Okay guys, today I’m coming at you with something slightly different.
Instead of a DJ tutorial, I’m actually giving you a music production tutorial. Today, I’m actually going to start off really slowly and just give you my top tip.
If you are new to music production or you’re thinking about getting into it, one of the hardest things is sitting in front of a music production program, like Ableton or logic and knowing where to start. This video is all about my top tip.
If you are starting a song for the first time, what is the first thing you should look at?
Okay, cool.
Let’s do this.
Okay, guys, so a little bit of background about me. I actually got into DJing because I started by making dance music.
Okay, just to give you a taste.
Let me give you a taste of some of my songs.
Okay, guys, I hope we’re all pumped up.
Now after hearing those badass beats, I just dropped this, but let’s just get straight into the tutorial.
Okay, the first thing you want to decide is what kind of track you want to make?
Or what kind of artist’s song would you like to kind of replicate?
Let’s face it, guys, if you’re starting out, when you’re new to music, you’re not going to be doing anything brand new. The first couple of tracks you do are going to be kind of just replicating songs you already live.
Here is my top tip.
Okay, all dance music. The main thing anybody is ever dancing to is the drum beat.
Okay, so if you’re starting off doing music production, I would always start with the drum beat.
Now, as far as I see it, there are two different variations of the drum beat.
In all dance music.
There’s the classic dance beat.
And then there’s the classic hip hop, beats, and all different music.
As far as I see, it begins to fall into those two categories.
And when I first started making dance music, I used to I now just didn’t even know where to start.
So it’s just listening to all this different music and really trying and analyzing it.
And after a couple of months, even a year or so of doing it, I realized that there were kind of just two basic camps that the drum beat fell into.
There’s the classic drum beat of a dance track, which we all know. It’s your Vici. Here’s your dead mouse.
It’s your Calvin Harris drum beat that just goes in to play for you and I’m going to break it down for you.
Okay, so it’s usually 125 to 130 beats per minute.
And you’ll start with just the kick drum.
On every other kick drum, you will have a clap.
And what you will quite often get as well is a high hat between each kick drum, which will sound like this.
If you were to listen to a classic Vici track, you would hear this exact drum beat going on.
Okay, if you also listen to a classic dead mouse track, you hear exactly the same kind of drumbeat going on.
So that is the one drum beat.
It’s classic kick drum kick drum kick drum clap on every other drum beat and a high hat between each drum beat, then we move on to the classic hip hop drum beat.
So the first thing you need to know about hip hop is that even though it might actually sound slower than dance music, it’s going to be a faster tempo.
It’s usually between 140 and 160 beats per minute.
Now, with these tracks, instead of it going, boom, clap, boom, clap.
What is actually going on is it sounds a bit more like dum, dum, dum, dum.
Let me show you what I’m talking about.
We’ve all heard that drum beat before.
In fact, all you have to do is go to soundcloud and listen to any hip hop track and you will instantly recognize that it is more like a drum beat.
And then I’m singing over the top, going to heaven really in the right tracks.
You’re here. It means here that don’t, that don’t.
What you typically get with these Kip hip hop beads is that classic high hats as well, which sounds a bit like this.
That kind of sound lets me play it and you can hear what I’m talking about.
Or you could just improvise a chord with something by yourself like there.
Okay, so guys, those are the two main camps that these beats tend to fall into: the classic drum beats or the classic hip hop beat.
But obviously, guys, this can be changed and mixed around however you want.
So here are a couple of other examples that fit into these two categories.
Here’s a different hip hop beat as well. This one is just a little bit faster.
So another variation is if you want to get that more Moo baton kind of flavor, the Major Lazer, the Dillon Francis type vibe, all you got to do is slow the BPM right down to like 110 or 100 beats per minute, use the same kick drum as the originals of
And then you want to add a tom in it as well.
So it sounds like this.
Dum dum dum dum, dum dum dum, dum dum dum,dum dum dum Tom by itself will sound like this.
When you add it to the drum beat, it sounds like this.
Or a different variation would be this.
And you can hear this in Major Lazer song. Let me play an example.
All it is is the classic dance track, but it’s got the kick to go.
The extra little Tom’s added it that is actually probably one of my favorite drum beats.
It’s got a bit of a swing to it, which I really like.
And then you can also take the high hats and add high hats over the top of it and mix in a bit of that trap feel feeling.
Now trap is going back to what I was saying about hip hop when you’ve got quick high hats playing that are categorized as trap music.
For you to go those high hats in there sounds more trappy.
Now this is where it begins to get a bit more fun because you can start mixing and matching if I was to take that major laser sound.
And now start adding a bit of high hats over the top. You get the idea just adding over the top.
So guys, I don’t want to go into too much detail.
But all I wanted to say in conclusion was there are two main types of drum beat in all dance music, a classic dance beat and a classic hip hop beat.
If you are ever stuck on how to start a track, just start with one of those two.
And if you really don’t know how to do it, what you can do is take one of your favorite tracks, chuck it into Serato or just Google what the BPM of the song is, put the song into your dance program like Ableton, and literally listen out for the drum beats
I’ve actually done this exact thing.
I’ve got a template for all tracks that I begin and over to the right hand side.
I’ve ripped a load of other people’s drum beats which I just add into my project to give me that initial bit of inspiration.
You can change it around later, but sometimes it’s good to take professionals, you know, who’ve got really good drums like DJ Snake and just copy his drum beats and then just make your own track around his drum beat.
That’s absolutely fine and I’ve done some of my best songs doing that.
For example, this is a marshmallow song.
These are the drums of getting low By Dylan Francis and DJ Snake.
I dropped the song in and just copied their drum rhythm which was this. This is the drum beat from Roses by Chainsmokers dum dum dum dum, dum, dum dum.
So there we go, guys, this is a little tip for you.
If you’re getting into music production, just know that the basis of all songs is the beat.
And there are two different types of beat. The most RS music will fit into the hip hop beat, or the classic dance beat.
And you can start there with any track you like.
And if you’re really stuck, just put one of your favorite songs into the dance program, make sure it’s set to the right BPM and copy their drum beat, take their track out, and then use their drum beat to start making your own track.
I promise you, once you’ve got a drum, a drum beat down, you will be able to make a track so much easier than just sitting there looking at a blank screen.
If you’re really new to music production, I would suggest just starting off with the classic drum beat.
You can’t go wrong with that.
And so guys, that’s the end of the video.
I hope you enjoyed it.
I hope it’s been insightful.
I hope perhaps this inspires you to go and try some music production for yourself.
If you liked the video, make sure you hit the like button.
If you haven’t already, subscribe to my channel and I’ll be doing more videos like this in the future.
Thanks for watching, guys.
