The ULTIMATE Guide To Mixing Melodies

If you want to learn how to level up your melody's mix, this is the video for you. I'm going to be showing you the best effect plugins to use to mix your melodies, including a bunch of free ones. I'm going to show you how to flip boring ideas into super unique sounds by using effects really creatively. And I'm going to teach you how to mix your melodies to sound clean, full, and easy to use every single time. So whether you're new to making melodies or you're just looking to take your loops to the next level with some fire sauce, this video will have something for you. We have a ton to cover, so let's not waste any more time and dive right into it.

First off, I want to go over some of the more character-heavy creative kind of effects first rather than just going in and getting really surgical with an EQ, compressors, and all that kind of stuff because my philosophy is that you should get the character and sound design down first. Get the whole personality of your melody, your style out, and then figure out a way to make that sound clean and all mixed together well. So, first I'm going to go over the most creative effects that you can be using in almost any loop. And I'm going to show you guys the best plugins for each type of effect, including freebies for every single one of these plugins.

Starting off with saturation. So, saturation or distortion, whatever you want to call it, without getting too nerdy on like the exact thing that it does. Pretty much the reason that you would use it is when you have like a flat, bland VST sound like this one, that needs a little bit more character. So, I'm using this overtone pedal right here. And if we turn this on, you can hear the before and after. Before, turn the drive down a little bit to be a little bit more subtle. Saturation is such an underrated thing nowadays cuz everyone has the same like clean super digital sounding sounds and saturating them can make them feel way more analog. Like right, even if you just gain match that, like let's turn it down a little bit with the distortion so you're not just hearing it louder, you can hear that the character of the sound, it just has way more life to it. So I use this all the time on synths, especially. Um, but you can use it on almost every sound that you would put inside of a melody whenever it just feels like it's lacking presence. I wouldn't just add distortion just to add it, but whenever you feel like something is just a little flat or lacking its presence or lacking character or just like not cutting through enough. Saturation or distortion is a great thing to go to. Some of the best plugins that I found for saturation are the overtone 01 pedal inside of Tone Flex, the Mog Foger saturation, and the best free one that I used to use all the time is soft tubes saturation knob.

Next up, we've got one of my all-time favorite effects, delay. So, for delay, I'm going to demo it on the exact same sound that we were just working on, and I'm going to use this Echolux pedal right here. And obviously everyone knows that delay is, you know, like an echo. But I feel like a lot of people kind of underestimate how big of a difference it can make to make stuff sound completely full or completely different. So for example, without any delay, this is what our sound sounds like. If we add just the factory delay, already sounds way cooler. If we turn the feedback up to create like this like ambient feedback loop kind of sound and saturate the delay a little bit and then also use modulation, like it gives like the delay a d-tuned chorus kind of sound. Sometimes I even like to put the delay mix on 100%. And listen how much more character that has than this. And it can also make really awkward melodies sound super cool. Like some really weird pedal soundscapes and stuff like this one, for example, that I just played in completely unquantized. Sounds really random and weird. You throw some delay on it, you get this. So, stop only thinking of delay as just like an echo effect and more as something that can add a ton of character and depth into your melodies if you're using it right and actually tweaking all the knobs inside of your delay plugins. By far my favorite plugins for delay are H delay, the Echoflex pedal inside of Tone Flex. And for a really fire free one that I don't see too many people using, GSI Vera Speed is really good for like a nice vintage style delay. Even though it's a little limited, it has a really cool character to it.

Next up, we got reverb. So, obviously everyone knows reverb. It's like the go-to thing to just put on something if you need it to sound a little better. But I feel like one of my main uses that I find myself using reverb for is taking a really dry sound that needs some like softening. Like it sounds really harsh and just like in your face, not in a good way, and kind of just like softening it around the edges and obviously adding that like reverb and spacey kind of sound. So, for example, I really like to use it on vocal chops. You hear how that just gets a little like it's a little harsh. So if we put some reverb, >> turn it down a little bit. >> And with reverb, there's a bunch of different types of reverb modes. In my experience, halls are really good for more ambient, super long reverb times. Plates are good for like a more vintage style reverb. But as you can see, if you just click through all these different reverb modes, they all have a different character, even with the same decay time and mix settings. And one underrated thing that I don't really see people doing with the reverb too much is using the EQ on the reverb to cut out low end or high end to make it exactly what you want it to sound like. Cuz if you put a really heavy reverb like this, you can hear that the low end is going to get a little muddy, right? But you can cut that out with the low cut right here and make sure that the reverb is only affecting the frequencies that you want it to. My favorite reverb plugin has got to be Valhalla Vintage Verb. It just works every time. But Retroverb inside of Tone Flex is also really good cuz it has three different reverb modes: Hall, room, and a plate reverb. That's like a nice vintage kind of stuff. And you can saturate the reverb a lot, which is really cool. But for the free reverb, Native Instruments Realm or RAM, I'm not sure how to pronounce it, is a really good free option. So definitely check that out.

Next up, we've got chorus. So chorus in my opinion, I mean a lot of people talk about it like it's good to use whenever you want something to be wider, but I really use it to make especially synths just sound more analog. So right synth with no effects sounds like this. If we just turn on the chorus as is. It just has a little bit more of that analog feeling. Yeah, it's a little bit wider, but you can also get really creative kind of effects out of the chorus. You don't need to just use it as like a something to just make stuff a little bit wider. So, if we turn the depth up, that's essentially going to increase how much d-tune is happening with the chorus. You hear how that sounds a little ugly compared to this. So, you can turn the depth up and the rate controls how fast the d-tune is. You hear you can get really bad weird sounds out of it. But if you do that tastefully and then mess with stuff like the drive on the chorus, so the saturation inside of a chorus, you can just make your synth sound a little bit more analog. But I would say my favorite use for the chorus is to make a synth bass like this sit better inside of the mix. It kind of acts similar to the reverb. Not obviously completely different effect, but it kind of like softens it around the edges. Makes it a little bit smoother sounding, right? So, with it and then without. The Moger Foger chorus pedal is amazing and it's really good at like giving a really analog classic sound. And the chorus pedal inside of Tone Flex gives that same kind of vibe. And the reason I go to grab this one is cuz of that drive knob on it. I really like to kind of saturate the chorus. It sounds sick. But one of my all-time favorite free chorus plugins has got to be Baby Audio's chorus plugin, which is called Magic Switch. It's really dope.

But moving on, we've got filters and resamplers. Kind of the same thing, kind of not. So, for filters and downsamplers, what I want to talk about is the difference between downsampling or resampling something and filtering it. So, if you're going for like that Drake underwater effect, which is 90% of the time that you're going to be using this kind of plugin, I feel like the thing I used to do when I was more a beginner is I would just take an EQ, right? >> And just do something like that. If we talk about how that EQ actually works, all that's doing is turning down the volume of these frequencies right here, right? But whenever you use a resampler or a downsampling plugin, literally completely just gets rid of those frequencies from the audio. So, this is the EQ. And this is using the low freak resampler. You hear how much more low quality that sounds? That is actually how Noah 40 goes about getting the Drake sound >> and it has a lot more character to it >> compared to just EQing it. So, the top uses for that are definitely vocals as number one, full loops or samples, and then honestly any instrument can go into that if you want it more filtered for a B section or just more of a chill kind of energy. The first plugin that I really started to do this with is Decimort 2, which sounds amazing. So, I built something really similar with Lowreak from Tone Flex. And if you want a free plugin that can do this kind of sound, Simatics Origin is really good for this.

Next up, we've got movement plugins. We got tremolo, side chaining, and panning. So, a great example of when I would use a plugin like Shaper Box or some sort of tremolo is whenever I have a pattern like this with a kind of boring sound, right, where nothing's really happening. And you want to just like add a little bit of movement to it so it's not so dull. So, one of my favorite things to do inside of here is add the side chain, which will just add this like kind of gated effect. And I like putting it like every half bar. You hear how like automatically this feels like it has a lot more personality to it. You can even turn the mix down a little bit so it's not so a little bit more viby. And then you can also go in here and add in the panning. So left to right. So now if you have headphones on, you can hear that the everything is moving from left to right. So now this just has way more movement with no extra notes compared to this. And if you want it to be less like perfect, you can also use more of a tremolo kind of pedal and you get more of a quicker effect like this. So it's it's not like such a slow pulsing movement. You can make it a little bit more unpredictable. But with most tremolo pedals, you can also get that slow gated kind of sound as well. And for my favorite plugins for this, we've got Shaper Box, which is probably the most versatile one to get like a bunch of side chaining, gated kind of effects, as well as panning stuff left to right. But the tremolo pedal inside of Tone Flex is also really good, especially at like more of like a vintage classic tremolo kind of sound. And then any stock tremolo kind of plugin inside of Logic, FL Studio, Ableton should be able to get the job done. But if you want a third-party one that's free, the Kilohz bundle has a bunch of great just like basic effects and it definitely has a tremolo in there that you can get this kind of moving around sound with.

And last but not least, flipping plugins. So this again is kind of like not like a specific style of effect, but more like the utility that you would use it for. So let me go in and show you guys some of that. So one plugin that every producer should definitely have is some sort of plugin that can really flip your stuff, especially with like time-based effects. So, for example, a simple half-speed effect can take a loop from something like this, right? Feels completely different. You could change the mode a little bit compared to this. And it sounds like I've chopped the sample and flipped it. And a plugin like Shaper Box 3 can do like really unique kind of stuff. Like take that. If you make a lot of underground beats, this is definitely a G-code. Yeah. Compared to this. So, so much that you can do with that. But one of my favorite ones to be messing with is the backtrack effect inside of Tone Flex. If you turn it on 100% mix, it's kind of acting like halftime where it just like works every time, but it's reversing and chopping it. And you can also pitch it, change the timing of that. These plugins help so much. One, when you have a melody that's not that interesting and you want to like flip it until it sounds cool, but also just if you need some different sections of your sample or just some fresh inspiration. My favorite plugins to mess around with flipping melodies is definitely Shaper Box. Also, EFX Motions from Arteria is pretty dope as well for a similar kind of vibe. But for something more simple and usable for almost every idea, Backtrack Pedal from Tone Flex is really good at flipping your ideas. And then, of course, you got to throw in some sort of half speed. So, Simatics Deja Vu is a free plugin that I use in almost every single project file.

Now that you have an understanding of the best go-to effects, I want to go over how to use them together so you can flip stuff from being really boring and bland to sounding really creative and crazy or to achieve a certain like aesthetic or sound to your melody. Which brings us to section two, creative mixing techniques. The first thing I want to talk about in this section is really like sound designing and doing unique things with your effects. So stuff like using the LFOs, drawing in automation clips, using features like drift and instability, and a whole bunch of good stuff like that.

Starting off first with recording in touch automation. So, normally to make an automation clip, you would come in here, grab your automation tool, choose what you want to automate, right? And you got to go through all these menus. Let's say I want to automate the delay feedback to go up at the very end of this, right? I got to draw in that pattern. Not very inspiring. And you got to click through a bunch of stuff, right? So, one thing that I really like doing that really helps me get like a more kind of emulating the workflow of working with real analog synths and pedals and just moving knobs and doing cool stuff, not worrying about being in perfect time and just going off of the feeling rather than like looking at menus and stuff is if you change this to touch mode and then you play this, it's going to record everything that you're doing within the all the plugins that you're using. So, for example, let's say I wanted to kind of move the mix knob on the reverb. I'm just moving it around, right? It just recorded in all of that without me having to remember what I was doing that sounded cool. And then I can stack on top of that. Let's start like moving the cut off frequency of this. We could start doing it with the distortion as well. And then we just get something that sounds way more expressive. And now without barely any work, I've drawn in three automation clips to spice up this melody. The only thing you do need to be careful about is once you're done messing around, change it back to read mode. Otherwise, every time you make a change while something is playing, it's going to record it as an automation clip, which can get a little bit annoying. But I use this technique in almost all the techniques I'm about to show you to get some really cool ear candy kind of sounds.

Next up, another cool trick that you can do is messing with the automation on overall mix swells of the plugin. So, another thing that can be cool is overall mix swell. So, you can do this using that touch automation, but I feel like this one sounds better as like a more cleaner, predictable kind of effect. So, if I go to tone flex in general and just go to the mix, the whole mix of the entire thing. If I wanted this sound to sound simple like most of the time, and then at the very end get a little bit more interesting, I could do something like this, right? Super dry. Then we just do the overall mix of whatever effect you're using. And I feel like this adds like a cool almost like riser kind of sound without adding anything like it works really well to transition into the next section of a melody. So we could even do like a smaller version like this so it doesn't feel so awkward coming in that second time. So adding these mix swells, you can add in the flavor of that effect without it overtaking the entire melody.

The next thing you can mess with is delay time and feedback automation. This is a complete game changer if you want to get like cool accents and cool like Travis Scott Mike Dean kind of sounds. The next thing I want to talk about is automation of delay time and delay feedback. So this is a really really fun tool to mess with. I remember if you remember earlier I was saying delay is so much more than just like an echo. You can do such cool things just messing with delay. So I'm going to do the same kind of thing where I'm messing with the touch automation. And I'm going to be messing with the delay time and the delay feedback in real time. And then you'll be able to see like how cool it makes the sound. So let's play the sound first without any delay. And then if we just put delay on, it's going to sound a lot better, right? Already sounds cool. But if I wanted to really make this sound trippy and just weird, sometimes you can go a little too crazy with this, but messing with the delay time actually d-tunes and changes the pitch in real time. So if we record that in with the touch automation, I literally just need to mess with the plugin. And that sounds a little too unstable for my taste, but I really like the thought of that effect. So, one thing you could do obviously is kind of make these automation clips just like a little less crazy sounding. But what I like to do instead is this is actually why I built it inside of this plugin. We have this warp knob that moves at much smaller increments than just moving the delay time itself. Right? So, if we do the touch automation and just mess with the warp, listen to how that sounds. So now you get these subtle just like the delay is [ __ ] the bed just a little bit but it's enough to just add like some vintage kind of character to it. And then messing with the delay feedback if you turn this up in real time it changes how much the delay plays. So, how many times it repeats and you can get like that feedback loop kind of sound which sounds a little crazy like that. But what I like to do is take that bounce that down into place and then I can take like that's a cool accent for a melody. You know what I mean? So, by messing with the delay time and feedback to create these really weird accent kind of sounds. You can take a sound like this and then turn it into like a weird trippy accent for your melody that sounds like this.

Next up, we've got modulating the reverse pitch inside of Tone Flex. This is kind of a niche thing just inside of this plugin, but it does sound really cool. And by using this modulating the reverse pitch, you can get the effect of this pedal right here, which you might have seen before. It's the Therma pedal. It has this really cool like pitch gliding delay kind of sound. And if we turn on the effect, you can hear how backtrack will just add like these reverse things in the background, right? But if I move the pitch wheel in real time, so you could even automate that in for a little pitch glitches here and there.

Next up, we've got reverb swells. So, for reverb swells, it's kind of the same thing as like that overall mix swell that I was talking about, but I'm just going to record this in with the touch automation. I feel like this is really good to use for transitions, especially. I don't know if I would have it repeating every four bars like I do in this example, but like if you had one section of the loop that switches up into a completely new section and it sounds a little awkward when you do it and you don't want to add in like a riser or some big crash or whatever, you can use the reverb and turn that mix up towards the end of it to kind of act as like a riser or like a transition into the next part like this, right? Or like to end off a loop or something like that could be cool. Could even mess with making the reverb a little bit more of like a short subtle reverb so it doesn't sound so crazy. Yeah, like that sounds super dope.

So, all those little techniques that I just showed you are really cool and sometimes they do sound better if you manually do make automation clips for all those things. But let's be real, sometimes you don't have the time for that or you don't know what parameters to mess with, all that kind of stuff. So, if you mess with LFOs inside of your effect plugins and stuff like the drift and instability inside of Tone Flex, you can do all that stuff automatically without drawing in any automation clips and still get that like cool warped kind of sound to your effects. So, if that workflow doesn't appeal to you of recording all these automation clips, bouncing stuff to audio and messing with all that stuff to get interesting sounds, you can do that automatically inside of effect plugins like Tone Flex that have a modulation system. Cuz essentially what that is doing is it's automating it without creating an automation clip. So, for example, I could automate the delay mix to go up every bar right here, or every two bars, let's say, and then listen to how there's no delay, and then it will slowly just go up, create like a delay swell, right? So, it's dry some of the times. I can click this feedback right here and also do the same thing with the feedback. So, it's going to get like a little bit more feedback loop sound when that delay comes in. Right? That's a little much. Could do the same exact thing with the reverb and have that come in a little bit. So, you can get more interesting effects without drawing in all of these automation clips. You can even do it on stuff like this pitch shift right here. Let's put it up like that and then put it down 100%. And then you get these little pitch glitches coming in with that as well.

But another thing that I like specifically about Tone Flex is the unstable and drift knob. Other plugins that do this, I think RC20 has like the flux knob that is really fire, but this is essentially going to create little blips in like whenever you're using the modulation system, it's more of a clean, predictable automation clip, right? With the unstable and drift, especially if we turn on like the tape right here and turn the unstable and drift up, you can hear that the tape, the d-tune is going to be so unstable and moving around at random times. So, it sounds way more like real analog kind of gear. You hear like all these like weird blips here and there.

The next little technique that I want to talk about is using a plugin called Rolling Sampler and then drowning your sounds in effects and recording it into Rolling Sampler and messing with the effects in real time and then taking that recording, chopping it into cool ear candy and accents for your melody. So, if I wanted to create an accent out of this melody right here, one thing I love to do is I record it into Rolling Sampler, which essentially just records the audio output coming from your DAW the whole time. It's not quantized. You don't have to press record. It's just always going. So then you can just start messing around with the effects and moving the knobs, adding on new effects. No thought whatsoever, just messing with this stuff. Add distortion, right? I'm just recording a ton of weird stuff with no thought really. So, I just mess with everything like that. Drag this recording in. And now, let's get rid of all those extra effects. And I can just go in here and start chopping up things that sound cool to use as an accent in the melody. And with doing that, you take this and turn it into this with no extra sounds.

The next thing I want to show you guys is how to make accents that fit your melody perfectly. Kind of going off of what I was just showing with the rolling sampler, but a little bit different of a thought process. So, let's say that you have a melody and you want an accent that just already works. You don't want to click through a bunch of accents that don't really fit the sound of your melody. One thing that you can do is you could either choose a sound from the melody or you could bounce the entire melody out. Right? So, I'm just going to click around in here and see if I can hear something. All right. So, I'm just going to bounce this whole section down. And then we get this. Right. What you want to do is drown it in effect. So, like delay. Let's do a really high feedback delay. And change the character of it a little bit with the filter. We could add some reverb. Really heavy distortion really helps to change the character of stuff. And then I'm going to drag this to the end and down sample everything. Now, let's bounce this whole thing to audio. I might do something like this. And then we could try to reverse that. Pitch it up an octave. That's kind of fire. That mixed in with those sounds. Even go up 24, make that mono, and you get these accents that perfectly fit. You can just hear how much that adds to like the fullness of the melody without adding any new sounds, just drowning in effects, resampling your stuff. And we're going to get more into that in just a second. Cool.

So, I've shown you a bunch of cool little sound design things to do when you're mixing, but from my experience, one of the things that's the hardest to do with digital plugins is getting that analog hardware pedal synth or like vintage sampled kind of sound to your melodies, especially if you're using VSTs and not actual analog synths like these. So, I'm going to show you how to make your loop sound like vintage samples, and I'm also going to do another example on how to make your synths sound way more analog. So if we start with a simple sound that sounds really good in vintage samples of Rhodes, right? Sounds good, but it sounds super vanilla. If I want to make that sound vintage, there's a few things that you want to use inside of your effects to get that. First thing is definitely saturation. A lot of these old vintage sampled records, one thing I'm always telling people is you need to have your stuff sound dirtier because VSTs sound super clean like that, right? A lot of these old records had like clipping and stuff was saturated with preamps and all that. So just saturating it a little bit, that already has a much warmer texture than this. Mess with the tone of it. Then you want to add on a tape or a d-tune kind of effect, right? Like that automatically makes it sound so much more vintage. I like to use a tape noise versus like a vinyl. I feel like it sounds more authentic. One thing that just can really make your vintage stuff sound way too corny is having a high d-tune like this, right? It's just like I like to turn the d-tune down to like 2% so there's barely anything, right? Then I like to turn up the unstable and the drift. So it adds in little blips of crazy d-tune. Just wait for it. You hear how like most of the time it plays pretty stable, but every once in a while it'll add that like random little [ __ ] up. And now I also like to add on a little bit of some subtle emphasis on subtle reverb and delay. You want the reverb to be more like it's just adding like a little space like it's actually inside of a room being recorded. And with the delay, you don't want something like this that like sounds like super clearly echo. I like to turn the sync mode off and then turn it down to like 50 milliseconds and listen to how it almost sounds like you've just got two recordings that are on top of each other and one of them is a little bit delayed. That is that vintage kind of delay sound. And then I'll turn the feedback down. So, right, you can't really tell that there's a delay there, but it just adds this nice little feeling. And then same thing with the reverb. I like to make it a plate reverb and turn up the saturation on the reverb. So, it's distorting the reverb, right? It's a little too much, but add a little character. Turn the mix down, the pre-delay up, and the timing of it down as well. So now we turn that down a little bit more. The next things that I want to do is mess with down here. Turn the input up. So that turns the volume of it going into all these effects up, which kind of changes and saturates the sound a little bit more. Let's turn that unstable and drift down a little bit as well. And then one thing that is really underrated to make your stuff sound vintage is messing with the width. So at 100% width, it's like normal stereo sound. If I turn it down with headphones, you'll really hear this. And listen to how much more vintage that sounds than this. So, it's subtle effects with each effect, but it adds up to a huge difference in character.

So, to start, we've got a super flat, boring VST sound like this. I have something that I like to call the trifecta to make your VST synths sound way more analog. Saturation, chorus, and delay. If you use those three together, if I just turn this up a little bit, the saturation, the chorus, and the delay just on the stock settings right before and then after, it already sounds a lot better. But if we tweak this a little bit, we can get a way more analog sound out of it. So, the first thing that I'm going to do is again, I'm going to just put this to 0% width cuz a lot of vintage analog gear is mono. Or sometimes if I don't like it at 100% mono, I'll put it to like 30% width. Then I'm gonna saturate it even more, but I'm gonna really boost the tones around like, I don't know, 600 Hz, like the low mids. And then I'm going to turn on the chorus and move that drive knob up on the chorus. Turn the mix down a little bit. And then it really comes to life with the delay. Let's turn that mix down a little bit. Feedback up and the drive up. So, we're saturating that delay. Can also cut off the frequency of the delay. So before you have this and then after. So saturation and then a chorus and then a delay. That is my go-to sound. And if I don't want it to be such a like really wet delay kind of sound, you can just turn off the delay and you still get the tone of the chorus and the saturation.

All right. All right, now that we've gone over that, I want to get into one more thing before I teach you how to really clean up your melodies with EQs, compressors, all that kind of stuff. I want to show you how to flip your melodies with effects. And the first thing being how to flip boring ideas into something really, really interesting and really full, even if you're starting with a super bland starter. Because if you mess with resampling, bouncing stuff to audio effects, pitch shifting, all that kind of stuff, you can take one boring sound and flip it into a ton of layers that sound like a full melody that sound really unique and really dope. So, one of the best skills inside of creative mixing is being able to take a boring idea or an uninspiring idea and then flip it with effects into something that fits your loop perfectly. Or in this case, I'm going to take this boring little melody that I just made with this VST and flip it over and over until we get a bunch of layers on top of each other and make a full loop out of one sound doing nothing but just processing it, not adding any more sounds. So, first thing I'm going to do is just bounce this into audio, right? And then one thing that's really underrated is messing with the speed and pitch. All right. So, I'm going to do this and then I'm going to put a bunch of effects on this faster one. Bounce that to audio. Resample it again. And let's see where we go from there. Could half speed that. Let's see what that sounds like mixed in with the original one. Let's half the original. Let's bounce that as an audio file and then put that through tone flex on one of these melody flipping presets like this one right here. Reverse sauce is crazy. Get rid of some of that saturation. Bounce that down. So, I'm just keep like bouncing and adding effects and bouncing and adding effects. And within a few minutes, you can go from a basic sound like this with no other outside sounds to something like this. Let's see if we reverse this how it sounds. Sounds like a completely different melody. Now pitch that up. And that came from this MIDI.

And the second thing that's kind of going off of that is how to actually flip your full loop. So like a full finished melody or a sample that you got off Splice or YouTube that you want to either avoid a copyright strike on or sometimes I know a lot of people just don't want, you know, they grab a loop off Splice, they don't want to hear someone else make a beat that sounds the exact same as theirs. So if you want to make samples your own, let me show you how to do that right now. So I've grabbed some loops from Splice. We got this one, our trap vibe, and then this little R&B one right here. So, if I just wanted to make these samples my own, whether they were my loops that I wanted to make like new samples out of, or I just want to avoid getting copyright strikes by everyone who's used the same exact loop, I can use this pedal right here on 100% mix. And like I said earlier, it's kind of chopping and reversing everything. So, it'll play the melody more or less in the same order. Just take a listen. So before and then after. And then I'm going to pitch that down a little bit too. Let's add some tape on that. EQ out some of that low end. And now we have a completely different loop that's still the same vibe, right? But I don't think anyone would hear this and this and immediately know that that's where you got that loop from. Then if we even like sped this up twice as fast before going into the reverser, change the timing of that. Let's change it to like every lower the BPM. Nasty. Just a completely different vibe. And it sounds sick on trap stuff, but I actually like it better on R&B stuff most of the time. I'll be real. Especially when you're going for like that Drake OVO kind of sound. That chopped reverse sound just works perfectly. So, if we do nothing else but just that, you can hear how we have the exact same vibe as the original sample. You would still make the same type of beat, but there's no way you're going to get a copyright strike from the other 8,000 producers who've used this loop. Could filter that out a little bit. Even pitch it down if you want to make sure it's a little different. Little reverb. >> So before crazy. So, as you just heard, Tone Flex is amazing for flipping melodies and just flipping ideas in general, and I definitely lean into that for the marketing of this plugin. But honestly, one of the best things about the plugin is it has all those go-to effects that you can use in almost every melody all in one place. I actually did the math on all those other paid plugins that I recommend. Let me pull up my calculator. And if you were to buy each one of those individually, it would be over $300, $324. But you can go grab Tone Flex for less than a third of that price. And on top of that, if you're not super into sound design yet, you can actually generate effect presets. So you can just describe what you want each effect to sound like and it will generate that effect for you. So if you're newer to using a bunch of effects creatively, it's a really, really good tool to get your foot in the door. And honestly, I have all these paid plugins that I'm talking about and I still grab Tone Flex over it. So, if you want to level up your melody mixes and get way more creative sounds with it, definitely click the first link in the description down below to check out Tone Flex. And let's get back into the video.

So, we talked about how you can transform your sounds with effects in really creative ways. But now, I want to teach you how to get your loops to sound clean, full, but also really open and having space for the artist and drums and just making them easy to use overall. But the key is to do all of that while maintaining all the cool sauce that you put in with your creative effects and not diluting like the character and the style that you have with your sounds, but just making everything mixed together with a perfect balance of creativity and coolness and then clean, easy to use simplicity.

Starting with I think the biggest thing that is going to help your mixes with your melodies and you need to forget the effect plugins for a second. I think one of the best things that you can do is use arrangement as a mixing tool. In a lot of cases, especially when you're making more complex melodies and you just keep getting new ideas and adding new sounds, it can sound really cool. But then when you bring it into a project and try to add drums on it, doesn't really work or there's no space for an artist to be singing or rapping over it. So instead of jamming everything in one section, if you create a bunch of different sections of your melodies, but keep all those ideas, one, you create a bunch of variety, but each section also becomes more simple to use. So, for example, I have this melody. And when I put all of the layers from the melody all playing at the same time, you can tell that it sounds cool, but it's just like so crowded. There's no way a rapper could make a song on this and someone could flip this with drums and it sound clean and mixed well without it being flipped like crazy. So, not only does it sound overcrowded and just like really loud with a bunch of stuff, but you're also missing some of the more subtle sounds that when they're put in their own section, they stand out and sound really cool and ear grabbing, but when it's all mushed together, it just becomes just this glob of sound. So, if I put everything back where it originally was, you can see that I have not got rid of any of the ideas that were in that. So, if we start off with this first section, you can see how you can hear what's going on a little bit more clearly. Now, also, not only does it make each section simple enough that the mix is good, but it creates a lot of variety and gives whoever is making the beat or the artist a lot of different inspiration on what could be a hook, a chorus, a verse, a bridge, an outro, intro, etc. So, then the second section sounds completely different. And then this section sounds completely different. And then we have a fourth section. So, by arranging it out into distinct different sections and not trying to put everything all at once, you make mixing way easier. Cuz it's way easier to mix like three, four, maybe five sounds playing at a time, making that sound good compared to 13 different layers all on top of each other at the same time. Arranging them out is going to make your melodies more interesting cuz there's always something new coming in and out, but also the mix is just going to be way easier to clean up.

The next tip I want to talk about is something I got put on to by my boy AO Sim. It's essentially mixing sounds differently whenever another sound that kind of clashes frequency-wise comes in on the melody, but doing it in a way where you can't really tell that it was processed differently unless you isolate every single layer. So essentially the way that this technique works that he broke it down to me is whenever you have a sound that's kind of clashing with another sound in your melody or you just want one certain sound to stand out but you don't want to like completely filter out or wash out the other sound to make the other one stand out. You could essentially do what he calls a tuck whenever those two melodies are conflicting. So, for example, if I play this without the tuck, we have the piano. And you can see that we have the high end of the piano and the high end of the vocal all at the same time. And it gets really kind of crowded and busy sounding, especially towards the end right here with this second riff that plays at the same time as this riff on the piano. So, just take a listen. So, if you wanted to keep all of the notes the same and you didn't want to simplify it by getting rid of the riff when this crazier vocal chop comes in, instead what you could do is you could bounce the piano down. And then every time that the vocal is coming in and I want the vocal to be the star of the show, I throw it on this layer underneath here where I take an EQ and just cut out some of the high-end or it could be the low end if you're doing this with bass sounds. And this is obviously a really simple example, but once you start getting like really complex loops with a ton of different sounds going on, you're likely to have some sounds that are clashing frequency wise. So on this one, I chose that I want the vocal to be the star of the show. So, whenever the vocal is playing with the piano, I have this little high cut to give the vocal more room to shine, but you're doing it in a subtle way where it doesn't sound like it's filtered when you're just listening to it. And then right here, when the vocal kind of chills out and this riff comes in, I have it completely unfiltered. So, you get that high end of the piano and you can hear it really clearly. And when you listen all together, you can't really tell that I'm doing this tuck, but it just cleans up the mix. And when you listen to it by itself, it might sound a little weird, but with the context of the vocal, now the vocal has way more room to shine. All

Right, this next tip is a huge thing that I see messing up so many people's mixes with their beats and their loops. But you need to EQ out the low mids of your melodies, especially when you're using boomy kind of sounds like piano, for example. It's one of those things where when you listen to each layer isolated, you may not realize how much low-end or like low mid-end there is in each sound. But when you have 10 layers stacked on top of each other and all that low end is building up, it gets really muddy and kind of ruins the mix. All right.

So, for example, I have this loop, which on the surface doesn't sound bad, especially when the volume is lower, but there is a ton of low mid-end buildup. That doesn't sound too bad when you solo out every single sound, but when it's all put together, you get this like really muddy mix right here. So if we go in, especially on sounds like piano, you can see all this frequency, right? And if we boost some of this, you see that a lot of this is not even really adding to the sound. It sounds like like a noisy wind in the background. That layer like four or five times it starts to get really noisy and add up. So, I'll cut out the super low end. And then somewhere around like 100 to 200, you want to look for the spike. This right here, it's not adding much to the sound. So, the sound before, it's not really taking the character away, but it's just taking out the very low end and then some of the boomy frequencies. And then do that on every sound, right? So, let's This almost sounds like a bass. You know what I mean? That doesn't need to be in there. This sound has a ton of buildup right there. Right. And even with the vocal, you can see that there is some low end that doesn't need to be there.

Just going in and taking out the little harsh frequencies in that low mid-end range on every sound is going to make it sound a lot cleaner. And also, especially if you have a bass or you're trying to add 808 to everything, it's going to make that hit way better because there's not a bunch of low end on all your keys or pads or whatever that's competing with it. So, I'm going to take all of those EQs and turn them off. And then we'll turn them on so you can really hear the difference. So, if you don't have headphones on, you might not be able to hear it, but you should be able to hear it with headphones. You hear how it's not really changing the character of the melody. It's just cleaning it up.

Next up, I want to talk about compression. And as a rule of thumb, if you can't understand what compression is doing, don't add it because you might be messing up your mix. I think my favorite time to use compression is whenever I'm working with live instruments or I'm working with stuff like vocal samples where the volume can be really quiet at certain parts and then all of a sudden really loud at other parts. But you can also use compression as kind of a creative effect if you push it really hard and overcompress stuff and give it a little bit of a distorted kind of sound. But I'll show that in a second.

So compression, everyone's favorite plugin to mess with. If you're not going for a specific compressor kind of sound, I feel like the stock Logic compressors are actually pretty good. Essentially, in a nutshell, what a compressor does is if we look at this vocal right here, right? You can see that we have some parts of the vocal that are quiet and then these other parts that are really loud, too loud, it looks like. So, what a compressor is going to do is if you just think about the word literally, it's going to compress everything to be about the same volume. That's like the very basic understanding of what this plugin will do.

So, it's going to compress the volume of the really loud parts and it's going to raise the volume of the quiet part so that everything is at a more uniform volume. So, this is the stock compressor. I mean, if you really don't know what to do, you could just go through like the vocal presets and stuff. You see, every time it goes to like minus 10, it's like lowering the volume of that. So, without messing with this vocal at all and just doing that, you can see how now the peaks are not as high and the lows are like everything looks more uniform in volume. So, you're not going to get random spikes where stuff is too loud or random like parts where you really can't hear anything. And compressors with all these controls are great. But, I'll be real like when I was starting that stuff just kind of like intimidated me. One of my favorite compressors that's just very easy to understand and it also has a really good character to it, especially for vintage stuff is this one right here, the UAD LA2 compressor. The reason I like this is because you really only need to move two knobs and they're pretty easy to understand. So the gain is going to be like how loud you're pushing the volume up, right? So I'm going to turn this volume down a little bit so we don't ear rape ourselves, but put the gain up to 100. Obviously really distorted kind of sound, right? If we put it to like 50, it's turning everything up. And then the peak reduction is how much it's going to reduce the volumes of the peaks. So if we put this to 100, You can hear that it's really compressing it. You hear that like clicky sound. You hear the volume's ducking. So that's overcompressed. You don't want that sound. You just want to move this until it sounds natural. And then if I bounce that, you can see that these are very very close in volume now compared to what they are above. So, that is the main use of compression. Again, if you don't know why you're adding it or you're just adding it for no reason, probably should not do it cuz it's very easy to mess it up.

The next thing I want to talk about is your master chain for your melodies. And I'm going to show you guys three example master chains that I actually use in my melodies. The first one being just like a clean normal loop. I'm not trying to do anything crazy on the master. The second one being something that sounds like a vintage sample. And the third one being something that's supposed to sound like kind of saturated and analog.

All right, so the first master channel that I use all the time on my loops using only stock logic plugins is this one right here. And this one is not really doing anything other than just making it a little louder. It's not really adding any character and it's just keeping it from clipping. So we have the EQ that's just boosting the high end like barely. Honestly, I I think I just put it there to put it there. Then we have the expander which is kind of pushing the volume a little bit and I just kept it right on the default settings in Logic. And then the adaptive limiter is pushing it up three and it keeps the output from going over zero. And you get this before and this after. And I kind of made a new version of that that I've been using more recently using this free plugin, Initial Clipper. If you're in FL Studio, you can literally just use a soft clipper. On this chain, I literally just use Initial Clipper with default settings and that EQ boosting the high end just a tiny little bit. and it's really just there to stop everything from going over zero. It's not really adding any character. This is the best when you're not going for a specific like aesthetic, just like your normal loop.

Now, the next master that I want to show you is the loud analog master. I use this one specifically for like synth melodies when I'm going and I got to turn down everything because it this master will make everything louder. This one just gives it like a really loud and it makes the waveform just like look like it came from analog synths even if it didn't. And the sauce to that is this plugin right here, the Oxford Inflator, which I'll show you in a second. But here's the before and after. So before and the after. So the Oxford inflator is really good at like saturating stuff and making it louder in a subtle way, but it's still it adds so much loudness without like completely overd distorting it. I'm not sure exactly how it does it, but it sounds great. So, if we put this back to the default position, you'll really be able to hear it. So, right, you can turn the effect percentage up, which already makes it a little louder, right? But the input as well, you can get so much loudness. Obviously, we start to get over distorted right there. But that and then you put the clipper on the top just so it doesn't go over zero. I always use this for my analog stuff like before makes it sound so much louder. And yeah, if you export this as a loop, you're going to definitely need to turn down the loop. But I like when my loops when you're clicking through a pack, like they're just loud and sound like super full compared to other ones that are really quiet. They sound more dull next to it.

And last but not least, we have the vintage master. So this sample right here, we're actually going to mix in a second. So it's completely unmixed and it sounds super dry. But we got this little solo idea. And the way that I like to work personally is if I'm going to add D-tune and like distortion and really cool effects like that. Most of the time I'm adding the most like very noticeable effects on each individual layer. So like I might want just the piano to have a really D-tuned sound. If you put it on the master of the whole thing, sometimes it can just be a little too much. So, I like to use Tone Flex on the master to add like a subtle tape and saturation to it. So, I got the saturation and the tape on. And it sounds like this. And I've also turned the width down a little bit to make it sound more vintage. So, you can see like if I'm turning that on and off, you don't really hear a huge difference. But if we turn like the unstable up a little bit, the width down, and then the clip run. This is the before and then after. This just sounds way more like clean, modern, in your face. which has a little bit more of that like warmth to it, which is exactly what you want to go for on these vintage loops. And I'll go more into mixing this whole loop in a second. We're going to mix three loops that are completely dry, no effects. But before that, we got a few other things to go over on how to get your mix clean.

The next thing that I want to talk about is panning and how that can really create space and just make your melodies work better together. And it also can make it sound bigger. So, we're going to actually mix this loop later, but it's a really good example of why panning can be really important. So right now you can see that nothing is panned. Everything's all up the middle and it doesn't sound bad. But for example, this bell is playing at the same time as all these violins. If I pan this to the left and then these violins to the right, or I said that wrong, but it'll give it a more Now I feel like I can hear the bell a little bit more clearly and the strings a little bit more clearly. because I'm hearing one in one ear. One in one ear. We got the guitar. I could pan the guitar to the right and the Rhodes to the left. Now, the whole loop feels like it's kind of like all around me instead of just all up the middle. So, one, it makes the whole loop feel more stereo and just like big, but also every sound has more space. So, kind of similar to how you would carve out, you know, frequencies with an EQ to make room for different sounds. You can do this without any effects by just panning stuff left and right to give it space within the headphones. And then keep a few sounds straight up the middle. So, with headphones on, take a listen before panning. Subtle difference, but you can definitely go crazier with this if you want to use it as like a special effect.

All right, last but not least, I want to talk about creating space for an artist. A lot of times we can have a bunch of cool ideas in our melodies that do sound cool, but when you start to add in the context of an artist singing over it, it can take up a little bit too much space. One type of loop that I love to use as an example are these like R&B samples that have really heavy vocal samples because singing or writing a song over this section that has the vocal completely unfiltered and like really in your face would be really hard as an artist. So you could just filter it out for the whole loop, but it is undeniably like the best part of the loop in the first section and it grabs your ear. So it grabs your attention. So the way that I like to do it is I like to have the first section having whatever it is, the vocal, if there's a phrase, whatever it is, kind of unfiltered in your face to grab your attention for the intro. And then once the song is actually supposed to start, the artist is supposed to come in. Then that should take the back seat either by being completely deleted or by being flipped with effects to being more like filtered and washed out so that an artist has room on it. So for example, on this B section, you can hear that the vocal is happening right here, but there's way more space. So you still have the vocal in your melody. And the way that I did that is I put on this reverse vocal accents preset, which is actually from the artist series volume 1 expansion. There's a bunch of cool mixer presets in there, but I have this background vox preset that's using that reverse backtrack pedal that I've been talking about a bunch in this video. It's honestly a cheat code. And then again, doing that reverse, but on 100% mix. So, stacking two different Tone Flex on top of each other and cutting out this. And then there's also a really heavy filter that's filtering out all the high end. And then you get this So doing this with your like lead phrase or lead melody, vocal, whatever it is, using it as more of a background texture for the B section will create way more room.

All right, for the last section of this video, I want to take everything that I just taught you guys from what each effect does, the best plugins to use for each effect, creative effect ideas, and also cleaning everything up to sound good together. And I'm going to combine all those things together to show how I would mix a melody in actual practice. So, I've got three completely unmixed melody ideas. And to start off, I want to do it with an R&B loop. So, this is what our loop sounds like right now. It's just a bunch of sounds, no effects. How could we let it slip, slip away, slip away, slip away? How could we let it slip away? So, let's spice this one up. So, the first thing that I like to do is put on my master. And I'm just going to use the initial clipper and the EQ just to keep everything from going over zero. And the first thing that sticks out to me is the vocal is like super dry and harsh. So, I'm going to add some effects on that. Low key, I'm thinking a delay that kind of is pulsing in and out like every two bars. Then we have reverb maybe. And then this low freak filter it out. That's good for now. Turn the bass down a little bit. This perk loop I definitely want to filter out a little bit more. And then to make this bass fit better in the mix, we're going to go back to the chorus. Just adding that alone. And then maybe even a filter cuz it's like an R&B vibe. Now we have this sound. Let's make this sound a little bit more analog first. So, the first thing I'm doing is just getting all the sounds like fitting in the mix a little bit better. Maybe a little filter. Maybe add some distortion on this bass. So, you can tell that everything's jelling together a little bit better now. Now, we have this piano, which is definitely like the main like melodic sound that's like really punching through. A combo that I really like with these R&B loops is obviously filtering the piano always sounds good, but I also like putting a chorus on it and then making it mono. Throwing in some reverb, too. Maybe a little bit less mono. And then cut out those low-end frequencies a little bit. Also throwing on a little background reverse with the backtrack can add a nice little depth to it. And now we got this little lead accent. Sounds kind of awkward right now. So I definitely want to add some delay and make this into like a really cool crazy accent. So let's see what we can do with that. Just going to turn on this delay. Turn the feedback up. EQ that so it's a little more high and heavy. So now we have a pretty cool idea, but it's definitely like if if I just loop this for the whole loop and just like what take out the vocal, it's just going to be a little boring this whole loop. So without adding any more sounds, let's start doing some creative mixing stuff to make the sounds that we already have some new layers that kind of fill it out. So I might pitch this piano up an octave, maybe chop it up to go every two bars. Maybe add some cool delay on this as well. And then I might also filter that. Let's bounce this synth lead that we have that has that delay down and let's use that trick on how to make your own accents that fit perfectly. So, we have this sound already, which already is more or less an accent. Let's drown it in even more delay with a different delay time. Some reverse, a lot of distortion. Filter it out, maybe some reverb, and then take out some of that mid end. That's really Now we have a cool little ambient soundscape that we can take. Maybe put it right here. slip away. Let's mute the effect on that other one. We could even pitch this one up an octave to smear the audio even more. I'm going to take this pad and bounce it down. And then let's put it up an octave. And then we're going to throw on that backtrack with that reverse chopping kind of effect. I go right here. Let's put it on one half 100% mix. If we bounce that down to audio and put that on top of it, now we have this. So, I'm just getting down all the ideas first. We could bounce this again and reverse it. Maybe pitch it up an octave. Maybe. And speed it up twice as fast. Maybe reverse that back. That's a cool little accent we can say for this. Drown that in its own delay. Now, now we can take that vocal, put it on its own track, and we can try putting the backtrack on 100% mix again, filtering it more. So now we have like pretty much a whole different vocal sample on this B section. So now if we put everything on top of each other, you can see how arrangement is going to be our best friend to mix this cuz it sounds cool. It's definitely a little crowded. So now if we take this and let's copy and paste everything over a few times. Now we can work on making a few distinct different sections. So the first thing I want to do is get rid of the bass. And I want this section to be a little bit more bare bones, more just like the piano and the vocal. The second vocal and get rid of the main vocal on this part. Have that second vocal come in. Maybe we get rid of the piano and we see what this sounds like. Now, we could take away all these synths and just see what the piano with these reverse vocals sound like. So, now we get a completely different section there, too. Completely different vibe than this unmixed idea we started with.

Now, let's move on and work on a trap loop. All right, to start off our second loop, this loop, we have a loop that's like a little too overcrowded. So, we're not really going to be worried about like making a ton of extra layers out of this. More just making everything work together, right? So, this is what it sounds like. So, there's a bunch of cool stuff going on, but it's just like all trying to be the main character, and it's not working. So, first thing we're going to do is we're going to duplicate everything over a few times and we're going to use arrangement to mix. I'm going to start off by figuring out what I want the first section to feel like. I think that this first section I want this main bell melody. I'm just going to kind of unmute sounds and keep the ones that I feel like fit this main intro section. And then this section, I want it to kind of drop into that baseline and have a whole switch up. So, I'm going to get rid of this sound now to make room for these other little top lines that are going on. And the synth chord can come in this section. So now every single section sounds and looks a little bit different, right? We have this simple section that would inspire a completely different part of the beat than this section. Cool. So now I'm going to try to make these sounds fit a little bit better together. I want this sound to actually be pretty raw. So I'm really not going to add too much to it unless it needs it. Definitely needs a little low end cut out of it. Then this sound is sticking out like a sore thumb. So rule of thumb when you're mixing, like don't just add effects to every sound just to feel like you did something like you mixed it. If it's not sticking out might not need to be, you know, affected. This one definitely it sounds cool, but it's like it's way too much. So, we bounce that to audio. And then I know that I want to put a really heavy delay on this. See what that sounds like by itself. Might distort that a little bit more. You see, I panned it a little bit to the right. Maybe I'll pan these bells to the left a little bit. And this section does feel a little empty. So, I'm going to take that sound, that main one, and half speed it. It's a really good tip to like not add any more sounds, but make your melody more full. I would say that this synth pad feels a little bit too dry and in the mix. So, I'm going to put a chorus on it to kind of round it out a little bit. Maybe some delay on this violin. Chorus on that bass as well. Now, this one's definitely sticking out. Start adding some delay to it. And I want this to be not as clear of like a a melody. I want it to be more of like a cool synthy accent. So, I'm going to bounce it to audio. Let's see about speeding it up. And then let's put another preset on this. Let's add some delay. Maybe half speed that. Add this little bit crush sound. Maybe this synth chord will get half sped whenever this sound comes in to make room for it. I could also like I feel like on this section, this bass should be filtered out more. Let's duplicate this layer again. And then let's maybe flip it and then half speed that. Yeah. So, just getting like more weird accenty kind of tones out of that sound. This section will be more like a soundscape than like a main melody. Then we have this section come back in. See what this sounds like. Push up an octave. So now we have this. We have four like completely different sections of this melody. So we could stop here, but I want to try to flip this into something unrecognizable, which sometimes can end up inspiring like a whole new loop. Sometimes you just like bounce this down, make a starter, and then flip that into a completely different loop. But we'll see where this takes us. We go to Tone Flex. There's one preset in here that just every time works. The spam your keyboard one. I've been saying this to everyone, but like just listen. So before, then after. Let's try pitching that up a little bit. Damn, that section is [ __ ] nasty like that. Let's see what we can do with that. Let's just up an octave for a B section. put this underneath there. So, without adding any new sounds, we took this melody in the beginning, insert it into this.

Now that we got the trap loop done, let's finish this off with taking an in the box idea and making it sound like a real authentic vintage sample. For this vintage one, we have this to start with, which I played earlier. Sounds cool, but it definitely sounds a little clean. So I'm going to put that Tone Flex tape master preset that I showed you guys earlier on the master. And let's turn down the saturation a little bit. And now we're going to go in and I think on this bass I just want to add a little bit of like a roomy reverb. Just make it sound like it's coming from an actual space. Now we want to make this piano sound more vintage. So I'm going to first distort it. Make it mono. I'm going to turn the D-tune down because we've already got the D-tune on the master. I don't want to overdo it. And let's do tape noise. Add some dropouts on the tape. And turn up the input. So before sounds super clean, sounds more dirty. Let's pan it to the left a little bit. And then now we have the Rhodes. Let's pan that to the right. You can hear that these are clashing frequency wise now, right? The piano sounded good by itself, but now the the Rhodes is bringing in some like low mid that I don't like. I just want the character of the Rhodes. So the frequencies are sounding better at that. Now the Rhodes I want to add a little bit more D-tune to it, some vinyl noise. So really it's just like saturation, maybe a tasteful amount of delay or reverb on these sounds and some D-tune. So this I want to kind of push it back in the melody a little bit so it's not so overbearing. Heavy D-tune on the drums can work really well. We're also going to go in and get rid of some of the high end and the low end. And then for this guitar, I don't really want to D-tune it too much. There we got a lot of D-tune going on. But I do want this to have a delay cuz nothing else really has like a nice really present slap delay. So let's see if we can do that on this. A little distortion. So with vintage stuff, making every layer mono, but then panning stuff left and right is a very good cheat code to get that vintage sound. So now we have these strings which already sound pretty good going through the master tape. And I don't want to overdo it. I'm going to try saturating it. Let's see what that sounds like. And making it completely mono. Maybe a little reverb will help as well. A plate reverb on this. That definitely sounds way more vintage. So, I'm going to duplicate that effect on all of those string layers that we have. And then pan each string layer left or right and then one in the center. Maybe change some of the settings on some of them. You hear all that low end? It's going to muddy everything up again. I'm going to put that on the strings. low end out of the bass. EQ a little bit of high end out of these drums. Let's see what this bell sounds like right now. On bells, you can definitely get away with a lot of D-tune and it can sound cool. So, let's try I don't want to distort it or anything. I think I just want to make it mono and add some D-tune on this. Sounds nice. So, it's pretty much adding more or less the same effect on every single layer. Cuz these vintage ones, you want it to feel like cohesive, like everything was made through the same exact equipment, but then just fine-tuning each one to each instrument because sometimes a distortion that sounds good on a piano will be too much for the strings or vice versa. And make sure to not go too crazy with the D-tune, but you need to make sure stuff is more mono, more dirty because it wasn't as clean as digital recordings are. So, this is the before and the after. Way more authentic.

Now that we got all those effects done, let's work on arranging this out. And then I'm going to show you guys one more cool trick on the master channel. really make it sound vintage and authentic like it's actually coming from a tape machine. You know, I think first and he's coming with the strings with that energy. Second section, we can take out the piano and the strings. Then we take out the drums for the last two section and the guitar maybe. So now we have a good amount of different sections. What I'm going to do is bounce this down as an audio file. And to make this sound a lot more authentic like a real tape machine, we're going to do a little trick that I do when I record onto tape on the real thing. So now that we have this all bounced, I'm going to speed the whole thing up twice as fast. So, I do this all the time when recording into tape because what this does is if you record something that's twice as fast onto the tape and then take that recording and slow it back down, it degrades it even further. Degrades the quality even more. So, we're going to do that exact same thing by taking that master Tone Flex tape preset and putting it on right here. It's going to make the D-tune more dramatic. It's going to make the fuckups more dramatic and like it really adds to that warped sampled sound. And we're also going to go in and use that touch automation that I was talking about earlier. And I'm going to record in a bunch of like little big D-tune blips or big movements with this scrape knob to make it sound like I'm actually using a tape machine. Someone bumps into it and it kind of screws it up or I'm using like a baked old tape. And let's see what that ends up sounding like. Cool. So, now we have all of that recorded in a bunch of just random messing around with that. I'm also going to turn the noise to tape and turn it up quite a bit. Now, we're going to bounce that with the effect. That's the important part. Everything that I just recorded in, all those automation clips are going to be half the speed that I recorded them in at, which is going to make them sound more dramatic, and everything's just going to sound smeared and ugly in a good way. Then if we speed this up, chipmunk sol it a little bit, you can hear it. Probably cut out a little bit of higher or even slow it down. But my favorite test to make sure it sounds dope and authentic, take this, bounce it down, load it into a sampler, turn the sensitivity down, and then start messing with the pitch of it. And then if you can create some cool chops with the sample, you know it's good lower hard.

So, as you guys saw, I use Tone Flex in like every single layer of every single project that I was showing you guys throughout this video. And I really do promise that I'm not just using it for every single layer just because it's my plugin. I mean, come on, maybe a little bit. I got to promote the [ __ ] But genuinely, it's easily the first effect plugin that I go to grab these days. It's not something that I'm just using for my YouTube videos and then behind the scenes I'm using the good stuff. I really believe in this plugin. So, if you need some really good, super quality effects that are really easy and simple to use, but also are capable of doing a bunch of weird, chaotic, creative stuff, definitely click that link in the description and go check out Tone Flex. That's all for me. Peace.