Start to Finish: Ill Factor - Episode 2 - Jumpstarting The Creative Process

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One of the scariest things sometimes as...

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you know, creating music, can be just a blank canvas.

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That moment when you're staring into an empty DAW, no matter which one it is, and you're just figuring out where do I go, what do I do? I often find myself in those moments and so I wanna share with you a couple things that can be helpful to kind of just jump start some creative inspiration.

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Now, typically, when it comes to being inspired and starting a song from scratch it can really come from anywhere.

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And I think that's key, you have to understand that you don't wanna pin yourself into a narrow one solution or one way must be the way to create music.

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That's the beauty of music that we have so many different ways to express ourselves.

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So, for me personally, if I find myself with writer's block or just have no idea where to start from I tend to just listen to music.

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I know that it sounds obvious, but believe it or not what I'm not saying is just, you know, step away, listen to music but being intentional about listening to the music and saying: 'What's inspiring me about this piece of music that I'm hearing?" And often times, when I listen to music I'll be: 'How can I recreate this?" And usually in that process of recreating something that might spark momentum, that's what we're after here, momentum, I think that's the key element.

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Because often times you're like: 'Alright, that sounds cool.' but it can also lead you astray and you will lose momentum and at the end of the day you're like: 'You know, I'll forget this and give my dog a bath'.

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Or squirrel, whatever it is that you have.

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But the reality is, yeah, there's not one way or one right way to be inspired to create music.

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So, you can listen to some music, try to reference something that you'd want to replicate, that's always helpful, and it always builds up your skill set as well when you do that.

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Or, just browse through some new patches, new sounds, and that's often times what happens in my process when I'm not either listening to music, trying to reference something, I might come across some patches and those are just different presets that you might find in synths or plug-ins as well as maybe browse through some loops whether it be from a website that offers loops or services like that or just something that's located on the hard-drive, I just spend some time going through it.

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Now, here's a tip, something I'd actually encourage you to do: If you find yourself running into just a writer's block, so to speak, and more often than not, what I would encourage you to do is take one day out of the week, and I know sometimes for us time is very limited when we get to spend on making music, so, spend one day of the week where all you're doing is coming through samples, going through your hard-drive, finding one-shots, whether it's kick, snares, rim knocks, your neighbor yelling at you, whatever it is, put that together in a specific folder, in this case in Ableton Live we can make a collection of those things, set that aside and dedicating some time one day of the week or something like that, just where you can allocate a time where all I'm doing is just building my archive, filling my reservoir, my well, with some new water, so to speak.

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That's what we're doing you wanna set aside some of these sounds and stuff that can be really inspiring for you, so that when you do try to start your session you can go back to that and be like: 'OK, I'm not gonna spend time browsing through samples I've got a whole bucket that I can choose from.' And hopefully inspiration will come along sooner.

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So that's something that I'd encourage a lot of people to do.

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Alright, so, here we go, back to the blank canvas and what I wanna do is just let's browse through some presets.

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Lately I've been using this plug-in here by Roland, Roland Cloud has issued a plug-in called Zenology.

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So I'm gonna click and drag that into my session view.

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If you're not familiar with the view that we're looking at definitely check out the previous episode where I give you a quick run-through of Ableton Live and the layout and what everything is, that way you can follow along much more seamlessly.

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So here we've got Zenology and Zenology is a really cool platform, what they decided to do in Roland is recreate everything, the way that the vintage synths such as the Juno 106 or a Jupiter 8, all these classic Roland Synths, they took the modeling from those synths and recreated it in a virtual plug-in.

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And so, it sounds great and often time I'll just browse through a couple sounds, so let's go in and click the preset here.

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And here's the browser window, let's go through a couple things here.

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I'm not in an 80s vibe right now.

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Kind of cool.

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Remember when I mentioned earlier, taking the time to find stuff you like? Well, I can mark my favorites here, I think this was a sound that came across that I really liked.

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I like this, so I'm gonna start here.

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Often times, I might also browse through samples but what I wanna do here specifically is start the session with creating a sample.

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And what that means is, adding the texture and kind of resampling myself to see where I go.

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I might just end up chasing going down a rabbit hole and ending up in a really cool place but I won't know till I get there on the other side.

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Let's just experiment with this and we'll hit the ground running.

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So I'm just gonna change this, I'm gonna go to 'Edit'.

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I wanna remove some of that white noise because this is just a little bit too harsh.

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That's cooler there.

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I'm gonna hit this mode here, which Ableton Live, without hitting the record button this is just me experimenting on the fly, it captures that and... Let's move this right over here.

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And just quantize everything.

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And nudge this one note over.

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Move this note right up here.

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That sounds cool and let's just loop this.

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And this is really neat because this is part of the process in Ableton Live that allows me to hit the ground running, not having to worry about, you know, what tempo I'm at.

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I was just kind of fiddling around with the MIDI keyboard, came across this little riff.

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Let's experiment.

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Why don't we change this and create a sample so I can kind of sample myself and venture off somewhere here? How many bars is this? I'm gonna set my bar one beat one here and extend this so that I have a two-bar count.

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And it also detected the tempo for me so I've got that locked in at 83 bpm.

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That's cool there.

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You know, let's add strings, I'm gonna use Kontakt for this.

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We go here and let's use String Ensemble.

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Cool, I'll just go ahead, we've got the riff there and I'll play alongside.

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So I'm gonna select all these notes and I want them to continue to go on for the duration of the bars so I'm gonna hit 'Legato'.

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And make sure that these are also playing.

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Set the length of the bar too, they got cut off too so we'll move them right there.

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Now what I'm gonna do is, I wanna swell the strings in, I don't want them coming in right at the beginning.

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And the reason why I don't want them coming in, well, I want the bells to focused on the beginning.

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What I'm going after here is I'm trying to create a sample, like, make this maybe a riff I can possibly even send out to somebody else that might inspire them to get started on an idea.

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So that's my reasoning behind what I'm doing here.

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So I'm gonna right-click on this show automation, that's the volume fader.

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And let's say at bar 2 we reach zero dB and at bar 1 let's bring it to absolute infinity.

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And let's lower the volume of the strings overall so we'll put the output at -3.

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Alright, that's cool.

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Grouping these together is gonna give me the ability to affect both of them at the same time with any plug-ins that I might add on them.

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So, let's use something that can really add some nice texture, this is gonna be RC 20 Retro Color by XLN Audio.

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Really cool plug-in to add some texture and width and even some dimension as well.

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So we have some noise that we can add on.

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I don't want the sample to live in a blizzard so I'm gonna turn this down.

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Maybe change it from vinyl to something else, maybe a VHS machine.

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Hitting the stereo mode I love using the stereo option on this 'Wobble', it really widens up the sound really nicely and gives some grit with the distortion.

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And lower this down.

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A huge difference, so let's listen to it without the plug-in.

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Alright, I'll bring the tone down a little bit.

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Now, what I'm gonna do is actually resample this.

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'But ill, why are you going through all this?' To show you the process of being able to create something and then also treat it as if it wasn't created by you.

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What do I mean by that? Well, let me show you.

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I have an audio track already existing here in the session view and I'm gonna choose the input here to 'resampling'.

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And this option allows you to record anything that you're listening to in your project, and it can be recorded internally.

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So, your technically resampling.

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So just by record enabling this track, choosing any clip slot, I'm gonna go ahead and hit my enter key to record onto this slot here.

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So I've just resampled myself.

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I'm gonna mute track 2, which has the bells and the strings that we just created and I'm gonna go ahead just double click this to audition this.

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That's the audio.

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And now what's cool is I can treat this, maybe pitch this...

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Pitch it up.

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So, there's something unique about the texture when you transpose it, detune it, stretch it, tweak an audio that I really don't get when just using maybe a typical MIDI instrument at first.

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So, I'll transpose this to 6 semitones down.

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That sounds kind of cool.

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How about reversing it? That's interesting.

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We're gonna do two bars of that.

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And I'm gonna reverse this.

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Cool, so, I really like the texture, the sound of the sample being in reverse, transposed down 6 semitones.

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And you notice I have sends A, B and C here, they correspond to the 3 sends I have the return tracks over here.

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And I have a reverb on, it's just a stock Ableton Live reverb on return track B.

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That means if I want to send a little bit of this big room reverb to this sound I can do so just by turning up this knob.

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Add a little bit of delay as well which is on return track A.

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This is the echo plug-in from Ableton Live.

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Alright, so that sample is really cool.

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I'm usually gonna start moving on to some drums, giving myself just some kind of back-beat to work with.

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And for this I'm gonna be using XLN Audio's XO.

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Now, this plug-in in particular is really cool.

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And going back to what we were talking about earlier about stepping out of your comfort zone and finding inspiration this plug-in lately has been doing that for me.

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What makes this unique as you can see, it looks like we are in some weird crazy painting here, a minimalist painting or whatever.

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But what's going on is, this is a plug-in that allows me to select files on my hard-drive, which may contain different types of sounds, snares, kicks, hi-hats, your neighbor's goat, whatever it is, it will analyze all those sounds and then categorize them and split them into this map.

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So what we're really seeing here is a map of sounds of specific folders that I've allocated in the settings here.

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So here are all the kicks.

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Some snares.

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And this is really unique because I normally wouldn't stumble across sounds this way, usually I would have saved presets or saved drum-kits, or like I mentioned earlier, files that I have in my places here, my browser, where can I immediately go to but after a while I tend to find myself going to the same sounds over and over again.

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And hey, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

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If you're making a million bucks with the same drum-kit go for it.

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But I found this tool to be really helpful just browsing through and coming across really interesting sounds.

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So, if I even zoom in it can get more detailed.

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I like that, that's dope.

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So I'm gonna assign that to kick 2.

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And I can trigger this with my MIDI controller.

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I gotta go chromatic here, so let's take this off this.

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Cool, so now I'm able to trigger the sounds that I've allocated to the slots.

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And what's great about this is you have all the parameters here, I can change the decay. That's the amp envelope for this, the attack, the pitch, tone, all that can be assigned here.

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And they have the FX sends within the program as well.

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So, if I go to the snare...

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That's really cool. It also comes with a built-in sequencer.

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So you can actually do step sequencing withing the plug-in.

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But for right now, I'm actually gonna be using the sequencer in Ableton Live. Let's just play the sample back, put the metronome on...

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I might actually wanna hear this in a faster sub-division, so, instead of every quarter note, let's put it at every 8th note.

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And that's usually how I go about this, I'll just keep running and throwing ideas down until I find a nice little groove and I can go in, pinpoint exactly what part of the loop I wanna use.

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So I'm gonna start from bar 3 here. When I hit the 'Fold' button, what's this is gonna do is focus in on the notes that I've inputted.

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So, I can focus in on the kick and snare that I've added.

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I wanna talk about quantizing really quick.

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I'm gonna hit Cmd + Shift + U to open up my quantizing window.

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I have it set to 46%, I do that on purpose.

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Usually, if you set your quantizing to 100%, well, it's the same thing as clicking and drawing in the note, it's gonna snap exactly to the grid.

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And the grid is the subdivision in which every note falls into the beat.

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If I have it on 100%, if I hit OK, you see how now the notes shift to nearest 16th note but it snaps fully to the nearest 16th note.

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Not slightly but fully.

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Even if it's just the kick and snare, it's way too stiff for me personally.

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So I'm gonna undo that.

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And you can see it just nudges the note back a little bit.

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So I usually like to have my quantizing down to forty something percent, give or take.

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And 'Adjust Note - Start' means that the start of the note is what's going to be adjusted.

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So that's how I like to have it.

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I don't like doing a lot of strong quantizing because what I think it does is it eliminates the humanistic element of what I just did by hand and then it makes it just too robotic.

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Now, if you're drawing in notes like what we'll do now, so let's go ahead and zoom in and maybe add a hi-hat pattern to this.

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So for this I'm gonna use 'B,' for my pencil tool.

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And make sure I have my headphone on to audition the sound.

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This would be cool.

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And Cmd + 2 it will just open up the grid.

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There you go.

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So, I'm gonna keep this going all the way.

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I'm changing the subdivision by holding Cmd + 1 and 2.

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That's gonna either expand the grid or narrow it.

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So that I can choose a different timing for the hi-hats.

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And you notice that the hi-hats are just really stiff.

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Why? Because I drew them in.

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So if I drew the snare drum...

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It's right on the grid, and if you can notice here, what I played is slightly off the grid.

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So that's fine and what I like to do sometimes is, even if I copy or layer sounds, in this case, the snare drum, let's layer it.

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Meaning, I'm gonna have two sounds playing at the same time.

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I'm gonna hold Opt, drag this up.

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And I wanna nudge this one just slightly back.

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By holding the Cmd I can bypass the grid.

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Why am I doing this? It's because A, this makes it sound a lot more loose, it gives it more of that humanistic feeling, and I get more of a flam instead of just the precise hit on that snare drum.

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That might be a little too much so I'll just narrow it a little bit.

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And so, yeah, the hi-hats are a bit too stiff for me so for right now I'm gonna deactivate them.

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I might use like a drum loop that has some more loose feel to it and play that on top of the kick and snare.

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Actually, I'm gonna go back to XO, that's the one I'm using.

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I like this sound So, let's go ahead back into the MIDI, that snare that I layered...

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That one. Let's move that up to that.

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Here's why I thought about moving it up.

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That sounds OK but, I don't know, when I layered it with the snappier snare drum it just felt like it was still lingering there.

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And this sound here, more of that rim knock, adds more of the spike to the front of that snare, it's just really short and that's what I want, I'm digging more of the snappier type of vibe rather than maybe a snare clap where there's a bit more decay there.

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You can hear that, right? That's much more punchier, that's my vibe, let's keep moving.

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Let me go to one of my Categories.

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That's cool, let's add this on top of that.

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Now, I'm dragging and dropping loops into the Session View and you might notice, the loop is already set in time.

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But not all loops will be set in time when you incorporate them into your workflow.

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So, there's gonna be some adjusting made. As you can see here, this is not directly on the grid, I can double-click and that creates a warp marker and I can nudge that warp marker and basically quantize my audio.

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But I don't wanna do that, as I mentioned before, I kind of like the vibe, the way it's not so stiff on there, that works out for me.

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Let's go throw another loop on here.

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Here's a drum break folder that I really like.

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Well, I'm gonna play my beat and audition.

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What I like about Ableton Live is, in the browser, when you're playing a session, it will automatically time stretch the samples that you're browsing in the tempo.

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So, you can hear what it sounds like while you're auditioning them.

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Really helpful.

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I love that, let's just drag and drop that right here.

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You can hear how this drum is sloppy a little bit, right? You've got like the snare off here.

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The kick is a little off.

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So let me show you something really cool, I wanna actually take the timing of this drum loop.

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Basically, the way I like to think of this is, I wanna hire the same drummer who played this drums to play my drums.

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Because I'm not as dope as this guy or girl who played this drums.

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So, I can extract the groove, and I'll go over here to the 'Extract Groove(s)' and Ableton is going to take out the actual timing, both the quantizing, even everything down to the detail of how...

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the dynamics of the drum loop.

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It creates it in its groove pool here and then I can actually go into my MIDI, or any other audio or source and apply the same timing and groove to my drums.

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So, remember when we had our hi-hats that were too stiff? I'm gonna put them back in, I'm gonna go over here in this groove pool and I'm gonna say: 'I want you to match the velocity by 100 %'.

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Meaning: 'Match the dynamics of how loud the hi-hats and snares are from the original drum break, match that to my drums!' The same thing with the timing.

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Now, how do we implement that groove onto my MIDI drums? Right here in this window we have 'groove'.

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Choose the 'MB212 break' which is the name of the file.

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Click that and then let's go ahead and hit this arrow to assign it.

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Now you notice that the hi-hats have changed in color and they moved in timing. Look at that! They're off the grid.

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Why? Because they're now matching the same timing as the drum break.

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It also mapped out the same velocity.

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So, if I play this side by side with the drum break...

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That's dope, because now my hi-hat time is right in-line with the loose drummer's timing, and that's cool.

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I don't mind that at all.

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Let me go ahead and do a couple things here, I wanna gritty up that drum break, I'm gonna go to my Audio FX folder, go to 'Drive', go to 'Overdrive' and throw that on there.

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That's one of my favorite plug-ins to use.

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Those sticks are really cool but I want to something cool to them.

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Let's go from 'Beats', where I have the 'Beat' mode here, and 'Transient Preserve' it's gonna preserve all these transients, I'm not trying to sound crazy here.

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I want it to have less decay.

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So, I want them to be more staccato. More...

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That's what I sound like when I sleepwalk, I guess, I sound like a crazy robot.

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With that set to forward in 'Transient mode', let's lower that.

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There's a lot of room in that stick sample so I can eliminate the room by just shortening up the transients.

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And I'm also gonna apply the same groove of our drum break onto these sticks.

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And so it also does it to audio, now we've got a warp marker for each hit it's nudging it, let's roll.

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So I'm gonna group these 3 drum channels together.

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Unlike Ableton Live 10, 11 has all these plug-ins put into folders and categories so it makes easier to kind of go to the specific category to find the plug-in you're looking for.

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So, under 'Drive', 'Drum Buss', I'm just gonna slap that on my drum bus, technically.

00:26:02
Because that's how I'm treating groups in Ableton Live, I'm treating them as actual drum bus.

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And normally in Pro Tools you would assign multiple tracks and you'd route the output to one stereo track.

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I'm kind of doing that here but using groups.

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The upside of that is that you can use this to now hide tracks out of view if you're limited with some screen real-state and it works well in this workflow too.

00:26:24
So, let's put the drum bus and the dry/wet and work our way out.

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So, what do we got going on here? 'Drum Buss' is simply saturation, some mid frequency crunch, a transient designer and an EQ to dampen and to warm it up a little bit.

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Often times, when you warm up your drum sounds it sounds a little further back but I personally like warmer, punchier drums and it's got this little boom knob which is basically adding some sub harmonics, giving you a nice beef in the low-end.

00:27:05
You can extend the decay and drown out the low-end there.

00:27:15
I'll just kind of leave that in place because it creates a cool vibe for me while I'm actually producing, so I'll put drums, I'll leave that there like that.

00:27:23
I can get rid of this group, which is what we started the sample with.

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Now I've got my drums, I've got this cool sample.

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We'll call that 'ill Sample' and let's just keep going.

00:27:38
I'm gonna put some more harmonic elements in this so I wanna start moving towards the bass.

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So, for the bass, immediately in my mind I'm thinking like this low end, you know, dirty, re-space, and if you're not familiar with that, well, let me create it.

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So we'll go to instruments here.

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I'm gonna use Wavetable.

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And you could follow along using any two or more oscillators synth that you may have in our DAW.

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What we're gonna do is held over to oscillator one and we're going to be choosing a saw-tooth.

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These are basic oscillator shapes.

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Square wave, saw-tooth, triangle and sine wave.

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And because this particular type of bass has a very buzzy type of sound we're gonna stick with our saw-tooth.

00:28:19
It's a hit, all it needs is a Verse, Chorus and that's it.

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I'm gonna turn on oscillator two.

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Also choose a saw-tooth but the trick is detune your second oscillator.

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You get that Hoover bass that type of sound a lot of electronic music, specially Drum and Bass in general is really know for.

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So, let's take oscillator one and lower that a whole octave lower.

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So, semitones, -12.

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And then filter that higher frequency part out using your cut off frequency.

00:28:57
So I'm gonna go an octave lower in my keys, add maybe some filter drive on there.

00:29:10
Now, what's really important is, when you're doing bass, this particular case, we need to make sure that we're setting it to monophonic.

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So, instead of polyphony set to 8, meaning that I can play 8 notes at the same time, in the minute I play note 9 one of them leaves, we're gonna set this to mono.

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That means that the notes won't overlap as I'm playing them.

00:29:34
Imagine playing this bass sound and you're having chords, it can get really muddy.

00:29:38
So, set it to mono, bring the release down a little bit and I'm gonna turn this unison on, which is gonna detune it globally and just a little bit of that.

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Nice and wide there.

00:29:55
That's a cool tone there, let me go ahead and just vibe with the sample and the drums.

00:30:27
I'm gonna put some ideas down.

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And just pick and choose, remember, throwing colors to the canvas.

00:31:12
So you notice that, in-between of me recording these basses I hit my down key on my computer keyboard and hit 'enter' cause I was like: 'I wanna start a new idea.' And without having to stop and start, I was able to actually just choose another clip slot here and record another idea.

00:31:27
And this is usually my workflow, I'll just empty out my brain of ideas, come out with different riffs and chord progressions that might work alongside with the sample or whatever it is that I'm working with, and then go back and A/B.

00:31:38
And that's why I love working in the Session View.

00:31:41
Because rather than doing a linear approach where I would set maybe an 8 bar loop and do that, I wanted to eliminate the idea I would have to click it, drag it, playlist it, move it over.

00:31:51
I don't wanna think linear yet, I wanna think vibe.

00:31:54
That's so important, what's really going to speak to me.

00:31:57
And if I have an artist in mind I'm like: 'OK, I just need to get to a point that inspires me.' Because honestly, if I can't convey excitement over and idea there's way an artist will be excited about what I'm doing, or songwriter.

00:32:12
Usually I'm working with songwriters or artists themselves and if I'm not feeling it chances are they won't either.

00:32:18
So the goal is, for me to find something that really like: "OK, this is totally cool." And then just keep moving from there. That's what I'm doing.

00:32:25
I'm adding all these little building blocks to get to that point.

00:32:28
We just put this bass line down but I wanna experiment with other type of bass tones, maybe an 808, like a nice hefty 808.

00:32:36
Here in my collections, an 808 instrument that I created.

00:32:40
I'll kind of walk you through that and just play this for you. This is an instrument rack, so this is a sample.

00:32:48
So, I'll turn all these off, what we have is an 808 kick.

00:32:52
And I'll play that.

00:32:56
And if you're listening on laptops, definitely wanna put on some headphones or listen to on some studio monitors.

00:33:03
This is an 808 kick but in order to really transform it into a nice, like, gritty 808 that is just gonna knock and you could feel it in your chest where gonna need some harmonic saturation.

00:33:15
And for that I'm gonna be using the Amp plug-in here in Ableton Live.

00:33:18
And this is just an amplifier simulator, you can use this one or any other amp simulator or any type of distortion that adds some harmonic saturation.

00:33:27
So, click this and let's go ahead and see what we've got.

00:33:33
That's a nasty gritty 808.

00:33:35
I'm running it through the Marshall amp simulator.

00:33:39
Which is the Rock.

00:33:41
Blues is a little...

00:33:43
You don't really hear that aggressive growl come through.

00:33:48
So I like a setting where's at with the Rock.

00:33:51
And then I'm gonna use the Drum Buss plug-in somewhat to how we use in the actual Drum Bus just to actually add some more drive. I'm lowering the transients here.

00:34:02
It just does something to that... When we go back here.

00:34:07
By lowering the transients, the initial hit of the 808 it just ducks a little bit and more of the body comes through.

00:34:14
And I'm gonna use an EQ to shave off all the high-end of the 808.

00:34:21
That's our 808, that sounds much better.

00:34:24
Focusing our attention back to the Simpler.

00:34:27
Which in Ableton Live is what you'd use to trigger your samples.

00:34:31
Right here you also want to make sure that you set the voices to one voice polyphony, similar to what we did with the other bass line.

00:34:38
I don't wanna have 808 chords, I just wanna have one note and not overlap to the other note.

00:34:43
What's important too, since we're using a sample, other than creating and 808 with the sine wave... And as a matter of fact, I wanna show you really quick how you would do that.

00:34:53
Go back to 'Instruments', Wavetable, I'm gonna put it in the same instrument rack.

00:34:57
I'm gonna mute this 808 kick sample and we have the Wavetable here.

00:35:02
We're gonna be using a sine-wave because essentially that's what the 808 is.

00:35:08
So let's go ahead and set that to one voice polyphony, mono.

00:35:12
Take away all the high-end there and lower the octave of that sine wave about -12 semitones.

00:35:25
Now we can shape the 808 so we have a nice long release.

00:35:31
And bring the resonance up a little bit.

00:35:34
Why am I doing that? Just so that the resonance, or sometimes called peak, can focus its attention or energy at this moment right here, so, 130 Hz.

00:35:44
OK, let's copy the same amount of processing that we did, the Amp, the Drum Buss and the EQ.

00:35:50
So I'm gonna do that, hit Cmd + C to copy and then paste it here.

00:35:57
I need to go an octave lower, I can either do that in my MIDI device or just go an octave lower here.

00:36:07
And I'll just bring the tail-end a little bit.

00:36:10
I might need to get aggressive with the saturation because the 808 kick sample was probably already saturated, went through a whole bunch of stuff so I'm trying to replicate that.

00:36:20
So, let's mess with the dry and wet.

00:36:28
Then I wanna add a little bit more of resonance there.

00:36:33
And here I wanna go ahead and boost up the transients.

00:36:40
That's how I would use a regular sine wave to kind of create the same type of 808.

00:36:46
And I'm gonna go back to the sample.

00:36:51
So that has like a kick inside the sample, which gives that knock.

00:36:55
So I'm gonna stay with that instead, take away the Wavetable.

00:36:58
And here's our 808.

00:37:00
So let's go and pick a bassline or a rhythm that's gonna work with the sample and drums.

00:37:07
I'll mute my first bass and just vibe out.

00:37:38
So we've got this bassline here with the 808, one thing I like to do with my 808s, I wanna make sure that it's helping the kick, that's complementing the kick so I'm not holding out.

00:37:48
The difference between like maybe using an 808 and the other bassline that we created is that the other allows me to just extend and hold out the notes when the 808 is really there for the impact.

00:37:58
So I'm doing these shorter notes.

00:38:01
I wanna drag this out maybe just a little bit.

00:38:11
I might wanna just dial back the EQ, the high-pass so I'm only hearing more of the lows.

00:38:27
That's a vibe that works but let me go ahead and A/B that with the other one.

00:38:38
To me personally I think that this bass sound is a bit more musical.

00:38:43
And that's kind of where I'm headed to there, I wanna go a little bit more emotional with that.

00:38:48
The 808 is good too, it just has that impact, maybe it works without the sample.

00:38:56
But then that bassline won't work as well.

00:38:58
So these decisions, they're small little decisions but they go a long way when it comes to putting the whole picture together.

00:39:05
Me personally, right now I'm vibing with the Wavetable with the first bassline that we created.

00:39:13
I might actually wanna dirty it up some more so I'm gonna head back to my audio FX folder, go over to the 'Drive' and looking for the 'Pedal', which is just like a pedal plug-in that has overdrive, distortion and fuzz on there.

00:39:27
And add some more grit onto it.

00:39:36
That's cool too, but I do like the bassline that we did with the 808, so, I'm gonna incorporate both of those.

00:39:42
I'm gonna go ahead and vibe using the same bassline that we used with the 808 but now with this bass sound.

00:40:17
I like where that's at and kind of just wanna talk a little bit about bassline. Why those notes as opposed to any other notes? Well, right now, the sample that we started with...

00:40:33
Specifically with those little bells at the end, they've got this like haunting, because it's in reverse, there's like this haunting tonal effect to it.

00:40:42
I think having an EQ...

00:40:50
A little bit more reverb there with the send.

00:40:53
There's that tone, and then...

00:40:56
That's the A that we hear.

00:40:59
So let me mute the bass part.

00:41:07
That's that tonal A there and in my mind it's just gravitating to going to...

00:41:14
To the D.

00:41:21
I don't know what key I'm gonna be working yet, because it's all gonna depend on the progression, not necessarily anchored with that sample.

00:41:28
But I like the dissonance that's happening, I like the relationship between that A and then me playing the bassline at the D.

00:41:37
Something I like to do a lot on my productions is I'll have one melody, one harmonic element on a spindle just kind of like, doing this repetitious hypnotic vibe.

00:41:48
And then I like to introduce to kind of introduce something else that's counter melodic to that but fits in the same picture.

00:41:56
So it feels like, even though this is looping and this is just a continuous vibe, having a bassline step away from the same notes that we're hearing there just opens it up and makes it much more brighter.

00:42:07
So if I play the notes of the drone that we have...

00:42:17
That works too technically, but look at the emotion that happens when I go with the bassline that we recorded.

00:42:35
There's a lot more emotion present there.

00:42:37
So that's kind of the reason why I just kind of gravitate towards those notes, so I'll bring back the drums.

00:42:45
And at this moment, even with the drum and a bassline and a sample, whatever it is, I'm already thinking melodically.

00:42:51
Where can I go with my voice? Where would an artist go melodically with this? And if I start humming something and something comes to my mind, I'm on a good path, that's usually a good sign for me.

00:43:02
If nothing really comes to my mind than I start just kind of dropping things out, tweaking them until I build momentum, that's the key here, what's going to add towards your creative momentum.

00:43:14
So, when you're working on things and your finding yourself just running into a wall, just start moving things till you start picking up that momentum again.

00:43:22
So, in this case, I'm really happy with the notes I'm choosing for the bassline.

00:43:26
Let me double click that and I'll hit 'Fold' here and those are just gonna highlight the notes that we created.

00:43:31
I'm gonna select all by hitting Cmd + A and quantizing, Cmd + Shift + U, so you can see the menu.

00:43:39
And then just hit OK.

00:43:41
You can just immediately quantize by hitting Cmd + U.

00:43:51
I wanna add something else too.

00:43:53
I wanna add a piano because like, I'm actually hearing this Kanye record in the back of my mind, I think it's one from like, Dark Fantasy's, where he like walks up to the MPC starts playing a single piano note.

00:44:04
I don't why that's in my mind but it's there.

00:44:07
And so I'm gonna use Addictive Keys here.

00:44:10
Lots of XLN Audio stuff.

00:44:13
I like their style.

00:44:14
I like using this 'Time Flies' preset for the upright piano.

00:44:56
That was cool, I'm always capturing these ideas here.

00:45:00
I don't wanna like not be able to capture something.

00:45:03
So I try to always use record.

00:45:31
Actually I just like that one note.

00:45:35
Two clicks and it's perfect.

00:45:37
But here we go, I'm gonna have, let's see...

00:45:41
I'm gonna keep that because that was my rough idea, I'm gonna create this and purposely record the one note.

00:45:47
I'm hitting the C, here.

00:46:12
Let's dirty this up using the Redux in Ableton Live.

00:46:26
A little bit of chorus too.

00:46:29
Let's go to our 'Pitch & Modulation' and then 'Chorus Ensemble'.

00:46:42
And let's put a reverb to give some dimension and space, just the stock reverb.

00:46:50
Once the reverb got on there, the piano got further back in the mix, that's cool, because it's adding that dimension, that depth.

00:47:07
Now, I'm gonna just take a little more of that low-end of that sample.

00:47:13
The strings that we have here...

00:47:16
What's really cool is this section here at the end.

00:47:23
That's cool.

00:47:24
We might even be able to just loop that, over and over again.

00:47:31
See what that sounds like.

00:47:46
It's a weird bar, it's no exactly two bars and I can see what we've got over here, one bar.

00:47:54
So I'm kind of limited with space there, so what I'm gonna do is go back to where it was.

00:48:02
And let's go back over here.

00:48:06
But I don't want that initial string to be present.

00:48:09
So, I'm gonna go right over here to the envelope, choose clip, go to the gain and let's just strip out the gain a little bit.

00:48:19
There we go.

00:48:32
Now, the tonal focal point is going to be the piano and that sample is cool coming in every now and then.

00:48:40
I really like this vibe and believe it or not, I'm already starting to think like some melodies, and it would be really cool to see what...

00:48:47
Jared comes up with, which is the artist I've invited to jump on the session with.

00:48:52
I love having just my mic on stand-by and start coming up with some ideas and putting some melodies down.

00:48:57
Because at this point that's what really is the most important thing for me because a great song is a great song, whether it's a song on a ukulele, a tin whistle, or a 55 track in a DAW session.

00:49:12
And so, if the melody isn't really winning you over and it's not telling the story or creating the vibe that you're trying to create with then I tend to try to overcompensate with adding a whole bunch of more production and more things on there.

00:49:27
Before getting too crazy, adding a whole plethora of sounds and loops and things like that, I wanna kind of stay here, I wanna see what the initial reaction is gonna be with the artist.

00:49:39
And I'll start working off of that.

00:49:41
It could a total flap or it could work but I kind of like this vibe, I think it's cool.

00:49:46
And then I always kind of just take it from there.