Lesson video

In this lesson, you will need a pencil and a piece of paper to write notes with.

This lesson makes use of music making software.

You may use the same one that I do, or a similar app or desktop digital audio workstation.

This lesson is also better with headphones but they are not required.

If you can, find a quiet space to do this lesson in, as you're doing lots of listening and playing.

If you need to pause the video now to prepare for the lesson, please do so and click "Resume" when you're ready.

Using music software.

You can create music using audio mixing software.

The demonstrations in this lesson use a free programme called BandLab.

BandLab is for use by over 13s only and if you are over 13 you still need permission to use it from your parent or carer.

What does a producer do? The definition of a producer in the music industry has evolved over time.

A producer may actually be doing many jobs simultaneously.

Using your own knowledge, write down what you think a producer does before we take a look together.

Feel free to pause the video and take one or two minutes and click "Resume" when you're ready to continue.

A producer oversees the creation of a song or an album.

They can make decisions on the lyrics, instruments, how they are played, where in the track they are played, artists or personnel, so who is the engineer? Who are the people working with him or her to produce the track? And also mixing, mixing is something that we're going to be focusing on in today's lesson.

Here's a quote from Recording Connection.

"Like a director is to a film, a producer is to a song." So it just goes to show that they are not just making the beats, which is what a lot of people think a producer is, but actually they are the person with the overall vision, and they're responsible for realising that vision.

They may make the beats yes, but they can also be involved with much, much more.

What does a producer do? Write a job advertisement for a producer, list the work that they'll need to do, list the musical skills and knowledge that they will need, and list the personal qualities needed, such as patience.

Pause the video to complete this task and resume when you're finished.

What would you change here? Okay, so here's the scenario.

An artist has come to you because their previous producer wasn't up for the task.

The brief was to create an EDM track with vocals, piano and bass.

The following video is taken from the producers project on BandLab.

How has the producer missed the brief.

Look at the instruments they've used and use your knowledge of EDM music and what it sounds like to identify at least two ways it's not met the brief, and a further two ways you could make the track better if you were the producer.

Fx, panning and dynamics.

Let's define each of these production elements.

Fx, or effects, are used to change the way the recording sounds, and some common effects are reverb, delay, and distortion.

Panning describes where the sound is in the stereo field.

This means how loud the track plays to the left or the right speaker or headphone.

Perhaps you've noticed parts of songs playing out of just one earphone only.

Dynamics refer to how loud or quiet the sounds are.

Perhaps the volume increases during a build up section, or you need to turn up the vocals after the recording.

We'll look at effects more closely shortly.

But first, let's head over to BandLab and check out some dynamics and panning.

Here we are over in BandLab and let's talk panning.

Panning is the distribution of sound within something called the stereo field.

Now, when we listen to music, it's often coming through both the left and the right, either headphones or speakers at the same volume, but we can actually manipulate that using BandLab or other pieces of software, so that the sound can just come out the left or just come out the right or maybe somewhere in between.

Now, you can artificially place things left or right as I said, and this happens in lots of different genres of music, but also in film.

Maybe you've sat in the cinema and noticed I don't know an explosion or someone shouting on either the left or the right hand side of the screen and you can hear it on the right side of the room because of the right side speakers.

In music, you might have heard a drum fill that goes from the left to the right, or back in vocals that relay in the left or the right as well.

More often than not though, the signal is just going to be coming through both at the same time, it would be a bit strange to hear music where everything is panned, and it's all going everywhere, it would be very distracting to the listener, but you can be very creative and do some cool effects as well.

So, it's actually very easy to do, and it shouldn't take as long before we master the art of panning on BandLab.

So let's have a look at our first track then we have our basic kick loop.

We can see that next to the volume slider, we have the pan control, so that's, it says L and R for left and right, and currently is set dead in the middle at zero.

That is the default setting for all of them.

That means that the sound is coming through both the left and the right speakers or headphones at the same volume.

If I click, hold and drag that to the left, the sound is going to be over on the left, if I drag it over to the right, it's going up, up, up.

It's going to be over to the right.

If I go all the way to +50, is going to be all the way on the right, and nothing is going to come out of the left at all, and similarly, if I go all the way to -50, it would just come out of the left speaker and not in the right at all.

So the first thing I want you to do is pick any track and move it all the way to one side or the other.

So I'll pick the right side.

So if I just played this to you now, I'm not sure if you'll be able to hear it through your speakers on my BandLab, but we'll see anyway.

I'm going to press "Play" and the kick drum is going to be all the way in the right hand speaker.

I'll just solo that so I can hear it better.

Okay, and just do the opposite as well.

Now it's coming up from over there.

So pause the video here, pick one track and make it go all the way left or all the way right.

And then click "Resume" when you're ready to move on.

Okay, so hopefully managed to do that.

I'm actually going to reset mine back to zero because it would be very odd for our kick drum to be left or right, that is something that we want to be in the middle for sure.

Where would we want panning in an EDM track? Well, I've scrolled down to the bottom of my track and found the sweeping sound, which I will play now.

Let's unsolo the kick and just have it so that this riser then white noise riser filter that we used last time can be heard.

I need to move that.

I'm just going to play this white noise sweeping filter, and it sounds.

Let me just reset that back to zero, unsolo.

There we go.

So we have a sort of whooshing sound.

And currently it's just coming out of both speakers so it's dead in the middle of just going.

Well, what if we could make it go from the left to the right? We can use panning, but we can also use automation.

Automation doesn't just control volume, it can also control panning too.

What I can do is open up my automation panel here, find the track that I want to automate, which is the Stand Up Delay Ping Pong Riser 03, and the default is going to be volume.

So I can just use the drop down menu to click "Pan", and I can get my start line and we can put it to -50 and my end line to +50 like so, and that means that it's going to start all the way left and as we sweep through, we're going to go to the middle and then as it starts to get louder, we're going to go over to the right.

Let's hear what that sounds like.

Soloed first, I'll close the automation panel, go to bar 9 and press "Play" starting left.

It's going over to the right.

Sounds good, let's hear what that sounds like in the context of a whole mix.

Good.

So that makes the sort of build up even more powerful and impactful.

So what I would like you to do now is pick one of your tracks and automate some panning going from left to right.

It doesn't have to be a riser, maybe you don't have one.

You can do that on the kick, you can do on the piano, this is just a practise at the moment.

So spend some time doing that.

If you need to rewind and watch this portion of the video again, please do so and click "Resume" when you are ready to move on to the next thing.

We've talked about planning and how we can use that in our EDM track.

We also want to talk about dynamics.

Dynamics simply describe how loud or how quiet our sound is or our signal.

So the easiest way to influence the dynamics on any track is to move the volume slider, up or down.

Now, at the moment these are all not moving, because I've already automated them, which we're going to talk about in a second.

My stand up bass isn't automated however, so I can control this up or down.

This is going to impact the whole track.

So it's going to make this louder all the way through, all the way through and even when I have this gap, and I have a new region, it's also going to impact that volume there.

So I can either make it really quiet by moving the volume to sort of -40ish, or really, really loud, the +6.

Again, the default is zero so anywhere around that is the sort of standard volume.

Automation for volume works in the exact same way.

So just for argument's sake, what we'll do is automate the volume to get louder from bar 9 to bar 21 in the bass, same way we open up the automation panel.

I'm going to solo my track just to make things easier.

I'm going to make sure that it's on volume.

I'm going to get my start line, my starting dot, move it down to that, and then we set to 21.

So I can put a dot at 21 and I can make that loud.

Now, if you don't want it to be just this linear and steady gradual increase in volume, you can add more dots on this journey as well or potentially you can make it go really, really loud and back down, and maybe I want it to do something like this.

Now this is probably a little bit extreme and not very common in EDM music but you can definitely experiment with this to see you can get confident with using panning.

So it's getting really loud, and then it's going to start to get quieter, and up and down.

Good.

Let's think about a section where we might want to use that.

You could use that in the build up section or the mixing section for sure.

So automation and changing the volume is hugely important in mixing our tracks.

So when we are sort of producing our tracks, we need to be thinking about what needs to be loud.

You can actually see as I scroll down my project here, some things are turned all the way up, some things I've lowered a little bit and at the very end of this video, we will be changing the volume on all of the tracks because we want to be able to hear each individual sound really, really clearly.

If everything was at set at the default volume of zero, it would be very unclear and it would be a bit mushy, and we wouldn't be able to clearly identify the different sounds.

So that's why we can use dynamics and panning so that the listener, maybe they've got headphones on or they're listening through really good speakers, a click can clearly tell, "Okay, so the kick drums here.

I can hear the melody over here, and it just makes it nice and clear." The next thing that I want you to do is automate some volume on just one track and then we're going to jump back over to the slides, learn some effects and then we'll be back in BandLab before you know it to practise doing some effects as well.

So pause the video if you need to do some volume automation, and click "Resume" when you're ready to go.

Let's talk about some effects in more detail.

Reverb, very common effect.

It talks about the reflections of sound.

Reverb aims to recreate the natural ambience of rooms and spaces, such as singing in the bathroom or a church.

EQ.

This allows us to boost or cut specific frequencies of sound.

For example, we could cut the high frequencies out in a bass drum track.

Delay or echo.

This repeats the signal for a specified time to create an echo effect, and usually the volume decreases after each repetition.

Compression.

This is automated volume control, and it makes the loud signals quieter and the quiet signals louder and to have an overall more balanced and flat sound.

Let's head over to BandLab now and hear these in action.

Let's talk reverb in BandLab.

As we've just discussed, reverb can make your sound sound like it was recorded in a different room.

Right now, I'm in a standard medium sized room and if I were to clap, it takes about a second for the noise of the sound of the clap to stop reflecting around the room and decay.

If I were in a church or a cave, and I was to do another loud clap, the reflections would bounce along for a longer time and it would take longer for the sound to fully decay.

And that's basically what reverb is doing.

It's the time it takes that sound to stop reflecting.

So if I wanted to add some reverb onto my kick drum, which right now sounds like this.

Pretty standard, I could go click on the track, I've soloed it so we can hear it more clearly, and I go to "Effects" here at the bottom.

I can click on any preset.

I'm going to just click on "Bright Room" for now, but there are lots and lots of different options, and that preset will bring up a reverb, the reverb parameters on the equaliser which we're not going to use right now.

And you can see straight away that if I'm to play this sound, it's going to sound a lot different to how it did before.

Here it is without reverb, and with reverb.

You can see how it has that sort of extra extra bit at the end of the sound and it makes it sound like it's in a different space.

We can change that further by changing the actual space that we're in.

So maybe I want to be in a church.

Let's see how that affects the sound.

So it sounds deeper almost.

I can mess around with the mix, the width and the room size.

And if I leave it playing and change the parameters you can hear it be affected in real time.

And even when you stop playing, it takes a really long time for that sound to decay fully.

So I'm going to leave you to experiment adding reverb and reverb only to one of your tracks.

If you make mistakes and you don't like it, you can either turn it off, you can get rid of it altogether, and you just make sure that your preset is set to none, or you can click on this bin option here and it will go and you'll be absolutely fine.

Remember to use the "Edit" undo feature as well if you would like to, but just take a few minutes, maybe up to five to experiment with reverb and getting the perfect reverb on at least one of your tracks.

Click "Pause" now and then click "Resume" when you're ready to go and learn about a different effect.

Hopefully you managed to get some nice reverb on there.

Now, when I brought up that "Bright Room", we had a reverb and we also have this thing called graphic EQ.

And EQ means equaliser and this is the thing I was talking about in terms of isolating certain frequencies and either boosting them or cutting them, and it's called graphic EQ because I can see it visually here.

And for a kick drum, which is a basic sound, what often happens is that those bass sounds are sort of boosted and your high frequencies would be cut, and to cut them we just turn them down like that.

Let's have a listen to what that sounds like.

There we go.

Okay, so without the EQ.

You can hear that although we have the kick, we have a sort of high frequency, almost like a slap sound at the end.

Let's keep listening to that and then I'll turn on the EQ and that sort of sound I'm trying to describe will go away.

Without EQ, with EQ.

You can hear that it's way bassier.

It might be that in your strings, for example, if you've got a high string melody, you want to cut out the bass frequencies as well.

So let's try doing that.

I will click on "String Spiccato".

When I click on that track, obviously I haven't put any effects on there yet.

So I can do that now.

Clicking "Effects" and I can go for the graphic EQ, opens it up there.

Maybe I want to boost my high frequencies and cut my low frequencies, and let's see what that sounds like.

I'm going to solo the strings and unsolo the kick.

So I'm just getting those high frequencies without the EQ, it sounds like this.

You can hear that those bass frequencies are there now.

I'm aware that through the microphone, you might not be picking these up but hopefully you can at home.

So have a go at adding a graphic EQ effect now to at least one of your tracks, and then we'll go on to the next one.

So pause video here and click "Resume" when you're ready to move on.

Okay, so let's learn how to add a delay effect in BandLab.

I've come up over to my piano sound which I'm going to loop.

That's what it sounds like without any effects on so I'm going to add effects, go to "Delay" and "D-Delay", and this is what it sounds like with delay on.

Hopefully you heard even when I pressed pause, there was still an echo back.

There are some parameters that we can have a play around with.

One is time.

That's how long it takes for the delay to kick in.

And the wet level will affect that delayed signal and the dry level will affect the original sound.

So have a go adding delay to one of your tracks and changing the sounds, for an example I could boost up the wet level, boost up the time and the feedback.

So you can hear that actually the part that does echo is louder than the original, because I've boosted the wet.

So I could actually turn that down and hear that again and that echo is going to be a little bit quieter this time.

So it's a bit more subtle.

So have a go spending another couple of minutes having an experiment with that, and press "Pause" while you do it, and then resume when you're ready to go.

Before we release our tracks and start making our millions, we need to mix the final track.

We're going to add appropriate effects to at least four tracks, and we're going to try and create an overall balance by using volume controls.

On at least one track we're going to use panning , on at least one track we're going to add some automation for the volume, at the very end, we'll do the headphone test to check the balance.

So as producers, one of our biggest tasks is to mix the track and achieve that sense of overall balance.

We're going to use some of the techniques we've used adding effects such as reverb, and we're going to do some panning and some automation to really make sure that this track is ready for release.

Here's my finished track.

I've zoomed out a lot so we can see what we have going on.

We know the structure, we've got the mix in, and already, we know that we've got some automation in those parts so all of those dots you can see, they're controlling the volume, and we have the build up section as well, which also has some panning there too.

We might want to add a little bit more.

Here we have the drop.

And the drop should be where everyone is playing back in and it should be the loudest part.

We can kind of see that all of the lines there are near the top.

So in terms of automating the volume, we may need that and if we're not that's okay.

Let's just for an example, let's add some automation to the distorted bass just so we can go over again.

I will add a starting dot, nice and quiet and end dot, nice and loud and I will drag that up.

Right here, this is in the build up section, the distorted bass is going to get nice and loud.

Remember that zero is the default position.

So if I get to 0.

2, that is okay.

I can close by automation there.

What I'm going to do and the best thing to do is just listen to the song in its entirety.

And there you can sort of decide what's too loud, what's too quiet.

We need to think, "Well, what do we want to hear?" We need to hear the melody at all times and some of the other really important features of EDM music would be the kick drums. That would be another thing that I would want to be quite loud.

Everything else is kind of personal preference and I can experiment with, remember, it's your track, so you can do whatever you want with the levels.

But remember, we're trying to create some balance.

I'm going to listen to the build up section just one more time to see if there's anything that I can do to change the volume or maybe I have an idea about the panning.

I'm going to take you along with me, but what I want you to do is the same thing with the whole piece.

Here's just the build up.

Already, I think it's the bass that I feel like it's too loud.

Which one is it? Yes, this one, this bass for me is way too loud and I can see that my volume it says "Automated" but it's also right all the way to the top and it's dominating the mix.

I don't like that.

So I'm going to open up the automation and I can see that yes, it's too loud so I'm going to bring that right the way down to -9.

6.

I'm going to keep the automation window open just in case it's not reduced enough.

It's there.

There we go.

Let's bring everything back in.

That's better.

That's a lot better.

I think here because it's the drop that melody, is it this one? No, is it this one? I don't think it is.

Yeah, I need the oldest melodic parts to be a little bit louder.

Let me open up automation again and I want just after the drop for this to be louder.

Same with this, I'd like it to be a bit louder than it is.

Put it back to zero, and I'm going to listen to that drop again.

That is better.

There we go.

I'm happy with the build up and the drop, but what I want you to do now is go through your whole piece and think what's too loud? What isn't loud enough? Where does the melody need to be at its loudest? Where does the bass need to be at its loudest? And once you have set the levels and completed your automation, this might take a long time, then join me back here and click "Resume" when you're ready to go.

So hopefully, you've gone through and you've achieved sort of the balance in terms of the volume and the panning using automation.

The last thing I'm going to show you is how to automate these effects.

What I've done is I've kind of chopped the piece of that bar 50 something, and at the very end, you can hear that the piano delay even when piece ends, carries on, which I quite like.

It sounds like this.

But I don't want the piano to have that delay on it when we have it in the intro bar 1.

It sounds too messy, but when we are at the drop, I don't mind it, because we have a lot going on, but it's too exposed to the opening.

So what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to automate that effect, and I'll show you how to do that now.

I need to open up the automation panel and on the piano.

So I'm going to solo that.

I can hear what's actually happened here the effect.

So what do I want? I don't want the effects to happen at the beginning, but I do want it to happen at the end.

So I'm going to select the wet level, and as I described earlier, the wet signal is the affected signal.

So if I set that to zero, then we're not going to hear the effect there.

I'm going to reduce the wet level all the way down so that means that this is not going to be affected.

But I do want the drop to be affected, so I can increase it like that.

So at the beginning, we shouldn't have any delay in the piano.

Let's just double check that that is the case.

No delay, but we should have it at the end.

There we go.

So when I bring that into the mix, at the very end, everything should stop, but the piano should carry on because of the delay.

So I close the automation, and I do that.

That's going to work for everything.

If I have reverb, for example on my kick drum, which I don't at the moment but I can quickly add.

"Recommended" is always the.

"Studio Reverb", and say I throw on some automation.

Where it says volume, I can just select the "Reverb-Mix", and I can mess around with their parameters as much as I want it.

You can actually see that the mix dial here changes as I move the line up and down.

That's really the last thing to experiment with, and then I'm going to leave you to add in any automated effects that you want to.

And again, you do not have to do that at all.

This is just if you want to do that little bit extra.

We're going to head back over to the slides now, as we've essentially finished our mix.

I'm going to give you some time to do that.

Once you are ready, the next step is saving this and downloading it, exporting it, ready to be released so we can sell it for £10 million.

I joke of course.

But yeah, we want to be able to share it and listen to it whenever we want.

So that is the next step.

Pause the video and take as long as you need to get this perfect, and remember to save it as you go along.

And you can just do that by clicking "Save" that in the top right hand corner.

Exporting your final track.

Follow the instructions on how to export and download your finished track so you can listen anytime and share your project.

Pause the video to complete your task and click "Resume" when you're finished.

Our track is finished.

Hopefully our device has its own file because our beat is too good, and we need to export it so we can share with the wall.

If you go to "File" and "Download", "Mixdown As", we will save it and it will save it to your BandLab library.

This process does take a while depending on how many tracks you've got and all the automation data as well so just be patient with it.

If it is taking too long, you could always try refreshing your page and doing it again.

Luckily, this is doing it quite speedily, which is good.

Once it gets 100%, you can choose your formats now.

MP3 is quite a standard thing to use, but so is WAV.

Obviously an HD WAV and the highest quality MP3 are going to be larger file sizes.

So just be wary that if you're on maybe a phone or an iPad or something like that, then you might want to pick up one of the medium quality ones just so you can actually save it.

If you wanted to send it to anyone or send it by email, the smaller the size of the file, the easier that is going to be for you.

I'm just going to click on "WAV", and click "Download", and then it will export that.

I'm going to pause the video here 'cause this process is going to take a long time and I'll show you what happens at the end of that process.

Oh, it's done.

Whoa, magic.

It will just ask you to save into your area, if you want it to save on to desktop, although you should never do that.

It's done and I can then open that and play that as an MP3, you can put onto my phone, like I said email it to whoever it is, and that is it, done.

Ready for the world to hear my wonderful track.

There you go.

Once your track is finished and you do feel like it is ready to be downloaded, follow that simple process and maybe you can share it and maybe I can even have it.

That would be great.

Hope you enjoyed this lesson.

I hope you enjoyed this whole project, doing EDM music.

Looking forward to hearing some of the work that will be shared in the future, and yeah, that's all good.

Hopefully you're making more tracks as well.

Good bye.

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