How To Get That 'Pro Sound' (as a beginner producer)

earlier today I got a message from one of my students requesting feedback on one of his songs his message read hey Alex I'm looking for your feedback on my latest assignment song I Love The Melody but I feel like it's missing that PRO Sound any feedback would be appreciated so I went ahead and gave the song a listen this is what I [Music] heard and then I got the idea what if we take this song which is a song made by one of my most beginner level students and I'll see if I could fix it

up to sound professional so that my student song can have that much desired PRO Sound let's play it back so we can get [Music] started first thing I hear is that powerless Melody these notes are honestly pretty good I think they would make a great Melody if the sound was right so I'm going to load up X for serum and create a stronger sound I'm going to initialize the preset go to oscillator a choose a saw wave turn on the filter tighten it a bit and then we're going to control this filter with envelope 2

and now we have nice pretty electr pluck this is much more modern sound that's easier to pull off the original sound is called a supera super saws are a bit generic you could still use sus but they're very tough to use if you don't know what you're doing I'm going to add some delay to our electr pluck this will help fill in these long gaps between [Music] notes delay is just Echo then what we'll do is We'll add Reverb to create a [Music] space now I'm going to add a free plugin called Ott to the

sound this is going to increase the presence of the Reverb and delay in these gaps here now we have a more consistent energy versus the original lead here's the original now back to mine now the pros like making unique sounding songs our lead sound here although modern is still a very widely used sound we can add uniqueness to it by layering it with a slightly different sound to get a whole new sound here's my [Music] layer this is a very pretty synth sound I found in Nexus it has a good guitar attack and presence Within

These gaps and because my student likes suol so much I took his original supera and added it to the stack as well now let's listen to the [Music] stack isn't that wonderful there is so much energy there that you can't mess this up all right let's see what we [Music] got a lot of work to do the next thing I hear is a poor Melody and chord relationship when you get your Melody right you have to get the chords right because the chords will govern what you have to do with your base these chords they're

just flat there's no life here they're basic when I play them with the melody they don't bring the melody to life the chords should supercharge the melody and these don't do it for a couple reasons the first is that all the notes are too low on the piano roll so the notes sound very scrunched up and kind of Muddy I'm going to revoice these chords by taking the middle note of each chord and just spreading them out so I'm going to move them up an octave these chords are still technically kind of basic because they

consist of a root third and fifth I'm going to add a note to each chord to make them sound less basic this is called a pedal tone or in other words it's just a note that doesn't change with each [Music] chord the other issue with these chords is that the sound is very stiff it's it's just a hard sound it doesn't change it doesn't move if you listen to any professional song the Sounds are always moving so what I'm going to do is add a little bit of Dynamics to this sound by reducing the sustain

and increasing the Decay this will make the sound sound more like a [Music] piano those Dynamics will be much more satisfying now listen to the melody with its new set of [Music] chords the Dynamics of these chords push that Melody out so much more I love [Music] it next thing we have to fix is this poorly made Baseline it's a sound I can't really hear it doesn't follow the chords right and it does not supplement this melody at all most of the time when you make a baseline you're either going to use the bottom note

of your chords or you're going to have a baseline that focuses on the tonic of the key signature that you're in in this case it's a melodic song so we're going to use the bottom note of the chords we're going to go to this bass sound get rid of these not sure what he was doing there and we're going to place the base notes when making a baseline you should have an EQ open at all time and you should be looking for an octave that gives you the strongest frequencies between 40 and 80 Herz those

are the frequencies that will sound the best on all speaker systems the other issue with this Baseline is the sound when I play it with the [Music] melody it's foundationally good but it could be better this particular student takes a liking to John Summit style of music and desires to make music like that that music is very transy and melodic Housey so I want to pick a baseline that complement that genre let's make a sound more suitable for that genre we're going to initialize the preset keep everything as is turn on the filter close it

up and then take envelope 2 and make the same sound I use for everything which is the this plug I'm going to shorten it up warm it up then I'm going to go to this midi effects here and add an arpeggiator at a rate of eight which means eight triggers per one bar then we get this [Music] sound it's a big sound but I'm going to do one more thing to this Baseline that'll be like a pro tip for you if we look at our Melody the notes are very spread out with these big gaps

in between each section of notes you can use this Blank Space to communicate other instruments in between it so when the melody takes a break in between notes we can go to the Baseline and add some passing notes so now we have this Baseline that melodically communicates with that lead Melody [Music] isn't that kind of cool next major problem we have is these drums we have a hip-hop kick and we're trying to make a house song when you're an expert you break the rules and use whatever sounds you want to do whatever ever you want

but if you're less experienced it's really hard to pull that off and you should use drum samples more suitable for your genre that will only help you this hip-hop kick is very small it won't fill up speakers like a house kick will if we look at this house kick I have here it's much longer and compared to this hip-hop kick if we play them back to back this one is so much bigger we're going to use his house kick I like his little high hat loopy ass here but it is missing the main ingredient which

in my opinion is the main high hat that plays in between each Kick I think that's the second most important drum in house music so with all our drums now get a pretty strong sound so now we have with everything our PRO Sound [Music] that's beautiful if we compare it to the [Music] original this new version will sound much better on speakers and I'm excited to show my student and that is a video for you if you would like me to coach you so that you could achieve the music production skill of your dreams I

have a link to apply for my coaching program below this video thanks so much for watching and I will see you in the next video Lesson