Quick Tip: Drum Variations with Clips in FL Studio
“Playlist clips in FL Studio can be sliced up and rearranged, which is an easy way to add fills and syncopated variations to drums. Once we have some variations, we can merge the clip slices and then clean it up a bit in the piano roll.”
A Guide to Freezing and Bouncing in FL Studio
“Freezing. Bouncing. Rendering tracks. Whatever you call it, it is a useful part of music production because it allows you to free up CPU power for more plugins and creates an audio file. While it’s not a one-click solution, bouncing in FL Studio is a process that is easy enough to be straightforward but complicated enough to give the user a lot of control. The first five steps may be all you need to know to get started with freezing tracks in FL Studio, and you can check out the rest of this tutorial to go in-depth with handling special circumstances.
“To clarify, freezing a track means rendering that track as an audio file, and then disabling the plugins. This tutorial is about doing this process in a way that does not alter the sound of the track, and that allows you to keep the plugins in the project file in case you decide to “unfreeze” and adjust the plugins.”
How to Extract Kicks Cleanly from Multi-track Loops in FL Studio
“Have you ever wanted to cut a kick drum out of a loop but found it difficult to do so without bringing the other instruments with it? Even if you’re dealing with loops that are drums-only, the vast majority of the kicks in these loops have cymbals and hats playing at the same time. But there are ways to extract the kicks cleanly, without the hats and cymbals. This tutorial will demonstrate three surprisingly effective techniques, useful for three different situations ranging from simple to difficult.”
How to Make the Synth Sound from Lady Gaga’s “Just Dance”
“In this tutorial we are going to cover how to create Lady Gaga’s famous synth sound from “Just Dance”. Despite all the advancements in sound synthesis, sometimes the best sounds are the ones that are most simple. In fact the basis for the entire sound is one simple square wave!
“I will be using FL Studio and the synth Sytrus for this tutorial but any synth that allows for an LFO to be applied to pitch and phase will work.”
How to Create a 303 Synth Sound in FL Studio
“In this tutorial we are going to create our very own 303 synthesizer sound using the TS404 Bassline Synthesizer plugin in FL Studio. As you might know, there are already five 303 presets that come with Sytrus and a whole lot more with the TS404, so why would I want to make my own sound? Well, I’ve never been a big fan of presets and as Image-Line put it themselves, the 303 presets are ‘303ish’.”
Formant Filtering with Fruity Love Philter
“Formant filtering is a process that replicates the vowel sounds produced by the human voice. As a tremendous part of our speech, these vowel sounds are instantly recognizable and can sound quite eery and interesting when a sound other than the human voice produces them. Formants will sound neat with almost any source material, but are especially fun with growling basslines like those found in a lot of dubstep or drum and bass. The Fruity Love Philter boasts eight independent filters with an impressive array of modulation possibilities and can be put to use in series or in parallel. This makes it ideal for easily making morphing, evolving vowel sounds.”
How to make a Reverse Glass Effect
“Some sounds are ubiquitous standbys, familiar friends that even define and carry the name of a music genre. Others are rare sounds that catch your ears and surprise you. This tutorial is about one of those effects, it will show you how to make a ‘reverse glass effect’ inspired by a sound from the soundtrack of Halo.”
Create a Heaving Kick Drum Without Samples in FL Studio
“In this tutorial we are going to go over how to create a powerful punching kick drum sound in FL Studio. Traditionally this would require us to have multiple high quality kick drum recordings from which to work from. We would need to trim them so they occur at the same instance, EQ out phase cancellations, etc and possibly still not get the sound we want.
“Instead we are going to use Image-Line’s new VST, Drumaxx. Drumaxx is a percussion synthesizer that lets us mold and create our drums as we see fit without any samples. This will let us tweak the drums at any point in the process without having to back track through multiple saved files. In addition we will still be able to add effects and tweak them more by simply sending them off to a track in the mixer. Let’s get started!”
Pitch Bends and Automation in FL Studio | Audiotuts+
“Having quick pitch bends on single notes, or having a sound slowly rise or fall in pitch can be an effective way to add richness to a song. Whether you’d like to use the pitch bend wheel on a MIDI controller, or draw in pitch bends with a mouse, this tutorial covers several techniques that take advantage of pitch modulation.”
How to Build Tracks So That Instruments Relate to Each Other | Audiotuts+
This tut uses FL Studio as an example, but talks about some great production techniques that can be used with any DAW.
“Are your instruments fighting each other to get the main role of the track? This tutorial is about techniques for having instruments relate to each other in ways that will allow them to share time in the spotlight and work together. This tutorial also covers using note placement as a way to compensate for having multiple instruments in similar frequency ranges. Keeping with this theme, we’ll also explore using melodic content that is already in the track to inspire new instrument parts, so that like characters in a play, the instruments will agree and disagree on points, but in the complete composition they’ll work together to present a distinct theme.”
