My name is JNTHN STEIN. I'm a music producer and beat maker
based in Brooklyn, NY.
I'm a member of
beat crew - Team Supreme.
One of the things we like to do,
is make lots of music,
share our ideas and techniques to create even better music.
What I'm going to do today, is make a beat
and show you some of the things I like to do.
When I start making a beat,
I'll start by scrolling though some drum sounds,
picking the ones that grab my attention immediately,
put together a quick rack of 16 drum sounds...
and program a quick beat.
Set the mood, set the vibe
and go from there.
Once I have a bit of a beat going,
a basic rhythmic structure, I move onto the lead melodic material.
A simple melody, that grabs and takes you through the song.
It'll usually be pretty simple...
or sometimes, it's just sounds and bends, blips and bloops.
It will be the lead melody - the top line, the figure that you follow along with.
The next step is to give it harmonic context.
I'll pull up a keyboard instrument, let the track loop...
and play the first chords that come to mind, lay it down and create a nice 8/16 bar loop,
that is my harmonic and emotional template.
I don't use so many presets, I like to start my sounds from scratch.
It forces you to put more time in
because the starting point won't be ready to go.
It will require some time, some tweaking and thinking.
But no matter what, that time and work will lead to a unique result.
When I add a new element to a beat, the first thing I think about is the...
pure, subjective, emotional feeling I'm trying to capture,
whether it makes you happy, sad,
it's terrifying, it's friendly, it's funny...
it's stern, it's militant, it's pleasant.
I start with these very subjective terms
and find ways to translate that into musical tools.
From there, I will work down to the finer details -
what are the note choices? what are the keys? what are the scales?
how loud is it going to be?...
basically work all the way from non-musical...
just, pure. Emotional. Sensory...
and move down the list until I could estimate the musical details
that would create these results.
After I'd laid down these chords on the Rhodes,
I felt that it was sounding a little too pretty,
so I wanted to add a next layer that would contrast that.
So I picked up my bass, ran it through a Ableton - Amp and Cabinet
and did a reiteration of those chords with some rock intensity.
When I record,
I like to just keep the tape running...
and go for a while,
kind of combine the recording and the practicing.
Keep going, until you feel you've ran through at least one pass
that will do the trick.
Then I have this long clip,
I'll go back, cut it down.
Often I take the end segment, that might be the best -
in the end you have the most options that way,
and it creates for a longer loop that could be repetitive down to one measure...
even though it's 16 measures...
but each one feels different because of the human errors and variation
and therefore interesting to hear.
The next thing I did, was amplify the intensity,
so I grabbed an Operator and made a saw wave-pad that was a bit distorted,
reverberated, had lots of noise in there -
something that kind of screams,
that I could throw on there to create a big dynamic change
from a broken down "verse" feeling to a full-built "hook" feeling.
I feel like today I have the comfortability and confidence
to achieve something close to the results I hear in my head
because of the endless trials that I've put in the past. Beat, after beat, after beat...
and taking away the self-critical thing that keeps you from showing it,
keeps you from putting it out on the internet.
It takes time and labor,
and in order to put in this time and labor you have to have a lot of love
to be willing to put in that time.
But there is a certain amount of hours that will get you to that good enough, everytime.
Music is very physical, even by nature,
so when I work, I like to...
step away from the speakers, change my posture, my comfortability,
to try and give myself a new physical and contextual perspective.
Stand. Sit. Sometimes I'll have the Push on the table, or on my lap, lay back.
I might even get up and see how the track feels, dance-wise, dance around to it.
Then I start to think objectively about what feels good,
what feels bad, what might be missing -
and then I might go back to the impulsive stage, adding more material,
switch back and forth between these two
up close, subjective - following actions
stepping away, looking at the painting from further away,
until the two reach a compromise.
Once I'd come up with the main section,
I decided to create different textures,
so I took that same melody that I'd created on the synth,
sang it, multiple times, created this 8-part harmony by looping four of them,
taking those four, pitching up the octave to create another four.
so that in later portions of the beat, the later half,
I could switch between the melody being played on these two synths...
to being sung by "eight of me".
Totally new sound, totally new texture.
Once I'd set up this "choir-chant-melody",
I hit 'convert', put it into a Simpler that I could transpose per key,
and a certain 'warp' setting that gives it that type of right, weird graininess.
I just use the first note of the melody to make a "yelp" sound.
I think...
all beats or music...
can... be...
spun out, from the smallest, single, little idea...
it's kind of like, musical mitosis: eggs splitting cells,
and you could feed on that and go with that,
and start to introduce a whole other opinion based on the same idea,
like looking at the same argument from two sides.
That's usually how I can create a B section or a contrasting section -
something that will
strike you and shock you,
and make you say "woah - didn't see that coming or I didn't expect that".
So after I'd built a few sections of the beat,
I wanted to create a contrasting section
without changing too much, so I deleted all the chordal elements.
grabbed my bass, put some drive on it to give it some grit, some gristle,
and I just did a modal, one-note, rock-style riff.
For the last section, I took elements of the quieter, more broken down vibes,
and the louder - hook section that came earlier, and combined them.
And I also added a fair amount of new rhythmic layers,
just to give it a whole other level of rhythmic intensity:
a smaller grid, faster rhythms.
Just went all in. All the elements I'd built, that I'd been stagnating,
and arranging, particularly in the beginning...
let that all go, put them all together and let them drive home.
It's enjoyable to think about my own work flow
and to see how I could achieve the same results easier, more efficiently and quicker
and therefore, in a more fun process
and open the door to put that time and love into new sounds and ideas.