Drum Loops for Beginners (How to Make Drum Loops)

1. Drum Loops for Beginners Course [INTRO]: Hey everyone, gratuitous here, if you are wanting to learn how to make custom drum loops in FL Studio with one shot drum samples. Then this course is for you. So if you're an absolute beginner, I walk you through step-by-step, how to get started nice and slow. As you can see here in FL Studio, we have free drum samples, so in the packs. So we actually use these for one of the beats. So we actually make two beats in this course. We make a dance drum loop and then we make kinda like a rap drum loops. So this is an actual project from the course, I break down how to color code, how to organize, how to understand about patterns and how to keep things fresh for your listener's ears. I talked to you about how to send all your stuff to the mixer so that you can take your drum loops to the next level when you're ready to do mixing and stuff like that. So this course is all about drum loops for beginners. But again, we also cover some intermediate to advanced stuff as we start to go on, as you can see right here. Okay? So I walk you through step-by-step. We build this one from scratch, same with the route drum loop. And I think you will really enjoy learning about drum loops and a nice, easy way to get results. Again, all with one shot drum samples 2. 1 - Making Drum Loops Overview: Alright, so welcome to the course. In this course I'm gonna be teaching you how to create your own custom drum loops with one shot drum samples. And when we begin this course, we're gonna be using the free sounds that come with fl Studio. So here in the browser, just go to packs and you can click through here and you can see you have things like symbols. You have your kicks, your snares, your claps, your high hats. Now, if these words are new to you, if you're really new to producing, it might be a little overwhelming. But watch through this course again and you will learn really, really quick because when we make our drum loops, these are the typical sounds that we have. We have a kick drums, claps, snares, high hats, and then various percussion elements. Alright, I'll break all that down as we go along. Later on in this course. A lot of my students know I use the drum bundled trio. Typically, as you progress, you will want to be purchasing third party sounds. And these are the exclusive audio jump bundled trial. You can just search into Google and you'll be able to find these drum kits. Alright, I'll explain more about those once we get into them. But again, we will start with the packs so that you can follow along nice and easy. So that is a quick breakdown, an overview of what to expect. So I will be using the pacs to get us going. We will build some drum loops. We'll talk about various things you want to be thinking about when it comes to drum loops, such as your tempo, will be talking about things like adjusting velocities. So if I click some stuff in here like velocity and stuff like that. Another thing is when we are building a drum loop, when you listen to the drum loop by itself, you really don't know how it's going to sound in the beat. So for example, if you've made the drum loop and then you put some melodies over top, all of a sudden you're going to hear that, oh yeah, this drum loops working out. So just because you play the drum loop and you don't like it, doesn't mean the drum loop is bad because a good beat, a good song as two parts. It has a drum loop and melodies. It could be a really bad drum loop by itself. But if that drum loop compliments the melodies, they go together really good. Alright, it's really important to understand. So let's move forward. Let's get into making some basic drum loops to get you up and running to learn how to make custom drum loops with one-shot drum samples. Because nowadays I am seeing a lot of people using loops, which means that the skill level of producers is drastically dropping in my opinion. And I hope that this course is going to allow you to continue to learn to be a really good, well-rounded producer, creating your own stuff from scratch. 3. 2 - Must Enable Features for Workflow: Alright, I want to share a really cool pro tip for workflow before we get into making our first drum loop together. Okay, so again, we have our packs down here and you just click into packs. Here's where all our sounds are. The fast workflow that I've learned over the years is if you go show only one folder content, now I am using FL Studio 20. So if you've upgraded to FL Studio 21, the browser has drastically been upgraded, but you should be able to find this feature really easy by going to the arrow and going show only one folder content. Okay? And what this is going to do is I opened up hats and then I go to symbols. It's automatically going to close hats for us. And it just allows you to have a really fast workflow. The last thing I want to share before moving on is you can use your arrow keys. Okay, so if I'm in kicks right now and I press the down arrow, we can go through the sounds. You can press the right arrow to hear the same sound over. And if you want to close the folder, you can hit the left arrow. It brings you up to the top of the folder. Then you hit left again and it closes it so you can work your way around, go through sounds and kinda go back. Alright, so that is the fast workflow. Come here and you just want to enable show only one folder content. That's what I like for my workflow because if I'm in, let's say this drums, drum kit. And then let's say I go to the mode audio one, it automatically closes the drums and it just gives a really nice workflow. Okay, so let's move on and let's make our first drum loop together 4. 3 - Making a Basic Drum Loop: Alright, so let me go to make a beat from scratch when we're first starting here, There's two ways we can start. We can either start with the drum loop first or we can start with the melodies. There's no right or wrong way. And my suggestion to you is to become a really well-rounded producer. You want to learn to start with your drum that first, as well as start with your melodies first. Okay, So in other words, try one beat with the drum loop and then add your melodies and after, and then try another beat with your melodies first and then add in the drum loop after. The reason is because it just allows you to learn how to adapt to a beat no matter where it is. But since this is a course about drawing loops, we're going to start with a drum loop first. Now, I already selected some sounds here. And that's just going to speed us up in this video. In our future videos, I will go through sounds together and we'll build a drum loop. But I just want to make this video quick so it's easy for you. So the first thing you should be thinking about when you're making your drum loop, what is the first thing that you should be setting? It is tempo, okay? If you're gonna be thinking you want to make a dance beat or you want to make a rap beat and R&B beat, etc. The first thing to think about is tempo. So for me, I really don't like to look at the ranges out there. So lot of times, if you want to make a certain type of music, you do have to follow those ranges of tempo in FL Studio. But for me I always like to make a custom be for whatever. I always try to fine tune it for whatever I feel the beat needs. And another thing too, is once you make the beat, you can always adjust it up and down a little bit to fine tune it. But in other words, my mindset when I make a beat, I think about am I going to make a dance beat? Then I usually go from, let's say anywhere 1-15 and there maybe like 140. And then if I'm making more of like an emotional beat, it'd be maybe like let's say anywhere from 96 or something to maybe like 77 or something. Again, I don't want to give you ranges. It's just when I make a drum loop, I'm thinking in terms of if I want to dance beat, we're making, we're going a little bit faster. If you want more of like a hip hop rap beat, I'm going slower. That's usually what I do. And it just makes it more fun. And I can tailor everything to the actual feeling that I think the beat needs. Okay, with that, out of the way, we're going to start with the drum loop. We have set a tempo. Let's just say we put it at 90. This is the easiest way to start. Okay, so you want to start with the kick drum and a snare or a clap. From here. I like to put my drum on the one and then my snare on the two and the four. So we just listened. Okay, Now, why is it so powerful as you can quickly start sprinkling in the drum however you want. Alright, so to build off of this, Let's go to drums were the hats. So I'm looking for a closed hat. Okay. We have opened hats, which are usually sound like we want to close tasks. So I'm just going to drag this in for now. So to spice up this drum loop, you can just right-click and go fill each two steps. And as you can see, it just did that or you can click it in however you want. One thing I will say is when it comes to clicking in sound's volume is really, really important. If we have a sound just like this and when it's super, super loud, it's gonna be overpowering. If you pull it back, you can make it fit really, really nice. Another thing too is as you can see, these are all clicked in. If you click this right here, you can see you can adjust the velocity, which is essentially your volume. And you can fine tune it for more bound to more human flavor in your music. So let's just listen to this drum that begin. So I'm going to be building a jump from scratch. This is where I'm thinking, okay, I'm going to add this in. So I myself have to listen so I'm going to be quiet and let me just work on this. Okay, I can start adding in hi-hat. So to keep things simple, you could just go again through the fill two steps. So again, this is a super basic drum loop. You can start adding it in here. You can start adding melodies already if you want to. For myself, I usually like to build the drum loop a little bit and I just wanted to share that the easiest way to get started as you put the kick on the one, you put your snare on the two and the four, or a clap. And then you can start adding in your hi-hat from there. So, so now we start adding in our hi-hat because again, there's a lot of dead space in here. And this is where your other percussion elements, such as high hats are. Bongo is all that, all that stuff can fit in here. So if you want to spice this up a little bit further, now, if I were to just click sounds in it, it's going to sound too, maybe too aggressive too much. So what we can do here is watch. We can right-click and go to the piano roll. You can do it this way and you can click sounds in and you can start adjusting your velocity, or you can also just do it from here as well. So it's the exact same thing. So for example, if I click this one in and I turn it way down We come back here to the piano roll. You can see that OneNote is turned way down. So if you do it either here, so let's just crank that way up. You come back here. It is the exact same thing. Okay, So this is just a little bit of a faster window to do it. So what I want to say here quickly is because let's say we like it right here. Let's just spice it up a little bit. So I'm going to click here. Let's just maybe add in the high hat, but watch, we can just bring down the velocity a little bit. Maybe we'll just kinda like do like a role here again. And if you wanted to get even more creative, you have panning, which can do left and right. But again, this is at this point of the beat. In my opinion, it's way too early for this kind of funky stuff. I would want to start adding more elements onto this drum loop. For example, I'd go into percussion. Shaker, bunch of cool sounds, right? So add that tambourine. If you have a sound like this, this is going to be really hard to fit into your drum loop. But what makes FL Studio so powerful is you can just enable the trim up for. You can adjust your out, you can increase your normal or enabling renormalize. So what you can really fine tune a sound and your length. You can do your sample. And so what I'm trying to say here is because without this, this sound is gonna be so hard to line up in time and it's just a, such a long sound. But if you want to be creative, this is what you could do. This really long, right? So what should we just do our out? Again? Tighten that up a little bit. Turned down. And again, you can fine tune this however you want. So again, volume is really important when you're building out a drum loop. If things are too loud, it's not going to just going to sound weird. So sometimes starting quiet and then working your way. Licklider, tambourine. So sometimes if you're gonna be using a sound, it can be really, really repetitive. So you just gotta be careful how often you're using a sound. Another thing too, is this is only a one-bar loop. What that means is only four beats. It's actually really hard to make a really catchy, powerful drum loop that does not sound. And knowing in a for loop, in a one-bar loop. So when I do my FL Studio beat making education, I like setting it up like this because what if I'm working, I can click into the playlist and hit enter, go fullscreen, hit Enter to go back. And it just allows for a nice experience for you. But usually when I make my own beats, especially back in the day when I had tons of different monitors, screens going on, I would usually make it bigger because then you can make your drum loop. And again, that allows for freshness in your listener's ears. And so I'm just going to stop the video here because this is just giving you a quick example of how to get started with a drum loop. Maybe what? We're trying to get that to work maybe. So let's just, this is just play all the way like this. Turn it down. Sounds really weird. So we can right-click and go cut itself. What this is gonna do is it's going to cut off the sound. It's not going to overlap with the contagion that more completed the pitch. You can do tons and tons of stuff. So much for bringing up a lot. I'm trying to get that to work, but that sounds pretty weak. But I'm just sharing with you, It's all about trying to find the sound, making it work. The last thing I will just quickly share before moving onto the next video is again, the reason why I wanted this extra snare here was just to share with you a layering. Layering is so powerful. For example, let's just say we have our drum loop like this. And then what I'll do is what a scooter, new patterns. So again, I hit the Plus on my number pad or it can you hit the plus up here? Or you can go to any of these to go to new pattern. Or even like insert one. There's multiple ways to do things in FL Studio, but I liked the number pad. Okay, so hit the Plus on the number pad. Okay, So here is this clap. We can add in the clap here. And again, if you're new to this, how this works is in music production, what we do is we make patterns and in the playlist when we hit play, you're going to see it just plays whatever is in this pattern. You can see that this clip right here, and I'll just give it a color. So this purple will come here and we'll just give that a color too. So this one right here is the kick snare, hi-hat. This hit this tambourine. This is actually all in one pattern. When you're making your drum loop for myself, I usually like to make it all in one pattern. It makes things really easy. And then later on you can break it apart. Because why you want to break it apart is when you arrange your song, you want to be able to add and remove things at different times. And if everything is in one pattern, you're not gonna get that flexibility. So let's just listen to this here quickly. So this is just the drum loop. It plays four times. And then I want you to hear the layer. So it's going to be repetitive. Yours is the layer. So I'm just sharing with you that we could have put this layer in this pattern. Just like this. We could, we could have just put it just like this. But again, as you start to become a better beat maker, you want to be thinking in terms of patterns and what instruments are, what sounds you want in that pattern. So then when you add, when you add multiple sounds in, you can add and remove. So for example, here's the high hat. This is pattern one. Pattern two. I'm going to put it in pattern three. I'm going to bring all the way down here. There's just put this snare backup with the other snare. And then here is this. And then here is the high hat. So this is going high at. And I'll break down all this keyboard shortcut stuff in just a moment. I'm just doing it really fast for you. So again, this is why it's so important because if we're going to build our beat. So does this, this does not have the hi-hat anymore, right? And actually does have the layer, but I want the layer to happen here. So pattern one does not have the layer clap, it does not have the high app. Pattern two has the layer clap. And then pattern three, which is the high hat, is now playing our hi-hat. So again, this gives us full flexibility. So again, breaking down how it works so you can see it. Then we're gonna get into better examples moving forward. Okay. So in short, what I was trying to get across to you is when you first started drum loop, start with your drum on the one, put your clap on the two and the four hit play. You can start sprinkling in your drum wherever you want. And this will allow you to really start practicing about where you can place your sounds for your music to be in time. That was the hardest thing for me to learn over my years is this is what we call sound placement, where we can click in our sounds. And this is the perfect way to start. Again. The first thing you should be thinking about is Temple. When you go to make the beat, is it gonna be a fast or a slow beat? That's what I think about and then I adjust it accordingly to thinking, Okay, yeah, I want it to be a dance beat. It's gonna be a bit faster. And usually in a dance beat, the first thing you're gonna do is you're probably going to put your kick drum on every beat. So again, 1234. So again, music is just math. Most commonly is what we call four-four time. It's called common time, 1234. And so in short, how this step sequencer works is each one of these is a 16th note. So in other words, 16th, 16th, 16th, or it could be eighth, eighth, eighth, eighth, eighth, eighth, eighth, eighth. And why this is really important to understand your eighths is because when we talk about swing, which I'll talk about later on in this course, is Swing actually nudges these notes over just a little bit. So for example, right now I'm adjusting it and ethyl Studio is doing it for us. So we're not seeing it visually, but we're hearing it. And if I were to right-click and go to the piano roll and highlight these, essentially this is what swing is doing. So look how it's lined up perfectly on grid. I'm swing would adjust your eighth notes over like this. And why this is powerful is because in digital music, if everything is snap to grid just perfectly, it sounds super robotic. And so swing through, nudge things according to how much you have adjusted here. Or again, you can always just come here to the piano, roll and adjust certain ones yourself. So I'm just gonna press Control a and then shift and queue up. Here you go to Tools and you can see there is quick quantize or quit quantize start times. There's a lot to know in FL Studio and let's just move on to keep things simple 5. 4 - How to Make Dance Drum Loop: Alright, so I started a new project here, brand-new know sounds fast tempo. Let's create more of like a dance drum loop. In this video, we'll do it nice and quick. So this one's a little bit different from a hip hop or a rap beat. Because when it comes to kick drum for music, Let's just say we just like this one. So again, typically it is what we call a four on the floor. So in other words, one-two-three-four, your kick drum is playing on every beat, 1234. Then again, you just want to be thinking about how fast you want that temple for your dance music. If you're really trying to create a certain genre, then you will be wanting to do research about what are those temporal ranges for that type of music. But again, for myself, I don't really like to follow the trends. I always like to kinda make my own music. And so I will try to adjust my tempo for where I think the beat sounds best. They're okay. But since this is a dance drum loop we're creating, it's on every beat and let's just hit play. Okay, so maybe there's a school a little bit slower, let's just say 132 and I'm just gonna go fast. Okay, so here is just one kick drum. Let's get a high hats. Go. Cool. Cool, Good. A couple of closed hi-hats. Again, layering is super powerful if you're only using just one sound. For me, I find it a lot harder to make a really good beat when I have a lot of different sounds going on, it just allows things to sound full and nascent easy, since this is the dance drum loop, I'll share a really cool tip when it comes to dance drum loops. We put this on what we call the offbeat. So we have the drum on the one, then the open hat goes on the offbeat like this. So already too loud case, we pull it back. But again, it started sounding really, really static. So again, you can just come here to the piano roll. You can just maybe nudge these notes just a little bit. And again, it's just going to add just a little bit of life to the music and just one or two nudges. And so how I do that is I right-click, go piano roll, hold, Shift, and the scroll wheel. That's all I'm doing. So you're going to see that the sound looks like it came back. And that is just because I nudged this one before just a little bit. And so FL Studio just put it there so it can look confusing. Now again, let's get a clap or a snare. So I kind of like these ones. These are kinda like claps. That's cool. So let's take these two now for me, I usually it to go drums claps, and then I worked my way. So here is our claps and I can just press Control and C and Control and V. So it's all about just kind of knowing the keyboard shortcuts for workflow. This is what we have so far. Too loud right? Now, open has too loud as well. So to lab. So I'm going to bring the open head down. I'm holding down Alt and down, or up. If you're on Mac, whatever alt is on Mac, sorry. So now we have our closed hat. So you can build this all in one pattern. And it makes it really easy to build the drum loop. But again, if we're going to add this in here, we have no flexibility on customizing our arrangement. And even like a really good beat, the arrangement is what takes a good beat to like an amazing beat. If that makes sense, the arrangement is like everything. Okay? So you want to have full control. So let's just start from that. So what I'm gonna do is I'm just going to take these, I'm going to press Control and x that's going to cut them. I'll hit the plus on the number pad and I'll hit Control V to paste that, I'll hit F2 and I'm just going to write in capitals, so I'll just go claps or F2 to give that a color. And then the keyboard shortcut, since those are highlighted, you can come here and you can see we have, I'm sorry, I think it's here. And you can see colors selected and there's gradient. So Shift, Alt and C. So this is a keyboard shortcut, so I'm just sharing those here quickly with you because it's all about workflow. So what I did was I hit F2, if you remember, here is that color when you hit Enter FL Studio keeps this color for us. Hit enter, then the keyboard shortcut is Alt, Shift and C. And then there is that color, that FL Studio safe for us. So I click it, we can click last, click the same color, and we're good to go. So it colored both of those. So I'm just going to hit one that gets her kick. So this is the kick. And again, so let's just give this a random color by hitting F2. I'll hit F2 again, and that's going to load up the pattern. So you see it's pattern one name. So for example, you can come here and you can see that the in order to rename and color a pattern is F2. But again, just knowing the keyboard shortcuts is really going to help your fast workflow. So we have the kicker here. I'm gonna hit the plus sign number pad, put the claps in. And now as you can see, we're starting to build the song. So if you want to start removing stuff or are adding stuff in, really easy, I'm going to hit, go back to the kick, kick this open hat, and I'm gonna hit the Plus my number pad. So plus, plus, I'm going to hit plus one more time. I want this pattern for, so I'm going to paste it in here and hit F2 or just go, I'm hoping hat, I usually find capitals are really nice. And FL Studio, again, middle scroll wheel hit F3. Okay, so what I wanna do here is the reason is pattern three, I want this to be these high hats. And these are three different closed hats. And the goal here is I want to use all three of them. And typically that can make a really, really powerful hi-hat loop. So far, this is what we have. Just like we had before. I think it's a little bit loud, so I'm hitting Q to listen. This one is really punching through like it has a lot of body. So what I'm gonna do is I might pull this back and I'm going to increase the clap. Okay, so here's the Cloud. That's pretty good. Again, this open hat is a little bit aggressive, but once you start adding in instruments and stuff, you don't focus so much on the open hat and it adds tons and tons of fullness because watch if I remove it, sounds kind of like it's missing something, then it's super, super full sounding care. So that's a really pro tip and you don't have to use an open hat there. You can use other sounds like tambourine and even born goals and stuff too. Okay, so again, always be creative with your stuff. So again, I'm going to hit F2. We're just gonna go closed hat. And we can highlight these, hit Shift Alt and see. And again here is this. And I just clicked that one to go across. Or you could have selected last and select it. Okay, So now you're just going to add in our high hats are closed hats. You can just add them in like this. And so when the song plays, we will hear a little better. So I'm just listening for What is the main high hat that I want to focus on. And then the other ones I can kinda just be fillers. This one is, has really high frequencies. Again, if we open up a frequency analyzer, again, I'm just sharing what I'm hearing so that you can kind of follow along care. So again, this is this four hat, very high in frequency. This one's a little bit lower. Even though one has super high frequency, it's still sounds a little bit lower than this one to me is very aggressive. And that's just my mindset. So this is the one I might just put like, let's just say every single step. Can we turn it down? That open hat, we're just going to bring it way down. So right here, even this is a pretty kind of catchy dance drum loop, but it can usually to spice it up a little bit. So again, we can go Cool. So this is what I'm trying to talk about, that if we are only building the drum loop right here, it can sound really, really boring. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to hold down Alt and the scroll wheel. You can see I can adjust the height or you can come up here and you can do that as well. So what I was trying to say is if you hold down control and right-click, you get this magnifier and you can zoom into certain areas. So watch if I zoom in right here and then press Control and right-click, it goes back to 100% or we can zoom in. Okay, so again, I'm just going to press Control and right-click to make everything 100%. And then I'm just going to use the Alt and scroll wheel to make this a little bit smaller. I want to bring this down. So you can also select, if I hold down control and click, it highlights the whole track or you can just highlight it like I did right there. So I'm holding down control and left-click to highlight. But sometimes this is a little bit annoying. You can just go track and it selects everything. Okay, so in this closed hat, I heard a really cool thing I wanna do. So in this situation because I have kick, clap, closed hat and open hat in my pattern list. And again, a lot of people like to use the panel picker or the picker panel and then you can adjust your patterns around. For me, I actually liked to have more screen real estate. And so I'd like to disable that myself. And I just memorize where things are and you can always come here and you can adjust them. So let me just walk you through what I'm going to do here. So we have a closed hat. You can come here and you can go clone, alright? And the clone one, because now we have closed hat and clothes tattoo. We are going to remove this one out of the closed hat. Come here and we will remove these ones. So I'm gonna hit the Plus my number pad. We will paste this in here, and let's just give this. So we'll just go closed hat two and that pink and then watch. We can just call that a little bit darker and it's just a little bit different. So what I wanna do here is I'm going to put it here and I'm going to clone this as well. So make unique close tattoo is just kinda playing like this. And then closed hat to number two. And again, we can kinda make this a little bit darker as well. This is on the plane, the one listens playing both to twice and then this is only one. And again, this is just adding freshness for our listener's ears. And I think that's so let me just listen to this. So we got now I think I want to be like That's what I was hearing. So again, this open hats a little bit loud. So as you can here we have created a pattern for the listener to listen to. This one has that one extra hit. So again, close tattoo has this one right here. And then closed hat to number two does not have that one. And so as you can see, this is starting to add tons and tons of things for the listener to listen to. And things are really simple still, we have one kick drum. We have claps which are layered. We have this aggressive closed hat, which is really cutting through. And to me it sounds musical, it really adds to the drum loop. And then if I go to the next pattern, I can do that by hitting the plus on the number pad. I can come here and select it here. And the easiest way is to simply just left-click the patterns. Okay? So as you can see, we're here in the closed hat. Here's the closed hat number two, and then the closed hat to number two. And I'll leave it just like that. So again, this is just that. I'm adding rhythm for the listener. But by itself it just sounds so weird, right? But in the beat, to me, this is set to me, this is adding tons of rhythm. So to spice this up further, again, we can right-click the kick, go make unique. Again, hit F2 to bring this menu up. Or you can come here because you can see if I'm on kick, but now I'm on kicked. Number two, you can come here and you can go to Rename and color. But again, just knowing the keyboard shortcuts, you don't have to know all of them, just some of the ones which are really essential to a fast workflow. For me, colors really do help know where things are. Because once we start getting into mixing and all that stuff, if it's the same color here, if it's the same color here, it's the same color here. You're good to go. I personally don't worry about coloring the tracks and stuff because I can move things wherever I want. I just like to have my patterns all lined up because it just makes things so easy when things start getting bigger. So again, we aren't kicked. Number two, again, you can kind of go brighter or darker. Let's just put, put her maybe around there and enter. So on this kick, what I wanna do is maybe just spice up the drum a little bit. Okay, so again, here's this, the normal kick drum. It just sounds like 1234. Again, if I click play here, it goes into pattern mode, which means it's only playing the pattern. That's what we're hearing. You can come here to song mode and hit Play, or you can hit the playwright here and it automatically switches to solve mode. And I just wanted to share in pattern mode. So this is just the normal kick drum, right? If we go to kick number two. So you can hear it kinda ****** it up. So let's just hear what we've done. So normal kick your *** kicked number two. It sounds okay. So again, this, this type of stuff, like I, myself have to really listen and fine tune, but it's hard to kind of talk and do it at the same time. But as you can see, this is just how you can start fine-tuning it. So I'd play me from here and then I hit play and then I'd keep listening. Sounds okay. So you just want to fine tune that to get it to where you want. I might just maybe put an extra drum right there. Okay, so maybe here. Again, you can do like that velocity. So if I click here, you can come here and you can turn it down a little bit. Another thing to say is that when you are dealing with the kick drum that has a long tail, usually you don't want those tails overlapping. And again, that is where the cut itself comes in. So for example, if we don't have cut itself enabled, and let's just go to a new pattern. So I'll go open hat. I'll go plus my number pad. If we're playing a kick drum really, really fast, the tail is going to overlap. And when it comes to the base, you can be getting what's called phase cancellation. That's bad. You can do more research into that. But in short, if the base tails are overlapping, they can cancel with each other and you could be left with like a really weak sounding drum. So let's just listen. That doesn't sound too bad, but watch if I right-click and go cut itself is going to be super clean sounding. So I'm really not hearing too much of a difference, but that's just one thing to know when you're dealing with a kick drum. Many times, you do want to enable the cut itself so that the, the actual tale does not overlap. To bring back this menu, you can either hit F6 or you can see it's right here, okay? Okay, so two things I just want to quickly do before moving on. Again, here is the claps. So again, we can go make unique here on this clap. And again, I can hit F2. And I usually just like to make this a little bit of a different color just so you can visually see. And then again, maybe we can put the two claps or even make them different lists. Let's just listen. Sounds kinda cool. The last thing I wanna do here with you is I'm just going to press Control Shift and C that allows me to clone. Or you can click here and you can go Clone. So I just want to add this one in right here. And you can see it is a closed hat to number three Okay, so what I wanna do is I'm just going to click on this. I'm going to come down here and I'm just gonna go move down. So in my pattern list, Here's closed hat to number three. I want this to be closed hat three K because this is closed hat and everyone close that number to close that number three. So in other words, I wanna deal with this sound right now. So here we are in this one. So again, you can come here to the Rename and color, but again, F2, Here's F2, and I just want to put this closed hat three, and let's just give this a different color. We'll go like yellow, just so it's not so tricky. Okay? So let's remove this one now. So again, we have closed hat, which is this one. We have closed hat two, which is doing this funky thing where it's like this and then we're removing that one. And then now this one right here, again, let's just bring that yellow color we have. And now let's just try to spice it up a little bit. So let's just maybe do something like this, just as a starting point. I don't know where it's going to sound like. So we're just going to hit play and we'll fine tune it a little bit. This open hat is a little bit annoying still. So again, let's just kinda play around with it. Look at this one. This one is here and then this one can be here. And again, this is the reason why wouldn't personally myself, I do like to build my drum loop all one pattern because I can visually see what's going on with everything. But I just wanted to share with you when things are in their own patterns that if we hit play. So for example, let's say it's not the chorus and it's just like the beginning of the song. And then you can start adding things. And then again, if you want to go to your different patterns, you can select them from right here. You can also select them from right here as well. But for me, I like to do the number pad, for example, if I want to remove all this stuff while you're on one. So we would click all this in a grid pattern too, because I know it's the kick pattern three is all of this pattern for I know is, is this one right here. So if you're following, is a pretty simple workflow. So here is this one, and I want to go to seven because I know it's like this. Instead of me having to redo that, you could just hold down control and left-click and just press Shift and click to drink to bring them over. Or you can also go control and B, as in Bob, control and B. Lot of times I just highlighted go Shift and click. Okay, so let's continue on. So I'm receiving the plasma number pad. Here is closed hat three and I have the open house care. So this is what we have. So this closed hat, Let's just try to find something before we wrap up this video, let's just add in the closed hat here, care, so it sounds like this. So maybe we'll just play with this. And then again, we can right-click this a lot of times. So when it comes to building a drum loop, you have the beginning of the drum loop where you can add something kind of funky in the middle of the drum loop. We just wanted to kind of flow with the beat. Then near the end of this of the bars, you want to maybe spice it up and I call that the end loop, bring in k. So the very beginning of a drum loop you can spice something up for, and I'll share that just a moment with you. And then near the end, I'm sharing with you the end loop bring in, so for example, how the kick drum is doing this kind of digital tool. And then same with the claps. We're kinda spicing it up a little bit with the hi-hat here. Maybe we'll just do something like this. And again, here's the velocity. We can maybe do something like this. And here is fine. So I believe this is pitch, so we can do something like this as well. So let's just listen to it by itself. I know it'd be a little bit quiet. So we're going to come here and again, we can crank it up. So sometimes with something goes higher in pitch, it becomes quieter so that we're just gonna kinda compensate for that. So again, just turn this down in colors a little bit. And then so let's listen to the end. So we don't really hear that. So again, if we want to accentuate that more, so I just stopped me start from here and bring it up. So kinda like this. And so what I was trying to say is that the very, very beginning of the drum loop. Sometimes you can do something funky. So we will go down here to packs, we will go to drums. Let's go symbols. So this is actually a good example. I'll bring this in. And so sometimes you can drag things in. But for me, I usually like to use the step sequencer as much as possible. And then for certain things sometimes you want to line it up because it's easier. But in this case, let's just put this here. And I'll put this here. It's a bit loud, right? So I'll bring this down. And if this symbol It was too loud. Again, you can use the trim or you could just simply use the out and you can tighten it up. So why should we tightened it up more? So tighten up just a little bit. Okay, So we kinda space something up in here. So what I would do is let's bring this over and then we can go to a new pattern, and then let's get another, another symbol. Okay, So what I'm wanting to do is I want it to be like so I'm just going to click in this here, and this is what I'm gonna do. Okay, so I'm going to click on pattern 11. We're going to click on the sound. Okay, remember I shared that cut itself. So in other words, if this sound keeps playing, it's going to cut. So I will cut itself. We're going to click here. And when we do cut itself, what it's doing is you can see we have a group. So in other words, we can set this up so that if this symbol plays, it's actually cutting off this sound as well. So in other words, both sounds could be cutting off each other. And that's really, really powerful trick. So you can see it's cut two-by-two. So I'm just going to come here and I'm just gonna go cut two by two. So in other words, if I do something like this, these sounds are cutting each other off for a really cool sound. Listen to loud. Okay, So what I'm trying to get at is pattern 11 has this sound and then we have this sound right here. So when this sound plays, which is going to play right here, again, there's that focus that zoom, right? So holding down Control and right-clicking, right-click and hold to zoom into that area. So back from the beginning, hit Stop. It's somewhat at play. Here. Maybe we'll just go to a new pattern. We'll get one more symbol. That could be cool. So let's put this here and I'll do this, or sorry, I'll put it here. And again, let's just put the cut itself to 2.2. So in other words, all three of these symbols are cutting each other off. So I'll share a really good example of that. So watch. You hear how when this sound plays, as soon as this one plays, it cuts it off. If I remove it. So it cuts it off and it makes a really clean sound. Making mixing easier. It also allows you to create really powerful rhythms. Okay, so let's just hear how this sounds. Plate little bit. And what we could do is maybe I'm not sure It happens if we play them at the same time. I'm just going to turn this velocity down a lot. They do play at the same time, which is cool. So what I was trying to say is we have our end loop bring in, comes back into the beginning. So at the beginning is the symbol. Then this is kind of like, you know, funky stuff going on in the drum loop. And then a lot of times you want something to kinda wrap back around, which could just be the kick and the clap to keep it simple for this video care. So hit Play. Then again, something in here is missing. So I'll just, again, just give you a quick example of different things we can do is look, just going through different sounds. So kinda looking from early bongo or something that has a little bit more body. That's kinda cool. So we're going to hit an approximate number pad. And then I'm just going to click and drag that underneath. Caravel could recall that too. Just looking for the sounds. We're just kinda hard to use. I can just hear, they're just kinda really quick sounding. That bond was a really aggressive. That's kinda cool. And so what I'm hearing is I liked the body of it, but the tail might be aggressive, so again, just tighten it up. That could be cool. I could be what I'm looking for. So what I'm trying to say is we're on pattern 14, we can add some type of end loop bring in. So again, I'm gonna be focusing from over here. Okay? Do you see how right here, these notes are this right here, okay, so just watch right here as I click them in. Okay? So what I'm doing is I'm focusing in on this area because we, everything here, it sounds kinda funky, sounds fine. Then here it's lacking. So we wanted to have some type of bringing, to bring it back to everything. So maybe we'll do something like this. So again, these are the symbols and again, this is why color-coding so nice because it's kinda hard to see, but this is the, this was 13. Okay. So this one, I want to add all of these sounds in, risk and Eclipse and random things in. And let's just listen to sounds, okay? We turn out it's a little bit. So again, I'm just hoping that you can hear how that has potential. Again, I'm doing this quick with you. So right, so this is a much folder drum loop. Again, there's open hat, look up, look how much I've turned it down into me. I still find its aggressive. So pull it back a little bit more. Okay, So just to spice this up, let's just add an instrument because we have no idea how it sounds. It's just a random drum loop that we made. And let's just maybe go guitar. And we'll add and something powerful here. So I got my midi keyboard turned on. So again, I'm going to turn down the volume is really important. You don't want things to be too loud because it can be hard to play. Let's see. What I'm hearing is one, the sounds are a little bit aggressive. They're really, really cutting through kinda weird. So if I turn it down a bit, right, That's one thing. Eq can also be another thing. And then also it's just, this is like the chorus of the song essentially. So in other words, if we're gonna be building out the song. So again, what I did there was I hold down Control, left-click, hold it and you can just go Control B. You could do that. Or again, you can hold on shift and click to bring it over. Okay? So what I'm trying to say is like this right here, this whole thing is the chorus. It's going to sound too overpowering. And so we have our reverse. Let's say we take especially the open hat. The open hat would probably not be in the verse because that is what adds so much excitement in the music. And we can kind of maybe, maybe have these two. So let's just listen to this. So again, let's just highlight this. I liked this. Hit Delete. Okay, So listen from the course to this. I'll just share one example here. Because again, when you are a beat maker, it's all about learning how to differentiate your verse from your chorus. I'm going to play something in the verse. And then once it comes to the chorus, I'm going to play a different melody. And I just want you to hear that in conjunction to the different melody, as well as adding in the open hat and these kind of weird symbols and stuff like that. That it's the difference between the verse and the chorus. And it could be something to work off of. Okay, my goal here is I'm going to play some improvisation, kinda more like averse, right? Versus kinda little slower. Comes to the course. Make it fun. Make. But again, as you can just hear and listen, there's so much knowledge that goes into making a successful, powerful hit song. But this was the basics of how to make a basic dance drum loop. I was just having fun with it with you. I shared exactly how he did everything and these were all stocks sounds with fl Studio. We use the packs here. So it's not to say that the stock sounds are bad. But for myself, when I make my beets, I usually like to use this drumbeat of Trio. I just know it has a lot of versatility of what I'm looking for. For me when I was selecting these sounds, I just found that it was taking me longer to select sounds, to find the sounds I want, as well as it's a little bit harder to know where the sounds, where once you learn how to use the sounds, That's a big thing too. Like, I know how to use these sounds, which means that I can quickly select sounds and get moving quicker. So for me, I just found I wasn't comfortable as those using them, but we were able to make something fine. And yeah, you saw step-by-step. So we have the kick, we have the kick pattern. Two, we have the clap. I spice it up with another, a little funky clap there. We had the fast hat only in the chorus. But again, depending on the arrangement of your song, you can add and remove that wherever you want. This hat right here. Again, we had it where I just played it just like this. And then the hat to number two was just like this. So we took, took that away again in the arrangement as well as our melodies. If you really want to emphasize this, because to me, I think that this was pretty cool if we could have made it work. Kinda like I'm going to turn up a little bit so you can hear it better. Right. So just because we didn't play that one extra one to me, it sounds like a really powerful rhythm that we could build off of. And we can build our melodies around, even build like the baseline around. We can really emphasize that. So again, when you become a better producer, you can start listening for those things and kind of build on those things because that's what makes this drum loop unique. That one little particular thing there, two, another thing too to say is again, I have no swing. A lot of times like to have a little bit of swing because again, we have our eighth notes. Again, swing just kinda nudges those over just a little bit. And I'll let you just listened to that. Let's just hear if we can hear a difference. Before we hear the swing though. Again, here is the closed hat. So just like this, then the closed hat for the N Loop bring in what I call it right here at the end. I just made it instead of like this, I just put two at the end there. Just like that. That one wasn't there. Then here's the open hat. To me, this was a little bit aggressive even with everything we're doing. But that's a really powerful, tricky. Put the open hat there on the offbeat. Again, that one looks like it's off, but that's just because I nudged the note over just a little bit k, This is the line right here. And you can see, I know should overs the bit. Then again, this was just kinda weird kind of trying to make something work with symbols. And then I shared the cut itself stuff with you, right? Just right here. It was in. So that's, that's the open hat. So that's the crash. So there's the cut right here. And then here is the cut for this one as well. So I cut them all. And then on this one I just played it just so that it wasn't just that sound, which is kinda cool. I just kinda layered it just a little bit. And then this one was just kind of all weird. But it just sounds cool like if we listen to it right here at the end again, then it would go like and just like some type of verse or something, right? Again, I was just going to share swing with you. So again, let's just hit stop and then let's just crank the swing up and swing will adjust all I'm Oliver instruments and all of our sounds. If you click into a sound, you can come here and then I think you can kind of pull back how much swing you want on a certain sound. But again, these sounds are here is on beat. So Swing does not adjust these sounds. It's going only adjusts these eighth notes in FL Studio, which is the reason why at the beginning, when I was saying, if you wanted to make your music in what we call double time. And again, I'm going to wrap up this video here in just a moment, but there's just a lot of information to pass on to you. So again, if we imagine this as the drum, the kick drum, so 1234, double time is putting the image on the slide. The clap, clap would be here. And so when you do this, it just kinda messes up. Being able to use this swing up. And for me it's like the swing knob, so powerful in FL Studio. You can still use it. You just got to use it in a different way like you're gonna be using. Yeah. So again, not to go off topic, but here is swing. Okay, so again, swing, adjust the eighth notes. And if you're following the course, I am putting a kick drum on the 123.4 and then you have the clap on 2.4. And then again swing as adjusting these eighth notes. Let's listen to swing. So again, no swing, hit Play. Crank it up. Listen to the high hats. The high hats are kind of like a duty. Especially here. Like all of these kinds of sounds that sounds super weird. So let's listen to this with no swing. So with no swinging goes, I think it sounds normal. With too much swing. It just sounds like super weird. Okay, So again, it's just nudging those notes, making them too late sounding. So for myself, when I'm making my beats anywhere from, let's say like ten to like 50 to 60 can get away with each track is different. So let's move on and I'm gonna be talking about some more tips for drum loops just for you guys to get up and running to make things simple and fun for you, okay? 6. 5 - How to Make Rap Drum Loop: Okay, So we got another blank slate. So let's just start from scratch. Again. I'm going to use the drum bundled trio, and I'll just give you a quick overview in case you've never seen this drum kit before. So it's a huge bundle, the drum bundled trio. Again, you could just search on Google to find it. It's by exclusive audio drum bundled trio. It comes to three drum kits. They can be purchased individually as well, has over 2,300 drum samples and how it's organized as super organized. So you have your kicks, tons and tons and tons of kicks. Again, I can use my left arrow to go back up. We have snares, tons of snares. We have claps. I like when a sound kit has snares and claps separated, we have high hats. So again, closed and open, high, open hi-hats. Very important as a beat maker because closed hats are very quick and they're very high in frequency. You actually might be surprised a hi-hat is one of your most powerful sounds. And it's like super short and tail, and it's super high in frequency. Okay. So high hats are some of those because what happens in the beep is they add so much excitement and energy. A hi-hat is really hard to take away from the track. So if you are building out your arrangement and you have your high hat, It's really tricky to take away the high hat. So you always got to think about that. Then again, we have our open hats, right? Just really, really useful for workflow as a beat maker, for percussion, for myself, percussion really add so much fullness teacher beat. And if you want to become a good producer, you need to have a lot of different variety in your percussion. For example, you can see here in percussion we have a hand drums. It's broken down to like conga drums is broken down to bond goes. Okay, it's broken down to frame drums. Like again, I don't even really know what these types of instruments are, but what I'm trying to say is as a producer, it's all about quality. And I would say that the pacs here, the pack, is definitely quality. These are equality, but it's just variety. K as a producer, if you're, if you're working and if someone asks you, Hey, do you have a tambourine? It's a yeah, I have a tambourine, flesh. We go percussion. We go to metallic. You can see tons of different tambourine styles just in this drum kit alone. I don't want to waste, I don't want to waste your time, but I'm just sharing that as a beat maker. It's all about having good sounds that are versatile and give you what you need. Do you have tambourine via bone goes? Do you have Shakers? If you have those things, you really don't need to be purchasing more drum kits. But one thing to mention is, Let's go back to the packs, will go to drums. Kick drums for dance music are a lot different than hip-hop drums for example, these more dads drums and these are free, these come with in the pack, so we'll listen to those. These are, these are great for dance music. But they're a lot different than what a producer would need for kinda like hip hop beats and stuff. So let's just get going. Let's get moving forward. Okay, So I wanna do the same thing. Malicious may kind of more like an emotional beat, but we'll do it really quick. Like nothing too intense too involved. Um, let's go 91. Let's just start in the organic drum kit. So some of these drums there, they can be used as layers, but I'm not feeling it as like a main drum. So I'm looking for these are big drums. But again, not what, not really what I'm listening for. That's kinda cool is like a layer. I'll talk to you about layers in just a moment. Again. That's kinda cool, but again, it sounds kinda wide. That's pretty cool. And kind of like that one. Okay, So let's just start with this one. That's an awesome drum. That's a huge drown like it, but it's not really, it doesn't have low end. So it's more of like a layer. We can use it certain times. That's also really powerful. That has a long tail. Care, so this one right here, his nice, I'm just going to delete this one. So good. I'm just going to hold down Alt and delete. Or again, you can just right-click and go delete. Okay? But again, like the keyboard shortcuts because I can keep my hands kind of in the same area. So Alton delete, hit Enter. I'm going to keep these three drums. I usually like to work with multiple drums. We're just gonna leave that. And again, I'm just going to do the exact same stuff I was sharing before we start with the one and then our clap on the two and the four. So let's just kinda find some snares. So this is a snare and I'll share it with you. To me, the tail is too long for what I want, but the initial sound sounds powerful. And again, you just use the trim and the out, and you can also do the length as well. So here here it was before. So the entail I don't like, I don't like that sound. I'm going to do this. That's, sounds like a much better snare to me. Like that I would want to use it sounds it's more clean It can be a layer on there as well, kinda cuts through on the top end. And this is kinda cool too, but I might turn it down. So again, this one right here, we're going to start on the one. And then this is our first snare. I want to first think about what is the snare that is kind of starting this track that I want to kind of break the main snare. This is the main snare that I want. So I'm going to start with this and then maybe we can layer stuff later on. So hit Play. Okay, So you can hear that we start on the one, proton, the two and the four, and you start sprinkling in your drum. Now let's try and layer. Turned down and seek in volume can be really aggressive. Okay, cool. So now when it comes to the snare, again, we can layer this on a sometimes quicker sounds can be a little bit louder. Here the tail has a little bit of reverb or something on it. I don't like that tails. I'm going to tighten this up tight, something like that and watch. Just make it louder. Make it a little bit louder and FL Studio. So again, I already maxed out my volume here. I could normalize it, but I did very, very little. So we can also crank it up even further here, which is really powerful. So maybe drill up. Okay, So again, what we can do is we can just put the drum loop in here and then this scenario here. Sometimes it's nice to layer that in the chorus or something, but I'm just going to remove this for now. So I'm just going to hit Enter. So this is our basic drum loop we have. Again, you can separate if you want. I'm just gonna go drum loop and we'll just give that random color. And then again, we can right-click and go make unique. And then we can just maybe spice it up just a little bit. Again. Let's do this again. So again, this snare drum, want to be a little bit careful how often I'm using it. And again, we can crank it up in volume a little bit. And even there too as well. And again, we can use the cut itself because remember the drum, we want to be careful when it overlaps. And I'll just do color itself on this one as well. So when I go to cut itself, it's only doing it for this one drum. If I want to use sounds to kinda cut each other off, again, I'd have to come here. And then we have to use the same cut group and stuff. Okay, So here we go. And again, let's hit F2 and just make this a little bit darker since we are here. Alright, so I'm gonna hit the Plus on my number pad. So now let's get into a hi-hat. And again, so see scrolling takes so long to get somewhere. So again, I just hit the left and my keyboard and we're good to go. Let's just go to high hats. Sometimes sound vendors who create sound designers who create these sound pack. Sometimes they give you the same sound but kinda pitched up and down. So let's try and take advantage. So let's just do something like this. Alright, and we'll just kinda work our way just like this. So try this. Again. Volume is important here and I don't even know how it's going to sound, so what is added in? Now, sometimes some of these sounds can be a little pan to the right. You can see right here, it's a little bit pan to the right, so I'm going to pan out a bit to left. I want this to be more centered. Same here, kind of pan to the right. And then same here, panda right here. It could just be a little bit loud. Take it away. So that could be like a chorus hat. So again, new patterns tell you the other one. So maybe we'll just put this, something like this. And I'm actually just going to put this down because that could be like a corner or something and the chorus. And then this one we're going to put up here. So we'll mute this for now. Sounds a little bit repetitive. Rape. I'm just going to leave that kinda like it, going to keep moving on. So the open hat, let's try to take advantage of putting on the offbeats. What we'll do is we're going to mix it up so we have this one. So what I'm gonna do is I'll put one on here and then one on here. Okay, So just kinda mixing that up, but it sounds like this. So again, that's the offbeat just like before on that dance drum loop, right? This is our dance drum loop right here. 1234 are putting on the offbeat And that is what I'm doing right here. Offbeat, off, be off, be offbeat. But instead of playing all the same sound, I'm just mixing it up. Okay? So I'll do this. So I think I need one other sounds. Okay, because it's a little too repetitive sounding. A little bit better. I like that it's kind of working out. So again, this is, this is how I build a random drum loop, right? And then let's add this in. This could be in the course. So again, I'm just going to bring this down little aggressive right now because I just want to fill up the drum loop without sounding too full. And then when I add this in, again, mixing, when we talk about EQ and stuff like that, we can make things fit a little bit more as well. But right now I think everything is okay. So we got Mongo's. So again, a lot of times myself, I find that sometimes sounds are just long, so I do tighten them up quite a bit in FL Studio and that's such a powerful trick. So for example, like in a channel sampler, right, the n out, all that stuff super powerful for doing really quick sound design to tighten up the sound exactly how, where I'm thinking it's going to fit the beat a little bit, a little bit better. Okay, so let's add in a bongo, very low entail. I can kinda fight with the drums and stuff. Okay, let's just get a random sound here again. So listen to the sound, has a little bit of the sound after. For me, I just want to make sure I'm dealing with tight sounds. That's just what I like to do. So I can actually see it right there. So watch if I actually use the n here and use normalized. It's kinda like I can hear that right there. Right there, right. So I don't want that. So we're going to keep going to put there. Okay, So we got, so again, we can add in our pattern here. Now again, here, if I keep adding in this pattern just like this, it could sound really, really annoying and repetitive. So let's get another pattern going on. So I hit plus my number pad. Let's do a different style of sound. This is very soft sounding. I think we need something more aggressive to cut through. Okay, so just listen close to the things I'm saying here because these are the things that you know, over the years I'm just kinda learn sounds this way. So this has more high-end, doesn't have much body. These are all kinda similar sounding. Again, I usually don't like a sound that has sounds after the sound. I find it really hard to work with. Something like that could be cool. We'll add that one in there. It's got a different folder. Carefree time that right. Could be cool. Okay, so she's out here. Turn it up a little bit more more care. So I'm not sure if I can get that to work. We'll see. So again, volume pretty loud. The sound right here. Even though this one is louder, this one's kinda cutting through the worst, but we'll turn them both down. So again, I'm just going to go through, just do this quick. And the sound here. Maybe we can just turn down the velocity of one, so it's just not Salt Lake. So digital sounding like this. And then watch we will hit stop, we will hit play. So so this this, I think this tail sounds a little bit too long. Again, I'm just trying to tighten it up. Now again, remember what I told you, this drum loop, you might think like man, like what did I just watch? This drum loop isn't good, or maybe it is good. But what I'm trying to say is wait until a melody goes over it because we have no idea what it's going to sound like. That's really, really important to understand because, you know, you might be building out the drum loop, but you have to try a melody over it. Let's maybe just try one more loop. Guess. It's kind of a cool sound. Okay, I think we got so let's go to seven. And again, so I have 123. And all four, all four of these are good to go. Okay, so we're gonna go into their new pattern I'm going to click this in, as you can see in compared to the other beat where I was a little more organized. This one is much more random and sporadic. And again, I would have to do more organization later on. But sometimes this is what it takes to get to the beat, right? You just whatever random and then you can organize it later on. But I have set it up where I'm thinking that this is one pattern, this is another pattern. This is another pattern. I don't have to split them apart that way, or we just have to kinda color code them, that's it. So again, plus on the number pad, all four of these sounds, I have solicit play. Again, Let's just trim this up a little bit. The sample start, let's, um, get it more on the actual transient. Okay? To less tail. So let's just move, put this every two steps. Or what we can do is try this swatch, go piano roll, hold down Control and click and highlight them all. Hold on, Shift and click and then watch this. We can hold on Alt and we could bring this down a little bit and it kinda make it a cool sound to another sound. We can try that on the one. Let's see how hear how it sounds. So gonna go to the piano roll. And again, you can be creative and play sounds of higher than low. Kinda like a little like a melody out of it. So I'm just gonna go to a half step. So let's just make this bigger. Sometimes it's nice to select the actual full step there and then hit play. Too quiet in philosophy. Then we'll do something kinda cool. I don't know what. So what I'm listening for here is I just don't want it to overlap. So I'm gonna go with the cut, cut itself. So go like this. And then let's add these other sounds and quick to loud sound. So I'm going to leave that one off and turned under velocity a little bit on now and k, So let's just listen to it. So this right here, this sound, I might put it in its own pattern and I might spice it up a little bit. So again, we have this or coolness and I just do that by right-clicking and going make unique. You also have to have a paid version in order to do to make unique, I think in FL Studio. And we can do something like this. So since the second time around. And so it kinda got acrylic little melody off of it. Then like you're just seeing me do this live, right? Noticed or in the recording. So we bring this down, make a little lower. Now given by this. So it's kinda like a little melody off of that sound. I just tried to take advantage of it. And those are, those are things you can do. A lot of times when you click a sound. In. A lot of times, most people think that this is the only type of way you can use the sound, but you can come here to the piano roll. And you can click sounds however you want. And you can get, you can create melodies out of the sounds without it sounding weird or anything like that. Okay, so let's open up nexus. We have a lot of sounds here in this drum loop, and I'm just sharing making a beat. This is how I like to make my beets. I like to have tons of different sounds. Because again, if I'm making a beat, local versatility, I have to add and remove different things, right? We have a drum loop. Okay. Hi hat. This is like the open hat bongo style of bongo. Wish. I just tried to spice things up a little bit. Here is kind of cool bongo thing I did where I wrote to the piano roll. And then you saw what I did was I'll share that with you again just so you can see that. So I went right-click, I went to fill each two steps and then I printed the piano roll. And then I highlighted it all down Shift, clicked alt, scroll wheel down. There you go. You can do the other way. Usually I find that maybe a little bit weird. I usually it's nice to have it like on like the light, the one It's kinda nicer. And then this one's kind of like a filler. Then again, if you want to be more special with this, you can right-click down here and go Notepad. And then these ones you can kinda space however you want. You can, if you're listening on headphones, you can hear that. So these are things that you can do in your drum loops to spice it up. But I'm doing things super quick with you. And this is what we have. Oh, sorry, my bad. So I'm going to clone this. And so that's how I wanted to do it. So watch, I'm going to bring this one up. Sorry. So this one is the one I want. This one here is like this. Okay? So it goes like okay, so we have it just like this. And then pattern ten is just like doo-doo, and then nine down again. And then what happens on 11 is it plays the car like this. I think I wanted to kinda go F and then it kinda like that. And we will try to find a melody. So let's try a different sound that could suit it. Um, but I just want to share it just different sounds. Higher. I want it to be louder. So on my midi keyboard, I actually have this set up where I can adjust my volume off of my midi keyboard. And in FL Studio, how you do that is if you can't right-click a third party knob, you can just move it with your mouse. Come up here to tools, so you go last tweaked. And if you want to set this up permanently, you would just go over I'd global link. Or if you just want to set it up just for this current project only equal link to controller. But you go over I Global Link and then with this window popped up, you just move your slider, just like this. And now I can adjust my output. It's only for this a virtual instrument. And anytime I open it up, I can do this because again, as a beat maker, volume is super important, right? No volume can't hear anything. If it's too loud, it overpowers it right? And then you actually have to go back to your mouse. You have to adjust here and then you come back. But I could just do it once I can hit Play. And with my left hand, I'm trying to find how loud. Way louder. Now, one thing I hear is just here in this last one, something super loud near here at the end. That was too loud. Okay, so I'm just going to select the velocity. So listen closely here. This is a really cool pro tip. If I were to turn down the volume here, it turns down the volume of the whole sound. But the only problem of what's happening here is this the one sound, like the OneNote. So you simply click here, turned down the velocity of just that one sound. And let's listen to it again. I wanted to be a little louder because it is pretty powerful. Yeah, there you go. Okay, so turn the volume off the midi keyboard. Pretty powerful, can bring back the release. What the releases doing is listened to the tail. But again, so much affects, good, Just be careful with all the effects. The volume now. So here we go. Let's try one other sound just to give you a quick example of, again, you have a drum loop. How does it sound with different instruments? You don't know, That's just say lead K. So one thing that really makes Nexus stand out in my opinion is the leads. They are so powerful about a splay. A couple of just without the drum loop. Having good sounds is so important as a beat maker. Same thing with your drum loops, right? Having nice sounds for quality and variety. And then the same thing, you have something, you don't have to get Nexus. I'm just saying that it's so powerful for workflow, for me. Just all the sounds I have, amazingly high-quality. I'll just do one last example here. A little bit aggressive travel, more time of an aggressive sound. If you hear that. Again, very aggressive, beautiful sound in less than dollar effects. So again, it just makes it annoying for us as the end-user. Because again, when you have multiple sounds coming into this beat, because again, for myself, when I make my beats, you can see how many different things I have for my drum loops. I like to have tons of different instruments as well for my melodies. And when you have all these effects going on, it's just so annoying. Okay, So last one before we move on, okay, So here we go. Lower in pitch. This is fitting a little bit more with the beat. This was a little thin sounding. All right, Here we go. About selecting the right sounds at the right time. So this one was more of a kind of emotional beat, I guess. Again, depending on how you play those melodies over the drum loop really now dictates how that drum loop sounds. The drum loop could be a real hip hop beat. If you play a kind of hip-hop melodies, if that makes sense. So it takes that drum loop and all of a sudden, it sounds totally different from what it sounded like when, when we made it raw. Like this is, this is it sounded Roth. It all. And then again, I play my chords and it sounds totally different with that drum loop. And so that's what I was trying to tell you when you're making a drum with you, you have no idea how it's going to sound and tell you actually put your melodies over top of it. And I hope that gives you insight. So, so far, I have shown you step-by-step how to build a drum loop nice and slow. And then I worked you into more advanced stuff such as layering, adding multiple patterns. And then again, just the biggest thing is when you add those melodies, you'd really don't know how that drum loop is gonna sound. And then again, the secret is in the arrangement, once you start arranging the beat, how you start adding and removing things. And so for me, when I have tons of different instruments and different melodies and stuff, it just allows me as the producer to have so much control and combinations, right? If you're only stuck with three instruments, sometimes it's really tricky to make a beat sound full. Because then you've got to think about, well, how do I arrange the song? You might have to use a lot of filters, EQs to kinda cut out the instrument, and I'll show that here quickly with you. So filters are things like these. If you've never seen a filter before, right? So watch if we hit play. So it's like a filter, right? So sometimes you do like this kinda stuff in music a lot, come back in. So if you don't have tons of instruments for me, I can just mix and match mix-and-match instruments and I don't have to use this type of stuff as much. But if you have tons of instruments and use this stuff, it's like you have so much flexibility and to create so much fullness. Now this is a low cut filter. Okay, back. Alright, so sometimes in music people automate that and allow it to move throughout the track, especially at a breakdown and stuff. Okay, so this video was a Hip-Hop ish or rap beat, more like an emotional beat. And I hope you got, I got a lot of insight out of that. Okay? 7. 6 - Organizing FL Studio Drum Loop: Okay, So in this video, I want to walk you through, once you're at this point, how do you organize it? How do you send it to the mixer? Know how do you get started moving with mixing? Now I'm not going to teach you mixing in this course, but I'll share with you how to get set up and get moving. And I'll explain all the keyboard shortcuts with you for you to learn my fast workflow when it comes to color coding and bringing it all to the mixer. Okay, so what's going on here is I have in the drum loop, so this one pattern has the drums and the snare. Usually, it's nice to have them separate so you can have full control over that. So I'm just going to grab all this, going to bring it down. And we can just clone from there. Okay, So now here it's underneath. I'm just gonna go Clap and we'll just give that a random color. And here is the clap. Let's just say here is the clap. Again, we have all the drum loop stuff going on. So I'm just going to click and hold. We will hit Control X to cut that. And then I'm going to clone this right here. So it will clone that one more time. And so now we have clapped 01:00 two, because Clap two reversion to I wanted to have this fill that end loop bringing, you wanna go to clap number two. This is clock number two and then the same clock number two. And again I can hit F2. So we're going to F2, F2, and we're going to bring down the color just a little bit. And again, we can differentiate clap too. So in clap one, I want to remove this. So let's zoom in here. So we have the drum loop, which should not have the clap. And then we have this drum loop number two, which should not have these claps either. Okay, so we have drum loop. This should not just be drums. We have drums. And then I wanna go drums. Then we can go number two. We can just kind of take this orange. And then we'll come here, hit this again. Select the orange embers being a little darker. Okay? So we have drums, which is literally just the drums. Drums too, which is like kinda like the N Loop bring in and then E15, it starts over again, okay? And then I'll now bring in, I also have the clock number two as well. So as I'm doing this, what I should be doing is here is the drums. We can highlight these. We can go Alt, Shift and see in the case of this one, because it's like a gradient, it works a little bit different. We'll select here, we'll select here it will accept. Now all these sounds are the same color. So we know that these are the drums. But what I'm trying to say is, let's say this is the clap. I hit F2, hit Enter. Let's say it was just one sound. I'm just going to push my middle scroll wheel that pops up as well. You can also hit Shift and click, or you can right-click and there is the renamed color an icon. But again, knowing the keyboard shortcuts is really important. So we come here. So we click on it, hit F2, here is the color. We hit Enter, it, stores it into f three-four us middle scroll, we'll have three, right? But again, if there's multiple sounds, usually the gradient is faster. But again here is f three as well. Okay? So usually I like to have the sounds as they're laid out. So let's see here. So this one here is actually up here. So I'll click and drag these and we're going to bring them all the way down with Alt and down. So you see, I'm bringing it all the way down. We have quite a few sounds and this beat all in line makes it super easy. Then if I click drums, we know it's here. Clap, it just works its way down k. That is usually how I like to flow. And let's just listen. I'm just going to hit F2 will just go like hat, hat one, and we'll give it a random color. Perfect. And we'll grab these shift Alt and C. And then again there's that. Go first, Go accept. Okay? And then again, these are open hats care. So open hats, grab these. So again, that was Shift Alt and C to do the gradient or you can come here, you go, color selected and there's that gradient. So Shift Alt and C is the gradient. Okay? I like this workflow because when we add it to the mixer, I just know exactly where all my drums are. Enormous claps are because drums or hear, drums are here. And once they come to the mixer, drum is all winds up. Okay. Fl Studio has introduced new ways to do this a little bit, but I still like this workflow. Okay, Here's bond goes. Okay, So we are here because again, that makes sense. We've colored all the way to here. So open hats is right here. There's the last sound. We click here, here we are. So this one is bungalows. I'm gonna go bongo one because I think nine is bungalows as well. So Bango one get that blue color, will get this again. And again. This is just the fast workflow. Yeah. So what I'll do is I will hit F2, I'll go bongo to, Let's just take that same blue and we'll just bring it away darker. Okay? And then come here to these sounds. So Alt, Shift and see, here's that dark blue. Bring it over. And there you go. Okay. This one here is this That was like the melody. So I'm going to bring that down a little bit. That was this one right here. Okay. So this one is like, I'm going to say bongo three guests. So we will hit this bongo three. And again, I want to select that dark blue moveable. It's a super, super light blue. We'll highlight these alt, Shift and C. Now, one thing was selecting the same color like I'm doing here and just kinda differentiating. I can see it visually in here, but when it goes to the mixer, I'm not sure if the colors translate as well, and we will have to find out. If they don't, then that's for you to learn that just make sure you're selecting different colors, like for example, orange, you know, kind of a pinkish whatever color. Just make sure that they're different. One thing to say is I usually never liked to color things read in FL Studio because red usually means missing. Missing files is not fun. Okay, so we have this sound right here. So I'll just go like a perk one flight percussion. So I'll just go like pick one. And the reason why I'm going pick one just in case I have another perk somewhere else, but I don't think I do because I just have another like kinda high hat, but that's usually how I would approach it. So I'm just clicking here just to select a random sound will go green. Middle scroll wheel hit F3. Because remember I just hit enter to save the color and it has that green stored for us. Okay, It's just workflow that's pick one. And then we can go like so like needle-like perk 11 or we can just go like per two and just use that same green. And then we come down here and we can make it a little lighter. And then this one is three. And then green, and we can go even lighter than that. So very last one. So this is a hat two, and then again, select just a random color. And we'll just go here. And I will select these again holding Shift Alt and C. Or again, you can come up here and go color selected. Here's the gradient. There you go. So those are highlighted. And how you highlight is you can click and drag or you can hit your middle scroll wheel to do that. Or you can hold down shift and click or right-click. There's multiple ways to do things in FL Studio. But for me how I would approach this if I clicked here, I would left-click and hold and bring down and then shift ultimacy because that purple is right there. And again you can either there or you can just hit last and then color it again. Whatever is easy and memorable for you. Okay? So there is all of our stuff organized. It takes some time, but I'm telling you, once you have tons of stuff going on in all of your instruments going on, once you go to mixing, it makes things so easy. And the thing is if you're making the beak today, you remember everything is. But let's say you come back in two weeks a month, maybe six months later you come back and when something is like this nice and organized, you can start flowing so quick because it's just workflow. Alright? This is just what I've learned over the years and it really helps me. So what I'm gonna do here, I'm just going to click and drag everything down. And then how you do this is to just going to right-click and you're gonna go channel routing. What you wanna do is route selected channels starting from this track. So I don't know what skill level you're at. My opinion, I would say learn the shift control, an L shortcut if you selected this one, all instruments go to ten, right? So that's not what we want. We want each instrument go into its own mixer insert. And again, I'm just going to go Control Shift and l to do that. Okay, and now you go look all the colors followed. Let's just look at the blues. The blues are so similar in color that it's a little hard to see on the mixer. So in my opinion, I would just say just go for different colors totally. I would say this one and this one definitely are different. But this one's kinda, you know, even though it's lighter up here. Again, I'm just passing on workflow tips. Just kinda nice to always keep them separate. So now if I were to hit play. So you can see everything is his own mixer insert. If you want to start mixing, it's just a matter of grabbing whatever you want. You can open up all your different EQs and stuff like that. Oops, F9 to bring that back, or it's right here. Another thing you can see, my effects are on the left side. So if you come here and you go to View, you can see that it's track inspector on the left side. Again, you can right-click these options and the Menu stays open so watched you can see how the effects from the right. This is how FL Studio comes by default. I like it on the left. Why? Most of the time your mouse is over here, local fast it is this workflow. And then one last little trick I'll pass on to you guys is if you want to create subgroups, you can bring inserts over. So I'm just holding on Alt to do that. So I select just a random one over here. And I'm holding Alt and the left arrow to bring that over. And let's say you want to route these two here as a subgroup. So you can hold down control and shift and click. Okay? And you can right-click here and you can go route to this track only. And so what that's gonna do is it's going to remove all routing from anywhere else. And then what happens is this here becomes like a Drums Bus care. So again, you can see I don't have that orange. So what I would do is let's just hit can control a, highlight, Control C to copy. And I'm just going to hit Escape And so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to come here, hit F2, hit Enter, remember it stores it in F3 for us. So I hit F2, control V to paste it that in, hit F3, get that color. And there you go. So what's going on here is these drums are going to this drums bus. And if you wanted to, you can even again make it just a little bit darker and it can help differentiate it just a little bit or whatever you want to do. I'm just passing on things you can do, not things that I always do. But you can do stuff like this where you have your instruments and then this is the drum bus. So what this is doing is if I hit play, now you have one mixer insert to control all three drums. So in other words, if I put an EQ on the drums bus or if I put a compressor on the drums bus, this is just one mixer insert for all your drums. Now, when it comes to mixing my drums, sometimes I like to do this depending on the types of drums I have. But sometimes if one drum is a lot different than the other drums, so let's say 13. I just want to send just like the master for example. Okay, so I'm gonna come here, go right to this track. So in other words, 12th and 11 go to 1010, goes to the master. 13 would then go to the master by itself, which means that I can affect it itself. If it was a really, really different drum, I'm just sharing with you options you have available to you. This is more advanced stuff, but you can see that we are all organized. And once you start mixing your music, you can clearly see that, okay, if I'm here at the drums, Here's the drums, right? And then when I'm making my B, I would usually bring this, all this stuff down. Again. You can also click from track one and gum write down that way you wouldn't screw up like I just did there. So let's say we highlight all these. We bring them down, up here, is where I would start working on my instruments, piano, guitar, or whatever I want. I usually don't like a template that way because every beat is different. So sometimes you'll see templates out there where people are trying to force you say like, Oh, this is for your piano, this is for your guitars, for your base, this is for your claps, for your kick. I don't like to work that way because every single beat is different. Alright? And so when it comes to making my B, I have a certain structure such as putting the instruments up top and I work my way down. And then you can have your percussion elements below. Drums collapse. All that stuff is percussion. And as you start to build out your beat, then you have your instruments and then your drum loop. Or you can do either way. You can put your stuff up top here and then your instruments below. As long as you just get a nice structure going on, that's easy for myself. I don't worry about like some people might go like, oh, drums are always read for me and then claps are always yellow for me. I don't work that way because in FL Studio you hit F2 and just get a random color. And it's just as long as it's color-coded, right? Color-coded become here to the mixer. It's color-coded. Up here, it's color-coded. So if I come back to this in a month, two months, never. Whenever. If I come back to it, it's just easy. Takes about 05:10 minutes attract, so it takes some time. But I'm telling you that if you set this up, it makes your life so much easier. I hope that helps. We, again organized at all, send it to the mixer. Again. If you want to learn more about that, you can check out my FL Studio mixer or workflow course. Alright? 8. 7 - Drum Loop Sound Placement [SAFESPOTS]: Alright, in this video, I want to talk to you more about sound placement. So in other words, where can you actually click in your sounds? Break it down a little bit more for you. I will be just be using just some default sounds here. And again, if you want more information on advanced level sound placement, checkout, my safe spots book. So say spots. Riley Weller on Amazon. Alright. But again, I'm just going to fill you in on what say spots is here so that you can understand it a little bit more. Because again, as I was learning to make beats, I really struggled about where I could click my sounds in because sometimes it would be in time, sometimes it wouldn't be. Some of these steps are really tricky to work with. And it's like, how does it work? Okay, So this is what I figured out over the years. And again, I just created that safe spots curriculum off of it. So here is a kick drum. Let's just get a hat. Let's get close tabs. Open app. Let's get a snare slash clap. Kinda like the same thing, like they sound different but they're doing the same purpose, right? 1212, right. That's cool. And I'll just kinda tighten it up just a little bit. Cool. Okay. So when it comes to sound placement and based off of safe spots, so you have a 16th, and this is super nerdy math stuff for music theory stuff, but it's kind of tricky because It's like, no, you have to know about 16th notes, you have normal eighth notes. And so how I have broken this down is we have the RMB, the offbeat a in-between and the b In-between on the, on the, on the, on B. So it goes 1234, that's your on beat. Now you have the offbeat. So offbeat, RFP, off beat, offbeat. Okay. So I'll be off, be a In-between, be in-between. And what happens is it repeats for each beat on beat, offbeat, in-between, be in-between, on the offbeat, a In-between, be in-between care. So this one is on beat, this one is the offbeat. Then these ones are the in-betweens. Now, if you were listening really, really close in the course, I told you that these are what, these are your eighth notes. What does that affect? Swing, swing effects the eighth notes, okay, So that is the in-betweens. So we have the odd beat, offbeat, and then your in-betweens are actually the eighth notes. But what I've discovered over the years is that the a and between is harder to use than the B in-between. Okay, So really the offbeat, the offbeat and the b In-between are the easiest to use. For my experience over the years. Let me break that down one more time for you because it'll give you a little bit more clarity in regards to how you can click your sounds. And because with music production and music theory, there's some people who go to school and they study music theory, super in-depth. I haven't done any of that, and I have taught myself piano, I've taught myself powerful drum loops. And why? Because I've sat here, I spent the time to learn where can I click my sounds and I really don't understand the deep real meaning of things. I just know what works for music, because most of music really ease off your ears and feeling. So we have the offbeat. Remember, this repeats for each beat. So we have 1234 and this is called a bar. So the technical music theory stuff is this is like a 16th note. 16th plus a 16th is an eighth. So this is an eighth, eighth, eighth, and eighth. Okay? So all of these are 16th notes. So 16th plus a 16th plus a 16th plus a 16th gives us a quarter note. So we have four quarter notes to create 1 bar, and that's why they call it like four-four time, which is common time. So we have a quarter note, we have another quarter note, which this is all a half note. And then I get a quarter note and a quarter note. Kind of technical stuff. Like it's just like, okay, well, what do I really need to know as a beat maker, the offbeat, how it works is it's always going to be on beat, but what happens with the beat is it's rigid. So for example, 123 kids, I can't count that fast. So 12341234. Now, if we start placing all of our sounds on here, like whatever our music is not musical. 123412. Like it sounds horrible, right? Because it's on beat. So not everything can live on beat. It's always going to be in time, but it's just going to sound super rigid. Then we have the offbeat. So the offbeat, let's just keep the kicker going on, on, on beat. Because again, remember it repeats each beat. So we have the beat. Then if we have the offbeat, this is kinda like filling in between. So it's halfway in between. The B is the offbeat, and it's usually always gonna be in time. It adds tons and tons of fullness to the beat. And you can be really creative in the type of sound you use. And typically we use an open hat, so like this. So again, that was what I shared with you in the dance drum loop. The offbeat is super, super powerful. Let's try it with another sound. Okay, here's the snare. So now we can put the snare on beat only on 2.4 though. Let's try a different hi-hat k. Let's check this out. Watch we can we can tighten it up and make it as louder. Okay, we just go up drive from here. It adds a lot of rhythm and dance to the music. Okay, So this is the offbeat. Now when it comes to the in-betweens, these are where I very often try to play with percussion. Will get something like that. I already used that sound, kinda liked it. Let's just pull back on the tail again. Now when you're looking at this, when I'm clicking in my sounds because again, I've already used the sound on IVs, just sound offbeat k. Now we can start using with the in-betweens. Now, that's not to say we can't layer sounds because if we can layer sounds ago however we want, but it's just, you can also start filling in different parts of this drum loop. Now again, this type of sound is a little bit longer than maybe what I want it to be because it's not just like a normal sound, like this. Normal sound. Normal sound. Normal sound. It sounds little longer than a normal sound. So you got to be a little bit careful on where and when you use it. And again, that's why very often you can even see it, right? So this is again, why very often trim this stuff. Okay? Now, you got to be a little bit careful because you can take advantage of a lot of these sounds. But sometimes it's just, it's hard to make the sound fit. Okay. So now we're into the in-between. So like I said, the in-betweens are the eighth notes, which is what Swing adjusts. Remember, comes here into the piano roll. We don't see it with our eyes because FL Studio is doing it automatically for us. But really what it's doing is it's taking our notes and it is nudging them forward just a little bit for us. Okay, so on, this would be like imperfect time and then this is nudging it forward. Now, swing does not nudge it early, because again, this is the line, so this is early. And then as music goes, this is now late. So swing nudges it late, and it makes your music sound more musical. But just in short and simple terms, swing as this nudging your eighth notes, okay? Okay, so we have the in-between and the B in-between. So the B in-between is usually very, very easy to work with. And the typical characteristic of the B in-between is it's kinda loose and rocky, kinda feeling like it's, it has a lot of rhythm to the music. It's kinda like boom, boom, boom. So for example, if we take away, this just broke with the drum for a second. So that is where the B in-between comes in. It's really loose feeling, very loose, rocky can elite kind of feeling. Okay. Now again, now we have the a in between. So what you'll notice is the a in between is really hard to work with, is hard to get it to fit. But you can see I'm taking advantage of the R&B, the B in-between, the B in-between and a in-between. I just kinda threw it in there. It kinda worked. Okay. Let's just try to do something with this percussion stuff so it can work. But again, so now you know when you're clicking your sounds, this is my mindset. So if you see me clicking in sounds really fast and you're just kinda like how you clicking sounds in. This is kinda what I'm already thinking. It's kinda like the offbeat. I have the offbeat, the in-between to be in-between most of the time I'm avoiding the a in between. And so if I'm clicking things in and be like, That's good to know. Typically generally work and if I don't like it, then you can kind of start removing things a little bit. Okay, So watch like, you know, all this would work. All of this would work. All of this would work. All of it would work. So you can see this is the a in between which I'm not clicking in. But if I want to be something a little creative with the drum loop, I want to spice it up a little bit. Then I might start looking into, I'm going to try to take advantage of this a in-between here. Okay, so quick recap. We have, it repeats for each beat. We have on beat, on beat, beat, beat, care. Then we have the offbeat. So offbeat, off beat, offbeat. And over time you'll just learn this a little quicker. So with R&B and off beyond there. So now you can see we have a inbetween and a B in-between. The in-between, I find it a lot harder to work with. Be in-between usually works a lot more and just gives like a loose, rocky kind of feeling to the music is just what we call a syncopation. And just lets us a lot of rhythm and groove to your music. Okay, so that's it for this video and that was an introduction to say spots. That's how it works. And it's just really important to understand that concept if you want to advance with your drum loops. Okay, So hopefully that helps you understand sound placement a little bit more. This is why I spent so many years and hours learning drum loops is clicking things and trying different tempo as playing with things. And these are the things that I've learned over the years and I hope it helps you. Okay? 9. 8 - How to Enhance a Drum Loop: Alright, so now that you understand a really basic level of safe spots, which is essentially just sound placement. The second part of the safe spots training is what I call the organic tools. Now, the organic tools are free and they come in any music program. But since we're here in FL Studio, I'm going to break it down for you. So the organic tools are the free tools you have available to you to further enhance your drum loops and melodies before even opening up any plugins. And again, they're totally free. Now, what you need to understand is this is all off the Midea, okay, So when you have midi, midi is just this, is just a note. Could be there or it could be in the piano roll. You can see this is the note rate. There is kind of small, but this is Mindy. When we have a midi note, we can take advantage of the organic tools. So the organic tools are things like panning. If you want to pan to the left, from our pan to the right, that is a free tool in your music program. And do you know how powerful panning is? If you want to put something a bit here, you can put something a bit here versus a bit rover here. And then when you're mixing your music, the difference it makes in your music for clarity because frequencies aren't fighting, right? Because it's literally not playing at that speaker, is playing it that speaker. It's a free organic tool. What's another free organic tool? Note nudging, okay, it's timing, taking advantage of timing. What does this do? If a sound is playing right here, for example, if you nudge notes, you can see that this is actually playing later than this one, which means that it can some looser, which means it sounds more musical. And another thing is, you're going to hear it clearer. Typically, as soon as you start nudging very, very slightly, you can be getting cancellation if you are not careful, but if you have high hats and like different elements like that, you're not really going to fight too much because also they're very, very quick sounding. But what I'm trying to say is that as another organic tool. So again, we have things like velocity. So velocity is how loud a sound is. I can't tell you how powerful velocity is to make a, make a sound stand out. Or if a sound is not fitting the way you want, you can simply just turn it down. So velocity, a lot of people think velocity is volume and it kind of is. But depending on the virtual instrument and you're using, it can actually be triggering a different note. So for example, if I hit my midi keyboard here, just like up here, if I press a fast, 127 is the max. So there's 127. And if you go lower, it can actually be used to trigger different timbers, different notes of a sound. So for example, imagine you had a piano. A virtual instrument can actually play different versions of that C note, for example, if depending on how loud you hit it. So that's actually what velocity can do. But since this is just a wave recording where there's nothing special going on, it's just an audio file. And if we were playing it through Midi, then it's just simply turning up volume and really basic level. But what I'm trying to say is, this is a free organic tool that you have available to you. What are some other types of organic tools that you have available? Sound selection, right? Making sure you're selecting the right sounds at the right time. It's free and it takes knowledge to do that. And a lot of people, when it comes to music production, they are always wanting fancy plug-ins, like let's say fab filter. If you noticed in a lot of my courses, I want to share a lot of like my plugins with you, my EQs I have to EQs, I have the 3D parametric EQ to, because this is really good to compare that if you're just getting started, basic EQ, right? And then if I use the pro Q3 is just better. Workflow costs money, yes. But the but the workflow, in my opinion is worth it. But you'll see sometimes people have so many plugins and it's just like cost a lot of money. The more plug-ins you bring into your software, there are more potential for bugs. Okay, So what I'm trying to say is all of these tools so far, like a layering, right? For example, if we have, let's say this hat, then this will, this is layering. If this open hat isn't cutting through, you can maybe have this quick hat. So watch where you just put it on every four and then we copy and paste that. So without it, with it. So now it can cut through, right? Maybe you want to make it leaving a little tighter, large. We come here to the length. Listen. And when it comes to mixing your music, something like this could be the difference of making that open hat like really cut through like the way you want and it's free, right? What are we doing? We're taking advantage of volume and layering. And maybe why sounds selection? Again, you can be taking advantage of note nudging. So for example, this one is really clicky one. So let's just make it late. I'll make it like early and then late and then early. So this is kinda like that phase cancellation that you gotta be careful of. Because to me, it doesn't sound very good. Alright, so just a quick recap. So again, for these free organic tools, I have things like a velocity panning, layering temple. Did you know that if you increase your lower your tempo just by like one beat per minute, it can really fix the groove of your track. Like maybe it just needs one or two. And sometimes people don't think about this, like if the beat is done and you're just kinda like I think it's done. Like maybe try putting it up one and, or maybe down one beat. And it can make a huge difference in the track. Don't spend tons of time on it, but I'm just saying that Have you ever tried that temple? It's a free organic tool swing. Swing is a free tool that you have available to you and it's your eighth notes. Take advantage of it. Sounds selection and already talked to you about sound placement, which is just say spots. We have the beat, offbeat, a In-between, be in-between. Again, it just repeats for each beat, we have the note nudging, where again, you're in the piano roll, your nudge your notes. Very, very powerful, especially to make sound stand out or make them more musical. Now, these were the ones that I wanted to talk to you about here quickly because I talked to you about the beginning of your drum loop as well as the end loop. Bring it. Okay, so I have the end loop bring in as well as you can extend your patterns. Alright, so let's just quickly talk about that. So I already shared an example pretty much all throughout this course. Like let's say we have this. Kayla, so let's get rid of everything we have here. And so let's say we have this drum loop, so a kick snare. So put that on the two and the four. Okay, let's put this on the offbeat. Just keep it really simple. This is a little like a dance drum loop. So again, we'll go like let's say one-twelfth. Open hat is very, very loud. Okay, So this is what we call it, just a one-bar loop. It's really, really boring if you don't do it, right? And so if I add in the pattern right here, again, all of our, Let's just remove these. Okay? So everything that's going on is just in pattern one. Now, in order to spice this up on the actual loop itself, we can add something near the end or we can add something at the beginning. But since this is just a one-bar loop, again, 1234, there's four beats in 1 bar, and as you can see right here, so 1234, it goes to the next bar. If you're just dealing with a one-bar loop and you're trying to do something special at the beginning and then something special at the end. It's not going to work because it's going to be too way too repetitive if you break it apart to make it like a four-bar loop. So 1234, so 4 bar here at the very, very beginning, you can add something in. So let's just drag it in to keep it simple. But usually I do like to add things and patterns as much as possible because it kinda gives you so much flexibility and you're able to take advantage of midi and the piano roll and all that stuff. It kinda gives a really good workflow. But for example, let's just say we have symbols. So again, we ever symbol here at the beginning. And what this is gonna do is it's going to let the listener, no, sorry. It'll be in some weird way too loud, right? And maybe the tails a little too long. So let's, let's listen to know. This is the beginning of our loop. Here we go. Okay, so what, what can we do here at the end? Because right now it's kinda boring. Listen. That lets the listener know that's the beginning of the loop. But again, if it's just like this, watch, watch how boring it's going to sound, it's going to sound way too repetitive. So where you could do something like that is let's say the beat was playing. And then you start doing something like this. Okay, So you started to do like a little buildup. And then maybe you do something like this. In this case, maybe you want to right-click and go make unique. So here's seven or seven, just like the normal, and this is 707 number two. So I can increase the outdoors a lot. And literature say it'd be something like this. Okay, So that should have lined up for it. Didn't guess, let's just do this. So for example, we have our basic drama going on and then we'll fast-forward a little bit. So we're doing a build-up, right? That could be like the chorus or something, but this is very basic and it did not sound very good. But now let's talk about the end loop bringing. Okay? So if we have this symbol right here, and then now I went shift, clicked in a duplicated it and I want to right-click and make unique. And that gave us 707 right here, which is this one. And it's just a little bit of a tighter tail. And so what I wanna do is that school reverse. So I had to bring that back like this. And so the NLU bring in, we can put it right here. And what you wanna do, again, I'm just holding down Control and right-clicking on that to zoom in. You hold down Alt and you can break free from the snap. If you don't hold on Alt, It's going to do this. Or you can also come up here to the snap and you can go none. But it's about knowing the keyboard shortcuts because this takes a long time, whereas this is fast. So hold down Alt and then bring it back and we're just going to line that up just on grid. And again, this is why the right-click, patrol and right-click is so powerful because you can just zoom in right there, okay? If you're too far out, you really can't see where you are. This is what I want to share with you. So you can hear this is kinda like the end loop bring in. So you could just hear that we are spicing up the loop for the listener. So first of all, you want to have a decent drum loop. This one's pretty basic. But we have our initial beginning of the drum loop. Let's listener know something's happening and then it continues like I call it the absolute bring in because it's the end of the loop and it brings in the track. And then right here, we can continue it on. Okay. So there you guys go. That's just a little overview of what I talk about regarding the organic tools. So regarding safe spots, we have sound placement where we can place in our sound, but then that's just the beginning of it. Once you click in your sounds, you want to learn how you can fine tune these sounds with things like again, velocity panning, layering, note dodging, understanding about the beginning of the loop. The loop bring in and again, that's everything in that safe spots book. So again, say spots by Riley Willard on Amazon. And that's it. Okay, so I hope you enjoyed this kinda beginners course for how to make drum loops. There's a lot of intermediate, advanced stuff we recovering, but I kinda worked you into it where I hope it wasn't too overwhelming. And it's also good if you want to just watch it over again, because tons and tons of tricks, which I passed onto you in a real world setting. Okay, So let's wrap up the course 10. [OUTRO] - How to Make Drum Loops in FL Studio: Alright, so I hope you enjoyed this course. Again. Let's do a quick recap. Here in FL Studio, you have your stock drum loop, drum samples right here in the packs. My recommendation is to enable the show only one folder content. So that when you click into a folder, then you click into another folder. It closes the previous one. For a really fast workflow. Again, you can use your arrows to go through, to go through them. Those are pretty aggressive sounds. And then when it comes to building your drum loop, the first thing you start with is tempo, right? You start thinking about, are you going to make a dance beat? Or is it going to be a rap B or whatever you type your beat you're making. The first thing you're thinking about is genre, which means tempo. Now, if you're going to make a dance drum loop, the sound is on every beat, 1234. If you are gonna be making a rap beat or a hip-hop B, or an emotional beat. My recommendation to you is to put the kick drum on the one, put your snare or clap when the two and the four, and then again, just sprinkle it around or however you wanna do it. Let's listen to this one turned down a little bit. You also have your swing there as well. And this is by far the easiest way. The next step here you can start looking into a high hat. And then after the high hat are looking into percussion and then try to take advantage of say, spots. So again, these three will usually always work for you. You can also layer sounds. There's nothing wrong with layering it as fullness. But sometimes if you're selecting different sounds, for example, this height right here, maybe I would add a sound in on the in-between, which doesn't work very well most of the time, in my opinion, from over the years making mini drum loops. Usually find this one is the trickiest one to work with. All of these ones, the in-betweens, right? If you don't understand about the a in between and be in-between, go back. And I did a specific video about sound placement and how the safe spot to work, right? We have the on beat, offbeat a inbetween and be in-between. So again, on beat, offbeat, in-between, be in-between. I find that on beat is, it always works. Sounds really rigid. Offbeat. It sounds really musical. You want to be a little careful when you use it because it is so powerful that we have the a in between, which is really hard to use in my opinion, and the B in-between is a lot easier to use, gives a loose, rocky feeling k. So then when I click these in, again, it just repeats for each beat. So we're not using that a in-between. So that's it. So I broke down how to get started building a basic drum loop. You have your free drum samples right here. I also use the drum bundled trial. Again, you could just check that out on Google. I really like it and a lot of my courses use it. So you'd be able to follow along and learn really, really well. If you have any questions about drum loops, which I didn't cover, again, just always feel free to reach out. I really hope you enjoyed this course. So my name is Riley Weller, my artist and producer named Ms. Gratuitous. And again that say spots book is available on Amazon. Just look for the author named Riley Weller. Okay. Thank you so much and I'll talk to you in another course of mine.