if you're looking for a free FL studio alternative LMMS might be the free DAW
for you in this video i'm going to do an lmms review and a quick tutorial and
we'll find out if this is a decent free FL studio alternative and if you have
no idea what FL studio is or you've never used it before you should still
check out this video as it's a great piece of music making software that will
easily get you started in beat creating and music production
welcome to simple green tech I'm Radio zane and on this channel i do audio tech
tips tutorials and reviews to help you unleash your creativity now FL studio is
a great daw in fact it was the first digital audio workstation that I
purchased quite a few years ago but I can appreciate that it might be a little
expensive for some users who are just starting out and you might be looking
for a free FL Studio alternative to get you started in beat making and making
music lmms is the closest free digital audio workstation that really compares
to FL Studio and once you get used to the user interface you're going to find
out that it's quite easy to start making beats and creating music in lmms one of
the biggest and only negatives that I have to say about lmms is that you can't
record audio into it directly you have to record audio in a separate program
like maybe audacity or some other audio recording program however I know that
when I'm using FL Studio or now lmms I'm not using it for its audio recording
anyway I'm actually going to be using it because of how easy it is to start
making beats and start making music inside the box meaning using virtual
instruments and really that's the only negative here with lmms and I'm sure as
it continues to evolve they're probably going to be adding audio recording into
it eventually I know in the early days of FL Studio it wasn't the greatest at
audio recording which is one of the reasons why I moved on to other DAWs
when you first open lmms it will look similar to this you have a couple of
tracks already populated you can see they even have an instrument that has an
orange slice on it similar to FL Studio's citrus plugin I
like to remove all these tracks and just start new okay so we now have this empty
project what do we do well lmms does include some of their own
instruments and you can mess around with those if you like you just click over
here on this icon and you'll see a list of instruments now you can just drag and
drop an instrument over into the song editor area and then you just click here
to see the interface for that instrument now you can change any of the settings
that you want in here personally I prefer to use third-party VST
instruments and to do this you first want to make sure that lmms has your
default VST plug-in folder set up correctly so let's first go up to edit
then go into settings and then you want to click on the folder icon right here
and then you look for where it says VST plug-in directory you want to make sure
that this is your default VST plug-in folder and for me this was set up by
default and that is my default VST plug-in folder for 64-bit plugins if
you're using the 32-bit version it should have your 32-bit plug-in folder
there just make sure this is the right one that you use this folder is
typically where 64-bit plugins will install to so you may not have to change
anything here if you do have to change anything you would just click on this
folder here and then you would find wherever your folder is then click OK to
get out of there if you don't have any third-party VST plugins already you can
download free ones from all over the Internet one of my trusted sites that I
use is pluginboutique.com they have a decent selection of free plugins and
they often have great deals on premium plugins I'm going to link to them in the
description below just in case you want to check them out and start building
your VST plug-in library and now that you have your VST folder set you can now
bring in a VST instrument to get started with making our music I'm going to bring
in a synth plug-in first and what you want to do to add a VST plug-in to your
song editor is click on the instrument icon again here and then you want to go
down to the stege and drag that in then click here to open the user interface
and right here where it says no VST plug-in loaded click on the folder icon
and this should bring up that default VST plug-in folder that you set earlier
if it doesn't you can also search for the folder the same way you would search
for the folder in Windows Explorer now find the plugin that you want to use
and double click on it I'm going to use Kontakt player here this is a free
plugin from Native Instruments that you can download and you can see after I
double clicked on it the user interface for that plug-in has popped up and if
you have a MIDI keyboard and you want to get it to work you can just click on
this gear icon here go down to MIDI click input you can click on your MIDI
keyboard here and that should enable it if you don't see your MIDI keyboard
there you may have to download this software from coolsoft
it's called midi mapper and that's going to set your midi keyboard as the default
for Windows so then programs like LMMS will know to use your keyboard this is a
free piece of software I'll link to it below so you can download it if you need
to and if you don't have a MIDI keyboard don't worry about that you can actually
use your computer keyboard keys to play notes just the same way you can do that
in FL Studio and personally this is a feature of FL Studio that I really enjoy
when I'm on my laptop and I don't have my MIDI keyboard connected it can help
you to quickly find a synth sound and get started with creating music and of
course if you don't want to do that and you don't want to use a MIDI keyboard
you can choose to draw your notes in and to draw your notes or to record MIDI
notes you have to open the piano roll and to do that we'll just double click
right here and here's our piano roll this is where you'll start to develop
your songs so let's first go over some of the controls quickly that you're
going to see here and the first controls are your transport ones so this will
play this will record notes from the MIDI
keyboard or your computer keyboard without playing anything back from the
song editor timeline so you're just going to be recording into the piano
roll without hearing anything played back now if you want to hear all the
other tracks play back if you have other tracks you would use this record button
right here and this will play back everything in the timeline plus record
your MIDI keyboard then of course we have our pencil tool where we can draw
notes in and drag them around you have your erase tool and with this
you can click to erase or if you don't want to use that you can actually just
with the pencil tool selected you could right-click on a note and that's going
to get rid of it then over here we have our selection tool and this can select a
large group of notes so you can move them all around together or delete them
all together whatever it is you want to do and again you don't need to click on
this tool to use it with the pencil tool clicked you can actually hold down ctrl
on your computer keyboard then click and drag and you have your selection tool
beside that there is also this detune mode and if you click on this icon then
you click on a note this will allow you to adjust frequencies of an individual
note this may not work for all types of instruments though but you can try it
out if you want to do this sort of thing beside that you have your quantize
button here so by default it's set to 1/16 and that's where you're going to
quantize to now you can change that to anything you want here you can have it
sent to the half note so if we change it then press the Q it's going to go to the
closest half note and beside that you have your cut copy and paste and then
right here you have your enable and disable auto scrolling so if you're
recording long it's going to automatically scroll you can turn that
off if you want then right here this controls what
happens after you've stopped playing or stopped recording could have it set to
go back to the beginning of the clip once you stopped playing or you could
have it set to go to wherever you started playing from after you stop or
you can have the cursor stay at wherever you stopped it on the next row here you
have your zoom control this controls how zoomed in you are on the notes
then you have the quantize controls that we looked at earlier and after that is
the tool that controls how the draw mode works if you have it set to last note
then it's going to draw the same as the last note that you either drew or that
you clicked on you can also set it to one of the presets here I like to leave
it on last note and you can choose the scale of your song if you like also if
you want to draw in chords automatically you can choose a chord here so let's
just choose a major chord and then we'll draw it in here you can see it drew in a
chord automatically and you can change that however you want I'm just going to
delete everything here and now I'm going to draw in a quick beat
all right so now we can add some drums to our song and we're going to do the
same thing that we did before we're going to click on the instrument plugins
icon here then we're going to drag and drop the Vestige instrument into the
song editor click in there and click on the folder here this time I'm going to
add the free drum plugin called beat factory drums and you can grab this free
plug-in from plug-in boutique I've linked to plug-in boutique in the
description below so you can check that out if you like now we'll open up the
piano roll but this time I want to record my beat using my MIDI keyboard so
what you'll want to do is click on the gear icon go to MIDI input and make sure
it's set for your MIDI keyboard and what you can do is actually hold the ctrl
button down on the clip and drag to create a duplicate of it and you can do
this several times if you like I'm going to do that to create a bit longer of a
pattern here so I have something to record over and you'll want to make sure
that they're moved over by one bar so you get one bar counted in before you
actually have to start recording so make sure your metronome is clicked on so you
have that nice click track and don't worry about having this moved over one
bar you can always move everything back later on I'm now ready to start
recording so let's go into the piano roll and I want to use this record
button so I can hear the clip that I played before while I'm recording so
let's press that now
all right and there we have a little bit of a drumbeat and I'm just going to
quantize it to the quarter note now let's listen to what that sounds like
and that's a fairly basic beat if I wanted I can actually add some hi-hat to
that I could either choose to draw it in here or I could actually record over top
of everything and add the hi hats in that way so let's try that
so now our basic drum beat is a little bit more of a actual drum beat you could
still add more in there and mess around with it and that brings me to the next
thing I want to show you which is down in this section of the piano roll here
it's the note velocity and if it doesn't say note velocity here it could say note
panning you just want to click right there and change it to note velocity and
what this does is it allows you to change how hard or how soft each note is
and this can help to bring a more human feel to your beat or to your playing and
now we have our synth line and we have our beat and we can actually loop these
over and over again by holding down ctrl dragging
or you can right-click copy and then right click over here paste
and you can do that as much as you want and you can even add your next section
in which has a little bit of different MIDI information and to add another MIDI
clip onto the same track you would just double click into an open spot here it's
going to create a new piano roll and you can either draw in your notes or play
them in on your MIDI keyboard or on your computer keyboard and you can choose to
arrange everything around however you want in the timeline here so now that we
have our beat we might want to edit things up a little bit by adding some
effects or maybe using the mixer to adjust the levels so let's click right
here on the mixer icon to bring up the mixer view and you can see we have a
master fader already loaded in there but no other mixer channels are loaded so
we're going to have to add two more in for our two instruments so we'll just
press plus and plus now we have two more and to route our instrument to each of
these we'll just click here to bring up the interface and then where it says
effects here you want to click then drag up until it says 1 so this is going to
be on one and then this one we're going to click drag up and now it's on 2 so
let's bring up the mixer again now when we play back you can see that there's
some levels in the mixer and we can adjust those however we want
you can also rename the channels if you want you just double-click right here
and we're going to name this bass then we'll name this one drums now we can add
effects to the effects chain just click there to enable it and then down here
you want to click on add effect and lmms actually comes with quite a few you can
see them these ladspa ones and you'll also see some others that say lmms so
you might have some here already even if you didn't have any loaded before but of
course you can also access all of your VST effects here that you might have
loaded on your computer as well so I'll load up an effect here now let's hear
how that sounds you click the controls button here to bring out the user
interface for each effect and you can adjust the effect however you want and
if you don't like an effect that you've added just right-click on this area here
and click on remove this plug-in so now let's say that our song is finished and
we just want to render it down to an audio file so we can post it online or
maybe send it to our friends or whatever it is that we want to do with it all we
have to do is go up to file and then you want to click on export not export
tracks what that will do is export each track individually into audio files and
that can be useful if you're going to be bringing this into another program for
editing or sending individual instrument's audio to somebody so they
can edit it or use it for something else but what we're going to be doing is just
clicking on export and then you would just give it a name
here and you can also choose what file type you want to save it as you have wav
compressed OGG or compressed mp3 I'm gonna click on mp3 normally I would save as WAV I'm just
going to click on mp3 to show you some of the settings after you click Save
you can edit some of the settings here and choose your different bitrate for
your mp3 and you can also change this back to wav if you decided you didn't
want to go with mp3 you can change your sample rate and the bit-depth if you
want once you're ready you would just click start you should now have your
song in an audio form once it's done rendering now we've been comparing lmms
to FL studio which it's very similar to but I'm going to take this one step
further and actually make it look like FL studio there is an FL studio theme
that was created by an lmms user named h4ckton3 I think I'm pronouncing it
correctly he spells it a little bit different but I think it's supposed to
be hack tone so if you go on to the lmms forum you can actually find a link to
this then unzip it
then copy the whole folder into Program Files lmms data themes you just want to
copy that whole folder into there once it's in there go back into lmms go to
edit settings click on the folder icon here then scroll down to where it says
themes directory you want to click on the icon right here and change the theme
to image line fruityloops select this folder click OK and it's going to tell
us to restart it so let's do that now if you look at it now some of the icons
look very similar to FL Studios icons I know the hack tone guy says that he's
working to make it look even closer to FL Studio so keep watching for updates
to this if that's something you want to do if you want to go back to the other
theme that we had you would just click on the folder scroll down to the themes
directory click on the icon there and change it to default click ok restart
lmms and it's back to the way it was before
honestly lmms is a great piece of software in my opinion for anyone that
wants to start making music or creating beats
in a similar workflow to FL Studio but you don't quite have the money to invest
in FL Studio yet don't get me wrong FL Studio is a great program and it has
some more advanced features than this program has but if you're just starting
out you're likely not going to use those advanced features or need them anyway
plus I have a feeling that the more lmms continues to grow the more features it's
going to add and the closer it's going to get at being the perfect FL Studio
alternative let me know in the comments below if you use lmms and what you think
of it and if you have any questions about this software please ask in the
comments below I may do some more tutorials on this software if there is a
demand for it now click this video up here for my three favorite free VST
instrument plugins or click this one down here see what YouTube recommends
you watch next thank you so much for watching if you like this video please
give it a thumbs up also subscribe to the channel if you'd like to see more
videos from me for simple green tech I'm Radio zane and we'll talk soon