Auto Sampler: How to use songs you love for inspiration and sonics

Pro Production Masterclass | Logic Pro X | Julian Hinton (Stormzy, Rod Stewart, Seal, The RPO, Laura Welsh, The Trevor Horn Band, Don Black.. | Sony, BBC, Warner ...)

So rather than just listening to our first track today, we’re gonna basically  copy it  by listening to all the different elements.  And, this is slightly inspired by one of the master classes I had. I, I, I had to, I had to do a boring car journey to go and pick something up  not too long ago.

And I knew I had like an hour in the car  on a Saturday, and I thought, what can I do? And I thought, you know what? I’ll watch  one of my fellow mentors  masterclasses. And I had a little look down and si, Medway Smith’s masterclass came up, how to write,  backing or backing tracks, how to come up with backing tracks for top lines.  And then what he proceeded to do was sort of get a vibe that he liked and sort of copy it, but inevitably it changes along the way.

’cause you’re not really sort of copying it necessarily. Anyway, I found it is not the kind of thing I would normally do,  but it occurred to me as a very, very useful thing. When you’re trying to write something, you’re trying to pitch for something. You know, a good place to start is  aping your contemporaries. It’s sort of what we all do.  Otherwise, nobody would ever, ever have another four on the floor beat ever again. Would they? They’d be like, oh, we’ve done that.  There’s something about music, about sets of chords, about sets of grooves, about sets of melodies that are infectious, that are always going to be great for humans to listen to.

So a great place to start, in learning that your craft as a songwriter, but also in terms of just being efficient and to the point  is to not just be influenced by what we listen to,  but,   actually kind of use it as our source material to a degree.  So to combine this with also really going deep in the listening exercise part of things. That’s what we’re gonna do today.  Okey doke.

I’m always telling you guys, don’t start messing around with production.  It’s all about the song.  All right? I’m always saying to people, why, you know, why have you got drums and backing vocals on a chorus? Which, and I say it in a polite way, it’s not good enough.  You know,    a thing I say to myself, don’t sing any backing vocals on a chorus, which isn’t finished, but I like other people, you know, you get halfway through the chorus, you get vibed, you hear an idea, well, I’ll start to sing some ideas, hang on, finish the chorus. but I do appreciate that it would be difficult to write an EDM track on just a piano.

Sometimes you need a vibe. I also appreciate, so how to do it if you haven’t got a production background. And if you’re new to logic, but equally, if you love that music and you wanna have a go,  so this doesn’t seem to be going away. It’s,  you know, I’m constantly being sent things by people having a go. And  I’m also constantly having sessions with people who are asking me, Hey, I’m having a go.

It’s not going too well. What do I do? You  know? Or Here, I’ve had a go, can you appraise this song? Can you help me out?  So I thought it’d be good. So, so what I thought is we’ll go, we’ll go through this and, and then, oh,  phone’s falling down. And then,  because it’s a season finale,  we’re on tender hooks for next week. sorry, next two weeks time, what I want you to do is watch today, and then I want you to copy,  and I want you to get into teams of three.

I think that’s a good number.  And I want you to make your own versions of this song, basically as an exercise, but a vibe. Be a nice or cool exercise, okay? And then, I don’t quite know how it’s gonna work as such, but,   we’ll get the message to you that you basically want to send in your tracks. And then  I’ll go through them next time  and we’ll sort of discuss maybe in person, fingers crossed, as in, put the cameras on and whatnot. we’ll discuss and see how everybody’s found the experience.

And, and I’ll give you my two pen on whether I’ve thought, you know, what way you could improve on, or things that you’ve done brilliantly or whatever it might be, you know, so, so I’ll, I’ll do it today, show and tell, and then you spend the next two weeks trying to do it.  And then,   hopefully,  you know, we’ll get together and we’ll go through it all next week. And that’ll be a nice culmination of this season of logic classes.

so let’s start with what we normally do and listen in detail,  but I’ll say out loud what I’m hearing for each section, and then we’re gonna go about recreating this track, okay?  Now then  let me share the old screen here,  and,  I’ll give, just give, show you a little,  little thing, which I, which I use.

Okay, so,  that, so here we’ve got Spotify Open, could be whatever it is, could be playing off Safari. And I’ve got this very nifty little app, which is paid for app, and it’s called Audio Hijack.

And it will basically record you a file, off the internet or off Spotify. So I click on here, I’ve got different applications open, I can choose, I can play something off YouTube,  Skype, FaceTime, just that, you know, whatever it might be. But most common would be say YouTube, safari  or Spotify. In this case, I’ve got the track lined up in Spotify. what kind of file do I want?

Well, in this case, an MP three is fine, but it could be a WAV or an A or whatever file you want. And then a way to listen to it. In my case,  universal Audio is what I’m going for. My sound card.  Alright, now, I’ve actually done this already, but I’ll just show you how this works in principle because you know, I’m always saying to you get reference tracks. now one way of doing it is obviously to buy them and import ’em into logic, okay? But you know,  you might be a reference track you don’t  potentially want to have on your system anyway, I’m just showing you a way of doing it, which is different.

the music isn’t necess, payment isn’t necessarily going to the musician here, but it is going to the software company. So I’m gonna press record here. It’s gonna wait for a signal.  And then while we’re, while we’re listening down to this track  is when I press play on Spotify, it’s going to start to record into audio hijack.  

So that’s a, that’s a, a, a, a, a relatively easy way and you’ve got lots of references you want to use. going in there. Now, then  I’m Just gonna do one thing is I want to try and find out what the tempo is. So there’s a little transient, I’m gonna chop that there, turn it down a little bit for the moment.

So just for the sake of it at the moment, what I’m gonna do is  I’m going to take this  and put that right on the beat,

Now, the most important thing about this process is  I want, I’m not trying to  literally recreate this song. So I, I’m not looking for the exact replicas of everything,  but I’m looking to, with the view of doing your own EDM track, alright? So  sonics,  transitions, structure,  production, textures,  you know, whether it be full  cut back, you know, full on, full of the floor, tons of synths, no syns guitars, you know, all these kind of things.

These are super common thing. So we’re basically gonna copy, but with the view  to it ultimately being something different, you know, remember we’re all creative. You have the, what’s the worst that can happen? You copy it sounds too much the same,  you tweak it, you know, but it gives you a starting point. Gives you inspiration, it gives you a vibe. So I’m gonna try and work super quickly so I can hear a pad,  okay?  And it’s a sort of quite a transparent, quite dark kind of sounding pad.

Now, the thing I, the instrument I would recommend for this job is alchemy  in terms of synth land. So there I’ve created shortcuts straight away. Mine is command apple, command shift t for a new software instrument. here’s where I click for instrument alchemy. I’ve recently used, but here it lives Alchemy logic’s.  Really cool synth.

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