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Lesson Info

Instrumentation

Hello, welcome to this lecture where we're going to be looking at instrumentation. So previously, we had a look at creating the different parts and actually writing the song. Then we looked at a little bit of vocal recording, but now we're going to look at changing the instruments and making it sound a bit more professional. Right now, we've been using the free stop plugins that come with this digital audio workstation logic pro. If you're using a different daw or digital audio workstations, you'll probably have a few different stop plugins. There. These are OK. They're fine to start with. They're absolutely fine for getting ideas down. But in this lecture, I'm going to show you some of my favorite instruments for writing music. So let's start off with the drums. So I'm just going to solo this drum track. So let's play these drums back. Now. These are quite natural sounding drums. And for this song, I want a more electronic song, to be honest. So I'm gonna actually replace this with a ...

more electronic drum kit. But for now I'm also going to keep this original instrument and just mute it and then actually copy it over the midi information. So let's actually uh hear these drums. I actually like that drum sound. I think it sounds pretty decent. But for this song, I want something a bit more electronic. So I'm actually going to use a drum instrument or drum sampler called battery. So this is by native instruments. Unfortunately, it is a paid product, but I think it's an amazing instrument. Ok. So I've actually got a lot of different battery kits and samples here. If you do have this battery drum sampler, you may not have as many as me. Uh but I just want to show you kind of my process and some sample sounds that I like. So for this, I want something a bit more electronic. So let's try just typing in electro and see what comes up. So here we have electro souls drum kit. Let's hear that. And now I'm actually just going to uh drag this media information down and solo this new one. So you can hear instantly. It's very, very different. This isn't the kind of thing I'm after, but I'm sure you can hear it sounds very different already. OK. So I've just had a search through the different kits here and I'm a fan of this one called Flask kit. Let's hear the solo and then in the mix and let's actually mute this other drum kit and let's hear this new drum kit in the mix. Now, this doesn't fit perfectly. Now. With the current instruments, but I will be changing this to make it a bit more electronic and I'm going to show you a few more things we can do in battery. So here we have the kick, quite a powerful sounding kick. I'm actually going to take out some of the highs of the kick. So we just get a lower sounding kick. So with this filter, we can cut out some of the highs, maybe not that much, just a bit more. OK. Nice. We have this conga sound. So the Tom sound has now become a conga. I actually want this sound instead. So I'm going to go back into the media information and change the conda to this Tom sound. So there's Tom sound right here. You can see it is E three. So let's go back into the midi information and change this to E free. That's E two E threes up here. OK, great. There's also this high hat, I'm not too fond of this sound. You can change it to this more typical closed high hat sound. We can always go through and choose different drum hits if we want the midi information or in the drum sampler. I did prefer the one before. So let's move this back down to E three and then go back inside battery and let's add some effects to this as well. So here we can add some delay. Also rever you can also change the tune and you'll notice you can also tune the drum over here as well. OK. I'm liking that with some delay and a much higher pitch. OK. So let's just have quick look at the snare. So we have this now and this one, I'm gonna add a lot of reverb on one of them and I'm actually going to filter out the lows of this as well. So we've just got a higher reverberated sound on one of the snares. And then I'm also going to compress this and just turn the level down as well. Ok. So it's starting to sound a lot more electronic. Now. It's starting to sound more like a club song than more of a rock song with the drums that we had before, which is kind of what I'm after. It really depends on what you want to do. I just want to show you a few ideas for this. Let's now have a look at the base. This sounds pretty cool for a bass. However, if you want to get a real bass sound, we can actually use something called contact. So I'm going to bring up contact now and here we actually have a Rickenbacker base. So this, in my opinion, is a better base sample than the one we had before. And let's hear this with the drums. It is a bit of bass sound, but to be honest, I want something a bit more electronic. So I'm actually going to use a synthesizer called Serum and this is a very powerful synthesizer for now, I'm just going to choose a preset and just tweak it slightly. So you can hear what it sounds like with this third party synth. OK. So I've just found this preset here on Serum. We have a sub oscillator, a noise oscillator and two main oscillators. Let's just hear the sub oscillator. I'm just going to increase the octave to minus one. Obviously, that's too low. Let's put it to zero. So I'm not actually going to use a sub oscillator. I don't find it useful in this certain scenario. Let's try oscillator a now that sounds cool to me. So serum is a wave synth. So this basically means it has lots of different samples and we can scroll between them with this wave table position. So you can kind of go through and find exactly what you want in your synth sound. OK. I'm going to try the O US later now. So that's more acting like the sub lower oscillator. And also we have effects in here as well. So we can add some distortion, for example. OK. That sounds more like what I want. This sounds more like a synth bass to me. OK. Moving on. Let's have a look at the other instruments. Let's have a look at the piano sound here. OK? So we have this piano sound here and it sounds fine to be honest, but I'm going to open up contact again. Now and I want to show you another piano sound. This one is a contact sample library and it's called The Gentleman. So it's upright piano and this is one of my favorite piano samples. So let's hear this now, we can change the tone, make it harder on a brighter sound, a softer sound can change the dynamic range. We can also change the space. So the reverb ready, we could even choose the room for the reverb emulation. I'm actually going to use this piano sound and then I'm going to have a pad sound as well playing the same part just to make it sound a bit fuller and a bit more interesting. So this I'm going to use serum again and I've just copied all of the midi information from this piano part to the serum synth part. So for this, I'm just going to actually uh find a preset a pad sound. OK? This one sounds great. So we have a filter on serum as well. So I'm actually going to add some effects onto this filter to kind of get a bit of movement. So I'm going to use an LFO. So we can really just change the rate of this filter, we can make it move with this LFO. OK. So I'm gonna use that sound just to create a bit of movement. I'm also going to try adding the sub this time. OK. For this, I'm actually just going to only use the sub sound, the sine wave, which is a wave type. And I'm just going to use this now with some efo modulation on the filter cutter. So basically, we're gonna make this filter sound move. I think that sounds pretty cool. I'm actually going to add some distortion. What I did there is hit a button that said post. So I'm just going to add some distortion and change some of the effects here. Let's hear this in the mix now. OK. Great. So I just want to show the process really. And now we're going to change the uh synthesizer. So you can hear there's a pluck sound at the end. To be honest, I actually like that sound. I'm going to leave it like that. I think that sounds good. So sometimes when I'm working with stock instruments, instruments that come with your digital audio workstation, some of the stock ones can actually sound really good. There's no reason to go out and buy loads of stuff if you don't need to. For example, I'm happy with the sound here. That's a great sound. And let's just change one more thing for this example. Let's change the string sound, the string sounds, in my opinion, do sound a lot better on contact rather than the built in ones for the software. So I'm going to use this contacts do have some amazing string samples. In my opinion, if you're just new to music production though. Don't go out and spend lots of money on different third party things. Just practice writing music and mixing and producing. However, if you want to jump to that next step though, you could always have a look at some other Sims or other plugins. So here we have some cellos, we can change the attack the brightness, stuff like that. This one for me sounds a little bit too classical. I want something that could suit a more electronic song. I thought the last sample sounded a bit too classical. So I'm going to use this one here called session strings, Pro two. And we can choose some cellos. I'm going to choose cellos modern and one more thing just before I go is the synthesizer here. Um I do want to change the synth to be honest. So just for this example, I'm going to use serum again. OK? So I've just found this pluck preset for the synthesizer sound. Let's now hear this in the mix. OK. We're starting to get somewhere with this style of music though. I probably would speed it up a bit. So I'm actually going to look at increasing the tempo. Obviously, we did record some audio before. So this will put the audio out of time. So just be careful if you do increase the tempo or decrease the tempo, your audio is not gonna snap in time. You can of course use time stretch if you want to adjust the audio. But with this, I'm actually going to try it at 100 and 22 beats per minute. And here what it sounds like a little bit faster. Ok. So I think that works a little bit faster. Still a lot more I could do with this track. This is really just the tip of the iceberg, but I hope I've given you some ideas about changing the sounds different synthesizers you could use and also that the stock stubs can sound pretty decent. It really depends on what sounds are after. It depends on what you have in your head and trying to find the best way to actually put that down in your digital audio workstation. I hope you find the last few lectures useful. Hope you now understand the basics of writing a song. And next, we're actually going to look at mixing the song to make it sound more professional. So thank you for watching and we'll see you in the next video.