Music Production & Beat Making Process EXPLAINED

[Music] [Music] what is going on everybody this is tatro your electronic music mentor and i'm clearly not in the home studio today i have rented this airbnb out in the woods to try to get some inspiration from a new environment and since many of you liked my previous videos of the uncut music production process explained i wanted to go ahead and make another one of those videos but as i got into it i found that i wanted to split it into three parts to go a little bit deeper than the last time i made one of these so if you're interested in the process of making a track from complete scratch follow along with this video with this series that i'll be putting out over the next few weeks and i think you'll be able to make some progress and fill in the gaps where they may be in your process today's video is going to be sponsored by unison who just put out a free midi pack with 300 different chord progressions and individual chords for you to use in your productions so that is free the link is in the description and we're actually going to be using that today as the jumping off point for the track so make sure you're subscribed with notifications turned on because this first video is part of a three part series where we're gonna go all the way from scratch to making a finished fully arranged beat without further ado let's get into it alright so as we get started here the first thing you'll probably notice is my ableton live template probably looks different than yours that's because and i highly encourage you to do this too is as i've gotten to know my own workflow the types of plug-ins the types of tracks that i kind of need for my tracks i tend to use the same things a lot or at least the same template so i've developed my own template here that's basically got a lot more than i might need for one particular track but it has all the main plugins and things that i generally use tracks have uh individual racks on them my basic audio processing rack i did a whole video on how to make that for yourself so i've got obviously a drums version of that i've got a drum rack set up tracks for my drum samples individually and then various different instruments as well as audio tracks for adding in other types of samples you don't have to do this right away as you start producing but it's something to think about and whenever you're ready you can just build a blank template yourself and go to file save live set as template you can have multiple templates that you can recall at different times or you can even save a default template which is what i've done here this helps me get up and running just a little bit faster so today i want to be making a lo-fi beat and i've noticed in my workflow i don't tend to use a lot of piano and i want to try to use a little more piano i've got this cabin vibe going here so i want more of that kind of classic lo-fi chill vibe so let's start with some piano so i'm going to go over into my library here and of course you can go under instruments and search for piano but i have a really nice plugin from archuria if i go under plugins and i just search piano we'll find it just a really nice sounding piano and i'm going to click and drag this onto one of my empty midi tracks here and we've got that initial american grand piano but obviously there's a lot to choose from i'm just going to leave it on this very basic one here let's arm it so i can hear what it sounds like [Music] totally fine i might add some reverb or something to it but let's just stick with that let's keep things really really simple now i've got my kind became mini here which of course is not a grand piano it's a little mini um 25 key keyboard and this will be really helpful i could play chords on this but it's really helpful for playing in drums playing in different melodies but a lot of the times i like to start my tracks with chord progressions and one of the best ways easiest ways i've found is from this midi pack that we have here today from unison so if i go to my sample packs folder i've got this new free midi pack which you can all get it has available all 12 keys and within each of the keys you can get access to the relative major and minor as well as individual chords and chord progressions chord progressions are what i'm most interested in and these are all just midi so this is i can put these on this piano track that i've just created and we can be up and running with a chord progression in no time so let me drag this in here and see how this sounds i realize that my template is set to a bpm of 170 that's for like the faster trap and pop stuff that i tend to make but let's lower things down here a bit and let's go to 70 bpm let's just hear how that sounds now i've dropped in that chord progression here [Music] it's a really nice sweet chord progression it sounds very hard though so there's ways we can go in and edit some of this midi i can double click into this and we notice that these velocity levels here at the bottom are all level they're all at the same level and that is adjusting how hard or soft those notes are getting hit so let me command a select all of these tracks all of these notes i should say and bring down the velocity because this is a chill lo-fi track so hear the different sound now [Music] much softer for comparison let me bring that up [Music] much harder so i'm gonna bring it down to be fairly soft so we can get that chill vibe such a sweet chord progression now there are other ones that one is like kind of the most complex here in this pack but we've got the basic one too this might sound pretty familiar [Music] so many of you might recognize these chord progressions the thing about chord progressions is you can't copyright a chord progression that's why we hear many many different songs with similar chord progressions not to mention you can play sort of the same progression you notice these roman numerals here 1 3 6 4 6. you can play that in any key which is what we'll kind of find in this pack that there are chord progressions that have the same roman numerals they're just in a different key and that's a music theory lesson for another day but that's that's why this is a great jumping off point you know chord progressions are there's lots of very common chord progressions there's lots of ways of taking common chord progressions and making them your own which is something that we're going to do here so why don't we work in g major today and i really like that advanced chord progression but let's check out this intermediate one here just to hear what it sounds like i don't know if it's the vibe i'm going for but oh [Music] that one would probably fit really well for some like edm more powerful tracks but hey why don't we actually jump in and use the basic one for now so again i'm just dropping this on on my piano instrument the notes are there ready for me i'm going to go ahead and select all the notes command a and let's bring down the velocity [Music] so all of a sudden you see we've got uh a starting point for our track and now we're gonna work a little more with these notes and maybe make this chord progression a little more our own but first when we start to get some type of rhythmic groove going so we have an overall feel for the track so i have my own sample packs folder set up here which i highly encourage you to do stay organized with your samples because what that allows me to do is go into this folder and i can type something in like shaker and then i've got all these subfolders each of these holds some type of either shaker sound or shaker loop so why don't i just scan through and let me see what i have from this lo-fi jams complete sample pack we've got percussion and textures some softer and since we are at 70 bpm i have to take that into account some of these are at much higher tempos so the time will tend to get stretched for instance if i drop this one in here let's see how it sounds even though it's going from its original tempo of 136 to 70. [Music] it's okay but it doesn't quite fit let's see if we can find one from another pack and then here we have one shots this is a couple different ways of working sometimes you can either start with a loop or you can program your own one shots we're going to get into programming drum one shots in a minute but i really just want a loop that is going to set the tone for us i guess you could say this sample is closer to our original bpm [Music] [Music] [Music] all right so i found this sample actually which is pretty nice it's a muff more of a muffled sound which i think will fit the tone of this a lot better now i've got an eq on this track and since we are going for a low five feel i'm going to roll off even more of the highs and probably take out some more of these lows this is going to help me in the mixing process later i don't want too much mud in my mix definitely doesn't need to be that loud either [Music] but at least now we have like a rhythmic groove going here one thing i haven't even talked about yet is that we're working in arrangement view which is something that's kind of new for me but i find it's a lot easier to get to an end product by starting an arrangement view and we can still work in a loop so i've set my brackets here to four bars which is a good size loop to start working with and if i click this button right up here and these brackets are set correctly we'll just loop on these four bars [Music] okay let's start programming some proper drums here now i could put them into a drum rack but today i'm going to lay out the samples right here in arrangement view with this drum group that i have so still in my sample packs folder let's go ahead and find a kick of course i'll have tons of kick samples but i should be able to find a more lo-fi vibe this one is called sad let's see what's in here drum shots you know one shots are like single samples as opposed to loops [Music] number two that's simple enough i'm not trying to spend hours and hours selecting sounds you know if something sounds pretty good i'm probably gonna go with it and what will also be helpful is if i can find a good perk sound so let me find like a yeah perk i'm not necessarily looking for a big high level snare right now i'm looking for something more percussive now these are from my i like these perks that i have in my sample pack actually it's kind of rim sounds that stick sound is pretty good so i'm i'm thinking it's a lo-fi track right and if i think about all the lo-fi tracks that i really like many of them feature a kick and a snare pattern with the snare on two and four so i noticed that the beat numbers are up here so for bar one beat two is here for bar one beat four is here so let me go ahead duplicate that slide it over and now i'm not again not going to think too hard about this i'm just going to highlight this entire section with the beats 2 and 4 and duplicate command d to duplicate works just like a word processor kind of like with copy and paste you highlight a word or you highlight a section and you can duplicate it across the timeline so now that i have that snare pattern set [Music] i'm actually going to bring this down in the mix a little and actually overall for all the drums i want to shave off some high frequencies so on the big group channel here i've got my high cut and i'm just going to do that so let's get a good kick pattern going here it doesn't have to be too active but let's see what we got [Music] i'm going to emphasize those down beats and then try to get some some kind of bounce going here and i'm just going along duplicating the same sample across the timeline didn't want to do that command z is your friend [Music] didn't really want that but that sounded pretty good now we can take things a little bit off the grid right click turn the grid off maybe i want this to be a little bit late put the grid back on to quarter notes maybe actually go to eighth notes notice how that's giving me more lines and subdivisions to work with [Music] i want a little bounce kick after that stop up i want that to come a little bit quicker so let me go to 16th notes i want that here i'm working on this grid you don't want to be working too free off the grid especially if you're just starting out the grid is your friend and like i said we can go a little sparse with this kick and i'm just building up this four bar loop now obviously the goal is to make a full track [Music] but we gotta start somewhere so let's build up the the ethos of our track the main the main sound of it let's build that up and let's think about structure later so i'm trying to find a way to do a little bit of a quicker kick here i might have to shorten the sample like this and i don't want to cut it off too much let's hear how that sounds [Music] all right that's a simple enough kick pattern for now we've got our basic kick snare we've got that shaker carrying our groove as well and we're good to go there now the drums might be a little bit too loud i'm going to bring them down a little bit let's go back and look at our piano i have something i want to try so we've got our basic piano chord progression obviously going but i'm going to duplicate this track so now we've got two instances of this piano running what i'm going to do in in the second one i'm going to double click into it i'm going to select all the notes and i'm going to hit shift up on my keyboard what you'll hear is a higher octave i'm going to go up one more octave see how that sounds it sounds fine but the purpose of me doing this is i want to create some atmosphere i don't just necessarily want two pianos happening what i really want to do is crank the reverb on this track and now if i turn the size up [Music] we've got this sort of mystical higher piano i'm going to get low frequencies out of it because we've got lots of low frequencies in our original piano and i just want this floating on top i've got a utility on here which is a ableton live device i'm just going to add some width to it to spread it across now if i unsolo this we've got the combination of these two pianos setting the tone [Music] now like i said these are just the the starting chord progressions in the pack but you can go ahead and make them your own by adding notes um or adding any type of you know movement in them and i'll show you what i mean let's try to create some uh movement and add some notes in on top so i'm thinking about how each one of these chords has one two three four voices throughout so let me see if i can actually add a little bit of movement here so i'm gonna shorten this note and i'm gonna duplicate it and i'm gonna play with adding some other notes hmm that note didn't sound too good actually let's go up one more yeah so i want to create this pattern where i'm taking that top note and i'm almost creating like another melody with it let's hear that [Music] a little higher if i turn the headphones on here i can actually preview the notes that's the note i want [Music] so i definitely want to switch something up here probably this note going down and notice i'm not making this too too complicated i'm literally dividing these in half so don't go too crazy with your rhythm if you don't quite understand what you're doing just yet [Music] i know that this is going to loop around right and my next note here is a d so let me create this voice so that it leads up to that d so we'd probably go from a c [Music] this sounds pretty decent but i think i can get this to sound a little more natural as well by making these chords rolled what do i mean by rolled i mean they're not all going to come in boom right on the downbeat um i want them to come in a little bit after each other so i'm going to start with the last chord to accomplish this actually and i'm going to highlight all the notes that land on that downbeat and actually i'm only going to highlight the top notes because the root note can always hit the downbeat but let's have the top notes come in slowly after i'm going to turn my grid off for this and i'm selecting those notes and i'm just using the arrow key maybe i'll tap two three times to the right select the top two notes now one two three three times to the right and the last note two three four so you see that i've created this sort of upward staircase or downward staircase pattern and let's see what that sounds like let me solo it so we can hear it a little bit better rolled chords just sound a little bit better to me for this vibe rather than that downbeat it's subtle and we can do it to a higher degree so let's keep going and do it for this next chord now what i'm paying attention to as well if i push this too far and these notes clash it'll actually delete the note i don't want to do that so i just hit back really quick that only of course matters if you have the same note in the previous chord so i'm moving right through same thing i'm not being super precise i'm just tapping i'm using my eyes we'll go back and listen to it in a bit making sure i'm not deleting any notes that i don't want to delete same thing here leaving that root note on the downbeat and moving these other notes over to have a too far to have a rolled chord sound just a little more natural [Music] and that's what these uh cord packs that's where the magic is really you of course can just drop in a stock chord progression throw it on the timeline and use it as it is but you can also dive in a little deeper and make it your own in really really simple ways adding notes changing the timing different things like that making a duplicate version to create some type of atmosphere and when we play that all together we have the basis of what could be a really cool lo-fi track [Music] there's one other way we can actually use this midi for our track and it is to make a baseline i'll show you what i mean a very simple baseline at least so i have this empty midi track here let's throw a base on it so the other thing i recommend that you do is there's this user library tab that you can add different instruments or different effects racks to things that you use all the time so i've started to do that trying to get more organized about it but in my user library if i type base i'll actually find the base plugin that i use all the time if i drop that in here and this just speeds up the process i don't have to go looking for all right what was that bass sound i used in that other project i really liked it once i start using something more than once i tend to put it in my user library it becomes part of my sound not to say i'll use it every time but occasionally so this is just a base from archery another archery sound here what i'm going to do now is even though this is a bass line i'm going to hold options and drag up my piano midi now why am i dragging up the piano midi because these notes these chords are for the most part in root position meaning that i can take the root note of each chord and use it for my bass line and what that means is i can highlight all these notes on top delete them and now i have a bass line that will go along with my track so let me just listen back this should sound pretty good we might have to adjust the range [Music] [Music] though i think it sounds pretty good it's obviously very simple the same way we did this with melodies let me turn my grid back on we did this with the piano chords i should say we can add in notes so i'm going to shrink this note and for that this beat right here beat four see three point four bar three beat four i'm gonna duplicate this note obviously it's a bass line i don't wanna hang over like this so let me just make it fit that one b let's add a little passing note easiest way to do this is to add notes in between where you started and where you're going so let's hear how that sounds [Music] it's leading in that direction so it sounds pretty good now here we could add another passing note if you wanted to keep up with this pattern so let me go ahead and shrink that easy way i could just duplicate this note shrink it up so it's one beat long and now instead of it being a note in between because actually this note in between doesn't fit in our key let's actually go for the note right above it that's in key which is f sharp [Music] so we're using these sort of neighboring notes to lead into our next note and to add a little bit of complexity now this is a very very simple baseline [Music] let's try to use these chords one more time to add one additional instrument i'm actually going to duplicate the reverberated version and we're going to change the synth we're going to change some things about this i'm going to cut the reverb back a little bit i'm going to bring this down one octave which will put me in a range that's between where the normal piano is playing and where the higher reverb is playing and let me go ahead and add an arpeggiator now instead of us hearing just the chord now we're going to hear each note of the chord played through i'll show you what i mean midi effects arpeggiator dropping it on this track let's solo that solo this [Music] so now we're getting this kind of pattern now in the arpeggiator we can change things like the direction let's go down [Music] we can change the rate which is pretty good now one thing i think would be interesting with in this midi would be to get rid of the bass note it's kind of standing out [Music] we can even add octaves to this our steps [Music] if we play with the direction we can go up and down [Music] now we've used a lot of piano already in this project so why don't we just swap out the sound we can keep the same track and we can add something as simple as a basic operator one of live's synths i'm just going to drop this on the piano which will replace the piano and give us this very simple synth sound i'm just rolling off some more highs i'll probably take out some more lows and now [Music] we've got this synth that's following along with our chord progression and doesn't sound half bad same thing we did before you can add complexity to this add more notes that you think could sound good so could we add a g on top here [Music] could we have this go down to an f sharp [Music] and let's just add a top note to each of these chords so i just duplicated that note across that should sound good [Music] that doesn't sound so good so let's find a note that's maybe closer to this note here [Music] you can probably bring it down in the mix and if we didn't like that sound we could swap it out with something else down the road as well but now we've got this pretty nice sounding lo-fi groove here i'm going to add one more thing which is effects wise which is some side chain compression which is going to be applying a compressor to all the instrument tracks to get a pumping sound from our kick drum so i've put the compressor here on the shaker right now if i expand it out i check side chain audio from kick fantastic and if i hit play we'll see the kick come through see that peak now to get it to react let's bring the threshold down to say minus 30 but now i take this side chain and i copy it i maybe put it on my base which is slightly controversial i can bring down the dry wet on the base specifically but on the piano i'll leave it at 100 wet i'm just going through each of my instruments and pasting this side chain compressor on here and now let's listen to the difference [Music] everything is reacting to the kick drum even though it's a little sparse you can still hear that pump which is very very common in lo-fi music [Music] now this is just a four-bar loop but there is a way we can take this four-bar loop and make it slightly more complex expand it out and get almost a full track out of these initial sounds and i'm gonna do that in a part two of this video so stay tuned for that alright so thank you for tuning in to part one of this music production process uncut and explained series i hope you did enjoy it stay tuned for part two because we're gonna add layers of complexity to this beat it might not seem like much right now but we will build this into a full track make sure you check the link in the description so you can take advantage of unison's new free cord pack which of course we used to build up the track today i want to thank unison again for sponsoring this video and like i said before subscribe turn notifications on you don't want to miss the next two parts of this little series here for now this has been tedro your electronic music mentor have a good one [Music] [Music] you

Channel: TAETRO

Views: 34,075

Keywords: ableton, ableton live, ableton push, novation, launchkey, launchkey mini, akai, beat making, drum pads, drum rack, tutorial, home studio, electronic music, recording studio, producer, home studio producer, beat maker, akai mpk, mpk mini, akai mpk mini

Id: yCRutVbWd98

Length: 32min 40sec (1960 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 18 2021