For this track, I wanted to create a beat which fitted the PLUTO theme, spacey and dark. Other tracks on the EP such as ‘Seen It All’ and ‘UPIA’ really nail this theme perfectly and it was exactly what I was trying to accomplish. However, I wanted to do this theme in my own style. For ‘Breathe’ I took inspiration from artists such as Metro Boomin, Travis Scott, Future and 21 Savage. Because I set up to create a track with a dark spacey feeling to it, I decidedto use the Aeolian scale. This is my favourite scale to use whenever I want to create a track something sinister. The beat is at 138 BPM which is around my favourite BPM range when created a beat like this.
To start this track off, I decided to go into my favourite synthesizer Omnisphere. Omnisphere is synthesizer I have in my DAW (FL Studio) that contains well over 12,000 sounds. I go to this synthesizer often in this track as it contains a lot of my favourite sounds. I wanted a nice pad to start off with to really lay the foundations of the track down. I went to the Pad-6lack preset in Omnisphere and laid down this 4-chord progression. I really like this pad as I feel like it builds up tensions, makes the listener feel like something big is coming just around the corner. Just this pad alone is obviously not alone to melodically carry a track, so I then went looking for another melodic element to compliment the pad. I decided to have a look in ELECTRAX, another synthesizer I own. For some reason I was hearing an arpeggio in my head, so I immediately went searching for one I believe was fitting enough for the theme I was going for. I eventually found the ARP-Sine Pool preset in ELECTRAX. I then duplicated the pad chord progression onto the arp, and it workedwell. It complimented the progression well; however, something was missing to me and I wasn’t sure why. I then decided to open gross beat. Gross beat is a ‘real-time. audio stream playback, pitch, position and volume manipulation effect’ described by Image Line, the creators of my DAW FL Studio. Gross has a feature called ‘Stutter’ which, you guessed it, stutters the melody. I was playing around with all the different stutters and wasn’t too fond of any of them until I stumbled across stutter 12 which worked PERFECTLY! It really adds a lot of tension to the track more than it did without. I still knew that these melodies were good enough to properly carry the track forward, so I went to look for 1 more melody in the track. I felt like the track needed a proper lead melody. I had a bell in my mind, and I decided to have a look for one in Omnisphere. After a few minutes of looking I found the Ambient Cathedral Drops. This is one of my favourite presets in the whole of Omnisphere so I knew it wouldn’t let me down. Now that I laid down that melody, I felt like I had all the melodic components I needed. I then decided to move onto the drums. The first thing I do after I have all the melodies I move onto the snare or clap, depending on what kind of beat I’m workingon. For this specific beat I went for a hard snare. The snare I went for was the Metro Snare 7 from the Metro Boomin Drum Kit. After I had the snare I oved onto the hi-hats. I wanted to hi-hats to be bouncy and not just 16 straight notes. I decided to usea lot of hi-hat rolls to create the bounce. I always changed the velocity every time the hi-hat hit to make it sound a lot less robotic. I used the Travis Scott Hi-Hat 2 from the Travis Scott Drum Kit.
I then moved onto my favourite part of every beat I’ve made or will make... the 808 bass! I tuned the 808 and make them hit on the root notes of the melody. I really wanted the 808 to hit and I feel like I did a good job of that! I went for the Beaz 808 from the KBeazy Drum Kit. I then moved onto the secondary snare. This is another snare I use in the beat to add a lot of bounce to the track. I used the MB Snare (4) from the Metro Boomin Drum Kit. Then finally, I created the kick pattern. I used a kick as well as a 808 to really add emphasis on the 808 when it hits at the same time as the kick. I used the Boomin Kick 1 from the Metro Boomin Drum Kit.
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