How to Make a Clams Casino Type Beat - How - To tutorial

Hello, this is MJ, and welcome to my first tutorial video. Today I'm going to show you how to get that classic Clams Casino - rich, thick, airy sound that he uses on a lot of his samples. One thing I want to say before hand is I use Ableton, this is Ableton Live. I know a lot of you guys use Fruity Loops, Reason, Logic - any DAW under the sun, I'm sure a lot of you guys are using. You might not particularly use Ableton, so you might not be able to follow the same exact steps I use, but you can take the process that I go through and apply it to your own DAW. So, for instance, you're not going to have this EQ8, and all these presets here. But you do have equivalent things in your DAW, so take a look around, all of the effects that I'm going to show you in here are really basic effects that you should have in your DAW any. I don't have anything crazy going on. Alright, let's get to it. First of all, I'd like to play you the sample that I used completely dry with no effects added, except for the fact that I already slowed it down and pitched it down to how I want it to be. This is actually part of a beat, called "Pyramid$', that I'm going to be releasing tomorrow, if you're interested in hearing the full beat, but here's the sample. There's the sample completely dry, no effects. The first thing I did was I applied the EQ onto the sample. Basically, what I did was really simple - I basically rolled out all of the low end from 94HZ down, just because I didn't want it to have the low end, because I knew I was going to add bass later. Next thing I did was I boosted 600-700HZ, just a tad bit. Same thing with 7,000-8,000HZ, and that was it. Let me play it dry for a couple seconds and then I will add the EQ so you can hear the difference. So you can see that made a big difference in how it sounds. And yeah, that's the EQ. Next thing I did is called a "Redux" - which is basically a bit crusher, it's Ableton's answer to what a bit crusher is, and I applied it just a tiny bit. Didn't go too overboard. I'll do the same thing, I'll play it dry for a couple seconds, then I'll add the effect so you can hear what it does. It just gives it that little bit of bit crusher sound to it. The next thing I did was I added an overdrive, which kind of gives it a little bit of distortion where you want it. I kind of applied it to the upper-mid range. Here's the sample with the overdrive. After that I applied a reverb with about 5 seconds for reverb time, pre-day set to about 42.9 seconds, size 102.95, and same thing - I'll play it, and then I'll add the reverb. That's really what gives it it's rich, deep sound. The last thing I applied was a simple delay. And that's it! Once you apply the EQ, the redux, the overdrive, the reverb and the delay, this is what you get. And there you go! That's about it. Like I said before, these particular effects set at these particular settings worked for this sample, in my opinion. Take what you saw here and apply it to your own sample, apply it to whatever you're working with. Play around with the settings a little bit, you can get some really cool, crazy sounds out of this. This was pretty straight-forward, I knew kind of what I wanted to do before-hand, so I didn't play around with it too much, but you can do a lot of cool things with this. That's about it. If this video helped you at all, if you're up for it, subscribe and hit that like button. It helps me tremendously, and I appreciate all of you guys who take the time to do that, and who watch my videos. That's it - that was the first tutorial. Let me know what you want to see next for the tutorial series. It can be anything related to production, it can be tips on how to EQ your drums right, or how to get your 808 to stand out more, anything! Just let me know down in the comments below and thanks for watching!