The ONLY MUSIC THEORY You Will EVER NEED as a PRODUCER | FL Studio Tutorial

what's good everybody in this video I'm going to show youall all the music theory that you're going to ever need as a music producer I'm going to show you pretty much everything I know about music theory that I've learned over the years making beats so with that being said stick all the way through to the end and let's just jump right into it so the first thing I want to talk about are scales in this video I'm only going to talk about Minor scales pretty much the rest of what I'm going to be talking about is going to be based in this so understanding this is really helpful for pretty much everything else I'm going to discuss so starting off with the minor scale I'm just going to go up to the stamp up here scroll down to minor natural or aolon and I'm going to drop this on the C note so this group of notes you're seeing here is a minor scale a scale is a grouping of notes that creates a key so if somebody says this song or B is in the key of D Minor all that means is that the notes being used in that song are these right here and a minor scale consists of seven different notes and is constructed by creating spacing like this so you start with your root note on the screen right now I have the root note of C you're going to skip two spots on the piano roll or a whole step for your second note then you place Place another note one half step or one piano roll slot above it then you do another whole step another whole step half step and a whole step and then a whole step between the seventh note and the first note in the scale and so I'm going to be mentioning numbers a lot in this video and all that means is the relative note in the scale so for C minor right here if I say the fifth note in the scale I'm just talking about G and how I came up with that is just counting up in numerical order so 1 2 3 4 5 the fifth note is G another example would be the seventh note so I count count up 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 the seventh note will be a sharp and all of these rules are true for every single minor scale even if I move this down to G Shar minor the way you make the scale is the same which means like the note spacing here is the same so this just means if you're making a beat and if you just want to change the scale all you have to do is shift it accordingly on the piano roll so say I make a melody in c minor and I want to put it up to E minor all I have to do is move it up four half steps and now I will have all my notes in E Minor and you'd have to do this for every melodic pattern also if you want to see this scale across different octaves what you could do is Select it shift click to copy it and then you're just going to move this C up to the next C up here and then same thing you're just going to take that same C and move it to the next C below it so if you want a method to view your minor scale while you're making beats and just to make it easier while you're still learning the different skills there's a couple ways to do that NFL so the first method involves using these notes so let's say I have the C minor scale here across three different octaves I'm just going to stretch the notes for let's say eight measures in a empty sampler track so it doesn't make any noise and then I can open up another piano roll and it'll show in the Ghost Notes so I know where all my notes need to go so if I want to make a Melody I could just do something like this another way of doing it is going up to the top left here clicking on it and then going to view going down to scale highlighting going down to minor natural right clicking on that and then selecting the root note so for the sake of the last example I'll just choose C again it's kind of subtle but you can see that all of these light gray notes in the piano roll are all the notes that are in the C minor scale so if I put all these notes in you can see that it's accurate with the other method too of using the stamp up here and pulling the scale down so the main takeaways from the scale is that that's going to be the notes that you're using to make your Melody and if you use notes outside of that it's probably not going to sound good with the rest of your beat and if you're making a sample or a beat and you want to shift to a different key all you have to do is just shift your notes the same amount up or down to fit that respective key here's a quick way that you can shift between the different keys with all your Melody without having to go into each one and shifting it a certain amount if you go to your channel rack here I have a couple Melodies that I just penciled in say I want to move this from C minor to F minor instead of having to go to each of these and moving it up all I have to do is Select both of these by using right click go to this drop- down menu in the top left and then go to transpose selected and i' do plus four plus or minus indicates if you're moving it up or down on the piano roll the number that goes with it is the number of piano roll slots or piano keys that you're moving it so now if I go into it it'll have both my Melodies at F minor and this is really helpful if you have more than two or three Melodies that it's going to take a while to move up or down so now that we got the minor scale the next thing I want to cover is building chords I'm going to go back up to the stamp tool here and get my minor natural scale I'm going to put this on D minor for the sake of this example so using the minor scale I'm just going to show you how you can make chords the most basic chord that you can make is a minor chord so I'm going to start with a root note of D all I'm going to do to make this chord is I'm going to place three different notes and I'm going to place a note on every other note in the scale so I'm going to go up to the next scale degree e I'm going to skip that one and place a note on F then I'm going to skip G and then place a note on a and this is going to make my basic minor chord or D Minor so this is a basic minor chord if you don't have the scale lit up behind it what you could do is just remember that the second note is three half steps above the root note and then the last note is 7 half steps from the root note or four half steps from the middle note and if you want to make another chord in this same key but for a different root note the same rules apply where you just put a note on every other scale degree so let's say for example I wanted to make a note with a root note of a so I'd put the first note on a then I'd skip a sharp and put one on C skip D and then put one on E now I have an A minor chord now let's say I wanted to put it on a root note like a sharp so I'd place it on a sharp then D and then F this is an AAR major chord and you can kind of tell just by the sound of it it sounds happier than minor chord so if I move this chord up next to D Minor you can tell the only difference between a minor and a major chord is that this middle note is just moved up on half step so the rule of making the chord without the scale is flipped the first and the second note in the chord are four half steps apart the middle note and the top note are three half steps apart but the root note and the top note are are still seven half steps apart so even if you're using a minor scale you can still come up with major chords depending on the root note that you're using but overall as long as you skip every other note you will come up with a chord and key as long as you stick with the scale so now I'm going to cover some basic chord types just building off of minor chord of the root note so the first Common variation that I see of this especially in Darker beats is we take this middle note and drop it a half step to the second note in the scale this is what we call a suspended chord to be more specific a suspended two chord because we're moving it from the third scale degree to the second scale degree and this has a more darker or mysterious type of tone to it comparing that to the original another type of suspended chord is a suspended four chord which just involves moving this to the fourth note in the scale it kind of has that more mysterious vibe to it as the other one but the suspended two definitely has a darker vibe to it the next one that I've seen I might be wrong but I believe this is called the first inversion of a chord where you take the top note and you drop it an octave another type of chord that is commonly used is called the seventh chord and it's kind of self-explanatory where we're just taking the root note here and we're just counting up seven scale degrees so just counting up the scale we have 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 so our note would go on C it still has the minor chord tone but it has a little bit of a happier part cuz the top part of this is an F major chord and the bottom half is still that D minor chord these types of chords are used more in melodic and paint type of beats another chord that's slightly less common but is also used is called a ninth chord all you're doing is just taking the seventh and just moving it up a couple more scale degrees so just counting nine nodes up from the root node of your chord so you go 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 which puts it on E or in other words it's just an octave up from that second note in the scale one last modification you can make to a chord is moving this fifth note up one half step to a sixth note similar to dropping the middle note a half step this is creating more of a darker Vibe and if you pair both of them together creates a really dark Vibe another thing you can do with your chords is take any of these notes here and drop them an octave just to change the voicing of it so for example we could take the top note of a here and drop it an octave or we could take D and move it up an octave or we could take two notes and drop them at the end of the day it's still a D Minor triad or D minor chord because we still have the same notes of d f and a or the first third and fifth notes in the scale they're just being played in different octaves you can experiment around with the voicings and just see what you really like also if you want to give your chords more depth you can add notes that are the same notes in the chords but in different octaves for example a lot of producers like to take the root note of the chord and copy it down an octave and you could also take the fifth and copy it down and maybe the root note and copy it up so these are all still the same notes in the chord we're just copying notes up and down octaves to make the chord have a fuller sound and like I said earlier all of these principles apply for pretty much every chord in the scale if you want to apply this with a root note of G you can do the same EX exact thing where you're skipping a note let's say we want to raise this an octave or we want to take this and make it a seventh chord the principle is the same you're still raising this root note in octave for a seventh chord you're still going to go seven notes up on the scale for the root note so it doesn't matter what your scale degree is as long as you're following the same formula you'll still get a similar type of result if you want to shift the key of your Melody all you have to do is just move it up or down on the piano roll accordingly let's say for example if I have this D minor chord and I want to move it up to F minor all I'm going to do is just shift it until this bottom note hits f as you can see with the F minor scale in the Ghost Notes this now fits that key now that we've covered the scales and how to construct chords I'm now going to go into chord progressions specifically some popular chord progressions and songs the first progression that I want to cover is the one six progression or the minor first major 6 this progression is really common in Little Baby beatss opening up this flp of a loop that I made recently I'm just going to go to the piano bass notes Here We you can see it's just the same three notes spanned across three octaves so I'm going to start on the root note of the scale which is e so the scale that I'm using for this beat is E minor and I'm going to start with the one or the root note of the scale and I'm moving it down to the six note so counting it up we have 1 2 3 4 5 6 which takes us to C usually the sixth note in this progression is below our root note so it's just going to be the same note up here just drop down one octave for the sake of giving these base notes more depth I just copied them to multiple [Music] octaves in some of little baby's beats sometimes at the end for the last measure or half a measure or so what they'll do is move these notes up to the seventh note in the scale or just one scale degree up from the sixth note all this does is just make it more cohesive and kind of lead it back to the root [Music] note so putting in context with the rest of loop this is what it sounds [Music] like so now moving on to the next type of chord progression which is really prominent in pain beats this works for artists like Lil Durk and Rod wave so going into this project file I'm going to open up my chord progression here and this beat was made in dsh minor usually how I'll make these sort of pain Melodies is I'll start by picturing out the bass notes first so the chord progression for this beat is 176 specifically for D Minor it's D C and B similar to the 4 pfb at the end I turn it around by using the seven again to lead it back into the first note in the scale this is constructed pretty similarly to the last one where we start off with the root note and Lead it down to the sixth note in the scale this time we're going to flush it out with chords and also put a little more emphasis on that seventh note in the scale so con constructing this type of Basse pattern from scratch I'm going to start off with my root note of D sharp and then count up seven notes so 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Place one on C and then I'm going to move it down to the sixth note in the scale which is one below at B similar to the last chord progression that we discussed these notes are usually dropped in octaves so that they're below the root note so bringing the chords back using knowledge of both the scales and constructing chords I have a dsh Minor triad or a regular dsh minor chord we get dsh skip F place a note on F then skip G and place not on a so we just have a basic chord here moving on to this chord that starts with C we start off with C skip dsh place a note on F skip F place a note on C which gives us a C major chord because the middle note's a little higher then moving to this last chord here we have four notes instead of three so it's the same Formula First note skip middle note skip third note this is a B major 7 chord because we have the seventh note relative to this first note so my root note of this specific chord is is B and if we count up seven notes in the scale we get a sharp so this is the relative seventh note to this note down here it's seven notes up in the scale from the root note of B and this kind of creates an inverse effect from the minor 7th chord to the major 7th so the bottom part of the note is a major chord and then top part of the note is a minor chord we move on to the fourth measure which is just a copy of our second chord here which goes back into the original first note so in context with the rest of the loop it sounds something like [Music] this so now moving on to the next chord progression which is the 14 chord progression and similar to the last one it's pretty self-explanatory we're starting with the root note and then moving up to the fourth note in the scale and building chords off of those this is used in a lot of different sub genres of rep this is used in kind of more like ambient synth type of Beats for artists like Travis Scott it's also used in some more melodic trap beats guys like Q Beats vinyls and Alan Ritter used this chord progression a lot for artists like Drake and Future it's also used a lot in West Coast Music I'll go through a few different project files that has the same chord progression and it'll kind of make sense in context with each different genre the first one I want to cover is the kind of synth vibe in Travis Scott type of songs this melody was made using the G minor skill and I have that pulled up in the Ghost Notes as the name of the progression entails we started with the root note or the first note in the scale and just made a basic minor chord so same recipe 1 35 it may not be immediately obvious but this is the chord of the fourth note in the scale it'll make a little more sense if I move this up an octave fourth note in the scale right here which is C so if we count it up from the root note it's four notes up and then we use the same recipe skip a note Place one skip a note Place one and in the final Melody it's just a different voicing of this chord by just taking this top note and dropping an octave and then I just took that and copied it over here so it's a really simple chord progression and it just leads really well back into the root note so now going to the West Coast variation of this chord progression so pulling up this melody you can clearly see the 14 chord progression in this one so along with the previous construction that I showed y all of making this chord progression all you'd have to do to to just make this normally is you just take your normal chord and copy it over and and then just move it up five half steps so 1 2 3 4 5 and as you can see it fits with the scale it's the same chord that I had before so the chords by themselves sound something like this and then throw in all the top notes and the rest of the melody with it it sounds something like [Music] this so now moving on to the more aoic Q Beats type of styling of this chord progression so I have this Spanish guitar open and as you can tell it's the same progression that I've showed you all on the last couple beats so I just have this first arpeggiated chord here where it's just using the dsh minor chord dsh F and a and I copied that over and then just moved it up five half steps and I pretty much just have this playing for the whole four measures and that's literally the basis of this entire Loop so like I said earlier this is a super simple chord progression but has many different ways of voicing it so it's pretty cool you could experiment around with different sound selections tempos and styles but this is a pretty Universal chord progression so now moving on to the next chord progression which is the 156 chord progression this is used a lot in more of that kind of like new age virtual type of sound to be more specific it's used in Beats for artists like ye destroy lonely K Carson Playboy cardi those types of Vibes going into this project file I have I have these chords right here so putting the scale behind the notes here so for this melody I used the D minor scale so I started with the root note of D or the one then I moved it down to the fifth note in the scale counting it backwards we could go 1 7 6 5 or count it up and then drop it an octave then I use the sixth note in the scale which is just 1/ 12 step up from the fifth note and just using those I just built some chords on top of it and then copied it over to the second half here and then I also just threw in the seventh note in the scale too just to kind of lead it back in and add a little variation to this pattern so this progression is not as rigid as the other ones you could change the order of these you could go 165 or you could go 167 or 157 or 145 but just some sort of variation of it but usually this is the most common one where it's 156 but this melody by itself sounds something like this and putting it in context with the rest of the loop to sound something like [Music] this so now moving on to the last progression if you even want to call it that only using the first note in the scale as a root note so for the most part this is used for dark beats your goal with this is you want to make the cords dark not with the root note but with the accessory notes so this pattern right here is using the E minor scale as you can tell on the bottom here I just have the root note E repeated over and over again I'm just using the first and third note in the scale and I'm just kind of emitting this top note here I have the same thing I copy it over to make these chords darker what you do is just take this middle note and drop it a half step so it sounds kind of like this I have that repeating again in the last measure I have the sixth and fifth note in the skill which creates more of that dark Vibe so that wraps up the popular chord progressions none of these are us used 100% of the time you can play around with different bass notes and all that but these are just good places to start if you want to make those types of Beats so now we've discussed how we construct our chords the popular chord progressions now we're going to go into how to construct your top Melodies so generally when I make my top Melodies I kind of sort it into one of two different categories the first being a more melodic type of sound and the second being a more dark and mysterious Vibe so I'll cover what's entailed in the more melodic side of things first so going back into this flp where I was showing youall 16 chord progression for the little baby type of Melodies so going into the top Melody here I pulled up the scale behind it so again we're using the E minor scale so our root not is here at e for the sake of explanation I'll drop these top notes in octave so it makes a little more sense so if we're looking at the notes being used so the primary notes in the scale that are being used are the first third fourth fifth and seventh notes in the scale the reason I didn't use the sixth notes in the scale is because those are usually used to make a more dark vibe that doesn't mean you can't use them whatsoever but generally these notes together have a more IC feel to it the reason why the second and six notes create that dark Vibe is because notes that are right next to each other on the piano roll or a half step apart they usually create tension or dissonance within the Melodies which creates that dark vibe to it so if I take all these notes and just put it up an octave that's how I ended up getting the final Melody and going to the little dirt Rod wave fop the same applies here when it comes to the notes that you would use for countermelody so if I open up the pattern that has the piano counter Melody if we look at the notes it's pretty much the same thing again the only difference this time is I'm including the second note in the scale in this context this works again this is not an absolute rule where you can't use the second and six notes I just find it that in most of my Melodies I usually don't use the six note in the scale but sometimes I'll still use the second note outside of the chords I don't use the six note in the scale because it doesn't really go along with the whole melodic Vibe so if I moved all these AARP notes up to B this is kind of what the pattern would sound like so if I move this back down to the fifth note in the scale it sounds something more like this definitely a lot more appealing to hear with the overall Vibe of the beat even in the saxophone Melody you can see using pretty much every single note in the scale except for the six note and I'll demonstrate Again by moving all these a sharp up to [Music] B so it's technically in the key but it just doesn't really sound good with the rest of the beat [Music] so those were a couple examples of the melodic counter Melodies so now going into this flp where I have a dark sample I'll just play the melody real quick and I'll go in afterwards and explain the differences so for this melody I'm using the same key of dsh minor the primary difference between this and the melodic beat is that this one heavily uses these notes that are SPAC a half step apart from each other like I said earlier this creates a more darker Vibe so you'd want to use it for a darker beat also notice I don't even use the seventh note in the skill whatsoever in the melodic counter Melodies I didn't use the sixth note at all and I used the seventh note quite a bit and now here in the darker Melodies I'm not using the seventh note at all but I'm using the sixth note so even if I go into the original pattern for for this melody you can see that I'm using the sixth note pretty heavily throughout it especially the fifth and sixth pairing if I moved it up to the seventh it would sound more [Music] melodic versus a six [Music] note so overall the primary difference between your dark counter Melodies and your melodic counter Melodies is that the dark counter Melodies are going to use pretty much all the notes in the scale except for the seventh note and your melodic counter Melodies are going to use all the notes except for the sixth note now we've pretty much got all the Melodies and all that out of the way just a little bonus I'm going to show yall a couple different ways that you could find the root notes or the key of your sample the first method is probably the most well-known method where you just go in and you play your sample and you just have your 808 track open and you just keep playing around with the notes until you get one that sounds correct so that sounds about right and if you're bass notes are switching between different notes what you could do is just go up here and just keep playing with the notes until it hits the right pitch I just keep repeating the process until I figure out what my next base note is another method that you could use is go to website called tunebat or any other similar website and go to key and BPM finder and all you do is just go and drop your file in and it'll give you BPM or key sometimes these might be a little bit off so take it with a grain of salt if it doesn't sound correct and going back into the project file if I reset this pitch and go to my 808s we can see that f is actually the original key of this and one last method that I sometimes use for this I'll go to the mixer track that my Melody's on and I'll open up this plugin called auto key it's made by the same people that make autotune similar to tunebat it's usually correct but sometimes it might be a little bit off anyways that's going to wrap it up for this one I hope you all found it pretty helpful and overall that's pretty much my entire knowledge base of Music Theory so if you found it pretty helpful be sure to leave a like and that's going to wrap it up for me so I'll see you on the next video

Channel: Beats by Tej

Views: 140,600

Keywords: fl studio tutorial, fl studio, how to make beats, fl studio mixing tutorial, how to make beats without loops, how to make modern beats, how to make modern trap beats, how to make beats for beginners, how to make beats from scratch, fl studio 21, fl studio tutorial for beginners, how to make beats in fl studio, music production tutorial, trap beats tutorial, how to make hard beats, how to make hard beats in fl studio, beatsbytej, 2024, music theory for beginners, fl studio theory

Id: FjXS6mBwTt0

Length: 24min 18sec (1458 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 31 2023