Making Music in FL Studio 12: Introduction to the Basics

1. Class Overview: Hi, My name is Dmitry Melnichenko and I graduated from the Ontario Institute Audio Recording Ecology in 2000 and seven on. I've been working as a professional ever since, but truly, my journey into music production began when I discovered the software called FL Studio or Free Loops, as it was called. At the time, I was amazed at the versatility of the software. The potential of what I could create was unlimited, and I truly believe this is the best two out there for fast, high quality music production. I created a stock library of over 200 tracks, and I work with clients from all over the world and film TV commercials and video games. And I also produce electronica music under the artist name clones. In this course, I'm going to introduce you to the powerhouse that is FL Studio. I'll show you some quick tips and tricks, how to navigate FL Studio and how to get creating music now 2. Project Overview: I've created a very special project for you. You have two tracks to choose from to create a very 1st 3 mics NFL studio. Choose any style you'd like rearranged the parts however you want and get creative. I'm really looking forward to seeing what you create. 3. Before You Start: Before you embark on this remix project, you will need to understand the following concepts described in the class. Understanding the main Windows navigation and tools ability to add it within patterns. Changing note sequences in piano roll and channel rack. Assigning channels to mixer trucks. Arranging patterns in the playlist, adding effects and using the mixer, rendering audio and exporting your final track. 4. Interface Overview: alright, guys. So the first thing I wanted to talk about with a full studio is the graphic user interface . Just by looking at FL Studio, definitely see that it's a unique looking program right away, and usually when you open it, there's a bunch of windows that are open with it. And for the purpose of this just getting comfortable with the way Ethel Studio looks. Let's close all of these windows and we can use F 12 to close them, um, to close all down necessary windows because I want to focus on the toolbar at the top NFL studio. We have the workspace below the toolbar, and it's slightly lighter gray color than the tool bar is. The toolbar is a little bit darker here, and if you click on an empty spot in the toolbar, right click on an empty spot in the toolbar, Um, you see a man, you pop up with older panels that we have open right now, so just make sure that all of the panels are open on your computer as well. Okay, so the first panel we're gonna look at is the Windows Menu panel has your standard software menus but it has this hint bar below, which is very useful. When you hover over anything NFL studio, you can see a little quick hand pop up here telling you what it does. It's also very useful when you're making your adjustments when you're building your track to know exactly how much you're turning things down or up for so it gives you a readout on decibels and percentages as well. So very useful feature here. To the right of that, we have a master volume and that adjust the volume output monitor volume for your speakers and the master pitch. This panel here is a transport panel, and it has your standard transport buttons play backstop record. But it also has this additional button here, which switches between playlist and pattern playback mode. By right clicking on that button, it will actually quickly bring up playlets, so that's another quick way to bring up your playlist at the top. We have our metronome, which is a standard feature as a click track to your playback, wait for input to start playing. FL Studio will wait for you to play any note on the keyboard to play back the track and countdown before recording sets a condom before you start. Recording overdub and blending notes is very useful when you're recording when you're laying down melodies over top of your previously determined chords that you already have in your panel, so you can lay down your melodies without affecting the cords that you've already set in your piano roll and loop recording is just gonna keep recording in the loop until you're happy with your take. Below that we have our temple selector left clicking, dragging up or down will set your temple. Also rightly can give you some additional options here. The next panel I wanted to talk about is this snap panel. This panel has some of the most powerful features NFL studio, and we're gonna talk about them in more detail when we're talking about music creation. But I just want to quickly gloss over them so you know what they are. A. D. A very top left. We have our typing keyboard to piano keyboard toggle. With this enabled, it's lit up blue. Um, it turns your typing keyboard into a mayday controller. Essentially, step editing mode is also very, very useful, and we'll talk about it more when we're creating our truck scroll to each time. Markers scrolls to reach time, Marker said in the playlist, enable notes and clip groups with this toggle enabled. If it's lit up blue, all your groups of notes and patterns will remain locked so they will move in this in a single group. If you want to add it, notes or patterns within that group simply on click this Stunkel added the notes and engage it again. If you want to lock them again into the group. Multi link to Controllers links your controls NFL studio to your physical controls on your MIDI controller and right below here we have our snap to grid selector, and this will set the grid size in the piano role in the play list, to which the notes and the patterns will snap to where I never have our time. Display displays either time or beats and bars. If you click on it left, click on it. This panel here is the Pattern Selector panel. Clicking on this downward arrow will let me browse between different patterns that you have created right now. We only created one pattern because this is a new project. Also right Clicking on the pattern name gives you the same sort of men you left clicking on the pattern name and dragging up or down will scroll three patterns, and clicking on this plus button here will automatically jump to the next available pattern . You can quickly rename it here as well. Here we have our monitor master meters, it shows displays away form when there's actually playback happening, and you'll see that when we're creating our track. And this is a peak meter, so displays meter peaks when we're playing back. Sound to the right of that, we have our CPU load meter. So how much CPU the project is currently using and how much ram you're currently using in your project. And now we have a whole bunch of these additional shortcut panels here, and these shortcut panels are fully customizable. So by right clicking on the shortcut panel, you can actually create your own our customize your own. But we had already some loaded in our toolbar here, so we're gonna use them to talk about the rest of the windows. The first window I wanted to talk about is the playlist window and Let's open it by right clicking here in view playlist button. You can also access it by clicking the pattern and playlist selector. Here, here's our trucks on the left and with our mutant solo buttons. Here we have a selection of tools here at the top, and we also have a pattern selector here so we can select between different patterns here on the top left of the playlist, we have our focus toggle here and here. You can select what assets you working on in your playlist right now so you can switch between way form, automation and pattern. Okay, great. So we talked about the playlist and every window. NFL studio also has this drop down for additional options as well. Here's our channel rack, and we're open it by hitting F six or clicking here on the View Channel rack and in the channel wreck. You have your mute solo buttons here, just like in the playlist. You have your pan, you have your volume control target mixed track. So targets the track. The mixture track that you're sending the Channel two and this is our channels. It could be anything from a sampler. Channel two synthesizer on automation clip or anything like that At the top, we have our group filter as well as additional playback button just for the pattern. And then we have our swing control and the switch to switch between the sequence of you and the piano roll view at the bottom of the channel rack. We have add new channel button and the scroll bar to scroll within that pattern. Next, we have our piano roll window here on the piano. Roland window looks very similar to the plate playlist window, except there is a piano roll on the left here instead of tracks as opposed to pattern selector in the playlist. So here we select the channel that we're gonna work on kick clap Hatton snare. That's what we have sat right now is the channels in our project. And right next to that, we have our drop down for which attributes off the note we're gonna work on and these adjust, according to the channel, that you're trying to add it right now. Next, when they wanted to talk about is our browser window and the browser window. You have all of your assets in the FL Studio that's where your samples would be and your plug ins and effects. And they created categories here, so to quickly access things in your current project as well as viewer plug in database here . And the last one, though I wanted to talk about, is our mixer window. And here in the mixture window, you can see a selection of our trucks. Um, here we have our master and are focused truck or current truck, and we have a set of four cents here to the right, and then we have our inspector on the right of the mixer window. Below that, we have our rough e que and some additional settings here for inputs and outputs for the sound card. Now the mixer view can change. Here, care the top of the mixer. We have our drop down menu for additional settings as well as some other controls that we can change multi touch control if you have a multi touch monitor, view way forms, displays, way forms instead of track peaks in the track view and then extra volume control. So if you're missing these extra volume controls in your project, make sure they're unable to. You can see them and as well as the view selector here for the mixer. And we can change it to compact view or wide you or extra large whatever. Whatever suits your current project at the top of the tracks, we have our mutant solo buttons. As usual, we have our pan left and right here, Um, arm track fader and stereo separation here. And, um, some additional settings and channel routing, which we'll talk about more when we're talking about a mixing our track. Okay, so now that we talked about all of the Windows NFL studio and now you know how the toolbar looks, I want to quickly show you how to create your own personal workspace in FL studio. Something that I want to note is that anything in FL Studio can be detached and moved outside of the program window to a different monitor or set up anywhere you'd like. You can even move these toolbar panels here, as you can see there easily sliding here, and you can move them around within the toolbar. You can either lock them are unlocked. Um, but you can also even remove them outside of the toolbar. If you hold control and click and drag the panel out. Now it appears outside of the toolbar, and you can place it anywhere you'd like. If you want to put a bag, just simply drag it over back to the toolbar without holding control and I'll snap back into place. And you can also even change the background. To do that, simply go to view by ground sat image wallpaper. 5. Making Noises: So now that we're gonna talk about creating noises and making stuff in FL studio, I'm gonna load up a new project for you so that we're going to start with a blank project. All right, so here we have our blank project loaded already. And let's open up the channel rack. This is where you place all of your synthesizers, samplers and automation clips. When you start and you put Project NFL Studio, it usually comes already pre loaded with a simple drum drum set up here with the kick, clap hat and snare. So you already can start creating simple drum loops from here. But if you if you'd like to add a new channel to the channel wreck, you just simply click on this plus button here, and I challenge you to actually find all the ways to add channels to the channel. Reckon Apple Studio, and there's numerous ways to do that. Okay, so let's add a synthesizer here. Let's click on the plus button, and a standard synthesizer that comes standard with awful studio is very actually very powerful. Synthesizer is a Citrus, so this is a Citrus channel on this, a synthesizer channel clicking on this gear here will give you additional options. But since it's an introduction introductory video, I wouldn't worry about going into in depth into these additional settings here. Okay, so now that we have our since loaded up, um, let's dial up a nice sounding preset here just for our purposes and click on the drop down here and go toe presets. Let's select a lead or pluck. Yeah, let's like the short sent here. All right, so we have our synthesizer. We can already start creating something with our synth here. Okay, So before we start creating our patterns and creating our drum loops and, um, note sequences in piano roll, I wanted to talk about the different views that the channel Iraq offers. Okay, so here on the top, right, you can switch between the sequence of you and the piano roll view, and I like to use the sequence, serve you for laying out my drum, my drum loops and my drum patterns because it's actually modeled after all school sequencers. And so it's very useful for triggering drums. So let's place let's place a few notes here for the drums. I'm just gonna place a kick in the snare. So as you can hear already, we were created. We created a drama move, so I just showed you how to create a quick drum loop. But for creating more complex melodies and chords and things like that for synthesizers, I prefer to use the piano roll and a quick way to access the piano role is to switch to the general view and left click on the channel you'd like. And I mean, you can also use the print funeral for drums. If that's something that you want to do, you can also access the piano roll by right, clicking on the channel and going into the piano roll. Okay, so here we have the funeral open for this synthesizer that we have selected here. So how do we create a melody now in this piano roll so we can simply start creating by placing notes left licking and placing notes on the piano roll? But another really useful feature here is a stamp tool here at the top by clicking that we can select from a set of chords and and scales to place into our piano roll. So if you're creating music and you want to keep within a certain scale or you're not sure which cord to use next. You can actually select between major and minor chords or whatever you'd like here in this stem tool. And when you click when you select, let's say we're going to select a major chord here and be click on it. The pencil tool will automatically conform to that cord, and now when you place that that in the piano roll, you can see that it places the entire cord Now, instead of just placing one note. So that's very useful for music creation too quickly go between major and minor chords and create your chord progression. So now if you select a minor chord and the next quarter we're gonna place here is gonna be minor. Also, something to note is that if you are using this stem tool, the notes will automatically be grouped, and I mentioned how toe on group them when we talked about the snap panel. If you want to add it, the notes within the group OK, but what if you wanted to create a custom court and you wanted to group it and move it around or you created a malady and you want you want to make sure that it remains as a set of notes and you want a group it together. Okay, let's create a quick melody here in just place one. Now it's very useful to have these nodes group, because if you want to paste them somewhere else or if you want to just move them and transpose them up and down the piano roll, Um, you want to move them as a whole entire set of notes. And as you projects get bigger and busier, it's gonna be quite difficult to select a certain part of notes and just move them without affecting any other notes that you might have placed around this particular cluster of notes. A quick way to group them is just holding shift and G, and now they're old group together. So now when I move, even want one, though the rest of them, as you can see, are moving together with that group. So if you suddenly want to added this note, you don't feel like this note is that correct note here simply unlinked them in the snap panel that no up or down on then linked them again and they again become a group. Okay, I also talked about in the graphic user interface overview. We also talked about these powerful features in the snap panel that I promised to review when we're talking about music creation. So now is a good time to talk about those. So you remember typing keyboard to piano keyboard future here, it turns your transforms your typing keyboard into MIDI controller. Essentially right. Clicking on it gives you a selection of scales that you can choose from and these air Really, this is really useful to lay out your scale that you're gonna work in. For example, let's select a blue scale here, and you can see that if I started typing on U. E. O already sounds like a blues. It was. How easy was that? So I mean, he can quickly lay out your melodies. Locks are locked to that scale, and this is where is a good time to talk about this step adding mode NFL studio. And it's really useful, especially in combination with this keyboard input typing keyboard input, because now that if we want t to lay out our blues, um, our blues melody line Let's say and we want input that right into the piano roll How do we do that? So we have our notes Creative already predetermined No, no, no, no, no, no. So it's I want to create this your little you base your here here to enter it into the piano roll. We're gonna engage this step at any mode. And now every note you hit a soon as you release it, it will appear in Let me scroll up a little bit because we're playing pretty low. Scroll down. So every time you place a note on release you No, no, no, You a So you can see it's already entered into the piano for you. And you can switch the size of these by actually zooming in or out So you can set the this the grade size and select how big the note is actually gonna end up, you know? No, no, no, no, no, no. Something also wanted to talk about that is a powerful feature. NFL studio is the glider on what is a glide. Now you selected by clicking this downward triangle here, and it's called a slide note. And by itself. It doesn't actually make any sound when it's played back, but what it does is it effects the note that you've previously placed into your playlist. So this is great for creating slides and glides in your baselines. Especially very became very popular now in electronic music. And how do you do that? So let's place our note first. So let's disengage this triangle here and let's place our know. So this note is just your regular note and you see here it doesn't quite reach to the answer. I'll give you a quick tip by holding control and heading que Il kwon ties it and snap it to the grid. So now we have a clean now the ends of the correct part. Um, so he replaced Note e, and we wanted to glide gradually down to say, See, you see, I've placed this selected this glide note here and placed it in the funeral, and it has this little downward triangle on it, indicating that it's a slide note. It's not just a regular note. Now, by adjusting the length of it will determine how fast that it will start from the previous note to the sliding note that we chose to be a C. So let's hear that you know, you can see how very useful you be for creating electronic music can also glide up. It doesn't matter which way you want to glide. Another tape I want to give you is that if you wanna use a glide note on a cluster of notes , it will always glide that note below. So if so, if you place it in between these announce, it will still glide the entire group of notes down to G. So down to seven tons. Okay, So another feature in the piano roll here is that we have our volume controls for each note velocity and stuff like that. And how do we know which part off? You know, you're adding. We know that by selecting here at the top of the piano roll window here, we can select which part of what we're working on. So every note has its attributes like penn left and right velocity release modulation and fine pitch. You can also adjust the controls for the entire channel here, and you can also access this selector by right clicking in this gray area here at the bottom left of the piano roll, and it gives you the same menu. So what does this do? Actually, it adjusts the velocity for each. No, so you can set different velocities. No, you know, you can hear how some notes will act will sound louder and some will be quieter. And that's because we set them here, um, in this area beside them to play back. That way you can also right click. If you have a grouping of notes, let's say, let's make these many notes here. That's a chopper to it. Quickly chops all your notes into how are you want to set them? So let's create a lot of notes. And now we have a whole bunch of notes and let's say we want it to gradually go up. So now, by right clicking and holding on this area here, you see, you can actually adjust up and down here, and it follows a line. So now the volume of the velocity of notes will follow this line, tell down gradually increasing in velocity, and this feature is also great for creating drum rolls like snare rolls for your buildups and things like that in electronica music especially, is very useful. So, um, if you place your we have our snare here and if you want to create a quick drumroll, you just create the length of it, stretched the note to the length, and then I'll you to create many snare instances or snare triggers. And then as you right click and you drag upwards, it will create a snare. Oh! 6. Mixing: Okay, so let's hope in our mixer by clicking on the shortcut in the shortcut panel or pushing off nine on your keyboard. Okay, so the mixer links the channels from the channel rack to their appropriate mixer tracks in the mixer. And we sat these by left clicking, dragging on these target mixer track selectors on the left of each channel. And as I left, click and drag up or down. You can see that it reflects in my mixer as to where I'm sending this cake channel, and if you drag all the way down, it will send it to the master track, and we'll see this three dotted line here on the mixer track selector. So now that you know how to set your mixer tracks from the channel rack, I just wanted to quickly show you how to signal travels NFL studio. And the purpose of that is just to explain to you what different controls we have along the way. So our signal originates in the channel, and let's just set our high hat to send our signal to, um mixer number mixer, truck number three. And as you can see when I hit play back on our pattern. The signal from the high had channel travels to mix a track number three, but it also travels to the master via these routing cables at the bottom of the mixer. So let me just go through the signal path and what controls we have along the way. So the first set of controls we have is to the left of the channel, and we have our channel. Volumes are channel pen, left or right, and we also have our channel mute or soul button. After that, the signal will travel to our mixer track number three, and on our mixer truck number three with the mixer track selected Weaken. See the track inspector for that makes her track number three, and the signal will pass through the Channel Inspector in the downward direction. So that's something important to understand when you're stacking your facts and I'll explain that a little bit later, and then the next point our sound will hit is gonna be this traffic you at the bottom of the inspector. And after that, the signal will pass through our track, where we have additional stereo and volume controls per each track starting at the top behind her mute solo button are Pan left and right, and we have our reverse polarity, which is a face flip 1 80 degree face flip. Here we have swapped left and right channels, flips left to right, let them right to left. And then we have our stereo width right underneath that so separated or merged how wide the signal sits in your stereo field. And then, of course, we have our volume fader here, which adjust the volume for the track at the bottom. We have our effects, which which turns the effects on and off in our effects track. And then there's a plug in delay compensation as well as the record button for that track and that the bottom of each track we have our routing cables, which send signals to in this scenario to our master track and to our sense. And you can send a signal to any track that has this upwards arrow on it as simply by clicking simply by left clicking on this triangle arrow and on clicking the arrow will un send the truck. Okay, so now that you understand some basic track routing, I just wanted to show you a couple of features that are gonna be really useful for you when you mix in your tracks and these air, creating a sub mix for your track and, um, side chaining. So let's create a drum group in our mixer. So for that, I will just remain rename our tracks to their appropriate channels. So our kick sent to Truck number one will rename it to kick and so forth. Okay, let's create a simple drum loop. And, as you can see, all of the channels are traveling to their appropriate makes her track. So now what I want to do is I want to create a sub mix for a drums and group or drums together. And there's many advantages to using sub mixing and grouping your tracks in the mixer. And this might seem like a nad Vanstone technique, but this is quite a simple feature. If you understand the truck riding in the mixer, so by default you can see that every track in our mixer is routed to the master into the sense. But what we want to create as we want to create a sub mix where all of our drums will travel to that sub mix truck and then and then from there to our master. So we want to un send them from the master, send them to our sub mix, and then the sub mix will go to the master. So let's choose our truck five, um, as our sub next track. And let's also select all the tracks that we're gonna have in this group and the sub mix, and you do that by holding control and shift and clicking on each track at the top. Here, you can click on the numbers or in these name windows, and it will select or de select the track with all our truck selected right click on our chosen sub mix track and go try crowding, create some mix. Let's call it our drums and choose a color for And as you can see, a soon as I had entered this created at drums sub mix for us. So now all the drums in this within this group will travel to this drums master. Let's just rename it by. Just hold, shift and click. Let's rename this drums sub mix just so it's easier for us for you guys to understand. Now we can see clearly when I click on each track within our sub mix that it doesn't travel to the master or the sends anymore. It travels to our drums sub mix track. You can see that by looking at these routing cables and our drum sub mix. Track travels to the sense and to the master, and that gives you many advantages over controlling your multiple tracks. Within that group, you can control the volume for the entire group of tracks as well as you commute all of the tracks. And also you can add the effects for the entire group of tracks. So here I'll describe how we add effects and how we stack effect. So when you remember when I talked about the signal flow, how it travels in the downwards direction in our track, Inspector. So with our drum sub mix selected, we see the track inspector for this drum sub mix. And by clicking on this arrow in the slot number one, we can place our effect here. And as you can hear, all of the drums are passing through this river. Plug in, um, even though each individual track does not have reverb on it, and that's a great way to save your Cebu or two touches group tracks and make him sound like they're in the same room together. Um, and here I wanted to also mention stacking your effects. So let's meet all the drums and just have the kick playing for us, right? So I muted all a muted clap high, had a snare, and the kick is now traveling to our sub mix and passing through this reverb. And as you can hear the reverb tale sound smooth and clean. So let's add a flame jer effect behind this river. And as you can hear every time the kick triggers, the signal passes through the reverb and then through the flame, Jer. So what? I mean by stacking your facts. For example, if I want the Flender to be the first effect that the the kick signal will pass through, let me just move this up. And as you can see, Flender became the first effect. And now let's hear that. As you can hear, the kick is being affected by the flame Jer. But the reverb tail is unaffected and it remains clean. So that's something to keep in line when you're stacking your effects so you can see how the signal passes through each effect in Siris, and you can stack up to 10 effect on each track. But you can extend that. If you were using your sins, you can extend it to as many sends it to as many slots as you want if you're utilizing the sands in the mixer, so from here I could send the drum sub mix to another truck, which opens up a whole other set of effects for us. Okay, so I'm just going to remove the effects from our drum sub mix. And you you do that by clicking on this arrow here and go for a place with none, and that will remove the effect. So another feature I wanted to talk about in the mixer is side chain and a side chain as a signal that's basically invisible and is being sent to a track of your choosing. So, um, there's many advantages to using side chain, mainly to clean up your mixes and doc certain elements under other elements so you can use voice. You can use your kick, but the most common one that you hear about is is ducking the synthesizer with the kick, so I quickly I'll quickly demonstrate how to do that. But keep in mind that you can use it for many other applications. So let's add a synthesizer. Let's place a note for a synthesizer in the piano roll, turn it down and let's send the synthesizer to Truck number six and we'll rename our track to synth. And now we're going to send the kick the site chain signal from our kick to our synthesizer . And we do that by right, clicking on the arrow at the bottom of the chosen track and clicking on side chain to this truck. And as you can see, what that did is that send a very faint routing cable and ascend without any signal going through. And that's another definition. Off a side chain is is basically ascend without any signal passing through it because you can hear nothing is happening yet for the sightseeing to work, we need to add a fruity limiter but effects rack on the synthesizer track. And as you look at our limiter window, you can see that there is still no side chain option here, And that's because we need to switch the limiter to the compressor mode. And as we switch to the compressor, you can see a sightseeing with no pop up and left click and drug upwards weaken. Select our side chain number one. But there's still no docking effect that we're trying to achieve with the kick, and that's because our compressor is not set yet. So let's set the threshold and the ratio of the compressor theme, as you can see when I adjust the ratio on the threshold of the compressor. This adjust the intensity of the docking effect that we're achieving with the synthesizer in the kick. Also, adjusting the attack and the release will adjust the timing of that fact. So playing with all of these settings here will adjust the intensity and the timing of your side chain effect. I hope all these techniques are really helpful for you in your mixing, and you can see a lot of them being used utilized in the demo projects that I provided for you. So feel free to play around and send different sounds two different tracks and see how that works out and experiment with stacking your effects and you can achieve some really interesting results depend on the sequence in which you lay out your effects. 7. Arranging: Okay, So now that you've created some patterns in your channel rack, um, I want to talk about how they're arranged, these patterns into your composition and how to use different automation effects automate different features and parameters. NFL Studio. Okay, so let's create our simple four by four drum loop here a pattern. We're gonna rename it to our kick drum and let's go to the next available pattern by clicking this Plus here, let's call it our snare. And let's create another pattern. We're gonna call it our sin. And let's add ascent in here. Let's choose. Citrus has, as usual, let's create a Let's select a preset Nice. So let's open our playlist window and let's start arranging things into our song. Okay, so the the synth patterns empty, but let's place a few notes here just for the demo purpose, you know? Okay, so here's our playlist. We already have it open. So now we can see that in our pattern selector. We're focused on the synth pattern, and this is the pattern that's gonna appear under a brush or pencil, and we can just pencil it in here and use. You can see I have complete freedom as to where actually place this synthesizer pattern. Okay, so let's let's create our let's place our kick drum pattern. First, it's place for the duration of four bars. Then we want to add the snare. So a quick tip for you if you've already laid out your patterns here and it's the same works in piano roll for notes as well. If you hold shift and you slide the existing patterns, it will automatically create a cop before you so you can quickly create arrangements just by sliding your pick drum over. You've already created a bars of it. Okay, now let's add our snare for the second set, and let's copy that over and we're gonna add are synth pattern here as well, you know. So when we switched to the to the playlist view to the playlist player back here by this button, or simply by clicking here, you can hear that the song is going to start by with our kick drum. Then it's gonna Addis thing and then our sin Great. So I wanted to talk about a little bit about creating variation in your tracks. Now let's say you want to create a little slightly different off beat kick in this kick drum pattern here just so we can prepare the listener for our next section. That's gonna have a snare now if he added this if he added this pattern and we wanna put an off beat drum here, you see, it actually changed all of our kick drums patterns here. That's not what we wanted. We only wanted to do one. So to achieve that, we have to create a unique patterns out of this kick drum pattern. And to do that, we have to click on the top left off the pattern and click make unique. Now when you added this pattern, let's create a are off be drum here because you can see these patterns around effect that until we get to this kick drum number two and it's a different has are off beat kick in there. So that's how you create quickly create variation in your tracks. Another really big feature NFL studios automation and I'm sure that any other software music creation software also has automation, and you might be even already familiar with what it is. But in FL Studio, it's a really useful feature because pretty much anything can be linked to be automated and the playlist. So let's quickly add this synthesizer here for the rest of the duration of this drum loop. And let's say I want my synthesizer to come in gradually and slowly. So now here's the volume parameter for this synthesizer, and we want it create an automation clip for this falling parameter. So if you're simply right, click and click Create automation clip. This will create an automation clip for this synthesizer. Also, if you don't want the automation toe last the entire duration, you can make a selection by holding control and dragging across this blank bar at the top of the playlist. And then, if you right click and you create an automation track for that, it will only create an automation truck for this selection. And as you can see, it created a new automation track so we actually want the entire track to be automated. So let's delete that That was just for the purpose of showing you. So let's place our full automation here back and for automation editing. It's very useful to use these features here at the top of the playlist Step and slide. What that does If you have stop engaged here, you can You can draw in your automation and it will create a point at each step that you sat in the grid selector here. Um, so that's great. But what if you wanna just place one point here simply right click and old place a point here for you. Now you can left click and drag it up or down and then adjusted accordingly. Now, because we want a smooth a gradual increase in volume on our synthesizer, we're gonna started at the zero. And as you can see, I'm adjusting here, Reset it to 0%. You can see in the Finbarr. It's giving me a readout. And we wanted to get gradually louder towards the end of the track. So let's say we wanted to come in here slowly and then it will be full force here when the snare comes in for us here. Great. So now you can see how the synthesizers gradually increasing in volume and you could even observe this volume knob actually moving up slowly, as and mimicking will you drawn into in your automation Great. So another feature here another way to edit automation. Also, there is a slide ticker here. What does that do? It actually slides the entire automation behind the point to the right of that point. But it also can be hindering. Because if you if you're slide is enabled and you move this point, all their other points also move. So whenever you have that issue, just disengage the slide. And now you're free to move this point without affecting the next one. Okay, And here is a really good time to give you a quick tip about automation. Because so you have this automation track here. And you like the way the synthesizers gradually coming in. But you decided suddenly that you don't like that feature anymore, and you want to remove it all together now by simply right click and you will delete the automation clip. But now, adjusting the volume of the synthesizer, it jumps to this mysterious setting that got left off here. And every time you had play, you cannot actually adjust the volume of your synth anymore. Now, when I first started working with a full studio, this was a really annoying feature, and I could not figure out how to get rid of it, so I'll show you quickly how to get rid of it. Let's open up our browser. Let's go to our current project, and in the patterns here you will find initialized controls. When you click on that, you will see that we have our acid synthesizer channel volume initialized control, and that control always sets it to the last known value. And so, if you remove the automation clip and you have this issue simply right, click delete event, and now you can see every time I had play. It doesn't jump to this mysterious setting that we had said before, so that's just something to If you get in trouble with automation, that's just something to look into. Okay, so place in time markers and the playlist is very easy. Simply goto this drop down menu here, and you just go time markers and add one. And now let's name our time. Marker is the start of the song. Right now. You can see the time marker appeared right away on that on our playlist. Now, this time Marker is free to move anywhere would like, and it's not actually linked to the part of the song, so it's not. It doesn't affect the patterns that are below it. It's sort of independent of that now. If you right click on the time marker, there's additional features. You can set it as a start marker. When you said it of the star market, the entire grid moves with the marker. And what does that mean is you can create a pre roll for your track, especially when you're working with video. And if your video starts at a certain point, or you want the music to start at a certain point without actually starting the countdown, as you can see that our time marker goes negative so our song will not start until way had that start marker you like. I mean, it starts, but our time counter it affects their time counter. So I thought our time counter will not start until we hit this start. Mark her hair. Now let's slide it back. This is the start of our song. Let's add it another mark. And now that we've placed one marker, we can add more just by simply clicking on this area here and adding more. Let's add our loop marker. Now, look, Marker is great for live applications. Or, if you want to track that last part of your track or song to just keep looping seamlessly, Um, if you're mixing another track in or using FL Studio Live or something like that, you can create a loop point here. And, as you can see when it gets to the Theo end of the truck, instead of jumping all the way for the start of the track, it will go to this look point here. Also, just another useful feature, and you can look around these different features in the markers and play around with them and see which ones are useful for you. 8. Exporting: Okay, so now that we have our truck created and we wanna export it, we have to render it out of FL Studio. There is quite a few rendering options in FL Studio, but the way it usually works is FL Steel will render anything that's in your playlist if you said it to a full track. So let's bring out our rendering window and you can bring it up by heading control are control our Let's give it a name, Track one shirt. And here is our rendering window here. When this window pops up, you have a few things here that that are important now the modes, which is between pattern mode and full song. So the same is the switch. Here it does the playlist and the full song. Now, why would you wanna render just a single pattern? A lot of times we want to create seamless loops and, um, rendering a pattern could actually be useful or you just wanna just simply ran their drum pattern. You can do that. If you switch to a full song. It will render that everything that it's on the playlist now. But it will also render a selection if it switched to the full song. So let's make a selection. Let's select only this part by clicking and dragging here. Now we have our selection. So when be actually, when we goto export, you can also go file Export way file. Not when we go to X export That file. Let's film called Track One. You can see that it's switched the song selection. So now, instead of rendering the full song, it will render the selection that you're selecting in the playlist. Now there's some other features that are really useful. Lake wrapped remained there. What does that mean? Well wrapped remained. There is perfect for creating seamless loops, and it's really useful for video games and on audio in general, just to create loops that you can stack together so wrapped remain there takes the tail of the last rendering. Let's say you have an Echo River at the end of your music. It will take that tail and wrap it to the beginning of your rendering, which means that then you construct them a seamless loops, and they will not sound off putting. They'll actually flow together. So it's a very useful feature, and I use a lot when I render out my stock music tracks because people like to use seamless loops for this part, we're gonna leave the remainder out, and here we can set multiple formats to output to export out of RFL studio, including MIDI. So an additional format since FL Studio 12 is a flak format, which is just another lost less format, just like a wave is here in the quality settings. Don't worry about it too much. Since this is an introduction, it's pretty advanced settings here. Once you render the track, all these markets will actually appear in your way file so you can render out trunks and send them to your customers or videographers. Whoever use working with and they will see those markers placed in the way formas well, so very useful and when you're ready to render, just simply had start and it'll render out that track, and then you can find it in the location that you rendered it too 9. Final Thoughts: Thank you so much for joining my class. I really hope it was a great learning experience for you. In this introductory video. We talked about the main concepts of battle studio. Well, after this class, you should be able to create patterns, navigate windows and arrange your tracks. Please post your project. I'll be sure the common thank you.