Music
How to produce a soul track from scratch – in 10 easy steps
Swindle and vocalist Joel Culpepper hooked up with Toddla in Red Bull Studios to write a brand new soul track in 90 minutes. Join us as we break down their songwriting process.
There’s no right or wrong way to go about making music, but there are a few methods and processes that can help you get from start to finish. In this article we follow along with Swindle and Toddla T as they build a track from the ground up alongside vocalist Joel Culpepper at Red Bull Studios in London.
Watch the video below – then scroll down to read a step-by-step breakdown of the songwriting process, complete with timecodes so you can skip straight to the right section.
1. Figure out what genre to work with.
The first decision is almost always going to be what kind of music you want to create. While this choice is by no means set in stone, it will help give you some stylistic parameters to work within. Limitations are crucial to progress – with the ability to have every sound and style at our fingertips, boundaries allow us to focus on the essentials of the music-making process.
2. Choose a tempo.
Musical genres tend to cluster around certain tempo ranges that suit their rhythms and conventions. Toddla and Swindle single out 3 possible options for this track between 70 and 110 BPM, each providing a subtle but inherently different feel. DAWs make it easy to slide between tempos so again this is all very flexible, but it’s worth doing some research into your chosen genre and figuring out a ballpark tempo to work at.
3. Loops are a good place to start.
Despite what some people will have you believe, there’s nothing wrong with using loops to get ideas started. These can always be replaced or edited later on down the line to make them your own. You’ll probably need to tweak the loop to fit the tempo of your project. There are a few ways to do this, but the easiest is to warp or stretch it – something almost all DAWs are capable of doing. Another approach is to chop up the transients and rearrange them individually. Toddla does this here to make the second half of the percussion clip loop seamlessly.
4. Build up the percussion.
While we’re still in this early creative stage, it’s good to throw in as much percussion as you can – these can always be edited down or redistributed across the track later on. It’s important to stay in the flow and not get caught up too much with arrangement or mixing at this point. Think about what needs adding to the initial loop or loops without clashing or masking the frequencies that are already present. Toddla and Swindle group the drums and throw a compressor on to gel things together and get more of a vibe, but this is by no means essential at this point.
5. Work out some sort of melody or hook.
Now, a melody or hook doesn’t have to be some big elaborate gesture. It doesn’t even have to be more than one note (Joey Beltram’s Energy Flash is a pretty solid example of this). But something for listener’s ears to catch onto, whether it’s a tom drum working out an interesting polyrhythm or a running piano line, is what’s going to make your track stand out. Swindle fires up the Fender Rhodes for a classic sounding staccato loop before doubling it up with a squelching bassline from his Roland Gaia.
Watch Swindle live in session below.
8 min
See. Hear. Now. with Swindle
The Brownwood-signed artist presents an exclusive session from his No More Normal album.
6. Add some creative effects.
Electronic music is as much about the timbre of a sound as the notes, so creative effects are key to creating something fresh. Toddla throws a series of Soundtoys plugins at the freshly-recorded Rhodes, including chorus, delay and a phaser, introducing plenty of movement and modulation to keep the ear interested.
7. Record your own sounds.
Today, we all have access to an infinite number of freely available samples, but what’s really going to make your track stand out from the rest is creating your own? Something as simple as using the voice memo function on your phone to capture the sound of hitting a frying pan will result in a unique sample that only you have. Even if it sounds like something you’ve heard before, the knowledge that it’s yours will further a sense of ownership over your music. Here, Toddla fashions a short shaker-style rhythm from Swindle’s car keys, instantly giving the track a new groove and energy.
8. Start getting things arranged.
Arguably the hardest part on any production, the arrangement is where your ideas have to flow seamlessly from one to the other in a compelling and fluid way. Luckily, there are conventions within whichever genre you choose to work which can help. Here, the boys stick to a classic pop template of verses and choruses, using that to create the structure. It’s much easier to subtract than it is to add, so don’t be afraid to build up a stereotypical arrangement at first before chipping away at the finer details later on.
9. Do some spring cleaning.
Depending on the kind of person you are, this stage could come much earlier, but it always helps hugely to keep your project tidy and organised. Rearranging channels into a logic order (generally starting with the drums and working your way down through synths, pads, one-shots, effects and incidentals), colouring and naming tracks based on their contents and removing unused sounds all aid in helping you get a clearer picture of where your track is at.
10. Finishing touches.
The tidying up also extends to the sound themselves, as at this point we want to be thinking about the overall mix as the track finally starts to come together. Getting the volume, panning and EQ of each channel right will have a cumulative effect on the mix, giving everything the space it needs. Some compression and limiting on the master output will give a bit of extra volume while glueing everything together nicely – just use a light touch to preserve overall dynamics (unless that squashed and pumping sound is what you’re after of course).
Now watch what happened when Toddla made a drum'n'bass remix with Kamakaze and MassAppeals.
