FL Studio 12 COMPLETE Basic Tutorial

Hello and welcome to the long awaited FL Studio 12 Complete Basic Tutorial I am Nathaniel Fisher And I’d like to firstly begin by apologising for the low quality and poor organisation in the original FLStudio Complete Basic Tutorial That was nearly three years ago now and with the release of FLStudio 12 One of the biggest updates to FL Studio in quite a while I would like to take the time to provide you with the tutorial that I originally aimed to create armed with a greater knowledge of both music production and the FL Studio interface I’d like to say thank you for all of you kind comments in the original tutorial and also for the helpful advice Despite the fact that arguably the tutorial was successful, I really do think it was very, very low standard- very poor quality.

But with that, I think it’s time to move on with the tutorial In this tutorial I will be covering Navigating the application Basic pattern creation Adding your own plugins to the program and creating very convenient shortcuts to opening them Automation and mastering.

Basically, arming you with the knowledge of how to create simple tracks in FL Studio So with that, lets begin.

So, FL Studio 12 for me, has two really good selling points over previous versions of the application the first one is the Vectorial Interface what this means, is that these aren’t images, that make up the interface These are mathematically calculated shapes Meaning that these can be on massive screens as long as the resolution is high enough giving you lots of room to work The second selling point is the implementation of a driver called FL Studio ASIO now ASIO is a driver that allows for near zero latency input which is fantastic for live performing and also for recording directly from a MIDI Keyboard such as this one into the application with maximum accuracy FL Studio ASIO is the first driver that not only allows for near zero latency audio processing it doesn’t lock the audio device to one application So I’d like to show you how to utilise this driver Now I believe it will startup with the Primary sound driver.

Now let me show you the difference So that’s with the primary sound driver Now we can reduce this But if we reduce it too far, and a lot of tracks are playing at once These things called underruns happen Now these underruns, cause crackles in the audio, artefacts that can be really quite annoying and can reduce the accuracy of what you’re actually hearing with regards to the final track Going below this number a lot of the plugins break instantly Now with ASIO which I cant switch to because it will break my recording It allows for that near zero latency But, it locks it to FL Studio only Meaning I can’t record So all you have to do to take advantage of this is go to FL Studio ASIO and click show ASIO panel It will be set to 512 initially but if your CPU is good enough you can turn it right down to 256 meaning only 6ms Now of course plugins add to that.

But this initial number is a good 70 milliseconds less than with the default audio driver Make sure you select the correct Microphone for any recording that you want to do And make sure that you select the correct output But it’s that simple to setup the near zero latency driver If you don’t mind a few artefacts and want less latency you can turn off Triple Buffer as you can see, that’s taken off 6 milliseconds But basically, the more complex your project is, the more you’ll have to turn up this value But first try using Triple Buffer Because that adds a minimal amount of latency and can fix a lot of issues I’m going to leave this unchecked for now because I want the least latency possible.

So that’s how to set up FL Studio ASIO Something that I think is brilliant It’s a really good advancement by Image-Line Now that that’s set up I’d like to talk to you about the interface And I’m going to make some more room here by just adjusting the width of this browser which gives me more room for the other windows, which automatically resize based on their snap locations So now that we’ve got a fully open project I’d like to rewind a little bit and go to an empty project This is what you’ll likely see once you purchase FL Studio So let’s go on that assumption So the first thing that you want to do is, if you don’t have a MIDI device such as this one then you can just click a button on your keyboard Just to see that the sound’s working If you see feedback here At the top center of the screen.

But you can’t hear anything Then you might want to check your Output device And also ensure that the volume is at a suitable level But once you’ve got that working You could start constructing a very basic track Simply by clicking on these buttons here So, now Every one that’s glowing, or bright will cause the sound to be triggered You can right click to disable them An easy way to fill in these Is to right click the channel in the pattern window and simply do “Fill each two steps” That saves you a lot of work.

But to be honest with you those sounds are OK Just to practice with, but they’re not very good in terms of professional sound So all you have to do to remove these is to Right click them and click delete And I tend to do this You don’t really have to But it just cleans things up a little bit Hold left click to add Hold right click to remove Quite simple So what I’m going to do is I’m going to choose from the plugin presets here A generator A generator creates a sound An effect modifies an existing sound So we’re gonna go ahead with a generator and choose a simple Preset Which is the default 3x Oscillator.

All you have to do to add this to your project Is to drag it from the left-hand side Explorer window (browser) And you can override an existing channel Or just drop it underneath Or above To create a new channel I’m gonna override the kick Now, with FL Studio 12 Much of the default plugins that come with FL Studio have been revamped Their interface is very very clean And very sharp indeed For the purpose of this tutorial I’m gonna go ahead and use my keyboard For any generation that I do But you can make do with a normal computer keyboard For the time being So here you get a simple sine wave Three of them, it looks like That’s panning, as is shown by the symbol there So, as you can see, the interface is quite simple to use This means square This is- looks like sine and square Triangle Saw Quite harsh.

And… noise- Very interesting So yeah, its quite easy to start producing things As you can see up here Pattern 1 would suggest the first pattern the first collection of notes So, all we have to do to actually put this into your project is to drop it here If you hold control, and move the scrollwheel up you’ll find that there’s actually some notes You can delve deeper by double-clicking the pattern And it will open it This button switches between song and pattern mode Highlighted, or glowing means it’s in pattern mode Which really doesn’t do anything right now And if you click it again, it goes to song mode It’s important to notice the difference between these two windows This is just one element of a song And this is the entire composition How did I do that? The same way I did it in this window up here Left clicking.

As you can see, it loops so you can listen to things over and over again with ease To adjust the length of a note All you have to do is click the end And drag it left or right You’ll notice that the next note you place is the same length as the last one So the program adapts to you being able to duplicate things It’s not called Fruity Loops for nothing You can resize any of the windows simply by clicking and dragging their borders So, this is a simple way to create your first pattern in FL Studio It’s important to have as much control as possible over the notes you make Because how loud they are Can be just as important as what note they are I’ll give you an example here By speeding up the pattern I selected all three of these notes using a box select which is Possible to do by holding CTRL on the keyboard.

And then just dragging the area that you want to select I can reduce the size of all the notes By clicking on any of the notes that are selected And it will reduce all the others accordingly This even works with different sized notes What I’m going to do in this case though Is I’m gonna use this button This button scales the entire pattern (that is selected) Which is really really useful and not only does it change their length but it also changes their position Snapping is really useful in this case But if you want to override it All you have to do when you try and resize a note Is hold ALT And then you can adjust it by any amount you want While I’ve selected the object I just hold shift Click any of the notes that are selected And drag wherever I want It’s not locked to the same note I can increase their “height” If I let go of shift I’m using space to start and stop the pattern.

I’m using the same techniques here to build up by pattern even further And you can copy and paste as many times as you want As you can see, the pattern automatically lengthens If you want to undo more than one step You can’t just press CTRL +Z because it will keep reverting between undo and redo In order to undo multiple times, hold CTRL + ALT And as you can see I’ve gone through multiple undo levels Velocity is really important Velocity is also known as volume The only real use of the term velocity is with regards to MIDI input MIDI input has 127 levels of velocity That’s based on computer limitations But as you can see, this defines the velocity of a note I’ll show you what this does Once I’ve modified all of the notes Now that is super important with drums As you can see, once I’ve held CTRL + ALT + Z It opens the current project history.

Now the current project is interesting because it shows you everything that you’re using Currently I’m using the Fruity Limiter In the mixer This tells you a lot of the information you need So, as I’m hovering over these Feel free to take a look at what is being displayed Now I called this the song view, if you like But it’s technically known as the playlist As you can see, even the shortcut keys are displayed To the right hand side of that panel I just indicated All you have to do to toggle these Is to click them Once they are opened, they will appear ontop of any other window As can be seen by this Now, I’ve shown you the channel rack The playlist, and the piano roll The piano roll you can get to know as the patterns.

One thing I haven’t shown you, is the mixer Now the mixer has been revamped in FL 12 You have multiple different ways to view it This gives you the most large display But it’s good to be compact If you’re on any less than two monitors, or a 4K display Now, the mixer is great It’s very adaptable In terms of display But I want you to see the indication at this point this highlighted green part when I press a key As you can see, That one is being triggered This one is the master channel This means that everything goes through the master Any effects you apply to the master channel Apply to all the different channels All the sounds have it, for example If I applied a reverb to it, my entire song would have a reverb, not just the drum So this isn’t good, because this means that right now I can only control my one instrument through the master.

Well, it’s easy to resolve that All you have to do is make sure that the channel of your choice is selected And right click the mixer channel that you want to assign it to Go to channel routing And click “Route Selected Channel To This Track” As you can see, the shortcut is CTRL + L So now when I press Not only does it go through the master Because as I said previously, everything goes through the master But it also goes through “Channel 1” of the mixer This means that I can apply effects to this without affecting the rest of the instruments in my song I’ll give you an example here So, with FL12 the different effects have been categorised So it gives you a bit more context about what they do If we go to “Filter” here for example And click Effector This is a great versatile effect module.

As you can see, it’s not doing anything right now This is because bypass is on Turn off bypass and it will actually be registered As you can see, as it’s on reverb There is a nice clean long reverb So the two different axis define the decay, and the size of the reverb It would seem that the Y parameter defines the size And the X parameter Defines the decay, or how wet the reverb is Now, I want to prove to you that this is only affecting the first channel So what I’m gonna go ahead and do Is I’m gonna click this button here And instead of going to the plugin database I’m going to go to a snap that I created myself It was originally called Snap 5 As indicated by the number But I renamed it to “Gen. External” Which means, Generators, External (Generators) Plugins that are not native to FL Studio.

Now technically FPC is But it is a little bit difficult to access So I’ve decided to put it here I’m gonna go ahead and drag this in FPC is great because it allows you to drag samples onto each of the pads here And you have maximum control over the sound of your drums I’m gonna go ahead and leave this As it is but I want you to note The channels that are being triggered When I press a note As you can see, Master is being triggered But there is no reverb Now, multiple channels can actually be assigned to To the same mixer track As can be demonstrated by doing the same thing I’ve already said But we don’t want that, so we’re gonna go ahead and change that Don’t worry about the fact that I routed it to this one first Once you route it to another one, it will be disassociated from the first one As you can see I’m gonna go ahead and apply a soundgoodizer.

If we click this to make sure it’s open A is the lowest frequencies Which is good, it’s bass D, in contrast, is treble Doesn’t sound very good Now, it’s important to not overuse it I usually keep it around here So now we have our drum with a bass boost on it And we have our oscillator Now we want to put these two together What I don’t want to do is start editing the piano roll of the drum In the same pattern Because this means that we can’t mix and match as we choose Instead what we’re going to do Is click the plus button Next to the pattern And give it a name that’s suitable In this case I’m not going to, but you can do if you want You can skip that Simply by pressing enter And it will remain as pattern 2 As you can see, I’m now just by clicking While I’ve got Pattern 2 selected I’ve now created the pattern here which is currently empty I want to work on Pattern 2.

But I don’t want to listen to the rest of the song While I do So all I have to do is click This button to make sure I’m in Pattern Mode It’s at this point in the game Where I’m thinking “What kind of song do I want to create?” Now, one of the most defining factors About this is the tempo Different genres tend to have different tempo ranges Electro tends to be pretty much always 128 beats per minute Dubstep can be between 140-150 BPM Drum and bass can be between 150 and 170 BPM Metal can be 170 BPM plus Orchestral can be as low as 60 BPM There is a massive range And luckily FL Studio allows you to change that here So, I’m gonna go ahead and say I want to create an electro dance track So I’m gonna go to 128 BPM I want to make sure that that sounds right So I’m gonna use the metronome The metronome is great because if I was to record something And there was a lot going on Or if I don’t trust my own instinct to how large the interval is per beat For a 128 BPM song for example The metronome kind of gives me a bit of guidance there Now I could do this same thing that I did with the original pattern.

Which was to place the notes manually But instead I think I want to record So all we do is press the record button Now for recording the keyboard its just The easiest thing to do is just to click “everything” So when I press play it should give me a countdown I wanna make sure I’ve got the right tracks here The right notes to press There’s a basic pattern When I press stop the pattern appears Now, I must admit even though I did have the metronome My rhythm is not the best So as you can see, it’s not really with the lines of the track Luckily there’s an easy feature to do this If you want to do a few notes, box select them first But if not, without selecting any and instead just press CTRL + Q To quantize the notes This constrains them To the beats or intervals of the BPM Which is really helpful, and it allows you to clean up any sloppy mistakes Now, it’s not complete perfect though I was so off tempo at the end, That this has quantized the wrong values Which you can see very clearly because that shouldn’t be there Should be here As you can see, every other note Starts on a big bold line As should this one So now if you press play If we turn off record mode Now as you’ve noticed, well I hope you have anyway The pattern 2, which is the drums Has updated, it’s got larger And it’s got lots of notes in it.

Now, all I have to do to hear them both together Is to untick this, and press play Alternatively, you should just be able to click anywhere in the playlist Which makes things a little bit easier It’s not exactly going to be number one But, I think it’s a good start OK, so we’ve got the basic patterns down But I want to change the sound of my sounds over time How do I do that? Well, it’s quite simple really As you can see here, we’ve got the Mixer, and this is where you apply effects Generators make a sound, Effects change the sound Now I’m gonna change what this effector does I’m going to turn it onto filter I’m gonna go ahead and press the pattern button And I’m gonna navigate to pattern one By clicking this and dragging it up or down, to select the pattern that I want Now I’m on the right pattern, I’m gonna take a listen at what the filter sounds like I’m also gonna turn off the metronome So I’m gonna pick a position that I think sounds good For the start About there And now, all I have to do because this is a native plugin To change it over time, Is to right click the knob that I want to change over time And create Automation Clip I’m gonna do the same for the Y parameter aswell As you can see, some tracks have been created underneath our existing patterns I’m gonna switch to song mode right now So that I can hear how my sound changes over time.

And over time, I’m going to make these about 50%, which is displayed in the same notification area As I’ve showed you previously Now I’m gonna change the curve of these Just by clicking this middle controller here And then start making my song a little bit longer now I can either copy these, just by doing that Or I can extend them just like I would with a note Make them look roughly identical Now, you might want to start controlling these patterns a bit more You might want to create a very similar pattern, but not know what the exact values were for example And it’s really easy to do this Say, for example, I wanted to take this part, and loop this part But not this introductory part All I would do is, use the slice tool Which is available just by clicking this Or by pressing “C” And I’ll take this pattern here Of these automations And just cut them both in half Now, this is quite good for duplicating this part alone But if I change this part Then the other part changes too.

Now that could be a good thing, But in this case, I don’t think it is a good thing I’m not a big fan of that I want this one to be different to that one But I want it to be based on that one to begin with which is why I copied it To do this all you have to do is click “Make Unique” And now if you change this pattern, which is why I’m gonna make this In line with the other end, so it doesn’t sound quite as jarring when it switches back again As you can see, it doesn’t change this one over here And now I’m gonna do the same with this one And now I’m gonna copy these See what it sounds like Now, as you can see I’m zooming in and out quite easily just by Holding CTRL and using the scroll wheel.

Alternatively if you do that over this Then you’ll scroll up and down And you’ll scroll left to right here You can also use this control To change the vertical zoom Or, hold ALT and scroll So, we’ve gone through the basics of using FLStudio But what about if you want to expand on it? With producer level plugins for example Some of you might of heard of Nexus, or Massive Well, installing this is quite simple When you install them, you get a .dll That you put in your FL Studio folder If you have lot’s of plugins, for example And you don’t want to store them on an SSD Because of limited storage, just go to general settings Or in fact, it will be “File” And you can choose a folder to find the plugins from Now, I’ve already done this But the issue is once you’ve loaded all your plugins They won’t be very easy to access You’ll have to go through the “Browse all installed plugins” And go to the VST folder And go through this entire list Now that isn’t very fun And besides, you might have a preset in that plugin that you want to save, and load very very quickly Which is why I created my External snaps Snaps basically save the state of the browser so you can switch between them Right here I have a custom sound library called “Vengeance” For drums I don’t want to have to navigate to it each time.

And if I open all the menus that I possibly want it’s going to get very very confusing So if you go to snap 7, for example, and you want to Have one category on display For example mixer presets Snap 7 will now save that And all you have to do to make it more Informative, is right click that label And you can rename it something like Mixer Presets So now, when you click this You’ll see Mixer Presets as one of your snaps Good eh? I’m gonna go to generators external because I think I am missing a plugin Hardcore Kicks Free Editon Let’s use that for example OK, so, Hopefully I’ll turn that down in editing Let’s say I’ve got it like this And I want to save the state of what I’ve customised And I want it to be easily accessible I’m gonna got to my generators external I’m gonna make sure that this one is selected And then simply going to go to this little arrow At the top left “Add to plugin database” It’s going to be added to External And there it is Now this is fantastic, But what if I have multiple different hardcore kicks with different setups? They’re all going to be called “Hardcore Kicks VST Free Edition” Now this is a bit of an issue, that I’ve discovered That I’m not sure if I can solve it within FL Studio But I do know that I can solve it I do know that I can solve it using the Windows Explorer What you’d have to do is navigate to your FL Studio folder Go to “Data” “Patches” And then navigate to “Plugin Database”, “Generators” “External” You should see the name of the Preset that you’ve just added I’m gonna rename this to “Hardcore 1” This is instantly going to break it – You need to rename the rest of the files Now it’s worth noting, that it will still be broken Because this NFO file tells you What the image is called Now I’ve just renamed the image So I’m gonna also update this And save it And it might take a second for this to work That way I can just Drag in my Hardcore 1 Make some modifications to it And then go ahead and click “Add to plugin database” again.

There’s the image updated now If you don’t want an image, just delete the image And now I can go ahead and do the same thing Drag it in there And if I were to open My Computer again I could go ahead and rename that and call it “Hardcore 2” And it’s that simple This is really really useful in a case such as this Here’s Kontakt Great plugin player Lot’s of different sound libraries here But “The Giant” is a piano There is not much flexibility to it, that’s what it is And if I want a piano, I don’t want to have to open Kontakt Then go to there, then there It’s just more clicks So all I had to do was, Open Kontakt Load “The Giant” Save it as a preset Or “Add to Plugin Database” Rename it to “The Giant” In My Computer / Windows Explorer And there we go, we’ve got the giant I can do the same for for example The Rickenbacker Bass Just load that The same can be done for effects I can just go to The effector here Click the dropdown arrow “Add to Plugin Database” I don’t think it will work adding it to Generators So you’d have to go to Effects You’d have to create a folder first Like I have done And you can go “Add to Plugin Database” You can also just save the preset Which is useful for slight variations Of something Instead of an entirely different instrument Like the Rickenbacker Bass Versus The Giant Piano That are both in the same plugin But if it was The Giant Piano “echoey” Or something like that For example Eternity or Dreamland Which I’ll show you the difference now I guess there isn’t much difference between those two but Entirely different classifications of instrument within the same plugin Should probably be saved as adding it to the plugin databse Instead of just a preset.

OK, so now I’ve shown you how to add your own plugins and be able to access them easily The next thing I want to do is to, say How to control external plugins Now this isn’t 100% accurate It doesn’t work for everything But it does work for a lot of things Let me give you an example here Let’s delete some of this just to ensure that performance is optimal Because to be honest with you, I don’t really like this sound of Much of FL Studio’s Plugins And if you want to delete one of these, it’s As simple as going right click, delete file Let’s use Massive for this Let’s go for a Dubstep Bass You’ll notice if I right click here I’ve got some options That don’t really work because it’s inside FL And these don’t communicate with FL However, there is a way to make it work So Multilink to Controllers allows you to define What virtual controller Is assigned to what FL Studio or in fact physical controller like a MIDI keyboard So I’m gonna go ahead and click this button here It’s now telling me to tweak the controller I want to control And that’s the LFO speed in this case Firstly, if you wanted to use a MIDI controller with that control If I tweak this.

As you can see The LFO speed is now tied to this Which in fact I can record Inside FL Studio Let’s add a new pattern for this Now, it’s quite good to use that to record But It makes modifying the automation there a little bit difficult So you might want to control the speed seperately It’s great for performing But with regards to having the maximum control Can be a bit difficult So instead of that what you can do Is click the Multilink to Controllers Click the LFO speed And then you can right click this And Create Automation Clip So now click the paint brush tool instead of the pencil which allows you to paint as many times as you want Now create a pattern in Pattern 3 And open the piano roll It’s important to note that this won’t work while you’re in pattern mode Click the pattern to make sure it’s selected here You can also select it via that Paste that in Now it doesn’t sound very good For a start, dubstep usually isn’t 128BPM The speed here is pretty terrible But as you can see, the basic gist is using automation To control external plugins So now, I just want to finish up Now that I’ve told you about how to use the interface, With going about composing a basic song You define the BPM based one what genre you’re gonna use That can be tweaked later, if you want, but it’s good to start out with a basic idea of what you need Might as well remove that as well So I know that I’m gonna need drums.

So the first thing I add is drums Now, most songs have bass Massive is quite good for bass They have a lead Which carries the bassline Which is the catchy part of the song And then they might have some kind of Organic instrument Such as a piano So we’re going to use The Giant in this case So that’s all I really need To create a pretty cool song But, I want some drama in the situation So I’m gonna go ahead and use Kontakt And I’m going to use this thing called Rise and Hit This is really really cool I’ll give you a sample of what it sounds like Let’s start deciding what sounds we want to use in our song I’m gonna reset this to empty Now I’ve got my own sounds here Which are really easy to add All you have to do to add your own samples Is to go to the FL Studio folder Data, Patches User And then you can put anything you would like there And then you can just create a snap by navigating to it And as you can see it’s opened my folder here ready So, we’re gonna go with electro So I’m gonna go ahead and click for an electro bassdrum.

If you’re wondering how to add a MIDI device Just plug it in, wait for the driver to install And FL Studio should have native support for it It has Native support for a large amount of devices I think I should just make you aware of a certain thing Which is really really cool If you don’t own a MIDI device, but you want something more tactile to use For example, a tablet, or a phone Image-Line have actually came up with a App called Image-Line Remote which is free You can get it from both the Android and Apple appstore You instal that onto your device You make sure it’s connected to the WiFi You click “Enable Image-Line Remote” You launch the device And you should be able to see some controls there For pressing keys, but it’s really good if you don’t have a MIDI device But there is some latency involved because it is over WiFi So, now that we’ve got a basic drum kit What we can do is make a basic pattern To see if they really do work out well together So because I know which ones go where…

I’m pretty happy with the sound of those I’m now going to allocate them a mixer track So that I can control them further So Arpeggiation (Arpeggio) is where you take basically the rhythm of a song but you spread it across multiple notes Or octaves An octave is basically a group of twelve notes You have got G3, and then G4 So, even though I’m pressing two different notes because they are the same note on a different octave It doesn’t destroy the rhythm as much I’ll show you what I mean by that And to finish off So now we’ve got a bit of a groove going on Let’s look for a dance Lead That sounds quite good, I like that Now at this point we’ve actually got Very low notes there So I’d rather have these approximately at the same velocity It doesn’t have to be exact But I want the high notes to be a little bit louder than the low notes To give more of a sense of rhythm It’s good to build up to high notes sometimes as well so we could do something like this If you want to change one of the notes that’s overlapping if it’s part of a chord, just select that note And the other one will maintain its velocity.

So as you can see, I’m trying to make the lower notes lower than the higher ones So an easy way to do that is simply just to select all the low notes to ensure that They’re all at least somewhat lower than the higher notes So right now we get the lower notes good, down there But after that one is layered with the high note I want to give a bit more presence to the lower note After it, just to maintain its dominance I think that looks good That doesn’t need to be too loud though, because it is stacked with another one, so I don’t want to overpower it Pretty happy with, that let’s see what all three of those sound like together I’m pretty happy with that Let’s go ahead and add some piano inflections So some flairs I’m gonna change my octave on my MIDI keyboard.

So one thing to note is some plugins can be a lot louder than others The Giant is actually quite quiet And Nexus is extremely loud So it’s at this point that I’m kind of prompted towards starting to master a little bit, or at least just mix To get a better balance So this is where I allocate Each of my channels a mixer track As you can see, they’re all currently just routed to the master channel which isn’t any good So if you wanna see the levels You can see that this one Unfortunately the OK, so we’re about minus 6 decibels there Whereas the sub bass is even lower it looks like Now the drums you want to be slightly louder than every thing else And there’s multiple ways you can do this These controls are very simple, you’ve got the channel volume, and the channel panning Panning is which speaker it’s more dominant in Songs are usually stereo Left and Right channels Volume, speaks for itself So I’m going to increase the bass volume here.

In fact, yeah, yeah, I’ll increase the bass volume I can change that later So if we go in the master here, what’s really important is for it not to clip So currently, I’m sorry, I have to lean closer to my screen It’s quite difficult That’s one thing about the interface I don’t like We’re hitting zero I think that’s because of the limiter Yeah, there’s a limiter here That’s limiting it at zero decibels That’s not good, we want it to naturally limit at zero So what we’re going to do, is we’re going to turn down our channels We’re going to start turning them down So our master’s still being hit quite harsh, and I think that’s mainly because of the bassline here No, it would appear that the sub bass is still far too loud I’m going to go ahead and remove this limiter Replace “none” So I can get more- Yeah there you go- I can get more of a natural sense of where the tracks are So now, even though we are technically nicely below zero I would actually like to limit them a little bit more What’s important here is not the level of these knobs These are an offset, What’s important is that the output value here My drums are maxxing out at minus 3 decibels which is great Whereas, my sub bass Is way down there.

So I don’t mind having a little bit more presence to my sub bass To go to about minus 6 decibels Now this, is quite quiet at this point because the limiter is not doing all of its quirky stuff So we can actually turn this up now Until we’re comfortable I’m happy with that, it’s at minus 3 In fact, I’ll turn it down slightly and just turn up the sub bass a little bit Bass is good So this is basic mixing Now if we look at our piano Look how low it is So the first thing to do in this case is because of the way that it’s mastered The easiest thing to do is actually to turn up the base plugin This will lead to probably the best outcome because its the plugin that controls it before anything else So now we’re reaching a much more respectable level So we’ve done some basic mixing here to try to actually be able to hear all of the sounds At the correct levels that we want And to decrease the chance of clipping But as you can see, we’re still peaking a little bit It would appear that the drums may be a little bit loud So what I’m going to do is I’m going to continue to turn things down a little bit to make room for the piano I might turn them up later when I do the mastering I’m gonna get a few phrases up here Start our countdown…

Excuse the poor playing So as you can see, the pattern’s not actually Going to start At the start of the song- because I only start pressing a note here so it’s going to snap to the nearest four bars Now we don’t really want that in this case, we want to get more of a square lineup So we’re gonna go in here turn off autorecording and listen what the output sounds like So that definitely starts at the wrong time I’m gonna go ahead and press CTRL+Q to quantize the notes To make them a bit more accurate OK, so now that we’ve got a few different patterns working together in harmony We want to start making the song have some progression So we’re going to move the main bulk of the track over here And think about how we can start So that sounds more like an introduction kind of beat So we’re gonna go to Pattern 5 and we’re going to clone that as well We’re gonna remove that and replace it with Pattern 6 And now we can go So give it a bit more of an introduction These drums are pretty good but they need a bit of variation, some breaks Now, I wouldn’t actually start with the piano The piano has given the melody at the start here Which you want to add some evolution to by the way So let’s go ahead and do that Very very cheaply Simply by choosing an Effector Using what we used earlier (Turn off the bypass) Choosing the path that you’re likely to take, this is how I Like to do it anyway.

OK, let’s make this much more linear Simply by using this control That’s a little bit sharp I like that It’s important to maintain these at all times, if you get lazy with them they’ll stay in the same position and you won’t realise How big an effect it’s gonna have on your song So it’s important to whenever it’s going to be playing Make sure you’ve got a automation clip if you’re gonna control it at all So the last thing I want to talk about before I finish off is Mastering Now, mastering is basically giving room to each of your sounds So that it doesn’t become muddy And reducing excess sound in each instrument to make room for others What I usually do is use two things I use a compressor This is for drums, so I’m going to make the ratio 20:1 And there isn’t much difference between different volumes I’m going to increase the gain here, so it will initially be louder.

And now, I’m gonna add some EQing to it Parametric EQ So as you can see, you can see the different frequencies that are being triggered, if you like And what I want to do is pick some Different ranges that I want to boost And some that I want to decrease So this is for the kick So around C2 The snare is more of a middling frequency The hat is towards the higher end But I don’t want it to be too high so I want to boost the lower end a bit So what I’ve done here is I’ve highlighted some areas that I want to save for the drums Now if I was to add- boost this part for the bass It would get a little bit muddy But instead I can just boost around here And they won’t have such a negative effect on each other So I’m not going to bother with the compressor for this part But it’s important to choose wisely Now, the sub bass is great, but it’s quite difficult to hear under the song anyway Whereas this frequency range is very very present If you want to lower all of them at once you can just do that As you can see there’s no frequencies being generated there So now Ive made room for both the drums and the bass At this point I need to check that my song isn’t clipping Which it would appear it is slightly So this means more turning down If you want to just create a loop region to loop around You just hold right click and drag an area Now a limiter is good to ensure that it never clips But, it should only be used as a catch all.

So it’s important to keep modifying this as you go along Now I’m very very comfortable with that part So a high intensity part of the song And I don’t think it will clip at any point Of course I can use the limiter to make sure it doesn’t Which I’ll do later But while I’m constructing the song, I need to ensure that all the changes I’m making aren’t grossly causing clipping So it’s not perfect, it’s not fantastic It’s slightly catchy I think But the most important thing is that the rhythm is there The mastering is OK I’ts not clipping The EQing is alright We’ve give from for different elements of the song to come through So I think that this tutorial has been very long I’m going to edit it of course I’ve gone right through different ways of navigating through FL Studio Customising it to your needs Creating basic compositions and controlling them and mastering, the basics of mixing and mastering, using the channels So please, if you’ve got any questions please let me know Please give me feedback on this tutorial It’s a long time in the making And I wanted it to have the same kind of style as my original one, trying to cover everything But being a little bit more articulate, obviously better audio and other things like that.

But anyway, nevertheless, I hope you’ve managed to learn something from this I hope it has been useful to you And if you’d like to see any more tutorials or have any questions about anything in particular Please let me know, and I’ll do my best to help you the best I can.

So, with that, I’d like to say Thanks for watching! I’m going to give you a peek at something I’m working on myself So guys, Thank you very much for watching again, I hope this is useful to you I hope you can make use of much of FL Studio While this plays I’m going to tie up a few loose ends.

So, this shows you the CPU usage If this is really high you’re going to want to turn down the quality of your playback increase the buffer length as I’ve shown you earlier here This is the amount of RAM you’re using, if that is to high, again you’re going to want to do the same things Or consider investing in more RAM This is the time keeping You can switch between the amount of bars that have gone by Or seconds, I prefer seconds personally.

The metronome is up here Don’t forget, this the Multilink to Controllers to link external controllers to FL Studio This allows the playlist to continue following the song as it goes along so you don’t have to manually scroll So I think that’s everything really Like I say, any other questions please let me know And apart from that This is Nathaniel Fisher, signing out!