THE ULTIMATE UK DRILL TUTORIAL FOR 2021 (Full Process - FL Studio 20)

yo what's good people it's jay cactus and in today's video i'm going to be showing you how to make a full uk drill beat from scratch in fl studio 20. i'm going to be showing you every single process so i'll be going through the melody sound selection the drum patterns mixing arrangement and even how to export your beat with stems in the right format this video might be a little bit longer than my usual ones but i don't want to skip anything i want to make sure that you learn everything that you need to know for making drill beats in 2021 but before you watch the video i am announcing the winners to the biggest giveaway i've ever done so make sure you check your email if you've entered it we'll also be announcing the winners on instagram so if you're not already then follow me at j cactus music let's get into it alright so the first thing that you want to do is set the bpm and for uk drill bits the bpm is usually set between 140 and 143. you can creep up a little bit but for this one i'm going to stick on 142 and then picking the instrument is entirely up to you it depends what kind of vibe you're going for but a lot of classic uk drill tracks will use pianos if you've watched a lot of my videos you know that i love the orchestral side of drill so i like to use strings and choirs and then blending pianos as well so i think i'll go for that vibe today so i'm using addictive keys for the piano if you know music theory you don't need to worry about setting the scale but if you don't then go to helpers scale highlighting and for drill you want to pick a minor scale so i'd recommend either minor harmonic or just minor natural i'll go with minor harmony this time and i'll set it to c sharp and when you're writing the melody you can do it a number of ways you can either think of the count melody and build the chords around that or you can start with the chord progression and then build account melody after or you could even just find the bass notes that you want to use and then build everything on top of that well i'm going to start with the chords for this one so basic c sharp minor chord would look like this i'm just skipping every other note but to make it sound more interesting i'm going to invert the e it's literally just bringing it up an octave so it's still the same chord but the e is in a different position and then to create a real dark vibe you don't want to bounce a lot between the chord progressions so try sustaining the root note so for example c sharps the root note of this chord so i'm going to keep c sharp on this one so this is the chord we had before c sharp minor i literally just bring this note down one and then up an octave just to match what we did before we've got an instant dark drill vibe i'm not going to do that same melody that everyone does in the tutorials i'm going to switch it up for this one so now we need to work out where we want to go from c sharp [Music] so we could do that we could go from a and then to g sharp so let's do the same again let's build a chord and then i'll do the same this one i'm just skipping every other note and let's try and invert in these two [Music] yeah there we go so we're going from c sharp to a to g we could do ang again and then switch it up here so we could go [Music] yeah that might work so let's see what we can do here bring in a chord maybe invert the c sharp do the same for this one just invert in the middle note same again so now we've got a chord progression and then for the bass notes we can just use the root notes of the chords so i could sustain that c shark because it's the same for them too and remember the root notes are the ones we started on so a5 and g sharp and then to make it more natural i'm going to press ctrl a and then alt and r to randomize the velocity and then i'm just bringing down this velocity wheel here and to make it even darker i still think that half time is one of the best plugins for drill beat so i'm going to put some half time on and see how it sounds so sounding too dark so bring it up an octave [Music] maybe even bring the bass notes up an octave just because it will get too muddy i've got it set to four times as well now for a little count melody just to switch it up [Music] so because i've used half time with four times it means you have to bring the notes quite far back [Music] and something similar here i'm actually going to bring everything up an octave [Music] just something simple for now and now i've taken the same piano and copied it because in this one i just want one times half time so it's easier to keep them on separate channels and i'm just using this one to accent some of the notes and now i can think of a little bit more of a count melody [Music] do yeah there we go [Music] just real simple you don't need to over complicate it with drill now i definitely want some strings in there and my go-to string bank is strings of winter or bbc orchestra for this one i'm going to use strings of winter and i'm just going to use my keyboard to think of some kind of count melody something like this [Music] i'm just going to record this in i'm going to turn the metronome on hit [Music] record so some of them might be off but i can just take the best one quantize it and then repeat it so to quantize it's just control and q for the shortcut so i just took the best one copied it across now we've got this and you know what to thicken this up i can press control and a to highlight everything shift and click and then control and up and this is just copying it up an octave and i could bring the higher ones down in velocity by just holding alt and then using the mouse wheel yeah it sounds hard and now to match the dark vibe i'm going to try a half time on the strings as well [Music] so i've just got the half time on one bar and two times and then i've just added some reverb with a low cut and quite high mix so it's pushed more into the background and then when i'm using strings i like to add a few different layers so i'll add one and one octave and then maybe a lower range of strings like a cello or something just to get the bass notes so this is what i've added it's literally just in the strings [Music] [Music] and then this is my other go-to plugin for orchestral sounds this is the free one bbc orchestra so for this one i just want to add this one sound in to add emphasis to the piano so i'm going to do something similar to what i did with the count melody for the piano so just something like this no not there let me bring these down one [Music] [Music] yeah that's the one and then the last instrument i think i need for this one is maybe acquire something like bbc orchestra or you can find some good vocal phrases from contact and then find something to just sit underneath actually it's not bbc it's just the spitfire labs choir and what you could do is take the first piano that we used the chord progression copy this and then paste it into the choir and get rid of the bass notes i'll get rid of the count melodies too and just extend them see what this sounds like i'll have to bring it down a couple octaves [Music] yeah i think i like the sound of it in this octave i'm actually going to try a vocal phrase for this one [Music] so i'll set the scale to c sharp minor [Music] maybe that one at the end or here let's try this [Music] i've just muted the strings for now this one might actually work i could even just alternate between that and the other choir that i use from spitfire and then what you want to do is make sure that everything's named right before you start linking it to the mixer so just name everything according to what instrument it is because that's going to make it easier when you export the stems at the end i've already linked mine but i'll do it for the choir so to rename it you just right click rename you can choose the color if you want enter the name and then look if you do it by this way and drag it up to the number it's not going to change the name in the mixer so if you wanted to link them all at the same time you can just click and drag down and highlight everything obviously i only need to link the choir right now so i'm just gonna highlight the choir go to insert seven and then press ctrl and l now you can see we've got the choir links and it's named and then for mixing i kind of mix as i go along so you saw me before when i put half time on sometimes i'll add an eq after that and adjust the level mainly in the channel rack i'll do most of the work there but to make things easier i'm going to create a bus and link all of the instruments to it so i'm just going to right click on an empty one rename and just type in instrument bus now i'm going to hold control click and drag over all of them right click down here on the instrument bus and then route to this track only and now if i put an eq on this one it's going to affect them all so i definitely need to take out some lows because i want to save room for the 8-way so i'm just going to bring this down to a high pass change the steepness so i usually do it to around about 100 hertz and then when i've got the eight weight in i just it's going to be different for every track so you want to make sure that your base is in and then you want to mix things together but in the vocals i want to add this plug in because i want to bring the pitch up a full octave and then blend it in so now we've got a high pitched one mixed with the normal pitch see how that sounds with the mix and then i could filter that out with the eq so to filter it i can do a high pass and a low pass or i could just do a band pass i just want it quite slow [Music] so when you're mixing and you're using effects and different eqs when you're using these plugins it's going to adjust the volume for example with this one because i'm cutting so much out the volume is going to dip back down so to compensate for that you can bring it back up that's what this bit is up here and that's what gain staging is so when you're using these plugins if you realize that the plugins made the volume jump up then use the output knob to bring everything back down and what i'm thinking for this track is i only want this bit to repeat and then maybe after every eight bars the full thing can play so it's just going to repeat like this maybe keep the vocals out for a little bit so this will be the main verse and then this bit can play [Music] that's just gonna add a nice bit of variation it's gonna stop it getting boring [Music] so before i start putting in the drums i'm actually gonna do that in the playlist so i'm coming to the playlist i'm going to click up here and then click on split by channel and that's going to separate everything so each instrument's got a separate pattern and now i can bring everything in so what i could do is copy it across with ctrl b i'll just do it a couple times so for the main verse i just want half of it to repeat so i just hit c to activate the slice tool i'm holding shift and i'm going to right click and drag down and that's going to cut off the right side it usually just cuts off the shorter side and then i can copy this one across and do that again so before i arrange it properly i am going to add the drum so i'm going to create a new pattern just name it drums and i'll bring that down here and i know this drum pattern is going to be different to this one because the chord progression changes in this section so i'm just going to focus on this bit for now and then i'll work on the second 8-way pattern layer if you've made a new pattern and you want to see where the chord progression is when you're adding the eight weights so you know which root note to put them on then what i'd recommend doing is going to the piano roll just copying the pattern and then in your drum pattern just add a sampler so look i'm just going to add a sampler here and then paste the pattern in i remember for this first one we would just repeat in this first half now when i'm adding my drums for example if i was adding an 8 weight here i can see the notes behind because ghost notes is enabled if you don't know where ghost notes is just come to the arrow go to helpers and then make sure ghost channels is selected all right so when it comes to drums sound selection is the most important thing when i first started making beats i used to add compressors and eqs to everything just because i thought i needed to but when i started getting into sound design i realized at the sound design stage i'm actually using compressors and eq is there so when you guys use these packs everything's already been compressed you don't need to do any of that again if you start off with good quality sounds in the first place you save yourself a lot of time so i'm just going to grab a snare from my pack and the standard drill bounce for a snare goes on the three and the four so look if i put the metronome on i'm gonna count it so one two three four one two three four one two three four one two three four it's that simple and then you can press f7 to go to the piano roll ctrl and b to copy it and then if you want you can add a couple notes just depending on the balance that you want [Music] and then for hi-hats a lot of drill beats will use sounds like this so almost sounds like a snare or a counter snare and the pattern for hi hats is to skip two skip two and then skip one but i'm just going to leave that last one because i'm going to hit f7 to go to piano roll and then just copy and paste this a few times and i've got instant drill bounce and then to get a better bounce you can start adding the filler notes in so you can set it to quarter step or step whichever one you want and you can bring the velocity down to these ones so i've said it's a quarter step for this one [Music] so i can copy that with control b and then switch it up for the last four bars so what i could do with this one is extend this this is just another way to get a bounce and then press alt and u to chop the notes [Music] now i can bring the velocity down i'm just right clicking and dragging down there i'm actually going to do that in a different place i might do it here so all new to chop and i'm going to drag it up [Music] you could even bring the filler notes down in pitch just depends on the vibe then i might adjust the panning for this one so i'm going to highlight everything i was just holding ctrl clicking and dragging over come to control and then notepad bottom half is the left side the top is the right so i'm just going to drag up see what this sounds like i'm going to adjust the pan into some of these as well [Music] maybe this one just sort of changes and then at this stage you could add a second hi-hat just to accent some of the current ones [Music] and then i'm gonna mess with the panning with these ones [Music] all right so now for the eight weight you want something that sounds quite deep quite distorted just listen to a lot of drill tracks and try and find the eight way that matches some of them that's what i did when i was creating my pack because i wanted all of them to fit for drill bits but i'm thinking this one for this beat and when you're dragging it eight weights first you want to make sure that it's inky so right click on here edit an audio editor click this button here and then detect pitch regions i've already tuned mine to c so you don't have to do that but if for example it was tuned to d then you'd come to the middle tab and then right click on d that just means that every time you hit c it's actually going to be c and now i want the note to only play for as long as i hold it so i'm going to turn on the envelope and bring everything down except for the hold so now because we've got ghost notes on we can see the root notes of the chords which were brought in so you generally want to follow the root notes of the chords but when you add in the filler notes like towards the end of the bar that's when you can use different notes so what i like to do is just think of the pattern in my head first lay out the pattern and then work out where the slides are going to go [Music] so this was my pattern but now i want to work out where the slides need to go so to add a slide note i'm just going to hit s and that's activated slide mode i could have just clicked up there and then when i bring a note in you can see it's got the slide tool next to it the other option is to draw in a normal note double click make sure slide selected there and then when you're drawing a slide note this is how it works so it's going to hit the bottom note and then it's going to slide up to the note that you want it to and it's going to take that amount of time for it to get from this note to this note so from c sharp to e if i bring it back the slide's going to happen quicker [Music] [Music] [Music] all right so i've got the eight-weight pattern and when i'm adding these higher octaves in these higher notes i bring the velocity down so you can see the velocity down there and with this section here i created a delay effect so i basically repeated this but then gradually brought the velocity down and then i adjusted the panning as well [Music] and a lot of the times for the slides i'll use the notes that are already within the chords and then you want to layer this with a beefy key but before i do that i put something on the master channel and i always add a classic clipper you can use a soft clipper but i just like the sound of a classic clipper so look i've got the classic clipper on i export at negative 9.1 and then i just bring the slope down so it's not as harsh so look this is how i designed the kick so i purposely clipped it this is with classic clipper off and then this is with it on you can hear the difference in the punch straight away so i'm going to drag the kick in copy the eight weight pattern and then paste it into the kick and then i'm going to get rid of all of the slide notes hit ctrl and a to highlight everything then alt k and then if it's the first time doing this you'd need to right click on c so that everything's set to c so right click on c6 and then if you hit shift and d it brings everything to the same length so it's a bit easier to see and with all them kicks it would just sound way too busy so i take out quite a few of them i'm also going to bring the velocity up a bit there we go [Music] and then with perks i usually just look at where there's some space so i don't really want the perk to clash with the kick and the snare all the time so i just try and create a bounce [Music] so something as simple as that so something like this would sound good at the start [Music] and this which i've used in a lot of my beats but just always sounds sick [Music] the other thing you could think about adding is something like a reverse open hat or reverse impact like this then i could add a second one in which is like half the time of the first one maybe here instead [Music] i've also brought an open hat and i'm just going to use this to emphasize some of the kicks i only want it to be short so i'm going to right click select cut itself and then in the piano roll i'm just going to drag these on i'm just copying them and i'm bringing the velocity down so it's going to stop when this other one plays so maybe about this length [Music] so i've got my drum pattern now the only thing that i need to change is the eight way pattern at the end of the eight bars when the other chords come in but for now i'm going to split the drum pattern and then bring in all of the drums you don't have to do this but i like to make everything the same length just so it's more visible and i've just brought them up so look if i copy these across the eight weight pattern that i put in there won't match these second chords that i play in here so all you need to do is make this eight weight pattern unique and then change the eight weights in the second half so this is what changed it to i'm just matching the root notes of the chords i've changed this pattern a little bit and i've kept this echo bit in and i might only use this bit for the end of the eight pass then i also need to match that with the kicks so again i can just copy the eight weights and paste them in the kicks all right so before i start arranging everything i'm just gonna mix it up properly so look because i've named everything first i'm just going to click on the snare and drag down and then go to the mixer channel start on an empty bus hold ctrl shift and hit l and now it's ruined everything for me so when it comes to mixing most of the time i just mix as i go so like you saw me before i was putting in eqs i was adjusting the levels in the channel right and then the final thing that i do is come to the mixer channel and just do one last tweak with the levels generally speaking you want the kick to be the loudest thing followed by the snare and the eight weight but don't always go from db because that's not perceived loudness so something could have a higher db but still sound quieter i won't go into why that is right now but just bear that in [Music] mind and then it's all about balancing things out so for example if you've got a couple perks in there if one of them's panned to the right maybe pan the other one to the left you just want to find that good balance with these two perks if you've got headphones on you'll hear the delay that's already set in there and the delay is bouncing between the left and right here so i don't need to pan them and i'll usually mix with everything playing at the same time but just for this tutorial i'm going to show you the drums [Music] so the kicks thumping the loudest impacts about the right volume [Music] needs to come down [Music] and then because the open hats pan to the right this perk's going to go to the left with the hi-hats you can keep them in the middle you could pan them slightly to the left or right or you could use a plug-in like panman and this will actually pan it for you [Music] so if i bring the width back [Music] so you can see it's going back and forth it's just gonna create a cool effect in headphones if you don't have panman then fruitypanomatic is a stop plugin so you can adjust the lfo and the amount you can copy these settings if you want if you've got headphones on you'll hear the hi-hats going between the left and right here and then i'll play with the instruments and just balance everything out [Music] so look we've got this piano and this one which are quite similar so this is going to go to the left the piano can stay to the right [Music] with the strings they're already planned so look even though i haven't changed anything you can see from the levels that within the plug-in is already panned so sometimes you don't need to do anything [Music] and if i think things are sounding a little bit too muddy i will cut out some lows but you don't really need to do it to your drums even the reverse impact you can see that it's already got the lows taken out so look the only mixing that i've really done is just leveling and panning which i'm mainly doing the channel rack and then the only eqs i added was one on the instrument bus and then one on the vocal just because i wanted a filter effect on the master i've just got a classic clipper i'm sending the output to minus 0.1 and you can see how much it's clipping so quite a lot but i like the punch it gives the kick so don't overthink mixing i'm telling you if you just start with good quality sounds do the right leveling choose the right sounds that complement each other and they're not fighting over the same frequency range and you're going to have a clean knit all right so for arranging it i think this can be the hook obviously with the drums i'm going to copy this across that's going to be the verse this whole thing this can be a hook we're going to need these drums because it's got the other chords in them and then that can repeat so it's a 32 bar verse when a rapper is listening to it they'll hear it as 16 bars half the time for the hook and then just the same again so look when you're arranging beats you just want to make it real simple for artists they want to listen to it and they want to know exactly what the intro is exactly where the hook and the verses are you don't really want to confuse people too much if you're trying to get placements and generally speaking you want all of the energy to be in the hook and when it's starting off you want things to build up so you don't want everything playing at the same time straight away you're just going to ruin all the surprises so i'll show you what i mean so in the intro i usually take out all of the drums and i could maybe just leave a piano in and then that reverse impact and then the only thing that i want to play straight away is maybe the crash and the hi-hats i want to save these strings for later on and i'm actually going to bring these down to octave so i'm going to make this one unique hit ctrl and down and this is going to help build energy up [Music] now we slowly want to build things up so this is actually starting with the first i'm actually going to label it too just so you can see exactly what i'm doing so first one this next section is hook one so if i have everything playing at the same time it's just gonna sound too busy so i'm gradually gonna lead up to the hook where most things play [Music] [Music] i'm actually going to make this pattern unique so i think there's too much going on in the eight weights for the start of the beat and then you just want to start introducing new things so you can gradually build up so little just got the piano snares the 8-way comes in and the kick maybe we could add the second piano now [Music] let's add these perks in the beginning as well then i'm going to cut the hi-hats here so yeah these strings in the second piano have come in and then this next bit the other instruments come in and we can maybe add the vocals here as well [Music] i'm saving these other strings [Music] and then before the hook i want everything to cut it's just going to take all the energy away and then when the hook comes in pretty much everything's going to play i'm going to take out the vocals though and just leave that of acquiring and i'll take out this and maybe the piano just for this section i'm going to take out that crash and the perk i don't want everything to play all the time so i could maybe take it out here as well and then just to switch up the pattern again i'm going to change the eight weight take out these slides and then i can even make this kind of fade out so i'm gonna take one turn it into a slide and turn the volume all the way down and then i'm gonna drag it over the e but i think we definitely need that reverse impact in there again [Music] now what i can do is just get rid of the second part decide what to do with the end of the hook so maybe cut out some hi-hats again then copy the first verse let's just listen to the transition between the hook and the verse because we might have to make it different to the intro so i'm thinking to actually take out some hi-hats here maybe even take out the eight weights there [Music] i think i want some of the vocals in the intro so maybe just this section yeah this is sounding hard so i just need to add my tag in now so when i made my tag i made it around about 140 bpm so it's already pretty much on time so i'm just going to turn down the volume from here and i'm going to assign it to a mixer track let's listen from the intro [Music] sounding mad and with the tag if you're exporting for youtube purposes then i put a couple tags in so one just before the hook and then one before the end of the last hook and then when i export the first version i just mute these two so just hit t and then click over these to mute them but now we just need to think of something for the outro so usually for these cinematic outros i like to copy the hook just have everything playing and then i can just fade that ending out and then in the master i'm going to add fruity balance i'm going to right click on volume create automation clip i'll bring it down to the bottom and then i'm just going to drag this endpoint down [Music] and then we've got a nice outro right so the last step is to export your beat so the first thing that you want to do is think of a name and then what i like to do is hit f11 call it drop him and then the offer is me and that just means that when you export it it's going to already save the title and artists for you so make sure that everything has its own mixer channel because when you export the stems it separates the mixture channels so if something's not linked to it then it's not going to export that one stem so we've already linked everything i'm going to go to file export and then wav file i'm going to create a new folder called dropping and the file name i'm going to name it j cactus drop them in brackets i'll put the tempo which is 142 bpm and then at the end the key which is c sharp minor hit enter and now you want to make sure that wav file and mp3 selected with mp3 around about 160 is fine if you're just sending these to artists and emails and you don't want the file size to be too big but the quality still wants to be there then set it around 160. and then for the wav file you can increase the quality if you want but 16 bit tends to be fine and then make sure you hit split mixer tracks and then at the top you can either have it on cut remainder or leave remainder so if you've got some instruments that might have some reverb at the end then it would save the tail of the reverb if you set it to cut then it's just going to cut it off and then hit start and then this is what it's going to look like when you've exported the stems so you're going to get this current file which you don't need so i'm going to delete that and then when i told you to name it within fl this is what it does it saves it in the artist and title section so for the stem folder i'm just going to highlight everything except for the master so i just want the stems in this one i'm going to right click and then if you've got winrar then you can just click that add to drop them and it'll create one for you or you can send to compress zip folder so now i've got the zip folder with the stems the high quality wav file the mp3 and then if you want a version with your tags for beat stars then just go back and re-export a version and unmute the tags so i hope you liked the video and i hope you were feeling the beat this was more of a beginner's tutorial but i just wanted to show you my full process making a drill beat from scratch i'm still going to be uploading every tuesday and thursday at 6 p.m so i will start doing more advanced tutorials as well but let me know what you guys want in the comments but thank you for watching and i'll see you next time [Music] the [Music] cocktails [Music] you

Channel: Jay Cactus TV

Views: 290,320

Rating: 4.9690857 out of 5

Keywords: how to make a uk drill beat in fl studio, uk drill tutorial 2021, how to make a uk drill beat 2021, how to make a uk drill beat in fl studio 2021, UK Drill tutorial, Uk drill tutorial fl studio, jay cactus, jay cactus drill, full uk drill tutorial, uk drill tutorial from scratch, how to make a uk drill beat from scratch, how to mix uk drill beat, uk drill mixing tutorial, how to master a beat, uk drill 808 slide tutorial, uk drill 808 tutorial, uk drill arrangement tutorial

Id: miIqJvpovfk

Length: 37min 35sec (2255 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 05 2021