Two types of break for electronic music

hey everyone this is oscar from underdog and today we're going to be talking about tension and release specifically during the breaks of a sum all music is about tension and release all the time you build up tension and then you release tension this is the fundamental force that propels music forward that keeps people interesting and it helps you tell your musical story very often during the music composition process you're going to be creating a bunch of elements that groove well with each other but then at some point when you're going to move on to arrangement you're going to have to figure out what's going to happen with those elements that are grooving well together so that you can generate some kind of tension and some kind of release it doesn't have to be in a big way it can be in a subtle way but we're going to look at some techniques today on how to achieve that someone once told me an anecdote about hypnotism i don't even know if it's true please correct me in the comments if it's not but apparently if you hypnotize someone then you bring them out of the hypnosis and then later on you hypnotize them again they go much deeper into the same hypnosis because they've already been in there once i don't actually know if that's true or not however it makes sense to me in the context of music you hypnotize the audience by bringing them into your sound world during one section then you snap them out of it for a while and then you bring them back into your sound world and they go deeper into it and with a more strong emotional connection to it so to use this effect let's look at what we can do [Applause] [Music] before we go any further like the video subscribe to the channel and consider signing up for one of our classes on underwriter.brussels we're an online music school not just a youtube channel before we look at the two types of breaks that we're going to look at today i want to show you the concept of the energy contour quite simply put what you can do with any track to analyze it is you can look at the length of the track and create a little graph in your mind either on paper or in real life and just draw a line that indicates how intense the song is how intense the energy is of the song at any given moment so on the y-axis you've got intensity whatever that really means and then on the x-axis it's just time right and so you'll start somewhere with the intro like in the low area around 20 then the first beat will happen and then you're like at 50 then you're at 60 etc and there's going to be these moments in in the middle where you hit this plateau and then a break will happen and the energy contour will go down and then after the break there will be the drop where the energy contour will go up again to a higher level than it was before try drawing this out for one or two of your favorite tracks to see how they're structured and how their energy flows this might offer you a starting point also for designing the energy contour of your song and we're going to be coming back to these energy contours when we look at the templates for the brakes now brake type number one is the linear brake this is the simpler one of the two first you start with a bunch of drums already playing in your loop and a bunch of synthesizers already playing in your loop before the break they have these motifs already going there's already a medium level of energy going on then at some point you're going to go into the break potentially with some transition effects you're going to go into the break and what you're going to do in the break is you're going to take away some of the elements particularly you're going to take away the kick you're going to take away any sub-base elements anything that has warm lows you're going to remove it from the sun for about however long it's about right like 8 bars 16 bars something like this and over that time what you're gonna do is you're going to open up the filter of your synthesizer and you're going to increase the envelope length of your synthesizer so that it gets bigger and more epic during that buildup this is a clear indicator to the audience that something is happening that some kind of energy transition is taking place and then at the climax you give back all those low frequency elements like the kick and the sub bass they all come crashing back in and it floods the dance floor with warm energy and suddenly your climax has happened and you are on a higher energy level than you were before the linear break in this model you're taking away things you're giving them back you're playing with contrast you're playing with upwards energy motion for a practical example in a production this is what it could look [Music] like [Music] so that was the linear break now the second type of break that i want to introduce you to i call it the trilogy break that's just a name i made up it doesn't actually exist anywhere i think maybe i hope and i call it the trilogy break because it has three parts to it it has the fall the rise and the hang let's walk through them for a second so you start at the same place as before with some drums and some synthesizers then a transition happens towards the fall what the fall is is an energy reset it's like complete silence plus maybe a pad plus maybe some strings plus maybe just the vocal and what we're doing here is we're telling the audience shh we're gonna calm down now we're gonna just listen to this we're gonna do this now you were dancing before but now you're gonna just sort of stick your arms up and soar and dance with the music in a very kind of a calm way not a lot of rhythm happens here maybe you're still doing your chord progression something like that but this is like a more intimate low energy moment really the energy contour goes all the way down and you hold it for a while you tell your audience this is what we're going to do for a while we're going to hang here for a while then after about 8 bars 16 bars however long you want to tease your audience you transition into the rise the rise is similar to the fall except more things start to happen so more synthesizers join in upwards motion is established again similar to the linear break where the filters of things start opening up the envelopes of things start opening up there's percussion again rhythmic percussion not probably not the kick yet maybe but probably not the kick yet maybe stay away from the low the bass elements a bit and what you're doing is you're creating this big crescendo so you've got rhythmical elements that are speeding up so maybe a snare roll that maybe goes every 16th note you've got these rising effects like lasers going or or falling effects going you got things basically crescendoing everything building up building up until a moment of maximum complexity until it's almost too much to bear and then you transition into the hang and the hang is just a moment where nothing happens silence you make people feel the silence maybe this is the place where you put a vocal snippet just a phrase or a few beautiful synth notes against a canvas of silence the audience expected the drop to already happen so this hang is like you're teasing them right and then after the hang bam there comes the drop and the drop can be either back to full energy or what's also done a lot nowadays is like a dark drop where you go into just a really dark techno beat because then you're playing with the contrast of being very high and synthesizer driven before the climax and then after the climax going into like a dark techno beat check out my techno rumbles tutorial in case you want to make some dark techno beats as well [Music] hmm [Music] so [Music] [Music] now the trilogy break is a really big epic thing to do and it's pretty cool however this energy reset might get old if you play it 20 times in a dj set so not every song that you make has to have this kind of really exaggerated storyline because on a dance floor really this kind of energy resets it's cool once or twice per dj set but you don't want to be doing this every song because people will just go decide that now they're going to go get some drinks because the dancing energy is gone so use it wisely as a little bonus tutorial inside of a tutorial i mentioned earlier you can have like rising and falling lasers try this take any synthesizer that can generate white noise put a bandpass filter on it make it fairly resonant and then play a note anywhere in your song and automate the filter of that cutoff to go from high to low or from low to high tweak the release time to fit into your song add some reverb and mix it in low in your song and it's going to give that splash of energy that kind of sweeping down crash or sweeping up kind of a laser effect to add energy and spice at those transition moments let me show you a simple example using ableton's operator so you grab the synth you set it to white noise you put the filter to bandpass mode make it fairly resonant and then you automate the cutoff frequency to go from low to higher from high to low now here are the two charts next to each other again the linear break and the trilogy break i want to give you one piece of homework after this video check out two songs one is martin garrix's animals you don't have to like it stylistically to understand that it's a very effective use of the concepts that we just talked about it's got the fall it's got the rise it's got the hang and then the beat drop and they even build in surprises there quite a lot so check that out another track that i want you to analyze is a song that's been haunting me from before i started making music which is infected mushrooms vicious delicious this is like a psythens side it's a sight it's side trans track it's upside chance it's a psy trance track it's a sidetrack it's a side trans track that acts like an encyclopedia of all the different things that you can do to indicate upwards motion during a climax it's got this never-ending climax it's almost like a shepherd's tone of transition technique so by the time that one transition technique reaches its climax there's another one starting and it just kind of endlessly goes on like that so check out that song as well after that check out one of the other production videos here take care of one another stay producing and bye bye

Channel: Underdog Electronic Music School

Views: 24,392

Rating: 4.9895287 out of 5

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Id: n3lvFEsf1O0

Length: 11min 49sec (709 seconds)

Published: Mon May 31 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/roosterAK]

Yes! Been bingeing Oscar for the last week, and subscribed recently. I can’t believe how low his view counts are, although he does move too quick if you are a beginner, but if you know how to use ableton his pace is perfect.

[u/Skootr1313]

Been watching his videos for the last two weeks..nothing but great content

[u/djsoomo]

Agreed! A diamond in a pile of coal! :)

[u/riskienights]

Thanks for the share, I was struggling to explain the importance of tension to my pal I spin with. Big up!

[u/faeustl]

Haha it’s funny… watching his stuff since one week as well and I love it 🎊

[u/Nonomomomo2]

Epic thx!

[u/will8975]

Love your vids bro, super helpful

[u/itsallyourshomie]

Thanks for this!!!! I’m hooked

[u/SomeHospital8256]

I knowww