Lesson video

Hello and welcome to your music lesson today.

My name is Miss Al-Hanoush and in today's lesson, we're going to be exploring how you can use a digital audio workstation to produce some EDM drum beats.

So let's get warmed up by doing a quick listening quiz.

For your warmup, I would like you to listen to Levels by Avicii.

This was one of the top selling EDM tracks of 2011, I would like you to listen and answer the questions below.

How many different sounds can you hear? What instruments can you hear? How has the music technology been used to compose this piece? And what is the musical name for placing sounds on top of each other? Here we go.

Let's hear that one more time.

How many different sounds did you hear? There was quite a lot of different sounds and you can work that out by answering question number two, which instruments could you hear there.

There was at least the synthesiser, so if you managed to put something like synths chords down, well done.

There was also a melodic riff in there, and there was a drum machine and some background effects as well, so well done if you put any of those down.

How has music technology been used to compose this piece? Well, the artist used a digital audio workstation to be able to compose this, inputting synthesised sounds into the programme and has made this on a computer, and has also used a drum machine, it's not a drum kit that's playing.

So as we heard each one of these sounds appearing, there is a musical name for placing these sounds on top of each other.

Did you have a go and a guess at what it was, well done if you said layering.

By adding layers, we build up our texture.

So think about a cake and when you've got one layer in a cake, it's okay, it's quite nice, but if you have lots of layers in your cake, it becomes really yummy and scrumptious, and way more interesting as well.

And that's exactly the same in music.

So if you want to, rewind the track again and listen again for how many different layers you can hear that makes this track interesting.

Now that you've warmed up your ears, in this lesson you will need a piece of paper, a pencil and a voice or an instrument, preferably a keyboard if you have one, or an app.

We will be using music software during this lesson, you can create music using audio mixing software, and the demonstration that I will be doing later in the lesson, uses a free programme called BandLab.

BandLab is for use by over 13s only and if you are over 13, you will still need permission from a parent or carer to use it.

So please make sure that you gain that permission before you begin to use the programme.

If you have another digital audio workstation that you would like to use, that's absolutely fine.

There's a lot out there that will do the same kind of thing that I'm going to be doing on BandLab.

In this lesson as well, you will also need a quiet space to work in so you're not disturbed and to make sure that you've got any apps or notifications turned off on any electronic devices so that you're not disturbed throughout the lesson.

So if you need to pause the video to go and get yourself sorted, and make sure you've got all your equipment ready before we begin, please do that now and then resume the video once you're ready.

Here is today's lesson agenda, you're going to begin by exploring EDM, what that means and what it involves.

You're then going to create your own drum patterns and then compose different drum patterns using a digital audio workstation.

You're then going to end the lesson by exploring rhythmic displacement.

So let's begin by exploring what EDM is and how you can use it.

Well, dance music has a very fast tempo, it's around a 120 to a 140 beats per minute.

So just to give you a couple of examples there, house music is usually about 130 beats per minute, drum and bass is a 140.

Techno and trance, they're around a 120 to a 140 and it's got a fast tempo so that you can dance to it, if it was too slow, you wouldn't be able to dance.

The instruments it uses, you usually hear sounds like synthesised sounds and drum machines, they're all computerised sounds.

They might rip off the original instrument but they're being played through a computer system or a digital audio workstation.

That's the majority of, kind of modern dance that we hear.

So what is EDM? Well, EDM stands for electronic dance music, and it uses music technology to create the pieces of music.

So they use what we call digital audio workstations to create the music and some examples of this are BandLab that we're going to see later on in the lesson, GarageBand, Logic and Cubase to name a few.

The music is very percussive so drum machines feature heavily in EDM, and includes a variety of styles which can include, house, techno and dubstep, and they're not the only ones but they're a few.

And the music is usually played in clubs or in festivals and it's selling point, is that it's music that people can dance to.

Let's just check that you understood what I said, so what does EDM stand for? Is it option one, electronic drum music.

Option two, electronic dance machine.

Option three, electronic dance music, or option four, electric dance music.

It is of course, electronic dance music, well done if you got that.

And a second question for you, what does layering do? So remember back to Avicii's Levels that we listened to earlier on in the lesson, is it option one, it builds up the music's texture.

Option two, it makes different drum patterns.

Option three, it breaks the music's texture or option four, it builds music's dynamics.

Well done if you said option one, it builds up the music's texture.

So it's time for your first pause task, I would like you to take five minutes to bullet point what you have just learned about EDM music.

As an extension, can you tell me how many different artists you can name, who are EDM artists and what EDM genre do they perform in? So for example, house, techno or dance, et cetera.

Pause the video to complete your task and then resume once you're finished.

Now that you know what EDM is all about, you're now going to see if you can create some different drum patterns.

One of the main features of EDM music is it's use of percussion and drum machines, so it's very percussive.

So in order to be able to build us some drum beats, we firstly need to be able to explore the drum kit and know which are the three main, important parts of the drum kit.

So in front of you, you can see a drum kit diagram, and three main, important parts of the drum kit are a bass or a kick drum, a hi-hat cymbal, and a snare drum.

So here's what they sound like when they're put together.

So the base, the hi-hat and the snare drum are really important within our drum kit, because they give us and provide us with the backbone for our drum beat.

So let's have a listen to what these sound like individually, so this is our hi-hat cymbal.

And that there is a closed hi-hat, you can have an open hi-hat as well, but that's the closed hi-hat.

This one is our snare drum.

And again, you can either play on the snare drum and hear the metallic snare sound, or you can play on the rim of the snare drum as well and you can turn the snare off on a snare drum.

And here's our bass drum, probably the most important part of the drum kit for us.

And the bass drum in dance music often uses what we call a four-to-the-floor, where it plays on every beat of the bar and it gives us that continuous pulse going through the music.

Let's just have a listen to the bass drum again.

So when we move on to actually putting this into BandLab in a little while, you will need to find the drum kit on your keyboard.

So the drum kit, if you've got a keyboard or if your keyboard actually allows you to play different drum rhythms into it, you can usually find these three parts of the drum kit on the following pitches.

So C, would give you a base drum, F sharp, would give you a hi-hat symbol and your snare drum can usually be found on D or D sharp, so you get two different snare drum sounds.

So if you have a keyboard that allows you to do that, or if you've got a digital audio workstation, you can have a go at seeing whether you can find those drum kit sounds on your keyboard or on your digital audio workstation yourselves.

On the screen, you can see a one bar EDM drum pattern, across the bottom of the screen are the beats in a bar, of the bar of four, four, which means it's four beats in a bar.

Let's just count this, one and, two and, three and, four and.

So each one of these boxes represent half a beat.

Down the left hand side we can see each of those three parts of our drum kit.

So at the top, we've got our hi-hat, then our snare drum and our bass drum.

Which beats does our bass drum play on? Well done if you just said beats one, two, three, four.

What about our snare drum? That's two and four, well done.

And our hi-hat, plays on all of the ands, So one and, two and, three and, four and, so it's the in between parts of the kit.

So our bass drum or our kick drum is giving us that four-to-the-floor bass drum, so it's a beat on every single beat of the bar there.

And our snare is working in time with our bass drum as well, you can see that our base drum and our snare do actually work together on beats two and beats four.

And then our hi-hat is kind of filling in busier, shorter notes in between for of us, so it's kind of keeping our music going the whole way along.

So we're going to see if we can play this live using our bodies as if we were sat at a drum kit, so you might need to be sat down on a chair for this part.

So we're going to see if we can create an EDM drum pattern, just using our bodies so that we can get our three parts of the drum kit in time with each other and see how they work together.

So we're going to start with our base drum because that's the easiest one.

And our bass drum, usually if we were sat at a kit, we would have our bass drum being played by our right foot, so our base is going to be our right foot.

Okay and you're going to play your right foot on every single beat, and we're going to go really slow.

So one and, two and, three and, four and.

Can you do that with me, ready? So one and, two and, three and, four and.

One and, two and, three and, four and.

Easy, well done.

The second part that we're going to put in is our snare drum and we said earlier that our snare drum works in tandem with our base drum on beats two and four.

So again, if we were sat at a kit our right hand would be playing our hi-hat and our left hand would be playing our snare drum, and they would cross over with our sticks.

So we're going to place our left hand on our left leg and we're going to pretend that that is our snare drum, 'cause that would be our snare drum hand.

So this time we're going to play our snare drum on beats two and four.

So one and, two and, three and, four and.

Do that with me, ready? Here's, I'll give you a count in from three, so three and, four and, one and, two and, three and, four and.

Brilliant, if you got that.

So let's see if we can put our bass and our snare together, So it should go like this.

So three and, four and, one and, two and, three and, four and.

Notice how this hand's not doing anything.

Let's try that again, so I'll give you a count in.

So three and, four and, one and, two and, three and, four and.

Well done if you managed to get those two in time.

So, that's the easy part, the tricky part is now trying to put your hi-hat in and this is where a lot of people get confused, so don't worry if you don't get this one first time, we'll go really, really slow to see if you can put it.

So our hi-hat is playing on the offbeat, so one and, two and, three and, four and.

And usually we would play our hi-hat with our right hand, so we're going to place our right hand on our right leg, and we're just going to play our hi-hat to start with.

So three and, four and, one and, two and, three and, four and.

So that's what our hi-hat sounds like.

So let's see if we can build them up and we'll put them all together, I think putting your hi-hat in straight away is going to confuse you.

So we'll start with one of our bass drum, we'll then put in our snare drum, and then if you're brave enough, see if you can have a go at putting in the hi-hat too.

Here we go, slightly slower just to help you out, okay.

So we'll go at one and, two and, three and, four and.

One and, two and, three and, four and.

Now we're putting in the snare.

So one and, two and, three and, four and.

And now we're going to put in our hi-hat.

So one and, two and, three and, four and.

Let's try that again, that last one.

And here we go, three and, four and, one and, two and, three and, four and.

Well done if you got that right.

Should we try that slightly quicker, here we go.

So three and, four and, one and, two and, three and, four and.

Well done if you got that.

Okay, so once more, see if you can go a little bit quicker.

Here we go, three and, four and, one and, two and, three and, four and.

Well done if you got that.

So I'm going to leave that drum pattern with you to practise, if you want to rewind the video and practise it along with that so that you get all three parts in, go for it.

If you've got a kit at home, you can try that as well, or you could actually try it and play that on your keyboard as well.

We are going to input this into our digital audio workstation in a little while.

So here is the drum pattern from Avicii's Levels, what's changed from the original EDM pattern that I showed you? Well done if you said that there's additional hi-hats in there as well.

So this is even harder because you now have to fit two hi-hats in the space of half a beat, so they're like, quarter beat for your hi-hats here.

So we've got semiquaver hi-hats being played here during the course.

Are you brave enough to have a go at this, let's take a look.

So our bass drum is exactly the same as it was before, so is our snare drum, this time, we have an extra hi-hat within our ands, so they're quarter beats each.

So one and a, two and a, three and a, four and a.

Are you brave enough at having a go at that, here we go.

Here's your count in, one, two, three, four.

One and a, two and a, three and a, four and a.

Do you think that you can keep that pattern going, let's have a go, here we go.

One, two, three, four.

One and a, two and a, three and a, four and a.

One and a, two and a, three and a, four and a.

Well done if you managed to do that twice.

So there's another pattern that you can see if you can practise yourself and see if you could just keep that going around, and around on a loop.

Let's see how we can incorporate these into our digital audio workstations.

For your next pause task, can you practise the two drum kit rhythms that we were looking at.

You can use chair drumming if you want, so you use chopsticks or wooden spoons as your sticks.

And if there are other household members, they could keep the pulse for you so they would need to count one and, two and, three and, four and.

As an extension, can you think about what other drum beats you could come up with, try syncopated rhythms and adding in other parts of the kit.

And also, can you notate in a similar grid to the one that we were using, your own drum beat rhythms. Pause the video to complete your task and then resume once you're finished.

Now that you have created some drum beat patterns, you're now going to compose some drum patterns using a digital audio workstation.

So the first thing that I'd like you to do is once you've logged on to BandLab, you will need to go to my library, it's the icon here and click it.

And then start a personal project, and click on mix editor.

That should bring you up with another screen and we want to then go to drum machine.

You can do this on instruments if you want to, but you'll have to play them in separately and quantize yourself.

So this is an easier version to be able to play in our EDM drum beats.

So click on drum machine and it should bring you up with a drum grid down the bottom, which is very similar to what we've been working on this lesson, and drum machine A and B.

Now, I don't want these so we're going to get rid of those by clicking on them and deleting.

So to start with, let's just take a look at the BandLab screen, at the top here, I've got my play, record buttons.

I've got my, how many beats are in a bar, so we want for a dance track about a 120 to 140 so that's fine and our time signature, we want that in four, four.

So I've got those, the set up and that's all great.

At the bottom I've got my drum kit and my drum machine, even.

So at the left hand side, you can that at the moment, I'm on an 808 kit and I can click on that, and I can choose a whole range of different drum kits if I wanted to change in there or drum machines here as well.

And it's worth playing around with that until you find a sound that you like, for now I'm just going to keep it on 808 kit.

So in my drum kit here, in my drum machine grid, you can see that there's lots of dots.

Now, these dots are symbolising when an instruments playing, but these are prerecorded patterns, so I actually don't want these for now.

So I'm going to double click anywhere in this grid and click clear pattern, I'm going to do the same for A as well, clear pattern.

Okay, so A and B are usually preloaded in.

On the left hand side, these are our different parts of the drum machine or kit, and they tell us if you click on it, what they are.

So here we have our kick drum and you should be able to hear that when I hover over it.

And then our next one is our floor tom and then we have our snare.

We then have our snare edge if you want to play on the snare edge.

We've got some claps there as well there as well added in our drum machine.

We've got a closed hi-hat, an open hi-hat and then we have our crash cymbal or our ride cymbal.

And you can change those as well, you don't have to just stick with the ones that are there.

So we're going to begin by inputting the EDM beat that we first looked at.

So can you remember where our base drum went, which beats on the bar did our bass drum go on.

One, two, three, and four.

So each four squares here, in our grid, is worth one beat.

So that's beat one, beat two, beat three and beat four.

So if we play that pattern, now.

We can hear our bass drum and it just loops it for us.

So on top of our base drum, we know that on beats two and four, our snare drum worked in tandem, so let's have a listen to those now.

Nice, okay and we know that our closed hi-hat we put on the ands, so the and would be here, so it's halfway between the beat.

So I'm going to place those in there as well and take a listen.

Hey, we've got an EDM beat, well done, okay.

So that's the beat that we tried to play on our imaginary kits earlier.

So I'm going to add that in and it should come up to the top here, and it's called A because that's our A pattern.

Now in dance music, they love having one, two, four bar loops.

So to loop this, I'm going to click this arrow that looks like it's going in a circle and I can drag it all the way across, I'm going to drag it for four bars.

And then if I press space bar or play up here.

We should hear it being looped for four bars.

So dance music loves repetition but it also loves development.

So let's have a look at the second pattern that we played on our imaginary kit, which was the Avicii's Levels pattern.

And it was pretty similar to the original one with our base drum on that four-to-the-floor.

And we had our snare drum on two and four, but our closed hi-hat was actually on the and, and then another one, so they were quarter beats.

So we're going to add those in there as well and let's just play that.

There you go, so it's now slightly developed because we've got another hi-hat rhythm.

So let's add B and we can see that that's gone in there, and let's loop it again for another four bars, and then we'll need to develop it again.

So let's listen now, so if that's all the way there, okay.

Drag that back to the beginning and press play, we should hear A and then B.

That wasn't quite on five, so we might need to drag that, there we go.

So now if I play it, oh, bring that back out.

Let's hear that again.

It's gone over the bar, right, so you've got to make sure that they're bang on the bar lines, otherwise they will be out of time.

So I'm not quite sure what happened with that one, let's delete that and let's move our drumbeat back in, there we go.

It should snap to the grid for us.

There you go and we can hear it.

So I'm going to just loop that for the fourth time, I'm not quite sure what happened there.

And then we're going to see if we can add in some development on A over here, just to show that we can develop our patterns.

But I'm going to do this on pattern C so I'm quickly going to add in the same drum pattern, making sure that my beats are on correct.

And then my hi-hat, we had here or I said on A, didn't I, so this was the same one as A.

And what else can we add to this, so you can be inventive with this, let's see what else.

Oh, I didn't even mean to do that but let's add that in, second snare, let's see what happens there.

I'm not sure if I liked that one, let's see that again.

Quite like that one, I like that pattern.

So I'm going to add C in, so make sure that your cursor is there, where you want it and add C.

And then I'm going to make my development even so another four bars, and then we can hear our whole piece developing as we go through.

Here we go.

And that is a really easy way to start to build up your drumbeats.

Now don't be scared to use other parts of the kit as well, remember the beauty of EDM is that you don't just have your two feet and your two hands, and you're not just sat at a kit.

With EDM music you are using drum machines so you can add as many different sounds as you want, it doesn't matter that technically you might not be able to play it because it's a machine that is playing it with you.

So you'll be layering all of your different drum sounds on top of each other, so you can have a go at doing that and playing around with all the synthesised sounds.

For your next pause task, can you recreate the drum patterns using BandLab, your keyboard, or your chosen music tech app, or digital audio workstation.

For an extension, what other drumbeats can you come up with, you could try syncopated rhythms and adding in other parts of the kit.

Try experimenting with different drum kit sounds too, until you get the one that really gives you the drum machine sound that you would like.

And think about what the difference is between the live kit sounds and the drum machine sounds.

As an extension, can you add chords or a melody to your piece and play your drum rhythms to your household members and see if they can guess the genre of your music.

Pause the video to complete your task and then resume once you're finished.

Now that you've had a go at composing some drum patterns using a digital audio workstation, you're now going to explore rhythm displacement.

Rhythm displacement is when the same rhythmic statement is performed but you move it to a different starting point in the measure.

So at the moment, we know that this starts bang on, beat one.

Whereas if I was to use rhythm displacement, I could move it maybe an eighth or a 16th of a bar forward and it would displace the rhythm, it would give me a totally different feel to the piece of music that I want to play.

You could also layer this rhythm here on top of another rhythm that has been rhythmically displaced.

And again, you would get this kind of buildup feel within your music.

There's also a technique of changing beat displacement.

So for example, I could move my hi-hat, instead of it just starting on the and here, what about if I actually moved this slightly earlier, maybe like a quarter of a beat earlier, I would get beat displacement as well.

So again, you can layer these on top of each other.

So let's have a look and a listen at what this sounds like using BandLab.

To show you rhythm displacement, I'm going to use one of the drum beats that we used earlier.

So I've already loaded that in and it's my rhythm B, that's up here, so let's just take a listen.

Very nice, there's one bar of it.

Okay, so that's my rhythm B from earlier, that's the same one that Avicii used in Levels.

And all I'm going to do for this now is, I'm going to copy this layer here by double clicking here and clicking duplicate track, so it's made me exactly the same as if I play those together.

They're exactly the same.

And I want to displace this rhythm now, so I'm going to do it by displacing it an eighth and I can work out where my eighth is because very faintly up here, the lines are drawn in.

So one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.

So it's split into eights and if I click on this and drag it, it should kind of snap to the grid for me, there, exactly where it should be.

If I now play that, take a listen to what it sounds like with the other original drum beat as well.

Here we go.

So it's completely given us a different feel, let's listen to that again.

All I've done is displaced it by an eighth and we've got a completely different feel.

I could loop this even more, so if I gave us a few more bars up to here and let's do this one as well, and let's just have another listen to how it displaces it, going over a few bars.

And it actually feels like there's a bit of a buildup in my music, so you could use that when you want to do a buildup in a dance track.

Another way of using displacement is using beat displacement.

So I'm going to just get rid of this one for a moment and I'm going to bring it back, so it's in time, okay, with the other one, so it's not displaced at the moment.

And all I'm going to do is make sure that I'm clicked on this one, so it's highlighted in white around it.

And here, what would happen now if actually I change some of my drumbeats around.

So for example, if I displace my hi-hat rhythm, instead of it being here in beats two and a half, if I just make it slightly earlier and I get rid of that one, what kind of effect does that give me.

Okay, I like that, so let's just have a listen.

Now because it's in time with the other one, it doesn't give me much of a difference.

However, if I displaced it and listen again.

I've got a completely different feel to my music.

So there's another way that you could displace it and also displace a beat within your track.

Now, again, this is really clever for development, a lot of students say to me, I'm not quite sure what to do with my drumbeats and actually, usually we just want to see development because it keeps your listener engaged.

So I'm going to bring those back down just to one bar, just so I can show you how you can develop your drum beats really quickly.

So remember that on this one now, if I click on this one, you'll see that it's changed on my hi-hat here and again on this one, so they're slightly different rhythms. So all I have to do is change one hi-hat, so have a listen now, from this one here to this one here and see if you can notice the difference between the rhythms. And all I've done is moved one hi-hat and you've got a totally different rhythm to use there, so that is showing development.

What would happen if I copied that again, so let's just duplicate that again and if I move it over again.

And on this one now, so remember we've got our hi-hats.

Let's put something else in, in here, let's be inventive.

What else, let's put on the last one, we're going to put a open hi-hat.

So let's add that in there and let's see what that sounds like.

And what about if we add in some toms as well, so let's add in a tom here.

And let's add in a tom here and let's just see what they sound like.

Okay, so now let's go back to the beginning and just by playing around, and adding in different parts of the kits, I've changed my rhythms again.

That's our original.

Hi-hat added.

And adding in some open hi-hats and some toms here, has given me almost a mini fill as well at the end there.

So that's again, another really quick way that you can develop your drum rhythms. Now, remember when you're composing EDM music, they do like to repeat, so remember to loop them before you add on your others.

I've just done those as one bars, just to show you as an example.

So how can you use rhythm displacement within your own compositions.

For your next pause task, can you recreate the drum patterns using BandLab or your keyboard, or your chosen music tech app, or digital audio workstation.

This time, can you add an extra layer using rhythm displacement, what kind of effect does this have on your music? Pause the video to complete your task and then resume once you're finished.

Let's just recap today's lesson agenda, we began by exploring EDM and you then went, and created different drumming patterns, and composed drum patterns using a digital audio workstation.

You then explored rhythmic displacement and used that within your composition too, amazing work.

For your final pause task, on your piece of paper, can you answer the following question, which was on the green screen at the beginning of the lesson.

How can digital audio workstations be used to create EDM rhythms? Take a few minutes to pause the video and complete your task, and then resume once you're finished.

How did you get on with that final question, so how can digital audio workstations be used to create EDM rhythms? Well, they allow you to play more rhythms than just one person being sat at a drum kit.

They also provide you with a variety of different sounds, again, more than what is just used on a drum kit because they're using drum machine sounds as well.

And you can use rhythm displacement to create a different feel within your music.

So I hope today has given you an insight into how you can create some EDM beats on a digital audio workstation and hopefully that will give you some inspiration for your own compositions in the future.

So before we end the lesson today, last thing for me is, please don't forget to fill in the end of lesson quiz to see how well you've done and what knowledge you've attained from this lesson.

And if you would love to share your work with Oak National, and share some of your drumbeats that you've managed to create today, please ask your parent or carer to share your work on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter.

Tagging @OakNational and #LearnwithOak, we would love to see what you've been up to and creating.

That's all from me today, hopefully I'll see you in the next lesson.

Have a great day and goodbye for now.