How To Slide Notes in FL Studio - Pitch Shifting

hello and welcome back to another FL studio' tutorial this one's all about how to slide notes whether you're using a stock plug-in third-party plug-in or maybe you're not using MIDI at all and you're working from a sample I'll show you how to slide your notes whether that's a bass line or a lead melody there's plenty of ways to do this they're all quite simple so let's just dive right in this tutorial has been highly recommended after my last video where I played this beat and lots of people were asking about how I was sliding this bass line so I'm just gonna start with that I'm gonna play the beat and you can listen out for the way the bass line slides it makes an otherwise very simple bass line just flow and be a little bit more smooth just sound a little bit more groovy so that's the method we're going to start with this first method is all about using an automation clip to automate the pitch of the instrument that you're using whether it's a third party or stock this is sort of the most complicated one there are a few more simple methods later on but this one works for just about everything so in my channel rack I'm using this plug-in here which is serum and I'm using my sinister Reese patch from my sample pack or sound bank if you make sure that you have this green cog turned on so that you can access the pitch up here this is what we're going to be automating and this works in in most third-party plugins and all the stock ones as well now this pitch dial here is actually automating the pitch Bend wheel down here inside serum so inside the synth you're using you may have to make sure that you've got the right number of semitones selected down here twelve for a full octave now up at the top here often if you're doing like 808 glides you might want a full octave range but I only want three or four semitones I find that I'm not doing these little fills more than a few notes apart so I'm just gonna select a range of three semitones for now now one semitone is just one piano key to the next so a C to a c-sharp or a B to a C for instance so I select this pitch range and I just create an autumn clip that's a right-click and then a left click to create the automation clip now if I go back onto my playlist you'll see that this has been created I'm just going to cut it to length that was AC to select the cut tool and I'll left-click and drag this automation clip it's going to be controlling the pitch dial up here so if I drag the automation clip all the way to the top we're going up three semitones all the way to the bottom is going to slide that note down three semitones from the note that we're currently on on the first point here what I'm going to do is just copy a value and that's my 50% that is dead in the middle and then if i zoom in now a quick tip for zooming in have you pressed control and use the mouse scroll wheel you can zoom in like this which I think really really helps with this point here copied that's a right click copy value I'm gonna right click at the start of each new note here just to create a new point on this automation clip then I'm going to right click on it again and paste that value in and this means that that point will be the correct pitch for that note so no matter what bands I do is going to return to the right value at the start of the next note this is where you have to start using a little bit of music theory and deciding what you actually want your slides to do my simple bassline is like this just three kind of boring notes but what I'd quite like it to do is play something like this like a little trill in between so if I pull this piano roll up you can see that what I wanted to do is go three semitones above the first note then two semitones down so that's an F to a G sharp that's three up and then an F down to a D sharp would be two down so with this in mind I'm gonna try and make the same moves on my automation clip and the reason I'm not just using this pattern at the bottom is because those don't slide those just start at the pitch I want that groovy slide there right click to create a new point and then keep right-clicking to create more as many as I want and I'm going to drag that first one up three semitones there so I get that first slide now I'm gonna press right click to create a new point sometimes these can get a little bit fiddly you have to sort of do that kind of thing it's not always perfect I'm gonna change this one to a hold point and although this isn't too precise I'm going to drag this about 2/3 the way down I'm gonna make this perfect in a minute that's gonna take me two notes down let's take a listen [Music] and then I'd like this middle note to slide into that last note so I'm just going to select a curve and just drag it down like this now I'm going to again paste that value there that's a right-click paste so this note here slides down and then it snaps back up when this note starts again so it just feels like a smooth transition into that note this is going to be wildly different with whatever baseline or melody you're doing but get the bare bones of it down and then to make sure that it's perfect see I've just done this one here by ear but to guarantee that you've got a perfect pitch band of two semitones down go and grab the pitch wheel up here and then look at the top left-hand corner of FL Studio press ctrl and then a left click and start adjusting this pitch dial that's going to make it really really smooth and you can see that at the top you've got a hundred cent or minus 100 and then you I'm gonna move it all the way to minus 200 cent so when I get there I just release and then I right-click and copy that value now I go to my automation clip and I paste this value in and you can see that it moved a little bit because I wasn't quite pitch perfect and now I can know for sure this note here is exactly two semitones down it's perfect [Music] and if I play that with the rest of my beat just to confirm that sounds pretty good to me so that's the first method and that works on a variety of different plugins just a quick announcement the winners from last week's giveaway are these three lucky people here so I've got in contact with you so just be checking your messages and your emails I want to get you that copy of FL Studio and my sound bank as soon as possible thanks however it is possible that you're not using a plug-in at all and you're simply using a sample so for instance I have this decap bass sample it's just one note and it's a nice long sample [Music] and lots of people use this and then pitch band to create the bass melody that they want so in this case the first thing I do is go over to this secondary tab here turn on the envelope and just lower the attack increase the sustain and lower the release the reason you may want to do this it means that when you release a key the bass stops playing so just like this simple I've prepared something in the playlist already here for this sample so everything's muted now and I'm just going to open up this in the channel rack and I'll show you these really cool slide notes that FL Studio has [Music] so I'm going to remove them and show you what these do so you'll be very familiar over the typical green MIDI note like this there's also this secondary type of slide no up here so if you go to the top left hand corner select this little triangle one you now have notes which are slide notes and these work in all eiffelstudio of stock plugins I believe and also if you're manipulating a sample and it's an amazing amazing tool that FL Studio has these slide notes are pretty simple but there's a few subtleties or tips and tricks to using them you'll identify them by this little triangle at the right hand side and the way they work is that the duration of the note dictates the duration of the slide so this is going to slide now from a C to a G but if I make it very very short it's going to start sliding here and it's already going to have reached the end the G by here and then it will hold for as long as this original C plays you heard that it slid up really fast now if I extend this G it's gonna take much longer to get there if I just extend this C all the way out and I extend this this G slide no it's now going to slide very slowly up to that G and I think if you're working from a sample this just gives you the most control there's a few tips here say you want to slide it quickly up to a G and then back down to a see something you can do is just select your cut tool left click and drag and now it will once it gets to the G there it's just gonna cut back down to the C just like this it sounds a bit silly it's quite a high no it's just a DD sharp there I'm just going to do that and you can get these little cool pitch shifting effects and of course these slide notes work going up in pitch as well as down in pitch and in many ways this is easier than using an automation clip but sometimes it can get just as confusing as well the downside of this technique is that it doesn't work with third-party plugins as far as I'm aware I haven't managed to make it work with any of those is just for FL studio' stock plugins and for working from samples to demonstrate the effect on a stock plug-in I have citrus here which is an F to do stock plug-in playing this pad here and what I would like to do is slide this pad down to that final note so I'm just gonna select a slide note which again is up in this corner and now it will slowly slide into that final a sharp which I just think sounds really cool one of the reasons I think we like these slides so much is that they really sort of push and pull with our emotions in a song they prevent a song being too static it does depend on the genre though and if you think about some of the most beautiful instruments you know sliding a note on a cello or a violin sliding notes on guitar it's just got that really human quality to it that many synthesizers struggle to create without an awful lot of programming so I think it just keeps beats real keeps them a little bit easy and it's kind of ear candy in a way breaks up a beat from being too boring I do however have one last example just to kind of prove a point and that's that you can do this on a typical WAV file as well so this is just a WAV file here simple so again if I just double click select the pitch band here create automation clip you can of course just bend these up and down as well and that's why I like using the just standard pitch modulation up here it works whether you're using WAV files MIDI third-party stock plugins it just seems to work the same on everything therefore you only need to learn one technique and it'll stay with you for your whole production career of using FL Studio so that's really everything for this tutorial but just remember you can apply this to anything especially on vocal chops and leads it just tends to bring them alive when a lead has really good pitch bending on it just really sounds very professional to me as long as it's done right make sure that when you're pitch bending you know you're staying in key and in tune with your song of course but hopefully this helps some of you out there and I hope you have a great week and I hope to see you in the next video - bye for now

Channel: In The Mix

Views: 316,306

Rating: 4.957365 out of 5

Keywords: FL Studio, slide notes, note slides, glides, bass slides, 808, bass, fl studio tutorial, piano roll, pitch shifting, fl studio pitch, fl, studio, pitch shifting tutorial, fl bass slides, fl pitch glides, best way, everything you need to know

Id: 8-E72vvlsV4

Length: 11min 57sec (717 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 18 2020