Transcription
Yo, what's up? My name is Moonboy, and today we're making melodic house. Today, we're going to be blending two of my favorite house genres: the hype and electric energy of B-house. So, in this video, we're going to be making a full song, start to finish, combining both these styles. So that by the end of this workshop, you'll learn how to make beautiful chord melodies, drops that literally give you the chills, and even a hype drop that will get the whole crowd jumping. Okay, now I'm hyped, let's get into it.
Step number one to making insane house is the drum beat. House is around 120 to 130 BPM. If you go to the top left here, you can change your BPM; 126 is what we're going to do today. Let's build our drum beat. We start with a kick on every beat, and then we're going to add a clap or a snap on the second beat. Then we add a hat on the off-beats, and then we add some rides to give it some more depth. If you have a clap or a snap, you can move it slightly offset from the kick to give it more of a crunch. Now, because we're going to be blending some bass house elements, we're also going to make a heavy, heavy drum beat for the second drop. This time, I'm using heavier drum samples, but I'm going to add some groove to the hats, and also I'm going to add a crash and some more rides. Nice. A great thing to do at the end of the drum beat is adding a fill. Now we have a great house beat.
Step number two: the melody. I like to start my songs with a really, really good chord progression. This really gives me a feeling of like what the song is going to be, and I can get inspired by it and just hear a ton of ideas. So, for this one, I want to go for a nostalgic, old-school trance vibe. So the entire song is basically going to be made from this one chord progression. So, for example, this bass note right here, we'll be using for any pad bass or sub, will be this root note, and these top notes will be saw syn; you probably make the lead melody from this top note. So a chord progression really is a building block to a song. Once you have this, you can pretty much just go whatever direction you want by creating a pad from this, some big choirs, ARP melody using this top right here to create like a synth lead, using these root notes right here for pad basses or Reese basses. Now, from this point is where we add our synths or anything we want to convert this core progression into.
Okay, for our first synth, let's do a trance pluck. Let's extend our drum beats to be the length of the full chord progression. Okay, now let's make a beautiful trance pluck lead. Create a new MIDI track; this is what controls a synthesizer, and then we're going to throw in Serum. To start by adding in a nice pluck preset, I'm going to be using presets from my free Matrix beta pack. Now, let's copy our chord progression into Serum's MIDI. Now, using our song's chord progression, we're going to use the root note and the top note to create a trance-like pattern. Here's an easy way to do this: go into the root note, and we're going to draw a dotted rhythm that repeats every quarter note. If you select the area you want to duplicate in the Endo right here, pressing Command D, we can duplicate these notes very easily. We can go ahead and remove this middle note, and then we're going to copy and paste this rhythm from the root note up to the top, and then just going to move it one space over. You can press the right arrow key or just drag it. This is a really sick pattern. You can even improvise melodies with this. All you have to do now is copy and paste this pattern into the rest of the chord progression. Let me know in the comments below if you're going to be trying this out for yourself. You can find really versatile presets like this in my new production suite, Matrix. A really awesome thing to do is to automate the filter cut-off to rise as the progression progresses. You can do this by clicking this automation arrow in Ableton right here, and then clicking wherever you want to automate on Serum. We want to automate the cut-off; click this point, drag it up, and if we hold Option, can bend this waveform. Sounds so sick. So now we have a beautiful trance synth. After we have this, you're going to experiment with different rhythms; you don't only have to do the dotted rhythm, you can just get creative. Here is something I did that I think is really awesome. So nice. I love these kinds of patterns. After this eight-bar pattern, let's rise it up into this big, beautiful chord synth. Here's where the chords are going to come in handy. So let's make another MIDI clip and add those chords in there as well. Open up Serum, turn on oscillator B; we're going to add more voices in this, this on tab right here, and see how it immediately makes it wide. We do that for both; maybe the first one could have 16, adjust to your liking. Let make it the second oscillator and octop high, maybe a little bit lower. Next, we're going to make it bigger by going into the MIDI, select all, Command C and Command V to copy and paste, and then shift down to duplicate. Now we have double the notes stacked on top of each other, so big, big and nice. Now we can adjust the attack to make it more smooth, add some release, add a filter.
Now, before we keep adding some small tweaks and effects, I want to share with you some secret sauce: the secret to adding more depth and character to synth is layering it with maybe a pad or a vocal. I'm going to use some noises from my Eternity pack. I made tons of layers to be able to be used in synths and pretty much anything. Just make sure we turn the keyboard mode on, turn up the volume since there's a ton of voices as well, make sure you turn up the poly amount right here. This is how it sounds with only the layer. Let's bring up the S; sounds so good. Now that we have a great Mega saw, let's make it even bigger by adding a base layer first. Before we add the base layer, I'm going to turn down the low end to give room for it. You can do this by adding an EQ, make it a high pass to cut out those frequencies in the low end. Now we're going to create another Serum; we're just going to duplicate this track and remove the EQ, and then in it this preset to remove everything from it. Now let's create another MIDI track for the base layer, add in Serum again. Now remember how I said we're going to use the root note of our chord progression? This is what we're going to be copying and pasting into our base. Here's what we have; we can make it an octave lower to make it more deep, control all, shift down, add on a filter, it lower; we could even put it down another octave, and we can add a second oscillator for the mid layer. Now all together with the saw; so nice. Okay, I know this sounds really, really big, and we kept adding more, but now we're really going to take it to the next level. This is god-tier sound design; we're going to be bending and shaping our synth to create pure ear candy. We're going to create one central hub for effects where we're going to route all kinds of audio to it, whether it's synths or vocals. Rather than having to apply effects to each individual sound, we're going to have one place to do it. To do this, we create what's called a bus, so whatever effects I put on this, it's going to affect whatever I send to it. Now we're going to group together all of our synths for now, and then we're going to route it. If you don't see this menu, click this IO option right here. This tab here tells you where the audio is going, so this synth group is going straight to the master. What we're going to do is send it to bus one, and then bus one goes down to the master. Next, all you have to do is press the end button to allow the bus to receive audio.
Now, here's how to do what I call the butterfly effect. First, we need to automate the volume; there's a lot of ways to do this. I like using Serum effects. Drag and drop Serum effects into our bus. Now, to control the volume in a good way, let's turn on the noise option right here, and then note latch; this connects Serum effects to the BPM. Now we're going to automate this level right here. So let's grab LFO1, click and hold this, drag and drop it to the level, bring the level down, and then in this little ticker right here, let's drag it up. Now we have like a floating feeling. Let's turn off BPM to make it more free form. So sick. Try to smooth a bit. Now we can create some really, really cool effects like this. There's so many different possibilities with this. Now we're going to automate this rate. If you press A on your keyboard, or if you click this automation button on Ableton, it'll open up the automation lane. Click whatever you want to automate on Serum. We want to automate LFO rate. As you see the red markers is moving where the bus is at, we're going to click a point here to make a mark, find the spot we want it to start at, and then click another point and find a part we want to end. Sounds really nice so far. Now we can level it up by automating the pan left to right. Let's go to LFO2, drag and drop to the pan, and let's make this a little bit less; it's going left and right. Lastly, we're going to automate the filter as well to kind of be flowing in and out. I'll just using LFO 3 for that, and then we can make a super slow LFO and kind of draw it. Now, if you want tons of same effect presets that add rhythm or bend and shape sound in very, very interesting and awesome ways, you can find over 150 synth and FX presets in my new production suite, Matrix.
Okay, now that we created this really cool effect, we need some euphoric vocals. So I sent this idea off to my buddy Sean from the UK to write something really sick for this, for you to come and bring me life. We actually ended up making a ton more vocals for Matrix; I just can't get over how sick it came out. This hook right here is amazing. So sick. We're going to have this hook play right when the mega chords come in. Here is where the bus effects we made earlier is going to come in handy. Go into this vocals right here, click this over here, route it to bus one, and now listen to how it combines and connects with the saw chord as well. Sounds so big, so epic, big and cinematic, but also very beautiful at the same time. And what's really cool about this effect is you can create so many different kinds of variations. If you didn't want to flutter and you want it to be more choppy, kind of like a stutter effect, which is kind of nice. This effect is kind of cool; it sounds like it's reversing. So many different kinds of things you can do with this.
Okay, before we go on to the next step, I'm so excited to announce my Producer Discovery contest to celebrate my new Matrix production suite. Five producers who make the most creative song from the free Matrix beta pack will win some insane producer gear. First prize will be the new M3 MacBook Pro, filled with music production software. Other prizes will also include professional MIDI keyboards, high-quality music production headphones, and that is not all. I'm so stoked to say that the five producers who win will also get access to my mentorship program. And to enter the contest, all you have to do is make the most creative song you can using the free Matrix beta pack. These contests literally give me life; like seriously, they're so inspiring. Oh yo. Oh, some of our contest winners even got releases on major record labels like Atlantic, which is insane. I'm so glad I can do something like this for the community. Really shout out some well-deserving artists out there. All right guys, happy producing. Can't wait to hear what you make. Good luck. Now let's get on to one of the most exciting parts.
Step number four: the drop. So now we're going to bring all the elements we made together—the synth, the vocals, the drum beats, the bass—into one epic drop. Okay, honestly, this was way better than I expected; I can literally hear this at like the main stages at festivals, dude. Now it's time to go insane with this. Let's now make a bass house drop for the second drop.
Step number five: drop it even harder. Here's how to make the power chords. Okay, this is one of the coolest basses that you can create; it consists of two layers. We're going to have a top lead layer and the sub layer, and these are going to be incredibly simple; it's going to blow your mind. So let's open up two Serums. Check the arm button on both; I press the Command click on both of them, and you can play the notes on both of them. The sub layer is going to be a simple sine wave; turn down the octave by two so it can be a deep bass, nice, and then we're going to turn up the octave of the lead synth. Now the trick here is we're going to crush both these sounds together, kind of smooshing them together to create this like really gritty layer. So we're going to select both of these tracks and pressing Command G, and that'll group them together, and then we're going to drag and drop Serum effects to the group. So that means we're going to add effects to both of them together because it's in the group. So now we have the sub layer going to the effects, and then this lead layer going to the effects as well. Now, in order to crush both these sounds, we're going to start by adding Distortion, and then bring up the drive, and now they're like one. So sick. So now that they're crushed together, we're going to add a little bit more effects to make it even cooler, like Hyperdimension, dragging it, putting it after Distortion. This adds some width. Compressor to mix them together even more. Turn on the Multi-Band, drag Delay and Reverb after everything so that it doesn't get crushed together. We're going to bring down the wet of the delay, filter it out, and make it faster. What Reverb and Delay does is creates more space within the sound. Now, because this is bass house, I want to make the baseline have a rhythm. What we're going to do is we're going to create volume automation inside the lead and the sub. So for the lead, I want it to be very fast. We have L1, put it on the level, drag the level down, bring this guy up. If the lead has a volume animation and the sub doesn't, it has this really, really cool effect of coming in and out. Turn trigger on; we're going to make it like this, like a one-shot. You can even turn up the octave of the saw, and that's literally with just a regular saw wave. If you add different LFO tables, so many different possibilities, you know. So now I'm going to add an LFO on the sub as well; same thing, but this time I'm just going to make it go down slowly instead of fast. Like the lead Envelope as well. Now here is where the magic happens; we're going to create a power chord with these two layers. For the root notes, we have G, D, D sharp, F; top notes, we have A sharp, F, G. So we use the root note for the bass, as you can see right here, and the top notes for the lead, and then we'll have this. And so now when we play it, it sounds so sick. Okay, now we're going to spice this up for the drop. I really want to add a rhythm pattern for these notes, something like… Changed up the top lead sound a little bit by adding a new oscillator and some Hyperdimension, and after adjusting, here's what I did. By the way, guys, included in Matrix is tons of insane presets like these, utilizing these techniques. I've created also course material that I'll be giving to everyone who gets Matrix. You can learn more about it in the description below. Okay, so I organized and laid out what we have, and here is what I did.
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