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[Music] [Applause] [Music] will you come around [Music] what's up it's austin here from make pop music and austin hall audio and visual and we are back with another video this week and this week we're going to be focusing on something a little bit different instead of doing something that's going to be super genre specific or it's going to be a very specific technique or tip i wanted to do something that's a little bit more general and a little bit more broad spectrum for you guys and so today we're going to be addressing how to make a pop song in 10 steps so these 10 steps will apply no matter what kind of subgenre of pop you're doing no matter what kind of different style or what your flavor or taste is and no matter what plugins that you use so i want to cover these 10 basic tips because however you do them will be completely up to you however these are 10 things i feel like need to happen in almost any pop song ever so if you're following along and you want any more information on any specific tip go check our channel because we probably have a whole video actually diving into something specific like that if you have any questions while you're watching leave them in the comments below and we'll answer them and we'll help you out however we can other than that let's actually hop into the video and see how to make a pop song in 10 steps or less so for this video we're going to talk specifically about production and arrangement we're not really going to dive into mixing we're even really actually writing lyrics or melodies or anything like that this is specifically how to produce a pop song so let's go ahead and talk about the first thing which i think this is kind of where you should start with any kind of pop song and that is finding your one kind of lead melody and typically i'm talking about not the vocal melody you can start with that if you want but for our intents and purposes we're gonna be starting with this guitar and this was kind of the first idea that i came up with for this song so we have this and that's just a guitar that's double tracked as you can see up here and then i pan them left and right and then now they're just one kind of stereo track so pretty simple guitar just a little kind of four chord pattern [Music] so we just kind of do that to get the song actually started and finding that element is really going to be what shapes how the rest of your song ends up coming out so once you get that amazing lead element that you think is catchy or you think fits the kind of vibe that you're going for that's where you're going to go ahead and do step two now for step two what you're going to want to do is you're going to want to add some chords behind that and that can be something like suspended chords or some kind of extra little uh pattern that's going to have a chord underlying it you basically just want to highlight what your main riff or what your main melody element or what your main vocal element is kind of doing there so finding something to go underneath just to kind of fit along and kind of enhance that really becomes key so we have these little plucks that are through serum right here [Music] now we've got those two little elements right there that's giving us kind of a lot of different melody and movement but we don't have any percussive stuff going on and we don't have any vocal stuff going on but for right now this feels like enough at least melodically to keep going with the song so adding in that main element and then getting that kind of supportive element or those supportive chords in ends up becoming huge and then we can move on to step three which as we go these will kind of start getting more and more in depth and for step three we're moving along pretty quickly here we've got our main element we've got our supportive chords now we need to actually start putting some drums to it some pop songs won't have drums especially like ballads and stuff like that but most songs will have some kind of rhythmic element so the first thing that we're gonna do is we're gonna figure out where we want this and for this song i decided to put it on the two and the four so [Music] i just did a little filtered out rim hit i wanted something pretty simple and i wanted something that was going to kind of cut through especially once we started adding vocals and then we need to start talking about what the actual relation between the kick or the kick style element and the snare or the snare style element would be so anything like a clap snap rim shot anything like that and for this song i found a cool little kick pattern that i felt like was simple enough but it added a nice little bit of bounce so in my opinion with kick patterns you want to do stuff that's going to add a little bit of bounce and just add a little bit of extra movement to what you've got going on especially in your scents but you don't want something that's going to be so overly kind of busy that can just end up sounding a little bit corny and it can just be doing way too much and getting in the way of all of the other elements and specifically the vocal so for this song we have just a really really simple kick and then that basically just repeats and what i did here is i basically just did a syncopated uh kick style pattern but what i did is i ended up swapping where the doubles were hitting so that keeps it feeling a little bit more fresh than just doing something and then copying that same thing over and over again so we have [Music] so instead of having the two hits after that first incompleted hit we have the two hits going into that second hit and that just kind of adds a little bit of variation and that's going to give us that bounce so now with that main guitar that little backup synth and then that kick and that snare or rim shot we're actually getting quite a bit of movement and it's starting to feel good to start laying down some extra layers and stuff now let's talk about the fourth step of a pop song and that is going to be adding some kind of bass line so for a bass line you can choose to either kind of just go under whatever the notes that are happening is doing so we are just going to end up following this chord progression but you also could choose to kind of pedal on one note and just have that bass note stay consistent throughout which you'll hear a lot in hip hop like the 808's don't move up and down with the chord progressions or the melodies a ton but for this i wanted something a little bit more melodic so we are going to have it kind of move [Music] and for this song specifically i didn't want something like a 808 in the verse but i wanted something that still had a lot of that sub content so we did this kind of hollow bass tab that's out of one of our packs it's out of the disco pop pack and you can see that we do kind of a little run up there just to add a little bit of extra movement because the guitars and this pluck right here is pretty simple so we can afford the little melodic movement within that and then that just kind of plays along well with this kick so you can see that we don't have the bass happening on every kick just the main ones [Music] and just having that kind of ebb and flow of that kick in that base pattern adds just a little bit of extra movement without having a ton of extra movement elements coming in and kind of cluttering this up so far all right now we're going to do what i consider to be one of the most important steps and that's once you have those fun fundamental elements laid down you know you've got your rhythm elements you've got your main chord progression you've got your main little melody and you've kind of got a nice bass baseline to fill that out those are the four elements that you're kind of going to need to carry any kind of pop song and then that's where you get to start really adding your flavor on top so you'll see all of these elements in red are the new elements we've added i've color coded this so you can kind of see as we go along step by step so you know we've got our step one in yellow step two in orange step three in blue step four in this darker blue and then step five is gonna be all these reds so let's go ahead and hear some of the stuff that we're adding i'm gonna be looking to add texture i'm gonna be looking to add movement and i'm gonna be looking to add some kind of counter melodies so some of these things will be just layered scents that we kind of have to elements we've already done and then other ones will be adding a little bit of movement or some kind of extra melody so let's go ahead and take specifically a look at this second pluck so far [Music] so you can hear it's just going to give us a little bit more bite it's kind of distorted it's going to add a nice little bit of thickness and width to our actual production and it's going to make sure that that pluck element doesn't get lost as we start adding a vocal on top so we had that main pluck element in the beginning just kind of being the basis for the sound that we want and kind of showing us exactly what we wanted to do with the actual playing and then we have the second pluck layered over top to really make sure that we're going to have that poke through the mix and just sit really nicely so the only thing we're really doing to blend those is a little bit of eq other than that there's nothing really going on it's just all about picking sounds that will go well together the next thing that i wanted to add was i wanted some kind of little vocal chop in here so basically all i did was i sung a little melody and then processed it a ton and then bounce that so the reason i bounce that instead of having one original track is because you'll hear a lot of reverb on it and i've cut that later in the song so check this out [Music] and if you want to know how to process this you can go to our mellow pop video check out how we process that like chelsea cutler style vocal and it's pretty much the same basically all this is is pitching down the format with auto tune adding a bunch of distortion adding a bunch of reverb and then side chaining it with kickstart and then we printed that and so when we pull it over here we've cut the uh the tail out when the actual snares hit [Music] and just being able to cut that out there gave us a little bit of extra movement and it kind of adds to that rhythm that we have going where before i wanted it to add a little bit of like almost like a pad element but right here was getting a little cluttered if we had that going especially because we're going to add in these extra little guitars so you'll hear them right here it's these guys right here and basically all that was was i played one chord on a guitar put a ridiculous amount of reverb on it and then printed that and once i printed it i just threw kickstart on so it's going to give us that swelling action without kickstart it's just kind of boring it sounds like this [Music] so adding that kickstart to kind of swell is again another way to add movement without adding a ton of different rhythmic elements that clutter up the mix and so now we've added a few things we've also got this extra little wubby synth right here and adding stuff like that is really cool to give your song a little bit of a backbeat and that's going to give it a little bit more of that kind of like movement where you want to bob your head and it's not just so you know four on the floor you know snare on the two and four you want something that's going to have a little bit of backbeat or something that's going to kind of feed into that melody as a counter melody and then having these cool little wubby scents kind of sweep in um was just a really really good way to do that so this is just a little uh free patch that we made before it's i believe out of the stupid deep presets and it's just uh stupid deep wubs and then i just kind of adjusted this lfo which is controlling this filter right here so you'll see right here as it swells the filter opens and closes [Music] and i just played that as long sustained notes because the filter is doing all of the movement so all i had to do was play those chords and then let that filter um and that lfo kind of do all of the movement and the work for me and that's just another really easy way to add a little bit of something else that a lot of people probably won't hear but you definitely kind of feel it when you're listening along let's go on to tip number six a lot of you know this is kind of like my bread and butter this is the thing that i love most and that is starting to layer up percussion because as you can hear right now the percussion is kind of lacking and we need a bit more movement and we need a bit more thickness so we're going to add quite a few things we're going to add this snap right here we're going to add a second snap we're going to add a little clappy snare we're going to add a little roomy snare and then we're going to add this hat loop and this symbol right here so we're going to add all these things right now and this is really going to give us a lot of extra movement so we'll start with just adding these two extra snaps [Music] so snap one is doing a lot more than snap two snap one is just adding a nice little bit of looseness to that snare as you can see here there's a couple different snaps happening in that one sample and then snap two is just kind of thickening that up not really doing anything crazy you could definitely get by without it but we're going to go ahead and we're going to add in a snare and this is one of the low file snares from splice just a nice little and then the next thing that i wanted to add was i kind of wanted some kind of like melodic sounding snare something that felt a little bit roomy almost like you'd hear in like the 1975 or laney or something like that so we've got this snare right here [Music] and the way that sounded before it had any processing was like this [Music] but what we did was we added verb suite and gave it a ton of reverb [Music] and then we added a gate probably the most important part of this and just kind of fiddle around with the threshold and the release until it kind of lines up with your song [Music] then we added camel crusher to give us some little saturation and quite a bit of compression and this is going to make it really pop [Music] and then just some eq i know we're not going into a ton of mixed stuff but i just wanted to add a little bit of body but take away some of those subby frequencies that we really don't need and then after that you have this little sound [Music] and that added such a nice bit of depth and it kind of filled out those scents where we could leave the scents pretty minimal but since that roomy snare has such a frequency to it and such a kind of note to it we were able to have another melodic element also be a rhythmic element and kind of double dip into that element then we're going to add this little trap loop right here which i have processed with multi-pass and some eq and that sounds like this so we've just got the drum modulator going on in multipass and we're just filtering out some of the highs and lows and that sounds like this just kind of modulates the frequencies and the pitch just to make it a little bit more interesting and a lot less lifeless like a trap loop and then we just added a nice little symbol hit [Music] and that's pretty much all we added for the drums right now in the verse we'll kind of dive into it a little bit more once we get to the chorus but that'll be a whole different tip so build out those drums and make sure that you're keeping the rhythm simple enough to understand and so it doesn't clutter up the arrangement however feel free to layer in some extra elements to give it a little bit of extra movement and just kind of thicken it up make the snare a little bit wider without having to do any kind of crazy processing now let's go into tip number seven and that's going to be adding in some dynamics and making sure that you're kind of changing up the arrangement as the song goes so it doesn't just feel like a loop that you've copied and pasted a ton so you'll see all the new elements right here in the purple and then there's actually one element that we forgot to talk about a minute ago but we'll go ahead and talk about that right now and so let's go ahead and just start the first thing that we're going to want to do is make the pre-chorus a little bit different so i want a little bit of a refrain from the chord progression that we've been doing because that is going to be the chord progression for the chorus so what i did was i laid down these roads right here and it's just using the contacts library from um the vintage keys i believe yep and then it's just this [Music] so we have the chord progression changing right there the vocal melody will also change once we get to that and that just gives us a little bit of a break and so we can come back in and it feels nice and fresh [Music] and then for this rhodes right here we're actually doing something a little bit different we've got a little bit of movement in this as you can see i played a pretty busy pattern [Music] so now we're feeling a lot better about that that's going to give us one extra element going into that course that we didn't have before and then we've also got some extra plucks right here to thicken this up and that's doing the same thing as the plex from earlier in the song it's just using a little bit different patch so it's a little bit sharper of a pluck and it's going to give us a nice little extra bit of transient that should poke through the denser arrangement and then let's actually go to this pad right here this is just in serum i believe and it's literally a pad that i made just for this it's a pretty simple filtered out pad [Music] and i added this trans gate so this is what it sounds like with no processing so it's just your basic kind of like any kind of string or brass pad that you may have and then i added on transcape from kilohearts it's in the slate subscription and i just have this adding a little bit of extra balance [Music] and then mixed up now we've got all of these happening together and the scents feel a lot thicker [Music] now let's go to what we're going to add to the actual drums to make them feel a little bit different we're going to add this extra little hi-hat loop in right here and that's actually a live hat loop and it's from our hi-hats pack and that's just going to give us a little bit of a different kind of texture something a little bit different than the trap loots were giving us earlier because we still have those going but i wanted a little bit of a human element in that so we have these layered over top and then one of my favorite elements from the whole song is we have this bongo kind of like electric bongo loop and that actually is just a splice loop that kind of sounded like this before it was in a whole different key and it didn't have any processing [Music] so i took it up four semitones to put it in the key of our song because it was in c and i needed it in e so we did that [Music] then we process it a ton with camel crusher we've got it on fat mode tons of distortion this is really going to kind of give it that flare [Music] but as you can hear this kind of a weird tail so what we did was we gated it kind of similar to what we did to that snare earlier then we added in some eq just kind of tighten it up i just took away a little bit of that low end because i don't want it getting in the way of the base that we're about to add in and then the last thing that we added in was the same roomy snare it's just a little bit louder and so the gate's at a different setting but without all of that we have our drums right here which are pretty much completely done so now we've got the drums and the scents all done guitar stays the same it's just that main guitar and then that reverse guitar and then for the bass we have an 808 in here and this is using serum and i'll kind of explain how i made the base and then i'll also explain kind of what we're doing with it so it's just a really really simple kind of 808 [Music] so i've got one oscillator here that's just a sine wave a second oscillator that's an octave up and it's a square wave uh that synced up and then i'm actually filtering that out so that's just going to give us a little bit of extra mid bite then we're processing it with some extra distortion and compression and then we have this eq actually turned off so it's not doing anything at all and then what we did was we matched this exactly to the kick pattern and the reason that i wanted to do the 808 here opposed to like that plucky base that we had in the verse is because i'm going to have it a lot more sustained so if we go back here you'll hear a pretty big difference from what we have [Music] so that's very short it's very staccatoy it adds a nice little bit of bounce but for this course i wanted something that felt a little bit more kind of full and grand and then that's pretty much it other than that we had these little choir vocals that we brought in um and we brought these in in the second half of the chorus or in the verse [Music] and that's basically just like i think 16 or 20 different vocal layers of me doing different dues and oohs and oz and that's pretty much it for that and then as you can see we kind of change it once we get to the chorus we have it a lot more sustained just like that 808 so that's a really good tip to kind of add some dynamics is making your verses a little bit shorter and choppier and then even if you're going to use the same elements or very very similar elements like we did in this having stuff kind of open up and sustain out having your kick be a little bit busier having your snare be a little bit louder and then maybe having a couple different extra percussion layers come in just to add that dynamic especially once we kind of bring it down here with just this roads so let's actually get into the next tip the next tip is going to be actually adding in that lead vocal and so if you're a producer it's not always your job to write with the artist however sometimes you will want to be part of the writing process and that's totally fine if you and the artist agree on that even if you're not a part of the process it is a part of your production process to actually end up popping that in and figuring out where that's going to go and how it needs to sound so once we got all of that i felt like that was a good enough skeleton and had enough going on i started working on the actual vocals and so we're just going to focus on the one lead vocal track right here and kind of talk about what we were doing in terms of melody and uh rhythm with a [Music] all the vocal and i can't seem to dig myself out of my mind to fake a smile and show my teeth just so everyone will leave i don't like questions that [Music] so we have basically the same melody happening in this first half right here and then it gets repeated right here with just a different uh set of lyrics and then we're going into this right here i've been pulling my hair out and biting my nails down to the bone i feel alone so i really wanted to go ahead and change up that melody completely since we are changing that chord progression introducing some new notes and i wanted something that felt a lot more mellow and a lot more casual because then we're coming in hard with this chord [Music] i feel alone [Music] so that's really what you want to do with that lead vocal is you want to make sure that every section kind of stands on its own but they all flow in together to where it doesn't feel like you wrote them at different times with different intentions so we have a verse right here that's pretty consistent all the way through kind of leads really really nicely into this pre-chorus and then this pre-chorus kind of gives us a second to catch our breath before we have this pretty big uh open yet kind of fast-paced chorus so given our listeners a little bit of a chance to also catch their breath is a really really good thing to do in the pre-chorus and that's pretty much all you have to keep in mind when you're writing vocals other than that melody rhythm thematics that's all kind of up to you and the writers all right now let's get to the part where a lot of you are probably waiting for and that is adding in some vocal production and this is going to be huge as you can tell right now this still sounds like a very very very bare demo but this step and the last step are really going to be what makes it feel like a full produced pop song and we're going to go ahead and start throwing some of that stuff in right now we'll kind of talk about it as we go i'm just going to unmute them so we've got some delay throws which are the first thing that i think you might want to start adding in and you'll see them happen on certain phrases everybody seems so happy all the time i really wanted a dry vocal so adding in these delay throws allows me to keep that lead vocal super dry but then having some of these extra little throws right here we did those all over the song you can kind of see we have a couple different layers they're just drastically different volumes and filtered out differently for my delay throws all i'll do is literally duplicate the main vocal and then throw on repeater and for this one i did a fourth it's spread out uh 100 wet and dry then i put a little bit of a reverb on it mixes it like 30 just to make that delay feel a bit more silky and sit in the mix a little bit better and then i just distorted the out of it and then filtered it out so it's just the mids that's pretty much all that's going on for those delay throws reverb throws are the same i would just put the reverb about 100 wet and then put the delay before the reverb and maybe do the delay at like 50 so basically just swap it for a reverb throw if i'm going to do that instead of a delay other than that let's go ahead and talk about the next thing that we're going to be adding in and that is this falsetto harmony halfway through the verses so when we have the bass come in when we have the extra elements and the drums come in i wanted the vocal to kind of pick up but i didn't want a ton of stuff because i still wanted that chorus to really shine so we have this falsetto harmony right here [Music] and that's basically the normal vocal chain up to this point and then i just added a doubler after the normal chain h delay at a quarter doing a ping pong dry and wet at 27 after the doubler reverb at four seconds so it's a super long reverb and it's like 35 wet so pretty wet vocal and then just filtering that out and the reason i'm doing that is because i have that lead vocal up the center and then i've got this harmony coming out of the sides and it's able to sound pretty digital but kind of fill out that space so it's not going to get in the way of that main vocal it's just going to kind of enhance it then we're going to add in this artificial low which if you've seen any of our videos you've probably seen me do this a million times it's just the main vocal literally copy and pasted turn it down a whole octave in auto tune and then just throw on doubler and then kind of adjust your de-esser so i have it ds super hard and i have a ds super low since it is down an octave all of those s's will also move down in the frequency spectrum and then we've got that layered under [Music] so that's all we have going on with that is how you kissed it so we kept the verses of this super minimal and super simple then we're pulling in a vocoder for this pre-chorus just to give us a little bit of extra kind of body so we've got the lead vocal in the pre-chorus that falsetto also continuing and then we've got a vocoder right here and i'll pull that up we're using vocalsynth too as always we've done this in a few tutorials as well and that's just going to add a nice little bit i need some answers cause i've been pulling my hair out and biting my nails down to the bone [Music] and that's basically just using the same exact uh chords actually the same exact midi that we laid down for that rose right there so that pre-chorus feels a lot better with that vocoder underneath it and it's just i believe it's one of their presets yeah it's a delicate biology and then i'm sure i tweaked a couple things here and there i need some answers [Applause] [Music] now let's actually talk about the vocal production that we're doing in the chorus so there is going to be a lot extra happening here and this is really going to be what makes this course kind of pop so we've got the lead vocal right here and the kind of pinkish purple that was the first thing we added same kind of falsetto just doing some different notes in the chorus and then the same vocoder just playing the chord progressions that we had from this pad that's kind of arpeggiated up here and so all of those things sound like this together baby i know you may think i'm crazy then we also did a left and right vocal that's the lead melody and then we also did these harmonies [Music] [Applause] then we also did these harmonies it's basically just an octave lower from the lead will you come around i know you may think i'm crazy but i'm losing time and i know i things i'm so blame [Music] then we've got that artificial low that we used earlier in the court uh the verse actually to give us a little bit of extra uh body down there [Music] then the last thing that we did was just added this vocal verb all i did was just duplicate that lead track and then make it a hundred percent wet and i also added in some h delay and this is just basically the same thing that ascend would do but i just didn't want to make a send only for the sound and this is just a nice big open wide reverb that only happens in the chorus [Music] now composition wise that's pretty much everything that we're going to talk about the last thing is going to be just adding a little bit of your secret sauce and to me that's really going to come into play when you start adding your effects so risers sweeps hits any kind of transitional effect it's really going to help the arrangement kind of move on so you don't want to write it to where it needs those things to happen but having them will make a huge difference so let me show you actually what it sounds like going from the first half of the verse into the second half with none of those and then we'll put in some of those i don't like questions that i can't answer feels a little sudden and a little abrupt so we're going to add in the symbol swell so we had a cymbal hit already and this is actually just a kind of little swell that's going to go in nice just makes it a little bit more washy then we've also got this little hit in here [Applause] so we're going to add both of those things in to kind of give us a nice little bit of downbeat [Music] next thing we're going to do is we're going to add a riser that's going to help us transition from this uh verse actually into this pre-chorus and it's very subtle you probably don't hear in the mix but it does help it have a little bit of that movement and we have it pretty low in the mix because it's a pretty sharp sound so it would poke through way too much other than that we have a nice little shaker right here from our sounds of life pack so just a nice little reverb bright shiny hit and then kind of doing the opposite of that we have this low kind of pillow hit that's also from sounds of life and then we have this little fall right here that's from our pup pack [Music] [Applause] so adding in all of those things really helps that transition of that pre-chorus listen to how smooth it comes in now [Music] i feel alone then going into that course we just have that same symbol roll we have this big clap impact that i use all the time [Music] just to give us a nice sharp down hit and then we have this riser right here that i also added that transcate this is what it sounds like before and then here's what it sounds like after and that is it so if you want we're going to play the entire song right now if you want to skip that and then just head to the outro where we recap we'll leave a time stamp below but go ahead and listen to this from start to finish why does everybody seem so happy all the time and i can't seem to dig myself out of my mind to fake a smile and show my teeth just so everyone will leave i don't like questions [Music] [Music] is my nails down to the bone i feel alone will you come around be myself sorry that i'm always changing i think i'll one step back in mind [Music] as you can see with pop songs there can be a ton going on and they can get really really dense this song's actually just kind of medium in terms of density there's not a ton going on in this but it's also not a really really simple track but you can see that there are 10 very very concrete steps and principles that i like to use in every song so just kind of rifle through them maybe write these down and then when you're kind of working on a song for yourself or for a client make sure that you're kind of addressing all of these things kind of in the order that we talked about because getting the foundation of the song and then just kind of building from there will be the best way to make sure that you have one concrete idea and not a bunch of little kind of small things happening everywhere it feels really cluttered and just kind of discombobulated but if you like this video please like comment and subscribe it helps us out a ton if you want any more specific tips on any of these let us know what you want specifically we'll let you know if we have a video for it and if not maybe we can make a video for it in the future other than that if you want to support us or check out more of our stuff head over to makepopmusic.com you can check out all of our samples presets we have some courses on there that go into a lot more detail and if you have any questions about any of that shoot us an email at support makepopmusic.com other than that that'll be it for this video and we'll see you guys next week with another one we hope you're doing well and staying safe much love everybody peace out changing