laptop screenshot of an old project
You ever look at someone screen, see a few charts and assume they are playing a game? Well many people have done so for me, and it makes me shake my head everytime its said.
- I mean, that's a waveform!*
It can be confusing though, afterall, I am using obscurium, a rather flashy music plugin used for sound design and creations.
Well, I thought I would give a post about how interesting Song making in the box (using just a computer) can be
For this illustration, I though to use Fl studio 12, A really interesting music making software that throws many conventional concepts about music making through the window.
The startup
oooo, the startup is so cool
It seems every application these days must have a flashy pop up, or its not just good enough. Some even have a sound effect to them that indicates any nearby person or group of persons that some one just open d up a program. ( bing you just opened pornhub)
After the franca calms down, you greeted with a rather boring outlook, with a few intruments already loaded up automatically for you, now in your DAW, you may notice that you get nothing or that the instruments are different, well many different daws have different settings.
basic 4 drums given to you to jump start you
When I am making a song via FL Studio, The first thing I usually do is go into my Samples folder, basically where I keep all my drums, effects, hits, soundfonts and general noise. I go into the samples folder and select the type of samples I would be using to make the beat/instrumental.
After that, I set the tempo of the song Ill be making on that day. I am an afrobeat producer, who know a little of RnB and Jazz, so I know the tempo for most songs within that range.
Sequencing drums
Then its time to start setting your drums right. I usually spend between 20 mins to hours programming a drum pattern, the drum pattern is first collected in a single channel, then I spread it out into multiple channels, so I can program a kick in one place, and pull it out in another without affecting the dynamics of the whole drums.
Seperate drums
Bass and melody
I look at the song I wish to produce, then the style before programming either a bass or a melody. I usually go for the bass because I believe that once the bass and drums of a song are in perfect harmony, 50% of the song is complete.
ooo bassline
After the baseline is established, the time for melody comes.
Now it may sound easy, but trust me its not. Creating bass and melody is usually the thing that eats up a lot of time in the music production process. There are days when the juices just aren't flowing well enough and the whole thing just sounds wrong, even with the correct drums.
When I produce, its not that strange to see me spending 2 days on the melody and bass part, because once that's done, whats left is to give it a little glamour.
extra snare added
Glaming it up
A strong bassline and melody should be supported by a little here and there. A sound effect here, a riff there. These things I love to call the glaming process. Just like preparing a lady for her wedding, after the makeups and dress ups and all the arrangement, the artist still gets up and drop a power on the cheeks a little, or uses a bit more gloss, you know, just to make the lady perfect. Same thing with music production.
Personally, I will use pads, strings, sound effects, vocal shots, etc
This is also the part where I start stacking or layering my instuments and samples.
I might add another snare, a darker and crunchy one to the main snare and pan both, I could add a delayed staccato piano to the main melody line, etc just make sure its ok.
Arrangement and automations
another project opened
Once Im done with those ones, its time to start arranging and mixing up the patterns of the song to see what fits where, what should be removed, what shouldn't.
In FL studio, we are given the option of placing a pattern any where in the timeline, meaning that a solo section can be mixed with other elements to turn it into a chorus.
This is also the part I add automations, maybe I want the ending to delay, but not the beginning of a section, then I can use automation to do it. The reason why I use automation at this stage is because automations in Fl studio can be easy tampered with, meaning its better you have your base set, before
you attempt any automation and end up affecting the wrong pattern.
Export stems and prepare for mixing
export and mixing stag starts
After about roughly 4 days of music making, the beat is now ready to be mixed and an artist sing on it.
I usually rename the finished beat to something a bit more sensible.
While I am waiting for an artist to show up, I start mixing the instrumental, using the tools that I spoke about in previous tuts, compression and equalizers, gain meters and analyzers, etc
Mixing is a totally different ball game in music production, so ill be taking on that in another post.
Thanks for dropping by on this post.
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