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S2E11 – We All Have 12 Notes

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This is a very interesting episode to think about, as no matter if you are a beatmaker, or musician, we only have 12 notes available to in an octave when making our music. And, if you download my free 5 Keys to a Successful Beat Book at https://itsGratuiTous.com/5keys, you will also learn that when you pick a Key and Scale, you actually only have 7 notes you’re allowed to play!

Once you understand this, it really opens your eyes that it’s not as complicated as it has to be, and there is no “secret”, except for hard work, and finding your own sound.

I also talk to you about common things I teach about like STAYING IN YOUR DAW, AND DON’T COME OUT (unless you have a question) to get the best learning experience with the least amount of distractions while you are on fire (passionate), and wanting to learn how to make beats in-depth.

Please reach out to GratuiTous with any questions you have about making beats in FL Studio.. enjoy the episode!

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S2E11 – We All Have 12 Notes

  1. Season two, episode 11. We all have 12 notes.
  2. Alright, hey, what's up, guys?
  3. Gratuitous from it'sgratuitous.com.
  4. If you guys want to grab my free book, my free beat making book.
  5. It's called Five Keys to a Successful Beat.
  6. Just go to it'sgratuitous.com forward slash five keys and I'll send you that book.
  7. I also want to give a reminder to those of you who have read that book.
  8. Read it again. There's so many valuable things in there, right?
  9. I give you my five keys, and I also give you seven core principles of being a music
  10. producer. I want to talk about two things here quickly.
  11. Because the second key leads into the topic of this episode, which is we all have 12
  12. notes, right? Within an octave.
  13. There's 12 notes. But key number two is picking a key and a scale, which means you
  14. only have seven notes you're allowed to play.
  15. Alright. So I talked to you about that in that free five keys book.
  16. I also talked to you about that in my piano lessons for producers course.
  17. Alright. So key number one is staying
  18. inside your doll and don't come out.
  19. My goal here, teaching you guys how to use FL Studio and make beats is I
  20. want to get you to the point where you don't have to watch videos.
  21. Like you don't have to watch my courses, you don't have to watch YouTube videos, you
  22. don't have to watch these videos to feel inspired to make your own music.
  23. I want to get you to the point where you learn the music program, you understand the
  24. music program, you understand how to make the beats.
  25. And it's making a beat versus knowing your DAW.
  26. Okay, so I talk to you about this a lot.
  27. That knowing your DAW, anybody can learn a DAW, a music program.
  28. You know, I could show my dad how to use the music program, and maybe in a year, he
  29. can maybe maybe start recording.
  30. start recording. Because you know, he plays guitar, he caning, maybe he can start us
  31. FL Studio So he's learning the DAW, but not everybody can make a beat.
  32. Okay. That'll be another episode.
  33. So again, key number one is staying inside your DAW and don't come out unless you
  34. have a question. Once you have a question, then get back in your DAW because your
  35. first three or four years of making beats and learning music production, those are
  36. the most crucial. And that is because you're on fire.
  37. Like, you know, you're so excited about learning how to make beats because it's a
  38. very cool industry once you learn about it.
  39. And as this fire is going on, like, you know, in other words, like you're really
  40. passionate about it. You want to keep learning about it.
  41. Because that was how I approached this every single night after work, being an
  42. electrician there for at least four years.
  43. I swear it was like every single night after work for at least two or three hours.
  44. It was just music, music, music because I liked it so much.
  45. And I learned so much in that time because I stayed in my DAW and I didn't come out
  46. unless I had a question. And for me, I learned really, really good off of the
  47. FL Studio tutorials by the original FL Studio Guru.
  48. There were so many valuable things.
  49. even though they're a little dated, FL Studio is still quite similar in how it
  50. operates, but they were great.
  51. Sometimes they would have playlists.
  52. I'd watch through those playlists and then I'd be like, okay, and then I would go
  53. back and I start learning how to, you know, in my in the music program, and I didn't
  54. come out. And so that's key number one.
  55. It's gonna keep you focused. It's going to allow you to make music
  56. without having to rely on feeling that you have to watch a video to make music.
  57. Okay., Because again you hop onto YouTube, you watch one video, you watch two
  58. videos, and before you know it, you wasted a lot of time watching videos, and maybe
  59. you only spent 20 minutes making music to talk about this episode.
  60. So key number two is picking a key and a scale.
  61. So picking a key and a scale is by far the most important thing you can do if you're
  62. going to make a beat. Because when I talk about making a beat, I only really
  63. consider two ways to make a beat.
  64. That's either original compositions where you are making your own MIDI notes and
  65. you're making your own drum loop, or there's sampling where you're taking audio,
  66. you're slicing it, and you're making your own melody, but again, you are creating
  67. your own drum loop. Even if that is through sampling, you're taking the loops and
  68. then you're, you know, chopping it up and you're doing your own thing with it.
  69. Now for original compositions, which is mainly what I like to create, because
  70. they're original, there's fully your own copyright.
  71. sampling, you gotta be careful with copyright, unless you sample your own music,
  72. which is really cool. Again, there's a course inside my platform on that.
  73. It's all within the membership fee.
  74. You can access all the courses, or you can just grab it by itself.
  75. So by picking a key and a scale, these are the notes we're allowed to play, okay?
  76. And that's key number two. This episode I want to talk about though, is we all have
  77. 12 notes. And so what I'm trying to say is like we're all human, we only have 12
  78. notes. And when you apply picking a key and a scale, now it
  79. only breaks it down to seven notes.
  80. And just to clarify, so how a piano works is you have 12 notes, and that's within
  81. one octave. And then when you go up to the next octave,, it's the same notes, but
  82. a pitch higher or a pitch lower depending on if you want up or down.
  83. And that's how music works. For example, A4 is 440 Hertz,
  84. A5 is 880 Hertz. So you can see it doubled.
  85. And if you were to play A4, which is 440 hertz, and then play A3, it's 220
  86. hertz. So it halved. And so that is how music works.
  87. Okay. You have to remember music is just math at the very very baseline of music
  88. when it comes to frequencies. That's why you can't play certain notes because they
  89. sound out of pitch. And so this is why when you pick a key and a scale, such as C
  90. major, okay. So the key is C, and then what's the scale?
  91. Let's just say major. Now, if you've taken my piano course, you know that C major is
  92. only white notes. And this is the reason why when you play the white
  93. notes, they all work. And then if you try to bring in the black notes, well, they
  94. they don't work in C major because those keys are not in that key and scale.
  95. You'd have to pick another key and scale to use both the white and the black notes.
  96. And I tell you in my piano course that I suggest picking a key in a scale with both
  97. white and black keys, and it allows you to know where your hands are much
  98. better on a piano because if you try to play only on the white notes, C major, it is
  99. so hard to play. Let's say you've gotten better at the piano to the point where you
  100. can look away and you can feel on the keys where you are.
  101. That is what I'm talking about.
  102. It's so it just allows a great workflow.
  103. All right, so we only have. 12 notes as a music producer
  104. And so it's all about finding the catchy sound and then
  105. finding the tools that you like to make the music that you like.
  106. Because the music industry is such a competitive industry, and there's a lot of like
  107. pride in a sense that oh, my beats are way better than your beats or
  108. whatever. But at the end of the day, we all only have 12 notes.
  109. And once you understand that, it's like there is no more.
  110. All right, you just gotta learn how to be creative with those 12 notes.
  111. And again, even you know, we have more than 12 notes, but they are still the same
  112. note, right? So if A4, but then A5, well, yeah, that's two notes, but it's the
  113. same note, right? Just a higher pitch or lower pitch, which now gives you a
  114. different sound for you to spread over the frequency spectrum.
  115. Because when we make our music, we have a frequency spectrum, right?
  116. 20 hertz to 20,000 hertz is what they say that we as humans can hear.
  117. That's where you want to be using octaves is to take advantage of this frequency
  118. spectrum. Let's say my first loop is a piano, and I play with both hands around
  119. let's say C4 to C5. So I'm kind of hitting like the low mids to like the mids and a
  120. little bit of the highs, let's say.
  121. So that's there. Well, now we have the like the low low end for a kick drum or a
  122. bass line or something. So that's how you gotta think when you are making your music
  123. that you wanna take advantage of the full frequency spectrum, and a really really
  124. powerful trick is once you kind of have your melodies all laid out, you
  125. you can select one of your melodies and can easily go up and down an octave to see
  126. if it stands out better. Sometimes you might want to layer so you can take that
  127. lower octave of the notes and the higher octave of the notes, put them both to like
  128. the same mixer insert, or you can put them to individual mixer inserts and create a
  129. subgroup or something. You can compress them so that they're all together.
  130. But now what you're doing is you're taking that same melody, which maybe was in the
  131. mids or whatever, you've duplicated it, you brought it up in octave.
  132. So now you're playing in the mids and the highs.
  133. You can affect it however you want.
  134. That's more advanced in a sense of thinking in terms of your sound selection to
  135. make your beats sound fuller, make your mixing and stuff really you know a lot
  136. easier. But just to summarize, okay.
  137. So we all only have 12 notes. You wanna pick a key and a scale,
  138. which now you only have seven notes.
  139. So when you're playing your melodies, or if you're playing chords, those chords have
  140. to have those seven notes. If you don't, then your music is gonna be
  141. out of pitch. And once you understand that, that is the secret to
  142. breaking free from having to rely on videos to be
  143. inspired. Okay, you're gonna know the notes you're allowed to play, then you gotta
  144. learn how to be catchy with them.
  145. Takes time, but you gotta keep at it.
  146. Alright, so I'll wrap up this episode here.
  147. The next episode I want to talk about is making a beat versus
  148. knowing your DAW. So be on the lookout for that.
  149. If you guys would like my free book, it's called Five Keys to a Successful Beat.
  150. So simple it becomes creative.
  151. Just visit it'sgratuitous.com forward slash five keys.
  152. I also want to let you guys know that I did a huge update on my website.
  153. You guys can go visit the home page.
  154. I've left you a lot of valuable free FL Studio tutorials.
  155. The first one I really want you to watch, and again, it's free.
  156. It's called How to Select the Right Plugins as a Producer.
  157. So when you're brand new, you can get lost out there, and you can start
  158. downloading every single plugin you see, but you just got to be careful with the
  159. plugins that you're bringing into your project.
  160. If you're brand new, you can really really make a headache for yourself because
  161. you're bringing in so many plugins that you may decide later on that you don't want,
  162. and it's just made your computer just a mess.
  163. Plugins are powerful, but there's a time and a place, and it's important
  164. to have plugins that you like and that are reliable because these are the plugins
  165. you're gonna be using all the time inside your music program.
  166. So in your really really early stages, you know, you might see tons of videos out
  167. there. Oh, this plugin, this plugin.
  168. So again, just go to it's gratuitous.com.
  169. I have a slider. It's how to select the right plugins as a producer.
  170. If you guys have any questions about learning how to make beats in FL Studio, you
  171. guys feel free to reach out to me.
  172. Again, my website is a dedicated training platform to learn how to make beats in FL
  173. Studio. There's knowing the DAW, learning the DAW, and anybody can learn the DAW.
  174. Like I was giving you the example of like, let's say my dad, I could teach him how
  175. to use the music program, but maybe he would never learn how to make the beat.
  176. how to make the So my platform teaches you, you know, how to use the DAW, but
  177. we're mainly focused on beat, how to break free from the videos so that
  178. you can get in your music program, right?
  179. Stay in there and don't come out and make the music you want.
  180. my platform even shows you how to be organized with your music files.
  181. I always talk about releasing beat tapes, they're a great way to really teach
  182. yourself music production. You're actually putting together like a little album, you
  183. know, a beat tape. So my beat tapes, they're on Spotify.
  184. I usually put like 11 beats on them, which means I have to make the beat, I have to
  185. arrange the beat, I have to mix it, I have to master it for all 11 tracks.
  186. And so if you are making beats and you're kind of wanting to get in get into music,
  187. or you're just wanting to get a lot better, you should really try creating a beat
  188. tape. And again, I even have a course in that in the platform.
  189. It's called releasing a professional beat tape.
  190. So this is why I say if you are a part of the membership, you can access all the
  191. courses and you watch the course pathways page, which teaches you what course to
  192. watch in what order in a super structured way, and you can learn.
  193. And then I'm here to help with any kind of questions.
  194. Again, you guys can check out the reviews page.
  195. I've had member interviews where you know they're just like you, they're just
  196. starting up. there's a lot of information out there where to go, where to find
  197. information, right? But I've been doing this for a long time, and I'm really focused
  198. on high quality education for you guys.
  199. You can visit it'sgratuitous.com forward slash courses.
  200. There's tons of stuff I have to share with you guys, and I will talk to you in the
  201. next episode about it
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