Transcripts
1. Preview & Trailer: Imagine knowing FL Studio
like the back of your hand and crafting radio ready
mixes, right of the box. If you're like most folks, you've been rummaging
through YouTube trying to piece together
an understanding of AFL-CIO by learning
from a bunch of different folks who
go into each and every feature until
you're overwhelmed by the sheer number of features in FLC on there's a lot
of features in here. What if I told you that in fact, you're going the wrong way? Have you ever heard of
the Pareto principle? Maybe you've heard it
explained as the 80 20 rule. It states that you can
get 80 per cent of the benefits with anything
using only 20% of the effort. The manual for FL
Studio is a hefty one. That's enough to make
anybody's head spin. But I'm here to tell you that
if you knew that just the 20% of FL Studio has features that really
make the difference. You can really
revolutionize the way you record your music. My name is David Wallace and
I know how to make records. I've worked with some
of the biggest names in the industry including
Michael Jackson, Whitney, Houston, Phil Collins, Earth, Wind and
Fire, and Chicago. I know the best practices used in the biggest
studios in LA, new York, and Nashville. And here's the kicker. They are available in
your coffee of FL Studio. Imagine being taken
on a tour of FLC. That was not, I repeat, not a boring reading
of the owner's manual, but a professional's guided to the features you need to
know in order just to make great music and
not get bogged down in the millions of
features that frankly, you just never going to use. If you want to learn
from someone who's produced over 70 courses for all the major brands in music production and work for the biggest artists
in the world. And just hang out together as we transform your understanding
and above all, your ability to make radio ready tunes in your own
home or projects to yours. Come and join me because after
all, we're making music. I tell my students
this all the time, it's the coolest
Harvey in the world.
2. Overview: Okay, so here we are in
FL Studio and we'll look at all the various pains in various windows
in just a moment. But the first thing that you
really need to kind of wrap your head around when you're
getting into FL Studio, which the original name of
the DAW was Fruity loops. So it was based on
loops or parents. And you'll notice that
on any particular door, you're very familiar with this timeline here that
goes from left to right, from the beginning of your song to the end of your song there. But in FL Studio, we basically work in
either patterns or songs. And patterns are just
really kind of loops that you can bring up over
here and then just drag out over into your
arrangement so that you can either playback either
a selected pattern or if you go over here in song, it will play back the song and all of those patterns
that you put in order. Well, let's start
with the lay of the land of the user interface. Like any particular application, you can see all of your
various menu options up here. We'll get into all
of those and get to know them very well in a while. And then of course you
have your toolbar up here, which has your various
transport options and also the ability to show
or hide various windows. So e.g. this is
viewing the mixer, so click on that and that
will bring up the mixer. You'll note that
whenever you hover over these various buttons
on the left-hand side, we have a hint power. So I'm going to hover over a mixer here and you
can see that it's F9. So either I can click
here or I can hit the F9 key on my keyboard and
show and hide that mixer. Now, when we have these
kind of floating displays, a lot of new people
will bring them up like this and then they'll click somewhere else and they'll go. I just clicked on what the heck happened to all of
these floating docks. Well, here's the way
you can fix that. Let's go back into our
channel rack here. And by the way, I'll explain what a channel
rack is in a moment, but just say e.g. this one, the channel rack here, which displays all of our
instruments that we can record. If we go underneath here and
we can go down to detached. And as long as we
select that now, when we click away from that, that will stay there. And it will just stay anywhere
on the screen or even on multiple screens if you
have multiple displays. The same thing we could do
over here to our mix up, bring up the mixer here, and do the same thing here. And I'm going to
select detached here. And that way when
you click away, these grains will stay here. And then of course you
can maximize them. You can bring them back where they were before or
you can minimize them. All that kind of good stuff. So let's go through some
of these various pains. A browser pain, as
you would imagine, this is a way you can go through various sounds and presets
and things like that. And then you can bring
them into your project. Now, the channel rack is a place where you bring in
your various instruments. So in this example, and I brought this
up from the preset, which is new basic aid.
Oh wait with limiter. Once I brought that up, then that has brought
up an arrow at kick, clap, hi-hat and snare. And if any of you not
familiar with the term eight. Oh wait, that comes from
the TRO, their weight. One of the most
famous drum machines ever made by rolling. Then what we can do
is we can say e.g. and I'll show you how to
do all of this later on. But for this example, I'm just going to make up a
really quick pattern here. Just with eight away Kick. Say the clap is going to be
on the two and the four. And then the hi-hat.
I'm just going to paint that across here. And the snare, I'm going to
put that on 2.4 as well. So with these
instruments that have automatically been brought
over underneath that template, which is called new basic
aid away with limiter. All of these various sounds
I've come across here, I've just dropped in this
very basic pattern here. Once we play that. And we just need
to make sure that we're in the pattern mode here. Once I play that,
you'll notice that these instruments will come up through the
mixer. Here we go. All sounds very robotic
will make some, a lot better patterns from that, but that will give you the idea. Behind the various windows
that are inside FL Studio, various sounds come over
into the channel rack. We can bring up those patterns either on the
channel RAC sequencing here, or we can do them in real time and paint them on a piano rope. There's lots of
ways we can do it. But basically all of
these sounds will then run through the mixer
so that we can hear them. And all of this is
placed within a pattern. We then drag those parents
out into our arrangement, but that's basically the way
to get around FL Studio. Now I said before, as you hover over anything
in the toolbar, you'll see a hint
of what's going on over here on the hint panel, but that's not just
for the toolbar here. If you hover over anything
you can see, say e.g. here I'm hovering
over the volume. It not only tells me
that that's the volume, but it also gives me the
current level of that. Now you can see it's -8.3. So that's a great way if you're just not
sure about anything, just hover over it
and you can see exactly what's going on over
here on the hint pound. And apart from this kind
of this on-demand help, as you hover over
various things. There's a complete help section underneath the
help menu as well. So that kinda gives you a quick overview of what
FL Studio is all about. And please don't freak
out if you haven't understood some of the jargon that I dropped, if
you don't know, a plug-in from a channel
wreck, Don't worry, I will absolutely go
slow and expand on these concepts and
principles as we go along. In fact, we're actually going to break out into a section of the course called
doors, one-on-one. It actually breaks
down exactly what doors or digital audio
workstations do, what all the parts are
and some of the tech talk that will need to
know moving forward. Now, if you've used
doors for years, you might want to skim
through this section. But for you knew these here, especially maybe some of you
who are making the leap from hardware to software listen up.
3. DAWs 101: Okay, there's gonna
be a short video called doors one-on-one. This is basically a primer on exactly what a door dies
inside your computer, whether that be logic, CO1, reason, Pro Tools, Cubase, FL Studio or Ableton and of course
others as well. But basically, what
happens when you load up one of these doors inside your computer for just
a few hundred dollars, you get to do what
we used to do with an entire recording studio that caused lots
and lots of box. Let me prove it to you. So with your favorite door
installed on your computer, you are replacing all of this equipment
back in the old day, we would start off
with a mixer and a multi-track recorder and all the cables that would
go in between that and that was not an insignificant
cost, by the way. But I'm not, I'm not talking
about the specific models, but any particular mix
it back in the day, the least you'd spend is probably a few
thousand dollars and then a few thousand dollars for the multi-track on the
right hand side there. So you'd be in for probably six grand probably on the
five-hundred bucks and cables. And then you could record a track over onto the multi-track recorder
and that's about it. You wouldn't have any effects, you wouldn't have any
other instruments. Let's start adding
up all the effects. Then you have a rack of
all of these effects. And then a rack of, say, all of your guitar amps and you stomp boxes
and all that stuff, as well as your
associated cabinets. If you're going to
start recording some the task and bases as well. So right now, we have
the ability to record basin and guitars with some effects onto a
multi-track recorder. If you then wanted
to add some sense, well then we need to
add those to bring in some sounds like your pianos or your organs or horns or any
other kind of synth sound. And then you'd be
adding things like samplers and a drum machines. So I could conservatively say that everything you see on the right-hand side of
this screen was the, that was the stuff that
I grew up recording on. This little setup
here with one of each would probably be 20
grand. I would imagine. When I say one of each, that's because in
a typical door, you don't just have everything you see on
the right-hand side. It has an inbuilt mix, it has an inbuilt recorded, it has effects, it has
guitar simulators. It has since it has some
Plus as drum machines, has all of this
Incorporated and adore, but it doesn't have just one. You could have as many
instances as you like. In terms of this, like on the right-hand side, you've got to Jupiter
Synth over there. I would save up and
have a one sense. And then if I got bored with that and
wanted another sense, then I'd sell that and I'd
get another set In a door. You can have as many instances
of these as you like. In your typical door, you're going to be recording two different types of tracks. There are other things
like loops and drum, drum tracks and glad that, but basically we have our midi tracks and
our audio tracks. If we think of the midi tracks, they're almost like sheet music. In other words, when
I give you a piece of sheet music,
there's no sound. It's just a flimsy
piece of paper. It's just instructions
to play back. I say a piano. But if you gave it to
someone who was sitting in front of a electric
piano like a roads. Then that performance would be played by the sound of a roads
or the sound of an organ. That's because midi tracks
are just instructions. There's no intrinsic
audio in there. But you compare that
over on the audio side, this is real audience, things like when you plug
your bass guitar and, or your guitar or your microphone
to record some vocals. These are audio tracks. Now let's actually
demonstrate the difference between these midi
tracks and audio tracks. I'm gonna be using
logic in this case, don't get hung up on that
because these subset, this very basic features of midi and audio tracks
will be equally applicable to anything else in your particular whatever
door you're using here. So you can see that
this is a midi track. And I can see that really visit, there's a stark difference
between this and this. This is an audio waveform,
the sexual sound. This is a vocal I recorded. This is a midi track. And if we go back
to the top and we tend to cycle off and plant, you may have everything. Okay, so a very simple song. We have a midi track over here. And when I select that, these are midi notes, the middle note events. So you can move
them up and down. You can move them left and
right, change your velocity. I said before, that's
almost like sheet music. And in fact, in logic, there is a score over here. You can see you can change all these notes just
around any way you like. These are just instructions. They will play back whatever
is selected over here. So e.g. if I went
over here and went to piano and brought
this one up here. Now those same sets
of instructions here, all those midi notes will
now play back this piano. You might have everything. So obviously, midi tracks
are very, very flexible. They're not married to
any particular sound. They just note events that play back whatever
you set up there and they're very
malleable and there's no artifacts when you
move notes around. It, just like changing
the notes on sheet music. Now compare that when we
go over to a vocal here, and we can do various
things over here as well. It's not quite as malleable as a midi note numbers,
midi note event. So let's imagine,
I believe this is. So let's imagine that I
wanted to move this here. That glad Pat, I can slide that across and analysis
of us in that. So glad you're Vin. And conversely, if I
recorded that way, you can hear that That's
a little bit late. I can bring that back, so it's right on the money. So glad that's a little bit
early, but you get the idea. You want to scooch that around until you get the
perfect timing. Now, it's not unlimited here. If you were to drag
this over here, you'll get some artifacts. Have a listen to that. So it's not as infinitely
malleable as midi tracks. But however, if you have, if you're phrasing is a little
late or a little early, you can mess with it
in audio tracks here. And then you can also
go into pitch here. Actually, let me just undo
that movement that I just did. Now when we go into
this flex pitch. Now we can move notes. Now. So now the further you get
away from the original pitch, you will start getting
some of those artifacts. But if you, most
of the time you're not gonna be transposing
things as me just undo that. But a lot of time. Finally, nudging x number of
cents to get that in pitch. So that's our track side here. But I said before that your typical door also
replaces your mixer. So down the bottom here, we have a mixer and it may
not look exactly like some of the mixes you've
been used to if you're using typical analog mixes, but you'll certainly recognize the bottom part
here where you have your levels and also you have your parents so we
can adjust them. I have everything. And obviously adjust
the master as well. And you have your typical mutes. And so as there now, on a typical mixer,
you normally have EQ knobs on most doors. When you click on E key, you will get
something coming up. A look, looks a
little bit like this, and this is where you can
actually curve your EQ. You can either do that
graphically or down here, narrow and widen the queue and there's typically some
factory defaults down here. So in this case we're
keyboards here. Let's go to a refresh roads. And you can see that's bumped up some low end and then taken
out some of the low mids. And it's actually a
pretty aggressively EQ. But let's have a listen to that. You might have. So that's how you set up EQ. You can also set up
compression as well. But we talked about effects. Normally you'd have a
rack full of effects. And typically on most doors you have these little
blocks right here where you can drop in any particular type
of effects you like. So let's imagine we're going
through here and reverb. And we're gonna go
with this one here. So now that Rhodes
is going to be going through this reverse merger when actually I'm going
to loop that around. So let's have a listen. Again. You can have some presets here. So all of your effects
anomaly placed in line. They're almost like
insert effects in the old days when you are, you're dealing with
an analog mixer. Now, if you wanna do set up your effects
in a different way, then we can use loops. Now, affects loops are
normally used in mixes and there should be
something like an ox and you'll normally see a
bunch of knobs up here. Well, in most doors that
you'll go through here, and then you'll just actually
click through and say, I want to send out
on bus number one. Now, look what happens
down in the mixer. As soon as I select this, it's made up a new auxiliary
channel that is being fed from that bus one and then
going out that Stereo Out. Let me name missile
something a little bit more meaningful
than just Orcs one, we're going to name that reverb. Now, right now, as
we tweak this knob, this is gonna be sending
a varying amount of this Rhodes part
out through here, which then goes out to
the stereo out here. Do you see you see
the flow here. This is a varying amount
feeding out bus one. And then this auxiliary channel here is being fed by bus one. So this is going up here, through here then to the stereo out and the wave got us up. Now, it's actually
doing nothing, would actually need to add
some effects on this order. So I'll go down here and I'll go reverb and we'll
go steroids here. Great. So let me
just close that out. So do you see the flown out bus? This first channel, which
is my electric piano, is going through bus one, which is feeding this. We have some reverb here. And so now when we
tweak this up and down, we'll be sending a
variable portions of this roads out to this and we should be
hearing some reverb. Let's have a listen. You might have within me, so I'm so glad I could do the
same thing with my vocal. Notice that that's been
conveniently labeled. Bus one is going out to revert. And then now if I
un-solo that you might have been my line. Now you can also, if you set up your door in
a particular way, you can automate almost
anything in your door. So if I go back to the top here, Let's write this book, my hair and I'm so glad. And we can play that back. You may have. I'm so glad. And that's not just restricted to just
automating the volume. You can automate the bus and you could automate
almost anything. Then once you have all
of your tracks in here, we have midi tracks, audio
tracks, even drum loops. And we've set up a mixer
exactly the way we want it. Maybe we've added some
automation then we did. All we need to do is just
go to the top of the song, play that back and
check our mix. Easy to take life for granted. So this project lives
inside of your computer. No one's going to hear
it unless they come over and you press play
here on your computer. You want to get this out
into the wild, right? And the way you do that on most DAWs is you will
bounce that out. In logic. It's just a Command D. And then what that
will do is make you a stereo file either
in a PCM format, like a high-quality
WAV or AIFF file, or an MP3 file. And then you can share
that with a world that's a lightning round in terms of understanding how doors work. And if you want to get up to
speed on your favorite door, then go ahead and check out our training at
proteome exp.com.
4. Setting up FL Studio: Okay, so now that
we have kinda get up to speed with what
your typical door does, Let's get set up with fl
Studio right here now, like any door, you're going
to need a couple of things. And i 0 box or audio
interface which gets your sound in and
out of your computer. E.g. I. Had this IO box right here, or audio interface that connects via USB and gives
me audio inputs on the front here to record into FL Studio or any other audio
application for that matter. And then on the
rear panel we have audio outputs that
feed these monitors, feed these minuses right here. I also have a
keyboard controller here that hooks up
via USB as well, which does a couple of things. Obviously it's a keyboard
so I can play in my piano was synth pads are also
some drum parts up here, but it also allows me to
start and stop and control. And also just record from
the front panel instead of mousing around the screen. We also then have some
mix of failures up here. And that will allow us to remotely mix and
also mute parts. The really neat thing
about the, this nectar, nectar T6 is it has really
tight integration with FLC Oh, so that you can switch
tracks, select patches, and do some fairly
in-depth editing of the virtual instruments with feedback of what
those parameters and those parameters names are
up there on the screen. Once you get used to
this kind of workflow, I find myself barely
reaching for the mouse. It's very, very handy. In most circumstances you
will have to peripherals and the IO interface and
a keyboard controller. And you'll need to set those up. Let's start at the top and
set these up with fl Studio. First things first, let's
set up our audio interface. We've gotten new option here, and we'll go into
audio settings that will take us
directly to the tab, the Audio tab right here, and here's where you
decide what audio interface you may have
multiple USB audio interfaces. Right now I'm using
a Beringia euphoria, which is the AUMC for, for HD. And you can see that
that will go up to 192 and you can decide what sample rate
you'll set it up here. So once you've settled up here, that will allow you to use inputs and outputs
of that device. In other words, you better
plug your microphone is in the front panel and then also the outputs will go out to your, to your speakers. And if you click down here, you can see a number of different interfaces
and choices right here. So with the UMC for, for HD set up, now we can use that
audio interface, will hear everything
that's coming out of FL Studio through that
interface into where speakers. And then we can plug various
things into that interface, which will turn up in FL Studio. Now, unlike the buffer length, this brings up the
subject of latency. Basically, latency
is how long it takes a signal to go through
that audio interface. And also here, this
is in samples here. And this will show you how many milliseconds that will be now, ten milliseconds seems like
a very short amount of time. But if you are trying to record things
right in the groove, if you have a longer 30
or something like that, things can really
get out of time. So you might be thinking, Great, Let me put it right
down to here, so I'll have no latency at all. Trouble is that if you have any computers that are more
than just a few years old, you your computer might
start to choke and have a hard time being able to
pass all that audio through. So the trick is you want
to get this as short as possible without
getting kinda clicks and pops and things like that. So I'm just going
to leave it there. Around 11 milliseconds
will be fine. Once you get past. Certainly. You don't want to
be going around her milliseconds during my
dad's a tenth of a second, you'll absolutely it'll be very hard for you to sing
in time and all that stuff. So get it as, as short as possible. When you're recording. By the way, then when you start recording a
bunch of tracks here and your computer has to do a lot of playback later on. So if you're mixing, you can afford to bring this out here because
it really doesn't matter what the delay
is when you are mixing. The rule of thumb is that
when you're recording, you want this as shortest possible without
clicks and pops. And then when you're mixing, you can afford to
bring it out there. And really not worried about that and give your computer
a lot of breathing room. So I'm gonna leave this back to about where it was, right there. Okay, we've got an
audio interface set up. Let's look at Midi
settings here, underneath options
Midi settings. You notice it takes us basically the same settings
that we were before, but it drops us right
In this mini page, will over at audio, setting up our audio interface. Now we're ever in midi here. All of your midi interfaces at various controllers
will come up here. If they are not here, this go ahead and click on Refresh device list here and you can see I have a panorama T6. And it comes back, even
though it's one control, this kinda various modes of that controller that
will come up here. And all I need to do is
go underneath the input here and select each
one and enable that. And I'll go down
to the next one, enable that, enable that. And again, this
will be different depending on what
control you have. But basically, all
we need to do is just to enable all
of these guys, I'm going to go ahead and close that and bring up
a new instrument. This is a no, we haven't
looked at this yet, but this is kind of a quick way underneath the channel rack will just bring up
a new instrument and I'm just going to
bring up a synth here. And so now we have a synth here. And I should get a play
that from my controller. Great. So we have our audio
interface setup and enmity interface set up. Now we've seen before
up here on the toolbar. Not only can we bring those up just by
selecting them here, see what the, the keyboard
shortcut is there. But if we write e.g. this is a metronome, we're going to turn
on that click or not. If we were to turn that
on, if we right-click, then you can see various options for that and that
will be unique to whatever you bring up in
the toolbar right here. Let me just go ahead and
turn it off here and we'll begin to look
at our Browse panel. Now the Browse panel is
a way to browse through. It loops through a mix of
presets, Channel Presets. I mean, all of
these you can bring up and drag into your project. Fl Studio is really adept in
the drag and drop method. You can either look at
everything that's available in the browser or just what's inside your current
project here. Or you can look at
various plugins. So e.g. I. Mean, these are all the plugins
that are in here. Let's have some fun here. Let's drag out fruity scratches. So basically what you do
underneath the browse here, we're in our plugin
database here. I can drag that out here
into Add channel RAC. Here's where all of our instruments come up
and you can see that we have kind of an approximation
of a turntable here, which we could load
up with a sound. And we do that back here. We'll go back here, and we'll go underneath
our packs and our loops. Now we have a bunch of loops
that we can drag into here. You can see that the
Browse panel is, I mean, it has so
much stuff in there, from various plugins to loops to drum sounds,
all of this stuff, it would absolutely
behoove you to go through and just play
through some of this stuff. But the workflows like this, we just dragged
over a, a plugin. Remember that was
from over here. We'd drag that over
into a shallow rack. And now we're going to drag
over a loop into this plugin. And here's what we can do. Play it forwards, backwards, or you can just scratch it
back and back and forth. So this is not, I don't wanna get too
deep in the weeds here, understanding how to
use pretty scratchy, but I'm just using it
as an example of how to use the browser and drag
various things across here. And it may not even be sounds. If you go across here, like mix-up presets here. What are all these? Well, these are
presets of your mix. If we go over here
to view a mixer, and again, we won't
go into the weeds. Here will learn about the
mixer in its own section. But everybody's used
a mixer, right? You've got your volume and pan and all that sort of stuff, but there are lots of little plugins that
you can bring up. But by using the
browser over here, you can bring over presets and drag them right
into the mixes. So let's have a look
here, guitar stuff. So I'm assuming this is a bunch of plug-ins that will be great, figured out like distortions and various things like that. So all we need to do
is just drag that over to any of these
channels in the mixer. And you can see there's a bunch of plugins that have been brought up that
is just perfect. In this example. For guitars. I feel like we've kinda jumped
around a little bit here. But basically the whole idea, I just wanted to show you what these various pay pains do. The browser obviously
is a way to browse through lots
of different stuff. Everything from
mix of presets to various samples and loops
and things like that. And then we can drag them
into a channel rack. And this whole idea of the
channel Req is here's where you assemble all of your
various instruments, which then you record
into patterns. And those patterns can be
placed in arrangements. And all of those
sounds come through. A mixer will learn all about how to actually record
in the next section.
5. Recording (part 1): Cool. We are all set up
and ready to go. Let's start to capture some
of your ideas into FLC. Now, you can record
vocals through a connected Mike either through the audio
interface right here. We could even use
USB mics as well. You can record guitars and bases directly into the
audio interface right here. And you can record
software instruments, which are basically midi tracks, where you record your
performances from a connected keyboard
controller here. You can even record external
midi tracks if you like. So that recorded a performance
plays an external sense. That would need to come back, but an audio interface as well. So let's take a look. Okay, we can actually
start recording here. You're getting
excited about this. Let's go up a new file here. And you can bring
up a new project. Either the default here, which is the basic
airway with limits 0, which will populate
the channel rack with a kick, clap, hi-hat, and snare from a TR eight away, probably one of the most
famous drum machines ever. And you can either bring up a project default like that or you can go up underneath here
and go New from Template. And there are a bunch
of different kind of categories of the various
projects that you can bring up. And there's a full description of exactly what's going on. And that will pre-populate
your channel rack and do all sorts of things with a mixer
and things like that. I'm just gonna go ahead
and start out with a new basic aid
away with limiter. A big part thing I've discussed
this earlier, earlier on, a big part of FL Studio
is the whole idea or the paradigm that we're
recording into patterns. And then those patterns, let me just get this out
of the way right here. Then those patterns
get dragged over into our arrangement here and
your painters across here. But patterns are not
really your song. I mean, I guess you could make a song out of just one pattern. But a better way to do it is populate this with
a whole bunch of different patterns which then get dragged out into
our arrangement. So let's get started with our first pattern and
we're going to use the actual step sequencer that's inside this channel rack. We have mentioned before the
channel Req is a place to place all of their instruments which we record into
these patterns. But it's not only a
place to just store these instruments and be able to select each of
these instruments. It's also a place where we can use this very handy
step sequencer, which is very nostalgic for me because almost every drum
machine I grew up with, I had a lot of TR, drum machines from Rohan. And frankly, most
drum machines in the '80s and '90s had a set of these buttons along
the front panel which allow you to turn on and off each of these steps
for this particular sound, for this kick drum here. If these are 16th notes, then these would
be quarter notes. If you go across here. So if you wanted to foreign
the full floor pattern, you would just click right through here and these
different colors help you navigate through here and make sure you're
hitting the right buttons. So now with the
pattern set up here, you can click up here, or you can just hit the
space bar and have a listen. Let's make this a little
bit more interesting. Now we'll do the same
thing with the clap here. Now, if these are
all 16th notes, these are quarter notes. And if you know anything
about programming drums, you'll be wanting
to have your claps on the two and the four, right? So you would do that
underneath here. This isn't, this is
a quarter note one, this is coordinate
to I want that. I don't want three, I want four. So now with that, we should have a four on the floor with a little
embellishment here, and then the two and
the floor on the clip. Let's have a listen. It's that easy. Now we go across
the hi-hat and if this is gonna be a
16th note pattern, we can just drag, you can either click on these one-by-one or you can
just drag across. And then you'll have
a 16th note pattern. If you left-click on
any of these steps, you'll be adding a, in this case, a 16th note. If you right-click, you'll
be turning them off. So if you wanted to turn
off every second one, you would just right-click
every second one. Let me just turn them
all back on again. So now we should have a
very robotic drum pattern. Let's have a listen. Okay, how are we going to then start to massage
this a little bit, give a little bit
more of a human feel. We do this up underneath
here under our graph editor. So I'll click on that. And you can see that
we can massage. We can do things like notes. Velocity panned all
of these ones here. Let's go over the
velocity here and you can see why this is so robotic because all of these notes came in at the exact
same velocity. So to make this
shadow a bit more, what we can do is go to
every second one and just paint in these velocities. So now it'll be velocity up
here and then alternating. And let's have a listen to that. Still pretty robotic, but that, that went a long way to change. What's going on. Let's go ahead and close
that graph editor again. And we'll do the same
thing with a snare. And we'll put that on 2.4 here, open up our graph editor. And instead of being on
philosophy, it's got a note. And you can see that it defaults
to being C5 right here. How about if we
pitched up that snare drum here and then pitch
down the one here, Let's have a listen.
Just turn off. Sorry, let me turn off. So you can hear
that change there. That's because we
changed the note there. Keep in mind that if you want to see what's going on down here, you need to select the
track that you're working. You're working
with a select that actual instrument right there. Then you might have
noticed that this is just one measure of
16 steps right there, and that is selected
up underneath here. In fact, let me
just drag this out and you'll notice that
as I drag this out, you can see this
will go out forever. But this is grayed out. That's because this is
set only to 16 steps. You can change that if you
want that to be two measures, you would set that to 32. Let's go ahead and
put that back to just 21616 measures there. And I'll drag this back
so we can see that they're also in terms of
what's going on up here. You can see that you can play this pattern right from here. You can also set up a swing. And a swing basically gives, it gives the pattern a swing. All of these steps here are exactly the same
time between them. So these are all
perfect 16th notes. But if you want to swing every second note
to be basically scooting every
second note a little closer to its
counterpart right here. And here's what it sounds like. So if you're under the
Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, you could be doing stuff
like that or build. All those folks
around there were absolutely using
swing our whole lot. Okay, let's add something with a pitch will go up
underneath here. There's so many cents, we'll look at that a
little bit later on. But for right now, let's just
go down here at BU base. And then now with Bu base here, I could just drop in, say quarter notes here. Let's have a listen. I can go underneath the
graph editor and you can see that if I'm
down here on note, I could go say down here and then up there.
So it'd be good. Don't don't, don't you don't
have to do it up here. You could also do it up here. So if I was to
paint across here, and of course you can
do the same thing with velocity and all of
that good stuff. We're going to
demonstrate how to record in the piano roll. And to do that, I've
gone ahead and gotten a File and New from Template
and I've selected empty. There's absolutely nothing in
here except a sampler, um, and then you could drag, if I went over to here, we could go through
the various packs and drag things
into that sample. I don't wanna do that right now. Let me bring up a
sense of I'll go down here and I'll hit citrus. And you can go
through the presets. Of course, I'll just
leave it at the default there and I'll close that. And in fact, I'll right-click on the sampler and delete that. So I'm just left
with citrus here. Now remember in
this channel rack there was a bunch
of buttons here. If we were recording drums, since we're recording
a synth here, what we can do is we
can just click that and that will open
up a piano roll. We can actually get that
from a few different places. If I was to close that, I right-click here, I can
go to piano roll there. I could also bring out
piano roll from up here as well and even use
this shortcut F7. No matter how you get to it, you'll get to your piano roll. And if you've used doors before, you'd be pretty familiar
with how piano rolls work. Generally, if you
know what I mean. However, the piano roll in FL Studio is considered
to be one of the best, if not the best piano
roll editor is out there. So with this open up, you can preview the sound up
on the left-hand side here. And you can draw
and notes because we have this setup to draw. You can paint notes and mute notes and all
that kinda stuff. But we'll just start
off with draw here. Right at the beginning. I could just click in here
and basically just drop in a bunch of notes using the left click on my mouse. If you right-click on the mouse, you can delete anything
that you have put in. And then of course, if
you hover over this, you can change the
duration of that. And once you've changed
the duration of a note, then any new node will take
on that same duration. So you can see that
now they're all the same duration right there. Let me right-click these
and get rid of them. So you can see that you
can change the length of the note on the
left-hand side. And you can move it
from left and right. You can move it up and
down the staff as well. You might think you could change the length
from the left-hand side. By default, FL Studio doesn't
allow you to do that. But if we were to go up
here underneath edit, you can see allow
resizing from left. And now you can re-size the note from the
left-hand side as well. Now let's look at the
painting options. We have a paintbrush right here, and then also our paint
in drum sequencer mode. Let's just go to the
very first one here. This will allow you to paint
in fairly cause strokes. Let me just undo that and then look in the drum
sequence of mode here. And this will work in conjunction with your
snap to settings here to get very
fine resolution. And even farther than that, if you start going say down to say half-step or
something like that, then you'll notice that this
will be very, very fun. This is perfect for painting
in things like hi-hat roles. Okay, So we've learned how
to just drop in notes, we can move it all around, but everything's just
an individual note. If we wanted to
put it in chords, then obviously we would stack
them on top of each other. So that would be a C.
Let's drop in a third, say a fifth there. So we'd have a
major chord, right? And of course we could
make that a minor by flattening that third. Now, that's a way that we can set up chords and you
can absolutely do that. But there's a very
innovative thing inside FL Studio called
step the stamp tool. And so what I'm gonna do, I'm going to right-click all
of these to get rid of this. And up here, we'll go ahead
and click on stamp tool. And here's where you can
drop in scales or chords. I'm going to bring in, say, a minus seventh. Now that I've selected that, if I go back here and just
click down here on C5, it won't put it
in a single note. It'll put in an entire
minus seventh chord and all sound like this. Very cool. So with that stamp tool, whatever chords you select from up here that will
drop them in this. So you might be thinking, Great, I'm gonna sell off the song
of the C minor seventh. Then let me just hit it
again here on the D. And you'd be like, what
the heck happened. I thought I was
stamping in courts. Well, the default in FL Studio
is to only do that once. And then you select
a new chord and then stamp it in again and then
another chord and stamping. And again, if you want
to put it in a bunch of, say, minus seven, e.g. I. Would de-select this and now go back to here and
go to minus 7th. I'm going to right-click
this to delete this and now go D minor seventh, then C minor seventh, and then D minor seventh. It's that quick to
drop in chords. Now imagine that I dropped
in some chords here, and I'm going to change
the duration of that. And then I'm going to drop
in another set of courts. And these gonna be a bit longer. This other set of chords, I gonna be way shorter. Then. Maybe another set
of chords right here, and they're going to
be this length here. Imagine I wanted to have
these flow into each other. So this is what they
sound like right now. And I wanted to make
that more legato. So what I'll do
is I would change the length of these so they
would flow into each other. Or there's a fire
easy way to do this. If I hit Command a or Control a on a PC to select
all the notes. And then I'll go up
here in my tools here and go quick legato and boom. They all flow into the
notes just after them. So now it sounds like this. Now let's imagine
we're going to draw it in a bunch of notes here. We want to do some editing
to a number of these notes. Of course, if you hold down Command a or Control a on a PC, then you will select
all of your notes and then you can make
some adjustments to that. If you went back to our
draw tall here, say e.g. you can adjust the
length of that. And also if you hold down Alt, you can move the
mouse up and down. You can adjust the
velocities of that. Then this case we're doing
that for every note here. If we, whoops, let me undo that. If we wanted to select
just a few of these nodes, then here's how we would do it. All we need to do is
hold down command and we can drag over
a number of nodes. Or if we hold down
Shift and Command. And of course every
time I say command, that would be shift and control for people on Windows computers. And once you've done that, then I could do things like, sorry, once I select them, then I could change
the length of that. And if I hold down
Alt or Option on a option on a Mac or Alt on a PC and move
the mouse up and down, I would just be adjusting the velocity of just
those selected notes. So again, if you want to
select any of these notes, we can use the Control or Command or Control a to
select all of the notes. Or you can use the command and drag over
a number of those notes. Or if you shift
and command again, or Shift or Control on Windows, then you can select
non-adjacent notes and then make those changes
just by being in the drawer, adjusting it back-and-forth,
moving them up and down. Or by holding down Option
or Alt on a window. And moving up and down. Your mouse is scrolling up and down your mouse and
you'll be adjusting all those velocities for those those only
those selected notes. Like I mentioned, we wanted
to copy and paste and just move some of
these notes around. What we've known how to move
various notes around here. But let's imagine we
want to copy and paste. So obviously you could use
the Select tool up here. Or an easy way to
do that is just hold down Command on a Mac or Control on a PC and just drag over the notes
that you want to copy. And then once you've done that, we can go the long
way is to go up underneath here and go
edit here and copy. Or you can see,
here's the shortcut. On a PC. It's on a Mac, it's Command and C. On a PC it's Control and C.
And so we just copy that. And then we can go
ahead and paste, which would be control. Let's just go look
at it back here. We can paste that. And so you can see that
while that still selected, we can drag that out to exactly
where we want that to be. So now we have that
same chord progression. And the last part of
it copied over to a later point within that,
within that pattern. Now by the way,
this has moved on the outside of the
length of this pattern. So I would want to set that
up to be a little bit longer. In fact, let's imagine
we wanted that to be, say that'd be 30 to 64. And that would bring up, say, for a four measure pattern. So let's have a listen to that. As easy as that, you can certainly do
it underneath here, but really get to know
these shortcuts yet. And by the way, they're the
same because shortcuts you use when you're copying pasting in an email
and things like that. So they're pretty
easy to understand. Again, measurement,
we've fallen so much in love with the stamp tool here, and we've got only
one checked off. So therefore we can do
a series of chords. And I'm gonna do
minor ninth and have a listen to that. Cool. And then I'm back here. Let's imagine that
I'm happy with that, but it's a little robotic
in terms of its timing. Let's imagine if I went and hit Command a or
Control a on a PC. And with all of those
notes selected, I'm going to go up
here into my tools and I am going to
strum these chords. Now you notice
that, that instead of them being run on
top of each other now spaced out temporarily
in time, right. And the strength of
that we can dial in. If that's at zero, then basically everything will
play on top of each other. But if we're just, just
strum that out a little bit, just like a guitar. I mean, you don't play it all the strings at
exactly the same time. You strum across the strings. And this will give this
a more of a human feel. Let's have a listen to this now. Might be a little bit too much. And we can even adjust
the velocities there. Of course, you can mess around
this as much as you like. And then once you're
happy with that, then you can go ahead
and hit Accept, and those changes will be made. Let's go ahead and undo
those strum changes by holding down Command
Z or Control Z. And now we've gone back to
the straight timing here. Another tool I'd love to show you about is
the arpeggiator. And what this will allow you to do is it will break all of those chords into
arpeggiated notes. Have a listen to this. And you can adjust
the range of that. You can change the
timing of that. There's also a bunch
of patterns up here, a lot of patterns. So let's go through who went through here
to trance to now. So many things to do with your pattern once
they have been recorded, you can mess around them
with this arpeggiator. In fact, a tool that's
fairly close to this is also the riff machine. Let's imagine that I put in
four whole notes right here, all the same pitch. So this is gonna be the
root of this pattern. Absolutely nothing
is happening here, but with underneath AT tools here we can go to arithmetic. And you notice that
something has changed. All of a sudden, it has gone a randomized the progression. Now this is only stepping
out to two here. We had four measures, so I'll go here. You can randomize that. Now. Remember, I just put
in for whole notes, which was just that C5 and all a sudden we have a brand
new progression. This is pretty busy. So let me go back here. And let me go to say H here. Let's have a listen to that. So all of a sudden we have a brand new kind of
progression to start with. Remember, we went
just all C's and now we have a progression
that has been suggested. Then we can go over to
here to add chords. And now let's have
a listen to it. Or even an arpeggiated. So notice that it's
not just suggested those arpeggiator has parts, but also you can see the
duration that has changed. And out of just
four whole notes, we now have some great ideas
to start on a new pattern. Now let's see how
we can record drums in the piano roll or
go underneath here. And we will select fpc, not MPC, but if PC. And you can go through the
various presets right here, this first one will be fine and I'll go
ahead and click in here to open up our
piano roll for the HPC. And you'll notice that all of these pads here, our
velocity sensitive. In other words, I
press up the top, it's not that loud. The further down I go, the louder that velocity
will be on the piano roll. Instead of this being notes, these are actually the names of these various pads here and this is touch-sensitive as well. You click over here, it's
quiet the further you go, right that louder, that will become just like we saw before. You can then just
start dropping in. So you kick drum. Let's imagine, I want to
have this at full velocity. So now we have the
first kick drum. And I'm going to do
four on the floor here. Because I'd set up my
velocity is maximum. Every new node comes in at that, at that new maximum. And then I'll do the snare
drum on the two and the four. Instead of four on the floor, me do it alternating. So I'm going to
right-click on these. So now we should have
a drop it in there. No. That would be good. As we've seen before with the painter. I'm gonna do the drum machine here and on the closed hi-hat, I'm going to just drop in all of these 16th notes and
let's have a listen. Again, very, very robotic. Now, I could go in
here using the Command or Control on PC and
select every second one. But there's a lot
better way to do that. If I go up underneath
here to select, and I'm going to select
just the odd ones. So now you can see that only the odd ones
are select here. And if I hold down Option on Mac or Alt on
PC, we saw this before. You can mouse up and down. And you can see we can
adjust the levels of those alternate
selected the high hats. And now I have a listen
to it. Much better. Now, if you don't want to paint all of these parts in and you don't fancy yourself as
someone who programs drums, then you can go over
here to the FTC and on the right-hand side here
you can see that we have a ton of particular
patterns all set up here. And you can go, I mean, there's a ton of them here. But if you were to select
the first one here, then as you scroll to
the left and the right, you can see it changing
within the Piano Roll. Let's have a listen
to us few of them. Let's set this up to being 16. So this can loop around, well, so obviously you
can go back here and you can adjust
these patterns. But boy, it makes
it so much better when you have all
of these patterns that you can just
bring in to kinda kick-start your imagination in terms of your drum patterns. Now I've brought
up a pattern here. I like this one
because it's 2 m long. I've gone ahead and set up
the channel rack here to show those 32 steps. And so with all of that, I can then add a base pattern. By the way, I'll show you how to real-time drums
in just a moment, or you just record in
real-time from a keyboard. Note that you can
play from here, but you can also play here from your keyboard
or even the pads here. So if you are, I'm left-handed. So after this cross edit, so you can play from
here, record into your, into your tracks right
now I'm just using one of these preset patterns. And now in fact, let me just close this out. I'm going to add a synth pedal. Use the same synth here. Let me just bring this over
and just do a bass part. I'm going to select some
of the presets here. I think I like this one here. Now. Cool, Let's go ahead
and record that in. And how I'm going
to record that in. I'm gonna do a count off. I don't need a metronome here. And would that count off set up? I'll hit record. Now, what are you
going to record? I'm going to record
notes and automation or you could do everything.
That should be fine. So now I'm going
to record on to a, onto this same selected pattern. And when I hit play here, I'll be given a count off and I'll just drop in
all base pattern. Okay, let me stop that. I'll disable that record and
now let's have a listen. And that just loops
around and around. You'll note that I have all
of my drum parts down here. And then this stuff is
kind of in grayed out. These are actually a bass part. This is the bass part
that I just dropped in, which was cc, cc. And then down here too,
what would that be? G. And if you think you could start to edit those
things, well, guess what? I am on the HPC part
of this pattern. So therefore, anything I do in terms of trying
to grab and notice that that won't work
because I'm just actually make new notes on this fpc. So let me right-click those
and get rid of those. How would I actually
be able to get into that base part
that I just recorded? What you can see right up here. You can go down here
and now I'm looking at the bass part and you can
see kind of in a grayed out, you can see add drum
pants down here. Now, if you want to see these and actually even
edit them in here, It's all done
underneath the view. So we'll go up here underneath
view here you can see that you can have the ghost
channels enabled or disabled. Since I click on that, boom, all the drums go away,
they're still there. We'd go up underneath here. And then so now we look at our drum part or we
look at our base part. But if we want to see those again, Let's
go underneath here. We'll go down here
to Goes Charles. And actually let me just
go over here to the drum. So now we can see our base part, but we can't edit it. Like I said before, if you
start clicking here uterus be adding things to drum part here. So we'll go underneath you. And then you can go editable. Now, when you hover
over this, now, I can, I can change that in time or
I can change the pitch.
6. Recording (part 2): Okay, this is getting
fun. Let's add a synth part will go
down here to as citrus. And I'm going to go through
the presets or want to pad, what's the one that I was
looking at before heaven? I really like having
here we go. Sounds good. Now once you get into this, you can make any changes you'd
like to that synth part. But once you've brought up the sound that you want
and tweak it if you like, you can go ahead
and close it out. Then once this is
selected down here, I'm going to be recording
heaven part as synth part. So same way we did before. We've got a count off here. We will record enable, we will do notes and automation. And here we go. Okay, We'll stop that, will take that off and have a listen. Okay. And if we want to
have a look at that, just like we did before, we will just select it here. It's up here. Good. Okay. Three parts recorded. So obviously if we
messed up any notes, you could move it any
particular note up and down. And of course you can do it from left to right if you want
to get multiple notes up, we said before, hold down
Command or Control on Windows. And then you can drag across here and say you want
to move these guys, but see what's going on here. We're being forced with
this grid up here. Now, if you wanted to just scooch these just a
little bit to the left, a little bit to the right. You won't be able to do
it while this is up here, you can either set that to none or you can
temporarily turn that off. Let me just click on this here. Again, we're trying to move it. It's snapping to that. If you hold down Option
or Alt on Windows, you can drag things around and or temporarily
turn that grid off so you can adjust your timing just exactly
where you want it to do. And of course, if you
want to quantize, then let me go ahead say hit Command a and select
all those notes there. I can go underneath the
tools here and either go quick quantize or I
can go quantize here. Okay, so now let's
look at quantize. Here. You can adjust
the start times. Look at the start times. Here. If you put that on Macs, that will go right to all
those beat divisions there. And if you don't want that, if you just want to scooch
things towards that, you can adjust that start time. You can do the same thing
with the duration here. And if you don't want that, you can leave that duration. And that way when you're
moving things around, it won't change the
duration of the note, it will just change it and quantize just the
beginning of these notes. Now obviously you will need to accept any of those changes. So you can basically
audition them while this window is open. And you can reset it, go back to exactly
the way you were. Or if you make any changes
you would need to hit except to actually make
those quantize changing. Don't forget you have a bunch of quantized presets
up here as well. So now we have a pattern
that we can play back and turn each of these paths off or
we can solve them. Now I said before that
the paradigm that FL Studio works underneath is a bunch of patterns down here, which we can then drag
over to our arrangements. So with this tool selected here, I can just drag this out and everything is
brought up here. You can, I mentioned
before there's a two measure pattern
here and then I could do the same thing over here. Or I could let me just
scooch that backup there. Let me just undo that, both of those or you can hit the paint tool
here and just say, Okay, I'm just going to bring a bunch of those
patterns out here. So that doesn't really help
us because unless we want a song with that pattern does
going over and over again, we'd want to do something a
little bit different here. So let me go ahead and
Control Z will undo that. And I want to split this pattern into all of
these different parts. So we'll right-click over here and we will split by channel. And then boom, straight
away we have the fpc. So if I was selecting that just the drums or just the
bass part or just having. And of course, if
you had a bunch of instruments here and
that was split out, they'd all be down here. And now here's where the fun is. You can grab the first one here with the paint tool and
say, You know what? I just want to have a bunch
of those drums out here. And then the bass part dropping in after, say, two measures. And then, yeah, I'll
do that in heaven. Let me drop that in
just after that. And then maybe one
of these I want to pull out so I can right-click on that,
right-click on that. And we have the kind of the
bare bones of an arrangement. Let's see this from the top. Whoops, I'm in
pattern mode and need to be in song mode. Here we go. Just starting out with drums
and the bass should come up. Any moment. Drums and bass will
continue the simple drop in. Thanks for dropout. So just with those
few things that we've learned in terms of
making a pattern, adding the various parts that we're going to record
in the channel rack, selecting their, recording
them into a pattern. And then if we like, we can break that pattern out by the parts and then paint them all out
into an arrangement. That's really the nuts
and bolts FL Studio. We now have the
bones of our song. Remember this all started out
with just a single pattern, which we broke out into
these separate parts, painting them out
onto an arrangement. And now we're going to
record an audio track alongside all of these patterns that kinda go in and out
of that arrangement. And the way we do that
is an eighth plus here, we're going to put
in an audio clip. Now, you might be thinking what the heck happened to
all of our paths. There were three
other parts here. Well, that's because everything is neatly grouped
underneath here. If you want to see all of them, just go ahead and click on all and you're back
to where you are. So we now have an audio clip. Let's go ahead and record that. You'll be given a choice of
what you want to record. I want to record audio into the playlist as an audio clips. So while these old
pop in and out, this will be a linear
track that will record next to all of these. So let me do that. That will automatically
open up the mixer and let me just set
that to none right now. Whoops, and stop that from recording that, let me
go back to the top. So here's where you set
up your audio interface. If you have a simple
audio interface like maybe a scar or
something like that, then that might have
one or two inputs. If you have a much
more complete, um, or, or complex audio interface, if you clicked on this, it might have eight inputs or even more. Your job is to decide where your audio input is coming in. So you've got a microphone or guitar coming into
any particular input. You just need to select
that input right here. Now, I'm using a screen
recording programs. So it's going to be a
little bit different here, but just suffice to say, this is where you set your audio interface and decide which input you're
going to be using. I'm going to use
this one right here. And I think we're ready to go. So let's hit play. Now this tune started out
with just a single pattern. But now the cool part
is being laid out. Wow, those lyrics are awesome. Let me turn that back off. I'll put that back to
none and I'll close out the mixer now let's
play that from the top. I shall turn record off.
Play that from the top. Now started out with
just a single pattern. So you can see now
that we have that, that part, we could slide that back around with use
any of the tools here, maybe the slice here, I could just slice
along here and then go back here and then move that, scoot
that back-and-forth. We now have a linear
part living right next to all of these
painted in pattern parts. Okay, let's look at vocal camping and vocal
comping is a way to composite a number of different vocal tracks and the best parts of them
to put them together. So imagine if you record, say, an intro here. And it was eight measures long, and you recorded that part, but then you'd record
the exact same part here and the exact
same part here. And then you are
able to shop in.
7. Editing: Okay, so we have all of
our tracks recorded. We have a full set of
editing tools to mess with. You all have different
tools depending on what tracks you're working on. Let's actually look
at the basics first. Okay, now, you'll note that
we've looked at some of these edits before when we were recording into
our piano robot. Since this is the
dedicated a portion of the course talking
about editing, Let's just go by way of review, having a look at this and saying some extra tips and
tricks as we go. As you can see, this is a drum pattern. So you can see that
inside this piano roll, we're not looking at CDE, we're looking at these
various dedicated drum sounds so that we
can paint them out. And if we wanted to edit them, we could do the first
way of selection, which would be just Command or Control a and that will
select everything. If you don't want to
select everything, just double-click to stop
here and then just go back. And then we could actually use the command, hold that down. And then we can drag
over a number of notes that we want to edit. If we wanted to select
any non-contiguous, what we could do is hold
down Command and Shift and then click on any
particular notes that we like. If we wanted to just
select all of say, say it as snare drums here, we could hold down Command
and then click on that. And then we have all of these
snare drums brought up. We could do the same
thing with the hi-hat. Now, remember there
are a number of other different specialized
ways to select. You can select random
notes more at random. You could select odd if you
want to select every second, a particular hi-hat
in this example. Now, once you've
made a selection, Let's imagine that I want to hit the Command and click
on snare drums. You could hold down, Shift and up and down, and you can transpose
those notes. So instead of it
sounding like this, could sound like this. Obviously this is
a musical part. You could grab all of
you are say, thirds, and then you could
flatten that to give you, put two in a monarchy
if you like. And then if you hold down
Shift and then drag, you're going to be
duplicating those nodes. Let me just undo that. And then if you hold
down Alt and drag, you will be adjusting
the velocities. You can see all of
the snare drums. If I'm just mousing up and down, you can adjust the
velocities of all of those that had been
selected there. Now, if speaking of Alt, if you hold down Alt, you can drag these to
the left and the right. And you might be thinking, well, I can just drag them anyway. But if you, I'm sorry if you don't hold
any modifiers down, that's gonna be
snapping to the grid. If you just want to
scooch things along, just hold down Alt and move it just to the left and right. As she speaking of modifiers, if you hold down Shift and
then mouse up and down, you can do the same thing
without actually having drag, drag and just by using the mouse and moving
that up and down. So that's everything with, in terms of editing individual
notes within a pattern. If I was to close that out here and then we look at our
arrangement, we saw this before. You can either draw each selected pattern into various tracks here or
you could paint them out, do all that kind of stuff,
just arranging patterns. So again, when you're dropping
into a particular pattern, you were adjusting notes
within that pattern. Now we're moving around complete patterns so I could move that up from
a different track, move it to a
different time here. And of course, all the shortcuts
that we've seen before, things like Command a for all. Or if we hold down Command, you could drag off, sorry, drag across a number of patterns or shift and command and hit non-contiguous patterns
and then you could move them around the timeline
any, any way you want. In fact, handy shortcut holding down Alt would
mean that you could scoot them around if you want to come in just before the
beat or just after the beat, let me just undo that back there so you can see
that all of this has got to do with moving
patterns around a song. And if we're going to
be playing back a song, make sure that you're
set up here to song. Otherwise, if this is going on, then we'll be playing
back whatever is selected right here. So in this case we have three different
patterns that make up, that are, that are making
up this arrangement. If I wanted to change anything
in one of these patterns, you might have the broad idea, let me just double-click
on this pattern here and make a change. Let's imagine. Let me just command click
this and shift and down. And we're going to make
that besides stick. And you might be thinking. Because I clicked
on this one here, that will just change
that instance. It won't. If we go back to F, F PC, you can see the side
stick has been changed there. I'll hit undo a few times
until it goes back there. So you can see that these are just instances of what's
going on over here. So if you want to
make any changes, then say to the intro here. So if you wanted
to start off with side stick and then
go into a snare, you would need to make
a new copy of this. So I could do that by
right-clicking here. I'll go down to clone
that now be FP C2. So I'll double-click on that and I'm going to
hold down command, grabbed that snares, shift
down three and now we have actually were in song. Let's go back to parents. Cool. So that's changed
this pattern here. And then all I would need
to do is right-click here, and I'll just drag
this over here. So now what that will
do is F PC2 with the sod stick will place first and then it will
go into the snail. Let's go back into song
here and have a listen. So I'd stick. And then
he comes to snare. The course. You have all these
tools up here. You could paint out these various patterns
across into the arrangement. You could mute
things if you like. So instead of deleting this, I could go over to here. Let's go ahead and hit mute. And then now the parents
still there, but it's muted. Let's have a listen to start
out with a side stick. And then it should just be
the base with no drums. Anymore. Back with a snare. We could do the same thing with a heaven pad or go ahead
and right-click that, and we will climb that. And then in this example, where those notes
here, There you go. What we can do is we can grab
these guys and delete them. Grab these guys. Does that extend down? It does. And then we could just
maybe extend that out here. So now here's what this
pattern sounds like. Not that it'll just
be a variation of this particular one. Let's go ahead and select, do the select tool here, and then say drop it in here. So you can see now that
Dad, dad, dad, dad. You can see that if
you want to make any changes over here, you really need to
go back to your all of your patterns
here and then make, either make a new pattern up underneath here
with the plus here, you can rename them if you like. But if it's based on
an existing pattern, just go ahead and right-click
on that and clone and then allow that to give just a little bit of a
change to your arrangement. Some of the other
editing tools here are our razor or a slice tool. And that way you can slice
some of these patterns right in half any way you want. Let me just go ahead
and undo that. And a handy one here is a
speaker icon here so it can actually listen
to exactly what's going on in each
particular pattern. Not that useful right now because we only have a
few different tracks. But boy, once you start populating this with
a bunch of tracks, that will really,
really help you out. Just, just kinda auditioning exactly what you're
playing with. Now, this is just one
arrangement right now, if we go underneath here you can see this swivels down here. We can either rename this arrangement or we could say cloned this arrangement
or add another one. Let's imagine we were
cloned this arrangement and we'll just call this
arrangement to that'll be fine. And let's imagine
this arrangement is, I'm going to hold down command and select that and delete that. This has no base on this at all. So if you want to mess around
with the arrangements and not screw around with the arrangement you've
been working on, make as many multiple
arrangements as you like. And if you're going to be making a lot of changes with
the arrangements, I would definitely go down
here and make a clone of that before you do
any big changes. Now, if you arrangements
thoughts getting very long, using markers is a
great way to get around your song very quickly
and also to select. Chunks of your song. And all we need to do is
just grab the playhead, place it where you want it
to be and hit Alt and t. And I'll call this
intro, will go here. And let's imagine we wanted
to call this alt T again. Say pre. No, sorry, that
would be the verse. And then seven X1 here, that might be, say,
the pre-chorus. And then this can
be the chorus here, alt T and a chorus. And then, then you
can go straight around to those particular
part of your song. They're nice, neatly labeled. In fact, there's a couple
of keyboard shortcuts, Alt, this all happens
on number pad. It's the estrus
and also the back. The back cursor there, that will automatically get
you straight to these places. And if you double-click on them, then that will select
everything within that particular markers region. Now let's imagine we wanna do some tempo changes
within our song. And because we've set up
a playlist markers here, we can easily just
double-click on this and that way we can select
any part of our song. Let's imagine at the beginning, I want to set this
to say 90 BPM. Now if I right-click here, I can create an automation clip. And you can see that's the
first empty area here. Let me just pull it out
in its own track here. And then now when
we go into here, I want to do this one, say 97. I'll right-click there and create an automation clip there. And then it's going
to settle back from this point and
everywhere after that it's going to settle
back into say, 95. And I am going to create
an automation clip there. So now you can see that these three I'm chunks of
as song all have different tempos and
you could just drag these up and down
if you wanted to change the tempo
drastically or if you want to ramp them up and
things like that, we'll look at automation
clips a little bit later on. But this is just a kind
of a quick way to then, if I just double-click here to get rid of
those selections, you can see that we
start off at 90. And remember things went
up to 97, look at it. And then it'll settle
back down to 95. And because this is the
last tempo change here, that will stay at 95. And for the rest
of the timeline. Let's look at some
quick audio editing. So I'm just going to drag a
WAV file from my desktop. You can drag it right into here. And if food is this is drag
this out to Add Timeline. Then you can see here we
have a vocal part here. And if you wanted
to chop that up, you could do that fairly
easily underneath here. And OID need to do is select
that slice tool, right? But there's a much
better way to do that. By the way, if you want
to zoom in or out, you can use the page
up and page down. But if you've gone a
little bit too far in, if you hold down
Shift and the number, that will bring it all back
into focus right here. So let's imagine that
I wanted to just slice right here and
just start moving. Some of the medicine mentioned, this is just spoken
word or maybe it was a vocal track that
you just wanted to scooch to the left and
the right just to kind of get various phrase into time. Here's how you'd be able
to do it to hold down, actually just move off of the clip and then hold
the right shift down. And then you can
slice straight up. And I could slice
this one straight up. Now you notice that that is clicking to the
nearest measure. If you want to be able to move it around
without that grid. Just remember the option trick or the Alt trick on Windows. So let me just undo those
couple of cats here. And so I will hold
down Option and Shift. And that way I can slice exactly where I want
those slices to go. Let's imagine we want them
here, I want them here. And the great thing about
these keyboard shortcuts, as soon as you let it go, then you're moving that around. And again, you can see that this is going along with
the snap right here. Now, in case of a vocal, when you are recording
with a click or in time with drums
and things like that. I would leave that
on because it's so much easier just to
move various things apart. Sorry, I move things
along the timeline. In this example, if
you're flying vocals, if you know that this vocal
doesn't need to start here, but maybe 812-34-5678
measures later. You'll know that'll
be perfect in time, but definitely use
the right shift. Hold that down and then you can just slice anywhere you like. If you don't want that, that snap on there, then hold down Option and Shift, and then you can slice
anywhere you like, and then let it go, move your samples around. Fast way to do some editing. Now if you want to get a
little bit more detail in audio editing, in fact, let me
just bring it over another male vocal here. I'll just drag that over here. By the way, if you don't see any of these
samples you bring up, You might be over here
and pattern mode. In this case, we're looking
at a male vocal here. And if I double-click on that, if we right-click here and go
into edit and audio editor, that will bring up this Edison. Now, the interesting
thing about Edison, There's a lot of tools in here, but let's just look at
a few of them here. You can obviously cut
up inside here as well. But let's imagine
you wanted to do a few things in terms
of audio manipulation. And here's one thing that I
would think of with this. This is a very low level vocals. So what you might do is Command a that will
select everything, and then Command N
that will normalize. And what that does is it takes the very loudest part of this sample and
puts it right up to zero dB full-scale and
multiplies everything out there so that everything
can be completely Maximize. Just a very, very
quick way to get the most out of your samples. And by the way,
it makes it a lot easier to edit them as well. I've brought up a
male vocal again and we're going to bring
that up into Edison. The way we do that is we can double-click on that and then go and right-click on here and go into Edit and
an audio editor. And easy way to
do all of that is just a right-click
and edit sample. And so now within Edison, There's a bunch of tools
here we won't get into. But what I will bring
your attention to is that looks like this has
all been normalized, so we're, we're all good to go, but there is a little
bit of noise here. Actually, it's probably
just headphone bleed. Let's have a listen to this
usually start from the top. You can hear a little bit of acoustic guitar coming
from the headphone there. So here's what we could do. We could select all of that. And then what we
can do is actually trimmed the noise out of that. But a better way to go is if
I was just double-click over here and select the
level of that noise. So now that we've
just selected that, now we can go underneath
this wrench icon here and we can acquire
noise threshold. And then now that that's set up, now Edison knows how
loud or how quiet that that part will be and anything around that
threshold can be pulled out. So I'll go ahead and hit
Command a or Control a. And we'll go and hit
the wrench here. And we'll go ahead and select, Get Noise and boom, that's dropped everything out. So that everything
in-between those phrases will be very basically
canceled out. Not that wouldn't
be something I'd go into the nitty-gritty of
with every single track. But if you've got a
little bit of noise than Edison is
really your friend.
8. Mixing: Okay, we now have a
record all of our tracks. We've learned how to
edit them to perfection. We've kind of been messing
with the arrangement, but now it's time to play
around with the overall mix. In the olden days, we would run all of our tracks
through a huge mixer with racks and racks of outboard signal processes
like things like compressors, EQs, reverbs and delays. You have an entire
music store with a gear inside your
mixer, inside FL Studio. And unlike the olden days where you saved up for just
maybe one effect, like a reverb that you could
only use once you have unlimited processes and
effects within FL Studio. So add job is to massage each track to make it
sound radio ready. Let's see how that before we see the mix
it in a full project, let's just start
out with a very, very basic pattern here that we brought up using the
ADOS kick with the limiter. Now, you might have seen
that a number of times unlikes new basic adequate with limiter, what
does that mean? Well, underneath the
mixer and we get there underneath either
pressing this button here or you can see F9. We'll bring this up. And you'll notice that all of these various channels and the channel rack here are a sign that you might
have been wondering, what are these
numbers down here? Are these numbers
allow us to route these channels to these
inserts inside a mixing. Now, I would normally call these channels right in a mixer. Whenever you use a mix
of these are channels. But in FL Studio pilots, we've got our channel
rack over here, so here are our channels. So I guess they had to go with a different one here
which is at inserts. So all of these sounds
in the channel rack being assigned over here and down here on the
master we have a limiter. And if I was to select that, you can see there's a
fruity limiter there. And that's where
that comes from. Whenever we bring this up new basic edit with limiter,
either way it sounds. And then when you go
down to the mixer, there is a limiter down there. So with all of these
being sent down here, if we were to play that pattern. So you can see all of
them are coming up here. We have a kick, snare, kick, clap, hi-hat, and
snare right here. We could name any of
these if we just click on that and then hit F2 and
you could make any changes. Let me just hit Enter there. So there's a few different
views of the mixer. Here. We can get a compact. You can see that if you've
got a bunch of towns that might be a way to
go refer right now. You can check out all of these right now
we're just going to, for this demonstration purposes, we're going to go with
extra large right here. And we have basically a
few different patterns. We have a master section over
here, all of our inserts. And then am mixer slots here
for the selected insert. If you don't want to
see that, then you can click that away right here. How do we? Well, I guess this is
kinda self-explanatory. When you bring up this,
this preset project, then these will all be automatically assigned to
the first four inputs there. If I was to grab these and
then just turn them off, then when you turn these off, they're not really off. Anything that isn't assigned to a specific insert is just going to go straight
out to the master. So we'll still be able
to hear the pattern. And that'll be fine. So when you are adding various things to
your channel rack, here, you'll always hear it. It will always come
straight to the master. But if you want to manipulate it separately on a mixer like
you would expect to do, then you would want to
start assigning these here. So in this case, I could assign this kicked in any
of these inserts. And I could just do them one by one and go through there
and that would be fine. But another way to do it
is if I go up here and I select a particular sound
in the channel rack, I can go over to the
whatever Mixer Channel that I want to assign that to, right-click it and then
go into channel routing, route selected to this rack. And there's a shortcut there, Command L that will drop that
into that particular one. So you can imagine it can
be very quick with that. Just select a sound, go to a channel and then hit Command L and that
will drop it in there. A better way if you
have a number of these. And by the way, another way I showed you this
shortcut before. Instead of just
selecting one at a time, if you double-click here, it will select all
of them right here. Now, all I need to
do is go over here, right-click there, go
to channel routing. And you can see that there's
a second selection here, routes selected child
starting from this track. Boom. They've all been routed. You can see that change there, but they're also all been named. Okay, so what can
we do in a mixer? If you've been using
mixes before, you know, it's a way to
individually change the sound of anything
that's coming down. This our cause and insert, forgive me if ever I call this. These channels have been
using this for years and we've always
used these channels, but in FL Studio we
call these inserts. You have about 125 of them. So let's imagine if we went
over here to this clap, what could we do with
this selected channel? Obviously, we're going to adjust the level of that individually. We could adjust the pan to that. We could be adding
effects to that. Let's imagine if I brought up a reverb here. Let's
have a listen now. You also have a Q over here. So you could say, I don't know, maybe suck all the
low-end out of that clap. If you want to sell anything,
just right-click it. And if you right-click it again, all the channels come back if you left-click and that will mute or turn off that
particular channel right there. If you get a little too crazy with any particular channel, you can always
right-click it and reset selected tract to default. And that will go back to that
in that case what in fact, let me just right-click it again because I liked the naming of that,
a channel routing. And then that will bring it back to that ate away at clap. Okay, so you get the idea. All of these inserts, we have effects there
and also EQ for any particular insert
that that's coming down. Now remember all the things
that we're learning about. Holding down Command or
Control on Windows and Command clicking to select
various Charles. So let's imagine if I wanted
to select all of these. All I need to do is
hold down command or control on Windows and then
just drag across that. And now I have all of
those drums selected. And in fact, I could adjust
the levels of it right here. In fact, if let me
just click over here, let's imagine that I brought
that up and that snare down. And then if I was to command
and drag over those, if I make any adjustments, that will do it relatively to exactly those
changes right there. If you want to select
non-contiguous inserts, then you do the old trick
of command and shift. And then you can select any number of these to
these various channels. Now I mentioned before
you can completely reset a selected
trait to the default. If you don't want
to do that, let's imagine you are
messing around with, say, the pen here. If you just want to reset this, this particular
parameter disrupt, just hover over it
and right-click that and you can reset that. You can do the same thing
with the volume if you like. Now I showed you a little bit
before how to add effects. Just need to select any one of these inserts and
then decide what, sorry, what kind of
effect you want to add. You can see we have ten
different effects slots here. So let's imagine, will bring up something that will
definitely get a here. Well, that would be
the reverb here. Now. Then you can go through
the various presets here. Let's say drum room. Maybe bump up the wet,
they're a little bit. So you could obviously
there's gonna be depending on whatever effect you bring
up in these effects slots. There'll be a ton of
different parameters here. If you want to replace
that with anything, just go across here and
then click down here, we can replace and you'll have the same group of effect
plugins that you can just replace with whatever
you've had that then you can add others in various
afflict of effects once here. And the amount of the sand going to that effect can be
addressed right here. And of course you can
turn that on or off. So if you start loading this
up with a bunch of effects, and let's actually do that. Let's just drop a, say, a delay. So now you might just want to add just a little
bit of that delayed. Well, you could just audition
it by turning it on or off. Now let's see how we can group
various channels together. You might want to give them,
say, a common effect or just bring them amnesic,
a common level. And how are we going to do that? I'm going to select
this insert right here, and I'll hold down the
shortcut Option or Alt, left and right,
and that will move that insert to the left
and right in the mix. I'm just going to move it just the left of all of
these drums here. And then I'm going to
Command drag over them. And then right-click. And I'm going to create a group. There. And I can call that say drums. And maybe give that a, okay, we'll give that a bit
of an icon there as well. So now you can see that
there's a little bit of a divider here so
that you can see. And I normally like to place my my group master to
the left-hand side, are there and you'll notice
what has happened here. We'll look at this a
little bit later on, but at any selected channel, let me just go outside of it. Any selected channel like this, you can see this as being
routed to the master. And the same thing over here, that's going to the master. And that's going to the
master and that's going to master and that's going to the
master. I don't want that. So here's what I'm gonna do. I'm going to command click Command drag over here and I'm going
to right-click here. And I am gonna go
channel routing, route selected channels
starting from this track, uh, sorry, track routing. That's where I'm
gonna ignore that. I'm going to right-click. Let me just go
through that again. I've dragged across all of
these and then I'm going to select my group master here and I'm going to
right-click there. I'll go to track routing. And I'm going to route
selected to this track only. And so here's what happened. If I just click out of it. This one is going to the master. This one is going over
to add drums master. And the same thing
with all of these. So all of these now they
don't go to the, to our left, right master, but they go
over to our drums master, which then I can just
adjust or have a single fader will that
will adjust all of these. Let's have a listen. And you might be thinking ahead of me. Why would I bring
that over there? I mean, I guess you could group channels and
move them up and down. There's a lot better
way to do it, but this is a signal
path as well. While this is selected, I have ten effects slots that I could affect the
entire drum mics. I could say adjust
the entire drum mics, take all the long run out of it. Bump or sorry, add some
low end to that master. So grouping those
tracks by grouping those Inserts over to our master and then routing
them over to that master. That master in turn
goes over here, gives you a brand
new signal path, which you can do a whole
lot of things with. Now you noted before
that whenever we make a group there's this
little separated here. You don't actually just need to use groups
to be able to do it. If you want to
separate anything, just select any channel and you right-click on that and
you can add a separator, just the left-hand side of that. Let me just go ahead
and turn that off. And also, another thing
I neglected to say, you'll notice there's a
master over here to turn affects on or off for
any particular channel. So in this case, this
has some reverb on it. If you ever want to turn that off on or you can
do it right there. You can also do it on an off individually there
or use the send. But this is a handy way
just to turn on or off for any particular
insert that you like. Now, we showed you how to bring all of these
into a subgroup here. But let's imagine
that you wanted to. This is actually, let me tell you what I'm going to
do before I explain it. Imagine you want it
to have add reverb to clap and a snare and send
them out to a common effect. Well, back in the old
days you do this a lot because if you bought
one Effects processors, probably couple of
thousand dollars. So you'd use effects sends
all the time to send varying amounts of each
particular channel or inserts in this case, out to that reverb. How would I be
able to send, say, the clap and the snare
out to a common reverb, or say a common, Let's do a flanger or
something like that. Here's how I do it. You could either obviously
go down here and add that flanger over here and
do the same thing here. But what if you
wanted to share them? You would use another
channel over here. So I'm gonna go over here
to Insert number six. And I am going to actually send the clap here over to
this particular channel. I'm also going to send the snare over to that
particular channel as well. And let me hit F2, which will allow
me to name that. And I'll say common. Effects. Okay, So now a common affects. What's happening is that the clap is both going
over here to our subgroup, but it's also going
over to here. And as snare is going
over to here as well. So now here's what we would do. We would go over to where common effects and
just drop that in. Let's do something
like a flanger. And let's have a listen to this. I had that turned off. You can hear that tau there. If it is solid, that solid
that will take it up. Let me just turn some
of these off here. And so when you
select anyone here, you can decide how much is
going to go over there. So right now, the clap
is not going over there. Now the clap is going out of it. And then you can
give it an amount. Let me just turn this one on. The signal flow here that
we have a clap here That's going over two as subgroup which then in turn going to
our left and right mix. But if I just go back here, this is going to two places. And these are the send
amounts that will be going over to say
this part right here, which is a common effects. So therefore, if you want to do, I don't, I'm just thinking
off the top of my head. Life in the fast lane
with the Eagles. There's a part where the
entire drums and some of the vocals go through a
common flanger phaser. You can do it by using these
effects ends right here. Just select the challenge there, and then send that off to any particular new
channel you want. And if there was a, there was a bunch
of vocals here, I will just select them all, drop them over here, put the common effect on there, and then everything would be going through that
common effect. Now, if ever I am using
these common effects pads, you might just want to
put dividers around them, but a better way to do that
is if I right-click here, I can dock to the units. There's three different
areas of the mixer, the left, middle, and right. Let's go ahead and put
that to the right. Now you'll notice that we have three different
areas right here. If you click on
them, then they will collapse and expand right there and the same
thing right here. So why would I put it over here? It's just a great
reminder to me that this is a common effects part. You might want to just
change the color, hit again, just hit F2. And you can change that
to any particular color. You like. Color-coding and mixer is just a great way to really
keep things organized. But dropping things over
to the right-hand side. I tend to keep the right hand
side for common effects. You might want to also put
maybe your masters over there. If you wanted to go across here, you could dock that
to the right as well. So now you can see that's
exactly what's going on there. Actually, there's
a separator there. If I right-click on that, we can take that separator out. So you can organize this
as much as you like. But what I like about this is that on the
right-hand side, I can have my money channels
if you know what I mean. So now, instead of going
through all of this and trying to find my
masters and whatever, you can go along the right-hand
side and then you can, you can adjust the
level of them, the level of your
common effects as well. Now brought up the demo
that comes with fl Studio. I've told my students, my students for many years, if you want to really
understand your door, bring up some of the demos and really reverse engineer it. See exactly what's going on in terms of the mixer or
the effects they use, and all the routing and
all that good stuff. Now the first thing
you'll notice, it's very colorful and it's that
way for a reason. It's great to color-code and really organized
your tracks. Certainly name them,
given them some, some icons up here. But you can see
exactly that all of the vocals are here and
kind of purplish pink, all the drums over here in blue, whatever colors you use,
just stick to them. And that way you'll be able to see exactly what's going on. And you're just be that
much more organized. If you wanted to get
even more organized, I guess I could go over
here to the kick here, right-click on that
and hit separator. That way I could separate the same my drums from
the vocals right here. Now, speaking of
getting organized, if you go over here on the arrangement and
all these parts here, if this starts getting
a little bit too busy, What you can do is you can
nest these various tracks. Just hold down command and then just drag over a number of them. And then you can
right-click that and you can group with the above track. And you can see now
they are nested underneath that
particular track. And then you could either show or hide those particular ones. It won't be a big deal, but when you start
getting a ton of tracks, then that's just a
great way to organize. Now let's have some fun, kinda reverse
engineering exactly what's going on with this. We'll start out with the vocals. So the main vocal here, actually there's three
different vocal parts that are all routed out. This vertical bars, this, this common vocal bass out here. But if you go over the main vocal is not only
going over there, but it's also going out to this focal delay
and vocal reverb. And here's what it sounds like
actually why it's playing. I'm going to drop
the effects in and out so you can hear
what this sounds like. Dry. The vocals coming up. Let's turn on and off. Now, you notice that's an infinite diet was
not an infinite delay. It just has a bunch of
feedbacks on that delay. How come we're not hearing that? Right from the beginning. If I go back up to the top, then you'll notice what's going on in terms
of this main vocal, and it comes down here
to the vocal delay. We'll look at automations
in a little while. But just for now, I'm just
going to double-click on this and we're going
to just bring this up. This is the vocal delay Send, which goes out to our vocal delay with
all those feedbacks. And so that's what's going on when you're over here,
there's no Send. And then around measure three, then the vocal gets
sent out to that. Let's have a listen. No sand here. So if I was to say bring
that all the way down here, there will be no delay. Let's listen to that
at the beginning. If you want. Now, I just noticed a moment
ago I'd forgotten about this underneath the audio
settings when you are mixing. Remember how we set
this buffer lengths are very short-lived recording
so that we wouldn't have any recording delay and everything would remain in time in your headphones
and things like that. That puts a lot of pressure
on your, on your computer. Now when we're mixing, I don't really mind if between hitting the playback there's
a ten millisecond or there is a 93 millisecond delay in that this will just give
you a lot more buffer length. And then when you play back, everything will play back
a lot more smoothly. Now I said a moment
ago that we're gonna be looking at automation. I've just gone ahead and
cleaned out the window here so that we're not
looking at a very, very busy mix here. Just a very basic, just a drum pattern with the kick and the clap
and the high hat. So now if you want to
automate anything and I'm telling you you can automate almost anything in FL Studio. All you need to do is
just grab that parameter, will right-click it, and
create an automation clip. And you can see a couple
of things have happened. It is come up here on our song. And also over here you can see that there's an
automation clip right here. This toggles between
looking at patterns, any wave files that you've
imported or recorded, or your automation
clips right here. As easy as just
grabbing this end. Whoops, I just need
to grab right there. Okay. So now that
we've set this up, if I drag across that timeline, you can see that that
fader is going up and down because this is controlling this
particular parameter. If you can see it's own
neatly labeled Verify. If I right-clicked here and create an automation
clip from there, then that would be
panning and so on. Let me just undo that. And then all you
need to do is say, drag that up and down. If you right-click, you
can mangle that even more. Let me just undo that and we'll just go back to just
a straight one here. And let's have a listen. And here comes a kick drum. Like I said, you could
automate almost anything here. Imagine if I went
over to the Insert here and brought
up, say, a reverb. And I'm going to
select the clap here. And I want to drop that
over to the reverbs, so we should have. Great. So this is the
send of how much reverb. Let me just close that out. This is the sand. Of how much of that reverb is. Let's go ahead and create an
automation clip for that. So now you can see, anyway, clapped to insert five. Imagine I wanted to do
that the opposite way. So now it'll start out
with a lot of reverb going over to insert five and
net reverb will tail off. And you can see the change
being reflected down here. Now you'll note if you
go underneath the browse and go to Sorry, mix-up presets. You can drag various processing
right over to these, to these blank inserts here. You can also do it
underneath here. Let's imagine we wanted to
add some mastering here, so we go over to our
master channel here. You'd have to drag it from
there or underneath here. We can file and then say
general-purpose mastering. And that will drop
in a number of different effects that are
placed across your entire mix. Okay, Imagine you have
your entire song, you've done all of
your plugins here, you've done EQ, you're
done automation, crafted your song exactly
the way you want it. Right down to your
left rat and mix, which has some mastering effects on here is just a demo
of I've loaded up. Once you have it all the
way you want it to do, go underneath
firewall, go Export, and say wav file here. We'll call this final mix. And we're going to drop that
into say, or downloads. When I hit Save, you'll
come to a screen like this. What are we going to pull out? Just gonna be a pattern
or the full song? And then you can decide what type of file
you're gonna be doing, what the bit depth is, stereo, all that kind of stuff. And then as soon as you're
ready to mix this all out, have a final stereo file. Just click on Stat
and I'll get it done. Wow, we got through it all. That was a lot to go through. But as you've seen,
this is a really, really complete a door I
often tell people about. When I first moved to
Hollywood back in the 80s, I used to design and install projects studios for
some amazing artists. I actually put together a
personal recording studio for Whitney Houston that
she could use in their hotel rooms when
we're out on the road. Let me think there
was eight tracks. Maybe a couple of effects, mike, pre and a small rack
mount and mixer. Probably about four or
five grand in 19 $80. What you have in your hands here for just a few
hundred bucks is a hundredfold what
the biggest star in the world had in her
hands at that time. Don't ever forget
that we live in really, really amazing times. Now, while I've taught you all the stuff you need to
know within FL Studio, there are also some
many other skills and training that you'll need to master if you
wanna get really, really great results and you're really invested in learning everything you can about home and project recording
in music production. Things like Mike selection and positioning
are mixing tricks, proper use of compression or all the EQ tricks the pros use. I actually have a
course that would be the best companion
for you called the ultimate harm
recording school. It's a solid six
or 7 h, I believe, of everything you need to know how to make radio ready mixers, along with many free
bonuses with Grammy Award winning producers and engineers giving some of their tips. There, check out the
website on that. I also have a bunch of
masterclasses that delve into EQ, compression and mixing in producing and arranging
killer vocals. Those courses go super
deep into these subjects. You can check them
out at the website. And remember we have money-back guarantees on all
of our courses right there. So in closing, thanks so much
for hanging out with me. I hope you had fun. I always do a love this stuff. I look forward to seeing you on the next protein EXP training
course shell for now.
David Wills
