How’s it going?
I just finished and uploaded my third instrumental under my new alias of Sugar Lamont, titled Exposé. You can check it out, e.g., on Youtube.
This got me thinking of something I might even call one of my principles when making beats. Namely, with each new instrumental I try to do something I haven’t done before. This can be an audio effect I haven’t used before, a creative way of coming up with a sound, or simply a new instrument.
With Forever, it was the midi instruments in general. Historically I have always preferred sampling, so I rarely play anything on top of my beats, but one evening, after having listened to Elaquent a lot, I decided to give it a more meaningful try. I actually own a midi keyboard, but hooking it up has always been annoying af. At the time, I was chilling on a couch while laying down the foundation on the said beat, and I couldn’t force myself to start messing with the cables. So I just selected a few Ableton’s stock instruments that sounded decent enough and improvised the melodies using the keys on my laptop.
Also, this was my first time experimenting with crash cymbals. Kev Brown has being doing this for a while now, and I love the natural feel it gives to his beats. But nailing it was way harder than I had expected. I spent quite a lot of time finding the right balance between the loudness, panning and keys of the cymbals and I’m still not 100% happy with the result, but I will definitely give it another go on one of my future beats.
With Heartfelt, the new thing I experimented with was the crackling percussive sound filling the gap between the kick and the snare. Can you guess what this is? I’ll tell you – it’s me! I hit record on Ableton and started making sounds with my mouth and cheeks, something similar to what Doug E. Fresh is known for, and taped it with my laptop’s internal mic. Of course I threw a bunch of effects on it afterwards to hide the ugliness of the original sound, but in essence that was it.
On Exposé, I already felt more comfortable using the midi instruments. There are quite a few of them used throughout the beat, all played on the laptop’s keyboard. The new thing here that I tried was that one particular snare with a heavy reverb at 1:48. Not much, but I had always wanted to do that, and I think it fits there nicely. In general, I’m also quite pleased with how the swing and this click-clack combination of the “hihats” and snares turned out.
The reason why I used quotes is that one thing these three beats have in common is the missing hihats. Over time, I have started to use less and less of them, as it has become increasingly hard for me to find good sounds and a shitty sounding hihat can really ruin the beat. Besides, there are other ways to make the beat swing, e.g., using bass, which I find more fascinating. Instead, I have used drum breaks that I’ve chopped up and hi-passed to make them sound more hihatty.
There have been many times I hear a new song and know immediately that the beat has been made by, e.g., Apollo Brown. This unique signature sound is also something I am after. But I also intend to stick to my principle of trying something I haven’t tried before with every new beat that I make, in order to expand my comfort zone and to simply become a better producer.
Hopefully this has given you some fresh ideas you can apply to your own instrumentals. I would be also interested to hear the last beat you made using some cool new technique. If you have anything to share, please leave a comment.
From the soul, y’all
– sL