Thursday, August 25, 2011

Pro Tip #2 Softening Your Beats

After the last post, Strengthening Your Beats, follower Dwei asked an insightful question, "So what do you do if you want [the beats] a bit softer?"

This is a great question that reveals my tendency to make everything somewhat in your face. But there are definitely times when the beat of the music should be softened. This can work for an entire track, or even sections of a track to produce dynamic movement across the track. Hit the read moar button to learn three techniques to soften your beats or check out Electronic Music Production to learn all you ever wanted.







To soften your beats, one obvious solution is the inverse of the suggestion made in Strengthening Your Beats, simply turn up your drums as you are writing the rest of your track. The natural effect of this will be for you to write musical phrases that avoid the beat because of the drum's predominance.

Once you've written the rest of the elements within the track, turn your drums back down to their reasonable levels, and you should hear that the beat has been de-emphasized, the pulse will be weaker. This can be helpful in writing background tracks, tracks that the listener doesn't have to consciously pay attention to. This type of music can slip into the background and set a mood. But be careful, if you want to hold the listener's attention, it may be difficult once the pulse falls below a certain threshold.

Assuming you have already written your song and you feel your beat is a little too strong, there are three simple techniques to soften your beat. Before applying these techniques, you must first determine what is making the beat so strong. More often than not it will be the drums hammering away on the beat. But if you've been dutifully following my suggestions, you will likely have other musical elements strengthening your beat. For the examples below, we'll consider that it is the drums that are providing the foundation of your strong pulse, but whatever it is that is beefing your beat up, apply these techniques to those elements and you should have a softer pulse.

Decrease the level! It is obvious, but in the great big world of music production, the single most powerful attribute of a sound is its volume. The only trick here is to make sure you only turn down hits that occur on the beat. Pulse is created by the dynamic between loud and quiet; what we want to do here is decrease the dynamic range between the pulse occurring on the beat and the sounds in the off beat (sounds after the 1 but before the 2, after the 2 but before the 3, etc.).
Here the peaks are quite high on the quarter note beats, emphasizing the pulse for a very strong beat.
Here the level of hits on the quarter notes have been decreased, while the level of all other sounds off the beat have been increased, de-emphasizing the pulse, ultimately producing a softer beat. 



EQ! Another technique to soften your beat is to remove high frequencies from hits occurring on the beat. As sounds travel through the air, high frequencies are naturally attenuated. Because of this phenomenom, the brain perceives dulled sounds to be further away. If you remove high frequencies from hits occurring on the beat, the pulse will sound more distant, and therefore softer.

Transient Shaper! Get out that handy transient shaper, and soften the attack of elements landing on the beat. A transient shaper is a dynamics processor somewhat like a compressor or a limiter, but it functions in a slightly different, but significant way. Compressors and limiters are triggered when the level of the incoming sound exceeds a certain predetermined threshold. Transient shapers, on the other hand, are triggered by the rate of change between a quiet and a loud point of the sound. That means that the transient shaper is listening for the attack portion of sounds only, it doesn't really care about the raw amplitude of the sound like a compressor does. Therefore, you can turn down just the attack of hits that are occurring on the beat, the effect of which is to soften the pulse.

4! 4! There were only supposed to be 3? Well if you take anything away from this article, please take this: small changes to various attributes of a sound or the mix will likely produce better results than making one big change. So in this case, it might be helpful to drop the volume of hits landing on the beat a bit, pull out some of their high frequencies, and then soften the transients a touch.  All of these slight adjustments together will help you to soften your beat in a natural, almost spookly transparent way.

52 comments:

  1. These are great tips! Kinda makes me wish I was still making music, but alas, books are my new obsession. Perhaps someday I'll form another band...

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  2. Big ups on this! Useful shit here. Short attack compression is mighty useful for flattening things out.

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  3. always something useful here :)

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  4. Great info for all the producers out there!

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  5. step 3: ??? but step 4: profit.

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  6. I don't understand much when it comes to making music, but this might -slowly- help a bit.
    Also, we need more titty cats hahaha

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  7. I agree with the comment above. i have no idea what you're talking about. haha. I just listen to music. I'm not good at anything else. omg. How sad!

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  8. Very informative, although I have no music talent what so ever, so it doesn't help me. I need a guide on how not to be terrible. :)

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  9. Very instructive info, as always. :D

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  10. Some very useful tips. Should be helpful for some of my friends (although may be useful to me too if I get into this)

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  11. Great tip. Going to practice this when I get the chance.

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  12. listen if i made beats this would be Awesome but i am forced to link to a friend :)

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  13. Cant you just put a pillow over the speaker?

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  14. I'm starting to learn this just to play around with in my free time. Thanks.

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  15. Alright, makes sense. Good to see that my comments are being read too. :P

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  16. Life's a series of beats and loops

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  17. Very useful stuff. Now if only I can learn to throw down some good beats.

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  18. Some reverb is always good for adding depth and setting them back a bit in the mix.

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  19. Hmmmm I might just try making something myself, I think I'll do good after reading this blog that is.

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  20. I've always wondered if Ozzy Osbourne mightn't benefit from some beat softening.

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  21. A really very interesting read! I hope you keep updating us with more info!

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  22. Bookmarked this; great tips :>

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  23. This is really helpful, thanks for sharing.

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  24. Great tips! Always informative for someone who wants to improve their skills

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  25. itd be cool if you did charts for 2 +3 but i understand

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  26. Cool information, thank you!

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  27. Very useful in case I'll ever decide to make music (which probably won't happen but it's good to know nevertheless).

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  28. Helllllooooo

    Got beats softer than a mouse farting on a pack of charmin.

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  29. Great follow up to your previous article.

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  30. Interesting, nice to see you replying to peoples questions!

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  31. great info i seen many usefull stuff XD
    learn learn

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  32. Nice tips - been into music production for years had never heard of a Transient Shaper.

    Now I feel dumb.

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  33. This is a little above my head but I have a friend who I'm sure would read this like it was porn.

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  34. Really helpful stuff. Step one was especially helpful for me. I am going to be saving this post as a reference for the future. I think I've been pretty much butchering the dynamic range on some of my past mixes in an effort to make them louder. Thanks a lot for the tips.

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