How to Mix in FL Studio 20

hello and welcome to another video I'm Michael and today I'm going to be showing you how to get started with mixing in FL Studio we're going to be covering all the basics and I'm going to give you sort of a three step guide to have to mix inside FL Studio and get started now mixing is a huge topic I can't possibly do it justice completely in this video but I'm gonna just show you a strategy to get started keep it logical and keep it really creative inside FL Studio the one thing I want to mention before we start is that mixing is unique to the individual there are no rights and wrongs there's no best way to do it or anything like that over time you're going to develop your way of mixing I just want to share a few things that I find really helped the process so I have all of these tracks loaded up in a session for one of our original songs and these could be MIDI clips they could be VST instruments or audio which is what I have in this case whichever ones you have they all need to be sent to a unique place on the mixer if you're completely new to FL Studio and you don't know what the mixer is or how to use it I'd recommend just checking out the video I'll link here and if you've seen that you'll be up to speed and ready for this video let's do a quick comparison between something that's completely unmixed and something that is mixed just so that you can start listening for differences between the two versions so I have a version here that's completely unmixed and what you're listening for is sort of the lack of punch in the drums you know the bass drums hardly there some elements will be overpowering some elements will be lost in the mix and then in the mixed version at the top everything is a lot more clear there's a lot more punch from the drums there's a lot more depth clarity to the song so let's take a listen first the unmixed version [Music] that's the sort of thing that we're going for in this tutorial we're looking for that clarity that dimension and just a nice overall balance when it comes to mixing there are hundreds and hundreds of tips tricks and techniques that you'll be picking up over the next couple of weeks months and years as you continue producing and because there's so many tips and tricks we often reach for those sort of fancy or advanced tips first and we start like putting on crazy vsts and doing all sorts of complicated stuff but really the keys to a good mix starts all the way back in the songwriting and the arrangement you need to make sure the arrangement is clear concise focused on what the song wants and then you want to make sure that everything's balanced now this is step one step one is just setting the right volumes for everything we're not reaching for eq's compressors we're just trying to set the volumes right when mixing it can be good to start at the very start of your song because if you try to start in the chorus or someone where there's too many elements things can just become really overwhelming so we're gonna start at the very beginning of the song where there's only guitar vocals and an atmosphere we're just gonna start by taking a lesson what I've noticed is that the atmosphere was a little bit consuming when it came in and the guitar was really boo me which I'll probably fix later with the EQ but to start off with I'm just gonna turn the volume of the guitar down and turn the volume of the atmosphere down the only technical thing to look out for the only numbers to look out for is to make sure that your master bus isn't clipping so it isn't hitting zero as long as you're below zero you're good you can be minus 12 minus 6 minus 9 all of these are good levels just make sure that you're not clipping the master buss so let's make these changes whilst we're listening to the song clouds of smoke covering another star the suits you want sleep now the atmosphere is a lot more subtle and everything sounding slightly more balanced let's go to where the next thing comes in which is the drums over here and the snare is much louder than the bass drum so I'm gonna take the snare down slightly but the bass drum just doesn't have enough oomph in it so I'm gonna raise the volume of that [Music] [Music] many thought I need to find a place where I can smile and this process of just balancing things is what you're gonna do throughout the whole song so you're gonna carry this through to the chorus through to the bridge and you're just gonna try and get it to play from start to finish with everything sounding okay it's not gonna sound perfect because we're we're not finished the mixing process yet along with setting volumes we can also set panning and stereo width in this step if you want to but try not to go overboard with it in this mix I don't have an awful lot of elements here so I'm not gonna pan anything left or right but if you had two guitar parts for instance you might want to pan one left and one right if you had two competing synth parts you might want to put one slightly right one slightly left to give it a little bit of space but what I am gonna do is I'm going to use the stereo separation on the atmosphere to give the atmosphere a little bit more stereo width [Music] here it sounds really thin and mono here it sounds a little bit wider I need to find a please so that's step one which is just setting all the volumes right step two is where we start cleaning up the sounds so we're going to be removing unwanted frequencies and trying to add some more clarity to the mix let's start again at the beginning and I'm just gonna listen to this guitar again clouds of smoke covering now if you're listening in decent headphones like me or you've got monitors you'll notice that this guitar is super raw recorded it's just an acoustic guitar it's really bumi and resonant so I'm gonna go over to my effects chain now yours might be on the left or the right hand side of your mixer I'm gonna add in a parametric eq2 which is under the filter section of your effects EQ is gonna be one of your most powerful tools to shape a sound it's going to help you balance sounds so that they're tonal balance or the distribution of their frequencies makes sense in this case the low mids of this guitar are overpowering so the first thing I'm going to do is select a high-pass filter and I'm just gonna roll off unwanted low-end when mixing I wouldn't advise listening to things in solo but I'm gonna solo this guitar so that you can really hear the changes very closely I'm going to drag a little bit more down here I'm gonna boost the highs slightly and now when I turn this on and off you hear a really big difference and the reason I wouldn't recommend tweaking in solo is because I have no idea how this is gonna fit in with the rest of the song so I'm going to turn everything back on briefly and I'm gonna listen with the rest of the song [Music] now I would say that that balance is an awful lot better is a little bit thin but it's not getting in the way of everything else yet as well as just removing access low-end it can be good to remove any frequencies that are really getting in the way no I can hear in this guitar that there's a really annoying frequency somewhere between seven and eight K that's what my ears are telling me anyway I don't know precisely where but I'm gonna take a listen for it and it's on this note here it's kind of this really sharp ringing sound you'll hear it right there so it's somewhere in this range I'm going to sweep across and we're gonna find it right there and if I just remove that frequency now this is gonna sound it off a lot better I'm gonna raise this back up to show you the frequency that was the problem and if you're listening in headphones that's gonna be a huge difference when it comes to picking the right slopes and how far to pull things up and down just use your ears always use your ears when mixing don't really worry about what it looks like a lot of people mix with their eyes too much and I know I still do and I did at the start doesn't really matter if it looks crazy or if it looks really subtle or too big you just gotta use your ears and your let your ears guide you if it sounds right than it is right I'm gonna move on to another sound which is the atmosphere and what I'm noticing is that I want to push it louder in the song but when I push it louder it seems to be rumbling and overtaking everything so I'll show you what I mean here behind the plans so whenever I raise the volume it just sounds to rumbling and confusing but when I take the volume down it sounds like it's completely lost so this lets me know that the the balance of that sound isn't quite right so again I'm gonna reach for an EQ and again I'm gonna remove low-end there's a theme here when cleaning up sounds that often you want to remove the low-end unless it's your bass drum or your basses and your subs you really do want to remove the excess low-end in these sounds so I'm going to choose a high-pass filter and I'm going to remove this again I'm going to solo it just so that you can hear the differences but you don't want to do this so load in your actual mix I'm going to turn this on and off and you'll hear all the rumble now I'm going to turn everything back on and I'm gonna push the fader up until this sounds balanced in the mix now what's great is that I can push the volume of that sound up and give it its pace but it's not rumbling and confusing and competing with everything else in the song so that's the second step where you go through each track one by one while listening to it in the context of the mix and you try to address if there's any problems if there's any excess low-end excess high-end just whatever it is try to clean it up a little bit and at this point we've set the volumes right in step one we've addressed any panning and stereo width and we've also cleaned up all the sounds so now we're in a perfect position to start adding effects like delays and reverbs saturation to really make this mix come to life this is where you really need to have some vision in your head you need to think what do I want this to sound like my raw guitar track could end up sounding like anything I could run it through a guitar amp I could make it really reverb and delayed and distant I need to know what I want so that I can work towards it so in this case I'm gonna take the guitar and I'm gonna make it sound a lot more spatial and reverb so let's try that so I'm going to go over to my guitar track I'm going to add a fruity reverb too which is just here under the delay and reverb section if you need to know more about how this plug-in works I'll link a video just here but I'm going to tweak some parameters in here until I get it to sound the way I want so let's listen to everything together many thoughts I need to find a place where I can smile I climb up to the highest face again Oh leave behind the world these plans so at this stage it's also important to remember the order of your effects if I put the reverb first before I clear it up it means that all of those muddy and bad frequencies will be running through the reverb and then I'll have to clear them up later often it's better to clear up a sound first then run it through one of the effects and then after the effect you can then continually process it and you're not just sort of amplifying it and propagating it through your song so that's sounding better to me with that guitar reverb but now the the snare and the bass drum sort of stick out cuz the snares like super dry and the guitar is all reverb it doesn't really mesh so I'm gonna add a tiny little bit of reverb to the snare drum to try and put it into that same space now although I've added reverb to these to the mixing process isn't all about adding reverb so you don't just want to add reverb to everything that's probably not the best way to go about it but in this case the sound was sort of calling for reverb [Music] thought I need to find a put I'm just upping the decay time so that the reverb slowly dies away in between snare hits the next thing we're going to do is address the vocals and we're going to try and treat these a little bit so I'm going to add an EQ to the vocals and we're going to remove some low end and make them sound a little bit more airy and bright [Music] now there's also some advanced tips tricks and techniques you can apply you can do de-essing you can do special delays special reverbs those are techniques that you'll develop in time but for now we're just giving an overview of how to do this process so I'm going to add a little bit of subtle reverb to the vocal again to place it into the same environment as everything else in the song any thought to get out [Music] at this stage you'll also want to be looking at adding compression adding choruses adding delays and any sorts of effects that your song requires or is sort of telling you to put on often listening to other music for inspiration will help you figure this out if you listen to someone else's vocal processing you'll hear specific delay timings they're using and you can try to match that or sort of bounce off that some inspiration or you might hear someone's really cool guitar tone and you might mess around with a chorus or a phaser plug-in until you can figure out that sort of tone but when it comes to the creative effects part of mixing there's absolutely no rights and wrongs just feel free to express yourself however you like but that three step process should really start you on the way to mixing in FL Studio the first one being setting the levels correctly second one being making sure that you clean up the sounds that need to be cleaned up so that everything's sounding balanced and the third step is applying your artistic effects and although this process started with setting the volumes and then clearing up the sounds it's important to remember that you can do things in different orders as well after you apply your effects these will change the volume so you need to adjust the volume again you might apply a reverb that adds a lot of low-end into the sound so you might want to then add another EQ and cut away the low end from the reverb again so you're not locked into a specific system or a template you're just gonna have to figure out what works best for you and remember that at all stages in the process it is really important to mix with your ears one of the things that I found really difficult at the start was detaching myself from how cool all the plugins looked and what the plugins told me was happening so I would eat you something and I'd convince myself that it sounded right because I'd run it through an EQ or I'd add reverb and the plug-in would look all shiny and nice so I'd kind of just assume it sounds good but you've got to remember that while over 99% of the people listening to your music don't know what a dar is they've never seen your project they don't know what effects you've put on it all they care about is what it sounds like so try to detach yourself from the screen and really lay your ears guide you and I can't I can't stress this one enough often when I apply effects I will hover over the solo button or the mute button and I will close my eyes and I'll click that button like 10 times and till I don't know whether it's muted or whether it's on and then I opened my eyes often I like the one with the effects but sometimes when I opened my eyes actually like the version without the effect sometimes when I'm compressing something I turn off the compression and I actually like it more so you've got to remember that just by applying effects it doesn't mean that your sound is actually going to get better you must keep using your ears and keep judging what you're doing so hope this video has helped you get started mixing in FL Studio there are loads more videos on this channel where I show sort of much more advanced an in-depth mixing of our own original songs but also just tips and tricks in general so if you do feel like picking up maybe one or two tips and tricks to help you along the way please do feel free to check out a few of those videos but thank you very much for watching and hopefully I'll see you in the next one bye for now [Music]

Channel: In The Mix

Views: 576,822

Keywords: how to mix in fl studio 20, mixing in fl studio 20, fl swtudio 20 mixing, fl studio mixing, mixing tutorial, mix, in the mix, muddy mix, muddy mix fl studio, how to start mixing, 3 steps, clear mix, fl studio mixing guide, how to mix, lesson, music production, music production (genre), audio mixing, panning, fl studio mixing effects, how to eq, fl studio 20, mixing for beginners, how I mix, how to mix in fl studio, fl studio 20 mixing tips, fl studio 20 tips

Id: 29BAPiVwip0

Length: 16min 58sec (1018 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 16 2018