Which of my beats is my favorite? The one I’m going to make TODAY...

My Beats

       I believe music truly comes from the heart. Some of us may never understand how sound and music relate to one another, but I’m on a mission to find out. This song I created was built using professional instructions from my professors at Full Sail University, combined with the love and dedication I have for creating music. Full Sail helped me discover how important it is to set the foundation of the song first, which makes the rest the song a lot easier to create.

       My first order of business was choosing the key I wanted to create the song out of. What’s helps me is randomly playing keys until a specific notes stands out to me. That ended up being A minor and slowing my tempo to 90 BPM. I also aimed to make an R&B track. After creating a groovy drum pattern using a kick, snare, and set of high hats, I proceeding to layer the drums with the harmony. The chords I used were I, iii, VII, v, VI and it sounded great. I also used 2 suspended chords, Csus2 and Gsus4 for the first time. After that, I used the harmony to help me create the melody by focusing only on the keys of A minor. It’s sounds easier than done, but after about 20 different attempts, I found the sounds that I liked.

       My favorite part was when my best friend Big Trub came in the studio. He heard the beat I was making and instantly began free styling to the song. So I did the honors of recording him and then recorded myself a few days later on the second verse. Recreating the 2nd melody and harmony was a bit challenging because I created those sounds from scratch. I chose the ES Polysynth for the harmony and ES1 synth for the melody. 2 hours later, I had the sounds I needed. I also switched to C major scale starting at bar 16.

       My sampled audio was created using a logic loop sample from the lounge vibes section. What I did was drag the apple loop into the quick sampler and shorten it then rose it an octave to add some flare to the ends of bars 16 and bar 32. After that, I listened to the track then came to the realization that I spoke about a car in my verse. So I found a logic pro sound effect of a car revving its engine and burning rubber and added it to the mix.

       Last, but not least, I chose to bus the drums, melody, harmony, vocals, and sound effects to their own individual bus for mixing. I also added a bus for 2 reverbs and a delay. I places a reverb on both vocals and as well as a delay. I then proceeded to add EQ most tracks and add compression mainly on the vocals. Trubs vocals were challenging as well as my own so I chose to automate the volume, compression, and delays on both tracks. I also automated the volume on certain instruments I felt were causing the song to peak. I also color coded all trucks and properly labeled them. After mixing the sound down to a safe level, I added a limiter to the stereo output to protect the track for, peaking and to add more dynamics to the song. This is my first song produced with the help of Full Sail.