How I made this RnB beat

Here’s a quick look at how I made this RnB beat, including some mixing and sound design. This beat started out with a chord progression I wrote on the Nord 2X.

Writing the Beat

Chords

This idea started with a chord progression I played around with on the Nord synth. Usually when writing a new idea I try to stick to the following approach to keep from getting stuck. I’ll set a timer for 10-15 minutes. In that time I challenge myself to jam around and try to come up with 3 basic but different ideas. When the time’s up I pick my favourite. This seems to help my creative flow more than trying to perfect one idea which often results in nothing.

Here’s the chord progression I chose for this beat. It’s a 4 bar progression in B Flat Minor.

Synth Sound Design and Mixing

With the chord progression written, I recorded the 4 bar chord riff with the Nord into Ableton (both left and right channels). I then panned those channels hard left and right. Finally I grouped the left and right channel together in Ableton so I could process the sound as one stereo pair.

With a hardware keyboard synth like the Nord 2X without fx, it’s easy to be put off when you compare it to some VSTs. VSTs often have lots of presets with extravagant FX (reverbs, chorus, delays, compression etc). It’s worth persisting with a ‘real’ keyboard as it might just need a few fx and compression to make a fair comparison. I’ll look at how I did this for with the Nord sound below.

Main Synth Mixing

With the Left and Right channel grouped, I processed and mixed the sound using the stereo Group. Here’s a quick look at the full plugin chain. Below I’ll go in depth with the more important plugins that made the biggest impact on the sound.

First up I used the Waves RComp taking off about 1-3 dB of the peaks of the synths with a fairly short attack and a long Release time.

A longer release time can really help to smooth out a dynamic sound in the mix. This Nord part had quite a lot of variation but I wanted it to be consistent. A slower release can also help to make a sound sit a bit further back in the mix. This helped here, as I wanted the main synth to be consistent but the guitar and vocals more at the front of the mix.

Next I used OTT by Xfer records to add a bit more body to the sound. OTT is a multiband upwards/downwards compressor/expander. It’s used in EDM quite often as an aggressive effect. I wanted a subtler effect so it’s set at a mix of 11%. OTT is free so pick it up at the link here.

After this, I added some Saturation from Ableton – ‘A bit Warmer’ preset.

Main Synth Mixing – Sidechaing and Filtering

Then I put the keys sound into Kickstart to add a subtle sidechaining effect. Kickstart is a simple sidechain plugin which I used to create a subtle pump effect on the 1/4 note here.

Following this, I added a few different modulation plugins (chorus, flanger and phaser) and some delays. The last and most significant effect was a low pass filter which I used to add a lot more movement to the sound in the chorus and also push it into the distance in the verses.

I used Autofilter with the following settings. I actually stole these settings from a Mat Zo livestream, with him using them in his track ‘Colours‘ from the Illusion of Depth album.

Funk Guitar Part

The next sound I added was the muted funk guitar part. This is a doubled part panned hard left and right.

On the individual guitar channels I used the following plugin chains on each side (same chain):

The Scheps 73 is a Neve 1073 recreation and is adding a bit of grit, high passing at 160Hz, adding some mids and highs and some saturation with the drive button engaged.

The L1 Limiter is knocking off some of the highest peaks on the muted guitar part before feeding the guitar into RAxx which is a parallel compression type effect. I still felt the guitar didn’t have quite enough character so I then fed each side into its own Guitar Rig with the super clean funk preset.

After this I added a CLA-76 with a slow attack and fast release to give each muted guitar sound a bit more punch and presence.

Bass Line Pt 1 – Live Bass

The next part I got down was the bass line on my trusty Lakland 5 string bass. I wanted to go for a thick traditional bass amp sound with the intention of layering a synth bass above it for bite and definition later.

First up I high passed the bass guitar at 50 Hz.

This just removes the extreme low end that you can’t really hear below the fundamentals of the bass.

After some basic compression I then fed the bass into the Waves Gtr Amp on a bass setting called Mo’Sound for a Motown type vibe.

After this I added some Rbass to give some low end power and an L2 limiter to control the peaks of the bass part. The final part to the live bass was a Soundtoys Devil Loc adding some growl and saturation to help the bass cut through in the mix and on smaller speakers.

Bass Line Pt 2 – Moog

With the live bass guitar part down, I doubled this on the Moog to add some more mid range growl to the bass part.

On this sound I used some EQ, the Oxford inflator and an L2 limiter to tame the peaks.

The EQ is removing unecessary top and bottom end and cutting in the sub, bass and mid range where I felt it was competing with the other parts in the mix.

The Oxford inflator adds a bit more power and weight to the sound without it being louder and the L2 again was just taking off 1-2 dB of the peaks.

Vocal Samples

The vocal samples were chopped up individually and then I grouped them and the fx were applied to the group. Here’s the plugin chain for the vocal group.

The main plugin here was the Waves JJP vocal. This used the following settings:

The Maag was added to give a little more air to the vocals ad then some ambience was added from the Valhalla shimmer and a delay.

Overall

Hopefully this gives you some insight into the sound design and mixing that took place and how I made this rnb beat.

Let me know if you’ve any comments or questions below and if you want to see more on sound design on bass and guitar check this post.