60 FL STUDIO SHORTCUTS AND TRICKS TO MAKE BEATS FASTER

yo what's good people it's jay cactus and in today's video i'm going to be showing you over 60 shortcuts and tips in fl studio these are all shortcuts that i use on a daily basis and although i'm not going to be showing you every single shortcut there is i'm going to be showing you the ones that will make your workflow faster and get you making beats faster the video was requested by you guys in the comments and in the discord so let's get straight into it alright so i started making a beat and i thought it would be a good opportunity to show you all of my shortcuts and i'm gonna break it down into sections i'm gonna be showing you keyboard shortcuts for the playlist piano roll and channel rack and then i'll go through some tips afterwards so i've added this down here just so you know exactly which keys i'm pressing and i'm going to start with the playlist shortcuts i'm going to go through these pretty fast as well just so i can get through all 60 of them so when i'm in the playlist the main three that i use are p to select the draw tool c to select the cut tool and then e for the select tool or for example if you were on the draw tool and you wanted to select something you could hold down control click and then drag over if you right click on something you can delete it or if you left click on something it basically means you've selected that pattern and then you can click to draw them in again once you've got the cut tool activated if you want to chop off the smallest end of any sample or pattern just hold shift so it cuts in a straight line and then right click and then select the end so for example i could cut that bit if i wanted it from the beginning i could do it that way or if i just wanted to cut without deleting it i could hold shift so it cuts in a straight line then left click and it will just chop it if i didn't hold shift you can end up chopping it unevenly because this goes diagonally if you want to select multiple patterns i can hold control click and drag over one of them and then hold shift as well and then i can click and select whichever one i like if i've messed up and i've chopped something that i didn't want to chop for example i could press ctrl and z to bring it back and then press ctrl and alt z to bring it back even further if you want to rearrange the tracks instead of right clicking and selecting move up or move down you can just hold shift alt and then use the mouse wheel to bring it up so you can keep everything organized if i want to stay even more organized i can label my verses and my hooks and intro so for example here i'm going to double click and then drag if you want to fine tune it just right click on the red bar and you can bring that back off off i've got this intro here so i'm going to press alt and t that's going to bring up the marker name then i can type in intro hit enter this section here is going to be my verse so i'm going to label that verse one and now if i just wanted to select the intro i could double click on intro and it highlights only the intro if i wanted to quickly chop up one of the patterns so it didn't leave a tale of the reverb for example instead of rendering the whole track what i could do is render a single one so for example this piano here hold ctrl and click to highlight it then i'm gonna press ctrl alt and c and this is gonna let me render that single pattern so just make sure wave is selected you can make it a higher bit rate if you wanted to and then i can hit start and as you can see only this one piano here has been rendered if i rendered it whilst i was only highlighting this part you'd only have audio here and you wouldn't have to cut each end like i just did there whenever i want to mute a section without deleting it i just hit t and then click on the patterns that i need to mute and then once i'm done i can click on it again and it brings it back so they're the main shortcuts that i use in the playlist and i want to show you some in the channel rack and the piano roll but before i do that i want to show you these quick shortcuts to navigate in between each one so to bounce between the piano roll channel right playlist all the main parts of fl studio so when you need to quickly jump to the channel rack it's f6 when you want to quickly jump to the piano roll for example if i had the piano highlighted i could press f7 if i quickly need to load up a plugin i can press f8 and then select the one i need to get to the mixer it's f9 to open up midi controls it's f10 and then you can easily navigate to the audio settings general file etc or f11 will quickly take you to the project credits so i can name this beat call it points the offer is me j cactus now when i export this beat it's going to save that data so it'll come up with the title and artist whenever you open it somewhere and then the other one you should know is f12 so f12 will close all plugins so if you know that your cpu is acting a bit mad or you just need to free up some space or just tidy things up hit f12 and it closes everything all right so in the channel right these are the main ones i use first i'll keep it simple if you want to copy something make sure you've selected the one you need to copy press ctrl and c and then for example if i wanted to paste that into the pad control and v if you have sounds or plugins that you don't need instead of right clicking and going to delete you can just hit alt and delete hit enter and that's going to get rid of it to keep everything organized you can hold alt and then hit up and down just to move things around so if you wanted your melodies at the top you could bring them up and then have your drums underneath to highlight multiple sounds or plugins click on the first one then hold shift and click on the other ones that you want to highlight the other option is to double click to highlight everything or click and drag to drag down the ones that you want to select to link these to a mixer channel i'm first going to organize them so i'm going to come up here go sort by and then track number you can see all these have numbers so they're already linked if you just want to send one of them to the mixer just highlight the sound by clicking next to it hit f9 to go to the mixer and then hit control and l if you had multiple sound selected and then you hit just control and l that would send all of the sounds to the same mixer channel but most of the time you want to separate everything and if you want to separate them all highlight the ones that you need to send hit f9 to go back to the mixer select the next empty channel then press ctrl shift and l and that's going to link them all if you want the colors in the mixer channel to match the ones in the channel rack then make sure you color them before so for example i've got everything unlinked here and let's say for example you want the effects to be pink so i'm going to click drag to highlight the effects come up here go to color selected and let's choose gradient i'm going to select the first color click on last select one that is a little bit lighter hit accept make sure the highlighted still and then i'm just going to come along here i'll go to empty insert ctrl shift and l and you can see the colors have copied as well all right so next i want to show you all of my top shortcuts in the piano raw so once you've hit f7 to enter the piano raw you can do so many things in here to make your workflow faster and i'm actually going to jump to the hi-hats so let's say for example you wanted the hi-hats to be all the same velocity you can hit ctrl and a to highlight everything now come down to the velocity hold shift click and drag and now you can see if i move it along they're all going to be the same velocity the same rules apply with the draw tool and the select so if i hold ctrl i can click and drag over these let's say for example you only wanted the first half of the hi-hats and you didn't want to change it for the second half what i could do is right click up here so i've only got the first half selected ctrl and b to copy it if i want to make some kind of hi-hat role and for example i want the notes to come up at pretty much an even velocity what i could do is hold ctrl click and drag over one of these hold alt and u to chop it up i'm going to click accept and you can see they're all the same velocity and what i want to do right here is make the velocity come up gradually so with left click it's not as even but instead of that if you right click and drag up now you can see that it's a more even spread so let me show you how that would sound i'm going to take you into the kick pattern and let's say for example you've recorded this kick pattern in with your midi and some of these notes are slightly off if you want to quickly quantize them you can hit control and a to highlight everything and then hit control and q quantize is going to work based around the snap to grid that you've set so for example because mine's online it's going to jump to the nearest line so control and q if for example it was set on a sixth step and i'll bring these slightly off so it's in the middle it's going to jump to the nearest six step if you need more quantize settings hit alt and q now you can adjust the start time duration sensitivity and the levels to quickly move up and down octaves i'm in the piano roll for the actual piano melody here i'm going to press control and a hold ctrl and then hit up or i can do it down and that's basically keeping it in the same key but it's up an octave so right here it starts on d sharp four that's going to jump up to d sharp five if i just want to change the pitch and bring it up a semitone at a time i can hold shift and click up or down so the melody right here is in d sharp minor if i hold shift and click up it's going to be an e minor i can do that with single notes or multiple notes too so if i hold ctrl again hold shift and then click over the ones i want to move i can bring them all up as well if you want to shorten all the notes for example if you had a hi-hat pattern like this and you've drawn them out this length if you wanted it a little bit more visible so you've got more flexibility hit shift and d and that's going to bring them all to the same length depending on how you've got snap to grid set so i'll show you what it would be like online so it's ctrl and z to undo that shift in d and you can see these are a little bit longer if you want to make all of the notes join up which is usually good for pianos what i'm going to do is just draw a note in here just so these n1 stretch hit ctrl a to highlight everything and then control an l now you can see that all the notes have stretched to meet the others and now i can just get rid of that last one that i added if i wanted to make this melody or chord progression a little bit interesting what i could maybe do is hold ctrl click and drag over the piano notes maybe just the chords and then hit alt a which opens the arpeggiator from here i can select the normal one so it's just going up and back down or i can flip it or select the alternate one if the piano was all the same velocity because you've drawn it in and let's say you wanted a more human feel you can just press ctrl and a to highlight everything hit alt and r to open the randomizer now you can see if i bring the velocity down they're all going down but it's a little bit more random so it's more of a human feel and the last one i'll show you is how to bring all of the notes to one note so this is perfect for when you want to copy the away pattern and paste it into the kit so right now i've got this eight-way pattern i'm gonna hit ctrl a and then ctrl and c to copy it i'm gonna go into the kick piano roll and then hit ctrl and v to paste it i'm gonna hold ctrl click drag over the slide notes and then hit delete that's just gonna get rid of them and now all of these i want them on c so i'm going to press ctrl and a to highlight everything and then i'm going to hit alt and k and you can see everything's brought down to c5 the first time you do this it's going to look a little bit different so you need to play around with these i think the first time all you need to do is right click on c6 you might need to hold ctrl or alt just play around with some of the settings i can't remember exactly what it was but after the first time you do it you won't need to do it again you just hit alt and k and then it sets it to c5 so just hit enter and then you've got the same kick pattern as the eight way from there i usually like to hit shift and d like i did before just so i've got more visibility and then before i go on to the tips i've just got some bonus shortcuts that i want to show you so the first one is to quickly find samples in the browser so i'm going to press control and f now it's going to open the smart surge let's say for example i knew this eight weight sample that i needed and it was called fat and wide and i couldn't remember exactly where it was i can just type in fat hit enter and that's gonna search in the folder and find the nearest one if that wasn't the right one i could hit f3 to go to the next sample that had fat in it or i could hit f2 to go to the previous one to quickly change the sample for example if you wanted to test out all of the eight weights make sure you've got the 808 in the channel rack highlighted and then just click the mouse wheel on the sample that you want to swap it for so for example if i wanted to try some of these like the flat and wide one you can see it's instantly swapped it [Music] hit spacebar to stop you can do the same with any sound so if i wanted to test out all of the hi-hats i can use the mouse wheel to click and it swaps it here and then i can quickly cycle through some [Music] one tool that i'm always using is edison so i'm going to hit f9 to go to the mixer channel and then to open edison on any insert that you've selected just hit shift and e if you need to render a certain section let's say for example i wanted to render this whole thing i just double clicked and then dragged over to highlight it i'm gonna go to the master click this button here and then hit alt and r and that's going to open the render options i usually leave it on cut remainder just so it's the right length but if you wanted to leave a reverb tail for example just go on leave remainder if you want to quickly change the order of the inserts just hover over them use the mouse wheel to go up and down so they're pretty much all of the shortcuts that i use in fl studio and now i just want to show you a quick few tips that i personally use to speed up my workflow the first one which everyone should know is just a split by channel if i click on here i've got this pattern selected which has an eight weight in it a cake and a hi-hat if i want to separate all of them i'm just gonna come up here and then go on split by channel now you can see i can click and drag down and i've got them all separated if you want to play around with some arrangement ideas for the beat you're in two mines and you don't really know if you want to start with the hook or start with the verse or you just want to experiment what you can do is actually create a new arrangement so if you click here you can click on add one and then yeah we can just call it arrangement two hit enter now you've got a completely different arrangement so you can make a new one here you can drag your samples in and if you want to go back to the other one just click up here and go to the first arrangement next one is a quick organization set and i like to do this with automation so for example i know the half times on the piano so i'm going to hold alt and shift and then use the mouse wheel to bring the half time just below the piano now i'm going to right click on track 2 and select group with this track and that just means that if i don't want all of the automations to be visible i can just let this here and it just keeps it a bit neater i'm going to do the same with this filter because i know that's linked to the piano as well so right click group whip above track now i can hide them both if i wanted the filter to come on at exactly the same time as a different effects like half time instead of manually drawing the curves just to match it a quick solution is to double click in the half time automation go to the range tool click copy state and then open up the love filter one click on the wrench tool again and then paste state you can see that they're both identical another quick tip for organization is just to insert tracks as well so if i right click on any of them i can insert one here and that brings the rest of them down next i'm going to bring in this vocal chop and if i quickly want it to match the tempo of the beat i can see the bpm of this sample is 120 bpm if i click on here go to fit to tempo and then select type in bpm i can just type in 120 and that's going to bring it in time without changing the pitch if i wanted to quickly render a track let's say my counter melody i could right click on track four because i know the count melody is here and then just go consolidate this track and then you can either do time selection which is the red bar or the full song which is everything i'll do the full song hit start as you can see it's rendered it for me and it's muted the original if you wanted to chop one of the samples and it had clicks or pops in it let's say for example you've chopped this here my guess is this sample because it's ended so suddenly it would have some kind of click or pot so i'm to double click in there and select d clicking mode to generic bleeding now you can see it's got a quick fade out if you turn off stretch mode hold alt click and drag you can manually change it another tip i want to show you is fast hi-hat patterns to get a quick drill bounce you want to click on the first one skip two click on the next one skip two then click on this one hit f7 to go to the piano roll hit control and a so it highlights everything right click this red bar and bring it back here now press control and b until you get to this five mark which means you've got a four bar loop so now you can see you've got a quick pattern if you want a track pattern just right click and then fill each two step or if you want more of a bounce right click hit fill each four step hit f7 to go to the piano roll ctrl a to highlight everything now you want to shift click on any of the notes and then drag it holding shift and click will just copy the notes so now you can see every other one is highlighted if i hold alt and then use the mouse wheel to scroll down you can see that it's only bringing down the velocity of the highlighted nose so if you're listening to this you've got more of a bounce if you want to copy plugin settings for example this reverb i'm going to click on this arrow left click and hold on save preset as and then drag it over something else let's say the count melody now you can see it's copied the exact same settings and now the last tip i want to show you which everyone should have done by now is saving a template so let's say you've got some favorite sounds you've got a go-to kick and eight-way you've got a hi-hat pattern which you usually start off with and then in the mixer you usually have everything linked up the same way so you might have your melody on insert one kick on insert two eight wait on insert three and then you might have something like an eq on the melody instead of creating that every single time what you wanna do is bring in your favorite sounds for example i've got my kick and eight weight here i've just renamed them my go to tempo is usually one four one i don't have an instrument on here yet but i'm just gonna link the kick away snare and counter snare for now ctrl shift and l to link them insert one is where my melody is going to go so i'm just going to add an eq and maybe some settings like this just because you know you usually roll off some lows but it counts in there i already showed you how to get that quick drill bounce and let's say that's all you need for now on the master i always have a classic clipper fruity balance and then zed game editor for when i'm making videos so now i want to save this as a template so every time i open fl studio this is what's going to open and this is just going to speed up your workflow so much you don't have to start looking for sounds and dragging them in everything's just good to go next thing that you need to do is go to file and then save as this bit's important so you need to go to your main drive which is usually c go to program files image line fl studio whichever version you're using then data then templates and save it here so i'm just going to name this drill template 141 because that's the bpm hit save the first time you do it you might need to close fl studio which i have done then when you reopen it go to file new from template and you can see the one that we tested is right here let's say you want to skip that step and literally every time you open fl studio it just opens with that template hit f10 to open this bit then you want to go to general and then down here where you see default template mindset to drill template but i could change it to the one we just used so make sure you're getting your template saved it took me way too long to set up my first one and i just wasted so much time so now that i have a template every time i open fl studio i'm just good to go so i hope you liked the video and i hope you took some gems from this one i think these shortcuts are just a must-know for producers as soon as you start learning the keyboard shortcuts you can make beats twice as fast it is one of those things that you just need to practice with so whenever you're doing something just try and go back to the shortcuts that i've showed you and after a while it'll just become muscle memory you'll just do it without even realizing it so yeah i know i didn't really show you how to make a beat today but i think this video was essential and if you think i've missed any shortcuts then let me know in the comments like i said i didn't really want to include every single shortcut i just wanted to show you the ones i personally use and the ones that i think that you need to know as a producer but yo once again thanks for watching the video and i'll see you next time

Channel: Jay Cactus TV

Views: 32,817

Keywords: fl studio shortcuts and tricks, fl studio shortcuts keys, fl studio shortcuts piano roll, fl studio shortcuts mousepad, fl studio shortcuts keyboard, fl studio beginner tutorial, fl studio beginner tips, fl studio beginner course, fl studio beginner beat tutorial, fl studio tutorial for beginners, fl studio tutorial 2021, fl studio beat making tips and tricks, how to make beats fast, how to make beats faster, how to make beats faster on fl studio, music production

Id: ZxudJOFRlqI

Length: 17min 16sec (1036 seconds)

Published: Thu May 06 2021