Dusty B
ILLIEN
Battle Points: 37
@Armani @ProPortionMusic @Fade and a few others were fucking around in the chat last night. It took a weird direction. Animals, what kid's are doing in high school nowadays, and you can connect the dots. Anyways, I said that I was going to incorporate animal noises in whatever I made next. Armani was talking shit, so I decided to call this one "Armani's Chicken Dance." Folks seemed to like it, and @OGBama recommended I post here with an explanation of how it was made.
First, let's set the scene: imagine you've ventured off, away from the city. Out to a pasture, kinda like the location of that famous "leave the gun, take the cannoli" scene from the Godfather. The birds are chirping. Oh shit, there's even some chickens. That's where we are.
I'm a big fan of creative constraints and going into a beat/project by limiting myself. The idea is to use my mind, the DAW is just a canvas, versus the other way around and using the DAW but killing creativity by an overload of choice.
Creative constraints (determined before I started):
-Assassin's Creed Theme (a sample I've had saved to flip)
-1 drum break from Bernard Purdie Masters Drummers Vol 2.
-9th Wonder Drum Kit
-Animal sounds must be incorporated
-Previously saved mixer presets only (allow for some fine tuning of EQ)
Here's the beat:
Listen closely. Hear those birds? That's through out, baby. The whole beat. Dusty B, no one else makes shit like this. Imagine we're walking out to the open field. Just me, you and the birds. Oh wait, hear that chicken? Cockadoodledo mf'er.
Here's the main sample:
What I did was chop up that opening into it's own loops, layered and built up as needed to build the intro and also add variation throughout. For this one, I listened to the sample a few times on repeat and took some notes to guide me when it came time to chop. Here's a snippet of the arrangement so you can see what I mean:
Sampling technique:
-Edison (via FL Studio)
-Manual highlighting in Edison
-Drag into playlist to create audio clip
-Stretch to match time
-Adjusted project tempo at the end to land on the pitch I wanted of the sample
Here's a video that covers the technique in FL Studio:
I then manipulated the sample to try and focus on certain aspects and just make it unique. Here are some of the presets I have to give you an idea of the FX for the various chops:
What I'm mostly trying to show with the mixer screenshot is that each chop of the sample is being routed to it's own channel, to allow for as much manipulation of the sounds as possible, particularly since I wanted to layer various samples.
Another thing I tried that's relatively new to me is creating a BUS for the low end. Because this sample has a lot of instrumentation with a natural low end instead of a bass instrument, I wanted to give a little bit of a bump to the lows of everything while trying to limit distortion and muddiness. So that dark red BUS channel titled bass is EQ of +1.8db @293Hz and -0.4@255Hz and most of the samples are having at least a little bit run through that BUS. I applied the same technique and created a BUS for a lowpass filter for some parts of the sample that were too dynamic for my liking as well as to bring up the volume on the high hats without making our ears bleed. I've been using the above BUS technique lately to try and get a clean and consistent mix across all my sounds.
For Drums, I was initially trying to mess around with one of the opening drums breaks from the drum break mixtape I listed in the opening. But it wasn't sticking. It didn't feel right, a chill ambience like track with live drums. So, I went to one of my favorite ever albums for inspiration. Dr Dre - 2001. Murder Ink drum pattern came to mind right away (I've listened to 2001 for decades now) and felt it could have a similar kinda gangsta rap vibe. That's where I bit the kick, snare and hihat pattern from, while limiting myself to the sounds from a 9th Wonder drum kit I have. I have an Akai MPK mini controller, so I played it out in one pattern to get a feel for it. Then I split the kicks, snare, hats into its own pattern, fine-tuning along the way.
Here's a link to Murder Ink if you want to hear the drum pattern vs. my beat:
After things were coming together, I turned back to the drum break for a source of variation. The hi-hat change ups that come after the bongos is a sped up Bernard Purdie drum break with high pass filters. The 2nd drum break from here:
And of course the animal noises. I have a folder of various FX. The 2 files used were "Chickens in Snow" and "Winter Birds." I try to download any free random sound packs I come across or get emails on, just so I have some options to click through. These were sounds in my FX folder. For the birds, it's a ~3 minute sample that I just let run throughout the entire beat, and I added a fade stereo effect so it slowly pans from left to right throughout the duration of the beat. If you listen closely, the birds start out panned far left and end far right. For the chicken sound, I turned back to Murder Ink to see when it could be a good time to add in a random sound FX, and then just dragged and dropped that chicken noise around a snare hit
Not sure if anyone will read this, but thought to write up the process after the discussion in the chat room. Hopefully it's helpful for anyone who hasn't dabbled much into sampling.
Cheers,
DB
First, let's set the scene: imagine you've ventured off, away from the city. Out to a pasture, kinda like the location of that famous "leave the gun, take the cannoli" scene from the Godfather. The birds are chirping. Oh shit, there's even some chickens. That's where we are.
I'm a big fan of creative constraints and going into a beat/project by limiting myself. The idea is to use my mind, the DAW is just a canvas, versus the other way around and using the DAW but killing creativity by an overload of choice.
Creative constraints (determined before I started):
-Assassin's Creed Theme (a sample I've had saved to flip)
-1 drum break from Bernard Purdie Masters Drummers Vol 2.
-9th Wonder Drum Kit
-Animal sounds must be incorporated
-Previously saved mixer presets only (allow for some fine tuning of EQ)
Here's the beat:
Listen closely. Hear those birds? That's through out, baby. The whole beat. Dusty B, no one else makes shit like this. Imagine we're walking out to the open field. Just me, you and the birds. Oh wait, hear that chicken? Cockadoodledo mf'er.
Here's the main sample:
What I did was chop up that opening into it's own loops, layered and built up as needed to build the intro and also add variation throughout. For this one, I listened to the sample a few times on repeat and took some notes to guide me when it came time to chop. Here's a snippet of the arrangement so you can see what I mean:
Sampling technique:
-Edison (via FL Studio)
-Manual highlighting in Edison
-Drag into playlist to create audio clip
-Stretch to match time
-Adjusted project tempo at the end to land on the pitch I wanted of the sample
Here's a video that covers the technique in FL Studio:
I then manipulated the sample to try and focus on certain aspects and just make it unique. Here are some of the presets I have to give you an idea of the FX for the various chops:
What I'm mostly trying to show with the mixer screenshot is that each chop of the sample is being routed to it's own channel, to allow for as much manipulation of the sounds as possible, particularly since I wanted to layer various samples.
Another thing I tried that's relatively new to me is creating a BUS for the low end. Because this sample has a lot of instrumentation with a natural low end instead of a bass instrument, I wanted to give a little bit of a bump to the lows of everything while trying to limit distortion and muddiness. So that dark red BUS channel titled bass is EQ of +1.8db @293Hz and -0.4@255Hz and most of the samples are having at least a little bit run through that BUS. I applied the same technique and created a BUS for a lowpass filter for some parts of the sample that were too dynamic for my liking as well as to bring up the volume on the high hats without making our ears bleed. I've been using the above BUS technique lately to try and get a clean and consistent mix across all my sounds.
For Drums, I was initially trying to mess around with one of the opening drums breaks from the drum break mixtape I listed in the opening. But it wasn't sticking. It didn't feel right, a chill ambience like track with live drums. So, I went to one of my favorite ever albums for inspiration. Dr Dre - 2001. Murder Ink drum pattern came to mind right away (I've listened to 2001 for decades now) and felt it could have a similar kinda gangsta rap vibe. That's where I bit the kick, snare and hihat pattern from, while limiting myself to the sounds from a 9th Wonder drum kit I have. I have an Akai MPK mini controller, so I played it out in one pattern to get a feel for it. Then I split the kicks, snare, hats into its own pattern, fine-tuning along the way.
Here's a link to Murder Ink if you want to hear the drum pattern vs. my beat:
After things were coming together, I turned back to the drum break for a source of variation. The hi-hat change ups that come after the bongos is a sped up Bernard Purdie drum break with high pass filters. The 2nd drum break from here:
And of course the animal noises. I have a folder of various FX. The 2 files used were "Chickens in Snow" and "Winter Birds." I try to download any free random sound packs I come across or get emails on, just so I have some options to click through. These were sounds in my FX folder. For the birds, it's a ~3 minute sample that I just let run throughout the entire beat, and I added a fade stereo effect so it slowly pans from left to right throughout the duration of the beat. If you listen closely, the birds start out panned far left and end far right. For the chicken sound, I turned back to Murder Ink to see when it could be a good time to add in a random sound FX, and then just dragged and dropped that chicken noise around a snare hit
Not sure if anyone will read this, but thought to write up the process after the discussion in the chat room. Hopefully it's helpful for anyone who hasn't dabbled much into sampling.
Cheers,
DB
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