Ableton Live Video 2 Creating a Basic Hiphop Beat at the Dubai DJ Academy

0:00 We're still at the Dubai DJ Academy

Alright, ladies and gentlemen, we're still at the Dubai DJ Academy. I am with the Ableton, or should I class him as the Production Tutor. He's known as Ed Lewis. In video number one, he made a very basic house beat. In video number two, what are we going to do, Ed? We're going to take this house beat as a basic, as a basis, and then turn it into other beats. So we're going to try hip-hop beat. Drum and bass beat and maybe finish off with something dubstep-y. Okay, but should we just for this maybe this one video just do one genre? Okay. And then do another one, yeah? Yeah, if you want to. Okay. Okay, so the house beat, just to play it back so you can remember, goes like this. Okay, so nice and straightforward and I will duplicate this again.

2:02 Maybe switch on the metronome so I just have a constant click, click,

So I've still got the original and we're going to turn this into a hip-hop beat, I think. So first thing I'm going to do is tape this down to be one bar in length. I'm going to delete all of this and we'll make it one bar loop again. Okay so the thing with hip-hop is it's a lot slower than house music. So, at the moment we're playing this back at 124 beats per minute. I'm going to take this down to maybe around 105. Now with hip-hop you don't have the kick drum or bass drum happening on every single beat. You have it in between some of the beats so let's... Maybe switch on the metronome so I just have a constant click, click, click. And I'm just going to move some of these beats around. So at the moment I've still got that boom, boom, boom, boom. I'm going to take out the one on the third beat. Just move this one down a bit. So that'll do for the kick drum. You can see there now the beats are, or some of these beats are in between the beat. Yeah. Okay. So clap...

4:40 I'm just going to shuffle some of these around a little bit

Usually stays the same, but in hip-hop snare tends to get used a lot more than clap, which is this kind of sound. So let's solo off both of those. I'm just going to move that down to the snare. Let's make this bit a little bit louder. Okay. Hi-hat. It's more of a... Yes, that's right, yeah. More hi-hats. Where am I going with that one? Close hi-hat, start off with. So moment on every beat. So that's a very straight easy one. I could add in an open hi-hat just at the end of that phrase as well. All right, easy thing to say, but that's how easy it is. But then of course it is and isn't easy. It's only as easy as you know, as much as you know. All right, so something we... Talked about a little bit in the last video was humanising, where we varied the volume of some of these beats. Now in hip-hop a lot of beats are swung, which means that these are all playing rigidly on a grid. But it's not just hip-hop, it's a lot of styles. You don't want it to be on the grid to make it sound a lot more human.

So I'm just going to shuffle some of these around a little bit. Not very much, just kind of nudging them slightly out of time. So that's just slightly more human now. One point I'd like to bring in here is that when you try to mix hip-hop, dubstep and drum and bass, your metronome or your time signature, your time signal should be the snare. To beatmatch, because that's the part of the track that's at a constant, because we've proven here, I mean you've shown very simply how a producer can just move the hi-hat around a little bit, at the same time maybe not have the bass kick in exactly the same time, but the snare pretty much 2-4, 2-4. So again, it's a good metronome for you, a good... Place to make sure, or listen to the snare and try and match the snares, not other parts of the track. Exactly. Yep. Okay, great. Okay. Alright, well there you go. That is taking a house track into a hip-hop. Video number three, what should we do? What do you reckon? Let's take it up to a drum bass thing and then bring it down to a dubstep. That sounds pretty good. Practice. And enjoy. Nice one.

This transcript was produced automatically from the audio of the video and may contain mistakes.