Music Production For Beginners (Step By Step Masterclass)
Ethan Davis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hi72cCOPUQU

Transkript (automatisch erstellt)

0:00 if you're curious about how to produce music and you want an experienced teacher who's been there and done that to show you the ropes then you are in
0:07 the right place my friend in this video I'm going to show you exactly how a professional producer like myself produces a song out from beginning to
0:13 end and the best part is I'm going to do it in a way where you can follow along with me every single step and make your own song too I've been producing music
0:21 for a living for over a decade now and I am qualified to teach you how the pros do it because I'm a professional so first I'm going to jump on the iPad that
0:28 way I can show you the most effective and widely used production formula and if you don't know it yet this is going to be an absolute game changer for you
0:35 it makes producing so much easier because instead of just shooting in the dark it's going to give you a road map for how to produce a fully finished
0:42 sounding song instead of just some rough amateur demo so if you want any shot of producing good music do not skip this step it's the foundation for everything
0:51 else all right now that we have the iPad I'm going to keep this short for you but let me break down the Five Element formula so the first of our five five
1:00 elements is going to be drums drums are the foundation for rhythm they're so important in music and a lot of times when you're producing it's really
1:07 helpful to actually start with drums okay so we got Drums element number two is going to be bass bass and
1:15 drums are considered the Rhythm Section and getting bass out in is really going to help your song Sound full and a lot of people don't focus on it enough and
1:22 it's one of the telltale signs of an amateur sounding track all right so we got drums and bass now element number three is a little bit
1:31 trickier but it's what I like to call mids m i DS mids and what this means is any mid-range element like a piano or a guitar or strings or anything like
1:42 that this is me trying to draw a whiter from above or like a synthesizer or something with some buttons on it okay so now we got our mid-range
1:51 elements here and now we're on to our final two elements which are going to be [Music] vocals
2:00 so there's vokes that's just all vocals somebody singing obviously and last but not least on our list we have [Music]
2:10 effects effects are anything from like white noise to really ambient Reverb sounding noises or even things like adding Reverb And Delay to a vocal okay
2:19 so that's it that's the Five Element formula so if you're producing a song I would focus on the drums first and we'll get into this when we start producing
2:26 something but if you make sure to check each of these items off of your list as your producing your song the drums the bass the mids the vocals and the effects
2:33 then your song should sound finished and this is just a great formula to keep in mind every time you start making a song all righty so now that we've got the
2:39 formula down for how to produce music we can put our knowledge to the test and try the formula out for real first thing I'm going to do is open up a brand new
2:46 session in Ableton what's that you say uh-oh you don't have Ableton well guess what they have a 90day free trial so you can download it and literally try it out
2:54 for 3 months see if you like it and if you don't just don't pay for it that way you get to decide if this whole producing music thing is for you so no
3:01 excuses you can get Ableton and follow along with me right now also quick note I would recommend Ableton Live standard not Ableton light doesn't have enough
3:08 features and not Ableton Suite because it's unnecessary okay so we have a brand new project open in Ableton I'm going to hit command s to save I'm going to
3:15 navigate to my sessions folder if you don't have a sessions folder just go ahead and make one it's so much easier when you save all of your projects into
3:22 your sessions folder I'm going to call this one music production for beginners and just hit save and then go ahead and go to file collect all and save make
3:29 sure these are all yellow and just press okay that's going to make sure everything that we work on stays inside the project folder and it'll make your
3:35 life easier down the line so there's so many different ways that you can start a song but what I'm going to do today is I'm actually going to start with an
3:41 Acappella meaning just the vocals of a different song so essentially we're kind of making a remix but what you do after that is you can mute the vocals and then
3:48 you can write a new song to the instrumental that you made I have a friend with billions of streams one of the best producers I've ever met and he
3:55 does this all the time when he's starting songs I'm going to go ahead and use an Acappella from my song dream which is from my dance music project
4:01 called John balaya I know that the acapella is at 115 BPM and BPM is just beats per minute basically how fast or slow the song is and up here in Ableton
4:09 you can just click on this 120 and use the arrow keys and make sure it's the same BPM as the AC capella that you're using another quick tip it might help
4:16 you navigate Ableton a little bit better if you check out my beginner's guide to Ableton which is right up here and you can just right click on that and open it
4:22 in a new tab get all the info you need on Ableton and then come back here and keep working with me but I'll try to explain things to keep it pretty simple
4:28 for you I'm going to click up here to the left and turn on the metronome just to make sure we got everything lined up I had a
4:36 dream water all right sounds good to me first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to start with drums now in Ableton you can just press command T and it'll make
4:44 a new track super simple what I like to do is I'll find most of my samples from splice so if I click on the S up here and open splice I can just type in kick
4:52 and look through all the different kicks that I've downloaded and then I can click and just drag one right into Ableton now sometimes it's helpful to go
4:57 into a song with some reference ideas IDE of how you want to produce it now lately I've been loving the song greedy by tape McRae I think the production on
5:04 it is so sick so in my head I'm going to be thinking about that as I produce these drums so first things first we have our kick dragged in and I'm just
5:10 going to use command C to copy it and then I can click anywhere enablon and press command V and that's going to duplicate it so I'm just going to get a
5:16 kick pattern [Music] going also you can just highlight a section enablon and press command D and
5:24 that's just going to duplicate [Music] it and to zoom in and out you just hover over this gray area right here and click
5:31 and drag so all I'm doing is just building out this kick [Music]
5:38 part I'm going to press command T and make a new track and I'm going to drag a snare in look for a snare that's pretty
5:48 nice that's nice too so I draged both of them in I'm just going to press command T and make another track below and I'm going to layer them together and see how
5:55 it sounds it sounds pretty good but I actually want this sound to be a little bit shorter so I can just drag from the
6:01 end of the clip and that's going to shorten it then I can also click on this little tiny square right here and drag that over to fade the end of it
6:08 [Music] out all right I actually like this snare better okay so I ended up deciding on just the single snare right here and I
6:16 can highlight it and press command D to duplicate it we're starting to get a little pattern [Music]
6:26 here all right we're off to a great start all right now I want to add some kind of Shaker sound all right that one sounds good so for this I actually just
6:33 want to use one little tiny part of it in the beginning so I can click the end of this clip and just drag it right on over if you want to get really precise
6:39 hold command while you drag and it'll just ignore the grid for you I'm going to shorten this [Music]
6:50 down and then I want there to be a right here a little two Shaker thing so I can find another little piece of this drag it over and I'm just creating a little
6:57 variation here awesome so I'm going to highlight this kind of loop that we've started creating press command C to copy it press command
7:05 D to duplicate it and now we've got this loop I was by okay great now something else I want to kind of do is make the drums a
7:17 little bit dirtier so I'm going to click on our snare track right here to the right hold shift and click on our shaker track press command G and that's just
7:23 going to group them together so on this group three I'm going to drag on an effect if you go to the left here audio effects drive and read Ducks we can put
7:30 on this Effect called some dust let's see how that [Music]
7:39 sounds all right I actually want to layer a Clap into this if I can I think this might be the sound I'm looking for let me just press command T to make a
7:45 new track and drag it in there there we go yeah that's what it was missing just pressing command D to duplicate dream that I was walking under the water B by
8:00 no one I had a dream turn that clap down a little [Music] bit had a dream Okay so we've got some
8:14 drums going now next up we can add a little bit of base now if you watch the video on Ableton you'll know that there's three different ways to get
8:20 sound into Ableton the first way is to drag samples in which is what we've been doing this whole time that way is super simple the second way is if we record
8:27 our voice or we record an instrument so samples recording and the Third Way is called midi now a good way to think about midi is it's basically an
8:34 instrument but it's on your computer and you have to tell the instrument on your computer what notes you want it to play if that sounds confusing just keep
8:40 watching and I'll make it really simple for you first thing you want to do is press command shift T and that's going to make a new midi track if you go up
8:46 here to the left where it says instruments we can go to simpler we can go to base we can actually use any of these bases if we want so what you want
8:52 to do is drag this B Bas right onto your midi track and just let go and now we have that bass sound on this midi track up here to the right you'll see see this
8:59 little keyboard make sure that that keyboard is yellow and now you can use your computer keyboard as a midi
9:07 keyboard you can press Z and X to go up and down an octave and you can press C and V to adjust the velocity if you want
9:19 [Music] okay so what I want this to do is to just play one note at the very beginning of each bar or every couple bars so I'm
9:28 going to highlight it section right here make sure that it's an even four or eight beats so this is 1 2 3 4 5 6 78 eight bars then I'm going to press
9:38 command shift M that's going to make a new midi clip and if you'll notice right when you do that there'll be a piano roll that pops up down here if it
9:44 doesn't just double click on your midi clip and it'll pop up down here then you can click on this Gray Line and drag up to see more of it and you can highlight
9:50 right to the left of the keys here and click and drag left to right and get the size exactly how you want it then you want to click on this little tiny
9:56 headphone icon right here and that way you can hear the notes of the pmo roll when you click on them all right so the song is in a flat
10:04 major if you don't know what key your song is in and you're using an acapella like this you can just Google search if it's a popular song and it'll tell you
10:10 what key it's [Music] in nice so I want the bass to go like that if you don't have good headphones
10:18 you might not be able to hear that note but it's a low Bassy [Music] note okay another little mixing trick I
10:27 want to do really quick is just to make it so when this kick plays up here and this Bas plays down here they don't conflict cuz a lot of time when you do a
10:34 kick with base the low end from each of those kind of fights for the same space so a way to fix that is we just go to audio effects right here we go into
10:41 Dynamics and we drag a compressor onto this midi Bas track right here where it says drop audio effects here we click on this little triangle Arrow we click on
10:49 side chain and we route this right to the kick which is on track two Decap kick Swift clipped Punchy click on that let's click on EQ so it's gray out and
10:57 we'll turn the ratio all the way up the attack all the way down and then we'll click on this bent line right down here in the middle and we'll play with our
11:03 threshold now this is called side chaining and it's basically when one sound plays it causes the other sound to duck in volume so we want this Basse
11:11 sound to duck in volume when the kick sound is playing so let's have a listen if we solo the Basse sound which we can do just by clicking on this s
11:19 right here listen to the way that it ducks in volume it's like quiet and then it gets louder I'll move that note up an octave
11:27 so you can hear it better and if we turn this threshold down even further the effect will be even more
11:38 dramatic but we can probably settle for somewhere around 18 and that should be enough to make room for the kick and the base to play
11:47 at the same [Music] time all right that's going to be fine for base cuz we can just drawing other
11:53 notes down the line next up I want to tackle some mids so I'm going to press command shift T and make a new midi track and I want to try to use a steel
12:00 drum I'm not sure if Ableton has one let's check it out doesn't look like they have
12:06 any okay I think this basic brushed bels will probably be close enough all right I'm going to highlight a section to make a new midi clip press command shift M to
12:14 make the clip and then go here in the piano roll and draw in some notes I'm going to press solo to solo it and make sure we turn on the click up here to the
12:22 [Music] left okay this is what our little pattern sounds
12:35 like it sounds pretty good but I kind of want to layer it with one more sound so I can click on it here to the right track number eight press command D and
12:42 that'll duplicate it now I'm going to solo the duplicated track and now I'm going to look for a different sound that we can layer with
12:49 it okay so I got this Palm guitar sound that I've been working on and this basic brush sound right here what I'm going to do is the same
12:59 thing I did with the drums I'm going to group them together by highlighting both of them and pressing command G and on that group I'm actually going to try the
13:05 same effect out which was in drive and it's under Redux and it's called some dust this is what the sounds sound like together we can actually try putting a
13:16 little overdrive on it as well and then just playing with the drive here all right let's listen to
13:24 everything together I was get the
13:31 water I had a dream all right on this Basse sound I'm actually going to try a little overdrive as well and just see how that
13:42 sounds and I'm also going to back off this threshold on the side chain
13:50 okay I'm going to turn it down a little bit and to do that enablon you just click over here to the right in the blue number box and just use the arrow
13:57 keys was walking under the water B by no I had a dream and here I want the chords to change real quick if you're enjoying this video at all I would love for you
14:09 to consider subscribing and giving me the chance to help you make the best music that you're capable of after all that's exactly what my goal is so I
14:16 don't know why you wouldn't subscribe this channel would have been a godsend for me back in the day it's free music education insert the meme clip of Tim
14:24 heideker when he's like it's free real estate baby now I have plans to put out a video on music theory and that video is going to be so helpful for you guys
14:31 when I do put it out but until then hopefully some of you guys know a little bit of music theory but I can only teach production in this video just to keep it
14:37 short so I'm not going to get into the nitty-gritty details of all the cords and stuff and I'm just going to try and move
14:44 quickly okay so I've changed the bass notes up a little bit here and what I want to do next is actually add another mid layer I'm going to press command
14:51 shift T to make a new midi track and highlight this section and press command shift M that's going to make a new midi clip and then I want to find some kind
14:57 of pad and if you're wondering where I'm finding these sounds I'm just an instruments instrument rack and then I'm going based on the sound that I want
15:03 which is a pad and I'm just looking through these if you can't hear them just click on this little headphone icon right
15:10 here let's try dark corner pad I'm also using Ableton sounds to show you guys that you can do this too I'm trying not to use any third party plugins cuz I
15:18 want you to be able to follow along all right I'm going to draw in some chords real
15:24 quick wow this pad is actually great had [Music] enough I'm going to lower some of these
15:34 high [Music] notes and I'm going to EQ this
15:42 [Music] pad wow there's so much cool stuff happening in that [Music]
15:56 song all right I've extended out some of these bass notes I've got this pad the way that I want it and this is kind of like the chorus section of the song and
16:03 this is when I want to introduce effects for the first time first thing I want to add is some white noise because we want the chorus to feel big I'm just going to
16:09 make a new track here at the bottom drag the White Noise onto that track and make sure it starts right at the chorus let's see how that
16:17 sounds let's have everything cut out here except for the little colimba pad thing we can have the snares coming right there so it sounds like
16:24 [Music] this to wake up I had a dream you [Music]
16:36 said all right now I'm just going to do some light mixing stuff like just eqing this white noise sound and scooping out the low's I'm also going to extend these
16:43 bass notes even more just make them all the whole [Music]
16:51 length and we need some kind of like ambient vocal thing to come in here as well so I'm just going to look through splice and see what you can find if I
16:58 just just type in [Applause] vocal why not let's try it out see how
17:07 it [Music]
17:12 sounds that's actually kind of cool what I'm going to do cuz I actually kind of want to use this cuz I think it's hilarious I'm going to drag eq8
17:20 onto it and scoop out some of the low end you can just copy what I'm doing here if you'd like I'm also going to bring some of the
17:27 highs down and then last thing I'm going to do to totally cover it up is I'm going to put a Reverb on it probably like a cathedral
17:35 we can solo it here and take a listen maybe play with a dry wet I never wanted to wake up I had a
17:49 dream you said another thing I want to do is I want these Colima sounds to get even louder and more distorted so here is
17:57 where we kind of start start getting into nitty-gritty territory and I have other videos that cover this it's called automation but essentially I want
18:03 something that's already here like this Distortion to change as soon as we get to the chorus I want this drive to go up so the first thing I do is to the upper
18:10 right here there's a little diagonal line I'm going to click on that and that's going to enable automation View and then I want to click on the
18:16 parameter that I want to change which is that drive so I go down here to the left I click drive and now we have this red dotted line right here on that columa
18:23 group now what we can do is click and make little dots on this line and drag stuff to change it over time we can draw in exactly how we want the drive to
18:30 change so first look at this line here look at how it goes up and down and then look down here to the left at the drive when I press
18:36 [Music] play you see how that drive changes over time so this process is called Automation and this is like a pro tip
18:45 for production and it's a great tool for Dynamics and I'm going to use it right now to make this chorus sound even bigger so the way I do it is I highlight
18:51 the section of the chorus I hold shift and I just drag this whole line up like [Music] this
18:59 [Music] [Applause] [Music] I also want to automate the tone right
19:08 here so I'm going to click on the tone that's going to bring a new red dotted line on group number nine right here just going to highlight it hold shift
19:14 and move that line up so this is what it sounds like before the
19:21 Automation and then it gets big here for the chorus all righty make sure to click this diagonal line when you're done and
19:29 turn automation view off hopefully it should sound now like it gets a bit bigger on the chorus [Music]
19:36 section I had a dream you [Music] said I just copy and pasted that screen maybe one other thing I would add is one
19:52 last mid-range element some kind of vocal drone let's see what we got I think we can actually try using this sound
19:58 [Music] sound and I think we can literally just copy and paste this first part maybe like this length right
20:09 here and then we'll scoop out that lowend and put Reverb on it just like we did with the screen so I'm just pressing command D to duplicate that out now what
20:15 I'm going to do is go to this scream sound that we have I'm going to double click on that track so we have our effects here the
20:21 eq8 and the cathedral I'm going to hold shift and click on both of them command C to copy those effects and let's jump over to this choir track right here just
20:28 double click on it paste them right here in the audio effects area and let's listen I'm going to turn the dry wet up a little
20:39 bit now these are in the key of E minor but our song is in F minor or a flat major they're relative to each other let's listen
20:48 now let's check it with a Colima and see how it sounds I'm actually going to add some more
20:57 high-end let's see how it sounds with the Dunkle [Music]
21:13 pad all right let's see how it sounds with everything else now hopefully the chorus should sound huge let's [Music]
21:21 see a dream you said we can bring it down a little
21:31 [Music] bit all right let me just organize this session and we'll do a quick review of
21:44 everything okay so here is everything organized we have the drums the bass the mids the vocals and the effects just like the formula on the iPad just to let
21:52 you guys know I've been working on this for about 49 minutes and that's just to show that you can make something that sounds pretty darn good in a a short
21:58 amount of time especially using this formula first thing we did was we got some drums [Music]
22:04 going don't forget we utilize this some dust preset on Redux to make the drum sound a little bit dirtier and cooler this is without
22:13 it and it sounds good too but this is with it you know what we can do actually we can automate it to turn off in the
22:19 chorus so it sounds like it gets even bigger okay so after the drums then we just included this Basse sound right here remember that was just an Ableton
22:26 stock base with a little Distortion then after that we dove into mids which is once you're done with your
22:37 Rhythm Section the mids really start to bring everything to life this is what the mids sound like on their [Music]
22:45 own but really all it is is this pad the Plucky sound and that crazy choir sound all of them together
22:58 [Music] and the bass drums and mids all [Music] together which honestly sound awesome
23:11 and then we have our effects down here which is just this white noise sound and this crazy vocal scream that we
23:22 found it's so funny to me but honestly it adds so much to the impact of the chorus because those two sounds start as soon as the chorus comes
23:29 [Music] in and the thing about that scream noise is it adds energy but when the vocal is playing with it you don't really realize
23:41 that it's a scream last but not least we have the vocal of course so this is everything [Music]
23:52 together how cool is that that's literally only 12 different sounds that we used we didn't even do any recording all we did was just drag samples in and
24:00 utilize midi and we used all stock sounds from Ableton and splice samples and if you don't have splice Ableton has a bunch of stock drum sounds too they
24:08 even have drum machines up here where it says drums so you can just look through these or you can go to samples over here to the left and just type in something
24:16 like kick and they have a bunch of stuff you can use and you just click and drag that over anywhere here and it'll drag the
24:23 sample right in for you so you have all the tools at your disposal if you have able no excuses and you could just find Acappella online and download them
24:31 figure out what the BPM is figure out what the key of the song is and just go from there and then when you're done producing your song you can mute the
24:37 vocal and you have this awesome instrumental that you can write a brand new song [Music]
24:52 to man I love Ableton so much and in time I think you will too okay so hopefully you feel at least a little bit inspired to start putting some paint on
25:01 the canvas and what I mean by that is creating sounds and eventually songs inside of Ableton and let me just tell you this you have it in you seriously
25:08 you really do you just have to get your reps in and it gets easier every single time I promise if you want to learn more about producing music you can check out
25:15 literally any other video on my channel but for some of you guys you're going to want to take things a little more seriously and you're going to want to
25:20 dive head first into producing and writing songs just like a pro and for you guys specifically I have a full-on paid course where I can take you through
25:28 the whole process in chronological order I get into way more detail than this video and I'm also able to Mentor you by giving you feedback on your music
25:36 opening up your project giving you notes showing you what I would change that sort of stuff so if that sounds interesting to you at all I'll put part
25:42 of the course in the description of this video for free and you can check that out below if you felt like you enjoyed this video I would highly recommend
25:48 checking out the free training because it's going to be a game changer for you I mean that wholeheartedly I worked so hard on it I really do think it's going
25:53 to help you so much that being said thanks so much for spending some time with me today I genuinely value your time and I appreciate you being here
26:00 remember to stop making excuses and start making music cheers