Welcome to Beat Break! This is my new series breaking down a beat in three
minutes! And today I'm going to show you how I
created an interesting Keys sound using Ableton stock instruments. Let's start
the timer and see if this works! I'm going to run through all the
instruments that I used and show you a couple techniques. Let me play you the
beat first!
I've been strong so far but I'm gonna do my trip loosen it break do something
(song playing)
(song playing Rap vocals by J.Cole)
(song playing) I've kept it as simple as I can in this beat. Drums, there's a
bass synth, 808, keys sounds, some samples and then I've got a string riser.
Exhale adding some vocals and rap vocals that you're hearing are by J. Cole. For
the drums, I've used the Ableton kit Formaggio 2.
You'll see that my kick drum, snares and the high hats and none of them are
perfectly quantized. I find that perfectly quantizing them you lose some
of the bounce of the beat. By shifting them it kind of just has a nice sway.
(Sanjay C beats/music playing). All
I've done here is I've added the punchy drums. And I always add the glue
compressor on drums especially Ableton drums it kind of pulls everything
together. Alright let's get into the bass next. This is a bass synth I'm using a B7
bass (Sanjay C playing Bass) I just wanted it to add something to the 808 bass which is doing the heavy
lifting. This 808 bass is from the "Tricky Traps" collection by Sonic Faction and
I've put a sidechain compression on it so every time the kick drum hits bass
gets out of the way of the kick drum. Then I've got the signal keys. Signal is
an instrument by Output I love these sounds in here they've got a lot of
movement in them. (Sanjay C music playing)
Oh, it sounds so good, right? If you don't have Signal... I recreated the
sound in Ableton just using Ableton instruments. So this is a mixture of the
FM piano 5 simple preset. I added to delay to it, auto pan, some EQ. So the simple
piano preset without all these effects that I added it - it sounds like this. Add
some delay... auto pan... then filter out the frequencies you don't want... then I added
to that - some organ sound... added a stereo widener to this and a little bit out of
auto pan as well. Then combined those so I grouped these two tracks together. So
you just select two tracks - right click it and say 'group' and added a saturator,
some more EQ to filter out more and then add another pan on top of that.
(music playing)
This is a sample of The O'Jays "Love Train" I introduced a song with this (Sanjay C music playing)
All I did is
I grabbed an audio sample of the sound. I put it into simpler, in Ableton. This is
an instrument you can throw any audio clip in here. But added the EQ in there
to make it sound like it's coming out of a small old radio. Next, I took the same
sample and put it into Simpler on this track and I just wanted the vocals from
The O'Jays in here. Once you have the sample in here, you can click this 'slice'
button down here and this will slice it by 'transients' but you can adjust the
slices so that you can actually play these clips on your keyboard. The next
thing is the 'string riser' so that it gives a nice transition between parts.
Then finally I've got the Exhale Vox. Exhale gives you vocal type of sounds...
(Sanjay C music playing)
The J. Cole vocals - I just took an acapella vocal I found somewhere and added
those in just as an example of what you can do. I hope you learned something.
If you have questions about anything I showed you in here, let me know. And I'm
gonna also provide the Ableton project for this - so you can have this whole beat
and deconstruct it! (You welcome! ;)
Alright, that's the FIRST Beat Break! What did you think?! Let
me know! :D If you've got ideas for my next Beat Break or what you'd like to learn
in the future! Keep Making The Music YOU Love! See you guys later!