Making Beats!

Many many moons ago a friend of mine gave me a copy of Reason (music production studio software) to try out.  I was so overwhelmed and quickly realized that I would need to dedicate waaaay too much time learning the software to be somewhat competent in creating music.  When Native Instruments, a few months ago, dropped the price of their Maschine - Groove Production Studio I started thinking...do I want to give music production another go??  Let's just say there was months of deliberation until I decided to go for it on the last weekend of the sale.  BTW little did I know it was nearly sold out everywhere!

NI's - Maschine (picture curtesy of djworx.com)

If you've never heard of Maschine you can read about it here... http://www.native-instruments.com/#/en/products/?category=1773 But basically it is a combination of software and hardware used in the creation of mainly four on the floor dance and urban music.

Reading about Maschine and how it works and using Native Instruments Traktor DJ software as my DJ software solution it only made sense to give it a go.  The producer and DJ these days are becoming one entity so why not come up with my own remixes or songs for that matter?  Perhaps I could be the next Deadmau5 or Avicii?  Well scratch Avicii, I'm not Scandinavian but I did go to Ryerson....

Now I am not going to say that with Maschine I am not overwhelmed!  The software comes with over 6,000 samples with all sorts of snare hits, bass kicks, piano sounds, bleeps...bloops and countless other instrument sounds.  Just going through and seeing what you like is a task in itself...and that is before learning all the ins and outs of the software/hardware itself.  Luckily I found a wicked website: www.maschinetools.com  - lots of tutorial videos at a very reasonable price.

Native Instruments also just released the 1.8 upgrade to the software which adds even more sounds as well as "Massive" NI's synthesizer solution creating even more possibilities.... infinite really.  I watched some guy on youtube creating a nice deep house sound from scratch and realized you could dedicate your life fooling around with Massive.  On a side note  I really need Tasha to start teaching ME how to play piano....

Anyhow last night I wanted to play around with making a remix...instead of learning how to use the software. I looked to find an acapella online and the first one that came to mind was "Been a Long Time" by The Fog, a classic house track from the early 1990s.  Not sure why that came to mind but I love the vocal. I loaded it up into Maschine and assigned sections of the acapella on the drum pads, added some effects, drum beats, chords and a baseline and voila...a new track.  Well an idea anyhow....

"Got to Have It" arranged in Maschine

Listening to it in the car this morning put a smile on my face.  It was something that I could throw down in my next DJ gig.  If people moved and grooved to the track how cool would that be??  Instant gratification.  That would take DJing to a whole new level watching people get off on your remixes or even own productions.  Of course this concept is not new...but it wasn't until last night when playing with this software that I realized that hey I could do that!  I think...well that and it is just fun as hell.

So for now check out this track I made last night.  It is a work in progress...my first test so to speak in the world of music production / remixing.  It will probably change 50 times over until I am happy with it and move on to something new but in the meantime I can pretend it has gone platinum!





Enough writing...I am going back to Maschine and making Test 2!!