Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi and welcome to
the second episode of FL Studio for
absolute beginners, B2. Again, my name is Sam, also known as Weasel. I'm part of miscible and weasel. I've been producing an FL
Studio for over 15 years. I've created a lot of cracks
in here that are signs on big labels like spinning records
are modern music. Music. Today we're going to go a
bit deeper into FL Studio. Still the absolute
basics I think, but definitely a little bit more complicated than
the first parts. If you haven't watched
the first parts and you're an absolute beginner, go check that out for a springy journal. Gonna
check that out first. Not gonna make any sense of
both bring going to do today. So I started off fl
Studio once again. If you don't have the
exact same screen, again, File New from
template minimal. Emt should have this
exact same screen. Now let's jump into it.
2. Importing sample packs: So in our first video, we worked with samples
that came within FL Studio and they
are included in the trial version and in
the full version as well. Today we're gonna
start downloading and importing our very
first ONE sample back. So we're gonna do That's
Trudy Internet's of course, if we start off the
Internet and if we go to Google or any other
search engine, and we Google Wave
point house essentials volume one will go to this one. Scroll down and we'll
download right here. It will take you
to a Dropbox link. You can download it right
here, just fake downloads. And afternoon, we're going
to create a sample folder. And create a sample folder on a disk on your computer that
has a lot of hard space. Especially if you're going to
produce for a longer time, your sample pack folder is
going to become very large. Make sure your disk has
enough space for that. For me. I'm going to starts a new sample back for you guys
on my E folder, on my E described
called sample back. Simple banks. Actually. We're gonna double-click
it and then we're gonna go to our downloaded PEC. If you can't open the
pack, it's a zip file. You just have to download a
program as well called 7-Zip. Now you can just go to
seven zip on Google and download this program
as well. Download this. So anyway, we're going to drag this folder into the
sample BEC folder. There you have it. We now have our first sample back in our sample packs folder
on our disk drive. Now let's go back to FL Studio. And it's presses little
triangle right here, and go to configure
extra folders. I have a lot of extra
folders already in here. But if we scroll down and if we click this
little folder right here, we can go to the
folder and debts. We just create it
for me and this is the E folder and then
the sample bag folder. So dads, and here you can
give it a name as well. Let's call it sample. Back. In this tutorial. We can now exit out of this and
you can see right here that its appearance in
our browser right here. And if we click it, you can see that our wave point houses essential sample
bag is now here. I like to have all my sample folders at
the ends right here. That's why there's an
x in front of them because this is sorted
alphabetically. You can do that if you want
to. It doesn't really matter. We now imported our very
own first sample back. Let's continue. Let's start exploring
the sample. Thanks, and you have drums, like I said before, you have one shouting, you have loops. Let's maybe lay down a
standard drumbeat once again. So let's take a kick. Drag it in here. Let's get the standard dance
music pattern. Let's open up this club as well. It's the CLEP, boom,
boom. Open up. Open up any higher as well. Let's give it that
pattern as well. Change the BPM 225. Right off the bat. If you're
producing, How's music? And if you have an ear
for music quality, we can already hear
that this drum pattern is standard dance
music pattern we just created is of much
better quality than the drum pattern that
we did in the first video. That's because the samples are especially made
for house music. If you're going to
search for sample bags, always search for
sample banks that are kind of in
your genre to have a good basis of good-quality
samples right off the bat. Of course, you can
take sample bags from other genres as well for some
inspiration or something. But just know that
if the quality of your basic samples is
already quite high, this also means that
your final song is going to have
a better quality.
3. Using samples in your piano roll & envelopes: So we just laid down
a simple drum beats. There's one other thing
we have not talked about, where you've only worked
with some samples. I want shot samples
and loops in the past. But what this sample
bag also has is music. Musical samples has a
couple of base one shots. Shots. We can use these melodic won't shout samples to create some kind of melody, which is drag it in. We can start creating
a melody with this exactly the same way as what an instruments
just right-click, click piano roll, and we can start creating some
kind of melody here. Just going to make them
longer or Control a and drag. It's looped. If we want
to go out of the loop, you can control
click right here. I made this melody
and you can hear a couple of problems popping up. The first problem is that the melody is longer than
the loop that's in air. Fixed assets, we're going to control a to select everything. You can also go here, go to go to select and then select
all control AS shortcuts, then collates or Control X. Again, you can also do
that by going to selects, going to edit, and
then two cuts. It's a matter of
preference, but whatever. Then we will create a new
pattern, call it baseline. We can then control V, paste, edit, paste to
have our baseline. I'm a new pattern. You can go to our first pattern as well and press F2 to give it a new name called a
drum loop or whatever. Let's go back to our baseline. There's another problem. You can already hear it. Our notes are bleeding
over each other. The notes are too long. This is because the
initial sample, this sample is pretty long. It's longer than the notes. And to fix this, we can go to the properties
of the sample. Now we asked to talk
about envelopes, and this is the Properties
window from your sample. You probably recognize it
from our first episodes. This is the couple of taps you have are going to
focus on this tab. With envelopes. You have a couple of parameters
that are always there. The attack, decay,
sustain, and release. This graph right here. Graph this visualization
shows watts. It does to the volume, in this case of the sounds. So if we want, like if we play it right
now, everything is at 0, we will not hear anything. But if we give it
a little bit of decay, we can hear something. If we give it a
little bit of tech and we'll have a fade
in at the beginning. You can play with these, with these parameters to
change how to volume. In this case, if this
sounds is being altered. I can explain every
single parameter, but I think that
will be a little bit too complicated
for episodes. Just play with this on your own. In our case, we're
gonna go for Holt's, which is if you play a notes, it will holds the volume
until the node is done. So in this case, the node is this long and it will be done after
this part right here. For us, we only want
the holes to be at its maximum and the rest
we keep it all at 0. If we play the melody right now, you can hear that it's
not bleeding anymore. So let's turn it off to
hear the difference. Where did the envelope you
can control things like this. We can also change the
***** for example, let's start that envelopes. Well, let's take out the sec. Let's give it a little. It'll boost of pitch and let's make it a
little bit higher. Pitch. It's like the, how high your sample is in the
frequency spectrum. If we increase the amount
of pitch a little bit at the beginning, if we play Uno, now, you can hear that it goes up at the
beginning of each node. So that's also a way to control your sound's
pitch when an envelope, we can do that, so we're
not gonna do that. Let's just change the volume
of fixed the problem. So this way, you can
use these kinds of melodic samples as
a metadata as well. You can work with samples as melodic instruments like that. For now, Let's start
creating a little song. So we have to drum loop,
like I said earlier, I like to have everything split. Let's create a new pattern
that's called kick. Let's give it a standard
dance music pattern. Same, same, same, same. Let's now arrange something. So let's drag that
in the club as well. Let's drag that in as well. Then we also have to
baseline right here. So maybe the baseline
comes in right here. Now we've created a
little arrangements. Let's now take our
individual samples and assign them to a mixing
slots in our mixture. So if we click the samples, we can actually press
F2 or right-click Rename To give them a
name, a better name. So I'd like to do that. I'd like to stay organized
such as just a clap. This is the hi-hats
and this is the base. So if we click right here
on this little thing, it will assign to the next
available free mixing slots. So that's one. In this case, this is going to two and it's
going to auto rename them. Which is really handy. I think I'm just going to
treat this is going to form. So now we have them
all names correctly. We can start doing
stuff with it.
4. Frequencies and sidechaining: So I want to talk about frequencies forbids I'm not going to explain what
frequencies are. You can find ads on
Wikipedia if you want. But just know that
every piece of audio has frequency
information in there. And we can see debts if we go to our baseline mixing Trek
and open up the fruit, eat paramedic EQ T2. Again, if you can't see it, go to more plug-ins, paramedic EQ, you will find
it there and double-click it. If we listen to our
baseline now and check that paramedic EQ
at the same time. You can see lots frequency
information it has. Down here you can
see the frequencies. And the human hearing
goes from 20 Hertz, which is just 20 right here, to 20 kilohertz, which is all the way at
the ends right here. You can see this
is a baseline and base has a lot of low
frequency information. That's what base daisy, as you can see them right here. Basis usually twin 100 hertz and maybe two on the returns
due on the 20 hertz. You can see that it also has
some sub-layers right here. If we didn't go to our club, for example, and we load
up a paramedic EQ as well. And we play our
clapped there I'm loop pattern, I should say. You can see that the CLEP as completely different
frequency information and it has a lot more high
frequency information. Just take note of that. Now if we go to our
kick and open up the paramedic EQ as well.
Go to our kick better. And you can see right
here that this sample, this pattern, also has a lot of low-frequency
information. Now both our baseline and our cake, low-frequency
information. In dance music, but also in
a lot of other music genres. The kick is like your driving factor
throughout your song. Because both the base and the Kcat low-frequency
information, we don't want those two things
to clash with each other. And to fix that you have this
thing called psi Channing. What side chaining does is
when the cake comes in, the base, lowers its volume. So to kick has more
space in the song. If you let those two things both play out without
doing anything about it, they will compete
for each other. I want the low frequency area. No, I wanted to
low frequency area and that's what you're
saying to each other. To side-chain, going
to select the kick. And we're going to
right-click this little arrow right here and click
side-chain to this track. Now if we go to our
playlists and we just take the cake batter and just
control click right here. And if we drag that
Shift-click, can copy this. You can also, if you're already quite comfortable
without a shortcut, you can also select it
and then press Control. Be autofill, It's
Trudy, playlist editor. Right now we have to kick and the baseline both
playing right here. Let's control-click here in the timeline to make
a loop in our song. Right now, you can
hear that the kick and the bass are both fighting for those low
frequencies a bit. We just saw chance this
signal to this single. So now we just have to tell
the base mixing track what to do with that signal that
is coming from the kick. We go to the mixing
track of the base. Right now, we load up this effect called
the fruity limiter. This is a limiter. I won't get into it. But if we go right here
to comp and we go, we check this little thing right here. It says side-chain. If we update to one, this mixing track of
the baseline will now interprets that mixing
track number one. Here It's signal coming in. We can now change the
threshold, hence the ratio. I won't get into it at
right now to alter watts, the baseline is doing
with that signal. You can see the kick
here coming in. And if we up the ratio, we can hear that the baseline is ducking more
and more and more. I realize now that this is
pretty complicated already, especially if you're
an absolute beginner. But this is the way
how you can create space in your song
for other elements, usually done with
kicks and baselines. But it can also be
done with vocals. For example. If you're an absolute beginner, you don't necessarily have to do or to take account of this. Maybe you should just focus
on creating tracks and having as much fun than all the more technical stuff
will come later. But side-channel is one of the most basic things in
creating dance music, and it's very important as well. Let's now change
the side chain to something we think sounds good. Something like that. Maybe we just saw
chance something. And if you notice right here you can see
some wires going. And let's now talk about wiring.
5. Basic effects & song structure : Thing you are going
to use most in dance music is this thing
called compression. And I'm not going to talk about both compression AS because
it's pretty complicated. You can check out a
complete separate video of hours about that subjects are called the basic
guides and compression. But what he does in its
most basic form is, let's open up the
fruity compressor. It takes out the
peaks of some of you are elements that you have. And it's pressed him
down so that you are in your drum loop in this example is more
compressed, more squashed. And if we listen
to the drum loop, we have right now already a couple of his way to Laos.
Let's take it down a bit. If you now change some
parameters on here, we can change the amount of compression that's
going on on this loop. Let's say we're happy with that. You can also, what
we can also do in this mixing drum bus we have right here is we can create
some kind of build up. Let's do a little
arranging right here. So right here we have an intro. We can press Alt plus two
to create a times marker. Let's put in intro right there. Let's create another one. Let's call it break. Let's drag that over two. It maybe. Then let's create
another one and call it drop. And let's drag that one. Here. We have a little intro, we have a break, and
then we have a drop. Let's copy this here as well. Now we can start
using effects on these entire drum bus to
create some kind of build up. So we can maybe answer
some kind of filtering. We talked about frequencies
already for little bits. And if we go to
the paramedic EQ, we can see the entire
frequency spectrum of our drum loop writers. So again, let's look this. So there's a cake. There's a lot of high-end there as well. One effect you can apply to your entire drum bus is
you can add equalization, so you can up some
kind of frequency. You can do that, but
you can also filter. And that's what we're gonna do. And we're going to add
a filter to take out all the low-end of the
frequencies of our drum bus. Let's add a iPads right here. Let's put it all the way
at 0 in the beginning. Let's automate this. So right-click create
automation clip. And because we loop
this animation clip will only take this side, but we can make it
longer if we wanted to. We have to be,
It's in the intro. Maybe we want a, maybe be once the drums do not have any low
frequencies and the break. So let's add an
automation points. From here until the drop. Maybe we want to
keep that going. You can right-click this to copy the value of that specific
automation points. And we can click right
here to paste that value. And then it's a drop. We want everything to be normal again. So let's just take out
the baseline again. So here we have two normal
drum it open here we have the drum loop from the
break without the low-end, which is automated
our first filtering, that's what it's
called filtering. Now let's also drag this
down with the scroll wheel. It's also add some reverb. So let's start up
free to reverb to. I'm not gonna go into all
the parameters right here, but this is the amount of
reverb we can apply to it. So let's set that to 0 first, right-click create
automation clip. Let's drag in some automation
points here as well. To watch and drop, we want
more reverb to be applies. We now added reverb. Let's also adds delay. We also use dance
in our first video. And if you still remember it, this is the amount of delay
you can, you want to apply. So let's automate that as well. Let's give that some
automation points as well. Let's copy all this stuff
over to the drop as well. Now we created a little buildup. Let's copy this over as well. He wants this entire track to be above or below something. You can press this
and click move up. Now all the drums are on the first four tracks
and the baseline is, I'm going to leave just for me, I'm going to set
this to two steps. So there we have it, we automated our
first little bills. Now we can also do
the same width, for example, the baseline. So we go to the
mixing track again, F9 for the shortcuts
few months to note ads. We can maybe add some
filtering here as well. Maybe we can take out
the base in the base, the lower frequencies
of the base in the beginning
of the break and then make it all come
back in the drop. Again, we're going to use a high-pass filtering
for this one, we're going to
automate the paramedic EQ for that specific
frequency range. We want, yet we
wanted it's Xubi, have no high ends at the beginning of the brake
or the entire break. Let's do much. You can't even
hear the bass right now. Let's make that a
little bit lower. There you have it. You've
created your very first on how strings, simple as that. And of course you
can go completely crazy in terms of effects. And you can really
build something up in an insane way just by
adding more effects. Just take notice that
it's not going to be too complicated and too
crowded because that will you can also go
too far, I think so. I think that's about
it for this episode, we talked about importing your own very first sample
pack into the browser. We talked about using some of those samples by
creating a drum loop, but also how to create a melody from a musical
one shot sample, which we did with the baseline. We created a basic
song structure. We also wired stuff
to a mixing bus, and we also side-chains
the cake to the baseline. We used automation and different effects to create
some kind of buildup. That's what we
covered this episode. I'm completely aware of that it's a lot more complicated
than the first episode. In my honest opinion. I think watching a
tutorial to get the basics of Offer programs down like we did in the first episode
is really important. You should play with this
program as much as you see fit. As long as you're having fun. Along the way, you will
walk upon problems. You will see a lot
of problems that you can't solve right away. I think that's the
best time to go search for solutions. The best. I talked about the 10
thousand hours rule in the surest episodes. And I think it's really true. The thing that will
make you learn the most is just putting hours in. It's facing problems
solving those problems. I think this basic guides FL Studio for
absolute beginners. It's really helpful to
get down to the basics. But at a certain moment
you just got to make, make ours and get
the experience and dense solve the problems
that you're going to see. I still find problems every single day of
producing. How do I do that? How do I do debts? I'm not I'm not aware of
everything in this program. Music production,
It's like painting. You can you can literally paints a hot dog blue and
start painting with it. That's a way to be creative and the same as with
music production. You can control and link every parameter to every
other parameter there is. You can make it as
complicated as you wanted to. And that's the beauty of
creating music, I think. But anyway, I hope you learned
something in this episode. I hope it was not
too complicated. Feel free to browse
through this episodes. A lot of times to really get down to
some of the shortcuts, for example, or checkouts. One of our other videos, the basic guide on shortcuts, for example, to get a better grasp on what this
program can do for you. Yeah, that's it. I hope you learned something and
I hope you had fun. That's the most important parts. See later.
Mr. Belt & Wezol, DJ/producer duo from the Netherlands
