Electronic music – KS3 Music – BBC

Part of MusicMusic technology
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Watch how Sarah uses computer software to produce a remix of the band's song The Sound Of Us.
Sarah: These days, you don’t need traditional instruments to create something really great and you can do it all from a tablet, laptop or even a phone. It’s so much easier and cheaper than having to go into an expensive studio like you used to.
Ben: You mean we don’t need a studio?
Sarah: No studio required. I started by using samples that I pre-loaded in the software and the keys part from our song that we MIDI recorded the other day. This means that we can play the part from any MIDI instrument in the software.
MUSIC
Ben: That sounds great. How did you do that?
Sarah: This is a project timeline where you can see all the tracks that you’ve recorded. I started by setting the tempo of the track to 112BPM, so the same as our song. And then I added drum samples at the same BPM so that the keys and beat would fit together in time.
Ben: What’s BPM again?
Sarah: Beats per minute. It sets the tempo of the track. A higher number would be faster and a lower number would be slower. First, I created our drum beat from individual samples. This is our bass drum sample.
BOOM BOOM
Sarah: And when you repeat it in a timeline, it becomes a loop.
BOOM x7
Sarah: And then I added a snare drum.
DRUMS PLAY
Sarah: And some hi-hat cymbals to the timeline.
MUSIC PLAYS
Sarah: And that’s our beat. I wanted to create a different feel for the tracks, so I put in an eighties style synth bass.
MUSIC PLAYS
Sarah: And then our keyboard part, which I looped. And then I added some reverb, to give the part a sense of space. If you have a listen now, it sounds like it’s being played in a huge hall.
Ben: Amazing. We can release this as our remixed version of the song.
Music is often made using some kind of technology – even traditional classical music is usually recorded with a computer.
From recording voice memos on a smartphone and making beats using drum pads to recording vocals in the studio, technology is a key part of the process of creating music in the modern world.
Electronic music, which is usually made with electronic sounds and instruments, has a few pieces of technology that feature in most or all of it.
A drum machine can play back drum sounds in patterns. It means you can have a drum beat without a dummer and drum-kit. It also makes it easy to produce steady repetitive beats and has been key to house, hip-hop and techno music.
A synthesiser is an instrument that can play a huge range of sounds. It is usually operated with a keyboard. It creates sound electronically using something called an oscillator. Oscillators vibrate in a steady way, creating a musical note at a constant pitch. When it was invented, this technology allowed musicians to create sounds which weren’t possible on traditional instruments.
Recording sounds and then playing them back is called sampling. When samples are played over and over, it's called looping. This technology allows producers to chop up sounds and combine them to create a collage of music. Samples are often used in hip-hop, French house and UK trip-hop music.
From the wah wah pedal that makes Jimi Hendrix's guitar sound like a voice, to the reverb that gives Beyoncé's vocals a sense of space, music technology is used to shape and change sounds on almost every piece of music that we hear.
House and techno are faster dance music styles with a bass drum on every beat, often built on drum machines. These styles emerged from disco and electro and eventually gave birth to styles like electronic dance music (EDM), tropical house and more.
Hip-hop is a slower style with snares on beats two and four, built around samples. This sound came from DJs repeating the drum breakdown or ‘break’ sections of funk records and later gave birth to styles like trap, drill and trip-hop.
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Listen to Delia Derbyshire’s arrangement of the Doctor Who theme tune from the 1960s. She used found sounds and synthesisers to create a futuristic sci-fi sound.
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Listen to Won’t Do by Jay Dee or ‘Dilla’ – recognised as one of the greatest hip hop producers of all time. He used the MPC sampler to chop up samples from vinyl records and create entirely new music.
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Listen to Strawberry Underlay by Ikonika and hear how she fuses styles using a combination of software, samples and synthesisers.
There are many types of software available for phones and computers. Some can be used online and there are many tutorials in styles like hip-hop, grime or house to get you started.
Here are the basic steps to making a house drum beat:
Open the software.
Set the tempo to 120 beats per minute (BPM).
Choose some drums sounds – look for a 909 drum kit, this drum machine was originally used in famous house tracks.
Place a kick or bass drum sound on beats one, two, three and four.
Turn on a loop so the pattern repeats.
Add a snare or clap sound on beats two and four.
Add hi-hat sounds on the offbeats in between beats.
Listen back to the basic house beat you’ve created. If you slow it down you will find it sounds a lot like a hip-hop beat too. Try adding chords or layers of samples over the top of the beat to develop it.
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