The Sound Of: Twenty One Pilots – My Blood (Drums Bass Guitar and Synths)

Hello, and welcome to the second video in this series which is called the sounds off and today we’re going to be looking at a song called my blood by 21 pilots from their latest album trench this song was incredibly highly requested along with some other amazing songs which I’ve checked out and I’m working on right now but the first thing I’m going to do in response to some comments is play some longer sections right now of my recreation of the song just so that you know right away what sort of music we’re going to be recreating and can decide whether you want to invest your time into the video or not so without further ado here you go so hopefully that gives you an idea of the sort of soundscape I’m going to be helping you create in this video I really connected with the energy in this song and the soundscape just really spoke to me a certain way so I’ve mainly focused on the chorus really looking at the drums the bass and the synths now all of the samples all of the serum presets and the bass guitar the raw stem and the edited stems will be linked in the description of this video so if you want to download them and mess around with them or use them in your own productions just make sure that you read the information that’s attached to those files and it should be all good but for now let’s not waste any time and let’s just get straight into the software and look at recreating this so the first thing that we’re going to look at is the drums in this track and they really drive the track now in response to some comments I’ve got I’m going to be playing more of the track uninterrupted and I’m also going to be fading the audio in and out just so it doesn’t catch anyone by surprise so the drums start like this just so that we can hear them in context play them in different sections of the song later in the song it sounds like this we have this ride cymbal is added and then the drums really switch up in this sort of break or the second verse here so let’s take a look at how these were created now at the start of the song the initial pattern is fairly simple but what they’ve decided to do is keep varying the pattern throughout it’s something they do they sometimes add an extra snare they add a little hi-hat role here and there and it just keeps the drums really interesting not overly complicated because the kick and the snare pattern keeps driving home there’s always a kick and the snare then a kick then a snare it’s always very easy to predict but everything going on around the kick of the snare changes in almost every single pattern so let’s take a look at the samples chosen and why I chose them so firstly I’m just going to turn off the processing on the kick and as usual I have all of my drums going to an individual track on the mixer then to a drum buss and then from the drum buss I also have this simulated room mic that I’m just going to turn off right now so that we can really hear the samples clearly so I started with this kick here and it’s a kick that’s very full frequency it’s like very very broad spectrum you’ve got some low-end in there you’ve also got a nice top-end because I know that I’m going to be distorting this kick and really trying to make it sound aggressive so I need something to work with what I’ve done with the processing on this kick made it sound a bit louder obviously but I started by just getting a little bit more thump out of the low-end because I wanted to have that low-end attitude then I saturated it so I just used the free soft tube saturation knob and this makes a huge difference to the drums so I’m just going to play all the drums together just for context but I’ll be turning the saturation on and off with the kick it really just gives it aggression and attitude just changing the saturation like this I’ll push it to the extreme so that you can hear the effect that’s too far see five not quite enough just right and the next thing I did was use the virtual mix rack because I wanted to use some EQ and compression now all of these changes individually don’t make a big difference but together they do so the first thing is a low-cut this is just to remove extreme low end from the kick 35 Hertz low cut very simple the next are two stages of EQ I just used two because I wanted just two different flavors so I initially I took some top-end around 8 K and just boosted it so I’m really too much pull up this top end a lot of it and then I pulled out some boxing frequencies around 400 like that I didn’t want that so I took it out he’s gonna add it a little bit of low end around 60 now the next EQ also adds more top end and a little bit more low end around 60 and then I decided to add some compression because I just wanted the kick to jump out at the track a little bit so I have a very very slow attack time which lets the start of that kick really hit through and then it kind of clamps down on it the kick sort of hits you a little bit more when the compressions on and it becomes very apparent in the context of the whole mix when I was tweaking all of those things I wasn’t listening to the kick on its own otherwise I would have no context to know whether the kick needed more low end or more top end so the next thing is the snare so I’m just going to turn off the processing and my snare is made up of three parts if I had one sample that sounded good I would just have used one sample but I didn’t so I have a top snare that sounds like this very clicky very transient the second snare sounds like this and I’ve taken away the start of the sample because I didn’t want it to be too spiky at the start so it’s just providing that sort of fullness and that high end I suppose and then the bottom snare is similar to the one in the middle it’s just even more fullness and a little bit more low-end as well so all three of them together I think with all three of them together and the kick we have a really good interaction between the kick and the snare and also the bass line which I’ll just play all of them together now you probably notice that usually my processing is to add punchiness this case it’s actually the opposite so if you listen again sounds very transient with the processing it’s actually less transient and more drawn-out this is really to do with the compression so if I open this up there is an EQ doing I think absolutely nothing and then there’s a compressor here with a fast attack time so I went to a preset but that I changed the attack time to make it very fast and this means that it clamps down on that transient so you can see the compression but really if I turn on and off you can really hear it when there’s no compression that transient hits through and really stabs you in the ears with the compression on it’s more smoothed out and this is usually the opposite of what I do the hi-hat in the open hi-hat are very simple just like this and one that’s a little bit more of an open hi-hat they’re both technically open high hats but the one that’s closed I’ve taken it from this and I’ve just taken the out just to kind of reduce that tail a little bit if I could take it to extremes you can make a you can make an open a hi-hat kind of sound like a closed hi-hat I suppose so just adjusted the out just a little bit all together so now I need something to hold all this together then that’s the compression on the drum buss and also the room mics or the simulated room mic I’ll start with the compression so I’ll just simply play it with them without and you should be able you should be able to hear the difference and with that bass line there’s a very small increase in level but the character changed that this compression makes just seems to make the drums be capable of sitting on top of that bass line without poking out too much is it’s quite a big difference in my opinion especially if you’re using headphones or speakers you should hear it quite quite clearly now I have a fruity Scent plug-in at the bottom of this which is sending it to this channel called room mic I’ve sidechain the signal to this channel called a room mic where the room mic on its own it sounds like this so you can probably hear what’s going on I have a reverb here verb suite classics a hundred percent wet so whichever reverb you have make it a hundred percent wet try to make it sound roomy like that and then after the reverb I have some EQ and compression so the EQ on its own is mainly a low-cut here so a low-cut to about 80 just so there’s not too much mud there and I’ve taken some high end out I’ve just generally tried to sculpt the sound to make it sound quite roomy without sounding too boxy so I’ve removed some 3-hundred here didn’t want too much of that and then I’ve compressed it and the compression just adds a lot of character and sort of grit to the sound so you can hear the compressors really pumping in a very musical wave you can hear it pulling in and out in time with the track so you’ll hear that it adds a lot of width and depth to the drums without actually removing their punchiness so I’ll play it with and without and I’ll play it with the bassline as well and I just think it’s a really cool way to add character it’s even just just blend it in a little bit you know I’m not overpowering just a little bit and now I’m just gonna talk about the variations and the drum patterns throughout which will naturally lead me further on through the song so it always has this kick and snare interaction like this but in different parts of the song for instance the second phrase you know there’s an extra snare at the end the fourth one it’s two extra high hats and all these extra little interesting things that happen around that fundamental rhythm keep the track really exciting and really engaging it’s just extra things added to keep you excited and to keep you interested and want to listen to the track the next big switch up in the drums is when a ride cymbal is sort of added here so just this here very simple here I’ve got this sample here I took this from a free version of Steven slate drums 5 which I’m using and I’ll show you more about that later I just printed it out and I’ve used it here I’ve used it along with the new EOS air EQ which I got in the everything bundle and I was just taming some of the high end because the cymbal had this sort of harshness at the top which I didn’t really like so I’ll just play it here it sounded like this so I just took a little bit of it away cuz blended in with everything it just didn’t sound right but again very minimal processing on the ride cymbal and there’s some risers and some toms so the risers I’m just going included a sample pack and put in the description box down below South Campus and that’s the first Tom that we hear so moving on in the track the Tom’s really come in when this break happens here just play this along so this is the first really cool switch up in the drums so the toms come in here and again I’m just using Steven slate drums 5 which is just here and I downloaded the free version and it’s just got these two Tom’s there that sound better than any samples I have so what I did was I just put in some MIDI I’ve changed the velocities and the way the Tom interacts with the kick and the snare is very important in this part you know this for Tom hits I think then a kick than a snare it’s very important like the fills are very intricate they’re very well designed I mean not actually sure whether all the fills are performed on real drums or whether they’re meticulously programmed on a sampler because some of them are so good these days but whoever programmed them was a drummer there’s no doubt about that or they had a drummers mind because the fills in this track are very intricate and and very expressive as well so when it comes to the processing on these toms there was of course more EQ more compression but instead of just talking about that again because I’ve talked about that on all the drums one of the biggest things you can do with toms that I’ve discovered is simply transient processing and this sort of goes for any sample but on the toms here I have a transient processor you know I have a video that explains every dial in detail of this plug-in I’ll link that just here and in the description just with the attack and release Styles you can shape this sound hugely so the attack dial is looking at the start of each hit eats each transient and you know if you turn this to the right you get more of a spike more punch more jumping out of the speaker if you turn it the other way you get a more smooth DAF sound I’m just going to adjust the plug-in and you can hear for yourself spikier further away from you closer so it gets pretty extreme than with the release you can make it sound huge larger than life or you can cut off the decay entirely paired with the other sample now I find that sometimes just something as simple as this transient processor can do the work of an EQ and compressor together because you’re really just shaping the whole sound it can be a really quick way to get a sample into the right ballpark definitely look at it as well for kicks if you’ve got a kick where the decay is too long or something like that just pulled the decay in if you need more punch out of the sample instead of messing around with compression for ages especially if you’re new to compression sometimes just load up a transient processor and it can save you a lot of hard work sometimes I forget that it even exists and then I open the plug-in up and I’m like wow you know that would have saved me a ton of time messing with compression ratios attack release it’s fun I enjoy it but it can some hopeful waste a bit of time whereas sometimes a transient processor can just get it into the right ballpark really really quickly so these Tom’s introduce us to the next really cool part of the drums and it starts with this crash I’ll leave the crash in the description down below in that sample pack and the drums switch up like this I’ll play it with the bass which sounds really really cool and what I’ve noticed about the drums here is the drums and the vocal timing and melody are so intricately woven here all of these high hats here bounce perfectly off what he’s singing if you just listen to it right here the flow of his of his singing matches perfectly with the drums here and I think the two of them didn’t happen by accident I think it was designed to work and flow perfectly off while he was singing especially with the high hats they’re just one more time and I’ll just show you the the drum pattern for this because it’s a little bit more complicated than the previous one so I’ll play the drums on their own so this time it’s kick kick snare kick snare and what I’ve decided to do is add some velocity with the hi-hat so if I select the hi-hat pattern here and open up the graph editor it’s like you know low high low high if I put them all the same it sounds really terrible you’ve got to do stuff like that to try and add some sort of realism if I had a hi-hat and I could play drums I just play it in and record it myself but without that and you’ve got to try and do something in the MIDI to give some form of realism to the pattern there you can see what the pattern is right here if you want to copy it just don’t pause the screen and then there’s another more intricate Tom fill just here again using the Steven slate drums 5 and this time there’s two different toms involved and again I’ve got that velocity there so that there’s actually like an increase if I don’t yeah I want it to like that you know really cool you’ve got ad you’ve got to add some personality to it like that you’ve got to imagine you’re sitting in front of the drums and I was sitting on that Tom drum I wouldn’t just hit it three times very quickly the same velocity I would definitely start more quiet get more loud it just you know put your own passion into the drums like that if I had a drum kit and I could play drums I can’t so you’ve got to do some more in the MIDI to try and add that realism back in just as I just I said a moment ago and my favorite section of the drums is definitely this part of the track when you listen to the way the bassline vibes with the drums it’s really interesting and I’m just gonna play it again it’s just for the sake of now the bet we’ve probably all been waiting for which is the baseline which is really the fundamental driving force of this whole track I got the drums down on this track pretty quickly I was messing around with some synths and then I kind of hit a brick wall because I realized that there was no way to recreate this bass with plugins even if I had a really good bass synthesizer like I’m you know like a trillion or something I would probably struggle to get all the hammer ons and slides and I’m not a bass player I don’t have a bass guitar I don’t play bass so I was in a bit of a tricky situation but I decided to call upon a friend a good guy called you and Lane you might remember him he won the remix competition I ran with produced like a pro with his absolutely outrageously amazing remix of right here so definitely check that out I’ve left all of his links in the description I called him up and asked if he could help in any way to make this happen and you know in a few hours he had it down I sent over the bass line he really dug deep into the processing and it’s just so so accurate and so good and honestly it just made this whole thing work for me if I can’t sing his praises enough so I’m going to cut to a few clips that he’s recorded where he talks about the bass he used how he recorded it what knots he’s using the same interface as me audience ID 44 just straight into there and he’s gonna talk a little bit about that and for a lot more information about his processing that he did he should be uploading a video on his channel which should be up or very soon which goes into all of the details because I’m sure some of you will be very interested in that but anyway let’s cut to him hey guys you in here just as a quick intro to my own video a more detailed breakdown of the bass temps and as a an interlude in Michaels I’m just gonna explain a bit about the bass I used on the recording over my blood by 21 pilots and afterwards if you’re watching an IJ audio I’ll go through a more detailed breakdown of all of the stems that I ended up sending Michael so first let’s check out the bass so this is a sub stingray model by Sterling which is a sort of I suppose the Epiphone to Gibson and square to fender and series by Ernie Ball or music man so you can see up the top here it’s the sterling sub on the headstock and you can look these up they’ve actually changed them since and they look pretty cool now and they just called them stingrays I think since but really nice bass a couple of notes I had to lower the pickup in the past if you can see here the pickup itself has been pushed down away from the strings which does change the sound but I tried to do as much looking into it as I could and make sure it you know okay for purpose but it was click clipping on the preamp on the output so it was the most easy solution for know before he might replace the pickup eventually and the preamp itself but the preamp has a volume pot and so your main output it’s got a meet control a tone control and a bass tone control so they’re kind of clocked at 12 it’s zero and you can take away base and add it or take away mate and add it here and then that just went straight into the jfet on the Audient preamp here and it sounded really good on the way in hopefully you’ll hear that in the more detailed breakdown or in Michaels video and I just did my own version of some sort of distorted baseline for the purposes of sending it on and gave all of the layers to Michael sent him a package with everything edited ready to go to the timeline to the tracks that he said sent me to a click and let him do what he wanted with it so kind of approach that like a session player I suppose and that giving him all the options he needed he could just go ahead with my di signal if he wanted or use all of my layers and we go through it further but you can see on the screen here that the main edit is comped together and then I have it bounced out so that I could send it to Michael Michael and there’s four other layers that form my main kind of distortion that I also sent to him so if you’re watching on a JL Audio we’ll go through it now and if you’re watching it in the mix you can job over here and see it or I’ll send you back back to Michael and thanks very much for having me so thank you very much for your insights there Ewan and let’s take a look at how we can do something similar with the stands so his his final baseline sounds like this which probably sounds a bit more distorted than you might remember in the track but if you listen to the track the bass really is pretty distorted under the track but it’s not always too loud so with the drums and he’s really taken care to get every little detail cracked and the timing is just so so good what I’m also going to do is look at the the raw stand that he sent over initially which sounds like this and if I just go to some different sections in the song that’s the first section then it changes up and he really gets all the detail there and then in that really cool section that I like later on the sort of second verse or break so that’s the raw tone he had and he transformed it into this and there’s more details on his channel but basically what he did was he took the signal and he sent it to separate mixer tracks and then processed them all differently for instance I’m just gonna load up a spam on the master so that we can really see what’s going on as well as hearing it what he has here is a bottom layer for instance which was you know similar to this which you can just see the low end the base then there’s a distorted bottom layer and you can hear there’s a nice thick low end but there’s also some sort of like sample reduction or bit bit crushing going on as well in the high end then there’s a distorted layer here and you can see that it’s been cut off from about 100 or 200 down so we’re just looking at the mid-range in a bit of the high range here really heavily distorted layer and the reason they’ve been separated is just so that they don’t interfere with each other you just want one or maybe two layers providing that solid base the actual sub base and you want all the other layers to be separated from that so that there’s not a lot of that sort of muddiness and patterning and sort of flapping about in the low end and there’s a mid layer and the mid layer is where a lot of the attitude of the base comes from it’s that bit that really sounds like a bass guitar the sort of unplugged sound and then there’s also this mid layer which has gone through some other forms of saturation this says mid valve so that might indicate what kind of sort of tube saturation it has I think Americans call it tube or tube saturation and in Britain in the UK here we call it valve sort of tube saturation you’ll hear nice lair and all the layers sort of add up to each other sort of married together and form this really thick cool crunchy wall of sound now you might be wondering how you could do this yourself so what I have here is just the dry the dry stand that he sent to me and what you can do is duplicate the track you know he processed it into three or four layers which is rather complicated but it sounded amazing I’m just gonna stick to two layers just to keep it simple duplicate the track exact same thing make a new layer so send one to one track I’ve sent this to twelve this one’s to thirteen so I’ve said low base and high base now if I play them together they’re just copies of each other so what I’m gonna do now is with the low base I’m going to turn on the effects that I have here so I’m just compressing it to make sure that there’s a really solid subby layer there that’s nice and consistent and I’m also just pulling out a little bit of low-end so somewhere around a hundred and two hundred I’m just finding a frequency that sounds good and I’m just boosting it just a little bit and then I’ve saturated it just to give it a little bit of attitude so I’ll just turn that processing on and off so you can hear the difference this is just on the Lola on the low layer the next thing I did was to take and eat you and simply roll off some of the top ends so up to around five or six hundred or so and this is going to be experimental in every single time you try this I didn’t want to remove too much of that mid-range because I felt it was really cool but we’ve got all the subs still at some of the mid-range you can also see that I’ve tried different forms of saturation here so I was trying things in different orders at one point I had some headcrusher on there which kind of sounded pretty cool but I took it off and just left in the back so that’s my low layer now the high layer what I’m gonna do I’m just gonna turn on the plugins that I have here and the first thing I did was just start by saturating it which takes a signal from something like this it’s gonna raise that level up to something like this loss of aggression so saturation knob just here nice little free saturation tool then I used the EQ so all I wanted to do here was remove everything below about a hundred hundred and twenty just so that we didn’t have those subby frequencies muddying the low layer because I want a low layer that’s thickened solid and then a mid-range II high layer to add a lot of that aggression the next layer was a mix rack and this was just a bit of compression just to try and level that performance out it was already a really good performance to be honest it didn’t have any crazy blips it was just hold it together and a tiny little bit of tube distortion and the result is like this now that might sound like a huge amount of distortion and now if I lower that level down play it with the low bass and then introduce all the drums all of a sudden it doesn’t sound like a huge amount of distortion anymore when I play it on its own it sounds like a lot more distortion than it is so what I also experimented with was ozone and an actual guitar amp so ozone I was just using the exciter this is inside I was on eight advanced so I’ve got the exciter here and I’ve got some tube distortion low mix level high amount and it sounds really really crazy so I’m just going to be playing this and out up sort of drop it in and out and then with that sub a low-end as well and then with those drums I always find that with the distortion and saturation you have to adjust the dials when you’re playing everything in context because it always sounds like too much distortion until you drop it into the track and then it sounds fine so what I’m gonna do now is look at that final layer what I tried was just running it through a guitar amp because I don’t have a bass amp so I’m actually so I was just using a skier I tried like a rhythm guitar preset and it sounded like sort of really messed up your hear here I found that it didn’t really have enough bass for me but it was something that was really interesting because you wouldn’t necessarily think of running a bass guitar through just a regular guitar amp but it might be another texture that would have been really cool maybe if I made a third layer I could have a very high a very very high-end layer run it through a guitar amp make it really sort of scream and then blend that in low level underneath everything else and it might just add another richness another texture underneath it that isn’t necessarily the same as anyone elses bass tone so those two layers together I’ll take the guitar amp off and I have ozone now it’s just a case of blending those two layers together and to blend them together the best way to do it is to just play everything with context play your bass line around get that low one to a point where it’s nice you know nice and thick and full and then just take the high one all the way down and then just gradually push up until you get the tone that you want so I think I’ve got the right level of distortion but if I play it with everything else including the vocals let’s see if it sounds good now I don’t know but it sounds an awful lot cleaner than it did a minute ago so if I just play it on its own again you hear how you can hear all the high end so the distortion the upper harmonics but when I played it with everything else it all just seemed to kind of disappear and be that pushed away with the rest of the tracks and now when I play it with contacts that sounds an awful lot better to me now and if I play that on its own it’s far more distorted than I would have pushed it on its own long story short add your effects when you’re listening to the whole track it just makes life a lot easier using that solo button it’s wasted me so much time over the years it’s not worth it and the last point I have about the bass line is that sometimes when you have two values which are very dependent upon each other you know the theta position of the low bass is very dependent on the fader position of the high bass because they moved together it can be good to just send them to a bus so here I have ITM bass I called it in the mix bass because I had i jl that was UN’s one this is my one in the mix I’ve sent it to a bus so I have the low and the high just sidechain to a bus here and that way I can adjust the volume together so that the ratio of low to high stays the same when I just this fader the ratio that I have between the high and the low stays the same whereas if I just move this fader then move this one then move this one and this one you can lose that ratio with where they were in relation to each other so that’s it for the bassline and just once again thank you very much to you and for helping us out with that and that will be linked in the description along with all the other samples that I used so now what I’m going to do is look at the synths now I haven’t spent a huge amount of time on this and what I think is that if you guys want to see like an hour-long video I could try to break down just about everything in a track but I’m trying to focus on some of the core elements but I’m gonna leave all of these presets in the description along with that sample pack so you can just try experimenting for yourself anyway I’m going to stop talking let’s take a listen to some of these synths so let’s start there’s a very sort of high-end synth like this I’ve created this using serum so preset in the description down below the next scent that comes in in the chorus I’ve made it with two layers one’s like a jupiter-8 here and I’ve got the second layer of it coming from serum very filtered together the next synth I have again all the presets will be linked in the description is this retro sin that I built from scratch later on the song or have a Jupiter playing this arpeggio all together along with the original track and what I noticed on some of the sins that was really important was sidechaining so even though there wasn’t a four-on-the-floor kick all the time there was a lot of side chaining I’ve used grasping at times just to try and make that the synth have this sort of pumping sound and not all of them had that side chaining but some of the sense that come in it’s very important that they have that side chaining and I also noticed with the sense that they felt quite high-end but they didn’t always feel like fizzy and too brassy which was something I kind of struggled with when recreating the sound design so there’s definitely lots of filtering going on and I really would love to have been able to spend a lot more time on that but I really just wanted to focus on the core elements of the track so that’s sort of it for this video and I just want to thank anyone who stayed this long or people that do watch my videos um quite a long way through it does make a big difference to my channel the the watch time people watching through the videos and I just want to let you know that I really respect your time as well so if there was anything else you think I should change in this video make more concise or go into more detail just please let me know in the comments it’s the best sort of criticism I can get because it just helps me grow it helps you guys grow and everybody is saving their time so thank you very much for watching I hope you have a great day a great week and I hope to see you in the next video – bye for now