Advanced Sampling: Creating Pads & Drones

Creative sampling has been at the forefront of Electronic Music production throughout its history. Whether it’s a drum break from an old vinyl record, remixing a classic soul track, or just recording your own samples to use in your music, it is a skill you must have in your arsenal as a producer. In my previous sampling tutorial, I created a huge bass sound from the recording of a bottle being flicked and recorded into a microphone. This week I take it one step further and create a lush, eerie drone pad sound from exactly the same sample! If you want to check out some fun and creative advanced sampling techniques, this one’s for you!

Transcript

Okay, so I’ve got the same bottle sample, the bottle getting whacked or flicked or whatever it is. But this time, let’s go down the road in making a pad or a drone, basically a sustained sound. So here it is again what we’re working with, and we can hear because it’s got that nice tonality. It lends itself really well to these types of sounds. Now in order to get the sample matched to the keyboard rather than using the transpose because I’ve got sampler and this is a function on most samplers to be fair, you can actually tell the sampler what is the original root key of the sample, what was it originally recorded at. So this was recorded at F2 and by putting that in, it means that when I play a C on my keyboard, it’s playing a C because it understands. It knows that this isn’t a C that’s been dropped in here. It’s a sample, that’s an F, and that way it can immediately align my keyboard because it understands what the correct root key is. 

So you’ll find that in a lot of samplers I thought it worth bringing that up and now let’s get some sort of sustained sound going on. So the way that I’m going to do this because I want a nice long drawn-out sound that is gonna be longer than the sample itself is we’re going to set up a nice loop. So let’s find somewhere in the sample that’s away from this beginning section so we get a nice consistent tone, somewhere around here. So if you listen at the beginning, it’s got those kind of higher frequencies. And I immediately get rid of them around here. Now I wanna go in a little bit further because I’m gonna set up a crossfade as you’ll see, but let’s set up the loop so it’s just gonna loop forward, standard kind of loop and we’ll set the loop start to be exactly the same as the start marker so that’s 11895 and then let’s bring this in. I don’t know this, take a stab at this somewhere around here be close, perfect. So there’s our loop and in order to help minimize that sort of clicking as it goes over the start points, first of all, the snap to grid can sometimes be funny but we’ll try it. There we go. So snap to grid means that the start and end point should now be in a line with a zero crossing. So reduce any clicks. We can still hear it’s clearly looping over so the first thing we’ll do to help that is the crossfade between the start and the end points. Now need to be careful because the further I go here, we’ll start getting those high frequencies in again, hear them sneaking in kind of sounds like a high hat at the beginning. Perfect! That’ll do. So now let’s get to work with actually first of all let’s shake the envelope and then we’ll put some effects to help get rid of the start and in sort of disguised that looping. 

So standard staff let’s go for an attack of a second, a release of a couple of seconds, get the sustain to the top. That all looks good, volume wise I think we’re still good, turn it up a little bit, so it’s now fading in and out. It’s probably a bit too quick for me. Let’s go for two on the attack and three on the release. Perfect. The fixed time start the ping-pong and follow that with a reverb and this will help add a nice kind of airy feel to the sound and disguise that loop start and end point. I want to go saying that’s nicely locked into the tempo so 2/16th and 8th is much more locked in. We’ll let the top frequencies in, feedback looks that probably is about fine. We’ll run with that no problem and then for the reverb let’s crank up the drive where it might be somewhere around 60% or do. That probably looks good. I’ll take some of the higher frequencies out of the tail and I think we’re good to go. Let’s have a listen. Voila! One pad sound, I like it.  I’m gonna bring the release in a little bit, overlapping a bit too much for my taste and let’s start playing with a feel or a little bit as well. Touch more volume, and there we go we’ve got a pad. Now as with pads movement is king, so it’s already got a bit of wobbling in there, it’s got some effects which are nice but it’s also good to add some other envelopes so a classic thing to do is normally add the filter envelope and have the filter sweeping in and out. Often a little bit different time into your amp envelope so you get them get sort of sweeping at different speeds that works nicely. We’re gonna do saying a little bit different. This particular sampler has a nice FM envelope in it as well which just means that we can add FM synthesis on the top and add some additional harmonics and have those sweeping around. So I’m gonna go for saying a little bit brighter but not too over-the-top. Let’s go for a saw 4 which is just a saw wave with 4 harmonics, so kind of like a heavily filtered saw wave. And let’s start by just getting a feel for what this is gonna do to the sound. Nice! And let’s see what happens if we just have this sweeping. Let’s go a little bit longer, let’s maybe go for five seconds. I think with two seconds aren’t we on the envelope, and that’s probably going to be fine as it is to be fair. Let’s try this. Perfect! Sounds wicked. You can see it could do with a bit of EQ as well so we’ll pop that on and then we’ll call it a day. Let’s get some of the low end out of here and maybe shelf down the tops of it. I got a really nice eerie pad so out of the bottle sample the exact same one that created a nice baseline. Wicked stuff so I love sampling, a lot of fun and very quickly you can get a whole variety of sounds and all of these we’ve made out of two sounds of a bottle so lots and lots can be achieved with there a little bit of exploration, lots of fun. Hope you enjoyed it. 

I’ve released a brand new totally free e-book for you called Creative Strategies For Finishing More Music. It features some of the world’s top underground producers sharing their inside tips on how to be prolific, handle creative pressure, turn your inspiration into finished tracks and give yourself that important edge in the music industry. The ebook has 15 pages rammed with insights and workflows from some of the world’s biggest underground music producers including John 00 Fleming, Shlomi Aber, Claude Young, Jr and Mark Jenkins and there’s loads more. The ebook is totally free for you so dive over to finishmoremusic.com/ebook and grab yourself a copy now.

Thank you for watching

I really appreciate you tuning in and I hope you’re enjoying the tutorials and taking some real value into your music sessions.

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Let me know how you get on with the techniques I showed in the videos and if you have any suggestions for future tutorials, ping me a message on Instagram (@IamKeithMills)

Creating Huge Bass From Found Sounds

The never ending pursuit of a unique, warm and rich bass sound is every producer’s bug bear. We surf presets, emulate our favourite artists and endlessly search YouTube for the perfect tutorial. Well I’m here to break the trend and tell you that almost any sound you can record can be shaped and sculpted into a quality bass sound for your music. Check out this week’s tutorial where I turn the sound of a bottle being flicked into a warm, rich bass sound using basic filtering, sampling and processing techniques.

Transcript

Okay, so this time let’s explore the other sample which is this bottle that’s getting struck in some way. So I’ve loaded it up into the sampler, it sounds like this, and you can hear straight away it’s really tonal. It’s going to lend itself really nicely. This could be, for example, some nice percussion tone or percussion. I’m thinking probably bass sound, that’s what I like making resounds like this, so that’s the route that we’re gonna go down. Now, before I do anything with it, I just want to make sure it’s tuned correctly to my keyboard. So whenever you’re using a found sound or even a sample from a pack, it’s best to make sure that when you press a C on your keyboard, this sample is playing a C as well. So at the moment if I press C, this is kicking out an F. So I need to transpose this up by seven semitones because the original sample was made F, and when I press C3, it will play back at that default F, but I don’t want that. I want it to play back at a C as well and that way if I’m programming bass lines melodies, whatever it might be, I know that it’s going to be matching my keyboard and I can get everything in key. So now when I press C, this is pressing a C. Now if I wanted to tune this precisely, I’d grab a sine wave from you know any synth basically and I would play the exact same note and I would just adjust the detune on this until they were both playing much more tightly. But I’m not going to waste time getting the absolute fine tuning right. I just want to know that I’m roughly there on my keyboard, which we are at the moment. So if we’re going for bass, I need to play much much lower, even lower than that. There we go, so that’s a low G and straightaway we’re in there. Now I’m going to take the percussive star out of this sound. So let’s zoom right in on this and we’ll take that early part out, let’s go for where it’s kind of approaching, so it’s a little bit more uniform, maybe here. That’ll do me. Now you could use the percussion in, you could have this as a kind of percussive bass. I just want to make sure that I’m getting one of the zero crossings which is basically where the waveform is intersecting our zero line and this will mean we won’t get any nasty clicks and pops. There we go, nice deep sound, I like it. And let’s go and mess with our envelope. Now, the envelope that I’ve got here in this sampler is a little bit limited so I want saying with a tiny bit more complexity to have a very specific shape that I go for these kind of sounds. So I’m going to just upgrade this to sampler which just gives us a few more bells and whistles to play with. And we’re gonna look at the amp envelope. So what I’m going to do is rather than be restricted to this really sort of very tight transient at the beginning, instead I’m going to bring the attack out and bring the initial point upwards, and if I just bring this down you’ll see what I’m up to the way that I’m rolling with this and then let’s set the attack. Somewhere around there will work nicely and then I’ll bring this decay in. Perhaps have been too tight for me, and let’s have a bit of release on this. Interesting sound. Okay let’s zoom out now. I’ve just realized I may not -. Hey, it’s a decent volume you’ll be able to hear this fun. So it’s still got a bit of that percussive tinge in the top-end. Let’s get rid of it with a filter. I don’t want to move too far into the sample, I could go just sub-base which it seems to you know the resonant part of this sample but I want a little bit of character at the beginning. So let’s bring the filter down and now I’ll turn this up in fact I tell you what we’ll do, we’ll overdrive the filter on this as well now. So I’m going to select a filter that’s got a bit of character modeled after a kind of analog filter and let’s crank up the drive, have to take a tiny bit off of the main volume so I can have a little bit more to play with on the drive, and already we have got a lovely lovely bass sound. And you can explore things like we’ve got a shaper here. Let’s give this a go add a bit of grit to it. Going to have to take a little bit off for the volume, and that’s just added a little bit of grit and character and then let’s just see I can see we need to do a little bit of tidying up with an EQ and then I think we’ll call it a day because it’s already sounding pretty damn good to me. In fact, I tell you what before we do we could add a little bit of punch to this another nice trick for your bass line so might as well dive dial some in. Similar to how you make a kick drum, what we’re gonna do here is go up by two octaves on the pitch envelope so what’s going to happen is the sound will start to octaves higher and then we’re going sweep it down really really quickly, normally spent like a hundred milliseconds works and it gives you a nice bit of punch to the sound. You can hear what we’re doing, but I want to go really tight I just want a little bit at the start. I’m gonna take a bit of this saturation off or maybe even this drive, one of the two. There we go, a little bit cleaner and then finally let her a touch of EQ just to clean up the low-end on this, go with a nice tight Q.

I tell you what, just for fun let’s see what happens if we use a little bit of a boost on the low-end and again I’ll just turn that down a touch so if you remember we started with a sound of a bottle being flicked and we’ve now ended up with a massive sounding bass and it looks like it’s already in mono so I don’t need to worry about snapping in. We’ve already got same pretty damn huge to work with and and again think of all the different samples you could put in and all the different variation. Even with this, you could have a nice percussive attack on it if you wanted to allow a little bit more of a high end or a little bit more of the start at a sample. So there you go again from a found sound very very quick this time we’ve made a baseline. 

I’ve released a brand new, totally free ebook for you called Creative Strategies for finishing more music. It features some of the world’s top underground producers sharing their inside tips on how to be prolific, handle creative pressure, turn your inspiration into finished tracks, and give yourself that important edge in the music industry. The ebook has 15 pages rammed with insights and workflows from some of the world’s biggest underground music producers including John- O Fleming, Schlow MeHaba, Claude Young Jr, and Mark Jenkins, and there’s loads more. The ebook is totally free for you so dive over to finishmoremusic.com/ebook and grab yourself a copy now.

Thank you for watching

I really appreciate you tuning in and I hope you’re enjoying the tutorials and taking some real value into your music sessions.

If this video resonated with you and you feel it will have a positive impact on the people you know,  please share  it  by using the social media buttons you see at the bottom of this page.

To make sure you are always the first to know when a new video lands: Subscribe to the FMM Youtube channel here.

Let me know how you get on with the techniques I showed in the videos and if you have any suggestions for future tutorials, ping me a message on Instagram (@IamKeithMills)

Pandemic : How are you showing up?

With the world currently facing the spread of the Coronavirus, it’s become more important than ever for us to be more aware of our responsibilities to ourselves and our impact to others around us in facing this pandemic.

Transcript

So I’m now back in the UK. So spent the last five weeks out in the sun everything super cool out in the US and I’ve arrived back yesterday into the UK, and it’s you know, sort of back to reality if you like. But it’s back to a slightly different reality to the one that I left. The atmosphere here is different; the way that people are behaving is different; the conversation is different. You know why? We all know why. It’s the Big C – it’s coronavirus. Now, I thought about this long and hard, is this something that I would talk about on the show, but when I really thought about it I realized that actually it’s more about a responsibility and I think that’s what we need at the moment, considerable amount less panic, less fear and a decent chunk more of logical sensible positive thinking.

So it’s my hope that if at the moment you do have some anxiety, some concerns about what’s going on, what I’m going to say it’s not just the case of a message that empowers you personally but it’s my hope that empowers you to help other people and to be a positive force for good right now because we need it… it’s real clear and simple we need it. We cannot control this situation, we cannot control these external factors that are going on all around the globe at the moment, we can’t control the situation but we can control how we show u[. You get to choose whether you show up with fear, with panic or whether you show up from a place of opportunity and enthusiast optimism and confidence and that’s your choice. That bit is in your control you can’t control the situation we can control how we show up and how you show up determines how effective you are.

If you are showing up from a positive place from a place of opportunity, optimism, from a place of growth, then you are operating on a higher plane of energy. You’re gonna have a lot more energy. If however, you are operating from a place of fear and panic and worry and concern and pressure and the weight of the world is on your shoulders, you are gonna be exhausted. You’re operating from a lower plane of energy. So who’s more effective someone is rocking up with loads of positivity and energy and a growth mindset, or someone who’s exhausted, consumed with fear and panic stagnating or even worse, regressing. And here’s the really important point – how you show up and how effective you are determines the impact you’re gonna have on the people around you.

So we can’t control the situation, we can control how we show up which determines how effective we are, which determines the impact that we can have to people we love, family and friends and work colleagues, the wider community, the message that we put out with things like social media.

So the bottom line you can be a part of the problem or you can be a part of the solution. You can choose.

Thank you for watching

I really appreciate you tuning in and I hope you’re enjoying the tutorials and taking some real value into your music sessions.

If this video resonated with you and you feel it will have a positive impact on the people you know,  please share  it  by using the social media buttons you see at the bottom of this page.

To make sure you are always the first to know when a new video lands: Subscribe to the FMM Youtube channel here.

Let me know how you get on with the techniques I showed in the videos and if you have any suggestions for future tutorials, ping me a message on Instagram (@IamKeithMills)