Transcript for:
Curso de Producción de Música con FL Studio por Tristan Wilcox

in this course Tristan Wilcox will teach you how to produce music with FL Studio Tristan is a professional music producer with over 10 000 hours experience in music production FL Studio is a complete software music production environment it features a graphical user interface with a pattern-based music sequencer when you start music production you'll find that one of the most difficult things to do on your own is create your first full-length track and that's why I wanted the goal of this beginner course to be that you'll have something done you'll have something finished that you can be proud of and that will apply all the knowledge that we're going to learn in this course the way that this course is going to work is SMB divided into 10 chapters each one of these chapters is going to be focused on one specific area of music production that you're going to be using every single time you open up a project file in the description you'll find that there is a link to FL Studio you can download the free version and follow along I'm personally going to be using the paid Producer Edition but it's not necessary and you'll be able to follow along just fine without further Ado let's go to chapter one [Music] foreign now that you've downloaded FL Studio the first thing that we're going to want to do is go up to file in the top left corner click new from template and then click empty and what this is going to do is it's going to prompt us to ask us to save changes for the file we're just going to click no and then from here um we have a completely blank file and so now we're all going to be working from the same spot and if something was open or accidentally opened in your project it'll all be cleared so we're all working for the same spot I think that's important so the first thing we're going to do is just try to get a virtual instrument into our song So to get a virtual instrument what we're going to do is click this box up here called our Channel rack and the channel rack is a uh basically just like a box that's going to hold all of our instruments for the song so what we're going to do now is we're going to open up a brand new instrument in our Channel rack so by clicking this plus icon it's going to show us a tons of different options for different instruments that we can choose from and I'm going to click on flex and I suggest I use flex just to follow along and then after you can mess around with different plugins as we move throughout the course so by clicking on Flex down here it's going to load up our first virtual instrument now once it loads you're going to see that the channel rack is sort of blocking our plugin so why don't we just click X on the channel rack and then use this top bar to kind of move this plugin into view and right here we have our virtual instrument so this isn't uh some virtual instruments can be a singular instrument so like there is a virtual instrument called FL keys that is just a piano and then there's some virtual instruments like Flex and flex is going to give you access to all kinds of different virtual instruments it's more of like a library of sorts that contains more instruments inside of it and so that's why I want to click on this one because I wanted to show you guys all the different sounds that you get right out of the gate with FL Studio even in the free version so I went ahead and I downloaded all of the free um packs that you can get and so if you want to do that now you can download those and you can see right here I I these are the ones that they currently have available and so um what I'm going to do is I'm going to navigate to pianos where it says essential pianos and then it's going so you see it has packs here and has presets here so think of this like the category so you have pianos guitars bass guitars and just click through these you see and then on presets it's going to give me different kinds of pianos to choose from so I have pianos and then the presets under pianos I have close Grand and this is going to sound a certain way and by clicking this it opens up that particular preset so to play this virtual instrument what we're going to do is we're going to click on any of the keys Z through M I believe um you can play key you can play different notes using your own keyboard so you can just play Keys like that which is great I'm just using my keyboard down here and if it's not working for you make sure that you have this uh keyboard piano enabled by making sure that that icon right there is orange so now that we have that turned on I'm going to go through just different presets and I'm just going to show you guys around and just show you the different types of instruments that you can play and use for our songs so right here we have essential guitars and I can click on like Ace nylon light and so we have a guitar here so it's cool and then we can go in our string section there's plenty of strings to use as well you got the base base we've got wind instruments you got trumpets space actions brass I mean so you've got plenty of really high quality samples and things that we're going to be using as we go along so the next chapter we're going to be focusing on how we can record Melodies and chords and bass lines in using our virtual instruments to start beginning our track [Music] all right now we're ready to start making some patterns so what we're going to do is we're going to navigate to the piano section and just choose any preset that you like here I'm personally going to go with the close Grant and from here we can just close out the flex plug-in by clicking on the X icon here and we will be staring at a empty projects again now from here to start making our pattern we're just going to click on the Square left of the channel racket is called the piano roll so once you click that it's going to open up a new window for us now this window is where you're going to be placing all your chords Melodies bass lines all kinds of things like that um and before we get started I'm just going to show you the basic navigation of the piano wall and we're going to edit some settings to make it a little easier to use so in the top left corner you're going to find that there's this little drop down menu and if you click that um we can head down to edit and just make sure you have allow resizing from left enabled um it's turned off by default and I'm not sure why because it's extremely helpful to use um so you're going to want to enable that um the second thing that we have to enable is go to view scale highlighting and make sure that this is set to automatic this is also going to be really helpful for when we're making cores and Melodies so making sure that we're placing things on key um so from here uh the basic navigation is fairly straightforward you have a sliding bar at the top which lets you move left and right and then you have a sliding bar to your right which lets you move up and down um the way to kind of think about the piano roll is that it's essentially a piano that's flipped vertically so you can see that if I uh scroll up and down it's scrolling up and down the pitch of the piano so we have these are going to be higher notes the higher I go [Music] and then the lower I go it's going to be lower notes so that's essentially how it works and then if I click play right here um I'm going to switch it from song to pattern since we're listening to our pattern we're going to want it to sit to this Orange right here and then if I hit the space bar or click the play button you'll see that it's going to start going through and so this right here this little bar is going to play whatever notes we have um and it's going to play them in in a sequence from left to right so if I just put uh left click a green note in here I'm just going to click once and it's in a place and no and I'm going to do this a couple times to show you guys how it works so if I click play again [Music] you can see that it plays it uh one after the other so the pin roll is pretty intuitive um there's I don't feel like there needs to be a ton of over explaining here but before we start making Melodies I do think that a couple more things are going to be important to layout and that is resizing the piano roll so this can be really difficult I remember when I first started my piano roll was zoomed in extremely close like this and I had to move notes like this and it was just really really painful and nobody and I couldn't find anything on how to make this fixed so the way that you do it is this if you scroll on this bar right here uh the specifically the bar that has the numbers on it if you use your scroll wheel on this it's going to resize it horizontally and then uh up in this top right corner you have another bar that lets you resize the piano roll vertically and this is just really helpful I know that like sometimes the piano roll can be sized weird and it can be really frustrating to try to make Melodies if you're too close or too far away from the notes so I'm just putting that out there just in case one of you was a little bit too zoomed in or so I think now we're pretty much ready to go over the basics of note manipulation so I have these notes that I just left clicked in here and there's a couple things that we can do with them so the first thing we can do is resize them so if I hover to the end of a note you can make it longer or shorter and then I can do that from the left side and then if you remember this is the setting that we just changed the allow resizing from left allows you to resize the notes from the Left End um and another thing that we can do with the notes is just move them around by hovering in the center of the note and then finally the last thing that we can do is delete the notes by holding down right click and deleting them now if you deleted a note that you liked uh you can you might be tempted to click controls Z and think that you fixed it and it's true it does work for one mistake but let's say I wanted to go back more than one undo if you want to go back multiple undo's you're going to have to hold Ctrl alt Z and this is something that uh well it records everything that you've done on the program will record up to that point and then by holding off of alt it'll undo all those things so I know that's a little confusing it's a little different than most programs uh Control Alt Z is undo and then just Ctrl Z is redo that's the way you have to think about it for FL it's a little hard to get used to but that's how that works the next thing uh I guess we could talk about is probably selecting multiple notes at the same time uh if you hold down control and then left click it'll bring up the selection menu which allows you to select a bunch of notes here and we can move all these at the same time and then the last tool I think that we need to know before we start making Melodies is just the slice tool so right up here on this row you're going to see all the tools I've been using so far so we have the select tool here which I use control left click as a shortcut you have the slice tool here which is if you if you want to know the shortcut I believe it's shift right nope never mind I don't know what it is that's okay um you can just use an iPhone up here and use that to slice um notes and then that's really helpful if you're trying to slice many notes at the same time and then finally what we have is the mute tool which allows us to mute notes you've got a bunch of tools up here that you can mess around with which will be really helpful for when you're making Melodies without further Ado I think that we should try and make a corporation we should actually uh start making a Melody and I think uh the panel will become more familiar to you as we keep using it over and over again what we're going to do is we're just going to delete these two notes I have over here and we're going to start off by moving a note in the range of see halfway from C3 to probably a little above C4 I want to make a bass line I'm going to take a note I'm going to just click it down here just like so and I'm going to stretch it all the way from the first number one all the way to two I want it to be one bar long the bar is going to be from any one number to the next number is going to say be signified as one whole bar and so that's the length I want my notes at this moment if we click this we're going to just try to make a baseline so I'm gonna place a few notes after each other and we're going to see if we can make a decent 70 Baseline real quick foreign foreign okay so I made a very simple bass line and the way I did it was just by placing a one note after the other and I kept one rule which allowed me to make sure that I was making um pretty good choices and that was I only placed notes on the highlighted rows and then the non-highlighted rows are notes which are going to be off key this is really helpful for when you're starting off and you don't know a music theory it can be really helpful to to know which notes are the right notes and which ones are the wrong ones just by staying in one key for your song here I as you can see if I just take away these notes now it doesn't pop up these highlighted rows but as you start placing them it I believe it's three notes is the minimum it tries to make a Scale based off the notes you placed and you can see it keeps changing based off of where you move the notes and then you can place those notes in there and it will make you a scale I'm going to undo all that for so far and we're going to go back to what we had before and this is what I ended up making [Music] now I recommend that you guys make your own bass lines you don't need a copy mine exactly but if you're struggling to make one you can uh copy it now I'll leave it up here and then right after that we're going to start and try to make some chords okay so now we are going to place uh just one note above each of these baselines so we're going to take it one step at a time we have our Baseline laid out so let's just start by adding one note at a time to each one of these just ask yourself does that sound good or should it be somewhere else okay that sounds good to me so we can leave this note here and let's go to the next chord Okay cool so we got the first two uh already sound pretty good and I just chose those by finding a highlighted row and just choosing one that I thought sounded good so we have this so far foreign that doesn't sound so good to me so we're going to move this probably down that also doesn't sound good let's just mess around with it until we get something like and if you don't want to listen to the whole thing every time you can actually left click up in this top row and we'll move the playlist slider to wherever uh you want to listen to so like let's move it just in the middle right here and play okay that doesn't sound good now you can attempt to move it on to a row that's not highlighted just to see if it sounds good and it possibly could so you saw there I actually knew that when I moved this note to this uh darker highlighted uh Square it was going to actually make it a highlighted row because um I knew I I know a little bit more about how the how the key was going to work so that just comes from experience but sometimes the key can change and you can actually put a note on a darker row and it will actually change it into a highlighted row because it realizes that you're using a different scale so that's something to keep in mind so it's not always wrong to use the not not highlighted rows it can actually be beneficial sometimes [Music] listen to this all the way through perfect okay so I'm gonna add just one note on top of all these and then we'll have a good Corporation here [Music] could do something like that I'm going to experiment with a couple other things and I'll get back once I have something I like Okay cool so I made something I liked here and this is what it sounds like foreign [Music] dramatic the way I did this was I simply just took uh one step at a time we made our Baseline then we added one note on top of it and just made sure that every step of the way I was making choices that I was happy with that I thought sounded good and then by the end of it you can have a product that you like sometimes it could be a little bit daunting to say hey we're going to make an entire chord progression but if you just take it one note at a time and just make sure that one note sounds good after the other note you can start building things a lot more quickly and not worry too much about the big picture and that's how I was able to make the score progression because I was just making sure that every step of the way I was making choices that I thought benefited the whole so all right now that we got our chord progression what I want to do is start adding some instruments to this pattern to make it uh more full so the way I'm going to do this is I'm going to go back to my channel rack up here and I'm going to click the plus icon and we're going to add in another instance of Flex from here what we're going to do is we're going to navigate to another instrument which can act as a baseline for our chord progression so I'm going to go to the string section here and I'm just going to choose the base sustain preset because I think that will be a good base for our chord progression so I'm going to click the X icon here and then right now if we go back to our Channel rack from before you can see that we now have a second instrument um um in our Channel rack so we have the closed grand piano and we have our bass sustain so the way that we can start adding notes to the base of stain to our um initial pattern with the chord progression is by going back to the piano roll here and clicking up in this little drop down menu you're going to see that you can choose the other instrument so I'm going to click base sustain and then we'll be in the uh instrument base sustain but in the same pattern so if I click play we're still going to hear the piano but now when I put a new note it's going to make the bass sound as you can see that right there so what we're going to do is if you don't see these uh Ghost Notes right here we need to go up to this corner and go to view and then make sure ghost channels are enabled if I disable that you'll see that these notes disappear and you can't see where your other instruments and notes are and so I find it pretty helpful to have the ghost channels enabled that way I can always see where I need to place my notes so the next question we have to ask ourselves is where we are going to place the base notes and for this um I'm going to navigate back to the piano and I'm just going to copy all the lower notes on our chord progression and use those as the base notes for our string section so the way I'm going to do that is I'm going to hold Ctrl shift and then I'm just going to hover over and using left click and I'm just going to while I'm holding Ctrl shift I'm just going to select each one of these notes like so and sometimes it can be a little bit weird and you'll have to click the note I don't know why it does that but sometimes it could be a little finicky but uh hit Ctrl C once you have all those selected and then we're going to navigate back to the base section and click Ctrl V and if all is well it should pop up right in the exact same spots and if it's a little bit off you can just move those to make sure they're on properly now let's assume what that sounds like [Applause] awesome so now we have a base section which we can use to supplement our chord progression from here I'd like to add a melody on top of our Corporation and I think that that will really get us in a position where we can start working with patterns in the next chapter so what we're going to do to make a Melody is go back to our Channel rack right here and we're going to hit the plus icon again and we are going to go back to flex you guessed it and we're going to find something that can make us a good um a good instrument for a Melody so I'm going to navigate to maybe not exactly sure maybe you could do like a wind instrument not exactly what we want and sure what we want here but technically doesn't matter what we pick I'll just do a tuba I don't know why but we'll just use a tuba why not so from here uh we're just going to navigate to the tuba instrument and then if I click a note you'll hear the this instrument and I'm just gonna make these notes a lot shorter so I'm going to drag this here make it smaller and let's just make a a rhythm for our Melody so the way I go about making my Melodies is I want to keep the Rhythm consistent to give you guys an example let's just play a rhythm here by clicking in some notes [Music] and then I'm going to just control click copy and then I'm going to shift click this and we'll duplicate it and then shift click again duplicate shift click duplicate you don't you don't have to do this right now basically I'm just showing you guys this to teach you guys how I think about my Melodies when I'm making music so let's listen to what this sounds like [Music] Okay cool so right here what we have is we have every single bar we are playing the same Rhythm so we have one note one note one note and then two smaller ones and then as you can see the pattern repeats itself and this in the listener's ear is going to create a pattern in the memory which will make it so it doesn't sound like the melody is all over the place because they can they can hold on to a rhythm which is it's catchy this is what makes it catchy but it it becomes repetitive if I just have this on one note so to make a Melody not repetitive you need to keep the same Rhythm or at least keep it moderately similar and then you have to change the notes in ways that are uh and this this comes a little bit with time is you kind of know how to change it in a way that doesn't sound too chaotic but a way that sounds enough to give the listener something interesting to listen to so why don't we start by moving these notes around like this like I'm gonna just move this one a little bit down [Music] thank you [Music] and then maybe we don't have these two notes Here we just we just delete them and then so to copy this I want so okay the way I think about this is kind of fractally if you if you've ever seen fractals before you know how they kind of like you can zoom in and it's the same pattern and you can zoom out and you see a bigger pattern and so I think about Melodies In a fractal way it really helps me think about how I want things on the bigger and smaller scale looking like a cohesive hole so the way that I'm going to do this is I you see how I have the I at first I had the Rhythm exactly the same for each bar and then in the second bar right here I deleted these last two endnotes so what am I going to gonna do for the fourth bar I'm also going to delete these two endnotes because it matches the the second bar so I if you if you right click on this bar with the numbers you can actually uh highlight a section which will repeat itself so if I click play here foreign so I'm going to be doing this often to show you guys the way I'm thinking about my Melodies so in this case you can see at first I Had Each bar repeating the Rhythm exactly the same which was initially this this pattern right here which I um [Music] and I repeated that four times now as you can see I have a rhythm which is two bars Long and and you're probably wondering why is it two bars Long well remember I made that change on the second bar where I took off these notes and then this entire pattern repeats itself because on this second bar I also take off these two notes and if you need to remember what a bar is it's from this number to this number so these two bars act as a one big pattern and then that the second two bars repeat this first two bars pattern okay hopefully you guys are are not having too much trouble uh following along a lot of the stuff I don't know because I can write it on a piece of paper or because I read it in a book it's it's trying to explain to you the type of things that you learn by experience and these things are very difficult to kind of like condensate in the words at times so I'm sorry if it sounds like a little bit confusing I'm really trying to boil down like what's going on subconsciously to you guys and it can be difficult sometimes so oh I think it really it comes from making a lot of bad Melodies over and over again and then noticing just one thing that made the melody sound good and then remembering that for next time and then over time you build up these experiences which allow you to make uh helpful and good changes to your music and so sometimes even when I'm doing a full course like this I can I can sort of walk you through what I'm doing but you are going to have to try to make your own Melodies you are going to have to make a lot of bad Melodies to really understand like how to make good Melodies and that's just how everything in life is you really just need to put in time and experience in these things so if you're struggling off the bat don't worry I I didn't have I didn't even know about Rhythm or anything when I was making Melodies I was just clicking notes all over the place and actually sound kind of good but I was placing those all over the place and yeah it was just really bad so if even if you start with this bear it just uh like if you get 10 out of what I'm saying about Melodies right now you'll already be ahead of where I was when I started so just I think you it it's when it's not complicated now but I think you're it you'll be okay if you if you just take a little bit away from this even if you don't understand everything I'm saying so in the second half of the melody what I'm going to do is I want to repeat the third bar I want to repeat in the first bar so I'm just going to copy the notes honestly [Music] okay and then in the second part I already know what I want to do so what I want to do is I just want to have it something like that maybe Okay let's listen to what this sounds like [Music] so what was my thought process and how did I make a Melody without even listening to it and knowing that it would sound good how what are the rules that I employed to get something that was going to sound decent no matter what the way I think about these Melodies is that I have a structure which I apply and it applies to the Rhythm but it also applies to the pitch of the notes so this is called a a b a c Melody okay so from bar one to two this is a from bars two to three this is B from bars three to four that's a and from bars four to five that's C and so why is it called a b a c well because a matches the a here matches this a right here and the C matches in rhythm I mean the B matches in Rhythm C however it differs in where the notes are placed okay and so it could technically you could say that this is a a b a b because the Rhythm doesn't change from two and four but I'm just saying it's a b a c because I change the notes that may not be technically correct but hopefully you're following along with my thought processor so what do I do I don't want the listener to be all over the place if I want the listener to be all over the place here's what I do [Music] okay we're going to do this as an example to show you how Melodies can get confusing so I didn't put anything on any wrong notes I didn't actually choose any specifically wrong notes in this melody okay I know I'm technically putting one on this darker highlighted don't worry about that that's technically not an incorrect no I can explain that later but just roll with me so so nothing's wrong about this it's just hard to follow okay because it doesn't repeat itself in any meaningful way there's no pattern here like sure some of the Rhythm stays the same but it's it's very difficult to follow and there's there's lots of wrong things about this melody and I use wrong in quotations because you can get a lot away with a lot of stuff in music okay so let's talk about why this melody doesn't work okay why doesn't this melody not work sure a lot of the Rhythm stays the same like you always have it start with three um Quarter Bar note lengths and you have that here and then you also have that here I hate that note okay so we have that continuity okay so it has somewhat of a pattern right but what's the problem it doesn't repeat the same pattern ever like it's always playing different notes so there's nothing that stays the same so this is fantastic right here because it may not be like a like a hit song Melody but it sounds good it sounds good enough because you have these two things repeating each other so I have a little bit of of continuity so you can kind of hear a pattern in your head [Music] okay so I could even if I didn't want to repeat exactly I could do something like this I could this might not sound as good but you could try something like this like yeah that works too but like you see how like the closer you can keep it while only making slight changes you have to this is where that you you have this balance right this balance between novelty and Chaos because you want it to sound well you have it's like novelty boring and Chaos okay something like that you have like this three thing going on because it could either be all over the place where nothing makes sense you either have everything super boring and The Listener like wants to turn off your song or you have to strike this medium where you're doing something that's interesting without making the listener feel like they have no idea where they are okay and then this is something that like I said it's going to take feel it's going to take time and you are going to have to mess up and you have to be okay with messing up okay so yeah I Melodies are gonna be though are always going to be difficult because no matter I've seen producers that are professionals people who know the software front to back and they cannot make a Melody to save their life and that's okay okay they're fantastic producers in a lot of different ways but Melodies are something that not everyone gets but if you put in time and effort and if you're really struggling if you I would recommend learning a little bit of music theory and that can also benefit you if you don't have it as much of a natural musical ear for Melodies but yeah so I just don't want you guys to be discouraged because once we hit Melodies that I knew this was going to be in Melodies and chords especially these things can take a long time to develop an ear for and honestly I can't give you guys the rules for everything I can't do the exact steps on how to become a music producer because there are no exact steps to becoming a music producer it's a non-linear process the best I can do is teach you the steps on how to use the tools how to navigate the tools and try to give you the best advice I can to try to get you in a place to where you can have the type of mindset to where you can do these things um okay hopefully I'm not rambling for too long I just really wanted to encourage you guys uh because I know that making Melodies is difficult and I know I'm making courses difficult and I just didn't want somebody watching this video to feel like they were really struggling and watching me make these chords and Melodies and they're like I don't know what this guy's doing I can't do this I'm I suck at music production please don't quit please don't quit if you if you didn't have a corporation or Melody figured out yet it's okay okay just copy the one I have and we can move from there I want you guys to have something finished even if it is someone of mine maybe you could change it and just tweak it in a few different ways to make it something your own and that's fine but like yeah I just don't want you guys to get discouraged because I know I'm throwing a lot at you and that's there's a lot more that we have to go through so hopefully you guys can stick around and this wasn't too much so let's move on to the next section and just uh try to take a little bit more slowly the next section is going to be easier so it'll give you a little bit of a breather from working on more difficult uh making Melodies that can be quite quite tiresome if you're struggling with it so uh without further Ado let's move on to the next chapter foreign I'm really excited because I remember in the last chapter I mentioned the way that uh I think about music production in a fractal way and so I want to show you guys why I think a music production like this and to do this what we're going to do is go to this square right here that's the left of the piano roll so remember we have our Channel rack here left of the channel rack is our piano roll and left of the piano roll is our playlist and the playlist is very similar to the piano roll in a lot of ways and you'll see this immediately because we can still use this top bar to navigate left and right just like the panel roll same with the vertical bar same with uh increasing horizontally and increasing vertically so it has the same controls the navigation as a piano roll but what type of notes are we going to be placing in here well the thing is this is not uh where we're placing notes this is actually where we're placing our patterns so the pattern that we made with our all the instruments I can actually click in here and then you remember when I clicked uh I changed it from song to pattern up in this play button now if I click it on song it's going to take the it's actually going to play our pattern here so that's what that the that's what the distinction is between these different types of play buttons so if I go to song and I click play or space bar [Music] what the playlist is used for this is where we are taking our patterns this is where the music gets made essentially this is where everything happens so I'm going to show you guys a super cool trick which is going to allow you to make things really quickly so I already showed you how to use one pattern to make um all the different um instruments fit together into a cohesive whole but you're probably thinking right now okay Tristan how am I going to do anything all my instruments are bunched together in this like same pattern what am I going to do I understand that so what we're going to do is we're going to right click the pattern one and we're going to go to split by Channel and what this is going to do is that this is going to split and name for us all of our instruments that we have so now they're all kind of laid on top of each other so we're just going to delete all of them okay and if we click this and add it in here then click this one add it in and click this one and add it in now we can see each one of these is actually one of the patterns that we made from before and it split it up for us essentially so now like for instance I could take out the piano maybe I want to undo that and I want to take the melody and hopefully this is very intuitive and you can see how many parallels there are to the piano roll so just like in the piano roll I could click a second one and I could repeat the pattern over again and maybe uh later in the song I want all the instruments to come together but earlier in the song I I don't want as many elements together maybe that's how I want my song to be and so what I'm going to do is I'm actually just going to restructure this so I'm going to hold shift and middle Mouse scroll wheel and I'm just going to move this melody to the top I I like to have my Melodies on top my chords in the middle and my bass lower because I'm pretty OCD and I like things to be organized so this is an easy way for me to organize things so again that was just holding shift hovering over where it says track one or whichever one you want to move uh for me was track one and if it's just scroll wheel I can actually move this up and down it's a quick little it's just a quick little uh shortcut you don't need to remember this it's something that is not necessary it's just something I do to organize stuff fast so right here let's just listen to what we have in our playlist so I was just clicking I was literally just clicking these patterns right here these are all the patterns that we made I was just clicking them in just like notes Okay so this is just the basics of how we can lay out in our playlist different by the way this is what this is called so the piano roll is where we put the notes in and where we where we click in notes and then the playlist is where we click in patterns so and it's the same controls so just like you can split notes you can also split patterns so it's it's literally the exact same thing as the piano roll it's just applied to the entire pattern so hopefully that's that's helpful for you guys to understand um I guess the one thing I didn't really explain is that right here this is in this like row this is where all your patterns are stored so before we just had one pattern and so that's why there was no reason to come to the playlist because everything that you were working with was in the panel roll but now since I split everything up if I double click on any of them it's going to open back up the piano roll and it's just going to open up this instrument you can see here that if I go back to my base my base isn't here anymore and my melody isn't here because these patterns are separated now I separated them into separate ones so if I click on the tuba you can see that the two has a check mark because that's the only and these don't have check marks because there's no notes in them but I want you to take away from this chapter is just the similarities between the playlist and between the piano roll and I hopefully by connecting these two different parts of the software and seeing the similarities between them it should become pretty apparent in in your head how they're connected and you can see how a full song could be made the playlist is just for where you put together you saw where you take all the patterns and all the Melodies and chords and everything and where you lay it out into a finished uh finished product that's going to be telling a story to the listener if you get that you understand the playlist so without further Ado why don't we go to the next section and start working on what samples are thank you in this chapter we're going to be going over samples a sample is just a sound file that can come in as a wave or MP3 and this is going to be used for something like recording vocals through a mic you'll be recording into a sample or recording voice memos on your phone or anything of that sort so the way that we're going to use samples is by accessing the Fuller system in FL Studio so if you look to our left right here we have this browser column right here you can see its browser and you have all these folders here now I already imported a lot of folders with my own samples so you guys aren't going to have a lot of these however if you open up packs right here this is where you are going to find the default FL Studio samples so why don't we navigate here and just click through these folders until we find a sample that we can add into our track that way you guys can understand uh what they are for so I'm just going to click on kicks and uh right here you can see there's this little new icon and this indicates that you're clicking on a sample so let's click on a few of these and listen to what they sound like [Music] all right cool so I'm going to use FPC 5K and I'm just going to left click hold and I'm going to drag it into my project and you can see there's this little gray highlighted area where I'm hovering with my mouse and if I just let go anywhere I want it's going to place this sample so this sample is going to play uh just like a note in our panel would except that now it's going to play this sound file once it reaches this point in the song so for instance if we listen here foreign so that sounded pretty random and out of place so why don't we find a place to put our kick that actually makes sense in the song and start making it into a type of pattern which would make sense so there are two ways that we could place this kick in our song I could for one I could delete this right here and I could go and create a new pattern before I click the new pattern I just want to make a one note so before in this column over here you'd remember that are all of our patterns popped up in this column but now all you see is the sample the FPC kick 5 kick that we added in this is because there are multiple icons here which indicate which um storage unit you're essentially looking at so this middle icon is for samples like the one that we just Dragged In and this left icon right here is going to show us our samples our uh my bad our patterns so if we click here I can click on one of these and add in as you can see that specific pattern so if I go back here and click on that I can add in my sample again so that's just helpful to remember if you ever get lost or forget which one's which that's where that is so what we're going to do is we're going to go back to our pattern and we're going to click the plus icon here and this is a good point in which you can learn how to manually name our patterns just in case you want to do that and you don't want to split it like I showed you earlier so let's just name this drums if I can spell properly drums there we go and also why don't we just make it a different color just to show you guys how you could do this you can just drag this any color you want and then it will pop up as that color make sure you hit the check icon right here and then boom it's going to make our pattern and it's going to make it a specific color as well so this gets into color coding and this is this can be really fun too to do I don't do it too often since it takes extra time but if I finish a project and I have nothing else to do sometimes I'll go back over it and make it look nice so let's um before we double click into here what we're going to want to do is go up to our Channel rack right here and you can see that from when we add in our sample it actually shows us the sample right here in our um Channel rack so to see our instruments from before we need to go to this top bar right here and click all and now this is going to show all of our instruments and our kick so there's a couple different um there's a couple different options we have unsorted which shows us essentially the instruments that aren't sorted yet and then we have audio and it shows us our samples and then we have all and then this shows us all the different things that we've added into our project you might be wondering okay what else goes in the channel rack the only thing that's going to appear in our chain rack that we haven't gone over yet is automations so automations samples and instruments are the three things that are stored in your channel rack and we'll go over that eventually but for right now we only need to focus on samples so the way we're going to approach this is we're going to right click on the sample and we're going to go to piano roll and now in the piano roll because we were selected on the drum pattern from before we'll be placing our our kick in the drum pattern so let's go back to the playlist just to reiterate what I just did so back in patterns over here I have selected the drums I go to my channel rack and then I can right click and if this is checked it's not going to go into the piano so you have to uncheck it and then check it again and now we will be in our drum pattern with the specific sample that we have so I I was debating whether or not to show you guys this but I am going to show you the way uh doing it like this even though I don't do it myself so you may be wondering like wow this is extremely confusing and I don't really want to put in samples like this um if you're thinking that uh and you don't want to do it this method then that's fine if you'd like to keep everything in patterns I'm going to show you this method just so that you have another uh way of producing that I know some people enjoy more um so just so I can give the full breadth of how you can use FL Studio because not all producers produce the same what we can do here is just place a kick and as you can see the kick actually it pitches up and down the sample um depending on where we place the note so that's also pretty cool feature P5 is going to be the default pitch of the sample just so you guys know I'm going to place a kick right on the first beat on the I'm going to place it midway between one and two and then I'm gonna place it on actually you know what let's leave it like that and I'll show you guys a little trick here so what could we do I could keep keep going with this pattern like this but if I know I'm already going to do that pattern well there's no sense in me uh manually drawing in the notes I can just do this I could take the pattern shorten it down and then copy it just like that and so this is a way that that if you did it like this it would save you a lot of time save even more time we can navigate if you remember the tools that we have up here we can use the paint tool and paint across just like that we have our entire drum pattern across and so let's listen to what we have right now [Music] okay I think that we should take out the kick right here I'm actually going to right click on this sample and we're going to take out the kick here and we're only going to leave it for the second half right here and what I want to do is I want to add in a different sample so I'm going to add in a snare and the snare is going to be our pattern right here so let's find a snare that sounds good now if you're looking for sample and it's slow to click every single one you can also use the arrow keys on your keyboard to quickly filter through them [Music] so I found a sample that I like simple and it's not too too crazy so we're going to use the sample and this time rather than making a pattern I'm gonna show you guys the other ways that you can use samples we're just going to click the sample in so now I can just click the sample as if it's a note see I'm selected back on my sample right here and so if I click this one I can actually just click and place every uh every spot I want to sample so I'm going to zoom in here to make sure I'm placing it in the correct spot see I have it when I have it in the right spot here so let's click click it here I believe that's also off a little bit okay and that should be pretty close Okay let's listen to this [Music] Okay cool so we have wait I actually is this off I can't tell okay there we go I fixed it my bad um all right so what we're going to do is I'm going to take this I'm going to select all of these and I'm going to hold shift and we're going to go down arrow so I'm just again I'm going to be using shortcuts and speaking as I use the shortcut to show you guys how I'm doing things quicker um because I noticed when I was recording these tutorials before I would use a lot of shortcuts that I are just like wired in because I know how to move around the software really quick but then I wouldn't explain how I did that so oh I was right the first time okay never mind um yes but I would use the shortcuts without explaining them so sorry if explaining the shortcuts is taking a little extra I want to make sure that you guys know where I'm going in the software um okay so what I'm going to do here is I'm just going to copy these and there's a couple ways I could copy and paste these across my song I could hold shift like I did before and shows you guys with the piano notes and just shift click it across and this method works perfectly fine however there's also another method I could use if I can also right click select this bar and if you remember what this does it repeats whatever section of the song I selected here so we could listen to this over and over again uh but if I actually select all everything that I want from the section of song and hit Ctrl B for duplicate not duplicate duplicate it's going to duplicate it one section over I don't really know how to explain it but you just get used to doing this a lot and this is the way I copy and paste things throughout my song extremely quickly and yes so that is another method that you can use to copy pastings across yourself so I'm hoping that what will happen is if I give you I guess enough enough methods of doing things in the software you'll latch on to like one or two that you like and you're like oh I like the way that he did that I want to remember that for later and then you can just come back to this video anytime that you need and just remember what that is and then be able to practice it that way you can be able to use it so that's my intention let's listen to what we have so far just to see what kind of progress we're making [Music] now that we've done samples I think it's time to go to our next chapter and then we can start fleshing this out a bit more so let's go [Music] okay so the plan here is to essentially take all the chapters that we've learned thus far and just repeat them over and over again until we can actually fill up and turn this into a more full song so I don't just go through these processes one time through making a song I know I said at the beginning of the course you're going to be using all these but you are also going to be using them multiple times over so like when I showed you to open up the channel rack to add an instrument and then layer maybe I don't just want one piano maybe I want two pianos stacked on top of each other I'm going to show you guys in the channel rack right here if remember our piano is called close Grand or whichever one you choose navigate to that one and then you're going to right click on this piano and then hit clone and right here it's going to duplicate our piano instrument and so here we see that we have the same Flex plug-in that automatically opened and showing us different uh the piano that we chose again so I'm going to choose a different piano sound here and we're just going to mess around with some stuff so Okay cool so we have this piano sound I'm going to exit out we're going to double click on our close Grand pattern and it's going to open it back up for us uh Ctrl C and then navigate up here and we're going to go to electric piano and then Ctrl V okay hopefully you guys are following along and then if we play see that's way more interesting so we just added just one more instrument and it just added just a little bit to to what's going on here so I think that that that's cool um we could do this again so I'm going to duplicate the electric piano again and then we can add a string instrument so why don't we add like all strings slow for instance we could just mess around with this and then I'm going to show you guys a super fast method for copying and pasting the chords so you see where we have in our Channel rack it's if it's showing you the Beats like this you can just click off of that and it'll show you uh just make sure you can see these these patterns right here um what you're going to want to do is click on the Square so you see we have the pattern here so if I double click this it's going to open the pattern electric piano if I double click this it's going to open up the pattern to my close Grant but you see the pattern here it opens up nothing because there's no pattern in there so what we can do to copy quickly copy and paste is hit Ctrl C on this little this little green square right here you just click it left click the screen Square Ctrl C and then click on the instrument that you want to paste it into and Ctrl V and then boom it's going to paste the uh the same course in there so we don't have to manually go in so let's listen to this foreign [Music] already sounding way better just by adding a few more instruments it's really adding a lot I think okay so we have this base uh I don't want to listen to all these instruments at the same time anymore I want to listen to Just the bass so what we're going to do first is I'm going to exit out of the channel rack I'm going to control left click select all of my instruments here then I'm going to use the shift key down arrow a couple times I want to give myself some room and then we're going to click on the close Grant because if you remember this is where we added our new instruments so why don't we split this again so I'm going to right click on it and I'm going to split by Channel and then right here I just got all my instruments again right here so as you can see it split our I'm just left clicking and dragging it actually puts all the patterns on top of each other sort of annoying but it's all right and so I miscounted here so just on track five right click delete that track boom and that's just gonna delete make sure there was nothing in it and once you delete that we got this here so right now if I right click on any of these green dots you can actually hear just this individual pattern foreign Okay cool so I think that would be really uh neat is if we uh just listen to this part so far uh of this song So a right click and then drag uh just on this this four bar pattern so one two three four these four bars um and then I'm going to right click on this dot again it's going to unmute all of them and then we can just assume okay cool I'm gonna double click the electric piano I'm gonna go in here and then I'm going to start changing some of the notes in here so I want this to be more of like an an ARP so we're going to start from the lowest note and we're going to keep that the same so we have oh that's fine uh the next note I'm gonna go here I'm just and basically this is just me from messing around with stuff just saying okay what would sound cool if like I've changed some stuff and this like you uh you need to give yourself permission to mess around like to mess stuff up and if you say Okay Tristan I want to follow along with the tutorial though and I don't want to mess up something if you want to try something uh what you can do is you can actually go up to here and click save as new version and I do this all the time so what I'll do is like for instance okay let's say I have this version of the song where it sounds like this and I'm like I want to make a major change to the song what I can do is go up to file save as new version and what that's going to do is create a duplicate copy of the entire project where I can mess around on this and I still have the other copy here so I still have my tutorial one right there boom I still have that so that project file just sitting right there so you can always go back to it so um now that we made this new project all right made this duplicate project I feel completely comfortable messing around because it's not going to affect the other project that I was happy with so here I'm going to change I'm just going to make some creative uh decisions here so I'm going to take these notes and I'm going to just incrementally do this [Music] foreign so I'm actually going to delete that top note because I think it would sound better like this and so I'm just going to have I'm gonna have a little walking motion so you see how from in this bar it's divided into four segments you have one two three four and so I'm putting a note walking up the stairs sort of like so each one is going incrementally one quarter of a bar up to the next note and then I'm gonna do the exact same thing here so I'm going to add a note here I think that would probably sound good and I'm pretty much just guessing at this point we'll see if it does [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] okay so right now I just was messing around with notes just listening to it over and over and I have it repeating remember if I go back to my playlist by clicking here I select this this portion of the song that way I could listen to it over and over and listen to How The Melodies play out in this in this part of the song so if you see the changes I made I I didn't have to talk exactly because I'm just messing around and I put some notes in places I didn't like and I deleted them and I just changed them and I just kind of made incremental changes to until I came up with something I was happy with so um and really I didn't have any Rhyme or reasons like what I was doing it's mostly just like intuition just clicking okay this is the highlighted note let's click here and see if it sounds good doesn't sound good okay put it on different note and just take your time with stuff and see what sounds good so um some tips I can give to make Melodies and Arps that sound good is I made sure that I didn't have different uh rhythms uh for the entire thing so as I said before the pattern that this is following is just exactly it's literally this it never changes Rhythm so it's always doing one quarter bar note that's the length of every single note you can see here that the length between each note that plays is exactly one quarter bar so I kept that consistent through the whole thing so I was able to change uh everything on top that was happening and it would sound uh decent so another thing that you can see that I did is I kept the bass notes always starting as the first note that hit um and so that was something that I also kept consistent uh and you can see here I just had the top note uh also hit with the bass note because I thought it sounded good so and yeah there's not you can notice that I okay so this is something interesting so you can see that here on the second bar and on the fourth bar I decided to have the top notes hit and you can see how there's a pattern there because on the first and third I have the second lowest note that's the first to play and on the second and fourth I have the highest note so you can see there's a pattern there so uh what's funny is that like when I'm making Melodies my intuition will do things that makes sense and then I can go back and analyze and go oh yeah that's why this works because they have this is a pattern with this and then this is a pattern with this and then that's why it works [Music] foreign [Music] this melody if you remember before uh with the lettering system would be a a b a b melody or I guess it would be a b a yeah a b a c because this is different well they're all different but if you think about it melodically wise I would say it's an A B AC I think I really don't know how that works but I cut roughly roughly get it okay anyways so we got something like this uh we can mess around so I could I could go control up arrow and just see what sounds like a octaphar [Music] foreign [Music] I think that sounds good and you know what maybe we want to add um okay so I like the way this is going I think I want to add another uh bass instrument here so I'm just going to do the same thing I'm just gonna take this down drop it an octave go to my channel rack find the base of stain that's my instrument here make sure it's set to all up here just in case you don't see it everything right click on the base clone and it's going to clone my instrument and I just find a different base here so I'm going to go to wins because I think it'd be cool to have some type of brass instrument like a little that could be cool so let's try it um if I click on my base pattern here I don't double click I just single click and then go to my channel rack it's going to show me that pattern and remember what I did before Ctrl C copy that pattern paste it on the new instrument I just cloned boom and then we have that clone so now if I listen [Music] foreign [Music] okay so we hear a problem which is happening I'm adding a bunch of instruments and you hear how it's getting a little bit loud and it's actually kind of hard to hear some of the instruments because you keep adding more how can we fix this so This is actually going to get into I don't know if it's our next chapter that we're going to do leveling I think it might actually be yeah it is our next chapter okay so this is a perfect segue into our next chapter where I can show you guys briefly what we're going to do to fix this problem that we run into once we keep adding sounds we actually run into a problem is that everything is getting too loud so before we head on to the next chapter I'm just quickly going to split this uh Again by right clicking on the bass sustain including split by Channel and then that's going to give me my bra sound here which I can just make sure that I have right here and now I have all my instruments and all my patterns laid out and named um if you guys want to color them it's up to you uh and hopefully you're able to follow along I know I'm going a lot quicker now because I've already gone over all the steps initially to show you how to do these things so I'm hopefully I don't want to repeat myself too many times so what I'm hoping is that if you guys get lost into one something that I'm doing here you can always go back to the chapter where I explain it in depth and then you come back and uh just see how I did it again so hopefully uh I know I went quicker this chapter but hopefully you guys are still able to follow along now let's get to fixing the volume problem [Music] okay so now we're going to take care of this volume issue it gets very loud once we get to the ninth bar here as you can see because we have the most instruments playing at the same time so how do we change the volume on a very quick basis to just make sure that things sound uh the way that they should the way that we're going to do that is we're going to go to the channel rack and as you can see we have these little um uh things right here which are these little levers which allow us to turn them if I left click and drag it will let me change the volume so it's very simple so like let's say I go right click on all strings slow and then we see all strings flow right here if I listen to it and then I muted it so I want to decide how loud do I want this and so you never want to change the volume of an instrument individually okay so what do I mean by that I mean that you should listen to everything in the song at the same time while you're changing the volume to see how it sounds as a whole because you're not listening to One instrument you're listening to a whole song so that's why you want to change the volume of everything so let's listen to everything and change the volume as we find needed foreign [Music] foreign [Music] moving these volume knobs around I was just messing around with it and I think it sounds a lot better already so you might be wondering so what exactly is are these knobs on the left right here these knobs are for painting so let's listen to what this sounds like if I panicked actually I think it'd be helpful if I just solo just so you could guys can hear what it's doing foreign to our right and left ears here so I'm going to make the close Grand at the center so if you ever need to reset these for any reason just right click on it and click reset and then we'll reset it so if I turn it here and then click reset it'll bring it back to the middle so just a little helpful thing just in case you messed up something and you wanted it back the way it was um I think that the electric painted would sound good sort of more towards the right ear so let's pan this a little bit to the right just a little bit and then the strings we can have a little bit to the left and see how this sounds [Music] foreign [Music] a lot better okay I'm actually going to change the tube instrument because I think it sounds weird so why don't we go here and just why what would be interesting why don't we go to a guitar instrument and just try out some of these guitars and then obviously we want to listen to The Melody so I'm just going to highlight this part and I'm going to highlight one chord before the melody hits because I want to see how it comes in too [Music] [Music] [Applause] okay I think that the electric piano actually takes a lot away when this Melody comes in so what if we took out the strings and the electric piano here just by right clicking and see what this sounds like okay I think that we do need the electric piano in there but I don't like that both these actually maybe it's okay that The Melodies are playing maybe I can just make it quieter um I guess I'll make the ultran just slightly quieter for now that's one way we can do that okay I I think it sounded cool and I like the guitar more than the tuba um and basically that is just leveling so it's really simple the chapter is not too crazy it's just basically just changing the volume and I even threw in panting in here wasn't gonna do that but I guess we're doing that that's okay um so yeah volume and painting this is very uh very simple stuff so you can just use that if it gets too loud if the entire project itself you're like this entire thing is too loud for me to listen to all you have to do is go up while you're listening and you can turn this volume just down like that and that this changes the entire volume of the entire track and there's a couple other things up here that maybe we could go over now uh we have another uh another option up here called BPM uh so this is going to change the beats per minute of the song so if I don't hover over the right side of these tiny numbers but over the left side and you can see it slows down our song or it can speed it up see so like I I had it at 140 initially so I'm going to keep it there but um yeah you could change the BPM if you don't like the BPM and then this is the master pitch I never use this but it's here foreign I have an idea for this later we might try something with that um okay well now that the chapters are we're going to move on to the next chapter and I will see you guys there [Music] okay awesome so I think that what we can do here is just work on a chorus for the song So this isn't necessarily this is going to be another uh fleshing out chapter so I have I have a lot of chapters where like it's going to be over a certain part but I'm realizing that I need more where I'm just actually working on the song so I think what would be really neat is if we have the drums sort of kind of uh getting a little bit more intense here and then building up into some sort of like chorus that could be interesting and unique here so why don't we have the drums start building up building up here foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] interesting um okay so I'm trying to think about what I want to do here let's go to Pax and snares [Music] please foreign we're gonna make a you know what we're gonna go over everything so I'm kind of uh at first we were kind of making something like some orchestral stuff uh and I never make this type of music this is just something that I guess just sort of happened as I was just making stuff um but like what if you wanted to make EDM music I have no idea what you guys would make maybe you want to make hip-hop so why don't we just start making some different genres in the song I'm not exactly sure what you guys are going to want to make so we'll just kind of do everything so how about uh here's here's kind of my plan for this song I'm not sure exactly what you guys think but I'm gonna have it be this kind of orchestral intro and then it's going to drop into some like EDM drop randomly this would be really weird and then after the EDM drop we can go into like some hip-hop uh and then maybe just close that like that and then we can go to the next chapter where we're going to start building this uh all together so this chapter this could just be lengthy I I guess uh this chapter I'm gonna take the most time and I'm just gonna start working on different parts of songs so uh what I want is you you know when you hear EDM songs they always have like that build up it's like and then it goes up faster and faster we need that so we're gonna put the snare here [Music] that's perfect so we're just gonna turn down the volume of the snare by double clicking the sample um I'm not oh you know what my bad I deleted this video I had a part in the course where I was showing you guys how to do this my bad I forgot to include it okay so this is something I I should just briefly cover so when you add a sample in here and you need to change the volume of a sample really quickly there's a fast way of doing that too now yes you could go to the channel rack and turn it down here that's true um I just find myself more often than not uh actually changing the volume here and okay so this is actually kind of confusing so if I double click the sample here and I change the volume here it's it actually does change the volume there so yes uh there's a lot of these knobs in FL Studio are kind of linked so it's just whichever one you find yourself using more often I find it faster to double click on the sample and then just turn the volume down here but it is changing the volume here just so you know so let's turn down the volume okay all right so I just changed the volume in the sample editor so we're going to go over the sample editor a little bit later uh but this is something uh interesting which I kind of want to go over with you guys soon okay so I like this pattern what's going on here so I'm going to control left click the stairs shift uh shift and left click and that's going to copy them shift left click again and I'm just duplicating this pattern bigger and bigger and bigger so now we have it like this [Music] perfect and I'm just going to add a snare here and it's just going to kind of make it a little bit more intense and then we're gonna kind of double up the snares here so it's going to go like [Music] [Music] okay cool and then I'm going to take all these patterns by selecting them and then I'm going to right click and just drag them a little bit shorter so that it ends kind of like this foreign [Music] so we got something like that and so we have some sort of build up for like some type of EDM drop this is hilarious I don't know what I'm making right now um so um I think that this is also important if you work on a lot of different genres you're going to improve greatly so if you just stick in one genre um your music May kind of get stifled I find myself uh the times I improve the most is when I completely switch what I'm making and I make something completely different and then I learned a lot from uh that experience so uh also spending time spent time with people that don't make the same music as you do if you find producers online and just hang out with them and collaborate and make all kinds of different music with different people you'll improve so much I can promise you that so I'm just going to shift clip Up Arrow uh and move that to the track above so that we have our snares together here sweet and now I think that we're ready uh and by the way again this is just trial there I was just clicking these I just zoomed in here and just click these snares until it sounded good so uh you guys can as I said if you need to copy what I'm doing just uh keep along with the project that's completely fine um but yeah I encourage you guys to mess around okay even if it doesn't sound good it's still better I would say it's better you're in a better spot if your song sounds like 10 times worse than mine if you're doing something that you're doing rather than you have something that sounds identical to mine because that means that you're probably not learning very much and I I can understand the wants and need to when you're learning something new to follow everything exactly but if you can take a little a little jump out here and there and get out of your comfort zone and do something that I'm not doing it'll really help you learn from your mistakes and also figure out things that you didn't know before so I'm just going to keep pushing that like the entire course and stuff wish you the guys to do stuff on your own uh because I I know I remember when I was in college we'd have people uh that would just follow it literally everything down to the wire and they never improved ever and it was really sad to see because like the people who messed up and got actually failing grades in the beginning of the course they were the people who wanted to try out different stuff and then they would end up coming back and being way better and were able to do anything that they needed uh so that's that's something interesting that I kind of learned at college and I think it definitely applies to music production as well okay enough talking let's just make an egm drop here so what am I going to do here I'm going to copy these chords so I'm gonna double click on this uh this pattern and I'm just gonna get rid of this red line at the top there I'm going to control C control I'm not going to control V I'm just gonna copy this I want the chords so I'm going to copy them uh for now um and what do we do here why don't we add a new pattern so I'm going to click the plus icon and I'm going to name this EDM chords cool and we're gonna click this right here and just stretch it and then this is where I want my EDM chords to play all right now let's add a synthesizer so let's go to flex and I guess we're just gonna use flex for everything because it's it's such a good plug-in that it really works for everything uh well we can mess around with some other actually you know what let's not use flex that would be the easy way out let's use let's use a different instrument let's mess around let's use uh what can we use here that you guys have um let's see I the thing is I actually don't remember I know Flex is for sure in the free version of FL Studio but I don't remember if some of these other ones are um I forgot okay you guys will have to see you uh so there's a bunch of other so you see how the category says Cynthia you can click on these so like we could use GMS this plugin this looks really weird but we could use this plugin to make uh some chords but I'm not sure if you guys have this in the free version NFL so yeah okay just to play it safe actually I am going to use flex just because I know for a fact that you guys have this plugin so okay so what am I going to do here let's go to arcsun cityscape and just click on the first thing here I think this one sounds pretty good so let's uh now what I'm gonna do um if you uh okay so I'm just gonna make sure I'm selected on this pattern our EDM chords I'm gonna go to our Channel rack and then I'm going to c70s bounce where uh our pattern uh where I want to put my chords in I'm going to right click go to piano roll here we go copy and paste and now we have this uh let's just listen to the pattern interesting Okay cool so this is what we have right now okay that's super lame um okay let's see if there's other instruments because that one's really yeah it's not very not very fantastic [Music] hmm Smith's around here [Music] okay interesting now you guys don't know uh aren't gonna know why I'm telling you to click these off but just click uh the power button on this the power button on this and then I'm going to mess around with these knobs and I'm going to see how I can change the sound to sounds uh to something cooler now I feel like this is a little bit cheating because I already know what all of these do and you guys have absolutely no idea what any of them do so I give you permission to copy what I'm doing here if you want to get the same sounding sound that I have um however I'm going to try to quickly explain what these do but I'm not going to spend too much time on it because this is going to be part of a different course which is going to go more in depth into sound design and I don't want to overload you guys with designing your own sounds uh in the beginner course because that's just like really difficult and it takes a lot of trial and error okay so filter so volume envelopes and filter envelopes you can think of this as um and I haven't taught you guys automation yet so you guys I can't even use that as an example yeah this is a big problem okay well mess around with these until you get a sound that you like uh I know what these do so I'm gonna just get it the way I want it to sound foreign [Music] what it sounds like so I'm going to just change change it to the way I want it okay perfect I like that what is the symbol perfect okay I like that all right now we're gonna mess around with some stuff so there's this cool thing called Chop uh if we go to this wrench right here and click chop [Music] okay why don't we go to this drop down arrow and we can click different presets here and we can try out different chopping methods that one sounds really bad [Music] thank you see some I'm just gonna see if there's any that sound decent here [Music] hmm [Music] hmm I don't like the way any of these sounds so I'm actually going to make my own so remember how I said the one and the three and the two and the four uh how that certain pattern so we're gonna copy that so I'm gonna control C control R and no wait my bad sorry not control C control shift left click select all these select all these and then I'm gonna show you guys uh some really neat quick shortcuts so I'm going to drag all these shorts and it's gonna let me drag all of them at the same time I'm gonna make it 1 8 of a bar long and then I'm going to shift left click and it will copy everything so I can make my own foreign [Music] thing here I'm going to copy these notes like so and then I'm going to do this it's going to go to do [Music] okay and as you this is a perfect time to this is a perfect time to show you guys uh what the a b a b or a b a c thing I was talking about because you can see how the rhythm is the same with one and three and how the rhythm is the same with two and four so this is a great example of how you can build patterns that your listeners can listen to and not get distracted by what's going on so I use a lot shortcuts to make this really quickly and you know how long it would be how painfully long it would be if I sat here and clicked each one of these individually and there's no way I'm going to do that so we're going to be using shortcuts that way I can teach you guys the right way to be using FL to be more efficient and not teaching you guys how to click in each one of these because that just takes so long okay so now we have something a lot more interesting okay here's what we need we need to right click select all this um and then I'm going to duplicate I'm going to duplicate this I'm going to clone it and then I'm going to copy and paste these chords into the second instance of this instrument and then I'm going to change the instrument [Music] oh that sounds cool okay hold on so I'm going to do the exact same things before but I am going to mute the instrument so I'm going to go to my channel rack and I'm just going to click on this and now we're only listening to the new clone instrument that we added in because remember illumi alumin Sun however you say that that was the first instrument that we're making the pattern with I just clicked on this little Green Dot muted it now we have this one and let's just make this the way I said before I take off delay take off Reverb by clicking the power buttons move this down drag [Music] okay I'm going to enable this back all right we're gonna clone it again now now we're flying we are flying mach 10 speed right here okay so let's copy and paste it here again we're going to mute both of these and then we're going to listen to this one and we're going to find another cool something that actually sounds really cool okay what does this sound like all together foreign [Music] cool I actually want this to be like an octave up so like what if I took this made it an octave up like this perfect okay and then I'm just going to turn this volume way down like this [Music] perfect okay and then I'm going to make a base so what we're gonna do is we're going to go to any of these patterns just click it go to the bottom here we're going to copy all these notes by Ctrl shift left click copy all the notes okay I don't know what's being weird there I just yeah okay Ctrl C then we're gonna go to our Channel rack we're gonna go to the plus icon we're gonna go to flex Archangel cityscape I'm gonna just click one of these presets right here I'm gonna go to my playlist I'm gonna click the plus icon I'm gonna name it base uh then I'm gonna put it right here lengthen it Channel rack right click piano roll on the base Ctrl V and now we have this [Music] Okay now what's super cool with bass lines if you have this like little octave thing going up so like what I want to do is I want to take every like second note here and then this middle Mount and I'm just going to control shift left click all these notes I'm going to do control up arrow and this is something I kind of do in a lot of my more like dance songs is I'll do this and it sounds like this [Music] and obviously I'm using all stock plugins and I'm using just presets so like this is like very beginner producer stuff like obviously my more advanced courses I'm going to show you guys how to sound design all your own songs the art sounds all your own uh samples everything we're gonna go through all that uh so if you're somebody who's already used FL and for some reason you're watching a beginner course yes I know all this stuff is insanely easy and what I'm doing is I'm just trying to get somebody who's never used music production before to get a grasp on how they can begin making music even if it's with presets and samples and loops and all kinds of stuff because what's important is that you have a grasp of how to make what's important is that you have a grasp on how to make songs before you start going to nitty-gritty details so with this I made this Baseline and we're going to do the same thing we're going to go click on this Baseline right here that way it's selected we're going to clone the base we're going to make a second base instrument I'm going to control C I'm going to control V and then we're going to mute the first this one with the pattern and we're going to find Okay so I'm also going to mute the chords up here all right let's find something perfect let's listen to this together that sounds really good okay I'm just gonna leave it like that honestly um I don't need to change anything let's just do it [Music] okay the only thing missing is that I need a Melody so I'm going to control shifts uh and then shift down arrow and then we're gonna make a lead on top of here so all right I'm gonna double click the tuba staccato whoops it's not too bad anymore it's actually a chill guitar so that's a little confusing but I'm gonna control C just copy this melody go back to my playlist I'm gonna hit the plus icon up here pattern I'm gonna name it Melody and obviously I'm going faster just because these are all things that we've gone over okay scroll this lengthen it out Generac add a new flex plugin actually yeah we're gonna do Flex again anyways all right let's add in another flex and let's right click on Flex go to piano roll and we're in the melody pattern uh let's click Ctrl V it's going to paste our melody in here uh and then I'm going to just right click so I'm only listening to this [Music] okay let's just try different stuff [Music] foreign [Music] okay so I have something that sounds interesting so let's listen to it all together [Music] okay cool uh let's control shift copy all this shifts uh actually I'm gonna so once I select all these and I have this little red thing above here I can hit Ctrl B with all these selected and I'll just duplicate it again all right now we're going to do something really interesting which I haven't showed you guys yet so we are going to click on this melody and we're going to click make unique and what that's going to do is it's going to put a number two on this melody and that means that we can actually change this melody to whatever we want and it won't affect the first version [Music] so now we have this look at so it goes [Music] and that okay I'm not gonna try to sing the melody but [Music] I don't know whatever I mean I'm not really a huge fan of this EDM Port anyways but I think it needs drums because it's lacking it's lacking right here so I think we need to go do like a four on the floor beat kind of have like a little kick snare thing going on so let's go to kicks we're just gonna add a kick on every single one of these lines just boom boom boom boom so now it's gonna go like this okay we're gonna double click on this uh kick and I'm just gonna click on this out and I'm just going to make it lower [Music] and my click normalize uh I don't really I'm not gonna go through why I'm doing this but it's going to make it sound better [Music] this is interesting um okay it's really funny like going backwards because now I'm using like all like completely basic tools and so like I'm trying to make something that's like doesn't sound completely terrible with like really basic stuff so I'm just gonna control shift left click shift left click again uh copy all this over and now we have this [Music] okay this this base is like way too loud so let's fix that so let's scroll down a little bit it's black sting it [Music] okay I'm gonna add in a snare [Music] okay let's just add in some hi-hats so so we're gonna zoom in here excuse me we're gonna put a zoom uh we're gonna zoom in here we're gonna put a hi-hat on every other side here [Music] oh it's kind of sounding cool let's do it like a little double right there [Music] oh that's kind of that's kind of that's a Bop right there Bop hi-hat Melody let's go oh whoops accidentally that's funny I put it one too close okay oh I see what I did okay whoops see so I just moved that a little off so I just gotta fix it all right there we go I think it's better now [Music] okay yep sure that's the EDM part okay cool all right we're making progress so what do we got so far let's listen to the whole thing because so far I have no idea what I'm making [Music] this is so funny [Music] thank you okay this is very interesting um yes very very interesting song so now we're gonna make a hip-hop part because you guys need to learn how to make all kinds of different genres so what should we do for the hip-hop part I kind of like this thing going on here I feel like this could actually turn into something cool okay so why don't we double click this uh Ctrl C copy that we're gonna go back here just kind of unmute everything by right clicking this uh green box we're going to click the pattern icon we're going to go into hip hop parts I can't spell Parts there we go okay cool we're gonna put this pattern uh okay so this is interesting so we needed to kind of uh transition out of this Emmy part so let's just Ctrl C and copy all the base stuff and just paste it here so have something like okay I'm trying to figure out how to like get out of this part so maybe I can just kind of delete all the stuff and it just kind of goes like [Music] and it just kind of ends with this last note yeah something like that and then we can go into some type of loop do we have loops in the drum packs I actually have no idea oh we do no way okay so yeah click on loops [Music] foreign [Music] these are very interesting um okay so I haven't really explained Loops so samples obviously they're just one sample and a loop is just a bunch of samples uh put into a loop which you can use and pretty simple so if I drag this in here this is going to be a very interesting transition so we're going from this [Music] okay so if if like let's say I drag in that Loop and I don't like it I can actually drag a loop on top of that Loop and it will replace it [Music] I mean that's not typically the type of hip-hop drums I would choose but you know what well let's just roll with it because why not okay so what we have here we need to add in a hip-hop instrument that's going to sound uh let's just pick something incredibly cliche Let's uh get a flute so we're gonna add in another Flex um we're gonna go to wind instruments we're going to go to flutes let's do flute staccato and let's just right click on the flute actually let's make sure we're in our patterns let's click on the hip-hop part let's right click our flute staccato go to piano roll copy and paste this in here and now we have this let's go to pattern [Music] okay so I need a control C control V that up because the notes are too low it's not playing [Music] okay that's actually kind of cool um okay so we're going to take this hip-hop art we're gonna place it up above here and now we have this foreign okay this is very interesting um now we need to have a 808 that just like goes sounds really sick so let's uh what should we do here uh why don't we copy the lower notes on this Arc just like so Ctrl C them and we're gonna go to channelrack again and finally we're going to go to flex who would have guessed it uh now let's go to a mobile tuned 808 base and let's just click on like one of these so let's see oh that's clean I'm just going to turn the compress up instead of just make it louder this doesn't sound bad okay cool now we're going to go to the flute staccato and I'm just going to go to our base instrument so you can see we've added so many instruments so far so let's just control V [Music] Okay cool so I'm going to turn down the basic just slightly and we're gonna try to make like I don't exactly know what kind of I don't make a ton of hip-hop so this is gonna be really interesting uh probably get roast in the comments for making the like crappiest hip-hop beat of all time using stock plugins [Music] what if it was like this and just kind of like I don't know something like this [Music] hmm what if it was like something like that [Music] okay something like this maybe I have no idea I have no idea we might make our own drums because I really don't like that drum sample I'm not gonna lie it sounds really trash um okay let's just put more of this stuff here right now I'm just doing basically everything again that uh went over before just kind of filling it in as I see fit so we're just adding it Baseline I'm pretty much doing the same process I did with the EDM I'm just changing the instruments to fit the genre and I'm just trying to make the bass line sound like it fits more with a hip-hop song so I already have listened to tons of hip-hop I've listened to tons of like all different kinds of genres so I already kind of know okay I feel like this space line is going to be more like this in this genre and more like this in this genre so I'm just kind of changing the Baseline based on what I think would sound good so that's the thought process there uh you know what sound really cool is if we had like a little note here and then it went like really high pitched like this [Music] okay we're just going to repeat this part because I don't want to keep listening to the EDM part uh and then we're going to see if there's any foreign [Music] that's not hip-hop that's literally just not at all okay I guess we're sticking with this um that's fine um let's see is there anything else I can add to make this more interesting I could go to channelrack and you know what okay we're actually going to I'm without going to Generac I'm going to stop adding new instruments because we have a bunch uh let's click on hip-hop part we're going to split this like I did before we're going to take the uh we're gonna take the bass boosted and we're gonna just put this lower and we're gonna have our Melody here um the last thing I want to do is I want to add in some like uh you guys will see what I'm about to do so I'm going to copy the bass notes right here I'm going to hit Ctrl C we're going to navigate to the brass instrument right here and do this [Music] foreign I am going to add another instrument I'm going to add in another flex and it's going to be a brass but I want to be staccato I don't want it to be a lengthy so we're going to go to full brass staccato and from there I'm going to go back navigate back here I'm just going to navigate to the instrument I just added and paste that [Music] okay and then I need it to kind of like foreign [Music] okay and again I'm just changing the volume to make sure it fits we're going to go back here we're going to split the pattern once more and then we have the base Parts oh whoops I'm going to drag this up like so I'm going to delete this and then I'm just going to copy this over here okay so we made hip hop EDM and orchestral music all in one pattern and all in one take uh that's very interesting I don't think I've ever done this before and the best part is it all sounds like well let's just put it this way it is not my best work that I've ever made but you know what uh I think a little bit of forgiveness is going to be accepted since I'm using all stock presets and plugins since that's what I'm working with uh okay guys hopefully uh we can go to the next chapter confident and you have at least something so even if you don't have all this that's fine in fact even if you just made one of these sections like let's say you just worked on the hour Castro or you just did the the EDM part where you just did the hip-hop part that's fine I'm just kind of going over a broad range and actually I don't even expect you guys to be able to completely following everything I've done if you have if this is your first time using FL Studio and you have everything I have up to this point and did your own take on it that is insane like that is I'm so like proud that you did that if you haven't gotten to that point I do not blame you at all I was going extremely fast uh and the amount of times that you're probably gonna have to go back and forth to see how I did things over again I know it's probably gonna be tough so if you can't make everything the way I did it or get it to sound this good that's completely fine don't worry okay it's gonna be okay so um I think what we I think we're pretty much ready to go to the next part of the uh tutorial so with that why don't we go to the next chapter okay this chapter is gonna be fun first we are going to go to our Channel rack and we are going to click all and we are going to see all of these instruments that we added and what we're going to do is you're going to hold shift go to start from the very first instrument shift left click and drag your mouse down and it will automatically select all of these then you can scroll down a little bit hold shift again click these last few now click control hell and what it's going to do okay you're not going to know what this is going to do at first I'm just gonna explain what it did so click X on your channel rack now it's going to pop open this menu right here you're just gonna click windowed on this so now we have this this is called our mixer and what it did right now is it just placed every single one of our instruments on a mixer track and named it and colored it for us is super convenient so again that is Ctrl L okay so we're gonna keep this mixer open and we're going to go to the beginning of the song again and click play and just see what it's doing foreign [Music] okay I'm gonna make one last change to this because I just thought of it it's gonna go [Music] okay so it's gonna be like this no no it needs to go okay [Music] something like that okay I know I said that we were doing mixing let's go back to the mixer sorry I just had to make that change because I realized that it would sound cool okay so as you saw the mixer uh what or the mixer this is uh what's called the mixer so we have the channel rack right here we have the piano roll right here we have the channel rack oh wait my bad hold on let's try that again playlist is here this is the playlist this is the piano roll this is the channel rack and then this is the mixer okay and what the mixer does is it essentially let's just close out the rest of this I just want to see my mixer so what the mixer does is it lets us control the volume and effects of individual instruments so that we can kind of blend them together okay so the first thing to put uh to know is that this changes the volume oh my goodness okay let's go to the beginning of the song just to try mixing this part of the song so I'm going to right click select and we're just going to focus on this little area we're going to go here and so you can see this changes the volume here so this is going to be uh where we're going to be leveling a lot I also use the volume a lot here so uh let's right click and just reset all these because I like the way the volume was initially and if I right click it's going to sell out here and note this is not the same as actually soloing here so if you do have to so if I right click in Solo an instrument that is muted in my mixer it's going to play nothing because you see so if I these are separate basically is what I'm trying to get at so uh why don't we focus on just adding some effects to some of these instruments so I think some Reverb would sound really cool on this electric piano so why don't we go to this slot uh there's slot one through ten just click slot one and let's find fruity Reverb too and click this here so now we have this Reverb plug-in and this is going to make it sound like it's in a room essentially so it's just up the wetness [Music] okay and then if you middle Mouse scroll you can actually move these effects around here and so that might be helpful for you so let's move the Reverb here and in the first lot why don't we do fruity delayed ink and just click on that and this is just to add another effect here and you don't need to know what any of this does you can just listen to how it sounds and if you don't want to hear an effect at any time you can just simply mute it up here I think that sounds great so now we're going to go to Strings slow and um to make some quick changes here I'm gonna go to slot one and I'm going to add fruity parametric eq2 and what that's going to do is it's going to allow me to change the frequencies of this particular instrument this is what you're going to be using probably all the time okay this is what's referred to as mixing so let's say I have two parts of my song that sound like they're conflicting with each other so we have we have some low end here but if you remember we also have my bass instrument here um if we listen to the bass here we have this going on here oh wait hold on I have to so you see we have two things that have low end so they're going to be fighting for space in the mix essentially what that means is imagine you're like packing a um I forgot what the trucks are called that when you move like a house and you have to put all this a moving van yeah I'm moving in okay so when you have a moving bin you have to fit all the items in your house into the moving bed and there's a very unefficient way of doing that which would be to put all the things and try to stuff them in the back but rather what you'd want to do is kind of figure out where everything could you might put the heavier stuff in the back maybe or you would want to space it out properly so that everything has its spot and everything has its place in the moving band in the same way with your mix every every single instrument wants to have a space in that mix and you don't want to have it overcrowded in certain areas so if you have too many base instruments it's going to sound overcrowded and it's going to sound not even it's not going to sound Pleasant to the ear because you'll have too many things going on in the bass instruments um A good rule of thumb to remember is that you can have more things happening the higher up you go so what do I mean by that if you have a like well let's just listen to our Melody so we have this chill guitar sounds higher pitched than this that's a lot lower into this I'd say that's even maybe even lower than this or maybe this is lower I'm not sure point being I can have less bass instruments going at the same time then I can have going with a melody I could have a lot of that's why I have three uh like three different kinds of pianos and strings instruments but I can't have three different kinds of basses because all the bases would be fighting for space so what we're going to do is we're going to unclick on everything here we're going to select everything here and what we're going to do is I'm just going to work on just mixing in the strings with the rest of the song so I'm going to open up by double clicking the parametric eq2 and make sure that you are selected on the correct instrument so I have all strings slow and we're going to just move uh we're going to cut out some frequencies to make it fit better so you see what this does so I'm just left clicking and moving these around so I'm going to take out the low end out of the strings [Music] so I'm just I'm trying to move it I want to get it to sound good and fit well in the mix so I'm not really there's uh just do what sounds good so like change these until you think it sounds nice and then turn it off and on to see if it sounded better okay I think it sounds a little bit better I think it sounds a little bit more tighter uh and a little bit better in the mix now I'm going to add another EQ onto my electric piano right here [Music] foreign [Music] so maybe I want to take the base out of one of these bases completely [Music] thank you foreign I'm just adding eqs on every one of these instruments and just trying to get it to sound like it fits together by just taming some of the frequencies I think are overlapping on each other [Music] Okay cool so uh right here basically what we're doing is again we're just adding different instruments and I think that maybe a Reverb would sound interesting here so why don't we add a Reverb also on the guitar oops you guys actually don't have that plug-in I forgot I like instinctively opened my own Reverb plugin that I have but you guys don't have this so we're gonna open up pretty Reverb to you my bad and then I just want to put hover over [Music] Okay cool so got something going on here I think that it sounds a lot better um cool so if you ever want to disable the effects entirely you can just go down down here and click on this little icon [Music] foreign [Music] Okay cool so this just we're just adding effects here and we're just uh trying to make everything fit together uh why don't we go to the this is gonna need a lot more mixing I think is this EDM part right here yeah it doesn't not there's a lot of stuff that doesn't work here so why don't we fix it so let's focus on [Music] okay and a quick way to take out low end is we have it actually in EQ here I can actually go in and just really quickly just make really quick adjustments here just by moving stuff around and I can make really fast adjustments here so uh why don't we do that for a few things here [Music] and like that I was just able to EQ these things really quickly in a really convenient way to try to make it sound better and so now we can add in the bass by unmuting these right here [Music] get it to fit together and let's listen [Music] all right I'm gonna add a Reverb to the lead I think it would sound cool [Music] and then this also needs a Reverb this little illumi Sun thing I'm just gonna add one to there [Music] sounds good to me okay cool uh and then so finally we're just gonna mix the hip-hop part so let's select okay you already know the flute needs some reboot let's add Reverb to everything uh okay Reverb actually does drown out a lot of stuff so if you want something more present in the center of your mix uh basically what it would uh to explain to somebody who's never understood that before it'd be like something can sound far away from you and something can sound really close to you and the items that you want close to you are usually going to be your lower end instruments so your base your drums um also I I find that vocals fit really nicely when they're in the center um if if you have vocals that sound like they're far away uh it can sound I don't know how to put it it just doesn't sound right if you listen to a lot of music you'll have there's there's some artists that can get away with doing some really crazy stuff I know uh Billy eilish has a song where uh her brother produces it and he actually throws the vocals really wide and far away which is very unique uh you don't hear very many artists do that so that was really interesting but that's like an example which goes against the norms so sometimes you can get away with doing stuff with that but generally you want your vocal your drums your bass all in the center and then you can work from there to uh try to uh make some things far away so it depends what do you want far away in your song what do you want close and so I'm gonna add a little Reaper on this flute because I think it would sound interesting [Music] and again I just clicked the flute here and it's going to show me the effects for the specific flute and then I can add the effects here so I know I didn't really explain that super well so like when you click on this and it highlights in green that's going to be the one that's selected and I can add an EQ here I can also EQ it here uh neither of them matter and if you need to reset these you just right click on the on these little knobs and click res and right click and click reset and we'll reset them for you okay so I'm just in it uh oh yeah this is something I didn't explain either in my bed if you scroll the uh the way I'm navigating this mixer is by scroll scroll Wheeling on the mixer so you just scroll wheel in the middle here and it will scroll between these and then you have different uh settings here I use wide but you can use wide three you can use wide all all these different things are going to show you different ways that you can organize your mixer so right here [Music] I mean you're only going to be able to mix so much in the beginning stages as a as a producer and you'll find more uses for mixing as uh you develop your uh your skills and you're producing more stuff you'll find that you need to do more so I think from here what we're going to do is move on to Automation and this part I'm really excited for so let's move on to the next chapter okay this is an excellent point in the tutorial to show you what just happened so my file completely just crashed and I need to pull up a backup and I lost all the uh recording for one of the tutorials so what we're going to do is I'm going to show you guys what happens when what to do when your project just crashes now you're going to go to backup and you can see here um I can just right click on this top one and click open and it's going to open back up all the changes that we made so I'm just going to click no and I have the backups enabled so I forgot to uh actually go over this with you guys and since I ran into a crash I think it is uh helpful to just show you guys what to do to mitigate crashes happening and uh if they do happen what you can do to fix it so we're going to go to options here and I'm just going to help you guys get this set up so instead of pop-up all this stuff just hit F12 close it all out we're gonna hit playlist and we're back to where we were uh and I'm gonna go over everything that I kind of went over before and I'm just going to show you guys how I did that and we're going to go over it again with this file so uh we're gonna go up to options uh we're gonna go to general settings I believe uh let's see maybe it's project maybe it's not project file okay yeah uh backup so you see how it says auto save frequently every five minutes before risky operations that's what I do and maximum 100 so that's that's what I what I do and what that does is it just saves like literally every five minutes automatically so that it doesn't like I never have something I never miss anything so right here I was uh basically what I was showing you guys is how to create automations and what automations do uh in the project is they are going to uh change the the mix volume of an effect so as I said before right here you have the mix amount so this is going to control how much of a certain effect you want in the project so if I have this at half it's going to be 50 of this effect 0 that's zero percent of the effect so with the Reverb that I was showing you guys before this is 100 it's on zero percent it's off and then incrementally increasing it so let's say I want it to increase over time how would I do that how would I want in my song I want the Reverb to gradually go in because right now I've only shown you guys how to have it on or either off so to gradually have it in and this is where you need a automation so to do this you would right click uh I I like to have my mix all the way down my automations and I'll show you why in a second and then you just right click this and click create automation clip and what that's going to do is when you click that it's going to create a blank automation clip on whatever uh whatever effect you had so you see I created two automation Clips right here which called Reverb and delay and when I created these I had them at zero and then I right clicked it and clicked create automation clip once you do that you can just right click and it places a little Point here and you can right click the points and delete them if you need and yours will probably look something like this it'll look like all the way flat uh what I did was I just created a point and then I moved it so that it gradually turns on from bar one to Bar five it's going to gradually go up and that was my plan and then over here I just the thing I did was I created another Point here and I just drag that to the top right corner and then I did that for both of these uh and then so I have the delay and the Reverb gradually going up the next thing that I talked about before it crashed and this is what caused it to crash is I said you know what would be so cool is if you could have the instrument change the actual instrument sound change as you uh as you as the song goes on and so that's exactly what I did I had the chords here and I had these two um and uh these two automations and what these automations do is essentially they change the length of the the way it plays so if we listen to this let me make sure I have all these enabled I'm not sure where it's muted but hold on let's see why is it muted what what is going on okay one second I'm gonna try to figure out why this isn't playing [Music] oh that's why it's not playing I don't have my volume turned on there we go I had my entire computer muted all right and now we should be able to hear it so you can see when I turn on this automation it gets way longer the actual notes and so how I did that was is I double clicked illumi Sun and then you can actually create the automations by right clicking sustain is what makes uh this is the this is what I created the automation with I I had it at zero before and I right clicked it and I clicked create automation clip and you can do this on any knob in the entire the entire program you can right click and create automation you could create an automation okay never mind you can't create an automation for that but you can create an automation with almost every single thing in this program so just try right clicking things and seeing what you can make automations with it's really fun so I created two automation Clips with this and you might be wondering okay how did you get the automation Clips to not be the entire length of the song like this bottom one the way you do that is by right clicking the the duration uh that you want to repeat and then when you create an automation it'll create it within this this like red bar remember you right click and hover over that and that's how I do that um I feel a little bit bad that I didn't have the initial file I had to kind of go over it like this since it crashed but we're just going to kind of work with it so um I'm gonna make one more automation from the ground up just so that you guys aren't completely out of the blue since I made these before and you didn't really see how I made them so I'll make one from scratcher so why don't we go to what I uh okay what can I do here um we'll have the strings not be in the first four bars we'll have them gradually come in with volume so that sounds super weird oh I yeah I turned on this effect here I'm gonna delete that okay okay let's right click this uh knob right here and click create automation clip and right here remember I selected this so it's going to give me strings volume so I'm gonna drag this down and we don't hear the strings obviously because that's the volume of the strings and if I make this just windowed and we can just watch what this what this does as it perfect and then you can see what happens and for the rest of the song it's going to be at the max volume cool cool okay and so as I said before you can right click and place extra things to manipulate uh what's going on here I'm going to just delete this point and this point in this point I still put a bunch of points uh and if this little middle note if you left click it and drag up and down you can actually change the way it like it if it goes gradual or not gradual it's really cool and then if you right click on the endnote here it gives you our either of these notes it gives you tons of options for different uh ways you can have it progress so this is really fun to just mess around with I encourage you guys to just experiment but like you have like stairs here so I could click at these and it like there's so many like you have no idea like there are so many different things that you can do half sign like I don't know what that does but yeah uh single curve is the default one so this is the one I almost always use uh unless I'm trying to do something fancy but yeah so that's how you make automations so I'm just gonna control this and just put it lower I like most my automation Clips down here away out of the way of my other stuff so let's just kind of keep these on their own little thing going on down here um and yeah so that's that's essentially how automations work it's just going to uh gradually change any effects or Knob in the entire program whether that's in an instrument an effect a volume over time and you can even do that to painting you can do that for these panning knobs right here um so make sure you click on all and as you can see there that's where the automations are so we have Automation and we have our automation stored in our Channel rack as well uh you don't really need to worry about that too much uh you're not going to use the chainrack automations for a whole lot of things so if we click all you can I can even right click these and I can create animations I think you guys get the point you can pretty much create automations for every single knob in the thing and the only thing that's uh stopping you is your creativity to use automations and so uh yeah we didn't really need to go too in depth on this I just wanted to show you that this is a possibility of something that you could work with if you'd like uh and the rest is up to you what you want to do with it so I created a few simple ones here you don't have to add these if you don't want to but uh we're gonna move on to the final part the final chapter of the beginner course and yeah so let's move on all right we made it to the end finally we are going to master the track so what is mastering mastering is essentially making the entire song Sound cohesive and together for the final product that you're going to deliver so the way that we do this is we are going to go to our master it's has M right here in its master and what this does is every single one of these uh uh you can see that there's little arrows oh I forgot to mention this okay so in the mixer you have each one of these instruments right now these instruments you have this little arrow and so if I take this Arrow off it's not going to play but if I click it into this you can see there's a little wire going into it it's going into the master so every single one of these instruments its wire is going to the master now uh this is called routing so this is going to be an advanced topic that we're not going to go over in this course but in the advanced course we're going to go into how routing can allow you to make buses and control multiple instruments volume and effects all at the same time that's a really Advanced topic and I'm not going to show you guys how to do that now but that that you basically if you can understand that each one of these has like a wire and that you can use this wire and that uh to direct it that that's a possibility that's all you need to know right now and what you need to know is that by default all of the wires are connected to the master and the master is where all the volume goes into so I turn this off I hear nothing okay but you can see all of these are going into here okay so what are we going to put on the master the first thing we're going to put on the master is we're going to go to slot 10 and we're just going to put a fruity uh we're gonna put Maximus okay and what Maximus is going to do is it's just going to keep it from going over zero uh so when it things go above zero it's called clipping and clipping uh does not sound very good it can sound distorted it can sound uh poor quality it just doesn't sound good so you don't have your songs going above zero when you're starting off uh it's really gonna hurt people's ears so make sure um you put Maximus at the end just to make sure as a beginner that your songs are not blaring out people's faces um and then there's a few things that we can do to kind of make it sound a little bit more interesting so I think that what we could do is we could add a fruity multi-band compressor uh and I know if that's like you're like I don't know what this is um that's okay we can go into this into a the more advanced course as well but maybe you could just try one of these presets here so you could just do a mastering 2.4 DB maybe and just put that on there and see if it sounds better foreign [Music] for mastering for a beginner project basically I just don't want to peeking above zero that is the mastering that you guys will be focusing on and then if you if you'd like you can add an EQ and then make sure to click uh this Lin what that essentially this is basically just Mastery mode it's called linear phase you want that enabled when you are using EQ okay uh I'm we're not going to elaborate past that point but so essentially if you want to make brief changes to your master you're affecting everything at the same time so make a very minute changes if if it's something that you can fix in the mix like let's say you think that this these chords in the mix need less low end do not change that in the master change that in the mix the master is just supposed to accentuate everything together so I'm Mike Buster Heine just very slightly here right foreign [Music] basic changes like this you're not going to do very big large things on the master just very basic things to make it sound a little bit overall more cohesive um so yeah so you can add in whoops you can add in a uh maybe a little EQ you can add in a little multiband compressor maybe a Maximus uh and then the Maximus has all kinds of different uh presets that you can use and these are going to be okay for when you're beginning music obviously I'm not going to use these myself because I I have my own mastering process over the I have my own plugins and all kinds of things that I use for mastering but this will be good if you're making just a very basic song uh it could probably make it sound louder and more clear okay that sounds pretty bad so we're not going to use that but uh if you ever want to um use a different preset you can just click on default to go back to the initial one um experiment like just try different stuff add different things see what it sounds like um and just find something but at very least have a limiter at the end so Maximus or fruity limiter put that at the end just so that it's not peaking at the end and then that's really all you're going to be doing for mastering uh for the beginner course I know it's that's very basic for right now but if if you're a complete beginner this is your first time using FL Studio and you can make a and you were able to make this entire thing it's not clipping above zero it's all the notes are in Key you have a Melody that sounds okay like you're doing absolutely fantastic and so here's my advice to you so I'm gonna basically just give you some producer wisdom before you guys I send you guys off to to either the next course if you want to do the second part in the series I'm not sure when that's going to be coming out um or if you guys want to just go on your own at this point you have everything that you need to uh here's what I would say if you want to improve extremely quickly what you want to do first of all do not watch tons of content maybe you just watch a couple videos if you don't know where things are that's it and then what I'd say is make as much music as possible make a song and then if it if it's not good make another song don't keep working on that other song if that's not good move on make a new one make a new one ever when I started producing I made a new song every single day for like two months and that made me increase in skill faster than anything else that you can do you will make way better music if you fail over and over again and learn from your mistakes gradually then if you try to work on one project and make it the best that you can I can promise you that the second thing that I can push you guys forward after learning everything that I've taught you here is uh start collaborating start uh start collaborating with other artists uh find people at your skill level so like go into different discords um and just find people in the Discord and say hey you want to make some music you want to collaborate how long have you been producing oh you're new I'm new why don't we make music together and have some fun and you can try doing that that's really that's a really great way to to grow your skills is to produce somebody maybe slightly above your skill level or um at your skill level at least um and that would be super super good for you guys and then another thing that you can do is just talk with producers actually just uh you don't even have to collaborate just talking with other producers and letting and listening to their music um trying to give them feedback on their music watching them produce uh it Discord has a great feature I Discord is honestly the way I learned how music produced because I met many many Fantastic producers that would literally just stream and show how they would produce and I just watch them and learn from them and then they would work with me and we'd all learn together and uh so yeah that's a great way it's just watching each other produce uh find different uh platforms and forms and discords where you can post your song Get feedback on it and give feedback to other people's songs uh that having that critical ear where you can give feedback to somebody and they can give feedback to you is going to make you exponentially increase in in uh in your knowledge because what will happen is is that people will say Hey you really need to work on this and then you're like okay cool and then you look up how to learn that specific area of music production and then you'll learn that over time and that way you can focus on different parts so um I'm trying to think if there's anything else I can give you guys before you go because I remember there was a lot of things as a beginner that annoyed me and I'm trying to remember what they were that way you guys don't have to go through the same problems that I went through um when you're working on projects uh it can be really difficult to remember all the things you're like okay I have to make chords I have to make uh I have to mix I have to master I have to do all this stuff automations all everything you're remembering all at the same time and holding all that like in your head like makes it want to explode when you're starting off and trust me most of the stuff it comes from habit uh I don't remember all this in my head I I there's no way I'd be able to do that the reason I'm able to do this without overthinking everything is because I because of practice it's because of habits we have a uh just um kind of like Hands-On knowledge you get from working uh and so that's also why I was telling you guys that you should produce as much as possible as fast as possible because that will give you the most experience and you won't have to overthink everything uh you'll just be able to kind of have the more like intuitive instinctive uh producing feel for it and you'll get kind of like that flow state where you can just kind of produce and you don't have to overthink everything so that's that's one thing I see a lot of uh younger producers doing is that they overthink literally everything instead of just making music and that that can be really detrimental okay so a few things a few extra things I just remembered um tried to remake songs that you really like uh listen to a song that you like and remake it and see how close you can get it so I did that recently with uh I forget which song it was we want to do a Lipa songs I tried to remake it like perfectly and I was able to get it to sound almost exactly the same and that was like really helpful for me it's just trying to think about how they produce and so yeah do that if you can find people breaking down songs how they made a like a top chart song watch those breakdowns uh Watch professional uh professional artists uh master classes uh there's a really good one by Hans Zimmer highly recommend that um just yeah listen and uh the content that you want to consume is the kind of content you want to be making but you want to have a good ratio so you don't want to be consuming all this content like you don't want to go on YouTube and just look up like a thousand tutorials in a row and then get into FL Studio and think that you're going to be insanely good that's just not gonna happen okay you don't want to go to reverse also uh I would say that if you just only produce all the time and you never consume content I've actually seen some producers have that problem as well and what can happen is is that they never kind of increase their skills they never get to that next level and so there's this little healthy balance where if you can consume a decent amount of content not too much if you can produce and put out as much as you can with what you're learning uh in an incremental stage and you can spend time with people uh that are better than you and with people people that are at your skill level uh just bouncing off and having a feedback system there if you can have those three parts of music production you will grow as an artist and you will do fantastic and I think that you guys are going to do great and I hope that this course was able to give you the foundations that you need to start music producing and if you have any questions uh you can just email me or you can shoot me a message in Discord um I want to hear you guys tracks so for free I will give you feedback on any of your guys's tracks that you made from this course so you can just tag the producer course or whenever uh Tristan's course and this send me an email and then just send me your song and I'll feedback it for free um I also will do uh paid lessons so if you want to know about those you can email me um and I can do a one hour or multiple hour sessions with you and I can help you out personally on a call and I can see your project and try to help you out with that so if that's something you're interested in you can shoot me an email I'm always available and I'm super excited to hear what you guys are making with this course see ya um I just realized actually I don't go yet I forgot to tell you guys one of the most important things before you're done uh when you want to be finished with your song you write a file export MP3 and what that's going to do you just title your song whatever you want and then you're gonna click save and then export it through and then that's how you export your song and then I forgot to also say that with the free version FL Studio the one drawback is that once you export a song you cannot open it back up okay so once you export this song and if you close this FL Studio file and open it back up it won't let you open it without the paid version FL Studio you might be thinking oh man that's such a bummer like man I want to open up and work on the same song but I actually think that it's fantastic for people who are starting out because what happens is that if a beginner just stays on the same song it's actually worse for them so in a weird way the free version FL Studio is actually a benefit to you because it forces you to always be moving on to the next track and that's the reason why I made so many tracks is because I couldn't go back to the last track once I was done with it once I exported it that was it so uh yeah I can't believe I forgot that so yeah once you have the song then you have to export it and then you can export the MP3 file and save that and share it with your friends and share it with people so I guess I'll just play the song that we finished here one time through and then I will see you guys later [Music] okay [Music] um obviously as I said before this is pretty funny to me because it just sounds I don't know it's not something I would normally make so uh yeah for the beginner course I think it's it'll work fine um it's it's this is a learning tool it's not something I would release but uh hopefully that this guy this helped you and um yeah I'm really excited to move on to the more interesting and difficult topics of music production so I hope to do that soon and I'll see you guys later foreign [Music]