Hello friends! Yesterday, I decided to relax and indulge in my favorite activity: making music. I felt inspired to create something in the style of chill lo-fi. Music with a melancholic, calm, relaxing vibe, with a touch of retro, as if it's coming from a cassette tape.
I immediately came up with a simple chord progression in C major.
It goes:
Cmaj7 Am7 Dm7 G7
Let's take a look under the hood.
It's all very simple here. We have 5 tracks: pad, bass, piano, drum sample, and arpeggiator.
All tracks are based on this chord progression.
For the pad, I used Ez Keys dream machine.
I applied equalization and cut around 200 Hz so that the pad wouldn't interfere with the bass doing its job.
Next, I played the bass part and applied equalization to my liking. I adjusted it so that the bass wouldn't interfere with the kick drum, but at the same time, it wouldn't lose its energy. I avoided using too many plugins on the bass and aimed to keep the track as simple as possible.
Afterwards, I played the piano part based on the chord progression. Nothing extraordinary, just something abstract. Since I was creating a backing track, I needed to leave space for the instrument that would be played by a person on top of this track.
For the drum part, I took a beat that was freely available. I tweaked this beat a bit to my liking. I chopped, edited, and automated it the way I wanted.
For the arpeggiator, I used the USynth plugin, which I've been really into lately. At first, I started with some preset, but eventually, I tweaked everything beyond recognition to my liking. Never rely entirely on presets; make the sound the way you want it.
As for the equalization, it's simple. I just cut out what I don't need in the mix.
On the master track, there are only two plugins. My favorite compressor, Kotelnikov, and the mastering plugin, Ez Mix.
The compressor blends all the tracks into one cohesive unit. It's like sandpaper for a wooden board. I mainly adjusted it by ear, just making sure the peaks weren't more than -3 dB.
For Ez Mix, I chose the Rnb plugin and adjusted it to my liking. This mostly made the track more readable and louder since it has a built-in limiter. I set the volume to about -16.
Enjoy!
If you want to gets access to all my BT in high quality, welcome to Patreon: patreon.com/ImprovizBackingTrack
Here I post also some lessons, scales and tabs for guitar.
▶️ 3Speak
