FL Studio 21 Beginner Beat Making Tutorial (2023)

if you want to learn how to start making beats you've probably downloaded FL Studio maybe you have the full version maybe it's the trial version but when you open it up you have absolutely no idea what to do but by the end of this video you will know everything that you need to know to make beats yourself and I'm going to make this very simple and easy to understand my name is Navi D I've been making beats for around 15 years I've produced for artists made music for a video game my music's gotten millions of streams on Spotify I'm also one of the recommended channels on FL Studios on website and so today I'll be helping you get started with using FL Studio to make beats and if you want we can also make a full beat together step by step I left a link in the description box below to a Mini pack of around 100 sounds that you can download for free and I'll be using sounds from that pack so you and I can make a full beat together by the way it would really help me out if you could hit like And subscribe I know you're probably new to beat making but if at any time you feel like something in this video has helped you out it would really mean a lot if you hit one of those buttons so anyways let's just go ahead head and start when you open up FL Studio there are a lot of buttons and menus and windows everywhere but these five buttons up here are all you need to know once you learn what these five buttons do you'll be able to make beats so let's go through these buttons one by one first let's start by creating an empty project so let's go into file new from template and select empty now we have a completely empty project here now as you can imagine if you want to make beats you'll need to use sounds you've heard music before obviously you know that sounds are necessary for music so you might be wondering where do you find sounds in FL Studio well that's what this first button that we'll look at is for this button right here is the browser button the browser is where you can find all of your sounds that you can use to make beats you can see if I click the browser button you can open and close it very fancy and in these folders you can find different kinds of sounds like drums and instruments that you can use to make your beat you can even add your own sounds into the this browser so if you're following along to make this beat with me and you've already downloaded the pack you can add this folder into the browser just find the folder and simply drag it into the browser now you should see your new folder inside the browser so once you find a sound inside of the browser that you do want to use for your beat this is where we're going to move on to the next button which is the channel rack the channel rack is this thing that's been opened in the middle of the screen this whole time and again just click this button to close or open the channel rack now what is the channel rack for once you find a sound that you want to use the channel rack is what you'll put all those sounds into for the beat that you're making so for example let's say I wanted to use this sound here to start my beat all I would do is take it from my browser and simply just drag this into my channel rack so the channel rack is where you put all of your sounds that you want to use for the beat that you're currently making so let's make a little summary here when you make beats you start with your browser this is where you can find all of the sounds that you could use when you're making beats then once you decide on which sounds you want to use for your beat that you're making you bring that sound into the channel rack then once you have your sound in the channel rack you can start making the actual music for your beat which is exactly what we're going to do next but before we do that there is one small thing we need to do first and that's to choose the BPM of the beat the BPM is basically how fast or slow you want your beat to be this number that you see up here is our BPM and right now it's set to 140. to hear how fast this actually is just press play and turn on this button next to it which is the metronome this will let you hear the actual pace of your beat and it's entirely up to you how fast or slow you want your beat to be but for this beat that we're making let's set this to 77 BPM by the way I have a full video on choosing the right BPM for your beat which I will link in the description box below if you want to know more anyways moving on we now have our BPM set let's go ahead and make our first pattern this is where you're going to use the next important button which is the piano roll you can see this brings up a new window that has a piano on the side here and this lets us play the sounds that we have in our Channel rack at different pitches just like any other keyboard and when you click in this area here this lets you draw in notes so you can create an actual musical pattern so here's what we have now we start by finding sounds in our browser and put them into our Channel rack again the channel rack is where we have all the sounds that we want to use for the beat that we're currently making then we can use the piano roll to create musical patterns using the sounds that are in our Channel rack so let's go ahead and make a musical pattern using this new sound we can close the browser for now just to make a bit more room here together okay now let's press play to hear how this sounds [Music] so that's our first pattern done amazing next let's go ahead and add in yet another sound now we could go back into the browser to add in more sounds but I want to show you yet another place that you could go to add sounds into your channel rack if you go into your channel rack and you press this little plus sign at the bottom this will bring up a list of plugins now you might be wondering what is a plug-in plugins are basically like mini apps inside of FL Studio and each plugin has tons of sounds that you can use for your Beats so for example the most popular plugin for beat making that comes with FL Studio is probably Flex so let's add that in now this new window comes up which is the flex plugin and all these presets here are different sounds that we can use for our beat for this beat let's use the still Knight preset so now that I've selected my sound I'll go ahead and open up the piano roll once again and I'll create yet another musical pattern with this sound by the way when you add notes into the piano roll you can change the length of those notes by just clicking on the tail and dragging it like so so now that we have these two patterns made when we press play you're gonna hear that we have both sounds playing at once [Music] [Applause] oh a quick little tip here when you're in the piano roll you can actually see the different patterns that you've made with each sound in this little menu up here now after listening to this pattern I do kind of feel like the sound from Flex is a bit loud so let's adjust its volume to do this we're going to go back into the channel rack you can see in the channel wrath we have our two sounds that we've added in so far and next to these sounds we have these little dials these dials are for volume and panning you can even see it tells you what they are in the little hint box above when we hover over each of them this hint box is pretty useful if you're ever lost or confused by the way so let's go ahead and take this still night sound from flex and turn down the volume and we do that by just turning down this dial and there we go so once again let's summarize where we are now you start off with a browser where you can listen to every single sound that you have in your library then once you find a sound that you want to use you bring that into your channel rack then once you have your sounds in the channel rack you can build musical patterns using those sounds by using the piano roll now let's go ahead and continue building this beat out a little more We'll add in some drums next so let's go back into my free sound pack in the browser now the common drum sounds that you're going to need to make beats will often be a hi-hat a kick and a snare or a clap those are the three common drum sounds for beat making so let's go ahead and start by using this hi-hat here and now that it's in my channel rack I can open up the piano roll and make a pattern using this sound by the way you can just right click on whatever sound you want to make a pattern with and select piano roll from this menu here instead of clicking the button at the top so let's create a hi-hat pattern just as a basic starting point hi-hats are typically placed on every single square or every other Square again it's up to you so let's hear how this sounds [Music] but you probably heard that we have a problem here our hi-hats only played for half of this Loop well this is something that you need to know when you build your patterns they will all need to be the same length otherwise you'll have this problem happen you can even see in the channel rack the first two sounds patterns are longer than our hi-hat pattern and that's exactly why our hi-hat pattern didn't play for the entirety of our Loop so let's go back into the hi-hat pattern and make this the same length as our first two patterns [Music] all right perfect so far so good now if you remember I told you that the channel rack was where you can change the volume of your sounds but what if you wanted to change the volume of just a specific note rather than the entire sound well that's what this area down here is for these lines basically control how loud each note of your sound is so let's create a hi-hat pattern where the volume goes up and down we can do that by just simply changing how tall each of these lines are by the way if you want to delete a note in your pattern just right click over top of it all right so that is our hi-hat pattern done just as a quick side note you might be wondering what these little squares in the channel rocker for filling these squares in is basically the exact same as filling out every single Grid in the piano roll as you can see it's just up to you which way you prefer so let's go ahead and undo this and go back to our original pattern here so our hi-hats are done all that's left is the kick and the snare so let's add those in next foreign patterns this is where I have a bit of a different opinion here when you make music the point is to be free and expressive and do what you want while I agree and think that's great when you first start making beats it can really be helpful to be a little bit more strict with your drums what I recommend is putting the kick on the one and the snare on the two and the four now you might be wondering what does that mean well when you open up the piano roll you can see that there are these numbers at the top here each of these numbers is called a bar and each bar is made up of four beats a little bit confusing I know but if you remember how the metronome counted you can actually see this visually the metronome ticks at every single beat now why is this important well like I mentioned when you start placing your drums down it's best to start by putting a kick on the first beat of every single bar like so and your snare on the second and fourth beat of every single bar [Music] this is what I recommend when you're making your drum patterns especially when you first start making beats from here feel free to add in more notes but again I recommend not getting too crazy with your drums [Music] by the way to move your notes around just simply hold the mouse and drag them and you can also quickly jump around to different parts of your Loop by clicking at the top area of the piano roll all right so far so good let's add in one last sound into this beat which will be our base let's go back into the browser and use this sound here and now let's create a pattern using this sound by going into the piano roll now before we make our last pattern with this sound let's pause for a second to talk about two very common problems that you're probably going to run into that you need to know how to solve let me quickly solo this sound to show you these problems a little bit more easily you might notice that when you make patterns your sounds May overlap so if we make a pattern like this with our base you can hear what I'm talking about and this overlap can sound pretty bad depending on your sound now if you run into this problem here's how to solve this go back into the channel rack right click on the sound that's causing this problem and select cut itself now if we take a listen to the same pattern only one note will play at a time so that's an easy fix now let's talk about problem number two you probably noticed that in the piano roll these notes are very short and yet our sound keeps playing even after the note ends if you run into this problem which you definitely will here's what you want to do go back into the channel rack and click on the sound then click on this tab up here and this is what you're going to see next what you want to do is turn this option on now this might be a bit confusing but this will let you change the shape of your sound as you can hear [Music] now this sound has a slow increase in volume and then it tapers off if we change the shape to this now the bass follows this new shape and starts to play immediately [Music] and if you look at the piano roll the sound only plays for however long the note is and then it has this quick tail and stops playing which is exactly what our shape looked like so those are two common problems that you'll probably run into when you first start making beats and now you know the solutions to both moving on let's go back into the piano roll for the bass and create a pattern with it thank you foreign [Music] [Music] this beat is coming along so far we've covered three of these buttons now let's cover the fourth which is the mixer what the mixer does is it lets you control the Sounds in your channel rack a few different ways the most important way is that the mixer allows you to add effects onto your sounds which can really change how they sound here's how you do this next to each sound in the channel rack we have these little boxes and you can even see this one here already has a number in it now if we press play and look inside the mixer we can see that inside mixer insert number one we have that sound playing now if I go back into the channel rack and I add numbers for all of these sounds and we look in the mixer now every sound is in its own mixer insert foreign and from here we can do stuff like control the volume of the sounds change the panning [Music] and mute just like we did in the channel rack [Music] but this area over here is where we can start adding effects to do this just simply click on one of these slots go to select and choose which one you want once you do this a new window will pop up with the effect that you chose [Music] I always recommend starting by using presets to this day I personally still use presets a lot so don't ever feel bad about this and once again I have a full video on using the mixer if you're ever in need I'll leave a link to that in the description box also so that is the mixer this lets you take the Sounds in your channel rack and control the qualities of those sounds by adding on effects you can also do the usual stuff like volume change panning and muting too so that's four boxes down now all that's left is this final little box here and this one is the playlist this is what you're going to use to make a full complete beat so far we just have one simple Loop playing inside of our Channel rack while this Loop that we built is called a pattern and you can see up here this is pattern number one if we change this to pattern number two this gives us an empty Channel rack that we can use to create an entirely new Loop or we could just take our current pattern clone it and make small changes like removing something from this Loop to make our life a little bit easier so when you're making a beat and you have multiple patterns made the playlist is where you can take these patterns and use them to make a full beat so for this example I can start my beat by playing pattern number two which is the pattern that I made where I removed that sound from my Loop then after that I can use pattern number one that has that extra sound in it foreign by using many different patterns that have different sounds or different musical patterns you can help your beat from becoming boring and repetitive just having a same Loop play over and over again by the way just another quick tip there are times when you're going to want to switch back and forth between your pattern and your song so if you want to listen to Just your pattern to what's inside your channel rack just go up here and press Pat this will just play the pattern in your channel rack and if you want to hear your full song select song this will play what's in your playlist [Music] so this is the full summary of how to make beats inside FL Studio first you start off with your browser where you're going to select the sounds and plugins that you want for your beat once you choose one you bring it into your channel rack and the channel rack is used to create patterns if you want to use the Sounds in your channel rack to create something musical this is when you're going to use the piano roll and if you want to make changes to the Sounds in the channel rack like add effects this is when you're going to use the mixer from there once you have built one or many different patterns you can use all the patterns to create a full beat which is done inside the playlist and that is how beat making is done all you really need to know is how to use these five boxes and you are ready my friend now if you do want more in-depth videos maybe you want to learn more information about how to use the piano roll better or the mixer I have a full FL Studio playlist with videos on each topic but learning FL Studio is just one piece of the puzzle if you want to learn more about the principles of beat making Beyond just how to use a beat making program like how to choose the actual right sounds for your Beats how to build the right patterns I do have a one hour master class that you can check out many people have told me this master class is what helped them finally make tons of progress in a way that free YouTube videos never could so a link to both my FL Studio playlist and the master class should be showing up right next to me and again I'll leave a full link to everything that I talked about in the description box below I hope you learned a lot from this video If so again think about hitting like And subscribe it would really help me out anyways have a good one and hopefully I see you next week

Channel: Navie D

Views: 131,882

Keywords: making a beat in fl studio, making a beat, making a beat for beginners, fl studio for beginners, fl studio for beginners hip hop, fl studio beginner tutorial, fl studio beginner, fl studio beginner tutorial trap, fl studio beginner beat, beat making tips, beat making tutorial, beat making trap, how to make a beat, how to make a beat on fl studio 21, how to make a simple beat on fl studio 21, fl studio 21 for beginners, making a beat from scratch, fl studio 21, navie d, beats

Id: i5BrupBYcDQ

Length: 19min 21sec (1161 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 07 2023