Props tutorial series returns: Super Neat Beat Cheat Sheet series & Quick Mix Fix Tricks Series

[EnochLight]

I'm looking forward to more of these!

Deep house:

Trap Drum Basics:

Electro Pop Drums (with Blocks):

Trip Hop drums:

Liquid Drum and Bass:

Mixing With Filters:

Working With Vocals:

Levels & Clipping:

Perfect Your Vocals With Pitch Edit (not part of Ryan's Picks for Quick Mix Fix Tricks, but a favorite of mine nonetheless):

Writing Melodies:

Vocal Juggling:

Mixing in Mono:

Making Catchy Hooks in Your Songs:

808 Bass: Part 1

808 Bass: Part 2

Recording Acoustic Guitar

Sparking New Ideas with Komplete Select & Reason

[ryanharlin]

Yeah hey guys! What other drum styles should I do? I'm making one as we speak about how to make trap beats... but after that I want to make some more and I want to make sure they're useful to people.

Some people suggested Dubstep and I could do that but I also feel like dubstep tutorials are SOOOO overdone. But if you guys feel differently, I'll make one.

Someone on Youtube suggested trip-hop, which I could do.

I was also thinking of modern electro pop styles (think Taylor Swift or Dr. Luke's Ke$ha or Katy Perry stuff).

Anything you guys want to see covered?

[ScuzzyEye]

Someone on Youtube suggested trip-hop, which I could do.

Trip hop would be cool. I think a lot of it was originally produced by recording drums at 100-120 bpm, and then cutting speed in half of the playback. Reason's audio time stretch would lend itself to that.

[EnochLight]

Yeah hey guys! What other drum styles should I do?

Yeah, the trap one is almost mandatory. Or shall I say, obligatory? Anyway, I agree a classic trip hop one needs to be included. I also agree that a modern pop-dance tutorial in the vein of Swift/Gaga/K-Perry must be included.

[jam-s]

How about some epic cinematic taiko drums action or some funkot (aka. Funky Kota, ファンコット, Indonesian House) house beats?

[Goan]

Trap and TripHop are gonna be nice. What I think loads of people would also like would be a jdilla / flying lotus / madlib organic style drum tutorial.

Something like this:

And, maybe that's to complex for this kind of tutorial, but how about some IDM (including modulations and glitches)? Like this:

[Olivier]

@RyanHarlin: If its just about beats i have some ideas..

I'd like to hear the minimal Techno side of things.
Or... the various methods of how to add variety to a rythm. Something on breaks perhaps. How and when to fit in toms 'n crashes ?

[joeyluck]

How about some epic cinematic taiko drums action or some funkot (aka. Funky Kota, ファンコット, Indonesian House) house beats?

This would cool! Do something outside the norm. Maybe even interest some users in drum samples and loops they may not have considered before.

Or interest users in a genre such as film and game scoring.
Maybe that could be a different tutorial altogether

[ryanharlin]

These are all great ideas, guys! Thanks for the suggestions.

One thing I'm hoping to do with this series (which is planned to be 5 videos) is to teach a lesser considered Reason trick along with the beat anatomy. That way even if you don't make Deep House, you might consider trying the Rex slice trick I show.

For the Trap tutorial I'll be going over the lesser-used triplet snap in the sequencer and showing my favorite bass drum in Kong that's not even a bass drum (TEASER ALERT!)

But for each one, I want to hopefully think up some unique part of Reason to explore.

[Wook]

Great tutorial, Ryan. I'm all for trip hop and Jdilla stuff.

I would also like to see how would you deal with making sounds lofi. Not straight up bitcrushing. That metallic sound makes me cringe. I mean making sounds dusty, crusty and covered with pig fat. There are some samples in FSB that have that sound. One of them is called "090_MagicRhodes_mLp_eLAB". They used some filtering I just can't figure out.

Thanks!

[EnochLight]

Great tutorial, Ryan. I'm all for trip hop and Jdilla stuff.

I would also like to see how would you deal with making sounds lofi. Not straight up bitcrushing. That metallic sound makes me cringe. I mean making sounds dusty, crusty and covered with pig fat. There are some samples in FSB that have that sound. One of them is called "090_MagicRhodes_mLp_eLAB". They used some filtering I just can't figure out.

Thanks!

That one's simple actually. A bit of delay on top of some Audiomatics with Tape and Vinyl settings, and your good to go!

[Wook]

Great tutorial, Ryan. I'm all for trip hop and Jdilla stuff.

I would also like to see how would you deal with making sounds lofi. Not straight up bitcrushing. That metallic sound makes me cringe. I mean making sounds dusty, crusty and covered with pig fat. There are some samples in FSB that have that sound. One of them is called "090_MagicRhodes_mLp_eLAB". They used some filtering I just can't figure out.

Thanks!

That one's simple actually. A bit of delay on top of some Audiomatics with Tape and Vinyl settings, and your good to go!

Thank you, Enoch. Yeah, that is a part of the solution, but those samples have a certain quality to them. I just can't put my finger on it. Did E-Lab use samplers, filters, tape machines? It's an enigma for me. The best I can pull of is medium-fi and that just sounds like bad mixing.

What can a man say. I love it dirty.

Check out other rhodes samples in Music Loops folder. Both fixed and variable tempo. They trigger melancholy mode instantly. It doesn't take much considering my ADD.

[JNeffLind]

I'll just say this is awesome news. I like the idea of an electro-pop oriented one, but honestly all is appreciated.

[Ronin]

Good stuff.
I would love to see some REGGAE drums being made, although I realise this isn't a very hipster genre these days, still, there are actually a very large amount of people in the reggae and dub scene who use reason.

I would be interested to see how you might use the regroove templates and such, since reggae has so many different drum styles and grooves.

[nooomy]

Yeah hey guys! What other drum styles should I do? I'm making one as we speak about how to make trap beats... but after that I want to make some more and I want to make sure they're useful to people.

Some people suggested Dubstep and I could do that but I also feel like dubstep tutorials are SOOOO overdone. But if you guys feel differently, I'll make one.

Someone on Youtube suggested trip-hop, which I could do.

I was also thinking of modern electro pop styles (think Taylor Swift or Dr. Luke's Ke$ha or Katy Perry stuff).

Anything you guys want to see covered?

I Woolf like to see like some IDM or trip hop also tech house and minimal techno would be cool
Btw I did that tutorial way before you guys :p

[joeyluck]

Would also be cool to see some focus on different meters

[Marco Raaphorst]

Or tell them people all you need is one loop and repeat it over and over and over and over again. Like this:

Using this loop:

[EnochLight]

Or tell them people all you need is one loop and repeat it over and over and over and over again. Like this

I'm hearing subtle variations in the loop, actually. Anyway, a catchy hook and a Grammy later, apparently people enjoy one loop.

[ryanharlin]

Second installment is out! I didn't keep in the part I teased here... I was going to enhance the 808 drum with the Tone Generator to make it deeper and whatnot but for time's sake, I pulled that.

Out probably next week (Friday): Electro Pop!

[Exowildebeest]

How about doing a genre that isn't particularly "hip" now? That would give you meta-hipster credits and make Propellerheads look as if it's really forward thinking and in touch with the deepest underground - at the risk of seeming obscure or old-fashioned of course

But seriously, do Drone Ambient or Schranztechno or Black Metal next!

[zeebot]

Drum loops are two a penny. Personally I'd like to see more about specific devices in the rack and 'outside of the box' uses for them rather than 'this is how you make generic beats in the style of...' videos.
The beat videos will be appreciated by people just starting out using reason or making music in general but I dont know about anyone else but if you have been making music for a while its really easy to listen to a beat and copy it in reason no matter what genre.

Still, thanks for the effort Ryan.

[ryanharlin]

How about doing a genre that isn't particularly "hip" now?

My goal with the series, which is slated to be 5 videos, is to do genres people want to learn about. It's not based solely on me seeing what's hip... though there's some obvious crossover there too. People want to learn popular styles because those styles are popular, if you see what I mean.

Deep House and Trap are two of the most commonly requested styles to learn. Dubstep comes up a lot but I've been somewhat reluctant to teach that one because I feel it's been covered THOROUGHLY. That said, I might do one anyway because people are still asking.

One that's come up repeatedly that I wasn't thinking of doing but might now is Trip Hop. For each tutorial, my goal is to show the genre but also a different production technique that can be applied to any style. So Deep House was about Rex slices as sample hits. Trap was about combinator layered drums and exploring triplet grids. Electro Pop I think will be about the benefits of using the sequencer itself as your drum programming environment.

Not sure about the other two styles or techniques yet but the demand for Trip Hop has me strongly considering that one. One challenge is that many of these Beats aren't only about the drums. What's the sound of Dubstep drums? Well partially it's the sound of EVERYTHING else going on around it.

In fact in the Electro Pop video, that'll be partially my point: the drums are only there to serve the pop song on top. For that reason, the pop version will include other instrumentation because the pop drums aren't tricky to make... they're just tricky to make support the pop song in the way they need to.

So if I can figure out a production angle for Trip Hop... I'll do that one and then I'll think about that 5th genre. I want to avoid doing Dubstep but feel free to quote this post and laugh at my defeatist surrender when the 5th one comes out and it's about Dubstep.

[ryanharlin]

The beat videos will be appreciated by people just starting out using reason or making music in general

That's the exact intent of this series. If you've been making music for a bit, this series isn't for you. But we all had to learn at some point and this series is for those people.

You'll probably get more out of my next planned series that I'm cooking up, which will be me sharing some of my mix tips and exploring the big mixer in all its glory.

[ryanharlin]

The beat videos will be appreciated by people just starting out using reason or making music in general

If you've been making music for a bit, this series isn't for you.

That being said, I have to disagree with MYSELF on this one. Because even though the beat anatomy might not be for you... trying different production techniques in your own music can produce new results. If you haven't made beat by using only rex slices as samples, as shown in Deep House. Making yourself work under that limited framework drastically alters what you make.

Don't just make drums that way. Make a whole song using nothing but single slices of Rex files. How far can you take that? That is where I think we can all benefit from exploring ideas in these videos.

[submonsterz]

I sent you a personal message when you posted this with a two min example file for an idea but sadly you've totally not even looked or opened the personal message on here still says to this day unread ........