How to: Make a Trap Beat for Beginners in LMMS (updated 2020 version!)

there is.So this is your zoom and you can zoom in and take a closer look at what you're doing and then this is what you use to highlight the scale, so if I go to larger and then I click g here. and check the current scale, this will show me all the notes that are in the G major scale and this is super useful. I actually didn't know this for a long time until someone told me, but yeah, super helpful and this. It will help you create melodies much faster. You may also notice that I have all my letters next to it and yours may not have them.

What you can do is go to edit and then go to settings and then just click on enable note tags in piano roll and then do it right and then it will say this and it says the changes won't take effect until you restart lms basically just restart lms and now you're going to have these looking like mine, so I'm just going to do miner or wind and I'm just going to click on E minor for this one, so right click to mark the current scale and now these are all the notes inside my minor and now I'm going to skip forward while I'm making the chords because I have a video on how to

make

chords and chord progressions and that's a whole video that you already know separately so if you need help with that definitely go watch that video and that should help you a lot and should inform you. the right way to start making chords and chord progressions and stuff like that, so yeah, okay, I came up with this little chord progression and it's going to sound like this, so now what I'm going to do is press control and switch to Al same time and I select all of these bottom notes and then I'm going to shift and click to the side, release that and now do control and down and now this just adds bass notes to these chords to

make

them sound fuller and as you can.

See, I adjusted the velocity there so they're not as loud as the top ones and the velocity is essentially just the volume at which the notes are played, so now what I'm going to do is press Ctrl a and now Shift and click. This is over and now I'm going to add a top melody on top of all of this and then I'm going to add some variation here at the end, so basically with doing your main melodies and a top melody is just a little melody that goes on top like this. so it goes throughout and just adds, you know, a little bit of variation, a little bit more bounce with your chords and your melodies, so basically I came up with this little melody and it sounds pretty good, I think it's a kind of creepy, but at the same time no, you know it's hard to explain, but it sounds good, so now one thing you can do with your melodies is raise or lower the pitch, so the way to do that is by holding down the shift key and then just do it down or up, but I'm going to do this down two and this is now going to be in the key of D Aeolian or D minor and now it's going to have a little bit of a different vibe to it, so now what I do What I'm going to do. do is start working on the little violin melody and the way I'm going to do that is go back to the piano roll and copy these bottom notes so We can just hold down control select and then just do control c and now x out of this come back here and then just do control v here and now we can go up these to press control and then go up twice as you can hear that.

It's a violin, so basically the way I'm going to do this is I'm going to go and add a couple of new notes like maybe here and that, you know, will add some bounce and just turn this into, you know, like a melody. complete, so now that I have this four measure pattern, I'm just going to Ctrl and Shift click on it and now I'm going to add some variation on this side, so this may seem a little complicated. but they're essentially the same base notes that I have with the chords just they change a little bit, so as you can see, I added this note here, this note here and then I separated it into three parts, so it was like one note here. but I just lowered this and then this note was originally here but I lowered it because it sounded better and then I added this here and as you saw I just copied the first four bars and then added some variation to make it different from the other half and now it all sounds like this, so the last thing I'm going to do here is take this down an octave and an octave is basically from, say, this d here to this D here, so it's essentially the same note but 12 notes apart, kind of confusing, but also you probably understand what I'm talking about, so I'm just going to bring this down by pressing Ctrl down and now together they should sound like this.

I'm going to solo them, so the way to do that is to just click on this little rectangle next to it and now click on the one on the left of the ones that you want to play with it, so if I want to play the high hat with it, I'll click on that one, but I just want to play the melodic parts, so yeah, it sounds good, as you can hear, you know, a creepy sound, a sad sound, so one of the last things I'm going to do is work on the pattern. 808, but before we do that there are two different things that I want to do with the drums to give it a little bit of flavor, so with the snares I'm going to add a little bit of bounce, so I'm going to go like this and like that and this is a pattern that you'll probably recognize pretty quickly and it's a super common pattern with

trap

s and

trap

music that a lot of producers use and a lot of songs use that so I'm I'm going to do the same thing I did here except without this first one and then I'll do this at the end like this and I think should sound good.

Also, I'm going to get rid of this kick because I don't like it, so I think it sounds good and now the second thing I'm going to do is with the hi-hats, so if you go into your piano roll and now I'm going to zoom in and now I'm going to change the set the grid to 32 and now I'm just going to do a bunch of hi-hat rolls so you can go like this and now I have a cool sounding hi-hat roll like this and that's basically I'm going to take right to the clap and what really what I like to do is adjust the speed so you know it keeps it fresh and new and now I'm basically going to go through the rest of this pattern and add some greetings. -The hat rules wherever I see fit, so basically what I did with the hi-hat rolls is I just made this little roll here leading up to the first clap and then copied it here, except I did this. one more down and then I also added these triple rolls that are a little bit before the second and fourth collapse and they repeat here and here and then I just added these, you know, down here and these down here and now everything should It sounds like that, it sounds pretty okay, it sounds like a real trap drum pattern now and the last thing I'm going to do is go into the iota mini and I'm going to copy these bass notes again like we did before the check. c and now I'm going to go into the piano roll with these controls v and now I'm going to leave this here for a second because there are a couple of things you need to do with your 808, so I'm going to click on this and the little file processor will appear of audio that you know and I'm going to go in here and increase the amount and increase the attack just a little bit and that will eliminate the clicking noise that you're going to hear with your 808 because it's incredibly annoying.

I actually have a little video on that because it's a very important thing that most people need you to fix with their

beat

s and that will give you a much cleaner sound. with your 808s and then the other thing you want to do is click here to see and some 808s may not actually be playing the c note, but most of the time your 808s will be on c so you can just click to see Also, sometimes your 808 samples will say you know in parentheses c next to them or in parentheses g, so that's going to be the note that you click on when you do this instead of c, you know, let's say it says g over there.

Instead, we're just going to click g, so now that that's out of the way, we can go into the piano roll for the 808 and now we're going to raise the pitch two octaves, so press control twice and now that we have this in the proper octave what we're going to do is also go into the kick piano and now do ctrl a and then ctrl c with this and now we're going to go back to the 808 piano and do ctrl v and Basically what we've set up here is that this is going to be the place where we know to place our 808s so basically you're just going to click on the notes to match the pattern at the bottom here and make sure that the notes that you're clicking on the notes, you know the bass notes like the ones we have here and then you're going to do that for the entire four measure pattern, so now that we have this combined with a kick pattern, we can just control, select all of these and then delete and now this should match our kick. , so it's going to sound like this together and it's going to cut off there because the drums are a four-bar pattern and the melody is an eight-bar pattern, but what we need to do is separate all of these into their own

beat

baseline editor so we can put them all into the song editor individually and basically the way we separate all of these into their own beat bass line editor is by right clicking on copy and creating a new one. beat bass line editor with this button and now paste, go back to the original and then just delete all the notes and now this will be here instead of here and now it will just do that with each of These sound good, so now that the I've separated them all into their own reference editor, what you can really do is rename them so you know what they really are, so I'm going to right click and now I'm going to get rid of this one and fiddle because that's what this one is, as you can see here and as I just showed you, you can also click on these and these patterns will appear inside your song editor, so I just renamed all of these and now what.

What I'm going to do is select this little square to do control and then hold down Ctrl again and click on it and now we're going to have this matching and it's going to be 8 bars. What we want to do is make 32 bars, so I'm going to make this now 16 and now it's 32. So I'm going to hold down the selection control and then I'm going to drag this so we have 16 bars of space here. Now I'm going to do a little intro so I'm going to do the piano here and the piano here and now I'm going to bring in the hi-hats and now I'm going to bring in the claps and the snares and then after these 8 bars All the drums will play at the same time , as you can hear like this, so now, so that the rhythm doesn't become too repetitive, I'll bring out the violin at the end of the first 16 bars and then at the end. at the end of the second 16 bars and then I'm also going to do the same thing with a hi-hat and now this is just going to add a little bit of variation as these two sections blend into each other and the last thing I'm going to do is switch to the little tool of pencil and now take the hi-hat and just drag it a little bit like this and now this will just add a little bit of suspense, I guess you could say before the drums. comes in so I think it sounds good and now I'm basically going to zoom out to 50 and now control select all of this control copy it and yeah, that's pretty much like a simple way to lay out your beats and now I just turned all of our little patterns into one full song so yeah that will be enough for me in this video.

I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you were able to learn something you know, maybe you'll learn a thing or two you didn't know. before and I hope you can make some Fire Trap beats and movies now so if you have any questions let me know in the comments below be sure to check out my Instagram my SoundCloud the description below along with the songs place . I produce all that stuff down there and I'll see you next time, so I've got you guys crazy, yeah.