How To Use The Edison - FL Studio Tutorial

hello and welcome to another FL Studio video today we're going to be looking at the Edison plugin we're going to be going into quite a lot of detail into this plugin because I know a lot of you have been asking for that so I'm gonna break this down into three really simple parts but before that I'm just going to explain what the Edison is and what it does so it's a stock and free plugin that comes with all versions of FL Studio and it's an audio recorder an editing tool you load it onto a mixer track and then from there you can record audio from an external source such as a microphone or a guitar plugged into your audio interface or you can record from an internal source such as a MIDI clip that's triggering a synthesizer or some audio that you've already recorded so it's gonna record this into a wav file and what's great is that when you're recording you don't even have to be playing your project along you can just set it to record your project can be static and you can still be recording in samples and sounds and as well as recording audio you can simply drag and drop any sample from your project or FL studio into the Edison and start editing it so the editing window has a variety of different display modes so you can really get comfortable with what the audio is doing and really see what's going on with it but from there the real power of this plug-in is in the editing tools so there's a wide variety of tools including normalization adding fades in outs reversing the audio slicing and cutting up the audio noise gating you can you can remove the noise entirely from the sample which is a favorite of mine you can also add reverb to a sample from different sort of impulse responses and do some really creative sound design stuff the idea is that you can go into a much higher level of detail manipulating the audio inside the Edison then you could just manipulating it on the playlist so in this video I'm gonna break it down into three simple parts one is just getting audio into it so recording using a microphone recording from the internal sources and dragging in how do you get audio into there second part of the video is gonna just be getting a bit comfortable with the plug-in it's layouts its various modes and the third part is diving into some of the tools in a lot more detail because there's an awful lot of fun to be had there so let's just get straight into it okay so let's just start with the basics how do we load this plug-in how do we get audio into it so it has to be loaded on the mixer so select an empty mixer track I'm just gonna choose 38 I'm going to go to slot 1 and I'm gonna press select and in the miscellaneous tab the Edison is the top plug-in so right away it just loads up you can drag it around where you want you can go to the bottom corner and resize the plug-in however works best for your screen I'm just gonna choose something like that let's very quickly go over the controls so we have the sort of play pause record and the different record modes which I'll talk about in a moment we have all of the tools and menus a lot of these sort of double up so it looks a lot more complicated than it is and then we have the waveform display here which says click to load a sample so how do we get audio into here there's loads of different ways first is simply dragging and dropping any samples so a sample in the browser just drag it straight into there if I press play it's just gonna play the sample just like that I can delete the sample by pressing delete let's look at other ways to get audio into here but the next way would be to record in an external source say a microphone a guitar anything plugged into your audio interface so at the top of the mixer I'm just gonna press this button here and I'm gonna select my microphone - analog 1 yours will probably say something different so now I can hear a double of my voice but I'll just make sure there's only one for this tutorial so you're not getting the double voice I'm hearing 2 right now so what I'm gonna do is choose a different recording mode so I'm gonna change it from on input 2 now and then I'm going to just say record for 5 minutes now if I press record I'm already recording my voice into here but what's great is that I haven't had to even press play on my playlist so say you're just warming up if you're practicing you're trying to get a good tone down either with your voice or a guitar you don't have to worry about playing it along with everything else you don't have to worry about cluttering up your playlist with lots of different vocal takes now I'm going to quickly turn both on so you can hear what I'm hearing which is a double so if I don't want to hear that double I can just click this button at the top and now I'm only hearing one of my voice which is excellent you can of course just go to the mixer and turn off your microphone here when you want to edit the audio that's what I do you'll notice that this is all highlighted in red here now your display mode might be slightly different but I'm going to cover all those display modes any if you want to make a selection you just do that using your mouse so you can left click and select one part or you can press ctrl and left click to highlight like a specific section in this case I'm gonna press ctrl + a to select everything and I'm gonna press Delete just to get rid of that so that was just recording separately which I like to do when I'm see like recording percussion say I'm just trying to record a clap or a click I'll do it separately without the track playing along if you want to record with the rest of the track it's really straightforward again you just press now you press record it's recording play along with your track and I'm recording along with my tracks so I could be singing I could be playing an instrument anything like that in order to get this sound that you've recorded back into your project so you can actually use it a couple of good ways to do this first is the drag tool here which I just you just left-click drag it straight on to the playlist and then you can align it however you like simple send that to the mixer or another favorite of mine is to send to playlist as audio clip and it's just gonna send it to the playlist just like that a more advanced way of recording I go into this a lot in my vocal recording tutorial because this is just a fantastic tool in the Edison it took me like two years to find this I feel so dumb that it took me that long but it's incredible so change the recording modes to on play and now what its gonna do is loop around the selection so let's say I just select this part of the audio to record around if I press record it's not actually recording anything right now so if I press play I'm recording my first tape say you've you're looping it around a phrase to sing it it's gonna start recording again and this is me recording into the second take and then this is me recording into the third take and you can just keep doing this as many times as you like until you get a good take now if I press pause and I turn off the recording here you can see that it's actually split up this recording into three separate takes with song jumps in between and what these jumps are they line up perfectly to the start of your loop here which makes it so easy to align vocal takes to select between these simply use your left and right arrow keys and you can select them like this if there's one you don't like you can just press delete get rid of it I'm just going to delete this bit at the end as well and now to choose between whichever take you want you can just select it and listen to it so if I press play and then this is me recording into the third take and you so say I like the third take the most now all I have to do is press ctrl + C and it will drop it straight into the playlist all perfectly time aligned this is one of the reasons I love using the Edison when recording sort of solo voices or instruments especially if you're not super confident and you don't know you can do it first time every time doing it this way means that you never have to clutter up your playlist with like a hundred different demo takes or you know six or seven different guitar loops you can just keep practicing and when you get the one that you like you can drop it into the playlist and you're still playing along with everything else you're still getting the right feeling it's not loading up your project with loads and loads of files I'm going to go into all the display and editing modes in a minute that this is kind of the boring bit of the tutorial but it's going to get really fun in a minute so I'm just gonna select all that and delete it what you'll also notice is that this says attack clap and that's because the first thing I dragged in was a clap sample so if you just started with the microphone recording it would have just called it recording instead so what I'm gonna do is show you the last way to record into the Edison which is to record something that's already in your project so maybe this is some MIDI triggering a synth or you've already recorded the guitar part in this case so I'm gonna do is record this section here so I'm just going to loop the section that I want I'm going to go into my guitar track on the mixer and I'm gonna press ctrl + E to load the Edison so instead of going to the slots here I'm just going to press ctrl + E now I'm gonna say record now I'm just gonna press record and I'm gonna press play up here and it should record in only the guitar [Music] if I stop the recording you can see that we've recorded in the guitar part here now we're gonna dive into the different display modes and then go to the tools so firstly the display modes are all accessed with this little I icon here just going to quickly resize this so that we can really see what's going on so what you have is your view spectrum and display settings so if I turn off your view this is probably what your Edison will open up as but I turn on the dual view so that I can see a spectrum underneath it it really helps me see where the noise starts if there's any clicks and pops stuff like that and then the spectrum mode which just kind of takes away that background and really lets you see where the fundamental frequencies are where the noise is going back into the display settings again mine is kind of blue but what you can do is change the color so I'm just going to go down to the spectrum gradient right now so you can change it you know to green this is not going to change the sound at all it's just going to change what it looks like I tend to like the glacier setting I think it's just nice on the eyes so as for the quality display settings so we can make it 64 bands which kind of sort of musha's it all together or you can select a different display mode you know 8,192 which gives you a lot more resolution so if i zoom in on this I'm just gonna quickly normalize it which I'll show you how to do later so now that I've normalized it we can see a little bit closer what's going on what you can do is with the Joule view selected you can go into the display settings and change it between mono left/right so if you choose the left it will show you the left channel in red if you choose right it's going to show you the right channel in white now my left and right channels should be identical in this case so you won't see a difference but if you've got a stereo source you can look at them independently I've just come back a couple of steps because now that we've got the display in the mode that we want I'm going to show you some of the advanced editing features so to select an area this is really straightforward on with a mouse you simply left-click and drag over the area and now whatever function you apply whether it's deleting or reversing adding reverb it's only going to act on this particular region so if I press delete it's just going to delete that entirely control-z to undo the undo button is also at the top here and if you right-click you can get the whole history of the undo so you can go back many steps if you really think you've messed up let's look at some other selection modes so I showed you that you can left-click and drag now if you go to either side of this and left-click and drag you can just the boundaries but if you want to select say I wanted to select just this end bit I can't just select that bit but if you want to you can press control which will make a new selection left-click and drag so control left click and drag and you can just select a precise section like this say you just want to delete that third cord there select that and delete so I'm going to delete this bit at the end delete go into that undo history you can see those two deletes so I can go back to there and it's all back again I showed you that you could select and delete but if you press control and delete it will delete everything outside of the selection which is especially useful and the last tool I want to show for selections is up in this toolbar here bear in mind if you have a smaller screen or you've got a smaller display your Addyson might actually look like this so you can resize it and get it like this if you can't resize it all of these tools are available with this button here this sort of spanner icon and they're all available in here as well just these buttons just look a little bit nicer that's all so there's one here called auto slicing so I left click is medium auto slicing and a right-click you get to choose the precision of the slicing so if I right click and select dull auto slicing it's gonna add slices in where it thinks the chords start but as it was dull it didn't pick up on this one here so to add a marker simply select a point just here and press this one add or remove marker excellent I'm just gonna add one more in at the end here now with these selections made we can use the left and right arrow keys again to select in between them and also remove noise on the outside that we don't want so let's dive further into these tools so the first one I showed you was just ctrl a and normalizing everything this is a great tool ctrl a normalised it's going to drag everything so that the maximum amplitude is right at zero DB and this lets you really see what's going on of course if I undo that and just select one section here and click the normalize button it's only going to normalize the ones that I select like this the next tool here is to trim the side noise from the samples and then gate the noise so if I just simply left click it's going to trim all of that noise at the start without me having to you know go in to any detail and it's just going to start from the very very start of the sample which is really great for editing if I just go back a step the next one was gate noise so in this case I am I right click it's gonna gate the noise that it determines with cross below a certain threshold but I think it was cutting off too much of this cord here which I don't want it to do so what I'm gonna do is set a noise threshold so there's a few ways to do this you can select the tool here and acquire noise threshold right beside it says alt + n so what I'm gonna do is select this noise here and press Alt + N and then there's this green line so I'll show you what this green line is this green line is the noise threshold so it's going to try and gate that noise when it dips below that threshold so if I press ctrl + n just here that's what it's determining is the threshold so now if I right click it's just going to delete that noise at the start and none of the rest of the noise simple the next tools are the fades and D clicking modes for in and out so put simply a fade is going to gradually fade the audio off at the start like this and a D click is slightly different so say for instance at the end seed see this was supposed to be the end of my sample and it ends just here at the top of a wave cycle what's going to happen is that as that loops it's going to go from a nonzero value back to 0 and you're going to get that distinctive click or pop artifact so what the D click is going to do which is a right click is just make sure that that goes to a zero value the difference between a D click and a fade is that a D click is going to just be acting at the very end and trying to not change the sample too much see it just pulls it down very very quickly whereas a fade is gonna gradually fade all the sample out and it's not necessarily gonna take it to a zero crossing so with the fade you might have to do the fade and then do the D click anyway just to guarantee that it's going to work and you'll have to use your judgment as to what you want to do but I find that fades are generally more sort of artistic tend to use them from more so like a sound design perspective you know it's really shaped the whole sound whereas the D click is very unobtrusive it just D clicks it tries not to change the sound too much this is especially useful in vocals so in-between vocal phrases if you want the audio to cut away very quickly or do you want to fade it down and fade that histone and everything else with it it can be really important and on the topic of noise there's a D noise tool here which is just an incredible tool I have a whole video dedicated simply to denoising and nothing else which I'll link in the description and right here it shows you how to remove all the background noise from vocals guitars but without just cutting the side noise it actually removes the noise from the entire sample which is just incredible so I'm going to gloss over that right now but is something you can do let's look at some of the more artistic effects now so let's look at reversing audio so if I go into the tools here so we can see all of the different stuff that's available to us like we did the normalize you can reverse so time reverse alt and left arrow key so most of the functions have like a shortcut beside them alt and left so if I have everything selected and I press alt and the left arrow key [Music] which is just like a really really cool effect you know from there I can drag that back onto the playlist if I undo it say for instance I want to reverse the first chord into it so let's just delete everything I don't need and reverse this first chord alt right what I'd like to do is instead of just dragging that onto the playlist and reversing it into the guitar which would sound quite abrupt I'll just take the volume down it would sound a bit like this instead of that quite harsh effect I'm gonna add some reverb to it now you can add reverb to any sample in the Edison this button here reverb so what it does is it opens up a convolution reverb which I showed in one of my last videos the convolution reverb is one of the most underrated plugins in the whole of FL Studio you can select an impulse response for the reverb turned on and I'm going to just change choose a different reverbs I'm going to choose reverb devices and choose the smooth cathedral preset gotta turn the white level all the way up and I'm just going to accept that and what it's done is added reverb to the whole sample I'm going to normalize this and turn the volume down a bit [Music] so that is a reverse reverb now if I select all of it and reverse it again that's what I'm going to be fading into the guitar now this is a much more sort of artistic creative way of using this so let's just add a crossfade here and fade this into the guitar and if I want to I can then send this to the playlist so I'm just going to send it over here 2:37 I'm going to add some more reverb to it and let's just make sure that's nice and wet large decay cool so this is one of the things that I like using the Edison for us sort of like a sound design tool it's a really good way to experiment with stuff without having to send it to a mixer track add a load of different effects on it and then find out that it's not going to work I find that sometimes just using the Edison is just a great place to start so now I'm just going to drag and drop a different sample into the Edison so that we've got something different to work with I'm just going to select this area here so what I'm going to show you now are some of the other tools we have available to us so equalizing so I'm just going to apply this to half of it and what we have here is an EQ so you can actually just apply the EQ like you would anything else say for instance I want to just have just the high end available to us and it will smooth out this curve say I want just the high end and I just accept that so with this normalize the start has that high end and then the end here has all of the low end as well just like that if I just undo all of those actions we have some more tools available to us at the bottom so this was the Edit waveform mode we have edit the panning envelope so if I want to pan it from left to right I can drag these points here create new points by right clicking and I can you know create waves like this and this will pan the audio from left to right which you can hear in the headphones right now or if you want this to be more automatic you can select a point choose a pulse type so like pulse or wave and yeah let's just do wave for now and it will pulse it backwards and forwards for you if I select this bit here you should hear it going from left to right in your headphones so you can do all sorts of different effects like this I just undo a load of this the next envelope that you can edit is the volume envelope so low low volume high high volume so I can start a little bit lower take the volume up take the volume down and I have to say that I don't often use sort of the panning and the volume envelopes what I use it for is when I create those risers often I'll add a little bit more emphasis by just taking it down at the start up at the end and it kind of can make the riser just a little bit more dramatic that's what I would typically use it for and as well as the panning and the volume envelope there's also one for stereo separation that does the same thing so more stereo or mono at the bottom so I'm just going to go back to the Edit waveform tab here and let's take a look at a few more tools as I mentioned at the start a lot of the tools are doubled up so down here for instance you can choose to display the spectrum or not and you can choose to display the markers or not so there's just some more view options down here along with this there's another menu down here which doubles up all the same features again where you've got all your view modes all your edit modes and also your file modes so of course if you don't want to just drag out a sample you can just save a sample save it somewhere on to your hard drive of your computer and use it in the future so one of the last tools I want to show you and there are a lot more tools that you should sort of just go through at your own leisure is the blur talks this is relatively misunderstood so FL Studio have a really good tutorial for this which I'll also link in the description but if you press blur and I'll just preview it to start off with you can hear that it creates sort of like a rich atmosphere even though this sound was very transient so if I have a smaller amount of blur we've still got a bit of transients there if I have a higher amount of blur I'm just going to accept that and it's just blurred the whole thing like this and this is that sort of characteristic pad or atmosphere that I often use in a lot of my songs so I'll take sort of the the notes here and we'll drag it out back onto the playlist and then I will have this underneath the whole song just like this and it will just be sitting there underneath the whole song all for what I would usually do is take away a lot of the low-end maybe boost the highs a little bit then duck it under the track and it just creates this really really nice atmosphere sort of pads everything out and I know that a lot of people have been asking how I do create the atmospheres and that is one of the key ways I do it is using that blur tool so that's really all of the basics for the Edison there's a lot more to it and the more you use it the more you'll get familiar with it and hopefully include it into your workflow I find that there's probably no there isn't a production I've ever done what I haven't used it there's been a couple of mixes where I haven't needed to use it but it's just such a powerful tool and I think then it can be quite intimidating because there's just so many buttons especially when you're starting out but I know a lot of people you know most sort of seasoned therefore studio users just swear by it for everything I record almost everything into here I record voice overs guitar vocals anything really and really being able to reverse samples and add reverb on them without having to keep printing it out through the mixer it's just such an incredible time-saver for me anyway but that's it for this video I hope it's helped I will probably be making more specific videos for each of the tools at some point but I don't want this video to get too long because it's already super long video anyway thank you very much for watching I hope that helped and I hope to see you in the next video - bye for now

Channel: In The Mix

Views: 383,527

Rating: 4.9596715 out of 5

Keywords: fl studio, edison, FL Studio edison, edison tutorial, fl studio edison tutorial, in the mix, tutorial, lesson, how to use the edison, edison recording, fl studio advanced tutorials, fl studio beginner tutorial, fl studio wav file, wav, mp3, fl studio audio recorder, audio looping, audio editing, fl studio editing, editing samples fl studio, edison shortcuts, edison hotkeys, fl studio hotkeys, fl studio shortcut keys, fast, workflow, fl, studio, fl studio tutorial

Id: 2VXR8CajTbo

Length: 24min 38sec (1478 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 20 2019