MIDI Patterns vs Audio Clips - FL Studio 20 Basics

hello and welcome back to the channel a friend of mine recently started using FL Studio and they had a really good question they see lots of professional producers using MIDI clips and patterns but they also see others who almost exclusively use audio clips on the playlist and they were wondering which sounds better and also what are the differences in the workflow so this really is a video for people that are fresh to FL studio new to the program and if you're a much more advanced user please feel free to dive through my sound design playlist the mixing and mastering videos on this channel there's a lot more to enjoy but for those of you that want to know more about the different workflows in FL Studio let's dive right in and take a listen I've got a lot of different pros and cons and points to get around to in this video as quick as I can but the moment the description as well firstly I have a pattern or a loop mate here one is using only MIDI and instruments and it's all patterns here the other is only audio clips take a listen they should sound pretty much the same so for some genres you can basically achieve the same result but there's so much more to it this is just a quick example to show that one doesn't necessarily sound better or worse than the other first point that's really important as CPU and RAM so if you're only running off audio clips you're not forcing your CPU to run through plugins I know this is really sort of basic stuff for some people but it's gonna save you a lot of CPU so if I press play and look at the meter up here it was probably averaging about nine maybe ten that's with my screen recorder running as well whereas if I go to the MIDI clips all of a sudden there's gonna be a big surge on the CPU it's stabilized somewhere between 40 and 45 percent of my CPU being used there so clearly if you're on an underpowered machine which is what most of us do when we start out I started on a really rubbish laptop it's probably better to print a few of your audio files especially things that are running you know through synthesizers like serum using you know multi voice synthesizers that use a lot of CPU so that's a really quick point the next point I want to address is that often people find that if they arrange their drums in the playlist they sound a lot louder and a lot more punchy and this is technically based in fact but I'm going to explain why drums are louder when you put them on the playlist and you can get them just as loud in the channel rack so firstly press f6 to pull open the channel rack that's a good shortcut there I've got a snare here in my browser left-click and drag on to my channel rack there we go I'm gonna press f4 to create a new pattern I'm just going to name that snare perfect I'm just gonna fill in a couple of steps just as you do I'm gonna add this over to the playlist if I take the exact same snare sample and I drag it onto the playlist if I add it on here you'll hear that this is dramatically louder than the one in the channel rack same sound a lot louder feels a lot more punchy as a result so many people believe that just arranging the drums in the playlist is just gonna give you a much punchy you know bigger sound on the drums which could be true if you don't want to adjust any volumes however the reason for this is quite simple if you open up the channel rack by pressing f6 again if you go and select the snare which is a left click just here and open up the graph editor at the top right hand here you'll see that you get access to a lot of different controls no velocity release shift all this stuff the velocity is what's important if I select the velocity you can see that they're not maximum so if I were to increase the velocity all the way to maximum or adjust the channel gain here you'll hear that they actually can sound just as loud and it's also worth noting just for beginners the velocity here if I right click and open the piano roll it matches the velocity at the bottom of the piano roll here so if I were to reduce this like this you'll see that it also mimics it in the graph editor here so they're one in the same thing this means that if you are arranging beats in the channel rack just be wary of that difference in volume if you're dragging the same sample into the playlist and the channel racks not really anything to worry about there you go the next point I want to talk about is getting your track in the right key so I've created this little beat here which I think sounds great but say I get a vocalist involved and that's way out of their register and you need to change the key of the song it's quite easy using MIDI and it sounds great but it can sound really bad on a printed audio clip so you've gotta weigh up the pros and cons of this I'm going to show you what I mean here so if I select the bass you can double click to pull open the piano roll or press f7 it's gonna pull open the bass line so there's a good shortcut for you here control a selects everything and then if you hold down the shift key and the up or down arrow keys you can change everything one semitone at a time so I'm gonna push it 5 semitones down so our first note is on a c-sharp so that's the register they're gonna sing in now if I were to do the same for the chords so ctrl a shift 1 2 3 4 5 I can quickly change the key of everything and because of the way that the synthesizer responds to the MIDI each of these bass notes is going to be really nice and crisp and each of these chords is going to be very beautifully voiced because it's generating a brand-new sound each time so it's gonna sound a little bit off because the key has changed but it'll still sound nice and crisp and punchy [Music] so it sounds different but you'll get used to it in a minute whereas if I want to change the key of this here I can't arrange the notes any differently so I have to just select the whole thing together go to the pitch range at the top one two three four five semitones and then pitch it down like this I have to do the same thing to the keys here at the top and now you'll hear what it sounds like and I want to hone in on the bass to show you the big differences in the sound here so let's listen to the MIDI the audio it's lost all of its distinction look the higher up just sounds mushy and weird this low fire fact of pitch shifting can actually sound great on some things sometimes on electric guitar it can sound really funky and cool so if you want to re pitch stuff and you're not sure what key your song is in you're probably just gonna have to stick with MIDI for now it'll make life a lot easier later on the next point is also do with inspiration and how you make your beats if you come from a background of rich music theory maybe playing keys or piano arranging synths and bass lines like this is not a challenge however for the vast majority of us who first open up the door we are not experts in music theory and we like using loops chord loops bass loops drum loops just to give us some kind of inspiration a starting point when we're learning because we're trying to handle this whole new door and music theory and everything we just need a little bit of a helping hand for instance I'm just gonna search for a different bass loop to start an idea with I have this pack here which is full of bass loops it's just a random one I have [Music] let's let's just go with that want to make it work so if I initially drag it in it's far too long so this won't work at all sounds great right so the quick way to do this I have a whole video showing how to re-time any loop but basically double click change the mode to stretch and then in the time section right click and select the number of beats or bars it's supposed to be now in this case it's 4 bars but if you were to select the wrong one it would be very obvious because it would be far too quick like this okay so 4 bars we've got a totally different rhythm going on right now to be honest I'm not the biggest fan of the sound of the synth so I can just use the same notes on a keyboard and a synth sound that I actually like if you're absolutely brand-new and you don't know how to get the notes out of this there's no shame in that when you're starting out double click it right click in here edit in pitch corrector it basically just gives you the notes here with it expanded we can see we're starting on c-sharp going up to an e going up to an f-sharp etc and you can just mimic the notes and the timing on your own keyboard it can be a good way to learn these sorts of things if you're not used to it once you know what bassline works you should be able to just jumble up those notes to find a really nice melody or an arpeggio that sounds great to you and it means that you've used that bass loop drops it into the playlist and in your final song you might not even use it because you've come up with this fantastic idea that's a lot more unique and creative to you sounds like you another reason why I love dragon audio clips into the playlist is because when I feel like my productions may be getting a little bit boring like these drums here I find really good inspiring drum loops I've got some from decap here he's an incredible incredible beat maker so if I just drag that into my playlist again I'll do the retiming and I just take a listen to this I'll have to turn it down because it really slams what I can do is our beginner is zoom in on this and does a good shortcut for zooming in if you hold ctrl and scroll with your mouse it zooms in like this and if you hold alt and scroll in his zooms like this so you can get really close to the playlist you can see where all the kicks hi-hats and snares are you can see that they're not all on the grid and you can now manually line up your samples with this and mimic the drum patterns and in doing that you're learning music theory you're learning rhythm and timing of course it goes without saying this doesn't mean you just rip off other people's beats but it is a really good way to learn it's a bit like making a cover song or a remix you're getting to learn how to use your DAW and all the skills without having to come up with all the chords melodies and drums yourself the next point I want to talk about is that the channel rack doesn't deal with transients and groove very well with very simple samples you can just press play here and it sounds great however I have a snap sample here like a click and if I just put that in the same place as the snare and mute the snare you'll hear that this doesn't sound good at all the click is behind time it's like someone's clicking too late each time and this is because of the transient of the sample so a transient is a change in signal so when a signal goes from nothing spikes up and then sometimes falls back down again on a snare you can see that it goes from nothing and immediately jumps up but on this snap sample there's loads of layered samples so where exactly is the start of this sample I can adjust the sample start like this but it's just gonna make it sound really weird because I am cutting off the start essentially so it is in time but I'm missing all this texture at the start so what do we do and the best thing to do is to just drag it onto the playlist and do it yourself I'm just gonna simply drag the click from here straight into the playlist and now I can manually line it up to where the snare would have been so let's just do something like this and see how that sounds it's a little bit early there we go that's perfect and now if I line up the second one as well so it feels a little bit lazy it's a little bit grooved but I can make it fit exactly the way I want to a really easy way to copy these across is to select at the top by pressing ctrl left click selecting this whole area and then by pressing ctrl and just selecting these two snaps now if you just press control B it pastes it across in the exact same position just two bars later and I can just keep doing that if you were simply to select them and press ctrl-c and ctrl-v you're then going to have to manually line them up again and it just takes a lot more time than just selecting them like this control V paste them all the way across so the biggest point I'm trying to stress between the channel rack and the playlist is that just because the channel rack says that something is lined up it doesn't mean it's actually lined up there are a couple of tools that help you again in the graph editor you can go to this shift parameter it helps push samples around a little bit so these high hats here for instance if I push the shift value here it's now actually halfway between this step and that step you see the difference there so this one again I'm gonna shift a lot so just a little bit of shift can make their thing sort of groove a little bit better but to be honest I find that it's really fiddly and even if you shift them and then you close it you can't see that you've shifted it until you reopen it again whereas on the playlist everything is visible and this takes me on to my next point which is that sometimes people just like to see everything in their project and I'm sometimes like this if it's on the playlist it's all there in front of you you can't miss any of it whereas if it's on here things are hidden they're hidden inside instruments inside patterns and it just might not be ideal for your workflow an analogy for this is that some people like being in a studio where there's instruments and keyboards and everything is plugged in and ready to go all the time whereas other people like storing things away and then they just like taking out the device they need as and when they need it neither is right or wrong better or worse it's just different people and different workflows the final place where the playlist really excels compared to the channel rack is based we just on any long samples so things like crashes fallers risers so if I just pull a crash in here I don't press play you could do that in a pattern but it's not going to be as easy the next step makes things even more obvious if I duplicate that one there and I'm just going to zoom in if you select this little wave file icon here in the corner and you left-click make unique now I can affect this one without changing this double click I'm going to reverse that and I can just make turn that faller or crash into a riser and timing these risers and followers properly in the channel rack virtually impossible which is why you'll see people do a combination the last thing I want to say is that when it comes to exporting your track and things like loudness sound quality there will be no difference whether you're using a kick that's being triggered from the channel rack or from the playlist it doesn't make a difference the way FL studio processes the audio as long as you're sending everything to mixer tracks mixing it the way you want there's no there should be no worry about one sounding better and one sounding worse so hopefully this video has been helpful showing you a lot of workflow tips and tricks and if you want to learn more there are tons more videos shorter and longer all over my channel with lots of information in them so thank you very much for watching hope you enjoyed it and I hope to see you in the next video - bye for now

Channel: In The Mix

Views: 100,102

Rating: 4.9765568 out of 5

Keywords: FL Studio, Tutorial, Beginner, In The Mix, Patterns, audio, fl studio workflow, midi patterns, playlist, fl studio, midi, fl studio 20, which sounds better, music production

Id: EdmGAwo6MQs

Length: 16min 6sec (966 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 14 2020