool thing happens so we got that yeah yeah that yeah in there so i doubled that up but then as a little treat for the headphone wears i'm automating some pan here so it's gonna hit left and it's gonna hit right then we get back to that echo so i'm chopping these samples based off of each other and then again with the yes the wooze so i'm going to let those again move back and forth a little bit and yeah it adds a little bit of that wave in there but just some space a little something special for the headphone wearers so that's our chopped hook [Music] god so i didn't bring back the beginning of that chop because i wanted to let the end of the hook hit that we could be a family and so that's kind of you know going back to the thesis now this is kind of a busy vocal chop for a hook that i'm planning on putting vocals on and that's why i'm not necessarily worried about getting all of every word or worrying about short chops first i'm chopping i want to be a chopped sample so i don't want it to sound like somebody came in and sang that or played it because someone's going to wrap or sing over the top of this that's part of the art of chopping a sample is having that chopped sound like i still want to keep that so i'm cool with that pretty much how that is i'm feeling it so now we've got samples kind of locked in let's look at some drums let's get drums going so the way i did these strums let's mute the snare let's listen to the sample chat so it's got that anticipated uh uh uh uh well you know i might kind of want that in the snare like that's a common snare pattern that you're hearing lately so let's [Music] all right so i like that we're going to backbone the new drum synths amongst many other things from steinberg it's really really dope and i've got just a snare sound i dropped in there and put the filter a little bit and just kind of you know put that in there and it's on keys i can play that whatever pitch i want to play it right it's not just on the pad and that's the pitch i can play up and down the keyboard so this is the tone of the snare that i wanted but now we can go back later on if i want to do some kind of drop and use different pitches on the snare i've got that easily done so i'm excited about that so roll off a little bit on top that snare is a little bright now you're going to see as we start to pick sounds drum sounds in particular i'm kind of mixing as i go and that's important when it comes to production because if i have the wrong snare drum if this was like a super low pitched long tail snare this pattern doesn't work right because too much size in there for this kind of short chopped snare that's going to go with the guitar so i'm already thinking okay pitch wise what i want to deal with lengthwise what i want to deal with tone wise this starts to encroach on mixing where do i want it super compressed do i want something long and verbally i'm thinking about all these things as i go that way when the beats right i already know that it's right [Music] all right so we're going a little bit of reverb here okay i like that to start let's look at a kick drum okay so got a kick pattern i'm backing backbone again for a kick tried a few things i layered in some stuff and then the noise what is this noise yeah i don't want that so that's gotta go it's a different kind of kick for me it's a little bit tubby but i kind of i don't know i'm kind of feeling that i don't know where i want to go with the low end yet i'm fine with leaving a little bit that tubbiness in there this noise that almost wood block sound on there it's kind of cool it adds a different texture to the kick and i'm i'm into that so we'll keep that in and the main part of the kick all right it's a little woofy it's a little on the grimy side so i'm into it you know i like to grind we rolled the filter off here not it's up here a little bit too much of that hit and i want that to kind of thump so we're going to roll that filter back down [Music] that's some tonality there now because i'm in backbone i can play it across the whole across the whole spectrum i kind of i don't know i want to mess around with some tuned kick drums on this right let's do something a little bit different so we're tuning the kick i'm just playing it find my intonation that's matching what the sample is doing matching the chord changes this is super duper critical please make sure that your low end your basses your 808s or if you're doing a tuned kick thing like this it's got to be in tune with the song is of extreme importance it's not enough just to have a lot of low end rumbling down around down there because that's all it's doing it's just rumbling around down there that's not what we're here for we want to find the clear low end that supports the song so it's got to be in tune you got to figure out what what the what the change is what key your song is in and if you've got melodic type low end like a bass or 808s make sure those are in the key of the song that you're playing it's going to knock so much harder because the bass is where it's supposed to be not just all over the place so we've got a little kick pattern here that's going to work with us [Music] okay let's do that in context okay so i like that but i come from a big band jazz background where everything is about that back beat that two and four and i want to accentuate the back beat because the snare is not just doing two and four but i want to make sure that's reinforced so we're going to bring in a clap and we've got that on our sampler track here so it took off a little bit of this beginning that was kind of not straight attack all right so we've got that going on that's pretty bright so i'm going to roll off the top and the filter section here in cubase is super powerful each filter has five different slopes that you can use on the top end on that high cut filter if you just put it on six db per octave it's just a very nice roll off to take a little bit of that harshness if you've got harsh high hats that are killing your eardrums a little too much crisp on that snare just put that thing on six and just turn it on [Music] right so that smooths that right out it's a clap we still want some brightness and there's a lot of low end my uh my meters are telling me here so we're going to take that out we don't need all that low end in the class [Music] okay so now we got a nice back beat we're starting to feel stable here in the beat so now i just need a little bit of movement it's a little plotty you know so we're gonna bring in a shaker let's look at the shaker what do we use for this shaker we're back in backbone and we did a little re-synthesis of something let's look at what this is [Music] so that's our shaker this regular shaker part all right so we're moving pitches i've got a delay on here let's take that off for a second we're going to look at why i'm doing that again a little bit of room so that's dry just shaker i mean cool it's a shaker that's fine that could work let's put a little pizzazz on that let's do something so this layer here is coming from some kind of base synth adjusted the formant so the format was up here okay and then we're gonna roll off some of the top on the filter we're awesome at the bottom this is the high pass so yeah this is a bass sound so that's a little too much again for the shaker track so we're going to roll that off all the way up to 1.3 k and adjust our level on this layer here so that's without the re-synthesis with the re-synthesis with this this with the format work and all that so yeah it's a little weird but i like a little weird [Music] so a lot of what you're hearing when you're in solo with that bass sound there gets eaten up in the track but there's some texture in there now now we got something hit right and so that shaker i want to put in a little bit of a space so we're going to send it to this room [Music] but one thing i like to do with my shakers and my hi-hats sometimes let's look at this rhythm right here all right it's on the upbeats but it is on the end of one on the end of two so they're all technically quarter notes so i'm going to send that to an eighth note delay to fill in some of those cracks now i can play this but you know delays are a lot more fun but that's going to give me an eighth note shaker pattern rather than that quarter [Music] all right so okay now we're hitting let's see how that works in the course of the other chop [Music] that's a beat we got a thing going here now my only concern is that is that course part now full enough i want to make the course the event remember the course is the thesis of your term paper so the course needs to be an event i want to add just a little more harmonic stuff going on in there just to kind of flesh it out and give it some fullness starting with that we're going to go to the chord track here in cubase if you are not a keyboard player like your man right here sometimes you need a little help getting the chordal ideas that you want might want out i understand chords i like pretty chords i can't necessarily sit down in a keyboard and plunk them out my hands look like this that's not how you play keys but the chord track will allow me to put in the song changes and then trigger synthesizers with those chords to play what i'm looking for so through a quick text message with ciggy found out our changes are d flat major seven and a flat with the ninth on top [Music] so i can make these anything i want like if i i can alt click and make my give myself an x and then i double click on that and i can choose any chord that i want so here [Music] if we wanted to be fmaj7 well that's not in the song e flat that ain't it now we're talking right and if i want to change my inversions if i want to change my voicing i've got that up here too so we're just going back and forth d major seven a flat knight and we are going to bring in some synths so we'll start with the keys here so these keys once i had a sound that i liked i printed the chord track information these keys are triggered by the chord track but once i have it on one i printed them to midi so i've always got it there [Music] all right nothing too crazy just a nice atmospheric building out of what we've got going so let's hear that in context [Music] got that i've got this buzz track so these keys are coming from where these keys coming from the keys are coming from halion unless this is mellow dx and yes i did not forget about the base we're going to bring the basin in just one second [Music] [Applause] all right so we got this little funky base pad thing going on here we've got this very pretty pad going on siggy's sounding great here we got to put a little bit of funk in there just let everybody remember what what we're really about so let's add a little bit of this buzz base also come from hallian it's an arpeggiated type [Music] [Applause] [Music] thing [Music] okay so that gives us another little texture in there okay cool but it's not rumbling yet yeah the kick is big but we know we got to have we got to have the fat bottom because that's what i'm about so let's get a bass sound going here and this is also coming from halion hallian halion okay now we now now we're in the bottom so we got this double synth-based thing going here okay so that is really hitting down there so we're gonna bring in our halloween tracks what are we doing on this base yeah we gotta calm that a little bit we're gonna take a little bit of that attack off like we're doing here we're gonna compress it i'm gonna saturate it we'll get into more of the mixing on it later on but i want it full i want it warm sounding so we're gonna hit it with the magneto with the tape [Music] so that's cool but you see i need it more than just in the in the hook so now i'm thinking okay as we go into the verse sections we got to have some other tonalities but i want to keep this open still you know the way that the sample's speaking to me i want to kind of keep that so i'm going to bring in the bass halfway through each verse so if we figure okay one two bars one through four will be the intro and then we're into what is set it up as a 16 bar verse when i'm making a beat for somebody i like to give them some guidance as far as an arrangement goes so i'll do some kind of intro i'll generally lay it out as 16 bar verse 8 bar hook mc wants to go outside of that they're more than welcome to we have a million songs in the world that are 16 8 16 8 but as far as a good place to start with it we'll start there we got a four bar loop so natch it feels kind of natural to go four times through the verse so there's your 16. i'm not afraid of 12 bar verses i'm not afraid of 20 bar verses you know however the artist wants to write let's do it like that but at least to begin with we're going to set this up as 16 and then 8 on the hook so at bar nine of the verse in this case bar 13 because we have our intro we're gonna start we're gonna bring this bass in there okay so now this is working with my kick drums which is why it was so important that those were in tune because the bass is in tune the whole low end isn't tuned together now it's working together not against each other and then we'll just add a little bit of that pickup i got a turnaround pick up at the end of the base loop just to have some momentum to bring that loop back around so we'll lead in with that [Music] [Music] family [Music] [Music] hey down here [Music] and we're back in the verse and that's our joint i like it i like it a lot it's upbeat still even at a kind of down tempo 83 i'm kind of a down tempo dude but even from what feels like a slow and maybe almost sad sounding sample with the energy of the drums and the shaker we kind of picked up the vibe a little bit but we kept it pretty we kept some long tones in there to really make it nice and lush in the chorus but it still knocks and that's what we're about uh it's the next step we're gonna bounce this we're gonna send this over to liquid get her approval on it make sure it's something that she wants to write to and then we'll have her come in and we'll cut these vocals so i'll see you all then peace

Channel: SonicScoop

Views: 12,560

Keywords: hip hop, production, ciggy, Paul Womack, Willie Green, Cubase, Steinberg, mixing, beatmaking, beatsmith, making beats

Id: 2CdMK3r5Fcs

Length: 43min 22sec (2602 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 23 2020