Transcription
SDK Kid has blown up and went from underground to a superstar insanely quick. His unique style and mystique have definitely added to his rise to fame. But there's one key thing that acts as the backbone for all of his success, the crazy production behind his record.
So today, we're going to make two 100% original SDK style beats from start to finish, going over all of the production techniques used in his signature dark, dystopian, and underground sound. There's going to be a ton of gems and unique techniques in this video that you can apply to your production. So sit back and get ready to go into the grimy, dark, and distorted world of SD Kids Production.
SD Kids Production always brings you to this dark, hypnotizing world. And the way this is done is with the melodies. His melodies are always super repetitive, earrabbing, and all have this dark, tense sound to them, which is actually really easy to achieve. And I'm going to show you that in a second. But first, there's a few core elements that you want to keep in mind when making an SDK style melody.
First thing you need is dissonant and ambient synths. It has to have more of like this textural dark ambience than like a very clear core progression kind of sound. The second thing you need is some sort of eargrabbing element. A catchy melody with something like a synth brass on four raws, a synth arps on Prague, etc., etc. Third thing you need is repetitiveness. I feel like this is really important to get that like hypnotic dark kind of sound that he has in his beats. And finally, you need silence in your melodies, which I'll explain more on later in the video a few different times.
But anyways, the easiest way to get started with one of these melodies is with some dissonant and dark synth pads, similar to the ones on Louis V Sandals. This sound is super easy to get. Let me show you inside the screen.
Okay, so the go-to MIDI pattern that you want to use for these SD kid type beats is just a minor chord. I'm using a piano just so you guys can hear the notes really clearly here. So, if we're going to do a C minor chord, you would go C, skip two notes right there, and then skip three notes right here, and you get this minor chord, right? So, you get this. And then what you want to do is you want to copy this middle note down one. So, normally in a lot of trap stuff, you'll do something somewhat like this, right? Where it's alternating these two notes and it gives that dark vibe. With these type of beats, to really get that tense, dark sound, you want to put these on top of each other. So, two notes that are like right on top of each other. And listen to how ugly it's going to sound in a good way, right? And then if we move these up an octave, so you can hear those as like the top notes, make the velocity louder, right? Compared to if I delete that note, it adds that like ugliness. So, just having something like that over and over, but on a synth sound is perfect.
So, I made that pattern using a crazy preset from Analog Console, which is the best analog lab bank that I've ever used. My boy Pride byJack sent that over to me, and it is insane. It is really crazy how realistic these presets are compared to like using real analog synths. They sampled and did a ton of crazy presets on some of the most legendary synths that I can't even get my hands on. Take a listen to some of these presets.
So, the way they did this is, as you can see, there's a ton of different analog console banks. I haven't even installed all of them, honestly. But you can go right here to like the vintage folder and you see like they have Jupiter 8s, memory mode, CS60, which is an insanely rare syn, profit fives, all this stuff. And these presets all have all of these parameters that you can play with on your MIDI keyboard to make it kind of emulate like you're using a real analog synth. So like for example on this one, I could be playing something which already sounds great by the way, but I could mess with the glide while I'm playing it. The chorus So you could record in a super simple synth idea like right, but then you could later automate it like a delay in to go like that's the the reason that working with analog synths sounds so good. And I'll leave a link in the description to check that out. This is not sponsored by the way. I was just genuinely really impressed with these presets. So, shout out to Jack and Ellis, the Synth Palace team, for making those cuz they sound insane.
Anyways, once I had that pattern down, it sounded cool already with that preset, but it felt a little bit empty. So, I put one of my go-to effects that I use inside of my Tone Flex plugin, reverse delay. And with that, you get this for the main layer of the sample. I love that choppy reverse texture that Tone Flex added. I use that effect all the time.
But anyways, once I had that, I wanted to build onto that tense sound that you get by layering those two notes on top of each other because again, songs like LV Sandals have that really dark intense kind of sound. So, I felt like just continuing to layer on on that dissonant note would just really bring that vibe to life. So, I grabbed the Profit V3 and I put down this super simple pattern. But it didn't sound edgy enough to me. If you listen to the scents on songs like Rottweiler and Dirty, they have this noisy, dirty sound to the synths. Okay. So, I wanted to sau up the sound a bit on this to get a similar vibe. And I've learned a sound design cheat code recently that is perfect for this. So, normally whenever you use the mod wheel on a synth, it might be doing something kind of similar to this, right? Where it's like messing with the cut off, but it it has a certain sound to it. So, recently, at least on the the profit emulations, you can change it from an LFO to the noise. So, what this does is it's going to modulate stuff like the filter cut off and all this, the frequency, which is like the pitch. It's going to modulate all that with the noise oscillator. So instead of like following like a normal like sine wave kind of pattern that's kind of predictable. It just sounds like I don't know exactly how it works but it sounds weird and [ __ ] up. So turn this switch all the way to noise and then I just chose B. So we're just messing with the pitch of oscillator B right now. And then so this is what our sound sounds like with no noise modulation. And then just watch when I add this in even just a little bit. That's that's more interesting. If you add a lot, it just makes it way dirtier somewhere around like that compared to this. Super fire. So, I messed around with that for a bit and you get this before and after.
Next up, if you listen to songs like Four Raws and Omens, you can hear this super repetitive kind of melody playing. To get that kind of sound, that kind of pattern, you really only need like three or four notes repeating over and over again. So, I did a similar kind of MIDI, but I chose a really weird like trippy sounding preset from the analog console bank instead of a more dry sounding one like he used on four raws. But anyways, this is what that pattern sounds like.
This was sounding fire, but I felt like everything so far was kind of like ambient, textural, trippy. You can't really tell what's going on with it. And I wanted something that stuck out a little bit that really grabbed your ear. Something a little bit more dry sounding. Kind of following the same idea of having that ear grabbing arp on Prague. And originally I actually messed around uh trying to do arp similar to that one, but it just kind of felt forced. So instead to do something similar, having like an ear grabbing thing that grabs your ear when you hear it. I used that concept, but I did it in a bit of a different way. That sounds insane. And I've been abusing this technique recently. So, let me hop in the screen and show you how to do it cuz it is super fun.
So, this trick that I've been abusing is using the Mini Moog synth from UAD. Originally, you get a sound like this is the the preset that I have chosen, right? Sounds cool. Sounds like a harsh analog synth. To make this really ear grabbing, you want to do something called D-tuning the oscillator. We're actually going to automate this in. So, it's not just as simple as like moving, right? This is the pitch of the oscillator right here. It's not just like moving it like that and then just playing all the notes like that. We're going to play one note. So, you can see on my like little keyboard right here, I'm just going to hold one note, right? But then we're going to move the pitch of one of the oscillators. So, there's three oscillators. There's oscillator one right here, two and three. The first one is playing the note, the C that I'm playing. We're going to pitch this up eight semmit tones. You hear how now it sounds like I'm playing a chord. But then we're going to record it in me playing it like this, right? Like moving that. You hear how like uneasy that sounds while it's like sliding down. Just it grabs your ears every time that I do that trick. And as you can see right here, I have recorded in the automation. So, we start high and then it goes down to where all of the notes are playing the same and then it rises back up.
Once I added that in with the other sounds, the main part of the loop was pretty much done. I kept the patterns super repetitive and simple because a lot of the reason why SD kids have this like hypnotizing like put you in a trance kind of vibe is because of the repetition.
Anyways, once I had all those sounds down, I bounced them all from MIDI into audio so that we can add in an essential part to his sound, silence. If you listen to LV Sandals, you can hear that at the end of every two bars, the melody cuts out completely, which gives it this really cool choppy kind of vibe. Also though, if you listen to songs like Omens, you can hear that the melody has this super choppy kind of sound. It's like almost before every synth note, it sounds like there's like a tiny silence that makes it feel like it's not quite smooth. I really like how a lot of his production uses this technique, so I wanted to put it into the melody. And I feel like this works really well on melodies that are just like this like cool ambient dark texture. Because sometimes when you have an ambient sound that just like goes out forever and ever, it can just start to feel a little bit messy. And when you add in that silence, it kind of like anchors everything together. It like adds bounce back into that ambience instead of just like wet reverb sound going on forever.
So anyways, to add this into the melody, I manually chopped the audio every two bars and then just drag the audio a little bit to the left to create these tiny silences. And even though it's subtle, it adds a nice vibe to the melo. Take a listen to before and after. Sounding fire.
And it's almost time to get into the drums. But before that, I wanted to add two little sounds to the breakdown section just to give the loop a little bit more variety so that if someone was flipping this loop, they had some more sections to choose from. And the first sound I added to this breakdown was a super dissonant synth brass sound similar to the one on Centuries. This sound instantly gives me that like dark cinematic kind of vibe. And I wanted to add that energy into our loop. So I grabbed this bright synth brass preset which is actually from Logic's stock plugin ES2. And I put down a super simple pattern using that two dissonant notes stacked on top of each other trick. Again, I'm just spamming that on all these melody layers. And then to finish that section off, I layered that with a synth bass. And you get this. Once I had that done, the melody was 100% finished.
So now it's time to get into the drums. And for this video, I'm doing something a little bit different. I'll be real, I am not the best at making these SDK kid type drums. I tried to make some myself, but I just wasn't liking how they were coming out. So I sent the loop into my Discord server, which is free to join, by the way. We have like over 30,000 people in there and told everyone to flip it SDKid style and if I liked their flips, I would add them into the video. My boy Samuel Brian came through and did a bunch of fire flips of the loop and he actually did a bunch of different beats. So instead of just showing you how to do one style of drums that SDKid raps on, I'm going to bring him on the video in a second to break down two different beats. one with that Elvie Sandal Cali man kind of like 190 BPM SD Kid stuff and the second one which is my personal favorite with that slower hard trap kind of sound songs like four raws Omen's Phantom etc. So let's dive right into that.
For this first beat which songs did you take inspiration from the most?
Uh for these ones uh 5 a.m. Kelly man Elvie Sandals and Mist were the biggest musical inspirations for this sort of beat.
Is it hood trap? I don't even know what it's is like hood trap kind of bounce or is it jerk?
Yeah, it's a combination of a lot of hood trap aesthetics and also like jerk sounds as well.
Whenever you got the loop, what is the first thing that you did to start this one off with the loop?
Mainly breaking it down into kind of two distinct sections like a chorus section and a verse section. For example, with the melody, I took that kind of main part which has that synth lead. And so that's kind of the the intro and the chorus of this beat and kind of chopped it up a little bit. And then with the verse section, it's got less layers which kind of allows for a little bit of arrangement variation. So I use this stem.
And then you noticed that you have like a silence at the end of every two bars. Why did you do that?
Having that pause has been something that I've noticed a lot with SD Kids album Rebel, which kind of allow the space for ad libs or extra vocal chance to be used. Phantom is a very big one that has that melodic break every two bars.
So once you had the loop chopped and how you wanted it, what's the first thing you did to start off the drums?
So the first thing uh with a lot of this kind of style is that prominence of what's called the clav rhythm in the snare pattern and like playing around with the velocities as well to get that bounce. Also a thing as well this rhythm traditionally it was used in a lot of bosanova sort of music. This is basically a modernized version of it with these sort of trap sounds being used for that rhythm instead.
Yeah. So what did you do after that?
So then I just went to plat pattern. So nice and crispy, nice and punchy. Now with these sort of beats, because they are such a fast tempo, it's really important to use a very simplistic 808 pattern. Like LV Sandals from its two bar phrase only uses one 808 and that's right on the start of that phrase.
But then you have stuff like M and Cali man that have two 808s. driving.
Okay.
So, I've kind of combined both and then you've got the second hit which is here. And then I've also got a open hat here. Um just makes the the 808 when it comes in really hit. Nice and simple. And then to eventually add more energy, I've added the stomp as well, which is um quite typical for this sort of genre. To show how important that technique is, here's the before with just the 808. And then this is what it sounds like. So it just gives that extra punch, that extra energy. And I feel like layering stuff in general works well at the fast BPMs because there's only so much room for like notes in the MIDI pattern cuz if you start adding rolls and all this crazy [ __ ] at these high BPMs, it just starts to sound like crackhead music. Sounds horrible. So if you keep it simple, but you just like kind of layer the sounds together, it sounds nice.
Absolutely. And then the final thing of this beat is the offbeat vocal chance. This is that kind of extra layer of rhythmic bounce. And even you can kind of see in the project file, I buried the velocity. And here's what all of those drums sounded like together. We'll play that final beat at the end of this video, and you guys can let me know which one you like better. But for now, let's go over his slower, hard trap style drums for the second beat.
So, you flipped this loop a lot different. I mean, the BPM is 127 versus 195 on that last one. What were the kind of songs that you were referencing whenever you were cooking this one up?
So, for this one, more of that sort of trap sort of style for SD Kid. So, Four Roars, uh, Century, Rottweiler, and Omens were definitely big inspirations for the this beat. So, for that hood trap sort of sound, uh, Wraith 9 is like the go-to. And then for this sort of style like um Century um Omen's uh Papo was one of the main producers for that SD kid trap sort of style.
Once you had the the loop where you wanted it, what did you start with on the drums for this one?
With this one, one of the kind of key foundations of this sort of style is utilizing that triplet grid kind of enables the beat to stand out from that traditional one, twostep pattern and allows for that kind of crazy experimentation with the rolls and the p. So, I started off with this close hat pattern. Uh, for the triplet hats in particular, um, Omen's was the biggest reference for that sort of style. So, yeah, mainly just focusing on that. Then I added the main snare. Then we add in the kick drum.
Fire. So what was next after that?
Then it was open hats. The open hat to kind of balance out that complexity. It's just very simple. From there it was then adding the vocal chance. Again like the previous beat. It's on the offbeats. So it gives it that additional bounce. And I think one thing with that pattern since it's so simple and like repetitive, it's nice to have something that's like very easy to predict that's Yeah. balancing it out and tying it together so it's not just complete mayhem.
Yeah, absolutely. From there, add in the the fill snares. The key with this sort of style is to go absolutely crazy with the fill snares. As a kid, I was always achieved. Just adds that extra energy and also gives it a bit of tonal variation within the beat as well. To add some extra variation, I've also got this triangle that acts like the stomp in the last beat. So the thing about the 808 here, you want to match the kind of chaotic level that's in a lot of these kind of trap centered songs by SD Kit. A key aspect is to use sliding or octave jumping 808s and then add some little little ear candy. Got a couple of sound effects. So, one that plays at the very start of the beat, which is this one here. So, just like a siren pretty much. And then finally, another sound effect kind of at the drop or the chorus section, which is just like a little blip.
Where do you get most of the drum sounds for these beats from?
If you want to have the most accurate sound selection to this sort of stuff, deconstructed kits are the way to go. like especially with like the 808s, the claps, the snares, high hats, all of that. For the first beat in general, like jerk or hood trap sort of kits. And then for the second one, um trap sort of kits as well.
Real quick, shout out to Samuel Bryan for actually coming on this video and give you guys some sauce. I'll put his Instagram down in the description and let me know in the comments if you guys like me bringing guests on to these kind of videos. But anyways, let's hear these final beats.
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All right, so that was beat one. Let's hear beat number two. And let me know in the comments which one you guys [ __ ] with more.
Heat. Heat. Heat. Hey, Heat.