Lessons

Lesson Info

Analyzing the Song and Preparing the Stems

All right here's the song much motions driving that is tio way to say e not just just control teo wait it says basically what the song is school um yeah so uh one thing you'll notice is it's like a one hundred people beats per minute I think I'm not exactly sure but it's pretty slow it's not house music and I think that's largely like why I took this particular one for this class because I mean often I get house tracks and they're just totally how is already house music and then they want another house mix and that's but you know but this is a little bit of a challenge because we're doing two completely different tempos and this is a really dramatic piece of music and there's all these parts to work with here and so they sent me the original tune I picked it and then they gave me like all these stems to work with there's like I don't know maybe thirty different parts and like a sardine if you if you sign up for the class you can down little these parts um so the um so the first thing I...

always do when I want to get a remix project like this is I tried to analyze I analyze it to find the you know the original tempo and find out what the key of the song is and I try to use that information um later when I'm producing the remix so one thing that I use is this a program called mixed in key um going to open that for yeah on dh we'll take a second to open it looks like and what makes thing he is is it's ah it's intended for djs actually it's they boast themselves is being harmonic deejay mixing software but what it does is it it draws and it analyzes the song and tells you what the bpm is and with the you know, with the key of the song is, um what scale it is and you khun actually use it for I like to use it for music production to help me analyze what I'm working on like say, I'm working a very experimental piece and I don't really know um what key it is that I'm working in, I might export what I'm doing and then take that little chunk of music and drop it in the mixed in key to find out what kid is and then I can go and you know, aiken sample from other song that's in the same key or I can, um you know, constrained the notes like, I'm going to show you later so they can play no, no, that is wrong, so basically it's really simply just take your audio file on you, drop it in and it it analyzes it and tells you what it is um this is one hundred beats per minute and then it tells you the key result which is eight a m it works on this sort of camelot uh this is the sort of circle of fifth thing they call the camelot system and this is a way that they used tio make it so that your key information is actually sort of a ll and in alphabetical list but if you want to know exactly what uh eight is we just go right into the tutorial here eight is actually it says a minor so a ce faras mixed in key is concerned the song is a name but you know uh it is e think that understanding the key is sort of comes down tio you know you're you're on musical, you know, music theory chops which of I have none so a lot of people don't but understanding mike how this software can can help you in your music and production could you know you can come up with better results so and so me keep ahead over here. So yeah let's just let's just not assume that mixed in key is the end result because just because it says that a song is an a minor doesn't mean that notes that are outside of that particular scale won't work and I'll show you um and open up uh see here I think so we're going to open ah all right. So, um a minor is what mick stinky says the song is and um and power to take the all right now these courts here are and a minor right? Um now this has already played the base line note for known nfl studio if you you can actually set it'll tell you what scale the notes that you've laid into the playlist are and so if I were to like just it's so it shows you right up on the upper left this area right up here is sort of your information window nfl studio and if you just hover over the, um the piano really actually see it says, um actually it's after major and these notes in f major are in key with the song as well, so maybe that might lead you to believe that it's not exactly major I mean, not exactly um what ah, a minor. It could be a major or if I were to go and lay down every single note that I felt was in key with the scythe who played them all the same time, I would see it actually seen major, so, you know, a minor f major c major it's, just all white nets basically, um all of those notes would work, so um so just ah, keeping that in mind so once we know, you know, understand that, then, you know, going into actually preparing the samples for the remix, I don't typically like to start actually writing music until the, um, the stems for the song that I'm remixing aren't the tempo like the chosen tempo, then I wouldn't have thought so listen to him at that tempo, like the target tempo you, they sound different than the inspiring and to wear what? Partially, partially, but also, once I get going, I don't want to have to lake times stretch each sound to make it fit into the song I want to have to go through this preparation process later, once I'm in the heat of of song creation, it would be like, you know, I mean, if you're going to make an omelet and like you start cooking the eggs and you realize you haven't even chopped up the onions yet, you know, like you try to make all make everything ready to go as it right when I get started, because anything that slows me down in the creative process could really hinder things quite a bit. So you know, that's ah, that's, a big part of it, but also, yeah, I mean length before, like, if I if I decide that I wanted to do it at one twenty five and then once I'm once I've gotten all this music together I go and I start time stretching these samples andi I realize this is terrible at one twenty five than I'm gonna have to go kind of back to the drawing board a little bit so, um I do the time stretching first um so let's talk a second about time compression um I guess without too much explanation um time uh, time stretching is it's a process that either lengthen zehr shortens an audio sample without changing its pitch and I guess in the whole scheme of things it's a fair let me has been around for a cup of maybe twenty years or something like that. Um basically what computers do is they overlap smoothly windowed bits of audio by our they're copying little bits of data in the audio sample or deleting little bits of data in the audio sample toe stretch in or compress the sample um and uh different software does it in different ways a bolton has its own algorithms for forgetting it and then nfl studio they have theirs. So uh found actually that f l studio has a the sound of the time compression nfl city is quite nice um so what we're going to do is we're going to take thes samples on dh um drop them into the timeline here nfl studio um those of you unfamiliar with f l studio it's it's a pretty non linear program it works in sort of ah sort of environment mode with ob with many your audio objects basically that get thrown into this timeline area to create a piece of music um so uh what I did in the creation of this particular tune is I stretched every single sample they gave me they give me like thirty some odd samples there's a lot of a lot to work with I'm not going to do that all of them here today, but I'm going to show you the basic process of how I got all these samples kind of did it all at once all the time stretching at once and I saved them all out one by one, so basically the original song we've learned is one hundred bpm so brianna about the tempo down to one hundred beats per minute we're going to start there I'm going to take these audio samples and drop them into the uh the playlist they call it um grab like a few of them just so you can take a look yeah when I did this I did every single sample in the whole list um so if you double click on the audio file and f l studio, you'll get the channel settings window here and inside this channel settings window you're going to see all the time stretching algorithms right here in this a little bit right there and and if you were to click on this drop down you can see all the algorithms that come with f l studio um now tio I would not say awful studio is the most intuitive and when it comes to certain things there are some things they're not undoable and some of them you know is it's a little it's I would say it's a little buggy at times but um basically in order to enable the time stretching on an idea sample you gotta you you pick a an algorithm right? Usually pro default does a really great job if you're going to use a piece of like a percussion sample then he would choose pro transient um the difference between the two is the pro transient one basically preserves the onset of the sample so it it still feels percussive whereas if you were to use pro default it might smooth out theater out of the sample and there won't be a cz like punchy you know? So these samples are actually vocal samples that have dropped in so we're going to use pro default for all of them so it's used for default and then a double click on the next one she was pro default double click on the next one pro default on dh down the list like that um now too and maybe actually enable it because right now it's actually it's not doing it's not actually time stretching anything at the moment I would select all of them and, um and actually just ok, so in the play list, you have a you have sort of these file setting samples, this little button right here enables time stretching within the playlist, so you click on it and now if I drag the end of any of these samples it's going to stretch it to that length in the timeline, right, I'm going to shorten it by one bar, right? And now you'll see it's actually processing it's going to go through it's going to process each sample and we'll do it four times and as it goes down the list, the difference here is that it actually processes the sample right here in the program like that enable ten it's it does it live as it's streaming it off of your computer? So while it's a really impressive it doesn't always sound is good when it nfl studio, I feel like it actually sounds a lot better rendering it's actually read bio versus just applying an effect to it is rendering it right there in the program okay, it renders it off of the original sample each time it has to render it so it's not like it's rendering it from the last time that it rendered it so the the uh it's not it's not like you know, degrading the audio file this time you do it but so I had shortened it by one bar and I'm going to return it back to where it was and it's going to stretch them all again um a little bit of a process but um once once it's done doing this I'm going to move thie the tempo of the song to my target temple which is going to be a one twenty p m on dh so well, this is even this we have a question from mountain stream sure if you use an old record which isn't one hundred percent consistent so somebody recorded the track without a click for example yeah um how would you match that tempo? Well, you have to you actually have to fix the tempo first and then depends on how accurate you want the beats to be inside that sample. I mean, if you're not too worried about I mean, I would probably just get an average tempo and then do the same thing it's not going to lock to the beat because because it is a wavering tempo kind of a thing, but once you're done time stretching it, then you khun save it back down, which I'm going to show you in a second um once you're done time stretching it you could say that back down and then you can bring it into battery or you know f l studio doesn't warp like able to him so you can't correct beats in the same way that you can't like you can't kwan ties were a wavering live like james brown be in the same way that you can enable to adjust it? There are some tools in a film studio that you can I think you can do that I think new tone I believe, does it, but I'm not going to do any tutorials on youtube today, so um yeah, but yes so now that we have enabled the time stretching by shortening and lengthening and now it's processed all the samples if I change the tempo nfl studio to say one twenty it's going to process it one last time it's going to say you want to re stretched all the samples and then say yes and now it's going to go in process all the samples and they're all going to be locked at one twenty pm um then it's just a matter of saving the samples to your project directory and the way I do it so I have my original stems saves down in their location on the computer the original location here than I have my project stones which in this, uh for this tutorial as version I did two versions of this the first one is scrapped it so I have version two one twenty p m and this is where I saved all of my new systems right here so basically when I did is now that you have it doubleclick you've got your little window here um I believe that all you need to do is right click in this we have formed down below in the channel settings window and then you can save as and now you can put that time stretch sample wherever you want on your computer and I I I mean you could feasibly leave it all inside the project but I'm like toe save my samples to a specific project a directory just in case my you know, same like my project directory is like not my system directory its own separate drive on my computer so in case my system crashes or whatever I still got my files saved aiken still load this project up whereas if I don't do that it's going to save it in my nfl studio attempt something director I'm not even sure where and I won't have the song again my assistant pressure so choose the director you want to save it too twenty p m and the samples and that's where I put everything so um so that's that that's the first part is just getting everything analyzed all the samples stretched um so they're back to my newts I guess that's basically it on the first on this first part does anybody have any questions over there about this initial setting up um mountain stream wanted to know what the difference is between keys in cords so okay uh accord can be in a particular key like and um music chops here really thin but basically cords uh well can play a scale within a key so something that is like I can go back to my um my rookie so one thing I love about f l studio is you can kind of re scale things after the fact right? So this particular pattern here is in a minor right? The thing is the key miners the scale um inside of that yeah the's records they're happening so if I were to change it to age a major be it would be the key major be skill nfl studio you can actually change that stuff you go into tools limits a and you've got all the way all of these this is the key and these are all the different scales that you could choose from right? So I'm going to change it to major for instance and now it's it doesn't do it perfectly but it's kind of wrong but you could do it so yeah, I think that answers the question ok, cool. Do you have a question? Yeah okay when you're selecting bpm is that sort of up to whatever project you're working on does do you sort of sense you're a house music producer? Do you kind of stick in that sort of house music world of one fifteen to one twenty five kind of area is that yeah, I do that if, um if it's a house project that I'm working on I mean I do produce and other genres as well, but most labels call on me to do a house remix because that's what I've been releasing and so I'm kind of like being focused more and more and more in the house music but yeah, I pretty much yeah, because it's house project it would range anywhere from like that one fifteen to one twenty five I guess following up with that have you had experiences where you've been asked to remix a project as a house peace and because of the way the original song is it really sort of challenge is that it's like maybe just in the wrong, uh, tempo for starters so it's just hard to oh yeah, that there? Yeah, yeah, totally and, you know, I mean this particular song itself, you know, being at one hundred bpm, it is a pretty you know, slow one to try to like speed up into into house tempo and you'll you'll see as this project goes along like some of the vocals it's the sound a little, too. We're going that fast, and so I had, you know, I just choose and select the parts that seemed to sound best at this tempo. I've had other projects where the original song is so slow I've had to, like, really reworked that vocal into doing something completely different by chopping it up, been putting in a battery and doing all sorts of different things, really diverting it from its original, which is what I don't I love doing. I like trying to keep the too pretty close, but, yeah, yeah, it's sometimes is a challenge, especially when things like the song is way too slower, maybe really, really fast, you know.