[0:00]So you just got FL Studio, you're super confused and all you want to do is make songs and beats, this video is for you. This is the ultimate guide to FL Studio. Let's hop straight into it. If you don't know me, I'm Game from busy Works Beats.com. We train over a million producers around the world. Some have gone to work with Drake, Kanye West, Post Malone, Ariana Grande, French Montana, Young Thug, YG, Lil Baby, Polo G, Trippy Red, J Cole and a ton more. In this video, I'll guide you through FL Studio in five simple steps. We can see five buttons that can navigate around the doll. This first button is called the playlist. This is where we arrange the puzzle pieces. This second button is called the piano roll. This is where we edit individual midi notes for the melodies for specific instruments. This third button here is called the channel rack. The channel rack is where we import drum sounds and sequence it out to make little. This icon here is called the mixer. This is where you go add effects like to my voice. I could turn off the effects. So this is what I sound like normally, but with effects, this is what my voice sounds like. And this is a good way to manage your sounds as you're building beats or after you've recorded. This fifth button here is called the browser. The browser is probably where you're going to live. Because the browser is where you drag and drop your sounds into FL Studio. So in this video, I'm going to make it super simple how to use FL Studio with a real producer's workflow. I'm not going to show you every function of FL Studio because truly you don't need to know everything. Always remember if you ever get stuck in FL Studio, here are five buttons to return to the window that you may have lost. If you screw up your screen, go to view, go to arrange windows and then go to realign. This will fix your screen to pull everything back into focus. Let's import some sounds. Let's go to options, go to file settings and then click on this extra search folder. And then go into your computer and find wherever your sounds are located. In this case, I have a whole folder called sounds on my external hard drive. And let's click in here. So now when you go to your browser, this icon here, hit the refresh button up top and you'll see a folder called sounds or whatever the name of your folder is. So in this case, I have a folder called sounds. I can go into my individual folders and navigate through all the drum packs and different things that I have in that specific folder. So now you can preview different drum sounds and different A to weights. Let's open up the beat maker blueprint, for example, and play some A to weights. You can find that at busyworksbeats.com/beatmaker. We have tons of drums, tons of sounds in here. Over 100 A to weights for you, for example. If you want more free sounds, join us on Discord. It's discord.gg/busyworksbeats. We have a ton of drum kits from Metro Boom and Pierre Borne, Just Blaze, Kanye West, Dr. Dre, Scott Storch, a ton of them in the Lunch 77 kit, linked right in our Discord. We have a free plugin section here where you guys can go through and download all those free plugins. We also have top hip-hop samples used on the top records, Dr. Dre, Kanye West, Jay-Z, Mo Def, Kendrick Lamar on and on and on. So these are all free in our Discord, just go to discord.gg/busyworksbeats. If you want to add plugins to your FL Studio, go to options and go to manage plugins. You can use these settings for faster plugin scanning. Go to scan options, turn off rescan, turn off rescan, turn off try to prevent and then just keep it on combine VST and then hit find installed plugins. FL Studio will go through these folders and it will look for the plugins there. If you've installed a plugin somewhere else on your computer, click this folder icon to select that folder. Also, if you're using a MIDI device, go to options, go to MIDI settings and mine is plugged up. But what you have to do firstly is go to input and then click on your MIDI device and then hit refresh and then make sure you enable the actual MIDI. All right, now let's start making some sound. Let's go to the channel rack. This is where we can load plugins. Firstly, you're going to have a blank sampler, you can either right click and replace this with a generation plugin. These plugins are basically the sound making plugins in your DAW. Now here we can load up different plugins. Let's load up FL Keys. Once we have FL Keys open, in order to add notes, we need to go to what's called the piano roll. Let's right click and go to piano roll. Here's some recommended options for your piano roll. Click this drop down in the top left. Let's go to view. We're going to turn on what are called ghost channels. We're also going to go to key labels, all notes. Next, we're going to go to the snap to grid and switch this to a half beat to get started. Now we can draw in the notes and it will play sound from our plugin.
[3:49]You can hit the space bar to play the sounds. Another tool here is called the metronome. This will keep you on beat when you're writing melodies and drum beats. Click up here.
[4:02]Every time the metronome hits, that's one beat. One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. In that case, we have four beats in one bar. So that's what the numbers up top represent our bars. And these slightly darker vertical lines are the beats. One, two, three, four. So we have four beats per this bar. Now let's say you want to add some reverb to your piano. What we can do is go to the channel rack. Click your piano, hit control L to send this sound to the mixer. It will automatically name it and assign it to the mixer track. Now here under FL Keys, make sure you have the actual inspector open. Click here on FL Keys and then you can open up any plugin that you have as an effect. Let's open up some Fruity Reverb 2. After adding Fruity Reverb 2, the piano will now have a reverb effect. The effects work from top to bottom, so that's the order of the effects. You'll learn more about that when you learn mixing. You could learn more at busyworksbeats.com/premium. If you struggle to come up with loop ideas, no worries. FL Studio now has in the browser, FL Cloud. So if you click on where it says sounds up top, it will load up the FL Cloud. Let's go to Larry O's curated pack. So now we can drag and drop loops. Let's drag this into the playlist. These loops are organized to automatically time stretch, but if you grab a loop from online from another source, just double click on the audio, go to mode, stretch mode and then you could use the time knob to lock it to the nearest bar. Let's go to song mode and turn on the metronome. You can hear that it's in beat. You can do a lot with loops. You could reverse loops. You could change the pitch of the loops using the pitch knob here. You could also chop up loops by double clicking, right click and then you can open up in the fruity slicer. So one the girl technique, click here on the slicing and go to half beat or beat. Now in this case, this is a sound generation plugin. We have to go back to the channel rack. I'm going to hit control X, right click, go to find first empty and then hit control V. So now this is on a completely new pattern. We still need to send it to the mixer, hit control L. We still need to add this pattern to the playlist. Let's go to our pattern selector, left click and drag it into the playlist. Here's a mute tool. We can mute the original audio. Now hit space bar.
[6:26]If you want to record in FL Studio, it's a multi-step process. Firstly, let's go to options. Let's go to audio settings and we're going to click this drop down and select wherever our mic is on our computer. Next, we need to change the buffer length. This is basically the latency between when you speak and when you hear yourself, so the lower the better. I have mine set to 128 at the max for doing video tutorials. You can X out of there. Next step is to go to the mixer. We're going to actually select a blank mixer channel. In this case, I'm going to select two. We're going to go to the top here and select your drop down and select your mic input. Everybody's mic input is completely different, but a microphone is a mono source. So we're going to select this mono mic input. From here you can add different effects. I've added Waves NS1 to prevent background noise. I have Arvox with a noise gate for video tutorials and I have an EQ just to simply make my voice more crisp sounding. Now, the new cool part in FL Studio is that if you click up here, you can actually switch this to record external input only. What this means is that even though I'm hearing my voice through all of these effects, FL will only record the actual signal that sounds more like this. FL will record this, it won't record the final sound like this. What that means is I can record myself through a bunch of plugins to hear myself and see what it sounds like. But if I ever want to go back and change something, I can. That's how I would recommend recording. So in short, click this drop down, go to external input only. And then if you want to hear yourself constantly, switch your monitor input to on. In order to record, we need to arm our channel for recording. Let's go to the bottom of the mixer and click this record button. Now we need to record our vocals into the playlist where we arrange our entire song. Click on record and we're going to record audio into playlist as an audio clip. This is just a test. This is not a test. I came in correct. Got another check. FL that's on deck. We don't play with wreck. Back inside the set. Where you coming yet? Turn off recording and hit play. This is just a test. This is not a test. I came in correct. Got another check. FL that's on deck. We don't play with wreck. Back inside the set. Where you coming yet? Now what we can do is double click on this audio, hit control L to send it to a new mixer insert. Very important because here we don't want to record over top of ourselves. So we need to send that audio somewhere else. And here we can add the effects that we had. Now, let's say you're recording through a bunch of effects and you want those same effects on this recording, because now when I hit play, this is just a test. This is not a test. It doesn't sound as crisp as my mic does. So what we can do is go to your recording chain, right click, go to file, go to save mixer track state as, left click and drag it over to your other mixer channel. As you see here, this is reserved for the paid versions of FL Studio. So I'm going to log in. I've now logged into my FL Studio producer edition, which allows me to duplicate things. So now we can right click, go to file, save mixer track state as, left click and drag it over top of the other recording. This is just a test. This is not a test. If you ever want to compare where your mixing chain sounds like at the bottom, you'll see this icon here, just turn this off and on. This is just a test. This is not a test. Also, if you have plugins that are giving you a lot of CPU troubles, you can turn them off temporarily. This is just a test. This is not a test. Next, let's arrange our song in the playlist. Let's grab the slice tool. Let's hit shift right click to do a vertical slice to delete that extra little bit over top of the bar. Firstly, I want to take this melody and clone it. Let's highlight this and hit control B. Control B is latch paste. It will paste to the end of whatever you're pasting. Very important that you cut perfectly to the bar if not this will be a sloppy paste technique. If you have something that's a little more off the grid like this, for example, and you hit control B, it will latch to the end of this. What you have to do is hit shift, left click and drag to keep the timing. I recommend you keep your snap to grid to bar mode when in the playlist. If you ever have audio that's off the grid, but it should be on the grid, hit shift Q. This is just a test. This is not a test. FL Studio now has clip gain, so you could left click these little dots here and turn the volume up or down. This is just a test. This is not a test. I came in correct. Got another check. From here, all you have to do is go to the pattern selector and select your patterns and just arrange the styling that you want. Let's highlight this, hit control B to latch paste. You can combine multiple patterns by highlighting them, hitting control and then hit control G to group them together. This is just a test. This is not a test. Now let's say you want to save your project. Let's go to file, let's save as. I'll save this as FL Studio Beginner Video. If you want to export your song, go to file, export. We're going to go wave or MP3, depends on how much space you want to take up. MP3 is a lower quality, wave is the best quality. Let's just do an MP3 for now. And you can save this anywhere on your computer. In the export window, we can also select wave or MP3 to export both styles. We're going to do full song and then we're going to cut the remainder. I have mine set to 16 bit and the MP3 I want a CD quality at 320 kilobytes per second. You can copy all the other settings. Just make sure you enable the master effects. In this new section in the export tab, click the drop down. You can export to SoundCloud as well. Navigate to your export folder and play the song. This is just a test. This is not a test. I came here correct. Got another check. If you want to make an entire beat from scratch, you want to make part two. So leave a comment below if you want part two and subscribe if you're new. Peace out, guys. Go to busyworksbeats.com/FL Studio for tons of free projects, tons of sounds and more FL Studio tutorials.
