FL Studio 20 Tutorial | Full FL Studio Crash Course | FL Studio Beginners Guide to Music Production

hi there it's Thomas George and welcome to this FL Studio 20 beginners tutorial so in this video we're going to show you on screen step by step the essentials of FL Studio so you can make your own music this video was actually taken from my complete FL Studio course for like full access to this course then be sure to check out a link below this video hello and welcome to this lecture where we're going to be looking at a brief overview of the interface and FL studio so we're going to quickly have a look at the channel rack the playlist the mixer piano roll and browser as FL Studio is slightly different over digital audio workstations I'm just going to briefly show you the layout of this software so this may look a little bit confusing at the moment but hopefully after this lecture you start to understand how FL Studio works one thing to know is you will always have a hint panel in the top left of FL studio so if you ever get confused you can always look over here for example here we have the master volume and master pitch and it tells us this in the hint panel just here one other thing to note which is really awesome is if you press f1 or if you're using a Mac function f1 as long as you're connected to the internet this will bring up the FL studio reference manual but not just that it will automatically go to the chapter of the area that you have selected in FL studio so for example right now we have the channel rack and step sequencer selected as you can see it opens up on this page and it shows us loads of information about this I'm just going to close this now and now I'm going to go over the five main sections in FL Studio first is this channel rack here and this is where samples and instruments that are using for your project are stored and this is also a sequencer and is where we start to write some of our music we'll look at this in a lot more detail later on but just so you know this first box here is the channel rack this is one of FL Studios unique features that make it different of our digital audio workstations and also we can open and close the channel rack with this button over here so if you don't see your channel rack just click on this icon and it will appear the next section here is the playlist window you may also know this as the arrangement window so this is really where you arrange your song and we can select this window by clicking on it or pressing shift and tap and just to show you again because we have this new area selected we can open up the FL studio reference manual and you can open this up by pressing function f1 on a Mac or f1 on Windows and you can see here in the reference manual the playlist chapter is open we can also open up the playlist window by pressing this button here the most common way to create music in FL studio is to actually create patterns in the channel rack and then arrange these different patterns in the playlist window okay and another important window which we don't actually have open at the moment is the piano roll window so if we click on this button here we can open and close the piano roll window this again is a very important area as you use the piano roll to actually write and sequence MIDI information we go into the piano roll and the other sections in a lot more detail later on but I just want to quickly show you the main sections in FL Studio before we dive deep into this course okay and going over to the left we have the browser section so this is actually a file section that allows you to find different plugins samples and instruments on your computer to use in FL Studio and the next section I'm going to briefly talk about is the mixer so this is where we can send our audio into individual channels and also add audio effects to these channels so some of these effects may include EQ compression delay reverb and many others ok so as you've already seen up here these icons in the toolbar are shortcuts to actually open and close the main different windows so this one here will actually open and close the mixer and the one to the right will open and close the browser okay so another important area that we're going to quickly look at is the transport area and this is how you can control playback for your song as you can see here we have the pattern and song modes so if you have patterns selected this will actually playback a pattern that you have selected in your channel rack for example there it played back the drums that we had selected in our channel rack however if we want to play the song back that's in our playlist window we will have to change this to song mode and now if we press played with a play button it will play back our song there's also a record button next to this but we're going to look at recording later on in this course as you can see there are many other features and icons in this toolbar at the top that this lecture really is to just go over briefly the main interface let's go over this once more we have the channel rack where we create our patterns then we have the playlist window where we arrange these patterns and then we have the mixer where we can mix and add effects to our tracks then we have the piano roll where we can type in and sequence MIDI and then over on the left we have the browser where we can access relevant files for FL studio' ok so that's just a quick overview of this interface now we're going to have a look at some of these features in more detail so the first thing I'm going to look at is the channel rack and this is where we store our different instruments so for example when you open up FL Studio you'll have these 4 instruments here so the two most important things I'm going to look at now are the sound source and the step sequencer so if you click on the name of the channel here it will open up the sound source so this is called the wrapper if I clicked on this audio wave here it playback the sample and to the right is our step sequencer each of these steps represents sixteenth note so here if I add some steps I look up to the transport section and choose pattern and then press play you'll be able to hear the kick drum okay so there we've actually created our first pattern we can name our pattern by going over to this drop-down arrow here and going down to rename just going to call this one kick and over here we can also select a color then hit enter okay so now I'm actually going to create a new pattern and we can do so by clicking this plus button over here and we're going to call this one kick and snap okay you may notice that the kick-drum steps have disappeared in the channel rack that's because the channel rack is now displaying the information for our new pattern so if I go over here and select our first button you can see there that the kick has reappeared and if we go back to the next button click and stare it's disappeared so as you can see there the musical information in the channel rack has reset so if I press play now you won't be able to hear anything okay so now I'm just going to draw in a simple kick and snare beat so to draw in just left leg and to delete right-click so I just made a couple of mistakes there and i just right-clicked to delete them so if we play this back now you can hear that our second pattern so if i click between the two patterns here we can see that kick and snare has the snare as well okay so if you want to add a new channel to your channel rack there's a couple of ways to do so one is by accessing the browser you can select this button to see or hide the browser and you can scroll down and find the musical samples under packs so for example here I'm just going to drag in a ride symbol just below the other channels and now we have the ride symbol in our channel rack you can also select this plus button here and this will allow you to add a new instrument so for example I could choose a synthesizer and here I've just opened up the flacc synthesizer which is a symbol on all versions of FL Studio 20 I'm just going to create a new pattern over here this time I'm going to call it chords okay so on the step sequencer you can't actually choose the pitch [Music] so what you can do is open up the piano roll to do so right click on the channel name and select a piano roll I'm just going to delete that note by right clicking and now draw in a chord okay you may have noticed as well that step sequencer has turned into a preview of the piano roll and if we play this back you'll be able to hear the chord okay so that's just a brief overview of the channel rack I just wanted to quickly show you the main features so I can get you making music as quickly as possible okay so now it seems like a good time to save this project and to do so you just need to go over to file and then save and I'm just going to call this example it is a good idea to constantly keep saving as you work through your project okay so as you saw previously we've created some patterns so we have a kick kick and snare and courts so the playlist is an important part of FL Studio and here we can arrange our patterns so first of all I'm just going to make sure our draw tool is selected in our playlist okay so here I have my kick pattern selected and I'm just going to draw it in into the playlist at the start now if I want to listen to the start of my arrangement I need to change from pattern mode to song mode so I just click where it says song and now if I press play and you can see there the playhead is moving along with the timeline okay now let's select kick and snare and I'm just going to draw some of these in' and if you make a mistake you can always right click to delete now if I continue playing the song we can do so by pressing spacebar you can see that we have our first button and then our second pattern and I'm also going to draw in our chords part this time going to select this tool here the paint'll so this I can click and drag to draw in multiple patterns one thing I'm going to do before I play this back is change the volume of our chords so in the channel rat we have a volume doll and I'm just going to pull this down now let's play this back obviously this isn't much of a song arrangement I just quickly wanted to show you how you can use your patterns in the playlist okay now we're going to talk about the piano roll but first of all I want to make a few quick changes so this chords part I'm not too happy with it I'm actually going to change the instrument and write in a new part I'm going to choose a new preset for my synthesizer I'll do so by clicking where it says Flex here so in this simply have a few different presets and let's just click and play through a few of these so I'm just going to switch over to pattern mode so I'm only listening to this pattern now I'm just going to select a different preset and then press the spacebar it's not quite one after so I'm going to have a look at a few of us [Music] that's more appropriate and now we're going to change the part in the piano roll let's click here to open up the piano roll and I'm just going to delete these notes by right clicking you can also right click and drag to delete multiple notes okay I just zoomed in there by holding command and scrolling you can do so as well on Windows by pressing control and scrolling in the piano roll the pitch of the notes is represented vertically as you can see here with the keyboard at the side and then time is represented horizontally and in FL Studio this is measured in bars so to draw a note you just simply click where you'd like to have a note and to change the size of it just hover over to the right hand side and then click and drag to adjust I'm just going to draw in a few more notes here and if you make a mistake you can press undo which is command Z or Mac or ctrl Z on Windows one thing you'll notice however is if you press this twice it will redo the last mistake so if you want to undo more than one mistake press command alt set or ctrl alt set on Windows you can delete your notes by right-clicking on them and you can delete multiple notes by right clicking and dragging okay now I'm just going to draw in a quick chord progression pressing command a or highlight all of your notes and pressing command B will duplicate these you can also duplicate notes by holding shift and clicking and dragging you can select multiple notes by holding command on Mac or ctrl on Windows and then dragging to cancel your selection Mac or control the windows and then click a free space on the piano hall do this it will simply draw in an extra note when you click [Music] okay so now if I play back my pattern you'll notice it's two bars in length so if I add a note in bar free and now play back the pattern you'll notice the length of the pattern has extended okay so I actually want to create a four bar loop so I'm going to draw in a few more notes so now if we play about this pattern you can see there we have a four bar pattern okay so we haven't gone over everything in the piano roll I just wanted to quickly show you a few of the key features so you can start making music so we've started creating a very basic arrangement I'm just going to play it back for you now make sure it's on song mode over here and then play it back now I want to quickly show you how the mixer works in FL Studio so I went and hide the mixer click this button here in the channel rack before is these numbers over here and what they do is they send a channel from the channel rack to an insert in the mixer so if I play about this section here of the song you'll be able to see signal going through some of the inserts so at the moment the clap hat and ride aren't actually playing anything if you haven't chosen an insert on your channel rack and you see this little dash mark it means that this channel will go directly to the master output this is fine however you won't be able to process this channel on its own but if I was to solo this flex instrument here I can do so by control clicking on this icon here you'll see that that is coming straight out of the master and that is this channel here where it says M but now if I change this number here I can send the Flex channel to one of the inserts twelve and now if I play this back you could see there whenever I change the number of the channel rack the signal was coming out of a different insert on the mixer if I right-click on the number I can then go down to type in value and type in an insert number okay I'm just going to quickly delete the ride symbol as we wouldn't be using it so right click and go on delete okay I'm just going to unsettle instrument now and pose back in the mix so the reason we want to send different channels to different inserts is so we can process them differently such as adding EQ or reverb okay now what we can do is rename our different inserts in the mixer so just right click and go to rename just so we're more organized I'm going to rename them the same as what they are in the channel rack each of these individual channels we have a number of different controls so for example here we have the pan doll which allows us to move something from left to right and below we have the volume slider and we can also mute the channel by clicking on this icon here remember if you ever get confused over what something does you can hover the mouse over it and in the top left it will give you a brief description of all this so for example here we have panning and here we have volume you'll notice on the right-hand side of the mixer we have this inspector and in here we can add plugins to each of our individual tracks so for example if I wanted to add reverb just on the snare I could select the snare insert then go over to an empty slot go to select and then here I could choose reverb for this example fruity reverb 2 which is available on all versions of FL Studio 20 and now if we listen back the snare will have reverb we also have an equalizer built-in on each channel so as you can see using the mixer is vital when it comes to mixing your music as it allows you to process each individual channel differently there are a lot more features available to us in the mixer but I'm not going to go over them just yet in this video I just wanted to show you the basics so you can get started as soon as possible later on we'll be looking at the mixer in a lot more detail ok so I'm just going to give you a quick wrap-up of what we've gone over so far so the channel rack stores your instruments and sounds and you can use the step sequencer and the piano roll to put in your musical information so the channel rack holds the information for each different pattern you then arrange these patterns in the playlist to start building the sock all of your channels can be sent to the mixer for different effects and processing and also the browser on the side allows you to access different files a case of only really scratched the surface of FL Studio I just wanted to show you the basics so you can start making music straight away so this video has actually been taken from a complete FL Studio course where we dive a lot deeper into FL Studio I've co-created this course with Ian Alexander and you can get full access to this course by checking the link in the description below this video the next part of this video Ian Alexander is going to take over and show you a few more basic functions and features of FL Studio so it's going to show you how to use what you've learned to start making your first song hi there it's Ian Alexander here I'm going to continue showing you some of the features of FL Studio and start working on this song I'm going to change the sound of our kick drum and add in a bass part so the first thing I want to do is create another drum pattern and this time introduce some high hats so if it's going to click on the plus button here and call this kick snare hats just going to give it a color too okay so enjoy my kick drum beat just by left-clicking on each of these steps put my snare in as well this time I'm just gonna click and drag to draw in the hi-hat on every beat it's going to go back to pattern mode and listen to this okay that sounds fine but a hi-hat sound a little bit too consistent so what I'm going to do is change the velocity of some of the hi-hat notes this will change the volume of the hi-hats and make it sound a little bit more interesting so to do this quickly I can just click on this button here on the channel rack now these bars here represent the velocity so what I'm going to do is just reduce the velocity of every other hi-hat all right listen back to that now it just sounds a little bit more interesting now I'm too combs drawing this pattern over here one thing to know when you're drawing in your patterns if they're not snapping to the bar like these are then just need to enable this icon up here so if I change this to none and our drawing a pattern you'll see there it's not snapping exactly to the bar so in this situation these would be out of time so if you ever have any issues where your patterns aren't snapping to the grid then just make sure you've got this turned on I tend to leave it up bar as this means each of the patterns will snap to the bar just going to delete these ones here right something else I want to do is change the sound of the kick drum so at the moment I just don't particularly like the sound of that kick so to do this all I have to do is drag and drop a sample onto this kick channel so in the browser it's going to click on this icon up here which says all go down to pax drums go into kicks and find a kick drum [Music] okay quite like that one so I'm just going to drag and drop it [Music] now this channel has a new kick drum sample one thing I'd like to mention quickly is it doesn't matter which track in the playlist that you paste your patterns onto so if I was to listen to the drums on this track here it'd be exactly the same as having them on a different track [Music] what I generally advise you do is use one track for each instrument but if you've got a slightly different part you could use new track for example here I had the kick drum on its own on track 1 and then when the next pattern came in I moved it to track 2 you can arrange these as you like but for the moment I'm going to move all the drums on to one track so to highlight multiple ones I'm going to hold command on a Mac or control on a PC and then click and drag them upwards now I'm going to draw the kick snare and hi-hat pattern over here so I'll just click on this pattern and then paste them in right the next thing I want to do is create a new pattern with a bass part so it's going to click on the plus up here call this one bass give it a color and hit enter now going to add new channel so click on this plus button and again I'm going to go down and choose flex we're just using flex at the moment as it's really easy to synth and has some great sounds it's also available on all versions of FL Studio 20 right I know there's a preset that I like here called creeper drone so I'm gonna select this I'm going to close the instrument all right I'm just going to open up the piano roll by right-clicking on the channel here and clicking on piano roll I'm going to quickly draw in the base part here gun drawing this note here C sharp 3 I'm going to move it so it starts at the beginning of the bar and now I'm going to stretch it out it's going to draw in another note now you'll notice there that the length of the note I've drawn in has changed I changed the length of this note here and now drawing a new note it's the same length again now if I click on this longer note and then draw in a note the note that you draw in will be the same length as the previous note that you have selected so this is really handy feature for when you're drawing your notes [Music] okay I'm just going to go back to pop mode and listen to this pattern [Music] okay great one thing you may have noticed is when as drawing in those notes they were snapping to the grid can control how the notes snap to the grid with this magnet icon up here so just like in the playlist if I choose none and draw in a note it won't be snapped to the grid you now if I choose the different snap mode for example bar you'll see there that all the lines have disappeared it's now it's only going to snap to each bar in this situation that is fine but if I was trying to write in a more intricate part I wouldn't want this as I won't be able to draw in fast notes so what I recommend you do is just leave this on step this way you can snap to sixteenth notes when using the draw tool at nephal studio you can also quickly copy notes by holding shift and dragging them across you'll see there is duplicated this note you can also use control-c and control-v or on a Mac command C and command V to copy and paste so if I select this note here and press command-c I can then press command-v and paste it we see there it hasn't pasted where we want it so what I often like to do is use the shortcut command B and that just duplicates the note I'm just going to press command Z to undo pasting this note now I'm quickly going to make a couple of changes in the channel rack here I'm gonna rename this instrument base so I'll right-click go to rename call it base I'm also going to give it a color I'd recommend going through and doing this on all your channels to keep things organized I'm also going to change the mixer output to number 6 so I'll right-click go down to type in value and right 6 now I'm going to select this pattern and paste it into our song so have a listen back okay great so we've now got a bass part obviously writing a notes is a big part of music production but recording can be a really quick way to get your ideas down so there's a couple of different ways you can do this firstly you can just use your computer's QWERTY keyboard to play in musical notes so make sure this icon is enabled then you can play in musical notes using your computer's keyboard this is really handy as you don't need anything else but if you do have a MIDI controller you can set this up really quickly and it's slightly easier to play a real keyboard so to do so plug in your MIDI device into your computer then go up to options and go to MIDI settings now the keyboard I've plugged in is this LPK 25 so all you have to do here is just press the enable button under input now this keyboard is active and I can use it in FL studio so if I play notes on my keyboard now we can hear our bass channel if you want a MIDI controller to be active on a different track just select this track here [Music] so you can use your MIDI keyboard to control any of the channels in your channel rack [Music] all I'm going to do now is add a new channel so we can start recording our melody so I'm going to press the plus button here I'm gonna choose Flex once again and this time I'm going to choose a preset chariot horn [Music] now going to add a new pattern call this melody I'm also gonna rename it over here so I'm going to right click go to rename color right there's a few settings which you'll need for recording firstly I want to record my ideas into a new pattern so I'm going to go to pattern mode when recording it can be really useful to have a metronome to help keep you in time to turn on the metronome click on this icon here and something else I'd like to do is have a countin so if I was to hit record without account in its start recording straight away having a countin lets you get a feel for the tempo and gives you a moment to prepare yourself so this icon here will give you one bar count in before you record there's a couple of other boarding options here blend recording and loop recording but we don't need those at the moment so I'm going to disable them okay now when I hit the record button this dialog box will appear and it's asking you what you'd like to record it's a few different options here but we want to record notes and automation so I'll select this option okay so now I'm going to press play and record in an idea okay great now I've recorded our part in I'm going to turn off the record button here so now when I play back I can listen to this pattern [Music] [Applause] it's not perfect but we can change that so if we have a look at it up close we can see here some of our notes are out of time it's only slightly out of time but I'd like to correct this so what we could do is individually move each note as you can see there when we are moving our notes they're conforming to our snap at the moment that is set to step so sixteenth notes if I want to move the notes without them snapping I can hold alt and move the notes more finally so you can see there I can move it into the correct position so what holding alt does is temporarily disables the snap mode so we could go through and do that for each of our notes individually but there's a quick way of putting your notes in time so a really powerful feature of FL studio is quantizing I'm just going to show you really quick way of doing so I'm going to hold command on a Mac or ctrl on PC and select all of the notes now if I click on the icon here I'm going to select quick quantize now look at the notes carefully when I press this button you'll see there all of the notes have been snapped to the grid so if I play it back [Applause] you can see there that almost all perfectly in time one thing to note when using quick quantize sometimes the notes snap to the wrong position on the grid so what I'm going to do is just adjust those couple of notes which are in the wrong position so for example this note here and this note down here haven't snapped where I would like them to so I'm going to move those notes individually I'm going to deselect all these notes by holding command on a Mac or ctrl on PC and clicking and now it's going to move the note to the right position [Music] as have listened back [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] something else you'll be able to notice when I played those notes in is recorded the velocity so the velocity is how loud the notes are going to be played back so for example if I adjust the velocity here the first note will be very quiet [Applause] [Music] for turn away to the top it'll be a little bit louder [Music] [Applause] so adjusting velocity gives you more control over how your notes are played back if you write in MIDI notes there always be at the same velocity so it can be good to vary these slightly it gives you music more interest it can help give it more of human feel it's going to delete these now listening back I want to change some of the notes in this melody I just like to move these three notes up an octave so I'm going to select these three notes by holding command on a Mac or ctrl on Windows selecting them I'm going to click and drag them up to the position that I'd like let's have a listen back [Music] [Applause] [Music] okay I like the idea now you can draw this pattern into the song and have listened to it in the mix okay great so started to build up our song now so now we know how to set up and record MIDI one thing I should mention quickly is be careful which snap setting you have on when you quantize your notes for example if I had it on bar and I quantize my notes now you'll see they're all the notes have been snapped to the bar obviously we do not want this so if this is happening to you just make sure you change your snap mode to an appropriate setting I tend to find step or half beat a good place to start I'm going to press undo so a melody goes back to the right position okay great so now you know how to set up and recorded MIDI it's a really important part of music production and I recommend you spend some time practicing this obviously if you're a beginner you may find it very difficult to play in time with the metronome if this is the case you can always slow down the tempo of your project to change temper of your project simply right-click on the tempo up here and then you can choose a tempo you can also type in a value if you want a specific tempo now we've got a few ideas down we can start turning these into more of a song so I'm going to arrange these patterns in the playlist to fullscreen the playlist click on the playlist window and press Enter so we previously recorded our melody but now I'd like to create another pattern with a slight variation on melody so the quickest way to do this is by cloning a pattern to clone a pattern simply right-click on the pattern in the pattern picker and go down to clone now we've got another pattern here called melody number 2 I'm just going to right click on this and rename it I'm going to call it melody variation now for draw that in and listen back I think I'd like to add in one more note in this pattern here so to open up the piano roll I'm just gonna double click on the pattern I'm just going to draw in a c-sharp here and then listen back to it I'll click on the timeline ruler here so we start playback from bar 9 okay great I'm happy with that so now let's start arranging the song I'm just going to close the channel rack for the moment so I can see the pattern picker on the left here now I think I won't start the track with the bass and just the kick drum so I'll select bass in the pattern picker and draw it in on the bass to continue throughout the track and play in the outro section another way to select a pattern is simply clicking on one in the playlist now I've clicked on quartz I'll be able to paste in the court pattern same with melody I'm just going to alternate between the melody and melody variation and I'm going to draw in the main drumbeat for this section here okay let's listen back this rough arrangement so back to the start and play from here I'm also going to turn off the metronome as I don't want to hear any more so I'll just click on this icon at the top [Music] [Music] [Music] okay that's a decent arrangement I just want to add in one more part before we start mixing so I'm going to add a new pattern and call this one pad I'm going to open my channel rack by clicking the icon here adding a new instrument this time I'm gonna use something slightly different I'm going to use the mini synth it's just another synthesizer that comes with FL Studio while I remember I'm going to choose a mixer insert for the melody and this new pad part I'm going to rename this one pad now it's going to open up piano rule and draw in a four bar pattern [Music] I'm going to drag this so it's a full length you see here it's not snapping to where I'd like it to so I'm going to hold alt and bring it back slightly remember holding alt temporarily disables snap [Music] going to change lengths these two notes [Music] and then shorten these so it's just a four bar pattern we'll go back to pat mode and listen to that [Music] [Music] cool that sounds fine now I'm just going to draw this into our song I'm just going to add it into the latest section of the song where it builds up a bit [Music] okay now we've got all our parts in let's start the mixing process I'm going to minimize the playlist by pressing enter going to make sure we have our session organized nicely so it can mix the track here for example I haven't named this channel appropriately it's just called flex so I'm going to rename this and call it chords I'll do the same in the mixer one thing I'd like to show you quickly is a handy tip for linking the channel rack with the mixer so if I select the channel that I'd like to link up go down to the insert and right-click here I can go to channel routing and select route selected channels to this track now it's copied the color and the name onto this insert I'll do the same for the melody and finally the pad make sure when you're doing this you have the right channel selected okay great everything is nice and clear now so first thing I'm going to do is set the levels so we have all the tracks at an appropriate volume so I'm just going to play back the song and adjust the volume sliders on some of these tracks [Music] [Music] okay that seems fine now I'm going to use some panning to widen the stereo image of the track so for example I'm going to pan the chords partially to the left and the pad over to the right now something we looked up before was adding reverb to the snare but I want to do the same for the pad part so I'm gonna select the pad insert go to the first plug-in slot go to select and I'll choose fruity reverb 2 now something else that I recommend you doing when you're mixing is using EQ in FL Studio we have the 3-band equalizer on each channel of the mixer so I can really quickly and easily add EQ to each of our individual channels first of all I'd like to EQ the snare slightly differently you can either click on the graph or use these sliders here to make adjustments I feel like the kick-drum has quite a lot of high frequency content so I'm going to bring that down I feel like the pad also has a similar issue so I'm going to cut out some of high frequencies here and also want to cut out some of the low frequencies and finally I want to make the melody a little bit brighter and more upfront in the mix so I'm going to boost the high frequencies a bit there's obviously far more that we could do but I don't have time to cover mixing in this short crash course so just remember when you using the mixer select the channel that you'd like to work on and then you can add in your plugins or user EQ every single channel in the mixer has its own set of plugins one other thing I'd like to mention when you're mixing in FL Studio I tend to like to make all of my adjustments within the mixer rather than in the channel rack as you may remember from before you can actually pan and adjust the volume of your tracks in the channel rack however I find for a mixing workflow is much better to just work on your tracks in the mixer so when you're happy with your mix you might want to release your song or show it some friends or family so what you need to do is export your song into a stereo file so anyone can listen to it on any computer or device so I'm just going to take you through the steps so you can export your song so the first thing you need to do is create a cycle region on the area of the track that you would like to export so in this situation I want to export the whole song to create a cycle region go to the timeline ruler at the top here hold command on a Mac or ctrl on Windows then click and drag so I have the whole length of the track selected now however I wouldn't recommend ending your cycle region at this point here this is because sometimes you may have reverbs in your track for example we have reverb on the snare and this reverb tail will ring on for a moment or two so just make sure you allow bits time at the end of your track to let everything fade silence I'm just going to give it two bars as this should be sufficient so I'm gonna hold control on a PC or command on a Mac then click and drag and create my cycle region again now what we need to do is go up to file and go down to export here we have a few different audio file types the most common are WAV and mp3 way files are higher quality but they take up more memory mp3 files are smaller however they're not quite as high-quality as WAV file so I'd recommend choosing WAV file now if we can give it a name I'm going to leave it as example we can choose where we want to export it I'm going to put it on the desktop for now leave the file format as da 12 as this is WAV file and then hit save now this box of options will open up however the default settings are absolutely fine to use so I'll just press Start you'll see the progress bar at the bottom then FL studio' will make that noise once a song has exported now I'm going to minimize FL studio' and go to my desktop and here we can play a song [Music] [Music] okay so that's the end of this video and I hope you found this crash course useful obviously we've only just scratched the surface of FL Studio and showing you the very basics so you can create a song and export it thank you for watching this video I hope now you're a lot more confident at using FL Studio so this video was actually taken from my complete FL Studio 20 course so if you'd like to continue learning with us then be sure to check out this complete course in a link below this video

Channel: Tomas George

Views: 316,885

Rating: 4.9531102 out of 5

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Id: x5-GweOYXtk

Length: 55min 24sec (3324 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 29 2020