alright let's jump right into this FL Studio 20 tutorial before we get into
loading virtual instruments and all the fun stuff we're going to quickly set up
our audio interface and MIDI controller then we'll get into some more of the
FL studio basics and if you don't have FL studio you can download the trial and
still use pretty much all of the features the biggest limitation is if
you save a project you won't be able to reopen it until you buy the full version
of FL studio first we want to go up to options and then you want to go to audio
settings and in the device area here you want to click and then go under the
section that says ASIO devices and then find your audio interface in there and
click on it now if you're just using your computer's built-in sound card you
can likely leave this as is for now or you can download ASIO4All if you
didn't install it with FL Studio and see if you can get that to work with your
sound card you shouldn't need to worry about any of the other settings in here
now let's go into the MIDI tab and in here you just want to find the MIDI
keyboard that you plan on using in the input section and you would click on it
and then make sure this enable button is pushed in and now your midi controller
is enabled by the way I'm Zane and welcome to simple green tech on this
channel I do weekly audio tech tips tutorials and reviews to help you
conquer the tech and unleash your creativity if you're liking this video
so far please give it a big thumbs up now let's get back into that FL Studio
beginner tutorial now one more setting to get at before we get into using
virtual instruments let's do our VST plugin management and to do this you
want to go up to you options and then click on manage plugins and then in this
section over here you're going to see some folders named in there but you'll
want to add a few more the typical ones are c program files VST plugins
and see Program Files steinberg VST plugins' and those are your 64-bit
plug-in folders but the cool thing about FL Studio is you can use 64 bit plugins
and 32 bit plugins so you can also add the C program files x86 VST plugins
folder as well and it's easy to do you just click on this folder button here
and then you would just go through and find your folders and click OK when
you're on them once you have all your folders loaded in here you just want to
click on find plugins but before you click on the find plugins I like to have
the verify plugins clicked in and then I also like to have the combined VST and
VST3 versions and combined 32 and 64 bit versions that way you're not getting
duplicate plugins when you're searching for them so you can click on that and it
might take a little bit of time to go through all the plugins depending on how
many third-party plugins you have if you don't have any third-party plugins yet
you might not even have those folders so you won't even need to worry about this
step yet and once it's done you can just close out this window here alright we're
just about to get into the fun stuff but let's quickly look at a few buttons that
you'll likely be using quite a bit these toggled the different windows to the
front of the screen so first is this button here this one brings up your
playlist slash arrangement view and this is where you're going to be putting your
whole song together in here with all your clips and your patterns they will
be arranged into your song the next button is your piano roll this will
bring up the piano roll for whatever instrument you are currently clicked on
and in the piano roll you can draw in some MIDI notes arrange your MIDI notes
edit them however you like and the next button is the channel rack this is where
you'll see all of your virtual instruments that you have loaded into
the current project and you can also add more instruments in here and we're just
about to get into that but first let's just quickly look at the next
which is the mixer view and obviously this is your mixer where you can adjust
levels and add effects and all that sort of thing we'll be going over how to use
the mixer a little later in the video now one more useful tool up here is the
tap tempo you click this and then if you have a song idea in your head and you
want to know what the tempo is you can just sort of hum it in your head and tap
here and you can see the tempo is changing here and also in your main
project alright now that we're familiar with some of the settings and the
buttons let's open up a virtual instrument so we'll click on the channel
rack you can click the button if you're not already there and you'll see some
basic drum hits in here you have a kick clap hat snare you can just ignore these
I usually just leave them as they are and sometimes I actually use them in a
project later on but what you want to do is just right click on one of them here
and then you want to go to insert and you'll see some of FL studios built-in
plugins all in here but if you added some of your third-party plugins and
you'd like to see those go to more plugins and you'll see all of the
plugins that you added in here and if it's a plug-in that you know that you'll
be using quite a bit you can actually click on the little star right next to
it now you can see it in the main list so you don't have to go to the more
plugins section so first I'm going to show you how to draw your notes in and
then we'll look at recording them with another instrument so if you want to
draw the notes in you can make sure you're clicked on your instrument here
and then you can click on the piano roll button up at the top here and you can
see that we're on this instrument as it says voltage modular and that's the
instrument I'm on and you can switch instruments right within here by
clicking and choosing whatever instrument now let's just draw in a
basic bassline here
all right let's hear how that sounds all right I think I want to extend all of
these notes and to do that hold down control on your computer keyboard and
then click and drag and you can see I've selected all my notes and now I can just
extend all of them at the same time by going to the edge of the note and
clicking there but you can also just extend one at a time by clicking on one
without them all selected and you could also move these around wherever you want
and if you want to remove a note that you've added you can just right click on
it and that gets rid of it then down here you can see velocity control this
is how hard or how soft you've pushed the key and you can change that here to
give it a more human sound but let's just say this is the bassline that I
want to go with now if we want to add another instrument we can go back to the
channel rack and then right-click go to insert and
this time I'm going to add the FPC drum plugin right here I'm just gonna choose
the 707 kit here I kind of like the sound of it and if you want to get at
these presets you just right click on these arrows here and you can see all of
the presets and this is something you can do with pretty much all of the
FL Studio plugins now I could create the drumbeat right in
the same pattern that I have my bass in but I want to have it in a separate
pattern so you can see here it says pattern 1 if we click and drag it up we
can go to pattern 2 and then we can record our drum into pattern 2 and this
comes in handy when you're using the arranger because now we can have our
bass and pattern 1 and we can draw that in here and then when we have pattern 2
we can draw it underneath and they're going to be separate but if we still
want to hear that bass line while we record our drum beat what we'll have to
do is go up to this area here and you just want to click so song is
highlighted and now it's going to play back the song while we record and before
you start recording you might want to make sure that your metronome is on so
you would just click right here that turns on the metronome and also if this
buttons not clicked on be sure to click it on so it's orange and what this does
is it gives you a bit of a count in before it actually starts recording
after you actually hit the play button when you're recording so let's go to
pattern 2 again now I'm going to click the record button
and what we want to do is record notes and automation so click on that alright
and there is our drum beat and now we can just double click on this to open up
our piano roll here you can see what the FPC it's actually named kick drum side
stick snare snare to all of that and we just have our basic drum beat here you
can see some of these spots I was a little off in my playing so I might want
to quantize this and we can do a quick quantize we go up to this wrench here go
to quick quantize you'll see it's moved all of our drums so they're in line with
the grid and now we can go back to our arrangement and we can move this all
around and we can add more of these patterns
and here if we like and you can keep adding patterns however you want and if
you want to keep yourself a little more organized in here you can change the
name on the track so we can say this is our baseline so right click and you want
to go to rename in color and icons we're gonna name this base
and you can change the color too if you want to identify the color will click
the checkmark and now our base is that color and we can do the same here
rename drums and we'll change the color to a green checkmark and now we know
that's the drums he can do that for all of these and you can even change the
name and the color of the pattern you would just click on this little icon in
the corner of the pattern clip and then you would go to renaming color and you
can call this drums one if you wanted you can change the color of the pattern
and now you can see drums one in here and as your project gets bigger this can
help you organize everything now let's use the mixer to adjust the levels a bit
before we record some audio in but you'll notice when we play this back
it's only showing the levels in the master fader not on individual mixer
channels so what we need to do is go back into our channel rack
and you'll see that there's these boxes right beside our instruments here if you
click and drag up we're going to put our base instrument into insert one and then
we'll put our drum instrument into insert two and now watch when we play so
we have our levels in there if you want you can change the name of the channel
in the mixer as well you right-click in there
rename color and icon so let's add an effect to our drums let's add a
compressor and to do that we'll just make sure we're clicked onto the drum
channel here and then go over to the side where you see all these slots and
just click on one of the open slots there go to select then you can use one
of the built-in compressors or you can go to the more plugins and find a
compressor in there I'm just going to use this basic compressor and again
right click in this presets area here and you'll see all of your presets
alright so this is what I want now I want to record an audio track into FL
Studio so we'll go to an open mixer channel will say channel 3 we're going
to give this a name going to call it guitar and now that were clicked on that
go over here and where it says none click on it and then you would choose
your input I'm going to record into the input 2 on my audio interface so that's
what I'm going to click and if we want to add something like maybe a guitar amp
simulator you can just add that in here now we've added this guitar effect here
and there's two ways we can record we can record the audio with the guitar
effect attached to it so we can't edit it afterwards it's on the file and
that's if we have this post setting here if you click it it goes to pre now
you'll still hear the guitar effect when you're recording but the actual recorded
file will not have the effect on it so you can change it up later this is the
way I like to record so I can change up the guitar amp tour whatever effect I
have on there I'm able to change it later so I'm going to record with the
pre setting and you can see my levels in there now with my guitar when you're
setting your actual levels you want to set them on the audio interface not by
using this slider here alright so just like before we're going to click on the
record button here but this time we want audio into the playlist as an audio clip
so click on that
all right we now have our audio clip recorded in here and we can edit it by
going over to the corner here clicking and dragging you can make it shorter
you can duplicate it you just click on it click over to the side and you have a
whole other one and then you can also right click on it to delete it and all
of your clips that you record will show up in the side here so when you click on
an audio clip its going to change to all of your audio clips click on a pattern
and you'll see all of your MIDI patterns in here now obviously if this was your
song you would have more parts and pieces but for this demonstration let's
say this is a completed song and we want to show it to our friends now so what
you want to do is go up to file and you go to export and now we want to export
it as an mp3 file give it a name here click Save then it brings us to this
window here where you have a few options you can change things like full song or
you can just record the pattern which would record only the pattern that
you're currently clicked on but we want to do the full song so make sure that's
clicked and then here you can change the mp3 bitrate
I like 192 you can use whatever one you want and then down here just make sure
it's HQ for all plugins because you want the maximum quality for your file and
then you would just hit the start wait for it to finish and you'll have your
mp3 file that you can send your friends fans post online or whatever click right
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much for watching for simple green tech I'm Zane keep
creating and we'll talk soon