How to Make a Song in FL Studio 20 💻 | Software Lesson

hey guys Jacob Dufour here at Sweetwater today I'm going to show you how to create a song in FL Studio 20 [Music] no matter what your experience is with da or making music in general I'm gonna start from the very bottom and show you some really simple things to help you get started making music so I'm gonna put on my headphones I've got some Sony stereo headphones here for monitoring and we're gonna start from the beginning so we got FL studio open it up and a new project will open there it is it always plays a really cool little sound when it opens so well we want to get to is the main window we go to view and you do your playlists so this is your playlist this is where you will see the tracks which are where you're gonna put your patterns that you create in this list over here every time you start a new program in FL you'll start with these four you'll have a kick a clap a hat and a snare and this is the way that you can go between the different instruments so I'm actually controlling that with the Akai MPK mini because I have a program that allows me to control different functions in FL with the pads so if I turn CC on right here now I can cycle between instruments so here's the kick clap hat and snare okay I want to create a beat I'm ready to go so I've already got the tempo set at 130 beats per minute we'll just leave it there if I click this pad now I've got record mode on but I can also go here and arm it with the mouse of course and this little button right here it will do a count in so if you want to record a kick beat for instance you don't want it to just start recording immediately because you need to get that tempo in your head so if I click this three two one which you can see there when I click play it counted down for me so you saw up here up by the time code gave me a four three two one so we're gonna record a kick drum beat so here we go cool now this is pattern one right that is what we've recorded in pattern one so when we select pattern one and double click we get what's called a piano roll and now we can see those four notes we played so turn record mode off it's just a one bar loop that's all it is now you say okay I want to add a clap to that I'm thinking I might do something like boom boom boom boom clap boom boom like that I've got my count in I'm gonna enable record again and I'm gonna change to clap which I can do from the keyboard click play now I like that but I might want to add like a little extra fill at the end of that clap so I can record over it and add it okay I like that I like where that's going now what you'll see is that this pattern contains a recorded track of kick and clap all in one but if you wanted to you could create a new pattern which you can do two things you can either click the plus here click the plus down here to create a new pattern now it's gonna ask you to name it I could name this clap click OK click the check now open my channel rec again and now I've got a new pattern ready to record so if I wanted to go back to this pattern I could take out the claps what you do by secondary clicking and dragging now I'm just back to a kick on this pattern but if I go to the clap pattern open that back up now it's blank so if I wanted to record that same clap I can do like this so now I'm starting to get the makings of a beat I've got this pattern which I'll go ahead and name the kick so now I've got a kick pattern and a clap pattern now I'm thinking I'd like to have a hi-hat so I'll create another pattern for that just to follow this way that we're going here open my channel rack back up and I'm thinking let's see I got to go down to hat there's my hat so maybe I'll do like an eighth note pattern like that what you play is a little loose it's okay because FL knows how to snap what you're doing to a perfect rhythm so you can change those settings right here and what that's called as quantization so what that's doing is quantizing all the you play to the grid which is determined by the settings you make so if you go here to none now it's off so it will record exactly what I play exactly in the time the rhythm that I play it but here I have it to snap it to a fourth beat so what that's gonna do is make what you play be synced and sound really rhythmically precise which is what you want so now I'm gonna record that hat I want to do so I'm thinking like I'll do some eighth notes like this so here we go so now I've got my loop right the basics of what can be a beat I've got a kick a clap and a hat but right now they're still just patterns so I have nothing in my playlist which is my arrangement where I'm gonna actually arrange my song so now when you're ready to start bringing them in remember each of these tracks is not an instrument it's not tied to a sound it's these patterns that are tied to a sound so this is always kick turn the record off go to clap this is my clap and this is hat turn the metronome off now if I want so now I can drag these to any track that I want so if I wanted to make track 3 the kick I also now need to switch from pattern mode to song mode which you can do right here or I have this set up on my pad so in pattern mode you're going to only hear the pattern that you've selected which you can you can see here in the channel rack but when you go to song mode you will see this ticker right here this green ticker move along with the arrangement right now it's set to repeat once it gets to the end of whatever patterns I've inserted it'll go back to the beginning so now I have my kick here but I could put it on track 2 if I wanted and it will always sound like the kick because again that instrument is tied to this specific pattern well let's just say we'll make track 1 the kick will put a clap in track 2 and we'll put our hat here now all three of those patterns will sound together and now we've got a basic groove going right now in our song we only have one bar of loop right we have this we don't have any melody instruments or chordal instruments so let's add something so we go over here to our channel rack when you want to add an instrument with the Plus here and now this is all the plugins you have available all these plugins are native to FL one that's really simple that I like is this 3x oscillator so now that I have this open again you see that track are moving so now that it's on the oscillator the 3x now that's the sound I'll get when I play the keyboard all right so that's what I've got now what I'm also gonna do right now because I'm thinking about it is select the channel to the mixer that I want if you're new to that a mixer is basically where all the instruments all the audio tracks whatever you have it will all be sent to a specific channel which is then where you can literally mix them together and put different effects to change the sound and improve your mix if you want to take a quick look at that this is the mixer here so right now I have 1 2 3 4 5 assigned so if I click play on my track you'll see that this is where my kicks going this is where my clap is going and this is where my hat is going and then the us this will go to 5 so now I want to create some kind of line right something that can go with this drum beat that I'm doing let me go back to pattern see what I can come up with listen to our beat again let's go back to song mode when you're coming up with ideas and you've got a drum beat down it's cool to go back to song mode for a second listen to your whole loop put together and you can mess on the keyboard and kind of play some things maybe I'll play a chord yeah let's come up with a couple chords that we like here to go with this loop I like that that's cool but you might notice this loop is longer than our current pattern so these patterns are set automatically to be one bar but the pattern I'm playing is longer than that so what we're gonna do is create a new pattern so we can do that over here let's call this chords one so this is chord pattern one so again when we're in our channel rack let's go ahead and go here and click detached so that when we go to another window this doesn't close every time which gets annoying so you go to course now we're on chords once so completely blank now this is where you select how long your pattern is right here see it's getting longer and shorter when you do that on an instrument like this see that so that's just extending the pattern length but we want to keep these at one bar but let's go ahead and make the chord pattern two bars by secondary clicking and now there's these presets so you get 1 bar 2 bar 4 bar 8 bar that will make it a set length so now we've got two bars here that should line up right let's go to pattern mode turn our metronome back on sounds good okay record enable let's record us a little chord part cool that got pretty close now the quantization that we have on kind of obscured a little bit of what I wanted to play so this is a good opportunity where we can go into the piano roll so you see here this is what I recorded this is what it look like in the channel rack but if you click on it now we can see the individual notes that I play in the piano roll turn record off so these notes this is what's dragging over that I don't like which wasn't exactly what I played so I'm gonna drag that back make it nice and tight and actually I might go to my select tool right here you see these are all the tools that you have that do different things we'll talk about them as we need them so right here we have the Select tool which allows me to select a whole block right now let us see when the plate again I think I want to change the length of this to tools that you'll find you use a lot I find that I use a lot to select and the draw tool so draw will allow you just to move notes around and allow you to change the length like this which is what I'd like to do now I think I'm gonna shorten this let's listen to that actually I think I'm going to keep that that length go back to select and then I'm gonna change the length of this to be like that I [Music] think that's pretty good for now I may tweak it some more and now I'm gonna drag this into my project I've got this loop but now what I need to do is have the drum loops continue to the end of where I have this of course I'll extend this out farther but for now let's just set up our basic sound that we're gonna start with so here we go oh let's go back to song mode so we play in our playlist and actually let's make sure that we're putting the kick here let's go ahead and rename this chords and color it something nice like that purple sure now this is the loop we have [Music] cool now we've got kick clap hat to make our drum beat we've got cords to lay us down some harmony we need a bass so let's go to track five well well we'll end up putting our bass on track five but first we need to create a new instrument over here in our channel rack so we click the plus let's go to more plugins you can do a lot of great things with the plugins that come in fruity loops and they offer a lot of those instruments and they're very cool but you may have other plugins that you like you know for instance I really like working with the contact library if I go to more plugins now this is the list of all the plugins I have available outside of FL if I go to contact 5 double click it'll load for a second part of working with DAWs is waiting for things to load and there it is alright so now we have contact I think I'd like to select a electric bass so I'll go over here to pre bass sound octave [Music] cool now let's lay down a base part now probably what I'm gonna do if you're new to chords or making beats or loops this chord is a major chord and the lowest note is this G flat so I'm gonna kind of stay with the lowest note in the corridor which you'd call the root note of the chord to make my baseline let's stay in song mode I'm gonna make sure that I have my contact five selected let's go ahead and send it to channel six in the mixer we could rename it let's rename it bass since we know this instance of contact is going to be the bass we could also go ahead and rename this and call this bass and give it its own color because we know we're going to put the bass pattern here we also should go ahead and create a new bass pattern let's call this bass one we'll say let's just call it bass that's good now let's listen to our loop again cool so I'm definitely hearing that kick boum boum boum boum boum that rhythm I think I might want the base to follow that rhythm so we set it down an octave let's try this out [Music] so I like that I think that's really cool and if I go to pattern mode we can just listen to the kick I'm letting the bassline follow the rhythm of the kick so let's record some bass cool there it is we got our bass track now we've already named this track bass so we can drag it in and now go back to song mode and let's hear what we got turn record off not recording okay now we've got a pretty basic loop right let's go ahead and save it's always good to save let's call this fruity loopy man sure I love that title it's gonna be a hit song alright now we've got our kick we've got drums chords and bass we can start dragging them around and making an arrangement right so you wouldn't just want to listen to this for five minutes it would probably drive you insane it needs to have some flow to it right we need to start from somewhere and build in so a very simple way you can do that especially when you're first getting started making loops making songs is to layer things just start from something simple and layer let's just say we're gonna drag some of our patterns over we're gonna just start with our kick so let's see what that sounds like turn our metronome off so we're only listening to our patterns so now we could go to after two bars of kick we could go to just hat I have the kick continue of course now here's an instance where we can use a different tool so this is the draw tool but the paint tool which is right here it's very cool because a lot of times when you're making loops especially in something like FL you want these patterns to you for a long time you know you'll have a this kick pattern go on for 8 maybe 16 bars once you're in paint if I add to this measure and I drag it will continue adding them as far as I want so I'm probably going to want this kick to go on a pretty long time this is how you control the zoom so now I have more bars available into the rest of my arrangement let's get back in here and make some more kicks there we go so let's hear what we've got now all right that sounds pretty good now we're not gonna want the cords to come in just yet so let's drag those off so now we've got two measures of just kick two measures of just kick with hat now let's use our paint tool and put some hats in there keep dragging these over until we're ready for them really we could just delete them let's go ahead and delete them until we're ready to bring them back in which will drag from over here so let's hear what it sounds like after the kick and hat and then the clap comes in we may decide let's use our select tool let's say we decide that we want the clap to come in first and have to come in after let's go back to our paint tool click clap drag this out alright so I think by about right here this bar right here which is bar 7 we're gonna bring in the bass so let's take our bass loop or actually let's do chords first I think saving the bass for last might actually sound nice so let's listen to what we got cool now we're gonna obviously want this to continue so let's go ahead and add some more chords in make that go for a while make the Hat go for a while let's zoom in here so it's a little bit easier to see again there we go it's add in our hat sounds add in some more claps like that now when we get to this part haha that was pretty sneaky wasn't it I was able to add the bass in before it got there now I'm going to put the Hat here and start with hat just to see how that sounds let's make sure zoom in a little bit make sure these are lined up on beat one [Music] all right I just had a little idea obviously we've got this basic loop but the song needs to go somewhere else right so let's say we want to stop this pattern about right here we're going to want to continue this hat on of course we're going to want to continue this clap going here I'd like to hear a break right there Bom Bom Bom so let's break it off and that's something cool you can do this pattern is of course only two beats long which ends right here but if you want to shorten it you can or if you want to extend it of course you'd have to go in here and then I just end the length if you want to put more sound here but in this case I don't want to record a whole new pattern I just want this one to stop right here so it will stop where I've dragged it so cool I like that now we're gonna have a new phase of the song right here that's gonna start we need to generate some content for that let's say we go back to our kick I'm gonna create a new kick track instead of create a whole new pattern you can clone the current pattern so if I go to kick by a secondary click and then I click clone now I have kick number two now I open that let's listen to this again I think I'd like this to be like sort of a half-time thing now right here so if I go here go to kick now I can change my piano roll I'm gonna go ahead and get rid of these notes secondary click drag you can see that brings up the little delete button now those notes in that pattern are gone I kind of like how you can pitch these so let's check this out turn our metronome back on I kind of liked that pattern so let's go back to pattern mode let's play with this Oh always helps to turn record on doesn't it all right I like that and now just for fun even though we have separated out kick clap hat all the different parts let's go ahead and record all of the instruments for the drum loop in this one pattern let's record a snare part with this kick cap record on click in here we go [Music] cool let's add a hat part to that I like that so arrangement wise we're creating a song right we've got this loop that goes when we come out of it now we're back into song mode start here [Music] cool so we've got like a different beat going now in a different part of the song so we go here kick kick that's add some kick cool let's create a slightly different chord progression to go right here we can go to our chord one let's clone it again so we'll do 2nd click go to clone now we have courts two now something very easy that you can do is you say well I want to use like the same progression but I might just want to move it to a different key right a different key Center so let's try that because it'll be easy we can make it sound different so we've got our select select it all go back to draw let's move it up to here let's see what that pattern sounds like maybe one more [Music] cool now we've got cords one number two we could rename at this point if we wanted to we could rename it to court - just like that now let's drag this into our chord track alright here we go I like that so it's kind of a variation on our first loop now we have the makings of an arrangement that we can continue to add - you can say if we want to put a bass part on that let's also go ahead and clone our bass line open that up in our channel rack which of course you can do from over here or you can learn the shortcut for that and now let's add a bass line we'll go in here once again we'll delete our old notes actually if we don't want to do that we could just drag all of these notes up to the same pitch level that we just did for the chords so right here let's listen to our bass pattern I moved that up the piano roll transposed it the same distance as the chord so they should gel together pretty nicely let's check that out [Music] cool and I may want to change the rhythm of this what I might do is just take all these notes out and just put the root of the chord on beat one let's see what that sounds like actually I may like to hear like a bump bump now the other cool thing about draw mode like the draw here and I had it in all I have to do is click and I can add notes wherever I want to add them and I could take them all away by secondaire clicking again and dragging delete but I just want to put one note right here so I have bump bump two three four bump boom - just like that want this note to be shorter drag it that way I like that alright so here we go we've got our loop cool now we've got like a secondary loop to our other one this could maybe be a different section of the song if you were gonna eventually add lyrics to this or a melody this would maybe be like a verse if this was like kind of your intro or your chorus loop this could maybe be a verse loop depending on how you want to build the song let's check out what we've got all the way through from the top [Music] cool creating a whole song you know something that's a few minutes long takes a whole lot of work a lot more time than what I just did to create that simple loop so what I did was open another project that I've been working on for a few days that is way more fleshed out with more instruments and different effects and lead-ins that I've added to each section and you can see here that it can get pretty busy there's a lot of patterns going on and it goes all the way through our playlists to here and I've stayed organized remember I told you about how important it is to be organized to have all the different instruments organized and then these are all of my patterns so I've created a great deal more patterns than what we had before but that's because I wanted to make a full song with rise and Falls different dynamic changes instruments coming in and out let me just show you some of what I've done in this arrangement kind of skip to the end of where you might be if you create a whole song now we have the mixer I've added some plugins over here so you have all these slots and this is where you can add plugins to help mix your sounds you have some simple tools things like a compressor you have a limiter stereo enhancer another compressor and then on the master I have a compressor limiter and then a DB meter which lets me look at the sound level that I'm creating when I play back this track I can see where my song falls on a DB level your decibels now if you could see here this is the zero so when you're mixing a good rule of thumb is you don't want it to go above that and part of that will be done through compression and then also a limiter which will keep it from going over zero which we call peaking also what I've done this is how you pan so when you're panning that's just changing an instrument going from left to right if you're listening in speakers you'll hear travel left you'll hear travel right and a lot of times you could do that to create more space in the mix if you keep everything in the middle it can sound really muddy like there's too many layers going on but as soon as you start separating things out you can start to send a little clearer and you can give each instrument its own space so let's listen to a little bit of this track and you can get a feel for what a full arrangement will sound and look like let's go to draw mode go to our beginning [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] cool okay so you're done making your song you're really happy with it you've tweaked things in the mixer you've added different instruments and plugins everything is exactly what you want it to sound like you can go to file you can go to export you can export a few different formats you can export as a WAV mp3 Aflac file MIDI file if you want to but let's say we're gonna do a WAV file you go to wave you name it whatever we want I don't know test my connection underscore and then v1 so now that's version 1 and I'll click Save but if I come back I do a completely different mix I might call that v2 and then as I go along I'll have a folder with all these different mixes that I've done and so I can go back I can listen to what it sounded like when I started do I like that do I like what I change to version 2 it's just one way that you could stay organized you may find your own way that works for you so in this case if I want to save it to my Dropbox I just click Save now here's where all the options you have for rendering the default is just to do the full song to leave a tail leave a remainder on the tail which will add some space at the end you have the WAV file bit depth at 16 but you can change that to 24 or 32 you can do stereo mono merged mono left or right signal only and then some different things for the quality that you have here but when you're first starting out the default will probably suit what you need just fine so you'll click start and now we're exporting thanks for checking out how to make a song at FL Studio if you have any questions about FL if you'd like to purchase it or you're interested in any of the gear here to build your own studio you can call your Sweetwater sales engineer then we happy to help you thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Sweetwater

Views: 1,456,474

Rating: 4.8636317 out of 5

Keywords: fl studio, fl studio tutorial, fl studio 20, fl studio 20 tutorial, how to use fl studio 20, fl studio 20 basics, fl studio beginner tutorial, how to make a song in fl studio, fruity loop 20, how to use fl studio, How to Make a Song in FL Studio 20, fl studio tutorial for beginners, how to make music in fl studio, how to make a song on fl studio 20, fruity loops tutorial, how to make music on fl studio, how to make song in fl studio, how to make a song on fl studio, flstudio

Id: 69Vpk3VKXBE

Length: 36min 6sec (2166 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 12 2019