 My 81 year old mother recently got her first tattoo and took her first ride on a Harley Davidson So I thought to myself what can I do to push myself outside of my comfort zone and the answer was make a beat Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you will using loops and samples is not normally the way I go about creating music I'm much more of an acoustic guitar and lyrics kind of guy and I'll usually embellish that with more Acoustic sounding instruments, so I decided to push myself outside of my comfort zone by making a beat with all that that Implies now I had about five hours to do this So it was all done in kind of a rush and you may have expected that I would start off with the drums And I thought I was going to do that, but at the very last minute I decided to start off with the keys so want to introduce you to the star of the show 40s Very own keys. This is a library from native instruments and it's a collection of sounds put together from the producer 40 who most famously has worked with Drake and I really wanted to use this because it lends itself to a kind of Lo-fi down tempo kind of piece, which is what I wanted to go for on this occasion Now the way this library works is each preset is made up of two different samples created by 40 And for example with this Cambridge Legion piano preset, which I've got loaded up here It's made up of a square saw, which is the a Sample and then a piano sound on the B. Okay. Now that sounds like this You don't have to stick with the two sounds which are there in the preset you can swap them out So I could go to this piano sound over here and swap it out for example with Let's go for rep keys, whatever that is and now I've got something which sounds like this Yeah, so as well as swapping out the sounds you can then go into this sound tab here And you can adapt each of the samples so you can Change the envelope the modulation envelope amplitude envelope there as well as a whole bunch of other controls there to adapt That sound and really come up with your own sound now the way I went about things was to go for one of the presets, which is the Ford keys preset Okay, and I didn't like the I wasn't keen on the a sound so I swapped it out for this a sound which is BLF and I ended up with this sound here Now I just played one chord there, but you kind of heard a second pulse. Have a listen again Yeah, now that's what attracted me to this particular sound And that's why I went ahead and used as my key sort of my key sound my key sound For the whole piece now I played at this point a random chord progression I don't really know where it came from, but I liked it right away And I think it set the sort of mellow almost I'm going to say spooky tone to this particular piece of music and the chord progression was this So that set the basis for everything I was going to do and the next thing I wanted to work on was the drums So before I go into which drum sounds I used and how I put the drums together I just wanted to quickly mention you're going to see me using the machine the plus from native instruments This is an amazing piece of kit which you can create whole pieces of music on like this stand alone without the need of a computer as such But in this case I did have it hooked up to my computer because I really love the feel of the pads on this piece of gear I'm not going to talk about it too much now but do check the links in the description and find out about the machine Now the library that I was using this time was another 40s own library 40s own drums again from native instruments along the same kind of theme Really suitable in my opinion for this sort of down tempo sometimes lo-fi kind of style Now I just went through the different kits first off and sort of auditioned them like so this is the fuller park drums Yeah moving on something here DFA kit another one here Queen Alley Kit And I eventually found the one I wanted we'll look at that in a moment But I also want to mention you can of course change the overall sound just like you could with the keys And you can go in and swap out different parts of the kit to put together your own custom kit And furthermore you can then change the sound of each of the samples using the controls here Okay, so I ended up using sort of an adapted version of this 312 basement kit Okay, now when I went ahead to sort of program the drums or play the drums People who have watched my channel before know that I do do it in a specific way And that is to play different parts of the kit rather than try and play all the kit at the same time I'm just not dexterous enough on drum pads to do that and it may not even be possible with this particular Rhythm that I came up with but the first thing I wanted to do was play the hi-hat Now I wanted them the hi-hat to be reasonably regular But I wanted to have some sort of subtle sort of almost ghost notes in there as well Which is what you're gonna hear So as I say I started off by recording the hi-hat and this kind of metal sound that was in the kit And it sounded like this when I played it So that created a bassist there and then I went ahead and played the kick and snare sounds along with some other Percussive sounds and this is what I did there Now in the spirit of this kind of way of making music, I pretty much just looped that drum beat Throughout the whole piece of music. There were some slight variations I did something different in the intro later on and then towards the end what I did was I used this control on the plug-in the delay control here and I kind of Randomly pushed it up and down and that created some interesting sort of sub beat So have a listen to that as I push this delay control up here And that essentially is all there was to the drums So for the bass sound I went back to 40s very own keys again There's a nice collection of bass sounds in there and what I ended up choosing was this Bootsy bass sound Okay, which sounds like this Yeah, just nice sort of thumping low-end in there But with a little bit of grit in there as well now in terms of the sound The only thing I did was go into my EQ here in Kate Walk on the Pro channel And I actually did a bit of a boost quite a reasonable boost actually at just above 50 Hertz there Okay, so I really wanted to push the limits of the low end here Okay We don't often find us of pushing this these types of sounds at the low end down there in this way Did I go too far? You can let me know in the comments down below about that when you hear the final piece But it was just sounding good to me and I did want to push the limits with it a little bit So that's the only thing I did to the sound of this instrument at all Now the key thing for me was that the bass was going to have a relationship with the drums Particularly with the kick drum now I say a relationship because I think perhaps we can get confused about this It doesn't have to be playing on exactly the same beats but perhaps some more of the important beats So let's have a listen to what I came up with in terms of just the bass and the drums together So it's kind of tapping into some of the variations that I actually have with the kick And let's just have a quick listen to how it sounds with the keys we already had So that's my basic vibe and now I had to add a bunch of other stuff Now I continue to use forties very own keys to create some layers of sounds Okay, these elements which came in and out of the song at different points But also sometimes they were all played together The first thing was this sort of motif here, which I called the spooky riff and it sounded like this Okay, the next thing that I added I wanted something with a bit more aggression to it Okay, so with a bit of grit to it. So I came up with this sort of lead line here It's sort of approaching an electric guitar sound or a distorted guitar sound there And then finally I wanted to add in this piano, which was gonna be almost like a march of doom That's the way I was thinking of it anyway, but it had this very ploddy sort of sound to it Okay, the piano sound and it sounded like this So that very almost monotonous Rhythm to it now all of those three together sounded like this And then in with the final piece of music they sounded like this Now you've always got to be careful in my opinion when doing this is about gauging when you've done too much But definitely none of these pieces are really about something that you're gonna focus in on as a listener Okay, they're creating textures and layers and also give me an ability to create Dynamics in the piece of music by sort of adding them in and taking them away Now at this point I still felt that need to have a kind of an acoustic instrument in there I gave into my inertia, but rather than grab my guitar and sell up a microphone and record my guitar I went for this library from Native Instruments the picked nylon library I just wanted to have something right at the beginning in the intro Which kind of got us into the mood along with our original keys Okay, now this library is great if you want that kind of nylon guitar sound and very easy to get something sounding very very cool Because it kind of plays itself Oh, for example playing a minor chord here and I'll end up getting this Of course, it's tempo matched To whatever you're doing so it's pretty easy to get the something pretty good going on In my case, I wanted something which had a bit of rhythm to it. So I went for calm See, okay, which sounded like this Now as well as having that kind of sound I wanted to mess it up a bit. Okay, so it wasn't sounding too natural So for that I used a plugin from isotype called vinyl. This is a free plugin And this is where you can kind of mess things up and make them sound as though they're being played on a record And I guess that was just to give me some contrast what was going to come in a little bit later, which was much cleaner More produced sound. Okay. So and it also just I don't know for some reason made this sound like a dreamy kind of memory feel at the beginning I had to add something else a bit later on to give it that but you'll get the idea when you hear the final piece Let's have a listen to how this guitar sounded in the intro with that vinyl plugin as well So that's how I messed up a really nice sounding guitar So at this point I was a little bit stuck. I really wanted some female vocal on this piece of music But I didn't have access to my vocalist nor time to record her either and I just Didn't like the alternatives now I was chatting to my good friend Ricky T brown and he suggested a little bit of a workaround stroke Cheat for me, which I was hesitant to use at first But I must say I'm glad I did because it took me in a direction. I wouldn't have gone in myself He suggested a plugin called arcade from output Now what this does once you insert it into your project it hooks up to its library on the internet You put in a key signature and a tempo and it gives you a whole bunch of vocal samples which are going to Automatically fit your piece of music sounds like cheating because it is cheating But nonetheless, I was pretty happy with the result. So I started off with this one It's called I got you this this particular preset. Okay, and if I just press one key On my keyboard, you'll hear one of the phrases from this little preset Here's another one So obviously you can combine those in any order you want to come up with something I hesitate to use unique But at least the the arrangement of them is unique now There's also some other keys on here the black keys which actually change the sound in some way so we could play this sound Those keys just mess around with it. I didn't use any of those features I just use the basic phrases and this is what I came up with initially Oh Now I wanted to do something which people often ask me about I wanted the last part of the phrases to have a delay effect on But in my case just one delay rather than use any delay plugins or anything like that I did it the very simple way I just duplicated the track and then I repeated those phrases And then on that track I put the volume a little bit Lower and just treated them a little bit differently. So I then ended up with this for the female vocal part Now I was really enjoying what I had so far, but then I thought Hmm, it'd be nice to have a male vocal to contrast this and something with a little bit more sort of lyrical content in it Now to cut a long story short I used exactly the same plugin for the male vocals I used a preset called always crying and this is what I came up with A weird phenomena for me kind of occurred although I was playing sort of random phrases of lyrics It kind of felt like they went together and as if they may have been written that way Do you agree with me? Do they sound convincing in that way? I don't know they do to me Let me know what you think in the comments down below now. I kept hearing harmony in there I just the more I listened to I thought I've got to have a harmony in there So initially I thought I'll do it the easy way I will just duplicate this track and using melodyne a pitch correction plugin I will change the pitch and create the harmony on the fly Well, listen to how that turned out Okay-ish But didn't like it sounded way too robotic to me. Maybe I could have messed around with it a bit more But I thought uh, what the hell I've got a microphone right in front of me Why don't I just sing the harmony which exactly is exactly what I did and it sounded like this Now the observant amongst observant amongst you will have noticed that I processed my harmony vocals Quite heavily in fact, so let me give you an idea of the signal chain For those vocals. I started off with my eq Just adding in quite a bit of high end down here So a massive high end boost to create some airiness in there. Okay. I then actually use this plugin I could use this before I did that eq abuse, but I just use this enhanced eq plugin from rave instruments to just to boost Around about one half There's no there was no real need for me to do that It was just initially what I went for Before I'd used the built-in one with cakewalk now I also use this plugin from native instruments called coral kind of like a chorus effect Is added to it there and then I use this plugin again from native instruments a bit of a theme here I think they're all just there together But I use this to really sort of degrade The signal is a great little plugin if you want to do that and Make things perhaps sound like they were recorded a lower bit depth, etc And then finally to add some reverb kind of effect in there. I use this plugin from native instruments called Rome, I guess it's called So let's have a listen to that by itself. I'll solo that you can hear the final result with that signal chain And then in with the original vocal I've been changing So we get quite a nice spacious effect there overall Which is what I was going for and I wanted that harmony to kind of fit the style of that original vocal as well So let's have a listen to the final piece and you can let me know in the comments down below whether I succeeded in my task Now when you do get towards the end of the piece a thumbnail is going to come up on the screen That's going to take you to a playlist Where I run through the complete process of me recording a song from beginning to end in detail And then releasing it to the world