how to: BOTANICA + METAL transcript

Botanica and metal. Two very different genres, at least aesthetic and [music] sound pallet-wise. The internet says Botanica music is a genre that combines nostalgia tinge tambers like piano strings, blah blah. Okay, it's Porter Robinson music. This is what it looks like. You see me and my girlfriend in this field of flowers. That's what Botanica's like. It's very electronic sounding and somehow also organic music sounding.

And on the other side of the spectrum, we have metal. The huge overarching genre of metal. Wikipedia says heavy metal or simply metal is a genre of rock music that developed in the late Okay, I don't care what that says actually. Metal obviously very heavy and processed drums usually, at least the style that I like. And then like some of the metal bands I grew up with was like North Lane, Veil of Maya, Set My Friends on Fire, Born of Osiris.

And somehow in my life, I have come to this point where I really love electronic music, but I also still shred crazy mode on guitar. I love being heavy, and I can't really get rid of my roots. It's just who I am. Like, look at me. I look like your stock metal core dude at the mall. Like, I get it. It's who I am. Okay. By the way, I'm going on a massive tour LA, New York, Europe, UK, opening up for Julia Wolf, and playing guitar for her.

Please come see me shred crazy mode and listen to me scream and move and hurt people in the pit. Ordering you to do that. Thank you. So, this is really just a breakdown of a song I just released. So, there's a lot of really interesting sections in this song and I'm going to go by them like one by one. Starting with this big fat part, then the sort of quieter very botanica sound designy ear candy stuff and then the metal part.

So, we have the acoustic guitar really being the line leader in this whole section. And it's just a left and right guitar. I played it very quiet, very close to the mic and turn it up very loud. And then we have all these little ear candy sounds coming in and out. Here is little nylon vibe on the right ear. I have another nylon vibe on the left ear just playing different parts in each ear following the chords a little bit.

I have this little melodica which is like uh you know the wind toy piano thing and I'll bump it up an octave. And then I add this convolution reverb which makes it sound like it's coming out of like a phone speaker. So, even that on its own is giving us a lot of cool texture to go along with the main guitar part. And notice how I'm having them all start at different times. They all have to sort of peek in and peek out and not add or take away too much from what's going on.

So, when they each do their own thing, they have their voice, then that ends, and then they have their voice. So, if we start it, we have right nylon, modica, left nylon, and we're adding some more. Got a little guitar harmonic, a lot of chorus. I'm putting distortion after the reverb, which is what's making it sound a little bit wacky. I got a little Jacob Kolier vocal stack here and that's playing all really nice extensions to complement chord progression of the guitar that I made.

Got this little melodica counter melody. Another melodica counter melody. And at this point I'm starting to add more like electronic sound design and leave the organic sound design in the back. So, no more melodica, no more guitar, no more ukulele. I'm going to start adding more of the glitchy, you know, real proper botanica sort of sounds that you're most familiar with. More melodica. And I even have a little bit of adula.

What is that called? Oh, a mandolin. A little bit of a mandolin I'm adding. Let's listen to all that with the vocals now that we're really privy to what the is going on here. Everything got >> the melodica nylon guitar vocal pad more counter melodies the mandolin more melodica some of the delayed sounds. Unfortunately I made a lot of these next sounds in like a sound design session. And so I would sit there for like a half hour putting random samples through plugins, automating random parameters, pressing the random button on a bunch of different plugins just to see what would happen.

So I have a sample pack that I made called Scrotanica, of course, and it's all random sounds that I made that are just ready to go, ready to put in a in a tune. And I really suggest if you're going to make Botanica or very sound designheavy music that you try and do that. It really takes you out of the creative space when you're trying to produce a track and you're like, "Oh, I want all these cool ear candy elements." And you're like taking a half hour to make a sound that happens for a half second in your right ear.

Like that's just not very practical to being like properly creative. So instead, take a day, make those sounds. make all your BS random glitchy whatever sounds, make your own sample pack out of it, and then when you want to add those sounds, you literally just boom, drag and drop and you're like, "Oh, that's what I needed." So that's what I did here. And we can listen to that. Um, I'll sort of solo some of them. Okay, so that was all stuff that was pre-made and I just dragged it in and took like 1 minute to make all of that.

So do that. Beautiful. But we still have this Jacob Kolier vocal stack moving as well as we still have some a little bit more melodica counter melodies. I have some sort of like percussive whooes and impacts that hit and then a little bit of just a synthesizer playing some chords and a melody. >> [music] >> playing a lot of nine chords. That is such a pretty chord progression. I'm not going to lie all together. Got some text painting here for people who care.

The lyrics say footsteps behind me. We got the footsteps, guys. The next lyric says, >> "Whispers in my ear." You know, I found a nice little little whisper sound in Splice. I had to do it. It's another little pocket of And I have this one little ear candy layer of me playing Melodica. I cannot play that. Originally, it sounded like this. You can hear me [ __ ] up in the middle of it. So, made it a lot faster. Bumped it up an octave.

And then I put mim on that as well. >> And then I kind of just let the guitar doing the speaking at the end. [music] I really like this layer. So, to make that, you're going to start with just a clean sine wave. You probably can't hear that unless you have headphones on. I'm going to add some rain. I'm going to add some stupid glitch sounds that I made. If you put it all in a bus and distort the out of it, all the texture from the rain and from the glitchy stuff is going to sort of peek through and make all these more like distorted textures.

And that sub is playing the baseline of the chord progression. On top of that, I'm going to add this chopped sample atmosphere pad that I made. It's a loop from Splice. This is like a melody from Splice that I pitched up and did a bunch of reverb, some pitching around, a lot of distortion and delay. Some more rain. And just for good measure, I just straight up added uh drum and basses one shots in here and just put a bunch of delay on them.

Just as a virtue signal to everyone that, hey, I I listen to EDM, too. I like good music, too. and the main star of this layer. [screaming] So to make that, you're going to start by singing like a ding-dong. And then you just put a bunch of effects on it. All right, but for real. And I just pitch clip on Reaper. Just one button at a time. I'm going to hard tune it, [screaming] hard compress it, form it down a little bit.

This is a huge like multi effects thing. It's distortion, reverb, delay, distortion, reverb, delay. There's another resonator in there. Some filters. And then we have a little bit of a side chain and a little volume automation left and right. And we pop that in the stack. [music] I think what's interesting is most of the layers are pretty like static, like they're just doing one thing and moving us through it. And it's really these drum and bass samples with all the delay that give us this more like chaotic panning energy.

I'm also going to add a little bit of guitar on the left and then some harmonics on the right. And those all have a good deal of delay on it. And that's my that's my shoe gaze botanica stack. There's this vocoder section in the beginning which is honestly super beautiful, but I don't really feel like talking about it. So, I'm just going to play it and you can just enjoy looking at the session. >> Yeah, that's it. Whatever.

Hope you like it. Okay, so obviously this is a much different type of production. So, it's a bunch of new tracks and it's just like a new song. Basically, I'm treating it as completely different everything. All right. For this huge stack right here, I use my bass six, which it's in some of my other videos. You can check it out. It's in the shop right now, so I can't show you, but I have left take that's transposed down an octave.

I'm playing an open string. Originally, it just sounds like this. I have a right take that's down six half steps. That's just playing an open string. So if one's down an octave and the other's down six steps, that's going to create a trionee. So between your left and right ears, there's this gross trionee. It's going to sound yucky. And then I do something similar on the left and right except instead of playing an open string, I'm like chugging with a palm mute.

And again, that's octave in one ear and then down six semmitones in the other ear. Those four layers together just a disgusting mass of sound. I also have been experimenting putting samples through my ampsim. So I usually use neurals for Nameless kind of CPU heavy so sometimes I'll use different stuff. This is just a thunder strike and I'd put it through my guitar distortion and I have a left and right take of that. So layered that on top of the guitars a lot of nice crunchy highend without it with it.

It's gross. We're going to add the bass guitar which is punk bass. a contact library. And then I'm putting that through my THU over loud bass amps sim thing with a sine wave sub playing that. And we layer all that together. On top of that, I have this eerie atmosphere sound that started like this. Kind of spooky. I'm going to put it up three octaves. I'm going to put maim on that as well. all those together and just add your drums, bro.

I have some impact sounds too, like a bass drop and like a cinematic drop sound. Okay, obviously I try to make this as insane sounding as humanly possible. I think something very interesting about this is if you heard this, you were a metal dude and you heard this, you would expect one, three, like there's beats there that you're wanting to hear, but I just don't give it to you. It's not even really a breakdown. It's just it's just sounds.

It's just impacts. It's just it's just poop noises. All right, we have these sounds in the middle. If I took the distortion off of those, [music] it's just me playing some gross chord like a major 7th or maybe like a panic chord in both ears. Um, put distortion on it. And then you could see I have this little pitch automation going into the beginning of it. I notice the left ear is going up one note every time and the right ear stays on that same note.

So we hear a lot of these like guitar fills that I'm doing sound like this or even this part. So, all I'm doing is I'm just taking like the last beat or two of the guitar part that I recorded and I'm just bumping it up an octave. On Reaper, it's just one button that I made that you can just bump whatever you want. Oh, this looks like it's up five octaves. Never mind. A little bit more than one octave. The drums. We can't forget about this scream.

I'm going to flex here for a second. Here's my unedited screen for this, but I usually always layer like a main scream just down the center and then I'll have like a host scream. So like a stereos split scream. So it's only two takes, but the second take I split to do left and right. So that's what these sound like. I think this reverb guitar part really adds a lot because first it's just like a groovven little melody.

I kind of get you to want that melody two phrases in a row. Play it again. And you're like ready to hear it again. And I just bend that one note back again. And got these weird little glitches. End it off. I always have to explain this, but it's the easiest thing in the world to do these glitch sounds. Just take a really tiny little sound and cut it short and then duplicate it a bunch. That's it. You can do it anywhere, anytime, as long as you have your parents permission.

Okay, so this was more of Botanica and then metal, not so much Botanica with metal at the same time. That is coming in the future, I promise. And thank you to all my patrons on Patreon. I got loops and tabs for all my music over there. If you're a producer, loops every month. Thanks for the support. Come see me on tour. LA, New York, UK, Europe, fall. Tickets in the bio. They're selling out already. See you guys next time.

Goodbye.