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S1E07 – SAFE SPOTS: Create Amazing Drum Loops

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Welcome to SAFE SPOTS™.

SAFE SPOTS™ is a term GratuiTous has coined over the years which reveals where you can place your sounds within your drum loop for them to sound good no matter what!

In addition, you’ll also learn about the ORGANIC TOOLS available to you in your DAW (music program) to further enhance this drum loop.

GratuiTous calls these tools ORGANIC because they’re absolutely FREE in any music production program.

In addition, GratuiTous has also written a book on this SAFE SPOTS™ concept, which can be found here.

SAFE SPOTS is available in a course, book, or bundle. (Please see the resources, or contact me).

Drum Loops SAFE SPOTS

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S1E07 – SAFE SPOTS: Create Amazing Drum Loops

  1. Hey, this is Gratuitous. Welcome to Music Production Made Simple, the show that
  2. focuses on best practices about music production, which is based on FL Studio.
  3. If you're wanting to become the best producer you could be, subscribe and listen
  4. weekly. You can also check out my courses, which teach you the principles and basics
  5. of music production. They'll get you up and running quickly.
  6. In addition, I also have books on Amazon and tons of music on Spotify.
  7. Always feel free to hit me up at Hi at it'sgratuitous.com.
  8. So let's get into the episode.
  9. Alright, hey, what's everybody?
  10. Welcome to episode number seven.
  11. In this episode, we're going to be covering safe spots.
  12. Now that might be a little bit of a surprise to you guys because in the last episode
  13. I said that I want to create this course by the end of July 2019.
  14. So here's what happened. Okay, so I was actually wanting to release a book.
  15. So I've been writing a book on FL Studio Best Practices, and I wanted to release it
  16. before the end of June 2019. And the reason for that is because I'm going to a
  17. wedding here at the end of June.
  18. And I thought I was done. I was starting to read like the rough copy back.
  19. And as I was reading it back, I just thought to myself, I was like, you know, I
  20. cannot release this publicly yet.
  21. I just found it was too choppy and my ideas are all over the place.
  22. So I thought to myself, I was like, okay, well, do you know what?
  23. Maybe I'll be able to put together the safe spots course and be able to release that
  24. before I go to the wedding here.
  25. So this episode is gonna be all about safe spots.
  26. You guys are gonna learn how to program awesome drum loops, okay?
  27. So I just want to let you guys know that on the website I also allowed you now if
  28. you want to purchase a course individually, or you can purchase, you know, the
  29. membership where you can access all the courses, okay?
  30. So now you have both options. And in addition, don't forget you guys can also
  31. support this podcast for five dollars a month.
  32. Just come to it's gratuitous forward slash podcast.
  33. You guys will see a support button there, a subscribe button, and always feel free
  34. to ask me questions on the episode page.
  35. You guys can come here and just reach out, ask a question, and I can always answer
  36. it within these podcast episodes, okay.
  37. So before we get into this episode on safe spots, I also want to just remind you
  38. that I have also written a book on safe spots, okay?
  39. It's on Amazon., and again, all the links will be in the resources section
  40. So the link to this actual safe spots course as well as the safe spots book.
  41. Okay. So let's get into the episode.
  42. So what are safe spots? Now, over the years, I've coined a term and it's called safe
  43. spots, and I use it to describe certain areas within our drum loop for our sounds to
  44. sound good no matter what, as well as be in time, be in rhythm and stuff like that.
  45. Okay. So in addition, you know, there's also another part of the safe spots theory,
  46. and that's to do with the organic tools we have available which further enhance our
  47. loops, okay? And I call these tools organic because these tools they're free inside
  48. of any music program, okay, in any DAW.
  49. And when we're making beats, it's really easy, you know, to get caught up in
  50. expensive plugins or thinking we need certain plugins to make our beats.
  51. But these organic tools are the fundamentals of music production, and you know,
  52. they're absolutely the difference between an amateur to a professional producer,
  53. okay. So I just want to repeat that again, okay.
  54. So when we're making our beats, many times people think that they need all these
  55. expensive plugins and stuff like that.
  56. But really, these organic tools, which I'm going to be talking to you in a second,
  57. these are the key differences which will help you build awesome drum loops, okay.
  58. You know, plugins many times help, but a lot of times people they want to jump to
  59. these expensive plugins rather than just using the basic tools that they have, and
  60. many times they overlook them.
  61. So, what are these organic tools you ask?
  62. Well, here's the cliffhanger moment.
  63. You're gonna have to buy my course to find out.
  64. Just kidding, you know. So, obviously, through this podcast, I am trying to promote
  65. my courses and the membership, and you know, hopefully building your trust to
  66. eventually, you know, want to, you know, sign up and take my courses, but I don't
  67. want to be that type of person to, you know, kind of clickbait you, you know.
  68. I I am gonna provide you with the value in these podcasts, okay?
  69. So I'm gonna be talking about these organic tools in a second.
  70. to I first want to talk you about safe spots, and then it
  71. transitions into these organic tools, okay.
  72. And again, I break all this stuff down for you in the course.
  73. So, first, what are safe spots?
  74. So if you look at FL Studio Step Sequencer, where you actually program your drum
  75. loops, you'll notice that there's four steps, okay?
  76. And so the first four are gray, and then you have four more steps and they're red,
  77. and it just repeats, okay? So it goes like gray, red, gray, red.
  78. And you know, this might be a little bit hard to understand because you're just
  79. listening, you know. If you're actually watching it, it's gonna be easier for you to
  80. understand. But so far, we have our step sequencer and we have four steps, okay?
  81. So each of these steps is actually a sixteenth note, and you need four of these to
  82. make one beat in four, four time.
  83. Okay. So four steps equals a quarter note, and we need four quarter notes to create
  84. one bar. So if we're looking at the first four steps, so the first step is your on
  85. beat, and it will always be in rhythm with your music, okay.
  86. Now the third step is like the off-beat, it's like halfway in between.
  87. And typically this is like the off beat, and it's a really common spot to add
  88. fullness to a drum loop. you can be putting a hi-hat here or like an open hat,
  89. especially open hats and like dance music.
  90. And now steps two and four are what I call the in-betweens, and I call them A and B.
  91. And they're a little bit trickier to work with than the first step and the third
  92. step. Okay. So now we're dealing with steps two and four, and I call those the
  93. in-betweens. Now, step two is A, and then step four is B.
  94. Okay, so A is a little bit trickier to work with than B, you know, to make the sound
  95. work. But there's one key factor here that you have to always keep in the back of
  96. your mind when you're programming your drum loops, thinking about these safe spots,
  97. is that tempo is a huge factor of making a sound fit. in these in-betweens, okay
  98. And then also another cool kind of pro tip is swing also affects these in-between
  99. notes too, which are just your eighth notes, okay?
  100. So just your second 16th note.
  101. And that's just you know what swing affects, it nudges your notes.
  102. I'm gonna explain what swing is here as when we get into these organic tools, which
  103. is our next section, okay? So that's just a little quick overview of safe spots, you
  104. know, where you can place your sounds.
  105. Now we're gonna cover these organic tools where we can further enhance our drum
  106. loop. Okay, we kind of can help force that drum loop to work within our track, help
  107. mold it. So I'm gonna list out these organic tools, and then we're gonna cover them
  108. briefly one by one. Okay, so again, the video course called Safe Spots, create
  109. amazing drum loops, goes more in depth revealing how to actually put these tools
  110. into practice within FL Studio.
  111. Okay. So these organic tools are velocity, panning, layering, note nudging slash
  112. swing, kind of the same thing.
  113. Note nudging is more manually, swing is a little bit more automatic.
  114. There's also sound selection as well as sound placement.
  115. So each of these organic tools goes hand in hand, and I call them free because
  116. they're 100% free no matter what DAW you use, no matter what music program, okay.
  117. And really, it's just a matter of understanding how to use these organic tools, how
  118. they work, and the different techniques you have available to you as you're
  119. programming your drum loop and using these tools to force these drum loops to to
  120. work, okay. So let's first start with velocity, okay?
  121. So velocity is actually pretty interesting, and actually velocity is different than
  122. volume in music production., o Okaykay?
  123. So certain plugins allow you to get different sounds depending on the velocity
  124. amount. Now, velocity is actually the speed, you know, on how fast you press your
  125. key, and it's not how hard you press the key..
  126. You can actually test this So, for example, on your MIDI keyboard, if you push the
  127. key down slow but hard, you're gonna see that you get a low velocity number.
  128. Again, always look in the top left in FL Studio, the little hint panel there.
  129. That's super super helpful with anything in FL Studio whenever you hover a mouse
  130. over a knob or something like that.
  131. And then again, you can also press that MIDI key really fast, and you'll see that
  132. you get a high velocity. Now the maximum MIDI value here is 127, okay.
  133. And when you're working with certain plugins, you can actually trigger different
  134. articulations/slash tambers of notes depending on your velocity, okay.
  135. So you know, that's just a pretty cool tip to know to give a little bit, you know, a
  136. little bit of variety to your music.
  137. Now, when you're dealing with the one-shot samples, you don't really have this
  138. luxury of getting different timbers.
  139. Again, that's different articulations or just a different sound.
  140. And what that means is like if I play a sound of you know to get a different
  141. articulation, you know, it might be like one's brighter, or then like the next one
  142. could be dull, but you're still playing that same note.
  143. For example, if I was playing like C5, I'm playing C5, but on a real piano, if you
  144. press it hard, the way how like the hammer would strike like the actual string or
  145. whatever, it might sound a little bit brighter on the actual hit, and that's just
  146. what you can be doing with velocity with certain plugins.
  147. Okay, so for example, imagine we were building a drum loop, okay, and we're gonna
  148. keep it simple. Let's say we had a kick, a clap, and a hi-hat.
  149. Now, if you're hi-hat, if the volume of each individual hit is you know constant,
  150. you know, they're all the same volume, it can make your music sound really rigid and
  151. really kind of boring, okay? But if you open up the piano roll in FL Studio and you
  152. start, you know, just adjusting the velocities of each individual hit, and you know,
  153. I'm not talking to make it you know dramatic, but it's just a matter of you know,
  154. just click just a little bit, you know, one's a little louder, one's a little bit
  155. quieter, and you'll hear when you play back that drum loop, you know, now you kind
  156. of get a little bit more, you know, it's it sounds a little bit more musical, a
  157. little bit more groove to it, okay.
  158. And again, that's just one of these organic tools to help kind of mold that drum
  159. loop to get it to kind of flow.
  160. the next organic tool you have available to you is panning, and just to get everyone
  161. up to speed here, so panning is the ability to allow a sound to play more out of
  162. like the left or right speaker, okay, like the left or right channel.
  163. And it's just a matter of like you usually there's like a knob, and you can just
  164. dial in, you know, the amount that you want.
  165. So panning can add freshness to your drum loop.
  166. So, for example, if someone's listening to your drum loop and you might just pan
  167. like one percussion sound to the right, and then a different percussion sound to
  168. like the left, and whenever that loop plays, you know, especially when they're on
  169. headphones, it can just kind of add just a little bit of freshness to their ears as
  170. they're listening to your loop, okay.
  171. Panning can also add space for other instruments when you're dealing with like
  172. actual mixing. You know, if you had like a piano, a guitar, and a pad or something
  173. like that, you know, you can kind of pan one to the left, one to the right, and you
  174. know, I'm not saying to go a hundred percent to the left and a hundred percent to
  175. the right, you can always blend kind of in between or whatever.
  176. It's useful for creating space in your mix, okay.
  177. In addition, panning can also be used to create wideness, okay.
  178. Because if we talk about stereo for a second, so stereo is the difference between
  179. your left and right channel. So, for example, if we had two claps playing and we
  180. paned one to the far left, and we pan the other one to the far right, and those two
  181. claps were like two totally different recordings, two totally different sounds,
  182. you're gonna get a really, really wide sound because the left is totally different
  183. from the right, and that's all that stereo is, okay.
  184. Okay, and since we're on the topic of widen wess.ideness, I just want to let you be
  185. aware you have to be careful with plugins because you can get phase cancellation
  186. That's why you always want to test your mix in mono, especially when you're working
  187. with these wideness plugins. But I show you in the course how to get a safe wideness
  188. through panning. Okay. So the next organic tool is layering.
  189. So many producers don't take advantage of layering, and it's not just for drum
  190. loops. You know, you can use it for any sound or instrument.
  191. And what layering does is it just adds major fullness, and you can also use layering
  192. really creatively in your arrangements.
  193. So, for example, let's say we had like a piano progression, okay.
  194. You know, so you can have the same progression, but then play like different
  195. instruments at different times of the song using that same progression.
  196. That's a cool way for you know to kind of create different arrangements and make
  197. your music sound a little bit different, even though it's playing that same
  198. progression. So here's an example that you can try.
  199. So try creating a chord progression with some piano, and then copy those MIDI notes
  200. into another instrument. Now play them both at the same time and hear the fullness,
  201. and then you know, if you have like a drum loop, try breaking apart the pattern so
  202. that you still have the two instruments, they're still playing the same MIDI notes,
  203. but now you have them in two different patterns.
  204. And you know, maybe just play the drum loop with like the piano, and then try
  205. playing the drum loop just with like your layer, and you're gonna hear how you know
  206. from arrangement standpoint kind of sounds cool, as well as from a fullness
  207. standpoint, it sounds really powerful when you play them together.
  208. Now, one thing you want to be careful of is phase cancellation when you're dealing
  209. with drums, okay. and so when you're dealing with drums and you're layering drums,
  210. to check that you just want to flip the phase in FL Studio.
  211. you just want to go like reverse polarity now.
  212. Now, if dealing with drums, layering your drum hits can also help with like crunch,
  213. depending on like. like the layer that you're using, whether it be like let's say a
  214. snare hit or some other kind of percussion element
  215. You guys can also be EQing this layer too to really fine-tune it with that drum hit,
  216. and sometimes it can even add clarity.
  217. For example, many times with your drum, it's not like the low end that isn't
  218. standing out because a lot of times the low end is there in your drum.
  219. Sometimes you're like, Oh, well, I need to turn up the bass or I need to turn up the
  220. volume of my kick drum. But many times it's like you don't have the beater sound,
  221. okay? You don't have like the click.
  222. And to help you out there, what you can be doing is like a common technique is to
  223. use like a hi-hat or some type of high frequency sound that whenever the kick drums
  224. playing, it really helps that kick drum to cut through the mix, okay?
  225. Because it has that beater, that that kind of click kind of sound, okay?
  226. And that's where your drum can help with clarity.
  227. Another little pro tip there is sometimes you can also route your kick drum to some
  228. parallel distortion, and that's usually an awesome way to add more hit to your drum
  229. as well as some clarity too. That's kind of off topic, but a cool trick.
  230. Okay, so our next organic tool is note nudging slash swing.
  231. Now, again, note nudging is more like the manual approach.
  232. Swing is kind of like you know, more the automatic approach.
  233. Swing adjusts your eighth notes, okay.
  234. So digital music can sound really rigid, and this is where you know computer music
  235. kind of gets its bad name from because when we program our MIDI notes and if we
  236. quantize, it's like everything is snapped to grid and it just sounds like so
  237. robotic, right? There's no musical feel to it.
  238. Now, note nudging can create a loose and organic feeling to your music, and many
  239. times it's just subtle moves.,
  240. L likeike you know, don't think you have to nudge crazy.
  241. Maybe just the odd note here or there.
  242. You can either put it early or late..
  243. Now, in that inside of FL Studio, the shortcut to note nudge is holding down shift
  244. and the scroll wheel So if you open up the piano roll and you have your mini notes,
  245. just hover your mouse over a mini note, hold down shift the scroll wheel, either up
  246. or down, and that will allow you to go early or late on that sound.
  247. And again, you know, maybe just one notch, maybe two notches.
  248. And if you go more than that, feel free to, but many times your music can start
  249. sounding out of sync. So sometimes you can only push this note nudging so far, okay.
  250. now for myself, I typically find that my tracks always benefit from a little bit of
  251. swing. You have to be careful on how much you dial in because it can kind of make
  252. your music sound like out of sync, okay.
  253. But in my beginnings, I actually found that I had to train my ear to hear like the
  254. effects of swing and like note nudging.
  255. maybe not so much note nudging because like you actually know like the note that you
  256. are pushing off beat, but when it came to swing for myself, it was kind of similar
  257. to like learn learning compression and learning how compression sounds.
  258. so obviously when you're trying to figure out what swing's doing, just dial it in to
  259. emphasize the effect. But at the end of the day, it's affecting the in-betweens,
  260. your eighth notes. Okay, so again, we have the on beat, the off beat, so the on
  261. beats the one, the off beat would be the three, and then you have the two and the
  262. four, and I call the two A, which is trickier than the four, which is B.
  263. But again, swing affects the two and the four, okay.
  264. So, again, just reference back to the step sequences there.
  265. So you can use note nudging on like drum hits, piano chords, or even again claps to
  266. kind of get like that loose feeling in conjunction with layering, okay?
  267. And again, you can note nudge early or late, okay.
  268. Now I wanna talk about another organic tool., and that is your sound selection
  269. Now it's incredibly important to select sounds which actually suit your song, okay?
  270. So inside of the course, we create a beat as our videos kind of progress, okay?
  271. You know, so in the beginning, we introduce like you know the drum loop, you know,
  272. the certain organic tools like velocity and stuff, then I start adding some chords
  273. in. And then later on, what I do is I actually start switching out some of the
  274. sounds inside of the drum loop, and we both hear it's like it's crazy how switching
  275. out the sounds, the effect it has on the song.
  276. So, you know, sound selection can make a song's you know sound bad, but it can also
  277. just give the song a totally different emotion, like a different vibe.
  278. And to take it a step further, so sound selection can also enhance a song's vibe
  279. like even further. So, for example, if you think about like an 80s track and like
  280. those 80s kind of sounds, for example, like a roll-in TR808, you know, that classic
  281. 808 sound. So the biggest thing I want you to take away from this section, the sound
  282. selection section is do your sounds suit your song when you hit play, when you
  283. listen to like your drum loop, when you listen even to like your instruments, does
  284. it blend? Okay, and on to our last organic tool, which is sound placement.
  285. And this is what safe spots is, okay?
  286. So it's just understanding where to place your sounds within your drum loop.
  287. It's also understanding the emotion each 16th note has towards your overall song,
  288. okay. Now, here's something I want to get across to you, okay?
  289. So I personally feel that why sound placement is what separates an amateur
  290. producer from a professional producer, okay?
  291. So something I share with you inside of the course is in my beginnings, you know how
  292. I would approach learning how to program drum loops and understand, you know, pretty
  293. much how I came up with this concept of safe spots. over the years
  294. Is I'd actually build drum loop after drum loop to learn where I could place my
  295. sounds, okay? Only to delete that drum loop, delete the sounds, and then start over
  296. with a fresh try. Okay. And I would just do this over and over and over again, just
  297. to learn where I could place my sounds for them to sound good and the effect that
  298. each you know step, each 16th note has within my drum loop.
  299. Okay, so I hope you enjoyed this episode on Safe Spots.
  300. The course is now officially released.
  301. It's called Safe Spots. Create amazing drum loops.
  302. Again, you guys can come to the episode page in the resource links, and you guys can
  303. check out the course there. You guys can purchase the course individually or within
  304. the membership. Okay. So obviously the membership is obviously going to be a better
  305. deal. I also have the book safe spots again.
  306. Just search my my author name, Riley Weller.
  307. So Safe Spots, Riley Weller, and it'll come up in Amazon.
  308. Again, all the links will be in like the show notes, okay?
  309. So don't forget you guys can support this podcast for five dollars a month.
  310. Come and ask me a question on the episode page.
  311. Thanks for listening, and I'll talk to you guys in the next one.
  312. Thanks for checking out the episode.
  313. If you had any questions, visit it's gratuitous.com slash podcast, select an episode
  314. and submit your question at the bottom of the page to the contact form.
  315. If you'd like to take my FL Studio courses, see my current studio and podcasting
  316. gear, read my books, or are interested in lessons, visit the link it's
  317. gratuitous.com slash learning.
  318. That page will redirect you to more info and resources.
  319. I hope the best with your productions.
  320. I'm gratuitous, and I'll see you in the next
  321. episode.
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