Looping and repetition.  So lots of modern music and, and not so modern music uses repetition  motifs, you know, choruses is a version of repetition, isn’t it? ’cause usually it’s, it’s the same thing coming back round again.
with the kind of music I’m making,  whether it’s underground music  or if it’s  pop music, there’ll be a lot of repetition in, in my work.  So what I like to do is, to, to make some variations on those, on those things that you might not always notice. so by that I mean tweaks to drums.
pitching kick drums slightly differently. Â If the kick drum is a subbie kick then you won’t necessarily need to tune it as tight as you would if it was a, Â a more, Â what’s the word I’m looking for? a kick that had more top in it, a more punchy kick. You maybe tune to a bass sound, but a suby kick, like the one I have in this track, Â it’s so low.
If you pitched it very slightly, a semitone or two, you wouldn’t notice it clashing with the base, but you, and in fact, you might not even notice it too much, but  subconsciously  there would be something happening there.  So I’m gonna jump into the track  and have a little, you can have a little look around my session. Okay. Share computer sound share.
Alright, so as you can see, I  am using  Ableton Live 10. This is my weapon of choice.  I was having a discussion with  Martin,  the big boss, Martin, who you all know before we came on air. And he was saying he just installed Logics new version.  And how,  interestingly, there’s been some really good updates there.
They have this view as well, I believe clip view, I  dunno what they call it in  logic, but these are the clips.  And it’s a, it’s a nonlinear, non-time based way of working. You still work the bars, there’s two bars there. however,  you could have these clips with very different bar lengths. So this Moog part, for instance, is four bars and it’s playing next to something here, which is 16 bars  on the drums, as you saw.
Two bars  loops.  Here we go again on the,  on the webinar title  looping.  I’m a very big fan of looping things, if it’s audio or,  or if it’s things that I’ve played myself, like that mood part or that guitar part. okay,  so let me dive in on  the drums here.
 So I’ve got this, some of you that are here may have done some mentoring sessions with me.  And if you have, you will know that I’m a big fan  of old drum machines and  old synthesizes. So this drum sound that we’ve got in this track  is an old Roland drum machine,  I believe a CR 78.
And it sounds like  s  has that cowbell,  has that cowbell going in the back. So as you can see from my clip here on the screen, when I double click that it opens this,  this clip view, you can see there’s a kick, there’s a snare.  These are the two.
I think maybe they’re Toms, aren’t they bums?  so yeah, you can see everything’s transient on the screen. Now  if you look over here on the left,  I’ve got this transpose  down and up.  If I pitch it very slightly as I play the loop, you’ll hear what goes on.  So  that would be an example of what I was trying to explain with, variation on a loop or on a repetitive part.
 So on my clips here, oh, sorry, I just got a message there. The birds are too loud. Sorry guys.  There we go.
Let me turn the birds down there. They’ll be very subtle birds in the background.  I like having some of you might notice already if you don’t, I like ambient noises in my tracks. Things that, sometimes are mistakes or sometimes, yeah, I just like to have some, some stuff in the background. So that is why there are birds chirping there. That’s not actually  outside my house.
 Sorry, back on track. So the variation in this loop.  So what I’m gonna do,  you can see here I’ve got, how many versions of that 1, 2, 7 versions of that drum machine. They’re different colors. So these two are pitched the same.  These  are, these green ones are slightly different pattern.
 I click that purple one  and I look at the shapes here that the waveform, that’s the same,  that’s the same,  that’s different. Can you see?  Okay, this one, I’ve got a tom there and this one I don’t,  I turned it down.  And this one is completely different. So what I did was for different parts of the song, so this is, is just an intro beat.  And then I go into,  I guess a verse  and I go around that a few times.
And then as the song progresses, I bring in a baseline. Â And then this, it would be, I suppose the chorus.
 ’cause I’ve only just made this track.  I haven’t yet really.  It’s not in a, in a proper arrangement. This is just like a working writing arrangement,  which is good news for you guys for your homework, which I will tell you  at the end of the webinar. so yeah, you can see the rough structure. These, these are working in something you call scenes. So this is scene one, this one,  and so on, so on.
Or you could name them,  you know  what they really are. So I guess that’s  the last one.  suppose that would be the bridge with the baseline coming in. and then this would be, which will eventually become chorus.
 And so I’ve made slightly different variations of these beats for the different sections.  And then this  one here, what I want to do with that  is after the chorus, before we go back to the verse,  I’m gonna pitch this drum machine so that the Toms really change in  pitch and tone.
