Like a lot of people right now in 2019, I am obsessed with Billie Eilish and her productions.

Her productions are done mainly by her brother Finneas. I've been listening obsessively to interviews with him. One of the things that surprised me the most was when he is asked what his vocal chain is for his sister. He just says it's just the logic stock compressor and that's it. And then they send their songs off to a mixer.

I'm sure there's other things that are done afterwards, but while he's working, he just throws up a Logic stock compressor and just goes with it. He didn't say this, but I kind of think that part of why he does that is about having an uninterrupted flow, an uninterrupted creative flow. When he's working, he doesn't bog himself down with a really intricate vocal chain that is going to distract them from what is really important - the big picture of the song.

That's really the point that I want to make is try not to get bogged down too early in the details if they're not really essential to the big picture that you're working on. There is a time and a place to get into the weeds, into the details and really cut off the fat off of what you're working on. But most of the time - early on - that's not the time to be doing that and it can really get us all - including myself - sidetracked and really slow us down in our creative process.

The other thing that I wanted to say is pay attention to what your interests are at that moment. Like there's a lot of times where we make to do lists of like - gotta finish song - gotta finish writing lyrics - do the bridge - gotta comp vocals - gotta tune the vocals.

And those are two completely different mindsets. And a lot of times it can be really difficult to just call up that mindset, you know, just because your to do list says that you should. Pay attention to what your mindset is. If you're in one of those moods - and I get in this head space often where I feel like doing very analytical type things like tuning vocals or comping tracks or whatever those are, those are kind of tedious, but sometimes I kind of, they feel like putting together a little puzzle. Other times I just can't stand doing that. And I just want to be creative. I just want to write emotional lyrics or whatever I'm just feeling. Whatever it is that you're feeling, do it and do it 110%. Don't try and be bouncing back and forth and distracting yourself, doing a little bit of lyrics and a little bit of this other stuff. Just go in and just put yourself in that space and finish what it is that you set out to finish.

Have a great week.

xxx - Josh

So yesterday, I was talking to a friend of mine about what I do to get drums to sound a little bit more nasty, a little bit more gritty. That's what we're going to be talking about today.

As I was preparing for this video, I was going through a couple of the things that I thought that I did - that I ended up not doing - and it kind of surprised me. But before we get to those things, let's just start with just a few of the elements that help create the type of nasty and gritty drum sounds that I like to hear.

I'm going to play a section of the song so you can kind of hear it in context and then we'll break down some of the things that I did for this. So here we go.

[Music Playing]

Okay. So one of the first things that I did is I put a trigger on my bass drum. So here's what the bass drum sounded like before I did any sound replacement. And that's what trigger is - trigger is a sound replacer for drums. So this is what the bass drum sounds like before.

[Music Playing]

So what I did, just to make things easy, I pulled up trigger, so I'm making it active now. And then what it does is it just reads the "wave form" of whatever you are feeding into it and then it replaces it with whatever sound that you want. So I just go to my browser and I just picked, (I don't even know where I got this), this one specific library from, this is from "That Sound" (https://www.iwantthatsound.com/) is the name of the library. But yeah, this one's called bottoms kick and then fuzzy kick and Subi kicks. I feel like I picked and choose from different places to create this one. And so this is what it sounds like now.

[Music Playing]

So it's definitely a bass drum with more grit and and more room to it. The next thing - this is what my snare drum sounded like.

[Music Playing]

And so what I did is I just duplicated it. I only recorded it on the top, so I just duplicated it. And I also put an incidence of Trigger on it. These are big beauty, big and dry and room. This is a Ludwig Black Beauty snare drum.

So this is what it sounds like. Oh - and what I did is, unlike the bass drum, I didn't completely replace the sound. I still kept my original snare, but I brought in this extra kind of Trigger sound-replaced snare. So now there's kind of two going at the same time - I just blended them together.

[Music Playing]

Because I still liked a bit of the attack that I had from my original snare. Sometimes when you sound replace drums that you've got, they can almost sound too perfect. A lot of times these samples have been recorded in really nice studios with great gear and they've been dialed in super perfect. You know? But I don't necessarily like that on every song that I do, so I'll still keep my original drums in there sometimes.

So that's what I do to get my kick and snare happening. So here it is, the kick and snare.

[Music Playing]

And what I was surprised about is I actually thought that I had put a little bit of distortion on my kicks and snares, but really I just used the sound replaced samples to bring in a bit of that grit. I just looked for the drums that already had a bit of that distortion, a bit of that dirtiness already built into it. But what I do sometimes here - is I will create an aux track, which is what I did right down here. I called this 'distortion effects' or 'dist FX' and I put a "Devil-Loc" plugin from Soundtoys (https://www.soundtoys.com/) and this is where I can blend in some of the distortion into the overall drum sound. I've got it sitting here on my drum sub and so all of my drums are feeding into this drum sub right here. And then I'm able to use this as an effects bus to just blend in a bit of the distortion that I have here on this track. So without it, this is what the entire drum set sounds like. Actually, let me just solo the drums so we can hear what we're dealing with. So these are the drums without any of the distortion.

[Music Playing]

And then with this distortion plug in, I'll unmute that. I've just put it a little bit right here. This is what it sounds like now:

[Music Playing].

It's probably not a huge difference. I'll keep it going, but I'll toggle the mute on and off. It's not a big difference, but for what I needed for this song, I just wanted just a little bit more. So here's with it off and then I'll put it back on.

[Music Playing].

So here I'm going to increase the level of distortion so you can really hear the drastic difference it can make. So here it is - just a little bit.

[Music Playing]

So as it got more and more, you could totally hear why I didn't keep it up there all the time because they can really get out of control with this Soundtoys Devil-Loc plugin. It's a nasty little booger! But it is one of my favorite little boogers! Do people have favorite boogers, I don't know. I do!

So that's it! That's, the quick and dirty of what I reach for when I'm going for quick and dirty drums.

xxx - Josh

I was recently reading this book from Stephen King called "On Writing". And in the book he talks about the importance of waiting for feedback on anything that you've created.

He talks about the value of getting feedback, all that that entails, who you should ask for feedback from, and things like that.

He said that if you let your creative process be influenced too early on by feedback from others, then you'll never really get a chance to see where your intention could go.

He uses the analogy of "create your first draft with the door closed, and then your second draft with the door open".

And what I think he means is, don't let anybody influence what you're doing when you're very first creating your idea. Give yourself the chance to explore and make some mistakes, back-step, and then take some steps forward.

And, and then when you feel like you've gotten a chance to do what you wanted to do, say what you wanted to say... then, and only then open up your door and let some feedback in.

I believe this is something us musicians, producers, and writers need to strongly consider.

Don't let your creative vision be influenced too early on by what other people say.

xxx - Josh

Do you ever wish that you could change the timbre of a voice, make it sound a little bit younger or maybe a little bit older?

Or make it sound like maybe the singer is smoked too many cigarettes, maybe inhaled a little bit of helium?

There's a tool in Melodyne that gets overlooked in a lot of tutorials, and it's the formant tool. And I'm going to jump right into this and play a bit of this vocal. And this is just a scratch a song that just a scratch vocal and track that we're working on. So it's not fully produced or anything, but just pay attention to the vocal here.

[Plays music]

So this thing has got a really cool tamper tour voice already and she's kind of got this like, I feel like a low end kind of grittiness to her voice, which is really cool. So normally I wouldn't use this on her voice unless I was going for something that was really interesting and different, which is what I'm going to try and do in this pre-chorus section right here. So this busier section that happens right here,

[Plays music]

I'm going to pull up the formant tool, which is this little tab right here. And all you've got to do is just hover over it, click, go in, click, drag up or down. I'm going to put it back and I'm going to manipulate it as it's playing so you can hear what it does.

[Plays music]

So I'm sure you've heard this kind of voice manipulation a lot in pop songs, especially on the echoes of phrases. So they'll have a phrase like in the normal vocal timbre and then they'll, they'll have it like echo with the formant kind of way up or way down. It's a really cool technique. And I feel like if you, if you go extreme, you know, it can sound like you're, you've got helium in your voice or the other way.

But what I have liked to do when I'm not trying to go for something extreme is just manipulate it just a little bit. Especially like if you've got a voice that sounds a little bit younger and you want it to sound more mature or vice versa, you've got a voice that sounds a little bit too mature, too old, and you want to bring some youthful elements back. I just bring the formant up just a little bit and you can make it sound like a more youthful voice.

So listen here. So this is gonna start a regular, non-affected.

[Plays music]

So I would find the sweet spot in there, but you can, you can get just a little bit of more useful sound in there. And then here, if I wanted to make her sound a little bit more mature. She's already got a low end kind of great, like I said to her voice. So this might not illustrate it the best, but you could bring it down..

[Plays music]

So those are the ways that I like to play around with this formant tool.

Experiment. See what you can do with it.

xxx - Josh

What's going on guys!

Today I want to show you how to make an instrument with a sample.

And this is a monophonic sample. I'll get into what that means, but today I did it with a car horn and it's pretty cool. It's a lot of fun.

I'm working at an office right now downtown in Phoenix and my ac went out on my car and had to take it to the shop. It's a 110 outside and Phoenix, so I used my godfather's car. He's got this beautiful old Buick.

When I went to arm the car and locked the door with this key fob it made this amazing sound throughout the parking garage. I'm like, "this is cool. I want to record this". So I grabbed my phone and recorded a couple of samples of it, brought it into my laptop and started clicking away.

Let me show you what I did.

Okay, so I want to make an instrument out of this car horn. What do I do? Well, right off the bat, we're going to open a mini track and I'm using Ableton live.

- Open simpler. Simpler as a built in instrument in Ableton that's purposely for monophonic instruments. So instruments that you're just going to hit one note at a time, like a bass or synth lead, something like that. But not like a pad. If you wanted a pad or piano or something you'd need "sampler."

- Put in the file that contains your sample sound.

- Go in and “dial it down” to put in beginning and end points to select the specific parts of the sound you recorded and want to use.

- Indicate the “C” note - C is just where it starts,

- In this example, I’m going to use the one shot mode.

- Adjust the length and the pitch envelope.

- Simpler automatically transposes notes across the keyboard.

- A car horn has a lot of frequency in it and it's actually like a cord. You're actually hearing multiple notes that are playing at once.

- Add some pads and some, some drums and other items to the mix. My example is just a looped chord progression for 16 bars.

- The original sound I used is the wrong key. If that happens, transpose to the right key.

- Adjust the synths up or down, and add other effects.

- I added some portamento glide to it.

- I also used some Neutron, a mixing tool by isotope and I've added an equalizer, cutting out a lot of the low end.

- I’ve also added some transient shaper to it and I lowered the attack on this so that it gives the appearance that it is a little further away.

- Adjust the various settings as you prefer for the sound you’re working with. This example also includes some compression.

- Next I added some reverb.

- Lastly I dropped on an auto filter. I used Ableton's auto filter.

- Adjust the filter as needed to get the sound you prefer.

- Boom, bob's your uncle! To hear it, hit play in the video above.

All right guys, that's it for this week. We will see you on the next video. If you'd like to learn more about how to produce your own music, please consider joining the Producer Course here: https://www.thetriplethreatartist.com

xxx - Zion

All music is copyrighted by Zion Brock. For licensing information please contact [email protected]

In this video I show how I blended real sounding horns with a not-so-real sounding synth horn patch to create something new and interesting.

Quick tip for how to check if your vocals are balanced at the right level within a mix. If you turn it almost all the way down and the last thing you hear is ONLY the vocal then your vocal MIGHT be too loud. However if you turn it almost all the way down and the last thing you hear is something louder than the vocal, then your vocal MIGHT be too quiet in the mix.

Many teenager's listen to music with a passion that most of us lose as we get older. Let's see if we can get some of that back but also take time to analyze what is making us have physical reactions to certain music. Music is magic! Let's figure out how the tricks are done!

In Part 1 I talked about ways to play and record an instrument that you might not know very well. In this video I'll show you how I took that approach and used it to create a fresh sounding guitar part (without using much actual guitar playing at all)! The point of this is to inspire you to try recording other instruments in simple ways that can result in sounds which not many others would ever think to try.