me break down the five element formula. So the first of our five, five elements is going to be drums, Drums are the foundation for rhythm. They're so important in music. And a lot of times when you're producing, it's really helpful to actually start with drums. Okay, so we got drums, element number two is going to be bass, bass and drums are considered the rhythm section. And getting bass out in is really going to help your song sound full and a lot of people don't focus on it enough. And it's one of the telltale signs of an amateur sounding track. All right, so we got drums and bass. Now element number three is a little bit trickier but it's what I like to call mids m i DS midS and what this means is any mid--range element like a piano or a guitar or strings or anything like that. This is me trying to draw a whiter from above or like a synthesizer or something with some buttons on it. Okay so now we got our mid--range elements here and now we're on to our final two elements which are going to be [music,] vocals so there's vokes that's just all vocals somebody singing obviously and last but not least on our list we have [music] effects effects are anything from like white noise to really ambient reverb sounding noises or even things like adding reverb and delay to a vocal. Okay so that's it that's the five element formula so if you're producing a song I would focus on the drums first and we'll get into this when we start producing something but if you make sure to check each of these items off of your list as your producing your song, the drums, the bass, the mids, the vocals and the effects then your song should sound finished and this is just a great formula to keep in mind every time you start making a song all righty So now that we've got the formula down for how to produce music we can put our knowledge to the test and try the formula out for real. First thing I'm going to do is open up a brand new session in Ableton. What's that you say uh-oh you don't have Ableton well guess what? They have a 90day free trial so you can download it and literally try it out for 3 months, see if you like it and if you don't just don't pay for it that way you get to decide if this whole producing music thing is for you so no excuses you can get Ableton and follow along with me right now also quick note I would recommend Ableton live standard not Ableton light doesn't have enough features and not Ableton suite because it's unnecessary okay so we have a brand new project open in Ableton I'm going to hit command s to save I'm going to navigate to my sessions folder if you don't have a sessions folder just go ahead and make one it's so much easier when you save all of your projects into your sessions folder I'm going to call this one music production for beginners and just hit save and then go ahead and go to file collect all and save make sure these are all yellow and just press okay that's going to make sure everything that we work on stays inside the project folder and it'll make your life easier down the line. So there's so many different ways that you can start a song but what I'm going to do today is I'm actually going to start with an acappella meaning just the vocals of a different song. So essentially we're kind of making a remix but what you do after that is you can mute the vocals and then you can write a new song to the instrumental that you made. I have a friend with billions of streams, one of the best producers i've ever met and he does this all the time When he's starting songs. I'm going to go ahead and use an acappella from my song dream, which is from my dance music project called John Balaya. I know that the acapella is at 115 bpm and bpM is just beats per minute, basically how fast or slow the song is. And up here in Ableton you can just click on this 120 and use the arrow keys and make sure it's the same BPM as the AC capella that you're using. Another quick tip. It might help you navigate Ableton a little bit better if you check out my beginner's guide to Ableton which is right up here and you can just right click on that and open it in a new tab. Get all the info you need on Ableton and then come back here and This segment demonstrates the step-by-step process of creating a drum track, focusing on layering and arranging kick, snare, and shaker samples. The presenter showcases techniques for copying, duplicating, and manipulating audio clips in Ableton, along with tips for achieving precise timing and creating rhythmic variations. This segment provides a concise, step-by-step walkthrough of creating a song in Ableton Live using readily available stock sounds and samples. The creator details the process of layering drums, bass, mids (including pads and choir sounds), and effects (white noise and a vocal scream) to build a full track within a short timeframe (49 minutes). The creator emphasizes the ease of use of Ableton's built-in tools and the availability of free or readily accessible samples online, making the process accessible to beginners. The segment concludes with tips on finding acapellas and creating instrumental tracks, highlighting the efficiency and creative potential of this approach to music production. This segment dives into a crucial mixing technique called sidechaining, illustrating how to make the bass duck in volume when the kick drum plays, preventing low-end muddiness. The presenter explains the concept clearly, demonstrating the process in Ableton and highlighting the impact on the overall sound quality. plans to put out a video on music theory and that video is going to be so helpful for you guys when I do put it out but until then hopefully some of you guys know a little bit of music theory but I can only teach production in this video just to keep it short So I'm not going to get into the nitty--gritty details of all the cords and stuff and I'm just going to try and move quickly. Okay so I've changed the bass notes up a little bit here and what I want to do next is actually add another mid-layer. I'm going to press command shift T to make a new MIDI track and highlight this section and press command shift m, that's going to make a new MIDI clip and then I want to find some kind of pad and if you're wondering where I'm finding these sounds, I'm just an instruments instrument rack and then I'm going based on the sound that I want, which is a pad and I'm just looking through these if you can't hear them just click on this little headphone icon right here let's try dark corner pad i'm also using Ableton sounds to show you guys that you can do this too I'm trying not to use any third party plugins cuz I want you to be able to follow along all right I'm going to draw in some chords real quick wow this pad is actually great had [music] enough I'm going to lower some of these high [music] notes and I'm going to eq this [music] pad wow there's so much cool stuff happening in that [music] song all right i've extended out some of these bass notes I've got this pad the way that I want it and this is kind of like the chorus section of the song and this is when I want to introduce effects for the first time. First thing I want to add is some white noise Because we want the chorus to feel big. I'm just going to make a new track here at the bottom drag the white noise onto that track and make sure it starts right at the chorus. let's see how that sounds. Let's have everything cut out here except for the little colimba pad thing. We can have the snares coming right there So it sounds like [music] this to wake up, I had a dream you [music] said, all right, now i'm just going to do some light mixing stuff like just eqing this white noise sound and scooping out the low's. I'm also going to extend these bass notes even more, just make them all the whole [music] length And shift and move that line up. So this is what it sounds like before the automation and then it gets big here for the chorus, all righty, make sure to click this diagonal line when you're done and turn automation view off. Hopefully it should sound now like it gets a bit bigger on the chorus [music] section. I had a dream. you [music] said, I just copy and pasted that screen. Maybe one other thing I would add is one last mid--range element, some kind of vocal drone. let's see what we got. I think we can actually try using this sound [music] sound and I think we can literally just copy and paste this first part maybe like this length right here and then we'll scoop out that lowend and put reverb on it just like we did with the screen so i'm just pressing command D to duplicate that out. Now what I'm going to do is go to this scream sound that we have I'm going to double click on that track so we have our effects here the EQ8 and the cathedral. I'm going to hold shift and click on both of them command C to copy those effects and let's jump over to this choir track right here. Just double click on it paste them right here in the audio effects area and let's listen I'm going to turn the dry wet up a little bit now these are in the key of E minor but our song is in F minor or a flat major. they're relative to each other. let's listen now let's check it with going to click on our snare track right here to the right hold shift and click on our shaker track. press command G and that's just going to group them together. So on this group three, I'm going to drag on an effect. if you go to the left here, audio effects drive and read ducks. we can put on this effect called some dust. let's see how that [music] sounds All right, I actually want to layer a clap into this if I can. I think this might be the sound I'm looking for. Let me just press command T to make a new track and drag it in there. There we go. Yeah, that's what it was missing. Just pressing command D to duplicate dream that I was walking under the water B by no one I had a dream, turn that clap down a little [music] bit, had a dream, Okay, so we've got some drums going now next up we can add a little bit of base. Now if you watch the video on Ableton, you'll know that there's three different ways to get sound into Ableton. The first way is to drag samples in, which is what we've been doing this whole time. That way is super simple. The second way is if we record our voice or we record an instrument, so samples recording, and the third way is called MIDI. Now a good way to think about MIDI is it's basically an instrument, but it's on your computer and you have to tell the instrument on your computer what notes you want it to play. If that sounds confusing, just keep watching and I'll make it really simple for you. First thing you want to do is press command, shift T, and that's going to make a new MIDI track. If you go up here to the left, where it says instruments, we can go to simpler, we can go to base, we can actually use any of these bases if we want. So, what you want to do is drag this B-bas right onto your MIDI track and just let go. And now we