How To Layer Leads Properly (Mixing Tutorial)

in this tutorial i'm going to show you how to layer lead sounds in fl studio as well as how you can combine those sounds as one in order to let you play all of them live or edit all of them at once from one piano roll [Music] layering is an important part of modern dance music whenever you hear a fat sounding lead playing in a track more often than not it's not one single sound you're hearing but rather a combination of sounds the trick when it comes to layering is to carefully choose the right sounds so that they will sound as one one of the first mistakes many beginners tend to make when layering sounds is that they choose several sounds that are almost identical whenever you have two similar sounds or more they usually take up much of the same frequencies this is a problem because whenever you have clashing frequencies it will make your mix sound muddy and that's the last thing you want in extreme situations you'll end up with phasing issues too and when that happens your mix is in serious trouble we always want our mixes to sound full crisp and clear at the same time when layering sounds you should aim to find sounds that work well together but how do we do that well let's say you start out with a very deep and fat sound it will have plenty of low mid frequencies so you should aim to find a sound that contains more high frequencies in the next one in order to make a sound appear fat you will need to fill up space so that you utilize more of the frequency spectrum not just a single part of it combining five sounds that all reside in the low mids just makes it sound muffled instead if you start out with a sound that's rather deep then try to pair it with another sound that has a lot of mids you can then look for yet another sound that has more highs in it always look for whatever is missing in the first sound and then try to find another sound that will complement the first one in such a way that it fills out whatever is missing in the first one this is how you build it up don't just choose sounds at random you don't need seven different sounds to make a lead sound huge i find that three to four sounds is usually enough sometimes one single sound is all that's required remember less is more let's attempt to layer some sounds to see if we can make a decent sounding lead let's start by loading a typical super saw [Music] i have already prepared a simple melody this will make it easier to decide which sounds to choose as i can have the melody playing and then add more sounds to it while it's playing [Music] it already sounds quite nice but we can still make it fatter now i have to ask myself what's missing here well in this case the sound i started out with is kind of thin and brittle so i could probably add another saw sound that's deeper to complement it now we have two saw sounds but they still are quite different you can clearly hear this when muting one or the other [Music] remember what i said about overlapping frequencies whatever sound you choose there will always be some overlapping frequencies some more than others it's a good idea to use eq in order to minimize any overlap in this case i'm thinking that the thinner sound will fill out the highs while the other one with more body will take care of the lower mids so what i can do here is shave off more of the lows on the sound that's intended to fill the highs [Music] i can then do the opposite with the one that's intended for the low mids rolling off some of the highs i'll take out some of the super lows too you don't need those frequencies down below 200 hertz that's where the kick and bass are and it will just end up interfering with the low end if you leave it in there [Music] now we have a much fuller sound you can definitely hear it when we mute one of them you can definitely tell that something is missing [Music] i still think that there's some room for improvement here the sound is rather full but it could use some more attack to it something to help it cut through the mix sometimes i will add a sound that doesn't necessarily sound good on its own but will really help the leaves cut through in a busy mix don't get caught up too much in how something sounds solo what matters is what the various elements sound like together in the mix there's nothing else going on right now but let's imagine we have a busy drop going on here you would then want to make sure that the leads are able to really cut through the mix in this case we can help it to do so by adding another sound with more attack to it for that purpose i'll see if i can find a pluck sound again make sure to use eq to make sure you don't muddy up the low end the low end is the most problematic area and we want to keep that space reserved for the kick and bass elements if you want to learn more about eq then you should check out my how to eq tutorial you can find the link for it in the description below now we're almost done just one more thing to do and it's rather important if you are using presets then you need to be aware of the fact that those presets were made to sound as good as possible in isolation they all have plenty of delay and reverb going on this will often become a problem as the delay times and reverb on the various presets won't match or there's just too much of it and we end up muddying up the mix sometimes though it may work out but often it won't so instead we're going to add our own processing to the sounds this will affect all the sounds at once and will also help glue them together and make them sound more like one sound the first thing we have to do is to go into the synths and disable reverb and delay so that we're left with a dry sound i'm using spire and we can click here to mute the effects in order to apply processing to these sounds at once we're now going to route them to a sub mix open the mixer and make sure that there's an empty track to the right of the last lead then hold ctrl on your keyboard and drag all three sounds including the empty track then click on the empty track select track routing and then create submix you can now give it a name and a color too if you want the three tracks have now been routed to this new track which is then routed to the master you can now add processing here as you see fit this can be eq side chain saturation compression delay reverb and so on in order to make the sound more massive you can add some compression after the delay in reverb in order to maximize the effect if you want more space then place the compression before these effects if you have a really busy mix you might want to consider sidechaining the reverb separately reverb takes up a lot of space in a mix it also tends to push sounds to the back of the mix when it comes to leads you don't want that you want your leads in front so you need to find the right balance here the exact processing chain depends greatly on the mix itself the genre and how much is going on in the mix if you want your leads more up front then make them dryer or sidechain the reverb the easiest way to sidechain the reverb is by using either send tracks or patcher if you don't know how to set up a sidechained reverb then you should check out my send tracks tutorial when you're done watching this one i've added the link in the description below [Music] compression is another commonly used effect on a lead mix bus you can use any compressor for this if you're not familiar with compressors then you can also use the soundgoodizer [Music] this is actually a compressor too it might appear as a magical plug-in but it's actually drawing these magical powers directly from the maximus plug-in the settings that you see here are actually presets from maximus which is a compressor now you know why compression plays such a vital part in modern dance music you can some producers also like to add a limiter as the last plug-in in the chain this is just a general suggestion on how you can go about doing this as i said it all depends on the genre the mix itself the sound you're going for how busy the mix is and so on what is right in one situation might be totally wrong in another this is why music production is such a difficult topic you can watch five tutorials on the same thing and they tell you to do it five different ways there's bound to be lots of trial and error experience is key eventually you'll know what works and what doesn't [Music] [Music] [Music] last but not least i'd like to show you how you can add these three sounds to one layer this will allow you to play all three sounds at once there are two main ways of doing this the first is to add a layer to do this just go to the channel rack and add the layer here if layer doesn't appear in your list you can click here and then type in layer in the search box in order to find it next select the channels you want to be included in the layer then click here set children now whenever i play a note all three notes will play at once i can now move the midi to the layer instead as it will trigger all three generators simultaneously [Music] this is quite handy as i only have to deal with one panel roll instead of three it's also quite useful for playing all the layers at the same time live you can also use patcher for this just right click and select add plugin then add your vsts they will all play simultaneously as one sound i hope you like this video if this is your first time here you might want to check out some of my tutorials for fl studio check out the links in the description below and as always feel free to like comment and share this video with anyone you think might benefit from it if you would like to support my work you can head over to my patreon page you can find the link in the description below and as always if you have any questions just leave me a comment [Music] you

Channel: FireWalk

Views: 216,954

Keywords: how to layer leads properly, how to layer leads fl studio, how to layer leads properly in edm, fl studio leads, layering leads fl studio, layering leads tutorial, fl studio layers, how to layer leads edm, how to properly layer your leads, stacking layers fl studio, how to make leads in fl studio, layer leads, layering tutorial fl studio, synth layering tutorial, how to make synth leads, how layer leads, how to mix leads properly, how to mix leads, mix leads, lead layering

Id: UqPqM5rUuVo

Length: 16min 12sec (972 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 27 2017