Beat Making 101

[shakur420]

psy0nyd3 been dropping some jewels. Figured we'd keep the discussion going in threads. For some reason my message box hasn't been saving my sent messages, all I got is what he sent me, so some of this might sound weird, lol. But either way, just trynna get some discussion started. I'll post this for now.

psy0nyd3 Wrote:About mixing - You mean getting the levels all right/mastering right & Some automation on the levels maybe to make the drum tracks more fluid? You've probably already read/seen/heard this, and I'm no pro as you know, lol. But the most important part of getting the noises mixed right is the levels, you want your track to be as close to the red as possible without actually clipping. You want the drums to just barely punch through the synths/samples, and you want the synths/samples to be as wide and thick as possible. ALWAYS make your bass noises mono, never stereo. Even kicks you want mono most of the time, if they are on the lowest end. Layer the snares with multiple sounds like get a white noise sample/synth, a nice acoustic snare, & maybe a clunk or click type clap. Also dont be scared to use drum loops and shit, its not cheating trust me. When you have a tight ass drum pattern that you banged out, throw a nice acoustic loop with rides over it, make the loop have a couple switch ups like every couple bars.

I used to work on flstudio but I switched to reason before I really started to grasp all of the different pieces of equipment and techniques to process sounds. If you have a cracked copy of flstudio then I'd recommend grabbing reason 4. Reason 5 is out now you could probably find that + crack too, from what I've heard theres a new feature which lets you work with .wavs easier like you can in flstudio. Thats really the only thing I liked in fl more than reason. In reason it takes way more work to use wavs. Even if you have a bought n' paid for version of fl, reason might be worth cracking because you can use them in tandem. Thats what all of the pros do. Reason is a studio suite, created basically for us poor people, and flstudio is a DAW(digital audio workstation). Protools/logic/ableton/cakewalk/Acid are all DAWs. Unlike DAWs the skills you learn in reason translate to real equipment.

Here is a really great tutorial on mastering. I'm not sure exactly how well it'll translate to frootyloops but it might help some. It just shows the difference that you get when you apply a little bit of compression to a properly leveled(mixed) track and eq the whole track a bit. I know its reason so its going to look crazy and foreign for you, but I think you might like reason. For me, its way more user friendly. This guy also is a DnB producer, but its hard to find people who break down the mechanics in tutorials as good as he does:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_9mb4YpBUk
And one from the same dude on the importance of processing your drums:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JudKRCN8gEo

Dude start posting up beats and I'll definitely listen and see if I can give decent critiques from a neutral perspective, you know, just export as wavs and post 'em up to soundcloud and send me the links or make a thread.

shakur420 Wrote:And thanks for that stuff on the mixing man. Shit, what you said about the mono thing. That's why a lot of kicks sound like they're coming from the "middle", eh? And snares coming from "outside", kind of. I thought of replicating that sound by making copies of the snare and panning one to the right and one to the left to give it that feel, but shit, lol, just make the kicks mono, eh? HAHA. I still learned a few things like offsetting hats or certain sounds just slightly off-center so they seem to stand out a bit, even if they're softer, but I'm gonna try that with the kicks. My main problem with the mixing is I guess what they say about the "dynamic range"? You know, how you fill up the sound with highs, mids and lows. And try not to have different sounds in the same area, otherwise they kind of bleed together in the final mix and you loose certain sounds or the whole feel of the track changes. It's weird though, like I said, I listened to that beat again in FL Studio (#7) and the sounds came through. But that same one that I rendered as .wav and uploaded, in the player, certain sounds just don't come out, you barely hear them. And I probably only hear them cause I know they're there. Other people probably didn't even hear them. Imma check out the tutorials for sure. lol, making me wanna fuck with it now, but I've been up for more than like 24hrs (had to work New Years), and the kid is buggin me to play with him and shit. lol, tequila gonna have me passin out soon. lol, but I'm definitely gonna check them out. I've got Audition, that I tried to use to filter acapellas, you know to make acapellas from tracks, I heard they had a plugin for that. Didn't work too well, but whatever, don't need it anymore. Filters in FL Studio work well enough for most, if I wanna take a cut from somewhere. Pluse, I got a couple gigs of Hip Hop acapellas to cut from so I don't worry about it for the time being.

I got Audacity which I use to use to cut samples in, lol, till I found out that I can just do it FL Studio, and not have to worry about naming, importing and all that bullshit. Their wave editor is fucking dope. I can zoom in tight, straight with the buttons on the mouse, de-clip the samples at the start and end real quick. I can chop samples in no time now. You know, if you're willing to give me some feedback, I'm gonna post some stuff. I'll ask to see if we can get the soundcloud player to be able to embedded in the threads, can't be too difficult, but we'll see. Imma put some stuff up in the next week or 2. Some of my more mediocre beats, lol, stuff that I ain't got no real arrangement for, no intro or hook or whatever (or sometimes a hook), but just a basic beat idea, decent drum pattern, samples. But, yeah, that would probably help with the practicing with the mixing, and maybe get some ideas.

I use FL Studio basically like a sampler and sequencer. I don't fuck with too many effects, or what in a real studio would be all this real equipment, just cause I don't really know how to use it properly. I've figured out reverb, EQ, bass boost and filters enough to use them to do what I want. Compression, I've got a limited understanding (lol, see, what the fuck is the difference between a "limiter" and a "compressor", other than one applies more compression than the other? lol) I've seen how Audition and Reason are, and I was just talking to a DJ the other week about how to sequence in those kind of programs. You just all these channels of wave files and you just slide them in the timeline as you want. There's a bit more freedom in the sequencing part than FL Studio, cause in Fruity Loops you gotta use the the little sections provided per beat. But there's ways around it, to change how many sections there are, and even "break" the sections if you go into the piano roll. It's just stuff usually works for me, sometimes though, I can't stretch a sample, or arrange it (I cut samples up real small, I don't like loops) to fit the bpm with the drums. But I'm learning. I'm sure I'm gonna hit up another program at some point. I've heard a lot of people sampling and arranging in FL Studio and then moving to Reason to mix and master. There's gotta be something to it.

Anyways, lol, shit, I think we should put this shit in a thread. I know we don't have too many regulars who make beats, but it might be useful for people, and for me too, to get people's opinions. lol. I'll wait till I start putting up some beats, see if we can get some people to give some input on putting beats together. But thanks for the advice and the tutorials. Definitely going to check them out. If I haven't posted a few beats in a couple weeks, give me a reminder.

psy0nyd3 Wrote:Yeah, learning how to mix and master properly is really tough. Like Sabzi says, its basically all about training your ears to really understand what actually sounds good. EQing stuff or panning it so the frequencies dont clash.

When you get a beat that sounds good in your software but when exported everything is super-muffled, something is clipping. A noise, for me usually the bassline, is way too loud so the program chops off all of the freqs that are over the red line, in essence muffling everything. You need to watch your peak meters religiously, and get them as close to the red as possible, without going into the red. That is something that I used to struggle with immensely, but I'm getting better.

When I take samples, I either cut the sample from the song in audacity, import to recycle, chop the sample, load it into reason's rex2 sampler and bang shit out. Or, I take the sample in audacity, load it into reasons nnxt - which is basically the same as an mpc sampler, and cut it up that way. With the seond method its way more technical and complicated but you can do a lot of stuff you cant do with the first method.

I really like FL's wav editor, In reason 5 they added a similar one but I doubt my pc could handle it. lol


I don't really fuck with too many effects either, basically for the reasons you mentioned. The diff between a compressor and a limiter is a compressor evens the peaks and troughs in the waveform, so it makes the quiet shit louder/the louder shit quieter depending on the ratio and threshold, and a limiter just chops off the tops to keep it from clipping.

Yeah reason is the same ie you can set how big the cells are and turn cells off all that stuff.

To stretch samples/beatmatch them, you change the pitch of the sample & the bpm of the song. There's really no way to stretch and shrink samples without changing the pitch. I used to HATE samples with drums but I'm starting to learn how to beatmatch & embrace them. You'll notice if you look though that the majority of my beats are chopped real small also. It just depends on what you're trying to do and how you feel.

The whole time that I've been making beats, I've always been trying to achieve that 'ambient vibes' feel, and I've never achieved it. lol I dont think its possible when using tiny chops, because then it gets all poppy instead of chilled out. Know what I mean?

psy0nyd3 Wrote:Yeah man, make the thread thats chill. Just do me a favor and erase the 'There is a little red light' sentence when talked about watching the peak meters to avoid clipping. Was thinking about reason's clip light. lol

Yeah thats the situation you'd want to use a limiter, but just make sure to also dull the frequency that you don't want with an EQ and bring up the frequency that you want, as good as possible.

Yeah I have a couple folders packed with samples too. lol A lot of them suck, and a lot of them are used in like 2 or 3 of the hundreds of projects I have. It sucks cause when I started I just kept piling all of the beats one after another into 1 folder. Now days, every 30-90 days I make a folder with the year + season so everything is a little easier to find, I can think of the date I made something and actually locate it.

A big part of producing is like you said, building up extensive collections of sounds. A lot of people even sample all their drums instead of using really common one the synthesized ones that come with most music software.

I use drumloops too. In fact, many of my beats have drumloops for the main groove. You can do a lot of really cool stuff with them, you can take high/mid filters to add accent to a song, or rearrange em, just take the kicks, snares, hats, whatever. Using drum loops is no different than sampling - it IS sampling obviously considering they're chopped. You can actually make your own drum loops too which can be really good, its just all about processing them all together with filters/reverb to kind of melt em together.

Primos beats are dope for sure, that awkwardness is way tight, like flyinglotus beats too. I think it has to do with the tempo, those beats are slower, and its that they didn't use the piano roll, they actually record it. There are ways to hook your cpu keyboard up with a MIDI yoke so you can bang shit out if you dont have an MIDI keyboard. Making the dopest beats is so simple and easy, yet its soo fuckin hard to get right. lol

psy, let me know if there's anything you want me to cut out - before all these motherfuckers learn your secrets. lol

Anyways, this is just the kind of stuff we we're talking about, mixing, chopping samples, drums. Didn't find a thread about just general beat-making discussion, so that's that. Any specific questions, or specific advice/tips, make a new thread. General discussion, what programs/equipment you use, or if you wanna drop some knowledge on a whole bunch of topics, loops, samples, etc. in one post, drop that here in this thread. If you're generous enough to go in depth with tips on a certain topic, start a new thread. If you wanna help someone out, but don't want your secrets/methods out there, just PM the person with the question/issue. If you don't care, and me and psy are gonna be the only ones talkin, well...the....fuck all y'all!! lol, and now I'm off to fuck with some stuff, so that I can actually post some beats, instead of just talking about them. HAHA

[psy0nyd3]

Haha I dont keep secrets, Shakur.

Most of the skills that I've learned I get from tutorial videos on youtube. Many of them suck and are not helpful like practically everything from ExpertVillage, but if you're interested in learning how to craft sounds youtube is a great place to start.

Hopefully we can get all of the producers that hang around here to come in and we can have some discussions where we all learn a little bit.

[shakur420]

Shit, that reminds me. Anybody who uses FL Studio and has questions, check out nfxbeats' channel (Warbeats). Best tutorials I've ever come across.
http://www.youtube.com/user/nfxbeats?ob=0

[cleef]

(01-04-2011 07:28 AM)shakur420 Wrote:  Shit, that reminds me. Anybody who uses FL Studio and has questions, check out nfxbeats' channel (Warbeats). Best tutorials I've ever come across.
http://www.youtube.com/user/nfxbeats?ob=0

nice one for that shak!

exactly the sort of thing i was looking for

[psy0nyd3]

Anyone interested in finding the original tempo of a song/potential sample?? Easy, just count the number of beats in a 10 second timespan, and then multiply by 6! There, now you have the tempo to set in your software!

[Joe M]

Do any of you guys have any experience with using Ableton Live for making beats?

[psy0nyd3]

Nope I don't, I tried it out for a little bit but only for mixing vocals. It seems overly complicated, but it does have that built-in tutorial system, which is cool I guess.

[NEVAHMIND]

Ableton Live = Crap! The most un-user friendly software out there. Clusterfu*k.

[Joe M]

Could someone help me out please:

In FL, say I have a sample like a piano bit, which I want to loop and put drums over it. How do I do this? How can I have the sample play and loop while I add instruments to it? The only way I can see how is to drop it into the sequencer, but then it repeats itself at the end of the beat.


any help?

[shakur420]

So the sequencer is where you add your samples. Then you lay your sequencer channels in the playlist. You can have separate sequencer channels for your drums, your samples, etc. and line them up in the playlist or you can build a version of your beat in one sequencer channel, with your drums, samples, etc. and then keep cloning (copying) that one to make variations on it.

At the top, you should have a little square window with a number on it, beside the play/stop buttons and the tempo. There should be a 1 in it. That's the sequencer channel that you currently have in front of you. There's a little light beside the play button that let's you switch between playing the "song" (playlist) and the sequencer channel you're working on.

So throw your sample in the sequencer, make the sequencer channel the right length for what you wanna do, 4 beats, 8 beats, etc. and add the sample wherever you need to make a loop. You can edit the sample by right clicking on the wav picture in the sample properties when it pops up (when you click on a sample in the sequencer) and you can also adjust the length of the sample in the properties to make it fit better. There's a knob called "time stretch" or something. In the box beside that where it says "resample", select "tonal" and adjust the knob. You can right click on the knob to choose some time options, "1 beat", "1 bar", etc.

[messinjure]

yo ! look for that youtube/nfxbeats he gives great tutorials,
Shakur thanx for that link, been using it ever since,

[shakur420]

^I know, he's wicked eh? Check out the forums too. Reading here and there seems like some good people willing to help, give advice and answer questions.
http://warbeats.com/Community/Forums