I've been using FL Studio for a very very long time I've coached tons of producers in the software and my entire career was built off of FL but anyway now that I've kind of established my credibility I don't want to waste your time this is FL Studio now before we do anything what we're going to do is go up to file go down to new from template and select empty you can choose if you want to save your current project I'm just going to select no and now as you can see we've opened a completely empty project a completely blank slate now I'm going to cover these main Windows here on the left this is the browser this is where we can easily access files that we've added ourselves as well as a couple folders that image line has added so we can see all the files in our current project we can see our recent files our plug-in database and so on there's also a few tabs up here that I'm not going to go over because they're pretty self-explanatory and you won't really be using them anyway so as you can see I have the AO essential sample pack Link in the description in this browser here how did I add it into the browser well all you have to do is literally just take the folder that you want to add into the browser and drag it directly into the browser and it will show up you can also do it manually by into options file settings and then clicking on the folder icons to add it manually and then if you want to delete something you can just select it and press delete now that we've gone over the browser we have the toolbar up here I'm not going to go over everything right now because that's completely unnecessary and we're going to have some Hands-On learning if we press F6 this is the channel rack you can think of this as a list of all the plugins and samples that you've used in your project as well as a step sequencer so you can sequence your own drum patterns in here as you can see there's an empty sampler if we click on it it's completely empty we'll go over this in just a bit but for now we can close out of it and we have a few other options that I will tell you in just a bit this main window right here is the playlist this is where we're going to build out all of our patterns all of our Melodies our drums and all of that and create a full song out of it you can think of this as like the heart of FL Studio if you press F7 this will open the piano roll it's empty right now but this is where we would program chords and Melodies and then if you press F9 this is the mixer where we can individually route a sound to one of its own mixer channels and then apply effects to it on the left here I'm going to press F5 again and just a quick summary for all the shortcuts because these are the most important shortcuts that you need to learn F5 to open the playlist F7 to open the piano roll F6 to open the channel rack and F9 to open the mixer you can also use these buttons up here if you want to anyway now that we've gone over the fundamentals let's just get into the music production so we've already added Theo Essentials sample pack into the browser Link in the description and let's open the drums folder let's open the kicks folder and as you can see we have a huge list of all the files here if we click it it's going to play a preview of the sample so that you can choose which one that you like so for example I could choose kick 18 let's say we want to start writing ideas and building out our song we can left click this kick right here and directly drag it into the playlist or the channel rack now if we drag it into the playlist it's going to still show up in the channel rack because remember the channel rack is a step sequencer but also kind of like a list of all the sounds that you've used in your project let's try adding it into the playlist and if we press F6 to open the channel rack again as you can see this kick has shown up in the channel rack because we added it to the playlist but just for an example we could take a kick and then directly drag it into the channel rack but it wouldn't show up in the playlist anyway I'm just going to right click and delete this if your samples aren't showing you can select all and let's build out a cick pattern so as you can see I'm selected on the pencil tool this is the most basic tool that you'll be using for the most part and in the snap to grid option I'm selected on beat what this means is that the kick will snap to the lines on the grid so each line is just one beat so we can just left click and program in a simple kick pattern and if we Press Play So as you can see it's not playing if we press F6 to go to the channel rack and press play as you can see it's playing through the channel rack and not the playlist that is because we're selected on pattern mode up here if we left click it's going to turn green and this means it's playing through the song and not the individual pattern let's press play again so now it's playing through the playlist because we're selected on song mode anyway I'm just going to select the paint tool and what we can do with this tool is just left click and drag like this and up here we can select the tempo of Our Song which is just how fast or slow the song is so we could put this down to 128 and this essentially means that your song is at 128 beats per minute let's press play again so now we're kind of getting somewhere I say we go ahead and choose a clap so let's open the clap claps folder let's look through some of the claps and choose one that we like I'm going to choose 21 so let's left click and drag it directly into the playlist and we can do something like this so you might hear that the clap is very loud compared to the kick so how can we fix that let's go to the channel rack F6 and we can turn the clap down with this volume knob right here so right about there is good you're going to get an ear for this over time now I want to copy this clap over to the rest of the to the rest of the pattern so what we can do is hold control left click drag and this is going to select all of these claps here now we can press crl + C then crl V and drag it over like this crl D to deselect it so it sounds good but it's a little bit boring let's try and add some more instruments maybe some high hats or something like that let's open F6 and I'm going to close out of these folders and open the symbols folder so as you can see we have the channel rack opened up and I'm going to open in the high hats and just look through these samples again I'll choose open hat one and we can just left click and this time we're going to drag it into the channel rack instead of the playlist you'll see this green line under the above sample that just indicates you're adding another sample rather than actually replacing this one and we're adding it into the channel rack this time so that we can sequence our own pattern like this if we press play once again it's playing through the playlist and we want it to play through this individual pattern or the channel rack so we can you can go up to this button right here click on it it's going to turn orange now it's on pattern mode press play and now it's playing through the channel rack so as you can see we've programmed in this pattern now so a few things really quick this Green Dot is the on or off button if you click it and play the pattern it's not going to play anything if you control click it it's going to solo just this instrument so if you had a huge list of all the instruments in your channel rack and you solo just this instrument it would only play this one you can control click it again to undo it this here is the panning knob it chooses whether the sound is playing on the left or the right speaker of course this is the volume knob I showed you this earlier we'll go over what this is in just a bit and let's make sure we're selected on the high hat just click on this bar right here and it's going to light up green now from here we can actually select this graph editor and this is going to open a few options right now we're actually selected on velocity and this essentially just means the volume of the sample so we can control the individual volumes of these notes Here something like that gives it a a little bit more of a human feel usually velocity would mean how hard or soft the note is being played but since this is just a single sample and not a plugin for example it's just the volume we can also select the pan window and do something like this and this is just going to decide if the note is playing on the left or the right so this is going to kind of separate the high hat from all of the other elements that we're going to add later and then we can click on the graph Editor to close it now that we've programmed in this pattern we want it to play in the playlist we're already selected on pattern one and we can just left click to place it into the playlist now a cool trick is to hold control left click drag and then press contrl B to duplicate it like this remember to select song mode and press play so the high hat is pretty loud but I think we should go ahead and just mix all of these drums together so that everything sounds balanced let's go to F6 and as you can see the kick and the clap is not being shown in the channel rack to fix that let's just select all in this category selector and by the way we can go ahead and right click and just delete this sampler because it's empty now I said I was going to show you what these are with these you can Target which mixer track that the sound is on so for example we could left click and drag this up to one this one up to two and then this one up to three now if we go to the mixer which is F9 and press play as you can see all of these sounds are showing up on our designated mixer channel so here's what I'm going to do I'm going to right click on this Green Dot right here which is the kick Channel I'm going to turn the kick all the way down and then just keep pressing space bar to play the kick and as you can see the volume here is rising up and I'm going to make sure it's hitting at about6 DB right about there now I did this because the kick is going to be kind of like our Anchor Point to which we'll mix all of the sounds around so the kick is pretty much always the loudest sound in your track now we can right click on this to unsolo it and now that we have the kick as an anchor point we could mix all of these other sounds to sound good with the kick does that make sense so let's lower this high hat it's a little too loud okay that's good for now let's go back to the channel Rock F6 the high hat is a little bit too long so what we can do is just open the sampler as you can see this is the high hat if we increase this out it's going to fade it out and we can make it as short as we want think about right there is good okay let's press F5 so now we have an eight bar drum Loop and we can pretty much just go from here so let's try adding a plugin and making a baseline open F6 and we want to make sure to create a new pattern which is up here you can press the plus icon name it base or something like that press enter now click this plus icon on the channel rack and you can look for 3x oscillator it's in the synth classic section or you can go to more plugins like up 3x oscillator and then double click now this right here is a plugin it generates sound a plugin can either be an instrument like a synthesizer or a piano or something like that or it can be an effect so compression Reverb Etc now that we have this open just follow along with me it looks confusing but it's really really simple as you can see we're selected on the sine wave and we want to be selected on the saw wave up here you can see that the saw wave has a lot more frequencies than the sine wave and that is because the sine wave is just a perfect tone it's just one frequency as you can see the saw wave has a ton more frequencies or harmonics now this is what we're going to do we're going to turn up the dtune just a little bit maybe by about plus 6 cents and then we're going to enable this second oscillator an oscillator just generates sound so we'll turn this up halfway this is the volume right here let's select the saw wave now we have two saw waves playing at the same time we can turn the dtune of this one down by -6 now let's turn the fine of oscillator 1 up by maybe 7 cents and then this one can be ne7 now we have a very basic saw base and we can actually turn down the pitch of this to -12 and the same goes for this one this is just lowering it by 12 notes which is an octave okay now here's the thing here's the fun part we can go to this gear right here click it and click this icon right here this is going to open the envelope settings as well as a few other options now with this we can enable the envelope and as you can see the volume of this sound is following the shape of the envelope here so you can follow along with me decrease the attack decrease the hold I'm going to leave the Decay right here turn the sustain down and turn the release down and maybe put the DK right about here so now we have more of a pluck sound now we can go to mod x and this controls the filter which is over here this is the cut off of the filter and then mod Y is the resonance let's enable the envelope and create a very similar shape to what we did before and you want to make sure to turn this filter down and now it's really starting to sound like a bass and actually at this point the volume is not very necessary so we could disable it if we want to because of the filter is kind of following the volume anyway if that makes sense so now that we have this let's go to the pitch envelope enable it and we can create this very small Spike you can copy my settings [Music] here all this is doing is adding a little bit of punch to the base so the pitch is going down really fast which is causing that effect right about there is good if we want to we could even go back to this and do a few adjustments here 3x oscillator is one of the most simple synthesizers you can go ahead and experiment with it if you want to okay so we got our base but we need to program in a baseline so we can do that by making sure it's selected in the channel rack and then press F7 or just right click and select piano roll now of course here we can program in our Baseline so I'll just put the note F2 and by the way I'm selected on the quarterb option for the snap to grid and make sure to select pattern mode because otherwise it's going to play through the song and not the pattern so we can just create a very simple Baseline [Music] Rhythm and you can follow along with me I'm literally just going to hold control left click and drag and crl C then contrl + V to copy and paste it and contrl B maybe this can go down an octave so just hold control left click drag then press control and down arrow so that sounds good but what if I just select every second note here I kind of hear this in my head press control up Arrow to raise them up by an octave and now we have this cool Rhythm it gives it more of a Groove let's go back to F5 and we can select the base pattern and just left click now let's select song and press play so now we're getting somewhere let's go back to F6 and make sure to add this base to its own mixer channel so I'll just do four and I'm using my scroll Wheel by the way go to F9 and this is the Baseline here so I'm just going to turn it down a little bit it's a little bit too loud that's good now let's go to F5 and by the way these Green Dots basically always mean that you can right click to Solo or left click to just disable it so I want to solo just the kick in the base so I'm going to right click on the kick Channel and then left click on the [Music] base and you might be able to hear that the kick and the base are just clashing a little bit now there is a way to fix this and it's called side chain side chain essentially just duct the volume of whatever instrument it is so in this case the base when the kick is playing to create room for the kick that way they don't Clash [Music] together so let's do that I'm going to show you a very specific technique that I use first of all I'm just going to right click on this and select in insert one that way it inserts a new channel above the kick we can right click on this press rename color and icon name it side chain I'll do a darker color press enter and this can be our side chain track now let's just drag in any sample I'll just drag in a random kick this one right here and you're going to want to make sure this kick is very short so I'm just double clicking on the sample here increasing the out all the way and then decreasing the length by about right there so it's literally just a very short click and we can normalize this as well make sure it's hitting at 0 DB now I'm going to select the paint tool and just paint this all the way through like that we want to make sure it's hitting on every kick let's right click and press Auto name this will just name it and color it and as you can tell you can hear the click and we don't want to be able to hear it and I'll show you how we're going to use this so we're just going to use this click right here as a signal for the base to duck down in terms of volume so let's go to F6 let's add this to its own mixer I'll just do five go to F9 we can also right click and rename this side chain and color it enter and I also want to move this Channel all the way to the left so how we can do that is just hold alt and then press the right arrow now this is what we're going to do okay we're going to unroute it from the master as you can see down here we have a cable going from the side chain channel into the master we want to left click on this Arrow to unroute it from the master now if we play it it's going to be playing but we're not going to be able to hear it and that's because it's not routed the master we want to go over to insert 5 which is where our Baseline is and right click on the Arrow side chain to this track we're going to go to the Baseline open slot one and then we can search for Fruity limiter this one right here now follow along with me make sure that compressor mode is enabled right click on this and select the side chain Channel decrease the threshold increase the ratio all the way and decrease the release a little [Music] bit so you can already hear that the volume of the base is ducking every single time that this trigger right here is playing let's right click on this and then once again now you can hear that the base is ducking every time that the kick hits because the side chain trigger is playing on every kick if we disable it sounds a little bit more messy but if we enable it sounds a lot more clean we can go back to F9 if we want and go back to the Baseline Channel and adjust the release for how long or short we want the side chain to be so right about there is good now you're probably wondering how this works well the ratio decides how much the volume gets lowered as you can see here if we turn it down the volume gets barely lowered at all so that's why I like to turn it all the way up because this creates a very strong side chain effect the threshold is almost like a trigger point as you can see you can set this to a certain amount of decb and anytime the side chain signal that click sound that we created Peaks over this threshold here that's when it tells the compressor to duck the volume that's why I like to turn it all the way down and like I said the release is basically just a timer how fast or slow the side chain is so let's go ahead and organize what we have so far because organization is very important for your workflow this is the kick right here we can right click this rename it to kick and choose a color I'll just do this red color I like to make my drums red you can do the same for every one of these and then lastly we have Baseline I'll just make this one kind of purple we can do the same for the playlist as well go to F5 right click rename coloring icon and do the same thing for each Channel and by the way to make these their color and name automatically just right click on the track and select auton name Clips so we want to start building out the rest of this track right what if we add some sort of Melody or synth or something like that let's add another plugin open F6 the channel rack let's press the plus and I'm going to choose 3x oscillator again because I'm trying to use only FL Studio stop plugins and of course it's very simple and easy to understand so select it we're going to choose saw again and make sure to disable these by the way this up here is the typing keyboard to piano keyboard option you you can left click it and when it's activated it'll turn orange this literally just allows you to use your typing keyboard as a piano you can right click it and select different options and scales as well anyway I'm just going to use the normal saw wave let's open the gear icon again select this this is going to open the envelopes enable the envelope and let's create a pluck shape again turn the filter down again and let's create an envelope for mod x let's increase the resonance just a little bit to add some texture just a little bit right about there and then we can create an envelope for the pitch again it's enable the envelope and then we could just create the same exact plug shape for like the sixth time or we could reverse it by turning this amount down this is going to create that slide up effect I think that sounds pretty cool I'm going to go back to the plug-in turn this down by an octave and we could even enable this oscillator right here and select the white noise turn it to about right there and this just gives it a little bit of texture right about there so now that we have this synth sound let's press F7 open the piano roll and start making a melody or something like that if you want very indepth education for FL Studio as well as learning music theory learning how to make your own chords Melodies and produce professional level music there's so much content I can't even remember it but if that sounds something that you're interested in go check the link in the description so as you can see we have these R notes here and that's because we're selected on the base pattern and that's okay because I'm going to use the base pattern as kind of a guideline for this next pattern that we're going to [Music] create if you don't know music theory yet just follow along with me or you can learn it in the FL Mastery Academy I'm going to take this up an octave maybe something like this and shorten it take it all up an octave control up Arrow I'm just going to hold control left click and Dr drag crl c contrl [Music] v okay that sounds pretty cool let's create another chord for this one by the way once again I'm selected on the quarter beat same thing again once again for this [Music] one [Music] by the way you might notice we have a couple of options down here this is the same exact thing as the graph editor you can press control and open a ton of these other options we have panning velocity Etc then you can control it by left clicking with your mouse but I'm not going to mess with these right now so now that we have this pattern let's press crl a this is going to select the entire thing except for the ghost notes of course press contrl + C I'm going to delete this by pressing delete now let's create a new pattern I'm going to name This chords press enter then press contrl V and we can make sure this is lined up I'll select pattern mode enable the metronome right here we can use the metronome to make sure everything's lined up and on [Music] beat perfect now I'm going to disable the metronome by clicking on it again let's go back to F5 and then we can paste in our chords make sure to select song mode press play and I'm just going to right click re name chords I'll just do this color Auto name Clips F6 put this on its own mixer Channel F9 we can turn this [Music] down now we pretty much have a full main idea we can start to develop it more and mix it and do all this other stuff so really quick I'll just right click rename this to chords do the same routine now let's mix the base a little bit first of all I'm just going to use my scroll wheel and kind of scroll this down to the bottom here and I'm going to add a new effect let's click on slot one and I'm going to search up blood overdrive this is basically a saturation plugin it essentially adds more harmonics to a sound all I'm going to do is just increase [Music] this and of course it's going to make it a little bit louder so we can go back here and turn it [Music] down it saturates it so it makes it sound a little bit more pleasant to the ear let's add an EQ in slot two I'm going to select fruity parametric eq2 too now with an EQ you can take these bands and lower specific frequency ranges as you can tell so we can use this tool to shape and fit our sounds together almost like in a puzzle so the first thing I'm going to do is just cut the subbase so about 100 Herz and we can adjust the intensity of the curve here and then at the top we can select the band type so I'm going to choose High Pass we can use this knob to adjust the bandwidth I'm just going to right click reset I'm also going to low pass this a little bit cuz I want it to create more room for the syns I don't want this base to have too much treble or high end I'll take this band and lower the mids a little bit I'll make sure to select the low pass band on band seven and adjust the intensity here so I just want the base to have this type of [Music] sound let's do the same thing for the cords I'm going to apply another Blood overdrive but this time I'm not going to saturate it too much just a little [Music] bit by the way this plug-in right here is not the best because of course it's an FL Studio default plug-in a better alternative that I usually use is Fab filter Saturn but since I'm trying to do this with only stock plugins this is kind of what I have to use and actually we can use this post gain right here to level it right about there Supply an EQ and we want to make sure to cut the lows or the base because this is going to create room for the actual base itself we don't want the chords to be taking up the frequencies of the base because this is going to create some [Music] clashing we also don't want to go too far that it just destroys the fundamental frequencies of the sound which is going to ruin its [Music] character right about there so what I'm doing right here is just kind of cleaning up the sound a little [Music] bit just making very very small adjustments and then we can even increase the high end just a little [Music] bit make make sure to compare the before and after of the EQ so you can do that by clicking on [Music] this let's press F5 and I'm going to do some arrangement here so I'm just going to hold control left click and drag Press contrl B this will just duplicate the entire section over and I kind of want to remove the clap here as well as the high hat in this first section sounds good so now that youe pretty much have the basics of FL Studio down I'm going to start building out the rest of this idea doing some more advanced production and all of that I'm not going to explain everything that I'm doing now because my throat hurts I'm going to I'm going to make another high hat pattern here so high hat two there we go and then make this red F6 maybe this one let's add this to its own mixer now I want to I want this high hat to be more of a detail so what I'm going to do is apply some Reverb to it I'll choose fruity Reverb 2 increase the Decay a little bit and this wet is how intense the Reverb is maybe some delay as well so I'll choose fruity delay 3 I'm literally just going to right click on these arrows here and select pingpong kind of get that side to side delay effect it goes from the left speaker to the right [Music] speaker I'm going to use this slicer tool right here you can press C to select it and what we can do is either left click to slice the end of this sample off or we can just right click and then it's going to slice it and delete it automatically I'll use the paint tool and just drag this over by the way we can select the tracks here right click on them and then select move up to just move them up and now we have kind of a category for our drums and what if we layer this clap I have a very specific sample in mind that one right there I'll right click on this and select insert one and we can just put this snare sounds more like a clap but whatever I'm going to lower the volume cuz I know it's going to be very loud put this snare under every clap layering your samples is a very important technique that you need to learn when you're producing music because we can take this normal clap and add a layer to it to give it more texture you can just barely hear it's more of a detail but adds more texture to it and the little Details Matter and make sure both the claps are level with the kick you can actually hold control and select both of these mixer channels and just lower them at the same time okay so you might remember that we cut the subbase out of this base right here and now we want to make a dedicated subbase to fill up these frequencies here so let's go to F6 let's create a new instance of 3x oscillator I'm going to disable these oscillators here and I'll select the triangle wave I like the triangle wave better because it has a little bit more harmonics than the nor normal sine wave which of course is just one frequency like I said earlier so select triangle wave I'm literally just going to go to the base pattern control a contrl + C go back to the subbase open the piano roll create a new pattern and then contrl V and we can press control down arrow to lower this in octave go back to F5 put this in the playlist and now it's more full we just want to make sure it's mixed in now here's the thing we want all of the instruments and not just this this base to be side chain to the kick right so you know what we're going to do I'm going to delete the limiter on this base I'm going to UNR the side chain from the side chain trigger to the base I'm going to rename this to side chain trigger and then make a new dedicated side chain mixer Channel which we're going to apply the limiter on click on this right click side chain to this track go back to the limiter on the new side chain channel right click and select side chain trigger and then do the same settings as before now we can take these channels here right click on the side chain Channel and rout it to this track only so do it for all of these even the subbase and now all these instruments are side chained now for the subbase I like to apply an EQ and just cut the low mids I just don't really like these frequencies for my subbase it's just what I prefer and it kind of cleans up the mix just a little bit so as you can tell we still have the essence of all these upper harmonics here but we have the main subbase does that make sense I'll name this subbase and you can do alt left or right arrow to move this around let's apply some Reverb to these cords here just fills up a little bit more space because this track is a little bit dry okay I only have a little bit of time left on my camera but we've pretty much produced a song now so I'm just going to speedrun this show you some really cool tips that I love and then we'll end it so I'm going to open these vocals we can choose a random one like this it's in the playlist now double click on it press control e this is going to open an audio editor called Edison comes with FL Studio what we can do is select the blur tool here adjust the settings and press enter and now we have this so it creates this really ghostlike effect and we can left click this and drag it directly into the playlist now I'm going to place it just like this this will be our ambient vocal go to F9 put this on its own MI then I'm going to Route it to the side chain also this is off key so I'm going to pitch it up okay that sounds good now I have a really cool idea for this open F9 again let's apply a ton of Reverb to it you can just copy my settings here something like that as well as some [Music] delay let's apply a panomatic this just adjusts the volume or panning automatically of the sound so we can select pan increase the amount increase the speed and in fact I'm going to apply a little bit of fruity fast Distortion to this vocal just a little [Music] bit now here's what we can do let's open a fruity balance I'm going to right click on this volume and create automation clip go to F5 and with this automation clip we can automatically control the volume of the vocal over time so if we zoom in here I'm going to select quarter beat and create this kind of wave shape maybe a little faster there we go one more thing we can do is double click on the sample go to this mode here and select stretch Pro we can change the format and this can give it different textures all right let's do a few more things I'm going to apply another Reverb to these cords here now this is a cool trick let's increase increase the size all the way increase the low cut just a little bit increase the Decay and let's right click and create an automation clip for this wet go to F5 and we can create some really cool Reverb sweeps for these cords here something like [Music] this the reeverb kind of sweeps up before it plays the cord another cool trick I like to do is apply a really fast delay to My Melody I'm going to select my own preset cuz I don't have enough time to recreate it you can copy my settings here if you want now we can create an automation for this mix knob right here right click create an automation clip go to F5 go to the playlist and we can automate this in a very unique way that kind of creates this spring [Music] effect and now we have a pretty decent [Music] track [Music] for a beginner FL Studio tutorial with only stock plugins it's pretty good by the way if you want to learn FL Studio in under 2 weeks get a ton of bonuses get help from me and join a community of producers just like you check out the link in the description as you can tell everybody in here is making Amazing Music they're already learning FL Studio downloading the sample packs and it's honestly amazing like I genuinely think it's sick the best investment that you can make if you want to learn music production in FL Studio so if you want to please check the link in the description make music now and you'll thank yourself later peace