WingsOfAnAngel
Banned
ill o.g.
Battle Points: 3
OKAYTUTORIAL 01: DRUMS
After reading a few posts here by cats who want to get started in music production and having a few OkayProducers inbox me about my favorite production techniques. I decided to write a tutorial series that I call OkayTutorial. My writing style is a bit unorthodox like some of my production methods so bare with me because it’s a process that I feel will help you learn effectively. These tutorials were written with software users in mind but cats with hardware can apply some of these methods. I’m personally promoting the software movement in hip hop production because in this day and age it makes more than enough sense to do so especially if you can’t afford to build your own Electric Lady or Hit Factory. For those of you skeptics who consider applications such as Fruity Loops as a joke because it only costs $100-150 to purchase, I got something to tell you: All you need is a good Windows based PC with a good amount of memory and some great plugins and you’re good to go. If you’ve read any of my past posts you’d know that I have my MPC in a box in my closet along with my other hardware instruments Why you ask? Because my software does it all better, faster and it takes up less space in my den. Now that I got that out of the way lets get into the art of hip hop production.
OkayProducers you want your drums to Bump & Pop huh? Well I’ll share the Marriott family secret recipe with you and I hope you do the same for others who want to learn the craft of hip hop music production. For me it’s all about preparation and sound design. Thanx to ?uest reminding me in the drum question post about how petty some of these cats who own the masters to some of these breaks are, I went back into my old stacking technique. I originally learned about stacking in the late 80’s from my boy Fat Doug a former ghost producer and writer for Hurby Luv Bug’s Idol Makers camp. Remember “Antoinette” that chick who got into it with M.C. Lyte? Well Doug was the lyrical and musical force behind her. Anyway, Doug taught me how to stack drum loops to create new and interesting breaks. Back then we had this unwritten rule where if someone showed you something you were to expound on that technique so being that I was into programming my own drum patterns I came up with the idea about stacking the kicks, snares, and hi hats over the years with more experimentation I mastered the very technique I’m sharing with you today.
The three professional production tools I’m using for this tutorial is:
• Image Line/Cakewalk FL Studio 4 Producer Edition (Fruity Loops) which is a loop based production application that includes a powerful array of tools that includes several samplers, synthesizers, effects and a sequencer that will make the MPC look slow and dimwitted. (Pending that you have a powerful PC with a good soundcard with low latency.) www.fruityloops.com
• Adobe Audition 1.0 (Cool Edit Pro 2.0) is a powerful audio editor and recording and mixing application www.adobe.com
• Propellerheads Recycle 2.0. Is a must have slicing tool that allows you to chop your loop in several places and manipulate your loops by changing the tempo or time signature. This is clearly my favorite tool because it saves me a lot of time. www.propellerheads.se
1. First you have to decide what kind of drum kit you’re trying to build for the song you’re creating. Today I’m going for a small room kit. I find the best way of going about this today is to find 3 drum loops that share sonic similarities. To expound on ?uest’s recent revelation of drums used by Pete Rock and J Dilla Im going to show you my technique using “Funky President” by James Brown, “Impeach The President” by the Honeydrippers and “God Made Me Funky” by “The Headhunters were recorded in small rooms using drum kits were made out of wood and the engineers back then used fewer microphones then they do today so what you think is an effect on some of these drum breaks are actually the mics picking up all the sounds in the room where the drums where recorded. I personally love that stuff and I like having that ambience in my music because that room noise is what makes the drums sound so cool.
2. I then sample my selected breaks flat, no EQs, no dynamic processors and no effects into Adobe Audition. To insure that your signal is at a good level turn on the meters in Audition and adjust the input level in your soundcard’s mixer to gently tap the number 0 on the meter. The reason you want it to tap is so you don’t distort your signal. Although these applications allow you to produce your music visually, I also find that using your ears as well as your eyes can help you a great deal so make sure what you’re seeing coincides with what you’re hearing. (Message!!!)
3. I then save and export my drum loops to a folder in the .wav format and import them into Propellerheads Recycle where I chop (Cut, edit, truncate, slice or whatever ****ing egghead term you want to use) my drums at the very tip of the attack point. If you’re using a slicing tool like Recycle you can visually cut your samples to perfection within seconds. (If you’re using hardware like the like MPC, ASR or Triton you can find your attack point by pressing the lowest key while scrolling to your desired destination. This of course will take longer. (Message!!!)
4. Within the Recycle environment I normalize my slices at 90% a lot of cats do it at 100% which is cool if you’re not using any dynamic processors at all but thanks to Viacom and Clear Channel your music got to be loud enough to compete with the other cats out thurr. Later on where going to use compression. So how you use your EQs and dynamic processors in the preparation stage is the key to making your drums Bump & Pop. After you normalize your slices export them to another folder.
5. Now open FL Studio 4 set it up to host 3 samples.
6. Ok here’s where the fun part begins; Sound Design. For those of you who don’t know about FL Studio I want you to go to the website I linked for you and check out the features. If you check out the specs you should find that FL Studio 4 has two sets of parametric EQs. The first EQ is a 3-Band parametric that’s very easy to find on FL’s mixer. For those of you not familiar with EQ I’ll break it down real quick. EQ was originally designed to correct frequencies in recordings that sometimes get lost in recordings. But pioneering record producers of 60’s & 70 started using EQ as an experimental sound shaping effect. This eventually found its way over to hip hop music thanx to the legendary producers such as Marly Marl, Hurby Luv Bug & Howie Tee. The other Parametric EQ is a 7-band virtual rack plug-in called Fruity Parametric EQ. What I usually do is load my three best kicks from my sliced samples folder in each sampler (Usually open kicks with no hit hats.) and assign each kick to a separate mixer channel. I then load the Fruity Parametric EQ in each mixer channel to coincide with each kick. There is a preset on The Fruity Parametric EQ called Bass Drum Punch, open it in each channel.
7. I then step write a 4 count rhythm in FL 4 using each kick so I can play this pattern while I’m adjusting the EQ on each kick to meet my sonic likings. By doing this you’re actually creating a new drum sound that is yours to claim because there are thousands of sonic possibilities. So play with your EQ and levels to create your custom kick sound. Just remember to save your pattern in case something goes wrong like a power outage.
8. Once I have established my desired kick sound, I remove all of my steps except the downbeat and export my custom kick to a folder called “Custom Drums”. I then repeat the process for my snare and Hat.
9. Now that I have created my custom drum kit its time for me to create a pattern which I can do in step writing mode, or manually by using my midi controller. I personally enjoy doing it manually so I can perfect it in the piano roll editor. After my pattern is created I then go into the basic envelope mode to adjust the ADSR functions. ADSR stands for Attack, Decay, and Sustain & Release. How you adjust your attack and decay is the very key to creating a buoyant rhythm track that will bounce in the ears of your intended listeners. You want to adjust your attack & decay on each drum sound to give your rhythm a tight and sometimes loose feel so your rhythms will have that soulful bounce. The more bounce your drums have the more danceable your tracks become and the better your chances of getting the DJ’s to play your **** up in the clubs and on the radio mix-shows. I stress this point especially to male producers because most females especially love to dance. Don’t believe me, go to a club sit back relax with a few drinks and watch what songs get the ladies on the dance floor. But while you’re checking out the ladies shake their ass, take notes of how their bodies react to the movements of the kicks and snares. Also take notice of what records the DJ plays more than once. What’s my point? Your kicks need to Bump and your snares need to Pop in order to compete for dance floor time because the ladies want to dance! That’s why certain cats are killing the charts and most of our progressive hip hop heroes are not. My personal theory is progressive hip hop music can be danceable too and I’m personally trying to take my new sound on that level. Now let’s get back to the technical ****.
10. I usually play my rhythm and adjust the attack and decay on my drum sounds as needed to get that bounce. I usually adjust these envelopes according to the sound of my kick, snare and hat. The best way of doing so is by giving my kick and snare a short attack and decay setting so they have a swift response and my hats a looser feel so my rhythms have a semi break beat type of vibe.
11. After I obtained that bounce I’m looking for, I turn on the normalize function and apply a modest amount of EQ using the 3-band EQ on the channel mixer but this time I’m using EQ as a corrective tool. The reason I do this is because that’s where the Bump & Pop happens. Most cats I know apply compression first but I find when you adjust the room sound of your drums with EQ first you have greater control of the sound you’re trying to achieve. Sometimes I use an extreme amount of EQ if I want to get crazy with it but most of the times I use my EQ sparingly.
12. I then apply the vintage compression preset within each of the drum sound’s effect channel. I don’t know who programmed this setting at Image Line but they were right on the money because it adds punch to drum sounds without any coloration. Depending on the tone of the kick and snares I decease the amount
13. For Lessonheads using other compressors the Vintage setting is: Threshold: -15.0 db, Ratio: 8.0:1, Gain: 8.6, Attack 29.2 ms, Release 1532 ms. This setting usually will give your drums that punch you hear on records being played in the clubs but you have use it correctly because if you over do it your **** will muddy or distorted.
14. Sometimes you might have to adjust your channel mixer EQ a bit more but that basically does the job. Once you have created your complete drum pattern you can mix your levels to your idea of sonic perfection export it in a 2-channel stereo mix or you can export it in separate channels. I personally export to both because I never know if I’m going to reuse my drum parts for other projects.
Next week tutorial will be about bass lines. I hope this helps and I would love to see some feed back on this tutorial within this post. I will try to answer your questions the best as I can. If you have any question that’s not based on this tutorial inbox and I’ll try and answer you the best I can.
Pete Marriott’s Hip Hop Production Tutorial 02: Bass
In my last tutorial I uncovered my favorite sound design techniques for creating custom drum kits. In this installment I’m going to share with you my two favorite sound design techniques for creating that filtered bass sound heard on so many underground hip hop records. Being that I’m promoting the software movement in hip hop I’m writing these tutorials for users of FL Studio 4.5 . Those of you not familiar with FL Studio 4.5, it’s a very powerful and affordable software Sampler/Synthesizer that was made famous by underground hip hop hero 9th Wonder of the exceptional hip hop group Little Brother. Since I wrote my last tutorial I have pushed myself to learn more about FL Studio 4.5 and I fell more in love with it more as I quickly uncovered more of it’s strengths by experimenting with it’s ultra-powerful filters and incredibly easy to use editor. I will breakdown these features within this tutorial as I will also upgrade the drums tutorial to meet my latest findings.
The filters on FL Studio 4 not only help define the shape of your sound but they also use far less RAM than memory hogs like VST and Direct-X plugins. By using these filters and editing tools I now have the ability to do it all within the FL Studio 4.5 environment. Why am I talking so much about filters you ask? Because I’m going to show you how to get that early 90’s filtered bass sound used by myself and other notable hip hop producers to this very day. I have to credit Chubb Rock and Howie Tee for teaching me how to use filters back in the late 80’s while Howie was producing the classic hip hop album “Youngest In Charge” by Special Ed, The funny thing was Chubbs showed me how to filter sampled loops and Howie showed me how to filter synthesizers which is pretty much the same process but they didn’t do it on an extreme level like most producers do today. I was taught how to use filters as a corrective tool rather than a creative tool. Now I’m going to show you what I learned on my own over the years. Filtering is so easy with FL Studio 4.5 you’re going to laugh at how simple it is.
Bass: The Filtered Frontier
Ok you just created the most banging drum kit in the universe and programmed a hot drum pattern, now you want to drop a hot bass line that no one ever heard on a hip hop joint before so now you dig though your library of mp3’s, your creates of vinyl and your 8-track tapes of music in search of a hot bass line. You find one, but wait it’s not open. There are all sorts of vocals, drums, keyboards, strings, guitars and horns interfering with that must have bass line. You can easily give up and search for an open bass solo or you can solve this problem by using the filters. FL Studio 4.5 has 8 primary filters and 2 secondary filters. This gives you the power to shape your sample and create a custom low end sound. Remember my tutorials are based on my production and sound design techniques. If you want to learn the basics of FL Studio 4.5 I suggest you consult the very user friendly help file that’s included with FL Studio 4.5. To learn more about filters type in the word filter in the search window and select the page Cutoff and Resonance Filter. Ok let’s filter our bass loop.
1. First find your sample of choice with that hot bass line you crave so much. (I prefer 4 bar loops myself, but do you what you feel will work for you.)
2. Then chop it up using the WaveEditor in the Channel Settings panel. (The WaveEditor in FL Studio 4.5 is straight forward that you’ll find it very easy to use.)
3. After you chop up your loop to perfection, change sample from Stereo to Mono, normalize it and save it to your samples folder. (The reason I suggested to you set your intended bass line sample to mono is because back the days the bass was usually panned slightly to the left or right on most recordings.)
4. Now assign your intended bass sample to a channel.
5. In the Channel Settings panel click on the Instrument Properties button and you will find our Primary filter settings.
6. Go over to the filter and you’ll notice two knobs labeled Cut (Filter Cutoff Frequency) and Res (Filter Resonance (Q)) and a drop down window that features 8 filters. Click on the filter called SVF LPx2 and turn both the Cut and Res knobs till you find your idea bass sound. See I told you it was simple, but hold up a sec before you get all excited there’s another filter I want to show you that I think you’re going to love.
7. In the Channel Settings panel click on the Miscellaneous Properties button and take notice of the Levels Adjustment section. This is where you can define newly filtered bass line more by adjusting the Cut and Res knobs. You can also adjust your bass line further by turning the volume up or lower depending on your personal tastes. (I usually like to bounce the meter and then bring it down to a level that doesn’t drown out my kick.)
Ok there you have it, a filtered sampled bass line. Now imagine for a second if you were to chop up and flip your loop then filter it as low as possible. You just created your own bass line and the sample detectives at ASCAP and BMI can’t touch you because you technically created that bass line and by you filtering it how are they going to know your sample source? (Message!) Now that you got the hang of filtering loops you can also apply these same filters to any of the synthesizer presets in FL Studio 4.5 to create your own custom bass sounds.
See, I told you it was easy.
The Proceed tutorial was underwritten by The Marriott Corporation TM “We Bring Good Hip Hop Back to Life” (Only heads in my age group will get that joke, You younglings going to have to sit this joke out)
Peace - Pete Marriott 2.0
After reading a few posts here by cats who want to get started in music production and having a few OkayProducers inbox me about my favorite production techniques. I decided to write a tutorial series that I call OkayTutorial. My writing style is a bit unorthodox like some of my production methods so bare with me because it’s a process that I feel will help you learn effectively. These tutorials were written with software users in mind but cats with hardware can apply some of these methods. I’m personally promoting the software movement in hip hop production because in this day and age it makes more than enough sense to do so especially if you can’t afford to build your own Electric Lady or Hit Factory. For those of you skeptics who consider applications such as Fruity Loops as a joke because it only costs $100-150 to purchase, I got something to tell you: All you need is a good Windows based PC with a good amount of memory and some great plugins and you’re good to go. If you’ve read any of my past posts you’d know that I have my MPC in a box in my closet along with my other hardware instruments Why you ask? Because my software does it all better, faster and it takes up less space in my den. Now that I got that out of the way lets get into the art of hip hop production.
OkayProducers you want your drums to Bump & Pop huh? Well I’ll share the Marriott family secret recipe with you and I hope you do the same for others who want to learn the craft of hip hop music production. For me it’s all about preparation and sound design. Thanx to ?uest reminding me in the drum question post about how petty some of these cats who own the masters to some of these breaks are, I went back into my old stacking technique. I originally learned about stacking in the late 80’s from my boy Fat Doug a former ghost producer and writer for Hurby Luv Bug’s Idol Makers camp. Remember “Antoinette” that chick who got into it with M.C. Lyte? Well Doug was the lyrical and musical force behind her. Anyway, Doug taught me how to stack drum loops to create new and interesting breaks. Back then we had this unwritten rule where if someone showed you something you were to expound on that technique so being that I was into programming my own drum patterns I came up with the idea about stacking the kicks, snares, and hi hats over the years with more experimentation I mastered the very technique I’m sharing with you today.
The three professional production tools I’m using for this tutorial is:
• Image Line/Cakewalk FL Studio 4 Producer Edition (Fruity Loops) which is a loop based production application that includes a powerful array of tools that includes several samplers, synthesizers, effects and a sequencer that will make the MPC look slow and dimwitted. (Pending that you have a powerful PC with a good soundcard with low latency.) www.fruityloops.com
• Adobe Audition 1.0 (Cool Edit Pro 2.0) is a powerful audio editor and recording and mixing application www.adobe.com
• Propellerheads Recycle 2.0. Is a must have slicing tool that allows you to chop your loop in several places and manipulate your loops by changing the tempo or time signature. This is clearly my favorite tool because it saves me a lot of time. www.propellerheads.se
1. First you have to decide what kind of drum kit you’re trying to build for the song you’re creating. Today I’m going for a small room kit. I find the best way of going about this today is to find 3 drum loops that share sonic similarities. To expound on ?uest’s recent revelation of drums used by Pete Rock and J Dilla Im going to show you my technique using “Funky President” by James Brown, “Impeach The President” by the Honeydrippers and “God Made Me Funky” by “The Headhunters were recorded in small rooms using drum kits were made out of wood and the engineers back then used fewer microphones then they do today so what you think is an effect on some of these drum breaks are actually the mics picking up all the sounds in the room where the drums where recorded. I personally love that stuff and I like having that ambience in my music because that room noise is what makes the drums sound so cool.
2. I then sample my selected breaks flat, no EQs, no dynamic processors and no effects into Adobe Audition. To insure that your signal is at a good level turn on the meters in Audition and adjust the input level in your soundcard’s mixer to gently tap the number 0 on the meter. The reason you want it to tap is so you don’t distort your signal. Although these applications allow you to produce your music visually, I also find that using your ears as well as your eyes can help you a great deal so make sure what you’re seeing coincides with what you’re hearing. (Message!!!)
3. I then save and export my drum loops to a folder in the .wav format and import them into Propellerheads Recycle where I chop (Cut, edit, truncate, slice or whatever ****ing egghead term you want to use) my drums at the very tip of the attack point. If you’re using a slicing tool like Recycle you can visually cut your samples to perfection within seconds. (If you’re using hardware like the like MPC, ASR or Triton you can find your attack point by pressing the lowest key while scrolling to your desired destination. This of course will take longer. (Message!!!)
4. Within the Recycle environment I normalize my slices at 90% a lot of cats do it at 100% which is cool if you’re not using any dynamic processors at all but thanks to Viacom and Clear Channel your music got to be loud enough to compete with the other cats out thurr. Later on where going to use compression. So how you use your EQs and dynamic processors in the preparation stage is the key to making your drums Bump & Pop. After you normalize your slices export them to another folder.
5. Now open FL Studio 4 set it up to host 3 samples.
6. Ok here’s where the fun part begins; Sound Design. For those of you who don’t know about FL Studio I want you to go to the website I linked for you and check out the features. If you check out the specs you should find that FL Studio 4 has two sets of parametric EQs. The first EQ is a 3-Band parametric that’s very easy to find on FL’s mixer. For those of you not familiar with EQ I’ll break it down real quick. EQ was originally designed to correct frequencies in recordings that sometimes get lost in recordings. But pioneering record producers of 60’s & 70 started using EQ as an experimental sound shaping effect. This eventually found its way over to hip hop music thanx to the legendary producers such as Marly Marl, Hurby Luv Bug & Howie Tee. The other Parametric EQ is a 7-band virtual rack plug-in called Fruity Parametric EQ. What I usually do is load my three best kicks from my sliced samples folder in each sampler (Usually open kicks with no hit hats.) and assign each kick to a separate mixer channel. I then load the Fruity Parametric EQ in each mixer channel to coincide with each kick. There is a preset on The Fruity Parametric EQ called Bass Drum Punch, open it in each channel.
7. I then step write a 4 count rhythm in FL 4 using each kick so I can play this pattern while I’m adjusting the EQ on each kick to meet my sonic likings. By doing this you’re actually creating a new drum sound that is yours to claim because there are thousands of sonic possibilities. So play with your EQ and levels to create your custom kick sound. Just remember to save your pattern in case something goes wrong like a power outage.
8. Once I have established my desired kick sound, I remove all of my steps except the downbeat and export my custom kick to a folder called “Custom Drums”. I then repeat the process for my snare and Hat.
9. Now that I have created my custom drum kit its time for me to create a pattern which I can do in step writing mode, or manually by using my midi controller. I personally enjoy doing it manually so I can perfect it in the piano roll editor. After my pattern is created I then go into the basic envelope mode to adjust the ADSR functions. ADSR stands for Attack, Decay, and Sustain & Release. How you adjust your attack and decay is the very key to creating a buoyant rhythm track that will bounce in the ears of your intended listeners. You want to adjust your attack & decay on each drum sound to give your rhythm a tight and sometimes loose feel so your rhythms will have that soulful bounce. The more bounce your drums have the more danceable your tracks become and the better your chances of getting the DJ’s to play your **** up in the clubs and on the radio mix-shows. I stress this point especially to male producers because most females especially love to dance. Don’t believe me, go to a club sit back relax with a few drinks and watch what songs get the ladies on the dance floor. But while you’re checking out the ladies shake their ass, take notes of how their bodies react to the movements of the kicks and snares. Also take notice of what records the DJ plays more than once. What’s my point? Your kicks need to Bump and your snares need to Pop in order to compete for dance floor time because the ladies want to dance! That’s why certain cats are killing the charts and most of our progressive hip hop heroes are not. My personal theory is progressive hip hop music can be danceable too and I’m personally trying to take my new sound on that level. Now let’s get back to the technical ****.
10. I usually play my rhythm and adjust the attack and decay on my drum sounds as needed to get that bounce. I usually adjust these envelopes according to the sound of my kick, snare and hat. The best way of doing so is by giving my kick and snare a short attack and decay setting so they have a swift response and my hats a looser feel so my rhythms have a semi break beat type of vibe.
11. After I obtained that bounce I’m looking for, I turn on the normalize function and apply a modest amount of EQ using the 3-band EQ on the channel mixer but this time I’m using EQ as a corrective tool. The reason I do this is because that’s where the Bump & Pop happens. Most cats I know apply compression first but I find when you adjust the room sound of your drums with EQ first you have greater control of the sound you’re trying to achieve. Sometimes I use an extreme amount of EQ if I want to get crazy with it but most of the times I use my EQ sparingly.
12. I then apply the vintage compression preset within each of the drum sound’s effect channel. I don’t know who programmed this setting at Image Line but they were right on the money because it adds punch to drum sounds without any coloration. Depending on the tone of the kick and snares I decease the amount
13. For Lessonheads using other compressors the Vintage setting is: Threshold: -15.0 db, Ratio: 8.0:1, Gain: 8.6, Attack 29.2 ms, Release 1532 ms. This setting usually will give your drums that punch you hear on records being played in the clubs but you have use it correctly because if you over do it your **** will muddy or distorted.
14. Sometimes you might have to adjust your channel mixer EQ a bit more but that basically does the job. Once you have created your complete drum pattern you can mix your levels to your idea of sonic perfection export it in a 2-channel stereo mix or you can export it in separate channels. I personally export to both because I never know if I’m going to reuse my drum parts for other projects.
Next week tutorial will be about bass lines. I hope this helps and I would love to see some feed back on this tutorial within this post. I will try to answer your questions the best as I can. If you have any question that’s not based on this tutorial inbox and I’ll try and answer you the best I can.
Pete Marriott’s Hip Hop Production Tutorial 02: Bass
In my last tutorial I uncovered my favorite sound design techniques for creating custom drum kits. In this installment I’m going to share with you my two favorite sound design techniques for creating that filtered bass sound heard on so many underground hip hop records. Being that I’m promoting the software movement in hip hop I’m writing these tutorials for users of FL Studio 4.5 . Those of you not familiar with FL Studio 4.5, it’s a very powerful and affordable software Sampler/Synthesizer that was made famous by underground hip hop hero 9th Wonder of the exceptional hip hop group Little Brother. Since I wrote my last tutorial I have pushed myself to learn more about FL Studio 4.5 and I fell more in love with it more as I quickly uncovered more of it’s strengths by experimenting with it’s ultra-powerful filters and incredibly easy to use editor. I will breakdown these features within this tutorial as I will also upgrade the drums tutorial to meet my latest findings.
The filters on FL Studio 4 not only help define the shape of your sound but they also use far less RAM than memory hogs like VST and Direct-X plugins. By using these filters and editing tools I now have the ability to do it all within the FL Studio 4.5 environment. Why am I talking so much about filters you ask? Because I’m going to show you how to get that early 90’s filtered bass sound used by myself and other notable hip hop producers to this very day. I have to credit Chubb Rock and Howie Tee for teaching me how to use filters back in the late 80’s while Howie was producing the classic hip hop album “Youngest In Charge” by Special Ed, The funny thing was Chubbs showed me how to filter sampled loops and Howie showed me how to filter synthesizers which is pretty much the same process but they didn’t do it on an extreme level like most producers do today. I was taught how to use filters as a corrective tool rather than a creative tool. Now I’m going to show you what I learned on my own over the years. Filtering is so easy with FL Studio 4.5 you’re going to laugh at how simple it is.
Bass: The Filtered Frontier
Ok you just created the most banging drum kit in the universe and programmed a hot drum pattern, now you want to drop a hot bass line that no one ever heard on a hip hop joint before so now you dig though your library of mp3’s, your creates of vinyl and your 8-track tapes of music in search of a hot bass line. You find one, but wait it’s not open. There are all sorts of vocals, drums, keyboards, strings, guitars and horns interfering with that must have bass line. You can easily give up and search for an open bass solo or you can solve this problem by using the filters. FL Studio 4.5 has 8 primary filters and 2 secondary filters. This gives you the power to shape your sample and create a custom low end sound. Remember my tutorials are based on my production and sound design techniques. If you want to learn the basics of FL Studio 4.5 I suggest you consult the very user friendly help file that’s included with FL Studio 4.5. To learn more about filters type in the word filter in the search window and select the page Cutoff and Resonance Filter. Ok let’s filter our bass loop.
1. First find your sample of choice with that hot bass line you crave so much. (I prefer 4 bar loops myself, but do you what you feel will work for you.)
2. Then chop it up using the WaveEditor in the Channel Settings panel. (The WaveEditor in FL Studio 4.5 is straight forward that you’ll find it very easy to use.)
3. After you chop up your loop to perfection, change sample from Stereo to Mono, normalize it and save it to your samples folder. (The reason I suggested to you set your intended bass line sample to mono is because back the days the bass was usually panned slightly to the left or right on most recordings.)
4. Now assign your intended bass sample to a channel.
5. In the Channel Settings panel click on the Instrument Properties button and you will find our Primary filter settings.
6. Go over to the filter and you’ll notice two knobs labeled Cut (Filter Cutoff Frequency) and Res (Filter Resonance (Q)) and a drop down window that features 8 filters. Click on the filter called SVF LPx2 and turn both the Cut and Res knobs till you find your idea bass sound. See I told you it was simple, but hold up a sec before you get all excited there’s another filter I want to show you that I think you’re going to love.
7. In the Channel Settings panel click on the Miscellaneous Properties button and take notice of the Levels Adjustment section. This is where you can define newly filtered bass line more by adjusting the Cut and Res knobs. You can also adjust your bass line further by turning the volume up or lower depending on your personal tastes. (I usually like to bounce the meter and then bring it down to a level that doesn’t drown out my kick.)
Ok there you have it, a filtered sampled bass line. Now imagine for a second if you were to chop up and flip your loop then filter it as low as possible. You just created your own bass line and the sample detectives at ASCAP and BMI can’t touch you because you technically created that bass line and by you filtering it how are they going to know your sample source? (Message!) Now that you got the hang of filtering loops you can also apply these same filters to any of the synthesizer presets in FL Studio 4.5 to create your own custom bass sounds.
See, I told you it was easy.
The Proceed tutorial was underwritten by The Marriott Corporation TM “We Bring Good Hip Hop Back to Life” (Only heads in my age group will get that joke, You younglings going to have to sit this joke out)
Peace - Pete Marriott 2.0
