Recreating the house beats of Skrillex and Four Tet

hey everyone this is oscar from underdog and here's a little story so about a week ago i was visiting my little brother he's 12 years old and of course as the big brother it's my duty to educate him a little bit of electronic music culture and so of course i was showing him what skrillex was if you came up with electronic music anywhere around the 2010s you remember skrillex because he was one of the main milestone figures in exploring this huge concept called dubstep and particularly the more extreme variant of dubstep that's sometimes referred to as bro step it's these very big intense in your face sounds that are all a little bit overwhelming the more the better there's no real space for subtlety there it's all about overwhelming you with the biggest drop possible so of course as i was showing him skrelex i see skrillex has some new stuff out and i'm like hey let me check out what sqlx has out nowadays and so i see that there's this collaboration out between skrillex and forte and forte happens to be one of my all-time favorite artists so i'm like what's this gonna be so i hit play and immediately there's this like jacking house beat going on and immediately i'm a little bit like her how is this skrillex then suddenly there's this hip-hop style vocal with huge auto-tune over the track and immediately i recoiled and i was like oh that's not my vibe but then i gave it a chance i listened to it listened to it all the way to the end and i listened again and then i listened again and then i listened again and now this is my favorite song and i have been listening to it non-stop for the last week so what should we take away from that well first of all skrillex is not the same skrillex that you thought you knew in the early 2010s he has evolved and there's a lot of really nice output coming from him the second lesson is don't get crystallized in your old music tastes the music that you fell in love with when you grew up a lot of people get stuck in that only loving that for the rest of their life stay open-minded try to see what other people see in new music and you'll be exposed to a whole world of richness of beautiful art but enough philosophy if you click this video it's probably because you saw jacking house music so i'm really excited to show you how to make music like this and i'll show it to you in four levels of complexity before we do that perhaps pause the video and go listen to the song listen to it twice listen to it five times and then come back i'd love to include a clip of it here but for copyright reasons i simply can't do that so from here on out i'm going to assume that you have the song already in your mind and now i'm going to show you in a couple of steps how to get closer to it so we're going to first analyze the pattern at the beginner level it's going to be something like this then at level 2 we're going to start polishing it already and we're going to get something a little bit more like this then at level 3 we're going to really start paying attention to the subtleties and you're going to hear something like this [Music] and then level four is the let's draw the rest of the owl where we recreate the signature lead sounds both by skrillex and by fortes and that's gonna sound a little bit like this [Music] so without further ado let's hop into it [Applause] [Music] before we go any further like the video subscribe to the channel and hit the little bell icon that really helps with the algorithm consider signing up for one of our classes on underdog.brussels we're an online music school not just a youtube channel and consider supporting us on the patreon page it helps us create these free music educational videos every week all right so here we are in ableton for level one this is the beginner level where we're just going to be looking at the pattern more than anything else we're not really going to talk too much about sound design what we're going to do is we're going to take a drum rack in particular ableton's 909 rack which you can find right here under drums 909 core kits we put that on a midi channel right here and we look at drawing in a pattern and the pattern that we're going for is something like this this is really basic so if you're just starting to make dance music absorb this pattern and really make it part of your core reflexes so what we've got here on every quarter note of the bar we've got a bass drum notice how it's a one bar loop so there's four kicks it's called the four to the floor kick drum pattern and on every back beat these are called the back beats you put a clap or a snare or a rim shot that creates a pattern that sounds like this and it's like the underlying metronome of ninety percent of house music then we're going to add in some hi hats the high fresh sounds in between and particularly we're going to bring in the open hi-hats this one notice that it's halfway between the bass drums so it gives that bouncy upwards jumping feeling in between the kick drums then what we're going to do is we're going to add in secondary hi-hats these closed hi-hats they're way shorter and what they do is they choke off the first hi-hat so when two hi-hats play at the same time often something that happens is called choking which is where when one hi-hat gets triggered the playback of the previous hi-hat automatically gets stopped so they don't overlap this is because in real life a hi-hat is just one instrument that can either be open or closed but can't be both at the same time this creates a pattern called jacking hi-hats which i refer to in this video right here and it goes a little something like this notice that moments like here where this long beat this long sound gets cut off so here it gets to be long but here it gets cut off and this kind of like really staccato feeling this like kind of feeling injects a lot of dance floor energy the only other thing that i did here is add a little limiter so it comes up to the same volume as these other examples okay that's level one let's move on to level two it gets more interesting from here so on level two what i've done is i've split out these three instruments into their own tracks because sketching out ideas with a drum rack is great but at a certain point you want to be able to have easy access and control over all your elements and while in theory you can do an awful lot inside of drum rack it's still not very ergonomic it's not very practical to have to go digging inside of the drum rack to change a parameter on a sound so once you become an intermediate producer get into the habit of splitting your drum sounds into individual tracks that way you can treat them with individual effects and you can mix them better with each other so what i've done here is i've chosen a kick that i think matches the vibe better i've chosen a clap that i think matches the vibe better i've made it quite short i've made a tail off with a very short decay and i've eq'd it a little bit to sit a bit better next to the kick and then on the hi-hats i've programmed my own hi-hats here so what you do is you create an empty drum rack and you can just drag samples in there to create your own drum rack as you might be able to tell from the names on these i've used 909 samples here and i've kind of tweaked the attack and decay curves a little bit the fade in and the fade outs here to make them a little bit less attacky and a little bit more soft and shuffly and very importantly when you go down to the in out over here you can set the choke so what you have to do is you have to select both of the channels that you want to choke with each other and then you have to select the same choke number that means that these two are choking each other so when one plays the other one will automatically shut the heck up and that's the effect that i wanted to continue to have these jacking hi-hats what i've also done here in terms of sound design is create a little custom rack that has a utility on there with a shaper tool that every quarter note makes the volume pump a little bit this is almost exactly the same as side chain compression or using an external vst like an lfo tool but i wanted to use ableton only stuff here so you can have this project if you subscribe to the patreon small plug here now another intermediate level feature that defines this is the groove so the higher hats they have a groove applied to them swing 16 66 so let's talk about grooves for just a second what a groove does is it takes the notes that are sitting here very nice and innocently on the grid in my midi clip and it applies swing to them and sometimes also changes in the velocity to accent certain notes or to give a kind of a rhythmical feeling to it if you want to see what a groove is actually doing to your midi notes all you have to do is apply it using this little arrow boom and now you can actually see that what it's really doing in the background is it's pushing back these notes a little bit to create something called swing swing is when you push every second note back a little bit to create a kind of a dragging feeling now i'm going to undo that because i like having it clean here on my midi clip and then the groove that i'm applying to it is doing the dirty work of moving everything off the grid when you're looking for a groove to apply look at the ones that have these long series of names like swing eighths swing sixteenths and swings thirty seconds this why is there th who knows i'm not here to be grammar police so when experimenting with swing a very good place to start is the sixteenth note one in a lot of cases that's what you're looking for unless you're doing a tempo that's drastically different than 128 bpm and so what this means is that with the 16 there means that every second 16 notes is going to get pushed back a little bit and 52 is the most subtle one and it goes all the way up to how much 73 and that's the most drastic one and if you go for a very drastic swing certainly it feels like triplets let's not get into that any further right now the cool thing is just that any instrument here that is programmed with 16th notes if you apply this groove to it they're all going to fall off the grid in the same place so it's going to have groove but it's still going to be clean and snappy and that's a very nice feeling especially in this kind of obviously synthetic house music so one more time so we remember all right now let's move on to level three let me play level three for you for a second okay so you'll see this one includes a turnaround at the end which is a little variation at the end of a loop that you do just to refresh the listener's ear because in loop-based music it's nice to have that little refresher at the end so that when the loop restarts it doesn't feel like it's getting repetitive or stale so what's particular to level three is that we're incorporating subtle organic sounds at every level of the sound design i don't know how this worked in the actual production of skrillex and forte but i imagine this is fortet's contribution quartets beats are always really organic and full of little intricate details so i imagine that he's responsible for some amount of this and this manifests itself in a couple of different places first of all the hi-hats instead of 909 hi-hats what i've done here is i've found myself a an organic shaker sound and created a hi-hat pattern like more like this i do the same kind of shuffly attack on it and it's also still choked so it has the same concepts behind it as the 909 one that we did before but this one suddenly has a more organic feel to it it doesn't feel like a 909 then the second most organic thing here is the mid percussion which is real drum sounds or it's from something called an udo and i've paid particular attention to the sound to like pan it in different interesting ways make sure that it feels like a balance between snappy digital samples and still having that atmospheric organic feel to it one of the ways i've done this is by adjusting the panning of each of these elements slightly so that they move in the stereo field as the beat is evolving so as you can see some are more left some are more right and they all have a slight random pan amount as well so it kind of moves from left to right in a somewhat organic way that's cute now in the sections of the original song where there's less elements playing particularly in the extended version that you can get on beatport you can hear that there is a noise floor included that's not just tape hiss or something like this so in a lot of advanced productions producers choose the noise floor or the characteristic of the noise floor that they put in it's the sound of silence between the notes so when all your percussion stops playing for just a fraction of a second your ears open up and what do they hear subconsciously well in this case what they hear is beach noises and that's actually quite startling i think that must be for that because that's such a forte kind of move and so what you get is waves like this really quiet and subtle but then either my mind is playing tricks on me but i could swear that in the high end on the original i can hear seagulls in the high end so i found myself on freesound.org amazing website by the way some samples recorded at the beach where you can hear seagulls [Music] okay and this is just the tiniest ear candy for people who have headphones on and who are paying ultra close attention it's like a reward for them and if you pay attention to the subtleties of your mix like this your mix has a lot of depth and nuance to it even though in the way that it's structured it's not that different from the level one basic house beat then let's talk about the turnaround for two seconds so the turnaround goes a bit like this so the idea for this turnaround is to have a whole bunch of asmr particles going around if you don't know what asmr is asmr is the pleasurable reaction that we have to very small fragile sounds amplified very loud in our ears and so in this case i've layered a whole bunch of them to swell upwards which kind of catches your ear by surprise so for instance there's a light bulb breaking going backwards there's some clicky percussion from a gold baby sound pack there's another light bulb that's panned in the entirely other direction and an eq differently and then some more clicks so all together again it sounds like this and the beauty of this sound is that it comes and then it disappears before you even get used to it it doesn't overstay its welcome it's just there to give a little bit of diversity for the turn around then on the master i've done the simplest mastering chain that exists a little bit of glue compression a little bit of smiley curve eq and a limiter and that was the fundamental house b that consider that the mission of this video done now let's get into the weird territory for those of you who want a little bit more advanced stuff to kind of blow your mind let's dig a little deeper so what's in the rest of the owl [Music] so inside the rest of the owl what have i got i've got myself the bass line i really just tried to copy skrillex's bass as closely as possible what it is is just some kind of sine wave base but with a little bit more top end so it exists also on small speakers and i tried various subtractive methods to get there and they didn't work in the end i think the cleanest method is best you just start with a sine wave and in something like ableton's wave table what you can do is you can add a little bit of fm to it and that creates these harmonics that just make it poke out in the middle a little bit so the bass and the beat sound like this [Music] together [Music] in terms of the notes let's have a quick look because i found that kind of interesting so it's playing d which may be the root note of the track seems very likely which is playing this kind of stable plucked bass line it then ascends slightly into the an octave higher which is super super safe territory and i want to draw your attention to this moment right here where it doesn't play on the downbeat very often you'll find that basses play on the downbeat but then when they don't they kind of subvert your expectation and it gives a little bit of a groovy bounce this moment so let me play it one more time and notice that little jumpy moment right here see if i put this one further you'll notice how it certainly loses a little bit of its energy notice this that's okay but it gets stale much quicker whereas this makes everything just that touch bouncier that makes everything a touch more interesting now enough about the bass i want to talk to you about the vocal because for me the main feature of the skrillex track is this skrillex vocal it's just super weird staccato like a tremolator kind of a vocal that's abstract and beautiful at the same time now with a little bit of online detective work i found out that this is actually resampled from a different track and then my first reaction was like ah you know anytime a producer does something that you look up to turns out that it's stolen from something else that's often the case so i looked at the credits of this track where it was taken from and actually skrillex is the producer of that track as well so he's just reusing his old bits from other productions so that's like a very legitimate move very cool but anyway how do we create this kind of layered pulsating vocal i had some ideas i did a bit of exploration and this is what i came up with for my version now i was quite excited by this because i really like what i did especially if you know how i created it i'm excited to share it with you today because what this is under the hood is the backstreet boys acapella i want it that away if you don't know what that is it's an r b song from my youth and i take a snippet of the phrase i want it that away and i load that into a sampler and what i then do is i trigger the sampler every 16th note so you can see here there's a clip where i'm triggering the sampler every 16th note and so it triggers from the start every 16th note and then i do something special i map the modulation wheel to the sample start position i map the modulation wheel to the sample offset right here you can see that right so that when you hit play it starts always at the same position unless you change the mod wheel and that means that inside of your clip you can then change the modulation like this and choose different places for the vocal to start so you're going to have ah and so you'll get something a little bit like this here's a different version [Music] doing the same technique let me show you the wave [Music] then i've bounced some of that to audio into a reverb so that it gets some accents every now and then like that and then i do a lower layer here as well [Laughter] the idea being that when all of this gets added together it almost feels like a cord it feels like a choir all going together you get something like this and again that's just the backstreet boys right there again you can get your hands on this if you sign up for patreon you can go in use this method honestly i think it's like a secret weapon to create beautiful textures out of just a simple vocal snippet one of the challenges in this approach is getting this vocal to sit in harmony with the rest of the track and i don't think i succeeded that well in this example i think the bass and this vocal group they kind of clash a little bit but for the purposes of this tutorial i think that's okay if you do have a closer look you'll notice also that i used some auto tune in there because i feel like the original of vortet and skrillex seems to also have quite a lot of autotune all over it so it's like a damper a texture that you want in your production as well i'll freeze these tracks for the final download of the project now the other part of the draw the rest of the owl is the forte part at a certain point in the original forted comes in doing this like xylophone solo it's this beautiful big arpeggio and it's lush and it's so forte it's just like a signature sound so my take on that is something like this and so to do this actually is a technique from another video which also is called how to do lush plucks like vortet where i use an arpeggiator to feed xylophone and the arpeggiator that i use is called cthulhu it's one of my favorite plugins ever because what it does is you feed it a number of notes in this case for instance i fed it the d minor scale just every single note of the d minor scale all eight of them and then those notes go into cthulhu over here and katulu then splits them up into individual notes and what i do here is i create patterns like this at first it's kind of at random and then you start tweaking until it starts to feel better and better and i can just activate notes here and if i want i can also go to the octave and turn up or down an octave of the notes that's very cute to create these kind of outliers high and low i put it to 16th note and i also put a little bit of swing on there because i think i wanted to swing in time with the overall swing of the track but then there was one more design challenge which is this is a super long solo and my pattern here is limited to 16 steps so what instead i did was i copied this pattern over into different iterations here so there's pattern a b c and d and this is something that you can automate in ableton so if you'll see here at the bottom let me re-enable automation you see this little red red dot here if i show automation you'll see here that every bar i just move it up enough so that it goes from a to b to c to d back to c so you see i do this like kind of a varying pattern and when it goes you'll you'll see when when it changes here it changes here look at this there we go and so this is how you create something that seems to have quite a lot of variation in it and because i copied the pattern from one to the other and then made some changes it also has a lot of stability to it some elements of this get reused over and over again now the output of this ketulu you have to feed it into an instrument for it to actually make sound because catullo itself barely makes any sound if you want cthulhu to make sound you can turn it on over here and this is what you get just a little sawtooth wave so instead of that what we have to do is we have to create a new midi track which i call the forte mallets and that midi track has to take the input over here from the arpeggiator track and then here you have to set cthulhu and you have to set it to in and then it's listening to those midi notes and so this is the sound that i settled on [Music] something tells me that vortet might be using a multi-sampler of some actual xylophones or marimbas or something like this however for the purpose of this tutorial i found that if i take myself this bell preset from wavetable and i add to it on top of it just the transience of this udu listen to the transients little organic sounds that add to the attack of this sound this is a very obviously synthetic sound when you add this suddenly there's a little bit of an organic dimension to it that would be very hard to get from synthesis and i guess the only thing that i haven't touched on right now is the fact that i've also bounced a few of the turnaround vocals over here so that along with the clicks you get something like these little secondary vocal layers can really add vocal richness to a track so that when eventually you add a vocal over top of this which i didn't do here you get a lot of different vocal timbres in the same song which can add to that feeling of complexity that's so beautiful from skrillex m410s so if there's two things i want you to take away from this video first of all it's stay open-minded to the music that you listen to you might actually discover something deep and rich and beautiful when you least expect it and the second point is that between level one and level three there was not that much difference in terms of the structure it's a very simple house beat the real mastery lies in subtleties timbres and nuanced decision making that separates the basic producer from the master producer i hope you can put this to good use come tell us on the discord channel what you did with this particularly if you do something with the vocal technique that i showed here i'm very excited to see what creative uses people can put this to a quick reminder to subscribe if you didn't already watch one of the other music production videos here be good to one another keep producing and bye bye

Channel: Underdog Electronic Music School

Views: 42,668

Rating: 4.9631195 out of 5

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Id: mV-KACH85G8

Length: 26min 17sec (1577 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 09 2021