Learn About Sean "LiveWire" Smith

The moment you've all been waiting for... FREE SAMPLES! Not. I was just going to say that a variety of samples are needed. Sure, your program probably has plenty of default samples, and that's all fine and dandy. Hell, you can make good beats with default samples. However, most producers using the same program recognize the samples and it drops the uniqueness value of your music. For newbs, that's not much of a big deal though. In fact. newbs will use the same samples over and over again in a lot of their beats, but thats a good thing for practicing sequencing. Besides, I haven't even talked about sampling yet, so don't worry so much about which samples you use, but rather how you use them. You'd be surprised how high-quality a beat can be just by using bad samples the right way.

For those of you who don't understand what samples are, you were probably lost the entire time you read that last paragraph. Samples are talked about very often by hip hop producers, probably more often than any other style of music, because hip hop depends on its samples and sequencers. So, what's a sample? A sample is nothing more than a sound. Well, It is a little bit more than a sound. Its a file containing a sound, and it can be very important for many reasons. One, if you plan on using a very high pitched sound, don't choose a sample with a small length to do it, because when changing pitch, you also change speed, and when you change the speed of a very short sound, the sound can be nearly inexistant.

I've noticed recently that a lot of newbs have a preference for the piano. Why, I'm not sure. I actually started out using the strings because I was following Dr. Dre's style. Then I gave up on it and followed... ahh, I won't give you my whole history in production. Let's get back to teaching you. Ok, the way we are going to do this is to start off with a piano. Now, you could set up a beat in the step sequencer, but it would all be the same note, which is... well.. boring. For this, we're going to use the piano roll. So, find out how to open the piano roll for the channel you're trying to use, which should be the piano's. The piano roll will have a lot of piano keys (go figure), with the piano key that corresponds to the sample's original, unchanged sound. This is normally labelled "C5". So, with that as a reference, that is how I will display piano rolls to you. You have to pay attention to understand it though, ok?

The way I will display piano rolls is to first have a note labelled C5 as your starting note. I don't mean starting note as the first one you use, but as the original sample. If the notes go into or beyond C4 or C6, I'll label those notes too, you know, just so you know and dont accidentally use the wrong notes. Just like a real piano, the piano roll is made up of white keys, for normal notes, and black keys, for sharps and flats. The white keys will be labelled with an equals sign ("="), and black keys will be labelled with a pound sign ("#"). Just be sure to remember this because otherwise, you may have a hard time with this. I would just use "X" and "-" to display notes, but because notes can be longer or shorter than one step, I have a different way. For a part of a note, I will use an asterisk ("*") and notes do not end until there is a bar ("|") in place of the space between steps. An empty space will be represented by an underscore ("_"). I'll deal with notes that are less than a step at a later time, when we get in depth with the piano roll.

So, grab that beat you made, put the piano into a channel, open the piano roll, and make this melody. And, for those of you unaware, a melody is the part of the beat that is not a part of the bassline. A melody of your own should not sound like the melody of another beat, but your bassline can. So, heres the piano roll for the piano:

PIANO
   =	_ _ _ _  _ _ _ _  _ _ _ _  _ _ _ _
   #	_ _ _ _  _ _ _ _  _ _ _ _  _ _ _ _
   =	_ _ _ _  *|_ _ _  _ _ _ _  _ _ _ _
   #	_ _ _ _  _ _ _ _  _ _ _ _  _ _ _ _
C5 =	*|_ _ *| _ _ _ _  _ _ _ _  _ _ _ _
   =	_ _ _ _  _ _ _ _  _ _ _ _  _ _ *|_
   #	_ _ _ _  _ _ _ _  _ _ _ _  _ _ _ _
   =	_ _ _ _  _ _ *|_  _ _ _ _  _ _ _ _
   #	_ _ _ _  _ _ _ _  _ _ _ _  _ _ _ _
   =	_ _ _ _  _ _ _ _  _ _ _ _  _ _ _ _ 

You like it? It's somewhat simple, but it may be the best some of you newbies have made thus far. Hell, it could be the only thing some of you newbies have ever made. So, what have we learned? We've learned how to copy a melody made by yours truly. However, you didn't REALLY learn much of anything. So, the next step will focus on the usage of the piano roll.