How I make Botanica ! transcript

hi I made this at the start of [Applause] [Music] me okay but that's not really what people cared about though this is what they really liked [Music] okay personally I didn't think it was that good but people wanted to know how I made it anyways so I decided why not make a quick tutorial so here is how [Music] I from my experience most of the Botanica tutorials I see are mostly either only people talking about how they arrange and layer their pieces or talking about sound design exclusively I'll try to tackle both based on the comments it seems you guys mostly want to understand how the sounds were made so let's first go over the three main types of sounds that I [Music] used so these are the types of sounds that sounds like you're listening to an overcompressed version of a song underwater I don't know why but they fit very well in the context of Botanica as a nice piece of texture it also kind of reminds me of some sort of sound that a futuristic UI pan would make I only really know two methods of making this so if you have any other methods feel free to use them firstly let's start with an Ableton exclusive method that I'm not sure if it's replicable using vocodex it doesn't really matter for you fo users anyways cuz you have your own method using the Edison noise removal feature H well for those of us who don't have that luxury the very first step you have to take is to make water huh uh I don't mean literally here let me show you you can Dragon pretty much any sound you want as long as it has some harmonic variability so ARs and modulated bases are great for this since there's a lot of movement here's some sounds I'm using as an example now add a vocoder the main effect comes from using these settings set the carrier to modulator bands to 40 and the ranges to Max then you can decrease the bandwidth increase the gate threshold and increase the depth until things start sounding good now play around with those values to get different results and change the release time to get tighter or more sustained sounds for postprocessing I like to add an erosion to add to the lossy feeling some multiband compression and a color plugin such as pitchmap or chroma this will get the sound to be in key and yeah that's basically it you can also use this technique to make watery sounds like this the other more univ approach is using a free plugin called spectral compressor A5 made a really good video on it and includes the download links as well as the method I'm about to go over so I will link his video below pretty much what we're doing is we're individually clipping each frequency band AKA spectral clipping and we obtain the difference between the clipped audio and the original sound using face cancellation ah if that sounds a bit complicated don't worry just set these parameters duplicate an instance of the clean sound and invert the phase and in the plugin make sure to adjust the threshold and curve to get your desired results okay these are the sounds that get you feeling they're a lot more commonly used so it's important to include these the basic idea for these sounds is to take some bass Loops or any other interesting sounds and perform intense granular synthesis on them that means you're basically playing an Unholy amount of copies of the input sound at different starting positions with various effects on them so be aware that some of your results could be very intense to perform GR synthesis I like to use a free plugin called fracture it has very intuitive and simple parameters and there's a ton of presets to play around with so you can get a specific type of sound that you want for example for watery sounds you can choose the preset resonant liquidity and play around with knobs until you get something you like I suggest you record while you tweak the parameters though cuz sometimes you miss a really cool result but can't really go back but yeah you just feed in some interesting sounds play around with the parameters and record the sessions and if you want the samples to be in key make sure to add a color plugin like pitchmap or chroma here's results that I got I feel like these sounds should be pretty self-explanatory P are a great way to add atmosphere and fill up your soundscape if you haven't been using them what are you doing these are honestly super simple to make just take some saws draw some random notes in the pentatonic scale of the key you want low pass them add an Unholy amount of Reverb and add some multibend compression if you want some movement you can also add and modu interesting stuff like comb filters Notch filters and phasers too then take some odd harmonic instruments like Bells draw some random notes in the pentatonic scale of the key you want low past them add an Unholy amount of Reverb and add some multipen compression and then you can take a piano draw some random notes in the pentatonic scale of the key you want or I guess just take a single note and Reverb the hell out of it if that's what you want I guess but both methods are pretty valid it all depends on what you need for a specific section so now that you have the basic sound design you'll need it to accompany some instrument there isn't really a right or wrong for what to use but here are some instruments that I find super effective firstly you're going to need some organic instruments pianos are great for acting as the foundational driving force behind the whole piece so I definitely recommend that one string instruments like violins and cellos contribute tremendously to intensity and somberness so make sure you have some of those I think soft guitars are also really nice as almost percussive sounding in struments and also for adding more texture and yeah probably get yourself a synth as well cuz you're going to need to use a lot of saws and sine waves and maybe even sound design some other things that I find helpful are certain sweeps impacts and vocals nice now that we have pretty much everything how do we actually [Music] use the first time I tried making Botanica I ended up making something that lacked substance and support sure I was taking advantage of swells and impacts for transitions but overall it was kind of constantly droning on without anything super interesting happening that's why in this genre it's super important to make you so starting and stopping and [Music] silence see did you feel the tension and release so to actually understand this on a more practical level let's walk through an example by making something together okay I got so absorbed with making the piece that I completely forgot to record my proc process for making it but it shouldn't matter anyway since it's more important to understand why things are done rather than focusing on what I did so instead I will explain the general framework for how I approach arranging these pieces and I'll walk through my piece as an example so here's the framework that I tend to follow I'm pretty sure I'm not consciously doing it it's just what I've observed as I've analyzed my workflow but also do keep in mind that everyone's style will differ right like viot style of Botanica is very different from linked Winters which is different from like Shameless so the best way to find a sound or Style you align with is by simply making more music and experimenting it'll also help you improve that music production which I know like wow that's crazy engaging in an activity more will make you better at the activity but yeah with that in mind here's how I approach making Botanica so firstly you want to start with a foundational Motif that will drive your whole piece for me I have a chopped up piano Motif that sounds like [Music] this this is actually an intro idea for a song I'm currently working on I I'd recommend taking advantage of silence and making something with a lot of meaningful pauses to keep the piece interesting now that you have your Motif next step is to go borderline insane listening to it over and over again the point of this is to eventually conjure up a hallucination for how you want the piece to go AKA coming up with an idea for a song with your idea you can start laying down the foundations of the movement using the glitches and textures that you made that's the primary use case I see for these sounds at least it really helps create a skeleton or outline for the rest of your song know that it's also better to layer different types of textures on top of each other to make it more interesting for example I'm using the spectral gated sounds some sizzly sounds some crunchy textures and some other textures that help make it sound a bit more interesting and to emphasize the movement and transitions even more I added some impacts and sweeps so this is what it kind of sounds like so far as you can probably tell it still sounds pretty empty at the moment so we move on to The Next Step which is filling out the space this is where you really hone in on highlighting the intense and chill moments of your piece and what you decide to add will actually vary from piece to piece I like to start with pads and build on the intensity or fullness with strings low notes atmospheric syns vocals and some soft rhythmic guitars notice that there's a couple sections without all of these layers those are the parts I want to sound more somber so I've stripped the elements away from this part lastly for the climax of the piece I introduced some new elements such as a base brass saws and a really thick sub so with everything stacked together this is what our final result sounds like yeah and then my piece just kind of transitions into the intro if this all seems a bit overwhelming just remember that this was not done in one go by any means it was an iterative process of slowly building up the track by adding layers one at a time to get closer to the idea that it was Envision and that usually takes quite a bit of time that's why I'm explaining this framework we start from something Broad and open-ended and slowly narrow down as we flesh out the piece but yeah that's pretty much all I have to say about this topic for now I really hope this video was helpful for providing the fundamentals to making Botanica and I hope I was able to at least provide some more information or inspiration if you really like this type of content please consider subscribing but only if you really want to God I feel like such a salout for saying that I know I might have sucked a bit with some of the explanations cuz I tend to lose sight of the main point I'm trying to make so if there's any questions please ask I'll try my best to answer them and if you have any critiques please let me know I really do want to get better at this oh God how do I end the video uh thanks for watching everyone I really hope you like the video hopefully I get to see you guys next time please okay that's enough of that bye