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Making A Trap Beat

THIS BEAT IS INSANE. Making a Trap Beat from Scratch FL Studio | Making a Beat [EP #8] - Kyle Beats

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mlm3JS5f8U

As part of my ‘desk research’ have been watching videos of professional producers making Trap beats.  This video in particular has helped me understand the process of making this style of music.   Although he makes the track in FL studios rather than the DAW I use (Logic X) the same principles can be applied.  For instance I learned that their are very specific sounds that are used in making Trap music such as 808 drum machines. In the video the producer mainly focuses on the process of creating the music, so I have learned a method of making the music.   He works mainly in making music whilst looping around a certain bit of the track.   He keeps adding layers, such as piano, and drums to the track.   I think that this method is good to use because of the nature of Trap music.  Its quite repetitive and sounds like it was made with loops.   Before I was making music in a different way. I understand how to get the drum sounds in Logic X because their are presets that are pre-made for the genre, and I am happy to use them for now as they sound good.    It has been quite inspiring to watch the video because it makes me want to make more music, and it has shown me that making the music is quite a simple process.  Before I used to think that making the music was more complicated, but having watched this video I can carefully see what he is doing and try this for myself.

Although the person in the video is not known me I do think that he got a good result from his music and therefore it is valuable to me.

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Remix techniques
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8xHjwmKF0o

(How to Remix a song | Vocal Chops | FLP)

This video was useful to watch because it showed a producer making a remix.  This gave me a lot of inspiration because it showed how easy it was to make something sound good with minimal resources.  Although this producer used FL studios the same principles can be applied in Logic using the EXS24 as the sampler.
The producer in the video took a vocal sample and cut up it up and put it into a sampler, and then programmed it in.

Although I haven't used this technique in my cover song,  I will now use it in the future compositions.  It didn't feel appropriate to use because the song was meant to be more raw and laid back sounding, and cut up vocals sound quite electronic and heavily produced.

In this video the producer took the original song and remixed it to make it more catchy.  He did this by repeating the chorus (drop),  the original song only had one drop which made the song less memorable.   I have taken this idea to make own composition/ remix more catchy.

Repetition

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lo8EomDrwA

Why We Love Repetition

According to "Why We Love Repetition", people love repetition in music because it is memorable and gets stuck in your head.   In this video they conducted a test:  they played a classical song with not much repetition to two test subjects.   They then played a remixed version of the song, which had a lot more repetition. The results were that the test subjects found the remixed version more catchy and memorable.

This is useful to know for when i'm making my own songs, because then I can make them more successful to the audience. I think by watching this video It has given "repetition" more meaning to me. Before I would hear people say that songs were "repetitive" in a negative way. But now I understand there is an artistry to it that I can utilize in my own compositions in order to make songs stay in the audiences head.

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Questionnaire results

For my primary research I created a questionnaire to find out more about popular music.  I want to make music that people like therefore I want find out what that is.

Four people were asked five questions and the results are as follows:

Question 1:

What is your favourite type of music?

50% of people asked preferred Trap Music

50% of peoples asked preferred Rock Music

From the results of question 1 I can see that peoples favourite preference to music split equally, both rock and trap are equally as popular between them.  Therefore if I was going to use this data in order to write a more popular song I could either write Trap or Rock music.  As I am not very familiar with rock music I am going to choose to write Trap music.   If I were to ask more people which music they preferred I probably get more variety of answers which would give me a larger picture of which music is more popular.  Also the demographic I was asking was from our production class and does not represent the general public.  The general public are going to be my actual audience of my music.  From this I have learned that I would have got a more valuable result if I had asked the general public this question.

Question 2:

Do you prefer music with vocals or without them?

75% of people asked preferred music with vocals

25% of people asked preferred music without vocals

From the results of question 2 I can see that the majority of people asked prefer music with vocals.  Therefore I am going to include a vocal line for my compositions because it may be liked more by people.

Question 3:

Why do you prefer music with vocals?

100% of people asked preferred music with vocals because it makes the song more interesting

From the results we can see that all people asked preferred music with vocals because it makes it more interesting to listen to.  This is “nice to know” information as opposed to information that I can directly input into my song as such; but it gives me a good understanding of why people need a vocal track.  Therefore it gives me a good reason to get a vocal track for my song.

Question 4:

Do you think that songs are better with repetition?

50% of people asked said that they thought music was better with repetition

50% of people asked said that they thought music wasn’t better with repetition

From the results we can see that it is split equally,  half of people asked said that they thought that music was better with repetition; whilst half of people thought that it wasn’t better with repetition.   In retrospect I should have asked a follow up question of why that was.  A ‘why styled question’ would have given me more useful information, as I would have been able to then understand on a deeper level.  However if I was to use this information in order to better my compositions I could take into consideration that repetition is not always a good thing.  Perhaps too much repetition can make the song annoying to listen to, whilst too little means that the song is instantly forgettable.  I am going to try and put some hooks into my song, but not too many that people don’t want to listen to it.

Question 5

What do you reckon will be the next big thing in music?

First person

“People will start sampling more recent music genres such as rock and indie.  Things with strong melodies and band chord structures.  Previously producers have sampling jazz, disco songs from their time, but now rappers are sampling rap songs that have been already sampled (from the 80s/90s).”

Second person

“Rap is the big thing at the moment, and I think it will continue to grow.  It used to be big ballad songs.  I think its going to get worse and worse quality music made though”

Third person

“The future of music will be reusing whats happened in the past with music and putting a new spin on it.”

Fourth person

“I think it will be early 2000s revival.  In 2010+ we had a lot of 80s throw back tunes.  Now we are going through through a 90s revival with bands such as oasis coming back and rap is popular again but with a modern twist.  Often fashion follows too, as we’ve seen with choker necklaces and velour tracksuits.  I wouldn’t be surprised if garth gates style hair makes a comeback, with boy and girl groups making ballads but with a modern twist.  Rap boy bands/ girl groups”

From these results we can see that there are themes that occur.  Person(s) 1,2,4 think that rap music is going to continue to be the future of music but it will evolve and develop over time.   1,3,4 think that the future of music will be recycled from older music.    That has been a trend in music for decades and could be likely to happen again.   I will see if I can try to incorporate this into my compositions in order to make more popular music for the future.  It’s very hard to predict future music trends, and the answers are very subjective; therefore all answers should be taken with a pinch of salt.

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Methodology

I chose to ask a mixture of musicians and producers several questions via a questionnaire because I felt it was the most appropriate method to collect both qualitative and quantitive data.   I picked musicians and producers as the demographic to ask because they are most likely to know as they have a deep understanding of the subject and trends in music.  I would probably not get as good results if I just asked the public the same questions as they wouldn’t be as likely to know the right answers.

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What I have learned through this process.

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What I have learned through this process.

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Through a mixture of primary and secondary research I have learned the following:

1) How to make better trap beats, and which sounds are appropriate to use for the style.

2)  How to sample a vocal line and make a remix out of it.

3) I have learned the importance of using repetition in music in order to make music more catchy

4)  I found out that people I know generally like music with vocals because it makes it more interesting

5)  I learned that people I know generally like Rock and Trap music more than other genres of music

6) I learned that in order to find out deeper understandings to my questions I would need to ask more open ended questions and gather more qualitative research as apposed to quantitative answers.

Through this research I feel that I have better understanding of myself as an individual, and as a professional producer. I feel that my productions have improved and my confidence in writing has improved too. My knowledge of Logic X is greater than it used to be, especially in creating electronic based music.