Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
So - last time we ended up just under three minutes to get a basic tune. A tune is not a club track though. This is the piano roll of our “tune” when we ended the tutorial last time. However, we can cheat by repeating our tune, shifting the tune, etc, but we cannot cheat an intro, or “build up” to our track. On the bright side, we have seven minutes left of our ten minute time trial. The reason for this is that I want you to imagine the possibilities of what you can do in an hour, if we can do all this in ten minutes! Most of all, I want you to have fun – LMMS is a lot of fun.
All the other Grandpas – I want you to put in those hearing aids and fire up LMMS. If you still have it, open the project from the last issue. Let us make a building ‘intro’ by using automation. On your beat+bassline editor, click add and the text should change from beat+bassline0 to beat+bassline1. Now we open our samples and drag over (or double-click) the first hihatclosed01. Color in every second or third block to get a basic tap going. We will automate this.
Though there is an automation button here, we want to add the automation track to our main song window. When you created the second beat+bassline, it automatically added it to your song window. It should be empty. Shift your beat+bassline0 two blocks over to the right, which should give you two counts of silence. We are going to fill that silence with the hihat, on its own track. Do you see how the tune is layered? You may realise that the constant tapping from the start may be a bit annoying. Enter our automation track. Please click on that now. (the one in the “song” window.) You should see this:
You can paint in the first block of the beat+bassline1 now, and stretch it over the first two blocks.
The automation track is just a white elephant at the moment, we need to connect something to it to automate. The way you do this is by holding down the CTRL key and clicking on the control you want to automate. In our case, it is the master volume. Hold down the CTRL key, click and hold the master volume slider in your FX-Mixer, and drag it over the automation block. You will see it has a red circle with a line through until it moves over the automation block, where it will turn into a green plus. The volume is now connected to the automation track, now what?
Well, we double-click on the first open block and a “piano roll” without keys will open up.
There are three types of automation, the first blocky one, then the linear one, then the curved one. You can use whichever one pleases you, but for this demonstration, we will stick with the steps. Paint some steps ascending or descending, it does not matter. I want you to understand the concept and see it in action. The steps or blocks are the most dramatic and that is why I chose them. If you were making a “real” tune, you would probably consider the other two. I want you to play your tune and keep your eye on that master volume slider. Notice it stays where you left it last. Now a word about the “length”. Just like the sounds, your automation track works in bars. So if you have three bars worth of automation, but the automation track only goes over two bars, it will do only the first two bars worth of automation. So be sure to match these up.
Now please play with your food, erm, I mean LMMS. Here is another picture if you had any trouble following along:
So for your ‘outtro’, you are going to do this again. Now your song has a build-up, a tune and a wind down. All under ten minutes! Yes with three minutes to spare…
The difficult part is how creative you get in the middle. Will there be a ‘drop’? How often will you repeat your melody? How many instruments will you choose?
I have given you the basic building blocks to build a song. Will you make one?
So? Is your tune club worthy? Send us your tunes if you made any. The genre is up to you, it does not have to be club music. Send us your disco tune, grandpa, we don’t judge.
Need inspiration? Look here: https://lmms.io/lsp/ - you can download these tunes and dissect them at your leisure.
I hope you learned something. Should we continue with this? Let us know on misc@fullcirclemagazine.org